You

  I point to the drawer in the cage and you obey and you plead, “Joe, look, I overreacted.”

  “Beck, take the cards,” I say and you look at me like I’m crazy. “Pick them up. The sooner we get started, the sooner you get fed.”

  You pick them up and you do love a test. You sit down on the bench and you face me. I see that you ate some of the pretzels and drank most of the water. Good girl.

  “This is an oral exam,” I begin and you laugh. I’m rooting for you to succeed so I look the other way. “Each question is true or false. And after each question, you’ll have the opportunity to back up your answer.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  I ignore you and you’re blubbering. I can’t get mad. If I had to watch and listen to the DVD menu for Pitch Perfect for more than five hours, I too would be a mess. I look down at my yellow legal pad and begin. “True or false? You’re having an affair with your therapist, Nick Angevine.”

  “False,” you snap.

  I want you to pass this test, so I press. “Again. True or false? You are having an affair with your therapist, Nicholas Angevine.”

  I deliberately left out the world doctor and you hang your head. “False.”

  I sigh. “You sure about that?”

  Finally, you open up to me petal by petal, as spring opens. You pull your hair behind your ear. “It’s complicated.”

  “This isn’t Facebook, Beck. Nothing is complicated. It is or it isn’t.”

  You are on your feet rattling, pulling at your hair, growling, screaming for help, afraid for your life, your poor vocal cords, what a waste. I drop my legal pad. I walk to the cage. “I love you, Beck. The last thing in the world I want to do is kill you.”

  “Then let me out.”

  “Soon,” I say and I return to my station and pick up my legal pad. “True or false? You are having an affair with Nick Angevine.”

  You groan and kick but you stab the air with the YES card. Yes!

  “Correct,” I say and I make a check mark next to the question.

  “Joe,” you say and you’re on your feet again, then falling to your knees, like an orphan. You beg, you supplicate. “Please don’t lose it over Dr. Nicky. It was a mistake, okay? I was crazy and it’s over. I mean we slept together once, Joe. It was nothing. One stupid night.”

  It wasn’t one stupid night and it’s time to move on. “Next question,” I announce and this is hard, Beck. This is hard for me. “True or false? Joe Goldberg has a lot going for him.”

  You guffaw and you answer, sure and fast. “True. Are you kidding? You have a ton going for you. I’m always telling you how smart you are, how much smarter you are than everyone I know. You’re amazing and you’re funny and smart and real.”

  I was afraid you’d say something like that. I reach into my messenger bag for the MacBook Asshole. You see it and you growl. You kick and stomp and pound your fists. You’re acting like a five-year-old and I wait for the tantrum to end. I know you love me and I know you didn’t mean these things but we can’t move forward without full disclosure. You’re the one who went into my wall. I had no choice but to go into yours.

  I read an e-mail you sent yesterday to Nicky from Beckalicious1027:

  “Nicky, honey, I’m trying to end things with Joe, but he has so little going for him and I’m definitely the best thing that ever happened to him and it’s hard. And honestly, Nicky, sometimes, in the middle of the night I wake up and I think I don’t want to be a stepmother. Oh! Can you bring back The Things They Carried? Thanks!”

  I close the MacBook Asshole. I don’t show you any emotion. As the test administrator, I must maintain my professional emotional distance. There is a dense quiet. It feels like the rare books are listening to us, breathing, waiting.

  “Okay,” you say and we are in a new place. “I am a shit, Joe. Textbook damaged goods. And you always look at me like I’m so amazing and I don’t know. I don’t know why you do that because I’m not. And I was gonna get your book back, I was.”

  I want to kiss you and tell you I love you and hold you but I don’t. I speak. “True or false? You don’t want to be with Nicky anymore.”

  “True, Joe,” and you sit down in the chair and spread your legs and hang your head in between. You lift your head. “One hundred percent totally, finally true.”

  I open the MacBook Asshole and take a deep breath. “We’re moving on to reading comprehension. I’m going to read you something that Nicky wrote to you. And then you’re going to tell me what it means.”

