The Pisces
Page 25

“A what?” asked Brianne.
“A catfish. Like, a scammer. Someone who pretends to be someone he isn’t.”
“Oh no, he’s not a scammer. I know that he is who he says he is. We’re very close.”
“How long have you known him again?” I asked.
“About six days,” said Brianne.
We all looked at her.
“It’s been a rich and rewarding six days.”
Sara looked at her quizzically over the pomegranate she was peeling. But she was in no position to judge. Having almost reached her ninety days of no contact with Stan, she had had a slip. A big one. Now not only were they in contact again but they’d been seeing each other.
Stan had reached out with an apologetic one-thousand-word email declaring his love. He also sent her a bouquet of carnations. Of course, Sara was allergic to them and gave them to a neighbor, but that wasn’t the point.
“He’s been staying with me for the past two days. And I know what you’re thinking! Bad idea, he’s just going to hurt me again. But this time something truly seems different. He still isn’t ready for marriage or an engagement or even to call me his girlfriend or commit to monogamy, but he’s showing up for me in a way that he never has before. He’s truly present.”
“I see,” said Dr. Jude. She was wearing what looked like a pair of silk pajamas. “What do you think was the impetus for the change?”
“I think he realized I was serious this time. That I wasn’t going to take him back.”
“But you did take him back,” said Chickenhorse.
“No, I know. I mean before that. I think he realized the gravity of his error,” she said. “Also, he lost his job at the hospital and has nowhere else to go. He’s been living in his car.”
“What?” We all balked.
I struggled to keep from laughing. Compared to the rest of them I was actually doing well.
“I can’t forbid you from seeing him,” said Dr. Jude. “But I want you to remember the state you were in when you came in here, how much you were suffering. In my experience these sorts of relationships only get worse, never better.”
“I know.” Sara sniffed. “And I know you’re all going to judge me. And Dr. Jude, I know I broke our deal. But he needs me. At the ‘Opening the Heart’ workshop they said that we can only recover from the past by coming to terms with our core truths. Well, he’s been sleeping on a mat in the resting area of the Korean spa. And I’m a compassionate person. And I want him to be with me. So that’s my core truth.”
I glanced over at Diana, the newest member of the group. She looked horrified. Diana was a Brentwood mommy—a gorgeous, fuckable mother in Lululemon—whose husband was a very new-moneyed TV producer. Apparently he wasn’t paying her any attention anymore. It’s not that he was bad in bed or turned her off sexually, but after they made love, a progressively less-frequent occasion now, he no longer connected with her. He no longer looked her in the eyes. It was like he could barely see her. Also, sometimes he had a difficult time getting it up. When he took Viagra she could always tell and she blamed it on the idea that he was no longer really attracted to her. So she had started having sex with younger men. At first it hadn’t seemed like a problem, but recently she was afraid that she would get caught and it would destroy her marriage. She had been getting sloppier with it: having sex in the back of her Mercedes SUV, compulsively sending text messages from her own phone. She could no longer stay off her phone for more than a few minutes, even during her daughter’s piano recital, and that scared her. She felt devastated when she could not get the attention of the young men in her orbit. Or, when she got their interest, they would have sex and she wouldn’t hear from them after.
I felt excited by her situation. She was a little older than me and looked like the kind of woman who had never been ignored. With her long blond-streaked hair, large breasts, doe legs, and warm skin, she had probably always gotten all the attention she could need. But now she was seeing what age could do, what those of us who never looked like goddesses had always felt. Now she was mortal like the rest of us.
“I’ve been going down on the tennis pros,” she said, in a way that was sort of proud, but also terrified. “I can’t seem to stop. But I keep getting hurt. I’ve done it with two of them, more than once. The older one is twenty-seven. It started out that we would just go get frozen yogurt and talk. Then one day we took one car and ended up having sex in a parking lot, and it started from there. The younger one is—he’s twenty-three. I bet the older one told the younger one that I was…a cougar or something. It’s embarrassing. I don’t need them to be in love with me, I just want them to be there for me when I get in touch. It hurts when I try to contact them and they don’t text back. Then I see them at the tennis club and they remember what I look like, and suddenly they want something. So I hear from them again. It’s always the same. But I don’t know how to stop.”
“That’s the dopamine talking,” said Chickenhorse. “You want your high. Is it that you don’t know how to stop or you don’t want to stop?”
“It’s that I can’t,” said Diana.
Suddenly I felt a wave of compassion for her. I knew what it was like. I thought about what Claire said, about being careful to stay away from the freaks or else you become a freak. Diana was so hot and polished—the wealth pouring out of her Spandex—with her diamond rings, chypre fragrance, and golden highlights. Did she see everyone at the meeting as sad and pathetic? Did I look as sad and pathetic to Diana as the other women looked to me when I came in?
But after group she came up to me in the parking lot.
“You seem like you’re the only one there who isn’t totally insane,” she said.
“I wouldn’t bet on that.” I laughed.
“Can I call you? If I have questions about what to do?”
“Sure,” I said. “I don’t know that I will have the answers. But I can listen.”
I saw the sadness in her eyes and the mess of it all. I saw her delusions and the way that things started between her and the older tennis pro as just friends. It was like Theo: you wanted to believe they liked you as a friend. She pretended that’s what it was, because if she admitted to herself what it really was at first she would have never gotten in his car. And she had needed to get in his car.
“I’m just afraid of getting worse,” she said. “My son has a friend. He is sixteen and gorgeous. And I see the way he looks at me. I used to think it wasn’t that, it couldn’t be that.”
“You’re so beautiful,” I said. “How could it not be that?”
“Thank you,” she said. “But I’m…you should see the young girls at their high school. I thought there could simply be no way. But now that I’ve been with Ryan, the younger tennis pro, well, I realize what it is with my son’s friend. I’m not going to go there. At least, I don’t think I would go there. But it scares me that I feel tempted.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s heavy.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t want to admit that to the group. I didn’t want to say I’ve thought about, you know, having sex with my son’s friend…I didn’t say it, because…it would be very illegal. I don’t know what the group’s policy is on that. If someone is tempted to do something illegal, are they forced to report it?”