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

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2 years ago

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.

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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.

CRAIG AND I BEGAN TO BICKER, then fight. We fought because I wanted him to quit smoking, and we fought because he asked me to wear my hair in a ponytail, not down, to a semiformal. But really we fought because I was in love with Henry and we both probably knew it. Craig didn’t want to lose me to Henry, and he didn’t want to lose Henry to me. I knew that if I broke up with Craig, I’d be banished from the house, from games of Hearts, from Joyce imitations—and from Henry. I didn’t dare hope that Henry returned my feelings, so I chose, for those final months, to be near him, since I could never be with him.

Craig and Mason graduated in May. Henry still had another year to go. I was also supposed to graduate, but at some point that spring I decided that I would write one of those honors theses, which would conveniently get me another semester—and Henry all to myself.

Craig and I broke up a few days after graduation. He was going to Europe, then moving back to his hometown; I was staying in town to wait tables. We’d come to the end, and it felt right to both of us.

Henry left for the summer, but he called me three weeks later, said he couldn’t find a job, was thinking of coming back to North Carolina; could he stay on my couch for a few days until he found a place to live? He came, and, to my surprise, a week later he confessed his feelings for me. He stayed all summer.

When Craig returned from Europe, he was angry. He wanted Henry to break up with me, and Henry would not. During the years we were together, Henry carried on his friendship with Craig entirely separately from me, never speaking to him on the phone when I was there, always visiting him without me. That fall, my second senior fall, whenever Craig came to visit, I dropped out of sight. If they went to a party, I could not go. Even my name was verboten, a small black hole in the corner of their friendship. It always took a few days for Henry and me to readjust after he saw Craig, for me to understand why he’d keep a friend who imposed such limits, and for him to let me fully back in.

“Even my name was verboten, a small black hole in the corner of their friendship.”

Apart from that, Henry and I had a good thing for nearly two years. But it was all too soon for Henry. He didn’t want to live together, because, he said, we got along so well that we’d just get married, and that would be like marrying the girl next door. I broke up with him after he said that, and he was surprised. But it wasn’t really over for a long time. For a decade we tried many times to get back together. We’d meet and fail. We’d impose a moratorium on contact. We’d break down and talk on the phone for hours. We’d meet and fail again. In our early 30s we broke the pattern and turned our deep feelings into a friendship that lasted the next 25 years.

I didn’t believe he would die. That’s not how the story was supposed to go. I wasn’t supposed to get a phone call from Craig in the ICU explaining that the treatment had failed, that the doctors were out of ideas. Craig on my cell phone, a voice I’d last heard years before cell phones even existed. “They’re saying less than a week,” he said.

I flew down from Maine. Henry and Craig had lived in the same city for nearly 20 years. They both worked as lawyers in the same government office. I took a taxi from the airport to the hospital and an elevator to the fourth floor. Henry’s mother was in the corridor. She was smaller than I remembered, with a little brave bird face. She hugged me and told me to go in. “He’s been waiting for you,” she said.

Oh, the look on his face when he turned and saw the look on mine. My old love. My dear friend.

It was only men in the room, lots of them, NCAA basketball on the TV. They hushed for a moment, then cheered: Kentucky had scored against Duke. Someone found me a chair, and I pulled it up close to Henry’s bed and took his hand. He had wires connected to his chest and that little plastic oxygen tube with the nose prongs, a brand-new Wildcats cap on his head.

He squeezed my hand and thanked me for coming. I asked how he was doing, and he said he was feeling great, humbled by all the visitors, all the love.

Henry never married. He had a serious relationship in his early 30s, and when that ended I never heard about anyone else. Occasionally I’d ask, and once a few years ago I set him up with someone, but it didn’t take. He always painted a bleak portrait of his social life: All of his friends got married and had kids and had less and less time for him.

“Craig saved my life,” he said. He shook his head and had to wait for his voice to come back. “I would be dead right now. He got me here in the middle of the night. He’s been sleeping right there ever since.”

Where was Craig now? I wanted to ask. I wanted to get the first encounter with him over with. He’d been polite on the phone two days ago, but Henry had been right there. Was he still angry after all these years?

“The coffee shop was closed, so I had to go to Starbucks.” Craig came in behind me and went around to the other side of the bed, put a coffee on the tray attached to the bed frame

Henry thanked him. “Lily’s here,” he said, and Craig looked up.

I went around to the other side of the bed and gave him a hug. He was shaking. He’d slept on that little foldout chair for at least seven nights, I calculated.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said.

His three boys circled around him. They had their arms all wrapped around each other, and their eyes were red. Their beloved Uncle Henry was dying.

I went back to my chair and Craig took his on the other side, and that’s how it was for the next 36 hours, Craig at Henry’s left flank and I at his right. Visitors came in and out all day. I’d let go of Henry’s hand and give up my seat only if a new person had just arrived from the airport or train station, or if his mother came into the room. But she always gave it back to me after a few minutes, saying how happy he was that I was here.

