by Sarah Gerard
I find them together now in the basement, where they’re elbow-deep in a storage bin of Aaron’s old homework. She hands me a typed school report he wrote in the eighth grade, about planetary moons. It’s bound with brads and a plastic sheet protector over a cover he drew himself, depicting a boy looking through a telescope with his father. Copernicus was thought insane during his time for claiming that the Sun was at the center of our universe, the report reads. It was Galileo’s observation of the phases of Venus that finally proved the heliocentric theory.
“This is pretty advanced for an eighth grader,” I say, trying to sound impressed.
“He may have had some help.” His mother winks.
Aaron clicks his tongue.
“What?” she asks.
“Why do you have to do that?”
She looks at me. “What did I say?”
“You always find some little way to cut me down.”
“You probably had some help, that’s all I said. Is that wrong?”
“Can’t you let me feel good about something?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. He’s very sensitive,” she says to me.
Aaron’s face is red, a vein bisecting it.
“Sorry,” she says to him. Then, to me, “Aaron was in the gifted program.”
WE BRING MY boxes to the Kensington studio. It’s four hundred square feet on the ground floor, with no central circulation, so the windows must remain open at all times, even while we’re sleeping, despite the fact it faces the street. Our bedroom is also the living room, which connects to the kitchen and a narrow hallway to the bathroom. Our two windows look out on the building’s entrance. In the morning, the caretaker of our elderly neighbor parks the woman on the porch to sun. An ornery Albanian man chain-smokes and spits gray phlegm onto the worn garnet steps. From the nursing home down the block, each passing van and ambulance kicks up dust that settles in a film on our curb furniture. In the evening, children run up and down the block and onto the gated grass beneath us. Before dawn, the drug dealer from the third floor screams at his girlfriend and throws her clothes onto the fire escape.
My terror and euphoria in the early days of our marriage come from my certainty that Aaron loves me. “I’m not used to this,” I tell him. We’re in the stage of our love’s deepening through rejoicing that I have left another man to be with him.
“I stole you away from Seth,” he says, lifting my shirt. He enjoys tarnishing Seth’s memory while he fucks me. Seth was afraid it would go to my head if I were allowed to think too highly of myself, so he would subtly remind me that I was shallow and narcissistic. With him it was expected that a humble genius would go for days, weeks even, without bathing, or years wearing the same threadbare Jawbreaker T-shirt.
Aaron’s features are delicate, almost feminine. His fragility pleads with me, compels me to protect him by telling him that I can’t be enough for him. “I’ve had years of negative conditioning,” I say. “Every time I look at you, you’re looking at me and it scares me. Seth never looked at me.”
When Aaron wants to praise me, I ask him to please say anything else. “Instead of telling me I’m beautiful, ask me what book I’m reading, or bring up something that happened in the news,” I say. I worry that Aaron is placing me on a pedestal, that he will be disappointed when he realizes I’m not who he thought I was. He’ll think I’ve deceived him, though I tried to warn him about how I am.
THE NIGHT BEFORE going to the courthouse with Aaron, I woke up crying on Leonard’s daybed. We were soaked in my sweat. I watched a dream recede, this one recurring, based on one of my earliest memories. In it I am three, crouched in the early morning light of my bedroom. I’m throwing my seashell collection—gathered on repeat pilgrimages to the beach with my family—one by one into my closet, which Jung might call a symbol. I’ve plucked these shells from the sand at the edge of the water with my own fingers. I believe that if I toss the right seashell into my closet, it will make a rainbow I can ride away from everything around me. Already, by age three, I feel aware of the existence of evil. Perhaps I intuited it from the beginning, the closing-off of possibilities starting in the moment the egg of me was fertilized; and my expectations were reified by culture as I matured. My mother cuts the yellow light of the hallway as she looks in on me tossing the last shell. No rainbow appears.
Aaron was still sleeping beside me. I imagined sharing this dream with him, then realized I couldn’t. “My dreams are frustrating,” he’d told me. “I’m always doing something annoying, like digging a staple out of a stack of paper, or typing a message that’s melting.” I’d come to understand that Aaron believed his mind was trolling him. He saw nothing meaningful or illuminating in his dreams. He’d never wake in the morning and say to me, “I had the strangest dream,” and close his eyes to recount it. He’d never wake crying from a dream and ask me to hold him. Dreaming only served to remind Aaron that he was powerless.
I watched his eyelids flutter. They were translucent like baby birds. I shook him. “I can’t marry you,” I said, sitting up. “I haven’t been single in years. You don’t know me. I’ll ruin you.”
He was silent.
“This is reckless and stupid,” I said. “I’ll be trapped. I’ll never have my own space. I’ll never be able to pick up and travel. I’ll have to tell you about all my plans. I’ll never do anything without you. Our lives will become enmeshed. How will I know who I am anymore separate from you? You’ll think you own me.”
He pulled me down and rolled on top of me. I was sobbing. I was grieving everything I’d lost and all I’d never have and all I stood to lose. I was sickened by my credulity; I had no reason to trust Aaron. I hadn’t even told my parents about us, too afraid of their disapproval. I hated myself. I was dangerously projecting my desires onto Aaron. So naive. So foolish. So trapped.
