True Love

by Sarah Gerard

  I pull up my sleeve. There are three fresh gashes, half an inch wide and two inches long, across the middle of my forearm. The analyst doesn’t say anything.

  “I started cutting myself in the second grade, but I haven’t done it since high school,” I lie. “So, I consider this a sort of relapse.”

  I wait for him to respond, but he doesn’t.

  “Are you awake?” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Now he uses this as another excuse to never leave me alone. If I try to lock myself in the bathroom, he forces his way inside and makes a big show of fishing my razors out from under the sink. He’s just trying to humiliate me. It’s like he thinks he’s my keeper. It’s infantilizing. I feel like a captive animal. I don’t know what to do.”

  “What comes to mind?” he says.

  Divorce him, I think, but I say, “I’d like to find another way to handle my stress.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “We’d been arguing for three days when I did it. He drives me insane. He’s angry and self-loathing, yelling at me, criticizing me. He micromanages even the way I make eggs. It’s almost nonstop with brief intermissions of sweetness and apologizing. He tells me he loves me, then the smallest thing sets him off again. I cut myself in the bathroom and felt better afterward. What’s wrong with that? We were finally able to go to sleep. The next morning, when he noticed the bloody tissue in the trash can, he started yelling again, accusing me of doing it to hurt him. How narcissistic can you be?”

  I’d escaped into the rain and gone running down the street, hiding beneath awning after awning through Little Bangladesh. I reached the corner dive bar and spotted Daniel through the window, drinking alone. He looked up at me and we smiled, and I thought about going inside, but it was nine in the morning, and I didn’t know why he would be there. I decided I didn’t want to know.

  “I went for a walk, and when I got back, the same argument started up again, from the night before. He can see in my face that I’m still upset. Even if I don’t want to talk about it, or deny being upset, he can’t be convinced otherwise. He needles me until I tell him what’s bothering me. Sometimes I lie and say that I’m upset even when I’m not because I know it’s what he wants to hear. Why does he want to hear that something’s upsetting me? Why does he think something is wrong all the time? Who taught him this? And of course, it’s his mother. All she does is complain. We stayed over at their house a few weeks ago and I woke up at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning to the sound of her screaming at Aaron’s brother. He was still in bed, under the covers.”

  “Why was she screaming?”

  “Because he got into Oxycontin and failed out of college in his first semester and then slept through his NA meeting. But he’s some kind of genius. He can very quickly become an expert in anything. He figured out how to get onto the dark web and was all over Silk Road buying chemicals he and his friends mixed into drugs. I think they did something funny to his brain. He’s not the same person he was six months ago.”

  I stumble on a memory of waking up in the Den of Inquiry, staring into a hole in my ceiling. A pipe had burst in the room above me, and I’d been sleeping in a pool of dirty water unbeknownst. I was so fucked up even after waking that I briefly considered leaving the hole unpatched, figuring it was better to see the pipes than not to.

  “I relate to him. He hardly ever leaves the house now. He doesn’t have friends anymore. He tries to make money, but sabotages himself. I think he’s afraid of succeeding.”

  I take in what I’ve just said. I stare at the air-conditioning vent.

  “Aaron is just like his brother,” I say. “He can pick up any instrument and play it within five minutes. He has perfect pitch. We sing together sometimes, folk songs.”

  “How lovely.”

  “It’s part of how we fell in love, harmonizing. I can only sing melody. Aaron harmonizes. We complement each other. He makes up for my deficits. We’re very compatible. But also I think we’re actually only compatible because he doesn’t really know me.”

  “Oh?”

  “He knows certain things about me, but they’re surface-level things. He doesn’t really know my baggage. I don’t want to get into it. I like that he’s still able to think that my limitations make me cute. Like, melody is the only part of the music I can hear. I can listen to any melody and sing it back to you perfectly, every note. Would you like me to sing for you?”

  “Of course,” he says.

  “I suddenly don’t want to.”

  “I am interested in anything you want to share with me.”

  “Then I’ll sing for you,” I say, “but not today.”

  “Not today,” he says. “Perhaps when we’re more comfortable together.”

  BEFORE EACH SESSION begins, I hand him a check for thirty-five dollars. This is the copay from my college insurance. The analyst tells me that this weekly payment is foundational to our partnership as analyst and analysand. If I forget the ceremony of paying him, he asks me why. I look within myself for a motive. I explain, “I know you deserve more than this.” I want him to want to continue seeing me. After a month, I can’t bear the thought of losing him. I feel as if I’ve invested too much in our relationship. I talk about him with all of my coworkers like he’s my boyfriend. “My analyst tells me to ‘have a decent afternoon,’” I tell them, smirking.

  “Thank you for being patient with me,” I say.

  “You’re most welcome,” he says.

  I lie on his couch with my shoes off. After standing for twelve hours, my feet ache. I went to a drawing class after my bookstore shift today and posed, then came here, and it will be another hour back to Kensington. I won’t get home till nine o’clock.

  “Aaron is suspicious of my every move,” I say. “He needs to know where I’m going, who I’m out with, when I’ll be home, every night. If I’m twenty minutes late, he starts calling me. He came around the corner of our apartment building the other day when I was finishing a phone call with a friend and demanded to know who I was talking to.”

