The Pisces
Page 27

Claire had not found anyone to take the place of Ponytail Man as a third member of her harem. It seemed she’d been right: she could not emotionally handle being with David alone—without a buffer of other men. First it started with missed texts. She found herself double-texting him to try to get his attention. Then he canceled plans to go see an outdoor concert in Santa Monica. The night of the canceled plans she called me and said that she just couldn’t do it anymore. She was trying not to feel for these men. She was trying to keep her emotions inside, to think and act with her pussy alone, but she couldn’t help herself. Now she was in love with David.
“I understand,” I said. “I have no desire to feel in a contained way. For me it is all or nothing. I don’t know that I can really enjoy the sex unless the person really wants me. And if the person really wants me, I don’t want them for very long.”
I said this because we were so alike and I knew it would resonate with her. Instead of accusing her I hoped that by telling her my truth she would recognize some of herself in my own admission. It was better than saying, “Why are you doing this to yourself? This isn’t going to work. Even a harem of a thousand isn’t going to work. You need to stop doing it at all.”
But she still couldn’t see it. Maybe she could tell that inside me there was some judgment of her actions, that I felt in some way better than her. I didn’t want it to show. I didn’t even want to feel that way.
“I’m not like you,” she said. “I don’t live in fantasy. I just can’t handle this right now.”
“You can get better,” I said.
I said this from a place of “I am better.”
She told me that she had been hurting herself again.
“Cutting?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m not a cutter. I’m more of a beater. I bang my head into the wall. I punch myself until I’m black and blue.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry,” I said.
I no longer felt better than her, or like this was a game or competition or a question of perfection or who was right or anything. I no longer judged her for being a mother and not having this shit under control, for what she might be putting her children through. I saw that she was me and I was her. It wasn’t that she was me when I was in a bad way. Even when I was in a better place, I was completely her.
Yet knowing all this—seeing in these women what I could be like and feel like—did nothing to dull my cravings when they arose. So strange how the book, now in flow, and Dominic, so lovely, could be enough for a few days, and then suddenly they were just furniture: objects in my orbit. They floated in the nothingness but didn’t fill it. For the next two nights after speaking with Claire, I fought to keep myself from going to the rocks. In the mornings I would waken glad that I hadn’t. I had resisted.
On the third night, it was like I was free again. I didn’t need anything. But then, with no warning: no resistance, no fight or second thought or question—no thought of Diana or the group—I found myself bundling up in a long skirt and a thick cream-colored sweater. I took a blanket out with me to the rocks and sat there, waves lapping up and stinging my feet. So strange how Theo had gone from someone who wasn’t anything at all to me to someone I suddenly needed. Was it ever real: the way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?
“It’s fine,” I said to myself. “It is absolutely all fine.”
He wasn’t there yet. But the ocean itself was exciting. I could watch it anytime from my balcony, but to be touching it was a different kind of thrill. Why didn’t I do things more often that excited me? Why did it take some strange swimmer boy to get me out here? Couldn’t the ocean itself be enough, the lure and adventure of its wild, salty licks?
I texted Claire.
i’m sorry if I judged you. or if you felt judged. I only wanted to differentiate things in my mind for myself so that I would no longer have to feel pain
i did it as a self-protective measure
i was trying to make sense of things or have a linear box in the big bad void
Are you high? she texted back.
no, I wrote. I’m back on the rocks
I lay down on one of them in the fetal position. When I awoke it was after one a.m. and the tide was rising higher. My body was coated in salt and ocean foam. I felt like I was part of the rock and part of the ocean, and I wondered if this is how Sappho felt, even in her deepest desperation, part of the earth, like that desperation or longing or eternal cosmic want was something to be celebrated—something natural—holy even, or at least, not just something to be endured.
What if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn’t everything you could possibly do all right?
I was almost ready to give up, when I saw him in the distance swimming toward me. I started laughing and some tears came to my eyes.
“Hi!” he called.
“Hello!” I giggled.
“It’s good to see you. I was afraid you weren’t coming back.”
I felt emboldened by how excited he seemed to see me.
“Do you want to get out of the water and sit on the rock with me?” I asked.
“No, you come closer to the water,” he said. “If I get out it will be too cold for me to get back in again.”
“I can’t sit on the water,” I said.
“No, just come closer to the edge. Put that blanket down on the rock. Lie down on it and just face me. Please? If you don’t mind.”
I did what he said. I watched myself. Was this natural, what I should be doing? Or was I so sick that I would do anything that this strange boy asked? He couldn’t even bother to get out of the water to meet me. Was that a bad sign? But he was so kind in other ways, so attentive and present.
“Now what?
“Do you want to hug me?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, laughing. “I do want to hug you.”
This seemed even weirder than him touching my foot. He was holding on to the rock and I leaned against him. I put my head over his shoulder, the way Dominic liked to support his neck on one of my limbs. He was cold and his skin was very soft. I felt like I was hugging a strange baby, but also like we had always known each other. We hugged and I felt like I dissolved into him, like I was diving into the ocean itself. I looked over his shoulder and saw the cresting waves, the whole ocean suddenly turning white, as though I were on the threshold of heaven. I had been so afraid of dying, but suddenly I knew that death would be okay and beautiful—and even dying would be okay, because there was a heaven, sort of. Maybe it was not the way religious people imagined it, but I saw it as some kind of luminous womb to which we would all return. And because we would return there, in a way we were already there. I started to cry. All the pain and fear of the past nine months poured out of me. Theo stroked the back of my head with his hand. I didn’t want to ever move. I was floating above myself and I looked down and saw us there on the rock. I wondered how I had been led to this.
He pulled back. He didn’t ask why I was crying.
“It’s hard, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Life is so oppressive and scary and…oppressive, and the whole time the ocean is right here. It’s like I can’t believe it’s been there this whole time. I feel like I have a new love for it or something.”