True Love

by Sarah Gerard

  When I can’t write anymore, I begin to compose a letter to Brian. Over the ensuing month, I’ve felt increasingly like what I have with him is love. I send him movie stubs stapled to NYC postcards, haikus scrawled on greasy dollar-pizza bags, used books I buy on the street. Right now, I’m writing an account of my day. I craft detailed descriptions of teen crust punks selling stolen bottles of 5-hour Energy. I tell him how lonely it is to be new again here. I know he’ll understand. I tell him I look forward to seeing him in the fall when he comes to visit his mother in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I ask him about his mother, how she’s feeling. I tell him to give her my love.

  I include the thriller writer’s office as a return address. I imagine this igniting a longing to use it. I imagine Brian tucking my letter into a carved wooden cigar box designated for the preservation of my memory. I use the company postage machine and drop the letter into the Outgoing Mail bin.

  I’M WALKING HOME from my first independent writing workshop. My MFA program begins in six weeks, and I want to be prepared to handle criticism. My class meets weekly at the Le Pain Quotidien on Bryant Park. It’s part of an unschool series that markets itself as a more affordable, democratic, sustainable, and life-affirming alternative to the MFA. My instructor is a year younger than I am, and out as a lesbian, but all of the characters in her novel are straight. Her teaching philosophy centers on the belief that we can best serve each other by asking questions, and that the holiest question is “How?” Five of my seven classmates are old enough to be my parents. I carry in my backpack seven marked-up copies of a new story from the Ira Cycle, which they have just deemed unreadable. Their questions replay in my mind. “How can Liz expect anything from Billy?” “How can she hide this from Ira?” “How can she call this a relationship?”

  I call Brian. Bed-Stuy is deserted, and for the next long block, there are only warehouses with locked retracting doors displaying flyers for Black Lives Matter groups, community garden meetings, and daycares. We decided to look at this neighborhood after seeing a story in the New York Times suggesting it might be more affordable than some other trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods. The title of the article was “Bedford-Stuyvesant: Diverse and Changing.” Using the combination of my student loans, my father’s signature, Seth’s new job at Dick Blick, and Paolo’s brother as a roommate, we’ve been able to secure a two-bedroom, fourth-floor walk-up on Marcus Garvey Boulevard.

  We’re the only white people on our block. The day before we signed the lease, Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri, and that city erupted. A month ago, cops on Staten Island choked Eric Garner until he died begging for air. We’ve seen the way our new neighbors look at us. Among ourselves, we refer to this as “awkward.”

  “Hey, it’s me,” I say to Brian’s voicemail, scanning the street for other humans. “I thought I might catch you.” I hit pound. I listen to the electronic recording. I press three to continue speaking. “Haven’t talked to you in a while. I hope you’re well. I had my first workshop tonight, for the story I emailed you a few days ago. Not sure if you’ve had a chance to read it. The workshop was really helpful. You know, I’m always here if you need to talk. Okay, hugs.”

  I listen to the message in its entirety and hate myself. I reflect on the possible reasons Brian has never acknowledged my snail mail. Maybe it makes him too sad to miss me. Maybe he’s jealous of my deepening commitment to Seth, as we are now living together. Maybe he prefers the distant intimacy of silent connection. When I moved to New York, we hadn’t taken the step of defining our relationship. It seemed to defy definitions. When I text him now, he responds, and only sometimes, hi—no emoji, no capitalization, no follow-up, no requests for nudes.

  He calls me back when I’m almost home. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice raspy. “I’m sorry, Nina.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, though I don’t know what he’s even sorry for.

  I listen to him sob for nearly a full minute. I sit on our front stoop, my heart racing. When I left for class, my downstairs neighbor was grilling on the concrete patio; now the grill is cool beneath its slipcover. I can hear Brian put the phone down and scream. He blows his nose. He returns, still crying. He cries as he talks.

