“He does what per se?”
“The restaurant.”
“Oh. Thomas Keller ‘does’ Per Se. You should be engaged to him.”
Amos sincerely expected to wake one day to the news that I’d married a famous person. Or a diplomat. To him, the definition of a compliment was “to set apart.” When we were falling in love, he’d enumerate the ways in which I was not like other women, listing traits such as intelligence and sanity—leaving me with the choice of rejecting the compliment or betraying my entire gender.
He fished a tissue out of his bag, a canvas satchel with leather trim. I must have been ogling the bag.
“My cousin gave this to me,” he said. “She got it in a ‘gifting suite.’”
Kit. I desperately wanted to ask about her. For years, I’d fantasized about her doing the same. What ever happened to Lola, Amos? She’s the only one I ever liked. But before I could nudge him down this conversational rabbit hole, he announced that it was getting late. We should go. An hour ago, I’d harbored fantasies of Amos pushing me against a wall. Now my head pounded, my eyes burned, and a squeal that did not belong inside a human body came from Amos’s stomach.
“Hospital?” I asked, furrowing my brows.
“Roger convinced me to split the General Tso soufflé,” he lamented, touching his stomach. “It’s grumbling chaos in there.”
“You should give restaurant blurbs.”
I got up from the stool and grabbed my coat.
“It’s a self-inflicted punishment,” he said. “I chose that place.”
I froze, arms partially sleeved.
“You picked an actual location?”
“Sort of. Roger is in Baby Land so I asked Jeannine. Do you ever get paralyzed whenever anyone asks you to pick a restaurant, like you’ve never left the house?”
Amos had a way of presenting quotidian problems as karmic ailments. A MetroCard with insufficient fare was just his luck. Spam was an act of personal oppression.
“This is going to sound nuts,” he said, “but I had crazy déjà vu right when you walked up. Did you know they figured it out, déjà vu? It’s your brain temporarily processing present tense as past tense, like swallowing something down the wrong pipe. You should write about it for Modern Psychology.”
“I don’t work there, I’m not a writer, and it doesn’t exist.”
“Oh. Right. Well, it wasn’t déjà vu déjà vu. It was more like clairvoyance. Like my lizard brain knew I should keep standing there. I think I was waiting for you.”
“Amos, that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
* * *
There were few cars when we got out on the street. The air was thick, as if someone had put a lid on the city. I heard the beep of a garbage truck and panicked, thinking it must be 3 a.m. But this was a regular truck backing up and it was only midnight. There was nothing wrong with staying out, drinking with another man, even one I used to date. I lost track of time. This was an emotional one-night stand, not an emotional affair. Still, I felt guilty for not checking in with Boots.
Amos reached into my jacket pocket and removed one of my cigarettes. It was intimate, having him fish around in there.
“Lola, can I offer you another piece of advice?” he asked, lighting the cigarette.
I could hear the crackle of the paper, like water being poured over thirsty dirt.
“Was there a first piece of advice I missed?”
“It’s more of an observation.”
“Ah, the gentleman has more of a comment.”
“What I loved most about you was your decisiveness.”
“One of us had to look up movie times.”
“I don’t mean with me. I mean you decide things and go do them. You decide to live on this shithole island, you live on this shithole island. You decide to skip work and go to a museum, you don’t hem and haw until it’s too inconvenient to go. You’re not afraid to move. You decide to quit your job, you quit your job.”
“I was laid off when the magazine folded.”
“Oh,” he said, blowing smoke upward. “Really?”
I nodded.
“Well, my point still stands. You of all people, I mean, get married or don’t get married but indecision doesn’t suit you. Opinionated and indecisive is lethal.”
“What indecision? Why do you keep poking at this?”
“Because I’ve met you. And even if we both live to a hundred and even if I never speak to you again, that means we will have known each other for like ten percent of our lives. That’s a lot. But it’s none of my business.”