I also wanted to give her love in the sisterly way I had given Claire and Diana love. The group had taught me how to do that, imperfectly, but I knew what it was now. You just sat there with someone and listened. That was all you had to do. I wondered if Diana had finished fucking her way through all the tennis pros—if she had moved on to her son’s friend. Or if she was doing better again. I thought about Claire and wondered if I stayed in Venice how long we would stay friends. How long she would stay alive. Had I chosen her as a friend because she had an end date too?
I wanted to leave my suitcase at the foot of her stairs, sit down beside my sister, and tell her that I would stay for as long as she needed me. I wanted to put my arms around her and thank her for needing me, for being unafraid to share the same space. I wanted to thank her for asking, risking that rejection. But that magnet kept pulling me out. It was as though what was to come was already written and I was just fulfilling my part of the story. And so I held on to my suitcase firmly, and all I could say was, “I’ll come back. I promise, soon, I’ll be back.”
I walked down a few houses with my suitcase so she and Steve couldn’t see me. Then I turned around toward the beach. Was this my last walk? The wind was blowing and it was cold. Annika hadn’t told me how cold Venice could be before I got there, even in summer. It was something I had to figure out for myself.
With the wind blowing, the beach houses looked warm and inviting. From the outside they made it look so easy to be alive on Earth, to hunker down all cozy and warm. I wondered if it felt that way for the people inside them, like a relief to be out of the elements. Or did they quickly forget about the chill outside and take the warmth for granted?
I sat on the rocks waiting for Theo. As I looked at my suitcase again, it filled me with sadness. How was I going to get underwater and stay there? What did he mean when he said he would help me? It was crazy to go into it so blind, but I felt I had no choice. Also, didn’t everyone go in blind? No one knew what was going to happen next. I hoped that it would be peaceful. I was just looking for peace.
When Theo swam up to the rocks I saw there was a full moon hanging low over the ocean like a big fish egg. I didn’t notice it until he appeared, though I don’t know how I could have missed it. As he crawled up, tail slapping against the rocks, I felt that I was seeing him again for the first time. He looked like a surfer, or not a surfer, just a creature, maybe a fellow human, but more beautiful than anyone else and in that way not human like I was human. How much beauty was I projecting upon him, and how much was the moon? And if I was not projecting the beauty, and it was not the moon, how much of him was real beyond the beauty? I wondered if we were ever not projecting. We think we’ve grown or learned something, but maybe it’s always just a new projection. Were my incessant thoughts and feelings just a mechanism to escape the nothingness, or was the nothingness comprised of my thoughts and feelings themselves? Was there another way out besides out? It didn’t matter now.
He smiled at me and I felt like he was looking at me at the altar. I felt like I had more control of him than I’d ever had. Even though I was the one who was surrendering her life to join him, the sacrifice seemed to give me power. It was the dead-girl thing. The dead girl was always the one with power.
“I didn’t know if I would need a suitcase,” I said.
“You don’t,” he said. He had a rope with him.
“Will you take it with us anyway? So no one knows what happened?”
“I’ll take it under, yes.”
A shot of adrenaline surged through me. I felt scared.
“So how does this work?” I asked. “I’ve always heard that humans can’t drown themselves—that you need to attach a rock or something. Apparently the human body, however stupidly, always fights to live. What do we do? Do you tie me up with that rope and pull me under, to the bottom?”
“You will tie yourself up,” he said. “It is true that the human body does fight to the surface, sometimes even against your will.”
I noticed that he said “fight to the surface.” He did not say fight to live. Never once did he explicitly mention my death in this. He still wouldn’t. But he hadn’t contradicted me either when I said drown. I dipped my hand into the icy water. My fingers went numb almost immediately.
“I cannot help tie you,” he said. “I can only guide you down to the bottom. I will never fight you. I will never pull you under harder than you want to go. In the past, with the others, this is how I always did it. I need to feel you are there of your own will.”
“The others?” I asked.
I knew that there had been others on land. Alexis in the boathouse and who knew what else? But I hadn’t known any others had gone under. This made me hurt instantly. Then I felt stupid. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I didn’t want to think of it. He had such a want for me, a desperation that I go under. He had wanted so badly that it be my own want that brought me under, that was how vulnerable and powerless he was over his own feelings. His need was so big that he couldn’t own it. He needed it to be my need. But this didn’t mean I was the only one. I never considered that whoever came before me might also be under there. Now I shuddered.
