The Lover's Dictionary (8 page)
transient
,
adj.
In school, the year was the marker. Fifth grade. Senior year of high school. Sophomore year of college. Then after, the jobs were the marker. That office. This desk. But now that school is over and I’ve been working at the same place in the same office at the same desk for longer than I can truly believe, I realize: You have become the marker. This is your era. And it’s only if it goes on and on that I will have to look for other ways to identify the time.
traverse
,
v.
You started to cry, and I quickly said, “No — I mean this part is over. We have to get to the next part.”
And you said, “I’m not sure we can.”
Without even having to think about it, I replied, “Of course we can.”
“How can you be so sure?” you asked.
And I said, “I’m sure. Isn’t that enough?”
trenchant
,
adj.
You never let things go unanswered for too long. Emails. Phone calls. Questions. As if you know the waiting is the hardest part for me.
ubiquitous
,
adj.
When it’s going well, the fact of it is everywhere. It’s there in the song that shuffles into your ears. It’s there in the book you’re reading. It’s there on the shelves of the store as you reach for a towel and forget about the towel. It’s there as you open the door. As you stare off on the subway, it’s what you’re looking at. You wear it on the inside of your hat. It lines your pockets. It’s the temperature.
The hitch, of course, is that when it’s going badly, it’s in all the same places.
unabashedly
,
adv.
We were walking home late from a bar — and the term
walking
is used loosely here, because you were doing something between a skip and a stumble — and suddenly you started singing out your love for me. My name and everything, loud enough to reach the top floors of all the buildings. I should have told you to stop, but I didn’t want you to stop. I didn’t mind if your love for me woke people up. I didn’t mind if it somehow sneaked into their sleep.
You grabbed my hand and twirled me around, two sidewalk sweethearts. Then, very earnestly, you stopped, leaned over, and whispered, “You know, I’d get a tattoo with your name on it. Only, I want you to have the freedom to change your name if you want to.”
I thanked you, and you resumed your song.
vagary
,
n.
The mistake is thinking there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.
vestige
,
n.
The night after we decided to move in together, we stayed over at my apartment. I looked at the things on my walls — the unframed posters from MoMA, the Doisneau kiss that had followed me from college, the album covers with push pins pressing into their corners. I had never had any desire to change anything, but suddenly I knew it was all going to change. I knew that when it came time to roll them up or pack them away, they would never be seen again.
I told you this, and you suggested that we go for a beginning instead of two continuations. Why try to angle together the wall souvenirs of our new-to-New-York lives, when we could invent new hieroglyphs to represent us? The lamp could stay and the lime-green couch could continue to park itself in front of the TV, but the postcards would be mailed into drawers and the wreath my mother sent last Christmas would be shown another door.
And this is what happened. We both took it as an opportunity to peel the wallpaper from our lives. The only thing I kept out were the photographs of my friends and family, placed on a wall with photographs of your friends and (less so) family on the other end, as if they were meeting for the first time, still too shy or wary to mingle.
viable
,
adj.
I’ll go for a drink with friends after work, and even though I have you, I still want to be desirable. I’ll fix my hair as if it’s a date. I’ll check out the room along with everyone else. If someone comes to flirt with me, I will flirt back, but only up to a point. You have nothing to worry about — it never gets further than the question about where I live. And in New York, that’s usually the second or third question. But for that first question, where it still seems like it might be possible, I look for that confirmation that if I didn’t have you, I’d still be a person someone would want.
voluminous
,
adj.
I have already spent roughly five thousand hours asleep next to you. This has to mean something.
wane
,
v.
The week before our first anniversary, I thought,
I can’t do
this anymore.
I was shopping with Joanna, shopping for you, and suddenly I couldn’t stay in the store. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her I had to end it. She was surprised, and asked me why I thought so. I told her it wasn’t a thought, more a feeling, like I couldn’t breathe and knew I had to get some air. It was a survival instinct, I told her.
She said it was time for dinner. Then she sat me down and told me not to worry. She said moments like this were like waking up in the middle of the night: You’re scared, you’re disoriented, and you’re completely convinced you’re right. But then you stay awake a little longer and you realize things aren’t as fearful as they seem.
