True Love

by Sarah Gerard

  I punch him in the chest. He gives up and I climb back into the closet and sit in the laundry basket, weeping.

  “You build the world with your words, Nina,” he says.

  There’s a soft click of the door.

  Twelve

  I call Seth from the bookstore and tell him, honestly, that I’ll be staying with a coworker through the rainy season. I can’t break up with him to his face; I am tired of looking at him. I keep our conversation brief despite his pleading. I act as if I’m surprised that he’s surprised. My gut tells me he’s mostly worried about where he’ll live now, so I offer to pay my third of the rent until our lease is up in August. That I’m gracious enough to do this instead of rendering him homeless underscores how petty it is that every day afterward he threatens via text to “put my effects on the curb.”

  I’ve brought nothing with me from Bed-Stuy. Leonard’s extra room is a closet with a window and a daybed; there’s no room for my things. I have my box of journals and clothes enough to fill a set of plastic rolling drawers. I remind Seth that I sent him Listings Project emails, Craigslist postings, names of friends of friends to aid in his job hunt. He’d said he’d follow up on them, then let the conversations die, or forgot to respond, or declined to make plans. People were unimpressed with him, and therefore unimpressed with me; it was humiliating.

  The problem as Seth wanted me to understand it was that he is an artistic genius and has a fundamentally harder time feeling motivated to do anything but make his art. So I asked my father if his creative agency would hire him.

  “He’s taking on more freelance work,” I said. It was the first time I’d talked to my father since I found out he put Butters to sleep without telling me. “I didn’t want to upset you,” he explained at the time, so I took some space from him to think about that. The space had lasted weeks.

  “What’s his experience?”

  I’d counseled Seth that he might need to learn new skills. “What kind of work do you have?” I asked. “He can do a lot of things.”

  He told me to have him send his portfolio. Seth commenced curating one, drawing from his various projects to give my father a sense of his range. He included favorite pieces from his “archive” at the coffee shop. Some sketches from his journal. His solo show at Black Box, as the artist-in-residence. Some cell phone photos of his Woven series, still in progress. When the time came to send his portfolio, he told me he was uncomfortable doing it on his own behalf. So I sent it for him. Then I followed up.

  “Does he have any experience with Adobe Suite?” said my father.

  “He prefers more traditional modes.”

  “I can’t help him.”

  “What if he were a consultant?”

  “What would I need to consult with him about?”

  I put the phone down and examined my fingers. With my left two incisors, I tore off the cuticle of my thumb. I chewed it and swallowed. My father thought Seth was a fool. I came back to the phone. “How does he learn Adobe Suite?” I said.

  “Have you ever heard the saying ‘Time kills deals’? Seth doesn’t want to work. If he did, he’d be doing it.”

  My father didn’t pursue my mother when she left. I thought she would have wanted him to, and this made me furious with him. I threw temper tantrums, hurling myself against the walls of my bedroom. I overturned furniture. I woke in night sweats and wet the bed for two years in high school. I demanded my father’s attention; I knew that if I failed to pursue him, he would lose interest in me.

  “He’s decided it’s not worth making a change, because making a change involves effort and thought,” said my father. “He’d rather do things the way he’s always done them. What you did is you let Seth get off the hook.”

  “This is victim-blaming.”

  “Time kills deals, Nina. People can always find reasons not to close.”

  I was a straight-A student in the Den of Inquiry. Even as I signed myself into rehab with my father beside me, handing over his insurance card, my performance of it was practical: I wanted him to see that my addiction was a problem I would swiftly ameliorate and put behind me. I have always been aware that I am the only chance my father has to be a father. If I fuck up my life again, then my father has fucked up. Like him, and for him, when need be, I must be cold and solution-oriented.

