The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

  The wine was wearing off. I suddenly felt exhausted. His teeth were shiny white, but not like an actor’s. They didn’t look bleached or fake. They were practically iridescent, like the inside of a shell. There was something almost feminine about him, pretty, but his jaw was well defined. These surfer boys. I always forgot that they were real. I mean, I knew that they existed. I knew they were alive. But it really seemed to me that the surfing was a costume, like they were only pretending to be so enamored of it. How could anyone be that devoted to something so lacking a destination? Just wave after wave, over and over. I wished someone were that enamored of me. But their love for surfing was real. It was a fact. They really loved surfing as much as they appeared to love it. This one didn’t have a board, though. This wasn’t a surfer. This was a swimmer.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Lucy.”

  I felt old.

  “Nice to meet you, Lucy,” he said. “I’m Theo.”

  When he said his name, his hotness increased. He was real, there in the water, real in a way that I wasn’t. He was swimming and wet and I was—what was I doing? I thought of all my books, the ones waiting for me in piles back in my parching Phoenix apartment, collecting dust. I thought of the university library. I imagined the library growing and growing, the books piling up on the edge of this ocean. One wave could destroy them all. They were so dry, like they were actually made of dust. My skin, too, felt like an old book: powdery parchment etched with lines that supposedly contained knowledge, but when you looked closer they were only empty scribbles. Not the right kind of knowledge. If you put me in the water, I too would dissolve. I was sure of it.

  “Do you always swim at night?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The waves are more intense but it makes you stronger.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of drowning?”

  “No,” he said.

  I looked at the moon. Then I looked back down at him, and I got scared. Who was he? I didn’t want to die. Or at least, I didn’t want to feel myself dying or drowning. Here I was, sitting on the rocks at midnight talking to a stranger, my legs hanging off the rock. He could just grab my ankle, pull me off the rocks and hold me under, and that would be that. But why would he do that?

  I don’t know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it—when we don’t remember what it feels like to suffer. During these times we are moving forward in the void, forgetting we are going nowhere, so the void feels less daunting. We feel like we are handling shit. We are handling shit and doing work on ourselves. And then another person comes in, and meets us there, and we think we can handle it. We think we can handle it, because in that moment we feel that we can handle anything.

  I always thought I could handle things, until I couldn’t. I talked like dying was no big deal, but in that moment I definitely didn’t want to die. It was crazy to be out there. I didn’t know what I was doing.

  “I should go,” I said. “It’s freezing, and I have to walk my dog.”

  “Oh, you have a dog?” he said, sounding a little disappointed.

  This too was strange. Surfer bros always seemed to love dogs. They themselves were like the beautiful carefree mutts of the sea.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “No reason,” he said.

  “Do you have any dogs or cats?”

  “No,” he said. Then he laughed. “I have fish.”

  “Fish?” I blurted, and started laughing in spite of myself.

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “Just across the beach,” I said. “In one of those houses.”

  I pointed in the general direction of Annika’s house.

  “Ahhh,” he said. “Venice girl.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I live with my sister.”

  I didn’t tell him that I was from the desert.

  “Well, if you decide to traipse out to the rocks again late at night, maybe I’ll see you again,” he said. “I’m always out here swimming.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Okay, well, bye. Be safe.”

  “Bye—you too,” he said.

  He was still holding on to the rocks when I left. He looked like he didn’t want to let go, but not because he was scared of the waves, just because—I’m not sure why. I walked onto the beach and took my sandals off. When I turned around he was still holding on to the rocks, with his cheek resting on one of them. He waved.

  When I got back to the house I swore I could still feel his eyes on me. I looked back one more time, but he was gone. I didn’t see him anywhere in the waves. I felt a creepy feeling go up my spine and was glad the dog was waiting for me.

  “Hi, Domi,” I said, sliding open the glass door.

  But Dominic didn’t come bounding toward me as usual. Instead he sniffed the air repeatedly and kept his distance. His ears went flat and he growled. I had never seen him like that before and it made me wonder if I was haunted now. He continued to growl, but the sound was cute to me. He was trying to be like a dog in the wild or a wolf. Did dogs still live in the wild? Did anything? Was there any wildness anywhere, or was all of it inhabited by tech dudes now, juice places and blow-dry bars? Had anything been left undiscovered, or did the Internet snatch it all up the moment it existed? Nothing remained untouched. Or maybe some things weren’t completely mapped out yet and there was still a little room for the mystery. Maybe some strange and beautiful boy could still pop out of the sea and surprise you.

  “Dominic, no,” I said. “Absolutely not. We don’t growl. We never growl at Mama.”

  Suddenly, I felt giddy and silly. No longer scared, not even at all. I wondered if the gods or maybe the universe had actually heard my amethyst prayer. Everything was so strange. Life was okay, though. Life was maybe even kind of cute. You simply had to expect nothing from it. That’s what the Stoics believed—Zeno and Seneca, those ancient fuckers. The trick, I now agreed, was you had to remain unattached to any future wishes or vision. You had to never get attached to any other person or expect anything good to come to you, and that was how you fell in love with life and how maybe certain fun and good things could happen to you. They only happened as long as you didn’t need anything from anyone. As long as you didn’t take anything from anyone or give any part of yourself away to another person, but you just sort of met the other person in space, good things could happen. You had to fall in love with quiet first.

