“Fucking great,” he says. “Thanks for asking. You take care.”
He moves past me toward the door to the men’s room. In the second he is brushing by, the scent of him hits me—sandalwood, Scotch, sex, pot—and my mind is filled with a hundred, thousand, million moments of us naked, burning, hurtling toward each other and colliding with sweet, sickening, bottomless need.
“Erik,” I call after him, my voice strangled by memory.
He freezes, his back still to me.
“Don’t,” he says.
“Don’t what?”
He comes back to stand in front of me, too close to be casual, should anyone be looking. I glance up the stairs. His hand reaches up, touches my cheek and I don’t stop him, then he closes the distance between us until we are pressed together, hip to hip, chest to chest.
I take a step back and run into the wall.
His hand whips up to grab the back of my head, he yanks me forward and presses his mouth to mine. I sink into the deep, painful pleasure that is Erik.
After a couple of seconds I push him away, but I’ve let it happen and we both know it.
“Damn it,” I say.
He laughs as he backs off.
“Bye, Mara.”
“Goodbye.”
He moves toward the stairs.
“Oh,” he says, pausing with a foot on the first step.
“Yes?”
“He doesn’t have a brother, does he?” Erik asks.
“What?”
“Your new guy. I hope he doesn’t have a—”
“You bastard,” I say.
And then he’s taking the stairs up, two at a time, and all the strength has gone from my legs and I’m sliding down the wall and sitting, crumpled on the cold, dirty floor.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper, alone in the hallway. “I didn’t know.”
Not that that’s given me a second of comfort.
Bernadette finds me at the bottom of the stairs and drags me into the women’s bathroom.
“Okay, what is it?”
“Erik,” I say in a whisper.
“Here?”
I nod.
Bernadette puts her arms around me and hugs me hard.
“Holy shit,” she says.
But Bernadette doesn’t really know. She knows about Erik, though she’s never met him, but she doesn’t know I ever went back to him after Lucas died. That part is my own burden, and far too difficult to explain, even to Bernadette.
She makes me splash cold water on my face and put on lipstick. I’m paler than usual and my hair is plastered to my head.
“I look like shit.”
“You’re fine,” she says. “Come on, this doesn’t have to be a big deal, right?”
“Right.”
“If he’s still there, you just ignore him,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Either way, we’ll get the bill and leave.”
“All right.”
She frowns. “He won’t...he won’t say anything...he wouldn’t, like, come up to us or anything, would he?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I, um, I already talked to him.”
“What?”
I nod. “Just now.”
“Down here?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
She shakes her head. “Whoa. Can you tell me—never mind, you can tell me about that later. Let’s go.”
I nod again and let her take me by the hand and lead me upstairs.
“He’s gone,” I say, as we turn the corner at the top of the stairs and the tables come into view.
“Good,” Bernadette says. “Come on.”
Chapter 31
You never thought you’d be a cheater.
“We have to stop,” you told Erik the last time. It’s been over for weeks now, but you will never be clear of him, of it.
And now you walk along Queen Street with Lucas, popping in and out of the tiny galleries that have been sprouting up there, places you both might get a start showing your work. The neighborhood is edgy, scruffy, and replete with homeless people of the mentally ill variety.
“Art and the mentally unstable,” Lucas says. He is holding your hand and smiling at the spring sunshine. “It’s an appropriate mix, don’t you think?”
You laugh and he leans in to kiss your cheek and you blink at the pain his sweetness causes.
You have to leave him. You don’t want to, but you are false. False, false, false—you don’t deserve him.
But you keep giving yourself one more week, one more day, another hour before you have to do it. You keep hoping to wake up to it all being okay.
You ought to know, just by looking at your parents, that it will never all be okay. Once you are damaged, once you are compromised, there is no way back to the way you were, no retrieval, no healing, nothing but a struggle to keep going.
But one more day cannot be too much to ask.
Especially a crisp, shiny, fresh spring day where you have love in one hand, a steaming latte in the other, and the dream of a bright future filling your eyes.
But evening comes, and dinner with Lucas’s parents comes, and the half-brother Lucas hates comes to dinner.
And he is...
he is...
ohfuckohfuckohfuck...
Erik.
Erik, the first son of Lucas’s mother. The one you’ve heard about, the kid whose father took him from his estranged wife when Erik was four and moved from state to state, eluding the authorities. The one who ran away from his dad, got arrested for breaking into a variety store and spent a year with abusive foster parents before coming to live, at age ten, with his mother, stepfather, and little brother, Lucas. Lucas, whose perfect life suburban life he undoubtedly resented. Lucas, who he bullied and tormented and who therefore has, even at twenty-one, no pity for Erik’s hardship and no patience for his repentance.
“Nice to meet you,” you say, and shake his hand, which is sweating. Erik’s hands don’t usually sweat. You try to banish your knowledge of him, pretend to yourself that he is new. Your face is hot. You order a Bloody Mary and drink it too fast.
