I stood, feeling high even though I wasn’t anymore.
“I almost forgot,” Nia said. “We’re having a showcase. The grad art students. You should stop by.” She pulled a flyer from her purse and passed it to me. I told her I’d try to make it.
On the way to the car, I looked back to find Tristan in my old spot, picking a stray leaf from her hair.
While washing his face in the bathroom that night, Jay said, “I think Tristan likes you.”
My heart picked up. “What?”
“He wouldn’t shut up about our open relationship before, but since you two met he hasn’t said anything.”
I let the comforter swallow me. “Who cares what he thinks?”
“He’s my friend. I care.”
I paused. “Did the things he said used to bother you?”
Jay turned the bathroom light off and perched on the bed’s edge. “Yeah.”
This was news to me. Maybe I hadn’t paid close enough attention to Jay’s moods in the months after opening our relationship. Maybe I mistook concession for something more solid.
I touched his dry, hot back. “It’s not his relationship.”
“I know.” Jay shimmied beneath the covers. “But as weird as it sounds, Tristan looks up to me. I was always the more, I guess, mature one. He was a little troubled.” Jay passed me a grave look. “He’s better now. But I think he felt kind of let down by the open relationship thing. Like, if I couldn’t have the perfect textbook relationship, then he’d never have it. What I mean is, his remarks were always more about him than me. Or you.”
“But we do have a perfect relationship. It’s just not textbook. Do you know all the shit they’re taking out of textbooks anyway?”
Jay smiled. I caught the tail end of a sad tremor in his eyes. He stroked my jaw. “No one has a perfect relationship, Kitty Cat.”
Chapter 16
Jay left early the next morning. In bed, I watched him bounce on my phone from Union Station to BWI. My picture for him was an old one from college: him at his freshman dorm desk delicately holding a turkey sub, looking surprised. There was a pocket Constitution he kept on his desk. I never understood it, that old, problematic document, the one that excluded us, why he liked it so much. It was one of the things that endeared him to me, his naked, naive belief in everything.
Eventually his location failed to load and his picture disappeared.
Tidying up the Airbnb, I found his half-eaten granola bar on the nightstand behind the lamp. I didn’t want to throw it away, so I stuffed it in my bag, then I crumpled over in tears. It was always the small things he left behind that made me feel his absence, its unbearable weight, crushing the breath out of me.
When I got home, my mom was talking on the phone in a low voice. I figured she was talking to Aunt Lisa and poked my head into the living room. My mom was bending her toes, which looked tiny and girlish in pink slippers, on the ottoman. I waved. She smiled, distracted.
I found an interview with Janine from the seventies on YouTube. She’s in her mid-twenties, her black feathery hair rippling away from her face.
“Many critics didn’t know what to make of your first novel,” the interviewer says, legs crossed in his armchair. “It was controversial to say the least. What was it you were trying to say?”
“I wanted to write about love and being young, but also rebellion.”Janine aggressively smokes a cigarette in luxuriant bell sleeves. “I guess I was writingagainstrespectability. Bonnie—”
“At one point she argues with her professor that racial uplift is a sham.”
“She does.”
“Why is it a sham?”
“Maybe ‘sham’ isn’t right, but it’s certainly a trap. You can’t moralize your way out of a racist system by, say, getting married, being a good Christian, adopting white nuclear family practices. But Black people have and continue to believe this. That if they just do this or that, equality will be attained. Though it’s never about what youdoordon’tdo. You don’t attain equality, it’s yours already, it’s the claiming of what’s already yours that’s the struggle. Bonnie understands this, so she does what she wants.”
“The novel didn’t do well.”
Janine laughs. “Define ‘well.’?”
“Your publisher dropped you, and as far as I know, your second book hasn’t found another publisher.”
