I slid plastic hangers back and forth in our overstuffed closet. There were dresses I’d bought at sample sales, hovering at the end of the bar, long dresses I thought might make me feel taller but only made me feel sloppy, or structurally complicated dresses I thought might make me feel like the kind of person who owned mid-century furniture. I let my fingers linger on the fabric, on the now-unoccupied places where I’d once been touched. I looked over at Boots and had the same feeling I’d had while watching the man with the backpack reading at the bar the other night. Sometimes choosing the right partner seemed like everything. Sometimes it seemed as deeply irrelevant as deciding what to wear to a wedding.
I made sure to sleep with Boots that night, getting a head start while listening to the sound of his electric toothbrush groaning. Even in the moments I wanted to kill him for being too passive, I could see the headline: “Woman Murders 40-Year-Old Disease-Free Man with 401k: Waste.” I thought if I could just feel his hands running down my back, feel him bury his nose in my neck, he could beat back the swell of information in my head. Sex, be it formulaic or exhilarating, could be reductive like that. It tended to complicate relationships when you weren’t in them, when you were getting in or getting out, but it simplified things in the middle. Look at us, letting the eagerness of our bodies override the discomfort of our minds. Look at us, in this human bed, doing animal things, blinking from position to position like holograms.
After Boots fell asleep, air whistling through his nostrils, questions raced around my mind. How had Clive managed to renovate a synagogue without anyone noticing? How badly had he brainwashed Vadis in order for her to keep this from me? Were the members also maybe Scientologists? Did Clive really think he was actually doing good? And who was responsible for keeping the atrium smelling like lemons? All minor curiosities compared with the biggest one of them all: Did I have it in me to confront the past without getting stuck in it?
If I agreed to this, it would be an advent calendar from hell.
I kicked off the sheets and got up to pour myself a glass of water, leaning forward on our bathroom sink until my nose touched the mirror. I’d always chalked up my devotion to the past as an extension of curiosity. If I found out someone who’d hurt me had gotten married or purchased property, I would google that person. Assumed behavior, but I went beyond the confines of assumption. If they had private social media accounts, I’d send “hang soon?” texts to our mutual friends with some vague fantasy that I’d be able to snatch up their phones while they were in the bathroom. I never did this. But I recognized the impulse as a bad one. I visited the Facebook accounts of the family, the Twitter accounts of the colleagues, the hashtags of the events to which I was not invited. It would’ve been more efficient to set up alerts for these men, but I never did it for the same reason I never bought a carton of cigarettes—too much of a commitment to bad habits.
If, on top of showing these men just the right advertisments and articles, the Golconda was using my search history （the retrieval of which would take negative effort for an NSA specialist）， it was a real cheat sheet. Because sometimes, in an effort to repair hours of damaging activity, I’d google people who had wounded me slightly less and therefore elicited less of an emotional response. It was a form of croquet, knocking one hurt out for another and another. Sometimes, after I’d knocked all the croquet balls out of sight, there was one left standing—and it had Clive’s face painted on it.
Tonight I was filled with rage at Clive for not dating me when he could have. We thought we were so smart, fighting off an inconvenient attraction. It wasn’t all his fault. But he was older and, as the one closer to the future, I felt it was his responsibility to see into it. If we had acted back then, maybe we could be together now, be different people now. But the timing was bad. So Clive set me adrift into the dating world, turning me into the perfect candidate for the Golconda. And now he was with Chantal, a woman who posted sexy photos of herself with incongruous captions like “God is in the detours” and “You don’t have to act like a man to be a strong woman.” As if wearing a bodysuit by a pool were the solution to a problem. She also took a dizzying amount of pictures looking down at her shoes, showcasing the thinness of her ankles. You have to be a certain brand of attractive to take tip-of-the-iceberg photographs of your extremities, safe in the knowledge that anyone will go: “Oh, icebergs—obviously.”
Clive never needed a peer, he needed a Chantal.