Book Three_A Codependent Love Story

by Paloma Meir

  “I like to make her laugh, and yes I would have done that.” I considered hanging up and never speaking to her again in my life.

  “Really? You would have dropped out of school to travel around with her? How would Danny have liked that?”

  “I need a break from school and you actually,” I picked at the scab on my knee. “Danny would have been fine with it.”

  “Does that mean he’s over her? I feel like she waiting for him to go and get her. He’s such a jerk. Why didn’t he just break up with her instead of sending her to Madrid? What a control-freak.”

  “He’s not over her, and he’s not going to go get her. He’s waiting for her to come home.” I lay down upon the dirt path, tired. “Something about life experiences. Carolina, why are you always so angry? So unpleasant? Are you like this with everybody?”

  “He’s going to be waiting a long time then... No, I’m not like this with everyone. You never call me except when something goes wrong with her...” She let out an exasperated breath. “It’s nothing... She went to Spain, her roommates were awful, her boyfriend broke up with her, and she met someone else. Is any of that of that so shocking? Sounds normal to me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me she was attacked in the nightclub? You didn’t answer my question. Why are you so angry? I know it’s not just with me.”

  “Because she wasn’t attacked. They were grabbing at her. She took two years of self-defense classes. She’s been seeing a psychiatrist for five years, biofeedback, and every therapy her mom reads about. She wasn’t anymore upset about it than anyone else would be. She’s not as fragile as you like to think.” She made a very uncharacteristic grunting noise into the phone causing me to pull it away from my head and look at it. “I texted you her phone number. Call her if you’re so worried about her.” She said as I put the phone back on my ear.

  “I don’t have an international plan on my phone.” I wasn’t going to call her.

  “Then why did you ask for her number?”

  “Let me know if she’s okay all right? I’ll see you at my graduation. Bye.”

  “Stop Serge. I’m sorry, but you never call me. The last time I went into Boston to visit Zelda, you were too busy to come over to her apartment and see me. You didn’t even make it to dinner.”

  “I am always busy. I don’t know, but I don’t think I can do it anymore. I’m really tired. It’s been hitting me the last few days.” The nervousness I felt earlier with Danny came back strong. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll call you more often, and you try to go home over one of the breaks. It’s been three years, and Mom says you never call her...” I wanted to close my eyes and fall asleep.

  “I don’t like her motivational AA talks. She speaks in slogans. Her of all people... I’m interning at the local theatre this summer, maybe over winter break.” She spoke in a calmer tone.

  “Okay,” I closed my eyes. “See you soon.”

  “Don’t go. What’s wrong? I said I was sorry. You don’t sound well... Talk to me. You never talk to anyone. What can’t you do anymore? Summer’s coming up. Take a break, a real one.” She paused, “Is Danny okay? I didn’t mean to be so heartless. Do you want me to come down? I think the train leaves at 6:00. I could be at your dorm by 8:00.”

  “Danny will be fine. People break up... it’s not a big deal.” I opened my eyes to see a group of tourists walk around me with a mix of fear and curiosity in their eyes. I got up off the ground and moved to a bench. “I’m going down to Peru after graduation... I feel off... I’m worried that I’m not worried. I can’t explain it. I don’t think that I care anymore... about anything.”

  I sat on the bench until the sun went down talking to my sister, about everything. My goals that seemed too far away to ever reach. The endless nature of my studies, the onion like peeling away of aspects with no hope of ever reaching the center, and if it ever did reach the core, I worried the entire system would reset itself with a new unknown set of variables.

  I spoke in specifics in a way I never did with laymen. She listened patiently, not offering meaningless solutions, just being a friend. I wouldn’t say anything was resolved, but I felt lighter, my head clearer, the belief that time off would reawaken my ultimate purpose.

  I was still talking to my sister when I walked into my dorm room, but by then about her new boyfriend who seemed to be a very well read lumberjack. Her description of him reminded me of her high school boyfriend John. In her life, all of her friends would be of the working class, other than Zelda. This was very different from my life in that most of my friends other than Marianne would always be very rich.

  Lost in the conversation, I forced myself to listen to because I never liked to imagine my sister with boyfriends, I didn’t notice my two closet girlfriends from my dorm, Brianna and Caitlin, sitting on my bed. I interrupted Carolina as politely as possible to tell her I would call her back later.

  “Serge.” They stood up together, holding hands as if they were looking for courage. I worried something had happened to their grad school plans or funding. Brianna was on an academic scholarship like myself. Somehow over the past few years, I had been put in charge of their emotional life, empathetic fellow that I was.

  People were always surprised when I would tell them about MIT and how emotionally messy and normal the students were. They expected our personal lives to be as logically driven as our studies. Wrong. Brainy and driven as we were, we were all still in our late teens and early twenties and just as prone to making a mess out of our lives as your average trade school student. I would always use these two as an example.

