The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

  “You have boyfriend?” she asked. “What he think of hair?”

  “No,” I said. “No boyfriend.”

  “Ah, see!” she said. “I will fix that. Relax.”

  I felt her spread on the wax. It felt too hot, but I didn’t know how warm it was supposed to be. It felt like my right labia was burning. She blew on the wax a few times with frenetic movements.

  “One, two, three,” she said.

  Then she ripped. I felt like my vagina was a tree, its roots being torn out of the ground. It was an ache, a tearing, and a burning all at once. I wanted to kill her.

  “Oh my God!” I yelled.

  I looked down. There was my full bush with one giant chunk missing. The area was pink and had a few tiny dots of blood. My crotch looked like a furry mouth with one pulled tooth.

  “Darling, lie back. That was nothing.”

  “No!” I said. “Don’t do it, please. I’m done. I’m done.”

  “I can’t leave you like this. You’re going to go to mans like this?” she asked, pointing to my torn-up vagina.

  “I don’t care!”

  “I go gentler,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to do. We were sort of fighting. I was pushing her hands away and she was applying the wax. With the second strip I started to cry.

  “This is fucking insane,” I said.

  But I let her do my lips, which felt like she was searing off my vulva. I couldn’t believe that other women did this. Who were these people? Then she did my asshole, which she said she had to do, because it was “carrying around stink.” I’d been carrying around stink for thirty-eight years.

  When I got home I lay down with Dominic and held a package of frozen edamame to my vagina. I hated everything. Now the dress, the lipstick, even my hair color seemed stupid. I realized I didn’t care about any of this stuff, even the dress, which I had loved. It wasn’t about the dress. It was in the acquisition of the dress that there had been beauty.

  I thought about different kinds of happiness. There was the happiness I felt in all of the adrenaline of running around, a crazed happiness. This was a different happiness from the quiet peace of just being with Dominic. I kissed his ear.

  “Sorry I get so distracted,” I said.

  He sniffed at me. Suddenly I didn’t want to go out with Adam anymore. I fell asleep with the edamame defrosting on my vagina.

  But the next morning, my excitement—that sense of purpose—was oddly restored. I woke up to a text from Adam that said,

  see you tonight gorgeous.

  There was something about the morning of a date that tricked me. It tricked me out of the haze of being alive. Or perhaps it tricked me out of the sadness of knowing that one day I would die. It punctured the nothingness. Now I felt passion and love for everything.

  12.

  Back at group, the word of the day seemed to have shifted from unavailable to triggered. In the safe space of Dr. Jude’s crap-filled office, everyone, it seemed, had recently been triggered by something.

  For Chickenhorse it was an escalation of the issues with her landlady. Apparently, the harassment had increased and was now becoming a question of abuse. Chickenhorse’s landlady had entered her apartment without her permission, while she was showering, no less, and had brought her little son with her. When Chickenhorse exited the shower, she was shocked to find a three-year-old boy and his teddy bear. She screamed and accidentally dropped her towel. Now the landlady was accusing her of unseemly behavior toward her son. She was given a thirty-day eviction notice.

  “My inner child is triggered, because I no longer feel safe,” she said, looking particularly chicken-gummed. “But I’m having trouble getting in touch with my anger. I’m scared I won’t have a place to live, so instead of fighting back I’m trying to be ‘good’ and begging the landlady to let me stay. But I’m the one who has been victimized!”

  The group cooed and soothed, letting her know it was not her fault. Was anything ever our fault?

  I wanted to tell Chickenhorse that she probably just needed to get laid. Why wasn’t she dating again? Maybe it’s because Dr. Jude’s version of dating, “conscious dating,” sounded boring as shit. You were supposed to call and check in with a friend before and after every date, no texting more than once a day, no sex outside of a monogamous relationship. Maybe Chickenhorse didn’t think she could follow the rules. She seemed very Fatal Attraction to me.

  Sara, over a large bag of Calimyrna figs, recounted the tale of how salsa dancing had suddenly turned dangerous for her.

  “It brought up all of my body-image shame,” she said. “When no one chose to partner with me, it triggered my insecurities over the way I look. Then a man finally did choose to partner with me and I found myself getting high off of it, wanting more from him, the way I always felt with Stan. It was unsafe.”

  Now Sara was filling her Stanless days and nights by attending an “Opening the Heart” workshop down the street in Santa Monica.

  But Sara’s heart already seemed pretty open to me. How much more open did she want it to get?

  “We’ll see how it goes,” she said. “Already I feel a little triggered by it, because some of the women at these workshops end up pairing off with the men. It’s as though they become a couple for the week. But this has never happened for me. Where is my workshop boyfriend?”

  Dr. Jude reminded Sara that she wasn’t cleared to be dating yet anyway.

  “I know,” said Sara, glumly biting into a fig. “But it would be nice to know for once that I could have a workshop boyfriend if I really wanted.”

  Brianne’s son had found a girlfriend, and this was hard for her.

  “It’s triggering for me, because it means I’ve been isolating a lot more,” she said from under her wide-brimmed hat, face covered in a chalky substance that I guessed was zinc. She looked like she was wearing a clown mask.