  I say this like his paranoia’s unthinkable. I was talking to a man I’d met on Instagram. I’ve become infatuated with his BDSM drawings and bought one for a hundred dollars just to begin a conversation with him. The drawing depicts a woman in a ball gag and handcuffs, with makeup running from her eyes. I hung it above my TV tray in the utility closet, telling Aaron, “I like this guy’s work.” I’d been messaging with him for two days when I got drunk with my coworker and asked him for his phone number, and called him on my way home. I’d just finished throwing up against the body of a train. I told him what happened and let him know I’d been masturbating thinking of him while my husband slept next to me. I was cackling. He messaged me later that night to say that I scared him. I asked him if he liked being afraid of me.

  “He’s especially suspicious of our friend Daniel,” I say, “even though Daniel is having twins with my college roommate.”

  I haven’t told the analyst about Heidi. I came across this information on Instagram on the same day I bought Tyler’s drawing. I liked Heidi’s announcement and commented, Congratulations!; then Daniel messaged me asking if we’d come to dinner. “He asked if we had any dietary restrictions,” I told Aaron, laughing. “Doesn’t he know you?”

  “Daniel and I slept together once,” I tell the analyst, “like five years ago. Aaron thinks I still want to fuck him.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. But he’s not special that way. I want to fuck a lot of people.”

  “How is he special?”

  I close my eyes. We’d sat in their living room after dinner. Aaron and I drank wine; Heidi couldn’t, with the fetuses; Daniel couldn’t, as he was allegedly sober. I vaguely wondered about seeing him at the bar. My thigh pressed against his on the sofa. I leaned into him subtly, smelling the warmth of his neck. He hugged us at the door, and his hands rested in the small of my back. They were stable, familiar.

  “I trust him,” I say
, opening my eyes. “And I don’t trust Aaron. I don’t want to have sex with Aaron anymore.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “I’m afraid of him. We argue, and for the rest of the day I can’t even think of having sex with him. Then he guilts me into doing it or seduces me against my will. He touches me in a way he knows I’ve liked in the past and my body responds, I can’t help it. I have sex with him, then I think I’m in love with him.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “What do you mean?” I say. I think about it. “Of course I do.” I reach for a tissue. “But I know this feeling of closeness is false—my body lying to me. He’s using my body against me.”

  Seventeen

  “I know you’re never going to come visit me,” my mother says to me on Thanksgiving. Aaron and I are spending the holiday at Aaron’s parents’ house, which I know she’s salty about. She’ll continue dropping her hurt feelings into otherwise pleasant conversations like chemical weapons for the foreseeable future. We invited her and my dad to join us, but my father was having dinner with his new girlfriend, and my mother was too self-righteous to fly up, though she claimed it was because she couldn’t get the time off. “This is our busiest season.” We’re post-dessert, and I’ve stepped outside to call her from my in-laws’ patio. It’s freezing, as we’re in the grip of a polar vortex. I welcome the excuse to distance myself, after performing interest in the turkey, the table settings, the music, and Aaron’s brother’s recent hobby of building computers in the attic.

  “I don’t have the money to fly, Mom,” I say. “I’m sorry. Maybe you can help me.”

  “Save twenty dollars a week,” she says.

  “I don’t have that. Aaron’s out of work right now.”

  “You say you’re struggling, but I’ve always struggled,” she says, making my life about her, as always. “I’ve always had to be careful with money.”

  “I am careful with money.”

  “But I’ve always been diligent about putting money away,” she says. “I’m sure you don’t have to write at the coffee shop. Or you could bring your own coffee to the coffee shop. Or write at home.”

  “I can’t write when Aaron’s there. He doesn’t leave me alone.”

  “You always date such clingy people.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You just always choose people who need you more than you need them. It’s something I’ve noticed about you.”

  IN MY NEXT conversation with my mother, she spends the entire hour complaining about her own mother, because her recent decision to be outspoken about Uncle Bruce has driven the wedge between them even deeper. Nana is currently shrinking into her mattress in a new nursing home. I vent my frustration and exhaustion to the analyst, and then, feeling very fresh, sit down to share my hard-won analytical insights with my mother. I start by detailing all of the ways she’s harmed me. Then I write, It’s because I love you that I hope you finally begin to heal from a lifetime of hurting. You have been through hell, and you have not done the necessary work to heal yourself. As a result, you pass your suffering on to others. Healing involves seeking therapy. With a therapist, examine why it is that you have always been so angry—I know there are many reasons. Examine why you consistently aim this anger at the people closest to you. Ask yourself why you continue to alienate people, and how it’s affected your relationships, and how you can begin to repair them.

  I want to thank you for being so honest with me, she texts me minutes later. There is no way she could have absorbed my email in that time; I spent hours writing it. There’s no reason for me to explain or defend myself, she says—in the first line, I’d accused her of being defensive whenever I raised an issue about our relationship. You’re completely right about how you feel, first of all because it’s your personal truth, but mostly because it’s reality. Then she says, Unfortunately, I don’t have time or money for therapy.

