The Man I Love

by Suanne Laqueur

  “It’s real,” he whispered. “It’s real and it’s something. I know, Dais. Believe me, I know.”

  Erik’s dreams were on him again, too. He’d wake up yelling into the dark and Daisy would bring him back into the light. She curled up against his back, her hand flat against his pounding chest, her head on his head, murmuring him back into rest.

  But rarely back into her body.

  * * *

  Daisy’s team of trainers and therapists was more than pleased with the rate of her leg’s progress. Both calf and thigh were getting stronger by the day. Oddly, the most challenging injury to overcome and the most chronically troublesome all her life was the ligament damage in her ankle.

  “Come on, Marge, that’s like being shot in the ass and going blind,” David said in mock disgust. “Can’t you do anything right?”

  Once, not long ago, Daisy would have rolled her eyes, clucked her tongue or outright ignored David’s teasing. Now she laid her temple against his upper arm and laughed. David was allowed to call her Marge now. Daisy allowed him anything. He had proved himself Erik’s true and trusted friend, and Daisy herself was too singularly and fanatically focused on her goals to be bothered by his ribbing. Nothing bothered her.

  Or so it seemed. The brave face she put on in the daylight was nothing indicative of what transpired in the dark.

  Only Erik knew what came in the night.

  He watched Daisy work. Nobody worked harder, fought tougher. He could see, almost taste the frustration, and he knew the unending aggravation from her leg’s unwillingness to cooperate was nearly unbearable. It was offensive to her. For Daisy was so used to her body doing what she told it to do. Every dancer was.

  “Dancers are narcissistic as hell about their bodies,” she said. “We love the mirror.”

  They were lying in bed, up in the carriage house. The last full moon of August hung in a corner of the window.

  “You have a fierce vain streak if you’re a ballet dancer,” Daisy said, “and you feel no shame about it. You’re entitled to it because you’ve been working your body to death for years. You hate the mirror. The mirror tells the truth. Ballet is so cruel because it allows one right way to do a step or pose, and fifty wrong ways. And on those good days, when you look in the mirror and you see it, you see your reflection looking just the way you want it to? Then God, you love the mirror. It’s our drug. It’s every dancer’s little, twisted addiction.”

  He could take it as a cue to launch into a pep talk, assure her she would find the fix again. But Erik understood her at a much more elemental level. She didn’t need him telling her what she already knew. He let her be, and let her work it out.

  “It’s so hard,” Daisy said. She was sitting up now, looking out the window, out over her mother’s rose gardens bathed in silver moonlight. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve had one vision all these years, being a principal dancer in a ballet company.” She looked back at him. “I don’t know if it’s going to happen now. I’m fighting like hell, but at the same time… I feel like I need to start thinking like you, and having some other irons in the fire. What’s my Plan B?”

  “Any ideas?”

  “None. I don’t know what else I am,” she said, her voice splintering apart. “I can’t think of anything else I…” She trailed off, sighing, her chin on her hand. “You have so many books on your shelves, Erik. I just have one.”

  He lay on his elbow with his body curved close to her. His hand ran down the length of her hair and along her spine, then back up again. “Think you would ever teach?” he asked.

  Her mouth twisted. “I guess. Keesja says nobody plans to be a dance teacher. It just naturally evolves for some. Maybe it will with me.”

  Erik watched her, helpless. Helpless with love for her. And admiration. All these weeks he had been watching her gather her will during physical therapy, amass every shred of cunning and ingenuity, and settle the bit of recovery between her teeth. It broke her down. She fought and lost. She cried bitterly, but they were her productive tears, her means to go back and try again.

  Now she was turning her laser focus inward, taking an unflinching look at what she might or might not be able to do, facing up to the practical decisions which might need to be made in the near future. And making a plan. Or at least, making the plan to make a plan.

  He laid his palm on her leg, across the scars on her inner thigh.

  “We’re all shaped by our scars,” Omar had said, as he inked a daisy into Erik’s wrist.

  “I love you so much,” Erik whispered. He loved her calm, pragmatic poise. She took on her problems without drama or tantrums. Beneath her stillness lay rich and complicated passion. Erik knew how scared she was. But afraid or not, Daisy would look her life in the face and do what she had to do.

  “I’ll be there,” he said. “Whatever you want to do. Or not do. I’ll be there.”

  She looked at him, the moonlight in her eyes. “I know how to dance,” she said. “And I know how to love you.”

  “There’s a book on your shelf,” he said.

  They stared, breathing each other, pulling into their little haven.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she said.

  “You’ll never have to know.” He smiled, reached and tucked her hair behind her ear. She lay down again. In what had become a ritualistic gesture lately, he set his daisy tattoo—now with the added Hindi script beneath it—against the little red fish inked by her hip.

  Petal by Petal

  They came back to Lancaster in late August.

  The girls moved into Jay Street. The boys moved into Colby. They unloaded and unpacked, then clipped back the stray branches in the gap of the hedge separating their backyards. Open for business.