  You stare at me. You say nothing. I take your silence as understanding and I cough. And I read aloud from Nicky’s e-mail to you:

  “Is that what you think, Beck? Well, I think I just told my wife about you. It’s a little late for you to say that you’re reluctant to be a stepmother. This isn’t a game, Beck. This is life. I’m coming over. I have nowhere to go. She wants me out, Beck. All this is happening and you ask me about a book.”

  I close the MacBook Asshole. “You have two minutes to tell me what this letter means to you.”

  I want to tell you the answer bad but I can’t. I start the stopwatch on my phone. The answer is so obvious, Beck. You’re supposed to tell me that you want to report Nicky to the authorities so they take away his license. You are supposed to tell me that you want his wife to kick him out and that you want him to die homeless, alone with a suitcase of scratched records and nowhere to play them. And then you are supposed to realize that you don’t really want that to happen. You should realize by now that you feel nothing for him. You should know that all you want is me but fifty-nine seconds of your allotted time have passed by and you haven’t said a word. You clap your hands.

  “All right, Joe. The jig is up,” you say, too singsongy. “I fell hard for a married guy. I’m a horrible person. I’m not gonna sit here and blame my parents or whatever, because I’m twenty-four years old. A lot of girls have shitty dads. There’s no excuse.”

  You gave the wrong answer. Nicky really did a number on you and it’s physically and emotionally exhausting to climb your way out of the trap he set for you, a pig in his rig. You are trying. I see that. I open the MacBook Asshole and announce, “Next question. Reading comprehension of the last exchange between you and Nicky. You wrote: I’m soooo sorry. Nicky, I really believe that I will never love anyone the way I love you.”

  You leap up, you object. “Joe, stop. Please.”

  I raise a hand. STOP. I read what you wrote:

  “I get wet just thinking about you and that’s never happened for me.”

  You interject aloud, “I’ve said that to every guy ever, Joe. That’s what guys like to hear. You can’t think that’s the truth.”

  I lose focus and I react. “Well, you never said that to me.”

  “Because you’re different,” you say, different, hot. “You wouldn’t buy into my bullshit.”

  You are charming but I have a test to administer. Besides, you don’t want to get by on your good looks, your sexy cadence. You want to pass the test with your wits. I look down at the MacBook Asshole and continue reading your letter to Nicky:

  “I feel like you love your wife more than you know. I feel like I might love Joe.”

  You interrupt again. “I do love you, Joe. I do.”

  I ignore you. It is still my turn to speak. “Now I’ll read Nicky’s response: You want to know how I feel, Beck? I feel like you’re a selfish fucking cunt. Good luck to you, Beck. You’re gonna need it seeing that you haven’t any morals.”

  I close the MacBook Asshole and return it to my messenger bag. I pick up my yellow pad. “You have three minutes to convey the meaning of your last communication with Nicky.”

  I give you extra time because you’re a good listener and you’ve been through hell. Nicky should fry for what he did to you. And I failed you when I let him go. He abused you in that sacred “safe” haven of beige pillows, classic rock, and bullshit. I feel sorry for you, Beck. It’s no surprise that you were so d
emented that you lied and told me your place was being “exterminated.” You needed to get away from your MacBook Asshole and the asshole that gave you the MacBook Asshole. Of course you were climbing into the walls in my home, literally, you poor thing.

  You are still thinking, pacing, and I am praying. I want you to give the correct answer. I want you to tell me that you don’t recognize your voice in those e-mails. I want you to tell me that after less than eight hours in the cage you feel born again. I want you to say that you never got wet upon seeing that hunchbacked megalomaniac and tell me you love me and beg for my forgiveness. All I want to do is forgive you.

  It’s been thirty-four seconds and two minutes since I started the stopwatch and you look up at me and answer, “The funny thing is, the first time I ever went to see Nicky, he wanted to know what was wrong with me. He was like, ‘Well, Beck, let’s figure out what the fuck is wrong with you.’ ”

  You laugh lightly and Nicky used the same line on me. Bastard.

