The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

  Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even for just a moment. Maybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high—no longer be a drug—and that was why you grew tired of them. That was what had happened to me and Jamie. It was only when he was pushing me away—and then after he was gone—that he became a drug. It was so much easier for someone to be the drug before or after the relationship. When they were absent they were exciting. When they were right there it was a different story.

  But some human beings did want simple partnership: someone with whom to weather life, like Annika and Steve. How did they stay so into each other living side by side, everything out in the open? How did they simultaneously have each other and still want each other? To want what you had—now, that was an art, a gift maybe. But whenever I felt I finally “had” Jamie, the nights in his bed seemed suffocating. I preferred the acquiring, the almost-getting, the moment before he was mine again. What was left to look forward to after you got a person? To “have” seemed nauseating. Then again, I was the sick one—the one in group therapy—not Annika.

  The women in group told themselves they were looking for symbiotic companionship, something like Annika and Steve. They thought they wanted a man to show up for them. But I didn’t believe them. They were choosing men who couldn’t be present, so it probably wasn’t really what they wanted. It certainly wasn’t what Claire or Diana wanted. It wasn’t what I wanted.

  28.

  For the next few days I rose at dawn and walked Dominic to Oakwood Park, where he would run around and chase birds. I felt like a wild woman as I ran beside him, a primal lady of the wolves. He thanked me gleefully, jumping up and licking my face, his cold, wet nose brushing up against mine. I couldn’t believe that his love for me was still so pure and unwavering, and I didn’t even have to work for it. Could a love like that really be trusted? Who was I if I wasn’t trying to make someone love me? I knew that Dominic, unlike the men, would never hurt me. But why then did his pure love feel a little scary while the others had strangely felt safe? I suspected that I was afraid it might make me lazy, not through any fault of my own, but because of a lack of friction: a gradual atrophying of the muscles with nothing to push against, nothing to resist. Or maybe it was something else?

  Since my mother’s death I had been mistrustful of love, or anything, really, that came too easily, as though it were fool’s gold and could one day, just like she did, disappear. I had spent so much time creating friction for myself: not only in whom I chose to love but in the work I did. I’d made my thesis impossibly hard—harder than it needed to be, ensuring that I might never complete it. Somehow it always felt safer psychologically to do that. But where had it gotten me?

  Well, now I was doing things differently, living in a state of what might be called sisterly purity. Upon returning from the park I would feed Dominic and make myself a breakfast of Greek yogurt, honey, and nuts, like I had done when I’d first started my thesis. I felt that if I could eat like Sappho I could somehow get closer to her. Looking at the ocean, a different ocean from hers but also the same, might have a similar effect.

  Unlike my apartment in Phoenix, Annika’s house didn’t make me feel like I wanted to put my head in an oven. But just in case, I made sure to spend some time away. I would go to a café and drink espresso, writing for hours, feeling a sense of purpose and meaning that I hadn’t felt in years. Skater boys, surfer boys, and boys with guitars floated in and out the door: shirtless, shorts low-slung, lean and muscular above the pelvis alluding to what was below. But I felt like a goddess, above them somehow. Something removed them from my field of want, as though I were protected. I wore white. Twice that week I went to group and felt more of a sense of sisterly love toward the other women. Now I was able to help. I was even maternal in a way that didn’t feel scary, but strong.

  I had figured it out. If you just stayed away from everything dangerous long enough, other people in your life would show you yourself and what you shouldn’t be doing. You could get high on their conquests but not have to suffer their losses. Diana, who was suffering, called every day. Most afternoons she went to tennis and was ignored by both of the instructors she had blown. In trying to avoid Caleb, her son’s young friend, she found herself on Craigslist now posting about being a MILF. Had she never heard of Tinder? I guess she was afraid her photo would be seen. Now she had begun fucking strangers in cars in dark parking lots. She always felt demoralized after, but before it she was electrified.

  Claire had not found anyone to take the place of Ponytail Man as a third member of her harem. It seemed she’d been right: she could not emotionally handle being with David alone—without a buffer of other men. First it started with missed texts. She found herself double-texting him to try to get his attention. Then he canceled plans to go see an outdoor concert in Santa Monica. The night of the canceled plans she called me and said that she just couldn’t do it anymore. She was trying not to feel for these men. She was trying to keep her emotions inside, to think and act with her pussy alone, but she couldn’t help herself. Now she was in love with David.

  “I understand,” I said. “I have no desire to feel in a contained way. For me it is all or nothing. I don’t know that I can really enjoy the sex unless the person really wants me. And if the person really wants me, I don’t want them for very long.”

  I said this because we were so alike and I knew it would resonate with her. Instead of accusing her I hoped that by telling her my truth she would recognize some of herself in my own admission. It was better than saying, “Why are you doing this to yourself? This isn’t going to work. Even a harem of a thousand isn’t going to work. You need to stop doing it at all.”

