My Boyfriend, his Best Friend, and Me: A Love Story

IN THE FALL OF MY SENIOR YEAR IN COLLEGE, a guy from my 17th century–literature class asked me out. We saw a movie about the Vietnam War and went back to his rented house for a beer. He was quirky and cute, but we were stiff and unnatural together, and I remember thinking, as I sat on his couch, that we probably shouldn’t go out again.

Then his roommate, Henry*, came home from his date. It was the ’80s in North Carolina, and everyone had a date on Saturday night. Henry behaved like he’d just gotten out of jail. He came into the living room and acted out the goodbye at his date’s sorority house, how he’d put the screen door between them before he’d have to kiss her. He stood there in front of us, wielding an imaginary door like an oversize shield. I’d never been on the male side of a date postmortem. Henry went to bed, and, punchy 
from his performance, the cute, quirky guy and I started kissing.

I dated him, Craig, for the rest of the school year. Our whole relationship played out in that rental house with Henry and their good friend Mason, who lived a few blocks away. Our university was big, but these three guys had created a tiny, cozy world within it. The rest of the fall and winter we played Hearts and argued about Reagan’s reelection; we talked in Irish accents and quoted James Joyce. Mason was writing an honors thesis on Joyce, and his huge poster board of index cards on Finnegans Wake was often in the room with us. This was the first I had heard of an undergraduate honors thesis, or possibly of Finnegans Wake. With the three of them I was always giddy from the banter, but when Craig and I were left alone we reverted to the way we had been on the couch before Henry came in. We were attracted to each other in that way that two people can be when words aren’t working, and the attraction helped us believe for a while that we were communicating.

When I had a break between classes during the day, I went to the house. By spring, I was timing my visits so that only Henry would be there. We talked in the kitchen, usually about books or writers. We both wanted to be writers, though I doubt we ever said that out loud. Pretty much everything he did made me laugh, which made me feel weightless and taut in my chest, and I felt standing in that kitchen that if I were tapped very lightly I would float up to the ceiling. 
Once when I came over he’d just washed his hair, and I watched him comb the top part straight up and leave it there to dry for several minutes before brushing it to one side. Craig and Mason called him Rooster because of it. He laughed as I watched him and said it was the only way he could get his hair to dry right. This is one of my most vivid memories of college, watching Henry comb his hair up into a rooster’s crest in front of me.