  “Marshall Scholarship still on? Cambridge to Cambridge Brianna,” I smiled reassuring her, “Princeton didn’t find out about your little “nuclear experiment”?” I asked Caitlin. I’m not even going to get into what she thought nuclear energy could be used for. Some of the students, especially her, could get a little too creative in their thinking. A few even broke down completely, going back home never to be heard from again.

  “No” Caitlin paused but left her mouth open.

  “Where’s Arturo?” I worried maybe something had happened to him because of their dramatic behavior. Other than Marianne, most of the girls and women in my life would always have that flair for heightening emotion.

  “He’s at Stata.” Stata housed the computer science lab. Arturo studied technology with a special interest in artificial intelligence. I was lucky to have him as a roommate because one of the other myths of MIT, that everyone was a computer geek was not true either. Most of us could barely load software onto our laptops, a slight exaggeration, but not far from the truth.

  “Okay girls.” I didn’t care if the word girls offended them. Many of the female undergrads could be regarded as women but not these two. “I’m going to lay down before dinner. We can talk later.” The earlier nervousness came back as they stood blocking my bed in their intense way. I took a deep breath and counted the hours until graduation and escape to Lima with Arturo.

  “My anthropology class,” shouted Brianna.

  “That’s not true,” Caitlin interrupted.

  “That’s where I got the idea from.”

  “This has nothing to with 4th century Etruscans.”

  “I would love to hear the about the Etruscans at dinner. Meet me over at the dining hall at 7:00, okay?” I moved them aside and sat on the edge of my bed, waiting for them to leave. I thought maybe I should check on Danny.

  “We want you to come and live with us in our room,” Caitlin plopped down on the floor and pulled her knees up to her chest.

  “All three of us together. We only have two more weeks of school. Who knows when we’ll all be together again?” Brianna sat down beside her.

  “We have finals. We have to study.” A big sleepover party with the two of them was not something I was interested in doing, much as I liked to spend time with them. “I’ll see you at dinner.” I took a very Zelda-like breath and wished they would leave.

  “This is hard
to say,” She stood up, arms crossed against her chest. I liked my view of the very tall boyishly dressed Caitlin. Physically, she had always reminded me of the pixyish Celena.

  “The Etruscans...” Brianna muttered as she put her chin on her knee.

  “Could you stop with the Etruscans, Brianna?” She looked up at the ceiling, “Okay, the Etruscans.... The Etruscans were a polyandrous, they weren’t even that, more like a bacchanal...” She looked down meeting my eye, “Sex. We want you to live with us that way.” Her face turned bright red.

  I’m sure my mouth was wide open as I realized I wasn’t the only one cracking under the constant self-induced pressure of our academics. She was the brightest in our class. It wasn’t that her mind was stronger, in fact I definitely had more of the facts down than her. It was more the way her mind worked, much in the way the great Richard Feynman’s did. Caitlin was all about problem solving, seeing the world at a different angle than everyone else.

  Her flaw, which was strongly apparent in the moment, was not thinking her perverse sex plan through at all. She was studying Nuclear Physics, which had a big overlap with my goals in Astrophysics. There was a good chance that we would work together throughout our lives.

  I stood up as my mind ran down the list of pros and cons as it always did when making choices. I decided I didn’t care about the consequences. If Zelda could run off with a man her mother’s age and Danny could do, who even knew or understood what he was doing, then I could spend the two weeks in my own bacchanal. It’s not as if I hadn’t been sleeping with both of them on and off for the past two years, although always separately.

  “Both of you at the same time?” I looked down at the round and very dark skinned Brianna. She always had the most child-like wonder. She smiled and nodded her head. How the sheltered girl from New Delhi had changed over the previous four years.

  “Let’s go.” I held out my hand to Brianna and pulled her up to a standing position, “This can’t be real.” I thought of how prank happy the whole school became the last few weeks of the academic year.

  “It’s real. You... I can’t explain it...” Caitlin took as step closer to me.

  “You always keep us out of trouble. I would have gone back home after the first semester if it weren’t for you.” Brianna wrapped her arm around me. I couldn’t even remember her first semester.

  “That’s what friends do for each other.” I shook them off and sat back down on the bed. “You two don’t owe me anything.” I was disappointed because there was no way I would let them “pay off” their imaginary emotional debt with sex.

  “Why do you listen to Brianna?” Caitlin grabbed my arm and pulled me back up. “We want to experiment. Come on, we decorated our room and have lots of snacks.” She turned my face to hers and kissed me while Brianna took my hand and rubbed it across her breasts.

  “I can fuck both of you at the same time?” I whispered in her ear.

  “Yes,” she whispered back.

  I turned to Brianna and placed her hand inside my sweaty soccer shorts.

  “It’s all theoretical until you kiss Brianna. Do it Caitlin.” Brianna’s face lit up while Caitlin looked nervous. I would have thought it the other way, but what did I know anymore?

  Caitlin craned her lips out to the eager Brianna. I removed her hand from my shorts and took a step back. My mind ran through the pros and cons again, and again I thought better of going down that list.