  But she still couldn’t see it. Maybe she could tell that inside me there was some judgment of her actions, that I felt in some way better than her. I didn’t want it to show. I didn’t even want to feel that way.

  “I’m not like you,” she said. “I don’t live in fantasy. I just can’t handle this right now.”

  “You can get better,” I said.

  I said this from a place of “I am better.”

  She told me that she had been hurting herself again.

  “Cutting?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not a cutter. I’m more of a beater. I bang my head into the wall. I punch myself until I’m black and blue.”

  “Oh God, I’m sorry,” I said.

  I no longer felt better than her, or like this was a game or competition or a question of perfection or who was right or anything. I no longer judged her for being a mother and not having this shit under control, for what she might be putting her children through. I saw that she was me and I was her. It wasn’t that she was me when I was in a bad way. Even when I was in a better place, I was completely her.

  Yet knowing all this—seeing in these women what I could be like and feel like—did nothing to dull my cravings when they arose. So strange how the book, now in flow, and Dominic, so lovely, could be enough for a few days, and then suddenly they were just furniture: objects in my orbit. They floated in the nothingness but didn’t fill it. For the next two nights after speaking with Claire, I fought to keep myself from going to the rocks. In the mornings I would waken glad that I hadn’t. I had resisted.

  On the third night, it was like I was free again. I didn’t need anything. But then, with no warning: no resistance, no fight or second thought or question—no thought of Diana or the group—I found myself bundling up in a long skirt and a thick cream-colored sweater. I took a blanket out with me to the rocks and sat there, waves lapping up and stinging my feet. So strange how Theo had gone from someone who wasn’t anything at all to me to someone I suddenly needed. Was it ever real: the way we felt about another person? Or was it always a proje
ction of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?

  “It’s fine,” I said to myself. “It is absolutely all fine.”

  He wasn’t there yet. But the ocean itself was exciting. I could watch it anytime from my balcony, but to be touching it was a different kind of thrill. Why didn’t I do things more often that excited me? Why did it take some strange swimmer boy to get me out here? Couldn’t the ocean itself be enough, the lure and adventure of its wild, salty licks?

  I texted Claire.

  i’m sorry if I judged you. or if you felt judged. I only wanted to differentiate things in my mind for myself so that I would no longer have to feel pain

  i did it as a self-protective measure

  i was trying to make sense of things or have a linear box in the big bad void

  Are you high? she texted back.

  no, I wrote. I’m back on the rocks

  I lay down on one of them in the fetal position. When I awoke it was after one a.m. and the tide was rising higher. My body was coated in salt and ocean foam. I felt like I was part of the rock and part of the ocean, and I wondered if this is how Sappho felt, even in her deepest desperation, part of the earth, like that desperation or longing or eternal cosmic want was something to be celebrated—something natural—holy even, or at least, not just something to be endured.

  What if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn’t everything you could possibly do all right?

  I was almost ready to give up, when I saw him in the distance swimming toward me. I started laughing and some tears came to my eyes.

  “Hi!” he called.

  “Hello!” I giggled.

  “It’s good to see you. I was afraid you weren’t coming back.”

  I felt emboldened by how excited he seemed to see me.

  “Do you want to get out of the water and sit on the rock with me?” I asked.

  “No, you come closer to the water,” he said. “If I get out it will be too cold for me to get back in again.”

  “I can’t sit on the water,” I said.

  “No, just come closer to the edge. Put that blanket down on the rock. Lie down on it and just face me. Please? If you don’t mind.”

  I did what he said. I watched myself. Was this natural, what I should be doing? Or was I so sick that I would do anything that this strange boy asked? He couldn’t even bother to get out of the water to meet me. Was that a bad sign? But he was so kind in other ways, so attentive and present.

  “Now what?

  “Do you want to hug me?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, laughing. “I do want to hug you.”

  This seemed even weirder than him touching my foot. He was holding on to the rock and I leaned against him. I put my head over his shoulder, the way Dominic liked to support his neck on one of my limbs. He was cold and his skin was very soft. I felt like I was hugging a strange baby, but also like we had always known each other. We hugged and I felt like I dissolved into him, like I was diving into the ocean itself. I looked over his shoulder and saw the cresting waves, the whole ocean suddenly turning white, as though I were on the threshold of heaven. I had been so afraid of dying, but suddenly I knew that death would be okay and beautiful—and even dying would be okay, because there was a heaven, sort of. Maybe it was not the way religious people imagined it, but I saw it as some kind of luminous womb to which we would all return. And because we would return there, in a way we were already there. I started to cry. All the pain and fear of the past nine months poured out of me. Theo stroked the back of my head with his hand. I didn’t want to ever move. I was floating above myself and I looked down and saw us there on the rock. I wondered how I had been led to this.

  He pulled back. He didn’t ask why I was crying.

  “It’s hard, right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Life is so oppressive and scary and…oppressive, and the whole time the ocean is right here. It’s like I can’t believe it’s been there this whole time. I feel like I have a new love for it or something.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I understand.”

