Suddenly, I felt a warm trickle between my legs. I looked down and in the crotch of my pants was a spreading stain of orange liquid. Fuck. I forgot that Pyridium turned your pee orange. I had pissed myself the color of a traffic cone.
I ran to the counter, paid for my Cipro, then bailed out of there. I couldn’t get in a car like this, I would stink it up and stain the seats. Quickly I waddled down Main Street, past a group of brunchers, disoriented and reeking of piss. I felt like I could see in them what the homeless saw when they walked past these people. I felt hatred for them and shame about myself. But the brunchers didn’t notice me at all, or the orange pee stain. It made me want to disrupt their eating, their stupid conversations, and sit in the middle of their tables. I wanted them to be forced to deal with me.
* * *
—
At noon I turned on my phone. There was no word from Garrett, but twelve messages from Adam.
I’m worried about you!!!!! I would come visit u at the hospital but I’m in tijuana
I’m fine, I wrote, really
Send pics of the blood, he wrote. Send nudes with the blood!!!
There was also a message from Jamie asking how I was. I typed in three different answers:
lovin the California lifestyle!
do you still miss me?
dying.
None of them seemed right. Dying was the closest. Now the urinary tract infection had subsided but I felt sick over Garrett. I kept replaying the night before in my mind. Somehow in my memory it was way hotter than it had actually been: my vagina wetter, his dick thicker, his moans heartier and more passionate. I thought about his tongue and jaw, and tears came to my eyes. What the fuck was happening? And why didn’t he want me? That night I slept with my phone next to my head on vibrate, but I didn’t really sleep. I woke up every hour and looked to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I decided it might be time to return to therapy and check in.
23.
When I walked in the door at group, everyone gave me looks that were a cross between disdain and We knew you would be back. They were actually excited to see me. I couldn’t help but think that they just wanted more people to be as fucked up as they were. The more fuck-ups like them, the less alone they were—maybe even the less fucked up they were. If everyone was fucked up in the same way as you then maybe you weren’t so fucked up. Compared to them I’d thought I was normal. I may have been obsessing, but I hadn’t stalked Garrett outside his office or anything. But oddly, everyone in the group seemed to be doing well.
Chickenhorse felt proud of herself and was tooting her horn. That morning she had spotted her neighbor’s two dogs locked in their parked car in the heat and swept in to save them.
“I called animal services on their asses,” she said.
Of course, when animal services arrived, the neighbors, who were merely putting groceries away, were livid. They banged on her door and screamed at her.
“You would think I’d be triggered or at least retraumatized!” she said. “But since I’m already being evicted, it felt empowering—as the victim—to stand up for other creatures who were being abused.”
Brianne, who looked to have just gotten some fresh Botox in her forehead, had met a man on OkCupid—a new foray for her. They’d even progressed from the messaging stage of the app to actual email.
“Of course, he’s on a business trip in Europe,” she said softly, her eyebrows arched like a child’s rendering of geese in flight. “But he said that when he returns he actually wants to get together with me. Face-to-face. In person. At a real restaurant. And I think I am going to go.”
I decided to come clean, sort of, about my two dates. I didn’t say that I went home with Adam and watched him jerk off or fucked Garrett on a bathroom floor, but simply that I had gone.
“The first guy was gross,” I said. “If they’re gross, I’m fine. I can take it or leave it.”
“Why did you go out with him if he was gross?” clucked Chickenhorse.
“I didn’t know he was gross beforehand,” I said. “It was an Internet date.”
“And the other one?” asked Dr. Jude.
“Well, that’s the one that’s the problem. He wasn’t gross. But he seems to have rejected me after. So now I’m all spun out. It’s not like I felt with Jamie. But it’s pretty bad.”
“Mmmm,” said Dr. Jude, sipping her tea. “What were you hoping to get out of the date exactly?”
I noticed that she had accumulated multiple strands of Tibetan beaded bracelets on her left hand. I wondered how many she would have to acquire until she reached enlightenment.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess to have some fun. Casual fun, you know?”
“It doesn’t sound like you are having much fun,” said Sara, offering me a banana chip.
I declined it. But she was right.
“Well, maybe I don’t like fun.”
“Of course you like fun,” she said. “Everyone does! You just don’t know what’s actually fun for you yet. I’ve had to try out a lot of activities until I found my thing. The heart-opening workshop was just okay. But now I’ve started improv classes and I am really loving it. It’s like my inner child is finally coming out to play.”
I cringed. Was there anything worse than improv? Maybe open mic nights.
“I also enjoy essential oils,” she continued. “It’s a form of self-care. Every night I give myself a little rubdown with a homemade blend—rose, bergamot, and a drop of frankincense—on my neck and shoulders.”
And probably your feet too, I thought.
“I like to take myself out on artist dates,” said Brianne, her face unmoving. “Just me. I will go to a museum or the movies, get inspired and really connect with myself one-on-one in a creative setting. Afterwards I will take myself out for a good dinner and also dessert.”
