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I come into my room to find Archibald lying on my bed playing his harmonica, kicking his feet against my dark blue wall. A grown man in a windbreaker. Hair going gray at the veiny temples. Pants too short for his thin, white legs. I’m wearing a lace slip in which I now I feel naked, fat, stupid. I put my housecoat on over it to gain some dignity. I sit in my desk chair, wait for him to notice that I’m not joining him on the bed.
At last he stops playing and turns to me. “What?”
“A woman named Britta just phoned. She says you’re sleeping with her. Are you?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I was descending to sleep with you, you know. I was descending! And you cheat on me? And you’re smiling? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing. Just you’re super hot when you’re pissed is all,” he says, biting on his grin.
I start to cry.
Now he’s on his knees explaining. He explains for a long time, while I smoke one cigarette after another. Britta isn’t really his girlfriend. Not really, he says.
“She’s just this crazy woman who lived on the fifth floor of our house for a while. I actually felt sorry for her, you know? All by herself on the fifth floor. She had this little dog she washed every night. You wouldn’t believe it,” he said. I thought of the dog I heard yipping in the background. “When I told her it was over, she started stalking me. Like seriously stalking. Wouldn’t leave me alone. I guess she likes what I can do or something. But she was clinging to me. It was embarrassing, you know?”
I think of that pointy voice on the phone, swerving from hysteria to gravitas.
I light another cigarette and notice my hands are shaking.
He takes them in his. I snatch them away from him but he takes them again and this time, I let him.
“But you,” Archibald says. “You are the one I always wanted. I never even thought I could get someone like you, you know? And I hate to think I’ve ruined my chances here.”
He starts to kiss my hands. Kisses them all over, multiple times. Someone like me. I am the one he has always wanted. Never thought he could get. I feel my eyes well up again. The room becomes warped and swimmy. Then he kisses my thighs, starts to gently pry them apart with his hands. Get out. Get out right now. The words rise in my throat like bile, but they don’t come out. Instead, I just sit there limp, letting him.
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I promise Mel I’ll end it. I promise myself I’ll end it. Every time I go over to his place or he comes over to mine, every time I hear the plaintive wail of his approaching harmonica, I think, End it. I tell myself this for weeks. Fucking end it. Speak the words. But what comes out is, Hey. I missed you. How come you’re late? For the first few weeks, I even picture myself walking away from him. Chin tilted high. Already lighter for having left him.
Instead I stay in bed, ignoring the nearly constant ringing telephone from an unknown number, waiting for him to come over. Get dizzy spells whenever I leave the apartment. Start skipping class. Calling in sick to work. Panic attacks, the doctor says, and prescribes pills which Archibald and I take together, lying in my bedroom or his, the lights dimmed.
“I’m dying,” I tell him quietly on our six-month anniversary.
“Oh, Dizzy Lizzy,” he says, grabbing my breast.
“I love you.” I say it more often, more fervently than before, the words slipping from my mouth before I can catch them, reel them back in.
“And I love you,” he says, stroking my thigh. When he touches me now, I feel revulsion and gratitude at the same time.
We have sex and I cry through the whole thing.
“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”
“I’m hungry,” I say.
Chinese food in bed, Take Out Dinner 2B with extra spring rolls. Pizza with wings. Sometimes I’ll stumble into the kitchen and make us something obscene, which we’ll devour, stoned, while watching one of his freak movies, for which I’ve now developed a newfound fascination: The Elephant Man or The Hunchback of Notre Dame or this carnival documentary he loves that takes a cold hard look at the mutant humanity behind sideshow acts. Or we listen to jazz, also my suggestion. I’ll lie there in my slip, let him go on and on about dissonance. It isn’t charming or funny anymore. It just is.
I no longer look at myself in the mirror on the way to the bathroom or the kitchen. I lie in my slip, never naked in front of him now, and I watch him, oblivious to my existence, playing the harmonica, for which I have now acquired a dull loathing, filling my room with its terrible, earsplitting whine. I watch him smoke my cigarettes, his thin freckled chest with its odd hair tufts, exhaling and inhaling. It’s over forever on the tip of my tongue, but when he sits up from my bed to say, Well, I should probably get going, I stare at his severely stooped knobby back, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, and when I open my mouth what I say is, Can I come with you?