True Love

by Sarah Gerard

  He pounds on the door with his fist. “I’m not texting with you on the other side of the fucking door,” he says. He punches with each word.

  “Leave me alone!” I say.

  Bang-bang-bang-bang.

  “I’M GOOD,” I tell Odessa. Our conversations are infrequent, and when we talk, I’m always trying to get off the phone with her. I’m always afraid when she phones that the call will last half an hour, and I never have half an hour to spare. When I’m not at work, I’m writing with my phone on silent, or I’m uploading short stories to Submittable so they can be ignored for three months, then rejected, or I’m spending time with Aaron, since he often complains that I’m neglecting him. I’m doing my best to be a “good wife.” We’ve neatly compartmentalized our Brian disagreement. I’ve promised that I’m not the cheating type anymore and have tried to force the idea into myself. I tell myself I was driven by circumstances to act out of character in the past, as a form of protection, as a way to keep something of my life just for me, to breathe when I felt I was suffocating. We’ve taken up a new hobby of cooking together. He calls me his sous chef and his “wifey for life-y.” I feel obligated to answer the phone one out of every three times Odessa calls now, if I can, if I don’t have oven mitts on my hands. Just enough to avoid the appearance of avoiding her. I can hear in her pinched tone that our conversations fall short of what she wants. Aaron is always in the room with me, or in the next room listening through the door.

  “I’ve been working a lot,” I tell her. I try to sound overwhelmed so she feels badly for taking up my time. I sometimes walk around the block if I need privacy, but it’s late October now and sleeting. I’ve been in my pajamas all day, cleaning our hovel, since Aaron infrequently sweeps or Swiffers or makes the bed. I lean against the locked door of the bathroom and keep my voice low.

  “Can you talk?” she asks.

  “For a minute.”

  “I want you to be with me for the birth of my child.” She’s due in six weeks. “You’re the closest person in the world to me besides my grandma. You’re like my sister, Nina. Please.”

  “I don’t have the money to fly to Florida, Odessa. I’m so sorry. I can’t afford time off.”

  “Please, Nina. Don’t tell me you can’t.”

  “Aaron isn’t working. It’s the slow season for him. And it’s the holiday season for me so the bookstore is really busy, plus I’ll be in school.”

  “Nina, I’m scared. I don’t want Ian on her birth certificate. I had a strong intuition about him and I went to see my psychic and she told me that he has a lot of negative energy right now. I’m thinking of having the baby somewhere else so he can’t be with me. I think he might be losing his mind.”

  “Is it possible you’re just scared about having the baby?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Somewhere else like where?”

  “Like New York, maybe.”

  “New York?”

  “Do you think I could stay with you?”

  I imagine Odessa sleeping on the love seat. Our love seat designates the living room portion of our apartment. It’s within spitting distance of the bed. Making a bed for her baby in the bathtub. Max on the floor. “Odessa, we don’t have any extra room. We don’t even have a full-on sofa. We can’t have you, Max, and a newborn in here. This isn’t a tenement house.”

  “Then come be with me.”

  “I can’t, okay?” I’m yelling. “I shouldn’t have to say it like this.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, quieter. “Can you stay with Dennis? He owns his apartment. You know he would let you.”

  She’s silent, thinking about it. Aaron is nailing something into the wall of our kitchen. I bet it’s something super imaginative, like an old license plate.

  “Yeah, maybe,” she says.

  AS THE WEATHER turns colder, Aaron begins smoking more inside. He doesn’t ask if he can; he sees me going outside to smoke and stays where he always is—in his metal folding chair positioned before his metal desk by the window. The desk is an imposing midcentury factory piece painted slate gray and rusting. He bought it on Craigslist for a hundred dollars. He didn’t tell me he was buying it; he decided one day while I was at work that having a “designated work space” of his own was more important than pitching in for the gas and electricity bills. I came home and the desk was here, taking up an entire corner. He leaves the window cracked just enough for the smoke to travel back into the room on a jet stream.

  I close the door on the bathroom, and the air smells cleaner. I try to read or write silently against the toilet, but the sounds of Aaron’s movie, Aaron arguing on the phone with his mother, clanging pots, making dinner, travels through the cheap plywood door. When he needs to shit, he barges in, sits on the toilet, and says, “You don’t have to leave, don’t worry.” He shits and makes grunting noises while I try to read. Sometimes he comes in just to tell me he loves me. “I haven’t seen you for hours,” he says. He tries to kiss me.

  I work forty hours a week for an annual income of $25,000. Aaron is paid a hundred dollars a day for occasional three-week gigs of twelve-hour workdays on movie sets. These come along through his personal connections, which I’ve learned are few. Every other week, he asks his parents to buy us groceries. Instead of sending us money, they drive to our neighborhood and take us to the grocery store. Walking through the aisles, his mother and I talk about Aaron’s favorite foods and his sensitivities. Gathering in our studio after, they make suggestions for income streams he hasn’t considered. He could get a job apprenticing for a photographer. It should be easy since he has experience with cameras, they say. As a bystander to these sessions, I’m at once parent, child, and wife. The various responsibilities of these roles carry into my everyday life as Aaron’s partner. Why hasn’t Aaron paid his parking ticket? his mother texts me. Yes, she knows he hasn’t paid it, she says—though I didn’t—because his father owns the car’s registration.

