Why We Broke Up

by Daniel Handler

  “OK, now what?”

  After two blocks Lottie Carson had rounded the corner and stepped into Mayakovsky’s Dream, a Russian place with layers and layers of curtains on the window. We couldn’t see anything, not from across the street.

  “I never noticed this place,” I said. “She must be having lunch.”

  “It’s late for lunch.”

  “Maybe she’s a basketball player too, so she eats all the time.”

  You snorted. “She must play for Western. They’re all little old ladies.”

  “Well, let’s follow her.”

  “In there?”

  “What? It’s a restaurant.”

  “It looks fancy.”

  “We won’t order much.”

  “Min, we don’t even know if it’s her.”

  “We can hear if the waiter calls her Lottie.”

  “Min—”

  “Or Madame Carson, or something. I mean, doesn’t this look like where a movie star would go, her regular place?” You smiled at me. “I don’t know.”

  “It totally does.”

  “I guess.”

  “It does.”

  “OK,” you said, and stepped into the street, pulling me with you. “It does, it does.”

  “Wait, we should wait.”

  “What?”

  “It’ll look suspicious to go right in. We should wait, like, three minutes.”

  “Sure, that’ll clear us.”

  “Do you have a watch? Never mind, we’ll count to two hundred.”

  “What?”

  “The seconds. One. Two.”

  “Min, two hundred seconds isn’t three minutes.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Two hundred seconds couldn’t be three of anything. It’s one-eighty.”

  “You know, I remember now you are good at math.”

  “Stop.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t tease me about math.”

  “I’m not teasing you. I’m just remembering. You won that prize last year, right?”

  “Min.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was just finalist, I didn’t win. Twenty-five people got it.”

  “Well, but the point is—”

  “The point is that it’s embarrassing, and Trevor and everyone gives me shit about it.”

  “I don’t. Who would do that? It’s math, Ed. It’s not, like, I don’t know, you’re a really good knitter. Not that knitting—”

  “It’s as gay as that.”

  “What? Don’t—math’s not gay.”

  “It is, kind of.”

  “Was Einstein gay?”

  “He had gay hair.”

  I looked at your hair, then you. You smiled at some gum on the sidewalk. “We really,” I said, “live in different, um—”

  “Yeah,” you said. “You live where three minutes is two hundred seconds.”

  “Oh yeah. Three. Four.”

  “Stop it, it’s been that already.” You led me in a happy jaywalk across, holding both my hands like a folk dance. Two hundred seconds, I thought, 180, what does it matter?

  “I hope it’s her.”

  “You know what?” you said. “I do too. But even if it isn’t—”

  But as soon as we stepped inside, we knew we should step out. It wasn’t just the red velvet on the walls. It wasn’t just the lampshades, red cloth made rose as the bulbs shone through, or the little glass beads hanging from the shades twirling prismy in the breeze of the open door. It wasn’t just the tuxedos of the men whisking around, or the red napkins folded to look like flags with a little twist in the corner for a flagpole, piled on the corner table for replacements, flags on flags on flags on flags like some war was over and the surrender complete. It wasn’t just the plates with the red script of Mayakovsky’s Dream and a centaur holding a trident over his bearded head with one hoof held up to conquer us all and stomp us to meaningless dust. And it wasn’t just us. It wasn’t just that we were high school, me a junior and you a senior, with our clothes all wrong for restaurants like this, too bright and too rumpled and too zippered and too stained and too slapdash and awkward and stretched and trendy and desperate and casual and unsure and braggy and sweaty and sporty and wrong. It wasn’t just that Lottie Carson did not look up from where she was watching, and it wasn’t just that she was watching the waiter, and it wasn’t just that the waiter was holding a bottle, wrapped in a red folded napkin, tilted high over his head, and it wasn’t just that the bottle, iced with a rainy sheen on the neck, was filled with champagne. It wasn’t just that. It was the menu, of course of course, presented on a little podium by the door, and how much goddamn everything goddamn cost and how much goddamn money we didn’t have on our goddamn selves. So we left, walked right in and left, but not before you grabbed a box of matches from the enormous brandy snifter by the door and pressed it into my hand, another gift, another secret, another time to lean in and kiss me. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” you said, and I kissed you back with my hand full of matches on the back of your neck.

  The night after I lost my virginity, after you dropped me off and after several blank afternoon hours on my bed tired and restless until I sat up and went outside to watch the sun fall on the horizon—that was another seven or eight matches. And then the third night was after we broke up, which was worth a million matches but instead just took all I had. That night it felt that somehow by flicking them off the roof, the matches would burn down everything, the sparks from the tips of the flames torching the world and all the heartbroken people in it. Up in smoke I wanted everything, up in smoke I wanted you, although in a movie that wouldn’t work, even, too many effects, too showy for how tiny and bad I felt. Cut that fire from the film, no matter how much I watch it in dailies. But I want it anyway, Ed, I want what can’t possibly happen, and that is why we broke up.

