The Boyfriend Chronicles: Brian

The Boyfriend Chronicles: Brian
(Originally posted 9/4/2003)

Brian’s another one I didn’t sleep with, but whose actions still leave an echo in my relationships. (I’ll get to The List eventually, I swear.)

I met him at a very uncomfortable party where I knew precisely three people of the thirty or so there. I noticed him immediately, because he looked stunningly like Billy Campbell. Yum. But he never spoke to me and I assumed that he was, like all the others, a college grad and way out of the league of an 18-year-old Mary Kay girl. (Yes, I sold the stuff. No, I didn’t have a pink car. The whole fiasco only lasted as long as it took me to use up everything in my introductory pink vinyl showcase. I still hate Mary Kay cosmetics. They smell funny.)

At the end of the evening, I went into his bedroom to retrieve my coat and noticed a print on the wall. It was by a turn-of-the-century artist featured recently in Victoria Magazine, to which I then subscribed. (I also had a short-lived affinity for lace and dried flower arrangements. It’s not a happy memory.) I commented on it and that was the end of the conversation.

Fast forward a month or so to yet another party with the same people, who by now had names to match their pseudo-intellectual posturing. I forget most of them, but I remember Clarissa, because that’s who he was supposedly dating, in an on-again, off-again manner. I found out he was 25 and hadn’t been to college, but loved to read and found most of his crowd as silly as I did. We got snowed in together at my girlfriend’s apartment for three days and discovered our mutual attraction. He was impressed that I recognized his painting and thought I was out of his league. He gave me one of the best kisses of my life and I gave him my phone number. He dropped me off at home, but not before telling me that he was sorry if he moved too fast. He’d had a checkered past by our community’s conservative, Bible-belt standards and wanted to keep the kissing for “special occasions” to avoid temptation. I was too inexperienced to know this was weird, so although I was disappointed, I didn’t argue.

It was a strange relationship. We would sit together in the basement of the house he shared with three other guys and just stroke one another’s hands, fingers, ears and faces until we were breathless with need. Still he resisted. We laid on his bed playing with his parakeet (it’s not a euphemism, it’s a little yellow bird) and discussing books into the wee hours and still he resisted. I met his parents, he met mine. We went to parties and took long drives. None of this would seem strange if it weren’t for the fact that the issue of our not kissing always seemed to hang between us.

See, the thing was, I was a virgin and he wasn’t. I knew this because he wrote me a long letter on scented pink stationary (again, too young to find this weird) and told me about it. It killed him that I was so pure (he didn’t know about the Barbie thing) and he put me on a pedestal so high we could barely see each other, let alone connect. I always felt awkward around him, and his constant references to me as an ‘angel’ didn’t help. Honestly, the guy didn’t know me at all.

Eventually, he just didn’t call. Just like that. He dropped me off and said, “I’ll call you tomorrow” and he didn’t. I waited through the next day and the next and then a week and a month. At some point I guess I realized he wasn’t going to call, and I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t just call him. He was my boyfriend, after all. But I never heard from him again.

I found out a year later that he couldn’t handle the comparison between his blameless, Virgin Mary image of me and his own drug-riddled, sexually promiscuous path. I didn’t care about any of that, but it apparently intimidated the hell out of him. His disappearance haunted me, and still does sometimes. I want to see him across a crowded bar, smoking a cigarette and flipping my long brown hair. I want to shock him with The List and let him know he was wrong about me.

But mostly, I just want to kiss him again.

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