* * *

—

I had been supposed to break it off with Anthony, and I told my Aunt Deedee that I had, but somehow I could not do it. Instead, I ghosted him. But I could not bring myself to block his number, and so his texts leaked through, blooming like blood through a bandage. And I read them.

He wrote:

 Probably you are wise to be ignoring me, and I imagine it is because you have learned something about me that displeases you, and probably you are right to do so. There is something in the geometry of your upper lip and the way the skin connects to the cartilage of your nose and the thicker flesh of your lips that dissolves my moral ability into a series of snapping synapses. I look at your blinking eye and I do not know who I am or what I am allowed to have, and I feel joyful and guiltless like a child. It is difficult not to believe I have a right to this feeling. It is difficult not to believe that every creature under the sun has a right to something as simple and honest as the pleasure I feel hearing your voice as you talk, climbing a series of ideas as a young boy might climb a tree, innocent of how far he could fall.

He texted:

 I am so sorry to keep texting you. I do not want to be this whining, childish person chasing after you and insisting on explanations. But I do wish you thought enough of me to be willing to explain. I suppose I am afraid also that this might be some sort of test, and if I persist and show you that I am willing to debase myself, to text you every hour, to beg to hear your voice or kiss your knee, then perhaps you will relent and our relationship can come into itself even more fully than before. Perhaps you need me to prove myself.

The anguish caused by not answering his texts was physical in nature, as though someone were pressing with their thumbs on my eyeballs until they ached. I got a C-minus on a calculus test and felt that I might soon perish through the intensity of my emotions.

One day, Anthony texted me a picture. It was a little boy, perhaps four years old, handsome, with dark curly hair. The boy was laughing so big that you could see the pink roof of his mouth. This is Hank, he said. This is my son. He’s twelve now, but this is one of my favorite pictures of him.

The next day he texted me a picture of a middle-aged woman who was not unpretty. She was blond from a bottle with her roots growing out, and she had downy cheeks and tortoiseshell glasses. She was making a peace sign at the camera and sticking her tongue out. He wrote:

 This is my wife, Laura. I married her when I was forty and she was twenty-five. She does not know that I have relationships with men. Despite this, our marriage is happy and I love being a father. Hank is my world. Laura is my best friend. I’m not willing to give them up. This means that the kind of relationship I can offer you is necessarily limited, and I am so sorry. I am so sorry because I wish I could offer you more. I am so sorry because I understand now that to have withheld this fact of exactly how limited my ability to enter your life was going to be was unethical. It was wrong. I can only say that at the time, I thought you were young and would tire of me anyway. Life would pull you down its road, and you would not have time for old men like me.

The next day he texted:

 I am sorry for lying about my age on my profile. I told you I was 45, but I am 56. I have told you many lies. I told you I was in love with you, and I believe this to be true. What other name can I possibly give to this feeling? How is it that I feel I could die from your silence, yet I am not willing to alter my course or offer you more? Is it that I have chosen my own death?

I didn’t know what to tell him. I was weirdly relieved that he was fifty-six and not sixty as Ann Marie had claimed, but what was the difference really? His son, Hank, looked like him, was beautiful in an easy smiling way that reminded me of him. His wife, Laura, looked nice. Maybe it worked for him. Who was I to make proclamations about adult life, the compromises worth making, the joys of parenthood compared to the joys of erotic love? I was not confident enough to tell him what I myself barely knew, which is that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren’t even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered. That there is something holy in that kind of stubbornness. That’s what I wanted to say to him. But I didn’t know how to text that. And I didn’t know why I should even try or whether I was an idiot or what there was to live for now that the greatest intimacy I had ever known had been shown to be so cheap and tawdry.

* * *

—

“Look at this place,” Bunny said. She’d had me meet her at a house her father was selling. It was on the other side of Main Street, and I had never had a friend on this part of Oak Street, never spent any time over this way, which was odd. To find a part of your incredibly small town that you are not familiar with. It was a huge house that had been added on to repeatedly with an utter disregard for a centralized design, and so as you moved through the rooms you felt like you were in a dream where doors kept opening onto new doors. The front door opened onto a small living room and open kitchen, but then a door on the left opened into a library with a full bar, all of the woodwork intricate and custom. “He was a finish carpenter,” Bunny told me. Through the library there was another living room with a fireplace, as well as a large bedroom and bath. All of the walls were painted hot pink. Santa Fe chic, Bunny called it. “Look, he built in hidey-holes everywhere. I guess he was some kind of gun nut.” She showed me how panels in the library came away and secret compartments could be accessed. Upstairs there were another two bedrooms, and in one of the bedrooms there was a flight of stairs in the middle of the room that led up to a half-size door. It was the most peculiar thing.

“What’s up there?” I asked.

“Come on,” Bunny said, and scampered up the steps, having to hunch to stay low enough to open the tiny half-size door. She crawled through into the darkness and just as I was following her on my hands and knees into the dark, she snapped on the lights. The attic had been converted into what could only be described as a child’s library and office space, with child-size built-in desks, bookshelves, track lighting. It was the kind of space one would have killed for as a kid or even a teenager. Neighborhood children would be inexorably drawn to this space. All it needed was a couple beanbag chairs and a lava lamp or maybe a fish tank. It boggled my mind that anyone had ever been lucky enough to possess this room, and then, as I realized that the retired carpenter must have built it himself for his children, I was undone by the concept of a parent who would spend the time and money to build something like that for their kids, and for some reason I thought about Anthony’s son, Hank, and his big open smile and I felt like I couldn’t breathe and maybe I needed to leave.