Single, Carefree, Mellow

Because this last part isn’t even about Boris, it’s about your father, you worry that you are becoming a pathological liar.

You never act jealous in front of Linette, his best friend from undergrad. She spends the day at your apartment on her way to a game she’s going to be in. She plays basketball for some college in California.

She is as tall and slender as you feared and not as coarse and brawny as you wanted. You had hoped she would lope around the apartment, pick you up, and chuck you to Boris, saying, Well, Bo, I guess we could toss a little thing like her right through the hoop.

Actually, Boris and Linette do go play some basketball, and when they come back, you all sit on the couch and drink beer. Linette puts her hand on Boris’s thigh, which is lightly sweating, and you hope it’s just from basketball. You resist the urge to put your hand on his other thigh. You imagine yourself and Linette frantically claiming Boris’s body parts, slapping your hands on his legs, then his arms, then his chest. Only knowing how much pleasure he would get out of this keeps you from doing it.

Instead, you finish your beer in one long swig, anxious to show that you can drink right along with any basketball player, and you rise. You say, “It’s been nice to meet you, Linette, but I have to go, I have a date.” You don’t have boyfriends anymore, just dates.

“Yes,” you say again, “I have to go get ready.” You say this so Linette will believe that you are looking the way you normally look around the house, that you are actually about to go make yourself better-looking. She does not need to know that you’re already wearing a lot of makeup, that this is about as good as it gets.

You pretend you don’t want to kiss him. He calls from a bar on Halloween, too drunk to drive, when you are home studying. You drive to pick him up, wearing sweats and your glasses. You wear your glasses only on nights when you don’t plan to see him.

He sings on the ride home, pulling on your braid. Wonder why he’s in such a good mood. Was Dahlia Kosinski at this bar?

In the kitchen, he drinks your orange juice out of the carton. You say, “Put that back.”

Boris says, “Too late,” and holds the carton upside down to demonstrate. Three drops of orangey water fall on the floor.

“Damn,” you say and throw the sponge on the floor. This is a good indication of how irritable you are, because the floor was already sticky enough to rip your socks off.

“I’m sorry, Gwen,” Boris says. “I’ll go get more tomorrow, I promise.”

“Forget it,” you say, rubbing the sponge around with your toe.

“If you forgive me, I’ll kiss you,” Boris says.

Now you don’t even have to pretend you don’t want to kiss him, because, you have to face it, that was pretty obnoxious.

“Oh, spare me,” you say, and cross your arms over your chest. Boris leans over and kisses you on the eyebrow. Don’t in any way change your posture, but you can close your eyes.

He touches your lips with his tongue. Wonder why you have to suffer this mutant behavior on top of everything else. He must look like someone trying to be the Human Mosquito. Does this even count as a kiss? This is a very good question, and you will spend no small amount of time pondering it.

Boris cuts himself shaving and leaves big drops of blood on the sink. You approach cautiously; it looks as if a small animal had been murdered.

You consider your options. You could point silently but dramatically at the sink when Boris returns. You could leave him an amused but firm note: “Dear Boris, I don’t even want to know what happened in here …” Or you can do nothing and assume that he’ll eventually do something about it. That is probably your best option. But what if he thinks you left it there? What if he thinks you shave your legs in the sink or something? Best to clean it up and not mention it.

This you do, pushing a paper towel around the sink with a spoon.

You take Boris home for Thanksgiving dinner. All goes smoothly except for your grandmother glaring at him after the turkey is carved and announcing, “The one thing I will not tolerate is this living together, and I say that aloud for all the young people to hear.”

Boris looks up from his turkey drumstick like a startled wolf cub, a spot of grease smeared on his cheek.

Later, when you are walking back toward the train station, he says, “What did your grandmother mean by that?”

Hoot. You say, “I don’t know, but the way she said ‘all the young people’ made it sound like there were a whole group of young people, drinking beer or something.”

Boris is not to be distracted. “The thing is,” he says, “we aren’t living together in that way.”

You try not to wince. You do shiver. You take Boris’s hand as he bounds along on his long legs, your signal that he has to either slow down or pull you along. He tucks both your hand and his hand into the pocket of his jacket. You look up at his face out of the corner of your eye. In the cold, you watch him breathe perfect plumes of white that match the sheepskin lining of his jacket. You think how happy you would be if Boris thought you were half as beautiful as you think he is at this moment.

