The chandeliers were on a slight dim and I could see the reflection of the elevator gears, shrunken and liquidy, in Clive’s eyes. No woman, not me, not Chantal, not Clive’s first wife, would capture his heart as Soren J?rgensen had. Clive would never get behind a woman the same way, never refash ion his world with her in mind. He could give to others, that was true enough. And it kept him from being a sociopath. But he could never need.
“Every last one of you sounds the same, you know that? Rather, everyone sounds like you.”
He smiled even though he knew he shouldn’t.
“It’s not a compliment. You’re turning smart people into mush-for-brains.”
“I am? Me? Do you know that eighty percent of New Yorkers own smartphones? The city itself has become more machine than human. For the first time in history, we are the ones who need to be tested for signs of independent thought, but I’m brainwashing people?”
“You’re frightening.”
“Awww, no, I’m not,” he said, ruffling my hair just as Willis had done.
10
Could I be with anyone I’d ever dated if only I’d been just a hair less judgmental? If there was an answer to be found, it was to be found the following night, in Oscar, the platonic ideal of the road not taken. Or, well, a road. Oscar was not a great love. But I held a firm outline of him in my mind and he was unique enough to skate through my thoughts on a regular basis, without “outside stimuli.” Having dated me would probably disqualify Oscar from being a member of the Golconda. Which was a shame. He was a prime candidate.
Oscar was a bourgeois bohemian who’d revolted against his suburban upbringing by diving headlong into alternative medicine. Oil diffusers lined his shelves, hand-labeled tinctures and balms hijacked his bathroom. An amateur apothecary, Oscar put bee pollen in places where bee pollen should never go. He used to fixate on my rising sign in a way that seemed thoughtful at first, his love language, but slowly revealed itself as unhealthy. None of my behavior originated with me, it all came from planets moving out of alignment, from atmospheric imbalances. To no one’s surprise, he spent most of our time together angling to meet Clive, asking me what I thought of a commencement address Clive had given, retweeting Clive to his two hundred Twitter followers. This compacted the cringe, imagining Clive registering Oscar as a fan.
I tried to be tolerant. I said nothing when Oscar set up a Kickstarter page for his shaman’s temple, nothing when he got rid of his phone because technology was a beta blocker, nothing when he slept with crystals the size of pumpkins. Let the man sleep with his crystal pumpkins, I thought. Do. Not. Judge. Once, I let him put one on my naked chest. He asked me if I could feel anything. I looked at the ceiling, feeling only like a cadaver. I thought of Willis’s gold medal, of the weight of it on my sternum. Was I a person men put things on? Like coins on the eyes of the dead for their passage across the river Styx. Eventually, I reported that I could feel something, but I wasn’t sure if it was the vibration of the crystal above or the rumble of the subway below.
“Okay,” Oscar said, “cool.”
His placidity was grating. Boots was uptight by comparison. Being with Oscar was like living in a city without seasons. Do not judge, I thought. Do not punish. Neurosis does not necessitate intelligence. The road to acceptance is paved with natural deodorant.
I bumped into Oscar coming out of a Duane Reade on Bowery. It was late in the afternoon and the skies had opened up, dark rivulets running into the gutters. I’d given up on running into someone—even Clive Glenn was no match for the weather—and decided to lean into the grayness, the sheets of summer rain, and buy myself a pack of cigarettes. When Oscar and I left through the automatic doors at the same time, our umbrellas knocked into each other. I pocketed the cigarettes. Oscar was not surprised by the coincidence of seeing me. This is how his world worked—alignment, inertia, destiny. It took an entire secret society working around the clock to put me in the same headspace.
Oscar was carrying a translucent plastic bag with Western medicine inside, the bag twisting around his wrist.
“Rash,” he explained without me asking.
He pulled aside his hair, which had grown long in the back, to reveal a topography of red welts. The welts merged into one another to form an archipelago. I got a whiff of comfrey, the scent of a salve defeated.
“Got it in the Amazon,” Oscar said. “They have everything down there.”
I had no idea if he meant the rash or the remedy.