I looked around the room and felt sad for all of us. We were built differently from other people—constructed in some fundamental way that was unlike those who could cope with love. Maybe we felt the same emotions as everyone else, but we felt them more intensely. Sappho felt more too, this I knew. Sappho was one of us. If she wasn’t overwhelmed by emotions, why then would she have needed to sing?
Chickenhorse said she had canceled her date with the guy from the dog park. She said that she had gotten a weird feeling from him.
“Weird in what way?” asked Dr. Jude.
“I don’t know. He was wearing one of those newsboy caps. And when I thought about the cap, I felt triggered. I just don’t trust any man in one of those caps. It’s like a flashing red no.”
“What is it specifically about that hat? Have you had a negative experience with a man in one of those hats in the past?” asked Dr. Jude.
“No,” said Chickenhorse. “The truth is…maybe it’s me. I know you want me to start dating again. I know you think I’m ready. But I don’t think I’m ready. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be ready.”
I wondered if this was what recovery looked like, the only option for women like us. Was it better to be somewhat sane without a man than to be crazy with one? Dr. Jude seemed to think it was possible that we could date consciously, eventually come to be in healthy relationships. She believed in us, and our ability to get better. But I didn’t believe in us. Chickenhorse didn’t believe in us either.
Brianne had stuck with her decision to give no money to the faux businessman. Now he’d stopped speaking to her. He had sent a final email a few days prior, stating that it was all her fault they couldn’t be together, because she couldn’t front him the money to return home. He called her selfish and said that he would be back when he was back. But he said he didn’t want to be with a person who lacked trust and generosity in that way.
“My life is very full,” she said, her lower lip—newly pumped with collagen—trembling a little. “It really is a very full life and I feel grateful for everything I have in it. But I was hopeful about this one. I thought that after I’ve done so much work on myself in here that maybe I was being rewarded for all of my efforts. I let myself get excited. Maybe that was my mistake.”
Everyone murmured that it was better she knew now that he was an asshole. But they didn’t say asshole. They said “unable to commit” and “love avoidant” and “terrified of intimacy.” It was sweet the way they wanted her to be okay. They seemed like they were really rooting for her. Strangely, in that moment, they all looked like children to me. I saw them each as they might have been as children: not in body, but an innocence inside. I remembered that each of them had mothers who once loved them. Their mothers loved them and just wanted them to be happy. How strange that every person had a mother. It made me sad that people had mothers who stuck around a very long time. I imagined the mothers who didn’t die would play with their daughters’ hair every day, brush the stray pieces off the forehead, tickle their necks, stroke the crowns of their heads.
After my mother died and Annika went back to school, my father offered to play with my hair before bed. It was a kind gesture, but we both knew it was just too weird. He wasn’t the touchy-feely sort. More of a head patter.
“Play with my hair,” I would say to my teenage friends, but when they played with my hair it was never enough. I needed more than the friends were able to give. I envied my friends who could have their hair played with for a few minutes and then simply be done with it. They could take it or leave it. They knew that their mothers could come in later to finish the job, without them even having to ask. So they took it all lightly. They did this with their lovers too.
I looked at Brianne’s cheeks, straining desperately to be young, and wondered what her face had looked like as a little girl. She found it unfair, terrifying, that time was actually passing. Time wasn’t supposed to pass. Or it was supposed to pass for everyone else but her. I understood this. I was scared too. I wanted to stroke her cheek and tell her that she didn’t have to put anything else in it. That she was still young in some essential way. A wave of pain rose inside me that I had never known could be so palpable. I felt that it was going to kill me, and tried to shove it down. The pushing back against it left me with a choking feeling. Who even knew what was killing me more: the pain itself or the fight against the pain? I was seeing, hearing, and feeling too much. I felt that if I did not leave the room in that moment that I would suffocate on something—the feeling or the resistance to the feeling—and I would die.
I ran from the room clutching my throat and out onto the sidewalk. I crouched down in a squat with my head between my knees. Just to be alone again, away from all of that humanity that echoed my own, made me feel better. The sadness and nausea began to subside. Then I heard the door of the building open and footsteps behind me. It was Chickenhorse, coming to check on me. I wondered how she got elected.
“Hey, just making sure you are okay.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Do you want to come back inside?”
“No, I need air.”
“Do you think I should sit with you?”
“I should probably just be left alone.”
“We aren’t going to hurt you, Lucy.”
I looked at her face. For a moment she didn’t look chickeny or horsey. Her eyes were big and brown and with her mouth closed she had nice, plump, red lips. Was it possible that she was actually pretty?
“Listen,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on with you. What it is exactly that you’re doing. I mean, aside from the Jamie thing. But, whatever it is—you don’t have to do it.”
I laughed out loud, a crazy-sounding laugh. I was crouched on a sidewalk in the middle of the day. Whatever I was doing, of course I had to do it.
