“Yes,” Edward said.
The gothic knell of a wedding bell, the hangman’s rope grown straight out of the chest then looped like tasseling around the tables. Rat teeth raking the cake. Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.
My fortune cookies, too, had lost their frolic: Bury your unrealistic dreams or they will bury you.
But not in bed.
“Dinner?” I said again. Being oneself was no great accomplishment. It was not being oneself that was hard.
Then he paused. “Perhaps this is too sudden of a phone call.” His voice had become weary and tart. “Too out of the blue for you, maybe.”
Amanda came to the doorway of my room, poked her head in and mouthed, “Wanna split a pizza?”
I nodded my head. Yes. She disappeared.
The earth was not perfectly round but pear-shaped. And according to black hole experts, ninety percent of the universe was missing.
Still, there was always a circus somewhere.
“Dinner?” I repeated into the phone. My knuckles looked white as opals. O whatever-God, unprompt mom of all steps, still no forwarding address?
Edward remained silent, as did I. What was I alive for? I would not always know or make it my troubled concern. For now I simply became aware of my own noisy breathing. Windy exhalations, I had been told, seemed louder on the phone than they actually were. Inevitably, winds had an unpredictable drama. Prevailing westerlies did not always prevaiclass="underline" sometimes things blew up from the south and created little eddies—little eddies! — of stewing weather. I slowly moved the receiver away from my face and it seemed to keep on going, floating toward the cradle, vaguely guided by my hand. Air rushed to cool my cheek. Outside, in the early night, it was already beginning to snow.
Reader, I did not even have coffee with him.
That much I learned in college.