This seemed fucking annoying. I did not want to do any more connecting with myself. In fact I wanted to do less.
“I guess I could do that,” I said.
“I dare you,” said Sara. “I dare you to take yourself out on a date!”
24.
I left therapy and saw that Claire had called.
“Can you meet me at Pain Quotidien?” she asked. “I’m in hell. I’m dying.”
“Of course,” I said.
When I got there, she was crying in the corner over an almond Danish.
“I really felt like me and Trent had a connection,” she said. “I really felt like with this whole polyamory bit I would have enough going on to keep everything under control. Like I wouldn’t get too attached or too crazy about any single one of them. Now that’s all gone tits up.”
“Which one was Trent?” I asked.
“The old one with the ponytail.”
“Fuck him,” I said. “What an idiot. You can do better. You know who else was an old guy with a ponytail? This creepy guy who used to come sit in the library for twelve hours a day. He wasn’t homeless, he had really nice sneakers, but he would just watch all the undergrad girls all day. At first I felt bad for him, because he was old and would sometimes bring soup and there is nothing sadder than an older man eating soup alone. But then one day he was caught in the women’s bathroom. He had been hiding there for hours. His name was Ron. So this guy, Trent or whatever, is basically named Ron. Basically he is a seventy-year-old man with a ponytail named Ron who lurks in women’s bathrooms hoping to catch a sniff of them. Whenever you think he is great, just call him Ron in your head.”
I thought I had done a pretty good job. But Claire just cried harder.
“That makes it even worse. That someone like him could reject me.”
“He’s not rejecting you,” I said.
“Yes, he is,” she said. “His wife said she just isn’t comfortable with the arrangem
ent.”
“So then it’s not even his fault. He isn’t choosing to reject you.”
I wondered how gross dudes like Trent scored both a wife and a woman like Claire.
“Yes, but he didn’t even stand up to her,” she said.
I wanted to be like, Look, this is what you get when you fuck a guy with a wife. This is what the polyamory people are like. You are never going to get to have the whole person. But I kept my mouth shut. Who was I to say anything? I’d just fucked a guy with a girlfriend on a public floor and wanted him to declare his undying love.
“How did the garters go?” she asked, as though reading my mind.
“Horrific,” I said. “I’m giving up men for a while.”
“No! But I adore this side of you! You were just getting started!”
“I’m just too crazy.”
“It’s that bloody group that got in your head, isn’t it? Ah well, I guess I’m on my own again to rummage through the cocks. Trent is dead to me, but at least David is more attentive now than ever,” she said.
“So pack it all into David. He’s younger and hotter anyway.”
“No, it’s too dodgy with him. He’s too hot. I might become too dependent. I need a buffer.”
“What about the guy from Best Buy? The really built one.”
“It’s not enough,” she said. “He was number three, remember? I need a new two. Or he can move up to two but I still need a new three. I have to have three.”
Seeing Claire’s insanity made me realize I was probably doing the right thing by being back in group. She could have a harem of a thousand studs, but the truth was there would never be enough to fill her need for attention—for devotion. That hole was bottomless. It was never-ending. She wanted their devotion, but should one of them—even one of the ones she liked most, like David—want her to commit, it would be over instantly. If he became obsessed with her, really fell in love, asked her to move in, she would grow tired of him in about a month. Maybe even less than a month. When I looked at Claire I saw that there was no human who could do that for us. Fill the hole. That was the sad part of Sappho’s spaces. Where there had been something beautiful there before, now they were blank. Time erased all. That was the part nobody could handle. Some people tried to shove things in them: their own narratives, biographical crap. I was pretending that nothing had ever been there in the first place, so that I wouldn’t feel the hurt of its absence. I wanted to be immune to time, the pain of it. But pretending didn’t make it so. Everything dissolved. No one really wanted satiety. It was the prospect of satiety—the excitement around the notion that we could ever be satisfied—that kept us going. But if you were ever actually satisfied it wouldn’t be satisfaction. You would just get hungry for something else. The only way to maybe have satisfaction would be to accept the nothingness and not try to put anyone else in it.
When I left Claire, I blocked Garrett in my phone. I also deleted the Tinder app. Then I went to Whole Foods and bought myself an expensive array of ingredients: a cod fillet, little clams, good olive oil, a bottle of white wine, black truffles, shallots, chanterelles. I finally bought Dominic the ingredients for his turkey, pea, and zucchini dish. Even though I’m not a great cook, we were going to have a little feast.
First I stewed up his mess. I loved watching him eat, how absorbed in it and unselfconscious he was, gobbling quickly and getting right to the point. I loved the sounds he made with his black lips and pink tongue, all sloppy and smacking, totally engrossed in his meal. Occasionally he would stop midbowl, still chewing, and glance at me sideways for a moment as if to say, What are you looking at? I’m just eating. We all do it, you know.