“You don’t really know me,” I said.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But I relate.”
I didn’t want her to relate. I didn’t want to be like her. But I knew she was being honest.
“So what’s the solution? Never date again?” I asked.
She looked at me.
“Honestly, I don’t know. Things were so bad for me by the end—the end of my last run. It could have killed me, easily. If I ever end up in that emotional space again? In a way, I think I’d be lucky to be dead. It would be worse to roam the planet, a tormented soul, for the rest of my life.”
Maybe this was why I was in group, to remind people like her of the hell that awaited them just on the other side. I was here to be a cautionary tale.
“How did you get through your withdrawal without dying?” I asked.
“I just kept going. One minute at a time. And gradually I saw that the feelings didn’t destroy me.”
“But you were forced to give him up, right? You didn’t choose to do it. I mean, he got a restraining order?”
“What does a restraining order mean to people like us? In the face of our kind of obsession? But I guess, technically, yes, I was forbidden from being with him. I didn’t make the choice.”
So there it was. She hadn’t so much recovered as she was stopped by the law. I pictured her like a marionette, a marionette of obsessive love, with a judge pulling the strings. She was running in place, like a boxer, but could not move toward what she thought she loved.
“But what if you could be with him? If you could be with him again, wouldn’t you do it in a heartbeat?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said quickly.
“Come on. What if he was standing right here on the sidewalk?”
She thought about it for a second and the corners of her mouth twitched downward.
“Do I still miss him? Yes, I do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But I don’t miss what being with him took away from me.”
“Like what?”
“Everything,” she said. “Dignity, sanity. My life.”
“What was the restraining order for anyway?” I said.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Come on. I’m in child’s pose on the sidewalk.”
She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before.
“Fine,” she said. “One day I saw his wife out walking. I’d never met her, only stalked her on the Internet. But there she was, power walking down Montana right in front of me. And I thought about how unfair it was that I knew so much about her, from the stalking, and she didn’t even know I existed. I just felt livid about it. And I sort of chased her down…with my Prius.”
“No!”
“It’s true.”
“You chased her down! Like tried to run her over?”
“I wouldn’t have said that at the time. But yes, that’s what I was doing.”
“My God, that’s amazing.” I laughed.
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s pretty disgusting.”
“I suddenly like you so much more,” I said.
“You shouldn’t. None of it was her fault. It was her husband’s fault. Really it was my fault.”
“Huh,” I said.
We were silent for a little while.
“Do you want to come back inside?” she asked.
“I’ll be back in a minute. I just need a little more air.”
But I didn’t have the strength to go back in. And I knew that if I tried to walk home I wouldn’t make it. Laughing had given me vertigo and now the sidewalk was spinning. I felt the cement with my palm and it was cooler than the afternoon air. I wondered if perhaps I should just lie down right there. Should I just lie down with my cheek against the sidewalk, just lie down and go to sleep? If I die in that sleep I think I would be okay. But I didn’t want to die there in public in front of whoever could walk by. Suddenly I was afraid again. I took out my phone and pressed the buttons to get a car to take me home. This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century.
The driver, whose name was Chase, pulled up in a silver Honda. He was cute, with a gap in his front two teeth—maybe age twenty-six at most. He looked like he was trying to grow a mustache, and his brown hair was past his ears under a baseball cap that read FML. He babbled that he was an actor, or was trying to become one. His favorite philosophy about acting was Uta Hagen’s, something about being a student of humanity. Well, for a student of humanity he was shitty at reading people. In my head I just kept saying, Shut up, shut up! I wanted to say, Don’t you know I am dying?
But even in my dying I couldn’t be mean to him for fear that he would think I was a bitch. Why did I even care what he thought? Was my death that unimportant? How could I prioritize the feelings of this vacant, mustached kid over my own—me, who was probably dying?
I repeated, “That’s nice” and “Oh, interesting,” and lay down in the backseat. I didn’t announce that I would be lying down, I just did it. He wasn’t paying any attention to what I was doing, instead going on about an upcoming audition for a prescription allergy medication where he would play the son-in-law of a woman with adult allergies. He said he had mixed feelings about it, because he didn’t want to limit his range to pharmaceuticals. The part he really wanted was at an audition for Samsung next week. He was trying out to play the phone.
“It’s not easy to make it in this town. I’m going up against two hundred other potential phones, at least,” he said, looking in the mirror at the traffic behind him.
I noticed he had green eyes. He really was cute. I waited for him to comment on me lying supine in his backseat, but he didn’t ask if I was okay. I suppose this was normal behavior in California. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. I wasn’t dead. I was breathing in the back of this cute idiot’s car.
When we pulled up at Annika’s house, he stopped and said, “Okay, we’re here. Wish me luck with Samsung!”
