“You mean mulled wine? Keep walking. Slowly.”
“It’s for the flu,” she snaps. “Do you have the box from my mom?”
“I’m holding on to it right here, see?”
She doesn’t look back, just stomps up the stairs and refuses to talk to me until we get to the fourth floor.
She tries to open her door but can’t get the key in the lock.
“I’ll do it.”
“I got it.”
“Hold on to the leash.”
She happily takes Daisy’s leash and frowns at me as she hands me the keys. I open the door and place the box on the coffee table in the living room.
“Thank you,” she says begrudgingly. “I’m going to bed now.”
“Okay.” I take the leash from her.
“Can you do me a favor and make sure I’m up by eight tomorrow?”
“No, but I can do you a bigger favor and make sure you stay in bed all day tomorrow.”
“Pffft. I’ll be fine. I’m gonna take another Theraflu now.”
“You can’t take two doses of Theraflu in one night.”
“Don’t be such a bossy prude.”
“You can wreck your liver by taking too much acetaminophen at once.” She’s infuriating.
She stomps her feet again and crosses her arms in front of her chest. “I feel fine. Go live your life. I feel awesome. Stop moving your face.”
“I’m not moving my face.”
“It’s jumping around too fast.”
“You need to drink a lot of water. Like a gallon of water.”
She blows raspberries at me.
I pretend to wipe spit from my face. “Now you’re even more dehydrated.”
“Haaaahhhhaaa.” She laughs like a little girl and then practically falls asleep standing up. She is a mess.
I remove the leash from Daisy’s collar and drop my messenger bag to the floor. Then I pick Bernadette up and carry her to her bed.
She keeps her eyes shut. “Are you carrying me?”
“Yes.”
She grunts, and then shivers, and then holds her head. “Ow.”
“Headache?”
“Everything ache,” she pouts.
I lower her to the unmade bed and watch her collapse into it.
“Do you want to wear those sweats or something lighter?”
She starts to pull her top off. “Nothing. I’m hot!”
“I think you need to wear something.”
She stops moving when the sweatshirt is covering her face. “Ahhhh! No!” She pulls it back on. “Everything’s prickly!” She groans. “I hate this. I’m dying.”
“You’re not dying. I won’t let you.”
She waves her arm in the air and lets it flop down. “Just let me die.”
“Do you feel nauseated?”
“No.” She squeezes her eyes shut and then starts to say something again but then has another dry coughing fit and makes a strained, agonized wail. “If I die, tell my parents I love them and I’m sorry.”
I pull her fuzzy boots off her feet. “What are you sorry for?”
“For not converge-sating with them.”
“Mmmhmmm.” I’m not gonna ask. I see that she already has a big bottle of water by her bed. “Okay. When was the last time you ate? Do you have food here? I’ll order something.”
She covers her face and whimpers. “I can’t eat… Wait. I’m hungry.”
I call Daisy over and bring her up on the bed. “Stay here with Daisy. I’ll order something. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Daisy!” she whispers and holds her arms out, eyes closed. Daisy licks her face and stretches out alongside her. I watch them for a few seconds before forcing myself to look away.
My two favorite girls are in bed together.
I go into the living room to order chicken noodle soup and orange juice from the deli and then send a group text to my friends to tell them I’m not going to make it to the bar tonight because I have to help out my neighbor. I ignore the “Yeah. Help her have more orgasms” and eggplant emoji responses from them. I may have mentioned to them, the one time I met them for a beer last week, that I have a nonserious thing going on with my temporary neighbor. They pressed me for more information, but I didn’t give it to them. If I told them I was having the best sex of my life with an artist I have nothing in common with besides a wall and a love for my dog, they’d never shut up about it.
When the food is delivered, I look around Bernadette’s apartment for a serving tray. It seems like the kind of thing she’d have. She has three of them. She must spend a lot of time in bed without me.
I carry a tray with two bowls of chicken noodle soup into her bedroom and find her doing some weird dance, jumping around with her eyes closed and flapping her arms around. It’s hard not to laugh. I should be irrevocably turned-off by this, but I’m not.
“What are you doing?”
Her eyes remain closed. “My skin is prickly!”
“Get back in bed.”
“You get in bed.”
“Okay. I’ll get into bed with you if you promise to eat. Come on.”
“No—you can’t get sick!”
“I won’t get sick. I got a flu shot.”
“Oh. You shouldn’t get those—but good. I’m glad. But don’t get those.”
“Get back into bed.”
She groans and opens her eyes a bit, squinting at me. “It’s moving too fast!”
“What is?” I brace myself because I’m afraid she’s going to say “Us. We are.”
“The bed!”
I exhale. Right. The bed is moving too fast. “You need to lie down.”
She wags her finger at me, her other hand on her cocked hip. “You need to stop being so loud to me!”
“I’m not being loud.”
“Your face is screaming rainbows!”
I place the tray at the foot of the bed. “Okay. Down you get.”
She slowly lowers herself back under the covers, gritting her teeth as if she’s getting into a tub of ice water.
