Once, I revealed I had children in the middle of a playful text exchange and immediately felt a chill. Oh really? the guy wrote after a minute-long pause. Shit, I thought. Then: No, not shit! That’s the truth! I shouldn’t have to hide it. Don’t worry, they’re not looking for a new daddy, I replied. Just I am. The guy blocked me ten seconds later, and I guffawed loudly and shouted, Oh, come on! into the empty room. That was funny!
The first spell-breaking fuck with not-K chased three double vodkas and two tequila shots and lasted about six minutes. It was with James, a lean, craggy, handsome man who was also stumbling out from the cave of a long-term relationship and still adjusting to the light. We texted incessantly for a few days, then met at the darkest bar in town. He knew the bartender, a girl with dyed-black hair and tattoos—another me; another everyone—who gave us shots for free and did one with us. She’d just gone through a breakup, too, that very day, meaning we all had an excuse to drink, an excuse to do whatever we needed to do to blot out our feelings. How good I was at that: feeling entitled. Letting my hair down, giving myself permission, and then melting tipsily into it. Fuck love, she said saltily as she upended hers. The bartender gave James a lingering, knowing look each time I ordered another drink. They’ve definitely fucked, I remember thinking. I don’t remember what he and I talked about that night, just that it led to clumsily urgent making out against the driver’s side door of my car. The homeless man sitting in a sleeping bag just outside the city’s main library looked on silently. I’d put the booster seats in the trunk.
Someone else’s breath. Someone else’s mouth. It was a clammy November night, the air damp and chilled and the streets puzzlingly empty. We sealed ourselves into the silence of my sedan and continued kissing, pulling back every now and then to make the kind of flat, questioning eye contact you do with a near stranger. There was a blankness behind his eyes, these new eyes, a look that satisfyingly reflected exactly what I felt in that moment: I don’t care who you are. I wasn’t even sure I liked it, I just knew that he wasn’t K, that I’d tried everything else and this was all that was left.
I so frequently thought about K and me in terms of narratives that already existed, pictures I’d collected since I was a little girl. There were so many scenes I’d imagined myself into—canvases and film stills, old photographs, even cartoons. There were scenes of captivity, desperation, and lust, and after our breakup, scenes of freedom, Disney sunshine, the whole village of my life alive in exultation, birds holding in their beaks the banner announcing my survival.
That night, freedom was pure escape. I imagined myself at the bottom of a luminescent sea, a movie ocean, chained to a shipwreck, eyes darting nervously around in what the viewer quickly realizes are the moments before drowning. My pretty hair flowing mermaid-like, turbid, grey-blue water sending Renaissance waves undulating through the length of it. In the back seat, James peeled my pants off and I unbuttoned his pants and we were drunk and stupid and we laughed a little bit and I straddled him under the weak streetlight and it was too fast to be good, too fast to be anything, but his face was rough and he smelled like a man and it was like taking a pair of bolt cutters to that chain around my ankle. I swam up, up, up toward light.
“Reader, I fucked him,” I wrote, paraphrasing Jane Eyre, on my girlfriends’ text thread the next morning, and they returned the requisite emojis of enthusiasm and love.
James and I quickly became each other’s security blankets. Somehow, his was the house I ended up at after all the other bad dates, watching reruns of 30 Rock in his sweatshirt and pajamas while his pitbull snored in the corner. In the dark early morning, before donning his construction vest, he brought me coffee in bed and I could tell he thought it the height of chivalry. Sadly, after the relationship I’d just escaped, it did actually impress me.
James gave way to others. There were bad dates: the milquetoast Midwesterner who told me he was recovering from alcoholism while I callously downed three drinks at the bar. He never called again. The boyish girl who I wanted so badly to take me under her capable, sporty wing but who didn’t even try to kiss me at the end of the night. I feared I emitted some toxic straight-girl desperation: the kind that just wants relief from men, to be put out of my misery. There were flings. A tall and brilliant Russian man I’d had a brief, intense relationship with years earlier came to town on business, and we drank red wine in a bizarre Airbnb under the gaze of its owner’s mask collection and had dinner and then tender this-is-what-could-have-been sex in a small, dark bedroom. There was the beautiful, frustrated academic with a penchant for Bushmills and Southern sludge metal. The drug dealer. The chef. It was like dating bingo. Not K, not K, not K, not K: that was the only real criterion.
