Джоан Силбер - Improvement

“Excuse me,” I said. “I just have to answer fast.”

“Go ahead,” Kiki said, not pleasantly.

I had to concentrate to tap the letters. It took a few minutes, and I could hear Kiki sigh across from me. I knew how I looked, too girly, too jacked up over crumbs Boyd threw my way. Kiki was not glad about it. She didn’t even know Boyd. But I did—I could see him very distinctly in my mind just then, his grumbling sweetness, his spells of cold scorn, his sad illusions about what he could do, and the waves of tenderness I had for him, the sudden pangs of adoration. I was perfectly aware (or just then I was, anyway) that some part of my life with Boyd was not entirely real, that if you pushed it too hard a whole other feeling would show itself. I wasn’t about to push. I wanted us to go on as we were. A person can know several things at once. I could know all of them while still being moved to delight by him—his kisses on my neck, his way of humming to the most blaring tune, his goofing around with Oliver. And then I saw that I was probably going to help him with the cigarette smuggling too. I was going to be in it with him before I even meant to be.

If Kiki knew, she’d wail in despair. I was going to pack the car and count out the cash; I was going to let him store his illegal cigarettes in my house. All because of what stirred me, all because of what Boyd was to me. All because of beauty.

I had my own life to live. And what did Kiki have? She had her job making deals between the very rich and the very poor. She had her books that she settled inside of in dusty private satisfaction. She had her old and fabled past. I loved my aunt, but she must have known I’d never listen to her.

When I stopped texting Boyd, I looked up, and Kiki was dabbing at her plate of food. “The hummus was good,” I said.

“They say Saladin ate hummus,” she said. “In the 1100s. You know him, right? He was a Kurd who fought against the Crusaders.”

She knew a lot. She was waiting for me to make some fucking effort to know a fraction as much. Saladin who? In the meantime—anyone looking at our table could’ve seen this—we were having a long and unavoidable moment, my aunt and I, of each feeling sorry for the other. In our separate ways. How could we not?

In all those three months that Boyd was away at Rikers, certain images of him kept me company. The sexy parts. Well, of course. Who wouldn’t hold on to those? The way he raised his arm to reach for me in bed, the transformed look on his face when his eyes were closed, a grunt of praise in his throat for something I was doing. So when the actual Boyd returned, real life confused me at first. It was less abstract and it had more speech in it. I had all that longing and then I had this person to talk to.

What did we talk about? Whether Oliver was out of line when he threw his dinosaur at me, whether Rihanna had a better voice than Beyoncé ever did, why people in restaurants could never fucking order logically.

Boyd was not happy in his work at the diner. But didn’t a man who’d tended bar have ways to maneuver people so they knew better than to give him a hard time? He did. He had to display just enough personality as a waiter to throw a healthy fear into patrons. The thing I wanted least was for Boyd to walk out on this job. His probation officer and I were of one mind on that topic.

And I was hoping the new cigarette-smuggling scheme was just talk. “Hey,” I said, “you don’t even smoke cigarettes anymore.” He’d gone to the trouble of quitting in the last year, and what a cosmic pain that was. He was moody and hostile, and after a month he lapsed and smoked himself into a stupor for another few months before he quit again. He did too many nicotine patches; he almost ruined his teeth sucking hard candy and chewing gummy bears for distraction. And now he wanted to go all the way to fucking Virginia just to load a car with Marlboros.

The one thing I had to be careful not to do was speak against his cousin Maxwell. Boyd could cut me dead with a look if I said as much as, “Maxwell has too many ideas.”

At breakfast one morning, Oliver told a long story about his friend Hector at daycare playing a trick on him and running off with a truck they were playing with. Boyd said, “I think this Hector dude is not your friend. Friends don’t act sneaky. Don’t you be sneaky, be loyal, you hear what I’m saying?”

I thought this was a bit much for a four-year-old but Oliver nodded sagely.

By the end of the first two weeks Boyd was better about the diner. He was telling me stories about the great ketchup wars, where a single bottle got grabbed by different tables, so he had to toss and catch it behind his back to chill everybody out. He gave all the customers nicknames—“got to keep things interesting”—and they liked that, they wanted to be his.

Maxwell’s apartment was the housing approved for Boyd by the probation board. I didn’t get the sense anyone was checking all that carefully, but Boyd liked to refer to his stays with me as “slipping away.” This was a sexy way to put it. One night he called me at midnight from Maxwell’s—he woke me up—and I could hear the guys talking and goofing in the background. “Whole group going out, but you know I want to go to you,” he said. “What do you think?”

I knew what I thought. I could sleep when I was ninety. And the sound of his key in the door some twenty minutes later was an erotic noise, the clicking and the turning in the lock. I was in the hallway right away, with my finger to my lips, but he knew to be quiet, not to get Oliver up. We walked into the bedroom like cat burglars, and he shut the door with perfect slowness, my stealth lover.

We faced each other in a great clasping hug—I’d overheard Boyd telling Claude how “tight” we were these days, and the metaphor of this was in the force of that grasp, the long grip of it. We held on for a while. Then Boyd backed me onto the bed—he could be very adroit—and he hardly had to unwrap himself to somehow get out of his clothes.

The whole time I was making my weekly visits to Rikers, being the good girlfriend, I only thought about his getting out of there soon. That was enough to look forward to then. I never guessed we’d be in anything like a new phase once he was out, and I didn’t ever think at all that a spirit so much like happiness would be involved.

When I got up from bed the next morning, to get Oliver fed and off to daycare, Boyd was lying with his arm thrown across his face, dead asleep and faraway. But once Oliver was awake, my son went into noisy-boy mode and started squealing about which socks he hated, and by the time I went back to check, Boyd was sitting up in bed, eyes tracking me. “All the guys that went out last night,” he said, “just hoping they find someone a hundredth as good as you.”

You carry yourself differently when you have a line like that to recall all day. I wasn’t above being thrilled to death by good words. Even my friend Sabina, who always said, “Why do we talk about men so much?” snickered in appreciation when I told her. I almost quoted him to Aunt Kiki when I talked to her on the phone, but I had some sense.

“You know what I was just reading again last night?” Kiki said. “Marcus Aurelius.”

“I wasn’t going to guess that.”

“You’d love him. He’s all about being calm, guarding your mind. You should read him, the Stoics are good.”

Boyd liked to say one thing I was really good at was keeping calm.

“I’m so cool I don’t need him,” I said. “The man could learn from me.” Except that he was dead, which always inhibited learning.

“The thing about the Stoics,” Kiki said, “they’re like hyper-rational Buddhists. Seneca said we’re all dying every day. Epictetus said we’re all little souls carrying around our corpses.”