You watch a woman across the bar fiddle with a lime slice in her drink. She pops the lime in her mouth, peel and all, and her face snaps from boredom to something like: I regret doing that. You’re the only trans woman here—as far as you can tell—and you wonder if the night would have been better spent watching a three-hour German film on Criterion instead of dragging yourself to this mixer for queer women. Everyone is younger and coupled except for this woman, who catches you smiling as she spits the lime wedge into her glass.
Now you’re talking, flirting, and she jokes that you look like someone who reads The New Yorker on a StairMaster. No, you say, your gym only has treadmills, and you only listen to podcasts. “I like the ones that are like friendship simulators,” you add. “Like I’m in a room with people as funny as me.”
“Are you lonely?” she asks with a sympathetic laugh.
“Sometimes,” you say. You hate how you try to be coy when you’re depressed.
Maybe it’s her self-possession, or the way she dips her shoulder to the beat of the music, but she looks out of place amid the bar’s gentrified aesthetic: a jungle of glossy indoor plants; stalactites of Edison bulbs dangling from the loft ceilings; a DJ nodding along to their own bassy selections. She volleys back jokes without hesitation, and you’re in awe of the rhythm that develops, drink after drink, until the mixer is over and the bar has been restocked with mostly straight couples.
You exchange numbers and go on a date the following week at a crowded Italian restaurant that also sells lamps and furniture. Price tags dangle from the chairs, and she asks the waiter what would happen if someone tried to buy the table where you’re eating. He winces a little, like he’s trying to work through period cramps, and says tonight’s special is the linguine with local clams. Her laugh is as inviting as a layer cake, and, when your meals arrive, she’s the first person in history—you’re certain—to look elegant talking through a mouth full of bucatini. For work, she pleads for money at a global nonprofit that sends toilets to developing countries.
“Please don’t think too deeply about it,” she says. “The work’s not stable, it pays horribly, and on my worst days it makes me a total bitch.”
“Today was good though?”
“No, no. Terrible. Worst I’ve experienced in ages. It’ll be in tomorrow’s papers,” she says with a perfectly tortured smile. “I’m about to She-Hulk my way to the dessert cart.”
After dinner you split the check and buy a weathered copper ashtray shaped like a turtle. The paper price tag tied to its foot flaps in the breeze on the walk to her apartment.
On her living room floor she reads your tarot and pulls the Four of Cups: An apathetic-looking person sits by a tree with three cups at their feet while a cloud reaches out with a fourth. She ponders the card and then says maybe your heart is stuck.
“Is that my fate?” you ask. “If it is, I’ll make other plans.”
“Maybe you should open yourself up to possibility,” she says. “Recognize a gift or help when it’s being offered. Or maybe you don’t appreciate all the options you have in life.”
“Not true. Flip another card just to be safe.”
“Or try living in the present more.”
“Maybe later.”
You learn her body: The folded cartilage of her right ear. The tattoos of lilacs and magnolias carpeting her upper arm, an octopus in a teacup on her ribs, a stick and poke of Marge Simpson above her pubic hair. Her skin is soft, and she says—for the first time you think she’s being serious—she has a nine-step skin-care regimen. Twice a day.
The way she touches you makes you feel like a lost artifact. Sex with her is a transference of feeling, of pleasure, of electricity passing from one body to another as she follows the path of your mms and ahhs and pleases and mores. She tastes you, savors you with the same curl on her lip from earlier tonight when she said the pasta was the silkiest, most luscious she’d ever eaten. When you come, you feel like a house sliding off a cliff into the ocean. With her index finger, she traces the scar over your left kidney—from jumping on a janky couch in a friend’s basement when you were a kid.
“My organs were harvested at a young age,” you say.
“What does that feel like?” she says.
“Like I’m incomplete.”
“Tell me three things about yourself you’ve never told anyone.”
You hesitate. This exercise feels about as natural as extracting your own wisdom teeth, but you hold out your hand and count to three, starting with your thumb. “One: I don’t know the difference between most birds. Two: I’ve never broken a bone, but I have lied about it. And three: I cried at my eighth-grade band recital.”
“What instrument did you play?”
“Saxophone.”
“Play me ‘Careless Whisper’ sometime.”
“Now you go.”
