“Well, I’m glad you waited.”
On Day Seven we invent a game: Fake Scrabble. The rule is no real words allowed. You come up with calibrat and I spell out punklassical and you beat me and you brag and I love you all hopped up on the win. You love to win and I’m not a sore loser and we’ll be as good in forty years as we are now.
On Day Nine, I catch you using my toothbrush and you blush. At first you rinse your mouth and claim it was a mistake but I see through you and I know your eyes and you bite your lip and cover your eyes. “I’m just going to say this and I can’t look at you when I say this. I like using your toothbrush because I like having you inside of me and I’m sorry I know that’s weird and gross.” I don’t say a word. I clap a hand over your hand and pull your panties off and give it to you right here, in my bathroom.
On Day Ten you tell me that you’ve never felt less single in your life.
On Day Eleven I tell you that I found myself singing a song from Pitch Perfect in the shop and didn’t stop even when people started laughing. “You’re inside of me,” I say and like that, you’re on your knees, hungry.
On Day Fourteen I realize that I have lost track of time because I’m not sure if it’s Day Fourteen or Day Fifteen and you squeeze my hand as we walk down the street. “That’s because every day is the only day,” you say. “I’ve never been so present in my life.”
I kiss the top of your head and you’re my articulate little bunny. “I never lose track of time, Beck. I think I might be into you.”
On Day Seventeen it rains and we’re in our robes in your bed and you highlight your favorite parts of In the Lake of the Woods and read them to me. When I go to work, I barely get anything done because you can’t leave me alone for five minutes without texting. Sometimes you want to talk about nothing:
Did you ever notice that the fingers on my right hand are crooked? Yep. You can tell I’m getting a lot done over here. Anyway . . . how’s work?
And sometimes, there are no words, just pictures, intense close-ups of my favorite places on your body, of which there are so many. You never make me wonder and you write back to me while I’m writing back to you and we never run out of things to say. Nobody’s ever known me this well. Nobody has ever cared. When I tell you a story, you have questions. You are rapt.
How old were you? Oh come on, I won’t get jealous if you tell me about your first time. Joe, please. Tell me tell me tell me!
And I tell you, tell you, tell you! Ethan says the first few days of any relationship are intense but Ethan doesn’t understand that this is not a relationship. You say it’s an everythingship. And what do I do with that adorable word after you come up with it? I buy a box of cake mix and a disposable silver pan and a can of frosting and three tubes of icing. I bake a cake for you and I write on the top of it:
Everythingship (n): a meeting of the minds, bodies, and souls.
And I carry that cake down the block and down into the subway and on the subway and up the stairs and up the street and up to your door and you squeal and you take about a million pictures of the cake and then we get into bed and eat the cake and have sex and watch old home movies of your family on Nantucket and eat more cake and have more sex and this is the only everythingship I’ve ever had.
I am on the ladder at work and Ethan is passing me unpopular books to hide in the high shelves and he says I can’t expect for it to stay this good and I am quick to respond, confident, bold. “I know it’s not gonna stay this good.”
“Phew,” he says.
“It’s only gonna get better.”
He goes to help a customer and the what-ifs crawl into my ear, right out of Shell Silverstein in Poetry. I text you:
Hi
And I tremble and sweat. What if Ethan is right? What if you don’t write back? What if you don’t miss me anymore? But you text me immediately:
I love you.
I could fall off the ladder and crack open my skull and it wouldn’t matter. Like Elliot says in Hannah, “I have my answer.”
My answer is you.
43
IT’S a good thing that I took a screenshot of your I love you text. Something changes after that night and it’s like I’m standing so close to a pointillism painting that I only see the dots, not the picture. You are still my girlfriend—you are. But . . .
You don’t e-mail me back right away, which would be fine if you weren’t making excuses:
Sorry, I was in class.
Sorry, I was on the phone with Chana. . . .
Sorry, do you hate me?
I try every kind of response:
No worries, B. Did you want to get dinner?
No sorries allowed. Unless, of course you’re not wearing your robe . . .
Hate you? B. I love you.
But no response is the right response because as soon as I hit SEND, the wait begins again. My thoughts turn dark and my mind wanders into Nicky’s beige den of rock ’n’ roll and lust. But you’re not seeing him. Were that the case, you’d tell someone or write to him and you don’t. I still have your old phone and I still check your e-mail and your Facebook. You love me. And one of these days, I’ll find a way to get you to admit that your mother still foots the bill for a phone you lost months ago. We’re getting there. But I love you so much that I can’t willfully close down my portal to your communications. When I worry that you’re drifting—and I do worry—I hold your phone and will you back. It sounds crazy, but I think it works. We need all the help we can get right now. Relationships get like this; I know that. But I’m allowed to be frustrated. Your word is sorry and my word is no and what happened to the time when our word was everythingship? Ethan says not to worry.
“She’s nuts about you, Joe! Blythe says she’s practically writing pornos in class, you know.”
Only Ethan would call it porno and Ethan doesn’t have to wonder where he’s eating dinner or when; Blythe is in it with him and since when did that relationship seem stronger than our everythingship?
My toothbrush is dry. You’re not using it anymore and I can pinpoint the moment you stopped. When I want to watch Pitch Perfect you are tired or you just watched part of it on the train. When I want to go out for pizza you had pizza for lunch—once upon a time, I knew your lunch at lunchtime—and when I want to have sex you want to wait just a little while longer.
“Just let me finish writing this paragraph. I am so late. So bad, I know.”
“Just give me a few minutes. I ate falafel and I think it was not a good idea.”
“Just wait a little while. I put our robes in the washer at the Laundromat and I should go back sooner rather than later.”
I bring you A River Runs Through It and The Things They Carried because you never knew that both books have more than the title stories. I write inscriptions in each and I don’t tell you. Four days go by and both books are still on the counter. There are no loving chocolate smudges, no highlighted paragraphs, no pages marked. You don’t love them, you don’t know them and at times I feel like an intruder.
Me: I was just looking at that picture of that place on your thigh.
You: Ack, hang on. Bad signal.
Me: Do your thing. I’ll catch you later.
And then you don’t write back to me and I slowly descend into insanity because
What
The
Fuck?