“How long has this been going on?”
“There’s no need to raise your voice.”
“How long?” you say and you obey. You use an indoor voice.
“As you know, I was quite taken with you when we met,” I say and maybe there is hope. “You flirted with me and we had a connection and I didn’t want to spring myself on you, you know, ask you right there. So I waited.”
“Uh-huh,” you say and you cross your arms and tap your foot.
“And then I learned about you, Beck,” and I feel like the guy in The Princess Bride and you are as stubborn as Buttercup. “I was enchanted, Beck. I still am. There’s nothing in that box for you to be afraid of.”
You look at the box and you look at me. I don’t know what to do and I feel inadequately prepared for my job as a zookeeper. I want you to see it all, I want you to know the depth of my passion, the power of my grasp, and the certainty of my love. But then again, you’re PMSing, you’re probably still scared from being in the wall, and every once in a while you mumble something about missing that asshole Peach.
“Go ahead,” I say, because there’s no turning back. You can’t put your panties back in the box. Literally and figuratively, the box is scratched and torn; you’ve wrecked it. This is not what I imagined. I want to lead you away from the splayed box, but as a zookeeper, I know I need to keep a safe distance from the animal for the animal’s sake and my own. You burrow through my things that you think of as your things and now you find my pièce de résistance, The Book of Beck. It’s beautiful. You should be flattered that a stand-up guy like me who’s smarter than most guys is creating a tribute to you.
“It’s not done,” I say. “I’m going to have it bound.”
“My stories,” you say and you are you again.
“They’re all there,” I say. We are fine, now, we are.
Any second now, you will run across the room and hug me. I am wrong. Your mouth contorts. You bark, “This is my e-mail.”
“Beck, please,” I say. “It’s a tribute.”
“You hacked my fucking e-mail.”
“I didn’t hack anything,” I snap, because again, you let me down. And you could have told your mother to cancel your fucking phone. That’s on you.
You close the book and drop it in the box. The sun is setting and it’s almost time to turn on the lights. I step toward you. You flinch and you are hateful and here we go again. Now you have new mean names for me like murderer and killer and liar. I remain tough, focused like a zookeeper must when the animals turn violent.
“You don’t mean that,” I say, calm.
“You’re a twisted fucking stalker and you don’t know what I mean.”
“No I’m not,” I say. “No I’m not.”
I chase you. I deflect your barbs and I block you when you come at me. It’s so easy to grab both of your wrists because you’re so little and I’m so strong and I have no trouble forcing you onto the sofa. You can’t fight and when you promise to be good, which you always do, I let go of you and return to my post at the door.
You are panting. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I love you.”
“This isn’t love. This is sick.”
“This is our everythingship,” I say. Our word.
“You need help,” you say. You are deaf. “You’re a sicko.”
I would like to be a bigger person, but you call me names and then I think about your crimes.
“You should be locked up, Joe. Okay? Do you understand that? This is all bad.”
You don’t close the refrigerator all the way and twice in your place we’ve had to toss out all the food.
“You’re a sick person and sick people need help, Joe.”
I am healthy and you are a trollop; you threw yourself at Nicky. You’re incapable of admitting that you’re jealous of Blythe.
“Joe, let me call the doctors. Please, let me help you.”
I don’t need doctors and you lie, even now you are looking around for a weapon. You try to return clothes you’ve already worn and even though you’re my girlfriend, you let me go to voice mail when I call you sometimes. You’re not always attentive with your razor and sometimes I think the lady who waxes you doesn’t have a license to wax anyone because your thighs are often coated in little red dots that don’t feel good against my nice, clean legs.
“Joe, you need to let me go now.”
And you need to stop judging me. You’re a slob, and not in the way you think you are. You leave used tampons in your trash and you don’t take the garbage out frequently enough and for a week last month, your apartment reeked of moon-blood. You still masturbate even though you have the honor of access to my cock. That silk blouse you’re wearing? You look slutty, Beck. I thought so this morning, but in an everythingship you have to let things roll off of you and focus on the positive.
