True Love

by Sarah Gerard

  We’re in a different room than usual. This one has a sliding glass door to a meditation garden. The analyst looks bored. I ask him if he is. He says no.

  “I’m afraid we’ll never change,” I say. “I can see why someone would tell me to leave, but then I doubt my own interpretation of events and think maybe I’ve imagined everything. And, of course, there’s no such thing as absolute truth. Then I think, in many ways, we’re perfect together, that no two people have ever been more perfect.”

  “She’s trying to make me sound like some kind of abuser,” says Aaron. “She slept with my best friend.”

  “Once, five years ago, before we were together.”

  “The problem is with the way we communicate,” he says. “I know I’m guilty of it, too. We’re more similar than I’ve heard her admit. I’ve been trying to break through to her, to show her that we do the same things to each other. It’s just as hurtful when she does them to me. Do you know she cuts herself when we fight?”

  The analyst listens.

  “I know you know this. I know she talks to you about me. Her resistance to apologizing in the moment really bothers me. It upsets me when she storms away and slams the door. It just makes things worse.”

  “I’m not asking him to leave me alone forever,” I say. “I’m asking for fifteen minutes.”

  “It would make me feel like she cared more if she could just apologize when I apologize, even if she doesn’t completely mean it.”

  “He’s not apologizing because he’s sorry. He’s apologizing so I’ll shut up.”

  “Excuse me, can I finish?”

  “I have legitimate reasons to be mad at him. After we fight, he acts like nothing is wrong. He jumps down my throat if he thinks I’m still upset.”

  “I just don’t want us to be mad at each other.”

  “You don’t get to tell me how to feel.” I lean into it. “I’m not a robot. It’s basic anatomy, Aaron. When you’re angry, your brain floods with chemicals. My body thinks I’m being attacked.”

  “You’re not,” Aaron says. “You know that.”

  “Apparently I don’t.”

  “It would just feel more balanced if you also apologized.”

  “Not this again.”

  “What? I’m allowed to have my own concerns. This is my session, too. There’s an imbalance in our relationship. You’re the one who dictates how we talk and when conversations begin and end.”

  “It’s not ending when I ask you to give me space for fifteen minutes. We’re putting it on hold. It means I can’t hear you anymore. I’m too upset and I can’t listen. At that point, you need to just leave me alone and let me calm down so I don’t fly off the handle. You needle me and needle me until I explode. It’s like you do it on purpose to piss me off and prove a point. I want to listen to you. I really do. I just can’t in that moment. And I can’t apologize. I’m too upset. You need to give me space. I’m fucking begging you, Aaron, for fifteen fucking minutes, to get the fuck out of my face.”

  He looks at the analyst. “See? Why is she swearing at me?”

  I hate him. I want to harm him, and this is not who I am—I know I’m a peaceful person. I cried when I dropped a lizard in the air-conditioning unit when I was five. I didn’t know what would happen, and the sound haunts me to this day. I learned something about time that day: I learned that a harm can never be undone. I’m not the kind of woman who hurts people. I know how it sounds, but I swear to God he makes me do it. He turns me into someone I’m not.

  “She doesn’t like the way I communicate? Me, either,” he says, “but I’m trying really fucking hard to change it. Until then, this is just who I am and we’re stuck with me communicating this way. She needs quiet time and space to think and do her writing. I sometimes have trouble giving it to her, but I’ve never asked her to stop needing it. I know she’s not going to change that about herself. She doesn’t think she has to.”

  “Are you hearing this shit?” I say.

  The analyst listens.

  “I’m tired of her not admitting the fact that how the two of us communicate is the problem,” says Aaron. “That’s what we need to work on. That’s it.”

  I look at the analyst. “Please help me.”

  He sighs. He takes a long moment, choosing his words carefully. “There’s a matter we must attend to before we address the way you communicate,” he says. “You forgot to pay me.”

