The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

  The word bowel made me giggle.

  “What kind of problems?” I said. “Like you can’t go or you go too much?”

  “Both,” he said. “It depends on the day.”

  “I’m sorry I’m laughing. I know it’s not funny. But it’s weird talking about this with a stranger.”

  “We all do it, you know.”

  “I know. Have you ever accidentally gone in your wet suit?”

  Now I was laughing so hard that tears formed in the corners of my eyes. He was grinning and treading water.

  “That’s privileged information,” he said. “I feel like we’re not intimate enough to go that far.”

  “Ah, okay, I understand. Good that you have your limits,” I said.

  “I don’t, it’s just—we would need to be more close for me to disclose something like that,” he said, smirking.

  “What would be more close?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Like if I had touched you before or something.”

  I felt surprised. I don’t know why I am always surprised when a man is attracted to me. Maybe because he was so beautiful and young. But I guess it made sense. Why else was he hanging around these rocks?

  “Do you want to touch me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Where do you want to touch me?” I said coyly.

  He swam over to the edge of my rock. I suddenly felt nervous.

  “Hmmmmm,” he said. “Would you let me touch your ankle?”

  “My ankle?” I laughed.

  “Yeah, your ankle.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You can touch my ankle.”

  He ceremoniously lifted one hand, wiggled his fingers like a pianist, and gave my calf a little squeeze. I laughed. Then, he lightly cupped my ankle and massaged it gently, looking up at me. I stopped laughing. Slowly, he ran two fingers up and down the middle of my foot bone. He pressed each of the toes, one by one, and made his way around to the back where he gently massaged my Achilles tendon.

  “You have such cute ankles,” he said. When he was done massaging he sort of patted the top of my foot like a child’s head. Then he hugged my calf with his hand and head. It was weird as hell but it felt so good.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve never shit in a wet suit.”

  25.

  “Doesn’t Venice make you want to shag everyone?” said Claire the next afternoon. “They’re all so scrummy.”

  She was getting her nails and toenails done at a salon in my neighborhood, preparing to meet David for their first real date—not just sex. I was sitting in the pedicure chair next to her but not getting anything done.

  “Beyond scrummy,” I said.

  “Well, I’m relieved to hear that you haven’t totally retired your pussy—at least in thought,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Actually, I’ve been hanging out with this swimmer.”

  “A swimmer,” she said. “Like an Olympian?”

  “No, like ocean.”

  “Show me his Facebook.”

  “I’ve only met him a few times and I don’t have his number or email or anything. I don’t even know his last name. He meets me at this rock pile, these breakers, on the ocean. Like, he swims up at night.”

  “What do you mean ‘he swims up at night’?”

  “He swims up at night. And we talk. Also, he touched my foot.”

  “He touched your foot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh so he has a fetish. Like Sara from group.”

  “Sara touches her own foot,” I said.

  “More like caresses,” said Claire. “She really makes love to that foot. Maybe she’s replaced men with her own foot?”

  “Ha! No, it was more like he thought my foot was special. Or like through the foot he was touching my soul.”

  Claire stared at me.

  “It’s not as weird as it sounds. And I think it’s safe for me emotionally, like, I’m not getting romantically obsessed, because I sort of just know now that he will show up. I can rely on him not to ignore me. It’s as though he is more of a friend or something. Granted, I don’t really want friends. And he’s gorgeous and looks like he is twenty-one.”

  “Twenty-one!” she squealed. “That’s brilliant.”

  “But I think he does like me. I mean, with the foot touching there was an indication that he is attracted to me in some way, though maybe not, because the way he touched it was sort of sensual at first but then it was just sort of friendly. The point is—I don’t feel crazy around this one.”

  “Well, that’s what matters,” she said. “That you’re happy.”

  “Yeah, I don’t even care that I don’t have his number or email or even know his last name. I just feel like, I don’t know, like the universe put him there to show me—”

  “The universe?”

  “Yes, that the universe put him there to show me that I can have some of that male energy in my life without going totally insane.”

  “The universe is a wanker,” she said.

  26.

  “There’s a light on in your eyes,” said Brianne. “Have you been doing inner-child work?”

  “Definitely not,” I said.

  “Trauma work?” clucked Chickenhorse suspiciously.

  I shook my head no.

  “Must be the self-dating,” she said. “You actually look alive for once.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  I let them know that I was doing well and had blocked Adam and Garrett in my phone. I made no mention of Theo or the rocks, as the group would deem it poor self-care that I had been wandering around there so late at night in the dark. Chickenhorse would probably call it self-harm.

  But everyone was suffering too much today to focus on me for long.

  Chickenhorse had been forced to move back in with her parents, which was traumatizing for her. Actually, she said it was “retraumatizing” and calling up trauma from earlier in life.

