My Boyfriend's Back

Ever since I've gotten married, I've been collecting boyfriends. It's true. I used the plural because I've had more than one. Don't worry, Expat knows. Well, he knows about most of them.

My oldest and best boyfriend worked at the World's Greatest Music Store two blocks from my apartment on the edge of the edge of the hood. Quickwit the Sheet Music Clerk started flirting with me right away, telling me as he took my orders for extra copies of SATB anthems that he liked taking orders for me because that meant he would get to see me when I came back to pick them up, and that he would pine for me until then. He showed me fancy software I could use for my voice lessons, appreciated my random knowledge of 80s cartoon trivia (the name of the band that Gem had was the Holograms), and even let me come into the back room to listen to the latest track he'd mixed. Plus, Quickwit could find anything in the store; always a bonus when your boyfriends are helpful. He had a band and about a year into our music-purchase-driven relationship, he invited me and Expat (a very classy touch, I think, to acknowledge The Husband) to come and hear them play. But my Eccentric Mother was in town, visiting me for the first time ever since I'd left Alabama (four years ago), so I told him that I thought maybe—just maybe—it wasn't meant to be. He sighed, and nodded, and kept his bottom lip from quivering as best he could. “I understand.”

And then he moved to Atlanta.

Really, it was that Quickwit's Real Life Girlfriend had gotten into music grad school at UGA, so she and he and their two cats were making the big move together, but I learned my lesson: when one of your boyfriends invites you to hear his band, you go. Period. You may never get another chance.

But I wasn't completely faithful to Quickwit, I have to admit. There were others I saw on the side. I had two different Hardware Store Boyfriends at two different hardware stores—Young Paint Mixer and Old Key Cutter. There was Grocery Store Boyfriend who liked to ask me every time I checked out how I was planning to cook the meat I was buying or if the No Pudge Fudge brownies were really any good and which ones did I like the best. (Yes. They are the most amazing brownies ever. I like the chocolate raspberry.) And then there's Very Earnest Bank Boyfriend. Earnest helped me set up my checking accounts the very first week I moved to Madison. He wears salmon colored button down shirts and is going to school at the U. We were hot and heavy there for a while when I was working part time, but now that I've settled into the Evil Desk Job, we seem to see each other less and less. But these things happen.

My latest boyfriend might not even know that we're dating, but I think he does. He came with my new gym membership at the Biggest Little Gym Ever down the road from my house. I joined about a month ago because let's face it, since I stopped managing at the Curves (for Women) gym last May, I have been markedly sedentary at the Evil Desk Job. Oh, you can go ahead and tell me that I still look great, but as Shakira says, my hips don't lie.

Anyway. Beefy Gym Boyfriend is Big—Eat You For Lunch kind of Big—and he has tattoos. Not that tattoos say much about your toughness these days. I mean, I have a tattoo and I'm a Cupcake. It's more the size of his upper arms—the enormity of the tattoo canvas, if you will—and the fact that the tattoos are neatly set off by his stylish black wife beater. His upper arms are roughly the size of my lower thigh except unlike my lower thigh, you can tell that they're mostly muscle. On his left arm, he has a black outline of what seems to be a Native American woman. On his right, a dream catcher the size of a dessert plate, complete with dangling feathers and beads and the whole nine yards. Beefy doesn't appear particularly Native American himself—more like neo-Nazi skinhead with an impeccably shaved skull and a neatly kept goatee. Like someone you would see on WWE. Or maybe at a monster truck rally.

Beefy doesn't actually talk to me because he's much too focused—on the elliptical trainer. You might not think he was an elliptical trainer kind of guy just to look at him, but I know that in his heart of hearts, he is Deeply Committed to cardiovascular health. On the rare chance that all of the ellipticals are full, you can find him on one of the three ancient stair-steppers in the corner. Like I said, Deeply Committed.

The strange and perhaps somewhat disturbing thing about Beefy is that he is always at the gym at the exact same time as I am. Always. This is no easy task, since I am not yet a particularly regular gym-goer. I usually go in the afternoons except when I go in the mornings or after 9:00 at night. I'm there on the weekends, but only sometimes, and never on Mondays, except when I am. How he finds me, I'll never know. Maybe he's a stalker and he waits in the bushes outside until he sees me leave the house in my workout clothes or with my stylish Nature Conservancy canvas gym bag with the Ugly Bird on the side. Or maybe he lives at the gym. Like that kids book My Teacher Sleeps in School. That would explain the never-changing black-wife-beater-with-gray-bastketball-shorts outfit. Maybe he has the girl who works the font desk call him every time I walk in (this seems most unlikely since it hinges on the girl at the front desk actually knowing my name). Maybe he just has a sixth sense.

I'm going to the gym tomorrow night after work. Don't tell Beefy—let's see if he shows up on his own. If he does, maybe I'll finally work up the nerve to say something witty and memorable. Like Hi.