True Love

by Sarah Gerard

  “You’re insane.”

  “Punch me.” He takes off his glasses and shoves his face into mine. “Punch me, I know you want to. Just do it, Nina. Just hit me. Hit me.”

  He points at his face.

  “Fucking hit me.”

  “I hate you,” I say.

  “Hit me, then!” I back away. “Come on!” He follows me to the bathroom, and I slam the door in his face.

  “It’s okay, Nina! I know you want to! Just do it!”

  We never fixed the door’s lock; he forces it open. I push his face away and hear something crash behind him.

  “You hit your partner!” he says.

  I slam the door as hard as I can and scream into it, a long, open scream that swallows everything. I want our neighbors to think he’s murdering me. I want the police to take him away in handcuffs. I would laugh as they were doing it.

  “You’re going to kill me!” I say.

  He kicks through the cheap wood, and I sit with my back to it, feet wedged against the bathtub, while he kicks it again.

  “Is this a yeast infection?” he says.

  Bang-bang.

  “Why is my dick rotting, Nina?”

  Bang-bang-bang.

  He throws his weight against the door and it opens each time, and I take the blows into my body, pushing harder against him. “Stop it!” I scream. I pray for a neighbor to hear me. I push harder against the bathtub with my feet. He throws himself against the door again and again. My foot slips. The edge of the wood cuts my cheek. Aaron drives the knob into my head.

  Twenty-One

  The subject line says, Dara sent me this. Because of course the cells of my body vibrate at the same frequency as my mother’s. The email’s rambling and bleeding, almost as long as the one I sent her a few months ago. I read Dara’s message at the bookstore, hunched over a Cup Noodles at the receiving-area computer. I’m wearing an eye patch, so I have to squint up close to the screen to make out the letters with my left eye only. I don’t mean to hurt you but I know I’m disappointing you, it says. You said I don’t stick up for you or myself, but that’s not true. I just struggle with you interfering in my friendships. I know you aren’t the whole reason my friendship ended with Jamie (I shouldn’t have said that) but I have a huge issue with you trying to control my friendship with Pam. I can’t believe you think it’s okay to voice your opinion to my friend about my relationship with them.

  My mother is presently traveling to her godfather’s funeral. Her godfather is the only man in my mother’s life who has never disappointed her, who believed her about Bruce when her parents didn’t. On top of that, it’s her birthday tomorrow and she hates her birthday, because although my nana planned elaborate parties for Bruce and Jude, she never celebrated her daughter. My mother is always a hosebeast around her birthday.

  “Come visit us in New York,” I said on our last call. “We’ll celebrate here.”

  “I’m not going to ‘visit us,’” said my mother. “I’ve told you, I don’t know any ‘us.’ I know you, my daughter. I do not know Aaron because I was not given the chance to know Aaron, so I do not have a relationship with Aaron. Maybe I would visit you, but I would not be visiting Aaron.”

  “It seems like Dara just wants you to like her friends,” I tell her now. I’ve gone outside to smoke and am sitting on a step by the receiving door. Across the street, in the nook of some stairs to an upscale doorknob showroom, a black kitten roots through a paper takeout bag. “People’s friends are very important to them, Mom.”

  “Pam was competitive with me,” she says. “It hurts that Dara would be friends with someone who danced with her like that in front of me.”

  I never know in these moments whether to validate her feelings or gently urge her in a healthier, less possessive direction. “I hear you,” I say.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay. I’m trying a diet I found online where I don’t eat long-chain carbohydrates. It’s supposed to help with my IBS.”

  “I remember when you stayed with me when you first got out of rehab. You had this special food that you brought with you in a lunch box. You were acting really weird about it, measuring it all out.”

  “That was my meal plan, Mom. They put me on a meal plan in rehab because I was bulimic.”

