by Trisha Cull
I cleanse myself of the obsession until all that’s left is passionate but tempered love and attraction. I can make it on my own now.
“But now you see things more realistically,” he says.
“Yes, I’m seeing things more realistically,” I say.
“You have a lot of things to look forward to right now,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
Clinical Note:
She is improving! No longer obsessing about me. Not as anguished by the fact that the boundaries in therapy are non-negotiable and healthy. We do still explore how denial serves her fantasies.
Richard takes me to Le Pichet, a quaint little restaurant not far from the hotel. It’s dimly lit with cool art on the walls. The street bustles outside with the sound of bands playing at local bars and restaurants.
I order a ham, egg and cheese soufflé. My wits are returning to me, and with my wits comes a ravenous craving for meat. I eat meat this one time only.
Richard orders the same thing and a half pichet of white wine. He sips slowly. He is, to me, a refined gentleman with a fine palate for wine and food. He does catering jobs on the side to supplement his painting pursuits.
“Your art would be so well received,” I say.
I have viewed his artwork on his website: bodies stripped of skin, all muscle and sinew, fibrous grains. I am drawn to his morbidity. He is a rare combination of goth and sweetness. He is the kind of man who wears designer wool pants with retro T-shirts and cool loafer shoes. Many of his paintings depict scenes of death: a small bird lying on its side, grey and white, charcoal; human bodies slaked of skin, fibrous grains of luminescent muscle. The human body backlit by golden light. The body is horrific and beautiful at the same time.
“What makes you drawn to images of the dead?” I say.
“It’s the lack of movement,” he says. “Solid figures versus bodies in motion. The substance of being.”
After dinner we go back to the hotel. I look at the walls, can’t decide whether to sit down or stand. He takes off his blazer, sits on the bed and falls back so he is laying down. His green T-shirt rides up a little, exposing his slender stomach and the small oval birthmark by his belly button.
I sit down on the bed next to him, conscious of my scars and think of all the men who have had sex with me, who think they have made love to me, whom I believed I made love to, and I realize this may be the first time I’ve ever made love to a man I actually love. I feel empowered by my sexuality. I am a woman, no longer a girl, but somehow always a girl at the same time, strong and innocent, passionate and playful, wise and wiser still.
Richard reaches over, places his hand on the small of my back, and I lay down too. I want him to want me for who I am, not for what I represent or how I look. I’m ready for him to want me. A moment later, we are kissing, gently, soft little kisses on my mouth and behind my ears. We roll into each other and make love.
Clinical Note:
More on erotic transference material as much as we can now that she is no longer having such intense feelings for me. In fact, there are only fleeting resurgences of the erotic transference now. She is doing very well in most ways.
On his second visit to see me, Richard and I make love almost every day. It’s the best sex of my life. No one has ever cared enough to actually search for me, to search for signs of my existence.
He finds me because I am here now and want to be found. I invite him to lay down upon me, but I no longer need to be pressed upon as if I will drift away without the weight of a man upon me.
We go grocery shopping, make gourmet dinners. He buys food I would never think of buying: quinoa, ricotta cheese, challah bread, eggs, fennel, a fresh basil plant, capers, potatoes. My culinary aptitude is greatly lacking. For years I have been sustaining myself on yogurt, cheese, rice cakes, cereal and noodle soup. I have not been able to afford or appreciate a more evolved and healthy food regime.
One night Richard is making carrot soup from scratch. Another night he bakes banana bread. Another night he makes Mexican fried rice and burritos with vegetarian ground round.
We gaze at each other across my green wood coffee table. He touches me frequently, always wanting to be connected to some physical part of me, but his touch is soft and non-threatening. So delicate are his artist’s fingers upon the various parts of my body that not once do I feel panic to escape and run screaming from the room.
When Richard isn’t touching me, I don’t feel a desperate need to cling to him, to harangue him in and suffocate him in the midst of my own fear of abandonment. We just fit together, nicely, sweetly, without angst or despair.
Richard comes to see me every month and returns to his house on Bainbridge Island between visits. His marital situation is peculiar. His wife knows he’s seeing me. They live separate lives under the same roof; Richard occupies a bedroom in the basement and his wife sleeps upstairs. They are parents to the boys but otherwise estranged from each other. Our goal is to one day live together while maintaining a close relationship with his children. It’s the best we can do for now.
“I still seek out the highs in this relationship with Richard,” I say. “I long for the rush. I worry about what will happen between us when things settle down.”
Dr. P smiles. He looks sexy in his blue and white checkered shirt with the three buttons undone down the front. I have always been drawn to his middle-aged man’s aesthetic, the wholesome clothing, the sexy collared shirts and sensible trousers. He’s just gotten his haircut. I gaze upon his haircut, the nape of his neck as he walks ahead of me into his office, holding the door open for me as he always does, and I am reminded again of my theory that it is at the nape of a man’s neck where his boyhood resides—all those unwanted haircuts, little by little his boyhood wilfulness severed until what’s left is a man’s resolve.
“It’s the polarity of your heart, Trish,” he says. “It’s your genetic makeup.”