“Sit up. You have to eat this soup.”
She sits up. I fluff up the pillows for her to lean against.
“Stop being so nice to me,” she whispers. “It hurts.”
“I’m not going to stop being nice to you.”
“Okay.”
I place the tray on her lap and hand her a spoon, wondering if she’s having some kind of allergic reaction to the Theraflu or if this is just how she is once she’s spent a certain amount of time with a guy. Either way, I’m staying for the entertainment value. She holds the spoon and stares at it, like she’s not sure how to use it.
“Do I need to spoon-feed you?”
She frowns at me. “No. It was bending.”
I shake my head. “Eat your soup.”
We both eat our soup on the bed in silence. When she’s done, I wipe her chin with a paper towel. Her lower lip quivers.
I place the tray on the floor and move beside her, staying on top of the covers. I take her hand in mine. “Now you’re starting to act more like the eighty-year-old Bernadette I expected you to be. Soup in bed.”
She rests her head against my shoulder. “Matt McGovern. I know your secret.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re even more handsome on the inside.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
She sneezes into her hands. I grab an antibacterial wipe from the packet she has by the bed and wipe her hands for her. She pushes her lower lip out, pouting.
“So sweet… I’m sorry I wanted to slap you. I don’t anymore.”
“Thanks. You wanted to slap me?”
When I touch her face to see how warm her skin is, she puts her hand over mine. “Why are you here?”
“To make sure you don’t have any weird side effects.”
“But why are you here with me?”
“Because I like you.”
She sighs. “I like you too,”
she whispers. Like that’s a secret we’re keeping from the world. Although, I suppose it is. We’ve been keeping it from each other too. “This is where everything makes sense. In bed. With you.”
I know exactly what she means, but it makes me sad. I’ve come to love the time we spend together in our apartments, but there’s an awesome city out there, and I have a feeling it would feel even more awesome to be out there with her.
I stay with her until she’s fast asleep, write a bunch of work emails, and then watch a movie on my laptop in the living room with the volume turned way down. I take Bernadette’s keys with me when I walk Daisy and then bring a dog bed and chew toy as well as my own toiletries and a change of clothes back to Bernadette’s for the night.
I’ll sleep on the sofa.
I set up Daisy in her dog bed on the bed with Bernadette.
I lie back on the sofa and stare at the painting on the fireplace mantle, the one of the forest’s edge.
I don’t usually look at a piece of art and say “I want that,” but I just want it. If I hadn’t known that she was the one who painted it, would I still have such a strong impulse? Maybe not. But she did. She had the impulse to make it, and she made it beautiful, and I want it.
Maybe I just want a piece of her because I know I can’t have all of her.
I don’t know.
I just want it.
I get up and look around. I’m never going to be able to fall asleep this early. I can smell the candles and soaps and dried herbs from the care package her mother sent. I’m so curious about her parents. She hardly ever talks about them. I’m so curious why Bernadette is so hesitant to leave her executive assistant job and yet her favorite book is about two young artists who live to make art in New York.
I see a sketchbook on top of the coffee table and pull it to my lap. Surely this isn’t a journal. Surely she wouldn’t mind if I looked through it.
Or maybe she would mind it. A lot.
On each page, I see drawings of a man and of a man and a woman together. It’s not obvious, but I recognize myself in those hasty sketches. I recognize us and how it feels when we’re together. I get a full-body chill. Maybe I’m coming down with something too. Or maybe I can’t believe she was able to capture what it’s like for us to be together with lines and shadows, when neither of us seems to be able to say it with words.
When I wake up, Bernadette is standing over me, staring at me with pink-rimmed glassy eyes.
“Hey.” I sit up. “You okay?”
She starts to say something and then has a phlegmy coughing fit. When she’s done, she sneezes and then curses. At least she’s moving through the symptoms fairly quickly. She touches her throat and pouts, and I can tell she means it’s sore.
“Don’t talk. I’ll make tea. Do you have eggs? Should I order breakfast?”
She blinks and then goes to the kitchen and gets a carton of eggs out of the fridge as well as the leftover carton of orange juice from last night. She opens a cupboard, takes out a box of teabags, and places it on the counter. She opens another cupboard and reaches for two coffee mugs, placing them on the counter. She gathers a frying pan, olive oil, salt and pepper, a mixing bowl, a whisk, and then pats me on the arm and goes back to bed.
While the pan is heating up, I call my assistant to tell him that I’ll be working from home today. He laughs because I’ve never done this before, even when I had a sprained ankle. I tell him to reschedule my lunch and forward only the important calls. I don’t have any meetings scheduled, so it’s not that big of a deal. When he asks if I’m okay, I tell him I’m just looking after a friend who’s sick.
I take Bernadette her breakfast and then take Daisy for her morning walk. When I’m back, Bernadette has finished her eggs and orange juice and is trying to focus on her phone. She holds the phone up to me. “Can you read this text from Sebastian to me?”
I take the phone from her and only glance down at it, because if I look too hard I might try to read every single text they’ve sent to each other. “He’s just asking if you feel better.”
