If you had asked me, that August, whether Anne and I ever fought, I would have said no, happily, the way a man reports that his car has never once stalled. We did not fight. We had, in six months, one argument, exactly one, and I filed it under personality quirk, hers, a rattle in a dashboard I had decided to live with.
It happened at an Italian place on the north end, the kind with a candle in a red glass jar on every table and a mural of a coast that has never existed. I had chosen it, naturally. Chosen is too soft a word. I had scouted it on a lunch break in June, sat at the exact table I would later reserve, tested the chicken with the peppers and judged it adequate, tipped twenty-five percent so the staff would remember me kindly when I returned with the woman I was wooing. I want you to understand the labor involved, because it is the labor of the whole relationship, condensed into one restaurant: I did not take Anne anywhere. I installed her in places I had pre-approved, and then I admired her in them, like a man who hangs a painting and spends the evening congratulating the wall.
Her preferred order at such places was written in my head by then, salad with the dressing on the side, the chicken with the peppers, no parmesan from the green can because she claimed it smelled like a gym sock’s ambition. I ordered for us both when the waiter drifted off mid-list. Anne let me. That was the last easy thing that happened all evening.
Here is where I have to slow down, because this is the chapter where the reader stops trusting me, and I would rather you do it on schedule than by accident.
We were talking about childhoods. I had told her about the house in the East End, edited, the ducks and the train of toy cars, no truck, no step, no girl at the window. My father came up once, and I gave her the scouting report: worked for the sawmill, took me for duck feedings on Sundays, good with his hands, gone too soon, which was true on a technicality I was banking on her not auditing. She let it pass, being good at letting things pass, which I mistook, then, for not noticing.
Out of Dayton she gave me a cul-de-sac, a father on the power company who read to her at night from a big leather chair that squeaked when he leaned back. He came up in a tense I could not quite locate, and I noted the squeak, the chair, the lean, a coin found in my own couch, pocketed without deciding to.
Then, over the salad, she told me about the Christmas of the unicorn.
She was seven. She had decided, with the total commitment seven allows, that she was getting a real unicorn that year. Not a doll, not a poster. A unicorn, living, presumably in the garage. She left carrots on the porch for it, cut on the bias, arranged in a smile. She wrote it letters. She told everyone at school, and when the other children told her there was no such thing, she came home and asked her mother, and her mother said, “We’ll see,” which is the coward’s comma, and her father said nothing at all, which was his whole role in the story, she said, laughing a little, he never said the true thing either way, he just let her go on believing, because the believing was cute, and cute bought them all a quiet December.
Christmas morning came. No unicorn. She ran to the porch. The carrots were gone, she said. Something had eaten them. Raccoons, probably, or her father finally doing cleanup, she never found out which, and that was the part that got her, even at seven, that nobody, not once, had told her the truth before the truth arrived on its own and ate the evidence.
“I cried for a week,” she said. “Not about the unicorn. I was a kid, I’d have gotten over a unicorn. It was that everybody let me stand out there on the porch with carrots. Like I was a story they were watching.” She turned her fork in the salad. “My mom says I was a sensitive child. I think I was just early.”
The waiter set down the chicken. The candle in the red jar leaned its small flame sideways. And I, being the man I was, being the exact man this book is about, heard none of the warning in it. I heard a sad-funny childhood story, and I heard the word unicorn, and something in me came to attention like a dog that heard its name.
“You wanted a unicorn,” I said.
“When I was seven, yes.”
“Anne.” I set my fork down, for effect. “I don’t believe in unicorns. Then I met you.”
The silence that followed had a texture. The table next to us kept on being happy. Our candle went on leaning. Anne gave me the look you give a stain on a shirt you had just decided to keep, and she said, very evenly, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t make me into something you’ll be disappointed by.” She put her fork down too, parallel to the knife, the way she did when a meal was over, and this meal was over. “That is the exact thing, Eli. That is the sentence I have heard from every man who ever decided I was the answer to a question he was asking himself.”
“I wasn’t doing that.”
“You said my name like you were pinning it to a board.”
“I was trying to tell you something nice.”
“You were trying to tell you something nice,” she said. “I was just in the room for it.” She took a breath, and when she spoke again her voice had gone quieter and flatter, which I would learn, much later, was her version of shouting. “Do you know what the carrots were, actually? My mother swears I left them for Santa’s reindeer and got the stories crossed. But I remember. I left them for the unicorn, because if a unicorn was coming down our street in December, somebody had to make it feel expected. I was seven, and I was already doing logistics for a thing nobody had promised me. That’s the part I keep doing. Not the believing. The preparing the porch for something that never committed to coming. So hear me on this part. I don’t believe in ‘the one.’ I don’t believe there’s a person who completes you. I think there are people who see each other clearly, and that’s rare enough, and it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted from anybody. And you keep looking at me like I’m a thing you found, and I am telling you now, at an Italian restaurant, before this goes any further: I am not a thing you found.”