I am wearing my vintage white lace strapless summer dress and brown leather sandals. It’s a hot summer day. Richard is visiting. The dress is lace, from bust line to hem with a solid white slip all the way down to the knees. I have lost some weight, enjoy my bare shoulders and décolletage, sense Dr. P gazing upon this open region of my flesh as he sits across from me now, and it makes me feel beautiful, it makes me feel like a woman, like a whole and healthy woman with a light tan on her skin and joy in her disposition.
“You need a lot of stimulation. You always have and you always will. This is part of your pathology, part of your genetic makeup. You will have to find a way to temper this need with the ordinariness of daily existence.”
My biggest problem has always been the bipolar tendency to seek out highs when the platitudes kick in. I have always needed a great and sprawling rush to ride. Or I have needed its opposite—crisis.
“You have a lot to look forward to now, Trish.”
“I hope we can always see each other,” I say. “I want to always know you.”
He smiles, leans back and stretches casually. “You keep saying that,” he says.
“What do you think the future holds for us?” I ask.
“There’s the ‘you’ in ‘us,’ and the ‘us’ in ‘us.’ You have to go forward in your life pursuing your humanity.”
“There was a time when I could not have fathomed leaving you,” I say. “I think I’m getting better, but I’ll always love you.”
When I leave he gives me a hug for the first time. This is the first time we have embraced. For years I have longed to touch him, have him touch me. But this is not sexual, and I am okay with this, miraculously, I am okay with this. I no longer need to be sexualized and lusted after by a man in order to feel valuable. He is patient and lightly holds me too. I smell his cologne, feel the warmth of his chest against my cheek, his arms around me, and for the first time in two decades, since I was a troubled teenager living in
a small town, dying with grief, I feel a great and presiding sense of hope.
Clinical Note:
Splitting of erotic transference. Trisha may be using Richard to distract herself from me. She is dating him now. Sex and romance may be overriding their friendship. She is, however, doing well.
“When I’m with you, I feel like my essential self,” Richard says. He is standing at my kitchen sink, scrubbing a glass bowl with baking soda and water to remove the dough residue left behind from making fresh pasta earlier in the evening. “When I go back, it feels like I’m putting on clothes.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He scrubs my bowl, tells me not to be sorry.
We make love. I let him make love to me. It’s my choice this time. I lay upon the bedspread exposed, the light of the streetlight outside making me silvery. He leans down, kisses me on the cheek, the forehead, my neck and collarbone, says, “I love you, Trisha.” I say, “I love you too,” and mean it.
We go on a walk to Moss Rock Park. He speaks to me of boundaries between people in love. “Sometimes, people forget where they begin and where the other person ends.” Then adds, “Marriage is political.”
“Yes,” I say.
“I want to marry you, Trisha,” he says. “I’m going to come live here, live with you, and I’m going to marry you.”
And I want to marry him too: not to be kept or saved, not to be resurrected or redeemed, but simply to love and be loved.
On the way to Moss Rock Park, in the middle of the street, Richard pauses to take a picture of the Garry oaks on the other side. He walks into the middle of the street, seemingly oblivious to traffic that could come around the bend any moment. He tries to frame the trees, adjusts the focus, then decides not to take the picture after all. “Another time,” he says.
I love this little fraction of time, this mysterious hesitation.
Our future exists inside this blank palate, this subtle interlude in which no image is captured.
At the summit of Moss Rock, we gaze at the city, Victoria’s lush greenness, so many trees: Garry oaks, cherry blossom, sequoia. We marvel at the bays, the peninsulas jutting out into the ocean like arms reaching for light at the edge of the glimmering horizon.
On the way down I say, “Shoot, I wanted to take a picture up there.”
He says, “Everyone has that picture.”
I ask him what path we took to get to the top. My footing is unsettled. I almost slip and fall, but he catches me, steadies me in his arms.
Richard sends me an email near the end of June:
June 22, 2012
Sweetheart,
When you wrote me in February, I had my feelings about you locked away in a huge box. It had a high fence around it, and outside of that perhaps a moat. With sharks in it. I had tried to break this huge love I had into parts by analyzing it. I wanted to store everything separately. I wanted to discredit the memories. “It wasn’t like that, it was like this.” It was a series of unfortunate misunderstandings masquerading as some kind of relationship. It was like it hadn’t even happened.
I had been tilting at windmills in the fog (or making sweet love to them).
This approach did not work. My love for you was indivisible; in order for me to destroy it I’d have had to destroy myself. I was, after all, immensely proud of myself for finding you and for following your thin, broken trail of breadcrumbs to your Prior Street cave. I did fall in love. I couldn’t escape that I loved that Richard. I loved the Richard that loved you. I wanted to be more like him. He wanted to be more like you.
So I made the box. I built the fence and then I dug the moat, found sharks for the moat. If I couldn’t dismember this love, this prisoner, at least I could build a dungeon. It took kind of a long time, especially since you wrote me every once in a long while to check in. Hey! This box is supposed to be locked. Prison is full.
So when you came and asked very nicely to visit the prisoner, you know, open the box, I hadn’t thought of that. You’re nice, and I love that about you.