She counts to three starting with her index finger and says: “I was a horse girl, and I think about horses every day. I have broken bones, seven of them. See. My toe is broken right now.” She lifts her leg into the air, and her middle toe is splinted with tape. “And I am the reincarnation of James Cagney.”
“Prove it.”
She scrunches up one side of her face and says, “You see here, sonny, I died on March 30, 1986, and I’ve been stuck in this woman’s body ever since. You’ve got to help me.”
Your naked bodies shake with laughter: the scars, the taped toes, and the warm air still cupped between you two. The night is filled with making out and nonsensical jokes, until the morning light blues the room and you finally fall asleep.
Clouds coat the sky like sheep’s wool as you walk the Tidal Basin together under the flowering cherry blossoms, past the Jefferson Memorial. She tells you she’s recently divorced. She studied to be an actor and did traveling companies of Broadway shows for years. Her ex-husband works for the DOJ and made enough money to support them both.
“I was doing Book of Mormon in Boise, and I just had this revelation like . . . what the fuck am I doing? This show sucks, but everyone is laughing. I started working in nonprofits—major gifts—because class, status, wealth . . . it doesn’t faze me. I’m persuasive. It was more money than I was making acting, and it didn’t give me the moral ick. But I realized how dull my life was. DOJ lawyers are dull, dull, dull. My ex ate raisin bran for breakfast every morning. Raisin bran! What millennial eats raisin bran? One night he was working late, and I put on a period film about beautiful French lesbians. Lots of wistful longing. After that, I couldn’t get it out of my head how much I needed to be with a woman. I looked back on my life, and things made sense. Why was I so preoccupied with this actress I’d worked with? Why did I want this woman smelling the cantaloupes at the grocery store to look at me? I tried to make it work with my ex-husband, but it was clear: I was either with him or I was queer. And lawyers are good for one thing—swift divorces.”
“You deserve better than a DOJ attorney,” you say. “Everything is an ethical dilemma to them. The gray areas are where the real living is.”
She squeezes your hand, and a blossom falls in her hair. “I like you because you’re patient with me,” she says. “It’s one of your best qualities.”
“Thanks,” you say, but what you mean is: No one has ever read me as generously as you have, and I admire your humor and how goddamn sharp you are, and I don’t know what to do with all this terror and desire for love.
She’s more alive with queerness and femininity than you. You never had a girlhood. You don’t know how to braid a friendship bracelet. You spent prom night home alone, jealous of the girls who wore their hair sculpted into curls, refrigerated flowers strapped to their wrists. There is nothing remarkable about your queerness or transness; they simply exist, like the scar over your kidney. You spend your days administering, bureaucratizing, proselytizing complex solutions to simple problems, awash in Outlook notifications and fluorescent lights, while your coworkers trip over pronouns, avoid saying your name, and never ask about your life outside of work, preferring not to perceive you at all.
You stand in front of Stumpy, a tree with a rotten trunk and one branch covered in white-pink flowers. The park service is going to remove many waterlogged cherry trees this year to carry out seawall repair. People take pictures with Stumpy, leave bouquets and goodbye cards in its hollowed-out trunk.
You don’t search for flaws, but they appear. She places demands on you in unreciprocated ways. Hurried texts from her require prompt responses; your texts to her linger unanswered because she’s had a busy, awful week at work. She makes an offhand joke about homeless people. She aggressively speculates that her ex-husband is in the closet. But then, what perfect Christmas tree doesn’t have a bald spot? That’s what the corner in the living room is for.
At a brick-walled basement bar, a light-up sign shows Billy Dee Williams holding a can of Colt 45 with the words “It works every time!” You watch a first-date couple at the next table, two twentysomethings who both seem nervously eager. The young man says he can’t believe yeast infections are that common. An upbeat reggae cover of the Cranberries’ “Zombie” plays in the background.
“Hey,” she says. “What’s up?”
“Just taking in the scene,” you reply unconvincingly.
“I’m part of the scene.”
“No, you’re right. How was work?”
“I need a distraction, please.”
You review the drink menu and point to one called White Russian Collusion. Even though the joke is ten years too late, she says, “That’s really funny,” and then orders a morose-looking glass of red wine. The rest of the conversation is knock-kneed, full of misfires and short, sad pops of compulsory laughter.
