that your boyfriend’s cousins were coming over for dinner and that you wished painful deaths upon them. Your boyfriend’s name was Barry. I’d probably met him as a counselor at freshman orientation. I said I had. You said he always encouraged student interaction and that you’d openly avoided it but that this time he’d approve. I think you actually called me a charitable case. I promised to sit between you and cousin four. You took me, quietly, efficiently, home.
That was your old apartment in Astoria. You were thirty-five and I was twenty-five and I was so impressed by your fortitude, your magnitude, by the apartment you rented alone as if living alone in New York were possible. By the authority of your blank walls and the unheard-of oranges striping the thin, not warm, and very sophisticated quilt on your bed. By the ceiling-high walnut shelf of multicolored encyclopedias, itself a jumbo encyclopedia of encyclopedias, that sternly faced your bed and must have been the first and last thing you saw each day. By the one little St. Bernard’s lily growing on your windowsill and the cat who nibbled at it. I wanted immediately, with my whole self, to be your cat.
You took me, in your equalizing uninflected way, entirely seriously. You let me peel the sweet potatoes. You introduced me to Barry as “a botanist.” I’d only told you as the N train crossed the Queensboro Bridge that I wanted to study the harshest grossest facts about the world’s prettiest organisms. You’d nodded at that as if I’d said I needed to use the bathroom, something basic and inevitable about my body. I think the bottom line is that we’re very similar.
Barry (very different) proposed with a princess-cut gray diamond that New Year’s Eve and by the following Christmas you’d moved into Riverside Drive. I declined your repeat invitation, which I still believe was a relief to you. It’s cute to have a student in the mix in Astoria. It’s weird to dilute Riverside Drive with me.
I’d spent the year reading everything I thought you’d ever read, so that I could speak to you. I didn’t want to sit across from you at a dinner table, I wanted us to coauthor a grafting treatise. You were always working on a paper of your own because the department had laid its tenure hoops out before you and asked you to start jumping. Still you read my abstracts and poked the right holes in them. Sometimes you’d ask my opinion of something we’d both read. I learned my own opinions by giving them to you. I did my own work and you did yours and in that way you and I grew older for a good couple of years.
The person who believes in you is the most dangerous person you know. The person who believes in you can unbuild you in an instant. We haven’t learned how to curb that danger. We don’t know what to do with the person who names our life. The one who says Do this, right now, not that and the this that person casually suggests becomes your entire livelihood. The one who lends you a hat that allows you to enter a room. A coat to survive your own winter. We don’t know how to thank, because gratitude is traded in sexual currency. If you don’t marry the person you’re most grateful to, if you don’t fuck them or pretend you want to, the part of you that person created shrivels a little. The part of me you created has overtaken the rest of me, as a weed, because all I do is thank you, is thank you, is thank you.
It isn’t as if you aren’t beautiful, you are beautiful. It isn’t as if you don’t find me, in whatever way you find me, beautiful. It’s that our interest in each other is a cold lake and neither of us wants to jump in. We want to stand together, at the edge of the cold lake.
Maybe I ought to become a psychologist. Maybe I ought to melt my own head.
The splendid thing is that right now, as I write, all the heat in the world has collected in the bread basket that sits between my best friend and your husband. Between Mishti’s vigor, and Barry’s lust, their combined temperatures could maybe warm us, maybe even at this distance.
TACOS
“No, Carlo doesn’t know about it.”
“Keeping secrets is basically apologizing. You hate apologizing.”
“There’s no it for him to know