“I don’t want to control you,” Aaron said, and I felt myself falling back. “I don’t want to own you. I don’t want to keep you from doing whatever you need to do. I just want to love you. I just want to make things with you, and make love to you, and laugh with you. If you don’t want that, you can leave me.”
He swore it.
I TRAIN MYSELF to love him in a married way. I willingly enter a feedback loop of obsession, hoping my love for Aaron and his for me will protect me from myself. I ask Aaron for daily reminders: “Do you still love me?” I begin to think that everything we do is an act of love or a cry for love. “You have the most stunning mouth,” he tells me; it feels like he’s hypnotizing me to control me, and I happily abandon myself to him. He holds his hands to my cheeks and looks into me. He does this while I’m eating tacos, brushing my teeth, waiting at the pharmacy. The note of wonder in his voice makes me aware of how seldom I feel impelled to remark on his appearance, so I look for features to notice and call out to him as my favorites. “The mole on your left cheek,” I say. “The craters of your hazel eyes. The tiny bald spot on your temple.” I describe them for him. I believe what I say to him.
We make weekly trips to the co-op together to stock up on the few vegetables and fruits Aaron is not allergic to. As a housewarming present, his mother took me on a personal tour of our local produce section, to school me in his dietary triggers. Foods he can’t tolerate include drupes and nightshades, peppers, eggplants, peaches, plums, avocados, any raw vegetable, chilies, huckleberries, cherries, and cinnamon. We can’t have cats. We can only have a hypoallergenic dog, like a Maltese.
AARON AND I are in the produce section procuring ingredients for tonight’s puttanesca and Taxi Driver and chill. I almost don’t recognize Daniel at the next bin over examining a peach—he’s so groomed and apparently sober. His dimples give him away when he smiles and says something to the person beside him. I recognize that person as my college suitemate, Heidi. She’s holding a bag of peaches as if selling them on QVC. When we lived together, I used to taunt her for her wholesomeness, her honors classes, her handheld Dirt Devil, her pore strips.
Her clean presentation made me feel freakish. I thought if she hated herself a little bit, it might make her more tolerable.
I reached out to her before moving back to the city and apologized for the way I’d behaved when we lived together. I explained that I was in a very dark place at the time, and had moved past it. I thanked her for having the courage to show me who I was when I was using—I actually used the word “using.” I asked if she’d be open to getting coffee when I was back in the city, hoping she’d hook me up with some work, but she never responded. Now she’s grocery shopping with Daniel, a participant in the dark history that necessitated my atonement to her.
Their heads turn in unison. From the looks on everyone’s faces I can see us all simultaneously remember the night at a party when I fucked Daniel on a balcony. Daniel was about to leave on his first tour, and everyone wanted to fuck him. I handed him an American Spirit as he leaned against a banister ten floors above the East Village. “I’m not done with you, you know,” he said.
Inside, people were doing keg stands and playing beer pong. They sounded miles away. I thought of how far Daniel and I had come in four years alongside each other. I was a semester away from graduating with my degree in English: useless, yet versatile in theory. I had barely made it there, and I wouldn’t make it to the end, but I didn’t know that yet. I was ovulating and had been doing lines since ten in the morning.
“What do you have to finish with me?” I said.
He reached for my neck and closed his hand around it. He leaned in. Our tongues laced together. I knew he was using me, but I wanted him to possess me. I wanted him to punch me as I was riding his dick and say, “Nina, I love you. Stop living like this.”
People gathered around us. Someone started chanting. We fell to the floor, and suddenly Daniel was inside me. I screamed his name. I blacked out, and when I opened my eyes again, Heidi was looking down on me.
There is no escape route in the supermarket. Daniel is smiling at Aaron. “Hey, buddy,” he says, and they hug. Aaron pulls away. Daniel looks at him, then at me. “Good to see you,” he says. “Nina.”
“Hey, Daniel,” I say. I wonder if he read the email I sent to Heidi. Surely they’ve talked about me. I assume they decided together that she shouldn’t respond. Rumors circulated after my disappearance from school. One said I had tried to kill myself. One said I had run away with a heroin addict.
“Do you live in the neighborhood?” asks Daniel.
“We just moved here,” says Aaron.
“Both of you?”
Aaron laughs. He looks at me. I’m expected to say something.
“We’re married,” I say.
“Wow,” Daniel says. “Congratulations. I didn’t know you guys were dating.”
I smile at Heidi. She looks at the floor.
“Are you still making music?” says Aaron.
“I don’t know if you heard what happened with Tree Service. We’re on an indefinite hiatus.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s for the best, actually. I’m doing solo stuff now. Come over sometime, I’ll play it for you.”
“Yeah, we’ll have to get together.”
THE NIGHT IS balmy when we finally escape.