  I begin to note that Aaron is depressive. I start awake in the middle of the night, and he’s smoking out the window with his back to me, playing SimCity on his vintage laptop computer. He never goes to bed when I do anymore. He’ll stay up for hours click-click-clicking his broken touch pad next to my head. He can’t take his laptop into another room because he can’t unplug it from the wall anymore since the battery is dead, and he is too proud to ask his parents to buy him a new one, and too lazy to restart the computer were he to move it into the kitchen. Though his parents pay for almost everything he needs, it’s essential that he rarely ask them to pay for things to preserve his ego. They assume he needs underwear, laundry detergent, Swiffers, and they ship those things to our apartment via Amazon. “My mother makes me feel guilty,” he says, unpacking another box of paper towels. He can’t bear to give her another reason to criticize him, something new to use against him. I lie in the dark watching him light one cigarette off another. I’ve told him that I hate it when he smokes inside, so now he waits until I’m asleep.

  I ATTEMPT TO talk to Aaron about money. I’ve identified money as the veil for his primary fear, which is failure, and beneath failure, rejection, and beneath rejection, uselessness. That I’m the primary breadwinner in our household emasculates him, makes him, by masculine standards, “useless,” a label he uses often, and which he learned from his father, who aims it at people like an inconveniently placed homeless person panhandling outside the supermarket, or the inattentive waiter at Le Pain Quotidien, or his wife’s extended family, from whom they are all estranged. To be useless is to have failed to earn or ceded your privilege to take up space on this planet. To him the useless are born fundamentally unintelligent, or have become stupid through some fault of their own—many “useless” people are also “stupid.” An inability to earn money is at the core of uselessness. What they’ve done or failed to do has rendered them forevermore unworthy of money, and thereby deserving to be discarded: trash. Money is Aaron’s primary system
of valuation. Being poor is the foundation and evidence of uselessness.

  Since he doesn’t make money, Aaron is cheap. When he buys people presents, he makes a point of telling them how little he paid for them. When I leave the bathroom light on, he scolds me.

  Lately Aaron has been interning for an indie production collective whose mumblecore horror feature won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize last year. That he’s an intern makes it possible for the bros at the collective to pay him only occasionally. Their deal is a handshake. They dangle the carrot that they might one day produce Aaron’s script if he sucks their dicks enough now. They ghost him, then invite him to exclusive screenings at MoMA, or New Year’s parties in the Village, then send him home from set for “behaving erratically,” then take him out for day drinks in Williamsburg. They hold his measly paychecks because “Anthony was doing blow last night and he’s not awake yet,” and the bank closes in an hour on Saturday. I’ve returned to modeling for drawing classes for an extra hundred dollars a week, since even with Aaron’s parents’ contributions, we can’t afford rent and utilities on my bookstore income alone.

  “Can’t you find a part-time job in a coffee shop?” I say.

  “I need to be available in case they ask me to work on a movie,” says Aaron. We’re finding a table at our neighborhood brunch café. It’s Sunday morning and we woke up late and cuddled in a sunbeam, then discovered we didn’t have any food in the house. We felt too lazy to walk to the corner store and then walk home and cook. We act like we deserve to treat ourselves.

  “That’s the thing about coffee shops,” I say. “Your hours are flexible.”

  “I don’t have any experience as a barista.”

  “Surely they would train you.”

  “They wouldn’t even hire me. My résumé doesn’t show that I have any coffee shop experience.”

  “The people at Qathra know you. You’re there every day.”

  The waiter comes to take our drink order. I order coffee and water. Aaron orders an Americano.

  “I don’t want to work in a coffee shop,” he says. “It’s degrading.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “It’s not what I need to be doing.”

  “Your job is not your whole identity.”

  “I need to be working on my script. Ben gave me notes and I need to get him a new draft by next month.”

  “You can work on it in off-hours and on the weekends, like everyone else. Including me.”

  “Working in a coffee shop would be a waste of my time. I could use that time writing.”

  “Then they need to pay you when they say they’re going to pay you, and they need to pay you more.” I watch the waiter as he finishes making our coffees behind the bar. He pours chilled half-and-half into a shared decanter and walks it all over to our table. We order different dishes both featuring poached eggs. Mine comes with apricot rose preserves on an English muffin. As the waiter departs, Aaron points out that my order was slightly more expensive than his.

  “Please don’t criticize my order.”

  “You say you’re worried about money. Then what are we doing here?”

  “I’m telling you that I can’t support both of us.”

  “I need them to give me commercial work.”

  “That would be great.”

  “All I need is one person to take a chance on me.”

  “I’m taking a chance on you.”

  “Once I make this movie, everything will be easier.”

  “Hope so.”

  “You don’t have to convince a million people to believe in you and give you money before you can write anything.”

  “You think it’s easier for me? Nobody pays me for what I do. I work retail five fucking days a week and take my clothes off on the side.”

  “That’s a little dramatic.”

  “That’s literally what I do.”