  AARON HATES THE analyst. He begins wearing sunglasses in our sessions. “These are prescription,” he says when the analyst asks about them. He claims to have forgotten his other glasses. He thinks the analyst disapproves of his life choices and prefers me, though I’ve tried to explain to him that the ideal analyst is objective. The analyst would never admit it to me, since Aaron is now also his patient, and since, in general, the analyst says very little, and says nothing directly, and speaks only in riddles, but I believe he does think Aaron is a coward. In each of our couple’s sessions, he asks him, “Mr. Firenze, why don’t you want to make more money?” In our individual sessions, he asks me, “Why is Mr. Firenze trying to make you leave him?” I believe his intention is to remind Aaron and me that we have control over our choices. I choose to rescue, cling to, and lie to Aaron, while he chooses to use me and then silence me with incessant adoration.

  I remind Aaron of his individual sessions with the analyst the day before each one, since he doesn’t keep a calendar. “I don’t do enough to necessitate using one,” he’s explained to me. I believe he would find it oppressive. After a few weeks of regular analysis, Aaron has satisfied himself that he’s proven his willingness to change, and says, on the morning before his session, “I think I’m coming down with something.”

  The following week, he says, “I made plans tonight.”

  I often text the analyst, I will be coming instead of Aaron this evening.

  Sometimes: Aaron will be coming with me this evening.

  On a rare occasion, Aaron is coming instead of me tonight.

  The analyst reminds me that classical analysis would have us all meeting every day. I feel that I’m failing us in the sense that the analyst has told me that he is also meant to benefit from our analytical partnership. In essence, I am also my analyst’s analyst, and ideally we would, all of us, eventually, be able to “say everything.”

  I text the analyst between my now triweekly sessions to fill the gaps in communication. Aaron stays up all night, I say. I ask him when he’s coming to bed and he screams at me. I was supine last night, hiding beneath the covers, and he was standing over me, screaming. My heart was pounding. I was afraid.

  I want him to tell me it’s time to leave Aaron. That this situation is growing dangerous, that I would be justified in escaping. He never says this.

  I thank you for sharing these feelings, he responds, a few hours later. Will you be able to be safe enough until we talk about this on Thursday?

  I construct the most professional response I can muster. I want to prove I’m not insane, that I didn’t bring this upon myself. Even so, I long for him to see through me, to see how broken and scared I am, to come to me, take me by the arm, and lead me to a better life. Thank you, I say. Everything seems fine now. A read receipt appears, but he doesn’t respond. I wait an hour, then follow up with him. It’s as if nothing happened, I say. I’ll be fine. I appreciate you listening.

  Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.

  Thank you for sharing your feelings and thoughts with me, he says.

  On Thursday, I tell him, “He says he’s ‘useless,’ ‘stupid,’ an ‘idiot’—he uses these words because he knows I can’t agree with him. He wants me to reassure him. But I can’t force him to believe he’s not a failure. And what evidence do I have? Do you hear my exhaustion?”

  We’re again in a different room. I’ve learned we keep moving because my analyst is a doctoral student at the center and the rooms are shared. This room is more air-conditioned. I stare at the vent, directly in the middle of
my field of vision. I imagine climbing inside it, crawling on my hands and knees into the darkness. Below it someone has hung a framed print of John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott. My mother hung the same print in our Mylanta-blue bathroom when I was a child.

  “I can’t leave him,” I say. “Divorce is expensive. I can’t afford a lawyer. I’d have to find a new place to live. I can’t afford to move. I can’t afford to live alone. I don’t know where I’d stay in the meantime. Certainly not with Aaron. Or my father. Or Leonard. Or any of my other coworkers. All of my friends hate me.”

  The Lady is lifting the chain of her boat, releasing herself downriver. Her expression is horror or rapture. A fall storm blows in; the world is thick with flowers. It’s tragic the way she kills herself for the possibility of one true experience. A moment of ecstasy.

  She saw for once in the mirror the flame-red helmet, the glinting armor, the shining saddle of Lancelot. She knows as she takes three strides toward the window that she will die for this, but she doesn’t care. She beholds the world with her naked eye. The mirror shatters.

  “I love Aaron,” I say. This sounds wrong to me. “I love him,” I say again, and I feel embarrassed. The analyst is quiet. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “He loves me and I worry what’ll happen to him if I leave him. Where will he go? He’ll think I’ve betrayed him.”