“He’s cleaned up a lot,” Aaron says, stepping around a dog tied to a parking meter. We turn down a brick street to get off the main thoroughfare, into a part of the neighborhood composed of mansions with lawns and broad sidewalks with flowering trees. We stop to admire a slow-moving bee, one of the year’s last to die off.
“We all have,” I say.
“He looks less like a tweaker.”
“So do I.”
“Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why the band broke up,” he says.
We walk on and pass an elementary school, then a neighborhood library. I imagine that this would be a nice area to raise a family. I imagine that’s why Daniel and Heidi live here.
“Touring probably made it worse,” he says. “And women.”
My phone vibrates. I take it out of my pocket, hidden by a grocery bag. Is it true? Brian texts. I put it back.
“Makes sense he would end up with Heidi. She’s so stable,” I say.
“She’s exactly the same.”
My phone vibrates. Are you married?
Fifteen
It’s been a year since Aaron and I began writing True Love. We’ve rewritten it five or six times. We’ve recently added a subplot loosely based on Aaron’s falling-out with Daniel right after Tree Service released their first EP. It shows the tremendous sense of loss Aaron felt when he realized that Daniel wasn’t a person he knew anymore. During the years Daniel was touring, he’d become someone Aaron could no longer talk to—scrawny and pompous and unconcerned with anything that wasn’t pussy, drugs, or upward mobility, according to Aaron. But knowing Aaron, I find it hard not to draw conclusions of my own about their friendship’s breakdown. Each time I think we’re close to finishing the script, he finds something wrong with it. “It’s not calibrated correctly,” he says. He asks me for ideas, then shoots them all down. I don’t believe Aaron wants to resolve the issue with Daniel. Conflict gives his life meaning.
When I was living at Leonard’s, Aaron and I corresponded daily about the script, and our physical separation allowed us to generate content while Gchatting, texting, emailing, without stopping to fuck, clean the kitchen, watch Sopranos reruns, or go to the bar. I wanted to harness the productivity of the Leonard period and carry it into a new life, a better me, but I’m beginning to think that’s not going to happen. Our studio is nothing like the live/work space I’d envisioned. The script has sat largely untouched for three months. The movie’s ending is still uncertain. The story as we originally conceived of it has proven unrealistic. There’s too little separation between True Love and the rest of life.
I’M STANDING IN Brian’s bedroom. Wetness runs down the insides of my legs as if I’ve just urinated. A puddle forms around my feet. My shorts and panties lie on the floor next to me. I look around, noticing my surroundings as Brian steps away from me. There’s only a mattress and Brian, who points to it and tells me to lie down.
“Have you talked to him?” asks Aaron, looking at me over his shoulder.
“Not in months.”
He pauses the video on his computer. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yes.”
He hits the space bar. Brian kneels. He kisses my neck and my breasts. His ass is small and flat. His crotch presses into me.
“We don’t talk,” I say. “I swear.”
“I saw his name on your phone.”
“When?”
I take off my shirt and lie down. Brian brings his dick to my mouth.
“When we were walking back from the co-op.”
“I didn’t answer him.”
Aaron looks at me. He’s crying.
“I didn’t, Aaron, I swear to God. I have nothing to say to him.”
“Why pretend he hadn’t texted you?”
“I forgot.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“I have no desire to be in contact with him. I don’t even want to think about him. He’s clearly a predator. He’s the white Bill Cosby.”
“Show me your phone.”
“No.” The video plays on. I hit the space bar and freeze on Brian’s fingers bent like a fishhook in my mouth.
“If you didn’t answer him, then you have nothing to hide.”
“I’m not hiding anything, I just don’t want to set a precedent for you having access to my phone.”
He hits the space bar.
“Stop it.” I reach for the laptop, but Aaron blocks me. I close my eyes and listen to myself gagging on Brian’s cock. I start to cry but suppress it. Aaron hits the space bar and looks at me.
“Why did he send me this?”
“We don’t even know he did,” I say. “I don’t recognize that email address.”
“Who else would have?”
“I don
’t know,” I say. “I didn’t even know it existed.”
“Are you upset?” he says. He points to the time stamp. “This was while you were with Seth.”
“Yeah, you knew that.”
“You told me you were in love with Brian. Are you still in love with him?”
“I thought I was at the time, but I’m not.”
His knee begins shaking. I think it will fly off his body. I put my hand on it.
“Show me your phone,” he says. He reaches for my hand. I pull away from him. “Just show me the conversation.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Let me see it.”
“No.”
“Just show it to me.”
He lunges at me. I jump up and run to the bathroom. He follows and I try to close the door, but he pushes against it. I push back. “Aaron, stop!” I yell. He doesn’t. “Stop it!” I throw my weight against the door and it slams shut. I lock it and Aaron hammers on the outside. He kicks it several times with the full force of his leg, and I sit with my back against it and feel the blows. The wall beside me crumbles inside itself. I text him, Please stop!!! I bang on the door. “Stop it!” I scream. I scream as loud as I can, an open vowel, enough for the neighbors on either side of us and above to hear. I punch the door several times and the banging stops. Three dots appear in our text conversation. They disappear.