  You go on. “And I told him that I felt like my head was a house. He didn’t get it but I said that my head is like a house and there’s this mouse in there. And that’s why I’m so anxious all the time.”

  You came up with that and he is a thief, low.

  “Oh,” I say and I should have killed Nicky the first day I walked into his office.

  “He didn’t get it until I told him that the only thing that made me forget about the mouse was hooking up.”

  I look at the Pitch Perfect menu on mute. You are nothing like Beca.

  “Anyway,” you say and you continue to break my heart. “I told him that I love to be wanted. I told him I love new things. And I told you that too, Joe.”

  “I thought you meant crap from IKEA,” I say and you look away.

  You try to explain yourself and you talk about your problems like you’re talking about a movie you watched in the middle of the night. You are clinical, detached and you’ve been this way for a while, long before we met. You call yourself a stalker. You say that you’ve pictured the same wedding—the song is “My Sweet Lord”—with a million different guys, “including you, Joe.”

  “So you did want to marry me,” I say. You are my love, my sweet lord.

  You growl. “You don’t get it, Joe. I’m not like that.”

  I think you are wrong and you say that therapy is a joke. You continue. “You can’t get a mouse out of a house. Not unless you blow up the fucking house.”

  You are exhausted and hungry and incoherent and I slide the legal pad into my messenger bag and put two cherry pie Lärabars in the drawer for you. You do love to talk about yourself, even in a cage. I play Pitch Perfect and I walk up the stairs and ignore your calls for me to stay. I can’t stay. I have to prepare the second segment of the test.

  I hustle over to Popular Fiction and pick up two copies of The Da Vinci Code. I jog down the stairs and find you tearing into a Lärabar with your eyes glued to the Treblemakers “making music with their mouths.” I did good! I pull the drawer out and toss a Da Vinci Code inside.

  “Are you kidding?” you say, your mouth gorging with cherry pie woman food.

  I point to my copy. “I’m gonna read it too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the only book I can think of that you and I have both never read.”

  We need to share an experience together in order to move forward. You flip through the book and you have a deep confidence, a sexual prowess, a bullheaded pride in the soft, hungry magnet that heaves between your legs. You’re not afraid of me, of anyone. Men love you. You know it. No man can ever be a mouse in your house because you’ll always have someone—a hot clerk in a bookstore, a horny shrink, a closeted rich girl. Someone will always watch over you and you believe that you are special. In the cage, you feel loved, not trapped. Just like me.

  49

  THERE is a mouse in our house and his name is Dan Brown, lord of our manor, creator of Professor Robert Langdon and keen, mesmerizing cryptologist Sophie Neveu. We are hooked almost immediately and we travel well together. We go to the Louvre and we follow the clues and you lie on your belly and you kick up and down when something exciting happens, which is often. I am on my side, on the other side of the cage, just as hooked as you are.

  We take breaks to talk about the Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion and we both wish Robert Langdon were real and I find clips of the film adaptation online for both of us to devour when we need to rest our eyes and our fingers. You have never felt so compelled to read and I admit the same is true for me.

  “I mean, I love Stephen King books,” you say. “But that’s different because his work is so well crafted. The Shining is fucking literature, you know?”

  I do know and I remember Benji and his refusal to admit that he loved Doctor Sleep. We read late into the night and you wake me up the next day by sliding the drawer back and forth and back and forth. “Come on!” you squeal. “I’m dying over here.”

  We start to read but we need coffee and I bolt up the stairs and through the shop and down the street and you aren’t just passing the test. You’re acing it. There is a long line at Starbucks but you deserve that salted caramel stuff you drink every so often and our book club is the best.

  “Is it twisted that I can relate to Silas?” you asked me last night. “This will sound sick, but when I found out Peach was dead, I was more angry for myself than I was sad for her. She was the best friend in the world because I was the world to her. She was obsessed with me and I couldn’t even remember the exact date of her birthday.”