  She’s forgotten that I didn’t stay overnight with her. I visited her at the nudist colony for one afternoon, then left, nauseated by her polycule’s family photos hanging in the hallway. I’d only come because I knew her polycule would be out of town that weekend. We sat by the pool, and I pretended not to be staring at her next-door neighbor mowing his lawn, the way his dick swung in the sun.

  “Is that why you were shitting with the door open?” she says.

  “Yeah, it’s called accountability.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about, accountability. It hurts that Dara feels like she has to lie to me about her friendship with Pam. She went to the bathroom last night and left her phone on the nightstand. She got a text from Pam and I opened it, and they were obviously in the middle of a conversation but all their other texts had been erased.”

  “You snooped through her texts?”

  “I didn’t snoop through her texts. I read that one conversation because she left her phone out and she doesn’t have a lock screen.”

  “That’s still a violation.”

  “She doesn’t care.”

  The kitten backs out of the takeout bag with a hot dog bun in its mouth. The bun is soggy with ketchup that smears all over the cat’s face.

  “If she doesn’t care, then why would she delete all her other texts?”

  “She thinks I’m going to be mad at her for hanging out with Pam.”

  “And you are.”

  “Of course I am. She lied to me.”

  “Honestly, Mom, I don’t like you in this relationship.”

  “That’s what Georgina and Paul say. They miss me because I have to spend all of my time with Dara. She called out of work for me the other day. For me. She told them I was sick. She just wanted to take me to Disney. Georgina couldn’t believe it when I told her. I was standing in the open garage screaming at Dara on the phone. Just screaming my face off. I look over, and the old lady next door has stopped taking her trash out to watch me. She looked terrified.” She’s cackling.

  “You can leave anytime,” I say.

  “I didn’t ask you for advice.”

  “Okay. Why are you telling me this, then?”

  “I want you to listen.”

  “I’m not your emotional dumpster.”

  “I’m sorry my problems are too much for you. You asked how I was doing and I told you honestly. I just don’t need your advice.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means Butters was probably someone’s cat, Nina.”

  “What? Butters was a stray.”

  “Cats are very curious. Our neighbor’s cat comes into our yard all the time. If I didn’t know better, I might think it was a stray.”

  “Butters was scrawny and covered in fleas. She wanted to belong to someone.”

  “Did you take her to the vet?”

  “Can you stop? What does this have to do with Dara?”

  “You’re so fucking selfish and irresponsible.”

  I hang up. I am giddy as I block her. “I’m never speaking to my mother again,” I say cheerfully, almost proudly, to the other bookseller when I return to the registers. I send out an all-staff email telling everyone to lie to my mother if she calls the store looking for me. They already pity me. When the better Nina asked what my eye patch was for, I told her I was mugged, then pulled it down to show her the lake of blood that’s filled in the western region of my eyeball, turning its whiteness red.

  WE HAVE BEDBUGS. We discover them after a line of welts appears on my back, inflamed and itching, each larger than a silver dollar.

  “I don’t have any,” says Aaron, showing me his lily-white skin, his ton
e suggesting that what I know in and on my very body is probably imaginary. I turn over our box spring and rip the fabric from the bottom, and live bugs come spilling out across the floor among tiny white pellets of eggs. The nearest book is William Gass’s On Being Blue, so I grab it and start crushing them. They’re clumsy, and blind, and flat, and they fall between the floorboards, into the hollows, out of my reach.

  On the phone, we’re told that in order to be completely certain the infestation is eradicated we will have to throw out our library. My library. I’ve discovered that Aaron doesn’t like to read. He’ll read things online, is adept at slipping into a Wikipedia hole and the deeper pages of IndieWire, but he hasn’t read a novel since college, when he consumed all of Charles Bukowski in one semester. The only books Aaron owns are Factotum, Women, and Love Is a Dog from Hell, plus whatever I bring him home from the bookstore—so far a history of the Oneida sex cult and Scar Tissue, Anthony Kiedis’s memoir. Aaron is now writing a script loosely based on Kiedis’s life, blended with elements of his own. It’s a period piece.

