In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

17 the Boyfriends Bus My wife had, by her count, eleven boyfriends before she married me twenty years ago. The way she tells the story it starts with a hockey player in high school who groped her at the prom, and it ends with the guy she lived with for five years before me, and includes such guys as the guy who she was dating who made a pass at a friend of hers, and a guy she dated for four days in Texas, and a guy who used to take her to the beach and photograph her naked there for artistic purposes, and a guy who dumped her for a girl in his Bible class, and a guy who ran a steam shovel, and a guy she went out with because she liked his mustache, and a guy who turned out to have another girlfriend the whole time she was dating him, and some other guys. She doesn’t count guys she had crushes on who didn’t have crushes on her, of which there were several, and I don’t think she is counting guys with whom she made out once in the movies or in a basement for an hour, but I don’t ask about that, because who am I to ask, and there are certain levels of detail you don’t actually want to be up on, so to speak, you know what I mean? Anyway over the years she has told plenty of stories about her boyfriends, many of them funny stories, although some of the stories , especially the ones she tells a lot, are not so much funny as cathartic and ultimately self-explanatory, the sort of stories you tell about other people when you are really trying to tell a story about 18 | Bin Laden’s Bald Spot yourself, you know? Stories about how you came to be who you are, which has a lot to do with the lovers you used to have. If you look at the whole boyfriend and girlfriend thing with a long view you see that the system is a total mess; basically you screw up time after time until you get married, if you get married, and then you screw up on a major-league basis, and can’t quit as easily. Sometimes you go out with people you know aren’t right for you because you want to see what’s it like to go out with people you know you shouldn’t go out with, and sometimes you go out with people because they like you and you like that even though you don’t like them, or because they have cool cars, or because there’s sex in the air, or because they’re not at all like the boyfriend you just had, and someone not like the last boyfriend looks pretty good when you are reeling from dumping or being dumped by the last boyfriend, and sometimes you go out with someone because they asked you to and you can’t think of any good reason to say no, and sometimes you go out with someone because that’s the only person who said yes when you asked, and sometimes you go out with someone for the feeling of going out with that person, which if you think about it is really a way to see how you feel rather than any serious attempt to see how they feel, which is why that particular kind of relationship is doomed. Anyway over the years my wife has told me enough stories about the boyfriends that after a while I began to think of them as real people, which of course they were, and one day by purest chance I ran into one of her old boyfriends, I’ll call him Nine, who turned out to be a good guy, a little regretful that he had a chance to marry my wife but didn’t really grab for the brass ring, but that was many years and many miles ago as he said, as he bought me a pint, and we got to talking about her other old boyfriends, whom he too had heard stories about, and after we had two pints each he proposed that we convene an old boyfriends meeting, gathering each of the twelve boyfriends, including me, for what would certainly be a peculiar and humorous event, and really it would be a celebration of my wife, when you think about...

Share