True Love

by Sarah Gerard

  I found myself telling him about the novel I was writing. I asked him if he would read it and give me feedback. I’d begun drafting it in my notebook when I’d moved back to Florida, disconnected from the internet and unsure of what else to do with my sobriety. The story followed a college student who’d been forced to go to rehab. I brought him a copy the next day in an orange envelope. I’d written the title on the front and signed my name underneath.

  “I’d like you to model nude for me sometime,” he said, taking the envelope. He held me with his gaze. “If you would be comfortable with that.”

  “A TRANCE SHAPES what we see and how we respond,” says the hypnotist. She hands me a tiny bottle of water and a tissue. I’ve drooled on myself. “We’re highly receptive, much like when we’re in love. It’s debatable whether we even have full use of our judgment or our faculties.”

  She tells me I need to work on my self-esteem; then she leads me through an intervention that involves tapping various parts of my body, repeating a mantra. I leave with a recording of our session that she’s burned onto a CD, which I have no way of playing. I notice I’ve been in her office for two hours. “Please don’t apologize,” she says. “I enjoy it as much as you do.”

  On the way home, I bike past Seth’s apartment. His window is open. He doesn’t answer the door, which doesn’t mean he isn’t home. He could be in there choosing isolation. I sit and wait for him.

  WHEN I RETURNED to model for Seth in the nude, I was surprised to find that our high school art teacher was there in his studio, drinking wine. The Stone Roses were playing in the room’s half darkness. I sat next to Mr. Kruck, a clean, gentle gay man. We were silent, as if bewitched by the presence of Seth, a sort of modern oracle. “I hear you’re a novelist now,” Mr. Kruck whispered. I couldn’t tell if he was amused. His eyes were fixed on the development of Seth’s abstract masterpiece.

  “That’s my book,” I said, gesturing to the orange envelope, unopened on the floor near a stack of Artforum.

  “Extraordinary. Seth, what can you tell me about this future bestseller?” he said.

  “Nothing,” said Seth. “I haven’t read it.”

  “You’ll have to fill him in once you do,” I said. He looked at me, then turned back around and continued painting.

  “I’m not sure I can give you a proper critique, Nina,” he said. “I would like your permission to pass it on to my friend Jared. He’s a student of literature.”

  “Yes, a wonderful idea,” said Mr. Kruck.

  “You know him?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. He was your classmate.”

  Seth washed his paintbrush and laid it on a towel. He selected a pencil from a box of drawing supplies and scribbled on the back of a receipt. “This will depend on his other commitments,” he said. “But here’s his number. I’ll tell you when to text him, if he agrees. He prefers to text.”

  When Mr. Kruck left, Seth resumed explicating his work in progress. “I feel that negative space and form play important recent roles. I transmute proportions of negative space onto dissimilar arbitrary portions of canvas. Thereby I explore space in painting, in particular the oppositional forces caught in the openness of absence.”

  I lingered. He disappeared into the bathroom adjacent to his bedroom, and I heard him brushing his teeth. He emerged in his boxers, wearing glasses, as if ready for bed.

  “So, when do you want to start?” I said.

  He squinted.

  “The modeling.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, I don’t have time tonight.”

  “I see.”

  “The demands on my time are immense. The real world steals my sanity. Here I am, constantly surveilled and manipulated by technology, reality and advertising alike pissing in my face. You understand.”

  I, too, often felt attacked, put upon, pushed around. I couldn’t help but feel as if only I could love Seth enough for him to be fully open, and that only he could lend me the recognition I so needed. Falling in love with Seth was a way of falling in love with myself.

  I WAIT FOR an hour for him to return or emerge; then I leave, wondering if he’s watching me through the window. I once waited four hours at a bar where he’d told me to meet him before deciding he’d stood me up. He’d forgotten. Agreements mean nothing to him. If he actually moves to New York with me, I’m convinced it will be an accident. He doesn’t answer his phone if he’s “working.” He won’t respond to texts. Days will go by and I will hear nothing from him. “I’m not married to my call log,” he tells me. I feel like an animal. Begging.

