“So I’m the same age.”
You kiss me. “I never did this either, you know? Phil… well he wasn’t much of a reader.” And then you sigh. You sit on the Red Bed sofa. “I think I did something wrong.”
“What did you do?”
You put your feet—always in socks, something I know now that we live together—on the coffee table and it still astounds me, you being here, Nomi down in the Whisper Room watching Dirty Dancing, your dirty dishes in my sink, your shoes lined up on my doormat. I sit by you and kiss you the way you kissed me in the window at Eleven Winery last night. You remind me that Nomi is downstairs and I laugh. “I’m just trying to find the logic. It’s okay to make out in full view of everyone at the winery on Winslow and put a selfie on your Instagram for the whole world to see… but this is too much? She’s downstairs.”
You jab me. “Don’t make fun of my Instagram.”
“Rest assured, Mary Kay. I will always make fun of your Instagram.”
This is why we’re good, because we’re different. You’re a show-off. A fox who wants everyone to know about the wolf in your den, and I’m helping you remember that the best thing about happiness is that it’s yours. Ours.
“Okay,” I say. “Fess up. What did you do that’s so awful?”
You look down at your iPad. “Do you have anything going on later this week?”
“Nothing major, why?”
You hand me your iPad and you didn’t do anything wrong. You planned a trip for us and we’re going to another island that you describe as Cedar Fucking Cove: The Victorian Version. You promise that Port Townsend is a Victorian paradise of old homes and you tell me that we’ll have Victorian sex. You keep saying that you’re relieved that I’m excited and how in the hell would I be anything but excited? “You’ll love it, Buster…” I love that sometimes I am Buster and other times I am Clarice and I kiss the top of your head. “This is fucking perfect, Hannibal.”
“Is it? It’s just two nights but honestly, two nights is enough and there are people there that live like Victorians and I just… I can’t wait for you to see it.”
This is the second surprise party you’ve thrown in my honor and the Meerkat emerges from the basement. “Hi, guys. Bye, guys.”
“Where you going?” you ask.
“Seattle,” she says. “Peg’s friend has this daughter… I dunno, she’s okay and her friends don’t suck. Whatever. I have to go.”
Your Meerkat is off Columbine and she’s wearing a new T-shirt and you tell her to take a jacket and she groans. “I’m not eleven.”
She slams the door and you laugh. “Is that my child?”
I tell you that all change, even good change, is hard, and we go at it on the Red Bed and I tell you to put that on Instagram and you laugh—Such a sicko—and we eat our beef and our broccoli and we go to bed full, satiated, but the next day you wake up screaming. This happens sometimes, you have nightmares. I try to take your sad song and make it better but you won’t tell me what you dreamed about. My phone buzzes while I am spooning you.
“Who’s texting you?” You’re never at your best after your nightmares, and your voice is full of suspicion as if I would ever lie to you.
My new friend Oliver. “My old friend Ethan.”
“You should invite him up. He has a girlfriend, right?”
I open the 1stdibs app and inquire about another David LaChapelle and I don’t want you to meet my friends and I squeeze you. “A wife,” I say. “And that’s a great idea.”
I put my phone away and you pull away and walk into the bathroom naked and you turn on a song—“Hallelujah”—and oh. You were dreaming about your rat and I go into our kitchen and turn on my music and I am a good guy. You are allowed to mourn in your own fucked-up way and I pour milk onto eggs, onto flour and I dream too, Mary Kay. Sometimes whether I like it or not I see RIP Beck in the cage and RIP Candace in the water at Brighton Beach, alive, swimming in a sea of blood.
“Mmm,” you say, dressed now. Ponytail low. Did you rub one out in the shower? “I’m starving.”
I flip a pancake and you smile and stretch your arms above your head and hold them up there. Cracking elbows. Twisting. “Who is this?”
“Rilo Kiley. ‘With Arms Outstretched.’ ”
You laugh and I laugh—your arms remain outstretched—and you say, “Do you know how fucking happy I am right now? Because I just…”
I stretch my arms, just like you. “I love you so fucking much.”