  “He never had many friends, but now he is out most of the time and I don’t have any companionship.”

  I wondered, too, if Brianne’s son was also in therapy. If not, he would be soon.

  “I’ve been staying the course with Match and Millionaire Match,” she said, gently patting her lips to make sure they were still huge. “And we will just have to wait and see. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. If not, it’s okay. I don’t need anyone. I have a very full life.”

  I wasn’t buying it today.

  “So you’d really be okay to never fall in love again for the rest of your life?” I asked her.

  Brianne looked at me through her clown paint.

  “I’m feeling judged,” said Brianne.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “What about you, Lucy? You don’t believe that a person can be alone and be content with that?” asked Dr. Jude.

  “I don’t know. Probably not,” I said.

  “Mmmm.”

  “Do you?”

  “Oh, definitely,” said Dr. Jude, yellow teeth flashing. “I don’t believe we need another person to complete us.”

  “Not even to fuck?”

  “Let’s be sure to be conscious of any triggering language,” she said.

  “Yes, I’m feeling triggered,” said Sara.

  “Right, sorry,” I said.

  The room got quiet.

  “Are you in a relationship, Dr. Jude?” I asked.

  She paused and toyed with an angel card on the table next to her. It said Awakening.

  “No,” she said. “Not at the moment.”

  “When was the last time you were in one?”

  “Well, if you want to know, I’m pretty recently divorced,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Would you say you’re content?”

  “Hmmmm,” she said, sipping her green tea. “Actually, yes. Most of the time I would say yes, I am content.
”

  Nobody said a word. Sara was slowly peeling a clementine with the hand she used to massage her foot. The amount of time it was taking could not be worth the bite-sized little fruit. I watched her peel and peel the white-and-orange rind, and began to shake. It was the clementine of Sisyphus. Everything was hopeless. Then Sara offered Brianne a slice of her foot-fruit and Brianne accepted gleefully, as though she were giving her a jewel. I felt sorry for them. None of them had anything left to look forward to in the romance department. Maybe they would go on some tepid controlled dates, but no dark alleys. What did any of them have to live for, really? A son who would just grow up and forget all about you? Some man in hemp pants at a workshop saying you had a nice aura? An office filled with shit? At least I still had sparkle in my life. I was going on an adventure.

  Of course, I didn’t say a word about Adam. I didn’t want them reprimanding me or giving me any healthy advice. I knew what they would say: I wasn’t supposed to be dating yet. And meeting up with strangers in alleys doesn’t constitute conscious dating. But maybe I didn’t want to be conscious.

  13.

  Later, as I waited for Adam on Ocean Front Walk, near Marina del Rey, where the homeless cleared and the vibration of the boardwalk became more desolate, I was so excited that I was nauseated. The Santa Monica Mountains were covered in fog, so the pink and palm-tree silhouettes of Venice looked like their own island—an old beach scene frozen in time. It was windy out and I was cold, but I felt important—momentous—like I was on a timeless mission. I could be anyone standing by any beach in history, waiting for a lover. I could be Sappho, unafraid of Eros, calling Aphrodite to her shrine.

  But as soon as I saw him coming, I thought, Oh God no. He sort of looked like his picture, but more the monkey aesthetic than the hot one. Also, he had an additional werewolf essence that the photo had not captured. It wasn’t just his jagged teeth, the scruffy goatee, but something else that was distinctly werewolf. He waved to me, and I waved back, cursing through my teeth, already disappointed. When he crossed the street I tried not to let it show, to be warm, though I wasn’t sure why I cared what he thought. I guess I felt bad about rejecting someone without even knowing him. I felt sort of ashamed that I was judging him for his looks, but with an alley make-out what other attributes could there be? It figured. Of course this werewolf-monkey creature was the best that I could do.

  He might have been disappointed in what I looked like too, but he didn’t show it.

  “You’re really cute,” he said, as though assuring both me and himself. “You look a lot younger than forty. A lot younger.”

  “I’m thirty-eight,” I said.

  “Not that I don’t like older women. I love older women. You’ve got seasoning. But you look like a young older woman. Or an old younger woman—”

  “Okay,” I said, relieving him of having to speak. “I got it.”

  “So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Do you want to stay here and have a drink or do you want to go for a walk?”

  “Let’s have a drink first,” I said.

  “God, you’re really cute,” he said.

  We turned in to a little dive. I ordered myself a vodka tonic. Rarely did I drink liquor anymore but I felt that the situation called for it. I needed to be less lucid than I was. He didn’t offer to pay for my drink. But he got two tequila shots, offering me one, and a Jack and Coke. I declined, laughing.

  “So what have you been reading lately?” he asked, after toasting me with one of his two shots. I had told him over the Internet that I was a librarian, and he loved that. He had asked me to wear my glasses, but I didn’t wear glasses.

  “I’m almost always reading the Greeks,” I said. “I’m doing a project on the poet Sappho that I’ve been working on for a number of years. Trying to finish it this summer.”

  “Oh yeah, I read him in high school,” he said. “I’m really into the Beats right now. Do you like the Beats?”