After dinner, in the parking garage, she leans against her car.
“Are we good?” she asks, joyless and nerve-racked.
“I hope so. Are you?”
“Everything around me is a mess, so it makes me think we are too. I swear my job is trying to kill me.”
“Nonprofits have assassins now?” you say.
“Don’t,” she says. “I don’t need your stand-up show tonight.”
She places her hand on the car door handle as if testing the integrity of an escape hatch. You have another joke lined up—how the assassins must have one hell of a Schedule C—but you swallow it like a dry walnut and apologize. She says not to worry about it. When she kisses you goodnight, it’s quick and lacks tenderness. Your lips and hers are both greasy from fried chicken and her habit of applying Burt’s Bees after every meal. You wonder if this relationship can withstand all the misery in the world. Her car engine echoes through the parking garage, a space that feels both vast and claustrophobic.
The next morning, when you run through the Mall, the cherry trees have already shed their blooms. They lie scattered across the sidewalks. How beautiful, how brief.
She is fired unceremoniously, and you’ve never been good at comforting people through a crisis. You pour her a glass of wine, sit next to her on the couch, rub her back, and say, “I don’t understand.”
“They told me I was useless,” she says. “Can you believe that?”
“Have you started looking for other jobs?”
“Not now. Just tell me that this sucks.”
“OK, this sucks?” you say.
“Not like that, please.”
“This sucks,” you say, firm but wooden.
She says she doesn’t want solutions, but you offer them anyway. You say what you think is the right thing, only to learn that the right thing is a land mine. You’re suddenly locked in an argument. Exhaustion provides the only resolution, and you climb into bed together, quiet and confused. You can be such a piece of shit. As you try to fall asleep, you envision a future with her: all the arguments that make you want to scream, all the vacations that you never want to end, your mind clawing for impossible answers to hypothetical scenarios at 4 am.
What if you had said, This sucks, the right way the first time? What if tomorrow, as an apology, you buy two tickets to Paris, and in a few months the two of you are sitting side by side at a café, eating baguettes and smoking unfiltered cigarettes? Or, no, you’re in a park, and you make a joke about smoking a baguette like a cigarette, laughing in a French accent, hon-hon-hon, and then a beautiful, French lesbian with bangs like Anna Karina sees you both looking joyful and free-spirited, and she says she is having how do you say—the aftehr pahr-tay, and many of France’s top lesbians will be there, and you’re both like, Sure, when in Rome, ha ha! and the party is like that scene in Irma Vep where the film crew and Maggie Cheung are eating delicious potages and drinking wine that would cost thirty dollars in the US but is only three euros because wine is a national treasure, and you can’t believe it’s already 2 am and you’re still listening to jazz or Sonic Youth and talking about Colette and why French society is so much freer, and you’re suddenly fluent with only three years of high school French and impressing France’s top lesbians, who all thought that Americans were xenophobic and closed-minded and unworldly, and you’re like, Non, c’est vrai aussi! which causes everyone to laugh and paw at you, but it is getting late—you hear street sweepers cleaning and stray dogs barking—so you say, Au revoir, and kiss each other on the cheeks, but as you wait for a cab, you think that, just because French people kiss each other on the cheeks doesn’t mean they aren’t also xenophobic and closed-minded and unworldly—they are, that was kind of the whole fucking point of Irma Vep—but you decide to let this thought flit away in the cobalt-blue morning, her arm hooked around yours, her head on your shoulder as your taxi driver escorts you through near-empty streets in slow motion, because everything is in slow motion and perfect for once, and you crawl into your hotel bed, windows open, curtains fluttering, and fall asleep to the sounds of other people starting their day.
It comes up over text—moving in together. She’s still out of work and is having trouble making rent. Maybe she’ll have to move back in with her parents in Connecticut. Worried about losing her completely, you offer your apartment.
I’m not sure if I’m ready for that, she texts back.
Just offering.
Can we talk though? I want to know where this is heading.
Sure. Someplace quiet.
The National Gallery?
Neutral territory. Good for treaties too.
You meet on a sunny day. Wind carries a thick smell of fresh mulch. Pollen sticks to the inside of your nose. A tour bus of Boy Scouts in khaki uniforms empties onto the Mall. They bound and twitch like squirrels. You tell her you were an Eagle Scout, a remark you almost held back.
