If You Knew Then What I Know Now

by Ryan Van Meter

  Goldfish have a reputation for dying. When I told people I’d had a goldfish four, then five, then six years and counting, they would be impressed—with Rufus or me, I wasn’t sure. It seemed uncommon to have a goldfish so long, even if the possible lifespan is around twenty years. Goldfish also have a reputation for being disposable. If it dies, you get another one. The pet store tanks are full of hundreds and maybe even thousands of them, glittering and tightly packed together like sewn sequins. Drunk kids used to swallow them as a dare because presumably no one would miss a few dozen, so why not? It might be said that goldfish aren’t usually important.

  On the day we bought him, Kim and I stood in front of that crammed glittering tank at the fish store, and I kept my eye on Rufus as the guy dunked his green net in again and again, creating mayhem in the water, each time scooping up the wrong one. “No, that’s not him.” I pointed to Rufus, and waited. I can’t say what it was that Rufus had that the other fish didn’t, though his throat was marked distinctively in silvery white. But I knew which one I wanted, the only one I wanted—fish love at first sight.

  Once Rufus was sick, and he was staying sick, I realized that he stood for a lot—hope, my friendship with Kim, its failure, my love with Geoffrey, its growth. Because why else would I be so upset over the dying of this silent orange fish? And it didn’t matter how silly it felt to be worried. Mornings changed: I approached his bowl carrying my cup of coffee as well as the anxiety that I would find him dead. And it was all made worse by the idea that I didn’t know what to do for him. Taking him to a veterinarian or a fish doctor was hopeless because I already knew what I’d hear. Well, it is just a goldfish.

  Kim and I didn’t speak for almost two years. And then she came back to Chicago to visit some mutual friends, and she wanted to see me. At a small party, she and I sat on our friends’ back porch, knees nearly touching. It was strange how easy it was to talk, and how smoothed out our history felt because it was history. She was doing well in her city, Geoffrey and I were too, in ours. After enough glasses of wine, we told each other we were sorry for what happened, for how she’d left. I wanted to tell her that I knew I hadn’t been very fair, that for so many years I’d made her the stand-in for the companion I wouldn’t let myself have, until that companion came along. And probably my needing her so transparently let Kim hope for something more than just friendship between us—even if it didn’t make much sense for her to keep that hope around. But I would never ask if that were true. Because for all the things we said, we allowed each other not to say all the things we might have.

  “Oh,” Kim asked, after so much serious talk. “How’s Rufus?”

  I smiled. “He’s fine. He eats peas now, but he’s still with us.”

  “I can’t believe that,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s amazing he’s still alive.”

  A year later, she visited Chicago again, and that time, she stayed with Geoffrey and me in the apartment that she and I had once shared, sleeping in her former bedroom. After she flopped down her suitcases, I took her on a short tour of the rooms we’d repainted, the green kitchen where we’d stripped off the ugly floral wallpaper, the bathroom now a color named “stone.” “I’m sorry. I can’t remember what it looked like before,” she said.

  It was the reaction I’d anticipated. “How is that possible? You lived here,” I said, and she shrugged, and we laughed at how well we still knew each other.

  She and Geoffrey and I stood in the dining room, in front of Rufus’s new jar that wasn’t new anymore with his smooth river stones, and she poked her fingertip in the water and drew ripples across the surface as Rufus fluttered. The dining room walls were now gorgeous deep orange that matched him—my favorite color; Geoffrey had painted the room by himself as a surprise for me. The next day was Friday, and I took the day off to go shopping with Kim. It was also my and Geoffrey’s sixth anniversary.

  He got home from work a little after five, and called my cell phone as Kim and I sat exhausted in rush-hour traffic, weakly singing songs in a fierce sunset. “I have bad news,” he said. “Rufus died.”

  “Oh,” I said, in a sad enough note that Kim knew even without hearing his words.

  “Did Rufus die?” she whispered as Geoffrey continued talking in my ear. I nodded.