You walk this way for a few minutes. Then he tells you that your hand is sweating, making a lake in his pocket, and gives you his gloves to wear.

You take to going out with Boris for frozen yogurt almost every night at about midnight. You are always the last people in the yogurt place, and the guy who works there closes up around you. Tonight Boris says, “Gwen, you have hot fudge in the corner of your mouth,” and wipes it away, hard, with the ball of his thumb. Wonder if you feel too comfortable with him to truly be in love.

But then he licks the fudge off his thumb and smiles at you, his hair still ruffled from the wind outside. He is the love of your life, no question about it.

For Christmas, you buy Boris a key chain. This is what you had always imagined you would give a boyfriend someday, a key chain with a key to your apartment. Only it’s not exactly a parallel situation with Boris, of course, in that he’s not your boyfriend and he already has a key to your apartment, because he lives there. Okay, you admit it, there are no parallels other than that you are giving him a key chain.

Still, you can tell the guy in the jewelry store anything you like. Go ahead, say it: “This is for my boyfriend, do you think he’ll like it?”

For Christmas, Boris gives you a framed poster of the four major food groups. You amuse yourself by trying to think of one single more unromantic gift he could have given you. You amuse yourself by wondering if you can make this into an anecdote for the women in Pigeon Lab.

When people ask you what Boris gave you for Christmas, you smile shyly and insinuate that you were both too broke to afford much.

The girls in Pigeon Lab have a Valentine’s Day party and invite you and Boris. Probably you shouldn’t show him the invitation, since his name is on it and he might wonder why you and he are invited as a couple. Just say, “Look, I have a party to go to, want to come?”

“Sure,” Boris says, and the best part of the whole thing is that this way you know without asking that he doesn’t have plans with someone else.

You don’t have boyfriends anymore, and these days you don’t even have dates. You tell Boris this is because you have too much work to do, and often on Saturday nights you make a big production of hauling your Psychology of Women textbook out to the sofa and propping it on your lap, even though it hurts your thighs and you never read it.

Instead, you talk to Boris, who is similarly positioned on the other end of the sofa, his feet touching yours. Sometimes he lies with his head in your lap and falls asleep that way. You never get up and leave him; you stay, touching his hair, idly clicking through the channels, watching late-night rodeo.

One night Boris wakes up during the calf roping. “Oh, my God,” he says, watching a calf do a four-legged split, its heavy head wobbling. “This is breaking my heart.”

This thing with Dahlia Kosinski reminds you of a book you read as a child, Good News, Bad News.

The good news is the ethics study group has a party and Boris invites you to go. The bad news is that Dahlia Kosinski is there and she’s beautiful in a careless, sloppy way you know you never will be: shaggy black hair, too much black eyeliner, a leopard-print dress with a stain on the shoulder. You know that her nylons have a big run somewhere and she doesn’t even care. The good news is that Dahlia has heard of you. “Hello,” she says. “Are you Gwen?” The bad news is that she makes some joke about a book she read once called Gwendolyn the Miracle Hen, and Boris laughs. The good news is that Dahlia has what appears to be a very serious boyfriend. The bad news is that they have a fight in the bathroom, so maybe they’re not really in love. The worse news is that in the car on the way home Boris says, “I don’t think Dahlia will ever leave that boyfriend of hers. Everyone I’ve talked to says they’re very serious.” Which means that he’s looked into Dahlia’s love life, he’s made inquiries. Wonder how there can be bad news followed by worse news. Does that ever happen in the book? Bad news: You’re pushed out of an airplane. Worse news: You don’t have a parachute?

Boris tells you that one night he stopped by the frozen yogurt place without you and the guy behind the counter made some sort of pass at him and wanted to know if you were Boris’s girlfriend.

Ask, “What did you tell him?”

“What choice did I have?” Boris says in a tone that crushes you like a grape.

Linette stops by again. This time she spends the night, disappearing into Boris’s room with a six-pack. You hear them laughing in there. Whatever else you do, call someone and go out that night.