  I’m a block from my duplex when a cat darts from beneath a car and runs in front of my tire. I swerve to avoid hitting it and fly over the handlebars, landing on my shoulder. I skid several feet on my face and lie on my stomach, scanning for injuries. I watch the cat watching me bleed. A silver-dollar-sized abrasion turns red on my elbow. I roll to my side and gather my bike. I limp to the grass.

  I sit, assessing the damage. The dry grass is like tiny blades cutting into my thighs. The front tire is out of true. I wonder vaguely whether I have a concussion, but seem unable to fully form the question. I sit for a long time and consider napping, just for a minute. The block is family houses. Someone will see me if I die.

  The cat approaches and rubs against me. I push it away. It rubs me again and catches my bleeding arm with its tail. The pain starts me awake, and I push the cat, harder, then look at it, suddenly sorry. It’s skinny, flea-infested, its paws matted with tar. A Creamsicle tabby. It looks like my childhood cat Skittles. Skittles died tragically of renal failure when I was fifteen. I have always blamed myself for failing to notice sooner that she was sick.

  I swear under my breath and decide I’m not going to cry. I resent Seth for failing to be here to help me. I peel myself from the ground and lean against the bike. The cat follows me for a block and then walks in front of my foot. I stop to avoid kicking her. I squat and look at her more closely. Her eyes are clear blue. I pick her up and carry her against my chest.

  Three

  Soon after the aborted drawing session, Jared invited me to his home. I arrived in the early evening, chained my bike to his fence on the brick street, and proceeded up the paving stone walkway through a sandy garden of wilting bromeliads. The house was Spanish-style, eggshell-colored, with a screened-in side porch. An old bathtub filled with potting soil housed weeds. Jared answered the door shirtless. He wore a knee-length floral skirt. His hair was pulled into a bun, and a tattoo of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa covered his left shoulder. “Welcome, Nina,” he said. “Come in.”

  The entrance was partially lit by an antique floor lamp draped in red silk. I eyed the bookshelf and recognized many of the authors I’d read in my undergraduate gender studies and African American literature seminars. Through an open bedroom door, I could see a man with a Jew ’fro sleeping beside a skinny white woman covered in stick-and-poke tattoos.

  “So, you’re a writer?” I said to Jared.

  “I’m an artist. One of my media is text.”

  “What are your other mediums?”

  “Media. Carpentry. You may have seen some of my work at Black Box.”

  “Did you have a show?”

  “I made the benches.”

  We proceeded past the open bedroom and onto the porch, where an old corduroy sofa shared space with a particleboard coffee table, a grill, a dusty workbench, and several unopened cardboard boxes sagging under stale rainwater. It was carpeted pool table green.

  “Tell me about your writing,” Jared said. He opened a cigar box on the coffee table. It held four Swisher Sweets, a sandwich bag of dry shake, an X-Acto knife, and a lighter. I sat on the couch.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever you see fit to tell me.”

  “Well, the book is loosely based on my life.”

  “I had wondered.”

  “But I mean, it’s fiction.”

  “What’s true and what’s not?”

&nbs
p; “None of it is technically true.”

  He rolled the blunt silently as I watched. He licked it, dragged his thumb lengthwise down the paper, spun it, then stuck the whole of it in his mouth and pulled it out again.

  “I look forward to talking with you about your novel,” he said. “First, I need to pass some items along to a friend who has just arrived.”

  A black Beetle pulled into the driveway. A petite Latina climbed out of it. She wore pinup shoes, black-and-white polka-dotted shorts, and a lime halter top. She teetered up the walkway and across the yard.

  “Hang on, Claudette, let me get them,” said Jared. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said to me.

  “No problem.”

  The woman opened the screen door and held her hand out for me to shake it. There was something hostile in the gesture. “How do you know Jared?” she said.

  “Seth introduced us.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a writer,” I said for the first time. “Jared is reading my novel.”