“You’re breathing,” she said.
We sat there. I breathed.
whet
,
v.
You kiss me when you get home, and when I kiss you back longer, harder, you say, “Later, dear. Later.”
woo
,
v.
I told you that it was ridiculous to pay thirty dollars for a dozen roses on Valentine’s Day. I forbade you to do it.
So that day, when I went to pay for lunch, what did I find? In my wallet, thirty singles, each with roses printed on it. I imagined you feeding them through your color printer. Oh, the smile that must have played across your face. I had to ask the woman behind the counter to take a quick picture of my own smile, to send it right back to you.
x
,
n.
Doesn’t it strike you as strange that we have a letter in the alphabet that nobody uses? It represents one-twenty-sixth of the possibility of our language, and we let it languish. If you and I really, truly wanted to change the world, we’d invent more words that started with
x
.
yarn
,
n.
Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it’s trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.
Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day’s petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eighths-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn’t have to be true.
“Okay,” you say. “Do you want to know how I met you?”
I nod.
“It was on the carousel. You were on the pink horse, I was on the yellow. You were two horses ahead of me, and from the moment you got in the saddle, I wanted to draw up right next to you and say hello.
“Around and around we went, and I kept waiting for my horse to pull ahead. I sensed it would know when I was ready, and it was waiting for that moment. You rose and you fell, and I followed, and I followed. I thought my chance would never come. But then, like magic, all the power in the entire city went out at once. It was darkness, utter darkness. The music stopped, and there were only heartbeats to be heard. Heartbeats. I couldn’t see you, and worried that you’d left. But right at that moment, the moon came out from behind the clouds. And there you were. I stepped off my horse just as you stepped off yours. I turned right and you turned left. We met in the middle.”
“And what did you say?”
“Don’t you remember? I said, ‘What a lovely evening this is.’ And you said, ‘I was just thinking the same thing.’ ”
As long as we can conjure, who needs anything else? As long as we can agree on the magical lie and be happy, what more is there to ask for?
“I loved you from that moment on,” I say.
“I loved you from that moment on,” you agree.
yearning
,
n.
and
adj.
At the core of this desire is the belief that everything can be perfect.
yell
,
v.
I found myself thinking of our verbal exchanges in terms of the verbs we’d use to transcribe them. Every time I came up with
said
, I knew we were okay.
Asked
or –
replied
— shakier ground. Even
joked
could be dicey. And
yelled
— that meant trouble.
Shouted
could mean that the other person was simply too far away to hear. But –
yelled
— that meant the boiling point.
Our apartment didn’t have any good doors to slam. If you wanted to slam a door, you would either end up in the hallway or trapped in the bathroom. Those were the only options.
yesterday
,
n.
You called to ask me when I was coming home, and when I reminded you that I wasn’t coming home, you sounded so disappointed that I decided to come home.
zenith
,
n.
I’m standing in the bathroom, drying my hands on your towel, and you’re hovering in the kitchen. I am happy from dinner, happy the day is over, and before I can ask you what’s going on, you tell me there’s something we need to talk about.
This is it, the moment before you tell me the precise thing I don’t want to know.
Is this the zenith? This last moment of ignorance?
Or does it come much later?
I would like to thank all of my friends who read an earlier form of this book as a story I gave them for Valentine’s Day. In particular, I would like to thank Billy Merrell, Ann Martin, John Green, Eliot Schrefer, and Dan Ehrenhaft, whose reaction to the story made me believe in it enough to take it further.
Thank you to Bill Clegg and Jonathan Galassi for helping me to make this book everything it could be. Thanks also to Jesse Coleman, Shaun Dolan, Alicia Gordon, and everyone else at FSG and WMEE, as well as the book’s foreign publishers, whose enthusiasm is deeply appreciated.
Finally, thanks to my various families. My family of friends. My family of YA authors. My family at Scholastic. And, most of all, my real family—Mom, Dad, Adam, Jennifer, Paige, Matthew, Hailey. It’s so much more meaningful to have you share this with me.