Who was he? An incubus needing so many women to want him? Needing so many women to die for him? How many women? In my own desire to feel chosen by this beautiful creature, I had never thought to ask if others had gone before. It had seemed impossible that his need to be wanted by others was more ravenous than mine. Sexually, I had encountered that kind of need amongst the playboys and assholes. But theirs was purely a physical desire. They sought nothing from me but sex, especially not love. They didn’t want my life. It was me who forced it on them. Now here was a man who needed my love and my life. But my love and my life, and the lives of how many other women? I felt a stinging in my eyes. I was crying.
“The others?”
He looked away.
“How many are there, Theo?”
“Some,” he said.
“How many?” I demanded.
He looked down at his hands.
“How many bodies are under there?”
He paused for a moment. I could see he was trying to decide whether to lie or not.
“Just tell me the truth,” I said.
“Seventeen,” he said finally.
So he had a harem. Of what I was not sure. Maybe it was just their bones that were left, or whatever didn’t decay in the saltwater. I was not a scientist. But whether they were alive or dead, sand or flesh, I needed to maintain my singularity. What was I going to do now? Suddenly I thought of what Chickenhorse had said. Whatever it is you’re doing, you don’t have to do it.
But I did have to do it. What else would I do? I could not go back to Phoenix, languish in my apartment. There was nothing there for me. And every day I would have to face consciousness, cursing myself for not dissolving in the most beautiful of ways when I could have. Suddenly, though, this dissolve no longer seemed beautiful. It seemed all wrong. If I were to die for him, if I were to be dead—and I knew within myself that I was to be dead—I could not just be a dead girl among many. The dead girl among many is not worshipped. I wanted to be the lone dead girl or nothing at all.
“I fucking hate you,” I said coolly.
I was shocked that these words came out of me. Immediately I thought to correct them, but I didn’t.
“Lucy.”
I looked at him carefully. Did he really love me, or had it been just a game?
In a way it was both. It was a game he was playing with himself, a very serious game, in which I had occupied a crucial role. Theo had hoped that I could fill his emptiness, at least for a little while. Then, once he had me under the water—once my want for him was proven—he would have no need for me anymore. I would begin to dissolve in that emptiness and he would need someone else to fill it. This was a game I knew well. Like Claire, I too want
ed a thousand cocks. Didn’t we all just want a thousand hard cocks attached to the bodies of boys who have died for us, still warm, to plug our infinite holes? It was a whole way of life, really, the pursuit of that satiety. And it felt like life or death for him too.
I wondered if I was looking at myself. Was I that beautiful and cold? What had always felt to me like an overabundance of want, too much desire, had not been the problem. It was my fear of having to feel it that hurt me. Theo was afraid too. That innate desire was something warm, lovely even, but his fear had turned it into something cold.
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to need, even if you risked rejection. Annika needed me now. When she put it out there on the line it moved me. In her it didn’t seem weak or disgusting, but like a beautiful quality. Her need brought something out in me that I didn’t know that I could be. It was transformational.
I could go back to the beach house. I could go back to the house and I could stay, she told me so. In fact, she not only wanted me to do that—she needed me to do it. Maybe I could even finish the book on my own terms. Fuck the university. I could find a real publisher, at least the book wouldn’t be garbage.
“Never come to this beach again,” I said to him.
“Lucy—”
“Do you hear me? I never want to see you again.”
“I am so sorry,” he said.
“Sorry I’m not dead.”
He was silent. We both knew that I was oversimplifying things. But he didn’t correct me either.
“I do love you, Lucy,” he said.
I loved him too. But at the same time, who knew what love was exactly? I still didn’t have it figured out. I remembered what Dr. Jude had said. The question is not what is love, but is it really love I’m looking for?
“I just thought—I don’t know what I thought,” I said.
“You thought that we were better than some mythic story.”
“Yes,” I said. “I thought that your choosing me made me special—special enough to defeat the story.”
“You are special,” he said.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “But I don’t want to be part of that story.”
