I texted back.
Me: Good. Door’s unlocked.
Then I stood up, walked to the front door, unlocked the deadbolt, and returned to the living room, where I stood in the middle of the floor and confronted the reality of what I’d just set into motion.
I was going to take off my clothes and lie on the couch and wait for Benji to come home.
This was not something I did.
This was not something I had ever done.
David and I had been together for six years, and in those six years, I had never once arranged myself on a piece of furniture in a state of undress for the purpose of romantic ambush. David had initiated. Davidalwaysinitiated, because David understood that I operated on a delay between wanting something and acting on it. He’d learned to bridge the delay with his own momentum. I’d been grateful for it, but now that David was gone, the momentum was mine to generate, which left me standing in my living room at 9 p.m. trying to generate it, and the generation was not going smoothly.
First, the animals, I thought.
They were a practical concern.
I could think my way through dealing with them.
They represented safe, comfortable ground on which to tread first.
Potato was on the couch because Potato wasalwayson the couch. Potato had been on the couch since 2016 and regarded the cushions as sovereign territory. I picked him up, which required both hands and a revised understanding of how much a hairless bulldog could weigh when he was actively resisting relocation, and carried him to Hiro’s dog bed. I set him down with the care of a man defusingan explosive. He wheezed once in protest, circled twice, and collapsed with the theatrical resignation of a creature who had been displaced from his sacred homeland.
“Sorry,” I told him. “This is a one-time requisition of the couch for purposes I’m not going to explain to you.”
Potato closed his eyes and began snoring.
General Tso was on the refrigerator. General Tso wasalwayson the refrigerator. General Tso would remain on the refrigerator, because General Tso did not take directives from me and because moving a twenty-pound cat with opinions was not a battle I was going to fight while also trying to orchestrate a romantic gesture. He would witness whatever was about to happen from his elevated position. I would have to accept this as a condition of living with an animal who considered himself the apartment’s surveillance system.
“Don’t look at me,” I told him.
He looked at me, directly, and with the unblinking assessment of an animal who had already judged the situation and found it wanting.
Hiro was asleep. Hiro would remain asleep. Hiro was not a factor.
The animals were handled. The door was unlocked. The stove light was on.
Now the clothes.
I stood beside the couch and removed my shirt, folded it, then set it on the chair.
I then removed my pants, folded them, and set them on top of the shirt.
I removed my socks, because a naked man in socks was not a romantic image—it was a cautionary tale. I had enough self-awareness to understand that whatever I was about to attempt required the complete absence of sock-based comedy.
My boxers came off last. I removed them, folded them—because I’m not a caveman—and set them on the pile.
At that point, with nothing left to remove, I stood in my living room at 9:07 p.m. wearing nothing except my glasses, which I removed after a moment of consideration because glasses introduced a variable I couldn’t resolve. With them on, I was a man who had gotten undressed but forgotten a step, as if nudity were a checklist and he’d missed an item. With them off, I became a man who had committed fully to the endeavor but who could not see clearly, which introduced its own problems because I wanted to see Benji’s face when he walked in.
Glasses on. Final answer. Lock it in.
The visual inconsistency was less problematic than partial blindness.
I looked down at myself.
The clinical assessment was not encouraging.
I was thirty-two years old, six-foot-one, and built in the lean, angular way of a man who forgot to eat when he was working and whose primary form of exercise was standing for six hours in an operating room.