  “My mother doesn’t accept my pit bulls. Or, she accepts them, but she doesn’t like them. Which is exactly the way she was about me as a child. She just tolerated me. But she didn’t think I was special. Also, now that I’m living at home I obviously can’t start conscious-dating anytime soon.”

  “Your feelings are certainly understandable. But with regard to the conscious dating, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true,” said Dr. Jude.

  “Of course it’s true!” neighed Chickenhorse. “You don’t know my mother. She has no boundaries. She’ll want to know exactly what’s going on, who I’m with, what family he is from, and then she’ll find some way to involve herself. So, sorry, now that I’m homeless we will have to put off dating again.”

  Brianne’s dating life was going no better.

  “Things have gone a little south with the man from OkCupid,” she murmured, adjusting one knee sock. “He sent me an email the other day letting me know that he couldn’t return to the States yet, because he was waiting for a business deal to close and temporarily was out of funds. Then he asked if I could loan him some funds.”

  The group gasped in unison.

  “I’m not sure what to do. One of the items I put on my vision board is that I want a man who is financially stable. I don’t want to compromise my vision board. I’m supposed to be manifesting. My life is simply too abundant to take on someone who is living a life of lack. But at the same time, because of that abundance, I can’t help but think that it might be the kind thing to help him out—especially if it will allow us to go on our date.”

  “Mmmmmm,” said Dr. Jude. “I would strongly suggest setting a boundary with him.”

  “Do not send the money,” said Chickenhorse. “He’s probably a catfish!”

  “A what?” asked Brianne.

  “A catfish. Like, a scammer. Someone
who pretends to be someone he isn’t.”

  “Oh no, he’s not a scammer. I know that he is who he says he is. We’re very close.”

  “How long have you known him again?” I asked.

  “About six days,” said Brianne.

  We all looked at her.

  “It’s been a rich and rewarding six days.”

  Sara looked at her quizzically over the pomegranate she was peeling. But she was in no position to judge. Having almost reached her ninety days of no contact with Stan, she had had a slip. A big one. Now not only were they in contact again but they’d been seeing each other.

  Stan had reached out with an apologetic one-thousand-word email declaring his love. He also sent her a bouquet of carnations. Of course, Sara was allergic to them and gave them to a neighbor, but that wasn’t the point.

  “He’s been staying with me for the past two days. And I know what you’re thinking! Bad idea, he’s just going to hurt me again. But this time something truly seems different. He still isn’t ready for marriage or an engagement or even to call me his girlfriend or commit to monogamy, but he’s showing up for me in a way that he never has before. He’s truly present.”

  “I see,” said Dr. Jude. She was wearing what looked like a pair of silk pajamas. “What do you think was the impetus for the change?”

  “I think he realized I was serious this time. That I wasn’t going to take him back.”

  “But you did take him back,” said Chickenhorse.

  “No, I know. I mean before that. I think he realized the gravity of his error,” she said. “Also, he lost his job at the hospital and has nowhere else to go. He’s been living in his car.”

  “What?” We all balked.

  I struggled to keep from laughing. Compared to the rest of them I was actually doing well.

  “I can’t forbid you from seeing him,” said Dr. Jude. “But I want you to remember the state you were in when you came in here, how much you were suffering. In my experience these sorts of relationships only get worse, never better.”

  “I know.” Sara sniffed. “And I know you’re all going to judge me. And Dr. Jude, I know I broke our deal. But he needs me. At the ‘Opening the Heart’ workshop they said that we can only recover from the past by coming to terms with our core truths. Well, he’s been sleeping on a mat in the resting area of the Korean spa. And I’m a compassionate person. And I want him to be with me. So that’s my core truth.”

  I glanced over at Diana, the newest member of the group. She looked horrified. Diana was a Brentwood mommy—a gorgeous, fuckable mother in Lululemon—whose husband was a very new-moneyed TV producer. Apparently he wasn’t paying her any attention anymore. It’s not that he was bad in bed or turned her off sexually, but after they made love, a progressively less-frequent occasion now, he no longer connected with her. He no longer looked her in the eyes. It was like he could barely see her. Also, sometimes he had a difficult time getting it up. When he took Viagra she could always tell and she blamed it on the idea that he was no longer really attracted to her. So she had started having sex with younger men. At first it hadn’t seemed like a problem, but recently she was afraid that she would get caught and it would destroy her marriage. She had been getting sloppier with it: having sex in the back of her Mercedes SUV, compulsively sending text messages from her own phone. She could no longer stay off her phone for more than a few minutes, even during her daughter’s piano recital, and that scared her. She felt devastated when she could not get the attention of the young men in her orbit. Or, when she got their interest, they would have sex and she wouldn’t hear from them after.

  I felt excited by her situation. She was a little older than me and looked like the kind of woman who had never been ignored. With her long blond-streaked hair, large breasts, doe legs, and warm skin, she had probably always gotten all the attention she could need. But now she was seeing what age could do, what those of us who never looked like goddesses had always felt. Now she was mortal like the rest of us.