You’re also a badass, and I love that about you, too. You may get tired of me. I know badasses like to hit the road just for the hell of it. Or you could very legitimately get tired of my relentlessly mixed metaphors. I might be uninteresting to you after a while (or by the end of this email) for any number of reasons. Our love is not mine or yours, though. It’s something we made together. You can stop regarding it, but it’s real. It’s very durable.
I love you, Trisha.
RLT
I’m twenty-five years old. My hair is long and blonde. My body is soft and voluptuous. I have very blue eyes. I’m sitting on driftwood, China Beach, looking out at the Pacific Ocean, hazy and white. There are smooth shining black stones in the water. The waves are crashing upon the rocks and pebbles, making the sound of rain beating hard against the trees, that sound of a steak sizzling in a pan. I am contemplating my existence, what I have done with my life so far. I am at peace in this moment, one of the few peaceful moments I will experience in the next fifteen years. I have done so little, travelled so little, written so little. Leigh is not yet a glint in my eye. My life stretches out before me.
I am thirty years old, sitting on the sofa in my and Leigh’s little apartment on Cadboro Bay Road, across from the high school with its bells ringing all day, with the rush of buses only feet outside our living room window. I am sitting on Leigh’s fancy sofa from his old life, surrounded by other remnants of his life, boxes piled around me, beautiful leather and wood dining room chairs, paintings stacked against one wall. I am sipping a dry martini, getting drunk, listening to Enya, not sure I want to be here, not sure I am in love with this man. Soon I will have a series of panic attacks, waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, staggering into the bathroom where I will cut myself with a razor blade, not badly—it will barely scar.
I am thirty-three years old, standing before Leigh in a white gazebo overlooking the Caribbean, waves crashing upon the rocks. It’s blazing hot. Rose petals flutter in the breeze. White tulle billows around me. My shoulders are bare, burning in the sun. My torso is tightly contained inside a white strapless wedding dress. I can hardly breathe. A sailboat with a bright spinnaker sails past in the distance. The bartender down the beach mixes mojitos in a blender. I hear the spinning of the blender, the crushing of ice. I smell mint—it is either real or imaginary mint—and rum, a memory of all the concoctions I have drunk here on my honeymoon in Cuba. Leigh is speaking to me. His mouth is moving. No sound is coming out. My mouth is moving too. No sound is coming out. We are moving our mouths silently before each other as the ocean sprays a fine mist upon us. I am not in love.
I am thirty-five years old, sitting on my bed in 408A, Eric Martin Pavilion, Victoria, BC. I am wearing blue scrubs, sedated and bleary-eyed, my wrists grazed lightly, blood dried along the cuts. I am stunned: I have left my husband, my husband has left me in here, my marriage is over, I have no belongings, just the clothes on my back, I have no money and bills mounting. Soon I will declare bankruptcy and venture into even greater depths of self-deprecation, crystal meth and crack cocaine, hallucinations, aliens in the clouds, God in the clouds and later still, cuts almost through to the bone, another hospitalization, three solid years of desperate love for Dr. P, three solid years of anguish and love and pain.
And now Richard:
I am laying on my bed in my Moss Street suite with its fireplace and hardwood floors, its ornate wooden walls and alcove ceilings. I am wearing pink pyjama bottoms and a short white cotton nightgown. Richard is cooking rice and salmon in my wasabi-green kitchen. It’s night, summertime, warm. A warm breeze drifts through the suite. Marcello lays sleeping on the couch in the living room. The TV glows in the distance, the volume on mute. The room is filling with steam. The room smells of basmati rice. The salmon will be pink and tender and perfectly cooked in a pan in the oven, glazed with hot but
ter and olive oil. We are listening to Bon Iver, “Stacks.”
There’s a black crow sitting across from me and his wiry legs are crossed And he’s dangling my keys, he even fakes a toss…
…This is not the sound of a new man or a crispy realization
It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away
Your love will be safe with me
Your love will be safe with me. Richard comes around the corner, sees me lying there on my side. He stops in the doorway, smiles, says he loves me and that I’m beautiful, that he wants to marry me.
Suddenly, my life is full of possibility.
Not so suddenly, I know myself, perhaps for the first time in my life, because I hung on and persevered.
I want to finish writing my book. I am writing poetry again. I am submitting essays and poetry to literary magazines.
I am happy.
I am in love.
I am these things and have come to this place with the help of doctors, family and a few close friends. I am here because of Marcello and Caravaggio, because they loved me and I love them. I am here because I remembered who I am, because, in the end, I have always been right here.
I want pure, simple, opulent love, something derived from deep inside me, not something tangible that can be plucked from the air or from the arms of a man. I feel it blossoming within, deep blue, then purple, violet, rose, and deepening again, pulsing, sunset, crimson, gold.
Epilogue
September 8, 2012
Chrysalis: Latin, chrysalis. Also known as aurelia or nympha. The pupal stage of butterflies.
I am standing at the lookout at the top of a long winding path that leads to the Pacific Ocean, Juan de Fuca Trail, Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
