Cult Classic(72)

“What?”

“After she was done with me.”

“I feel like I’m having a stroke. You’ve been sleeping here?”

“Clive said it was better if I sleep here.”

“God, he’s so insane,” I said, trying to pry his anger off me.

“It’s not so bad. Honestly, it’s nice to give my sinuses a break from the cat. I was about to head back to the apartment to meet you because I know tonight’s your last night. According to Vadis, at least. Then I heard a thud and there you were. Here you are. Which is how I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That I’m about to get dumped. That’s how it works, right? I see you in here, it’s bad news for Max. Max is in the past tense now.”

“Well, at bare minimum, he’s in the third person. So that’s not good.”

“Nope!” he said, pulling a stick of gum from his pocket and chewing violently.

“I have so many questions.”

“You look like a homeless person, by the way.”

I wiped the back of my hand against my forehead. My fingers were black from prying open the window. I had attic dust on my face.

“You don’t even like Clive. You’ve never liked Clive.”

“Lola,” he said, snapping, “keep the fuck up. I hired Clive.”

I felt as if I were above us, that we both were, watching these versions of ourselves, confused and incensed respectively. My major organs were competing to exit through my throat.

“Come again?” I croaked.

“Clive offered to help me and I took him up on it.”

“Help you with what?!”

He looked around for a place to put the gum, then decided to jam it underneath his seat.

“Max,” I scolded reflexively, and he gave me a look as dirty as I’d ever seen.

“A few months ago,” he began, splaying his hands on his knees, “I was cleaning out the hall closet and I moved this shoebox. It was heavy so I opened it and it was packed with all these letters and shit. There was this card that played a song, and I thought, huh, maybe this is where Lola stockpiles cards to give to people. My mother does that. But that’s when I started reading the letters. Some of them were breakup notes, some of them were nothing—meet me here, see you at eight, nice shoes, let’s bang—but you saved them all. And I know women do that. Sorry to be gendered, don’t leap down my throat. But you printed out emails from the 90s. The box was lined with ticket stubs and scrap paper and it was … intense. Like hoarding intense.”

“I can’t believe you went through my stuff.”

“Yeah? Call The Hague. Believe me, I have no interest in reading about how some random douchenozzle thought your eyes were like planets, but you do. Once I opened that box, it seemed like splitting hairs to suddenly care about your privacy. I don’t know, maybe I felt like I’d earned it. Not looking seemed like a convenient morality.”

“Like how Julia Roberts won’t kiss Richard Gere in Pretty Woman.”

“Don’t make jokes.”

“I wasn’t making a joke, I was making an analogy.”

“I know we agreed not to talk about our pasts. I know it was my idea. And it’s not the box, the box is not the end of the world. It’s what the box represents. I’m not the moron you think I am. I could sense you pulling back. You nearly went off with that crazy chick from the wedding. Or you wanted to. If I’m honest with myself, and trust me, I’ve had lots of time to be honest with myself, I’ve sensed you were a flight risk since the night we met, when I saw you kissing Pierre on the balcony.”

“You saw that?”

“And I feel like I’ve been trying to show you I’m a good fit for you ever since.”

“Why didn’t you say anything to me?”

“About Pierre?”

“About everything that came after Pierre.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to rock the boat or see how easily you’d throw me over. I don’t know, it’s all just very … very…”

“Nautical.”

He nodded and lowered his head. His watch was too big for him, but he centered the face on his wrist anyway, as if it would stay. I imagined what this room looked like when it was full, with dozens of members sitting there with their eyes closed, maybe some with laptops, googling, coding, cracking, manipulating. Like the call center at Esalen in 1969. Max slept alone in this room after they’d all gone.

“So around the same time as the box,” he went on, “I get this email from one of my buyers and he wants me to bring him a couple of pieces in person instead of paying for shipping. He bought three and he’s downtown so I say okay. And he has me meet him at this annoying fusion restaurant down the street. And I walk in and there’s fucking Clive. Then, out of the bathroom, comes my second-favorite person in all the world—”

“Vadis.”

“Honestly, you’d been acting so weird, my first instinct was that you were secretly on pills and they wanted to stage an intervention. But then I was like, well, why wouldn’t Clive just use his real name?”

“Because he didn’t want you telling me you were going to meet him.”

“Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Normally, I don’t like to give Vadis ammunition but you’re kind of the only thing we have in common. So I said something wasn’t right with us because it wasn’t. Like you weren’t cheating on me exactly but you were stuck and I couldn’t unstick you. Then she turned to Clive, who said, and I will never forget this: ‘What if I can unstick her for you, Maxwell?’”