The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

  On the day of our breakup, I had blown a tire on Camelback Road and called him for help. When he arrived he looked in my trunk and said, “But you don’t have a spare.” “No,” I said. It was late in the evening on a Sunday and the auto-body shops in town would be closed, so we called AAA. While we waited I felt hot and fussy and angry. I wasn’t sure exactly why. He looked silly to me, dough-bellied and chinless. Everything had rounded out. He was making little sucking noises with his front teeth, alternating with small whistling noises. It was one of those moments when you look at the person you have loved for a long time and everything is wrong with them. There is absolutely nothing right. You cannot believe you were ever captivated by them in the first place.

  “I don’t feel happy,” I said.

  “There are other places I’d rather be too,” he said.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I think we need to talk. About us.”

  “Now?”

  I watched him so at ease with himself, the fat in the middle, the various layers of padding around the chin, the chin disappearing into a soufflé of neck meat. His chin area looked like it was a second mouth and I imagined it talking. What was it saying?

  Feed me, it said. I don’t give a fuck if I’m attractive or not. I don’t need to. I have options.

  All of him said that. From his nervous laughter whenever I had brought up marriage—or even moving in together—the years of dismissals, the claims that I wouldn’t want that either, to the disappearance of the chiseled, handsome stranger I first met at a party into a honeybear I came to know and love into another kind of stranger: a physical manifestation of time and letting oneself go eclipsing both the stranger and the honeybear until they all but disappeared. I felt irate. How dare he not give a fuck? What a luxury, the luxury of a man. The luxury of someone who looked at the ravages of time and went, “Eh.” And that is when I said it.

  “Maybe we should just break up.”

  As soon as I said it, I knew it was an empty threat, something I tossed out. It was how I felt, but it was only a bit of it—a percentage. Maybe 22 percent. That 22 percent was loud right now. It wanted to punctuate the heavy evening ennui, the waiting-to-be-rescued. I wanted drama if only to sever the nothingness of things breaking, the heaviness of having to live in the world, dependent on things, dependent on others, waiting for roadside assistance with a talking chin. I wanted to have him try to stop me, to intervene. Maybe I wanted to hurt him a little bit. Mostly I wanted to hear him say no.

  But he didn’t say no. He didn’t say no at all. He looked at me, sighed, and said calmly, “I think you might be right.” And with that the chins disappeared. And all I saw now were his strong shoulders, his deep blue eyes. So many times when we were fucking, his belly bouncing off me, I tried to look only at his eyes—to conjure the attraction I had felt when we first met. Now, suddenly, it was all I could see.

  “Or at least,” he said, “maybe we can try a separation for a little while.”

  Now my words had had the opposite effect of my intentions. Or maybe not opposite, exactly. With Jamie taking the bait, but running with it in a completely unexpected direction, he had certainly put a pin in my boredom and annoyance. Fear is a great intoxicant in its own way. Anyone hooked on its adrenaline can tell you that. But in taking this risk, this angry set of words, one sentence, I had lost control of my own narrative. Now he owned the power. I was at his mercy.

  I thought the only way to get it back would be to continue testing him. Play it cool, don’t panic.

  “Okay,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”

  He didn’t want that, he said. But he wasn’t sure what to do. He said he felt that he had not been able to satisfy me in the relationship for a long time.

  “Satisfy me or satisfy yourself?”

  “Well, maybe a little of both,” he said.

  The AAA man arrived. Jamie did most of the talking. I could hear what the man was saying but I couldn’t really take it in because I was processing what had just happened. I should have kept my mouth shut, I thought. But in another way, I felt that I had been true to myself, I just wasn’t sure to which self. The self that wanted to shake things up so as to receive attention and doting? The self that needed to be shaken up, because the ache of living in a body was so fucking dull? Some higher self that said he wasn’t right for me? The 22 percent of me that was an asshole?

  “Let’s sleep on it,” said Jamie, after the spare had been put on my wheel. “We don’t have to decide anything right away.”

  “Together or separate?” I asked.

  Together or separate was always a big question for us. He wanted no more than two nights a week together. I pushed for four. When I was in my apartment alone, I longed to be in his fold. I hinted and alluded to having free time. I got drunk on white wine, then begged. I wanted the access, the invitation, to feel that I was always welcome. It was a need based on his absence of need. So I pushed for more togetherness. But once I was with him, the closeness was never what I wanted it to be. I suffocated in his presence. When he wasn’t pushing me away, the closeness was cloying.

  “Maybe separate would be better for tonight. Tomorrow and Tuesday too? Maybe for the week. I have a lot of work and it would be good to maybe just try this on, the space, see how it feels?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I was scared.

  He kissed me on the forehead.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, Lucy,” he said. He opened my car door, climbed out, and slammed it shut.

  “I’m sorry!” I said, my voice trailing after him.

  3.

  That night I called him.

  “So we aren’t really taking a break, are we?” I asked.

  “I actually think it’s a good idea,” he said. “I know you were the one who brought it up, but I’d actually like to.”

