The Lover’s Dictionary: A Love Story in 185 Definitions. David Levithan
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was our sixth (maybe seventh) date. I had cooked and you had insisted on doing the dishes. You wouldn’t even let me dry. Then, when you were done, smelling of suds, you sat back down and I poured you another glass of cheapish wine. You put your legs in my lap and slouched as if we’d just had a feast for thousands and you’d been the only chambermaid on duty to clean it up.
There was a pause. I was still scared by every gap in our conversation, fearing that this was it, the point where we had nothing left to say. I was still trying to impress you, and I still wanted to be impressed by you, so I could pass along pieces of your impressiveness in stories to my friends, convincing myself this was possible.
“If you were a country,” I said, “what would your national anthem be?”
I meant a pre-existing song — “What a Wonderful World” or “Que Sera, Sera” or something to make it a joke, like “Hey Ya!” (“I would like, more than anything else, for my nation to be shaken like a Polaroid picture.”)
But instead you said, “It would have to be a blues song.” And then you looked up at the ceiling, closed your eyes, and began to sing a blues riff:
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
My work makes me tired
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
But I gotta pay my rent
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
My parents never loved me
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
Left all my emotions bent
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
I know what I’m here for
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
Make your dishes so clean
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
Just be careful what you wish for
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
’Cause most my shit is unseen
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
So many men
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
Fall into my trap
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
But, boy, I gotta tell you
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
You might rewrite that map
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
Because I’m a proud nation
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
It’s written here on my flag
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
It’s a fucked-up world, boy
Nuh-nah-nuh-nuh
So you better make me laugh
Then you stopped and opened your eyes to me. I applauded.
“Don’t sit there clapping,” you said. “Rub this blues singer’s feet.”
You never asked what my anthem was. But that’s okay, because I still don’t know what I’d answer.
antiperspirant, n.
“There is nothing attractive about smelling like baking powder,” I said.
“Baking soda,” you corrected.
“So if I want to make a pound cake, I can throw some butter, flour, and sugar into your armpit — ”
“Why are we having this conversation? Remind me again?”
“You no longer smell the yeasty goodness that you apply under your arms, because you are completely used to it. I, however, feel like I am dating a Whole Foods.”
“Fine,” you said.
I was surprised. “ ‘Fine’?”
“Let the record show, I have stepped onto the slippery slope of compromise in the name of promoting peace and harmony. There will be a ceremonial burning of the deodorant in ten minutes. I hope it’s flammable.”
“It’s just that I really hate it,” I told you.
“Well, I hate your toe hair.”
“I’ll wear socks,” I promised. “All the time. Even in the shower.”
“Just be warned,” you said. “Someday you’ll ask me to give up something I really love, and then it’s going to get ugly.”
antsy, adj.
I swore I would never take you to the opera again.
arcane, adj.
It was Joanna who noticed it first. We were over at her house for dinner, and she said something about being able to see the woman across the street doing yoga in the mornings, and how strange it looked when you were watching it from a distance.
“So how is Miss Torso doing?” you asked.
And I said, “Perhaps we should ask the pianist.”
Joanna just looked at us and said, “It used to be that you each had your own strange, baffling references. Now you have them together.”
People often say that when couples are married for a long time, they start to look alike. I don’t believe that. But I do believe their sentences start to look alike.
ardent, adj.
It was after sex, when there was still heat and mostly breathing, when there was still touch and mostly thought . . . it was as if the whole world could be reduced to the sound of a single string being played, and the only thing this sound could make me think of was you. Sometimes desire is air; sometimes desire is liquid. And every now and then, when everything else is air and liquid, desire solidifies, and the body is the magnet that draws its weight.
arduous, adj.
Sometimes during sex, I wish there was a button on the small of your back that I could press and cause you to be done with it already.
arrears, n.
My faithfulness was as unthinking as your lapse. Of all the things I thought would go wrong, I never thought it would be that.
“It was a mistake,” you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.
autonomy, n.
“I want my books to have their own shelves,” you said, and that’s how I knew it would be okay to live together.
avant-garde, adj.
This was after Alisa’s show, the reverse-blackface rendition of Gone With the Wind, including songs from the Empire Records soundtrack and an interval of nineteenth-century German poetry, recited with a lisp.
“What does avant-garde mean, anyway?” I asked.
“I believe it translates as favor to your friends,” you replied.
awhile, adv.
I love the vagueness of words that involve time.
It took him awhile to come back — it could be a matter of minutes or hours, days or years.
It is easy for me to say it took me awhile to know. That is about as accurate as I can get. There were sneak previews of knowing, for sure. Instances that made me feel, oh, this could be right. But the moment I shifted from a hope that needed to be proven to a certainty that would be continually challenged? There’s no pinpointing that.
Perhaps it never happened. Perhaps it happened while I was asleep. Most likely, there’s no signal event. There’s just the steady accumulation of awhile.
B
balk, v.
I was the one who said we should live together. And even as I was doing it, I knew this would mean that I would be the one to blame