  After a week of classes, they threw a little dinner party. Daisy and Lucky cooked. David came over. And John Quillis, now firmly established as part of their clan. John’s height was up an inch and his voice down an octave. His face was shedding its babyish curves, sporting a careless growth of beard. He looked adult. And a little haunted. In the light of the kitchen table, they all looked older and battle-worn. Yet as they ate and laughed and passed around a bottle of red wine, they talked optimistically about what lay ahead.

  Lucky was designing a dance therapy minor to go with her physical therapy major, and using Daisy as her case study thesis. Daisy hadn’t yet been green-lighted to go back to class. She was doing her therapy and her training sessions and had christened the fall semester, “Operation Irons in the Fire.” She was taking psychology, creative writing and art history, and auditing a course in French literature.

  She was also teaching.

  Kees took over as director for both the contemporary and ballet divisions, holding down the fort until a new ballet head could be hired. Short-staffed, he wanted Daisy to cover some of the lower-level technique classes. She balked at first. “I don’t teach,” she said, partly indignant, partly terrified.

  Preoccupied and stressed, Kees would have none of it. “Consider this your senior project. Teach the damn class or I’ll flunk you.”

  To her surprise she was good at it. More than good. “She’s a natural,” John said. “Like who didn’t see that coming?”

  “Duh,” Will muttered.

  Will’s appearance had shocked everyone: he had cut his hair. Not a mere trim, but cropped close down to the scalp. Even after a week, Erik barely recognized him. He gaped all during dinner, still getting used to the startling presence of Will’s facial features. He was all eyes and jaw. Exposed and raw. Dangerously handsome.

  “Dude,” Will said, “you keep staring at me like that and we’re gonna have to take it upstairs.”

  Erik rose out of his seat. “Let’s go.”

  John got up as well. “I’ll witness.” And the table broke up laughing.

  “What possessed you to do it?” Daisy asked, touching Will’s head.

  Will shrugged. “I just felt the need to do something dramatic. You and Fish g
ot tattoos. You know what I mean.” He massaged his left wrist as he talked. The surgeons had saved the middle finger—no end of jokes there—and Will had spent the summer in intense rehab, gaining back control of his maimed hand. It pained him—both the lingering discomfort in his palm and the phantom pain from the two lost fingers.

  “Was Lucky mad?” John asked.

  “Furious,” Lucky said, smiling.

  “Only because I did it without telling you.” Will sunk a little in his seat. “I didn’t think that part through too good. None of us is really into surprises anymore.”

  “No shit.” John said.

  “But once the shock wore off… What the hell, it’s just hair. It grows back.”

  Lucky ran her hand over Will’s crown. “It’s like velvet,” she said, a little dreamily. “Especially when you rub against the nap.”

  “Yeah, with your inner thighs,” David muttered and again the table broke up.

  Erik laughed along, but he kept an ear peeled the next few weeks, listening for Will and Lucky’s customary noises in the middle of the night. Either they were having quieter sex or, like Erik and Daisy, they weren’t having much at all. Erik desperately wanted to ask. Hit the gym or go for a run and bring up the topic. Ask Will if he and Lucky were having trouble in bed.

  But he didn’t. It was awkward. And such a fucking drag. He thought his physical relationship with Daisy would get better back at school. Back in the cradle of their romance.

  It didn’t.

  Their desire was back—whether it was from the campus vibe, or from the memory of past sexual encounters splashed all over the apartment on Jay Street, the love call was loud and undeniable. Yet the love itself was unremarkable.

  Daisy had to struggle to come. Moves and tricks Erik had once brought her around in minutes, but now brought only an indifferent, dulled pleasure. “It feels good, it’s just not taking me anywhere,” she said, her voice filled with a confused frustration. “It’s like I’m stuck. I don’t know.”

  “I know,” Erik said, confused by his own experience. He felt like a klutz in bed. Getting aroused was no problem, the urge struck often, but once in the act, he couldn’t get completely into it. He wasn’t exactly stuck, but he couldn’t seem to find the hook during sex, the ability to step off the edge of himself and fall headlong into a climax. It was like sleeping with one eye open, or one foot planted on the floor: he couldn’t give over to pure pleasure anymore, he felt constantly braced for something.

  Cruelest of all, sometimes the sex was sweet and connected, but followed by an anxiety so intense, it left them reeling and shaking, if not outright physically sick. It was a sucker punch tactic filling Erik with an angry dread. They’d be cuddling together in the afterglow, minding their own damn business, and little by little he would start to feel sick, feel the unexplainable fear coming out of the dark.

  “When the wolves come,” Daisy said. To her the angst was like a pack of hunting beasts loping over the horizon, coming to tear them apart.

  Erik fought it. Tried to make a stand, using all the mantras and talismans at his possession, but it was no use. The undefinable terror ensnared him like a trap, a fish in a net, dragged down by a churning undercurrent of something is wrong, something is wrong, and no means to fix it other than throwing more and more time at it.

  Beside him Daisy shivered, caught in the same net. “Why is this happening?”

  “I don’t know.” He had no answers. He could not help her, could not save her from the wolves plucking her apart, petal by petal.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. They clung to each other, shaking it out, trying to beat it back with jokes.

  “Gotta love the afterglow.”