  By the time we returned to the apartment, Geoffrey had drained and scrubbed out Rufus’s jar. The stones were piled in the sink, dark and glistening with soap bubbles. Rufus lay on a tiny white bed of folded paper towels. His mercurial eyes had already turned black.

  “I think we should bury him,” one of us said.

  As he dried in the air and the luster of his scales dulled, all the colors I’d always noticed in his body seemed to disappear, and I wondered if I had always imagined the green, blue, red and grey. Geoffrey bundled the paper towel around him, and I closed it with a strip of tape. We were going to bury him in the back yard.

  “Make him a headstone,” Geoffrey said because he knew I would want to do it. He pulled a flat-sided stone from the heap in the sink.

  I patted it dry and wrote Rufus’s name across it in permanent marker. “Wait,” I said, and ran across the kitchen to the bedroom. On my knees, I dug under our bed for the journal I was writing in the year Kim and I bought Rufus. “I want to put his dates on the stone,” I called out. I knew it had been March, and I thought it was early in the month and almost certainly a weekend, probably Sunday. As I flipped through pages, passing all those old recorded days, I skimmed for his name. Kim and I buying a pet would have been a big enough event to write down. And I remembered writing it down, but it wasn’t there. I checked February, turning page after page, searching for his name or any word that would signal the story of his coming. I checked January, though I knew it would have been too early; April was too late because in April we knew Geoffrey. “What are you doing?” he said, from the kitchen. They were waiting, so I just wrote down his lifespan in years, wondering what sense I could make of any of this if I couldn’t get my memory to match the facts.

  We stood in the back yard. Under unruly lilac branches showing off new blooms, I dug out a hole with a hand trowel. “What do we say?” Geoffrey asked, dropping the white packet in, covering it with dirt, and tamping down the stone on top.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and we all stared at the rock.

  Kim sighed. “To Rufus. A great fish. We love you.”

  For so long, even though we knew he was sick, it seemed as though Rufus might just go on living the way he was. He survived one day with his tail crimp, so he’d always survive the next. But there we were. I wanted to say something about how uncanny it was that he’d died that day, on my anniversary with Geoffrey, how our relationship had always been as old as he was, and how it was also the weekend that Kim was back in the apartment for the first time in years, several of which had passed in silence. And that I was sorry for what I had hoped for the three of us back then—for everybody to contain their feelings, for nothing to ever change.

  A year later, when Geoffrey and I finally moved from that apartment to another state, we took Rufus’s old stones with us. I’d always planned to do something with them, and still thought I would, so we packed them into a shoebox stuffed with wads of newspaper. At our new house, on the day we moved in, Geoffrey unpacked the stones, and piled them in the front flowerbed in the spot under the mailbox. He cleared out the weeds, and the smooth dark rocks sat there like the marker of something. We unpacked everything else and made the stuff of our life fit this new place. That first night, we fell into our same bed in our different room, and when I switched off the lamp, I said, “Look.” On the ceiling was a sky of glow-in-the-dark stars, leftovers. “Wow,” he said, and we kissed, and slept.

  Months later, it was somehow over between us, and I lived in the house alone and he moved to his own city, and we had crossed through each other’s names in those Emergency Contact boxes. And I spent a lot of time thinking about how you can be sure of something and still always be wrong. In the
front flowerbed, the weeds grew and I didn’t keep up with them and eventually, I noticed they were taller than Rufus’ pile and I just let them go. I decided then that I would leave his stones there, even when I moved from the house to any future place. I like imagining someone pulling weeds one day, revealing the pile of them again, and this person thinking the stones odd and beautiful without having any idea of what they really mean.

  Things I Will Want to Tell You on Our First Date but Won’t

  That I’ve had a crush on you for a long time. That besides your name, I don’t actually know you. That the first time I saw you I didn’t think you were as cute as I think you are now, and this is a good sign. That the first time I saw you, I just thought you looked nice, and I thought if we went on a date, we’d probably have a nice time. That I also thought, He could be one who gets me over my ex. That I even thought, He could be the one, but not like the other one, my ex, who I used to think was the one—until he broke up with me, and then became just the last one. That I don’t understand how you can think you’re with the one only to find out later you are not. That I’ve Googled you.