  PLEASE TELL ME why this is hard for you, Seth says. We’ve texted every day since I left. When we talk on the phone, I scream at him. Seth doesn’t think I’m grieving him, and I’m not, but I want him to think that I am. I feel nothing for him now, a week after leaving him. I can’t imagine letting him touch me—I feel repelled by the memory of his dick. I’m embarrassed that I was ever impressed by it, but I had such low expectations then. I feel callous and I don’t want to feel callous. I miss you, I say. But I’ve never been alone. There’s always been someone in my life taking me away from myself. I hope you understand.

  I understand that you want to be with Aaron, he says.

  I breathe from my diaphragm. I imagine myself floating above this nonsense. Seth doesn’t know that I’m spending time with Aaron. I’ve seen Aaron every day since leaving him, but Seth is guessing at that; he has no way to confirm it. When he asks me what I do with my time now, I enjoy reminding him that it’s none of his business, that he’s no longer entitled to that information. I don’t ask him what he’s doing, do I? I don’t care.

  I respond, I’m trying to be open with you.

  I feel sad for you, Nina, he says. And your demented, twisted, destructive idea of a relationship.

  Sorry you feel that way.

  I wish I’d never met you. I’ve spent weeks unraveling all the bizarre lines of bullshit you fed me. Your warped morals and justifications. I wish you the best. You’re a queer girl.

  You too.

  With enough work and enough support, you can learn to stop hurting others, much as you’ve learned to stop hurting yourself.

  Goodbye, Seth.

  Do you know I shouldn’t even be talking to you, Nina? You’re beneath me and you’re not. We’re both abnormal. That’s what attracted us to each other.

  Interesting theory.

  Yes, sorry you think this means we can’t be together. I also see the reasons, but I was holding out hope that people can change. You’re a shining example that they don’t.

  I mute him without responding. I decide yet again that I don’t care. When I left Seth alone in that nasty apartment that he wasn’t paying for, I felt a new version of myself taking over. She was ruthless and immune to his mind games. The last vestiges of love lifted like a veil as I rode the D train to Leonard’s house that first night, cleansed myself in his standing shower, and leaned against his island counter to tell him my version of the story. I felt horribly free. I was able to grow in any direction I wanted to. I could be whoever I wanted to be. I imagined living alone in the woods, a hermit writing outsider novels.

  I called Claudette the following morning and said very simply, “Seth and I broke up.” I tried to sound mature, like I hadn’t acted out of impulse or done anything to harm him, per se—like I respected and cared for him, and thought separating was in his best interest, too. It should speak to my character that I didn’t disparage him. “It hasn’t been working for a long time,” I said. “I just want to end the conflict. I want us to be friends. When we’re ready.”

  She was quiet. I watched Leonard come out of the shower and walk across the apartment in his towel. “Are you even upset about it?” she said.

  I was operating at a certain remove from my own emotions. I may have sounded cruel, but I simply wanted her to understand that in no way did I blame Seth for our disunion, publicly. “Of course. I’m not a sociopath.”

  I WISH TO acknowledge my indebtedness to the brave men who have spent their time, comfort and, in many cases, have given their lives, so that all may know the truth and geography of this wonderful planet. For days after leaving, I bring books from the bookstore home to Leonard’s and stack them aga
inst the walls. With access to silence, I aspire to read titles by Clarice Lispector, Thomas Bernhard, and Frantz Fanon on the recommendations of more talented students in my MFA program, but I never open these books. Instead I keep The Hollow Earth by my bedside. I claim that the earth is not only hollow, but that all explorers who spent time past the rim of the polar opening have had a look into the interior. I’ve abandoned my novel. I imagined having my own space would lubricate productivity, but when I sit down alone with myself now, I hear nothing; it’s as if I’ve lost the walls against which ideas resonate. I write the same lines over and over. In my closet of a bedroom, I spend hours staring into the void of my computer, desperate for something to fill it. I text Aaron and tell him to come over, and he arrives in the early morning after leaving the set. I say we need to work on our script, so we sit on the daybed and write dialogue together. “‘I’m writing a book, Tina,’” I say.

  “‘What’s your book called?’” he says.

  “‘I’m calling it I Want It All. It’s a working title.’”