  Even if I do get rid of my books, we find out, there’s really no guarantee we’ll be rid of the bedbugs because “they can travel through the walls from apartment to apartment,” says the exterminator, now standing in our bedbug-infested studio to carry out his inspection. Our building consists of seven floors, with eight units on each floor. Some tenants have been here forty years, I tell him. “Some of them probably know they have bedbugs and don’t care,” he says. He explains in great detail how poison kills them by destroying the waxy coating around the bedbug, causing it to slowly desiccate and die. “We also add a gel that they walk through that shuts down certain biological functions,” he says.

  “Do you ever feel bad for them?” says Aaron.

  “No,” he says. “They outnumber us probably a million to one.”

  “Are you serious?” I say.

  “Each female lays up to five hundred eggs. They can go for up to a year without feeding. I enjoy killing them.”

  “Will the pesticide hurt our plants?” says Aaron. Lately he’s been pouring extra attention into the plants, overcorrecting for our last fight. He sends me updates about the plants when I’m at work, as if they’re our children, as he’s home all day unemployed and otherwise feels useless. In place of working regularly, even part-time, he has made of himself a housewife. The apartment is his domain, and in addition to not trusting me to cook independently, he now also doesn’t trust me to water the plants appropriately. If I try to water one of them, he tells me it’s the wrong day for “that guy.” He’s given each plant a name. My favorite is Bolígrafo, the money tree, because I named it and therefore feel some ownership over it.

  THAT NIGHT, I page through every book on my bookshelves. I’m looking for any sign of activity: carcasses, pellets, brown bloodstains. I kneel on the floor while Aaron sits on the love seat above me, complaining about the hassle of having to do everything he’s actively not doing. Eight bags of laundry sit in our kitchen, ready to be hauled down the street and washed then dried for an hour on high heat. He begins reading aloud about bedbugs, as if any further research is necessary after questioning the exterminator. “They mate through traumatic insemination,” Aaron informs me. “The male stabs the female in the abdomen with his needle penis.”

  It takes me until three in the morning to put every book I own into plastic garbage bags that I double-knot at the top in an attempt to suffocate the bugs. There’s nothing more I can do to sanitize the books because we don’t own a microwave, but I can’t let go of them, either—I’ve spent the year since moving into the studio building up my library after leaving most of my books on the curb in Bed-Stuy. There was no room for them at Leonard’s.

  I harass Aaron into helping me carry the rest of the bags down the street to the twenty-four-hour laundry. We’re there until eight o’clock on the morning of the election. I stop at our local library on my way to the train and find a group of granola-eaters lined up against the outdoor wall mural depicting multicultural paper dolls connected at the hands. We greet each other over their children’s strollers. The sun rises. I begrudgingly vote for Clinton.

  Twenty-Two

  We stay at Aaron’s parents’ house on Staten Island while an exterminator goes through our apartment and douses everything with neurotoxins. Aaron’s parents’ new Maltipoo is untrained, so there are wee-wee pads all over the floor. Everyone in the house is pretty confident about where we each think this election is going. I suspect Aaron’s father voted for Trump, but he isn’t admitting it. He would never vote for Hillary. He keeps his eyes trained on Fox News. He’s stroking the Maltipoo and gently kissing her on the mouth over and over. As a first-generation assimilationist with land-owning parents, Aaron’s father admires Trump’s xenophobia and rabid individualism. He likes to think of himself as a businessman. I watch him bliss out as the numbers climb, as my hope sinks, then disperses entirely. I think the new dog may be the only thing in this world that brings Aaron’s father any true happiness. He falls asleep each night holding her beside Aaron’s mother, whom he never touches in front of us. I imagine my rage concentrating into a tight ball, becoming a cancer growing in the center of Aaron’s father’s brain.

