When it’s just the two of us, everything is heavenly. I work at a department store, folding clothes and selling men’s cologne: Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana, Cool Water. Matthew bartends near the beach, serving sugary cocktails the color of radioactive matter: Electric Blue Mojito, Gunpowder Sangria, Purple Punk Martini. We share an apartment next to a sleepy dollar theater. It’s a two bedroom because that makes his parents more comfortable. We only use one bedroom.
We go to community college part time, plodding toward our associate’s degrees. I study fashion design, entry-level classes where I feel bored and safe. He studies accounting. He says his classes make him feel overwhelmed, but I see his grades, and there’s nothing lower than an A-. I tell him that if he’s overwhelmed, then I must be dead in the water. He says he’d rather be dead in the water with me than apart on land any day.
Not everyone in town likes us. Twice someone has slashed our tires. The second time there was a slur keyed into the side of our sun-scorched car—letters that were meant to be curved but could only be etched in jagged lines. I say we shouldn’t pay the money to fix it, that we let them win by setting us back that much further from getting out of this backward town. He says that pride is worth more than a zip code. We pay to have it fixed. I take another shift at the department store. More Calvin Klein. More Dolce & Gabbana. More Cool Water.
Our dream is to live in the city, where life takes place outside of a strip mall and for once we will not be so strange. We save and we save and we save. Loose change from pockets goes in a coffee can under the sink. On Sundays, we lounge around in underwear on our Craigslist furniture, eating jelly beans and cutting coupons out of the paper. We buy off-brand Pop-Tarts because they’re fifty cents cheaper, though neither of us likes the knockoffs enough to eat them, and so we save money because we no longer eat Pop-Tarts. We wear our clothes until they rip, and then I patch them up, and we wear them again.
We close in on our moving date like an airplane hiccupping toward a landing strip. Our bank account swings left, swings right, and by the time we have our associate’s degrees, we somehow hit the mark. We pop a bottle of cheap champagne under palm trees and tip back plastic flutes that click instead of clink. We toast our future, bright as the northern lights.
We move into our new apartment at summer’s end. We live on one floor of a brownstone. We put giant candles in the fireplace that no longer has a flue, and prop one side of our bed up on stacks of Matthew’s old comic books to compensate for the uneven floors. With the bed skirt, you can’t even tell. We paint the walls, put succulents along the windowsills. During the day we run errands on the subway. We love the idea of public transit but admit it’d have been easier to take home our new dresser in the trunk of a car.
On every block, we pass other men. They either don’t look at us, or they look too hard. They walk as if they have somewhere very important to be, but I don’t see them at rest anywhere other than brunch. I prefer the young mothers walking their babies in strollers, a hypoallergenic poodle mix trotting loyally beside.
We try a night out on the town. I spend thirty minutes trying on different outfits while he scrolls through his phone on the couch wearing the same jeans and worn-out gray T-shirt he always wears.
Does this one look good? I ask at last.
He looks up and smiles. Of course. You always look good.
We go to a bar named Ice. Everyone’s eyes find Matthew. He is tall and beefy and broad with blond curls that wrap around his head like a Roman halo. I am reminded that I am slender, of average height, and, apparently, unremarkable.
The guys here are brazen. They ask if we are open. They don’t ask my name. The music is too loud with too few lyrics. The dance floor is tight and assaulted by smells: Jean Paul Gautier, sweat, poppers, no Cool Water. They are bigger, richer, smarter. Their teeth are whiter. They are unfailingly clever and quick, and they make Matthew laugh and laugh. No one comments on my outfit. I want to go home. He wants to stay. We make compromises of ten more minutes, one more song. By the time we leave, neither of us is happy.
We start applying for part-time jobs before classes start. He gets a job bartending at Ice, where I know he’ll attract endless attention from the opposite side of the sleek white counter.
Why did you choose to work at a gay bar? The taste of bitterness is unfamiliar on my tongue.
I thought it’d be more fun, he says.
It’s a job, I say. It’s not supposed to be fun.
I apply for a position with an Italian tailor named Vincenzo, who runs his own shop above an art gallery. He is somewhere between forty and fifty, with a belly that strains the buttons of his fitted Italian shirts and a beard as thick as a bristle-brush. From the ceiling hang dozens of racks, each packed so tight with garments you can only see the sleeves and hems.
My interview consists of performing an alteration. There is no AC, but a fan turns its head back and forth across the room, fluttering my hair and the plastic-wrapped clothing in rhythmic alternation. When I am done, he leans over the desk and inspects my work.
Where did you learn this stitch? he asks, studying the set of elbow darts I’ve laid into a lavender dress jacket.
Self-taught, I say.
He looks up from the garment and studies my face. You are very talented, he says.
