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“You miss him, I take it?”
“How can I not? He’s the love of my life.”
“I know. You make it sound like it’s over.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure it is, Oren. You must understand, love is like matter in that it cannot be created or destroyed. It can onlybe transferred or converted from one form to another. And Iknowabout matter. Before I was an interior designer, I was a high school physics teacher. That’s why love so often turns to anger or hatred but doesn’t just disappear. People talk about falling in love, and that usually means finding companionship with someone based on attraction and friendship, and yes, lust. But true love—love in its purest and rarest form—is preordained, and for those fortunate enough to experience it, falling in love for them is simply a recognition of something…aninheriting ofone’s destiny. Octavio and I are lucky enough to have that kind of love. Mary Jane isn’t—though I don’t think she misses it or even would want it. You and Jackson, though—you have that love Octavio and I have. It was obvious to me from the first time you and Jackson came to dinner.”
Outside, as we waited for her Uber to arrive, she said, “I believe in your and Jackson’s love, and I have no doubt you will find your way back to each other.”
I smiled with what I thought was benign agreement, but she must have seen hopelessness instead, for she slipped her right hand from her muff and caressed my cheek. “My dear,” she murmured, “you must believe, as I do.”
Her Uber glided to the curb; I opened the door, and she slid inside with infinite grace.Yass, Queen, I thought. She slipped her hand into her muff to join its mate as I closed the door.
Watching me, she mouthedI love youthrough the closed window as the car pulled away.
Despite my apparent hopelessness, Jackson is still my first thought in the morning, and my last thought at night.
Tuesday, March 31, 2016, Janus—Leaving the lawyer’s office this morning, Jackson and I ended up alone on the same elevator, which ran express to the lobby. During the elevator’s descent, I asked, “Jackson, what happened?” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him that question.
“I love you,” Jackson said, “but now I have to love someone else.”
“It can’t be that simple—”
“Itisthat simple. See, you—you—overcomplicate everything. You need a back story and a front story and rationality.You need to make sense of things.”
“I do.”
“Things don’t always make sense.”
“Well, you’re right there. I mean, you left me for a woman.Kittof all women, for God’s sake—”
“I didn’t leave you for Kitt! Look, Oren, love isn’t rational, and there isn’t just one kind of love. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s like the tide. It ebbs and flows. Sometimes it moves in unexpected directions.”
“I don’t understand any of this.”
“Look, maybe I just want a new adventure. Maybe I want to write a new story—one for which I don’t know the ending. Our story was written the day I asked you to stop pining over Rio and give me a chance to love you.”
The elevator door opened, and he rushed out without saying goodbye, stopping only when he reached a corner of the lobby. I watched him bend over a planter; he appeared to be experiencing dry heaves.
Monday, April 20, 2016, Janus—This morning, blowing on my cup of microwaved freeze-dried coffee—try as I might, I cannot master Jackson’s instructions—I stared out the window at Jackson cutting the grass across the wide street and expanses of lawn separating our—my—house from his and Kitt’s.
I miss Jackson most in the morning, not just for his perfect coffee and our chocolate croissants. I miss waking up to feel him moving gently, insistently inside me while holding me so closely it felt like he was trying to get under my skin. I miss him.
Kitt emerged from the house, her blooming belly before her. They seemed to address each other in a tense exchange. I wanted to enjoy their apparent acrimony. I would have wished them both dead except that would leave their child an orphan, unloved. And having been unloved and without a family of my own, I did not have it in me to wish a similar fate on another unknown to me and born without malice or knowledge of me and what Blue Moon had meant to me. Eventually, Kitt went back in the house and Jackson continued cutting the grass, his back resolutely turned on our house and its overgrown lawn and unruly hedges. I made a mental note to look for a lawn service.
When I returned home tonight, the grass had been cut and the hedges trimmed. The lawn mower had been cleaned, and the gas can beside it filled. There was no other indication that Jackson had been here.
Saturday, April 30, 2016, Janus—“Take what you want,” I told Jackson, not caring. “I’ve sold the house.” In the end, he took nothing but clothes; his comic books; his dozen or so oversized “coffee table” books with their glossy photos and large font text, which I am sure will be a splendid addition to Kitt’s half-dozen or so obscure feminist poetry collections;the collection of elegant timepieces—“They’re too beautiful, too expensive to be called watches,” he’d insisted—I’d created for him over nearly forty years; and his collection of stopped clocks. I wondered if he had one marking the precise time he’d decided to break my heart.
Kitt came with him, I suppose to keep him from jumping into bed with me, to keep him from admitting she had been a mistake, an aberration.
Jackson disappeared into our bedroom, leaving Kitt and I to stand in awkward silence, avoiding eye contact. She spoke first. “You didn’t think I could do it, did you?”
“Do what?” I asked, hating her—this horsewoman of my personal apocalypse—more than I’d ever hated anyone; more than I hated my grandfather, more than I hated Reverend Jack.
“Pry Jackson from your grip.” When I said nothing, she continued in that taunting way of hers, “It was surprisingly easy. I know you used you laugh at me.”
