When I went in she looked completely different, her hair greasy, unwashed, and piled high on her head in a bun, instead of the flowing curls I was used to. Under her eyes were big circles, the faint purple color of the underside of a shell. They were deep and I imagined lying down in them. She was wearing a T-shirt inside out and sweatpants, no bra. Her breasts sort of hung there, facing down.
Depression is real, I thought. It’s a real disease.
I don’t know why I thought that then. Like, that it just dawned on me. I’d had depression my whole life too but more of a dysthymia—a general malaise. I had never thought of it as an ailment that manifested physically. At least, it had never affected my physicality in the way that it seemed to have affected Claire’s. Or maybe it did and I simply couldn’t see it. Maybe this was what I had looked like when I broke down after Jamie. Maybe this is what people saw when they saw me.
“Are your kids here?” I asked.
“Arnold has them, thank God.”
I was a little scared of her. Even when she said she’d been harming herself there was still a bit of Claire in her, some of the humor and charm, as though the depression was something she could slip out of when she needed to engage with the world. When she needed to protect me from seeing it. But now she was clearly gone. I wondered if it really had to do with David or Trent or any of the men, or if the two just coincided. This seemed so much greater than men.
“You’re going to be okay,” I said. But I wasn’t convinced.
“I’m gutted. I really just don’t see the point of going on living,” she said. “It just seems so insane. Like, why would you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because truthfully I didn’t. “I’m probably not the best person to talk you out of suicide.”
I was trying to make her laugh but she didn’t.
Suicide was one of those things that, having been suicidal, in retrospect, I felt like I could talk about without being judgmental. But at the same time, there was no rational reason I could see giving her to live. Could I say that I was once suicidal but things were better now? Could I say that I was glad I had lived? The thing was, I hadn’t really known I was suicidal until I woke up with the doughnuts. Also, even if things were better now, were they ever permanently better? Who was I to put that pressure on her to stay alive?
But what kind of person didn’t try to talk their friend out of killing herself? I didn’t want to tell her that she had to live for her children. I knew that she felt bad enough about them already. I could have told her what an amazing and fun and funny person she was, but I knew that right now it all felt to her like just a performance. Her charming personality was only more heaviness—another mask that she was going to have to pick up again to prove she hadn’t lost it in the depression. The only reason to put it on again was out of fear that she might never get it back. Otherwise, there was no real reason to have to put on a heavy costume every day. It was too tiring.
“Would you sleep over?” she asked.
I felt claustrophobic. I thought about Theo.
“I can’t,” I said. “The dog.”
“The dog can sleep here. We can get him some food.”
“I know,” I said. “But his medicine is at home.”
“I’ll give you money for a car to go back and pick it up.”
The thing was, I could easily do that. I didn’t want to tell her that I was abandoning her for the swimmer. If anyone would understand that I was shirking the duties of friendship over a boy, Claire would understand. But in this situation maybe she wouldn’t. Also, I didn’t want to hear myself say it.
“I don’t think that will work,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
30.
I went late to see Theo. The fact that he had other plans the night before, and I didn’t know what they were, made me feel insecure. Instead I spent extra time cuddling with Dominic, the dog’s head draped over my arm so that his neck fit snug like a warm puzzle piece. I pretended that I preferred to be with the dog and could take or leave seeing the swimmer entirely. But I was playing a game: I knew that Theo was not mine alone. I mean, he said he didn’t have a girlfriend, but he was so beautiful. Of course there were other women. Everything I saw in him that I liked was available for others to see. But the way he treated me, with such reverence, made me feel like he held me above all others or anything else. If there were a gaggle of younger girls, I was his special older woman. Still, I couldn’t help but play a little bit of a game just to make him wonder.
He was waiting for me when I got to the rocks. He was still in the water and was holding on to a rock, his chin resting on it.
I sat down on the rock and leaned forward. With my hand, I lifted up his face to mine, kissed him wetly, our tongues in each other’s mouths. He moaned in my mouth and the moaning set off shudders inside me. I realized for the first time that he didn’t just like me or think I was pretty, but that he wanted me. In a flash I felt myself get wet inside.
“I just want to take off your fucking wet suit,” I said.
He looked me in the eyes.
“Lie down,” he said. “With your legs over the rock.”
I lay down. He took off my flip-flops and began kissing my feet, sucking my toes.
“Oh my God.” I laughed. “Aren’t they sandy? Sorry if they taste weird!”
He just moaned more and stroked one of my legs. I was wearing a long flowing skirt and he had one hand up it, his other hand still holding on to the rock. Then his head was up my skirt and I felt him kissing my calves, giving me licks on my knees, and then nibbles on my thighs. He kissed my pussy over my underpants. I was wearing terrible, grandmotherly cotton underpants. He breathed on my pussy through the fabric and it felt warm and wet. Then he licked the skin on the sides of my undies, kissing back into the center and out again, moaning with his warm mouth open on the fabric. He pulled my underpants to one side and gave me a long lick, starting with my hole and slowly tracing over my clit. He did this again, back and forth, bringing the moisture from inside me over my clit. I was shaking. I looked up at the sky. It felt so good, but I was nervous.