  She looked at Jared. He was just returning with a shopping bag of women’s lingerie, which he handed to her.

  “No, Claudette,” he told her, reading her face. “She’s sleeping with Seth.”

  “We should hang out sometime.” She smiled. She seemed to be saying this for Jared more than me. I listened as she segued into a story about a love triangle at the coffee shop where, I gathered, she and Jared both worked. The full version involved a lot of characters, some of whom were as yet unidentified. Jared sensed that I was waiting and lit the blunt. He passed it to me on the couch. I passed it back to him. With the blunt, we were passing back and forth the understanding that Claudette was intruding on a conversation that was only just beginning.

  He took out his phone and nodded to show her that he was listening. He began to move his thumbs across the screen. Claudette continued. She was speculating about the possibility of the coffee shop’s management disapproving of staff affairs. Whether it was possible the owner would fire someone. She didn’t seem to care that Jared was openly talking to someone else while she was talking to him. I took my phone out of my purse and texted Seth a heart emoji. I kept my hand on top of the phone afterward in case he responded. It vibrated.

  Nina, your ideas are good but you let them stew too much upstairs without getting out and getting examined. Many of your sentences are long and awkward. Your metaphors are frequently mixed, and lose potency as a result. Your voice is good, but gets muddled and lost when you reach for big ideas. You rely too much on staid literary mechanisms that no longer have currency. You have a tendency to tell instead of showing. Unresolved plot holes and inconsistencies riddle the story line, though you do some skilled foreshadowing. The story attempts to be at once gritty realism and patent romanticism, but ends up being effectively neither, while its overblown descriptions of good and evil give it a moralizing tone. This story feels raw, like it hasn’t gone through a drafting process yet. You seem not to be able to see the forest for the trees, and there are some lovely trees, but they just don’t make a forest. You obviously have a good grasp of language, but you need to work on some of the basic nuts and bolts of storytelling before attempting to build anything as grand as you’re doing, otherwise its structural integrity cannot hold up even a well-wrought facade. Things you can work on include: making your world logically consistent; making sure all things, actions, places, and names have both context and causation; getting rid of unnecessary verbiage, especially words whose duty is being done by other words; working to eliminate clichés and overused literary mechanisms; and using the right word instead of several close approximations all lumped together.

  I closed my phone and returned it to my purse. I stared at the arm of the sofa while Claudette finished her story. It took her ten or fifteen minutes. I sank into my body. I felt at once far away and painfully present. I considered the attractiveness of vanishing. I would leave Jared’s porch, walk to the water, and continue walking until I was submerged.

  Claudette reminded Jared about dinner at her mother’s house tomorrow. “I love you,” she said.

  “You, too, kid,” he said.

  They kissed.

  “Bye, Nina,” she said, as if we were friends.

  He watched her drive away, but remained looking out at the darkening street after her car had turned the corner, as if deep in thought. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “Did you have any questions for me?”

  “Not really.”

  He seemed offended. “I’ve read your novel. I am the only one who’s read it aside from you. There’s nothing you want to know?”

  “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  “I see.” He lit the blunt, which was now a wet roach. He burned his fingers and reached inside the wooden box for a clip. He held the metal end of it and passed it to me.

  “I guess I have one question,” I said. “What do you write?”

  “Everything is writing,” he said. “At the moment, I’m working on my Bumble profile.”

  I’M ONCE AGAIN stoned on Jared’s porch. His roommate is out selling drugs to teenagers getting drunk at the Bends, Seth is at a Black Box show opening, and I have the night off. Over the two years since I met him, my friendship with Jared has become strategic. It normalizes me to Seth by giving Jared the opportunity to approve of me. It enables him to explain me to Seth at key moments. And it gives me someone other than Seth to cry to when Seth ghosts me. While maintaining that, due to seniority, his first loyalty is to Seth, Jared also validates my frustration when Seth says things like, “I hope you know that the time I give you is not time I already have.”

