In a Relationship
The man I’m dating sees life in terms of data. He’s the kind of person who knows more about pi than most would care to. My man, the man I’m dating, is tallish—5 feet 11 inches, and strong, 170 pounds, the latter I know because he told me on the day that we first said hello and drank a craft beer. He watches his weight using a digital graph that he began keeping a few months ago, maybe because we often ate French fries together during our very early courtship, something he considered an indulgence, especially at nighttime. He’s not a control freak exactly—no more than I am—but he intends on staying lean because he’s a climber, as in a person who scales walls: mountain walls, cliff walls, gym walls covered in rubber, neon doohickeys. Climbers climb better if they don’t eat a lot of fries or a lot of anything delicious, or so I gather.
What’s his name? He wouldn’t want me to say. He’s private. Besides, that’s less important to your knowing him than the fact that he starts a day of climbing on a level of 10a or 10b, which is a difficult number right off the bat, a number requiring real strategy and strength. He doesn’t warm up on a 5, not the man I’m dating. He has twice taken me climbing, and I eventually worked up to an 8, but at that level, I smacked the gym wall, like a fly against a windshield. Dizzily, I swung back and forth from the rope he was holding as steadily as anyone could. “Okay?” he asked. “Great, totally great,” I said, giving him a thumbs up. “Bruised but excellent—maybe ready to come down.” “Good job,” he said, not hearing me, “you’ve got this.” So then, to save face, I got right back to it, scrambling frantically to reach the green neon doohickey with my right hand, sweating profusely, emitting a new smell like rancid gasoline. Finally, I made my way up the seemingly endless wall, then I caught my breath and said, “Take. Take, for fuck’s sake.” And the man I’m dating lowered me down so delicately. Coming down is the best part because you can dance the wall, tapping your feet as you like, dancing with a one-and-a-two-and-a-three rhythm. That part, I never wanted it to end. Coming down a climbing wall would be my ideal life-after-death activity forever.
In the mid-1990s, this man—my man?—studied advanced mathematics in several universities in Europe; meanwhile I studied literature at an elite East Coast college that allowed students to tailor their curriculum as they saw fit, omitting math and science if they chose, as I mostly did, to my regret. My husband, who died two years ago, also studied literature, that and history. We had a lot in common. I miss him every hour. Maybe this is one reason I have felt open to dating the particular man I am dating, even though we don’t go out for fries much anymore—he’s not my husband, he’s a new country altogether and a new equation. “I have gained seven pounds since I met you,” the man said last month. “Too many potatoes.” The man I’m dating is from Spain; he doesn’t elaborate on the central point at hand, unless new data needs to be presented, though I don’t believe his Spanish-ness has anything to do with it. “So don’t eat potatoes,” I said. “But you like them,” he said. “I’m not even that into potatoes, weirdo,” I said. “And you don’t have to eat them just because I eat them.” “Yes, I do,” he said. “You’re very weird,” I said. He laughed, I think he did.
But I’m not giving you any real sense of what is truly likeable about him, this man who went by “Nemo”—meaning no one or no name in Latin—on the dating site we met on because he didn’t want his data to be recognized, searchable. He wants to seem inscrutable, this man. He’s not, though, not to me, not completely—or is he? I’m not always sure about the biggest questions these late days. Like, I tell students not to describe a character’s eyes, but why? I am going to. Eyes feel important to me now, like evidence, like a proof. This man’s eyes are a brownish, yellowish green/gray, which may sound like a mud puddle—and this is why one shouldn’t describe eyes—but the color, wait, it’s more a lake in summer at dusk, changing with the light. My husband’s eyes were a golden brown that he would paralyze women with. When he looked at me in bed, he looked with pure focus; I knew he loved me, but I also knew he had looked at his loves the same way his whole life. He had looked at love before I met him, far as you can look. And that’s okay. He had made love to these other loves with great passion, and that’s okay, too. Thinking of his mostly beautiful life makes me feel consoled and a little bemused. I like the eyes of the man I am dating. He tells me things with his eyes, beyond words and numbers. I also like his body and his weird brain.
“Birds don’t have penises,” the man I’m dating said one morning after I slept over at his house. We had lifted the blinds and were watching birds out his bedroom window—he regularly scatters food for them. “Well, ducks do.”