“Good,” you say. “Because I’m really liking this whole life-is-a-gift thing we have going on.”
You are walking to the door to head to work—you go in every day but for me it’s only three days—and you reach for the doorknob. But then you let go of it. You stare at a box of trash bags. “When did these get here?”
Yesterday at 4:12 P.M. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“I told you I was gonna get trash bags. I completely forgot.”
I walk up to you. Closer. “And I ordered some online. It’s no big deal.”
You cluck. I reach out to you but you don’t want that. “Look,” you say. “You’ve never been married. You’ve never lived with me. I’d tell him I’d pick up almond milk and I would mean to pick up almond milk…” AND YOU DID PICK IT UP. “But then I’d forget.”
“I don’t care about ordering trash bags.”
“Not right now,” you say. “This is all brand-new. But here’s the thing. Next time I forget to pick up trash bags, and there will be a next time, you won’t realize it, but things like that… they build up and then before you know it, you’ll resent me. And I’ll resent you because like you say… we’re talking about something as mundane as trash bags.”
“Mary Kay, I don’t give a fuck about trash bags. I will never give a fuck about them.”
But you look at the trash bags. “Every day, I drive in to work on a high, you know? Because this is a dream, being with you. But then when I’m about to head home, I get nervous. Is this gonna be the day that he’s just fucking sick of me?” You gulp. “Is this gonna be the day that I’m just fucking sick of him?”
That last part was a lie. You’re afraid because you know you’ll never be sick of me and I hold your hands. “Can I say something?” You answer with your eyes. “Look, Mary Kay, I’m not a dream come true. I’m not perfect…” I used to have terrible taste in women. “But I want you to know that I am never leaving you. And I know that sounds trite.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I don’t have a crystal ball.”
“No,” you say, warming up now. “You don’t.”
“But just so you know, every day, when I know you’re on your way home… well, that’s my favorite part of the day.” You raise your eyebrows. Playful. “Well, I say, it’s my favorite part of the part of the day when I’m not in the same room with you.”
That was all you needed and I fixed it and we put our heads together. Our foreheads. I can feel your cells commingling with mine. I can feel our hearts pushing, wanting to get Closer as in closed. Fused.
“Joe,” you say. “Promise me you’re in this for the long haul.”
“I promise you, Mary Kay. I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me.”
You laugh and hum a little of that old Huey Lewis song and then you turn serious. You clamp your hand around my forearm and you don’t let go. You squeeze to seal the deal, the greatest deal of my life. “Good.”
40
Here’s the thing about us. It just gets better. The library is fun. It’s slow, and that gives us time to play our own subtle game of hide-and-seek. I love feeling you watching me when I push Dolly Carton around the first floor and I love when you slowly go down the stairs toward the Red Bed, making sure that I know to follow. You were right about this—it’s a fucking blast—and you are right about everything and it’s hard not to throw the books at the wall and scream at the top of my lungs I FUCKING LOVE YOU, MARY KAY DIMARCO.
The day drips
on and the quietude is eerie. It’s dead lately, which gives us time to hatch plans for our Bordello. But sometimes quiet is too quiet and you whisper at me—I think our sex vibes pushed everyone away—and you are right. Love is powerful that way, and finally, it’s time to go home. We feed our cats and we fuck our brains out again—yay!—and once again we’re naked and sweaty, wrapped up in each other. Coming back to Earth.
“What a day,” you say. “And I can’t wait to get away for a few days. Is that awful?”
“Not at all,” I say. Because it isn’t.
“Hey, have you heard from Seamus?”
“Not much… I think he’s out of town on some CrossFit thing…”
“Does he seem off to you?”
Stupid, yes. Shallow, yes. Off, no. “Well, I think it’s to be expected. It’s hard for people who are alone to see two people fall in love.”
“Right,” you say. “Everyone says that love makes the world go around but it also makes the world a cruel, exclusive place, like a book club that tells you there’s no more room at the table.”
