The Man I Love

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Where was this? I thought it was lost?”

  “I had it. When we first found your necklace, it was missing. But I poked around in the dust and grease and finally found it. It was obvious why your necklace was under the stove, I mean, how it had gotten there. And it seemed symbolic mine was the charm that fell off. So when I found it, I didn’t give it to Will to send back to you. I kept it.”

  Erik looked at her.

  Her eyes were far away. “For a while I wore it on a chain around my neck. It made me feel close to you. I thought that… I had a funny idea it would connect us. You’d feel me wearing it. Christ, here I go…” Her voice broke. She stepped back from him, laughing a little, pressing the heel of her hand to her suddenly streaming eyes. “Anyway, after a while I realized it wasn’t a good thing to have hanging around my neck,” she said. “And I put it inside the dolls with my other little souvenirs. My secret little shrine at the office. The end. Are you hungry?”

  “I’m stunned,” he said. He looked back to the little scissors on his palm. He cleared his aching throat. “I’m really torn here. I’d like to ask for this back but I love you had it all this time.”

  “It’s yours, it was a gift.”

  “But you kept it with you. You needed it. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  She took a deep breath. “How about,” she said, her voice trembling, “you put it back in the doll and you’ll know where it is now. You’ll know it’s with me.”

  “All right.” With some reluctance he put the scissors back inside the doll and twisted it closed. “I can’t believe you kept my lint,” he said.

  “I loved you,” she said.

  He looked at her. She looked back.

  They stared.

  It happened.

  “I missed this,” he said.

  “I missed it too.”

  “But it’s still here. We can still do it.”

  “It’s still here. And nobody else does it.”

  He closed his eyes, gently letting the bubble break.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “We can go get some dinner.”

  “A little. But I don’t feel like being in a crowd. I just want to sit somewhere quiet with you and talk.”

  She nodded. “How about we go to my house and I’ll cook.”

  “You will?”

  “If you want.”

  “I want.”

  “I left my coat in the theater.”

  She turned out the light and they walked through the dim corridors to the side door leading into the theater. There Daisy stopped short and Erik plowed into the back of her.

  Will was sitting in the front row. Busy with notebook and papers, one ankle perched on the opposite knee. When he saw Erik, the pencil he had been twirling in one hand went flying over his shoulder.

  They all stared.

  Finally Daisy spoke. “You wouldn’t believe what Customs lets into Canada these days.”

  Will shook his head. “You’re right. I wouldn’t.”

  Erik put his hands on Daisy’s shoulders. “Give me five minutes?” he whispered.

  She nodded, smiling. “Take ten. I’ll be back in my office.” And she slipped out the door they had come through.

  Slowly Erik walked closer to where Will sat.

  “So,” Will said. “Obviously you’ve come to suck my cock.”

  “I have.”

  “Finally. What took you so long?”

  “I would’ve been here sooner but I ran into Dais on the street and…”

  Will smiled. “She told me you called.”

  “Finally.”

  “Yeah, you are inexcusably late.”

  “Am I too late?”

  Will sighed and stretched his arms along the seat backs. He tilted his head and stared at the ceiling.

  “Even if it is too late,” Erik said. “I gotta start owning this. What I did was wrong. And I’m sorry. I needed to come in person and say so.”

  Will was still looking up, his lower jaw moving around. He closed his eyes. “If you don’t finish what you start this time,” he said. “If you disappear on her again, Fish, so help me God. I will kill you. I won’t just bruise you a little. I will bury you by the side of the road and piss on your grave.”

  “It’s not lost on me how you picked up the pieces—”

  “Bullshit,” Will said, standing up, his papers cascading to the floor. “You have no idea what it was like. For her or me.”

  “You’re right, I don’t. Not yet. I didn’t come here just to make myself feel better and walk away again. I came to stand still and feel. Feel what I didn’t give Dais a chance to feel twelve years ago. Finish what I started.”

