Another Boyfriend

My boyfriend used to follow me around the house, reading short fiction off his phone. He said if I wanted to be a writer I had to learn to write like Amy Hempel.

“This,” he’d say, “is what sells.”

I didn’t know who Amy Hempel was. I would peel carrots, scrub dishes, and pack lunches for his son while he narrated stories to me: ruined sweaters, men from Bogota, animals, slugs, California, cemeteries. He was a community college English professor with a PhD in rhetoric. I was a line cook at a downtown diner. His ex-wife, also a professor, told everyone I was a “young college dropout.”

He never corrected her. It was flattering someone thought I was so young.

~

On our first date, we met at an all-night diner. I was two years sober, he was six. Snow clung to my hair as I searched for his booth. He was cuter in real life than his photos. Silver dusted sideburns, stubbly chin, tattoos on both arms. Wanting to impress him, I said I had just come from a literary event. He said—in addition to his PhD—he had an MFA in fiction. I said I wrote novels in my free time for fun. He said I should publish them.

“What makes you think they’re any good?” I said.

He tapped my foot. “Because you’re so charming,” he said.

~

One of his tattoos was of Aristotle, clean shaven. On the other arm was a stanza from The Canterbury Tales, surrounded by red-orange flames. I said he must be the English professor all his students crushed on, and he laughed because, yes, that was exactly who he was.

~

At the end of our first year together, the lump appeared. For the last few years, there had been a pebble sized cyst on my upper right breast. I never wanted to consider it too closely. Once, a doctor said, “It’s probably nothing, but still get it checked out.”

I, of course, never did and, one day, while showering, I felt that it had doubled in size.

~

Hard and round, like a thumb breaking through my skin.

~

My boyfriend, a doctor of rhetoric, examined it in the bathroom. I stood in just my bra and underwear while steam heat chugged from the radiator. He squeezed the lump, making me wince.

“I think I can drain it,” he said.

“I just want it gone,” I said.

He clamped down so hard that a cheese like substance squirted out in a squiggle.

Then I blacked out for the first time since I had gotten sober.

~

When I woke, he was holding me on the floor, telling me his name.

~

The next day, I called a real doctor. The infected cyst was so deeply rooted it required two surgeries to remove. After the first one, the surgeon said I needed to pack antiseptic gauze into the open wound each night. I would lay on the couch while my boyfriend threaded the tape. On nights we had his son, we’d wait until he was asleep.

It could have been cancer--a disease that struck my mother, grandmother, and aunt—something I always worried was inevitable. Yet, those nights, as I enjoyed the warm bloodbuzz of prescribed Percocet, I never gave a thought to it because my boyfriend read me Amy Hempel stories.

“I remember only the useless things I hear,” he’d read, smearing iodine across my chest, “that Bob Dylan’s mother invented Wite-Out...”

~

The lab tests came back negative. My wound healed, leaving a snake-shaped scar at the top of my breast. I tucked the remaining Percocet in my sock drawer beside a mason jar of weed and a pack of Camel Lights. Things I never told my boyfriend about. Things that gave me comfort to know I owned, but wasn’t allowed to have.

~

Years later, I found myself on another first date with another boyfriend. We sat in a warm coffee shop on a cold, blue night. He mentioned Bob Dylan and, wanting to impress him, I said, “His mother invented Wite-Out.”

“Actually,” he said, “that was Mike Nesmith’s mother. From The Monkees.”

I told him I was sure it was Bob Dylan because it was in an Amy Hempel story.

My new boyfriend didn’t know who Amy Hempel was, but he still took out his phone. He searched the internet. He showed me proof.