The party in Henry’s room went on through the evening into the night. We ordered takeout from a Chinese restaurant nearby. A musician friend played Bob Dylan and Neil Young on his guitar. Posts were coming in on the Facebook page Craig had created—many from female high school and college friends confessing their unrequited crushes in great detail. Craig and I read them out loud to Henry, and he shook his head. “Revisionist history,” he said, but he had a big grin on his face.

nurse came in and said the doctor was on his way and people would have to go to the visitors’ room down the hall. We all started filing out. “Everyone but Craig and Lily,” Henry said, and I turned back, relieved.

The doctor came in. I was sitting in my chair by the bed, holding Henry’s hand. It was a new doctor, and he assumed I was Henry’s wife. But he quickly figured out that Craig was the one who knew all the details, who spoke the language of Henry’s cancer.

After he left, Henry started to feel anxious and needed more oxygen. I looked at Craig with alarm.

“He gets like this at night,” he told me, and nodded to the nurse when she asked him if she should give him some Ativan along with more morphine. Henry was asleep and snoring within minutes.

I woke up early the next morning and wondered how early was too early to go back to the hospital. Within minutes my phone dinged. Henry: Come as early as you can.

Getting dressed right now, I wrote back.

It was just the two of them in the room. Craig had folded the chair back up. It was quiet. We sat together, the three of us, the TV off and our phones away, and we talked. We talked about North Carolina, and Mason, who had died in 2001, with Henry and Craig stationed like this beside his hospital bed. Mason with his evil grin and cackle laugh—he came back then and sat in the room with us. I could nearly hear him shuffling the cards.

Craig went down to the lobby for coffee. I offered, but he insisted I stay. He was so kind to me, so warm and grateful I was there, even though I’d almost ruined their friendship decades ago. I’d always thought he was wrong to punish Henry for so long, to cut me out. Maybe I’d even suspected that Henry’s shame about our relationship was part of the reason he wasn’t able to fully commit—but I never really considered how Craig had been hurt. What if my best friend had started dating Henry as soon as I left town? Would I have forgiven her? Would I sleep in her hospital room night after night?

When Craig left the room, Henry started to say something, but I squeezed his hand and pointed to the monitor. His blood oxygen was too low. He sucked in some air from the mask around his neck, and his numbers went back up.

“You and Craig,” he said quietly, “you really get me. You always have.”

By the afternoon the puffiness that had started on the right side of his chest was spreading to his neck and face. I’d given away my chair and was sitting on the other side of the room, full once more with friends and relatives, and I watched him start touching his neck and cheeks, feeling the extent of the swelling.

Do I look like a frog?” he said, then bulged out his eyes and scanned the room for someone who was listening. He found me. “Do I look like a frog?” I was laughing too hard to answer.

Oh, I loved him. I loved him with my heart and soul. I did not marry him and we did not grow old together, and he did not grow old at all, but we loved each other well.

He got anxious again that night and Craig got him an Ativan and he went into a deep sleep.

THE NEXT MORNING I was at the hospital by six. Both Henry and Craig were asleep, Henry with the oxygen mask strapped to his face and his cell phone in his hand, Craig on his stomach beneath a sheet on the foldout chair. I sat in my usual seat until a nurse came in, took his vitals, and Henry woke and saw me. His voice was muffled beneath the mask, and he pulled it down around his neck.

“He told me that when he learned the cancer had come back, mine was the voice he wanted to hear.”

Hey,” he said.

Our last morning.

We talked quietly. Craig snored beside him. Henry asked me if I thought he should have married, and I said I didn’t know. But of course I thought he should have married! He wouldn’t have been alone for the last 20 years. And he was always so delightful and natural with children. My kids knew him as The Henry Who Climbed the Tree after a visit to our house in Maine when they were little. If he’d had a family, I thought, he might have stopped smoking cigarettes long ago

I don’t think I would have liked it,” he said. “I’m too much of a loner. And all the chores. I wouldn’t have been good at the chores.”

I lifted the mask to his face, and he took a few pulls.

We held hands and told each other how much we loved each other, and how glad we were that we had somehow preserved that love. He told me that when he learned the cancer had come back, mine was the voice he wanted to hear. He told me he had only ever been happy for me, for my writing and marriage and family.

We circled back around to the beginning again, to Craig’s reaction. He talked about how hard it was. I made sure that I could still hear Craig snoring.

“I couldn’t give up either of you,” he said.

He was quiet for a minute, and then he said, “The worst thing about all of this is leaving Craig behind. After Mason died we had each other, but this time he’s going to be alone.”

His face cracked open. He began to sob. It was the only time I saw him cry in my whole life.

I flew home. For two more days Henry and I talked and texted. The day after that, Craig had to hold the phone for him. That night Craig texted that he’d gone unconscious. And the next day Craig called to say he was gone. I told him how much Henry had loved him, how grateful he was, how his only tears were about leaving Craig alone. Later he texted that he would always cherish what I’d said.

Long ago the three of us had been in a love triangle. But the real love story, the best love story, was theirs.

*Names have been changed.


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