I turn around to see that he, too, is waiting to cross the street. Because of social media and life in general, I recognize him as instantly as he recognizes me. He’s wearing fancy spandex and leaning on a sleek bicycle that looks like a paper clip that fell from heaven. If there were any justice in the world, Jason Pakarinen would be drinking in an Applebee’s in the middle of the day with his ass crack showing. But there is no justice in this world. Jason Pakarinen went on to be well-liked throughout high school and graduated from Stanford and a bunch of other schools and is currently a physicist in London.
Who let him back into the country?
We embrace. Because apparently, being an adult is about the same thing as being in fourth grade: embracing your sworn enemy. I admonish myself for being flattered that Jason Pakarinen is so happy to see me. I introduce him to my boyfriend and they chat about total nonsense. Like the pros and cons of dropping off one’s laundry. I am gobsmacked by how they can have such a dull conversation, as if the universe didn’t just collapse on itself. But it does make me happy to imagine a little girl such as myself, wondering what my boyfriend ate for dinner when he was a kid, knowing he was not a cruel child.
When a cop moves the barricade aside, we all hustle through together. Jason Pakarinen tells us all about his life, about how wonderful London is and how he’s just gut renovated a house for himself and his wife, a pickle monger who’s pregnant with twins.
“They’re mine,” he says, making a clever joke.
I tell him about a novel I just bought, holding up the bag as proof, as if purchasing a novel trumps everything he has just said. My boyfriend, who never knew Jason Pakarinen, the boy-god, looks at me like I’ve been drinking. At the end of the block, I assume Jason Pakarinen and his bike will cut into the park, but he keeps following us, wheeling and talking.
“I’m so glad I ran into you,” he says.
Again, I try not to be flattered. Finally, as we reach another corner, he shows his cards. His mother heard from my mother that I used to work at a publishing house.
“This is true,” I tell him.
“My wife is putting together a book proposal,” he says.
“On pickle mongering?” asks my boyfriend.
“She’s really popular in the UK,” explains Jason Pakarinen. “I wonder if I can ask you to look at the book proposal.”
“I worked in publicity,” I explain. “I didn’t really see proposals.”
I have seen hundreds upon hundreds of book proposals.
“Oh,” says Jason Pakarinen.
I can tell he’s about to give it another go. You don’t get into Stanford by giving up that easy!
“Well,” he says, “maybe if you just had any advice for her … I’ll e-mail you.”
“I rarely check it,” I say. “Anyway, it was nice to bump into you!”
I give him a hug so brief it could pass for a breeze, grab my boyfriend, and pull him away. In my peripheral vision, I see Jason Pakarinen looking confused, as if he has overstepped his bounds. And maybe he has. I don’t ask people I haven’t seen in twenty years for favors. I don’t go up to doctors at parties and ask them to look at a weird bump on my thumb, and I certainly don’t say, “Wait here, I want you to look at my wife’s weird thumb bump.” As far as Jason Pakarinen is concerned, my advice-giving days are over. Shop’s closed. But perhaps this doesn’t justify physically running from this blast from the past as if a shard had hit me in the eye.
“Well, that was a little on the bitchy side,” my boyfriend decides.
I know it was. But I give him a dirty look for saying it first. He is undeterred, waiting for an explanation for this incongruous behavior. What he does not realize is that it’s not incongruous—it’s overdue. What he does not realize is that Jason Pakarinen is responsible for a fragment of the woman he loves, a fragment so small no one would notice it missing but me. I look over my shoulder to make sure that Jason Pakarinen has disappeared. Then I ask him who his favorite Peanuts character was and cross my fingers for the right answer.
The Doctor Is a Woman
I used to subscribe to a magazine that came with a postcard crammed in the spine of each issue. On one side of the postcard was a famous work of art, on the other a thin line, splitting the negative space. Standard postcard protocol. I liked the postcards mostly because I like to avoid clutter and they gave me something to throw out. Except for one. A photograph of a tent called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, by the British artist Tracey Emin. Inside a camping tent, Emin had stitched the names of anyone she’d ever shared a bed with, from friends to relatives to lovers. The tent’s reproduction on a postcard whittled its meaning down to the provocative title, but that was enough to save it from the trash. I put it on the mantel of my defunct fireplace, where I kept other precious keepsakes, like crumpled receipts, votive candles, and free-floating sticks of gum.
One night, as I was making dinner, I smelled something burning in the living room. Somehow the postcard had migrated near one of the lit candles and begun to smoke. I rushed to blow it out, thinking only of the vulnerability of my own belongings. But the next morning, on the cover of the arts section of The