  “But what does that mean? For how long? Is it just temporary and then will we get back together at the end?”

  “Let’s just take it one step at a time,” he said.

  I could no longer conjure the image of Jamie as I had seen him earlier in the day: overweight, unable to solve my problem, shut down. Now I saw him only as I had seen him when we were first together: strong in the jaw, self-contained in a sexy way, Gore-Tex handsome. I saw him again as a separate person, not an extension of me or something to be coaxed or endured, but his own entity: dry-humored, capable, a real man—whatever that meant. I saw my loss, felt the weight of it, and sat down on my bed. My mouth twitched downward and my stomach heaved. I felt tears rise up. I had not cried in years.

  I had felt, for a long time, that if I started crying I would not stop—that if I finally ripped, there would be nothing to stop my guts from falling out. I was scared of what might come out of me: the things I would see, what others would see. I was scared the feelings would eat me. Feelings were a luxury of the young, or someone much stronger than me—someone more at ease with being human. It was too late for tears. I was to keep going, to move forward on the same track in spite of life’s unsatisfying lifeness. I was not to ask where I was going or if it was where I really wanted to go. I was not to ask if I was actually going anywhere at all. But now, somehow, I was sobbing.

  And so began the melancholy. The days of crying, without notice, in inopportune situations: at work, at the bank, in the Whole Foods checkout line when I saw his favorite protein powder and my spirit gagged at the loss of him. It was as though the powder were him, or transubstantiated him. So strange to know a person’s favorite protein powder, their favorite flavor (vanilla almond), and then just have them gone. I didn’t call or text. A Pisces and never good at restraint, this time I was dedicated to punitive silence and making him want. He will be back soon, I told myself. He has to be.

  Four days went by. I heard nothing. I grew enraged. Eigh
t years and this was all? No inquiry into how I was doing? I could have been dead. On the sixth day he called me. He wanted to see how I was holding up.

  “Not great,” I said. “You?”

  “Terrible,” he said. “I haven’t been sleeping.”

  Thank God, I thought.

  “I know,” I said. “This is so silly. I think we should stop this. Enough is enough.”

  “I need a little more time,” he said.

  “Can’t you just come over?” I pleaded.

  “I don’t think that’s a great idea right now,” he said. “Maybe in a few weeks?”

  “A few weeks?!” I said. “How much longer is this going to go on for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I love you.”

  “Fuck you!” I yelled, and hung up the phone.

  Then I texted him.

  i’m sorry

  i’m just hurt and scared

  forgive me?

  i love you too

  He wrote:

  let’s just take this time

  4.

  Then came the obsession. I started reading my weekly horoscopes and his (Sagittarius), parsing every word for a sign that the universe was going to bring us back together. If there was nothing about love I would read a different horoscope. I would read them until I found one that suited me—until it said this was my lucky day or week or month. I consulted a psychic, an old woman in Tempe who worked in the back of a Mediterranean restaurant. She said that I needed to focus on me, do work on myself and my “blocks” and more would be revealed. She suggested a powder made of quartz crystal to put in my bath. She said it would serve as a clearing of negativity. I bought it for $250 and soaked in it. Nothing happened. So I called more psychics.

  I realized how much time I had spent with Jamie. Or maybe not how much time I’d spent with him, but how much time I spent alone but knowing, at least, that he was there. It was different now, being totally alone, with no one person in the back of my mind—that little figure, like a cushion. I’d never had many friends in Phoenix to begin with. There was Rochelle, a professor of anthropology, who had introduced me to Jamie.

  Rochelle had been married since before I met her. Mid-forties with wiry, pubic-looking hair that she kept cut very short, in a style I secretly called “the Brillo,” she wore no makeup and was deeply okay with herself. I thought it was nice that there was a man on Earth who was happy to fuck her—not only to fuck her but to marry her. I wondered if this was where she got her confidence or if it was her confidence that had drawn her husband to her.

  When Rochelle first introduced me to Jamie, I was barely thirty, and had the luxury of time, a cool air about my future, zero apparent desperation. She probably thought I was normal. Through the years we would meet every six months or so at the same Colombian restaurant and make the same jokes about how her husband and Jamie both snored, the way they both acted like babies when they got a cold. There was an affected comfort in these casual insults, as if to say, I know this man is mine. He isn’t going anywhere. I could take him or leave him. I pretended to her that I didn’t want to marry Jamie, didn’t want to move in together, and had more than enough time with him. I was a woman contented with what she had and did not need more of anyone or anything.

  But now I became clingy with Rochelle, besieged her with a barrage of compulsive questioning about Jamie’s whereabouts. The questions were coupled with a series of neurotic affirmations on my part that he would be coming back, it was only a matter of when.

  Simply being around her in those first weeks made me feel connected to Jamie, though she wouldn’t tell me much. She looked at me like I was a woman who had caught a terrible disease that she never thought either of us would catch. She toyed with her dangling beaded earring and said she hadn’t seen him in a while, didn’t want to get in the middle. Then I saw a picture of them on Facebook, sitting next to each other at a birthday party. They each had glasses of wine and little dishes of flan, so fucking civilized. They were clinking glasses. Rochelle was clearly a traitor.

