The Lover's Dictionary (6 page)

jerk
,
v.

“This has to stop,” I say. “You have to stop hurting me. I can’t take it. I really can’t take it.”

“I know you can’t take it,” you say. “But is that really my fault?”

I try to convince myself that it’s the alcohol talking. But alcohol can’t talk. It just sits there. It can’t even get itself out of the bottle.

“It
is
your fault,” I tell you. But you’ve already left the room.

justice
,
n.

I tell you about Sal Kinsey, the boy who spit on me every morning for a month in seventh grade, to the point that I could no longer ride the bus. It’s just a story, nothing more than that. In fact, it comes up because I’m telling you how I don’t really hate many people in this world, and you say that’s hard to believe, and I say, “Well, there’s always Sal Kinsey,” and then have to explain.

The next day, you bring home a photo of him now, downloaded from the Internet. He is
morbidly obese
— one of my favorite phrases, so goth, so judgmental. He looks miserable, and the profile you’ve found says he’s single and actively looking.

I think that will be it. But then, the next night, you tell me that you tracked down his office address. And not only that, you sent him a dozen roses, signing the card,
It is so refreshing
to see that you’ve grown up to be fat, desperate, and lonely.
Anonymous, of course. You even ordered the bouquet online, so no florist could divulge your personal information.

I can’t help but admire your capacity for creative vengeance. And at the same time, I am afraid of it.

juxtaposition
,
n.

It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can’t even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of
better
and
worse
. It’s simply a matter of
is
and
is no longer
.

K

kerfuffle
,
n.

From now on, you are only allowed one drink at any of my office parties. One. Preferably a beer.

kinetic
,
adj.

Joanna asked me to describe you, and I said, “Kinetic.”

We were both surprised by this response. Usually, with a date, it was “I don’t know . . . cool” or “Not that bad” or, at the highest level of excitement, “Maybe it will work out.” But there was something about you that made me think of sparks and motion.

I still see that now. Less when we’re alone. More when we’re with other people. When you’re surrounded by life. Reaching out to it, gathering energy.

L

lackluster
,
adj.

And when Kathryn asked you about me, I imagined you said, “He’s lackluster.”

Which is why I waited for you to ask me out for the second date. Just to be sure I hadn’t underwhelmed you.

latitude
,
n.

“We’re not, like, seeing other people, right?” I asked. We were barely over the one-month mark, I believe.

You nodded.

“Excellent,” I said.

“But I have to tell you something,” you added — and my heart sank.

“What?”

“At first, I was seeing someone else. Only for the first week or two. Then I told him it wasn’t going to work.”

“Because of me?”

“Partly. And partly because it wouldn’t have worked anyway.”

I was glad I hadn’t known I was in a contest; I don’t know if I could have handled that. But still, it was strange, to realize my version of those weeks was so far from yours.

What a strange phrase — –
not seeing other people
. As if it’s been constructed to be a lie. We see other people all the time. The question is what we do about it.

leery
,
adj.

Those first few weeks, after you told me, I wasn’t sure we were going to make it. After working for so long on being sure of each other, sure of this thing, suddenly we were unsure again. I didn’t know whether or not to touch you, sleep with you, have sex with you.

Finally, I said, “It’s over.”

libidinous
,
adj.

I never understood why anyone would have sex on the floor. Until I was with you and I realized: you don’t ever realize you’re on the floor.

livid
,
adj.

Fuck you for cheating on me. Fuck you for reducing it to the word
cheating
. As if this were a card game, and you sneaked a look at my hand. Who came up with the term
cheating
, anyway? A cheater, I imagine. Someone who thought
liar
was too harsh. Someone who thought
devastator
was too emotional. The same person who thought, oops, he’d gotten
caught with
his hand in the cookie jar
. Fuck you. This isn’t about slipping yourself an extra twenty dollars of Monopoly money. These are our lives. You went and broke our lives. You are so much worse than a cheater. You killed something. And you killed it when its back was turned.

love
,
n.

I’m not going to even try.

lover
,
n.

Oh, how I hated this word. So pretentious, like it was always being translated from the French. The tint and taint of illicit, illegitimate affections. Dictionary meaning:
a person having
a love affair
. Impermanent. Unfamilial. Inextricably linked to sex.

I have never wanted a lover. In order to have a lover, I must go back to the root of the word. For I have never wanted a lover, but I have always wanted to love, and to be loved.

There is no word for the recipient of the love. There is only a word for the giver. There is the assumption that lovers come in pairs.

When I say,
Be my lover
, I don’t mean,
Let’s have an affair.
I don’t mean,
Sleep with me.
I don’t mean,
Be my secret.

I want us to go back down to that root.

I want you to be the one who loves me.

I want to be the one who loves you.

M

macabre
,
adj.

If you ever need proof that I love you, the fact that I allowed you to dress me up as a dead baby Jesus for Halloween should do it. Although I suppose it would be even better proof if it hadn’t been Halloween.

makeshift
,
adj.

