I knew I’d spend no small amount of time, working it out in my head, wondering if I’d be just as disturbed by him not getting permission. I often felt my prime years to figure out if I subscribed to the concept of marriage were when I was a child, back when all of life was hypothetical. As an adult, it’s hard to come down on a common institution to which you have no anecdotal access. It smacks of sour grapes. Boots had come along at a time when any reasonable person would’ve assumed I had an educated stance. If I wanted to take the political route, marriage was confinement, a raw deal. People hoped for transformation but too often got lobotomization. Idealization hardened into disappointment. But life is not lived in politics, it’s lived in days.
And so I was content, sitting in the back of that cab with nothing to look at but the profile of Boots’s head, the city rising up beyond him. Even if I was only ever borrowing someone else’s certainty, it would become mine eventually. I could let the idea roost. I decided right there and then that if there was ever anything so terribly wrong with me, it was only that I was a woman who’d spent her youth in New York and never left.
* * *
To make this moment exponentially worse, Amos had, in fact, become a famous Amos. Time bends differently for each of us, but it had bent so favorably in Amos’s direction, it was clear any post-breakup curses had backfired. He’d written two novels and, last I heard, was compiling a collection of his poetry. The first novel was long and pretentious and inspired the kind of critical ire so extreme, you couldn’t argue he was doing something right by getting a rise out of people. The second was equally long and pretentious but about a Palestinian child who, while playing one day, wanders into a dilapidated house. He opens a kitchen cabinet and stumbles upon a Hamas-built tunnel that he crawls inside, but instead of popping out in Israel, he winds up in an alternate reality where there’s no such thing as war. It was on the bestseller list for four weeks, popular enough to amend the consensus about Amos’s first novel, which went from “unreadable” to “dense.” Suddenly, Amos was not a poet who’d tried his hand at fiction, but a novelist who’d dabbled in poetry.
The taller man with the messenger bag was probably his new editor. This person must have selected the venue and expensed the meal. He spotted me first. Amos clocked the break in his audience’s attention and followed the taller man’s gaze. He smiled and rocked back on his heels.
“Hi there,” I said, hugging him to buy myself time away from his face.
“Lola,” he half-whispered.
“I feel like calling you ‘Stranger.’”
“Go ahead,” he said, chin moving against my shoulder.
“Hello, Stranger.”
By the time we detached, he had this beatific look on his face. Here was someone who’d mourned well, whose memory was flushed of unpleasantness.
“Are you coming or going?”
“Neither,” I said, holding up the pack of cigarettes, “coming back.”
Amos smoked more than I did, or at least he used to.
“How are you?” he asked, as if having administered a truth serum.
“Just, you know, meandering the mean streets of Chinatown. You?”
“Oh, it’s far too much to sum up in a sentence.”
I had to refrain from flicking the lighter in my pocket.
“It’s good to see you,” he continued. “Are you still editing?”
“Are you still pissing standing up?”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said, waving at the air. “Yes, of course I’m still editing. I’m at Radio New York.”
“The tech thing?”
“It’s not a ‘tech thing,’ it’s just funded that way. I’m a little disappointed you don’t know where I work.”
“Or am I just pretending not to know?”
“Now there’s a question. Clive and Vadis and all them are in there.”
“You’re kidding,” Amos said, looking over his shoulder as if their faces would be pressed against the glass. “I didn’t see them.”
“Well, that’s probably okay.”
“I never had a problem with those guys.”
“Clive’s toned it down,” I said, “since he found inner peace and a billion dollars. And Vadis’s not, I don’t know—”
“Barking at interns?”
“No, no barking. She’s gypsy chic now.”
“I’ll pretend to know what that means. But man, how did I miss seeing you?”