Dorchester

Two months before I ended a three-year relationship with my boyfriend, we went over to his best friend’s apartment and convinced ourselves that we were deeply unhappy. We were deeply unhappy, but until that night, we were debating the reality of our situation. After all, what does an unhappy relationship look like? Does it look like boredom? Does it look like weeks without sex? Does it look like leaving the same dirty dish in the sink every week waiting to see which one of you will wash it? We didn’t know. We were contemplating so many things. We were contemplating infidelity. We were contemplating dying together a hundred years from now. We were ruminating on whether or not we should wait for summer before we break up, because who breaks up in the winter? Nobody does. We went over to his best friend’s apartment in Dorchester on the fourth floor of a house perched on a slight hill. The only way to reach the apartment was to scale an exterior staircase. It had snowed a few hours earlier, and there was ice on the steps. I couldn’t fathom descending them everyday to do routine things like go to work or run to the supermarket. His best friend worked for a non-profit that did something involving literacy, and his best friend’s partner was a video game designer. Or maybe he wasn’t. This is all from memory. This is only what I can remember.

When we walked into the apartment, we were first met with warmth. The residence was circular. You could freely move from the living room to the small dining room into the slightly bigger kitchen into a hallway with a bathroom through the only bedroom and back into the living room. I didn’t know if living there would feel endless or confining. My boyfriend’s brother had recently checked himself into the hospital for a three-week program that he hoped would help him manage his anxiety. Everyone agreed this was a good thing, because he had been struggling for so long, but it had me thinking about imprisonment. Conjuring up an image of him walking into a room every night knowing that leaving would be difficult, if not impossible, triggered something close to hyperventilation for me. He had called my boyfriend that morning and told him that he liked everything about the program except for one girl in group therapy with him who wouldn’t stop rolling her “r”s. I suggested that perhaps she had an accent and couldn’t help it. My boyfriend merely responded that it was freezing outside. This was how we spoke to each other. Listening, but reacting to separate conversations. I pictured an alternate universe where a boyfriend like mine, but different, was saying “Yes, it could be an accent” and a different version of me was responding “You’re right. It’s very cold out. We should wear bigger jackets for the trip to Dorchester.” That isn’t how I talk. It’s how characters in stories talk. But this is a story, isn’t it? I’d love to make it sound like how it was, but I’m not sure that would be a story. That would be something else.

Once we were inside the apartment and had exchanged embraces and greetings, I felt a sense of safety come over. Four stories up felt like a castle in the sky. Radiator heating felt like exuberance from a fireplace somewhere out of sight. The humble tray with two bowls of chips placed in front of me rendered an enthusiasm in me normally reserved for a holiday feast. I ate as though I hadn’t eaten in months. My boyfriend reminded me, not so politely, that I shouldn’t ruin my appetite. Ben, his best friend, had been cooking all day. Josh, Ben’s partner, made a joke about what a terrible cook he is. The dinner was to be a roasted chicken with bean salad and hot honey carrots. I kept eating the chips. Part of me wanted to lie and say I was vegetarian. I wanted to be a problem. I didn’t know why. I wanted to ruin the evening. I didn’t. I let it move along knowing full well that any one of the four of us could destroy it if we wanted to. I thought about vases smashing against a hard stone floor. I thought of a chicken left in the oven burning and then catching fire. I thought about choking on a carrot. Ben asked if we’d like to play board games later. I suggested something like Charades.

If you, the reader, had frozen the evening and jumped inside of it like an intrusive narrator or a rogue videogame character, we could have had a conversation about orgasms. You might have asked me when the last time I had one was, and I would have told you that I didn’t remember. That wouldn’t be true of course. I was masturbating every day, but an orgasm with yourself doesn’t feel as though it should count. I hadn’t had an orgasm with my boyfriend in months, because every time we had sex, one of both of us fell asleep. It’s not that we were tired. It’s that we were tired of each other. Two days earlier, I was at the gym, and a man followed me into the steam room. We both sat across from each other and touched ourselves while shadows of other, law-abiding men walked by the frosted door. I finished. The other man smirked, got up, and left. Had I cheated? Was that cheating? I called my therapist and said we needed to talk right away. Our last month of sessions had been all about my imaginary childhood pets. I wasn’t allowed to have real pets, so I would make up imaginary pets and then kill them off in what I thought were fairly creative ways. I had a dog named Grover who fell into an open cemetery plot and was then buried alive. I had a cat named Picnic who was eaten by a moose. I had a parrot that ate a poisoned macadamia nut. I never told anyone about this until I mentioned it to my therapist, and then it was all she wanted to talk about. I suspected she was going to write about me for some kind of science journal, but I wasn’t brave enough to ask if that was the case.

After dinner, we played a game called Don’t You Dare, which was a cross between Scrabble, Charades, and Truth or Dare. Late in the game, Ben drew a card that required him to kiss either my boyfriend or myself. I was relieved that he chose my boyfriend, because I knew if he chose me, it would become an argument later. My boyfriend was extremely sensitive when it came to other men desiring me, and I knew that he had harbored a crush for Ben for years that had never truly gone away. Already somewhat subconsciously cutting ties with him, I was happy that he had finally received some affection from Ben, but when I looked over at Josh, I knew that he should have skipped the dare and acted out the plot of Titanic instead. Josh excused himself, went into the bedroom, and never came back out. Sensing the shift, Ben said that he was a little exhausted from cooking all day, and would we mind calling it a night?

My boyfriend and I thanked him profusely for the hospitality. None of us brought up Josh or suggested saying “Goodbye” to him. As we were putting on our coats, Ben was stealing glances at the closed bedroom door. Who knew what awaited him once we were gone. When I found out that Ben and Josh had divorced and that Ben had remarried a year later to a pediatric surgeon and that Josh had become a circuit queen, it felt like a fishbone caught in my throat. In any other story, that night would have been the turning point for them. Maybe a better story would have convinced you that Ben kissing my boyfriend generated a series of events that led to the divorce. In this Universe, the Universe I believed to be real, my boyfriend and Ben eventually drifted apart for reasons that had nothing to do with roasted chicken or Charades.

As he and I made our way down the icy stairs that night, I was in front of him, and I remember being afraid that he would push me. That he would send me plummeting down all four flights all the way to the bottom where there were two recycling bins and a covered grille. He never would have done that, but I remember worrying that he would. I remember worrying about a lot of things that never would have transpired. I remember walking down the steps so carefully unsure how anyone could make their way to the ground everyday without catastrophe befalling them. Day after day without any kind of accident or slip-up? It didn’t seem possible.

It still doesn’t.