“Theo,” I said. “It might take me a little while. Is that okay? Will you tell me if you get tired?”
He took his head out from under my skirt.
“I want you to take as long as you need,” he said. “Take the whole night. Take forever.”
I lay back down. The stars were beautiful but I closed my eyes. I focused on the feeling in my pussy entirely and not what was going on around us or even him. It was a sustained goodness and I felt that in my sexual relationships with others I had missed the point. Had it ever been solely about pleasure for me? Maybe I had missed the point of what having a pussy was for entirely. It was not for having babies or pissing, but simply a locus of pleasure—its own purpose. Now a growing confidence was there, like a crystal inside it or maybe a whole ocean. Perhaps the crystal had always been there without me seeing or knowing. Had I always glowed from there but never realized?
Right above my pussy, my whole pelvis felt full—not of piss or pain—but self-sustaining, pulsing. I felt glad to be alive. Or not even glad, just alive. I was in my is-ness and was not going to fight it. So this was joy. Like my pussy, this part of my pelvis felt like it had existed forever but had disappeared years ago. I remembered feeling something like this as a young child, but somehow that feeling had been eclipsed and forgotten until now. It had been eclipsed by all the matter on Earth. I saw that all of that matter was just emptiness. It accrued and accrued to nothing.
My chest, too, was warm, as though it sought to open, like a light in there was pushing through rusty doors. This I resisted. I was scared, afraid to let the doors swing open fully. But my throat felt like the throat I had known as a child, when all language was new and words hadn’t hurt so much. In the past when I made sex sounds, I tried to imitate what I saw in porn.
But now what I heard was way deeper, guttural, without the formation of my mouth. It didn’t resemble syllables and definitely not words. It was the sound of the planet rotating.
I didn’t even think about Theo. For once I was not thinking. Maybe for the first time ever. I felt space in my mind, in my skull, which I had never felt before. Had that too always been there? If it had always been there, then life, it seemed, could have always been beautiful, redeemable, sacred. But if it had always been there, it was strange that I had never found it before. If something so beautiful and pure existed right between your ears, why wouldn’t you stay there forever? Why wouldn’t you live there?
* * *
—
I started to laugh. I couldn’t tell if I was coming, or if I had already come. But then the laughter subsided and I felt a darkness crawl over me—a cool darkness that was dead serious—and I realized that I had not come yet and was going to. His tongue was like a dog’s tongue—a little rough—so unlike my fingers or vibrator. It was like a magic carpet or something, in that I came and came and came. It was like the orgasm began, then stopped, then started a couple of times and I felt that I was able to control it, before I rode the carpet all the way up to where it crested and then exploded. I stayed in it longer than I had ever experienced. And just as I came I became aware of him again. I said his name out loud, I heard myself say it. But I also felt a connectedness between me and something bigger—beyond him—as though there were a split screen. He was on one side of the screen and the universe was on the other. I felt love for both of them.
I lay there on the rock and stared up at the sky, silent, for a long time. He kept his face in between my thighs and I hugged his head with my knees.
“Would you like me to come out of the water?” he asked.
“What?”
He took his head out from under my skirt, looked me in the eye, and smiled.
“I said, ‘Would you like me to come out of the water?’ ”
“So much,” I said. “More than anything. More than anything I would like you to come out of the water.”
“I’m scared,” he said.
He looked like a little boy when he said that, scrunching up his nose and squinting.
“Of what?” I laughed. “Are you scared of me? But you just had your face in my pussy.”
“I have some imperfections,” he said. “I have—something is wrong with my body. I’m afraid for you to see.”
“I think you’re beautiful,” I said. “You are a gorgeous creature. I would never judge you. Anything that could be different or weird about your body I would only see as even more special.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” he said. “About what you see.”
Now I wondered what it was that was wrong with him. Did he have a shrunken lower body? Was he missing a leg? Was it just a small dick?
“I don’t like people,” I said. “I have no friends. I have no one to tell.”
This was a lie. I would surely be telling Claire at some point about the pussy-eating in detail and, I figured, probably every inch of his body. As soon as she was better and ready to hear it. It would probably even cheer her up.
“Okay,” he said. “But if you don’t like it, there is nothing I can do about it. If you feel frightened by it—by me—I can only go back into the water and swim away. I won’t be able to see you again.”
