*
I forgot to tell Frank what the rabbi said about “Thank you” being a prayer. A prayer can be a hope, a request for help, and an act of faith. When I say it to Frank, “Thank you” definitely feels like a prayer.
*
A few days later, we’re back in the garden. The hose is sprawled between us, lazily watering my mother’s rhododendron bush. The bees weave happily from flower to flower. It is the last week of summer.
“It’s been different without you,” Frank says. “At the office, I mean. No one to give me shit about my bad puns. My confidence is skyrocketing.”
“Soz about that,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“Soz.” I shrug. “It’s how British teenagers say sorry.”
“How sorry can you be if you can’t even spring for the second syllable?”
“Since when was word length correlative to sincerity? ‘I hate that’ sounds a lot sincerer to me than, say, ‘I anathematize that.’”
Frank laughs. “Like ‘There’s truth in that’ versus ‘There’s verisimilitude’?”
“Exactly. Or ‘I love you’ versus …”
I stop. So I said it. Accidentally and to illustrate a linguistic point, sure, but I said it.
“… I can’t think of a longer way to say that,” I say.
“Adore,” says Frank softly. “Cherish.”
“Love is better,” I say.
“It is,” he says. “And I do too. Love you, that is.”
*
I am in his arms.
“Soz about how I acted after we got the Kapow! account. I was an idiot. And scared.”
“Soz I disappeared on you. Soz I didn’t say goodbye.”
“Soz I let you go. I should have handled it differently.”
“Soz I didn’t give you the chance.”
“Soz I waited the whole summer to tell you Cleo left.”
“Soz Cleo left.”
“Soz your father died.”
“Soz you never met him.”
“Soz I made such a mess of it all.”
“But not for this? You’re not soz for right now, are you?”
“No. Right now I have never been less soz for anything in my life.”
And then he kissed me.
*
Frank tells me about how his mother used to pick him up from school drunk. He tells me how Cleo’s mother died. He tells me about finding her bleeding out on their living room floor. He tells me what happened to their sugar glider. It’s not pretty. He tells me that a couple of weeks ago, he stopped drinking and started going to meetings. He tells me he always thought he would hate AA because of his mom, but actually he feels like he’s beginning to understand himself for the first time, maybe in his whole life.
“Could you ever …,” he says. “Could you ever be with a man who did all that?”
I put my hand on his.
“Have you ever heard of something called kintsugi?”
*
Amazingly, my agent emails me back about my animated TV show Human Garbage.
You’re a weird one, cookie. But get me three more episodes and I think I can sell it.
*
Today, I will write.
“We’ll see about that,” I say, and go to run a bath.
“Better believe it,” I say, and turn on the shower.
“Never going to happen,” I say, and saunter back to the bed.
“Just try me,” I say, and march myself to the desk.
*
Frank and I go to the movies together and make out for two hours straight. We visit the galleries in Chelsea. We go bowling in Brooklyn. We eat egg and cheese on a roll in Washington Square Park. We swap books. We go back to sending each other funny emails. We go to a jazz club, then realize neither of us likes jazz and leave to get ice cream. We take walks. We eat pizza slices.
Even though it’s getting cold, we take the ferry to Rockaway to watch the sunset. From that distance, the whole city is one big reflection of the sky. Pink skyscrapers like temples of Himalayan salt. It looks like a mythical city for the gods, which in some ways it is.
“The ferry is really just the public bus with a better view,” I say.
“That’s what I love about you,” says Frank. “Cynical even in front of sunsets.”
*
I go to the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library to work. Aside from the squeaky chairs, it is writer’s heaven. In fact, the heavens are quite literally painted on the ceiling above. Powdery blue skies and soapy clouds. I sit at one of the long mahogany tables dotted with emerald reading lamps and smile at my fellow workers. Who knows how many hit shows and best-selling novels have been written within these book-lined walls? I’m just getting into my flow when a man sits down across from me, opens an encyclopedia on his lap, and begins furiously masturbating beneath it.
*
Frank lets me use a spare conference room at the agency to write. At least this way, he says, the only person I have to worry about masturbating in front of me is him.
*
The best part of this new arrangement is that Jacky and I can go to lunch again.
“So, you’re banging the boss,” she says as we sit down at the diner. “Dish.”
“We’re not banging,” I say. “We’re dating.”
“How high school of you,” she says. “Let’s be bad and share some fries.”
I take a deep breath. “Actually, in high school I dated a forty-year-old man,” I say. “He used to make me do things like wash his laundry and swallow his cum.” I exhale. “It was not great.”
Jacky leans toward me over our huge sticky diner menus. “Oh hon,” she says. “One spring break in high school I got drunk, and a group of seniors locked me and another boy in a hotel closet and told me they’d give me a hundred bucks if they could watch me give him a blowjob.”
“That’s awful,” I say. “Did you do it?”
She shrugs sadly. “I liked one of the boys who was outside the door, and I thought … I don’t know what I thought. I was sixteen and a hundred and ten pounds and had just discovered the Long Island iced tea.”
She takes my hand across the table and squeezes.
“I’m really sorry that happened to you, Jacky,” I say.
“I’m sorry about you too.” She shakes her head. “Fuck that old man.”
“Well, he died in a lawn mower accident,” I say. “So there’s a happy ending at least.”
“God is not always just,” she says. “But he does have a sense of humor.”
Our server comes, and we order our salads and fries.
“And a chocolate shake for dipping.” Jacky winks at me. “I think we need it.”
We both lean back in our booth chairs and look at each other, smiling.
“Did you get the hundred bucks at least?” I ask.
“Oh yes, hon.” She laughs. “I took my girlfriends to Benihana for dinner. Those shrimp volcanos were worth it!”
*
The leaves have turned, I’m wearing a jacket, pumpkin spice is everywhere, and someone actually invited me to go apple picking. It is definitely, officially fall.
*
I’m waiting in line for coffee by Cooper Square and listening to the art school students in front of me talk.
“What happened with that guy, the Icelandic performance artist?” the first friend asks.
“We broke up.”
“How come?”
“He slept in a Victorian nightgown, had a baby called Jean-Pepe with his lesbian neighbors, and yelled ‘Look me in the eye!’ every time he came.”
“So … How come?” asks the first friend.