The Man I Love

by Suanne Laqueur

  He sat still, the tears making steady tracks down his face. The pain pressed on him from all sides.

  “You must have missed him horribly,” Diane said.

  What an obvious thing to say.

  But what a truthful thing to say.

  I had a bad dream.

  “I missed him.” He closed his eyes, took it out of the past and cradled it in his hands. “But I don’t know if he missed me.”

  The forbidden thought, now spoken aloud, was a knife in his heart, slashing straight down to his guts. He thought he would die. This boyhood pain was insurmountable. He was unmanned.

  “I wonder where he is,” he said, surrendering to the question coiled up in his bones. A daily inquiry actively thought or subconsciously pondered, but constantly with him, a gene on his Y chromosome: Where are you, Dad?

  “I wonder if he even thinks about me.” He shook his head, opening his eyes. “I wonder if he saw the news stories about Lancaster. If he saw it on TV or read it in the paper. I wonder if he saw my name and thought that’s my son. If he did, and even a shooting couldn’t move him to find me, then either he has no heart or…”

  “Or what?” Diane said.

  “Or he’s dead.”

  He looked down at his empty palms and saw white feathers. Exhaling wearily, he watched them blow away.

  The Current

  They dug.

  Deeper.

  Erik came in one afternoon in a bad mood. He chucked his jacket off, plopped down on the couch and put an ankle on the other knee. He exhaled loudly and Diane raised her eyebrows at him, but said nothing. She always waited for him to make the opening serve.

  “I had a date last night,” he said. He was attempting to do this more often—get out there and open himself up to the possibility of connecting with someone.

  She volleyed easily. “What was that like?”

  “A disaster.”

  “How so?”

  “She was lovely, it wasn’t her. It was just my usual bullshit.”

  “Which is?”

  “It’s the second, no, third time we’ve gone out. We ended up back at her place and…” He trailed off awkwardly.

  “Did you sleep together?” Diane said.

  “Yeah. It was fine during it. Great, actually. But then afterward, I was a wreck.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I was lying there having a panic attack. I had to get the hell out. I felt really bad but… This is like the story of my life. This always happens and I don’t know why.”

  “You find this always happens when you go to bed with someone?”

  “I’m fine before, fine during, and then afterward, I go into a death spiral. Is it cold in here?”

  “I don’t think so. Are you cold?”

  “A little. What were you asking me?”

  “How long has this been happening?”

  He took a deep breath, shuffling his cards. Pointless posturing, but naturally with any kind of sexual issue, the kneejerk reaction was to sugarcoat. But if he was here to dig into it, if he was paying to dig into it, then he may as well dig into it. “Since the shooting,” he said miserably. “Five years.”

  Diane barely blinked. “That long.”

  “Yes.”

  “So even with Daisy this happened.”

  “Both of us.”

  She shifted to lean on the other arm of the chair. “Both of you would have anxiety after sex.”

  “You’re going to do that annoying thing of parroting everything I say back to me, aren’t you?”

  She smiled, her tongue pushing into her cheek for a moment. “Yes, I am.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, trying to organize his thoughts without thinking too much. “Daisy and I had some issues with sex after the shooting,” he said. “Two problems. Three. Two right away and the third later. First, immediately afterward it was just impossible, physically impossible. She could barely get out of a chair, much less into bed. Honestly, it was the furthest thing from either of our minds. Forget I said it was a problem. The issue was when we started again. It was weird, we both felt really disconnected. Ambivalent. Like we could take it or leave it. And I guess that’s pretty normal for post-traumatic stressed people.”

  Diane nodded. “It’s the first thing to go.”

  “And then we started feeling like it again, but every time it was good between us, we’d be shaking wrecks.”

  “Anxiety?”

  “Awful. Sheer panic. Shaking and nauseous and terrified. Of nothing.”

  “Was this before? During?”

  “Just after. Occasionally it was good, I mean really good during it and actually peaceful afterward. Occasionally. But then it was like we’d be sucker-punched—it would be twice as bad the next time, like we were being punished. We were flailing. We didn’t know what to do. At all.”

  “Did you seek any help?”

  He laughed. “Shit no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we were twenty-one and twenty-two years old for crying out loud. Who thinks to go into sex therapy then, no matter what the circumstances? Come on.” He tucked his fingers under his arms. He was nearly shivering and he pressed his feet hard on the floor to stay his knees.

  She nodded, twisting the corners of her mouth. “All right, fair point. So you just muddled through it.”

  “We did, but we muddled together. Both of us had the same problem. If it were her lying there anxious and I was fine, or the other way around, it would have sucked. But we’d both be nauseous and shaking. We were in it together.”

  Diane drew a foot up under her leg. “I was just going to ask you if the loss of sex made the relationship feel diminished in any way. But it sounds as though you remained emotionally bonded. If anything, your bond grew stronger?”

  “We were tighter. Definitely. We were rarely apart. We needed each other. We didn’t understand what was happening but we talked about it. We tried to laugh at it.”

  “Yet something in your consciousness was linking sex to anxiety.”