“Come on,” I said. “Would you stop? I won’t not like it. There’s nothing that can scare me.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but I believed it. It’s an art to believe your own lies. Some people think you have to actively convince yourself in order to believe your own lies, but in that moment, I just didn’t know any other reality than everything being okay—no matter what he showed me. I knew only that silence and the wanting him to come up on the rock with me. I didn’t think I could be scared of anything. I just wanted him to be with me.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
He put his beautiful white arms on the rock and hoisted himself up, then flipped himself over so that he was sitting next to me.
Around his pelvic region was a thick beige sash, like an oilcloth. Below it was the wet suit: scaly and coal black, covered in barnacles. At the bottom were what looked like a pair of fins or flippers, of the same color as the suit, connected to the rest of the black rubbery scales. He looked more like a scuba diver than a swimmer and more like a thick piece of cod than a scuba diver. The suit seemed old—like it had been soaking in the ocean for years—with all of the barnacles attached to it, bits of seaweed. It wasn’t sleek or shiny like I had seen on the surfers. It almost looked like the rocks we were seated on. Like he was part of the ocean landscape.
The flippers too really looked like fish fins: thick by where I guessed his ankles would be and then fading to a translucency at the bottom. Sheer black. They reminded me of a black bubble-eye fish I had at thirteen who died while my father and I were traveling to visit Annika at college. When we returned home, the fish was floating on her side at the top of the water, the tank stinking. I remember feeling embarrassed and not wanting to show my father she had died. I wasn’t afraid he would blame me for her death, but something about her curvy little body, just floating there, made me feel exposed. It was as though I were lying at the top of the tank, naked and smelling, too intimate an experience to share with my father. I remembered how her tail had already begun disintegrating, and a tiny piece of it had detached and was floating next to her. This is what his flippers looked like.
Then something turned in my eye, or the eye of my mind, like when you look at one of those psychedelic posters that can be seen two ways. For a while you look at something one way, but then, all of a sudden, the image flips. Once you see the second way you can’t go back to the first. What I saw was that this was no wet suit at all, but somehow a massive, slimy, heavy tail. It was literally connected to his body. Maybe it was his body? Underneath the cloth were what I assumed might be genitals, then, if he had them? And just below that was an area where the tail, or whatever this was, met his skin. It did not meet in a straight line like the top of a pair of pants, but blended gradually. First there was an area that was mostly skin with a peppering of black scales, like one or multiple birthmarks. From there the scales became more raised, almost like moles or lesions. They began to cluster closer together until they became a solid mass, like rubber or the thick skin of a fish. It looked like time happening, like a wave gradually rolling up on the sand. It was as though whatever this was had happened over time, like some kind of infection—gradually taking over his body.
Except this wasn’t an infection. It was like he was part fish.
“Are you grossed out?” he asked.
“No,” I said. What the fuck was this? Was Theo a mermaid?
“Freaked out?”
“No. Just shocked and wondering if I’m crazy. How did this happen?”
“I was born this way,” he said. “I am what you are thinking I am. Sort of.”
“What do you think I think you are?”
“A merman.”
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I was thinking that.”
“I don’t call myself that. None of us think we are that. But to humans we are that.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “This is fucking crazy. So, like, there actually are mer-people? And Sirens?”
“Sort of. But not the way you conceive of us. Well, we are sort of the way you conceive of us. I mean, obviously I’m very sexy.” He laughed.
“You are!” I said.
“Ha, not really. But I mean, we aren’t like the Siren myths and stuff. It’s not like we are trying to kill humans or keep them imprisoned on an island. We aren’t like the way they are in The Odyssey. Homer slandered us. But we do live a long, long time. Youthfully. Hundreds of years. We spend most of them looking like we are in our late teens and earl
y twenties. I think it’s the saltwater. It preserves us in some way.”
“So are you mythic? Are you a mythic creature? Is this a joke you are playing? Am I hallucinating you?”
But from the look on his face I knew it wasn’t a joke. There was no way the place his skin met his tail could be fake. The gradations were too rough and eerie. There was no makeup or costume in the world that could do that. He really was part man and part fish. Or something. Had I lost it at some point along the way? Was I worse off than I thought?
“You aren’t hallucinating, not really,” he said. “I mean, you are kind of hallucinating in the sense that your perspective has shifted. But in a way you were really hallucinating before you met me—in the sense that there was only one part of life you could see. You believed only that which was in front of you. Most people do. Most people believe that which you cannot see or know could not possibly exist. Humans are very arrogant. I don’t think you are arrogant, but I think it’s just your nature to only believe in what you can see.”
“I don’t even know what to say,” I said. “I have so many questions for you.”
“Let’s start slow,” he said.
“Are you real?” I asked.
He laughed. “I suffer like I’m real. I have wants like I’m real. I fear that I will be unliked or unloved. Men, women, I think that maybe everyone wants the same thing.”
“Men want sex,” I said.
“Don’t you?” he asked.
“I do,” I said. “Maybe. But I think I mistake it for love, or something.”
“How do you know when you’re mistaking it?”
The Pisces Page 13