“These are the things I wish I knew about you,” she says as you enter the museum.
Maybe it was a mistake choosing such a solemn and contemplative place. Raising your voice above a whisper feels like an intrusion. The entrance branches into different rooms, leading you through multiple cultures and eras. You can move through time, follow the various paths available to you. You pick a direction and go.
I
You follow her into a gallery filled with streetscapes and portraits. Some are familiar, like a languid woman collapsed on a couch in a shroud of pearlescent cloth. The colors are beautiful, true to life, but most of the paintings in this room appear hastily done, as if the fleeting scenes would vanish if they weren’t captured immediately.
“Ever since I divorced, I’ve had the sense that relationships are made for other people,” she says.
“Are you afraid that you’ll put in all this time and effort again and it won’t work out? Or you’ll become a different person?”
“I feel like I’m all out of metamorphoses.”
“Me too,” you say.
“I just want to enjoy my life as a moth.”
You both stand in front of a portrait of a child sitting on a woman’s lap. The child holds a hand mirror and is looking at the painter. It’s a gentle scene, playful, but also precarious in a way that unsettles you: The pudgy nakedness of the child. The oversize sunflower pinned to the woman’s dress. The way the woman tries to hold the child in place, fighting for balance.
“I have the sense you need some space,” you say. It’s a stupid, obvious observation, but the most honest read of the relationship.
“I think so,” she says. “Is that what you want?”
“I’m not sure,” you say, but what you mean is no.
“I need a little time, mostly to land back on my feet.”
You leave the museum, single again. It’s a premature ending, but amicable, you reason while crying; humane, like euthanizing a dying dog so it doesn’t suffer.
In the weeks that follow, you reinstall dating apps and order a new bra. You hook up with a guy who smells like Old Spice and whose body is as angular as a modern-art museum. You’ve never bottomed with a man before. He leaves you gagging, gasping for air, and, while coming, you cry without sobbing. His musk sticks to your sheets, your skin, your hair, reminding you of your old body, the unwanted other who lives inside you in the shape of a man’s lurking shadow.
“Let’s do this again,” he says. “You’re cool, like . . . straight-up homie-coded.”
“Thanks, I’d like that,” you say, but you never respond to his texts.
You still think of him sometimes. You buy a stick of Old Spice, keep it in a drawer next to your bed, and huff it whenever you need to feel wanted.
A month later she texts you an old video of a shirtless, mustachioed man in suspenders playing the “Careless Whisper” sax solo in malls, fast-food restaurants, a college lecture hall. You emphasize the text with a HAHA and type Lollllllll.
That could be you, she texts back.
Time to dust off my saxophone, undo laser, and grow a mustache.
Don’t you keep your sax in a case?
Yeah. I dust off the case so my mouthpiece isn’t full of dust when I open it.
Obviously.
Obviously.
I thought the mustache would help with that but nvm.
You want to say that you’ve missed her, that you’ve been thinking about her, that you lie awake at night in a terrible not-present present where, instead of this un-togetherness, you both get high, watch bad movies, take pottery lessons together, and then become pottery influencers. People watch videos of you online—working together in matching clay-splattered aprons—and comment: Look at these beautiful pottery lesbians! Let me buy one thousand of those beautiful, expensive, one-of-a-kind vases!!!
Typing bubbles appear on the screen.
Want to get a drink soon? she texts. I’ve had a shitty month.
I’d like that. Sorry about your month of shit.
At a quiet bar in her neighborhood she tells you about her cat that died in her lap, her best friend who announced that she’s moving back home to Maine, and her new job, which is simply OK and likely morally bankrupt.
“The organization—get this—brings AI into schools,” she says.
“Do you really need a philanthropy person for that? It sounds more like a money-laundering scheme.”
“Someone needs to manage their galas.”
You both laugh, but it’s somber, as if you’ve reanimated a body that’s already been buried. She grips your hand tenderly.
“I don’t want to make it seem like I reached out just so I could dump all my shit on you, but,” she says, “I have missed you.”
You manage to say you’ve missed her too.
Back at her apartment she picks a comfort-watch, will-they-or-won’t-they rom-com from the 2000s that you’ve never seen. She settles into your arms and eventually falls asleep while you finish the movie.
