I don't know what exactly makes a boyfriend. Since the age of sixteen, I've had somewhere between two and eight, depending on how you count. I try not to. Not long ago, I was convinced that boyfriends were bullshit, that people in serious relationships were coy and dull. In my mind, aggressive singleness was the way to go.

promotion

   I was having a fine time, dating in the etiquette-free zone of New York. But was it dating? There weren't many actual dates involved. But whatever I was doing, it was fun. And I liked being alone. The games I played were intended to discourage commitment, not invite it.
   Then came Jack.
   For a year, he sold me coffee on Thursdays and Friday afternoons. Jack worked at the little bakery around the corner from my office. He was tall, always half-smiling. We started chatting, learned each other's names. I found out that coffee was not, in fact, his calling. He was an animator and freelance graphic designer. Not, under any circumstances, a bassist.

I felt like I was going to fucking explode if something didn't happen soon.

    Sometime in October — a few months after Jack started giving me unsolicited discounts on coffee and tiny sandwiches tied with ribbon — our chatting and flirting ratcheted up. By early November, I felt like I was going to fucking explode if something didn't happen soon. Unconsummated flirtation is inhumane. And it was getting dark outside really early. Plus, I had a brand new, queen-sized futon. A bed that was off the ground. So much room.
   That is why, one evening, I decided it had to be done. I marched downstairs to ask Jack out. But at his counter, all I could do was mutter incoherently. As I handed him the fifty cents he charged me for a $1.50 coffee, I tried, one last time, to force the words out. Instead, I whispered something about the shop's sandwiches and how I really liked them, which I did, but it wasn't like I was some kind of sandwich freak or something —
   "What are you doing later?" he asked me.
   "What?" I was stunned.
   "Like 9:30. What are you doing?" I repressed the sudden urge to grab his collar, pull him over the counter, kiss him and say, That's what I'm doing later.
   "I don't know," I said, tremulous. "I was going to sit in my bed. It's new."
   He laughed. "Would you like to get a drink?"
    The whole bakery was watching us, like we were some fucking Meg Ryan movie. Comfortingly, the people in line behind me seemed more annoyed than touched.


That night, I'd been sitting at the bar for a couple of minutes before Jack walked in. It was enough time for me to be near the bottom of my first whiskey, so I insisted on getting his first drink. He shrugged and let me. A Budweiser. I don't entirely trust beer drinkers, so I was wary. We sat at a table in the corner, where Jack told me he was twenty-five, from Paris, then D.C, now Harlem. He had a sullen little brother, like me. I played with my ring, a big silver skull with wings. "It's an evil ring," I said in an evil voice.
    "Kind of Hell's Angels?"
   "More like Keith Richards. I'm not evil, though."
   "Did anyone say you were?"
   "I don't know. I just wonder what I look like to people sometimes. I have a sex-related job. I swear too much. But I'm really innocuous."
   "I didn't think you were dangerous."
   "I threw a barstool once. Can I kiss you?" I said this without thinking. To my great relief, Jack smiled and kissed me. It was a surprising kiss: lots of stubble, not at all quiet or sweet like he seemed, and there was childish impatience on both ends.
   At some point, I was tired and wanted to go home. Jack came upstairs with me, and we made out on my new bed. With the carefully selected red sweater pushed up above my breasts, I said, "You know, you can crash."
   "I like you," he said. "I wanna take things slowly."
   Take . . . things . . . slowly.
    Was this some French phrase I wasn't familiar with? It sounded like English, but what did it mean? I could only think of two possibilities:
   1) I was being blown off, because I fucked something up.
   2) He was gay.
   "So sleep on the sofa," I told him, trying to stay cool. "It's three a.m. You're going to go 130 blocks uptown now?"
   "Look, I gotta work tomorrow, but Monday, I'll call you."
   I nodded, having no expectation that he'd actually call. I was annoyed with myself for having ruined yet another perfectly good capitalist relationship by making out with my supplier.
    Sunday, he called. To ask me to dinner. The next night, I prepared myself for my first dinner date in possibly ever. With shaking hands, I applied a new gold eyeshadow named something like Nights on the Beaches of Botswana. We met up at this pretty cheap place near my apartment where we drank a big bottle of Pinot Noir and talked more about his animating. He had a lot of amusing, post-apocalyptic ideas, and I said, "We should work on a cartoon together."
   This is when I realized I really wanted him. When I think of the great love stories I know, it's never the passions and the distances traveled that move me, not the self-destructive muses — not Scott and Zelda, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. It's the couples who worked together on something, who expressed their love through projects and shared passions. Richard and Mary Leaky. Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits. In high school, my boyfriend made a comic book, and we were happiest when sitting on the floor of his parents' factory, cutting and pasting, stapling, Xeroxing, creating poorly stapled little booklets. (I was also pretty happy when I was shirtless on my parents' sofa, with his inexperienced fingers hovering at the button of my cargo pants.) So "maybe we could make a cartoon together" meant "I have, for whatever reason, faith in my fondness for you."
   "That would be fun," he said. "Let's do it."
   "It'll be about a gang of troglodyte children, of course," I said as we paid the check, and headed out, hand in hand, up Avenue A.
   "Absolutely. They'll have superpowers, but really limited ones. Like, one will be able to move Ikea furniture with his mind."
   "Can there be one ill-tempered girl who can read the future of flowering plants?"
   "How could there not?" He squeezed my hand. "It's strange. I really like you."
   "Well . . . two dates. Kind of a New York record."
   "Yeah, it's bullshit here. I've seen it fuck with people. So I don't do it."
   He was being frustratingly vague, but I didn't push it. "I just do it. The fun, the sex, without risking much."