know why or how or what to do about it, she knew it was an exhaust pipe for every private tension I carried, she knew you didn’t love me, and she loved me, and knew me well, and wanted to protect me from the disappointment of something I didn’t understand.
I felt her fabric pull away from me and the minute thuds of her knees crawling forward. Then she was out of our hole and I could see her calves and ankles in silhouette. I gave her a minute to make her exit and then crawled out myself—sometimes sitting under the staircase alone is a good idea but it usually isn’t. Someone had opened one of the library’s grand windows and its long curtain billowed out into the room. It was so smooth and pregnant I wanted to take a picture of it, but should anyone be allowed to take a picture of a window curtain full of wind, stealing and stabilizing its motion? Why celebrate it by robbing it of the very thing you’re celebrating? And what is a photograph of love, is it marriage?
My phone was dead anyway so I stood and celebrated the curtain in my mind. I don’t even know if you know about Mishti and Barry. I don’t even know what I know about you and Tom. I’m going to go home to myself now. I’m going to take my own medicine and go home.
CREAM
You opened your office door and said, “Closed.”
“What was all of that about my being ‘very good’?”
You let me in. I only then realized I’d gone home to your office.
“Well I’ve done the math and calculated that you stopped being very good right when you started dating Tom.”
“So?”
“So I want to see what it feels like,” you said with a sardonic twist to your mouth I’d never seen before, “I want to fuck off and see how it feels. It’s not something I’ve ever done before.” The idea of you fucking off made me imagine first the sun finally exploding, second malnutrition, and third some kind of miniature vibrator that made me sadly horny.
“So what have you been doing?” I asked, hoping very much you wouldn’t tell me. Please don’t tell me what you and Tom are doing. “Ice skating?”
“Yes. Every Thursday night we go ice skating.”
“And what’s with the Thursdays did you and Barry write a Thursday clause into your marriage—”
“You were right about Mishti, give her a command and she executes.”
“She executes your marriage.”
“With a hot pink guillotine.”
“Tom isn’t the right dude to end a marriage for, even yours,” I was stooping so low now my tongue touched the floor, “he’s not really interested in taking care of anybody.”
“I’m not ending anything Nell you alarmist librarian. I’m beginning the part of my life in which I like living.”
Because I am interested in taking care of you, or at least, because I care about you, aggressively, I want you to like living. I know you have low self-esteem but I think you have perfect self-knowledge. You have the grown woman’s gift of preferences—you want Weil over De Beauvoir; your skin wants acid, not serum; you wake up with a single cumulus cloud of inertia filling your entire head and you want fatty cream in your coffee; you want a lot of salt; your shape is this shape and calls for that pant leg; you have chosen your field of work and every day you choose it; your oil is this oil, your fruit this fruit, you tolerate lactose and grain—these aren’t questions anymore, only a laborious set of rules you follow to satisfy your own demands. I guess I’ve assumed that kind of internal fluency would make days easier.
“I never thought of you as unhappy,” I said, as if you’d insulted me.
“Do you think of yourself as unhappy?”
“No.” But I have no demands and I don’t know myself very well.
“Well, we’re the same,” you said, in a warm almost whisper, and with that tranquilizer in my system I climbed back on your flying carpet and hovered out of your office, down the stairs, into some afternoon rain.
Barry rushed up to catch the door from me, shaking out his umbrella. He looked terrified and wet, as if he hadn’t been holding his umbrella over his head but somewhere else.
“Nell, you—” He hesitated. I wanted for the first time to know what he was going to say. “You wouldn’t—” He pulled the little velcro belt around his miniature umbrella so it became a