The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

  “Theo,” I said.

  He wouldn’t answer me and seemed to be in a trance. It was like he’d become a Siren. As Homer said, the Sirens had gorgeous, melodic voices, but they could also howl with pain and agony. It was not pain as I had romanticized it: him beautifully bereft with aching for me. It was not the Sirens as we humans imagined them, armed with divine power. This was vulnerability, a bit of madness even, and what it revealed was that he truly loved me, and that love could be grotesque.

  Dominic woke up in the other room and began barking along with Theo’s moaning.

  “Please calm down,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I told him that maybe I could work something out. Maybe I could stay after all. I hadn’t known how much he cared. But he said it was too late.

  “You lied to me,” he said. “I was going to keep coming to see you on land. I had even wanted to ask you to come join me under the water, seriously. And here you have been set to abandon me all along.”

  I didn’t know exactly what “under the water” meant. Was he more delusional than I was? Did he know I couldn’t live under there?

  “Theo, no, it isn’t like that. I really am in love with you. I want to stay with you forever.”

  “That you would think of leaving me,” he said. “That you would let me grow so close to you and never tell me it was finite. It breaks my heart. It’s humiliating too.”

  “I was afraid that if I told you there was an end date you would see me differently. I liked the way you saw me. I didn’t want anything to change. And then it was too late, you knew me the way you knew me. I thought of finding a way to stay in Venice, but I was scared that you would reject me,” I said.

  “Can you help load me back in the wagon?” he said. “I need to go back to the ocean.”

  “Wait, can’t you just stay and we will talk it through?”

  “Just help me. Take me back, please. I’m asking you, help me back to the water.”

  “I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said.

  “Didn’t know what? That I loved you? When you said ‘eternal love’ I thought you meant that you wouldn’t leave me ever.”

  “So then I won’t. I won’t. If you don’t want me to, I won’t. I don’t want to either! When I said eternal love—when we talked about it—I didn’t know you meant in body. I didn’t know you would want me to stay here in body. I thought that it could mean in spirit or that it might be a game you were playing. I always thought that at some point you would swim away and I would never see you again.”

  “Why would you think that?” he asked. “When did I ever give you that impression? Did I do anything but care about you?”

  Explicitly this was true. But under my lens, my paranoiac, insecure vision, my endless anticipation of abandonment, even the slightest lack of attentiveness was interpreted as a fatal lapse in desire. I couldn’t tell him that I’d been looking for any sign that he was over me, or would never love me as much as he would love someone else. I couldn’t say that the fact that he had loved anyone before me meant I needed to keep an out. I couldn’t tell him that I wasn’t sure if I was truly capable of love.

  “You don’t believe in love,” he said, as though reading my mind.

  “I do,” I said. “I believe in love more than anything. But I think I am very bad at it.”

  It dawned on me then that he was more like me than I thought, his fear of abandonment so intense. Maybe we were identical, and because we were identical I had gotten to be someone else, without even really knowing it. I thought of my moon in Gemini, the twins, with their dual nature. I contained both man and woman. But Theo and I, we were two of the same. I thought of Pisces, the two fish, bound together by one string—one star—Alpha Piscium. In attempting to escape the monster Typhon, Aphrodite and her son Eros turned into fish and swam away. But who was Aphrodite and who was the monster here? I had threatened to swim away so I wouldn’t be the abandoned one. Now he was trying to punish me by leaving first.

  You never think, in your fantasies, that the object of the fantasy can be hurt. I had known that he was sensitive. But I hadn’t trusted that it was real, or at least, that it was as real as my own sensitivity. I didn’t believe that he could actually feel betrayed. Was it because he was a man and I was a woman? I thought that only I could feel that kind of shame, need, and rejection. I thought that only a woman could feel that. It all seemed crazy now. I was crazy when I was the one begging for someone to stay and I was crazy when I was the one leaving.

  “I feel ashamed,” he said. “I want to go. Would you help me go?”

  I just stood there.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll do it myself.”

  He pulled himself off the sofa and began to drag himself across the rug, naked, nothing covering his genitals or ass. I just stood there watching, shocked. I didn’t try to help him, but I didn’t stop him either. I wasn’t crying. I didn’t feel sad. I was just stunned that my fantasy of him had been so wrong—that he could live and feel so far beyond it. At first he had been just a hot young surfer boy who could only hurt me—never someone whom I could actually hurt.

  I watched him crawl to the door and flop up and down until he got some momentum. Then he reached the handle, turned it, and dragged himself outside, naked, into the night. He looked like a dying fish. It was only then that I began to cry.

  “Wait!” I said, and ran to him. “Stop, let me help you at least!”

  “You’ve done enough,” he said.

  I followed him out, down the cement pass to the boardwalk, where he was scraping his tail as he dragged himself. He was moving slowly. But he was moving, getting there. I felt so nervous I didn’t know what to do. Suddenly I felt like laughing, but not at him. Maybe I felt like laughing because the whole thing was so bizarre. Just when I thought that things couldn’t get any weirder than waking up covered in doughnuts in Phoenix, here I was in Venice with a half-man half-fish I had somehow fallen in love with, who was dragging himself away from me. Or maybe I felt like laughing because I was scared.

