As I watched him from a distance, I wondered: Had this man been designing my monthly missives about Mexican folk art?
He slowed as he approached. He still had a boy’s face. I had difficulty imagining Jonathan paying for goods with cash he earned from a job he held. How would he do these things without using a drawing of a fox as currency?
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
They looked at me in unison. Had we not just been over this?
“I mean now. On Earth. In general.”
“Oh,” Jonathan said. “I work for the Department of Environmental Protection.”
“He’s going to save the planet.”
I tried to imagine them having sex. Adella was theatrical and confident, the kind of woman who glommed on to her gender as if it would steer her whole personality. And who had done pretty well with this theory. But the Jonathan I knew was uncomfortable in his own skin, rarely thinking of himself as human, forget masculine. He blushed at his own erections. I never saw him crave anything. But we were older now and perhaps Jonathan had learned to funnel his desire for punishment into something satisfying.
“Only mass sterility will save the planet,” he deadpanned.
“I love that you guys know each other.” Adella changed the topic. “This world is too tiny. I swear, there’s just ten people in all of America and the rest is funhouse mirrors.”
“Here I was at the end of America,” Jonathan recited, “no more land—and now there was nowhere to go but back.”
Jonathan had done his senior thesis on the cult of personality surrounding the Beat generation. He interviewed people who made pilgrimages to North Beach, who found the rusted car under the bridge in Big Sur. He tracked them down, recorded their pride and their sadness. He got a tattoo on his shoulder, a line from Naked Lunch: “A freight train separates the Prof from the juveniles … When the train passes they have fat stomachs and responsible jobs.” It was my hand he squeezed when he got the tattoo. How strange, I thought, that I was the first woman to touch it and Adella would probably be the last.
And yet Jonathan had clearly never mentioned any of this to her.
Under normal circumstances, not qualifying for disclosure would’ve been an insult. But I knew something neither of them did: I mattered enough to him to land him here. And the prophecy of Jonathan’s tattoo had come to pass. He did have a fat stomach now, an emo gut bloated with years of feelings. And he did have a responsible job. Still, the more he spoke, the more I saw how this was the Jonathan I knew. He told Adella that it might be fun, in case the burglars returned, to tape a thousand different keys to the front door. She looked at him blankly and excused herself to answer a work call.
Branded content? Was it maybe branded content?
Jonathan and I occupied ourselves, wordlessly measuring our current faces against our former ones. I may not have been able to recall how we ended but I could recall how we began—the nights in the basement of our dorm as we waited for a washing machine to free up, searching for each other at parties, writing long emails that continued over summer break. I had an internship in the city and I wrote to him of my adoration for “the vacillating scents of city trash.” There were descriptions of New York at the turn of the millennium, during its gimmicky theme bar phase: Korova Milk Bar, Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Beauty Bar, Idlewild （which featured real seats from a DC-10）。 Jonathan was spending the sweltering months volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. He set up an email account for a splinter and sent me a series of missives from the splinter’s point of view. The splinter felt stuck. The splinter longed to be removed with my lips.
We were stymied by cuteness, by an inability to speak plainly about our feelings. We’d send each other origami and Polaroids and drugstore birthday cards that said things like “Guess who’s 5 today?” Our relationship died for the same reason Jonathan’s senior thesis got ripped to shreds: It smothered itself in its own conceptions. Turns out it’s a lot harder to write something original about William Burroughs than it is to skewer the people who idolize William Burroughs.
While Adella paced in front of us, fiddling with her earpiece, Jonathan explained how his father had died. Prostate cancer. Stage Four because he hid it, because he wouldn’t go to the doctor. Horrific but quick. I felt an unreasonable possession over Jonathan’s father, over the apartment I had not seen in years. Never mind the fact that Adella received mail there, kept her toiletries in the bathroom.
“I thought it might be weird to reach out. I should have. He always liked you.”