Lucas and his parents are tense, but it has nothing to do with you. You hope. Somehow you survive the evening.
You survive the walk home with Lucas and his ranting and raging about his parents trying to force him to accept Erik, whom he does not consider a brother, into his life.
Despite your guilt, you can’t help feeling impatient with Lucas for his intractability, his judgment, his lack of forgiveness for someone who had a nightmare of a childhood.
“And then,” Lucas is saying as he stomps back and forth in front of your bed, “then he had the nerve to show up here six months ago and tell me he wanted to start fresh! To...what was it he said...to make amends and forge a new relationship, to be real brothers!”
“You never told me,” you say.
“This is a guy who made my life hell for years! He’s not worth our time, Mara.”
“But...”
“I told him where he could shove his fucking amends,” Lucas continues. “I said to him: you’ll never change, you’re the same loser you’ve always been, and you’re lucky anyone in our family lets you near us. But I don’t have to. I might have to help you get a job, but only because our mother begged me to. I don’t have to love you or like you or forgive you.”
“You helped him get a job?”
“Yeah, at school. I’m not even sure what he ended up doing.”
You retreat inwards, fighting horror.
Sex is worse than usual that night, but if you have to grit your teeth and fake orgasm and every touch feels like a violation, it’s your own fault.
***
5:55 a.m.: double espresso.
6 a.m.: painting.
I have five-hundred dollars left in my bank account, bills coming in, and no credit cards, lines of credit, or surprise inheritances coming in.
I’m fucked, but I must keep working or I will lose all sense o
f purpose. As it is, whether Hugo is here or not, I’m not sleeping well.
I feel like I’m painting with my eyes shut these days, because I disappear as I work. I have given up on geometrics and am painting whatever I feel like.
The face of Lucas appears in many places—in the shadow of an abstract door, in waves crashing onto a shore of purple sand—and when I sleep, I dream of him.
I sleep with Hugo, and dream of Lucas.
And in the waking light before dawn, sometimes I still want Erik.
Dad comes home from treatment and we have a talk during which he seems almost normal—balanced, practical, aware of his personal pitfalls. Shauna is never far, and I hope she’ll do as she promised and stay with him.
“And how are you?” Dad asks, holding both of my hands in his.
In the four seconds it takes me to breathe in and out, I’ve dismissed the thought of any answer but, “Fine.”
“Good,” he says, taking me at my word.
***
Chapter 32
Hugo is staring at me.
He’s been staring for many long minutes, while the only sound has been of my retching into the bedroom garbage can.
I’ve done it.
I shoved him so hard he went flying off the bed and landed on the floor, cracking his elbow on the bedside table on his way down. There’ll be a bruise.
He had no warning, but I did. I should have known.
My skin, all at once, is like an open wound, my insides a battlefield. There is no thought to trace it to, no moment of warning before it happens, and yet I should have known I would not be able do this.
No matter that my heart begs, my body will not let me love.
Hugo assures me he’s okay. But I know he is reconfiguring me, taking me apart and reassembling me with a new fact, a new facet. What does he see?
If I were a painting me, I’d paint a half-person, a woman chased by monsters. They catch at her legs, tear at her clothing, lurk in alleyways and jump out to grab her as she passes, taking chunks of her and swallowing them whole. She reaches for love, runs towards it, grasps and holds it for a beautiful moment before it turns ugly and drags her down.
But I am prone to the melodramatic in my visions. Hugo probably just sees me as a neurotic, a case of damaged goods.
I find my clothes and put them on.
He does the same.
We make our way by silent consent to the family room, away from the bed and the bedroom and all that is contained there. We sit on opposite ends of the couch.
I swallow. “I’m so sorry.”
He stares at me with narrowed eyes and eventually nods.
“Mara,” he says. “I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but I don’t like being thrown out of bed.”
“Of course not.”
“So...?”
This is it, I tell myself, No more hiding, no more lies, no self-pity,
“I have trouble sometimes,” I say. “In bed. Actually I have trouble out of bed too.”
“Okay, let’s try some specifics,” he says.
“There are days when I can’t leave the house,” I say. “And days when I can’t get out of bed, can’t function at all, really. Other times I’m fine. Since I met you I’ve been better—I’ve been working on it.”
“So you’re, what’s it called...”
“Agoraphobic? Not exactly.”
I try to explain that it’s not so simple as a diagnosis, that I don’t fit the “profile,” that I’m just frightened and lacking in faith, with an overactive and morbid imagination.
“And let me guess,” he says. “You’ve had no professional help for this.”
“Well...”
“And you didn’t tell me because you didn’t trust me.”
“No, it’s not like that, I just...”
“Don’t trust anyone,” he says, finishing my thought. “Except maybe Bernadette.”
“You don’t understand,” I say. “It’s myself I don’t trust. And did you really want to know about me standing for an hour at a stoplight because I can’t make myself cross the street? Did you want to hang out and watch me plaster myself against the wall in the subway station because I’m looking for terrorists and scared that someone is going to push me in front of the train? You think you would have stuck around this long?”