  “Nobody pays me for what I do, either.”

  “That’s not true, you just don’t do enough of it. You sit around on your computer all day in a Wikipedia wormhole. Your computer doesn’t even work. What can anyone give you to do on it?”

  “Can you not yell? We’re in public.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Aaron. You’re so fucking entitled.”

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist. I’m doing the best I can. It’s hard for me to find work in my field.”

  “You’re a college-educated white man.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You can do whatever the fuck you want.”

  “That’s not true.”

  I go outside to smoke. I make a big show of storming out and bringing my coffee with me. The coffee is bitter. I sit on the partial wall of the restaurant’s patio. The sky never lifted today, is a heavy, laughing charcoal. When I return to the table, Aaron has deposited his salad onto my plate. He can eat leafy greens but chooses not to, just to be safe. He’s been waiting for me to return before he starts eating. He wants me to see how polite he is.

  “All I’m saying is, there are ways we can save money until things pick up for me,” he says.

  “Are you going to tell me again that I’m not being frugal enough at the supermarket?”

  “You bring home a new book every day.”

  “I get them for free.”

  “All of them?”

  “Most.”

  “Do you really need the ones you’re buying?”

  “I get a forty percent staff discount.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “It’s none of your business how I spend my own money.”

  “We need to be able to talk about this. I know it’s hard, but please don’t get defensive.”

  “I’m divorcing you if we’re evicted. Let’s talk about that.”

  “Don’t joke like that,” he says. “It’s not nice.”

  He saves one of his eggs for later. He boxes it like a sacrifice.

  Sixteen

  I begin seeing a West Village psychoanalyst who takes my insurance. I’m in the last semester of my MFA program; my thesis is a monstrous, mixed-genre novel about my mother that incorporates long sections of blackout poetry from the pages of More Than Two and The Ethical Slut. I’ve chewed off all of my cuticles trying to write it. It reveals perhaps too much about my mother, so I experiment with interleaving a fictional transcript of the black box recording of Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s last transmission from his flight into the Hollow Earth. In it he encounters the Agharthans and is tasked with bringing back the message that the human race is headed for extinction. No one believes him. My hands and feet are the casualties. I wear bandages on my fingers, always in pain while I’m typing. I lie on the analyst’s couch.

  “They’re never not bleeding,” I say. “Not just my fingers, my toenails, too. I chew my toes and peel the skin, and there are open, bleeding sores on my hands and feet. Sometimes I eat the skin and the fingernails. It hurts to do the dishes. I’m embarrassed to hand people change at the bookstore. My fingers are covered in Band-Aids that I have to change whenever I shower. It hurts to wash my hair. Sometimes I don’t even know that I’m bleeding, but even when I realize, it doesn’t matter, I can’t stop. My toes keep getting infected and keeping me up at night. I can’t walk around the city.”

  “Why do you want to be in pain?” he asks, gentle and serious.

  “You think I want this?”

  “Do you?”

  I consider it. “I guess it feels like I’m releasing something under pressure.”

  “What are you releasing?”

  “Rage.”

  I visit the analyst every Thursday. I’m the last patient in the center before it closes. When I ask him how he’s been since our last session, he says, “Well enough.” He’s in his mid-forties, tall and broad, Mediterranean, and impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit and leather shoes, with matching watch and socks. The sound of his white noise machine lulls me into a trance. We address each other by our last names. This len
ds our meetings a formality that fosters mutual fascination, to my mind. When I ask him what we should talk about, he tells me that he will “hold me to saying everything.” It’s what I’ve always wanted someone to say to me. I feel as if he already knows and accepts me.

  For most of our sessions, the analyst says nothing. He allows me to talk. I worry at times that I’m boring him. I confess, “My husband is a very anxious man. We argue several times a week. Our arguments escalate and they last for hours, sometimes all night. We slam doors and scream at each other. He breaks furniture. He broke three tables in one month, so now we have a glass table, to discourage him from slamming things into it. It’s like we’re collaborating to control his temper. I try to physically separate myself from him to end the arguments, but he follows me around the tiny apartment, and there’s nowhere for me to go. He tries to force me to talk to him. This morning, I closed the door on my office”—the small hallway between the kitchen and the bathroom, in which Aaron has removed the door of the utility closet and wedged a TV dinner tray inside with a folding chair—“and all morning, he yelled headlines at me from the next room while I was trying to write. ‘Trump lost the Iowa caucuses.’ ‘The FBI is investigating the Flint water crisis.’ Like he’s Walter fucking Cronkite. I didn’t have time to care about the fucking news. I had to leave the house at eleven to make my shift by noon. Then he decided he needed to water the plants in the bathtub. Three times. Each time he acknowledged that he was disrupting me. We talked about this less than a week ago. I had to run away to the library. It was full of babies and stay-at-home moms. Aaron opened the door all self-righteously when I came back to drop off my laptop. He says things he knows are wrong to manipulate me into reacting. He says the most horrible things to me. He asks me how long I need to be alone. If I say half an hour, I can hear him outside the bathroom door after twenty-nine minutes. I fantasize about crawling out the window instead of opening the door for him. The last time he did this, I cut myself.”