It takes a lot of maturity to rebuild what’s been obliterated. You’re not afraid of love; you’re afraid of being abandoned, of still playing hide-and-seek when everyone has gone inside and you’re alone in the woods, sweaty, hungry, swatting at blackflies that stab your skin. Loving means accepting that other people want to find you even when you’re convinced that you’ll never be found again. Maybe things will work out or maybe they won’t, but someday you’ll learn this.
II
You and she enter a gallery and stop in front of a painting that depicts a steeplechase: A young man is fallen, unconscious or dead, lying underneath a rush of horses. The text for the painting says the artist revised the work twice in three decades. First more horses were added. Then the sky and the silks worn by the jockey were made more vibrant. The only aspect untouched from the original is the fallen jockey’s face, his anguish preserved in fine detail, floating like cream against the rough, dark strokes of earth and sky and horses.
“What if being alive is about all the ways life pummels you?” you say.
“Are there prizes for Most Pummeled?”
You mime handing her an award. “Congratulations.”
“Oh, a big, fat turd made of glass. This is so heavy, wow,” she says, cradling it. “There are so many people to thank. My agent, first of all, for finding the worst opportunities and making me feel like all of my life choices have amounted to one long, silent-but-deadly fart. My parents, who for many years correctly said that I should have been a nurse or a chemist. Oh, wait. What’s this?” She examines the award. “There’s been a mistake. This trophy actually belongs to you.”
“Oh, gee,” you say and take it from her. “This is remarkable. And here I thought I was going to go home empty-handed and would have to tell Mario Lopez that it was an honor just to be nominated. Well. I’d like to dedicate this award to society. You are the wet fart to every trans person. You are diarrhea with corn floating on the surface. Thank you. That I’m still alive is a miracle.”
As other visitors enter the gallery, you both attempt to stifle laughter. You’re having too much fun to end things now.
At her apartment, she dresses like a guy and fucks you in a way that makes you feel pitiful and holy and also gives you rug burn. Afterward you watch an award-winning movie where a melancholy trans woman learns to trust herself. You watch another where a trustworthy trans woman teaches her melancholy friends how to love. When did every story about trans people become so cloying and sentimental? Trans Joy—what a kick! No, you want Trans Dirtbags. Trans Emotional Baggage. Trans Toxicity.
On a date at a bowling alley, where a Meat Loaf tribute band drowns out most of your conversation, you invent a character, a trans woman named Chelsea, and you take turns giving her storylines:
“Chelsea fucks a coworker and clogs her toilet with a massive dookie,” you say.
“Chelsea rigs a youth soccer game to beat some transphobe parents,” she says.
“Chelsea thinks she’s retired but is pulled back into the game when a bunch of assassins kill her dog.”
“That’s just John Wick.”
You shrug. After bowling a gutter ball, you want Trans Revenge.
If nothing can prepare you for relationships other than relationships, then you feel uneducated. You don’t have a lot of experience, and your three exes have all become “user-experience” designers. Sometimes you’ll search for them on the internet and find their examples of easy-to-navigate but generically elegant wedding websites. How are they so happy and stable in their profile pictures? Do you invite unhappiness?
Some conversations with her are easy, seamless, but other times you blink and are already sliding into misunderstanding, frustration, and the dark irrevocable. Breaking up seems more difficult and painful than staying together, but you crave loneliness again.
On a night when you’re feeling irritable, she drags you to a bar with her old actor friends. At first they want to know everything about you, but your presence becomes ornamental after you say that nearly every actor you’ve met is petty and juvenile—unlike them, you clarify hastily, but it’s too late. You spend the rest of the night scrolling Instagram, Reddit, your email, and texts with your mom while mentally cataloging the actors’ tics: rubs earlobes; pulls down hem of skirt; says everything is “massive,” including empty theaters, a porcupine, and their recent Tinder dates. Back at her apartment, you’re drunk. She asks what your problem was tonight, why you were silent, why you couldn’t even fake being interested in her friends.
You say you felt like you were being waterboarded by extroverts.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Pretend, for a moment, that you’re better than them,” you say. “Because you are.”
“Have you ever been friends with someone before?”
You shrug. “I watched La Strada on my couch alone on prom night.”
“And I feel like you’re still stuck in that place.”