You are so smart and I kiss your forearm. “I’d be depressed if I was in his shoes.”
“Oh no,” you say. “He doesn’t like me like that…” Of course he does. “I just worry.”
“I think that’s natural. When things are really good, you worry more than normal.”
You are vulnerable and there is goop in the corners of your eyes. “Yeah.”
“But tomorrow we’re gonna go to Victorian Cedar Cove.”
You grin like a kid. “Yeah.”
“And everything is gonna be fine. Assuming that Victorian sex isn’t dangerous.”
You laugh. “Victorian sex is perfectly safe, I promise.”
“No, Mary Kay. You and I are perfectly perfect.”
Soon you are asleep, snoring and even that’s not annoying. I’m too happy to sleep. I order some more balloons for Nomi’s graduation party next weekend—I bet Phil wouldn’t have ordered balloons—and I pick up one of your Murakamis and I’m half-reading, half-daydreaming about you as you dream on my body. I love to look down and see you there. I love that you want to be here with me and I feel like I can see the neurons firing inside of your mind, forging new pathways, everything leading to me, to happiness.
I’m hungry, so I go downstairs to fix a snack. We’re out of eggs so I grab a Hostess Cupcake—RIP Melanda had good taste in junk—and I tear off the wrapper and the cupcake tastes like childhood, like sugar.
And then my phone buzzes. I have one new text message, and that message is from Love Fucking Quinn: We need to talk.
She never writes to me and my legs fill with pins and needles. I put my phone on the counter and no. This is not happening. I’m hallucinating—I should have gone to sleep like you—and my screen is black and maybe I was hallucinating.
But then my phone lights up again. One new email from Love Fucking Quinn.
She’s never texted me and she’s never emailed me but she is the mother of my son. All the worst thoughts flood my mind at once—Forty fell down the stairs, Forty drowned in the pool, Tressa stole Forty—and I grab my fucking phone and I walk outfuckingside and I call Love Quinn on the phone.
The phone rings once and she doesn’t pick up and I see my son in the arms of some pervert who played the Injustice System and got a job at Disneyland. The phone rings again and I see my son with half his face torn off by a Rottweiler—Love trusts bad dogs, I don’t—and the phone rings a third time and I don’t know where my son is right now. Did he just crawl out of an open window in a high-rise in New York City and are my tears from heaven? Did he die without ever getting to meet his own father?
“Well, hello,” she says. “I thought you’d be sleeping.”
“Is Forty all right?
“Aw, I’m good, Joe. Thanks for asking.”
“Is he sick?”
“I think I have new allergies, but I don’t have it in me to get tested. All those needles…”
The level to which I did not miss the sound of her voice… I cut her right off. “Don’t fuck with me. Is my son okay? Yes or no.”
“Joe… He’s fine.”
“Thank God.”
“Well, okay, but maybe more like thank me because I’m the one who actually takes care of him…”
“What’s going on, Love?”
“I sent you an email. I bought you a plane ticket and you’re coming to L.A. tomorrow.”
I say nothing because that’s what she deserves: nothing.
“All right,” she says. “It’s simple, Joe. I need to see you. We need to see you. So I bought you a plane ticket.”
If I ask her to wait until Monday she might hang up on me. I want to see my son. I want to be with you, Mary Kay. My neurons are being torn in half.
“Joe?”
“I’m here.”
“Good. And you’ll be here tomorrow because if you’re not… Well… you’re doing so good with your girlfriend and her daughter. I mean I know you’d hate for them to find out about the family you left behind…”
She knows. How does she know? And she’s doing it again, twisting all the facts, and I want to climb into the phone and choke her out and it’s twenty-fucking-twenty-one and WHY CAN’T WE TELEPORT? I am steady. Breathe, Joe, breathe. “I didn’t leave you, Love.”
“Oh yes you did,” she says. “You got into a car my parents gave you and you drove to a house my parents bought for you and those are the facts. I’m sure you’ve twisted it all in your head to make yourself some kind of victim slash martyr… but I know things. And if you want me to keep my mouth shut… Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Today actually. So you better go back to bed. The car will be there soon.”