When you are in the kitchen the next morning, Boris wanders out. You ask him how he feels. “Tired,” he says. “Linette kept me up all night talking about whether she should go to grad school or not.”

Wonder if he’s telling the truth. Say, “Should she?”

“God, no,” Boris says. “She’s such a birdbrain.”

“Oh,” you say loudly, over the banging of your heart.

You clean the bathroom late one night after Boris has gone to bed. You wear a T-shirt and a pair of Boris’s boxer shorts that you stole out of a bag of stuff he’s been planning to take to the Salvation Army. It gives you immense pleasure to wear these boxer shorts, but you wear them only after he’s gone to bed, and you never sleep in them. You do have some pride.

Your cleaning is ambitious: you wipe the tops of the doors, the inside of the shower curtain; you even unscrew the drain and pull out a hair ball the size of a rat terrier. It is so amazing that you consider taking a picture with your smiling face next to it for size reference, but in the end you just throw it out.

You are standing on the edge of the tub, balancing a bowl of hot, soapy water on your hip and swiping at the shower-curtain rod with a sponge when Boris walks in and says, “Well, hello, Mrs. Clean.”

You smile. He yawns. “Do you need some help?” he says.

You let him hold the bowl of water while you turn your back to him and reach up and run the sponge along the shower-curtain rod.

“I never knew you had to clean those,” Boris says. “I can’t believe it’s one in the morning. I feel like we’re married and this is our first apartment or something.”

Your throat closes. Until this moment you had not thought about the fact that this was your and Boris’s first apartment, that once the lease is up there might not be a second apartment, and you might not see him every day.

“Hey,” says Boris. “You’re wearing my boxer shorts.” He puts the bowl of water on the sink and turns the waistband inside out so he can read the tag. “They are!” he says, delighted.

You freeze. Clear your throat. “Yeah, well,” you say.

Even standing on the edge of the tub, you are only a few inches taller than Boris, and he slides an arm around your waist. He brushes your hair forward over your shoulders and traces a V on your back for a long moment, as though you were a mannequin and he were a fashion designer contemplating some new creation.

Then you feel him kiss the back of your neck above your T-shirt. You remember Halloween and think about saying, Boris, are those your lips? but you don’t. You don’t do anything. You still haven’t moved; your arms are over your head, hands braced against the rod.

“You’re so funny, Gwen,” Boris whispers against your skin.

“Really?” you say. A drop of soapy water lands on your eyelid, soft as cotton, warm as wax. “Me?”

SINGLE, CAREFREE, MELLOW

You could sum it up this way: Maya’s dog was dying, and she was planning to leave her boyfriend of five years. On the whole, she felt worse about the dog.

“God, that’s horrible,” said Rhodes, Maya’s boyfriend. “I don’t know if I can stand it. There’s really nothing we can do?”

He was talking about the dog dying, because he didn’t know that part about Maya leaving him yet. Though if he had, he might well have said exactly the same thing. And then Maya would have had to say, No, there’s nothing we can do. It’s like that song: You just can’t be here, now that my heart is gone.

Yesterday morning, Maya’s dog, Bailey, a yellow Labrador, had refused to eat breakfast. This behavior was so extremely out of character (Maya could in fact never remember it having happened before) that both Maya and Rhodes were immediately concerned. Maya made some scrambled eggs for Bailey, and while she was doing that, Rhodes examined Bailey and discovered a marble-size lump in her cheek.

Maya had felt a hot ember of resentment about the fact that Rhodes had found this lump before she did. Bailey was her dog, had been her dog since she was eighteen, had been her dog for exactly twice as long as Rhodes had been her boyfriend. Maya should have been checking for the lump instead of scrambling eggs as a displacement activity. She felt marginally vindicated when Bailey ate the eggs, though, and then she drove Bailey straight over to the veterinary clinic.

The vet had done a biopsy and had called to tell Maya that Bailey had an extremely aggressive form of cancer, and would most likely not live more than six or eight weeks.

