toe is longer than his big toe. He goes through phases of intense love, then hatred for Indian food (it gives him explosive diarrhea). He is endearingly cranky in the mornings but inherently an early riser, and he gives up coffee every six months, swearing this time it’s for good. He likes to wear a mustache, but only when accompanied by a beard. If you go to a museum with him, he will unfailingly wander off by himself. He is a talented drinker but rarely seems drunk. He is a library of facts about the ocean. His body temperature is always one to two degrees higher than the average 98.6 and so sleeping with him feels like being in an intimate position with a furnace. He has a way of narrowing his eyes when he is annoyed or suspicious, and a way of ridiculing someone without their noticing until it’s too late. He absolutely spurns astrology; his handwriting has a way of changing to suit the occasion. He can roll his r’s quite well and, if he chooses to, speaks pretty decent Spanish. He whistles while he urinates. He always carries a knife and uses it (in handy versus violent ways) every chance he gets.
He cries infrequently, and when he does it is silent with a great deal of shoulder shaking. He does his best thinking in the ten minutes after a visit to a planetarium. He can curl his tongue into a U and also a “clover,” and is a talented eyebrow raiser. There is a spot with a half-inch circumference below his left jaw where hair does not grow; he has bizarre theories about why. Most of the time he has illicit fireworks purchased in Chinatown on his person. He adores Burnese mountain dogs and lights up at a sighting of one.
I use the present tense here, but it is possible that Jackson actually has given up coffee, that he has covered the tattoo of my name with something else, that he cries openly in front of this new woman. It has been a year, two months, and six days since we spoke. It has been four months since, in a moment of loneliness that came not late at night but early on a sunny morning, I called him and left a message he didn’t return. The last of his belongings and mementos of Us sit in a box in the back of my bedroom closet; though I resist the urge to take it down and finger the black-and-white photo booth strips, the silly tin science-fiction lunch box I bought him that he loved fiercely, the only remaining piece of art he made in his sleep, I know the objects so well that I’m not sure what difference it actually makes.
Officially, I’m Ida, though Jackson has called me I as long as I can remember. The symbolism is sickening. Even in the worst of it, even in phases where I spoke almost exclusively in monosyllables and guttural sounds and sat around lost in the worn flannel shirt he left behind, I would never bring this up to anyone: and he calls me I. Like I. As in myself.
In a particularly memorable home video, shot by my father who poured his monomania exclusively into filmic evidence of our childhood for a full year before quitting pretty much entirely, Jackson and I are sitting in a sun-faded kiddie pool in my front yard, aged three and a half or four. There’s something in my hands Jackson wants but can’t have—the camera zooms and focuses—it’s a set of brightly colored rubber rings—and he looks right at the camera, at my father, at justice, and cries: I want it but I has it!
Cut to: Valentine’s Day. We are at the kitchen table, our fingers covered in glue and the filth it’s attracted, and my father has not taken pains to maintain any level of organization so that bow-tie pasta and bits of stained doily and construction paper and crayons are everywhere. Somewhere in the background you can hear Julia walking a rambunctious James around the house; she is singing “Baby Beluga” full force and he wholeheartedly despite not knowing all the words; my father tries to point the camera toward the sound but it can’t be framed and he switches it back to us.
“What,” he says, “is Valentine’s Day for?”
I ham for the camera and flirt and wiggle: “Loooove,” I say.
“And who do you love, honey,” says my father, but before I