The Other Side

by Lacy M. Johnson

  My Spanish Teacher leans against the door frame as I pull into the parking lot, as I climb the concrete stairs to his apartment—his tall, wide frame lit by the glow of the lamp inside. He takes a long swig from a bottleneck beer. I walk past him, through the living room, past the chair and the fax machine, down the hallway, turning lights out as I go. He follows behind me, his hand in my hand. In the bedroom, I take off my coat, unbutton my shirt, my limbs shaking, every hair standing on end. He leans into me. This is what he wants, I tell myself, leaning back into him. This is why I have come. Because I believe a grown man’s rough hands can give, and take from me, what I’ve lost in coming here. Now my jeans pool around my ankles. Lie down with me, I say. Before my teeth shake loose. Before weeds grow from my bones. The unwashed sheets. The open window. His body on top of me: heavy as a pile of stones.

  It’s strange, I think now, how even what the mind forgets, the body remembers. How the body remembers apart from the mind: the way of standing-beside or lying-under or sitting-above or rising-from. The body remembers the prepositions: its position in relation to other bodies. The raised shoulders, the lowered voice. How every muscle, even the tongue, can go stiff. Or shudder. How after the other is gone, the body continues on: beside, under, above, from. The shadow, the ghost, the trace. Habitus: second nature, a memory so deep the body will always remember.

  We drive sixty miles from his apartment on campus, where I sleep every night, to my parents’ home in the town with a one-block business district. They’re standing on the front porch when we arrive. They shake hands with him, invite us into the living room, say to us, Have a seat. I sit with Mom on the floral-print couch by the front window. My dad sits in a brown recliner by the door. The Man I Live With sits on the edge of the other floral-print couch, in a corner, by the bookshelves, where Mom displays her collection of porcelain dolls. Behind him, pastel pink and blue flowers weave up and down the wallpaper. Mom hung all of it herself before we moved in. I felt ashamed of it then. I feel ashamed of it now as we’re making small talk: Oh, yes, the weather is very unusual this year.

  Maybe it’s Mom who comes right out and says she is frankly shocked at how old he is: thirty-eight, exactly twice my age. Or maybe she first asks if he colors his hair. Then Dad wants to know if he has accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. I cover my face a little and sink deeper into the couch. The Man I Live With answers honestly; he’s told me in the car he will not placate these people. He delivers a moving lecture on world religions, including an in-depth deconstruction of the savior myth. Or it is not a lecture. Maybe he just waves his hands while telling my father his beliefs are the beliefs of a small-minded man.

  During the argument that follows, Mom occasionally chimes in for some jab about this man’s morals, his appearance, his age. He jabs back, more forcefully and with a sharper blade. Within the span of an hour, my dad’s face has turned three shades of red and he has left the room, close to purple, fully saturated with the conversation. Mom cries, sitting next to me on the floral couch. I pick at a thread on the pillow. I do not say a word.

  The Man I Live With puts our two plates on a little table by the window in the living room of his apartment: tonight it’s pescado a la Veracruzana. He plugs a CD into the player and we sit down to eat; the kitten jumps onto the table, attracted by the smell of the fish. He is asking about my day, about what I have been reading in my literature class, about what goes through my head while I’m cutting lenses at the Vision Center. I start to answer but then he is telling me about the flaws of capitalism, about how I will quit my job, how I will let him cover our expenses, about seeing Bob Marley in concert in Denmark, one of the last he ever performed. He tells me about the Danish political system and the anarchist camp in the center of Copenhagen. I’ll take you there, he says. A song comes on, one of his favorites. He puts down his fork, stands up, takes my hand, pulls me up and out of my seat. He holds my hand in his against his chest, his jaw against my forehead, the words in his throat sung so softly. We shuffle in circles from one side of the room to the other, back and forth, over and over, the kitten scarfing down the fish getting cold on our plates. His hand on my back so softly.

  He asks if I will love him forever.

