The question was light and conversational. He tossed it out the way he tossed out all his questions, like a ball he was throwing in the air to see where it might land. He blinked weary eyes but stared attentively, ready to catch it or let it drop depending on how I responded.
I could have deflected.
I could have said, “Nothing important,” or “Just a project,” and he would have accepted it and moved on and the 2 a.m. kitchen would have remained what it was, a neutral zone where two insomniacs coexisted without asking too much of each other.
But I couldn’t stop myself.
I don’t know why.
“My partner,” I said. “His name was David. He died two years ago. I’ve . . . I’ve been writing about him.”
The cereal spoon stopped moving.
Benji’s face went through a fast, visible sequence from surprise to curiosity to something that was notquite pity but was close to it, before finally landing on something softer and more careful.
“A book?” he asked.
“What?” Again, he hadn’t asked what I’d expected. “Oh, right. No. Well, maybe. I don’t know what it is yet. It started as a way to remember things, the details you think you won’t forget and then you do. Like how he sounded first thing in the morning or the specific way he loaded a dishwasher, which was wrong, and which I never corrected because he was so confident about it. I’m writing the things he said that I want to keep.”
“Like what?”
No one had ever asked me that.
People asked about the book, about the writing process, about how it was going.
Ayesha asked if it was therapeutic.
My mother, on the rare occasions we spoke, asked if it was finished yet.
No one asked what David said.
“He used to call my cooking ‘Peter-food,’” I said, and the memory arrived with a specificity that surprised me. “He said I ate like a man fueling a machine. He said food should be enjoyed rather than administered.”
“He cooked for you.”
“He cooked for everyone. He cooked the way youbartend, like it was a way of taking care of people that didn’t require him to say what he was actually feeling.”
Benji went quiet for a moment.
“How long were you together?” he asked.
“Six years. We met in Portland. He was a high school English teacher who could make a room full of seventeen-year-olds care about Whitman, which was either a superpower deserving a cape or a form of illegal child-hypnosis. I’m still not sure which.”
“English teacher.” I could see Benji filing this away, adding it to whatever model he was building of the man who had lived with me before him. “That explains the books.”
“The books are mine, too—but the way they’re organized is all David. He had a system. He’d sort alphabetically by author within genre, except for poetry, which was chronological because he said poetry should be read in the order it was written so you could feel the conversation between centuries.”
“That’s beautiful.”
I huffed at the memory.
“I thought it was insane. I told him that. He said, ‘Peter, you organize your animals by species and medical needs. Let me organize my books by the conversations they’re having.’”
I took a sip of tea that had gone cold without mynoticing.
“He won that one. He won most of them.”
The kitchen was so very quiet then.
