by Zaina Arafat
But then, what to make of M.O’D., the editorial assistant at my magazine job in New York? “Can you bring me those author contracts by COB today?” she ordered, as if I were her personal secretary rather than everyone’s. I did it anyway, eagerly. I felt compelled to impress her, as though her blanket disapproval made it necessary to dispel the assumption that I was an idiot. Every Friday, the staff would go out for happy hour, one of the few chances I had to speak with M.O’D. outside the office. But I was always stuck with a seat at the opposite end of a long picnic table, her back somehow always facing me. “Maybe she just feels threatened by you,” offered the syndications coordinator, my only friend at the magazine. It was a generous interpretation, as M.O’D. clearly had no reason to be threatened. While she got to shape essays, my interactions with writers was limited to cutting their checks, then fielding passive-aggressive emails if someone hadn’t received payment. The highlight of my time at the magazine was the month spent preparing to perform at the office holiday party, hoping my a cappella rendition of “Santa Baby” would win her over. When the evening finally arrived, my heart sank as I watched her get up from her table and leave the room just before I stepped on stage.
Editorial assistant: mild disregard, eventually morphing into a complete shunning.
I looked at the constellation of names scattered across the page. I started randomly drawing a line connecting them until Molly bounded into the shop. “There you are!” she said. “We’ve all been sitting in the van waiting for you!”
Though she seemed uncomfortable after finding out I was a “homosexual,” Molly now followed me wherever I went, never more than a few feet away, and chimed in on every conversation. When I’d wander off with someone else she’d trail along. “Groups of three at all times, guys!” she’d announce, as though she were a chaperone at a high school dance. During morning meditation I’d feel her staring at me as she anxiously peeled skin off her face, her feet, her nose. At night she’d sit on the edge of my bed and pick.
I tried to seem calm when I asked her to stop one day after group, while we were hanging out in the basement. “I’m just really OCD about germs,” I said.
Molly paused, then said, “I think you’re cool, but I get the feeling you don’t like me.”
My stomach churned a little, and a smidge of guilt tainted my conscience. “I do like you,” I said, “but when you crowd me I feel irritated.”
That’s how we were supposed to express our emotions, with “When you . . . I feel” statements. Molly nodded, seemingly entranced. “Well, what I’ve learned,” she said, “is that when someone bothers you in some way, like really gets under your skin, it’s usually because they remind you of someone else in your life.” She nodded vigorously as if convincing herself of her own theory, pleased to be in the counselor role. She looked to me for approval. I found myself wanting her to cite her sources—where had she learned this? From whom? It seemed somewhat ridiculous, almost too convenient. “So, me, for example, do I remind you of someone?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“A person who crowds me and makes me feel irritated.”
She laughed and pressed her palm against my shoulder. “Seriously! Like your mom, or maybe your dad?”
I shrugged and sat down on the couch. I tried to think of who in my life Molly reminded me of—my parents? my brother? Anna?—but my mind inevitably snapped back to Charlotte, like an excited puppy on a leash.
“What’s wrong?” Molly prodded.
I looked around and then lowered my voice. “I like someone here.”
“Is it Greg?” We both looked over at him; he was standing at the foosball table, dramatically twirling the rods. Earlier Molly had spotted us walking back from the woods, leaves stuck to our clothing and bits of dirt marring our bare legs. “Were you two doing what I think you were doing?” she’d asked.
“No!” we’d responded in unison. In fact, I had just given him a blow job, hoping that it would distract us both from the things we really wanted. Giving head was the easiest way to manufacture a sense of control, one that I’d been craving ever since I’d gotten to the Ledge. It didn’t last long—we’d gone weeks without physical contact—and when he came, I realized I hadn’t thought of Charlotte the entire time.
“Come on, you guys,” Molly had whined while I’d removed pine needles from my shorts. “You’re not supposed to be doing that!”
