We nearly kissed a couple of times, which would have been a gateway to some scarring, useless affair. Clive was still married then, to his college sweetheart, a fact I often forgot because he rarely mentioned her. I was young and so I confused her absence in conversation with an alienation of affection when it was only a compartmentalization of affection. I did not realize that I was being doted on precisely so he could stay in his marriage. So we walked it back, calcifying ourselves as friends, analyzing our flirtation in real time. Talking about it served the purpose of scratching the itch without acting on it. We were only flattering ourselves. If our attrac tion had been that potent, the tension that important, no amount of analysis could have kept it at bay. By the time Clive and his college sweetheart divorced, there was no more itch left to be scratched.
I was Clive’s first hire when he became the deputy editor of Modern Psychology, a magazine we respected from afar, because of its history, but with which we did not actually engage, as the reading experience so closely resembled eating balsa wood. But Clive gave it energy and style. He made it human without making it dumb, glossy without making it superficial. I was there to witness his lightning ascent to editor in chief. This did not surprise me, given how invested Clive became in the whole field. He couldn’t shut it off. He liked to talk about his staff’s feelings as if they were data. Or the men I dated as if they were lab rats, the way married people do, as if their life is the control and yours is the experiment. Indulgence disguised as empathy, judgment disguised as friendship. But I spilled every detail because I wanted to stay close to him.
He claimed he didn’t like the public face the editor-in-chief role required. He felt like a fraud, attending conferences on behalf of the magazine, appearing on morning shows with lists of ways to “destress before work.” What could’ve gone so wrong with your day that you needed to calm yourself down before 8 a.m.? He used to text us videos of him humping cardboard cutouts of talk show scientists. When he became a regular fixture on those same talk shows, he still joked. At least the designer suits were a tax write-off. No pinstripes, though, Clive said, regurgitating the admonishments of segment producers.
Then Clive got his own show. Just like that. This career for which people jockey all their lives fell into his lap. With the show came his own car service, his own dressing room, and his own shiny new girlfriend, a makeup artist named Chantal who’d been smudging concealer over Clive’s pores for months. She had a heart-shaped face and her own line of blush brushes. She got him into Bikram yoga and sage-smudging. Pedicures. When the show was canceled, Clive became a parody of himself. He posted Carl Jung quotes on social media. The bookshelves of his office were now lined with titles like The Anxiety of Presence and Past Life Regression. A four-hundred-page book called How to Breathe sat open in the corner where the DSM had once been. He also started closing his door to meditate, which we thought was bad until he stopped closing the door. We’d walk by and see him, sitting ramrod straight, eyes closed.
“Inner peace as outer performance,” Zach said, loud enough for Clive to hear.
“Don’t,” I said, sensing that ridicule might drive him further away.
“He can’t hear me. Can you, Clive?!”
Zach lamented that it was impossible to tell where Old Clive stopped and New Clive began. Still, I defended him. There was no such thing as New Clive. It was all an act on behalf of the magazine, on behalf of this institution we were rebuilding together. We would do the same if we were in his shoes. Sure, Clive would fold in the occasional pat therapy phrase—one had to “set one’s boundaries” and “keep one’s side of the street clean.” But he was still the person to whom I confided during the nights we put the magazine to bed. I knew him. I knew him best. But this was before. Before Clive began disappearing just as the magazine was dying, just when we needed him the most, before he began babbling about parallel universes and metaphysics.
And well before I’d been dragged to a secret lair on the Lower East Side with a fucking garden in it.
Clive said nothing. He just stood there, waiting for me to speak.
“And to think,” I said, “you’re not even Jewish.”
“Call it a rental,” he said, relaxing. “This place used to look like Dresden after the bombs.”
“You’re flipping synagogues now?”
“Have you had the coffee?”
“Did you guys drug the coffee?!”
Errol looked mortally offended. He coughed into his pocket square and excused himself from the room with a bow, the glass door rattling closed behind him.