Cult Classic(6)

Here was a man who would never pancake on me (though I sometimes worried this was more a failure of imagination) or disappear for weeks, breaking the silence with a three-thousand-word screed or, better yet, the insistence that there had been no silence. May our gaslights illuminate the bridges we burn! Here was a man whose snobberies were logical (buy the more expensive concert tickets, vote early, make your own coffee). Here was a man who asked me about my day because he wanted answers, not credit. A man who intuitively sensed the relevance of my summer camp stories. A man who let me refer to him as “Boots,” a nickname that began during a conversation about parents who give their babies nonsense names in utero. Never mind the implication he was the child of our relationship. He didn’t care. Because here was a man who did not think of himself as woefully untapped by the world, who was not driven to an existential crisis by an unread literary journal. Here was a calm, nonjudgmental soul who knew of Amos Adler only because I’d mentioned him once, in passing.

“Famous Amos?” Boots asked, mulling it over. “Like the cookie?”

“More or less,” I said, balling up the old sweatshirt of Amos’s that had inspired this exchange.

“I’ve never known an Amos.”

I wanted to add “me neither,” but I knew I had to end this conversation.

When we first got together, Boots and I made an agreement never to speak about our exes unless absolutely necessary. Say, one of them died in a freak accident and one of us was tapped to deliver the eulogy. Or one of them was elected prime minister of a small country. It was his suggestion that we move into the future with only each other. He’d been scarred by a girlfriend who was obsessed with her ex. It was exhausting and scary, trying to predict her triggers. She “carried around hatboxes of baggage, like a cartoon of a woman with steamer trunks behind her.”

“And a poodle!”

“What poodle?”

“Nothing, go on…”

“Well anyway, I guess my baggage is baggage.”

And so I agreed to this arrangement, even though I thought this policy was too strict, not to mention robbing us of imagery that could be pocketed for sex. But I was the one who stood to benefit: Boots had been in two serious relationships, college girlfriend and scary girlfriend included. We were never going to be seated at a table with someone who required an explanation. I, on the other hand, had nothing but explanations. Some of us get smaller denominations from the romance ATM than others. In addition to the flings, I’d had about fifteen five-month relationships, not to mention the six-and nine-month relationships, not to mention the ones that came to life in the night like haunted toaster ovens: You up?

I had tried to explore the why of it. Thanks to Modern Psychology, I had access to the most complete therapist database on the planet. My parents were still happily married. No one had abandoned me, beaten me, or withheld their love. Was I enamored by disinterest and disinterested in affection, set on giving my heart to people who didn’t deserve it? Seesawing between desperate and inscrutable like a deranged child? Was I trying to find replicas of my father and then smashing those replicas? Had Cupid’s bastard brother snuck into my bedroom and whispered in my ear, “My child, never commit”? I’d begun to suspect that my search for an inciting incident was the inciting incident. But before I could get to the bottom of it, I met Boots, who made it all stop, who could not unbreak me but who could protect me from the narrative of the broken.

The night we got engaged (along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the lights of the city winking in approval), we were in a cab going over the Manhattan Bridge. I was drunk by then, flirting with nausea in the backseat. I cracked the window and looked down my left arm, following it to its natural conclusion.

“Whose finger is that?” I asked.

“Who put that there?” Boots laughed, teasing me, declaring me wasted.

But I was not talking about the ring. I was so drunk, I was talking about my actual finger.

Boots had asked my parents for my hand, if it was my hand, in marriage. This conversation was easy to imagine, one of them screaming at the other to pick up the kitchen phone. They are not tough people. A phone call is all that would be required to sell the house and pay off the terrorists. Or marry off their daughter. But he and I had not discussed marriage, not seriously, only implicitly, in the way we kept filling up the calendar, facing holidays head-on. So while the question did not come out of left field, it was no fastball to home base.

I knew I’d spend no small amount of time, working it out in my head, wondering if I’d be just as disturbed by him not getting permission. I often felt my prime years to figure out if I subscribed to the concept of marriage were when I was a child, back when all of life was hypothetical. As an adult, it’s hard to come down on a common institution to which you have no anecdotal access. It smacks of sour grapes. Boots had come along at a time when any reasonable person would’ve assumed I had an educated stance. If I wanted to take the political route, marriage was confinement, a raw deal. People hoped for transformation but too often got lobotomization. Idealization hardened into disappointment. But life is not lived in politics, it’s lived in days.

And so I was content, sitting in the back of that cab with nothing to look at but the profile of Boots’s head, the city rising up beyond him. Even if I was only ever borrowing someone else’s certainty, it would become mine eventually. I could let the idea roost. I decided right there and then that if there was ever anything so terribly wrong with me, it was only that I was a woman who’d spent her youth in New York and never left.