Then I cooked the fillet and clams in the wine and oil, browning the mushrooms and shallots to a crisp. It was delicious. I drank the rest of the wine and sat down with my Sappho.
Sappho’s gaps are not intentional negative space, and I do not propose we read them as such. The words are gone and they are never coming back, I typed. We can try to fill the gaps with biographical knowledge, but this will not replicate the music. Guessing at gaps cannot simulate music. Nor can the silence of the gaps simulate the missing music either. But the silence comes closer.
Had Claire somehow helped me find a new direction, a new legitimacy to my thesis? At least I was admitting that my own idea had been bullshit—that you couldn’t read something as intentional if it had never been intentional, even through a perverted academic lens. Yet one crux of my thesis remained: there should be no attempt made to fill in the gaps with biography or bullshit narrative. So what to do with them then—the discomfort of not knowing? How to savor what was there without guessing at what wasn’t? I was drunk but the question seemed good. The writing seemed good.
Around midnight, somehow, I found myself back out again on the rocks. It was chilly and I didn’t bring a sweater. I looked around, and then, feeling embarrassed, I stopped. It was obvious Theo wasn’t there, but I kept imagining that he was—or that he was deeper in the waves, farther out, watching me looking for him, laughing. I pretended to myself that I had come out to the rocks simply because I had wanted to be near the ocean. But I was disappointed.
I turned to go home.
“Lucy,” said a voice.
It was Theo. Had he been hiding behind a rock? This kid was confusing. When I felt him watching me from far away, maybe was he watching me from much closer? He sort of bobbed a few feet away.
“You’re back,” I said cheerfully, but casual. I did not ask where he had been.
“I’m back,” he said. “How have the dates been treating you?”
“Disgusting,” I said.
“Ah, too bad.”
“Each its own little death.”
“Funny,” he said. “You’re like a little death.”
“What?” I asked.
“You are. You’re…gloomy yet charming. I like it.”
“Well, no one has said that before.”
“You’re gently death-ish. You know about death, you’re aware of it, and most people aren’t anymore. But you’re not a killer. You’re a soft darkness.”
A soft darkness.
“Yeah, I’m aware of death,” I said. I was thinking about the doughnut incident. “In high school I wore black lipstick and black nail polish.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “It’s not manufactured. You have it in you.”
“What about you? What’s your story?” I asked.
“Oh God, I hate my story,” said Theo.
“I bet you have a great story.”
“What do you want to know, exactly?” he asked. He was treading water a little faster now. I caught a glint of his wet suit under the waves.
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Around here,” he said.
“So cryptic,” I said. “Are you aware of death?”
Asking that, I felt kind of creepy in a good way. He had a lot of power in not revealing too much of himself. Just that lack of willingness to disclose—that’s all it took for me to perceive rejection. So this gave me a little edge. Also, his observation about me and death could have been a bit scary if he wasn’t so matter-of-fact. I mean, he was a stranger, male, and likely stronger than me. He could easily pull me off a rock into the water and drown me. But I trusted him completely—at least in terms of my physical safety. And now that he had complimented me about my proximity to death and I had owned it, and thrown it right back at him, I felt cool. We had both decided now that death was my territory. I was the Professor of Death. Much more than a middle-aged woman who was beginning to get serious crushy feelings for a young stranger in the water.
“I know about death,” he said.
“Have you ever seen someone die?” I asked. “Like up close and one-on-one?”
“Yes,” he said. “I have watched a number of people
die.”
“Scary, right? The dying process. I don’t feel scared about death but dying freaks me the fuck out.”
“I’m not scared of dying,” he said.
“You’re not?”
Now he was the professor and I was the pussy.
“I would say I’m less scared of dying than I am of life.”
Actually, I maybe agreed with him.
“I think I’m equally scared of both,” I said.
This was the truth. It felt good to say it.
“What is it about dying that scares you the most? Are you afraid of having regrets?”
“No,” I said. “I think it’s literally the physical process. Like, the suffocation. I’m so scared to be suffocating and panicking. I get panicked even when I go to the dentist. I am not good with discomfort. So I think I’m more scared of the discomfort—my own fear around it—than anything else.”
“It might be scary for a moment,” he said. “Maybe for a few minutes. But then, from what I’ve seen, you are very free.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s the fear before the freedom that I’m scared of. If I could just go to sleep—just like that, go to sleep and never wake up—I would do that anytime. I would do it tonight. But I’m scared to be conscious while it’s happening.”
“I had that feeling about you. That you would be happy to just go to sleep.”
“Why? Because I’m so boring?”
“Not at all,” he said. “The opposite. But I can feel you’ve suffered.”
He was so dramatic.
“Yeah, well, life is the dumbest,” I said, standing up.
“I’ve suffered too,” he said. “I’ve been sick.”
This piqued my interest.
“Yeah?”
“Yes. I have stomach problems, terrible stomach cramps. Problems with my bowel. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
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