“Type that I’ll come in this afternoon. I can do email stuff here. There’s things I need to get for him later.”
“You are not going to work at all today.”
She sneezes and then blows her nose five times in a row, filling up five Kleenex tissues. “I’m fine,” she says. “Tell him I’ll be there in the afternoon. I’ll take a daytime Theraflu.”
“I think you should just drink tea and rest.”
She glares at me. “Theraflu.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She doesn’t notice that I take her phone with me when I go to the kitchen to make her a mug of daytime Theraflu.
When her phone vibrates and I see that it’s Sebastian Smith calling, I answer on the second ring. “Hi, this is Bernadette’s neighbor. Listen, she’s got the flu. I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to leave her apartment today. She’s sneezing and coughing, and she’s got a fever and she can barely speak.”
After a moment, a deep voice asks, “What’s your name?”
“It’s Matt McGovern. I live in the apartment next door.”
“Dolly Kemp lives in the apartment next door to her.”
“Yes, but she’s in Europe with her boyfriend. I’m her nephew, I’ve been staying there for a couple of months. You can email Dolly to confirm this if you know her—I appreciate that you’re being protective of Bernadette. But I’m being protective of her too. So, is there anything urgent that she needs to get done for you today?”
“Not urgent, no.” I hear him sigh. “Okay. I’ll send her an email, but tell her… Tell her I hope she gets well soon, but no rush.”
“Okay. Bye.”
I hang up before he has the chance to say anything else.
It’s not even possessiveness that I’m feeling toward this woman. With Vanessa, I would always go out to parties and bars and restaurants with her, even though I would rather we’d stayed at home together—because I wanted to make sure other guys kept their dirty hands off her. Right now, I just want to make sure Bernadette is taken care of. And I feel lucky to be the guy who gets to take care of her.
It’s different.
Everything’s different.
And also, strangely normal.
After Bernadette has slept for a few more hours and then taken a bath, she whispers that we should play Scrabble. I move the care package from the coffee table, and she doesn’t seem to notice that her sketchbook was on the floor by the sofa where I left it last night. I let her sit on the sofa with Daisy, and I sit on the floor on the other side of the table, facing her.
She keeps coughing every time she tries to yell at me when I throw down 78-point words, so I bring her laptop over and tell her to message me instead.
The first time she makes up a word, I let her have it because she’s sick and because her definition of cryonetrics as software that measures sad data actually makes sense to me.
But I refuse to accept that merdls is a Yiddish word that means “the plural of a happily single woman.”
She sticks her tongue out at me and then rearranges the tiles and takes one away.
“Slerd is not a word!” I yell out. “No more making up words.”
“A slutty nerd is a slerd,” she whispers, totally straight-faced.
“Stop talking and stop making up words, you slerd.”
I don’t think I’ve had this much fun in years.
She frowns, takes away the “r” tile, and I accept sled.
“Have you ever been in a serious relationship?” It’s only the question I’ve been dying to ask for over a month.
Her eyes get shifty, her lips lock up, and she falls back. She’s pretending to be asleep.
“You don’t have to answer.”
She sits back up and types: Not serious.
BF: You’re trying to change the subject because I’m winning.
I have over two hundred points more than her.
“So you
’ve always been a happy merdl, is what you’re saying?”
She laughs until she coughs and then wipes a tear from her eyes.
BF: I want to tell you the name of my painting. The one over the fireplace.
“You mean my painting?”
BF: No.
“One day. Okay, tell me the name.”
She types slowly and carefully. My eyes are glued to my phone.
BF: It’s called ‘Into the Woods.’
“I like that. Why?”
BF: It’s the view of the woods along the edge of the farm where I grew up… I’ve been staying on the edge of the woods, looking in. One day, I’ll go into the woods.
“One day.” I move over to the sofa to sit beside her and brush the hair out of her face. “There’s really nothing to be afraid of, you know.”
She looks up at me and blinks.
Her phone, which is on the sofa next to her, vibrates.
“Let it go to voice mail.”
She doesn’t even look down at it to see who’s calling.
BF: I’m going back to sleep, okay?
“Okay.”
BF: No more words today.
“Okay.”
She kisses Daisy on the top of her head and goes to her bedroom.
No more words today, Bernadette. I’ll just go back to looking at your pictures.
16
Bernadette
It has been a month and a half since we started no-stringsing (yes, it’s a verb), and we’re not doing it right. I mean, we’re doing the sex part right, by golly. We are A-plus world champions at the sex part. But boundaries have been blurred and crossed. Invisible strings are being tripped over, and so far no one has gotten hurt because we keep falling back into bed and that makes everything fine again.
But now, he has invited himself to Sebastian’s party. The party I’ve been planning forever, the one that is so important to my boss for some reason. Matt McGovern wants to come to this party, and because he was so sweet and thoughtful when he took care of me last week, I couldn’t say no.
“You taking a date to this party?” he asked as I left his apartment last night.
“No. I’ll be working, basically. I’m kind of the hostess.”
The Brooklyn Book Boyfriends Page 35