The woman behind the table watched this happen with the patience of someone who had sold records to Nova before and understood the process. “She knows what she’s got,” the woman said to me.
“Always,” I said.
Nova sleeved it carefully, set it in her bag after paying, and moved to the next spot without ceremony. I walkedbeside her. We went through four tables together, twenty minutes that felt like five because the conversation had its own logic and neither of us had anywhere more important to be. She found two more records after I stopped by a few vendors with comics mixed in with their offerings and found something, a McDuffie signing that I had not expected to see outside an auction. She looked at it and saidthat’s yourswith no inflection, a statement of fact about an object and its correct owner, and I thought, as I had many times before, that there was no one I had ever found this easy to be with, which should have made everything simple and that the ease was precisely the thing making everything complicated.
Then her phone rang. She looked at it. “Simone,” she said. “I have to take this.”
“Go,” I said.
She walked toward the doors, already talking. I stood with my find in my hand and watched her go.
I am thirty years old, eighth-grade English teacher, West Philadelphia. I teach at the school I attended, a decision I made at twenty-two that I have not once regretted, though I understand why people find it strange. I have explained the difference between a B-plot and a C-plot to twenty-six thirteen-year-olds on multiple occasions and done it well. I have a 401k. I floss. I drive a late-model Volvo XC60. I own the complete original Milestone run, Hardware, Icon, Static, Blood Syndicate, Shadow Cabinet, bagged and boarded, filed by creator in a section Nova labeled in her own handwriting on a Post-it note three years ago, and I have never once taken thatPost-it down because it is exactly right and I want her to know I know it every time I walk past it. I once spent forty-five minutes repositioning Nova’s speakers by fractions of an inch because she said the bass was pooling on the left side of the room and I wanted the bass to be right, and I want you to understand that I was not thinking about the speakers. I am a man who is very focused, very functional, and thoroughly in love with his best friend and doing absolutely nothing about it.
I also sell comics. Not my collection—the finds, the estate sale copies I can’t justify keeping, the doubles I come across at half-price shops, the lots I win at auction and sort through and price and move through a quiet network of collectors who know my taste. It is not a second career. It is what I do on Sunday afternoons when I want my hands busy and my head clear, and what it has been doing quietly, for the past four years, is filling an account I opened specifically for the Archive. I have never told many about my passion project. Well, more like out-of-reach dream.
I had also, for the past two months, been seeing a woman named Kendra Mitchell. She was good. I had been trying, with real effort, not to sabotage it. Weeknight dinners, lazy afternoons, the comfortable pace of two adults who liked each other and were being straightforward about what they were building. I had been trying, with real effort, not to sabotage it.
I stood in front of my mirror for fifteen minutes deciding what to wear. I had the one I wore when I was comfortable and the one I’d bought for tonight. Two shirts. I have a complete Grant Morrison New X-Men run. I canbreak down the thematic architecture ofTheir Eyes Were Watching Godfor twenty-six eighth-graders in fifty minutes flat. I have spent actual dinner party hours defending the Dwayne McDuffie DC run and have not once apologized for it. Fifteen minutes on two shirts. This is not who I am.
In comics, when a character keeps returning to the same object, the same place, the same person, that’s not characterization. That’s the writer showing you what they can’t let go of. I have been teaching this for eight years. Apparently I still needed the lesson applied to myself.
I put on the new one.
Kendra opened the door before I knocked. Just how she operated, always slightly ahead of the moment, prepared without being rigid, comfortable without requiring anyone else to adjust. She was in a burnt-orange sweater with her locs down, and she looked as she always looked when I arrived, like someone who had decided who she was and stopped revisiting the question. She was steady.
Behind her the apartment smelled like garlic and something slow-braised. There was a foam anatomical ear beside the fruit bowl, the kind she used with her students. It had a name now. Of course it did. I decided not to examine that too closely.
“Harold says you’re four minutes early,” she said, nodding toward the counter.
I glanced over. The ear, apparently Harold, stared back.
“Four minutes is not early,” I said. “Four minutes is respect for your time with room to breathe.”
“Harold is reserving judgment.” She stepped back to let me in.
I nodded at it on my way past. I understood why she liked it.
We ate at the kitchen table the way we always ate, easy, the conversation finding its own level. She had made salmon with something involving preserved lemon that was good, and I told her so, and she accepted the compliment with the directness she brought to everything, no deflection, just thank you, the lemon is the whole point. We argued about whether a food could be both technically correct and aesthetically wrong. She said yes, I said no, we were both right in different ways, and the argument had the comfortable circularity of two people who had been having versions of this one for a couple of months and had no interest in resolving it.
It was easy. Nothing in me reached.
My phone was on the counter, face down. I had put it there before we sat. I heard it buzz once during dinner and kept my eyes on Kendra’s face. The effort was visible. I knew she saw it. Kendra refilled my glass without comment.
After dinner we moved to the couch and put onBoomerang. She was leaning against my shoulder when she said, without shifting, “Can I say something?”
“Go ahead.”
She was quiet for a beat, choosing with care rather than caution, as she chose most things. “I’ve had a really good time with you these past couple of months. I meanthat.” A pause. “And I think there are moments when you’re somewhere else. Not often. But I notice it.”
I didn’t say anything right away.
“I’m not asking you to explain it,” she said. “I just thought you should know what I see.” She wasn’t asking for anything. She was leaving it with me. Then she settled back against my shoulder and we let the movie play.
At the door she hugged me, sincere and without weight. It didn’t ask anything of me. I then stepped out into the night.
The bars were still full and lit. The city didn’t care what I had just been handed. Fair enough.
Marcus called when I was three blocks from home. He always knew when to call. “How’d it go?” he said.
