Boyfriend was a really short chapter. Yunior still hasn’t changed with the drug use. He continues to smoke weed, which makes him sleepwalk. Most people gets messed up from smoking weed, but with Yunior, it only makes him sleepwalk. One time he woke up in his hallway feeling like he got tramped all over his body by his high school marching band. What woke Yunior out of the high, was the fact that the apartment immediately beneath him, where a couple was living, was having an argument at three in the morning.
According to the argument the Boyfriend, wanted space from Girlfriend. Yunior barely knew Boyfriend but have seen him at the bars and the girls he used to bring home while Girlfriend was away. “He just needed more space to cheat. ”, was a right conclusion. Because if you have a girlfriend, there isn’t a reason why anyone should cheat. Yunior compared Girlfriend with his ex-girlfriend Loretta. He kept thinking of Lorettas physicue, even though he swored he wouldn’t. Every time Yunior saw a pretty Latina women with a nice body, he would imagine Loretta coming back to him.
He was bothered that Loretta left him and is now dating an Italian guy. Yunior found himself feeling cold hearted. He would hear the arguments from the floor below between Girlfriend and Boyfriend but it didn’t really phased him. In fact, he said “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. ” He wasn’t moved by the emotions Girlfriend was going through, or he didn’t want to open a wound that he ignored.
My gut feeling is that he didn’t want to open that wound up because he brings up Loretta again. Loretta boyfriend was Italian, and worked on Wall Street. Loretta explains to Yunior that they are still going out. “I like him. He’s a hard worker. ”, is what Loretta told Yunior about her boyfriend. No matter how much heart-leather you have, that sort of talk could still hurt anybody, even Yunior. So Girlfriend was very beautiful. A model perhaps. Even Boyfriend. All the girls in the bar was after Boyfriend. Perhaps that was their jobs, Yunior used to think.
Yunior never heard them menion anything about work, hours, bosses, anything. The only thing he would hear was them arguing. I think Yunior had some compassion for Girlfriend because he invited her to come over to his place for some coffee. When she came up, he had played some Spanish tunes for her, since she was Latina. He played Andres Jimenez. Poor Yunior, he had gas problems and couldn’t really make an impression on her. And even if he’d tried, she was too depressed to even notice. She would stare deeply into her coffee.
Girlfriend offered a remedy for the sleepwalking that Yunior would experience every time he smoked weed. She told him honey would stop that. She had to have the same experience, because when Yunior asked her if she smoked, she replied that it makes her breakout. So there had to be some smoking history. Her tio had that issue, and it would knock him out after taking a teaspoon of it. Something Yunior would never try. . Yunior would see Girlfriend in the halls and they would trade hi’s but nothing more than that.
Not even a smile. She never came back to his apartment, never conversed with him in the hallway, and Yunior knew that that was the end of it. A month later after returning from the liquor store, he noticed Girlfriend with a new look. She had cut her hair short. “Makes you look fierce. ”, he complimented. The first time I heard her smile was when she said “That’s exactly what I wanted. ” I wish that there was more to it. That there would have been a happier outcome from their meeting in Yunior’s apartment.