  Across the street from Mayakovsky’s Dream, right across directly like a Ping-Pong bounce, we hid in A-Post Novelties peeking through the racks of whatnot, waiting and waiting for Lottie Carson to finish her glamorous stop-over and leave so we could follow her home. We couldn’t loiter on the street, I guess, or who knows why we were in A-Post Novelties with the forever grumpy twin hags who run it, and all the nonsense, expensive and bright, people buy for other people for the other people’s birthdays when they don’t know each other well enough to know and find and buy what they really want. This camera is at least the only thing you got me from A-Post Novelties, Ed, I’ll grant you that. I moved amongst windup animals and dirty greeting cards while you ducked under the mobiles they have until you finally said what it was that was on your mind.

  “I don’t know any girls like you,” you said.

  “What?”

  “I said I don’t know any—”

  “Like me how?”

  You sighed and then smiled and then shrugged and then smiled. The mobile was silver stars and comets glittering in circles around your head like I’d knocked you silly in a cartoon. “Arty?” you guessed.

  I stood right in front of you. “I’m not arty,” I said. “Jean Sabinger is arty. Colleen Pale is arty.”

  “They’re freaks,” you said. “Wait, are they friends of yours?”

  “Because then they’re not freaks?”

  “Then I’m sorry I said it is all,” you said. “Maybe smart is what I mean. Like, the other night you didn’t even know we’d lost the game. Usually, I thought everybody knows.”

  “I didn’t even know there was a game.”

  “And a movie like that.” You shook your head and made a weird breath. “If Trev knew I saw that, he’d think, I don’t know what he’d think. Those movies are gay, no offense about your friend Al.”

  “Al’s not gay,” I said.

  “The dude made a cake.”

  “I made that.”

  “You? No offense but it was awful.”

  “The whole point,” I said, “is that it was supposed to be bitter, awful like a Bitter Sixteen party,
instead of sweet.”

  “Nobody ate it, no offense.”

  “Stop saying no offense,” I said, “when you say offensive things. It’s not a free pass.”

  You tilted your head at me, Ed, like a dim puppy wondering why the newspaper’s on the floor. At the time it was cute. “Are you mad at me?” you asked.

  “No, not mad,” I said.

  “You see, that’s another thing. I can’t tell. You’re a different girl than usual, no offense Min, oops, sorry.”

  “What are the other girls like,” I said, “when they get mad?”

  You sighed and handled your hair like it was a baseball cap you wanted to turn around. “Well, they don’t kiss me like we were. I mean, they don’t anyway, but then they stop when they’re mad and won’t talk and fold their arms, like a pouty thing, stand with their friends.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “Get them flowers.”

  “That’s expensive.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s another thing. They wouldn’t have bought the tickets like you did, for the movie. I pay for everything, or else we have a fight and I get them flowers again.”

  I liked, I admit, that we didn’t pretend there hadn’t been other girls. There was always a girl on you in the halls at school, like they came free with a backpack. “Where do you buy them?”

  “Willows, over by school, or Garden of Earthly Delights if the Willows stuff isn’t fresh.”

  “Fresh flowers, you’re talking about, and you think Al is gay.”

  You blushed, a dashing red on both cheeks like I’d slapped you around. “This is what I mean,” you said. “You’re smart, you talk smart.”

  “You don’t like the way I talk?”

  “I’ve just never heard it before,” you said. “It’s like a new—like for instance a spicy food or something. Like, let’s try food from Whatever-stan.”

  “I see.”

  “And then you like it,” you said. “Usually. When you try it, you don’t want the—the other girls.”

  “What do the other girls talk like?”

  “Not a lot,” you said. “Usually I guess I’m talking.”

  “Basketball. Layups.”

  “Not just, but yeah, or practice, or Coach, if we’re gonna win next week.”

  I looked at you. Ed, you were goddamn beautiful that day and, you’re making me tear up in the truck right now, every other one, too. Weekends and weekdays, when you knew I was looking and when you didn’t even guess I was alive. Even with shiny stars bothering your head it was beautiful. “Basketball is boring,” I said.

  “Wow,” you said.

  “That’s another different thing?”

  “I don’t like that one,” you said. “You never even went to a game, I bet.”

  “Boys throwing a ball around and bouncing it,” I said, “right?”

  “And old movies are boring and corny,” you said.

  “You loved Greta in the Wild! I know you did!” And I know you did.

  “I’m playing Friday,” you said.

  “And I sit in the stands and watch you win and all the cheerleaders scream for you and I wait for you to come out of the locker room standing by myself for a bonfire party full of strangers?”

  “I’ll take care of you,” you said quietly. You reached out and brushed my hair, my ear.