  “You were the church,” I said.

  “And she was the Silas,” you said.

  I reminded you of the first conversation we ever had in the bookstore, when you teased me that I was a preacher and I said I was a church.

  “Wow,” you said. “Wow.”

  I smile at nothing and everything as I walk back to the shop, carrying your salted caramel. We are a dream couple, we are what happens after Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks finally kiss, after cancer-free Joe Gordon-Levitt and sweet shrink-in-training Anna Kendrick eat their pizza in 50/50. We are Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke after U2 finishes singing “All I Want Is You.” When I reach the bottom of the stairs, you clap but you are puzzled.

  “Joe,” you say. “That tall cup is too tall for the drawer.”

  “I know,” I say and I love you for living in here, for not fighting.

  “So how are you going to get that to me?”

  I smile and show you the low, wide mug I bought for that specific purpose and you say it again, “Wow.”

  You’ve said that word more in the past twenty-four hours than you have in the past twenty-four weeks and you call me a genius and ask me to tell you again about how I got Benji to go to the shop. We have our coffee together on opposite sides of the cage and when I finish telling you the story you shake your head and here it comes again, “Wow.”

  “Nah,” I say.

  “One thing though,” you say and you set your coffee on the ground. “That last Benji tweet, you said in Nantucket. And I remember reading that tweet and thinking he must be seriously fucked up because he knows that it’s on Nantucket and not in Nantucket.”

  “Nice work, Sophie,” and I grin and there is no mourning and there is no war because we are united, we are Unicef. We give.

  “Thanks, Professor.” You glimmer and you wink.

  “Break?” I say.

  “Perfect,” you reply and we are so good in here and I play “We Are the World” and you laugh and ask why I chose that song and I tell you about how I feel like we improve upon the world in this basement and you are serious and you know what I mean and you agree and I have never been this connected to another human being in my life. You know the way my senses work, the way my brain works. You like it in there, in here.

  The hours fly by and something in The Da Vinci Code leads into a conversation about the Dickens Festival and costumes leads to hats and I blush and you realize that I know about th
e Holden Caulfield hat. You close your Da Vinci Code. You hug your knees the way you do when you are truly, totally sad.

  “That must have been horrible for you,” you say.

  “It doesn’t look good on him either,” I say and I am as stealthy as Robert Langdon. But you still feel bad.

  “I’m a phony.”

  “Beck, no you’re not.”

  “You’re like this nobleman of the Priory of Sion running around figuring me out and I’m so inept I can’t even properly hide a hunting cap, let alone a disgusting and cheap and shitty fling.”

  Disgusting! Cheap! Shitty! Fling! It is a relief to hear you talk this way and I smile. “You give it your all, Beck. You just have to be more careful about who you give it to.”

  “You’re right,” you say. “Nobody is more dedicated, more intense than you, Joe.”

  “Except for you,” I say and you smile. You wink.

  We read. When we are both in it we are quiet. We get sucked into a book in the same kind of way and at some point we both fall asleep. I wake up first—Yay!—and I let you rest. I go up into the shop and stretch. Ethan has texted me:

  Joey my man! Congrats to Beck. Blythe tells me she is getting published in The New Yorker! That’s amazing! Let’s meet up for a drink next week! On me! Or housewarming, moving to Blythe’s as we speak!!!!!!

  Exclamation Point Ethan finally has reason to use exclamation points and I feel happy for him. I go to Fiction A–D and find Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and I am dizzy. I anticipate our future, the day I tell you about following you to Bridgeport, to the Dickens Festival in Port Jeff. You will say wow. Again.

  And less than an hour later, my predictions prove accurate. You leaf through Great Expectations. “Wow,” you say. “So you really did know what my half siblings look like.”

  “Yep,” I say. “I bought a beard, you know, just in case.”

  You toss Great Expectations in the drawer. “I think you’re a genius.”

  I pull the drawer and take Dickens out. “You ready?”

  You grin. “I thought you’d never ask.”