True Love
Page 18
“You can’t be monogamous. I was thinking about it just now, and it’s just not how you’re made. Your mom is a slut. Right? I think it’s genetic.”
“Fuck you, you’re basically a virgin.”
“Please stop yelling at me.”
“I’m not yelling. This is how I talk because I hate you.”
A white SUV rounds the corner and its lights sweep over Aaron’s face, blinding him. I wave my hands. It stops beside us, and Aaron jumps in front of the door.
“Get the fuck out of my way.”
“Please stop yelling. People are sleeping.”
“Fuck you, Aaron, get the fuck out of my way. Get the fuck out of my way. Get the fuck out of my way. Move. Move. Move.”
My Uber driver calls me from inside the car beside us. Aaron takes the phone from my hand. He holds it out of my reach.
“Fuck you, Aaron!”
The phone stops ringing. The Uber starts to pull away, and I grab Aaron’s shirt and shove him onto the grass. I grab my bag and run toward the Uber and open the door, rolling inside, and lock the door behind me.
MY COWORKER IS the only person I feel certain will answer the phone. She’s the only one I’ve told about the true origin of my bloody eyeball. I told her because I saw the way she looked at me when she had to look me in the eye. Like she already knew. The red has faded into a watery brown like the stains in my underwear at the end of my period. She holds my head as I cry. She pulls her fingers through my hair. She brings me to her bed and presses me into her chest. She tells me to let it out, and she kisses my eyelids.
“Aaron screams at me. He screams when I’m lying in bed. He breaks tables, chairs, the kitchen spoon, the lightbulbs. He broke the window with his head. He picks fights with me when I’m just looking out the window of the car, he’s like, ‘I’m not your chauffeur.’
“This one time, he had strep throat,” I tell her. Her eyes are on me as I try to convey what happened. “We drive to the hospital. It’s three in the morning and Aaron’s strep throat has come on fast and is really painful. We go to Maimonides. It’s closest, but the emergency room has a long wait, and it’s hot and smelly, with rude nurses, and it’s understaffed because it’s the middle of the night.”
I sob for a minute.
“We wait two hours and then we decide to go somewhere else. By now, Aaron’s pain has grown unbearable—he has a low tolerance for pain—and he drives maniacally. He runs red lights and stop signs. I beg him to slow down because he’s scaring me and he just ignores me.
“We get to the second hospital and he pulls into the garage, and he’s ready for a fight with the attendant because he knows she’s going to make him pay, and he doesn’t have any money. I do, but he’s refusing it on principle. He thinks because he wants to, she should let him park there. He screams at her. He throws the car into reverse and we screech backwards into the street.
“He throws the car back into drive and I scream and plead with him to stop but he won’t. We get to a stop sign and I jump out and go running down the block. Aaron speeds away. I’m next to the hospital, but I don’t know where to go, and it’s early in the morning. I’m alone, lost, scared.”
I cry.
“I wander around for a minute and I see Aaron coming down the street. He gets to within a block of me and I see that he’s running, and he looks at me and screams, ‘Why are you crying?’ Then he runs on without me.
“I stand there crying for another few minutes, then follow him inside because I don’t know what else to do. He’s checked in at the nurses’ window and is waiting to be triaged. He’s calm and acts like nothing happened. He says, ‘Hey, sweetie,’ when he sees me. He asks me again why I’m crying. He’s actually curious.
“I just look at him in shock. He makes such a fuss about the throat swab hurting that the doctor storms away and refuses to treat him, so I have to beg the doctor to come back.
“Three days later, after telling me that he’s going to quit smoking, and knowing that I hate it when he smokes inside, and knowing how terrorized I am still from the ER trip, and using my money to buy them, Aaron smokes an American Spirit in our living room right in front of me.”
SETH IS SITTING on the planter outside the bookstore the next morning. He’s let his new girlfriend cut his hair and is wearing one of those bike-messenger hats that make everyone look like a penis; the effect is especially pronounced on his especially big head. “Hello, Nina,” he says, and there’s something self-satisfied in it, as if he’s glad to see me surprised, has even been anticipating it.