  “‘Sounds like a long book.’”

  “‘It is. It’s about everything I want.’” We laugh. He types for a while and I watch him, comforted that his collaboration will shepherd me back to myself. I feel no need to perform for him.

  “I can see what you’ll look like when you’re old,” I tell him.

  “I was born old,” he says.

  I imagine us being the only two people in this wretched asshole of a world. We’re so very alone here, lonelier all the time. Jared’s last email to me read: Having been placed non-consensually betwixt y’all in a delicate situation, I’ve witnessed both parties commit a series of self-focused, not to say selfish, acts of poor listening and, thus it follows, poor communication. He sent it the morning after I sucked Brian’s dick in the disabled stall. I read it behind the register at the bookstore, and felt my friends and my self-respect peeling away like dead skin. I need to know honestly, he said, I request facts because Seth distorts them, unintentionally, and I can’t do what he needs me to do, namely help him calm down and think, if I don’t know truth from fiction—do you want to sleep with other people?

  I had always known there was no neutrality. I saw this message beginning the domino effect of collapsing everything I love. Every social outcome has been in Seth’s favor. I no longer hear from Claudette. I haven’t communicated with Theo since telling him that Numina was no longer something my schedule could accommodate; that I could not, for no money, find him a new unpaid editor. Who knows what rumors circulate about me thirdhand through the bars of St. Petersburg. I am Lilith. I am Jezebel.

  Thank you for this unsolicited feedback, I responded.

  “Nina, I’m sick of taking out trash on other people’s sets,” says Aaron, checking his phone. It’s four in the morning and he has to be on set at eight. It’s over an hour to Staten Island.

  “That’s why we’re writing this script,” I say. “Stay over. Don’t go back tonight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  “What about Leonard?”

  My room has two doors: one leads to the hallway; the other leads to Leonard’s room. I sometimes hear him turning over in bed.

  “I don’t think he would mind,” I say.

  Leonard is the bookstore’s security guard and has wanted to sleep with me since he found me crying on my cigarette break. I pay him each morning for the kindness he’s shown me by eating oatmeal in my boxers and sports bra on his recliner. I experience a brief suspension of reality as I make love to Aaron on Leonard’s daybed and imagine him listening, jerking off, cumming on his fist. It is quiet but for springs and breathing. I have the sense that he smells us when Aaron goes down on me and I soak the mattress in warm urea. We leave the window open for ventilation. Aaron is gone before dawn, and I drift through the following workday, the following night, and every night after, as he comes, and comes over, and comes, and comes again, over and over and over.

  WE CARRY MY boxes down four flights of stairs from the Bed-Stuy apartment and load them into Aaron’s car. I’m sorry to hear you had problems with the neighborhood, my landlord said when I emailed her about returning the deposit. “Nikki is going to wire the money to me,” I tell Rafael, the last of us there, with his single blue bin of belongings. He nods but doesn’t look at me. Seth has talked to him, I’m sure has bled his heart out for Rafael on my account. “Hey, do you have, like, ten dollars of weed I can buy from you?” I say.

  “Just take this,” he says, handing me a plastic baggie from his pocket.

  “I couldn’t,” I say, but I do. It’s rude not to. I never cared about Rafael’s friendship, anyway. I’ve always considered him, as a white spoken-word poet, a little bit racist. I never went to the Nuyorican with him, despite his invitations, plural. That space is not mine. “Thanks, man.”

  We drive my boxes to Aaron’s parents’ house on Staten Island. He’s told me they can stay in the garage until I find a place or we find a place. It seems inevitable that we’ll end up living together, as if it’s not entirely within our control, as if it’s the only fiscally responsible choice and the only self-respecting choice Aaron has. Over the course of nearly a month, we’ve become a unit. We make plans jointly, make plans for the not-too-distant future, are easy collaborators.