Maya hung up with the vet and immediately called Rhodes. Because the problem was, of course, that although sometimes Maya’s heart was gone, sometimes it came back. Sometimes she could actually feel it thump back into her chest so hard it made her rib cage rattle. And then she would have to see Rhodes, would have to put her arms around his thin body and kiss him, even though he was too tall to kiss comfortably, would have to touch his face and brush his hair out of his eyes, and hear his voice, even if he was saying something unbearably boring about computers to somebody else, like, “NFS keeps timing out and locking up my whole system.”

There were times when nothing but Rhodes would do.

That night, Maya and Rhodes had dinner at Rhodes’s parents’ house, which was just across town. They did this about once a week and Maya had always been grateful that she and Rhodes were not required to give up their weekends, just one weeknight. Rhodes’s family was accepting and relaxed, and for the most part, it was easy to be around them. As opposed to her own family, who lived across the country and when they were there for Christmas last year, Rhodes had hugged her mother and her mother had asked if he was drunk (which he had been, incredibly so, but that was not the point).

But today Rhodes’s mother, Hazelene, rushed up to Maya and embraced her so fiercely that Maya wondered if there had been a terrorist attack or natural disaster in the fifteen minutes it had taken her and Rhodes to drive over.

“My dear,” Hazelene said. “You must be devastated. Rhodes called me in tears as soon as you got the news about Bailey.”

“Oh,” said Maya, understanding. “Yes, well, it’s horrible.”

She was a little shocked to learn that Rhodes had called his mother, called her in tears apparently. She tried to think if she would have done this if things were reversed. Rhodes did not have any pets but he did have a lumpen sixteen-year-old sister named Magellan (they all had idiotic names, the whole family; there was a brother named Pegasus). Would Maya have called her own mother in tears if Magellan were given six weeks to live? In all honestly, she wasn’t sure she would have. But then Bailey lived with them (Magellan, thank God, did not) and Bailey loved Rhodes with a devotion, which, in a human, would border on the insane. Whereas Magellan, apart from a brief period of infatuation two years ago when she painted Maya’s fingernails dark blue, did not seem to like Maya all that much.

Like later, during dinner when Rhodes’s father, Desmond, said, “Can someone explain to me who the Jonas Brothers are and why they wear chastity belts?” and Maya attempted to catch Magellan’s eye to exchange a look of commiseration and Magellan said, “Why are you staring at me? Do you want me to pass the butter?”

What could you do with a person like that? Maya was an only child and she had always hoped she would be close to her boyfriend’s sisters, that they would become like her own sisters. And right at that moment, during dinner, she realized that this still might happen. Not with Magellan (obviously) but with some other boyfriend’s sister, the boyfriend after Rhodes. The idea of this filled Maya with a feeling so sparkly, so effervescent, that she could only gaze around the table, wondering why everyone did not sense this about her, why they could not see she was poised for flight.

Maya worked two days a week as a collection management librarian at the university, and the other three days a week, she worked from home as a website designer, mostly for schools and libraries. The director of the library was a man named Gildas-Joseph, who had a very faint French accent and the first glints of silver showing in the hair by his temples. Maya found him wildly attractive, although she knew that if she were actually single and started dating him, she would quickly find something about him highly annoying, most likely the fact of his wife and children.

Maya told Gildas-Joseph that she had to leave early, for personal reasons, and didn’t add that the personal reason was taking Bailey to the vet.

Gildas-Joseph just looked at her with his dark eyes, and said, “Of course, Maya,” and Maya thought again how sexy he was.

She took Bailey to the clinic, and this time they saw a different vet, Dr. Drummond. He was tall, with a short, almost military haircut, and very light blue eyes. Maya found him attractive, too. This was part of why she felt she should leave Rhodes, this business of finding all sorts of other men attractive.

Dr. Drummond sat on the floor, petting Bailey and stroking the unswollen side of her face while Maya said, “She’s not eating very much, and when she does, sometimes her mouth bleeds a little. Also that thing on her cheek looks bigger to me.”

Dr. Drummond gently pried Bailey’s mouth open and shone a light inside. “The tumor is invading her mouth,” he said. He paused. “I think we may be talking about two weeks or so now.”

Maya did not think she would cry but when she tried to talk, her voice was all wobbly. “Two weeks? That’s all?”

Dr. Drummond nodded. “I can give her a shot, a painkiller, but I’d like to see her again in a few days.”