  Erik raked his hands through his hair, frustrated. “I don’t get it. If walking into the theater made me anxious, or rehearsing, or running a show, it would make sense to me.”

  “But instead sex was the trigger. Why do you think?”

  “You’re the shrink, you tell me.”

  “Do you have any ideas?”

  He resisted the urge to throw the pillow at her. “No, I got nothing. I have no idea why my greatest source of joy and comfort made me feel like I was going to die. By all means, enlighten me. The shooting had nothing to do with sex.”

  “It didn’t?”

  He threw the pillow, but at the side wall, not at Diane. “Oh good lord, don’t do this. What are you getting at?”

  Diane’s eyes hadn’t even flicked toward the trajectory of the cushion—apparently worse things had been thrown in this office. Languidly she reached for her coffee cup and took a reflective sip. “Let’s back up a little. How soon prior to the shooting did you have sex with Daisy? Or been in any kind of sexual environment with her.”

  “I told you I can’t remember anything before the shooting.”

  Diane put her coffee cup down. “Try,” she said.

  Erik exhaled. “Let me think.”

  “Any kind of physical, loving, intimate way. What was the last time you remember before the shooting?”

  The cold in his limbs intensified, grew prickling and sinister as he tried to think. “It was….” Every thought he began bumped into an invisible wall and splintered. “It was—” he began a half-dozen times, only to trail off as his mind faded out, and every time it faded out, his chest got tighter. “Diane, I’m sorry. I can’t think when,” he finally said. “It’s gone.”

  “You’re getting agitated.”

  “I know.” He wasn’t feeling good. Something was wrong.

  “Do you feel frightened?”

  “A little bit… Yeah.”

  Her voice dr
opped, not in volume, but in pitch, lower, resonant, calm. “I think this is important,” she said.

  He tried to get air in past the obstruction in his chest. He wanted to say I can’t breathe, but it came out, “I can’t remember.”

  “Try to relax, Erik. Listen to my voice. We’re going to work through this together.”

  He was shaking now. A cold, dark wind through him, trying to blow him back from going down this road. “What’s happening to me?”

  Diane got up slowly, being careful not to startle him. “Your body is trying to keep you from remembering.” She took a blanket from one of the other easy chairs and held it out to him. “It’s going to be frightening but it is not going to kill you. I promise. Let it come back to you. I’m right here. I’m not going to let you face it alone.”

  It seemed a supreme act of bravery to put himself into her hands, but he did, wrapping the blanket around him like armor. “All right.”

  “Try to remember when, before the shooting, you were last sexual with Daisy.”

  He closed his eyes. “I don’t even know where to start rewinding.”

  “Start in the aisle. When you came out of the booth into the aisle. What was before?”

  “I was under the console with the broken glass. And before… I was watching the shit go down. And before that I was running lights”

  “Now back up from there. Before James came in. Before the dancing even started. What were you doing?”

  “Diane, I can’t breathe.”

  “You can. The air is going in. You’re breathing. I promise.”

  “All right.”

  “Back up. Where are you?”

  He visualized the action running in reverse. “It was a rehearsal. A tech run-through. And it was Daisy’s turn. They would have called her and she would have come…from the audience. No. Wait.”

  Like a small bright flower, the memory rebloomed: Daisy, walking down the aisle. Tying her skirt and walking toward the stage. He had watched her. She had walked down the aisle. Away from him. Down the aisle. Which meant she had been…

  “Where are you, Erik?”

  Another flower unfolded its petals. In the booth. Of course. She had been in the booth with him. “It was,” he began, but his throat was bone-dry. He cleared it. “It was…”

  “Stay here. I know it’s hard.”

  “I feel like I’m dying.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The lighting booth.”

  “When?”

  “Before she went onstage to rehearse, Daisy was with me in the lighting booth.”

  “Tell me.”

  It was so strange, picking these flowers. He looked at them, sure they belonged to someone else. Then he held them closer to his face, caught their scent and he knew they were real. They were real and they were his. He remembered.

  “She was sitting on my lap and…” It was flooding him now, fast and furious. Not flowers but a white-water river of memory churning up in his brain, each recollection clamoring for attention and refusing to be corralled into order. His hands came up to the sides of his head, trying to hold it all in place.

  “Were you having sex in the booth?”

  “Yes. I mean no, not then. It was the night before. God, I’m all over the place.”

  “It’s all right. Keep backing up. Tell me about the night before.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her helplessly. “My head is spinning, I can’t even…”

  “Erik look at the wall. Right there, the place where it’s blank. Take everything in your head and fling it on the wall. Like a movie. Put it there.”

  He tried, stared hard at the white expanse of space and attempted to project his thoughts onto it. He even imagined a whirring clicking noise, like a projector. It worked. The tornado in his head died down to a gentle gale. “We were in her room, and we were just… God, I remember now.”

  “Describe it to me, what are you feeling?”

  He knew Diane wanted him to speak in present tense but it was too terrifying. Until he could figure out what was scaring him so much, he had to keep it in the past.