You deserve to have some fun! I told myself. But it mostly wasn’t. The work of getting to know someone, even briefly, felt both exhilarating and perfectly pointless. I emerged from these trysts the way one does from a long conversation on a transatlantic flight: refreshed, yet ten minutes later disorientingly incapable of remembering a single detail about the person whose life story you just heard, at whom you nodded so vigorously, mmhmm-ing in solidarity for hours. Where was it he said he was going? What does he do for a living? And wasn’t there something important about a brother, or was it a son?
Fortunately, sex often felt just like when I was younger. A vigorous diversion. And not just sex itself, but its lazy aftermath. The sumptuous pleasure of stretching out into the freedom of my own home like a corpulent cat. That hadn’t been ruined, not by marriage or divorce or children or depression. As it turned out, it was all still just right there for the taking. You only had to be selfish and crazy enough to reach out and grab it, to fondle its balls. I enjoyed getting up to pee and returning to my room to find in it not the same body I’d been fucking and fighting with for years, but a new slab of humanity. Someone happy to see me, who pulled me back into bed, who lit a joint for me. Someone who wanted to impress me. Why shouldn’t I be impressed. So, love was dead—so what? I thought. Lust, happily, was not. The sharp, hormone-rich aroma of someone else’s armpits filled the air of my apartment and it felt like sweet revenge. It also broke my heart a little, but very little.
When people asked me about K, I replied with seriousness, He’s dying. Occasionally I found myself saying what I really meant: I hope he dies.
* * *
• • •
During this period, K was gone but not gone. I heard from him occasionally and he was how he was: funny, regretful, angry, confused. We treated the dissolution of our relationship as something both tragic and ineluctable. Just like the beginning of the relationship, it didn’t feel like a choice we’d made or could unmake. I got used to it after a month or so. It wasn’t like the days right after he left, when every clap of thunder or flicker of light startled me, made my eyes dart nervously around like a dense babysitter in a horror movie, as though he was about to reappear. Now I just casually heard his voice in my own voice, as I made jokes that sounded like his, and felt surges of him like ocean waves in my body, in the atmosphere.
He had competing narratives: that he was dying alone in a room at his mother’s house, and that he was painting the town, meeting people, working, moving and shaking, dating. We still saw each other occasionally. I would make the drive out to the suburbs after work, talk with his mother in the kitchen for a while, the same hushed conversations, the two of us, both expert at this role, making our folk prognoses. I’d watch TV with him in his room for a while like he was a patient in a hospital. He was growing fatter and bloated, trying to kill himself with alcohol and drugs. I look like a monster, I know, he said once as I sat on the edge of his bed, probably looking sad.
You’ve looked better, I said.
Wow, he laughed, that’s very honest for you, Pimentoloaf. I’ve never heard you say anything like that. Good for you.
I laughed. Please don’t die, I said.
Oh
, honey, he said. That’s the sick joke of it all. I’ll probably live to be a hundred. And really have decades to soak in this breakup.
If you want to try to stop, I’m here, I said.
I know, he said. Wanna watch a Chopped?
* * *
• • •
Eventually, I met a good one. Josh, a kind, good-looking, successful man with a softness in his eyes and just enough mystery to be interesting, but not enough to make me wonder if he was bullshitting me. He owned his own house and a big, beautiful dog whose anxious, bounding joy and loyalty to him seemed to be harbingers of good.