  His parents’ house is two stories with a soft green yard, and hydrangeas with rabbits underneath. There’s a literal white picket fence separating their house from the neighbors’, but it stops before the street. His mother is at the stove making spaghetti Bolognese when we come inside. She’s a peach-colored woman, shorter and wider than I. She greets me skeptically as if she knows something about me just by looking at me, or knows nothing about me at all, and had no idea I was coming, but considers it mildly inconvenient yet typical.

  I have the immediate sense that the family is secular, faithless, though Aaron has told me that for a period he went to Catholic school. Coming from the South, I’m accustomed to seeing at least one crucifix over the kitchen sink, even in the homes of families who never attend church—even my mother has one, and even her special friend identifies as a born-again Christian, and listens to the Christian radio station, and goes to Christian rock concerts: it’s an aesthetic more than a true belief system. But the walls of Aaron’s parents’ house are decorated with Italian ceramics and photos of Aaron and his brother as small children. There’s a hideous yellow credenza displaying gaudy Venetian clowns in the sitting room.

  Aaron’s mother pauses suddenly in her stirring and places her hand over her stomach. “Are you okay?” Aaron says, peering down into her face, grasping both of her shoulders. I feel a pang of jealousy watching them. There’s something incestuous about it.

  “Just my stomach,” she says.

  “Are you unwell?” he says. “Can I get you a Tums?”

  He hurries away before she can answer. We’re left alone in the kitchen, and I feel pressured to say something about Aaron to his mother, since he is all we have in common. She looks at me.

  “Aaron says you’re a teacher,” I say, using my good-girl voice.

  She nods and says, “And what do you do?”

  “I work in a bookstore,” I say weakly. Aaron returns. He displays four Tums in the palm of his hand. I have the urge to validate myself to his mother already and feel strangely infantilized by my relation to her as her child’s peer. There is bad energy in her attitude toward me. She probably thinks I’m the kind of person who moves back in with her parents and thus does not deserve her son, all the while judging me poorly for dating a person who has moved back in with his parents. Will I betray her sweet precious baby when I learn how pathetic he is? I dread her discovering that I’ve been to rehab. I can tell she’s the kind of person who’s never seen a therapist.

  “Set the table, will you?” she says to Aaron. “You got a speeding ticket.” She says this as if the two ideas are related. She gestures toward the Formica counter at a pile of junk mail.
She has a faint Queens accent and a way of becoming the thing around which every body in a room orbits. “You understand what you do in that car goes on your father’s driving record, not yours.”

  “Yes, I know that,” he says.

  “But we’re not paying your speeding tickets.”

  “Yes, I know that, Mother.”

  “DO YOU HAVE a way to pay these people?” says Aaron’s father. We’ve just finished telling them about our plans to shoot the movie. We’ve reached the dessert portion of the meal, where Aaron has set out an array of cookies and decaf, and seltzer he made a show of preparing in the SodaStream. I see Aaron’s dynamic in the family as very childlike, and it gives me unrest considering it’s understood that we are moving in together, but I also know that I need him. A partner is a conduit for conducting a certain dimension of one’s experience, a way to collage and create oneself, like a walking, breathing search engine: it’s expedient to have one, affords one’s life content and depth and authority and direction. Plus I have no idea how to do it alone. What steps do I take, with my income, my inexperience? How do I find a roommate? What if I don’t like that person? What if they’re a serial killer? What if I run out of money? What if I’m forced to move out and I don’t have a windfall? What if I step into the empty street and trip and fall, and am laughed at? What if I’m hit by a Mack truck and no one can identify me? What if there is no one around to see me not doing the dishes, farting in my underwear, or saying I don’t have time for them and locking myself in the bathroom, or waking up grouchy at them for no reason? Will I disappear? How will I know which movies to watch, which books to read, which albums are coming out, which shows are opening? What if Aaron is mad at me for saying no?

  “How are you going to pay for this without a producer?” says his mother. “Not out of pocket, I know that. You’re not putting it on a credit card, because you know who’d end up paying for it.”

  “I didn’t ask you to pay for anything.”

  “You never have in the past, either.”