The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

  “How did you know you weren’t in love with him anymore?” I asked.

  “I just knew,” she said. “Over time I realized.”

  “I get so confused,” I said. “There were moments when I felt like I was no longer in love with Jamie at all. But after we broke up I wanted him back more than anything. So maybe it was the lust that had faded.”

  “Lust is lust,” she said. “Any woman can have sex. It’s not hard to find a man to sleep with you.”

  This was true. I’d never thought of it like that before. With Garrett and Adam, and even Theo, I’d felt like it was a sign that I was special when they’d wanted to have sex with me.

  “But love is…” She paused. “Well, love might be something beyond words. It’s funny, in all my years of doing this job, I still don’t really have the words for it.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I think the place for you to start, the question that you might want to ask yourself, isn’t so much what is love,” she said. “But is it really love I’m looking for?”

  48.

  The same smell of mashed potatoes and dirty scalps greeted me at the psych ward as I checked in to visit Claire. This time, though, I felt no stronger than the patients there. I guess this was how it came to that. This was how a person became crazy. I knew I was very close. I had known for quite some time, despite not wanting to know. Theo’s sparkle had blotted it out. It eclipsed what, deep down, I already knew. I thought about what Dr. Jude had said. She sounded good. Her words were philosophical, wise, poetic even. But words didn’t make me miss Theo any less.

  Claire looked incredibly stoned. I had seen the med cups lined up near the front of the hall and the nurse dividing up all different kinds of pills. I assumed Claire was on quite the cocktail. The whole thing reminded me of a documentary I once saw on a methadone clinic. It seemed like they were just doing harm reduction, switching her from one dependency to another. Now, instead of dicks and whatever unprescribed pills she’d been taking, they were giving her an even stronger dose of prescribed shit. Meds for dicks. It seemed like a decent trade. And it seemed like it was working, at least as long as she could stay high.

  She was strangely at peace with her surroundings, like a hypnotized yogi. Maybe she was too stoned to feel the vile aura of where she was. I guess the drugs transformed the stench into something more palatable, the way they did to one’s own emotions.

  I was glad to see that she still recognized me through her haze.

  “You!” she called when she saw me.

  “Hi, baby,” I said. “How are you?”

  She said she was doing well—so well, in fact, that she might not even have to go to treatment. But she wanted to go and had decided to go, regardless.

  “Do you want to know what’s strange?” she asked. “I find myself enjoying the group therapy here, just listening to people. They have all sorts of fucked-up problems, far beyond mine—far beyond everyone from the women’s group. It’s like if Sara the foot-toucher were on acid all the time. It makes me grateful for my own problems. I would love to bring the two groups together into one big circle of healing. This way, when Brianne is complaining about Millionaire Match, she can be reminded that at least she doesn’t have auditory hallucinations. Maybe I’m destined to lead a group-therapy exchange program.”

  “Wow, sounds like they really got you, didn’t they?” I laughed.

  “I don’t know if they did or didn’t. But do you want to know what’s the weirdest? The strangest thing of all? I don’t want men anymore. I feel finished.”

  “Wow.”

  “They say that you don’t hit rock bottom until you hit rock bottom. Lucy, what if this is it?”

  “What if it is?”

  “All I can tell you is that I feel so bloody free right now!” she said, adjusting her hospital bracelet.

  “I’m so glad for you, Claire,” I said. Then I began to cry.

  “Oh no, what’s wrong?”

  “Please. You have to help me. I am in so much pain. Theo is gone forever and I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “The swimmer?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “He left,” I said. “He just left and I don’t think he’s ever coming back.”

  “Oh love,” she said.

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  “Ignore him,” she said. “Ignore, ignore, ignore. Do not pursue. In your mind, you have to literally give him up.”

  “If I give him up do you think he will come back?”

  “They always come back if you give them up—especially, as we know, if you find other cock. But what if you don’t do that? What if you don’t replace him with anyone? You don’t have to give him up just so that he will come back to you. You could give him up just to give him up.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, it might behoove you to sit with yourself for a while.”

  Who was this talking?

  “So that’s it? Just give him up and sit?”

  “None of these wankers are worth the pain,” she said. “You have to dump them on the roadside and let them rot there.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “He didn’t fuck me over. It was me who hurt him. It was me who lied to him, not the other way around. This isn’t like the other ones. This time I’m in control. Sort of.”

  “You asked my advice and I’m giving it to you.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “I need love. Or if it’s not love, then the power of that feeling. I love it. I love love. It’s the only thing I have.”

  “Oh, Lucy,” she said. “You have a lot. It’s like your tits.”

  “What?”

  “Your tits. You always say that you have no tits. But really, your breasts are ample. They’re more than enough.”

  “I want a D cup. Metaphorically.”

  “And I want a thousand giant cocks. Or I think I do. But it’s a lie. Because even a thousand cocks would never be enough. And it’s crazy to think that they would. The fantasy is a lie.”

