“I gotta go to San Francisco for a couple weeks,” he announced, “starting Monday.”
“What’s in San Francisco?”
“Weed. Facebook.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Massive amounts of homeless people due to a broken mental health system?”
“Less ha-ha?”
“There’s a restaurant group that wants me to do their stemware. And their salad plates, which are also glass, which is stupid for about a hundred reasons, but it’s a significant contract if I get it. They own a couple of spots in Vegas.”
“San Francisco,” I said, making a noise like I did not believe San Francisco existed.
I stared at his head, submerged in what little light had edged in around the shades, moving my fingers up his skull and feeling his hair fall back into place. He emitted a little moan of pleasure but was too tired to do anything about it. For this, I was grateful. On the one hand, seeing Amos was an aphrodisiac. On the other hand, I’d begun stockpiling the times Boots didn’t want to have sex to make myself feel better about the times I didn’t want to have sex. A respectful order of things had been established in a way that felt closer to baking a cake （add wet ingredients to dry, heat and cover） than sex. Our days of throwing ingredients into a pan had passed too quickly. As for fucking? Can we not embarrass ourselves by drawing attention to this recital of desire? Not when “that feels good” passes for dirty talk. We mostly used the word when we weren’t doing it. The other night, I caught myself calling him “hard” in a tone that would not have been out of place in a conversation about mineral water.
“Why so late?” he asked.
“We got drinks after.”
“Was it fun?”
“The funnest,” I whispered, “and now nothing in this world will ever be so fun again.”
“Okay,” he said. “Night, baby.”
It was never bad with Boots was the thing, but I wondered what kind of bar this was for a marriage: a low one or an elevated one? Sometimes, when I pictured our lives together, it felt like settling in the very best way, like a picnic blanket that falls into a manageable shape on the first try. Other times, I imagined we were siblings who’d been assigned to the same bed on a family trip. No snoring, no kicking. That’s all that was required. This allowed me to remold him in my mind as some combination of every man I’d ever known. A testosterone hydra. If he knew about this heavy lifting or, worse, those times I had to pretend to be a prostitute, and not in a fun way, in order to have sex, it would devastate him.
I knew Boots had his concerns too, but he would not take the crucial step of realizing it was I who was making him concerned. He chalked up our moments of disconnect to a mutual fear of the same gods. His hesitation manifested itself logistically, in the discomforts of compromise: How will we intertwine our families? What will potential babies do to our potential sleep? What will we do if one of us develops a gambling addiction and we have to move into an RV and live off fried crickets and malt liquor?
My worries were more abstract yet more pernicious. I worried about the betrayal of memory. I worried my former love life was a bomb waiting to go off or, worse, that it would never go off. That I would wake one day, having buried the past so well I’d find myself unrecognizable, having moved to a city I hated, slowly losing touch with my friends, then with the culture at large, until the only books I read were the ones I read about in nail salons, the only art I knew was presented to me through my phone, and the only plays I saw were the ones that had been adapted for the screen. And I’d have to pretend there was nothing wrong with this because there was nothing wrong with this. Not for that version of me. But is this what all my romantic dramas and career had been for, their natural conclusion? A life of palliative television? If I ever felt relentless, Boots would have to be enough. And if he wasn’t? I’d punish him with resentment. I would’ve preferred not to worry so much. But I had no choice: I was worrying for two.
I closed my eyes and let my mind go fuzzy at the edges. Soon I was in an Olympic-size swimming pool, doing laps. Men filled the bleachers. I knew them all but I couldn’t make out their faces. Some were cheering, some were jeering, some were ignoring me entirely. I wanted to get out of the pool but I had to dive down to retrieve some treasure and was not allowed to come up until I found it. Finally, I spotted it, flopping around by one of the filters. It was my mother’s diaphragm from the ’70s, which I have never seen in real life but knew on sight in the dream. Translucent bits of tissue clung to it, floating by their bloody threads. I laughed so hard, I woke up coughing.