“Ducks?” I asked.
“They have penises.”
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“I have a very good memory.”
“You do, for some things.”
“Cardinal,” he said. “Just there, see.”
“Thanks,” I said, because I watch for male cardinals. I count them, a new hobby.
Naked, cuddling, the man and I spent some more time on the birdwatching, one of our dating rituals. Squirrels arrived for the food after the birds. A deer showed up followed by three offspring.
“Quack,” I said reaching for the man, reaching for him beneath the covers.
“Quack, quack,” he said back, reaching for me.
When he tells me over coffee that mitochondria are miraculous—which I hadn’t considered—or how widows in Spain have a tradition of sitting in mourning with their backs to their open doorway, their faces to the street, as a way of straddling their internal and external worlds, I am all in. In turn, he listens to me talk about short stories I’ve read or written. He reads the stories and tells me his authentic thoughts. He laughs when I make hideously ugly faces just to show him I can. We learn from each other, I believe. Sometimes I wish he would talk less expansively about the legitimate concerns he has regarding AI, because it’s gloomy and borders hardcore on mansplaining. We have a lot of satisfying sex, though, sometimes sex like teens—in numerous combinations—even though we are decidedly not teens.
But here’s the problem, and it’s a math problem of sorts. See if you can help me solve.
The last time we went to the Baltimore Museum of Art, quite recently—to see an exhibit of paintings by a Black artist who captured her chosen Black subjects with so much happy and sad reality that we couldn’t stop studying the faces, talking about them, caring about them—we also somehow talked about math. A math I still don’t understand to save my life. Leaving the exhibit, I said, “The paintings have an identity, each one.” Totally unrelated, the man I’m dating said, “Identity is a function.” He said it so offhandedly. “What?” I asked. “Like, f(x) = x,” he said, “that would be the identity function.” “Weirdo,” I said, trying to be playful but cutting straight to passive-aggressive. He was hijacking the subject from art, which irked me. Plus, I knew it was too late for him to eat a meal according to his daily calendar, and I was hungry. “Let’s get fries at Gertrude’s, I’m empty,” I said. “Fine,” he said. “Make me fat,” he said. “You bet I will,” I said.
While we were eating the fries—he loves fries, let me tell you that definitively—a red cardinal landed on a sculpture of a funny-looking bronze man just outside the window beside our table. Though I’m not remotely a number person, I have counted the red cardinals I’ve seen since my husband died, and I’m well past two hundred and fifty. My husband’s name was Michael. He helps me find my glasses each time I misplace them, just as he did when he was alive. And he visits me on city buses in my dreams, the same city buses he used to ride to sleep over with me when we were dating. Of course, the man I’m dating now knows that I associate cardinals with Michael, and though he doesn’t believe in any afterlife or any mystery, he is pleased to point out a cardinal if I overlook one.
“Just there,” he said, his mouth full of several fries. “Red bird.”
“Saw it, thank you,” I said. “I’m counting on an endless parade of red birds for the rest of my life.”
Two more red birds arrived, strangely enough. A second and a third. No bullshit. They were there without their subtle, female cardinal counterparts. Such a thing is not typical, this red sequence, this absolute maleness.
“Just there,” the man said again, “and there and there.”
“This is magic,” I said to the man I’m dating. “Like Magic Mike with cardinals. But also, just magic.”
He didn’t react. I wondered, as I had before, if Michael was warning me off this man who helps me track my cardinals or sending me into his well-built arms. It’s my business to wonder that, so please don’t judge.
“This is magic,” I repeated.
“Everything is magic,” the man said automatically, which is something he often says, which, frankly, makes magic feel impossible and idiotic.
“No, this is really magic, weirdo.”
“All right,” he said. “All right.”
“All right.”
“Don’t call me weirdo.”
“No?”
“Not so much.”
“Don’t be weird.”
We finished our fries, every morsel, and got the check, which he paid this time. I didn’t offer. We hadn’t spoken in the several minutes since I had last called him a weirdo and he’d called me on calling him a weirdo. But now he was suddenly talking about numbers again to himself. Double-checking the tip, I assumed—but no.