  “But I am crazy. And I don’t want to live without the fantasy,” I said.

  “You can do it. We can do it together.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said.

  “Can I just tell you one more thing?”

  “What is it?”

  “Jamie got that woman pregnant. They’re moving in together.”

  “No! The scientist?”

  “It’s true.”

  “How the hell did that happen?”

  “They were fucking.”

  “No, I mean—oh Lucy, I’m so sorry.”

  “I know. How can I go back to Phoenix and face them?”

  “You can and you shall. Let’s just pray it totally destroys her pussy.”

  “She better get fat as hell.”

  “Well, now he’ll really be pining after you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh yes. Nothing brings out a man’s quest for escape like a lactating woman with somebody else doing the sucking.”

  49.

  As I left the hospital, I wondered if Claire was right. Was it possible that she had started seeing more clearly than me? The way she looked at me now was the way I had looked at Diana and at her before: lovingly, but full of pity. I decided it was she who was to be pitied. She had given up on the thing that made her most alive, even if it made her the most crazy. I knew the old way still sounded beautiful to her. But in an act of self-preservation, she was walking the path back to safety and sanity now. Even for Claire, the pain had just gotten too great.

  Of course, this was today. Who was to say where she would be next week or next month or whenever she got out? For now she had convinced herself, or maybe done more than convinced herself. Maybe she had actually healed a l
ittle. But just because you had healed, it didn’t mean the men could no longer get you. Love and lust were latent in her, lurking. For now she was free of the insanity. The cocktail of meds had certainly helped. I wondered if what she felt on the cocktail was as good as romantic obsession, better than that sparkle. You had to feel something truly heavenly to get over the chase. The chase was everything, all the hope and possibility of life. Very little else would ever be enough. Love itself would probably never be enough. You had to have the moment of almost touching, almost fucking, the moment right before he enters you for the first time, all the time.

  I thought of a story I had read about Solon, an Athenian statesman, who one day heard his nephew singing one of Sappho’s poems. He immediately asked the boy to teach it to him so he could have it memorized. When asked why, he simply said, “So that I may learn it and then die.”

  I was not going to stop hunting for him. I was not even at the place where the addict throws away her drugs only to buy more. I wasn’t throwing anything away. Sappho had never given up on love, even when the longing was a dagger in her heart. When she fucked her lover Phaon, perhaps she thought she wouldn’t get attached. I’ll just fuck this young, hot creature and be done with it, she must have thought. Or maybe she thought she’d fuck him into loving her. But Phaon could not love her back: she was too old, or maybe too needy, and he was newly young and hot, having recently been rubbed with Aphrodite’s magic ointment, which transformed an old man into a sexy boy. It would be difficult for any woman, but there was just no way that Sappho, being Sappho, would be able to play it cool or stay detached. And so she got hooked.

  I had done all the drugs and now I was at the place where the addict goes to wait for her dealer. Even if she shakes and shakes, she waits. Even if he never returns, she waits. There is nothing else left.

  So I returned to the rocks every night and sat by the sea with a blanket around me. As the days passed I became less inflamed with pain, and more just empty. I began to feel purified as though I were a gourd and someone had spooned me out. I felt spiritual, almost holy, like I could look down at myself from the sky. There I was, a woman on the rocks by the ocean, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the return of her lover. Everything I knew about art would say that I was a painting. I was certainly a poem. Sappho was too—her life, perhaps, unknowable, but her feelings were mine. I was mythic. And though I was convinced that I would never see him again, it was too tragic to contemplate. My body cried. But I didn’t let the nothingness eat me whole. Inside me was a small spark of hope that sent me out there every night.

  I would bring the wagon, just in case he appeared. I wanted to show him I would labor for him. But I also wondered if maybe it was a jinx—that if I brought the wagon he wouldn’t be there, like when you bring an umbrella and it doesn’t rain. Still, the wagon was my totem and I had to bring it. It showed my hope to the gods I didn’t even think I believed in. It was like an empty chalice waiting to be filled.

  Every night, I promised myself that it would be the last night I drugged Dominic. But every night I had to do it, just in case. Should Theo return, I didn’t want there to be any impediments when he came swimming up. I would take him home and we would be entwined right away. I would do anything to stay with him. I would never think of leaving him again.

  Sometimes I would fall asleep on the rocks. As I drifted off I would imagine that he was watching me from somewhere, seeing if I was putting in my time, testing me. Perhaps it was the gods I didn’t think I believed in who were watching me. But this is how it is with the gods and other mythic creatures. You imagine them watching you. You almost feel it. And so I waited for him. Nothing meant anything without him, except the hope of his return.

  * * *

  —

  One night I dreamt that Sappho came over to the rocks and sat with me. She looked like Chickenhorse, only it was Chickenhorse as a hot, butch lesbian: her thick thighs in ripped jeans, hair styled in a pompadour and dyed jet black. Sappho-Chickenhorse told me I was stupid to wait for Theo. She touched my sternum with her palm and said, “Look at yourself, all of this over an asshole fish-boy.”

