The Pisces
Page 48

“Hi, baby,” I said. “How are you?”
She said she was doing well—so well, in fact, that she might not even have to go to treatment. But she wanted to go and had decided to go, regardless.
“Do you want to know what’s strange?” she asked. “I find myself enjoying the group therapy here, just listening to people. They have all sorts of fucked-up problems, far beyond mine—far beyond everyone from the women’s group. It’s like if Sara the foot-toucher were on acid all the time. It makes me grateful for my own problems. I would love to bring the two groups together into one big circle of healing. This way, when Brianne is complaining about Millionaire Match, she can be reminded that at least she doesn’t have auditory hallucinations. Maybe I’m destined to lead a group-therapy exchange program.”
“Wow, sounds like they really got you, didn’t they?” I laughed.
“I don’t know if they did or didn’t. But do you want to know what’s the weirdest? The strangest thing of all? I don’t want men anymore. I feel finished.”
“Wow.”
“They say that you don’t hit rock bottom until you hit rock bottom. Lucy, what if this is it?”
“What if it is?”
“All I can tell you is that I feel so bloody free right now!” she said, adjusting her hospital bracelet.
“I’m so glad for you, Claire,” I said. Then I began to cry.
“Oh no, what’s wrong?”
“Please. You have to help me. I am in so much pain. Theo is gone forever and I don’t know what to do,” I said.
“The swimmer?” she asked. “What happened?”
“He left,” I said. “He just left and I don’t think he’s ever coming back.”
“Oh love,” she said.
“What do I do?” I asked.
“Ignore him,” she said. “Ignore, ignore, ignore. Do not pursue. In your mind, you have to literally give him up.”
“If I give him up do you think he will come back?”
“They always come back if you give them up—especially, as we know, if you find other cock. But what if you don’t do that? What if you don’t replace him with anyone? You don’t have to give him up just so that he will come back to you. You could give him up just to give him up.”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, it might behoove you to sit with yourself for a while.”
Who was this talking?
“So that’s it? Just give him up and sit?”
“None of these wankers are worth the pain,” she said. “You have to dump them on the roadside and let them rot there.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “He didn’t fuck me over. It was me who hurt him. It was me who lied to him, not the other way around. This isn’t like the other ones. This time I’m in control. Sort of.”
“You asked my advice and I’m giving it to you.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “I need love. Or if it’s not love, then the power of that feeling. I love it. I love love. It’s the only thing I have.”
“Oh, Lucy,” she said. “You have a lot. It’s like your tits.”
“What?”
“Your tits. You always say that you have no tits. But really, your breasts are ample. They’re more than enough.”
“I want a D cup. Metaphorically.”
“And I want a thousand giant cocks. Or I think I do. But it’s a lie. Because even a thousand cocks would never be enough. And it’s crazy to think that they would. The fantasy is a lie.”
“But I am crazy. And I don’t want to live without the fantasy,” I said.
“You can do it. We can do it together.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Suit yourself,” she said.
“Can I just tell you one more thing?”
“What is it?”
“Jamie got that woman pregnant. They’re moving in together.”
“No! The scientist?”
“It’s true.”
“How the hell did that happen?”
“They were fucking.”
“No, I mean—oh Lucy, I’m so sorry.”
“I know. How can I go back to Phoenix and face them?”
“You can and you shall. Let’s just pray it totally destroys her pussy.”
“She better get fat as hell.”
“Well, now he’ll really be pining after you.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yes. Nothing brings out a man’s quest for escape like a lactating woman with somebody else doing the sucking.”
49.
As I left the hospital, I wondered if Claire was right. Was it possible that she had started seeing more clearly than me? The way she looked at me now was the way I had looked at Diana and at her before: lovingly, but full of pity. I decided it was she who was to be pitied. She had given up on the thing that made her most alive, even if it made her the most crazy. I knew the old way still sounded beautiful to her. But in an act of self-preservation, she was walking the path back to safety and sanity now. Even for Claire, the pain had just gotten too great.
Of course, this was today. Who was to say where she would be next week or next month or whenever she got out? For now she had convinced herself, or maybe done more than convinced herself. Maybe she had actually healed a little. But just because you had healed, it didn’t mean the men could no longer get you. Love and lust were latent in her, lurking. For now she was free of the insanity. The cocktail of meds had certainly helped. I wondered if what she felt on the cocktail was as good as romantic obsession, better than that sparkle. You had to feel something truly heavenly to get over the chase. The chase was everything, all the hope and possibility of life. Very little else would ever be enough. Love itself would probably never be enough. You had to have the moment of almost touching, almost fucking, the moment right before he enters you for the first time, all the time.
I thought of a story I had read about Solon, an Athenian statesman, who one day heard his nephew singing one of Sappho’s poems. He immediately asked the boy to teach it to him so he could have it memorized. When asked why, he simply said, “So that I may learn it and then die.”
I was not going to stop hunting for him. I was not even at the place where the addict throws away her drugs only to buy more. I wasn’t throwing anything away. Sappho had never given up on love, even when the longing was a dagger in her heart. When she fucked her lover Phaon, perhaps she thought she wouldn’t get attached. I’ll just fuck this young, hot creature and be done with it, she must have thought. Or maybe she thought she’d fuck him into loving her. But Phaon could not love her back: she was too old, or maybe too needy, and he was newly young and hot, having recently been rubbed with Aphrodite’s magic ointment, which transformed an old man into a sexy boy. It would be difficult for any woman, but there was just no way that Sappho, being Sappho, would be able to play it cool or stay detached. And so she got hooked.
I had done all the drugs and now I was at the place where the addict goes to wait for her dealer. Even if she shakes and shakes, she waits. Even if he never returns, she waits. There is nothing else left.
So I returned to the rocks every night and sat by the sea with a blanket around me. As the days passed I became less inflamed with pain, and more just empty. I began to feel purified as though I were a gourd and someone had spooned me out. I felt spiritual, almost holy, like I could look down at myself from the sky. There I was, a woman on the rocks by the ocean, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the return of her lover. Everything I knew about art would say that I was a painting. I was certainly a poem. Sappho was too—her life, perhaps, unknowable, but her feelings were mine. I was mythic. And though I was convinced that I would never see him again, it was too tragic to contemplate. My body cried. But I didn’t let the nothingness eat me whole. Inside me was a small spark of hope that sent me out there every night.