  I go upstairs around midnight and stare at the ceiling with the lights off. I feel the earth turning beneath me into a new epoch in which perdition is actualized and the meek die under gunfire, starvation, acid rain. Aaron comes in and lies down beside me in the dark. He can tell I’m upset, so he whispers to me as if I’m a child.

  “I’m not that worried.”

  “Of course you’re not,” I say. “What do you have to worry about?”

  “What do you have to worry about?”

  “My reproductive health. My mother. Nuclear war. Our future children. Every animal species. Everyone who isn’t a millionaire. Every nonwhite person I know.”

  “You’re being dramatic,” he says. “The president doesn’t have that much power.”

  I sit up and look at him: a shart stain on the tighty-whities of humanity. Lying here in his childhood bedroom, light spilling in from the hallway, he looks like a prepubescent Boy Scout who’s never controlled an erection. Aaron hated his childhood. “I was powerless,” he’s told me. He hated the limitations of his body and brain; hated and rejected the idea that he didn’t know everything. He resented any restrictions placed on his movement or his personal achievements, others’ failures to recognize and reward his genius. Aaron is ashamed that he ever was a child, derives no pleasure from remembering it. He hates asking for permission, for instance to use his father’s Netflix log-in. He hates having to ask me for money. It reminds him that even in his adulthood, he is in so many ways still such a fucking child. He refers to his twenties as the “prolonged adolescence of the artist.” Yet he believes that if others are struggling, it’s due to their failure.

  “Who did you vote for?” I say.

  “I didn’t vote.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t have time.”

  “You had all day, Aaron. The library is down the street.”

  “I was waiting for the exterminator.”

  “He came at three o’clock. You could have gone at any time.”

  “What’s the point?” he says. “It makes no difference. It’s a rigged system. I don’t even like either candidate.”

  “I hate you,” I say, standing from the bed. I throw the lights on and begin packing my suitcase. “I truly hate you and I want a divorce.”

  “Can you stop saying that every time we argue? It hurts my feelings.”

  “Good,” I say. “I’m glad you’re in pain. I want you to be in pain. It amazes me that you even have feelings.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “You know what’s not fair? Our country just elected someone who thinks it’s okay to grab women by their genitals. Who brags about it.”

  “And that’s my fault? You’re being ridiculous. Where are you going?”


  “That’s none of your business anymore.”

  “Our house is full of bug spray.”

  “I don’t care. I’d rather die than stay here with you.”

  “Will you just calm down?”

  “Has that ever worked?” I say, chucking a pair of shoes at his head. He blocks them with his forearms. “In the history of humanity, has it ever worked to tell a woman to fucking calm down?”

  I jump on the bed and start mashing the pillows into his face. He screams. I knee him in the jaw and then march across the room to pick up the shoes, throwing them as hard as I can toward my suitcase.

  “You’re insane,” he says.

  “And you’re a piece of shit,” I say, sticking my finger in his face. He covers himself as if I’m going to hit him. “Don’t ever talk to me again, you privileged, useless prick, you’re a fucking embarrassment.”

  I STAND ON the sidewalk wrapped in my jacket waiting for my Uber. It’s one in the morning, and TVs flicker behind curtains down the street. The sounds of white people celebrating light up Staten Island. I am crying softly. Ten miles from here, the Fresh Kills Landfill is seeping through the ground and poisoning everything in its midst. It was once the largest landfill and the largest man-made structure. I’m half a mile from the corner where Eric Garner told Daniel Pantaleo, an officer who pledged to be faithful to him unto death, ten times that he couldn’t breathe, before passing out forever. Two figures smoke on the porch across from me, watching.

  Aaron comes outside. “Nina, stop yelling.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Aaron.”

  “This is what I’m talking about. Am I not allowed to have my own opinion?”

  “I’m aware of your opinion and I want nothing to do with you.”

  “I wish we could talk about this maturely.”

  “Me, too. I wish you were any kind of man.”

  “I know what this is really about.”

  “Do you.”