  Will nodded, arms crossed over his chest, fingers working at the material of his shirt. Will didn’t fidget unless he was upset. Erik knew that. Knew it like he knew the sky was blue.

  “I’m sorry,” Erik said.

  “It hurt like hell, you know. Your fight with her was your fight with her but to throw me over the side…”

  “I know. I ran like hell from everything. It was the only way I knew how to deal. Doesn’t make it right or excuse it, but I’m only just figuring out why I did it myself. It’s why I called her. It’s why I came here. I gotta own this. And I gotta feel it. You can bury your pain or avoid it. You can tattoo over it. But you won’t be free of it until you feel it. My own father never set my mom free. Never set me free. I came here to set Daisy free. I owe it to her. And I owe you at least one opportunity to punch me in the face and I won’t duck. Swing away.”

  A smile began to curve up Will’s mouth. “Well, I’ll be fucked,” he said.

  “I’ve been fucked for years. Be nice to have some company.”

  Will shook his head, looking at the floor. “You’re killing me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Erik said. He took the last few steps to close the gap and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Will.”

  Will muttered some unintelligible French and then seized Erik. Grabbed him in arms and hugged him hard, his hands pummeling and patting until they both landed with a not-so-loving smack on Erik’s ass.

  “Jesus,” Erik said. “I said in the face.”

  Will pushed him away. “Wanted to do that for years. I best go for it before you disappear again.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Will started unbuckling his belt. “You’re going on your knees.”

  Erik sprang back, laughing, and headed for the door.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Run away, Fish.”

  “It’s what I do,” Erik said. “No watching my ass as I run.”

  “High and tight,” Will yelled after him. “Just like a girl’s.”

  Build Something Beautiful

  “It’s a sweet little house,” Daisy said, turning the key in her front door, “but I really bought it for the porch.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Erik said. The porch ran along the whole front of the small house and hugged one side. It was bare now, but he could imagine wicker furniture and flower boxes in spring. Daisy sitting out here with a book and some iced tea. He added himself into the scene, sitting on the steps, playing guitar.

  It was too easy.

  He was an idiot.

  “Come in,” Daisy said.

  It looked nothing like La Tarasque, and yet the moment Erik stepped inside, he knew every piece of furniture, every cushion and lamp and knick-knack had been chosen and placed to evoke the essence of her parents’ house. Right down to the Meyer lemon tree by the window.

  She gave him a short tour of the downstairs, ending up in the kitchen.

  “It’s a carbon copy of your mother’s,” he said, gazing around at the yellow walls, the red-enameled pots on a shelf. A basket of cloth napkins, a bowl of oranges.

  “Not exactly. I don’t have her big table.”

  “I know, but…” It was obvious and yet he couldn’t explain. It was all so familiar.

  Daisy took two beers from the fridg
e. “Opener is in the drawer there.” She put her head through the loop of a red butcher apron and tied it around her narrow waist.

  “What are we having?” Erik said, opening the bottles.

  “You kidding? Grilled cheese and tomato soup. The best conversational food out there.”

  As Erik sat down at the island, a grey cat gracefully jumped up and onto the counter. “Hello,” he said, holding his fingers out to be sniffed.

  “Bastet. My live-in lover.”

  Having passed inspection, his palm moved in long, slow arcs over the top of Bastet’s head and down her silvery back. Her eyes were powder blue marbles. “She’s beautiful.”

  “She,” Daisy said, “is a standoffish bitch. As are most Russian Blues.”

  As if cued, the cat meowed at her. Daisy leaned in, lips puckered, letting Bastet rub and nudge at her face. “But yes, she is beautiful.”

  Erik sat and drank his beer, chin resting on his hand between sips. Daisy sliced bread and cheese. Assembled the sandwiches and set them on the hot grill. Warmed up soup. She lit a few candles, turned on some music. His eyes followed her everywhere. He was reminded of their long-ago Thanksgiving, when he had watched her move around the kitchen with her mother. Blithe and confident and happy. As if she had never suffered a day in her life.