Maya said nothing. Dr. Drummond gave Bailey the shot, which made her whimper, and then he broke a dog biscuit into tiny bits and fed them to her slowly.

Then he glanced at Maya’s face. “Let me walk you to your car,” he said.

Maya went to the receptionist, but was just waved away (evidently when your dog was dying, they billed you later) and she and Dr. Drummond and Bailey walked out to the car. Dr. Drummond helped Bailey climb in and then he stood next to Maya.

“Are you okay to drive?” he asked.

She nodded, and he held her hand. There in the parking lot, he held her hand.

In just a few days, Bailey had gone from an old but healthy dog to a sickly frail animal who panted with the slightest exertion and coughed when she barked. And the tumor in her cheek was now the size of a golf ball and distorting her face. She wouldn’t eat dog food anymore, or even scrambled eggs. Now the only thing she would eat was raw hamburger mixed with bread and milk.

They were out of milk, so in the evening, Maya and Rhodes and Bailey walked down to the convenience store on the corner. Even this walk of two blocks left Bailey wheezing.

“I’ll wait outside with her,” Maya said.

Rhodes went into the store and Bailey flopped down on the sidewalk. A little white fluffy dog was leashed to the bike rack, but Bailey didn’t go over to sniff her.

Maya knew that dog by sight, as well as the dog’s owner, a fiftyish woman, who was presumably in the store. They lived in the neighborhood, and could be seen going for walks and running errands in all sorts of winds and weathers. Maya thought the dog’s owner was probably single because she had never seen the woman with anyone else (or without the dog).

The dog’s owner and Rhodes came out of the convenience store at the same time, and the little white dog danced around happily.

The woman looked at the dog, and said, “I love you.”

She didn’t say it in high, excited dog-speak. She said it exactly the way a woman might say it to her husband or lover. Maya and Rhodes looked at each other.

On the way home, walking slowly, slowly, for Bailey, Rhodes put his arm around Maya and she leaned against his side.

“At least,” she said, “I’ll never become that kind of person now.”

Rhodes was thoughtful. “I wouldn’t mind being that kind of person,” he said.

That was Rhodes. He honestly wouldn’t mind; she would. Did they complement each other or were they doomed? Maya could never figure it out.

Rhodes was gone on Thursday nights, so he could attend the project status review in Arlington for his department on Fridays (he worked with computers, and was an assistant professor, but that was actually as deep as Maya’s knowledge of what he did went). This Thursday, Maya took a bubble bath and put on her blue kimono with the design of flying black gulls.

Then she sat at her computer, and Bailey curled up under the desk, where Maya could bury her bare toes in Bailey’s fur. Maya drank two glasses of red wine and searched iTunes for songs about dying dogs, but all she could find was a track of Grandpa Jones singing “Old Blue.” She downloaded it and put it on continuous repeat on the iPod docking station and sat on the couch, drinking a third glass of wine and stroking Bailey’s head, which rested in her lap.

The doorbell rang, and Bailey made the sad coughing sound that was her bark now. Maya held the top of her kimono closed and went to answer it, still carrying her wineglass.

It was her boss, Gildas-Joseph, holding a heavy-looking nylon bag.

“Hello, Maya,” he said. “I brought the tent we talked about.”

Had they talked about a tent? Yes, she supposed they had. She and Rhodes wanted to go camping.

“Well, thank you so much,” she said. He was obviously waiting for her to take the tent, but Maya didn’t want the top of her robe to fall open, so she had to direct him around in a lady-of-the-manor sort of way, saying, “Just put it there in the corner, please,” and gesturing with the hand that held the wineglass.

Gildas-Joseph put the tent down and then petted Bailey. “How is this old girl?” he said to her. “Hmmm? How are you?”

Maya blinked back tears. She suddenly felt very close to Gildas-Joseph. “Would you like a glass of wine?” she asked.

“I can’t,” Gildas-Joseph said. “My wife and children are in the car.”

His wife and children were in the car! Maya suddenly felt like she’d offered him something illegal, or at least immoral. She reverted back to her regal mode, and said, “Well, thank you for stopping by,” and balancing her wineglass with some difficulty on top of the shoe rack, she shook his hand.