Cult Classic(69)

This was the same casually philosophical tone I’d employed when we were on the balcony, comparing Paris with New York as if no one in the world had done it before.

“Of course,” he said, relieved to be speaking in abstractions. “But don’t we find them just as often? I found you.”

“You did.”

Knox used to say that falling in love was like trying to remember something you never knew. The first time I heard him say it, I told him it was beautiful. But when he said it again, a pat piece of poetry thrown into the evaporating pool of our love, I told him that it sounded sad. It meant that love was always out of reach, happiness forever floating on the tip of one’s tongue.

After Pierre took his leave, citing jet lag, flinging his blazer over one shoulder, strolling back to his wife, I started, finally, to feel it—the completeness of my package. Something like peace. But then a realization hit me like a dart: I’d never told anyone about Pierre. Not one soul, not even the soul belonging to Vadis. I’d left him out of the story of the night I met Boots because I wanted her, wanted both of us, to focus on the possibility of permanence. This did not include the distraction of a third party, of a mysterious stranger who, because I knew he would remain a mystery, would clobber the reality of Boots. I’d never written about Pierre in a diary or an email or had so much as a text exchange about the man I’d kissed on the balcony. I had no keepsakes of him because there was nothing to keep. Not even the button with his face on it. I hadn’t perused his social media accounts in years. There was no list on which Pierre would appear except perhaps for the one I kept on an invisible scroll, curled in my memory.

So how on earth did he get here?





16




I leaned on a strip of brick between stoops, glaring at the building like I wanted to blow it up. I had my arms crossed, as a couple of my exes had done in their headshots, and one foot flat against the wall, as people did in photographs from the ’70s. It was strange to think that positions of bodily comfort could be subject to trend. For centuries, men strolled around, lost in thought, both hands clasped behind their backs. Or one hand, palm out. But it didn’t matter how I stood—so long as I was out of sight of the Golconda’s security cameras.

I called Vadis, who was somewhere inside, and lied. I hadn’t seen anyone. I must’ve run through all my exes already and whoever Clive thought would come simply didn’t show. It was an anticlimactic ending but an ending just the same. That was the goal, right? Closure. Progress. She suggested I come by the Golconda anyway, for their version of an exit interview. It was important for their research; Jin would be disappointed. But I couldn’t stand the thought of the suction cup on my skin. I told her that two weeks of nightly vigilance had given me a migraine, not to mention a persistent eyelid twitch (true). Clive had more than enough data for his investors. And to seal the lie, an unavoidable truth: Boots would be home in a matter of hours. His flight was in the air. I needed time to gather myself.

Because, at long last, I had made a decision.

I would end it.

A door was closing all right, but it was closing on Boots. In my pocket was a list of reasons why we shouldn’t be together. I wrote it out at the office that morning, on a Radio New York notepad, which, in practice, struck me as a gratuitous layer of disrespect. It also felt like an immature activity, like I should have written the thing in magenta ink and folded it into a triangle. I had no intention of showing Boots the list. It existed only to steel my nerves for when he said he couldn’t believe that I would blow up our lives like this. But he was steady to a fault; he could never surprise me. He was content to the point of incurious, calm to the point of comatose. He was the person I should be able to talk to the most, not the least. I didn’t like his friends or his tastes, and he didn’t particularly like those things about me either. I was hiding behind him because I didn’t feel like being alone anymore, and this was weak and cruel. To top it all off, I’d begun comparing Boots with every man who came before him. As if they were still there for me to choose. As if I were still a choice for them.

He deserved better than to be with a woman who made lists.

I thought of our apartment, of the empty shelves, of the layers of white paint on the door frames and all the altercations that must have occurred beneath them long before we lived there. The joy and the tedium of so many strangers had been painted over so that new strangers could start fresh. It would be painted over again after we moved out.

My phone vibrated. Zach had taken to sending me diatribes about the wealthy circumnavigating landmark laws. Look what they did to the Bowery! Look what they did to Dumbo! They paved a parking lot and put up an even shittier parking lot!

I hear you, I texted back.

This was too curt a missive and triggered a spate of responses:

Wait

Are

You

There

Now?

Answer ME

I ignored him. I was filled with horror for the phone itself, zizzing like a petulant child, horror for the past buried within it. The graveyard of exchanges at my fingertips. I looked at the shape of Zach’s texts. The speech bubble had too recently been the purview of comic books. Not enough time had passed between our association of the bubbles with fiction and their transfer to reality. It turned us all into actors, anticipating their lines, reading between them.

I touched my list, pressing down on the paper’s edge. In that same pocket was my lighter. If I lit it now, well, at least I could burn the list, too. But before I self-immolated, I needed to know what was in that room.