Cult Classic(9)

He had a way of putting a positive spin on everything. It’s one of the things that first attracted me to him. I did not need another poet, arguing that depression was the only reasonable side effect of intelligence. The downside was that when the subway smelled or the food was inedible or the hotel room was too loud, Boots would be the last person to call the manager. You can’t make lemonade out of everything, I posited, some lemons are meant to be tossed. On our fourth date, I broke my ankle and Boots refused to ask the emergency room nurse for pain medication.

“She already said she’d bring it,” he assured me.

“But that was thirty minutes ago.”

We didn’t know each other well enough for me to use him as my personal pit bull, and a trip to the emergency room was a premature stress test. But even then, I knew I had this man on my hands who would sit with me for as long as it took, one who brought me flowers and stripped his tone of disappointment when he saw me light a cigarette afterward.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t,” I said, forgetting that I was supposed to be trying to impress him.

The filter pulled at my skin as I yanked it away and threw it on the ground.

“I also didn’t know you littered.”

So what if he was being serious? And so what if he would not harass the nurse? Or allow himself to be overcharged for the wrong flowers?

It was just a ring. But sometimes, when people compli mented it, I tacked on a disparaging comment. I worried that the ring broadcast how disconnected I felt from Boots of late, how secretly full of misgivings, none of which I felt I could share with him. The ring was dangerous in this way. But the ugliness of the thing was one of our private jokes.

I pulled my arm away from Amos. He cleared his throat.

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything,” he said, hands in the air.

I had not hidden my relationship. In fact, where was my thanks for not shoehorning it into the conversation? I’d done nothing wrong except, perhaps, to lay the groundwork for wrongdoing. My only crime was relying too heavily on Amos. I knew he would notice the ring and, once he did, we’d be safe. Amos was intolerable on the surface but good deep down. Whereas I was starting to worry I was the reverse.



* * *



We sat at a shellacked block of wood beneath a canopy of Christmas lights that never got taken down. New York was perpetually waiting for the cold, steeling itself for gray skies and sleet. I pawed for hooks beneath the bar and put my foot onto Amos’s stool so that my leg hovered between his. We clinked glasses. Then he asked me why I wasn’t in love with Boots.

“Good morning,” I said, swallowing beer foam. “You never did like to preheat the oven.”

“Neither did you. Answer the question.”

“I do love him,” I stressed.

Amos winced. That “do” was pretty damning. But all I wanted was to feel the brush of Amos’s fingertips on my kneecap, to rent some of our old electricity. Of course I loved Boots. We’d been together for two years—over two, by his count. But admitting I was not being held captive in a loveless cage was a buzz kill.

“Were you ever in love with him?” Amos asked.

“Define love,” I said, tossing chum in the water, “define ever.”

Amos rolled his eyes.

“You’re asking if I’ve ever had a six-hour phone call with him? Or driven upstate in the middle of the night to tell him I’m sorry only to get into a second fight and lock him out on the porch with the raccoons? No, I have not.”

“Glad it’s just me.”

“I never said it was just you.”

“Clever girl,” Amos said, taking a sip of his drink.

“That’s what they call the dinosaurs in the movies right before they shoot them.”

“You’re still quick.”

“Fuck you. We’re the same age. Don’t talk to me like I have dementia.”

Amos sighed into his lap, exposing the flesh beneath his collar. I played out a reality in which we had never broken up, in which he had only ever wanted to see me, only wanted to put his penis inside me. Would he kiss me right now or would we be annoyed at the sight of each other? Just because something ends prematurely doesn’t mean it won’t end eventually. Usually that’s exactly what it means.

A wiry gentleman in a short-sleeved button-down emerged from the bathroom, removed a book from his backpack, and began reading and drinking Fernet. He looked like a grad student. Amos and I watched him do these things, taken by the mutual distraction. He wanted to know what the man was reading. I wanted to know why some grown men wear back packs. At their best, they suggest an insolent outdoorsiness; at their worst, a lifetime of student loans.

“I know what you think of me,” Amos said, twisting back around.

“This should be good.”

“But we wanted the same things, Lola. I wanted a real relationship with both of us sitting in the same room, eating takeout, not fucking.”

“You wanted to sleep with half of North America.”

I knocked the outside of my knee against the inside of his.

“Yeah, but that wasn’t the only reason we broke up.”

“Amos. I’m not sure ‘extra reasons’ is kind at this juncture.”