  “Tell me what happened to you,” he said. “After I left.”

  Daisy flipped the four sandwiches on the griddle over. “We tabled this one, didn’t we?”

  “I needed to be looking at you.”

  She smiled at him before turning to take some plates and bowls from a cabinet. “After you left, two things were going on. Three. One was mourning you. Two was beating myself up for sleeping with David. The third was dealing with the trauma of the shooting.”

  “Did it ever come back to you?” he asked. “Anything from the day?”

  She slid her spatula beneath the corner of one sandwich, peeked under to see how done it was. “Yes, it did.”

  He sat a little straighter on his stool. “It did? Really?”

  “I’ll get to that.” She took a pull of her beer. “So, after graduation I got into the corps of the Pennsylvania Ballet. Living the dream, right? I assume so because I can barely remember a thing from those days. I remember waking up every morning being shocked the sun was up. I’m alive? Again? I thought surely I’d be dead by now. I wasn’t taking care of myself at all. Not eating, barely sleeping—”

  “Were you still doing coke?”

  She shook her head, ladling soup into bowls. “But I was smoking like a fiend. God, the chain-smoking. I was a shell. Just going through the motions.” She flipped the sandwiches onto a cutting board and sliced them on the diagonal. “And I got fired.”

  “Shut up.” Erik passed her one bowl at a time to be filled up with soup.

  “I know. Me, right? The smartest girl in ballet? I blew it. I mean, the tactful way to put it is they didn’t renew my contract.” She rolled one of her shoulders dismissively. “I got fired. Which broke me out of my pity party a little. Unemployment will do that. But dance is a small world, I had some good contacts. I got into the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and I thought it would be good—New York, fresh start. Out of Pennsylvania, away from the memories and the ghosts. This was my second chance. I wasn’t going to screw it up. I started caring for myself better—just in terms of eating healthy and not smoking so much and managing my body. I was dancing really well, and I was starting to teach, too. Just freelance at studios around Manhattan and Brooklyn. And then I ran into Opie one day. I mean John. Dammit.”

  He laughed. “See?”

  “The artist formerly known as Opie. We were going to the same master class and it was totally random, but totally wonderful at the same time. I felt really lonely and it was good to see an old friend. After class we went for coffee. You know. The four-hour cup of coffee? And it just went from there…” Her voice trailed off. She bit a corner of her lip as she sat down.

  “I always liked him,” Erik said, wanting to put her at ease.

  “He was good to me,” Daisy said, stirring her spoon around her bowl. “And he was there when the window broke.”

  “The window?”

  She was in a diner with John, one evening in the hard winter of 1995. Manhattan was getting pummeled with its umpteenth snowstorm. As they sat eating in a booth, a sanitation truck came down the street, perhaps a little too fast. The load of snow in its plow flew up against the front of the diner and broke one of the windows.

  “Right behind where I was sitting,” Daisy said. “So one minute I’m eating an omelette, the next minute I am under the table, curled up in a ball, screaming your name.”

  She looked at him and he looked back, not making a connection.

  “I was screaming your name,” she said. “Because of the broken glass.”

  His spoon clattered into the bowl. “The glass,” he said, a hand to his head.

  She nodded.

  “You saw James shoot the glass of the lighting booth.”

  She kept nodding. “I’ve never experienced something so surreal in my life. As soon as the window shattered, it came back to me. Being on the floor of the stage, hearing shots. Knowing I’d been hit. Knowing Will was shot, too. I didn’t know it was James. Just someone with a gun was in the theater. I couldn’t get up. I pushed on my elbow, twisted my head and looked over my shoulder. I saw him shoot out the windows of the booth. And I screamed your name. Then the memory stops. My brain pauses until I woke up in the hospital the next day and they had cut my leg.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “You remember the nightmares I had? Just vast, dark silence. No people, no sound. Just terrible space?”

  “I remember.”