  “We were making love but it was…” He trailed off as the images on the wall grew brighter, more vivid, dripping sweat and giving off a faint scent of sex and perfume. Desire, thick like syrup, caramel sweet and rich. The bumps of Daisy’s spine and the muscles along them rippling as he thrust into her from behind, slow and sure and strong. Something almost narcissistic about it—admiring himself in his prime. All cut arms and abs, bursting with health and stamina. He was young, rock hard and raring, carefree and reckless. He could fuck her all night, she only had to ask. And she did. She begged for it.

  “I had her down on the bed. I was behind her and I was just holding her down and fucking her. Sorry,” he said.

  “There’s no shame there. When you’ve established that kind of trust and intimacy, sex wears all kinds of faces.”

  The movie on the wall, which had been silent, now offered up a soundtrack of memory as well. “She was saying…things. Like you fuck me so good and… I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

  “It’s not about me,” she murmured. “Go on.”

  “It made me feel incredible, like I really dialed into what it felt like to be a man. I was down at some elemental level of being…”

  “Male.”

  He nodded, lost and transfixed in the remembering. “I was making her come. Getting her off, one after the other. She kept begging and I kept going and we just fed on each other. And at one point she put her hands behind her back and I held onto them. She just gave herself over to me.”

  “It sounds intense.”

  “I can’t believe I forgot this.”

  “You didn’t forget.”

  “God, I had her in my hands. Had her right where I wanted her and I wanted to make her scream the house down.”

  “You were very much in love with her.”

  “Yes.”

  “You trusted each other. You were utterly free to say whatever you wanted and be whatever you wanted. You could be loving and sweet, or you could be primal and savage. You could make love or you could fuck, it was all the same thing.”

  A stream of tears on his cheek then. He hadn’t even realized his eyes had welled up. “I never knew anything like it in my life.”

  “And there seemed to be no end to it.”

  “Nothing to stop it.”

  “And when you were in the lighting booth the next day,” Diane said.

  He turned his head from the wall. “She was in there with me,” he said. “She was sitting in my lap and we were talking about it. Talking about the night before. And we were laughing and rehashing it and sort of blushing. This coy bit of I can’t believe the shit I was saying, but we were laughing. Teasing each other. And God, I couldn’t wait to get her alone again. Get my hands on her again. Usually she was the practical one. Nothing ever swayed her from class or rehearsal. But she was sitting in my lap and she was all in my eyes. She said, I just want to ditch this place and go back to bed with you. But Marie called her and she had to go. And she…” He squeezed himself tight, his ice-cold, shaking hands in fists, all of him shaking, looking for a place to flee.

  “Let it out, Erik.”

  “She kissed me one more time and she walked down the aisle. But she turned back and looked at me. And waved. And that moment right there—everything was amazing. She pointed at me and she was smiling at me. Everything was perfect. I was so happy. I swear it’s the last time in my life I remember being completely and totally happy.”

  “You were connected to her,” Diane said. “With every cell of your body.”

  “It was like I was still inside her.”

  “And you were still connected to the night before, yes. The current of sexuality was still live. It was still crackling.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a powerful moment, Erik. A moment layered with joy. All kinds of deeply intense feelings of love and connection and arousal and you
th.”

  “I was so happy,” he whispered. “I was…” He was starting to cry as the fabric of the universe began to tear down the center, thread by thread, warp and weft separating.

  “Lean into it,” she said. “Don’t pull back, Erik. Tell me.”

  “I was looking at her. But I was looking at Will, too. And David behind the set. My friends. My teachers. Everyone I loved, all of us. My life. Right there. Perfect. I was so happy…”

  “And then?”

  “James came in.”

  “And he took it away from you.”

  “He told me it was a fairytale. He told me the day would come when I would lose her and then I would know what it was like. He made that day come. He brought it to me.”

  “You were a target, Erik.”

  “It wasn’t just Will. He came after me, too.”

  “He shot down your happiness.”

  “He shot it.” He sobbed into his hands. “He came and he shot it. He killed it. He took her away from me, he took all of it down. It was gone. It was dead, all of it. And Daisy…”

  The river of memory closed over his head, picked him up and tossed him along. The current battered him against the rocks, dragged him on the gravel, filled his lungs with frigid, brackish water that choked and burned. Out of the depths of his young heart poured his grief, the raging, bitter injustice of what had been done to him. He cried hard, for the undeserved ripping of pages from the stories of his life. For the senseless destruction of everything he had held so dear.

  Diane made no move to rescue him or throw a lifeline. She sat quietly as he wept. It was strange, disconcerting, crying so unreservedly in front of someone, a woman no less, who made no move to comfort him. Without a word or gesture or touch, she sat there, giving him her unconditional presence.

  She was his witness.

  She put no spin on his pain, just acknowledged it, a tiny piece of public within this intensely private moment of grief. His trust she would rescue him if it were warranted, was absolute.

  “How do you feel?” she asked when finally he brought his face out of his hands.

  “Like I have the flu.” He ached all over and he thanked God he had made this appointment late in the afternoon. He guessed he had just enough in the tank to get himself home and collapse.