  10.

  But in the morning the beach was filled with tourists and the amethyst was just a rock. The quiet was gone again and replaced with nothingness. The candle had melted all over the deck and I spent a good half hour scraping wax, which was congealing—thinly—in the sun. I decided I would take Dominic for a walk over to the Santa Monica farmers’ market, try to be like other humans on a Sunday. Maybe buy some fruit and be swept away in some bullshit of the day. Maybe I could just be a woman and her dog buying fruit.

  The farmers’ market was full of families. I don’t like families. There was a band doing covers of Crosby, Stills & Nash and children getting pony rides. It made me want to never eat anything organic again. By the locally farmed corn I ran into Claire, the redhead from group. She smiled and waved. I guess she was a little better. At least, she was no longer crying.

  “I’m never going back to that group again,” she said. “Fuck them and their shite, they know fuck-all about me. I don’t believe in love addiction. I don’t believe in withdrawal or taking time off from dating or anything that puritanical or black and white can fix my problem.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty depressing.”

  “The worst,” she said. “And I just had a date with a hot younger man. His name is David, a total crumpet. I’m already enamored, probably on the road to obsession. But I think that if I can just keep them coming—you know, have more than one boy I’m fucking, maybe two or three—then I won’
t get so fixated on one of them.”

  “That seems smart,” I said.

  “I’m already interviewing a harem. I’ve been going to polyamory events. I met this one guy, Trent, at an event in Topanga. He is a little older, did porn. He has a ponytail and I can’t tell if it’s scraggly or scrummy, but I think scrummy. He has a wife. She has boyfriends. I’m going to fuck him tomorrow night. I also met this other guy named Orion; he’s, like, barely eighteen, very twee. He was wearing a kilt. He’s pansexual. We made out all night. But he lives in Vermont and already went back, so I’m still looking for a third. I might shag this guy who works at Best Buy. We’ve fucked in the past. He’s a Jamaican guy, super cut, really nice to me.”

  “Are they all poly? Is David poly too?”

  “No, he’s, like, I don’t know what. A computer programmer. Might be on the spectrum. Does yoga, though. Huge cock.”

  “So fun,” I said. “I’m jealous.”

  “You should really be doing Tinder,” she said. “Or come with me to these poly things.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m worried about getting obsessed with someone else. And Dr. Jude said—”

  “Rubbish,” she said. “How else do you think you are going to get over him? You think you are going to just heal? Nobody heals. You need to replace! That’ll be the thing that makes him come back in the end, but by then you won’t want him. Men can smell it when we’ve moved on. Especially to a bigger cock. Bald Brad texted me.”

  “Don’t text him back!”

  “Oh, I won’t,” she said. “I have no need.”

  “Well, that’s interesting,” I said. “I’m glad you found a way to balance it all and not get attached.”

  “For women like us? I’m convinced this is the only way. The only way you’re going to get over him is by having a lot of sex and seeing what else is out there. You might even surprise yourself. You might see that you can do it, you can just fuck and not get attached. I guarantee I will not be getting attached to Trent.”

  “Ponytail man?”

  “Yes.” She laughed. “Also, you need to see how hot you are. To feel it.”

  “I am so not hot,” I laughed. “I’m gross.”

  “Oh, bugger off. You have the disheveled waif ingénue thing going. Like that bitch from Les Misérables.”

  She looked at her watch.

  “Fuck, I have to go pick up my kids. Never have children. They’ll ruin your life.”

  “Not planning on it,” I said.

  “You should just try Tinder,” she said. “Just try it.”

  11.

  That night I thought about going to the rocks to see if Theo the swimmer was there again. It made me feel stupid. What was I doing chasing down some boy? Instead I made a fake Facebook profile (I’d shut mine down since I saw Jamie and Rochelle toasting over flan) and created a Tinder account, using old photos: some from five or ten years ago. I was not consciously thinking I will kill the old me and in her place will grow an electronic me, but that is what I was doing. I wanted to negate myself somehow, as if you could just sign up to vanish. As if you could sign up to really be alive, but as someone else. Well, I was going to be somebody who didn’t care. I was going to be free about sex, my body. I wanted to be the one to no longer give a fuck. Could you sculpt yourself into one who does not give a fuck? Could I remove the giving a fuck from the time in my life before I met Jamie, where I had sex with a lot of people, but always seemed to care whether they loved me after? I had to go into it with a professed mission of not giving a fuck. So I wrote my bio:

  Let’s make out in a dark alley.

  There were a lot of disgusting dudes, particularly actor-type bros. I hated actors. With my levels of social anxiety, I couldn’t be with anyone who was faking being relaxed. We all already wore enough masks. I didn’t need someone whose profession was putting on extra ones. My propensity was to strip off masks as quickly as possible, lay everything out, so as to relieve the discomfort of having to wear one in the first place. I was almost compulsively confessional. But with actors there seemed to be an unlimited supply of masks, just layers upon layers.