I spend my days in class, my evenings hunched over dresses and pantsuits. Matthew spends his days in class, his evenings with anyone who’s willing to pay twenty dollars for a thimble of rail vodka diluted in soda water. We have the mornings at least, time stolen in bed when the sun crests over the other row homes and into our bedroom like a prayer.
Then he starts going to the gym. Alone in bed, I clamp my eyes shut against the avalanche of ice into the blender, the soft thud of berries, the desiccating puff of protein powder.
On Instagram I see stories of Matthew with a new workout partner. The stranger is a nugget of muscle whose skin is so impossibly white I wonder if he wasn’t created just five days ago in a science lab. They are Swole Mates according to the hashtags. They wear workout attire of all black, spotless sneakers, compression leggings that come down mid calf. Matthew’s Instagram followers balloon impossibly from the hundreds to the thousands to tens of thousands. Strangers flood the comments section with emojis: tongue, flame, squirt. you guys are the hottest couple, someone writes. I start to respond. they’re not a couple. he’s my boyfriend. i’m studying design, and he’s getting a ph.d. in how to become a cliché. I delete it, and by the end of the day Matthew has responded on his own: thanks lmao. we’re just friends, capped off with a heart kiss emoji to the original commenter, a fifty-something man somewhere in Southeast Asia.
In class, we are asked to create something avant-garde. With the temperature plummeting, the sun dropping earlier in the sky every evening, I can think of nothing other than sweaters, thick and warm. I go to the store and buy skeins and skeins of yarn: the rusty red facade of the dollar theater; the charcoal of our old apartment complex parking lot, where we posted election signs for liberal candidates even though we knew they’d lose; the shimmering turquoise of the beach, where I’d lay with orange soda water and watch the setting sun make freckles bloom on Matthew’s back like the revealing of invisible ink.
Vincenzo, I learn, is superstitious. No sewing is allowed on Sunday, or we will have to undo all the stitches when we get to heaven. Never pass a pin without picking it up or we will suffer bad luck. If the thread tangles as you sew, then someone is lying about you.
And be careful with the scissors, Sebastian. Always you must cut over the table. If you drop them, and a blade breaks, then you will have a quarrel.
What if both blades break?
Vincenzo stares at me gravely. Catastrophe.
My avant-garde sweater takes shape. I’ve decided it will be an ultra-thick sweater, the yarn stacked upon itself so that it is two inches deep, a wooly armor against the deepest chill. The turquoise, rust, and charcoal threads blend so that the fabric resembles the jeweled wall of a ruby and sapphire mine. Or, as one of my classmates says, an oil spill on a coral reef.
It doesn’t take long for Matthew’s hours in the gym to pay off. His arms get bigger, his belly disappears. There are no more jelly beans. I hold him in the morning as he sleeps, and he is the shape of another person. I whisper into his pec that has become taut and round as a boil: Who are you doing this for? He doesn’t wake up.
The holidays approach. Vincenzo’s shop is flooded with dresses for church, gowns for galas. From the second I step in, it is fittings and alterations. One afternoon, he is sizing up a woman in a burgundy dress that ripples around her like burnt caramel. With pins in our mouths, we kneel behind her and take in the hem. The fabric crinkles, and he smells like sweat and leather. The studio lights show each freckle and hair on his hands. Occasionally, his bare arms brush against mine. He removes a pin and whispers to me over the rustle of the fabric. I do not know how I survived without you.
At the end of the semester, models from the fashion school are assigned to wear our garments in a mock runway show. Nearly six feet tall, the model named Fawn who has been assigned to me towers overhead, all legs and arms and cheekbones. She tries on the sweater and looks at herself in the mirror dubiously.
It’s avant-garde, I say.
Fawn shrugs, the gesture taking considerable effort under the mass of the garment. It is hot, she says.
Well, it’s a sweater.
She wrinkles her nose and squints her eyes. The colors are strange.
They’re symbolic.
It is, she exhales, very heavy.
I look at her shift under its weight. I know, I say. It is.
After finals, during winter break, Matthew and I take a long weekend getaway outside the city. We rent a small cabin nestled into a mountain. Snow falls onto evergreen trees and the sills of the windows. We drink hot cocoa spiked with brandy. We do the crossword in front of the fire. We lay in bed and look out at the stars. Without the city lights, they come out in the thousands.
The next morning, we go for a hike, micro spikes strapped to our boots. We wear scarves I’ve knitted: his blood orange, mine baby blue, both soft and smooth like icing. At the summit, we take pictures of ourselves with the valley in the background, then in front of the snow-frosted evergreens. One second, he says, as he removes his jacket and flannel. In moments, his upper half is bare, save for his scarf, draped like woolen fire over his shoulders and dangling down the V of his torso to his narrow waist. I look for goosebumps, but I don’t see any. Can you get another pic? he asks.