  “I’ve been going down on the tennis pros,” she said, in a way that was sort of proud, but also terrified. “I can’t seem to stop. But I keep getting hurt. I’ve done it with two of them, more than once. The older one is twenty-seven. It started out that we would just go get frozen yogurt and talk. Then one day we took one car and ended up having sex in a parking lot, and it started from there. The younger one is—he’s twenty-three. I bet the older one told the younger one that I was…a cougar or something. It’s embarrassing. I don’t need them to be in love with me, I just want them to be there for me when I get in touch. It hurts when I try to contact them and they don’t text back. Then I see them at the tennis club and they remember what I look like, and suddenly they want something. So I hear from them again. It’s always the same. But I don’t know how to stop.”

  “That’s the dopamine talking,” said Chickenhorse. “You want your high. Is it that you don’t know how to stop or you don’t want to stop?”

  “It’s that I can’t,” said Diana.

  Suddenly I felt a wave of compassion for her. I knew what it was like. I thought about what Claire said, about being careful to stay away from the freaks or else you become a freak. Diana was so hot and polished—the wealth pouring out of her Spandex—with her diamond rings, chypre fragrance, and golden highlights. Did she see everyone at the meeting as sad and pathetic? Did I look as sad and pathetic to Diana as the other women looked to me when I came in?

  But after group she came up to me in the parking lot.

  “You seem like you’re the only one there who isn’t totally insane,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t bet on that.” I laughed.

  “Can I call you? If I have questions about what to do?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I don’t know that I will have the answers. But I can listen.”

  I saw the sadness in her eyes and the mess of it all. I saw her delusions and the way that things started between her and the older tennis pro as just friends. It was like Theo: you wanted to believe they liked you as a friend. She pretended that’s what it was, because if she admitted to herself what it really was at first she would have never gotten in his car. And she had needed to get in his car.

  “I’m just afraid of getting worse,” she said. “My son has a friend. He is sixteen and gorgeous. And I see the way he looks at me. I used to think it wasn’t that, it couldn’t be that.”

  “You’re so beautiful,” I said. “How could it not be that?”

  “Thank you,” she said. “But I’m…you should see the young girls at their high school. I thought there could simply be no way. But now that I’ve been with Ryan, the younger tennis pro, well, I realize what it is with my son’s friend. I’m not going to go there. At least, I don’t think I would go there. But it scares me that I feel tempted.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s heavy.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t want to admit that to the group. I didn’t want to say I’ve thought about, you know, having sex with my son’s friend…I didn’t say it, because…it would be very illegal. I don’t know what the group’s policy is on that. If someone is tempted to do something illegal, are they forced to report it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But your secret is safe with me. Do you feel any better now even just telling me?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  27.

  I didn’t go back to the rocks that night. I could see myself too clearly in Diana and her suffering. If there was anything in the universe, any kind of guiding force, any kind of greater power, I saw now that it probably hadn’t brought me Theo to show that I could be friends with a beautiful member of the opposite sex. Maybe it had brought him to me at the same time as Diana to teach me a lesson. I didn’t know if the universe actively taught lessons. But if it did, the lesson was that I could not handle what I thought I could handle. The l
esson was that I didn’t need to act out with Theo to learn the lesson. I didn’t have to suffer again. The suffering of others, Claire and now Diana, could remind me of my own suffering: the suffering of the past and my potential future suffering. Maybe this is why we did things in groups. Maybe this is why people had friends: so we could see ourselves and our own insanity in them.

  Instead I went over to Abbot Kinney with Dominic. A few people stopped and commented on him, how beautiful he was, how regal. I felt proud of him, not eclipsed by him, as though being with him somehow made me better. He made me feel purebred. What was money anyway? What was polish? Why was I so susceptible to flights of fancy, my perception of other people’s views of me? Look at Diana. I thought she had it together and she was a mess. She actually liked me.

  Maybe I didn’t need someone else to define me, but oh, I still wanted it. How vacuous was I? How empty was I that I needed a border drawn by someone else to tell me who I was? It didn’t even matter whether the person was real, a lover, a new friend, or even a dog. The person could even be imaginary, like the fancy people I saw on the street, who were not themselves imaginary, but became whatever it was I projected onto them. Seeing myself through the eyes of a projection, however uncomfortable the judgment, made me feel safe in a strange way. It was like a box in which to live: a boundary against the greater nothingness, to think one knew something about what others thought of you. It was there I could begin and end. And perhaps it was a prison, to have to begin and end, but it was also a relief.

  This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over nature, there were better versions of them in control.

  Or perhaps it was not for the sake of control over the terror of nature at all that they created their gods. Perhaps it was because the world, with all its beauty, was not enough. Simply being alive was not enough. The Greeks needed a new fantasy to make the world more exciting. With their war, wine, poetry, gods, and food, they needed to get high. Maybe we all did.