The Pisces
Page 31

“I don’t even know what to say,” I said. “I have so many questions for you.”
“Let’s start slow,” he said.
“Are you real?” I asked.
He laughed. “I suffer like I’m real. I have wants like I’m real. I fear that I will be unliked or unloved. Men, women, I think that maybe everyone wants the same thing.”
“Men want sex,” I said.
“Don’t you?” he asked.
“I do,” I said. “Maybe. But I think I mistake it for love, or something.”
“How do you know when you’re mistaking it?”
“I think when I get high off it.”
“Well, why not? That could be love,” he said. “Can’t you get high off of love? I don’t think I want a love that doesn’t make me feel amazing.”
“I don’t know if that’s love or something else,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s love if the person disappears.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s not love,” he said. “But it’s hard. That is a very painful experience.”
I was surprised to hear him say that. I felt that surely he must always be the one doing the disappearing. Merman, fish fillet, whatever the fuck he was, I still thought of him as a surfer who worried about nothing. Someone who was very free to just disappear off into the night at any time.
I wondered what he looked like to the mermaids under there. Were there mermaids? Was he beautiful for the sea or just average? I didn’t dare ask. Surely the mermaids must be beautiful—breathing in and out under the ocean. I imagined them long-haired with little waists and shells on their tits. I imagined them all like Aphrodite. I wondered if perhaps they all looked the same and he’d eventually grown bored of them. Maybe that was why he wanted a land woman with calluses on her feet, plain as I was. I was nothing like Aphrodite. But maybe that was the point.
“You’re not going to abandon me now that you know what you know,” he said. “Are you?”
“Me? No!”
I was delighted. Did it take a mythological deformity to find a gorgeous man who was as needy as I was?
“Good,” he said.
He put my chin in his hand and gave me a wet kiss.
I could smell the difference between the top and bottom of him. His head, shoulders, and neck had a clean smell, a fleshy, wet-skin smell. He smelled human, but better. Once in a while, the scent of his bottom half would waft up and it smelled like a fish market—not exactly dead fish, the way my fish-tank emergency had smelled in my youth, but it smelled like blood, the ocean, shit, seaweed…a little like pussy, actually.
I felt almost as though his bottom half were some sort of pussy, although it was phallic in shape. Maybe because he was insecure about it, and I had always felt insecure about my pussy. Maybe it was because in seeing it, this part of him, the part he had concealed, I was, in a way, entering him. I thought about dominance and submission—how in some ways he had been the submissive one in eating my pussy. Yet in other ways I was dependent on him emotionally now that I had let him see me like that: splayed, surrendered, thrusting in his face. I was attached to him more than before, because I had opened for him like that. Maybe he felt that of me. Maybe he needed that before he could show me his tail.
I wondered what was underneath that sash around his pelvis. I wondered if he had a cock. Did fish have cocks?
“May I touch you?” I asked.
He nodded.
We began kissing again and I ran my hands through his hair, tickling the back of his neck. I rubbed his chest, smooth as a sculpture, fingering each of the nipples. I wanted to tease him, treat him like a girl a little bit, because I still felt vulnerable and also because I knew, somehow, he would like it. His nipples hardened like pellets under my fingers and he gasped.
I touched his stomach. It was so smooth, not cut or built, but not roly-poly either. A little soft, full, but also firm. It was existing. He existed. His arm muscles felt stronger than his abdominal muscles and I wondered if this had something to do with the way he swam. He had no hair on his stomach or pubic hair sticking out up over the sash. I rubbed my hands in a circular motion over the front of the sash and felt his penis under there, strong, semi-hard, like a thick trunk. His balls felt weighty like peaches.
“Oh,” I said. “I wondered what you had.”
“Yes,” he said. “And an ass too. The tail starts below all that, not like human myths where the tail starts at the stomach.”
“Where did you get the sash? Do all of you wear sashes?”
“Shipwreck, obviously,” he said.
“Oh, yes, obviously.” I laughed.
“And a loincloth does make it easier. Sand, jellyfish, it can all be very abrasive.”
“Do you know a lot about Greek myths?” I asked.
“Some,” he said.
“Is that how you know about Sappho? Did you, like, date her or something?”
“I’m not that old.” He laughed.
What did dating even mean for a merman? Tinder under the fucking sea? Swiping right on a starfish?
“Have you…been with any other women who live on land?” I asked.
“Some,” he said.
“Recently?” I asked.
“Not in a while. I’m trying to change that,” he said, and touched my arm.
I liked that it had been some time, because I wanted to be the only one. I didn’t care what the reason was, even if he simply hadn’t been near land. Of course, the inability to be with someone else on land did not mean he loved me in a special way. And his having been with other women who had feet did not necessarily equal lack of love. But it still made me feel safe to be the only one in a long time. These thoughts, themselves, were madness. He lived in the ocean and I lived in the desert. This wasn’t going to last. Maybe there could be some magic bend in our time together, the way I felt when he was going down on me. That had felt so eternal—as though if it were happening in one moment it was happening forever. But no one could live inside a moment. It was already over. And yet, here he was, still with me. We were sitting beside each other and he had his hand on my thigh, my hand tracing his knuckles. He is still here, I kept repeating to myself.
“I have to go,” he said, as if he could read my mind. “It’s not a great idea for me to be out of the water like this with the light coming up.”
I hadn’t realized that it was dawn. The sun was rising over the Santa Monica Mountains, turning the water silver. I could see that a few surfers had made their way to the Venice pier, laughing with one another.
“Are you like a vampire?” I asked. “Are we in one of those teen vampire movies, only you’re a mermaid?”
“Ha, no, nothing like that,” he said. “It’s just not a great idea for anyone to see me out here. I’ve gotten harassed before. I’ve gotten hurt. I could be taken to the Venice freak show. I can’t exactly run. So it’s always dangerous for me to be out of the water.”
“Will I see you tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow, but how about the following night? You should wear a skirt again like that.”
“Ha-ha. Okay.”
Two nights sounded so far away. It seemed endless.
“Also, you shouldn’t tell anyone about me,” he said. “As we discussed. Mostly I say that for you. I don’t want you ending up in a psychiatric hospital or in rehab and that’s what people will think if you tell them you met a man who lives under the sea.”