“Really?” I said, my voice going up an uncontrollable octave. “He didn’t know me.”
“Lola. To not know you is to love you.”
“That sounds like an insult.”
“I think you know it’s not,” he said, turning scarlet.
Now I remembered. We were at Zen Palate in Union Square, eating our soy protein balls before they got too cold to consume, and Jonathan got up to go to the bathroom. While he was gone, I held my glass of lukewarm organic wine, contemplating what I knew had to be done. Jonathan had his Polaroid camera on him and on his way back to the table, he took a photo, shaking the picture.
“Look at this composition,” he said.
I knew that would be the last picture he would ever take of me, that by this time tomorrow we would not be dating. I wondered if he still had it.
Adella returned to us with a perky “What’d I miss?”
Unlike Willis, Jonathan had not minimized the story of us. He remembered, all right. But like Willis, he also remembered to move on and live his life.
“What’s your story these days, Lola?” Adella asked.
“My partner and I are getting married.”
I’d never once answered this question like this and considered any unbidden relationship status offensive. Nor had I ever referred to Boots as “my partner.” But I enjoyed the ambiguity of it, the pilfered implication of growth, the potential expansion of sexual preference. I didn’t need to compete with Adella’s completionism, but I wanted to put myself in the ballpark of it. To establish my own ballpark. I’m self-aware, too. I’ve evolved into a partnership, too. I don’t need to be the boss of someone, nor am I anyone’s puppet.
Even though we were, all three of us, Clive’s puppets.
“Congratulations,” they said, generously but not too generously.
Our goodbye was an awkward baton pass of hugs. I tried to listen to their conversation as they walked away but their words were unintelligible.
That night, I pulled out the box of old letters that I kept in the back of our closet, wedged between vacuum-sealed sweaters and folded boxes that Boots used for shipping his pieces. I’d probably need to move my secret stash under the bed soon. He’d been selling enough pieces of late, one of my protective walls was thinning.
I had judged Willis for shoving all his experiences into a tidy box, but I had done it literally. I dug until I found one of Jonathan’s old cards. It was dated with a number that made my heart seize. So much time had passed. For a while, any year that began with a “20” felt comfortably contemporary. But now people born in the new millennium were whole people with opinions and degrees, babies even. As such, they were in flagrant violation of this comfort. They were having their own debates, making their own memories, sending their own cards, discovering music with the zeal of the converted. They were walking into parties, hoping their own Jonathans would be there.
The card featured a cartoon of a go-go dancer in white boots, music notes against a rainbow background. It read: Someone’s in the birthday groove! It still played a tune, a melody like a tiny ambulance.
8
But before I went back to the apartment, back to the box, I dropped by the Golconda. Mostly because I wanted to see if it was open, even as I knew open was not quite the word. Clive was too busy laminating prototypes to offer me practical information such as hours of operation. Was it possible the answer was “always,” like a 24-hour drugstore that happened to charge $250,000 a prescription? I paced in front of the doors, trying to catch the attention of the security cameras. People were watching and so I pretended to be frustrated with my phone, to be aghast at imaginary incompetence. I found myself unable to stomach the idea of going back to our perpetually bright apartment right away, eating a bag of chips for dinner, testing the limit of the Chip Clip springs. I was midway through composing a text to Clive—Maybe less with the surrealism and more with the—when the doors clicked.
I moved quickly, letting the building shroud me in darkness. I nearly fell when a rat decided that the best means of avoiding me was to go directly over my shoe. When I got to the second door, Errol was there to greet me, enveloped in a lemon-scented particle cloud. It was confusing how someone who emitted so much charm had wound up lending his time and talents to Clive. Though I suppose everyone wound up serving Clive eventually, and in ways that broke the boundaries of him signing our paychecks. And that, he didn’t always do. At Modern Psychology, people were hesitant to badmouth him when he stiffed them. They chalked up an unpaid invoice to a misunderstanding, an accounting delay or Clive’s personal economic philosophy bleeding into his professional one. Paychecks were fantastic but surely they only made life better, not livable. And yet those in his orbit kept bringing him more—more partnerships, more funding, more cheap labor. They recognized too late that these services were not being offered, they were being extracted.