I wasn’t expecting him.
He is John Stewart, Henry Rollins, Bruce Campbell, Anthony Bourdain, and Agent Dale Cooper rolled into one amazing man.
He says that I have a wonderful singing voice, and I believe him. He teases me for my goofy laugh and inability to whistle. He cooks me amazing things, and introduced me to some of my favorite foods—raw oysters, fish, avocado, mushrooms, artichoke hearts—I used to be a terribly picky eater. I’ll eat anything he cooks. And I bake for him, and he’s as in awe of what I pull from the oven as I am of what he whips up on the stovetop.
I love folding his laundry; he cheerfully does floors, windows, and cleans the bathroom. I get a thrill to fetch him a beer over his protests that “there really isn’t a Best Girlfriend award!”, which isn’t unfeminist because he mixes up amazing cocktails for me, and he brews the best coffee I’ve ever drunk (secret ingredient: cinnamon), and he brings it to me in bed. Sometimes he even wakes up early on mornings when he doesn’t have to be at work till midday to make me coffee while I’m in the shower.
We live together, in our favorite neighborhood in the Boston area and have perfect weekends listening to Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me, Says You, and Car Talk. I buy him socks and underwear, and he buys me amazing cute shoes that he picks out all by himself, which impresses my friends and co-workers to no end. And when my feet are ice cubes, he wraps his warm ones around mine, and doesn’t tickle them.
The seven-hour first date
Two years ago, I somehow found out about an event called “Dr. Sketchy‘s Anti-Art School,” a burlesque life-drawing session held in a bar in Allston. I’d been feeling like a bad artist (in the sense that I’d not been making art rather than bad at making art), and hadn’t drawn from life since college, so made a point of attending. It was fantastic and silly and fun: no nudity, of course, but rather with raucous punk and rockabilly music and costumes (little red riding hood, bride of Frankenstein, spangly mermaid, etc) that were a delight to draw.
During a break, I decided to introduce myself to the event’s MC, but someone was ahead of me, and introduced himself to the host as “Chris.” “Me too!” I said brightly, and that was that. Or that’s the short version.
The longer version is that Cristo noticed me before then: first my sketch pad, then me. The fact that I was watercoloring perched on a barstool, which impressed the hell out of him. When he tells the story, he always points out that he assumed I was one of the models. After that break, I realized that he’d been sitting just to my right the whole time, and began glancing at his drawings, too. They were incredible. Hard, confident, sharp lines, but not cartoonish; pulling out parts of the subjects I hadn’t seen there; less about the model herself than sort of idealized in that way that all great cheesecake art is. I liked him.
My friend Jeanne loves that we met this way, as artists. That from the beginning, he knew a part of me that not many people see. I love that we have a tangible record, in the form of our drawings, of how we met, of how we see the world through our own eyes: a dozen or so sketches of the very same thing, but with our individual marks.
As the event wrapped up and we packed away our sketchpads, he mentioned a mural he’d painted on commission on the wall of a building just around the corner. I am a very cautious girl, and not inclined to go for walks with strangers, but I trusted him immediately, and it was a busy, sunny day. Plus a good friend of mine lives in a luxury condo on the street he named, and so I agreed to take a walk with him and look at it. After we admired his painting, he mentioned that a movie he wanted to see was playing at the indie/arthouse movie theater in Kendall Square, and would I like to watch it with him, or grab a drink? When he tells the story, he explains at this point that he didn’t want to let me get away. Our first kiss was on the way to the theater.
By the time we got to Kendall, there was an hour or so to wait before the next showing of the film, so we grabbed a pair of Guinnesses and sat on the patio of a little bar chatting in the warm summer evening. Then, a very familiar face appeared: my friend Alana, who, ever since, has bragged that she crashed our first date, and dubbed us “c-squared.” It inspired the name of the collaborative art website we’ll be launching in a few months.
When the movie let out, it was late enough that the fact that I had to be at work the next day was a concern. We exchanged phone numbers outside the T: he was going inbound and I was headed outbound. At Kendall, there’s two entrances to the subway system, and you can only go in one direction once you’re inside. We kissed good-bye.
I stood on my platform, and he stood across two tracks from me. Our trains came at the same moment. I could see him through the window of mine, seeing me through the window of his. When the trains began to move in opposite directions, we did the cheesy melodramatic train station goodbye thing, rushing along the lengths of the cars til they’d passed.
Years into this thing, it’s just gotten more perfect.
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