When I went ahead and got engaged to someone with the nickname of an unborn baby, it was like I did Vadis’s job for her.
“Amos,” Vadis stage-whispered, looking toward the door. “I can’t believe it.”
Then she turned abruptly and shouted: “Clive!”
“What?!” he shouted back. “Jesus.”
“Vadis,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder, “don’t.”
“Nothing!” she said, before turning back to me. “How did he get here?”
“Well, to be fair, how did any of us get here?”
“Obviously. Right. It’s just … Okay. Have fun. Report back. Be careful.”
“Of Amos? I’ll let you know if he stabs me in the neck with a quill pen.”
“Just, you know, in general. Take notes.”
She tapped at her temple as if turning on a button.
“Okay,” I said, patting her on the head, “you’re weird. Cute, but weird.”
I left quickly, feeling pressure to get back outside. I was sure the reality of seeing each other felt just as tenuous to Amos. He could just vanish. But when I stepped back through the curtain, there he was.
“Where to?”
I was disappointed by his reliance on me to pick a place. During the years of not speaking, I’d superimposed a new person on Amos, composed of all the things I liked about him as well as an eradication of all the things I didn’t like. In this case, an inability to select venues.
“Give me a second.”
I removed my phone and began rapidly scrolling through my texts. I’d gone on a date with Boots to a perfect bar around here, but I could never remember the name. It felt less like a betrayal to take Amos to the bar than it did an insurance policy that I’d be reminded of my relationship, of who had become responsible for my healthy associations. I held the phone close to my face, putting a spotlight where Amos was already looking.
“And when you’re done,” he said, “you can tell me about this.”
I let him hold my arm up by my engagement ring. My hand went limp in his, a napkin in its napkin ring. Which is about how big the ring suddenly seemed. The ring had belonged to Boots’s grandmother. Why my generation assumes that entire generations before us had taste when only a few of us have taste now is a mystery. The diamond is cloudy and pear-shaped. It’s fixed in a setting that brings to mind the word prongs. I learned the hard way to turn it around every time I put on a sweater.
“It’s dual-acting,” Boots decided, “a shiv and a ring in one!”
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.