ORANGE JUICE | Seven

In the end, in the very, very end, I had to end it where it began. Why ask tarot what I can ask him in person? Why wear myself out with questions I can make him answer?

Certain I would catch him at home on a Sunday night, I cabbed to his block. At his door I was nervous. I thought I heard the television in the house. I tried the doorbell, then the door. No one answered. I went around the block to get a look at the house. It was dark and all the windows of all the rooms were closed. But a man opened the living room windows – someone was in then, not him, but someone – and I tried the door again. A man who looked like a thin teddy bear came to the door and when I asked for “Max” he said, “There is no Max who lives here. Is your address correct?”

I said I was sure I had the right house. “I’ve been in there.”

He said he had lived there on his own for years.

I said I had been in there with a Max in April.

“What has he done?”

“So Max is here?”

He said he did have a housemate but it wasn’t a Max. “I want to help you but tell me what he has done. Has he done anything criminal?”

I almost laughed. “No. It isn’t criminal not to call a girl.”

He said he had a housemate named Gotham, Gautham or something (“As in Batman?” I said but he didn’t get it and gave me a weak smile) who was out but would be back soon.

“Is he from the Maldives? Does he work for a bank?”

“Gotham” works for a tech company, his friend said. Thrown by the unfamiliar name and job, I thanked him and was ready to leave. Maybe my “Max” had left. Or he had lied. Or he had asked his friend to lie. What more did I need to know?

As soon as I was downstairs I had a new plan, however. My inner policewoman thought, why don’t I get the dating app again, go to the suspect’s photo page, show it to the man upstairs and see how he reacts? The app was slow, super slow. By the time I had the pics on the phone, the suspect was walking by me with loads of shopping and a fair and plump woman. (So that is his type. Someone like me.) I followed them, a few steps behind, and they didn’t see me until they got to his door and I went, “Hey…can I talk to you? Two minutes?”

Looking at him again after six months, I saw an uneven colouring on his face, a splatter of vanilla on caramel, that I didn’t recall. It was still a good face but all I felt was…nothing. He said, sure, he could talk. As his girlfriend went into the house he got me to walk with him to the lawn near the block. He said he remembered me, although he hadn’t recognised me immediately; it had been that long. He said he was surprised by my visit, although he didn’t sound it. He was as smooth as I remembered.

“New girlfriend?”

“Girlfriend.”

“Good for you.”

Finally, we were at a pavilion and he asked me what I wanted to talk about. I said he had not responded to my texts since May. (I was trying to be factual and to let him have his say, to be fairer to him.) He said he had gone abroad in May and got a new phone number in June. He said he thought he had told me to “get over” that afternoon.

“No you didn’t and you should have. I’m not a psychic.”

He said he had made a mistake. “It wasn’t planned, it just happened, it can’t be reversed. But we knew afterwards we were not two people who would get along.”

He knew. Did I? Did I know it and wishfully unknow it?

“I thought there was nothing to talk about and we would get over it. But seeing you here now, I know I made a mistake.”

He asked me to blame him. “You have to blame someone. Then one day you can forgive even if you don’t forget,” he said. Or he did not say it and I misheard. I had heard enough, though. His words cost him nothing and I didn’t want more. As I left he wished me good luck. I said bye.

It was windy – a night as nice as that day – when I walked to the road and caught a cab home.