“I’m leaving,” you say. Ha.
“You don’t want to do that right now.” I remain calm because someone has to remain calm. “People always regret what they do in emotional moments like this.”
You don’t even bother trying to get past me. You respect my strength. But I see you looking around. You are an animal and you run into my bedroom. Mine. You reach onto my shelf. Mine. You pick up the Italian Dan Brown. You throw it at me.
“Where’s my phone, Joe?”
“In good hands,” I promise. And I pull it out of my pocket. “You left it on the table.”
You call me a sick fuck and you groan and you’re a slob and slobs suffer.
“Stop imagining things, Beck.” I would be a great zookeeper. I am good at this, slowly closing in on the animal as it works itself into a tizzy.
“I’ll scream. You don’t know how I can scream. Your neighbors will come. They’ll know.”
I don’t mean it but I say it: “I’ll kill you if you scream.”
And it’s over. You begin to yelp and spring at me and I don’t like you right now. You make me do terrible things like hold you down and clap my hand over your mouth. You make me twist your arms and bear down on you, and this is our bed. You kick.
“You scream and it’s over.”
You just kick.
“Beck, stop fighting me.”
You squirm but I’m stronger. You’re a danger to yourself, to the world. You don’t know what you’re saying and you need me now more than ever and eventually, your anger transforms into sadness. Again. Your muffled blubbering heats the palm of my hand and I don’t loosen my grip. “You’re gonna wind up with nodes like your friend in Pitch Perfect if you keep yelling like that.”
You stop, finally. I make a proposal. “Beck, blink your eyes if you promise not to scream anymore. If you promise, I’ll take my hand away.”
You blink. I am a man of my word and I take my hand off your mouth.
“I’m sorry,” you say. You are hoarse and you flash your eyes at me. “Joe, we can talk about this.”
I can’t help but laugh. Ha! You think we’re gonna talk while you’re in the middle of a PMS explosion? We can’t talk now! Your mood swings are psychotic! My goodness, Beck, do you think I’m that stupid? But you beg.
Please, Joe, please.
I love the sound of your voice and that would have been my #10:
Beck has a beautiful voice.
Unfortunately, you were lying and you kick once more, trying to escape. The worst part of being a zookeeper is the moment when I have to save the animal from its emotions, from its wild, illogical nature. You kick and scream. You bite. But your Portman-sized body is no match for mine, Beck. I count to three. I give you the chance to shut up. But you don’t shut up and after three, I take your little head in my hand—sorry—and smash it against the wall—sorry. You are going to be so sorry too when you calm down and realize what you made me do.
I am lonely in the silence and I kiss your forehead. Clearly, you have problems and your menstrual cycle issues are just the tip of the iceberg. What kind of a girl climbs into a wall? You c
an’t accept my love when you’re this messed up. And you’ve got one hell of a way of asking for help. I move fast. You won’t be asleep for long. I pack supplies and sling my messenger bag over my shoulder and lift you up and carry you down the stairs and hail a cab.
The driver sizes you up and wants to know which hospital. But we’re not going to the hospital, Beck. We’re going to my shop. This is New York. The driver doesn’t ask questions. Animals know you don’t fuck with a zookeeper.
47
YOU won’t be happy when you wake up alone in the cage. But I have done my best. I left you a plastic bottle of root beer, a plastic bottle of water, a bag of pretzels, some crayons I found in a drawer, and a notepad. It’s not like you can ever say I starved you or deprived you. You’re safe. I even brought the shop’s laptop downstairs and put the Pitch Perfect DVD on with speakers on a chair outside of the cage. You’ve seen the movie enough to know that Beca does some terrible things to Jesse. She rebuffs his advances, she mocks his interests, she bites his head off, and she won’t let him get close. But in the end, she makes a bold public proclamation of love in the form of a song and he forgives her for all the terrible things she did. And I am going to forgive you, Beck. I kiss you good-bye and I lock the basement doors and text Ethan:
Hey buddy, no need to come in tomorrow. Pipe burst. Gonna be a few days!