  Then I don’t have time for this conversation, I say.

  You’ve been in therapy for two months and you think you’ve figured everyone out.

  I’ve been in therapy since high school.

  So you have an honorary counseling license.

  Therapy gives you tools.

  I have tools.

  She reminds me that she recently read a spiritual self-help book called The Untethered Soul.

  MY MOTHER DOESN’T answer the phone for the next two months. She sends me to voicemail, then texts me and says, I’m working. She’s been sick since Thanksgiving with a sinus infection that shows up as an enormous black hole in the X-ray of her face—she finally breaks the silence when she texts me a picture of it from the doctor’s office. She refuses to take time off because she uses work to punish herself and barricade herself against her own life. “I fill in for everyone during holiday season,” she says; then, “It’s slow season and I’m making half of what I usually do, so I have to work twice as much.” She loves being a martyr.

  WHEN I ASK her, Are you mad at me? she says, No, sorry you think that.

  We’ve barely talked in two months, I say.

  I’m moving out of my apartment, she says. I’ve basically been living at Dara’s.

  Let me know if you want to talk about it, I say.

  I don’t have the time or energy right now.

  I hope the new antibiotics are working.

  I’ve been sick for a year but it’s been nonstop since Thanksgiving.

  What if I came April 17-19? I can ask for a day off.

  It’s honestly hard for me to take off work or have visitors that month, she says.

  Can we talk about this on the phone?

  You always call when I’m sleeping or at work and I can’t answer. I’m sorry, I can’t commit to anything with you right now.

  I call Uncle Jude. After weeks of him ignoring my mother, she relented and saw his counselor with him. I believe he was hoping that, in that one magical meeting, she would awaken to the benefits of professional help and seek her own, but she hasn’t.

  “I’m worried about my mom,” I tell him. “She’s been sick for a long time and she won’t answer the phone. I think she’s mad at me, but I don’t know why, and she says she’s not, but I know she is. Did she say anything about me when you visited her?”

  “I hardly saw her,” he said. “She was working the whole time I was there. She arranged for me to go out to dinner with her and Dara one night, then she canceled at the last minute, so Dara and I went out together.”

  “Was she sick?”

  “I don’t know. She said she was tired.”

  I ASK MY mother for her address. She warns me that she rarely gets packages. People in her neighborhood steal them.

  I mail her a gift of a bundle of palo santo. I include an abalone-shell stand and a handwritten card. Hope this brings you some peace. Love you.

  Did you get my present? I text her a week later.

  She responds the next day.

  Yes, I told you I did.

  AARON AGREES TO come with me to analysis. He also agrees to see the analyst alone, though he doesn’t think he needs to. I intuit that he believes the problem with our relationship is me. His relenting to occasional therapy is a long con to show me how willing he is to change, though he has no intention of changing, and would have no idea how to go about doing so even if he did. No one in his family has ever been to therapy, and they have no vocabulary for talking about feelings, let alone taking responsibility for them—they are emotional idiots—“idiot” being another classic Firenze family insult. The Firenzes are loath to suffer idiots. To be an idiot is to renege on the individual’s responsibility to know everything by knowing nothing. Knowing everything is the foundation of masculine identity, and the seat of power. A man should never be wrong, yet an idiot is wrong because he’s “stupid.” To be an idiot is emasculating. Women can also be idiots, but it’s more common and less surprising when a woman is an idiot. It’s almost like kicking a dog to call her one.

  Aaron’s in
tention is to turn this period of seeing the analyst around on me later: “I changed,” he’ll say, though he won’t have. “It’s your turn.”

  Aaron wants me to start “thinking of us as a unit.” He thinks I think I’m better than he is, since he’s a loser, though I’ve never said this aloud, and would never insult him to his face, except when I say things like, “What’s wrong with you?” or, “What’s your problem?”

  “We’re the same, Nina,” he says. “We’re equals.”

  “Yes, we agree on that,” I say. What I don’t say is “Then why don’t you make more money?”

  My hope is that my analyst will advocate for me. That, with therapeutic mind games, he will trick Aaron into becoming a less paranoid, more confident, more ambitious, less entitled individual who is solvent, listens, enjoys reading, and is happy entertaining himself now and again. Therapy scares Aaron—who knows what he’ll find lurking in his own mind?—but I predict that once he meets my analyst, he will understand the allure, and quickly benefit from guided introspection. I can’t afford more than one appointment for us per week, so Aaron and I now alternate week to week, and every third week, we go together.

  “I’ve stopped thinking that our emotionally violent dynamic will change,” I tell the analyst in our first couple’s session. “I’ve been thinking of ways just to weather these storms better when they do blow in. I’m putting a lot of effort into it. I never know when something will set him off, and once an argument begins, there’s no de-escalating it—he just loses all control. He followed me around the neighborhood for four hours last week, in the middle of the night. I just went for a walk to clear my mind.”

  “She told me she was going to throw herself in front of a bus.”

  “Excuse me, can I finish? Did you really think I would do that? No. I was exasperated. You’d been harassing me for hours.” I turn to the analyst. “I was afraid to go home at that point. I was hiding behind trash cans.”