  “I didn’t want to tell you,” he says. I stare at the concrete. “For the last two weeks, Erin and I have been talking every day. I knew she was lying to her new boyfriend, but I didn’t know who her boyfriend was. She wouldn’t tell me. I didn’t know it was my fucking best friend.”

  I watch the apartment across the street. On the second floor, a small rectangle of frosted glass lights up. A figure moves near it, then away.

  THE LIVING ROOM smells like weed when I enter. I notice a joint hanging in the ashtray in front of Paolo’s brother, Rafael. He works for a moving company by day and moonlights as a spoken-word poet under the alias White and Woke. He sells weed and stays up all night banging on his typewriter. I’ve tried to relate to him as a fellow writer, but Rafael doesn’t read, so the conversations don’t go far. I try to loan him books, and they sit untouched on the floor of his bedroom. His bedroom is bare except for a mattress and a Tupperware bin of white T-shirts and track pants.

  Leaning against the living room wall behind Rafael are Seth’s in-progress paintings, close-up meditations on loose-weave textiles, in which he’s taken an interest since talking with Paolo about the regrettable way Western culture has lost touch with its connection to fabric as a medium for storytelling. He paints parallel line after parallel line, then paints a perpendicular set of lines over the first set in colors both contrasting and nearly identical. He’s been doing this for weeks on the same three canvases. The original lines of weave are no longer visible. They all blend together. The paint builds up.

  I pass his sketchbook, beside which he’s laid a sheet of my seventh grade school pictures. It was the year I cut my hair short like a boy’s. I loved it at first but hated it once school started, when I had to wear it in the halls every day. Bobby Heilmann called me “GI Jane.” Sensing my embarrassment, Odessa altered the hairstyle in the photos with permanent marker, leaving one untouched for comparison. Seth has reproduced the sheet in pencil in his sketchbook. On the untouched photo, he’s drawn devil horns. How obvious.

  “How was class?” says Rafael.

  I shrug and hit the joint. “Fine, I guess. Not great.” I exhale through my nose. “People don’t like my protagonist.”

  “Why not?”

  “They don’t understand her.”

  “Does she understand herself?”

  “She thinks she does, but her insight is poor.”

  “Have you been crying?”

  “A little.” I smile sadly, to elicit sympathy.

  “Don’t let it get to you.”

  I find Seth in the kitchen taking a pan of ziti out of the oven. “Who were you talking to on the steps?” he asks.

  “Brian,” I say without thinking. “I guess he and Erin have been talking about getting back together.”

  Seth doesn’t respond, perhaps contemplating whether Brian is a passing curiosity. Whether I have some masturbatory compulsion to become fixated on other people. Whether, once I blow my wad on Brian, I will suddenly be disgusted with the affair, ashamed of what I’d wanted. The idea that Seth knows something about me that I don’t know about myself makes him seem superior as he carries the ziti past me. I slip into the bedroom and drop my backpack and coat on the bed beside a pile of clean laundry.

  “I wasn’t aware you were keeping in touch with Mr. Beasley,” he says from the other room.

  “Oh,” I say. I text Brian. Everything will be okay. Stay strong. We’ll talk over the holidays. “A little. This is the first time we’ve talked on the phone.”

  “Interesting. I wonder why he would want to talk to you about Erin.”

  “Maybe he thought I could be impartial.”

  I return to the common area. I sit at the table and serve myself. The ziti jiggles.

  “This is really good, Seth.
What’s in it?” says Rafael.

  “Sardines,” says Seth. “Can you be impartial?”

  “About what?” I say, as if I’ve forgotten already what we were talking about. I poke a grayish mass in the center of my plate. It flakes apart. “Oh. Sure, Erin is a little grating, but I have no problem with her.” I chew.

  “Perhaps that’s why Brian called you. Because you have no problem with her.”

  “I didn’t ask why he called me, Seth. He was crying.”

  “Sounds dramatic.”

  “It was.”

  Rafael goes in for seconds. I discover that I can break the sardines up and spread them around, making them less potent.