  I walked with him across the boardwalk slowly and onto the sand. In the dark, in some ways, he looked just like one of the other junkies, if one of them were wearing a strange fish costume. Or he was a veteran amputee who, having fallen out of his chair, was trying to drag himself back: what remained of his legs wrapped in a sparkly, scaly bag.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  I began to sob. I ran back into the house, where Dominic was now barking crazily.

  “I’m sorry,” I cried to the dog. “I’m so sorry for everything. Here, come here.”

  I put my arms around his neck and cried into his fur. Then I ran up the stairs and Dominic, still loyal in spite of everything, followed me up. From upstairs I could see that Theo had made it only halfway to the ocean. I called to him, but he didn’t turn around. When he finally got to the tide, he didn’t climb up onto the rocks, but simply dragged himself into the sea, never once pausing or looking back. Pulling himself across the sand he looked so helpless and pathetic, but as he crawled into the ocean and disappeared, he suddenly seemed so in control of himself. I thought, He is the laws of nature, though I didn’t know what that meant.

  I ran back down the stairs and over the sand to the water’s edge—Dominic racing behind me. I sat down in the sand and waited. I waited there all night with no blanket, just me in my sundress. I huddled against the dog to keep warm. Once in a while I would call out Theo’s name, but he never came back.

  46.

  By morning I was very sick: in the spirit, the mind, and the body. I couldn’t stay in Venice any longer. Clearly something had gone very wrong, and I was getting worse. Group therapy had only led me to a merman with severe abandonment issues. Fuck this whole situation. I had come here to get away from Jamie, in the hope that the distance would help me recover. Now he was pursuing me and I didn’t eve
n want him anymore. Didn’t that mean my mission was accomplished? Hadn’t I won? It was time to return to Phoenix and claim my prize. I decided to call and tell him the good news.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “I know.” He laughed.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m okay. I haven’t heard from you. I’ve been worried.”

  “I’m sorry. I needed some time to do some thinking.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what are your thoughts?”

  “Well, I was wondering first if you are still with—Megan. Or has that already burned out?”

  “Well, there’s been some complications with that situation, actually.”

  I knew he would fall out of love fast, but this had ended quicker than I thought.

  “Oh really?” I said.

  This was going to be good.

  “Yes, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this. But I didn’t want to text it to you. And when I wasn’t hearing back I figured I would talk to you in person when you returned.”

  This was it. He wanted me back. He was leaving Megan for me, he just needed to be sure I still wanted to be with him too before he ended things. Men are cowardly. But I could understand that and had sympathy for him. Five minutes before, I had been lovesick over Theo. The heart contains multitudes. We all need someone in our lives, because ultimately, humans are weak.

  “Actually, I’m thinking of coming home early,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  Now he sounded nervous.

  “What do you think about that?”

  “Listen, Lucy, I don’t know how to say this. I—I hope you aren’t thinking of coming home early for me.”

  Oh no.

  “No, not for you,” I stammered.

  “Okay, good. Because, uh, things have changed a little with Megan and me.”

  “How so?” I snapped.

  “Well, it appears—it appears she is pregnant. And she’s going to keep the baby. So we’re going to be parents together. She’s going to move in with me, at least for a while.”

  I was silent.

  “Lucy?”

  I couldn’t say anything. All those years I had tried to get us to cohabitate, and all it took for this blond scientist bitch was some little womb booger and there he was, boom, ready to commit. I didn’t want to show him I was angry. I didn’t want to curse him out, give him that satisfaction of knowing he had won. Where I thought I had all the power in my pocket it now belonged to a fetus. But I couldn’t say anything. No words would form. I was totally alone.

  “Hello, Lucy, are you there?”

  I was in a fetal position on the floor with stomach cramps. I didn’t say a word, just let him yammer a few more times until he hung up. What was I thinking? Jamie would have only been a bandage. It was Theo I really needed. But now he was gone forever. I was withdrawing fast. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. The hospital wouldn’t be right. What could they give me that could fix this? It wasn’t a real drug I was coming off of. It was way worse.

  47.

  Somehow, I found my way to group. Dr. Jude took one look at my unwashed hair, my skirt covered in sand, face drawn and skinny, and nodded knowingly as if to say, This is where the addiction takes you.

  Yes, this was where you ended up: disheveled, lovesick, alone. Wherever you thought you would end up, wherever you thought the worst could be, was nothing like where you actually ended up. There was a reason they all kept coming back to group. Somewhere, in the backs of their minds, they must have remembered what the pain was like. They didn’t want it anymore.

  But Sara was still seeing Stan and she seemed like she was doing okay. She chirped about how she was integrating her Stan life into her self-care life.

  “This time, I’m still doing me,” she said. “I’m still self-dating. But it’s also nice to always have a partner now at salsa dancing. He does warm-ups with me before improv class too. True, I have to pay for everything. And technically he has nowhere else to go. But he’s here for me now. The way I see it, if he didn’t want to be with me he could still be sleeping at the Korean spa. Those floor mats are not so uncomfortable. He does have a choice. He’s not forced to live with me. He’s choosing me.”

