I saw Fernando through a restaurant window on Hester Street. He was on a date. He had ghosted me in my hour of need, but he had thought of me again after that day. Feeling emboldened by my new role as the Night Mayor of Chinatown, I walked into the restaurant, gave the ma?tre d’ a twenty-dollar bill, and nodded at Fernando’s table. I told him that if two credit cards were presented, the money was to go toward the woman’s half of the bill only, but if only one credit card was presented, the ma?tre d’ was to keep the money. Then I took a gratified step back out into the night.
* * *
Phillip I met in the nascent days of online dating, which meant I half expected him to burst into pixels. The idea that we had plucked each other off a shelf and could just return each other with no consequences was distracting—though quaintly inhuman compared with the swiping of faces that would become muscle memory years later. This is my online boyfriend ran like a news crawl across the back of my eyelids. Phillip, on the other hand, had no reservations about how we met. He opened up. He shared. He was getting his PhD in plant genetics, he wet the bed until he was fifteen, and he carried an EpiPen. I was inconsistent, divulging my deepest fears one moment, neglecting to tell him my office was a block away from his lab the next. Three months in, we were still seeing each other only once a week. In the most polite breakup of its generation, he suggested perhaps it would be easier for all parties to bring that number down to zero rather than up to two.
We should’ve left it there, but we got back together a month later when I ran into him on a crowded crosstown bus. Having had an IRL breakup animated the relationship for me for the first time. I no longer knew Phillip from online. I knew him from no longer knowing him. Now I wanted to see him all the time.
Phillip’s defining moment came during this second chapter of our relationship, when he punched me in the face.
Surpassed only by the time, ten minutes later, when he dumped me. Again.
We were asleep and he was dreaming that he was in a boxing ring, taking swings at the air. He rolled over in the middle of the night and clocked me awake. He bolted to the kitchen and came back with a dish towel and a pint of ice cream, handing me these items like a child hands an adult a broken toy. As I ice-creamed my eye, he sat sheepishly at the end of the bed and informed me that “this” wasn’t going to work. I still wasn’t “letting my guard down.” This was rich, coming from someone who’d just hit me in the face.
What had always interested me about that breakup, in addition to the fact that I had to look as bad as I felt for a week, was that Phillip refused to share any further details of the dream. He was fighting someone or something … but what? The obligation to stay with me? The fear of wetting the bed? Was he punching through my barriers? Maybe it was the eight-year relationship from which he’d recently extricated himself, which we never discussed. His attempts to not talk about her were painful to witness.
I watched Phillip through the window of a men’s clothing store, examining strips of houndstooth, and was tempted to march in there and ask him about the dream. I wondered if he remembered that night as well as I did. Phillip had sent back a sweater of mine a few weeks after the breakup, accompanied by a note, which I kept. It was my only evidence of him. The note, written on a piece of scrap paper, hoped I was well, which I found to be a grievous glossing-over of events. But seeing Phillip again inspired me to think of the note in a softer light. They were just words, written by someone who didn’t know what to say. Prior to the note, I’d never seen Phillip’s handwriting. How badly can you be hurt by someone whose handwriting you’ve never seen?
I followed Phillip as he exited the store, trying not to be seen. He arrived at a bus stop just as a bus pulled up. Then my phone started ringing. It was Boots. We hadn’t spoken in a couple of days, kept just missing each other. I sent it to voice mail but it was too late. I was too close to Phillip, who turned and spotted me. I had a flash of worry that he wouldn’t be able to place me. I was out of context, a time traveler. And I felt so haggard, part of me felt recognition would be an insult. But as he boarded the bus, he pointed into the open door, and yelled “Bus!” Phillip had places to go, people to see, plants to graft. And it was as if all the feelings I’d ever had about our relationship drove off on the M22 with him.
* * *
Aaron was wheeling a baby carriage down Mott Street. He wheeled right past me but I could tell it was him. All these men had lost or gained weight, changed their style, become estranged from their hairline, but their mannerisms were as indelible as fingerprints. I followed him to a bakery famous for its bear claws. There was still a line out the door at 6 p.m. He greeted a petite woman with bluntly cropped hair who handed him a beverage from a cup holder in a second stroller. They looked like they had come downtown for the express purpose of obtaining bear claws. One or both of them had been issued images of pastry by the Golconda.