  “Ms. Wicks, can you experiment with the idea that you might want something?”

  The Lady’s tapestry tells the world of her curse. The only way they’ll ever know her. She’s dead by the time she reaches Camelot. The townspeople gather around her. They find a parchment on her chest, her final statement, but it is not addressed to Lancelot. He’s nowhere in sight. She didn’t expect him to be. She fled for her fantasy, to die with it.

  “I want to be alone,” I tell him. “I want everyone to leave me the fuck alone. My monogamous relationships all overlap. I don’t know how it happens. I’m not looking for it. I feel like my life is mocking me. I watch myself doing things and I don’t know why. I don’t even recognize myself. I don’t know who this is inside my body.”

  “Who do you think?”

  Eighteen

  I graduate and lose my insurance. I thought it would last through the summer, but at Walgreens my NuvaRing costs a hundred dollars and I have fifty-six dollars in my bank account, so I leave without buying it. It’s Monday and payday is Thursday, and all we have in the kitchen is a can of kidney beans, old pancetta, browning basil, and a box of fusilli. We’ve stopped asking Aaron’s parents to buy us groceries, to spare ourselves the humiliation. For dinner tonight, we’ll eat whatever is left over at the bookstore café after it closes: a muffin and Italian wedding soup from a bladder maybe, or chocolate croissants and a bagel that aren’t claimed by other booksellers—everyone has a side hustle, and everyone is broke.

  To sign onto the store’s insurance would take a hundred dollars out of each paycheck. My hormones spike the first day without the ring. By the third day, I’m raging.

  “I never want to take birth control again,” I tell the other Nina. She’s straightening design books in the natural light of the store’s entryway. I’ve learned she has poor boundaries for an employer. She may be my friend, or she may be my mentor, or she may be my rival—it changes day to day as different booksellers fall in and out of her favor. She’s the Regina George of intelligent retail.

  Perhaps her problem is that, like many wealthy people in New York, Nina feels guilty about her privilege. Or perhaps she suffers from malaise, longs for the vitality of the rabble, wants to be one of us, then blames and resents us for failing to absolve her of self-loathing. She emails me at one in the morning, Why is the early-reader spinner out of order? Then she takes me out for lunch at Balthazar and overshares—“When my sister gave birth, she split to the anus.”

  “I track my fertility,” she says, facing out five copies of Living with Pattern.

  “With an app?”

  She walks to the Parenting section and scans the Pregnancy shelf. I feel a fire in my vaginal canal, and it’s ever creeping northward, through my belly and nipples.

  “I had no idea what it meant to have a libido,” I say, sure she can smell me. “I’ve been on mute since high school.”

  She hands me a hefty tome with a CD-ROM glued to the inside.

  “Taking Charge of Your Fertility,” I say, turning it over. Deep fuchsia petals decorate the softcover. “And this actually works?”

  She shrugs. “So far.”

  I BRING IT home to show Aaron. The pages are illustrated with full-color close-up photographs of white women’s fingers testing the viscosity of their cervical fluid.

  “Is this sticky?” I ask him, holding up some of my own.

  The first thing we learn is that the book teaches the Fertility Awareness Method, which is not the same as the rhythm method. The Fertility Awareness Method is based on the concept of empowerment through education. Here is a contraceptive that works 99.4 percent of the time without hormones or implantations, it says, but instead through diligence and communication between partners. Each morning, I reach for a clipboard and a basal thermometer and, after peeing, check my cervical position with two fingers shoved inside, swirling around in a circle. If my cervix is low and soft, if I’m full and slick, there’s no question I’m fertile.

  I’m attaching the exercise we discussed about how to handle the fertile phase, says my new fertility counselor, Ilaria. I reached out to her looking for guidance after a month, unable to ignore the fact that Aaron was not as invested in Fertility Awareness as I was. After I explained our financial situation, Ilaria agreed to a free Skype consultation. The tone in her follow-up email is troubled. For now, I advise that you use some kind of barrier method whenever you have intercourse, except for the first 5 days of the cycle. During my fertile week, we’re supposed to choose abstinence, but my hormonal surge means we have to exercise a special willpower. We try to use condoms or spermicide, but we hate condoms and spermicide. When you’re “highly fertile,” I recommend you either stick to oral, or use a combination of methods, like condom + withdrawal. Condoms sometimes fail.

