When New York banned smoking in restaurants, I stopped eating out. When they banned it in the workplace I quit working, and when they raised the price of cigarettes to seven dollars a pack, I gathered all my stuff together and went to France.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I hear. "Can we please just try to have a good time?" This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn't work. I've tried it.

"Can I help you?" I asked, and her hand went to a whistle that hung from a string around her neck.
"Mess with me, and I'll stick my foot so far up your ass I'll lose my shoe."
Someone says this, and you naturally look down, or at least I do. The woman's feet were tiny, no longer than hot dog buns. She had on puffy sneakers, cheap ones made of air and some sort of plastic, and, considering them, I frowned.
"They might be small, but they'll still do the job, don't you worry," she said.
Right about then, Hugh stepped out of the living room with a scrap of paneling in his hand. "Have you met Helen?" he asked.
The woman unfurled a few thick fingers, the way you might when working an equation: 2 young men + 1 bedroom - ugly paneling = fags. "Yeah, we met." Her voice was heavy with disdain. "We met, all right."

Had it been raining, he might have willingly joined me, but, as it was, Hugh had no interest in dingoes. It took a solid hour of whining to change his mind, but even then his heart wasn't in it. Anyone could see that. We took a ferry to the zoo, and while on board he stared longingly at the water and made little paddling motions with his hands.

"Do you know anyone who will sell me a skeleton?" I asked, and the manager thought for a while. "Well," she said, "I guess you could try looking on bulletin boards."
I don't know what circles this woman runs in, but I have never in my life seen a skeleton advertised on a bulletin board. Used bicycles, yes, but no human bones, or even cartilage for that matter.

For the first few days I kept my discomfort to myself, thinking all the while of what a good example I was setting. When Hugh feels bad, you hear about it immediately. A tiny splinter works itself into his palm, and he claims to know exactly how Jesus must have felt on the cross. He demands sympathy for insect bites and paper cuts, while I have to lose at least a quart of blood before I get so much as a pat on the hand.

One time in France we were lucky enough to catch an identical stomach virus. It was a twenty-four-hour bug, the kind that completely empties you out and takes away your will to live. You'd get yourself a glass of water, but that would involve standing, and so instead you just sort of stare toward the kitchen, hoping that maybe one of the pipes will burst and the water will come to you. We both had the exact same symptoms, yet he insisted that his virus was much more powerful than mine. I begged to differ, so there we were, competing over who were the sickest.
"You can at least move your hands," he said.
"No," I told him, "it was the wind that moved them. I have no muscle control whatsoever."
"Liar."

My boyfriend's mother was a handful, and every year, just before Christmas, she would schedule a mammogram, knowing that she would not get the results until after the holidays. The remote possibility of cancer was something to hang over her children's heads, just out of reach, like mistletoe, and she took great pleasure in arranging it. The family would gather and she'd tear up, saying, "I don't want to spoil your happiness, but this may well be our last Christmas together." Other times, if somebody had something going on - a wedding, a graduation- she'd go in for exploratory surgery, anything to capture and hold attention. By the time I finally met her, she did not have a single organ that had not been touched by human hands. Oh, my God, I thought, watching her cry on our living room sofa, my boyfriend's family is more fucked-up than my own. I mean, this actually bothered me.

Hugh had gone to sleep hours earlier, and it startled me to hear his voice. "What do you say we lance that thing?" he said.
It's the sort of question that catches you off guard. "Did you just use the verb to lance?" I asked.
He turned on the light.
"Since when did you learn to lance boils?"
"I didn't," he said. "But I bet I could teach myself."
With anyone else I'd put up a fight, but Hugh can do just about anything he sets his mind to. This is a person who welded the plumbing pipes at his house in Normandy, then went into the cellar to make his own cheese. There's no one I trust more, and so I limped to the bathroom, that theater of home surgery, where I lowered my pajama bottoms and braced myself against the towel rack, waiting as he sterilized the needle.
"This is hurting me a lot more than it's hurting you," he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it, a horrible custard streaked with blood. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside of him? And so much of it! The first tablespoon gushed out on its own power, like something from a geyser. Then Hugh used his fingers and squeezed out the rest. "How are you doing back there?" I asked, but he was dry-heaving and couldn't answer.
When my boil was empty, he doused it with alcohol and put a bandage on it, as if it had been a minor injury, a shaving cut, a skinned knee, something normal he hadn't milked like a dead cow. And this, to me, was worth at least a hundred and twenty nights of Sodom. Back in bed I referred to him as Sir Lance-a-Lot.

Ever prepared for the possibility of fire or theft, at my peak I had thirty-four cartons stockpiled in three different locations. "My inventory," I called it, as in, "The only thing standing between me and a complete nervous breakdown is my inventory."