I looked over at Greg as he sent the players into a mad spin, the ball bouncing off the table and against the wall. “Someone else,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you say something to whoever it is?”
“It’s not like that, with this person.”
“Have you ever actually told anyone you’ve fallen for how you felt about them?”
Had I? I realized then that I had never confessed my feelings to any of the women. Not even to Kate. For a moment I considered saying something to Charlotte. But I was stuck there and would have to see her every day afterward. And yet, even if I never had to see her again, I wasn’t sure that I’d want her to know. Because then what?
“I haven’t, actually,” I said.
“Well, maybe you should try it and see what happens,” Molly said. “You know, the definition of insanity—”
“I know the definition of insanity, Molly, thanks.” Again I felt the guilt smidge, so I softened my answer. “Look, don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’ve been rereading Pia Mellody.” I took the book out of my purse to prove it to her. “I’m trying to figure out what’s causing this, and how I can make it stop.”
I’d just begun reading a section on the emotional cycles of love addiction, which Pia described with formulaic certainty. As love addicts begin to develop a relationship with the object of their affection, she wrote, they stop seeing who that person actually is, but instead focus on a fantasy image, which they place like a beautiful mask over the head of the real human being.
Molly shook her head and smiled. “Read all you want,” she said with uncharacteristic authority. “But you’ll just end up a more informed prisoner.”
A chill passed through me. I thought about that for a moment before I opened the book to where I’d left off.
KATE AND I HAD BEEN SECRETLY SLEEPING TOGETHER for almost a month when I noticed a bruise on her upper thigh. “What’s that?” As the question left my mouth I feared I wouldn’t want to hear the answer.
“Oh. Blake,” she said. “He does that when I’m on top of him.”
Kate was a “best-looking” senior-superlatived, field-hockey-captained, Camel Light–smoking, Dead-bootleg-listening straight woman. She was also my freshman-year college roommate. Blake was a golden-dreadlocked, sharp-nosed surfer. He was a townie, and older than both of us. Kate had been sleeping with him for two weeks. I pretended not to mind.
In the light of day, she and I had never spoken about our nights. The closest we came to talking about it was the morning after the first time we hooked up. We’d gone out for her birthday the night before, to the bar where I worked. She wore a Billabong hoodie that hugged her torso. Over drinks I’d given her a present: David Gray’s White Ladder. After opening her gift, she leaned across the table and kissed me on the cheek. I could smell Blue Moon on her breath. We ordered stuffed oysters, a questionable choice at a college dive. A pre-set eighties mix blared through the speakers; we got up to dance when “Take On Me” came on, moving our bodies closer and shimmying our way to the floor, then grabbing on to each other to pull ourselves back up. I could feel people watching, and I liked it. Once home we put on the CD—it was whiny, brooding, melodramatic—and we lay side by side to listen. Nothing out of the ordinary until she began caressing my face; tracing my eyebrows, my nose, my lips. Then she kissed me. Nervous, I stopped her. “I don’t want to ruin our friendship,” I said. It was a line from movies, what the girl always said when a guy friend made a move.
Kate tilted her head back a little too far and laughed. “Don’t worry. We’re just,
you know, ‘experimenting.’”
So I didn’t worry. Besides, I wasn’t attracted to Kate, so maybe it was safe to let her “experiment” with me. But when I woke up the next morning and glanced at her beside me, still asleep, the danger was apparent. She looked different than she had the day before. How had I never noticed her long brown lashes? Her strict, elegant nose? Her pink pastel lips? I slid out of bed and tiptoed to my side of the room. I had no desire to leave her, but was afraid that waking up beside each other would be too jarring.
It was the first day of spring break. We were spending the week road-tripping along the Florida coast with her friends. It was a thirteen-hour drive south to Fort Lauderdale, our first stop. After about thirty minutes I heard Kate shifting in her bed. “What time is it?” she called out from under the covers, her voice muffled by the comforter.