She fills a pint glass with tap water, takes a few sips, then passes the glass to you. You chug the rest and feel a droplet leak from the corner of your mouth. You refill the glass and pass it back to her, but she holds up her palm and says she’s good.
“You’re not going to say anything?” she asks.
“I was drinking water.”
She’s staring at you.
“What?” you say.
“I don’t know what you want.”
“More water.”
She grabs the glass from you and drops it into the sink. You jump, expecting the sound of shattering, but instead there’s a head-rattling, metallic knock. The glass just rolls around.
“If you’re not going to take me seriously . . . ,” she says.
“I don’t know why you’re so demanding.”
“Fuck you.” And then again quieter, “Fuck you,” as if she’s trying to convince herself that she hates you.
You cradle her wrist, your fingertips touching her palm, and consider apologizing. It feels impossible to undo your childish habits, easier to leave things unsaid. She draws closer. You push into her, and then you’re kissing in an ugly sort of way. She bites your neck, and you bite back on her tits. You fuck. Rough, clumsy, unbeautiful. You demand that she smother you because it’s the closest thing you can offer to penance. Her hand covers your mouth and nose. Your spit erupts from the cracks of her fingers. You’ve forced yourself into silence, and you hate how good it feels.
In the morning at work, you scroll on your phone until its battery dies. You don’t have a charger at your desk. Stomach acid stings the back of your throat. Your insides feel corrosive. If you could, you would text to ask her out for coffee, tell her that this is over, but only if that’s what she wants too. You need your sanity back. Maybe your dead phone is filled with texts from her saying she needs to reevaluate, that this isn’t healthy, that she needs a break. The thought is its own type of comfort. This is how you know you’ve reached the end.
III
You pass between the National Gallery’s West and East buildings in an underground walkway filled with bright, shimmering lights—a bit of wonder many feet underground. It reminds you of a sci-fi film from the sixties, the kind with garish, mid-century modern sets.
“When I die, I want the inside of my coffin to look like this,” she says.
“Make me executor, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
“Are we really talking about estate planning already?”
“Too soon,” you say, “but how committed are you to making this work?”
“To be honest, that question unsettles me.”
“Me too.” You pause. “Is that it, then?”
“Perhaps.”
Her smile is sad and small. Maybe this really is it. Give each other a nice, friendly hug and say it was fun while it lasted.
One day you call in sick to work and drive until your gas gauge pings, just to see what it feels like to reach a limit and force yourself to crawl back. Maryland. Delaware. New Jersey. New York. Connecticut. The ocean on Rhode Island’s craggy shore. A fishing boat lumbers along the horizon. Stately Victorians look like dollhouses. You refill your tank, buy a pack of Camel Blues, and drive back to your apartment. It’s full of shadows and night and unchanged-ness. How teenager-y! Are you going to listen to Deerhunter and cry a little bit?
The turtle ashtray sits in your lap while you smoke a cigarette on the fire escape. It’s been years since you smoked. After half a cigarette, you’re queasy and your throat feels stuffed with cotton, but you smoke three more.
Months later you see her at Dulles boarding a plane to Denver with a leather tote bag over her shoulder. Maybe she sees you and pretends to be busy FaceTiming with her new girlfriend. Or maybe she shouts your name, waves you over, and hugs you across the stanchions, and both of you excitedly agree to catch up. Or maybe you just miss her and then sit next to the window, watching her plane slowly taxi away. It doesn’t matter whether she’s returning home or just visiting, if Denver is a layover or her final destination. Some cups will never be full.
You feel an itch, a burning. You text her.
Did I see you at Dulles?
A week passes—you regret reaching out to her—and then a response.
Omg yes! I just got back from LA how are you?
You meet for coffee at a café infected by the plague of white subway tiles. People around you chatter breezily while you stand in a line that snakes all the way to the front doors. You don’t know what to talk about, so you debate which five-dollar pastry to try. She looks different. Shorter hair, just kissing her shoulders. Her work attire is stiff. She tells you about her life in between the last time she saw you and now: an itemized list of new hobbies (pickleball, needlepoint, going to sleep at 9 pm), trips taken (Los Angeles to visit her old college roommate, a family trip to the Keys, a conference in Minneapolis), and countless other things that make you cramp with yearning to have shared all of it with her.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Working on myself,” you say, but you’re not sure what that means.