  Nine

  Aaron is leaning against the counter of a to-go pizza window. It’s magic hour, and I’m watching him pick the bell peppers off his slice of veggie lovers’ and deposit them on my plate. This is the fourth time we’ve hung out in two weeks. When I returned to the city, I contacted other friends from college, but the conversations all died off quickly. Except with Aaron.

  His glasses slide down his nose. He pushes them back in place and fixes his hair behind his ears. A mole rides on his left cheekbone.

  “My logline is ‘A twenty-something runs out of money in Los Angeles and has to move back in with his parents,’” he says. His eyes are sea green and laughing. “Oh, ‘And his girlfriend breaks up with him.’”

  “So it’s autobiographical?”

  “The membrane between fiction and nonfiction is thin,” he says. He places his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Of course not. Nina, my golden fire, hand me a napkin. Thank you. But why even tell you this? The film will never get made.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I’m being realistic.”

  “You’re being a pessimist.”

  None of my other college friends tried to find me when I left school—only Aaron did, which was fine. I’d disappeared without telling anyone. My father encouraged me to cut ties with people who enabled my “disease.”

  In the harsh light of sobriety, I was embarrassed by certain choices. As the self-appointed “headmaster” of my dorm room, otherwise known as the Den of Inquiry, I had become a grotesque creature. I viewed my move back to Florida, however humiliating, as a fresh start. I could slip free of the version of myself determined by those who knew me as I was.

  Three years later, Aaron showed up as a comment on an article I’d written for The Planet, saying, So glad to see you writing again, Nina. I always enjoyed your stories.

  It took me a month to find the courage to respond. I remembered Aaron as the roommate of Daniel, a core participant in my former iniquity. Social media suggested Aaron was no longer friends with Daniel. It also seemed he was now an aspiring screenwriter. I emailed him asking for a script to print in Numina. Since then, we’ve exchanged emails two or three times a month.

  “I need some brainstorming assistance,” he says.

  “Shoot.”

  “I need some memories to play in his head. Things to look back on fondly, but I need them to be more than just him and his girlfriend. I don’t have other friends, though.”

  “That presents a limitation.”

  “Do you have any memories that I can use, as far as very brief flashbacks? You’re so much better at this than I am. Things he will miss about Los Angeles. You must have had some of those as you were leaving Florida.”

  “Not really.”

  He waits.

  “I had sex on the roof of a building downtown.”

  “Slut.”

  “Let me think of how I said goodbye. I sat on the seawall, smelling the Gulf. I stood for a long time in my empty apartment, appreciating the humidity of the air. I walked around my neighborhood barefoot. I ate a honeysuckle flower. I smoked a cigarette inside.”

  Aaron is quiet.

  “Should we go?” I say. He checks the time on his phone. I’d invited Seth to see Boogie Nights with us at Film Forum, but I knew he would decline; he’s out with Paolo, and he doesn’t like Aaron. We walk to the theater and find two seats in the middle. It’s otherwise empty on a Monday. Aaron leans back with his foot on the chair in front of him. I find this charmingly rude. The lights lower, and the camera pans through the opening nightclub scene. He leans over the armrest and says, “Let’s make a movie together,” and the darkness cloaks us and presses down. His breath is warm in my ear. He sits up again with his arm against mine.

  “If we were a movie, what kind of movie would we be?” I say.

  “The best film you’ve never seen,” he says.

  WE CALL OUR movie True Love. It follows a group of troubled, narcissistic young people as they become entangled in a series of ill-conceived relationships that flame out in humiliating ways. For hours each night, I sit on the floor of the locked bathroom, the only place where I can be alone in our Bed-Stuy apartment—if I close the door on the bedroom, Seth needs his phone charger, Seth needs a jacket, Seth needs his cell phone, his keys, his book, his bed. He sees that I’m irritated and accuses me of never learning to share: “It’s because you’re an only child,” he says. I turn my back to the door. I’m Gchatting with Aaron.