  That, like a sixth-grade girl with a pink notebook, I’ve thought about how our names go together. That, unlike the girl with the notebook, I’ve never written our names next to each other to see how they look, though I’ve considered it. That I am thankful your name isn’t the same as mine, which is probably the biggest disadvantage gay people have in dating—the chance of dating someone who has your name. That I could never, never date someone with my name. That I think this is so creepy, I can’t think of a man perfect enough to be the exception to this rule. That I’m also thankful my name isn’t Michael or something as hopelessly common because then my already shallow dating pool would be suddenly drained. That in high school when I was obsessed with 1960s Warren Beatty movies, I wanted to change my name to Warren, which is embarrassing to admit but would have helped with this no-same-name policy because I’ve never actually met a Warren.

  That our first date will be my first date in eight years, and counting. That our first date will be my first first date since my first date with my ex. That I don’t know what to do on first dates. That my first date with my ex is a blur because I was thinking, This is my first date with this guy I like so much! It’s happening right now! the whole time so I won’t have much to compare our date to. That I didn’t date much before my ex and then when he came along, we were together for eight years. That other than a two-week thing with this too-beautiful and too-young guy whose idea of dating was to stop by my house whenever he wanted to make out with me on my sofa and then leave about an hour later, I haven’t dated since my ex and I broke up a year ago.

  That for a long time after my ex broke up with me, I thought I was fine because I always think I’m fine. That I’d pretended I was fine all of spring and summer until one afternoon I was talking to him on the phone. He and I are trying to be friends, which is sometimes hard because when I first saw him, I didn’t want to be his friend, I wanted to be his boyfriend. That I don’t want to be his boyfriend anymore, though this hasn’t always been true since the breakup. That when we were talking on the phone and he finally told me the name of his new boyfriend, even though I already knew he was dating someone else and thought it was way too soon for him to be doing so, it was hearing the man’s name. That we talked a bit more and then he had to go and it wasn’t until I tried to aim my fingertip at the END on my cell phone that I noticed my hands were shaking. That his new boyfriend’s name is not Warren or Michael or the same as mine.

  That I wasn’t fine. That I had been ignoring how non-fine I was. For example, I had chosen not to notice the fact that I hadn’t really slept since he broke up with me. And if I ever slept, I’d wake in the dark as if out of a nightmare, breathless, my heart knocking hard like an angry landlord. And my hands didn’t only vibrate after hearing the names of new boyfriends—they shook all the time. My stomach was stuck on simmer, and all I ever ate were spoonfuls of peanut butter and jelly straight out of the jar. That I was usually wearing only underwear when I ate these spoonfuls, and afterwards, I’d lie down in the middle of the afternoon and take long naps on the hardwood floor and wake up sweating. That I hated turning so easily into the jilted sad-sack cliché. That I finally understood the point of clichés—they feel comfortable.

  That I should have known something was wrong because I was writing a lot of breakup poetry. That when I searched for “gay breakup” books at Amazon.com, the first result was Cowboys: Erotic Tales.

  That I saw a therapist, another cliché, which felt comfortable. That when my therapist said, “Why don’t you start at the beginning?” before I could make the first syllable of the first word, which was going to be something simple like, “Okay,” my voice came undone, and I started crying. That I hate crying in front of people, especially men. That crying in front of him felt embarrassing but also oddly consoling because he was a man. That once I started, I couldn’t stop talking and crying, and telling the whole story from the beginning while my therapist took notes on a clipboard. That once I stopped, he looked at his scribbles and said, “I’m just doing the math here, but was this your first boyfriend, your first significant relationship?” and I said, “Yes.” That my therapist leaned deep in his chair as his eyes turned to the ceiling and his head tilted back, and he said, with a big open mouth, “Ah.”

  That I hate when I tell people we were together for eight years and now we’re not, and they put their hand on my shoulder and say, “Oh I’m so sorry,” as if somebody died. That sometimes it feels like somebody died. That even my therapist said, “What you need to do is mourn the loss, to give yourself permission to grieve for the relationship.” That months later, I was teaching a poem about death and grief to a room full of nineteen-year-olds, and I asked, “So how do we bring an end to mourning?” and one of my students said, “Eat lunch.” That I think this kid should be my therapist. That I never say the word “dumped.” That I always say it was my ex’s decision.

