The Pisces
Page 47

“How do you feel?” asked Dr. Jude.
“A little sad,” she said. “But so much better. I’m not as on edge as I was. My worth isn’t dictated by text messages.”
Brianne, too, had found some solace in her son.
“When I told my son about the OkCupid guy, he said, ‘Mom, that just sounds like a lot of drama. Do you really need that?’ And I thought, You’re right. Drama. It really is that simple. So I set some healthy boundaries. I told the guy that I would still love to see him when he got back to the States but that I wasn’t going to give him any money. I said that I wished him the best of luck and I believe in him: that he would be able to make it work to find his way back here.”
“Awesome,” said Sara, biting into a Bosc pear.
“But the strangest thing was, the very next day, my son and his girlfriend broke up. He said that he was sad, but he knew it was for the best, because now he could see there was drama in that relationship too. Then he said, and I’ll never forget this, ‘Mom, I’m so glad that we can have a nice relationship. It means so much to me that I can tell you these things.’ ”
What a pussy, I thought.
But was he a pussy? He probably knew more than all of us. Maybe children weren’t the worst thing after all. They couldn’t be any worse than anything else. I had always judged these women who derived such satisfaction from their offspring. I thought they were weak and nauseating, like they had given up on their own lives. But I liked Diana. And Brianne, well, at least she had something to live for besides plastic surgery. Something to tether her to the Earth. Maybe she wasn’t totally lying when she said she had a full life. Or, at least, that her life felt full. Who was I to judge anyone? I certainly didn’t know any more than they did, crawling in here on my hands and knees.
I told them about Jamie and the pregnancy. I pretended that was the cause of my tears. It was something legible, a rejection they could understand. To recount the tale of Theo would be too far beyond their comprehension. What could I even say? I’m mourning a man I’ve been seeing secretly this whole time. He might be in his forties but he looks twenty-one. No, I didn’t meet him online, I met him in the ocean. By the way, he has a tail.
It was hard to grieve like this, to mourn one man while pretending to be mourning another. Why were some sadnesses so much more permissible than others? Why did it seem like everyone was going to be okay except for me? Even Chickenhorse was in good spirits, letting the group know that she had finally decided to try going on a date. She met a guy at the dog park and he invited her to a pit-bull rescue benefit.
“I assume he’s an asshole,” she said. “But I don’t think he’s married. So I’m going.”
* * *
—
When group ended I stayed back a minute to talk to Dr. Jude.
“Lucy,” she said, blowing the dust off a book called Low Self-Esteem and Addiction: The Siamese Twins. “It’s good to see you back. I’m sorry you are suffering.”
“Thanks,” I said, wiping my nose. She offered me a tissue.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Sure.”
“When you said that you were content without anyone—that a person could be content without anyone—did you mean it?”
“Oh, Lucy,” she said.
“Because I just feel like that’s a lie. I think everyone is looking for someone. And I think that if they aren’t, they’re just pretending.”
“That isn’t necessarily true,” she said. “Me, I’m just happy to be alive. Do you really want to know what I think? Well, let me tell you something that you don’t know about me. I’m a breast cancer survivor.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I had stage-three breast cancer when I was only forty-nine. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. In fact, I didn’t think I would. But after a number of very grueling years of chemo and radiation, as well as a double mastectomy, I was declared cancer-free. And I’m still in remission.”
“That’s great.”
“It is,” she said. “But after the cancer, going through that horrible experience, I took a good look at my life. I thought about what I wanted the next years of my life to look like, however many I had left. And one thing I realized was that I no longer wanted to be with my husband. It was a very hard thing to come to terms with. I have no children. My family lives on the East Coast. He was my family and had seen me through the whole ordeal. He still loved me very much. But I was no longer in love with him. And I realized then that I would rather be by myself, even if it meant never finding anyone again, even with my body looking the way it did postsurgery, than spend the rest of my life with someone I didn’t love.”
“How did you know you weren’t in love with him anymore?” I asked.
“I just knew,” she said. “Over time I realized.”
“I get so confused,” I said. “There were moments when I felt like I was no longer in love with Jamie at all. But after we broke up I wanted him back more than anything. So maybe it was the lust that had faded.”
“Lust is lust,” she said. “Any woman can have sex. It’s not hard to find a man to sleep with you.”
This was true. I’d never thought of it like that before. With Garrett and Adam, and even Theo, I’d felt like it was a sign that I was special when they’d wanted to have sex with me.
“But love is…” She paused. “Well, love might be something beyond words. It’s funny, in all my years of doing this job, I still don’t really have the words for it.”
“Right,” I said.
“I think the place for you to start, the question that you might want to ask yourself, isn’t so much what is love,” she said. “But is it really love I’m looking for?”
48.
The same smell of mashed potatoes and dirty scalps greeted me at the psych ward as I checked in to visit Claire. This time, though, I felt no stronger than the patients there. I guess this was how it came to that. This was how a person became crazy. I knew I was very close. I had known for quite some time, despite not wanting to know. Theo’s sparkle had blotted it out. It eclipsed what, deep down, I already knew. I thought about what Dr. Jude had said. She sounded good. Her words were philosophical, wise, poetic even. But words didn’t make me miss Theo any less.
Claire looked incredibly stoned. I had seen the med cups lined up near the front of the hall and the nurse dividing up all different kinds of pills. I assumed Claire was on quite the cocktail. The whole thing reminded me of a documentary I once saw on a methadone clinic. It seemed like they were just doing harm reduction, switching her from one dependency to another. Now, instead of dicks and whatever unprescribed pills she’d been taking, they were giving her an even stronger dose of prescribed shit. Meds for dicks. It seemed like a decent trade. And it seemed like it was working, at least as long as she could stay high.
She was strangely at peace with her surroundings, like a hypnotized yogi. Maybe she was too stoned to feel the vile aura of where she was. I guess the drugs transformed the stench into something more palatable, the way they did to one’s own emotions.
I was glad to see that she still recognized me through her haze.
“You!” she called when she saw me.