She hangs up on me and I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I just die underneath and she is the shark inside my shark. She cut me open and extracted all my secrets. I puke off the side of the deck and I look upstairs and the lights are still out in our bedroom.
I get in my car—a car my parents gave you—and I call Oliver and I get voicemail and I text Oliver—911—and I call again and it’s soothing in some demented way, like knitting while the person you love is in surgery. Finally he picks up. Groggy. “Joe, it’s a little late.”
“What did you tell her?”
“What did I tell who?”
“Love called me, Oliver. She sent me a plane ticket. And we had a fucking deal.”
“Slow down.”
“I bought every piece of art you wanted and you said you had my back. You said you’d keep the Quinns out of the picture.”
“Joe.”
“What?”
“Are you calm?”
“Am I calm? She bought me a fucking plane ticket.”
“And what did you do before that?”
“Oliver, you’ve been stalking me and watching my every fucking move and you know I did nothing.”
He sighs. “First of all, I don’t know anything about a plane ticket.”
“Bullshit.”
“Second of all, if my ex-girlfriend who is the mother of my child was both well-heeled and… well… a little dramatic, I think I’d think twice about bragging about my brand-new fucking make-a-family on a public forum.”
“I did not post a picture of Mary Kay. I only post books.”
But he railroads. “I wouldn’t let the whole world know that I’m in love with a woman and I wouldn’t want my ex to see me playing dad with another family because I’d be smart enough to know that my ex wouldn’t like that, my friend.”
“Oliver, for fuck’s sake, I didn’t post a goddamn thing about Mary Kay.”
“Ah,” he says. “But your MILF did.”
I take the hit and Oliver laughs and I hear Minka in the background. “See,” he says. “Minka says this is a double fuckup because your lady friend tagged you. Which makes it seem like you thought you were being coy, ya know, posting without posting.”
It’s no use fighting him because Oliver is right and Minka is right
and I never should have let you throw us to the wolves. But I did let you do it, didn’t I? It’s not your fault for wanting to post a fucking selfie but it’s my fault for going along with it. You make me so happy that I got stupid. I did this to myself and I was doing so good. I did not kill Melanda. I did not kill Phil. I did not kill Ivan.
But I might have just killed us, Mary Kay.
The call ends and I can’t feel my feet and my eyes are twitching. I walk upstairs to our bedroom. You’re still sleeping but in the morning you’ll wake up and I won’t be here. I pick up a notepad on my nightstand. I grab one of your tchotchke pencils. Virginia Woolf’s head in place of an eraser. The absurdity of this moment. The horror. I don’t know what to tell you and my flight is in a matter of hours and I just promised to be here. With you. I scribble lies on a notepad—my bullshit words are sticks that will hurt you—and the last two are stones.
Love, Joe.
You know I love you, but you don’t know that I can’t avoid Love Quinn. I pull the covers back. I get into bed and you are in a deep sleep, but even in this state, you are drawn to me, moving into me as you make room for me. Such a good fit. The only true fit I’ve ever known. I hate that you’ll wake up tomorrow and realize that RIP Melanda was right all along, that men always let you down, that they bail on you because men do fucking suck. But so does Love, Mary Kay. So does love.
41
Bon Jovi said that true love is suicide and he was right. Love is trying to kill us, Mary Kay. I got off the plane and I got into the black car she sent for me and now I’m at the door to a honeymoon suite at Commerce Fucking Casino. She’s in the room. She’s listening to my George Harrison—Hare Krishna, Hare Forty—and I knock on the door like an ABC prime-time Bachelor-brained loser, like I want her rose. She opens the door and she is thin, thinner in person than she is on Instagram and she’s wearing a Pixies T-shirt, as if she likes the Pixies, and see-through panties. I smell kombucha and salad water and matcha and did I really love this creature or did I only love what it felt like to be inside this little creature?
You Love Me Page 31