Things We Should Do Better

On Saturday night we were coming home on the bus from a dinner party. It was two o’clock in the morning, and the double-decker bus was packed. Behind us a group of male college students were continuing their party. Most of the other passengers were sleeping, including me, but at some point my boyfriend tapped me on the shoulder and asked for a plastic bag. I gave him a small paper bag with holes in it, which was all I had. He promptly threw up: partly in the bag, but mostly on the seat, on the floor and on his shoes. It was not a pleasant sight or smell. The food did not seem to have evolved much in the few hours since dinner. Luckily for me, we had not been able to find two seats together and had been forced to sit across the aisle from one another. His seat companion remained blessedly asleep.

Our fellow passengers lost no time in reacting to the odor.

“It smells like pesto!” (Actually, it was risotto with Portobello mushrooms and brie.)

“Excuse me, would you mind throwing that away?”

My boyfriend staggered downstairs to find a trash can.

“That guy has made my day!” exclaimed one satisfied traveler.

But darker voices dissented. “We need to throw that guy off the bus,” they muttered.

Did I defend his honor and stand up for him against those who wished to vote him into exile? I did not. I kept my mouth shut. I was not about to find myself dropped off in the middle of nowhere with nothing but owls and night rats for company. After all, I was not the one who had been intemperate with drink.

While he was downstairs searching for the trash can, his seat companion awoke to find himself enveloped in sickening fumes. He pressed himself back against the window and suffered through the rest of the journey in horrified silence.

The other passengers made merry about the vomit for the next twenty minutes until we reached our destination.

As the bus slowed at our stop, we were surprised to see two of our friends emerge sleepily from the front of the bus, on their way home from a wedding. I immediately enlightened them about my boyfriend’s contribution to the journey.

“I thought I smelled vomit,” said my friend. “Didn’t I say that? I said to Michael, ‘Someone on this bus has been sick.’”

“Should we tell the driver?” I asked as we got off.

“No!” hissed my boyfriend. “Whatever you do, don’t do that! I don’t want to be arrested for vandalizing a bus.”

“It’s a good thing they don’t have your details on a DNA database. As soon as they had analyzed the vomit, they would have been knocking at your door to arrest you.”

I then endured an hour of apologies and explanations as to why this unbecoming episode had nothing at all to do with drunkenness and everything to do with the lurching motion of the bus. I finally fell asleep, only to wake the next morning to another round of clarifications about how the bus vomiting was purely an issue of motion sickness but not intoxication, etc., etc.

“I don’t care if you were drunk,” I said. “How many times do I have to say that I really don’t care? It just doesn’t matter.”

Then I made the mistake of letting slip that the hubbly-bubbly water pipe which our hosts brought out after dinner had contained actual tobacco.

“I thought it was fruit!” said my boyfriend.

“No, it was apple-flavored tobacco. Why would anybody smoke fruit?”

“Do you mean that I smoked? You know how I feel about smoking!”

“It’s not the same as smoking cigarettes. You didn’t offend anybody. You have not irreparably damaged your health.”

My reassurances were in vain. I gratefully rushed off to a play rehearsal, leaving him to writhe in the torments of hangover and hypocrisy.