  “Do you want to kiss?” I asked. “I’m not sure if that is how you feel about me? Or maybe you just like me as a friend. I’m not sure.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I want to kiss you very much.”

  We kissed on the lips, gently at first. His eyelashes were thick and black and he tasted like the ocean. His lips were chapped from the saltwater, I guess, and it felt like I was kissing a flower. I licked each of them. Then he opened his mouth a little wider and I lightly put my tongue in the front of his mouth. He began to suck on my tongue and I felt that my tongue and the rest of me would go through him, like I was going to be pulled inside him as though he were a big fish. I got dizzy. I took his tongue into my mouth and I felt that I was circling through his body, but also through an entire life cycle of some sort. I felt that I was spinning forward.

  He kissed my forehead and I laid my head back on his shoulder.

  “So how old are you anyway?” I asked.

  “I’m not a teenager,” he said. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “Will you tell me something about you? About what you were like as a teenager?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Will you come back tomorrow? I have to go now.”

  I wanted to ask where. Where could he possibly have to go? We had barely begun kissing. But since I had been the forward one, the one who asked him if we could kiss, I didn’t want to be too needy.

  “What time tomorrow night?” I asked.

  “Ten?”

  “Kiss me goodbye?”

  We kissed quickly and then I watched him swim off. I wondered if I had been too engaged in the kiss, too desperate and needy, falling down a hole. Maybe he could sense my addictive tendencies coming off of me like bad perfume. Maybe he was just sexually attracted to me? It was hard to say, but I assumed I had done something wrong, because, well, I always did.

  When I got home Dominic was in the corner. I had forgotten to give him his medicine and feed him. This was what happened when I followed my desires. I couldn’t believe how quickly I had forsaken him. It was as though he simply ceased to exist while I was out frolicking on the beach with a stranger. Was going to the rocks a mistake? For a moment I wished that they weren’t so near to Annika’s house and that Theo hadn’t given me a time for tomorrow—that we couldn’t have a day or two apart. But of course, when the time came I knew I’d rush out there to be with him.

  I gave Dominic a bowl of dehydrated duck and added a little water. I gave him some extra too, even though I wasn’t supposed to.

  “I’m so sorry, Domi,” I said.

  He ate hungrily, then licked my face. Then he started sniffing me, almost compulsively, and growled. Clearly he did not like the smell of Theo. I wondered if it was the scent of the ocean itself that made him angry. Perhaps he liked the ocean and was jealous that he couldn’t go there with me. I felt bad, but Venice Beach had a massive fine if you were caught there with a dog.

  I washed my face and realized that I hadn’t eaten either, but was too tired to make anything. I thought of that song, I didn’t know the music, just the words, something like “When you’re in love you’re never hungry.” Was I in love with this swimmer boy? Or was I just completely crazy? It didn’t make sense that something could feel so good, holy, and spiritual—like the gods themselves had put it there—and still not be right. It must be right, a gift for all of my suffering. But what if Theo just wanted sex? I thought about whether he was an “unavailable” man, and it seemed unlikely. I mean, I had never spent time with him out of the water. But even if he was available, I was not available—not for long a
nyway. What would happen when I went back to Phoenix?

  I fell asleep spooning Dominic and felt the kind of love I felt the first night I’d arrived in Venice. Only this was deeper, more tinged with dependency, like a heroin vibe, and I knew it wasn’t Dominic but Theo I was feeling.

  29.

  The next morning I awoke to find a long string of texts from Jamie. He must have been drunk and stayed up all night, because the texts were in varying stages of “I want you.” He could probably smell Theo from thousands of miles away, how absorbed I was becoming. Men could smell an opening and they could smell a closing.

  He said he wanted to see me when I got back to Phoenix. He asked what I thought about giving things another try.

  I figured you got a restraining order, I wrote.

  I miss you Lucy.

  I didn’t ask him about the scientist. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I didn’t want to burst the double bubble of dopamine I now had coursing through me, first from Theo and now from Jamie. I lay around in bed for an hour, high on the potentiality of both of them, texting languidly. Jamie’s texts seemed more urgent than they had ever been, asking me questions about my return date, if I needed anything financially, if I wanted him to come pick me up and we could drive back to the desert together.

  I enjoyed being coy now, the elusive one for once. The independent one.

  That’s ok, I wrote, really, but thank you. I will see you when I get back.

  Then I got another text. This one from Claire.

  how shall I kill myself?

  I grabbed Dominic and got a car to her apartment in West L.A. I saw, for the first time, where she lived. It was not at all what I expected. I knew that her ex-husband had kept their home in Pacific Palisades and she had taken an apartment, but I had imagined a grand courtyard with a fountain: something small yet charming, Old World Spanish with luxe modern interiors. But this reminded me of my place in Phoenix and that I would be going back there. The complex was big, old, and musty, and there was a pool drained of water. A sign hung on the gate read CLOSED.