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