“That’s what everyone says after a breakup,” she says and laughs.
“I’ve been trying to make new friends. And I went back to therapy.”
“We can still be friends.”
“Damn. Thought you were going to abandon me again.”
“Shut up,” she says, and you both laugh.
Over the next few weeks you text each other frequently. Memes. Jokes that anyone living outside of DC wouldn’t understand. You’re in each other’s lives again. You look forward to coffee or a drink with her, but you don’t hunger for her. She invites you to pickleball, and you accept even though you can’t stand the dink-dink sound. It feels foreign, this new relationship, this different type of love. Sometimes you want more, but you accept the kindness, the eagerness to open up with each other, like a flower finally unfurling when it’s ready to bloom.
IV
A large canvas appears inside a recess. The painting is a scramble of organic earth tones with splashes of magenta, searching for a pattern. It silences both of you, forces you to be still. There is a unity here despite the messiness, the imperfection of it all, even if you have to work at seeing it and get lost in the painting to feel it. It calms you. Maybe this is the place you will return to together to solve all of your problems.
“I’ve been thinking about this all wrong,” you say. “I’ve got things to say in my head, the hard stuff, but I don’t know how to say them. So I say what I think I’m supposed to say, and it comes out wrong. I’m a big mess inside, but I want to work on it if you’re willing to be patient with me.”
“I can do that,” she says. “But I’m not easy to be with sometimes. I need to know how much you appreciate me.”
“I appreciate you.”
“Merci beaucoup,” she says.
“De rien.”
You learn how to argue and how to give grace in subtle ways. So much of your life has been unfeeling. Not that you didn’t feel things; you just unfelt everything back into nothingness.
With time, you move in together, and now you buy twice as much toilet paper. Marriage happens, and everyone at the wedding is tearfully happy. You talk about having kids. You try. IVF fails, then takes, then fails again. She cries softly with her head on your lap, her whole body cramping horribly from the mifepristone and misoprostol while you watch every Nora Ephron film twice. You would have named her Cecilia.
Life moves you to a modest-size house in the Berkshires with a pellet stove, a gentle but independent Appaloosa named Chops, and a chorus of robins and cardinals and blue jays and chickadee-dee-dees waking you up every morning. Sex is relegated to the weekends, frequent enough and still passionate. Before bed every night you solve the New Yorker crossword together. You could measure this life in rolls of toilet paper, pounds of pasta consumed, hours spent laughing at old Simpsons episodes. But you don’t. You get bellyaches from your inside jokes. You cry in the soft crooks of each other’s necks as parents and friends are extinguished from your lives. You admire how her graying hair makes her look more dignified and worldly. Every day she becomes beautiful in a new, different way.
You hope you die first because she’s stronger. She’ll endure it better. But death does you part, a slow-moving iceberg of a cancer that consumes her body, then melts her away.
In a box you find a tarot deck. The cards are large and unwieldy as you shuffle them. The one you pull is unlabeled, it means almost nothing to you, but something about the river depicted on it reminds you of when you visited Paris together in your thirties. She dragged you to a gay bar where muscly men in tight polo shirts sang karaoke sadly, operatically. Everyone clapped. She picked a song by opening the book and dropping her finger. Lenny Kravitz. Sure, you knew his music, but as the song began to play, you both realized that you had never heard it before. So you read the words with some melodic flair. Everyone in the bar looked annoyed. At a break in the lyrics, she brought the microphone close to her lips and said that this was going great. Someone booed. You drained your drinks and ran to the Seine. The setting sun lit her hair like a chandelier. A small ferry played tepid electronic music, and people danced on the deck, as stiff as Lego men. They waved to you, but instead of waving back, you pulled your shirt up and flashed them. A few of the men wooed and cheered as you hopped up and down and your small, soft tits bumped over your ribcage. She looked at you, her jaw dropped, but then she laughed, howling, bending forward, her arm crossing over her stomach, saying, I’m peeing. Oh, God, I actually peed myself. Laughter erupted from you too, and you shouted how great it was to be alive in this beautiful city of idiots.
“Nincompoops!”
“Charlatans!”
“Deadbeats!”
The boat looked like it would barely pass under the next low bridge, but it did, and it swanned under the next bridge, and the next bridge, and the next.
