Summary
At the beginning of "Boyfriend," the narrator explains that when he smokes weed it causes him to sleepwalk. On one of these incidents, the narrator wakes up in his hallway. When he awakens, he hears his neighbors having a loud fight on the floor below him. The boyfriend, who the narrator refers to as "Boyfriend," tells his girlfriend, referred to as "Girlfriend," that he wants space from the relationship. The narrator reveals that he knows Boyfriend, and assumes that he actually wanted "more space to cheat" on Girlfriend (111). Every time Boyfriend heads to leave, Girlfriend starts crying again, asking him why he's doing this. The narrator thinks that their relationship reminds him of his ex, Loretta.
The narrator heads to his apartment, and he can hear Boyfriend finally leave and Girlfriend crying loudly in her apartment. The narrator can hear Girlfriend from his apartment, which is right below his. The narrator goes into his bathroom, which is right above hers, to listen to her cries. She washes her face over and over again. The narrator starts to feel bad for Girlfriend, but he also admits that he is numb to this sort of thing after breaking up with Loretta.
The next day, the narrator tells his friend Harold about Girlfriend's breakup with Boyfriend. Harold and the narrator reflect on how out of their league Girlfriend is, who "was too beautiful, too high-class for a couple of knuckleheads like us" (112). The narrator reflects that they speak Spanish to each other, which bothers him, because none of his girlfriends ever spoke Spanish.
The narrator listens over the course of the next week as Boyfriend appears a few times for his things and he and Girlfriend fight again. She tells him long arguments, but he cannot be swayed from leaving her. The narrator eavesdrops as they have sex, and he assumes that Girlfriend is sleeping with him in the hopes that Boyfriend will be convinced to stay. The narrator knows that Girlfriend's strategy will not work. The narrator compares their relationship to his relationship with Loretta. Instead of talking, they would lay in silence. Back then, the narrator never knew what Loretta was thinking, but now he guesses what she was thinking was simply "escape."
The narrator reflects that in his bathroom, he can hear the fights between Boyfriend and Girlfriend best. In the bathroom, Girlfriend talks to him about her day and Boyfriend does not say anything substantive beyond "yeah, yeah." The narrator describes seeing Boyfriend at the bars, taking note of the fact that he likes to hit on white girls. The narrator then reflects on his breakup with Loretta. She left him for an Italian guy who works on Wall Street who she met while she was still dating the narrator. She tells the narrator that he is a hard worker, which hurts him greatly.
After one shower, Boyfriend never comes back to Girlfriend's apartment. Girlfriend spends a lot of time calling her old friends and crying in the bathroom and in front of the TV. The narrator spent his time listening to her and looking for a job. One day, the narrator gets the nerve to ask Girlfriend up for a cup of coffee. She says yes, and when she arrives at his apartment he notices that she has put makeup and jewelry on. The narrator puts on music and they drink coffee together. The narrator notes that she looks sad but beautiful. They talk about weed for a little while, but Girlfriend says that it makes her break out. She recommends that he should eat honey to cure his sleepwalking. That night, he can hear her dancing alone in her apartment.
The narrator says that he never tried the honey cure and Girlfriend never returns to his apartment. Sometimes they pass each other on the stairs, but they exchange nothing more than polite hellos. By the end of the month, he notices that she has cut her hair short. He compliments her on her hair and tells her that it makes her look fierce. She smiles, saying that is exactly what she intended.
Analysis
"Boyfriend" is one of the shortest stories in Drown, and it is only about five pages long. It is narrated by an unnamed man who eavesdrops on his downstairs neighbor, referred to throughout the story as Girlfriend, who is going through a breakup. He listens to her tears and mirrors her movements from the apartment above hers in order to hear her better: "Girlfriend would not stop crying. Twice she stopped, she must have heard me moving around right above her and both times I held my breath until she started up again. I followed her into the bathroom, the two of us separated by a floor, wires and some pipes," (112). These lines show how invested the narrator is in listening to his neighbor, aided by the cheap structure of their apartment building that ineffectively muffles the sounds of neighbors.