“Still early,” I said. After that we said nothing to each other as we packed on opposite sides of the room. I filled the silence with paranoid speculation. Was she ashamed by what we’d done? Had it been awful for her? Or had she been too drunk to remember? For a moment I worried that I had somehow taken advantage of her, or worse, imagined it. But, no, she had made the first move. And it had happened. I could still smell her on my pajamas.
In the car on the way to pick up her friends we slowed to a stop at a traffic light. “So,” she said, “does this mean we can’t join the military?”
Over the next week, we made out in Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Miami, Key West. She’d drop a quick kiss on my cheek when no one was looking, touch my thigh under tables, climb into my sleeping bag after everyone else had passed out. We returned home and continued, finally having sex.
Three weeks after Florida I watched her leave the bar with Blake in the middle of my set. I’d never seen him before, and I asked the bartender who he was. Apparently he was a local craftsman. He’d been in Costa Rica for the past few months on an extended surfing trip. He had honey-colored dreadlocks and a deep tan. I kept eyeing him, watching him order a succession of Red Stripes and greet the numerous women who came up to hug him. He seemed equally excited to talk to each of them, and I imagined that every last one of them walked away feeling wanted. I noticed him noticing Kate, which triggered deep panic. I kept looking over as he subtly inched his way closer to where she was sitting. I wanted to cry when I saw him tap her on the shoulder, then offer a little wave when she turned around to see who it was. A good move, I thought to myself. I overheard him ordering another beer, and asking if she wanted one as well, which she did. “Hey!” the chef called out to me. “Order up. Orders, in fact.” I looked to the kitchen window and saw several steaming plates waiting to be carried out. I had no choice but to turn away from the horrific scene of Kate and Blake, just as they were laughing about something. Before heading to the kitchen I reached over the bar and poured myself a shot of Jägermeister, then another.
The place was packed, and I could only catch snippets of them talking. Why did they keep laughing? What was so funny? I thought I might die when she tapped his stomach, the lines of his six-pack visible through his shirt. But no, that came later, as I watched him drop a twenty on the bar, take her hand, and lead her out the front door.
After they left I drank three Rail Royales, the house specialty consisting of a shot of every liquor in the rail and a splash of Sprite. I clocked out, got in my car, and backed into a dumpster.
I’m not sure how long I’d been sitting there when a cop appeared and tapped on the plastic driver’s-side window. Instead of unzipping it, I opened the door and spilled out of the car. “She’s sleeping with someone else,” I cried as I stumbled into the policeman. “And I’m falling in love with her.” He collected me in his arms as I thrashed against his chest, tipsy passersby stopping to view the spectacle. I imagined that in fear, if not compassion, he dropped the charge from a DUI to underage possession. He called a cab and sent me home.
I didn’t see Kate until the following night. I took the campus bus back to the dorms after my shift, and as it approached my stop I was dreading the sight of her, knowing she’d spent the entire night having sex with someone else, while also desperately hoping that she’d be home. When I got to our room she was sitting on the couch, eating a bowl of Easy Mac. “Hey,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”
I told her about what happened after she left the bar. “I still have to pay a fine,” I said. “For the dumpster.”
Kate didn’t respond. “Did you hear me?” I asked.
She stood up and threw the bowl at my head, something I’d only seen my mother do. Was I now my passive-aggressive father? It shattered against the wall as I dodged out of the way; orange elbow noodles splattered across the wall. “You think it’s my fault!” she yelled. “Don’t you? You think it’s my fault this happened to you?”
At that moment I knew: her guilt, encouraged by my immediate surrender and lack of resistance, would eventually destroy us. At the same time, it would be my only weapon against her.
I apologized and assured her that of course it wasn’t her fault that I’d crashed into that dumpster, it was mine. I cleaned up the mess and brought her a new bowl of pasta. I made sure to get a little smudge of orange sauce on my T-shirt, so she wouldn’t forget what she’d done. We watched a movie and I held her while she dropped little kisses on my cheeks and said it made her sad to imagine me hurting. “I hate when we fight like that,” she told me.