  Sara said she wanted to stay in group and also stay with Stan. Dr. Jude said she didn’t recommend it, but she wasn’t going to kick her out.

  “You’ll see,” said Sara. “I’m really flourishing. I’m even thinking of getting into spoken word.”

  I wondered if Sara was totally kidding herself or if she was proof that the seemingly impossible could be done after all: the mending of an old, unhealthy relationship into a new, healthy one that didn’t destroy you. Should I have been more responsive to Jamie when he had first started texting? Why had I ignored him to chase a relationship that was only sustainable when confined to a rock? Clearly I had made some kind of wrong decision or I wouldn’t be back here, head in hands, seated next to Dr. Jude’s framed poster of Jungian archetypes. What was worse, still, was that the others all seemed to have gotten better without me. Even Diana had been totally clean, off the tennis boys for over a week, and was paying more attention to her children.

  “Regardless of how I feel about my husband, whether I lust after him anymore or not, my children are what I really live for. I’m doing this for them. So that I can be present. It wasn’t fair to be sitting at the kitchen table with them while they ate pizza, running off every five minutes to check my phone in the living room to see if a twenty-three-year-old had texted me. I wasn’t able to be there for them. And they could sense it.”

  “How do you feel?” asked Dr. Jude.

  “A little sad,” she said. “But so much better. I’m not as on edge as I was. My worth isn’t dictated by text messages.”

  Brianne, too, had found some solace in her son.

  “When I told my son about the OkCupid guy, he said, ‘Mom, that just sounds like a lot of drama. Do you really need that?’ And I thought, You’re right. Drama. It really is that simple. So I set some healthy boundaries. I told the guy that I would still love to see him when he got back to the States but that I wasn’t going to give him any money. I said that I wished him the best of luck and I believe in him: that he would be able to make it work to find his way back here.”

  “Awesome,” said Sara, biting into a Bosc pear.

  “But the strangest thing was, the very next day, my son and his girlfriend broke up. He said that he was sad, but he knew it was for the best, because now he could see there was drama in that relationship too. Then he said, and I’ll never forget this, ‘Mom, I’m so glad that we can have a nice relationship. It means so much to me that I can tell you these things.’ ”

  What a pussy, I thought.

  But was he a pussy? He probably knew more than all of us. Maybe children weren’t the worst thing after all. They couldn’t be any worse than anything else. I had always judged these women who derived such satisfaction from their offspring. I thought they were weak and nauseating, like they had given up on their own lives. But I liked Diana. And Brianne, well, at least she had something to live for besides plastic surgery. Something to tether her to the Earth. Maybe she wasn’t totally lying when she said she had a full life. Or, at least, that her life felt full. Who was I to judge anyone? I certainly didn’t know any more than they did, crawling in here on my hands and knees.

  I told them about Jamie and the pregnancy. I pretended that was the cause of my tears. It was something legible, a rejection they could understand. To recount the tale of Theo would be too far beyond their comprehension. What could I even say? I’m mourning a man I’ve been seeing secretly this whole time. He might be in his forties but he looks twenty-one. No, I didn’t meet him online, I met him in the ocean. By the way, he has a tail.

  It was hard to grieve
like this, to mourn one man while pretending to be mourning another. Why were some sadnesses so much more permissible than others? Why did it seem like everyone was going to be okay except for me? Even Chickenhorse was in good spirits, letting the group know that she had finally decided to try going on a date. She met a guy at the dog park and he invited her to a pit-bull rescue benefit.

  “I assume he’s an asshole,” she said. “But I don’t think he’s married. So I’m going.”

  * * *

  —

  When group ended I stayed back a minute to talk to Dr. Jude.

  “Lucy,” she said, blowing the dust off a book called Low Self-Esteem and Addiction: The Siamese Twins. “It’s good to see you back. I’m sorry you are suffering.”

  “Thanks,” I said, wiping my nose. She offered me a tissue.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “When you said that you were content without anyone—that a person could be content without anyone—did you mean it?”

  “Oh, Lucy,” she said.

  “Because I just feel like that’s a lie. I think everyone is looking for someone. And I think that if they aren’t, they’re just pretending.”

  “That isn’t necessarily true,” she said. “Me, I’m just happy to be alive. Do you really want to know what I think? Well, let me tell you something that you don’t know about me. I’m a breast cancer survivor.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I had stage-three breast cancer when I was only forty-nine. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. In fact, I didn’t think I would. But after a number of very grueling years of chemo and radiation, as well as a double mastectomy, I was declared cancer-free. And I’m still in remission.”

  “That’s great.”

  “It is,” she said. “But after the cancer, going through that horrible experience, I took a good look at my life. I thought about what I wanted the next years of my life to look like, however many I had left. And one thing I realized was that I no longer wanted to be with my husband. It was a very hard thing to come to terms with. I have no children. My family lives on the East Coast. He was my family and had seen me through the whole ordeal. He still loved me very much. But I was no longer in love with him. And I realized then that I would rather be by myself, even if it meant never finding anyone again, even with my body looking the way it did postsurgery, than spend the rest of my life with someone I didn’t love.”