Part of the explanation for the narrator's investment is because he is going through a breakup himself. At some point before the story began, his girlfriend Loretta left him for an Italian man who worked on Wall Street. The narrator tries to suggest that he is no longer hurting over the breakup, but he slowly reveals as the story progresses how much it affected him. Like Girlfriend, he spends his days mostly alone, thinking about the love that he has lost in his life: "I don't know why I started following her life, but it seemed like a good thing to do. Most of the time I thought people, even at their worst, were pretty fucking boring. I guess I wasn't busy with anything else. Especially not women. I was taking time off, waiting for the last of my Loretta wreckage to drift out of sight" (114).
Their shared heartbreak creates an imagined kinship between Girlfriend and the narrator in the narrator's mind. Over the next couple of weeks, he tracks her so closely that he begins to assume her emotional response to certain situations. For example, when Boyfriend visits Girlfriend for the last time, the narrator seemingly knows that this is the last time they will see each other: "He wasn't sticking around, though. That was obvious. He was one of those dark-skinned 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 whitegirls. She didn't know nothing about his little Rico Suave routine. It would have wrecked her" (144).
Perhaps the narrator believes that Boyfriend's escapades with white women would have "wrecked" Girlfriend because he also was left by his girlfriend for a white person. In fact, as the narrator's friends suggest, Loretta merely used him as a stepping stone in order to attain that relationship because of his lighter skin: "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). This kind of dating scene commodifies whiteness at the expense of those who do not have it, causing intense pain for the narrator and, it is assumed, Girlfriend.
However, Girlfriend's response to her breakup is a move away from white beauty standards and towards self-empowerment. In the final moments of the story, the narrator notices that Girlfriend has changed her appearance: "At the end of the month she got her hair cut short. No more straighteners, no more science fiction combs" (116). The subtext of these lines is that Girlfriend has made the choice to turn her back on European beauty standards which would have called upon her to straighten her hair. Instead, she embraces it in its natural state, and cuts it short, independent of the opinions of society and men.
This perspective might take some getting used to for some readers, who might be put off by the creepiness of the situation. The narrator unabashedly listens as Girlfriend and Boyfriend has sex with each other, and he even describes what it sounds like when she performs oral sex on him in the shower. The mere fact that he does not name his neighbor and simply refers to her as "Girlfriend" suggests an element of objectification within the text. She is reduced to her position as a scorned ex-girlfriend and is given little personality or life outside of this categorization. Additionally, the narrator seems to be motivated to stalk Girlfriend because of her physical appearance, which objectifies her even further within the world of the story: "Homegirl was too beautiful, too high-class for a couple of knuckleheads like us. Never saw her in a t-shirt or without jewelry" (112). That the narrator imagines Girlfriend to be so high above him alienates her from him until he conceptualizes her as coming from an entirely different species as his own: "People like these were untouchables to me, raised on some other planet and transplanted into my general vicinity to remind me how bad I was living" (112). In this way, the narrator's conceptions of Girlfriend are deeply tied to his own perception of himself, and every time that he interacts with her, it is informed by this perceived difference. This process works to dehumanize Girlfriend in the speaker's eyes, who obviously never intended to make the narrator feel bad about himself, but nevertheless has been turned into an object of fascination in the narrator's eyes. All of this creepiness culminates when the narrator asks Girlfriend for coffee, knowing full well that she will not turn him down: "One night I got the cojones to ask her up for a café, which was mighty manipulative of me. She hand't had much human contact the whole month, except when the delivery guy from the Japanese restaurant, a Colombian dude I always said hi to, so what the hell was she going to say? No?" (115). The fact that the narrator does not force a relationship with Girlfriend at the end of the story might be his only saving grace. But, as his surprised response to her haircut tells us, he never really understood Girlfriend at all. Instead, she existed as a figment of his imagination.
