Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [32]
Science is a glorious thing. Angela divorced after seven years, a number predicted by her endorphin cycle. Even though I heard for years that the marriage was in trouble I stayed away because research shows that the vast majority of relationships that begin as extramarital affairs end within a year after the partner has left her or his spouse, and my love for her was undying. Angela Bertram had been separated completely from the bastard for almost two months. I’d heard something about infidelity, but made sure not to torture myself with specifics. I’d stayed away because rebound relationships initiated in the first three months after the conclusion of a long-term relationship had a dismal success rate. I had been planning on contacting her in three weeks, on the exact date of the third month of her final separation, before fate had changed the calendar. If I was a religious man, I would have seen the hand of God. Instead, I saw the wonders of the scientific method and the fruits of self-discipline. There had been other women in my life, there was sex and sometimes romance and much flirtation. But no love. No one had gotten to my heart because my chest was hollow. Whatever was once there, Angela Bertram now possessed it.
She came out of the subway, and she blinked and looked around for a few seconds, orienting herself. Her sense of direction was poor, her eyesight worse. Angela refused to get glasses because she was a little vain and was afraid of falling into a downward spiral of myopia, that the lightest prescription would soon lead to lenses thicker than the Hubble Telescope. She found the street sign, found the direction, and walked toward the restaurant, where I sat by the window. The look when she reached me at the table, the hug that started with the arms and pushed in with the full body behind it, it was everything I’d been waiting for. Always let them be the last to contact you when you split, even when they dump you and say they don’t love you anymore, so that you both know that you are the one who never called them back.
“You look great. You look the same. Like you haven’t changed one bit,” Angela told me, still holding my hand as she took her seat. Another victory on my part. Seven years without increasing your body mass index is a great accomplishment. Especially for a man soon to hit forty. It was the great age, when poor lifestyle choices and bad genes started to show dramatically on the human form. For her, I’d kept myself encased in amber, mind and body. From this position, though, up close, I could see all the ways Angela Bertram had changed over the years of name hyphenation. Her once braided hair was now untwined and ironed. The darkness of her skin banished the thought of wrinkles, though. It still shone like the skin of an orca. Accented now by diamonds that covered most of her earlobes.
“Don’t you ever wish you could go back, make different decisions?” she asked after entrées, a sadness there I planned to rub away. “The divorce has taught me, I’m creative. Even if I’m not doing art anymore, I need to be a creative person. I needed a partner who’s a creative, adventurous person. How did I think I could be content with someone whose idea of life was just raking in the cash from corporate acquisition contracts?”
I knew she’d never be happy in that life. I knew that when we were together. What I didn’t know was how terrified she was of growing old in the same poverty she’d been raised in. This I figured