  “But you were once the insane queen of unrequited love,” I said. “Shouldn’t you, of all people, understand?”

  “Just be careful you don’t drown,” she said.

  In my dream I closed my eyes. She kissed each of my eyelids. I felt turned on, like I wanted to rub against those thighs of hers in her jeans. When I opened my eyes again in my dream, Sappho had become Claire.

  “I’m sorry I can’t drown with you,” said Claire.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “I’m really sorry, Lucy.”

  “Nobody is going to drown!” I said. “Go get your nails and toenails done instead. You can pretend you’re going on a date with David.”

  “Mani-pedi as the antidote to suicide,” she said. “It all makes so much sense now. But I just got them done. What do you do instead of kill yourself when your nails are already done?”

  “Maybe Le Pain Quotidien?” I said. “You should go get a Danish. But I need to stay by the water, just in case he surfaces.”

  “How long are you going to wait?”

  “It won’t be long now. I feel him watching.”

  50.

  After four nights I began to lose hope. The sickness reemerged and it was deeper, all the way to my bones, the way addicts describe dope sickness. I shit myself constantly. I vomited into the ocean. Whatever he had done to me had made my body dependent. I literally needed him to survive. I had heard of people who died from drug withdrawals. Whatever was leaking from me could not be good. Was I going to die of the shits and the shakes? Was I going to die a painful, shitty death? Suddenly I became terrified of dying. It seemed like I was about to stop breathing. Even just the thought that I could stop breathing and disappear was terrifying. What was scarier still was that I had done this to myself.

  I needed help. There were two hours until group. I needed some kind of emotional methadone, some advice at least about what they had done to tone down their withdrawals. I showered quickly, then walked from Venice to Santa Monica, afraid that if I took a car I might vomit or shit inside of it. Stopping at CVS to buy Pepto-Bismol, I felt terrified, like an alien, as though I were Theo on land. This trip to CVS was so unlike last time—the urinary tract infection where I had felt that strange closeness to myself. Now I was totally estranged and out of my body, as though I had no idea how to move. I saw my feet walking, felt my heart pumping, but I didn’t know how I was breathing on my own—how my lungs knew to breathe and my heart knew to beat.

  * * *

  —

  “Well, I did it again,” said Diana. “I slept with one of the tennis pros again. This time an even younger one. Barely eighteen. It’s like they’re just passing me around now. I don’t know how everyone in my social circle is not going to find out.”

  Everyone looked at her in awe as though we were watching a soap opera. Sara was popping cashews like popcorn.

  “I just—I don’t even know how it happened. It was like I was in a blackout. One minute I was getting into my car, the next minute I was talking to him. Then he got in the car with me and we started making out right there in the club parking lot. I took him to the Loews on the beach and got us a room, because only tourists go there and I knew we wouldn’t see anyone. The whole thing lasted less than an hour. He didn’t even ask for my number.”

  “Did it come on spontaneously? Or was there any moment leading up to it where you noticed the idea in your mind? Anything that could have been a trigger?” asked Dr. Jude.

  “Besides the fact that he was eighteen with rock-hard abs? And wanted me? No. Oh, there was a moment—the night before. I was at a party with my husband, an industry thing. And I looked at him from across the room. He was dressed up in a tux and I was wearing a cocktail dress. He was talking to a director, a fa
mous one. And if there was any moment where he should have seemed attractive to me—it would have been that moment. But I looked at him and just thought, ‘I do not want that man. I do not want him at all. And I am going to be trapped with him for the rest of my life.’ And I felt like I was sinking. Like I was sinking through the floor.”

  What was wrong with us? There were women on the planet who so easily accepted their paths. They were destined to like what they were given, and were given just enough, so that everything fell into place. Those women instinctively knew how to get a man and keep a man, each man interchangeable with the next: a torso, a dick, a pair of hands. Those women knew how to embrace whichever assembly-line man they were given. They knew how to breathe new life into him day after day and see what they had as special. They were like living psalms. There were no holes in their lives. Those women had never met a void a day in their life. They simply didn’t see any.

  “Can I just say something?” said Sara. “Diana, I’m sorry, but if I had a husband who took good care of me—and I looked like you—and had young children who loved me, I would be so happy. I would just—be happy.”

  “Dr. Jude, I’m feeling judged,” said Diana. But Sara didn’t stop.

  “Stan left again. We got in a fight about a historical documentary. The Roosevelts. He said that I was the most annoying woman he had ever encountered and then he just left. I don’t know where he is staying. Maybe the spa? Maybe another woman’s house? I don’t know who would want him. We were supposed to go to a workshop this weekend. An ‘Opening the Heart’ course—a refresher for me, and basics for him. I was so excited. I was finally going to have a workshop boyfriend. I paid for both of us and everything. And you know what? I don’t even want to go now. I don’t want to open my heart! Now I’m going to have to go by myself. I’m going to be the woman alone again.”