“From any number, you can get a bigger number,” he said, now looking into my eyes.
“Okay?” I asked. “Why are you weirdly mansplaining?”
“Compare the numbers of two sequential sets,” he said, sighing sweetly. “Pair the elements of two sets. The whole numbers contain the even numbers. And you can say all the numbers are infinite, because there can always be more.”
Yawning, the waitress took our plates.
“Look, I’m ready to go,” I said. “You hurt my feelings about the cardinals.”
“Sorry.”
“I do believe in magic,” I said to myself, like a child. “Or at least I believe that my husband is around.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Sorry to call you a weirdo all the time.”
“I am a weirdo, it’s okay,” he said.
We got up and left the museum; we walked down a long city sidewalk not holding hands, not touching or talking. Then we reached our parked cars we’d caravanned over.
“Well,” I said.
“Well?”
He kissed my hand politely, as if maybe this was quits.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“I don’t know if I can go totally godless, you know?” I told him. “And I think it’s stingy of you not to be more open to possibility.”
He shrugged.
“You believe in God now?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “that’s not the point.”
We stared at each other, his eyes confessing massive confusion.
“I tried to tell you, I believe in a sequence,” he said, taking my right hand for a squeeze then letting it drop. “A sequence can go on and on, it will.”
“Why does that even matter?” I asked him.
“You seem grumpy,” he said.
Grumpy, correct. The sun was going down, and the city noise whined and honked. I looked into the man’s eyes and saw the memory of a lake, the ripples, the end of summer, the sediment you find if you dive deep down. The man kissed me goodbye on the cheek. And I started to walk to my car, feeling very sad. Sad, but understanding something about sunsets, and sequences, like orders of fries, and more fries down the line, his, mine. Fries forever.
“Oh! Potential for infinity!” I shouted, downright desperately. “Are you telling me something optimistic? Math-wise?”
I unlocked my car but didn’t open the door.
“Wrong!” he shouted back.
“Of course, you would say that!”
I stood beside my car and waited for him because he was hustling over so quickly, so dramatically.
“It’s not potential for infinity,” the man said with more passion than was normal for him.
“Tell me more,” I said. “Really.”
“Because the Greeks never thought that you could hold infinity in your hands,” he said.
“What did the Greeks know?” I tried for a joke.
“Exactly,” he said. “Now we know that numbers are infinite.”
“We do?” I said.
“So, you can hold infinity in your hands, do you see?” taking my hands somewhat accidentally.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, you can.”
He was being so nice, holding my hands, that I let him kiss me.
When we stepped apart, I asked, “Is believing in infinity anything like believing in ghosts?” He shook his head. I let him kiss me again, deeply now—one last time why not. “Ghosts, no way,” he added needlessly, and mid-kiss. We kissed a little more before I shut that down.
“Don’t you want me to follow you home and watch a movie or binge a show?” he asked, pressing against me. I was no longer hesitant; I knew what I had to do, and how much it would hurt.
I pictured Michael’s x-ray eyes, my concept of his past loves, more than a few, my sense that he is flying, infinitesimally, all around us, an army of him, mostly invisible but occasionally bright, bright red. I flashed on squirrels and portrait paintings and spiraling orgasms, and on the French fries that people are evidently required to share, and I thought I took to heart what the man I am dating was saying about a sequence that keeps going and going. But his lake eyes told me of his past loves as well and everything he thought he could expect from our pairing until we both eventually died. As he blinked, ugly, plastic blinds snapped down on nothing. Nothing. More nothing.
“Want me to follow you, or no?” he said. “Because I won’t ask again, end of discussion.”
Did I give him the correct answer? What do you think?
Because I grabbed the man’s weirdly thick forearms, as if I knew I could hold infinity in my hands, and I said to him, “For fuck’s sake, Nemo, yeah—please do follow me home.”
“You’re a weirdo, too,” he said, which felt like both a beginning and an end, it felt so natural. “Let’s go.”
© Betsy Boyd
Betsy Boyd’s fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Five Points, Story Quarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Her short story, “Scarecrow,” received a Pushcart Prize. Betsy directs the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore and is the recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council awards, an Elliot Coleman Writing Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, and residencies through Fundacion Valparaiso, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
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