“Oh, hi,” I say, like I’ve been expecting this moment, too, refusing to give him any satisfaction. I knew all along he would come for me. I know that he came here to gloat.
“You’re looking healthy,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“I saw Odessa the other day,” he says.
“Oh, how is she?”
“She’s good.”
“Did you see the baby?”
“I did.”
He smiles and says nothing more about this. I see in his eyes that he’s smiling at the memory of the baby. I suddenly want him to touch me.
“I hear you’re married now,” he says.
“I am.”
“Don’t fuck it up.”
DANIEL’S SPONSOR HAS found him in a hotel room. “There was blood everywhere,” Aaron tells me on the phone. I picture him flaying his wrists or spending long hours cutting his thighs before shooting himself in the mouth. Daniel did it by drinking enough in one night to kill himself, Aaron says.
I look up how much a person would have to drink to kill himself. The way it would kill him. I’m curious to know whether there’s any blood. Aaron didn’t specify the source of the blood. I need to know where it came from. Maybe he bled from his stomach, but this would be internal. It’s possible some came out his ass.
“HE WAS GETTING drunk every night in fancy hotel rooms, traveling up and down the East Coast like a farewell tour,” Aaron says. I’m sitting beside him on our rust-colored stoop. I’m holding his hand because it seems like the right thing to do. He tells me he doesn’t know exactly how Daniel died—whether it was intentional or not.
“He was hemorrhaging the ten thousand dollars he’d inherited from his parents.”
“The hotel room was five hundred dollars a night,” I say. “I looked it up.”
“I wish I had ten thousand dollars.”
“Last time I saw him, he was sleeping on the floor of someone’s studio,” I say.
“When was that?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do.”
Maybe Daniel’s blood was splattered across the walls and had soaked through the light blue bedspread. Maybe there was blood everywhere because Daniel had been cutting himself while drinking himself to death. Maybe the blood had nothing to do with the moment of death. Maybe he suffered for a long time before he died. Maybe the blood and vomit only mixed outside of Daniel’s body. Maybe he died in the bathtub. Maybe the blood and vomit pooled on the tile floor of the bathroom. I feel that his energy was heavy and thick like cement. I feel it grinding like tectonic plates.
Hi, Nina . . . he’d said, in his last voicemail, from two months ago. I play it for Aaron now. It’s Daniel. And, goodness, it feels like centuries. But I said I would call, and I . . .
. . .
. . . I would like to speak to you for—he chuckles—various or unknown reasons. But if you’d like to call me back, my number is 919-559-8594, and yes, I understand that in modern times, you will probably receive that, but . . . I’d love to talk to you or Aaron soon. Um . . .
. . .
. . . Yeah, call me back, if you’d like. Okay, bye.
“I didn’t,” I say.
“You weren’t his friend,” says Aaron.
“Yes, I was.”
I let go of his hand.
“Listen, Nina,” he says.
I watch a woman exit her apartment across the stre
et. She’s balancing an overfull bag of laundry on her shoulder. She wobbles down the steps, and a bottle of Free & Clear detergent tumbles out of it, followed by several intimates. The detergent tumbles into the gutter and breaks open.
Aaron looks down at my hand. He places his on top of it.
“I think people can change,” he says.
Acknowledgments
Eternal thanks to Patty Cottrell, Adriann Ranta Zurhellen, Erin Wicks, Rachel Hurn, Arielle Stevenson, my parents, the team at Harper, and the Ucross Foundation, without which this book would not exist.
About the Author
SARAH GERARD is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, which was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and the novel Binary Star, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, T magazine, Granta, Baffler, and Vice, and in the anthologies Tampa Noir, We Can’t Help It If We’re from Florida, and Small Blows Against Encroaching Totalitarianism. She lives in New York City with her true love, the writer Patty Yumi Cottrell. Find her at Sarah-Gerard.com.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Sarah Gerard
FICTION
Binary Star
NONFICTION
Sunshine State
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
TRUE LOVE. Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Gerard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover design © Yaroslav Danylchenko/Stocksy United
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition JULY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-293742-1
Version 05202020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293743-8
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3
www.harpercollins.ca
India
HarperCollins India
A 75, Sector 57
Noida
Uttar Pradesh 201 301
www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com