On the drive back to the city, he opens his phone every five minutes to see the likes roll in. Based on the comments, it doesn’t seem that many followers are scrolling past the bare-chested cover shot to get to the photo of us together, smiling, the valley twinkling beneath us like polar treasure. Tongue, flame, squirt.
Why didn’t you post the picture of us together as the cover picture?
What? He fiddles with the radio station, searching for Top 40 in airwaves dominated by country music and church rock.
On Instagram. You didn’t post the picture of us together first. Why?
He pulls his eyes away from the road and stares at me like I’m a crazy person, or like he’s devastated that I’d be worried about such a thing, or both. He grabs my knee with one hand, squeezes. Babe, it’s just Instagram!
It’s not just Instagram, but I am afraid to speak my doubts aloud and give them life. Instead I seethe in silence and look out my window at the thousands of ice-crowned spruces that line the highway.
We take a break at the next rest stop. When I get back to the car, there’s orange-flavored soda water in the cup holder. His phone is opened to the post, the picture of him shirtless and alone removed.
I never want to hurt you, he says.
I believe him because he has never lied to me in his life, and the soda tastes like the beach.
The next morning I am so tired I am unable to pull myself out of bed until the afternoon. When I finally show up for work, Vincenzo is upset.
I sent you a text, I say.
He pulls me into his private office, a small room with a plain wooden desk, a roller chair with tufting peeking out of its olive vinyl, a window looking out over the river. Why didn’t you call?
Because I texted.
He sputters, frustrated. I do not use texts.
You don’t use texts? Dust motes float in the light spilling through his window. He is like a tailor out of a storybook.
I didn’t know what happened to you, if you were okay. He paces the room, doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
I feel pinpricks of sweat on the back of my neck. I can stay late, make up the work.
The work? He stops pacing and looks out the window. The work? He shakes his head and looks at me square. It was not the work I was worried about, Sebastian. The garments, they will be there tomorrow. They are not like people, and for this, we can be grateful. They will not walk away.
Class has ended, but I continue working on the sweater in the school studio. I decide I will give it to Matthew as a gift. I add layers and layers. The punch green of palm fronds. The milky yellow of our old beater car. The radioactive magenta of a Purple Punk Martini. It grows and grows.
Weeks later we receive our grades for the semester. Mine are all passing, including a B+ on my avant-garde project, and I’m thrilled. I gingerly ask after Matthew’s results, certain the hours at the bar and in the gym will have taken a toll. I promise myself not to say I told you so. Beaming, he turns his computer to me. A line of As marches down the screen like a dystopian alphabet. I find it difficult to swallow.
How do you do this? I force a smile.
Aren’t you proud of me?
Of course, I nod. So proud.
We go out to a nice dinner to celebrate. There are dishes I’ve never seen before. Watery marrow scooped out of bone with a pinkie-sized spoon. Roasted quail, their tiny wings folded against their miniature breasts. A pillow of purple and translucent carrots. He keeps his phone on the table, and it lights up with texts throughout our dinner like a sputtering electric candle. We are finally doing it, he says between messages. Living our dream.
Once our plates are cleared, I present him his gift. The wrapped box takes up most of the table. Laughing, he undoes the bow and tears the paper. When he peels the tape from the box, the lid pops off from the pressure of its folded contents. The sweater at last is revealed, its folds rising and falling like a kaleidoscopic landscape. What is this? he asks, running his hands over the wool, smiling cautiously.
It’s a sweater.
Matthew unfurls its mass and looks at it with polite bewilderment. It is as if I’ve presented him with an exotic animal, and he has no idea what food it eats, or whether it might bite. He removes it completely from the box to get a better look, but it’s very large, and the dining room small, and there’s not much space to hold it in front of him. It’s enough though that I can now see that not one hard-earned bicep, pec, or trap of his will ever show beneath it. In a cold sweat, I wonder if I’ve been subconsciously plotting sabotage all along.
I love it, he says, and I know from the uncertainty on his face, the strangeness in his voice, that he’s lying.
You hate it.
No, babe no, I don’t hate it at all. I’m just, he stutters, I’m just trying to think what we’ll do with it for the rest of the night is all.
The rest of the night? I had planned on calling an Uber to take us home after the check so we could get out of our clothes and look at the lights of the city glitter on the snow-covered rooftops. He looks at me as if I’d proposed we ingest cyanide pills.
But it’s so early. There is a party in the outskirts of the city, he explains as he refolds the sweater without trying it on. DJ Takron is spinning tonight. He says this as if DJ Takron were a household name, like the president or Ryan Gosling.
I am tired, I say.
Please, babe? He texts someone else as he speaks. For me?