I had always thought there were two types of people: the helpless and the fixers. Since I’d always been in the first group, calling my landlord whenever the faucet dripped, I was hoping you’d be a fixer. But once we moved in together, I realized there’s a third group: the inventors. You possess only a vague notion of how to fix things, but that doesn’t stop you from using bubble gum as a sealant, or trying to create ouchless mousetraps out of peanut-butter crackers, a hollowed-out Dustbuster, and a picture of a scarecrow torn out of a magazine fashion spread.

Things rarely get fixed the way they need to be.

masochist
,
n.

If there wasn’t a word for it, would we realize our masochism as much?

meander
,
v.

“. . . because when it all comes down to it, there’s no such thing as a two-hit wonder. So it’s better just to have that one song that everyone knows, instead of diluting it with a follow-up that only half succeeds. I mean, who really cares what Soft Cell’s next single was, as long as we have ‘Tainted Love’?”

I stop. You’re still listening.

“Wait,” I say. “What was I talking about? How did we get to ‘Tainted Love’?”

“Let’s see,” you say. “I believe we started roughly at the Democratic gains in the South, then jumped back to the election of 1948, dipping briefly into northern constructions of the South, vis-à-vis
Steel Magnolias
,
Birth of a Nation
, Johnny Cash, and
Fried Green Tomatoes
. Which landed you on
To Kill
a Mockingbird
, and how it is both Southern and universal, which — correct me if I’m wrong — got us to Harper Lee and her lack of a follow-up novel, intersected with the theory, probably wrong, that Truman Capote wrote the novel, then hopping over to literary one-hit wonders, and using musical one-hit wonders to make a point about their special place in our culture. I think.”

“Thank you,” I say. “That’s wonderful.”

misgiving
s,
n.

Last night, I got up the courage to ask you if you regretted us.

“There are things I miss,” you said. “But if I didn’t have you, I’d miss more.”

motif
,
n.

You don’t love me as much as I love you. You don’t love me as
much as I love you. You don’t love me as much as I love you.

N

narcissism
,
n.

You couldn’t believe I didn’t own a full-length mirror.

nascent
,
adj.

“I just don’t like babies,” you said as I led you home.

“Now is probably not the time for this conversation,” I told you.

“Whatever. I’m just saying. I really don’t like babies. You should know that. I don’t want to keep that from you.”

“We’ve actually had this conversation,” I said. “And also conversations where you say how great kids are. But the last time we had this specific conversation, it was after Lila’s kid threw up on you.”

I should not have mentioned it. You paused for a moment and I thought,
Lord, please don’t puke now, just to illustrate a
point.

But you recovered.

“I’m just saying. I really can’t stand babies.”

I should have let it go. But instead I asked, “But don’t you want to pass on your incredible genes?”

neophyte
,
n.

There are millions upon millions of people who have been through this before — why is it that no one can give me good advice?

nomenclature
,
n.

You got up to stretch, and I said, “Hey, you’re in Ivan’s way.”

You looked at the TV and said, “That’s Tina Fey.”

I tried to keep a straight face when I explained, “No. The TV’s name is Ivan.”

“The TV has a name.”

“Yes. And you’ll never guess what it is.”

“Does everything have a name?”

The answer was no, only Ivan. Because when I bought it with Joanna, I promised her I would call it Ivan.

But I didn’t tell you that. Instead, I told you I’d named everything.

You pointed to the couch.

“Olga,” I said.

The refrigerator.

“Calvin.”

The kitchen table.

“Selena.”

The bed.

“Otis,” I said. “The bed is named Otis.”

You pointed to the light fixture over our head.

“C’mon,” I said. “Who names a light fixture?”

non sequitur
,
n.

This is what it sounds like when doves cry.

O

obstinate
,
adj.

Sometimes it becomes a contest: Which is more stubborn, the love or the two arguing people caught within it?

offshoot
,
n.

“I don’t like Vampire Weekend nearly as much as Kathryn does,” you said. “Ask her to go with you.”

And so we went on our first date without you — awkward, hesitant, self-conscious. The best friend and the boyfriend — no way to know how to split the check. To talk about you would be disloyal, weird. But what else did we have in common?

Oh, yes. Vampire Weekend.

But halfway through the meal I said something she found funny, and when she laughed, I had to say, “Wow, you two have the same laugh. Did one of you get it from the other, or have you always laughed like that?” And we were off. She said she hoped I was more successful in sharing a bed with you than she had been on your junior year road trip, when you would take up all the space and snore so loudly that one night she went and slept in the bathtub. You didn’t notice, and the next morning you turned on the shower without noticing she was inside. She still didn’t know who screamed louder. And I told her about the time that I got so tired of you stealing the sheets that in my sleep-weary logic I decided the thing to do was to tie them around my legs, knot and all, and how, when you attempted to steal them that night, you ended yanking me into you, and I was so startled that I sprang up, tripped, and was nearly concussed.

“That’s how you end up when you’re with our dear one,” she said wryly. “Nearly concussed.”

It wasn’t like we held hands during the concert. We didn’t go out for wine or shots or milkshakes afterwards. But I liked that she was no longer entirely yours. We had four hours of history without you.