The miracle about love is that I’m still not angry with you. I feel sorry for you. It must be so hard to carry all that anger around. I don’t have that kind of anger in me. You were so vicious and I wish I could reach inside of you and suck the venom out.
I unlock the door to your place and I prove my forgiveness: I take out the trash. It reeks of bananas and womanhood. All of this might be your way of punishing me for the mistakes I’ve made, for my hands on Karen Minty, for my thoughts of Amy Adam.
I flop onto the couch in your living room. Something jabs my ass and I stand up and jam my hand between the cushions and it’s my copy of Love Story. I don’t remember you asking to borrow it. It’s soiled with milky coffee, shards of tobacco from the cigarettes you smoke for no reason, a gum wrapper, ink stains, sand. How the fuck did sand get in there? Sand.
And I’m still not angry with you. I love you, my little piggy. I flip through Love Story and wonder why you stole it from me, why you tarnished it with an 800 number for a rice cooker you’ll never buy. I would have given my Love Story to you. I would have given you anything. I look at the blank television set and wonder if this is my fault too? Was I stingy with you? Did I miss a hint you dropped about Love Story? I can’t sit here anymore and I go into the kitchen to clean my book. But of course you’re all out of paper towels and I remember one of my favorite nights in this kitchen, a few weeks ago, a few eons ago.
We’d had a great day together even though you’d been tied up with school and I’d been slammed at the shop. I joked that I’d be arriving at your place at seven sharp and that I expected dinner to be on the table, the joke being the fact that you can’t cook. But when I hopped up those steps that lead to you, you saw me coming from out the window and I didn’t have to buzz. You ran to the door and grabbed my hand and told me to close my eyes. And I did.
You led me into your apartment and guided me to the sofa and I didn’t peek and you told me to open my eyes and I did. There you were, in your robe, holding a paper plate with a sweet potato you had sliced down the middle and molded into the shape of a heart. I looked up at you and smiled and you teased, “Welcome home, honey.”
I fucked you like the glorious animal that you are and you told me the long-winded story of how you bought a sweet potato—the first one was rotten and you had to go back!—and poked holes in it and gutted it and splayed the skin, the way a high school sophomore splays a frog’s abdomen in biology.
I laughed at the still untouched sweet potato. “Now all I see is a frog.”
You were serious and soft. “No, Joe. That’s my heart.”
Then we ordered Chinese because one sweet potato was never going to be enough and I love you. But now I am here alone.
I use one of your little tank tops to wipe down Love Story and you won’t be knocked out for that long and it’s time to get to work. I’m gonna need your computer so I go back to your bedroom and take it off the nightstand where it lives and I go to the end of the bed I built and I sit and immediately, I am on my feet. Under the tangled sheets there is something hard and flat: a MacBook Air. You don’t have a MacBook Air and I don’t like the MacBook Air and I take it out of your room because I don’t want that thing in the bed that I built.
I need a drink and I open the freezer and there’s our vodka but there’s something else in here, gin. Since when do you drink gin and own a MacBook Air? I take the vodka into the living room and sit on your filthy couch. I take a swig. Maybe your father got it for you. Maybe your mother got it for you. Maybe Chana left it here and maybe there was an intruder and maybe I should grow a set and open it. How bad can it be?
I’m an imaginative guy and I picture a lot of scenarios, but what I find in the MacBook Air blows my mind: a screensaver shot of you and Dr. Nicky taking one of those motherfucking pictures they call a selfie. You’re both naked in my bed, the one I brought back on the ferry, the bed I built for you, for us. He’s in our fucking bed and I go into the kitchen and take the gin out of the freezer and pour it into the sink over all the dirty dishes. Fuck you, computer. Fuck you, Nicky.
