same. I could not anticipate or control how strongly seeing his face made me react. Why was it easier for me to walk around North Shore and park in the same parking lot I had been almost beaten to death in than it was for me to look at Ray Lampert’s face?
His nose was the dark raspberry of a true alcoholic, but his forehead lift had held up well. It was like my subconscious had simply stored all my animus from that time in his file, and now looking at him was allowing it to spill out and spread panic all over everything. But I walked over to their booth like a normal person, and did an impression of a normal person saying hello, sitting down, taking off my denim jacket, which was stupid to wear, it was too hot in the city in September.
I sat next to Ray, mainly so I wouldn’t have to look at him, and he immediately put his arm around me and began slapping me with his giant, warm hands. “Well, look at you!” he crowed. “What a handsome queer you turned out to be!”
“You’re not allowed to call me queer,” I said, trying to say it in a friendly way.
“I thought that was the word now! It’s not fag, is it?”
“No, ‘queer’ is a fine word, it’s just you aren’t allowed to call me that.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Hey, Michael,” Bunny said, as though I had just gotten there, and I thought she was just trying to end the mess I was in with her dad, and so I focused on her, and made eye contact, and I smiled, and for one long moment that’s all we did, smile at each other, and it was good. She looked incredible. She was in peak physical form. Her skin glowed with vitality. Maybe boxing was good for her. Maybe I was just being a ninny. After everything, I marveled, Bunny Lampert was so damn beautiful. Part of it was that the world had changed around her, and people now saw Serena Williams and understood that she was gorgeous. Part of it was that her face had settled into itself somehow. Part of it was just the luster of extreme physical health. But she was a knockout. She took my breath away.
We ordered. Bunny requested seven egg whites and a side of broccoli and two chicken breasts, which caused the waitress to do some eyebrow lifting, which caused Ray to brag about Bunny’s boxing record to the waitress. “She may even be,” he said, “in fact she probably is, the best female boxer in the world.” The dynamics were all very familiar, and at first that felt oddly good, who we used to be and how we used to act coming back to me so vividly, like I was rediscovering something I had lost.
“Have you heard from, oh god, what’s her name? Oh, I know her name, it’s right there, I just can’t get it,” Bunny said.
“Kelsey?”
“No. God, no, we were friends with her. She was black. It’s right there, I just can’t get it.”
“Naomi?” I said, shocked that Bunny could forget her name.
“Yes! Naomi!” Bunny said. “Whatever happened to her?” And so I told Bunny everything I knew about Naomi from Facebook, and since Bunny was not on Facebook all of this was news to her. I filled her in on what I knew of the others, and told her about my life, but when I spoke too long about my work and my dissertation, I could sense her attention wandering. There was a lot we couldn’t speak of with Ray there. Bunny didn’t mention her time in prison, her girlfriend, or what any of that was like.
“Wait,” she said at one point, “is my fight today?”
“No,” Ray said, “it’s tomorrow.”
“I thought it was today.”
“No, Bunny, it’s tomorrow, I promise.”
She loved boxing and she talked about it rapturously. “I just wish my mom were alive to see me box,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I just think she’d be so proud of me.”
“I bet she would,” I said, even though I thought Allison probably would have preferred it if Bunny went to college or got married. But maybe that would have been wrong of Allison. Maybe it was wrong of me to have preferred that too.
“Did you ever think of going to the Olympics for boxing?” I asked. “They have that, right?”