  I felt dissociated from my body, like my head was in a cloud of fog and my limbs were not under my jurisdiction. I started smoking weed around the clock, something I hadn’t done regularly since my early twenties, going to work at the library stoned. I made no progress on my book. I only wanted to lie around and eat sugar and fats: giant chocolaty drinks from Starbucks, bags of Hershey’s minis and gummy candy, tortilla chips with nacho cheese dip. I had always had a small frame and never gained weight easily, except in my hips, which were wide. My choice of clothing made them look deceptively smaller: loose, flowy cotton skirts and dresses, wide linen pants that kept them concealed. The rest of me would be swimming in my clothes, giving me a sort of elfin, pixie look, all thanks to my hips. But now my pants were leaving a tight elastic mark around my waist each time I took them off.

  I also began engaging in weird crafts. I craved creative expression, an artistic order, but did not have the lucidity of mind for Sappho. I went to the nearby crafts store and bought a hot-glue gun, beads, tools for needlepoint. I began hot-gluing beads onto empty wine bottles, making “vases.” Eventually I stopped going to the library entirely. I told them that I needed a week’s hiatus to work on my book. The other librarians agreed to cover for me. My apartment looked like a frat house mixed with an arts fair. I stayed up all night beading. Then one week turned into two. Finally I dragged my ass back, but I still wasn’t sleeping. I hid in the university bathrooms on the toilet with my eyes closed.

  And then Jamie did come back, for a night anyway.

  “I feel ready to meet now,” he said, and so we went to our favorite Mexican spot.

  After a few margaritas he held my hand under the table and we stared into each other’s eyes. I had not remembered being present for a meal like this, together, both fully engaged, neither of us on our phones, in years. After dinner we made out in his car. He tasted different, like a licorice taste had entered his body in the time we’d been apart. Maybe it was the cilantro. He drove me home and then followed me upstairs. I went to get him a glass of water. When I came into the living room he was sitting on the sofa.

  “Come here,” he said.

  I walked toward him and sat on his leg. I held the water up to his lips. He drank, then put it on the table and kissed me. He undressed me, still sitting in his lap. Then he laid me down on the sofa and undressed hastily as I watched him in the dark. We fucked on the sofa, quickly, our mouths on each other’s mouths the whole time. I didn’t come. I never did from fucking. Jamie’s lack of initiative in going down on me was a source of contention between us, always. He was willing but not ravenous for it. But his mouth on my mouth as he fucked me felt in a way like he had his mouth on my vagina. He didn’t stay the night.

  Then Rochelle called.

  “The girl he is seeing is a scientist,” she said. “She’s blond.”

  “He’s seeing someone?”

  “I thought you knew,” she said.

  Apparently the woman’s name was Megan and she was five years younger than me. Rochelle knew nothing more about her. She had bumped into them at a Chinese restaurant.

  “Well, can you find out?”

  “I’ll try,” said Rochelle.

  I could tell she was getting sick of me. Or more than sick of me, actually, she was scared of me. She had always thought we were both safe from the crazy-woman disease: that desperation and need. But now I had fallen into it, fallen all the way under, and she saw how a person could just go. One minute you were playfully complaining to friends about a man’s farts and the next minute you would kill to have the farts back. Could she catch the disease from me? Was her own contentment in danger? I texted her three times to get the info but she just wrote back:

  rly busy

  I wanted to tell her I was pissed off, that I felt she had abandoned an
d betrayed me. I wanted to say that the only reason she had any confidence in her Brillo-self—the only reason she was “okay”—was that there was too much inertia in her relationship for her husband to leave. I wanted to say that this wasn’t a reason for confidence, or something to be proud of. As I had seen, that inertia could be disturbed at any moment by an accidental slip of the tongue. But I didn’t want her to quarantine me entirely. I might need her.

  So I wrote my own narratives. Megan was not only a scientist but an award-winning geologist. They hiked together and discussed the reproduction of cacti. They fucked on a rock. Nothing is more beautiful than the sex your ex-boyfriend is having with his new lover. Nothing more magical and full of gasps. Meanwhile I was in Hersheyland. I could no longer play it cool. One night I parked down the street from his house until I saw him pull in to the driveway and get out of his car. He was alone. I waited until the lights turned on. Then I got out of the car.

  Walking down his driveway I realized that I had butterflies for the first time in years. Maybe this was what it took to maintain butterflies in your partner’s driveway? A blond scientist named Megan.

  I rang the bell. He took a minute, did not ask who it was, then opened the door.

  “Lucy,” he said.

  I felt rage in my chest, in every part of me.

  “Fuck you, you fucking asshole!” I yelled. And then I hit him in the face.

  I had never hit anyone before. This was not what I had planned. I hadn’t planned anything actually. We were both in shock. I didn’t know what to say. Two drops of blood ran from his nose, down his lip, and splattered onto the floor. He put his hands up to his face.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Jamie,” I said. “Jamie, wait, let me see. Let me see.”