He took me to a bar I’d never been to and let me drive his nice new car afterward. I was drunk, and weaved downhill to his house feeling unhinged, like he would have let me do anything at all, high on the power of being hot. We fucked against the butcher block in his kitchen and then I excused myself and threw up. Once, I sent him a text message with a red heart and a black heart at the end, and he began adding the two hearts in that order to the end of a lot of his messages, particularly if they were romantic or involved making plans. I understood instinctively that mine was the black heart. His was red: pulsing brightly and healthily, ready for love. He was a gentle soul. He once worried aloud that he wasn’t enough of a “bad boy” for me. He wanted to meet my kids. Over the course of a few weeks, he did more for me in the way of practical assistance than K had in the entirety of our relationship. He was a love-is-an-action-verb problem-solver, who noticed my refrigerator door was broken and swiftly fixed it the next time he came over, with a replacement part and tools he’d brought from home. He bought me small gifts. He talked about the future. Once, as I was writing on a deadline from his bed, he came in and said he was going to run out and get us some dinner.
You don’t have to do that, I said.
I know, he said. I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry?
Yeah, I said. But you don’t have to go all the way out. I’m sure there’s something here I can make for us when I’m done.
He looked at me like I was an alien. It’s just dinner, he said. You get so weird anytime I do anything for you. It kind of freaks me out.
It kind of freaked me out, too, how uncomfortable his easy affection and care was, how even as I appreciated it, it made me squirm like a bug under a magnifying glass. When he left to get food that night, I opened the diary on my computer and wrote, “Lying on Josh’s bed finishing some work. He went to get dinner. It’s calm, quiet, clean, Conway Twitty playing and the sound of the dog licking peanut butter out of a toy. Remember this feeling. Your life could be this peaceful if you let it.”
* * *
• • •
I didn’t tell him when my period was late, and a week later, I ended the relationship. We were supposed to take a trip together. We had begun to make those kinds of plans, but every day the pressure of being with someone like Josh—someone good, who was actually paying attention, whose antennae were focused intently on detecting my signals—felt more overwhelming. I felt less suited to it, paralyzed by it. Even as we were breaking up, he was so present and honest, he revealed so many of his own feelings with such disarming clarity. But ever since breaking up with K, my body’s response to a display of male feelings was akin to the unleashing of histamines after exposure to an allergen. I couldn’t take it. I was curt. I said, I’m not ready, all the things people say.
The morning after we broke up, I peed on a stick and found out I was pregnant—with another globule, a not-yet-lentil-sized bundle of cells that I would have to send back to the seas, the stars, the sky. Where do souls go? If one even inhered in this miniscule mass. I pictured it: a bloody seed.
I wrote it down in my diary: I am pregnant. It looked as heavy as it felt. I feel like a Gauguin, I wrote. My tiny breasts have acquired an awkwardly triangular, 2-D flop. They’re sore, stuck haphazardly on my increasingly square body. I feel rooted, fat, pathetic. I knew immediately that I wouldn’t tell Josh. I wanted to, but it wouldn’t be fair. He was too invested, too smitten. The pregnancy would be something to bind us, bond us, a reason or an opportunity for him to show up. I dreaded an abortion, but not more than I feared Josh appearing on my doorstep and insisting we go through something together. Worse still, he might try to get me to think about it differently. I could imagine him holding my hands, fixing me in his good-guy gaze, and saying, We could do this, Nina. And we could have.
No, I had no time for tenderness. I had to get to the hospital and blot out the possibility of a life, of more motherhood, another detour into dowdy obsolescence, sleep-deprivation-induced psychosis. I didn’t need a gooey, soft-hearted partner, I just needed a ride to the clinic. Only one person I knew could carry it off with the requisite cynicism, nonjudgment, a little dark humor sprinkled like stolen Splenda into the tall cold glass of sorrow I was about to drink. Fuck tenderness—I wanted Doctor Death. Before I called K, I texted him.
ME: I need you.
K: I need you too
ME: Hi
K: Hiii
ME: No like i need ur help
K: Oh ok. i got u
ME: thank u
K: anything for u pimentoloaf. what is it?