  That if he hadn’t broken up with me, I would have stayed with him forever.

  That when I see you, I don’t know what to do with my body. That when I see you, my eyes just want to stay there looking at your face. That whenever you see me looking at you, I have to look away because of the not knowing what to do with my body. That I don’t know how to walk across rooms and talk to strangers, especially male strangers who are cute, and who have seen me look at them and then look away, even if I think they want me to. That I also don’t know how to arrange my body to look like someone who wants the cute male stranger across the room to walk over. That the first time I crossed the room to talk to a cute stranger, and tried to hand him a small square of paper on which I’d written my phone number, he didn’t want it and said so in a nice enough way, but I still walked off vowing never to do that again. That I have never done that again. That I will never do that again.

  That I realized my ex breaking up with me changed the way I thought about my body, which is why I don’t know what to do with it when you look. That I once imagined what I must look like to you, and from this point-of-view, I understood I needed new jeans and to start doing sit-ups. Also, a haircut. That I stood on tiptoes in front of my medicine cabinet mirror, shirt off, and actually said to the dog, “I really have to start doing sit-ups,” and when she didn’t know what I meant, I realized how much I talk to the dog. That she used to be our dog and now she’s just my dog.

  That my body actually feels different now, maybe even unfamiliar, as though it was gone eight years and suddenly returned, like when a friend borrows a book for so long that when you finally get it back, you forgot you ever owned it. That it’s because he knew my body better than any other man, and he told me he loved it while overlooking its certain flaws, and now that he’s left, I feel as though I don’t only have to meet a whole new man but I also have to convince him to think the same way about my body. And on top of it, I should probably like him back. That one of the first
things I said to my ex when he broke up with me was, “I can’t believe you’re making me have to date again.”

  That other than the too-young and too-beautiful two-week guy, and a stranger who grabbed me from behind in a public restroom, no man has touched me since my ex.

  That I think you know you have a crush when the man you already think is cute is always cuter than you remembered each time you come across him in your day, and it’s something about seeing him move around in the world which makes him cuter, not just his face. That sometimes I imagine what we’ll do on a quiet Saturday afternoon, like get to-go cups of tea and take the dog to the forest preserve and hook our index fingers together and walk the trails swinging arms, half-mocking couples that walk swinging arms and half-enjoying the swinging of arms. Or even if the sun is out and shining, we can lie on the bed, each of us reading separate books while sharing a bag of candy and not caring that we’re wasting good weather because we’ll both agree that books are better than anything. That small thoughts of you—even though I don’t know you—sometimes interrupt what I’m doing; like if I’m stirring a pot of soup, I’ll wonder if you love tomatoes as much as me. Little things like that. That I try to assume this is what everyone does when they think about a crush though I’ve never confirmed this. That I do not want to confirm this.

  That part of the weirdness I feel when you look at me is the sensation of having a crush, and it’s because I haven’t been on a first date in so long that I’ve forgotten this feeling. That I wonder if you can keep having a crush on a man you know and love.

  That the truth is, even though I thought my ex and I were mostly happy, or happy enough, I could still always imagine loving another man one day. Not any man in particular, and I don’t mean a UPS man sex fantasy either, but some other future love that wasn’t him. Even when we were together. That sometimes I believe in the one, and sometimes I don’t, though most of the time when I believe in the one I think we’ve never been guaranteed we’ll actually meet this person, or if we do meet, that it can work out—maybe you’re moving in two months, already have a boyfriend or wife, are named what I’m named, or maybe I’m just too heartbroken to pay attention to the fact that the guy standing in front of me is you, my one. That, at some point, I realized my imagining another man as a possible future partner, even when I was satisfied with the one I had, meant I was going to be ok. That, at some point, I also realized most of the time when I thought I was talking to the dog, I wasn’t really talking to the dog.