He was a good flirt; very witty. When he asked me what I did, I told him I was a femme fatale. He laughed and said I don’t think so. Oh yeah then what I replied. You’re a femme fatality he said. And we were off...married at city hall eventually.
Along the way, we had one spectacular fight.
He was a writer, but a slow one. Painstakingly, he crafted muscular and substantial sentences. None of the glibness or ease of his mind in person transferred easily to the lonely page, with such a distant and noncorporeal audience. He was a social creature, really had to work at it. And drink, too. He stayed up until 3 or 4am every night writing. He rarely got started before midnight. I slept. And often woke up to emails from him. He emailed me on writing breaks, while he knew I was sleeping and could not reply. His emails were romantic, with poetry quotes, sometimes whole poems. They became more and more like monologues to the void than letters to a person. I took umbrage at being treated as “the void,” so I mostly started ignoring them.
But then, the rest of our relationship got transferred to his one way conversation with the void. If we had an argument, he would email me a long thing at 3am about how he dreampt it was resolved while he was napping, and include a lot of quotes from Pablo Neruda or Wallace Stevens. THIS made me furious. I confronted him.
I am not a figment of your imagination! If we have an argument, you cannot resolve it in a dream and then inform me in a drunken 3am email! We are not having a three way with Wallace Stevens! Wallace Stevens is dead! I am a real person!
He laid back on his bed and closed his eyes, tuning me out. If you don’t sit up and look me in the eye, I am going to physically hurt you, I said. He stubbornly remained in place, eyes closed.
I punched him on the cheekbone, with a closed fist. He sat up, shocked. You gave me a mouse! No! I sucker punched you in the face; there were no rodents involved. Mouse, it turns out, is boxer slang for a black eye. He was an amateur boxer, and had even competed in the Golden Gloves. I didn’t know that the most efficient way to give someone a black eye is to avoid the eye entirely and aim for the blood vessels underneath it. I just got lucky.
He stayed in the house, moping, hiding his black eye from the neighborhood. I gloated. And gloated. And gloated. I gave a boxer a black eye!! I want that on my tombstone: she was the kinda broad who gave a boxer a black eye. I tormented him: you know, there are domestic violence shelters you could go to. Do you want the number of a crisis hotline? Then I laughed and laughed. I went out and got Thai food and beer for him, but I did not let up. Am I real person now? Is your black eye real? Do you want to send it poetry in a dream motherfucker?
Finally, after about 36 hours, he left the house. To go to the nearest bodega. He was half Irish and half Lebanese, and liked to claim that he was an I-rab. The guys at the bodega were all Palestinian, and his buddies. They discussed politics at length frequently; they hung out. If I was there, I was excluded. It was all very manly.
When he came back, I asked so, did you tell all your manly bros at the bodega a girl gave you that shiner? Yes. Mmm, and what did they say? They said when’s her funeral. Oh yeah. And when IS my funeral, hmmm? Oh you don’t have to worry about that, he said, with delighted condescension, you’ll be there. And I was so pleased he was a good flirt again it was like he had never sent me all those bullshit emails to nobody at 3am.