ME: it’s better to talk about in person
K: come over then. but i’m not in great shape, i warn you
ME: that’s okay. we can talk about that. or not. i’ll be over later, after work
Anything for me, I guffawed, from the privacy of my own bed. K loved such proclamations, loved them so much more than the daily work of love, than making the coffee or taking the dog out to pee. After work, I gathered my belongings, which always seemed voluminous and unwieldy at day’s end like I’d been living at the office, and drove out to his mother’s house, where he was camped out in the small bedroom that I knew every inch of. I could picture his exact positioning on the bed, the only place in the room to sit. I had missed this slow, long drive from my office in the city in rush-hour traffic all the way to the suburbs, with a seltzer in the console and loud music I could sing along to. I loved driving and I loved the suburbs and other people’s moms, the brief respite from responsibility I’d enjoyed so many times as K’s mother unloaded a recent Costco haul and fed me. That day, I stopped at the liquor store on the way like I used to and bought a cheap bottle of white table wine and a bag of Cheetos. I prepared to see K and to enlist his help.
* * *
• • •
It’s strange to be here for me and not for him, I think, as we take our seats in the hospital waiting room. Three times we’ve sat in the ER, waiting to be seen for his abscesses. The nurses with clipboards would shuffle around in medical scrubs and Crocs. They would say things about insurance that he wasn’t listening to. I listened. When they asked certain questions, he let a silence hang in the air until I stepped in and answered.
While we waited, K would ask me to take a photo of him, for posterity or sympathy or social media. There was something amusing to him about his own suffering. Ever since he’d had cancer in his twenties, he’d treated his own life cavalierly. I joked that it didn’t matter, he’d been granted nine lives. Isn’t that sad? he said. You know so many good people and I’m the one who’s going to live the longest.
Now, in the sterility and brightness of the hospital, amid corporate signage promoting the hegemonic wellness imagery of active, bright-toothed families throwing Frisbees in blurred green parks, K looks extra Other. Extra punk, extra grim, extra tragic. He looks like he both belongs and doesn’t belong here. He looks like a street person, like someone who ends up in a hospital, but also like someone who doesn’t fit in, here or anywhere. I thought this about him the sicker he got, the farther from the straight world of doctors and nurses and other normal people. He dwelled in a permanent exile.
Usually, after a trip to the hospital for an abscess, we argued. Before my anger could sediment, it
had to bubble over, be spit forth like lava. I hated feeling responsible for him but not being able to rely on him. There was no reciprocity. What would happen if I got sick? I hissed. What if I needed you?
Do you honestly think you couldn’t rely on me if you were sick? he said, sounding affronted.
You have nothing, I said. You have no resources. You have no money. No, I don’t think I could rely on you. I can’t rely on you. Look around—I don’t rely on you for fucking anything. If something happened to me, I would be completely fucked.
But here we are, a damp spring day. I’m filling out paperwork at the check-in station while he sits in a chair in the waiting room. I keep thinking I should have worn drawstring pants, something more akin to pajamas—athleisure wear, all the rage—instead of tight jeans. I imagine the thick, rough menstrual pad I will have to situate bulkily into my underwear before we can leave this place, and the thinner pads I will buy at the drugstore afterward, the kind with wings that I have only worn after births and other gynecological traumas like this one. I will have to button my pants gingerly, ease the button through the hole with my fingernail, trying to suck in but not being able to in the bloated aftermath.
And you have a ride home after the procedure? the woman at the desk asks.
Yes, I reply.
And where is that person? she asks.
I point to K. He is sitting fifteen feet away, looking at his phone. He looks especially bedraggled, a bit grimy in the face, his greasy hair—still majestic, now streaked gorgeously with grey—is hidden beneath a beanie. Couldn’t he at least take his hat off? The hair has the power to sway public opinion. He has tucked his chin into his windbreaker and is chewing on the zipper. He seems to notice us looking in his direction and looks up. His eyes have that darting, beady quality. I can picture the slick wet of his pupils like spilled inkpots. I look back at the woman checking me in. Her expression hasn’t changed, her fingernails are clack-clacking over the keyboard and I know she doesn’t give a shit but I have a strong urge to say, It’s not his. A desire not to seem like the kind of person who would get knocked up by a guy like him.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 28