  THERE HASN’T BEEN blood in my underwear in six weeks. There’s only a clear vaginal discharge and my swollen labia. My cervix is low and hard. My breasts are tender. I take a pregnancy test on my lunch break, and for the rest of my shift, I stand behind the register Googling images of babies in different stages of development. According to my fertility calendar, my embryo is the size of a poppy seed. It has eye pigment, lungs, a heart, and a single layer of translucent skin. No arms or legs. A mutant seahorse.

  I feel no sense of protectiveness over it. Instead I feel it’s invaded my personal space. In another week, its heart will begin beating and it will be as big as a peppercorn and have blood vessels, a spinal cord, and a brain. My abdomen will be full and thick; my nipples will chafe; I’ll cry on the subway, sleep in the break room with ginger tea, have no desire to be touched. Other people will smell toxic to me. A week later, it will have bones and muscles. I gaze at the tip of my finger and imagine a poppy seed on it. I feel as if every eye in the store is on me. I decide to swear off coffee and alcohol; my body no longer belongs to me. I’m starving but queasy, overwhelmed. I long for a cigarette.

  On the train, I give my seat up for a pregnant woman. I want her to see me, hold me. I rest my palm on my abdomen to communicate to her that I’m in pain. I imagine the parasite needing me. I find that I love it in a certain way for this. I decide to eat dairy, legumes, sweet potatoes, and salmon. I’m a nurturing person.

  I call my father to ask him for the money. We haven’t talked since his new girlfriend answered his phone and I was forced to converse with her for several minutes while he finished in the bathroom. I’m glad he’s able to hold down a relationship, but she had a Floribama accent that made me want to kick through the wall. He tells me that I’m the age my mother was when she had me, and reminds me that I’m marr
ied, and I think he must be saying this to hurt me. I sit on the edge of my bathtub gazing at our grooming appliances.

  “It’s five hundred dollars,” I say, using Aaron’s nail clippers to excise a layer of dead skin from my thumb. “I’ll never ask you for anything ever again. I make fourteen dollars an hour, Dad. Please.” I know I’m privileged and selfish.

  AARON COMES WITH me to the clinic. My fetus is the size of a raspberry as I sit two chairs away from him in the waiting room. The news is on, and the air is uncomfortably warm and smells of takeout. Trump is yakking about his border wall. Last month he was hawking taco bowls in Trump Tower. I could vomit. There’s been a shooting in Orlando and forty-nine people are dead. I text my mother. Everyone okay? That anyone would have children astounds me, since it feels like there won’t be a world left in thirty years. I read somewhere that having biological children is the second worst thing you can do for global warming, after flying in an airplane.

  A pregnant woman beside me struggles to her feet, reaches for the remote, and hits the power button. The room falls silent. For the last three weeks, while waiting for my abortion, I’ve secluded myself, avoiding the news, too sensitive for this planet, avoiding human contact. I don’t want comfort. I don’t want to share this private transformation I’m undergoing in which I’ll become monstrous.

  I burrow into my grief. I’m morbidly curious about viable pregnancies. I angle away from Aaron and navigate to Heidi’s Instagram, where lately I can tell she’s taking steps to broaden her audience, and springboard her pregnancy into a brand. She’s tagged the manufacturer of some raw-cotton onesies she’s styled in a draping formation over her naked baby bump. Each minute I spend pondering this, my fetus grows one hundred new brain cells. I put my phone in my purse on airplane mode. I rub my face and press my middle fingers into my eyeballs. Aaron comes over to me. “What’s wrong?” he asks, as if it’s not obvious. His show of contrition irritates me. A baby would bind us indelibly, which he may have wanted, and I delight in a small measure seeing him suffer. If only our “circumstances,” as he calls them, had been different, we could have had a baby, he says, so thank fuck we’re destitute.