I opened my eyes and squinted at him. I wanted to tell him that I hoped he never got a part.
“Wanna fuck?” I said instead.
I was shocked when the words came out. He must have been too, because he turned around to look at me for the first time.
“Are you serious?”
“Totally.”
“Here? In the car?”
“Sure, why not.”
“Someone might see us.”
“I don’t care if you don’t care,” I said.
“Man. I’ve been driving for three years and this has never happened. Yeah, why not? YOLO, right? Hold on,” he said, and put the car in reverse.
This was not really the response I was looking for. I wanted more of an “I’m floored by this request, because you’re so beautiful” and less of a “Well, since you asked, carpe diem!” But he pulled into a side alley and shut off the car.
“Come up here,” he said. “Come around to the front.”
I got out of the car, walked around to the driver’s side, and crawled onto this mustached man-boy’s lap. I was facing him, straddling him. He put his seat all the way back and I took off his FML baseball cap. His hairline was receding. We began kissing and he put his hands up my shirt. He sort of grabbed at my breasts and twisted them, like they were handles on a door. I felt like he was feeling for there to be more, trying to stretch them into being bigger, but they would only stretch so far. I wanted to say, Be gentler, but instead I said, “Yesss.”
He slid his dick out of his jeans but left them on. He didn’t put on a condom, or ask if he should wear one. His dick was small, but firm, like a dill pickle. I lifted up my skirt and slid my underwear over to the side, sat on the dick. I moved up and down saying, “Yeah, fuck me,” even though I was the one doing the fucking. A few of my pubic hairs got caught in his zipper. I kept hitting my head on the roof of the car with every few humps. Each time I hit my head I said sorry.
“That’s okay. Rub your clit,” he said.
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“And don’t come inside me.”
But he came inside me, and in less than a minute, making a face that looked like a dying warrior, a hissing sound escaping his open mouth.
“Damn,” he sighed after he had finished expelling his load of little Uta Hagens into my vagina. “That was great. Did you come?”
“Um, definitely not.” I laughed.
Was he kidding? I would have to be a better actress for that. I guess he thought I was hypersexual and came instantly, tossing orgasm after orgasm into the wind. Who else would fuck a stranger in his car? Most people wanted to avoid being fondled by their driver.
I imagined his sperm in there, trying to talk to my egg, and my egg ignoring them. What were his sperm saying? It’s a tough town, but I’m hoping to get an agent this year, said his sperm. Just shut the fuck up, said my egg.
“Well,” he said, patting me on the ass. “I hope you give me a good rating.”
“Oh, for sure,” I said. “Five stars.”
51.
I got into the bathtub and ran the water, soaking and scrubbing away Chase’s semen, which had formed a crust on my thigh. I could see it leaking out of me too in the bathwater, like passing clouds. Really, what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I be a person who was content to just lie around and watch the clouds, without trying to consume anything? Was there something wrong with just being alive? Why was I so defective? Then again, it wasn’t my fault we were put on the planet and left to make our own meaning. I was making mine and doing the best I could. Drying off, I put on one of my sister’s silk kimonos, then went downstairs and got a glass of white wine. Was I cool? Was I glamorous? Was I living a life that others would crave, or was I out of my mind, fucking some strange driver? Part of me felt glamorous and part of me felt insane, the two
feelings rotating over and over.
I lay down on the floor and noticed that I felt better. I was relaxed, somewhat high even. The bad sex had served as some kind of methadone. Dominic came over and licked my face, whimpering. I would take him out later, so what if he shit in the pantry. I could just go to sleep, I thought. Now I felt certain that it would be sleep, and not death. I knew that it would just be sleep.
But as I was drifting off, my phone rang. It was a Phoenix number and I answered it quickly, thinking that it might be Rochelle calling from her office to say that Megan had miscarried, or another piece of news involving Jamie. But it was the advisory committee, both the English and classics chairs, on the line. They were calling to let me know that they had read the outline and sample from my new thesis. Their voices sounded enthusiastic. Well, this was good! They were responding much more quickly than I expected. And having both of them on the call definitely signaled something big. Maybe they were so impressed that they were going to offer me more money? It was strange but I was so worn out that I couldn’t visualize either of their faces, only the rosacea nose of the classics chair and the hatching chick from the Easter sweater of the English chair. When they spoke, I imagined it was the nose itself speaking, with the chick chiming in as it emerged from its egg.
“There’s an unorthodox fluidity about the new work that’s very refreshing,” said the nose.
“Yes, the decreased omniscience, the infusion of romanticism. This new iteration is very powerful,” said the chick.
“The voice of critical omniscience wasn’t your strong suit,” said the nose. “Or perhaps, you didn’t believe what you were saying before and that’s where the thesis faltered. After all, if you couldn’t convince yourself, then how could you convince the reader?”
The Pisces Page 22