I pulled her closer and ran my fingers through her hair. “Let’s never again.”
When she smashed another dish the following year I slit my wrist with a piece of it. Blood dripped all over the linoleum. She took me to get stitches and didn’t leave my side for a week.
Of course we both stayed in town for the summer, neither of us went anywhere. Kate was taking extra classes so she could double major, and because she’d failed astronomy that spring and needed three science credits to graduate. Blake was in San Sebastián until the fall, surfing. He had ended things with Kate before leaving, not wanting to be tied down and preferring to “preserve the time they’d spent together before it soured.” She came home crying after he told her this, and I tried hard not to show how relieved I was.
I had spent most of the money I’d made in the spring on repairs to both my car and the dumpster, meaning I needed to keep my DJ gig and cast aside my tentative Summer at Sea plans. Instead, the only places I traveled existed along the length of Kate, beneath her clothes, inside her mouth, all on her white-sheeted bed that felt like a frothy ocean. An art and fashion major, she painted, drew, collaged, and dressed me. She drank and tasted me. She did everything but feed me, though not for lack of trying. I had lost control over my own volition, or maybe I’d chosen to wrap it up in her.
Once, as I sat naked in her bed, we both glanced at my reflection in the window and noticed the vertebrae of my spine through my skin. “You’re getting really thin,” she said. “I’m scared I might shatter you.”
At work one evening I overheard my boss say to the bartender, “That girl who comes in here, the blonde?” he nodded in Kate’s direction as she hovered over the pool table about to sink the eight ball. “I want to fuck her until her back shatters.”
I fantasized about impaling him with the cue stick. But I said and did nothing. I was terrified that if I did, he’d know. And if anyone knew, if even Kate acknowledged our relationship, it might end. The less visible I was to her, the thinner I got and the less space I took up in her life, the more likely things were to continue.
I remember how we slept. I’d lie flat on my back and Kate would unzip my hoodie halfway down my chest, slide her hand onto my breast, and place her head on my clavicle. I’d burrow my nose into her hair. When she wanted sex she would gently caress my nipple; it would harden and she’d run her pierced tongue down my stomach, arriving underneath a pair of tattered boxers that I wore as pajamas. I’d pull her on top of me, aligning our bodies so that we practically snapped into place. I always came with such force that my back
would shoot upward, propelling me forward and crashing into her.
“I want to marry you,” she said one night as we lay wrapped in a sheet on the floor, having slid like salamanders off the bed.
I winced with fear and a fleeting disgust. A relationship with a woman meant failure: I had failed to get a man, failed to find something normal, failed to not be pathetic. “This is why you don’t have a boyfriend!” my mother yelled each time I did anything she deemed wrong, even if it had no relation whatsoever to what I’d done or why I didn’t have a boyfriend, even when I did have one. I’d spill juice on the kitchen floor and that was why no man would ever love me. I’d forget to get a pedicure on the first day of spring and it was the reason I would never get married.
“Marry me, then,” I said to Kate.
“I love the scars on your feet,” she said. She kissed the top of my foot—I had kissed the bottom of hers a number of times. “I love these scars.” She placed her lips beneath my hipbone, tracing a thin scar that my mother had laid with a high heel’s spike. “I want to protect you forever.”
“Okay.” I nodded. “I want you to.”
Two years into our relationship, when I sensed that Kate was beginning to drift, I stopped eating. I’d try to initiate sex and she would swiftly turn it into a cuddling session. She’d come home later and later without explanation. If I asked, she’d say she was at her studio on campus. But what fashion student needed to pull all-nighters? The more she pulled away, the less food I consumed. Maybe starving myself was an act of passive resistance, a way of regaining the control I had surrendered to her and refused to take back, which would’ve been the healthier option. Instead, I chose to leverage her guilt.