We pull up to a warehouse. The windows are covered, and the street is dark, but the asphalt pulses with bass underneath our feet. Our cover at the door is more than the cost of our dinner, and I’m struck by a pang of sadness for the roasted quail. Toting the sweater, I follow Matthew down a cement stairway to a cement dance floor. The crowd is a sea of skin, slicked with sweat, broken by occasional strips of leather or mesh. A muscle twink thwacks a hand fan in rhythm with a beat that reverberates like a platinum boomerang. Eyes solder onto Matthew. Everyone and everything is metal. I am driftwood.
I want to go home.
Don’t do this, babe. We just got here.
I have a headache.
How unexpected.
You don’t have to come back. You can stay. I trust you.
He doesn’t come with me. I don’t trust him.
At home, I throw the sweater onto the sofa, crawl into bed, and open the GPS on my phone. Matthew’s profile picture smiles up at me from the coordinates of the club where I left him. I pull the covers over my head and stare at my phone like an oracle, waiting for the circle to float back toward our apartment. When it finally leaves the warehouse, it drifts in the opposite direction. I pick up my phone to text him. I put it down. I pick it up again. I text Vincenzo, knowing that he won’t respond.
Are you up?
A few second later: Yes.
I am caught off guard, as if I’d reached the end of a staircase and realized only after my foot passed through the air that there was still another step. I thought you didn’t text.
After a long pause: I didn’t.
But now you do?
But now, I do.
Did I wake you?
Yes.
Are you alone?
Yes.
Do you want me to come over?
Another long pause, then: Yes.
It is three in morning. I check for Matthew’s location on my GPS, and he is still on the other side of town. I will give him five minutes, I decide. After four years, I can wait five minutes.
Ten minutes later, I call the Uber and go.
Vincenzo’s apartment is both smaller and grander than I expected. There is only one room, a studio. A porcelain vase with lilies. A goldfish swimming on a small table by the window. Worn books piled in vertical stacks on the floor. Watercolors adorn all the walls: koi, violets, snowfields, a pond. I walk around the small room and inspect each painting as if we are the only two guests at a museum.
You paint?
I paint.
An elevated train ambles down the tracks somewhere outside his window. Its faint light blinks for several seconds, then steadies and dwindles away. Such a late train, I say.
He points to a wooden clock that looks like it was carved from the heart of a tree. No, Sebastian, it is an early train.
I feel as clueless as a child. I sit on his full-sized bed. It is covered with an enormous blanket that feels pilled and soft, like it’s been washed a thousand times. He sits next to me. I expect the familiar smell of sweat and deodorant that follows him around the shop, but instead there is a scent of lemon and coconut that is disorienting. I look closely at his face. There are wrinkles around his eyes I hadn’t noticed before, a small scab where he nicked himself shaving.
I’ve never been with anyone else, I say.
He puts his closest hand on the back of my neck, as if to massage it. You never wanted to?
I shake my head. No.
He starts rubbing my neck. His hands are calloused and rough. I do my best not to tense up. I think about Matthew. I tense up. The massaging stops, and it is so quiet each tick of his clock sounds like the rap of a snare drum.
I believe, he says, taking his hand off my shoulder, that we should have some tea.
There is a painful but welcome release of pressure. It is like when I jammed my thumbnail as a teenager, and the doctor drilled a hole in it to let it bleed.
We talk until the sun comes up and turns the lilies on his table into black silhouettes. We talk about sewing. We talk about the city. He talks about how he’s been single so long that he passed through loneliness the same way one passes through a tunnel, and that, like a tunnel, it’s only dark when you look back. I tell him that when I was younger, I was lonely all the time, but so much time had passed that it wasn’t until I moved to the city with hundreds of thousands of people that I remembered what loneliness felt like, or that I’d forgotten the feeling at all.
I take the train back. The sun rises over the buildings. I see on my GPS that Matthew is home. I rest my head against the window and come up with two plans. In Plan A, we will move back to being the only two in the village. We will get our degrees online. I will sell cologne, Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana, Cool Water, and he will mix drinks the color of radioactive matter. I will plan extravagant vacations for us and then ask why we can’t go; he’ll say there’s no money, and then we will pitch a tent at the local campsite and eat s’mores until we can’t fit into our sleeping bags. We will cut coupons out of the paper. I will keep my scissors over the table. Everything will be heavenly again.
In Plan B, I will end it all. I will live on my own, or with Vincenzo, or maybe I’ll even call my parents. I will live somewhere else and be someone else without Matthew. My world will be both larger and smaller than it ever was before.
I walk from the train stop back to our apartment. The January sun is climbing in the sky. It is unseasonably warm. Melting ice patters onto brick sidewalks. Everyone is out. Guys walk past. They look too hard or not at all. Mothers walk their babies in strollers. Their hypoallergenic poodle mixes trot loyally beside. And there, on our front steps, waits Matthew. He looks toward me, his eyes squinting in the sun. He wears, of all things, an avant-garde sweater: vast as a continent, the color of everything.