He patted his stomach through his shirt.
“It’s kind of stupid that they trot me out for these things,” he mused, tucking his hair behind his ears. “But duty calls!”
“And how are the twins?”
“Oh, well,” he said, not flinching at the idea I possessed information he hadn’t shared. “Since you asked, I’m obligated to do this.”
He scrolled through pictures of baby girls. They were formal portraits, the girls wearing pink bows tied around their bald heads. Or else they were asleep in their cribs and the photos were of the nursery itself—a girlish explosion of matching mobiles, rose-patterned wallpaper, and monogrammed piggy banks. The last photo was of one of the girls, naked, propped up on Willis’s old sofa with his gold medal around her neck. There was a time when I had sat on that same sofa, wearing the same outfit. I gave Willis his phone back.
“New York always reminds me of you,” he said.
“I’m not sure I’m prepared to represent a whole city.”
“We came in to see the tree last Christmas and it was butt cold. And I thought of how cold you must be in your apartment because you refused to take out your air-conditioning unit between seasons.”
“It’s not worth it.”
“It is.”
“Agree to disagree.”
“Agree to freeze your ass off!”
Behind me, Brody had spread himself out in the booth, head down as if he were searching for something in the folds of the leather. Eliza was stroking his arm with a mixture of vibrancy and pity.
I told Willis about my new job, about the magazine folding. He only registered it as an updated LinkedIn profile, not the death of a way of life. He always said that everyone in New York identified too much with their careers. This was a stunning piece of hypocrisy, coming from an Olympian, the kind of blanket statement that made for a champion athlete but a strangely unfeeling civilian. Willis never saw “what the big deal was” in any given scenario, no matter how significant. A swastika on an advertisement, rendered in sharpie, was “just one idiot.” Global warming was “something the Earth was gonna do eventually.” I suspected that if Rocket died, he’d be the first to tell me it was an opportunity to get a kitten.
There were perks to this worldview. Willis knew the answers to his own questions before he asked them. Like Boots, he was not tortured. Unlike Boots, he used words like goals. Though I will give him this: Willis had a healthier grip on the confines of his own mortality than most of my peers, even if I didn’t agree with his rationale. Marriage, children, home ownership? Real. Jobs, boyfriends, landlords? Fake. This is why some people got engaged in the first place, to step off the fake list and onto the real one. And I had joined their ranks. I had turned another human being into a talisman against social grief. So I lifted my left hand and fanned my fingers in a way I had never done before, not even to the mirror.
“Ahh!” Willis said, lifting me up off the ground.
I squirmed to get back down. I had a full stomach and I also did not like how thrilled he was. I was only aiming for placation, to wipe that anthropological look off his face. When this first started happening with men, I was flattered. Clearly, my siren song was so loud, having a wife of their own was not enough of a deterrent. They needed me to be off-limits as well. It did not take me long to realize their relief had nothing to do with some long-suppressed desire to sleep with me. As a single woman, I made them uncomfortable. How hard it must have been for them to place me in their firmament of friends prior to me being part of a couple. Occasionally, they’d pump me for dating stories in the name of vicarious living, but they only missed their old lives, not my current one. On some level, I must have sensed this difficulty because I made constant efforts to demonstrate my wholeness, my effervescence. Feel the breeze, boys. As it turned out, all my efforts were for naught. Their current relief belied old pity. I mourned for all the time I’d wasted, concealing bouts of bitterness or depression, minimizing the impact of disappointments. I may as well have been smashing stemware against the fireplace.
Eliza was trying to catch my eye. Brody was still in the booth. The last train to Bronxville left in an hour.
“Tell me everything,” said Willis.
“What? Oh. He’s an architect,” I lied.
After all this time, I still wanted to seem otherworldly to Willis. Superior somehow. I immediately regretted it.
“He must be really smart.”
“Oh, I don’t … I don’t care about that as much as I used to.”