  We leave for Mexico during the first week of summer vacation, stopping first in the southern part of the state to visit one of his half brothers, a former air force officer who works now for the Department of Justice. I sit mostly quietly on a lawn chair near the picnic table in the backyard, sipping an iced tea under the shade of a swaying oak tree, while The Man I Live With stands near the grill, his legs spread wide apart. He tells stories to entertain his nephews. He gestures wildly. His voice, his performance, fills the neighborhood.

  The next day we drive and drive, stopping only at the Continental Divide. In the photo, I’m squinting into the sun, one hand shading my eyes, the other hanging limply at my side. We descend from the mountains, through the pine trees and spruce trees and juniper trees, into a desert spotted with sagebrush and manzanita, past signs warning drivers not to enter dense smoke, straight to his mother’s apartment, where we stop to pick her up and take her out to dinner. A Spanish place, he tells me in advance. Order the fish, he says, as we scootch into a booth. They speak in Spanish to one another the whole time. I don’t need to understand every word to know she doesn’t approve. She asks about his children, his ex-wife. Her eyes plead with him from behind her glasses. We stay only one night at her apartment, where we sleep and fuck on her living room floor. She’ll hear us, I protest. I need you, he insists. Or maybe we stay two nights. Or four. Long enough for her to wash our laundry and tell me in her thick accent that my clothes look like tiny children’s clothes.

  Maybe at that time, when she is holding my shorts an arm’s length from her body, The Man I Live With has already told me that his mother was unmarried when she got pregnant with him. A young girl away at school in Caracas, knocked up by a Finnish oilman. She came to the United States to give birth, making her son an American citizen. She gave him the last name of his father and took him back to Venezuela to be raised by his grandmother and aunts. Or maybe I don’t know this yet. Maybe The Man I Live With tells me this story as we cross the border into Mexico, or while traveling south along the coast. I’m certain he’s already told me when we attend a bullfight in the resort town, and when he parades me through the town mercado like a prize, because all the next day while we drive down the coastal highway, he keeps bragging about what a good lover he is. It’s in my blood. A birthright, he says. He says he’s seduced women on almost every continent: women in tents and upper bunk beds in hostels. This is how he left Venezuela, he tells me as we approach the resort town, by hitchhiking in a woman’s sleeping bag. He hitchhiked across Europe this way, across Asia, and back to the States. We check in at the hotel, drop off our luggage, fuck in the shower, and dress for dinner. Before I order he starts telling me how another woman should come live with us. Would we share her? I ask, feeling vaguely curious. He explains that she would not be our girlfriend, only his. You are just not enough. We’d all be friends eventually, of course. That’s the only way it would work. By the time he’s turning the key to our hotel room, I’m fuming. This isn’t part of our deal. Actually, you’re not that great in bed, I say, emboldened by all the margaritas. Actually, maybe you should work a bit harder at satisfying me. I’ve been faking it for months.

  The Man I Live With yells and slams lamps and luggage and furniture around the room. He opens the door and throws my suitcase into the sand. He rips my clothes off and throws them into the hallway. He grabs a fistful of my hair and slams my skull against the bed, holding me there while he spits in my face. He calls me Puta! Chingada! He shakes and shakes and shakes me until I am limp and then he storms out the door.

  The next morning, he’s calmer. He says he’ll put me on a plane and send me back home, where I can go on being a stupid fucking hillbilly.

  But I have no life back home to return to. I’ve quit my j
ob at the Vision Center, like he asked. Focus on your studies, he said. I’ll cover the expenses. I can’t ask my parents for help. They’ve said I’m on my own. My Older Sister stopped taking my calls when she learned I never slept a single night in that cheap studio apartment in the student slum between campus and downtown. You lied to me, she said before she slammed down the phone. I don’t talk to the other students in my classes. I have no money, no belongings, no place to live.

  I say I’ll do anything to stay with him.