He looked paler than ever, as though the full moon or my rejection had blanched all the blood from his face. He was beautiful and yes, I loved him, in one of infinite ways a person could love. I knew that I would wish a thousand times that things could have ended differently. But I also knew, somewhere in me, that there was no soft ending. That kind of ending—the soft and loving ending—would have me back on the rocks, then under the ocean, for dead. One of the dead.
“Goodbye,” I said.
“Lucy.”
But he knew I was not coming. We both knew it was the end.
“Goodbye,” he said.
I watched him push off the rocks and dive into the ocean. It looked like he was entering a giant vagina, as though another woman had come to take him from me already. I wondered if he would always have other women, if he had loved me the most. Even if the other women were just bones in the sea, even if they were nothing, they had dissolved for him. They were his nothing.
But what, then, was he? Was he really even anything? Mythical creatures were born and died all the time. They were born when we needed them and they died when we no longer saw them through the same eyes. In that way he wasn’t so special. How many had been born before him? How many died when a human vision, powerful but ultimately fragile, was effaced by time and dirt? He would be reborn when the next woman needed him. He would come to occupy another space again.
I picked up my suitcase and walked back across the beach. A line of palm trees at the edge of the boardwalk rustled in unison in the wind.
“Fuck me,” I said to the palm trees.
I still didn’t love myself. I wasn’t sure how or when that was going to happen. But maybe it would if I continued to stay alive.
“Forgive me,” I said.
When I got back into the house, Steve was in the kitchen eating cereal again. He eyed me skeptically over his reading glasses. In front of him was the newspaper, with a headline that read FIRES IN THE VALLEY.
“I made a mistake,” I said.
He blinked and kept chewing.
“I’m not going to leave yet after all.”
“Is that so?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He was silent. He rose and put his bowl in the sink.
“Try not to bleed on anything,” he said, and shuffled up the stairs.
It dawned on me that I hadn’t gotten my period in a while, not since Theo and I had bloodied the sofa. That was at least five weeks ago. Maybe I was hitting menopause? Did women hit menopause at thirty-eight?
* * *
—
I didn’t bother opening my suitcase, brushing my teeth, or washing my face. I stripped down to my underpants, braless, and climbed onto the sofa, snuggling up under the blanket. It was strange to be there without Dominic or Theo. Why could they never coexist in the same space, Theo with his fantasy love and Dominic with his pure love? Theo was so afraid of Dominic, how his pure love might hurt him or even eliminate him. I was afraid too, which was why I had chosen to hide him away. I had hoped that fantasy would triumph. Now I was left with neither. But I had my sister.
In a way it was kind of nice to be alone. The euphoria was gone and the silence was gone—those were Theo’s. In his place, some of the nothingness had clearly returned. But I felt different about it, like it was laughing with me or maybe I with it. It was my own nothingness to have and to hold. In my mind I called it a fucker and turned off the light.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, my agent and mermaid, for being a believer from the beginning. Thank you to my editor, Alexis Washam, for your vision, and to Molly Stern, Liz Wetzel, Rachel Rokicki, Lindsay Sagnette, Roxanne Hiatt, Lisa Erickson, Jillian Buckley, Alex Larned, Rachel Willey, and all of the other amazing people at Hogarth. Thank you to the passionate ladies at Bloomsbury UK: Alexis Kirschbaum, Philippa Cotton, Alexandra Pringle and Rachel Wilkie—you make me feel lucky. Thank you to my Hollywood mafia: Michelle Weiner and Olivia Blaustein at CAA. Thank you to Olive Uniacke and Erik Feig at Lionsgate, and to Anne Carey for keeping it (sur)real. Thank you to Libby Burton, whose initial edits were vital to this book. Thank you to my foreign publishers, especially Aylin Salzmann at Ullstein! Thank you to Amy Jones, Susanna Brisk, and Karah Preiss. Thank you to my parents for my education. Thank you to Pickle for showing me the love of a good (bad!) dog. Love and gratitude to Nicholas Poluhoff, without whom—for so many reasons—this book would never have existed.
About the Author
Melissa Broder is the author of the essay collection So Sad Today and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for poetry, and her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, Fence, The Missouri Review, and others. She writes the “So Sad Today” column at Vice, the astrology column for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter, and the “Beauty and Death” column on Elle.com. She lives in Los Angeles.
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