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?”
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
