“That’s like every entry in the Urban Dictionary.”
I push my napkin in front of him and tell him I love him. He doesn’t say anything and then he says he can’t say it back. If I’d thought there’d been a chance of it, I wouldn’t have mentioned it.
“How do you know you love me?” he asks.
“I don’t know—because sometimes it’s all I can think. Sometimes it’s the only thing that’ll stay in my head.”
He considers this and says, “It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It only means I can’t say it.” And then he gives me some reasons but I don’t listen. Probably he is saying love is terrifying and financially ruinous and stuff like that. I scratch out I ? Richie and flip the napkin over. I draw more hearts, dozens of them, in all sizes, that grow closer and closer together until there’s no more room. Then I pencil them in. I’ve always doodled hearts; it has nothing to do with anything.
I think about the things he does for me—how he insists on paying and pulls out chairs, how he walks on the outside of the street when there’s no sidewalk so he’ll be the one that gets hit, and wonder why these things don’t matter more—they are actual things, whereas the other is just a group of words I’ve said to a bunch of people who are no longer around, people I don’t even think about.
On the way back to my house, he stops at the gas station. He likes the make-your-own-six-packs, always gets two of each so we can drink the same thing at the same time.
He opens a couple of Fat Tires and we sit on my floor and look at his pictures from India on his laptop: he’s in a rickshaw, a hookah bar, a train station. He took a picture of his feet from every bed he slept in. There are pictures of him with other mustached men who called him brother. Somewhere, in a camera belonging to a girl from Arkansas, there’s a picture of him holding a dead baby he plucked out of the Ganges; he thought it was a pile of rags. “We weren’t supposed to take pictures on the Ganges,” he says, “fucking bitch.” He tells me how the girl from Arkansas kept trying to have sex with him. Except for his ex-wife, all of his stories involving women sound like this: the girl wanted to fuck him, and he did, or didn’t, and either way she was angry. He lost jobs, friends, places to live.
When the slideshow is over, he shows me a picture of him and his ex-wife dressed as Adam and Eve for Halloween. His hair is disheveled; he’s holding an apple and looking away from the camera. Her face looks kind of like a boy’s, but she has long hair and skinny legs and large breasts. They are possibly the most beautiful couple I have ever seen.
Today, a postcard arrives while I’m eating cheese toast he made in the oven, watching him walk around with his shirt off. It’s from a man named Frank, an older gay man he knew in Tallahassee. He would come home from work and find Frank passed out on his patio furniture. Now, Frank writes him letters, dozens of them that go unopened. I read the card to myself and then read it aloud: German friends, a tourist trap, an island. It is like a regular postcard in that it says nothing.
“I hate it when he calls them his German friends like I don’t know them,” he says.
I put the postcard on the stack, wondering if there are any checks inside the envelopes and if he’d be willing to cash them. Then I pick up an empty box of Diet Dr Pepper. “I thought you didn’t drink this stuff,” I say, turning it upside down.
“It’s a mask,” he says. He shows me the two, lopsided eyeholes. His room is full of helmets and trucks and plastic men with movable parts. Once, he sent me a picture of himself wearing a chest plate, holding a sword and shield: Did anyone order a knight in shining armor? I watch him undress behind his open door, and glance at his mother in the kitchen, painting watercolors. I wonder what she thinks of me, if she wonders what I’m doing here. I go to the bathroom and put my swimsuit on. The bathroom is decorated in sailboats—on the shower curtain and bath mat, hanging above the toilet—though we are nowhere near the ocean.
I open the sliding glass door, where the dogs lick my hands, and take a towel from a chairback. My boyfriend comes out and picks up his clippers, tends his marijuana plant. His mother doesn’t know it’s a marijuana plant; when she had a party last week for the diabetes children, he had to relocate it.
“Come smell,” he says.
I lean into the hairy little pods, say it smells good, and then go lie down. I think about his ex-wife in a flesh-colored suit, leaves covering her nipples and vagina, and try to read but there are the dogs and the sun and my boyfriend, who is shirtless, who likes to climb things and fling himself off.
“I’m your cabana boy,” he says, bringing me a beer. “Pale Ale okay?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Don’t be too polite to the cabana boy,” he says. “Cabana boys should be treated like shit.” He tells me all I have to do when I want another is to hold up my empty bottle and waggle it. I try it out and he says, “Yes, good, like that,” and goes back to pruning his plant. Then he chases the leaves and pine straw out of the pool with a net while I squeeze my breasts together, arrange my body into what I hope are alluring shapes. He doesn’t notice. After a while, I go to the bathroom to check my face and hair and body in the mirror. I lean into it and wonder if he can see me, why he doesn’t see me.
When I come back out, his ex-wife is there, their kid. She’s not as pretty in person, moving around.
She looks at me and says, “Hey, Alice,” and I look at the pool, the blue water rippling. I didn’t know she knew my name. Of course she knows my name, but I didn’t figure she’d have the balls to say it. I wrap a towel around my shoulders and sit at the table, pick up an empty bottle and set it back down. She hands my boyfriend the boy’s bag, a tote that says EGGS MILK BREAD BOOKS and they stand close together and talk in quiet voices. Just get back together, I think. Just admit you still love each other and it’ll be a whole lot easier on all of us.
The boy walks over to me with a dinosaur in each hand. “Which one looks the scariest?” he asks. They are the same size with white, pointy teeth. He presses a button on the red one’s tail and it makes a pitiful roar.
“Does the other one make noise?” I ask.
“They all make noise.” He hands me the red one and presses the blue one’s button; it makes a slightly different pitiful roar.
“Not that authentic, really.”
“Which one is the scariest?” he asks.
“This one,” I say, indicating the one I’m holding. I open its jaw and stick my finger down its throat, make a puke sound.
After she leaves, my boyfriend sits next to me and squeezes my leg just above the knee. “This is how the horse eats the apple,” he says, which is something we say to each other, something we do.