Boxer takes off his pants in the middle of Central Park.
“My boxers are dark enough, right?”
They are blue plaid, and long, and look like J. Crew shorts. I tell him he’s fine. He kicks off his shoes and charges into the fountain, with all the little kids and the two German tourists in too-skinny pants. The water looks gross. Boxer looks elated.
“There’s no chance you’d come in, right?”
I think about being 10 and refusing to swim in the lake at camp. And that was organic.
When Boxer climbs out of the fountain, he shakes all his drops on me, like a wet dog. We climb back to his stolen apartment in the Time Warner Building and listen to obscure rock mixes, and he tries to line up all his dates for the week, and I stare out the huge windows at the river.
We empty a bottle of Annie’s Sesame Ginger dressing into a bowl and finish the whole thing with crackers and carrots. Our crack.
At seven, I take off, and realize for the past 30 minutes we haven’t said a word to each other, just shared the same space, and in a weird way it makes me feel closer.
[JI BAEK - AM I THE IMAGINARY SOCIALITE?]