  The Man I Live With tells a good story. In the evenings, after we return from Mexico, he plays bridge and backgammon on his computer and wins nearly every time. Or he plays tennis on the courts at the recreation center and beats men half his age. I love to watch him play: his arms crossing back and forth across his body, his body crossing back and forth across the court, sweat running down his face and chest and back. On the weekends he watches Argentinian films and when I ask who Perón is he explains to me about the Dirty War. He makes beautiful dinners with names I can’t pronounce while my cat curls on my lap. We have discovered, after leaving the cat at the university animal hospital all summer during our trip to Mexico, that it has feline leukemia. I consider returning to my job at the Vision Center to pay for a blood transfusion, but The Man I Live With wants me to concentrate on getting good grades in school. He’s still sulking about what I said in Mexico, and I believe that if I do what he wants he will forgive me, and then things will go back to the way they were before, when I first moved in, when we would dance around the living room. Instead of skipping class, or showing up late, or a little drunk or a little high or low on drugs, I am the first to arrive in class, coffee in hand, and always have my best work done.

  On the weekends, we drive downtown, where the bartender at our favorite dive talks to us from behind the bar and mixes us drinks. Sometimes the bartender’s girlfriend is there, too, a veterinarian at the university animal hospital, and she explains to us that, even with the blood transfusions, my cat cannot possibly live much longer with feline leukemia. The band starts playing and we stumble out to the dance floor, standing close together, my head on his shoulder, his chin on my forehead, swaying back and forth very slowly in no relation to the music. He calls me skat, a Danish word meaning pet, darling, treasure. He asks if I will love him forever.

  One night, while we’re watching television at home, a Hair Club for Men commercial comes on, and the announcer asks: Do you have a problem with thinning hair? And The Man I Live With says No, as if he and the announcer are having a conversation, and we both laugh very hard for a long time, because his hair is absurdly thick and long and curly and not remotely thinning, and his laughter perpetuates my laughter, and my laughter perpetuates his laughter, and when we finally stop laughing, I snuggle into the space between his arm and his chest and we continue watching television.

  When the cat finally gets very very sick, we take it to the hospital and it is put to sleep. We wrap its body in a tiny blanket I have knit from fluffy blue yarn and bury it in the yard behind our apartment. The Man I Live With makes a beautiful dinner while I am crying in the bed and when I come out of the room and sit down at the little table by the window in the living room we plan the trip we will take next summer to Europe.

  Even what the mind forgets, the body remembers. I remember the dead cat. The knitted blue blanket. The yard behind our apartment. I remember the sun on my shoulders, the warm black dirt in my hands. I remember crying in the bed. I remember coming out of the room and sitting at the little table by the window in the living room.

  I remember sitting, years later, with My Good Friend in her living room, drinking a glass of wine, when her cat draws the warm length of its body under my hand.

  Another memory comes back.

  I lie in the dark bedroom crying about the cat that has become very ill, about the trip to Europe we will have to cancel because of the cat’s terrible illness, about the blood that I have found seeping out of its nose and ears and anus, when I hear from the kitchen a terrible thud, and then another, and another. The thud becomes a crack, a breaking of something that is not fragile. I stop crying and instead listen to the silence that follows, trying to understand what I have heard.

  The front door opens and closes.

  From the window in the living room I see The Man I Live With walking to the dumpster, carrying something dark and limp in a blue plastic shopping bag. He comes back inside and I ask what he has done. He walks into the kitchen in silence and leaves the apartment with a knife. Still breathing, he says, and walks out the door.

  I tell people we have put the cat to sleep. I leave a short message on My Older Sister’s machine. I call my parents and they say it is for the best. For years I also say this. But, sitting with My Good Friend in her living room, I can’t remember how and when I came to believe that lie. I can go back to that dark bedroom. I can close the door and turn out the lights. I can swaddle myself in layers and layers of wrinkled sheets.