  “After the day in the diner, the dreams had imagery. They went from being a black cavern to a crazy hall of mirrors.” She glanced at him. “Your dreams were filled with blood. Mine were filled with broken glass. And then the real breakdown started.”

  She took a bite of sandwich and he ate some more of his own dinner. Her silence was thoughtful but she didn’t speak.

  “Go on,” he said. “Please.”

  “I was obsessed,” she said. “With glass. This horrible compulsion to smash mirrors or break windows.” She smiled at his raised eyebrows. “I wasn’t doing those things. I was just thinking about it. All the time. And listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. You know, just before the track ‘You May Be Right’ starts?”

  “It’s a breaking window.”

  “Right. I’d listen over and over. I made a mix tape once. The sound clip of the breaking window was in between every song. It was crazy. And then one night I smashed a wine bottle in the sink.” She put her forehead in her hand. “God, I haven’t talked about this in a while. I cringe telling it now, it sounds really sick.”

  His heart twisted in his chest. He wanted to gather her to him, hold her safe and make it all go away, even the memory of it. But he only made his hand gentle on her arm, and kept his voice calm as he asked, “What did you do?”

  She reached to ladle some more soup into her bowl. “Took a piece of the glass and tried to cut my fasciotomy scars open. It wasn’t a conscious thought at the time, of course, but later in therapy we talked about how the surgical procedure had been necessary to relieve the pressure building up in my leg. And in a real sense, pressure was building up again in me. My entire body, my entire being was suffering from compartment syndrome. And I tried to release it.” She looked at him. “I didn’t do a good job. It’s harder to cut through scar tissue than you would think. Plus in my line of work, my legs tend to be visible. It wouldn’t be something I could keep secret. So I started just making these little cuts. Like on my lower back or along my waist or stomach. And then I’d…” She put her hand to her head again, laughing a little. “Oh boy.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’d put straight alcohol on the cuts. Or I’d get this lotion—it was anti-itch and it had menthol in it.”

 
; He cringed himself, his face screwing up in imagined pain. “Jesus, you’d put that on your cuts?”

  “Yeah. Anything to make them sting. The harder the better. I used vodka once. Salt another time—how about that metaphor?”

  “You were feeding the hurt,” he said. “Just like you and I used to do.”

  “If I made it sting bad enough I could actually get off on it. It was just a really deranged time. I was in trouble.”

  “Did John know this was going on?”

  “Well, naturally he found out.” She glanced at him and her face colored behind an apprehensive smile. “I’m sorry. I’m acting like a teenager.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’ll eventually stop blushing when I talk about the other men in my life.” She ran her fingertips beneath her eyes. “It’s just… When there’s no official breakup, it’s hard not to feel every other man is cheat—“

  “No,” he said. “No. That was David. And we’ve talked about him. Everything else, everyone else—it was your life after I left. All right?”

  Eyes closed, she let her breath out, nodding her head. “Thanks,” she whispered. Her shoulders relaxed. “When John and I started sleeping together, naturally he saw the cuts. And right away he was on it. But in such a supportive, awesome way. He knew how fragile I was, he knew just how to approach it. It sounds dramatic but he saved my life. I started going to a therapist and doing the dirty work.”

  “Digging.”

  “Digging. Learning how to stop scarring and punishing myself. It all circled back to forgiveness. I had to forgive myself. I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t grow or evolve until I did.”

  “And is that when you sent me back my stuff?”

  She nodded. “My skin healed. The sun came out and it was spring. Things were going really well. I felt better. Felt like myself again. John and I were turning the corner into our relationship. And I still had this box of your stuff. He kind of gave me a soft ultimatum, asked me, ‘When are you going to let go of him?’ And I said, ‘Right now.’ I packed it all up. I called you, just to let the record show I tried one last time.”

  “I hung up on you.”

  “And I sent it back. And I was fine. I thought I had moved on. Few months passed, I went to Chicago for the Phantom auditions and when I came home, John told me you had called.”