“Anyway,” said Amirah, “one is real life, and one is, like, a frisson. I know what I want long term, but sometimes in the moment you really need to know someone has never seen anything better than your ass.”
That did sound nice. Maybe I could have a frisson or two, even if my long-term trajectory was irreversibly “husk.” Amirah received a text asking her to cover for someone at work. “Do you mind if I go?” she asked. “I’m trying to build up goodwill so I don’t have to work New Year’s. Plus there’s a patient I promised I’d make friendship bracelets with.”
“Should I be jealous?” I asked.
“Well, she’s a seven-year-old with bone cancer, so probably not,” said Amirah.
I sucked the insides of my cheeks between my teeth. “Fuuuuuck!” I said. “Fuck. I meant, like—”
“I know what you meant,” she laughed. “And this patient’s prognosis is pretty good. Chill out.”
I was always amazed at how lightly Amirah wore the day-to-day heaviness of her work, how she could go into the hospital and deliver difficult news to parents or help children manage pain they would be dealing with for their entire lives, then come to dinner and listen to the rest of us complain about bad email etiquette. Whenever she revealed some harrowing detail about the hospital the rest of us would panic, though as she’d pointed out many times it was not a competition, and Clive’s professional stress was not less valid just because it was mostly caused by the tumultuous personal lives of minor Canadian sports personalities. （“Are we . . . sure about that?” Clive had asked at the time. I still was not.）
“God, that’s so intense,” I said. “I don’t know how you aren’t constantly having a breakdown.”
“There is actually a crying room on the third floor,” said Amirah. “But it’s mostly nice to be able to be there for people going through a hard time. Like it’s difficult, but it’s good. I’m sure that’s how you feel when you . . . explain Macbeth, or . . . Honestly, I have no idea what your job entails.”
“Like half of it is coming up with puns for the pre-colon part of paper titles,” I said. “But in many ways that is similar to helping children with cancer, you’re right.” I stood and started rummaging through my cupboards. “Let me feed you before you go.”
I took out ingredients for her favorite sandwich, a disturbing combination of pickles and hummus with honey and ballpark mustard. Amirah stood behind me as I assembled it, swiping her index finger into open jars before closing them and putting them back in the fridge.
“Why don’t you text the Laurens,” she said, taking a first, soggy bite. “Don’t sit around your apartment alone. It sucks in here without Janet.”
To avoid crying at the mention of my cat, I shouted, “GREAT IDEA” with unconvincing vigor and pulled out my phone. It turned out the Laurens were convening shortly at a bar near Emotional Lauren’s office that offered wine by the ounce. I told Amirah I did not feel particularly sociable but did want to drink several thousand ounces of wine.
“Perfect!” she said. “You can walk me to work.”
She grabbed her bag and we headed to the hallway, where I tried to make myself presentable with a stray mascara I’d left on the shelf near my keys. I poked at the bags under my eyes and sighed loudly.
“Shame this had to happen right as I lost my last shred of youthful beauty,” I said.
“Don’t talk that way,” said Amirah, pulling on a pair of decorated plastic clogs. “Ugh, I could kill Jon. I’m so mad at him.”
“It’s not his fault,” I said, shoving my keys into a purse and opening the door. “Really. It’s my fault, if anything.”
Amirah made a face. “How is it your fault?”
I didn’t really know, that was just how it felt.
The next day I was supposed to go to work but could not bring myself to do it. For one thing, Toronto’s humidity levels had switched from June’s traditional “Coca-Cola misting zone” to a “world’s armpit” scenario we usually didn’t struggle through until August, and for another, I looked like shit and was sad all the time.
Although I didn’t teach in the summer, I normally worked a few days a month at my cramped desk in the English department as a research assistant for Merris, the elderly and understanding early modernist who had supervised my master’s thesis and occupied a place in my imagination somewhere between feared-yet-beloved aunt and powerful elder witch. I had not come in for the last two Wednesdays, texting her vague and unconvincing excuses each time. This Wednesday, she called.
“Merris, hi—sorry, I—”
“What is it today, grandmother’s emergency dentist appointment?”
I liked working for Merris. She was the most knowledgeable person I had ever met, and she never made other people feel stupid, though sometimes, as now, she could not resist toying with them a little bit. I could see her sitting at her desk, smiling wryly, long fingers wrapping the cord of her office phone around her knobbly left thumb. She was probably wearing a pair of reading glasses with another perched on top of her head. Sometimes there was a third pair on a stylish chain around her neck.
“I think I’m getting a divorce,” I told her. “I mean, I am getting one, but I don’t know when or how, exactly.”
“Ah.”
I hadn’t loved telling anyone about this development, but breaking the news to Merris felt spectacularly silly. I was a twentysomething going through a breakup, so what? Merris had been married twice, divorced once, and was now widowed and living what she called her “best life,” sharing a large duplex in the east end with two other professors in a kind of highbrow Golden Girls situation.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Work from home for now and come in again when you’re ready.”
I told her that might be never. Merris laughed and tried to pass it off as a hiccup. “Take as long as you need,” she said, “as long as you only need until September.”
Merris had not cared for Jon, based largely on her feeling that he’d lectured her about French Canadian cinema for “several hours” at a department function a few years ago. When I asked Jon about this, he told me they’d spoken for under fifteen minutes, during which he’d said almost nothing about film, except to mention he’d recently been to a showing of Xavier Dolan’s Mommy. I suspect they were both being low-level insufferable and disliked seeing their own pretension mirrored in the other. At our wedding, he had tried to ingratiate himself to her by quoting Sonnet 18, and she’d said, “Shakespeare, for weddings? You might be onto something.” Like everyone I’ve ever loved, both of them were capable of being a Bit Much.
After Merris and I hung up, I returned to my usual activities: working, eating, and thinking up reasons to avoid taking a shower. Most days, after a few hours of carefully scrutinizing plays from the 1500s that were unpopular even then, I’d reward and/or punish myself by looking at Jon’s various social media profiles. He had recently scaled back our already minimal communication, something I was trying to take with a casual grace while freaking out about it internally. In an effort to seem breezy, I’d also suggested we block each other on social media, to “facilitate our transition out of each other’s lives.” He had done so unnervingly quickly, though neither of us had blocked the joint Instagram account we’d created for our cat.