Drown

The narrator begins the story by stating that he should have been more careful with the marijuana that he ingested the night before, as marijuana makes him sleepwalk. Consequently, he woke up in the hallway of his apartment building, “feeling like [he’d] been stepped on by [his] high school marching band” (111). He remarks that he would have been there all night if his downstairs neighbors, whom he calls Boyfriend and Girlfriend, in lieu of actual names, hadn’t started having a huge fight at 3 A.M. 

Although he was too high to move, the narrator remembers that Boyfriend was telling Girlfriend that he needed more space. The narrator asserts that Boyfriend was only saying that because he needed more room to cheat. The narrator intimates that he was acquainted with Boyfriend—he would see him at the bars and would also see him bring home girls while Girlfriend was away. Every time Boyfriend went for the door, Girlfriend would cry and ask Boyfriend was doing what he was. The narrator states that the couple reminds him of himself and his old girlfriend Loretta. He reveals that he promised himself that he would stop thinking about Loretta, “even though every Cleopatra-looking Latina in the city made [him] stop and wish she would come back to [him]” (111-112).

He continues recalling the fight between the couple upstairs, stating that by the time Boyfriend left, he himself was already back inside of his apartment. He recalls that Girlfriend would not stop crying, except for the two times that she must have heard him moving around right above her. Both times, he held his breath until she started to cry again. He followed her steps with his own and listened as she talked to herself, cursed Boyfriend in Spanish, and washed her face repeatedly. The narrator reflects: “It would have broken my heart if it hadn’t been so damn familiar. I guess I’d gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber” (112).

The next day, the narrator tells his friend Harold what happened. Harold says, “If I didn’t have my own women problems I’d say let’s go comfort the widow” (112). The narrator responds by saying that Girlfriend isn’t their type: she was too beautiful and high-class for the, adding that Boyfriend could have been a model. He muses that they actually both probably were models—he’d never heard them talking about jobs or bosses. He regards people like them as untouchables, “raised on some other planet and then transplanted into [his] general vicinity to remind [him] how bad [he] was living” (112). He also begrudges the amount of Spanish that they shared between them, as none of his girlfriends—even Loretta, who was Puerto Rican—ever spoke Spanish. The closest he came to a Spanish-speaking girlfriend was an African-American woman who had spent three years in Italy and liked to speak Italian in bed. He remembers that she only dated him because he reminded her of some of the Sicilian men she’d known, which caused him to never call her again.

The narrator recounts that Boyfriend came by several times the following week to gather his things and add salt to the wounds. He would listen to what Girlfriend had to say and then re-assert that he was done with the relationship and leaving. He remarks: “She let him fuck her every time, maybe hoping that it would make him stay but you know, once somebody gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving” (113). He then reveals that he is familiar with such a scenario, as he and Loretta had enough “shabby farewell fucks” to go around (113). Unlike the couple upstairs, though, he and Loretta never shared intimate conversations. Instead, they would lay in silence and listen to the din of the neighborhood. In hindsight, he imagines that Loretta was thinking of escape the entire time.

The narrator remarks that the couple upstairs always ended up in the bathroom, which was fine by him, because that’s where he could hear them the best. He intimates that he doesn’t know why he started eavesdropping and following her life, “but it seemed like a good thing to do” (114). He wasn’t busy with his own things, and was waiting for the wreckage of his failed relationship with Loretta to recede. He reveals other things he has heard from their bathroom: Girlfriend talking a mile a minute and Boyfriend saying “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” with his “smooth Barry White voice” (114), and the two of them showering together while she performed oral sex on him. He remarks that it was obvious that he wasn’t going to stick around: “He was one of those dark-skinned smooth-faced brothers that women kill for, and I knew for a fact, having seen his ass in action at the local spots, that he liked to get over on the white-girls” (114). The narrator adds that Girlfriend knew nothing of this.

The narrator then states that he used to think that the barrio rules were “Latinos and blacks in, whites out”, but that love had taught him otherwise (114). Loretta had left him for an Italian, and he couldn’t pretend that it didn’t hurt when she told him, “I like him. He’s a hard worker” (114).

The narrator reveals that, after one of the couple’s showers, Boyfriend does not come back. The narrator listens to Girlfriend call a lot of her friends, including ones that she hasn’t spoken to in a long time. He intimates that he himself survives similar situations through his male friends, whom he does not have to call for help. He says, “It was easy for them to say, Forget her sellout ass. That’s not the sort of woman you need. Look how light you are—no doubt she was already shopping for the lightest” (115). He furthermore observes that Girlfriend spent her time crying, either in the bathroom or in front of the TV, while he spent his time listening to her, calling around for a job, or smoking and drinking.

One night, the narrator works up the courage to ask Girlfriend up for a coffee, which he admits is very manipulative, as he knows that she hasn’t had much human contact in a month. He is surprised to find her looking smart and watchful when she opens her door for him, and when she makes it to his apartment, she has on makeup and a rose-gold necklace. She compliments his apartment, saying that it has more light than hers. He remarks that that is “a nice call”, since “about all [he] had in the apartment was light” (115). He then plays her an Andréz Jiménez record and they share a pot of coffee. He assures her that they are drinking El Pico: the best.

They don’t have too much to talk about, as she is depressed and tired and he has bad gas. He remarks that she must have thought he was very bizarre for having to excuse himself twice in an hour, but that each time he came back, she was staring deeply into her coffee “the way fortune-tellers do back on the Island” (116). He remarks that crying all the time had made her more beautiful, unlike himself—Loretta left him months ago and he still looks like hell. He says that having Girlfriend in his apartment makes him feel even shabbier. When she finds a marijuana seed in a crack in the table, she asks him if he smokes. He answers that it makes him sleepwalk. She remarks that honey—an old Caribbean remedy—will cure his sleepwalking.

That night, Girlfriend puts on a free-style tape by an artist that the narrator thinks is named Noel. He listens to her moving around her apartment, not putting it past her to be a dancer. When they see each other on the steps, she is polite but curt with him—never slowing down to talk, nor to give him a smile or a word of encouragement. He takes this as a sign. At the end of the month she cuts her hair short and stops using straighteners and “science fiction combs” (116). He tells her that he likes her haircut as he is coming back from the liquor store and she is on her way out with a woman friend. He tells her that it makes her look fierce. She smiles and says, “That’s exactly what I wanted” (117).