  My love for the man requires the cat to be living. My fear of him requires the cat to be dead. Each needs and negates the other: the dark bedroom, the warm black dirt in my hands.

  [four]

  THE THERAPIST’S OFFICE reminds me of an attic in the way the ceiling near the window slants upward, the two sides joining like an A. She keeps a rug on the floor and the overhead lights turned off. A lamp in the corner lights one half of the room, the other half lit by the lamp on her desk, or by the light coming in from the window, depending on the time of day. Two armless chairs face one another in the middle of the room. Like a Beckett play. Behind one chair, her chair, is the desk. Real plants with long, broad-striped leaves fill one corner; in another, an empty birdcage. The Therapist has seen the news. She knows what happened. She asks me, in a very quiet voice, to tell her the story again. I tell the story again. At the end of the session, she schedules our next appointment and sends me to the psychiatrist at the student health center. She says she’ll call ahead. He’ll be expecting me.

  The Psychiatrist in the student health center downstairs also asks me to tell the story. He listens without blinking, sitting with his legs crossed at the knees in a chair that could swivel but doesn’t. He does not write or move or look away. I look away. I look away from his thick glasses and look instead at the floor and at my fingers, twisting and picking and scratching at the tips of one another in my lap, and at my feet, which do not sit flat on the floor but dangle off the couch, very far away. I’m not usually this short, I say. The fluorescent lights turn my skin green. He asks a few questions: my health, my habits, my dreams. He wants to know whether I use illegal drugs. I lie. I only remove my head on Tuesdays. He looks at me over the top of his glasses in a way that waits for me to change my answer.

  I tell him almost the whole truth about a set of disturbing dreams. He calls them unconscious ruminations. Ruminations? He writes three prescriptions: one for an antiepileptic, which prevents dreams. He does not want me to dream these disturbing dreams. Another prescription for an antidepressant. He explains the mechanisms of serotonin reuptake inhibitors. He wants me to achieve mental balance. I laugh out loud. He looks at me again over his glasses. The third prescription is for a very very small dose—he pinches the first finger and thumb of his left hand together—of a different antidepressant, which, when taken in very small doses, also happens to increase appetite. He wants me to eat more. I have to stop losing this weight. He says that while this medication tends to increase an appetite for food it may increase other kinds of physical appetites as well.

  He says other appetites in a way that winks, though I do not actually see him wink.

  The Psychiatrist tells me to take the blue pill for depression and anxiety and the white pill for lack of appetite. The yellow pill is for forgetting: it puts me to sleep so long without dreaming I forget to wake up. I forget what my name is. I forget where I live.

  I know it’s the blue pill that makes all the feeling go away because I start taking it first. Or if i
t is not the blue pill that makes the feeling go away, the feeling goes away around the same time I start taking the blue pill. And by feeling, I mean feel-like: I do not feel like getting out of bed. Or like getting dressed, or drinking water, or eating food. I can’t keep food down anyway. I do not feel like puking my guts out so I do not eat. I do not feel like going to work. Or like walking alone from my car, across the parking lot, now or ever again. The editor at the literary magazine where I am an intern calls and wants to know where the banner ad is and I say I’m sorry; I’m a little behind on that. I’ve had some personal issues lately. The editor says, Your issues are not my issues. Get it done today. Maybe he thinks I’m faking it. Am I faking it? I do not feel like asking this question. Or like being awake. I do not feel like watching television or reading a book. I do not feel like watching the sun come through the blinds. I would rather feel nothing all day.

  So I take the white pill, which is supposed to make me hungry again. Mom comes to town to drive me to The Psychiatrist and spends the whole time worrying that I’ve gotten too skinny. She cleans my kitchen while I get dressed and after the appointment with The Psychiatrist, where I weigh in at 105 pounds, she drives me to the vitamin store to buy a giant bottle of protein shake mix, and then she takes me to the grocery store to buy whole milk and a bunch of yellow bananas and a big bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a loaf of bread.