  “Let’s go. Arturo could come back.” I grabbed their hands and walked them very quickly up the two flights of stairs to their room.

  They had decorated by pushing the beds together and spreading Brianna’s scarves from her unworn saris across the bed and also tacked them onto the ceiling giving the small room a feeling of a Bedouin tent.

  The study desks had been pushed together by the window. They were covered with candles, a big mistake with all the, I was sure highly flammable, fabric flapping around the ceiling and walls.

  I walked around the beds that took up most of the room to blow out the overly scented candles and possibly save the lives of everyone in our dorm. I smiled as I looked down at all the fruit, nuts and vegetable samosas Brianna knew I liked.

  Touched by the thought they had put into our bacchanal, I reached out for an apple only to see off to the corner a platter of chocolate chip cookies. Zelda filled my mind. I turned around to head back to my room.

  I took a few steps, almost dizzy, swerving around what was supposed to be our bed of over-indulgence. My eyes focused on the floor to keep my bearings as I headed to the door where my temptresses stood.

  “Are you okay?” Caitlin asked.

  “I don’t know.” I took a good look at the girls who had been more good friends than anything else. They stood together, eyes open wide, confusing me. “It’s the cookies. It’s not something.... I’m going to put them in the hallway.” Brianna looked at Caitlin and giggled.

  “I’m going to assume you didn’t put much thought into this beyond the design of the room?” I pushed Zelda out of my head and went back to the tables and picked up the plate. My hand shook. “Change out of your clothes, put something light on.” Neither one of them had ever liked nudity, always wrapping sheets around themselves if they had to walk around my room.

  Veronica wasn’t like that I thought as I opened the door and practically threw the cookies into the hallway as if they were radioactive. I closed the door and flipped the light switch on the wall off, filling the room with the low light of the receding day. I hoped that would make them more comfortable.

  “Come on Caitlin, top off.” I ran my hands down her arms and lifted her sweatshirt off. She looked into my eyes blind with trust. “You’re beautiful Caitlin.” I took her face in my hands and kissed her very gently. Brianna came up behind me and rubbed what felt like her bare chest on my back.

  “We’re off to a good start. Don’t you think?”

  …

  By the fourth day, I understood why Polyandrous societies hadn’t thrived. I pledged my everlasting love to Caitlin. Caitlin pledged hers to Brianna. Brianna just wanted to take a nap.

  Every position, every combination had been experienced to the fullest in those first three days. Rolling around hungry for each other and food that we didn’t have enough of in their room.

  I lost interest in anything that wasn’t Caitlin, ravishing her body, complaining if she rolled away from me to Brianna. I asked her to marry me, telling her it had always been her and no one else. It didn’t even make sense as I was saying it.

  She didn’t respond to me, only lusting after Brianna as I worshipped her body in every way. She held out her hands to Brianna, touching her, encouraging her to join us again. I would raise my head from Caitlin’s long legs and nod my head in the negative with a very stern look on my face, making Brianna laugh and roll further away from us.

  “Don’t you ever stop talking?” Caitlin asked as the sun went down. “I think it’s time you went back to your room.”

  “I’ll never leave you,” I screamed out with the final thrust.

  “I have to study. Come on.” She slid out from under me and stood up, crossing her arms. “We’ll see you tomorrow or the next day. Right Brianna?” She looked over to see her one true love, and my mortal enemy curled up in the corner of the bed asleep.

  “But I love you.”

  “I know, you keep saying that.” She held out her hand, which I took because it was the hand I worshipped. She pulled me out of bed with a strength that only a goddess could possess. “We all need food, sleep and most of all showers.”

  “Only if I’ll see you in the morning, just you,” I sneered to my napping rival.

  “In the morning everything will be as it was before.” She picked my clothes up off the floor and thrust them into my hands.

  “We’ll always be together,” I promised as I put them back on and thought that we did need showers. We hadn’t bathed since we had snuck into the communal bathroom two nights before.

&nbs
p; “Serge, it’s over.” She put her hand on my shoulder and pushed me out the door and locked it behind me. I stood in the hallways sneakers in hand, tears in my eyes and hole in my heart.

  I stared at the door angry that Caitlin couldn’t see how we were meant to be together as soul mates for the rest of our lives. I turned toward the stairwell and took my first steps away from the only true love I had ever known. A thought crossed my mind. Maybe I had misinterpreted Caitlin and her love for Brianna. It became clear as my pace picked up. Caitlin had not wanted Brianna to feel left out. That had to be it. Of course Caitlin recognized our eternal connection.

  I flew down the steps and knew there would be a text any moment confirming her love for me and asking how we could let down Brianna gently. As I rounded the corner down onto my floor, I thought of how Caitlin had said the same things I had said to her, to Brianna. How her hand only reluctantly let go of Brianna’s when I pulled her away. How she stared at her as I consumed her body.