“We’ll never know, will we?” he says.
I notice he doesn’t say ‘yes.’
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
I look down at my hands, ashamed at the answer.
“I see,” he says. “Nice.”
I swallow hard. The silence lengthens.
The sex issue is hard to tackle. I try to figure out how to start, but Hugo speaks first.
“What about that,” he says and jerks his head towards the bedroom. “What’s the deal?”
I bite my lip.
“I’ve never done that before,” I say. “I mean, I’ve never actually shoved someone like that.”
“What an honor,” he says with a bitter laugh.
“But I’ve had trouble before. I turn into this horrible ball of tension and suddenly I feel so exposed, almost violated. It just hits me. I try to get through it and I can usually, you know, push through, so to speak, but it gets to the point where it all just...hurts.”
“You’ve been feeling like this while we were having sex and you kept going? And didn’t tell me?”
I feel my face flush, but I meet his eyes and nod.
He stares at me, eyes wounded and angry, his fists clenching and unclenching.
“Damn it, Mara,” he says. “What kind of an asshole do you think I am? You think I’d want to make love with someone who feels like I’m raping her?”
“I didn’t say it felt like--”
“Violated was the word,” he says. “But let’s not split hairs.”
“It’s not you,” I say. “I mean, it’s not about you, it’s me.”
“But guess what?” he says, his voice getting louder. “It’s me you’re in bed with! Which means there are two of us. But that seems to have escaped you.”
“I just mean that the issue is mine. It’s happened before.”
“What, with the dead guy?” Hugo asks.
My memory flashes back to Lucas sweating on top of me, eyes closed and grunting, pushing, pushing, not seeing, never seeing...
I shudder and wrench myself back to the present.
“Yes, it happened with Lucas.”
“Well, it still comes back to trust and the fact that apparently we don’t have any.”
“I know,” I say. “I have some things to sort out.”
He is silent.
“Hugo,” I try to steel myself, by my voice shakes. “It’s probably best if...”
He waits, almost glaring at me.
“I’m going to need some time. Time apart, I mean, from us.”
“You want to break up.”
I gulp.
“I thought you were in love with me. Did I imagine that? And is it too much to ask for you to give me some credit? Of course it is, because you have to do everything alone.” He has stood up and is pacing the front room.
“Hugo...”
“How much of this has even been real, Mara? I mean, what is there to break up? I thought I loved you too, but apparently I’ve been in love with an illusion. You lied to me. You let me fuck you and all the while you were hating it. I’m the biggest chump.”
I jump up from the couch and grab hold of his arms. “Hugo, no, I—”
“And now you want to end it.” He jerks away and goes to the door. “It never even started.”
“I only meant I wanted to take a break. Some time.”
Hugo yanks his jacket on and shoves his feet into his boots.
“Please,” I say.
He takes a long look at me. I look back, my heart in my eyes.
“It wasn’t fake,” I say. “Please believe me. The most important things were real. Are real.”
; “I wish I could believe that.” His hand is on the doorknob. “I gotta go.”
***
When he’s gone, I stand with my back to the door, leaning on it for support.
I thought I’d been brave enough, with my cute little self-improvement program, cutting things off with Erik, all of it. I thought I was making progress, becoming whole. So how is it that my love life and my career are in the shit and I feel worse than ever?
Not running fast enough...
Erik. The bastard. I see his eyes; laughing, cruel and far too wise.
I never stopped running, I just fooled myself into thinking I had.
So here I am, fucked up as ever and stuck with everything I’ve been trying to escape. Mom, Dad, Lucas, Erik. I am consumed, haunted by the angry words, by love twisted to hate, by the way people disappoint and betray one another and never recover. I am plagued by my failure, with such cautionary examples, to live better, to be better.
Most of all I am tormented that my failure killed Lucas.
The thought, once allowed in, causes stabbing pains in my belly. I lurch forward and stumble to the dark kitchen.
How could I have thought anything like love could co-exist with this pain? If running doesn’t work, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to live with this every single day? The alternative to running is to stand and fight, but how? With what?
Horrible sounds pour from me, worse than sobs, worse than anything. I don’t want the memories, but they are inexorable and if the final ones come, I’ll die, I know I will.
Help. Oh God, I need help.
I open the cupboard with the grappa and take the bottle down. I know it won’t bring Hugo back, or Lucas for that matter, but I need it. I need something right now to fill the holes, to slow the onslaught of memory, to buffer me, to save me from the truth.
I put the mouth of the bottle to my lips, tip my head back and pour the hot, bitter liquid down my throat. It tastes terrible. I cough, sputter and then take another swig.
Fuck it. What’s the point of being sober? What’s the point of any of it? I am doomed and crippled. I am weak and neurotic and a fucking chicken.
A fucking chicken who can’t cross the road.
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