  “Because I’d be,” I said, “you know, your date.”

  “If you were with me after the game, it would be more like girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriend,” I said. It was like trying on shoes.

  “That’s what people would think, and say it.”

  “They’d think Ed Slaterton was with that arty girl.”

  “I’m the co-captain,” you said, like there was some way someone at school could not know that. “You’d be whatever I told them.”

  “Which would be what, arty?”

  “Smart.”

  “Just smart?”

  You shook your head. “The whole thing of what I’ve been trying,” you said, “is that you’re different, and you keep asking about the other girls, but what I mean is that I don’t think about them, because of the way you are.”

  I stepped closer. “Say that one more time.” You grinned. “But I said it so lousy.”

  What every girl wants to say to every boy. “Say it,” I said, “so I know what you’re saying.”

  “Buy something,” said the first hag, “or get the hell out of my store.”

  “We’re browsing,” you said, pretending to look at a lunch box.

  “Five minutes, lovebirds.”

  I remembered to look at the Dream door. “Did we miss her?”

  “No,” you said. “I’ve kept an eye out.”

  “I bet this is another thing you never do.”

  You laughed. “No, I follow old movie stars most weekends.”

  “I just want to know where she lives,” I said. I felt Lottie Carson’s birthday, the back of the lobby card, sparking in my purse, a secret plan.

  “It’s fine,” you said. “It’s fun, something. But what will we do when we get there?”

  “We’ll find out,” I said. “Maybe it’ll be like Report from Istanbul, where Jules Gelsen finds that underground room full of—”

  “What is the old movies, with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean what do I mean? You talk about old movies with everything. You’re thinking about one now probably, I bet.”

  It was true: the last long shot of Rosa’s Life of Crime, another Gelsen vehicle. “Well, I want to be a director.”

  “Really? Wow. Like Brad Heckerton?”

  “No, like a good one,” I said. “Why, what did you think?”

  “I didn’t really think,” you said.

  “And what are you going to be?”

  You blinked. “Winner of state finals, I hope.”

  “And then?”

  “Then a big party and college wherever they take me, and then I’ll find out when I get there.”

  “Two minutes!”

  “OK, OK.” You rummaged in a bin of rubber snakes, look busy look busy. “I should get you something.”

  I frowned. “Everything’s ugly.”

  “We’ll find something, it’ll kill time. What’s good for a director?”

  You interviewed me down through the aisles. Masks for actors? No. Pinwheels for background scenes? No. Naughty board games for the party after the awards ceremony? Shut up.

  “Here’s a camera,” you said. “There we go.”

  “It’s a pinhole camera.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s cardboard.” I didn’t tell you that I didn’t know what it is either, just read it on the side of the thing. Or, until now, the truth of it, that I knew of course, of course I knew it, that there was a game and that you’d lost that night I met you in Al’s yard. But you seemed to like, I think, I hoped back then, that I was different.

  “Cardboard, so what, I bet you don’t even have a camera.”

  “Directors don’t do the cameras. That’s for the DP.”

  “Oh right, the DP, I almost forgot.”

  “You don’t know what a DP is.”

  Three of your fingers gave me a jumpy tickle, right in the belly, where the butterflies lived. “Don’t start with me. Alley-oops, technical fouls, I have a dictionary of basketball in my head, and you don’t know any of it. I’m buying you this camera.”

  “I bet you can’t even take real pictures with that.”

  “It comes with film, it says.”

  “It’s cardboard. The pictures wouldn’t come out right.”

  “It’ll be, what’s the French word? For weirdo movies?”

  “What?”

  “There’s a, you know, an official descriptive phrase.”

  “Classic films.”

  “No, no, not gay ones like your friend. Like, really, really weird ones.”

  “Al is not gay.”

 
“OK, but what is it? It’s French.”

  “He had a girlfriend last year.”

  “OK, OK.”

  “She lives in LA. He met her at a summer thing he did.”

  “OK, I believe you. Girl in LA.”

  “And I don’t know what French thing you mean.”

  “It’s for super-weird films, like oh no, she’s falling up the staircase inside somebody’s eye.”

  “How would you know, anyway, if there was some film thing?”

  “My sister,” you said. “She was almost a film major. She goes to State. You should talk to her, actually. You remind me, a little bit—”

  “This is like hanging out with your sister?”

  “Wow, this is another time when I can’t tell if you’re mad.”

  “Better buy me flowers just in case.”

  “OK, you’re not mad.”

  “Out!” shrieked the second twin like a bossy curse.

  “Ring this up,” you said, and tossed her the camera for her to catch. And here it is back at you, Ed. I could see the little arrogance there, from co-captaining, how it really could be whatever you told them, like you said. Girlfriend, maybe. “Ring this up and leave us alone.”