  I’ve told Seth that I’m writing and asked him to give me privacy. Through the cheap wood, I hear him crowing with Rafael, listening to Jawbreaker, banging pots in the kitchen, making dinner with dehydrated soy product he bought in bulk in Chinatown but doesn’t know how to prepare.

  I started to say this in the car tonight but was interrupted too many times by one thing or another and gave up, I say to Aaron. I think the best thing to do, if we’re worried about pacing, is outline.

  What I’m going to do, actually, Aaron responds, is watch Magnolia and log everyone’s screen time.

  Rafael needs to use the bathroom; I am ousted. Brb, I say. I quickly close the chat box and open a random Word document on my desktop. I carry my laptop, propped in the crook of my arm, demonstrating my innocence, and sit, as if in a trance, in the common area. I’m poised at the corner of the table Seth constructed from eight salvaged milk crates and an enormous piece of wood from the street. It’s ugly as hell and could be infested with bedbugs, but it’s multipurpose. It’s our dining table, his worktable, a repository for junk mail.

  “What are you writing?” says Rafael, emerging moments later, followed by a whiff of feces. The toilet is refilling, and I see a digested leaf of lettuce floating in it.

  “Homework,” I say.

  “Already?”

  “Every week.”

  I brush past him, back to my cave. I sit on the toilet lid with my feet on the bathtub and hit the partially smoked bowl he hides in the extra toilet paper. Back, I say to Aaron.

  Our film doesn’t have the thread that’s tying everything together, he responds.

  The thread is their relation to Lisa.

  You’re brilliant.

  Or are we getting ahead of ourselves because we don’t even know what everyone’s story is?

  There’s too much potential, like diner potential, where you have too many choices on the menu and you’re paralyzed, and it’s also a question of, do we start really fast out the gate, and switch rapidly from character to character, then slow as the movie progresses?

  And in terms of pacing, remember that some scenes will have one character, some will have four, some scenes are more significant than others (although, in a perfect story, every scene carries equal importance).

  Each character’s story has to be broken down into tiny segments so we can shuffle the pieces around and see what goes where, and at times it has to feel claustrophobic.

  Fat legs in skinny pants, I say.

  This is why we’re perfect together.

  You think in larger pieces, I’ll fill in the details. For instance, the Buddha must feature prominently.

  The Buddha resides on the dashboard of his car.

  The Buddha is our mascot.

  The Buddha is our protago
nist.

  He bought it in a flea market stall on Olvera Street, just before leaving Los Angeles. He owns nothing but the Buddha, not even his car.

  The Buddha is perfect, I say.

  You’re perfect.

  I INVITE HIM to the thriller writer’s office. It’s after hours, the building is dark, and I can do with it what I wish. He meets me in the lobby, and we tour the tenth floor looking for a cubicle to occupy with our story making. We pick one in a corner with greeting cards pinned to the walls and a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses next to the monitor. We decide this desk belongs to Karen from accounting, and we eat her chocolates and work on True Love. We now maintain an almost constant stream of messages. I’m forced to carry my phone with me everywhere, as each text I send Aaron receives an immediate response. Do we take the position that Jordan is using Carissa? I say. Given her lack of experience, I think so, he says. And his obfuscation of the truth, I say. But does she really want the truth? he says. I’d want the truth, I say.

  Beyond True Love, I’ve confided in Aaron about Brian, my sins, my need for a confessor. I’ve painted myself as a prisoner in my home, and Seth as a negligent jailer. I love him, but it’s hard being with an artist, I’ve said. Our modes of working are totally different. Seth needs to play music while he paints, he needs to move around. I need silence. Writers are eccentric, we’re private, we require a lot of personal space. But we’re not always the best communicators, ironically. I think linearly. Seth thinks like a rhizome.

  Sounds like my relationship with Amanda, he says. Everything came down to the way we failed to communicate.

  I realize it’s over now, but I never fully got closure with Brian, and while I don’t want to be with him, I would like to know what happened between us from his perspective, I say. I underemphasize how I miss Brian, how I harbor intrusive fantasies of sucking him off in the shower. I say, Maybe then I could forgive myself.