The reader already knows what I heard. I heard: she has been hurt by boys who thought she was magic. I heard: I will be different from them, because in my case it happens to be true. I heard a challenge wearing a warning’s clothes, and I accepted it on the spot, inwardly, with trumpets. She had said, I don’t believe in the one, and I had heard, she has not met the one, and I proposed, silently, over uneaten chicken, to spend the relationship proving her wrong.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it in the sense that a man means it when he has decided the apology is a door he can close. “I won’t do it again.”
“Okay,” she said. She did not believe me. The fork came back up for three bites of a meal she had already ended, out of something I now understand was politeness, and we did not speak about the unicorn again for two years.
We paid. We walked. Summer in Columbus holds its heat after dark, radiating off the brick, the whole city like a dish towel that had been in hot water, and we went the long way past the closed bakery and the hardware store with its roll-down gate, her hand in mine, both of us performing fine for the streetlights. At her steps she did the lock, three times, and the middle turn, the one for herself, I would have bet money she did harder that night.
“I had a good time,” she said, in the tone of a woman stamping a document.
“Anne. Come on.”
“No, I did.” She touched my cheek, briefly, like checking a wall for damp. “You asked me once, in the bar, what I wanted. I told you I wanted to be known, not solved.” The door opened on its chain of locks. “Good night, Eli.”
I called Marcus from my car, because a man like me, caught being wrong, does not sit with it. The second ring got him.
“Tell me I didn’t do the thing,” I said.
“You did the thing,” he said. He was eating something; I could hear the television under him. “What was the thing?”
“She told me about wanting a unicorn when she was a kid. I said I didn’t believe in unicorns until I met her.”
The chewing stopped. There was a pause with a whole court case in it. Then Marcus said, “Bro, you told a woman who was heartbroken that nobody leveled with her that you are now the special exception who gets to not level with her?”
“That’s not,” I started, and stopped, because I had heard it. He let me hear myself. The television murmured. Somewhere in his apartment a glass got set down.
“Eli.” He wasn’t laughing now. “What did she actually say, word for word?”
I told him. The don’t, and the pinning it to a board, and the thing you found, and the I don’t believe in the one.
“And what’d you hear?”
I didn’t answer that. He waited, which was his father’s trick, the intake-room silence, and in the end I filled it the way every man in that room must fill it, with the truth said sideways: “I heard that I get to be the exception.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said, not unkindly, which was the worst of it. “That’s the thing, man. You always hear that. Every time.” He picked the television remote up, muted it, and for a second all I heard was him deciding how much father to put in his voice. “Daddy had a guy, he’d say it plain. A man hears what he wants and calls it listening. You know what the women in those folders all had in common? They’d told the truth early, and the man had filed it under flirtation. Every single one.”
“Anne didn’t flirt.”
“That’s my point,” he said. “You didn’t even need the encouragement.”
I drove home the long way, past the car lot, flags still up even at that hour, popping in the dark over nothing. I told myself the fight was small. I told myself couples have worse. I told myself that a woman who says she doesn’t believe in the one is a woman asking to be shown, and that showing her would be the work of years, and that I had years.
All of that was interpretation. None of it was evidence.
She had told me, plainly, at a table I had chosen, over a meal I had ordered: I want to be seen clearly, and you are looking at me through glass. And I had nodded, and filed it under obstacle, and driven home past a car lot congratulating myself on the size of the job I had just volunteered for.
Here is the part of the chapter that belongs to you and not to me. Two people sat at that table. One of them told the truth with her whole chest: her whole childhood wound, the porch, the carrots, the father who never said the true thing either way. She gave me the map. The other person took the map and drew a unicorn on it, right over the part that said, in her mother’s handwriting, this child checks the porch.
If you are keeping score at home, reader, this is where the book tilts. Everything before this was a man collecting a woman. Everything after it is a woman slowly realizing she has been collected, and a man slowly realizing the collection was the crime.
She said good night at a door she locked three times, and the middle turn, the one she did for herself, I would have bet money came down harder that night than it needed to.
There is a coda to that evening, a small one, the kind I would not bother with except that this book runs on small ones. Anne told me, much later, that she had stood at her own window a long while that night, deciding something. What she decided was not to end it. She had picked the relationship up and weighed it in her hand, and put it back on the shelf, because the beginning had been good and the chicken, she allowed, had been decent. She decided to believe the unicorn sentence was a fluke, a handsome man saying a handsome thing, and that the fluke had spent itself.
What she could not have known was that the sentence was not the fluke. The sentence was the load-bearing wall, and everything built after that night, every date, every remembered preference, every carnation, was wallpaper over it. The fluke was the part where she almost saw.
I wrote nothing down that night. Even I knew some things didn’t go in the notebook.
Or maybe I just didn’t have a number for what had happened, and the notebook only took what I could count.