  “Most people have a cigarette. We have a panic attack.”

  They were both free-falling, gripped with a terrible foreboding they could not explain. Shivering, freezing cold, pulling their clothes on and seizing extra blankets.

  “Let me spoon you,” she whispered.

  “Please.”

  She pressed up against his back, knees behind his, her hand flat against his knocking heart. Laying this way, with Erik sandwiched between her hand and her body, pressure from both sides, seemed to be the only calming remedy.

  “At least we’re both feeling it,” he said.

  “We’re in it together.”

  “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have a nervous breakdown with than you.”

  “Oh, honey. You say the sweetest things to me.”

  “I’m trying to be funny about it. I don’t know else what to do.”

  “I love you. We’ll get through it.”

  “I love you.”

  “We just have to get each other through it and…fuck sex.”

  He laughed. “Fuck sex.”

  “Fuck this.”

  “Fuck this fucking fucked-up world. Jesus Christ, what the fuck.”

  “I love you. You’re fucked-up and I love you.”

  “I love your fucked-upness.”

  They were trying so hard but they were so young. Unskilled and powerless at three o’clock in the morning when they ought to be consumed with each other. Instead they were being eaten alive.

  Pepparkakor

  Erik wondered how many important conversations had taken place while he was either up a ladder or holding one.

  He was holding one now for Joe Bianco, who was replacing a section of Christmas lights on the porch of La Tarasque.

  “You having nightmares?” Joe asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “How often?”

  “Few times a week,” Erik said.

  Joe grunted, yanking at the strand of lights which was caught on a nail. “Every night for me when I came home from Vietnam.”

  Erik pictured a younger version of Joe, maybe longer hair and a moustache. Bolting out of bed, gasping and sweating, waking up from the war.

  “For how long?”

  “How long every night? Years. The bad dreams. Jumping at loud noises. Always looking for danger. Years, it took.”

  Still holding the ladder, a foot on the first rung, Erik looked out over the property, at the last light of day turning the horizon pink and orange. The leaves were dead on the Japanese maples. Francine’s gardens were neatly wrapped up for the coming winter. Shrubs encased in burlap, the mulch piled high. Wood smoke hovered on the air.

  “Was it different dreams?” he asked. “Or just the same one over and over?”

  “A handful of different ones.”

  “And you still have them?”

  “Sometimes. Some things still have an effect. The sound of a helicopter. Not something I hear often but if I do, it makes me nervous. And thunder. I still hate thunder. Catch.”

  Erik caught the string of dead lights and handed up the new one, then the hammer, which Joe hooked through a belt loop. “For me it’s always the same dream. Just the one.”

  “What about Daisy?” Joe’s accent always seemed stronger when he was speaking names. Daisy’s name, especially, which softened and slurred into Dézi.

  “What about her?”

  “Is she having nightmares?” He glanced down at Erik and raised an eyebrow. “I never pretended you weren’t sleeping with her. You want me to start now?”

  Erik smiled at his shoes then looked back up at him. “She has them, too,” he said. “She wakes me up or I wake her up. I’d say at least three nights out of a week, someone is waking somebody up.”

  Joe held down his palm and Erik put a few nails into it. “I went to war, Erique, and saw death rain from the skies.” He kept speaking, punctuating each quiet sentence with a blow of his hammer. “I took apart land mines so my men could get through, then I put mines back together to kill other men. I blew up bridges and set fire to trees. I saw children gunned down in the fields where they played. I saw women with their bellies sliced open and men with their limbs blown off. I heard screaming in the night I cannot ever un-hear. But I did my tours and came home to buil
d a life where my own child could be safe. I deal with the nightmares because I think of them as extra insurance. I take them on. I can carry the burden, just as long as my family is safe.”

  He stopped, a forearm on the top of the ladder, the hammer poised in the air. “Then a boy with a gun goes after my daughter. Now it is my own child with her leg sliced open. My Dézi screaming in the night. And it turns out nothing I did made any difference.”

  Erik looked at him, seeing Daisy’s mannerisms and expressions flit in and out of his face.

  “What can you do with a world like this? No insurance exists. You can’t control who lives or who dies. All I know, Erique, is if my only daughter is having nightmares, then I want you sleeping next to her. Not just because you love her. But because you understand her.”

  Joe indicated the switch with the handle of the hammer, and Erik threw it. The porch lit up, gold and twinkling.

  “Ça y est,” Joe said, and carefully came down the ladder. He was struggling with an arthritic hip, resigned it would eventually need to be replaced. He was touchy about being coddled though. Erik helped him fold up the ladder and stow it as unobtrusively as possible.

  “Come with me a minute,” Joe said as they went back inside. They hung their jackets on the pegs in the mudroom, then Erik followed Joe’s limping gait down the hall to the small study next to the living room. The inner sanctum. Joe’s desk and bookshelves, antique map collections, and his two beloved Meyer lemon trees by the southwest windows. Both were in bloom, and the citrus smell from the blossoms was strong.

  “I’d like you to have something,” Joe said, opening a drawer in his desk. He drew out a small box of navy blue leather, a double, flourished rectangle embossed in gold on its top. He handed it to Erik.