  I liked the Beats for a second when I was fourteen. By sixteen I realized they were mostly just good for picking out a douchebag. There was something about douche bros and the Beats. They just gravitated there.

  “Yeah, I love them,” I said. “Who is your favorite?”

  “Kerouac,” he said. “I’m really into Kerouac, Burroughs, and Bukowski. Kerouac just keeps it so real, like the way he writes his characters it’s just so—legit. I would love to write like him someday.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “So how about that walk?” he said.

  Outside it was almost dark. He lit up a cigarette and offered me one. I declined and watched him squint and inhale, then exhale. Clearly he had studied that move: a James Dean kind of smoking pose. But he was no James Dean, and his hands were even more monkey-werewolf than the rest of him: monkey in the way they curled around the cigarette like they were clutching a banana and werewolf in the way his arm hair crawled well over his wrist and onto the hands themselves. He was hairy to the knuckle. We started to walk and I felt like I was going to vomit. I kept wanting to say, “You know what? Thanks, but I’m not feeling so great and I’m just going to walk home.” But we kept walking.

  Suddenly he grabbed my hand and said, “Can I kiss you?”

  But he didn’t wait for me to respond. His palm was sweaty, but his lips were full and I closed my eyes and it felt shocking to be kissing someone new. The new mouth shape was exciting, also strange. After eight years I forgot that lips could come in different shapes and feels. Also, the taste of cigarettes and whiskey was exciting. I was half nauseated and half turned on. I felt rebellious and young.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said, giggling. “You’re just cute.”

  Looking at him, I really didn’t think he was cute. But I didn’t know what else to say so I shut my eyes and took the back of his head in my palm and pulled him toward me. Then he introduced his tongue, much deeper into my mouth, circling it in a clockwise motion. What the fuck was he doing? He was ruining it. I started to put my tongue out as a guard, to try to stop his rotating tongue, but I guess he just took this as a sign that I was turned on—that I was into it—because he continued with the circling, only deeper in my mouth, almost to my throat, gagging me. I put my finger up between our mouths, pretending to trace his lips, but really trying to create some distance. Then I closed my lips a lot, guiding him into softer and gentler kisses. I kept my eyes sealed shut. I could have just cut it off there. I’d gotten what I said I wanted. I’m not sure why I didn’t.

  He rubbed my tits over my black cotton dress. I could feel his bulge against me. Then he started kissing my ear and neck, which I think is a turn-on for some women, because men do it a lot—especially when they are younger. I remembered these moves now from when I was in my early twenties: the weird breathing in my ear, the sticky trail on my neck, moves he probably read on Esquire.com. All I could think about was how my neck and ear now smelled like his breath, which had taken on a sour quality: the whiskey, tequila, and smoke forming a noxious stew.

  “Let’s go back to my house,” he whispered into my ear.

  “Uhhh, I don’t think so,” I said. “What if you’re a murderer?”

  “I’m not a murderer.” He laughed.

  “If you were a murderer you obviously wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I’m so not a murderer,” he said.

  “Well, I will just walk a little further and then I’ll decide. Maybe I can pick up some more clues in the meantime.”

  “Yeah, let’s just walk in the direction of my house. Or we could go to your house instead?”

  I imagined bringing this kid to Annika’s house. I didn’t want him knowing where I lived. Or in there to begin with.

  “No, that’s okay. What’s your address?” I asked.

  Then I texted Claire:

  I’m going here with a strange boy from t
he internet

  it’s your fault

  if i don’t text you after then this is where to find the body

  His house was one tiny room that reeked of cigarettes. The mini refrigerator, stove, and oven were right at the foot of his bed, and the bathroom just off the head of it. There was beige wall-to-wall carpeting, even in the “kitchen” part, with stains that looked like spaghetti sauce, tar, and generally a lot of lint. He had very few books for someone who claimed to be a writer and loved to read. I counted seven: three of them Bukowski.

  “I love Bukowski maybe the best, actually,” he said when he caught me looking at the books. “Find what you love and let it kill you. So raw.”

  I didn’t say anything. He put his arms around my waist and began kissing me, then pulled me onto the dirty plaid bedspread and took off my dress.

  “You have such a hot body for forty,” he said.

  “Thirty-eight,” I said.

  “Mmmm,” he said, sliding his fingers into my underpants and tracing my war-torn labia. “I love your pussy. So hot that you have hair down there.”

  I took off his pants. His cock was hard as a stone, yet simultaneously pink and slimy. I didn’t want to touch it. So I didn’t. He began fingering me, very dryly, adding further battering to my poor wax-mangled vagina.

  He kept whispering, “Can I fuck you? I want to fuck you. Will you suck my dick?”

  I kept saying, “No, not yet. I’m not ready.”

  I guess in an effort to turn me on he inserted two more fingers into my wilting vagina, banging them in and out. My labia burned but I was surprised to find that up inside me I was wet, as though I didn’t know I was turned on. Now the wetness began to come down onto my labia and clit. But he ignored my clit and just kept banging away.

  “Such a hot, tight, pink pussy,” he said.

  I didn’t know how he knew it was pink. He hadn’t even looked at it or licked it.

  “Let me fuck it. Please?” he said.

  “No,” I said.