  Importantly, Jared encouraged me to finish my last twelve credits at the community college. “Don’t do it because you’re told to,” he said. “Do it because journalism is dying.” He proofread my applications to MFA programs. When I was accepted, he was instrumental in convincing Seth to move with me to New York.

  I treat Jared as if he’s someone I can confide in, though he isn’t always; he’s a gossip. But, as he says, “Trust is an action.”

  At the moment, Jared is mansplaining polyamory, and I am performing compassion through active listening.

  “If Claudette is uncomfortable, then she and I need to talk about that,” he says. “It does me no good if she talks to other people. I’ve been honest with her about my expectations and involvements with other women.” He passes the blunt.

  “My understanding is that this complicates her relationship with Sofia,” I say.

  “And of course I feel badly about that,” he says.

  “But this is how you’re made.”

  “I am the way I am, and she chooses to be with me, knowing who I am.”

  Jared doesn’t reveal his other paramours to one another unless they ask him using specific names, as in “Are you fucking Sofia?” This is necessary to preserve everyone’s privacy. Otherwise, he has a difficult time forming connections with people, and forming connections is what he naturally does as a polyamorous person. “Homo sapiens are not biologically inclined to monogamy,” he says, citing the landmark pop science book Sex at Dawn. To restrict this part of himself is equivalent to torture. “I am capable of feeling deep love for more than one person at a time. Haven’t you ever wanted to be with someone who wasn’t your partner?”

  I wouldn’t admit this to him. I also wonder if he isn’t sending a coded message—if he wasn’t watching me with Brian on the beach a few weeks ago. We’re only, at this moment, two blocks from the location where he came on my face in the dunes. My neutral expression asserts that it wasn’t me he saw, just in case it was.

  “This is a touchy subject for me,” I say, “because of my mom.”

  “Right, the unicorn.”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “Have you met any of her partners?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your relationship like with her?”

  SINCE
LEAVING FOR college, I’ve only seen my mother a handful of times. This occasion stands as an exemplar: I was home for Thanksgiving and asked if I could come to Lutz, an hour from my dad’s. I didn’t want to drive all the way out there, but I knew I’d have to if I wanted to see her. I was on my cell in my father’s kitchen while he shouted at Bill Maher from the living room.

  “I’m not asking for pity, but it really sucks to be me some days,” she explained. “I don’t have the time or energy to talk about it. It’s just hard for me to host people. I don’t have the space or the time to clean for you.”

  I apologized. She complained that her work schedule was punishing—my sense was that this was by design. She had been this way since leaving my father. As long as she worked upward of eighty hours a week, she never had to get close to people, and she would always have something or someone to gripe about.

  “That’s both-sides-ism, Bill!” my dad yelled.

  “Hang on, Mom, let me step outside.”

  “Go far away so he doesn’t yell at you,” she said. This was supposed to be a joke about how my father was someone who yelled at me, except that he wasn’t. If she made him my enemy, though, then she would have more of me, even from another city, even as she kept me at an uncloseable emotional distance.

  “I don’t want you to feel bad,” I said, shutting the front door.

  “It’s just honestly really hard for me to have visitors or take time off work.”

  “It’s easiest for me to come now because I’m in Florida.”

  “I can’t commit to anything, Nina. I’m sorry.”

  HER TRAILER WAS in a park called Slash Pines. Mobile homes were near the street and RVs were in the back, near the swamp. My mother’s home was somewhere in between. She’d left a key in a hanging planter on the porch, where she also kept her bicycle, a tiny refrigerator, and some dirty deck furniture. Inside was clean, the window air-conditioning unit turned down to sixty-nine, churning with two pine-tree-shaped car fresheners taped to the vent. The dust on her sewing machine suggested it wasn’t used. Cases of liquor sat stacked against the refrigerator, her kitchen serving as extra storage for the bar where she worked. “I don’t even drink,” she’d told me, as if working in a bar was an ironic twist of fate that had befallen her—her, of all people.