  The first person I messaged with was a designer named Garrett. Garrett’s bio said he owned his own graphic design firm, with clients like JetBlue, Apple, and MTV, yet somehow he was only twenty-nine. These fucking kids. He was hot though, and I couldn’t believe he would be interested in me. I lied and said I had a boyfriend, but we were in an open relationship. I don’t know why I said that: maybe so he knew I was wanted elsewhere, maybe to appear less desperate and more preoccupied. Or maybe to point out that if he tried to kill me, there would be someone who noticed I was missing. He said that was funny, because he had a girlfriend and they were also in an open relationship. He was originally from Toronto, now lived in Silver Lake. He said he was in Venice tonight for drinks with a client.

  making out in the street, eh? he wrote.

  yes, I typed.

  what about doing anything else? anywhere else? want to fuck?

  I got nervous.

  Then I began messaging with Adam, twenty-seven, who kind of looked like a monkey, but in a sexy way. He had one of those man buns. Adam told me straight up that I was hot. I liked this. He said he would love to make out with me in the street, any street. He said he lived right near Venice, in Marina del Rey, and was a waiter at Whiskey Red’s, but he was trying to become a writer. This was my man.

  I told Garrett no thanks and he seemed disappointed. He asked if I was sure I didn’t want to fuck. Could he ask why I was declining? I told him I had met someone who I thought would be a better fit. He said he understood but if I changed my mind to let him know.

  Adam and I decided we would meet two nights later and try our street make-out. It was now 1:57 a.m. I realized I had been swiping on profiles and checking messages all night. I forgot to take Dominic out and it had been eight hours. I rubbed his belly and apologized, then walked him all the way to the Venice canals. Adam, Adam, I thought, and imagined wanting him. More so, I imagined him wanting me. Him lusting for me. I fell asleep masturbating to the thought of this person, as of yet still basically imaginary.

  I woke up with my hand inside my underwear. My pubic hair felt bristly and bushy, like a steel-wool sponge. Sometimes I used to put conditioner on it but I hadn’t in a while. I wondered what Adam was used to, if any of the girls his age had pubic hair at all. Then I felt my real hair on my head. It was like a bad cloud. I could feel all the gray seeping out, making me nauseated, probably Adam too.

  I wanted to be perfect for Adam. I walked Dominic and gave him his breakfast, then went over to Abbot Kinney. There was a salon there called Trim and it looked pretty empty. I spoke with a cute brunette woman with caramel highlights named Allison.

  “I have a date,” I blurted.

  “Nice,” she said. “So what are you looking to do?”

  “I need to color it. Nothing too crazy. Like an auburn is what I usually do.”

  I showed her some pictures of myself on my phone, what I looked like prior to falling apart.

  “So where are you going on this date?” she said. “Anywhere cool?”

  I didn’t want to say I would be slobbering on someone like dogs in the street. Or that it was with someone I had never met and that he was over ten years younger than me. I mean, the age difference in itself was kind of cool, but I still felt weird. So I lied and said that it was an older tech executive who I had been seeing. I said we were going away for a few days to a bed-and-breakfast in Santa Barbara.

  “Oh, that should be great,” said Allison enthusiastically.

  It felt fun to be having girl talk like this. I never had girl talk—not since Rochelle turned from ally to rat. This felt hopeful, like there was something to be excited about—both for Allison and me. She was probably just pretending to care. But even if it w
as all a lie, I preferred the lie to real life.

  After getting my color I went into some clothing stores, all of them insanely expensive. It was rich hippie shit: silk kimonos for $700, cuff bracelets and bib necklaces that looked like they came from a tent at Woodstock but were upwards of $3,000, fringe vests for $1,900. But then I found one boutique that advertised everything for $20 or less. I tried on a black long-sleeved dress that showed off my slender legs and waist, but was A-line at the hip.

  The saleswomen all said I looked amazing, and I liked their enthusiasm. I liked the attention and it made me high. Now I didn’t even care how the date with Adam went. Just getting ready for it felt like something to live for, some net in my life that caught me and strained me out of the ooze. It was as though some wonderful future event were being extended backward in time. The future event needed only to exist so that I could have this excitement and anticipation now.

  Next I went to a fancy makeup shop and bought some lipstick to match my hair color, a matte crimson. The women there treated me like an interloper and gave me strange stares. I think I talked about my date too much. I kept mentioning the tech exec and Santa Barbara so they would think that I was rich enough to be there. But they never smiled. Was I not supposed to talk to them? Could you only talk to some women about imaginary dates, while others could smell your reality the moment they looked at you?

  The final touch was a bikini wax. I went to a dive—some shithole where they said they could take me right away. I was just going to do the sides, but when the waxer—a bosomy woman named Kristina—saw my vagina, she started yelling.

  “Too much hair! Too much hair!”

  “I know! What do you think I should do with it?”

  “Me? I say take it all off.”

  “Ha, no way,” I said.

  “Okay, fine. I take some off. I show you. Just lie back.”

  I lay back on the small pillow covered in paper. The room was cold and the ceiling was covered in what looked like big pee stains and mold.