But when I reenter your living room, the MacBook asshole is still on the coffee table and if computers could smirk, this flimsy piece of shit computer would be smirking at me. I have to calm down and who knows? Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. Maybe this MacBook asshole is actually old and you made a mistake a long time ago. But the homepage of this MacBook Asshole is a Gmail account for [email protected]. You opened the account a couple of weeks ago, right before I met Amy Adam, when you started to get quiet on me, when I started to get suspicious. You opened it for Nicky. You are a bitch and you told him that you thought I might be reading your e-mail. Cunt. I read.
Nicky: Wasn’t I right? Your boyfriend can’t read what he doesn’t know exists.
You: You’re terrible but you’re also right.
Nicky: You like your new toy?
You: It’s too much a whole computer ahahahha
Nicky: Stop.
You: Make me
That’s all I need to see. There are over 437 e-mails between you and Nicky and I’m not crazy. That middle-aged hunchback has been defiling you and taking advantage of you and letting you pay him to fuck you. When I felt like you were pulling away, you were in fact pulling away. You’ve been reduced to secret e-mail where it’s all about Nicky. All those times you apologized to me for being late/tired/overwhelmed with work/busy/in class/full, you were either sleeping with Nicky, talking about sleeping with Nicky, or writing to Nicky. I open the photos and there’s one thumbnail of particular interest. Nicky stands over my bed holding your naked calf. He’s laughing and he’s wearing my Holden Caulfield hat you were going to bring back to Macy’s.
I’ll admit it, Beck. That hurts. But I can’t put all the blame on you. I’m the one who fucked up and let you down. I knew something was wrong. I have instincts and I ignored them and now you’re locked in a cage because of me. I had the opportunity to take the mouse out of your house and I didn’t. No wonder you couldn’t stop screaming at me. You have every right to be mad at me for failing to protect you from this lecherous, Vans-clad semidoctor. I send Lynn and Chana a note from your secret account:
Things got ugly with Nicky. I’m so afraid Joe is going to find out and I am sooo behind on writing. I’m running away from it all to write for a few days. Love you girlies xo Beck
We can’t have your classmates worrying about your whereabouts, so I switch to your legitimate e-mail account and reach out to Blythe in a way that ensures she won’t be trying to track you down:
Blythe, omigod big secret, you know my maid story? Your notes were incredible
and I sent it to you-know-where and . . . they want it! I have so much writing to do (they’re brilliant with notes, you should be interning there). Good luck with your workshop and I want us all to get dinner when I’m done writing. Your choice, it’s on me. xo B
I take out your phone and open your Twitter app:
#SocialMediaVacation starts now. Xo B
48
I think I have memorized the treacherous e-mails between you and Dr. Nicky. I had to know them because I had to prepare an exam for you. I am cold, calm; I put us before my own selfish rage and I write the questions on a yellow legal pad that I bought at the deli on the way to the shop. I am ready and I carry my heavy messenger bag of computers to the bottom of the stairs and try to calm you down. You are shrieking. You should preserve your energy. “Okay, Beck, that’s enough.”
You look like hell, you poor thing. Your hair is a wreck and you’ve been crying. “What are you trying to do to me, Joe?”
“I’m here, it’s okay.”
You look at the computer I set up and you shriek again and clap your hands over your ears. I don’t understand because Pitch Perfect is your favorite but I fucked up and forgot to hit PLAY. The intro screen has been repeating since you woke up, which appears to have been a long time ago. I hit the MUTE button. “There now. How’s that, Beck?” Alicious1027.
You blubber and whimper and you’re a mess but you nod, I think, and I tell you to walk over to the sliding drawer where I deposit two flashcards.
You look around. “What the fuck is this?”
“The drawer, Beck.”
I tap the drawer where Mr. Mooney gave me pizza, where I gave Benji club soda. Sometimes people do change and I want you to pick up the cards.
I explain. “You need to take the two cards. Then we’ll begin. One reads ‘yes’ and one reads ‘no.’ ”
“Joe,” you say and you’re not walking, you’re not listening.
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