The Pisces
Page 51

“Do I still miss him? Yes, I do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But I don’t miss what being with him took away from me.”
“Like what?”
“Everything,” she said. “Dignity, sanity. My life.”
“What was the restraining order for anyway?” I said.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Come on. I’m in child’s pose on the sidewalk.”
She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before.
“Fine,” she said. “One day I saw his wife out walking. I’d never met her, only stalked her on the Internet. But there she was, power walking down Montana right in front of me. And I thought about how unfair it was that I knew so much about her, from the stalking, and she didn’t even know I existed. I just felt livid about it. And I sort of chased her down…with my Prius.”
“No!”
“It’s true.”
“You chased her down! Like tried to run her over?”
“I wouldn’t have said that at the time. But yes, that’s what I was doing.”
“My God, that’s amazing.” I laughed.
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s pretty disgusting.”
“I suddenly like you so much more,” I said.
“You shouldn’t. None of it was her fault. It was her husband’s fault. Really it was my fault.”
“Huh,” I said.
We were silent for a little while.
“Do you want to come back inside?” she asked.
“I’ll be back in a minute. I just need a little more air.”
But I didn’t have the strength to go back in. And I knew that if I tried to walk home I wouldn’t make it. Laughing had given me vertigo and now the sidewalk was spinning. I felt the cement with my palm and it was cooler than the afternoon air. I wondered if perhaps I should just lie down right there. Should I just lie down with my cheek against the sidewalk, just lie down and go to sleep? If I die in that sleep I think I would be okay. But I didn’t want to die there in public in front of whoever could walk by. Suddenly I was afraid again. I took out my phone and pressed the buttons to get a car to take me home. This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century.
The driver, whose name was Chase, pulled up in a silver Honda. He was cute, with a gap in his front two teeth—maybe age twenty-six at most. He looked like he was trying to grow a mustache, and his brown hair was past his ears under a baseball cap that read FML. He babbled that he was an actor, or was trying to become one. His favorite philosophy about acting was Uta Hagen’s, something about being a student of humanity. Well, for a student of humanity he was shitty at reading people. In my head I just kept saying, Shut up, shut up! I wanted to say, Don’t you know I am dying?
But even in my dying I couldn’t be mean to him for fear that he would think I was a bitch. Why did I even care what he thought? Was my death that unimportant? How could I prioritize the feelings of this vacant, mustached kid over my own—me, who was probably dying?
I repeated, “That’s nice” and “Oh, interesting,” and lay down in the backseat. I didn’t announce that I would be lying down, I just did it. He wasn’t paying any attention to what I was doing, instead going on about an upcoming audition for a prescription allergy medication where he would play the son-in-law of a woman with adult allergies. He said he had mixed feelings about it, because he didn’t want to limit his range to pharmaceuticals. The part he really wanted was at an audition for Samsung next week. He was trying out to play the phone.
“It’s not easy to make it in this town. I’m going up against two hundred other potential phones, at least,” he said, looking in the mirror at the traffic behind him.
I noticed he had green eyes. He really was cute. I waited for him to comment on me lying supine in his backseat, but he didn’t ask if I was okay. I suppose this was normal behavior in California. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. I wasn’t dead. I was breathing in the back of this cute idiot’s car.
When we pulled up at Annika’s house, he stopped and said, “Okay, we’re here. Wish me luck with Samsung!”
I opened my eyes and squinted at him. I wanted to tell him that I hoped he never got a part.
“Wanna fuck?” I said instead.
I was shocked when the words came out. He must have been too, because he turned around to look at me for the first time.
“Are you serious?”
“Totally.”
“Here? In the car?”
“Sure, why not.”
“Someone might see us.”
“I don’t care if you don’t care,” I said.
“Man. I’ve been driving for three years and this has never happened. Yeah, why not? YOLO, right? Hold on,” he said, and put the car in reverse.
This was not really the response I was looking for. I wanted more of an “I’m floored by this request, because you’re so beautiful” and less of a “Well, since you asked, carpe diem!” But he pulled into a side alley and shut off the car.
“Come up here,” he said. “Come around to the front.”
I got out of the car, walked around to the driver’s side, and crawled onto this mustached man-boy’s lap. I was facing him, straddling him. He put his seat all the way back and I took off his FML baseball cap. His hairline was receding. We began kissing and he put his hands up my shirt. He sort of grabbed at my breasts and twisted them, like they were handles on a door. I felt like he was feeling for there to be more, trying to stretch them into being bigger, but they would only stretch so far. I wanted to say, Be gentler, but instead I said, “Yesss.”
He slid his dick out of his jeans but left them on. He didn’t put on a condom, or ask if he should wear one. His dick was small, but firm, like a dill pickle. I lifted up my skirt and slid my underwear over to the side, sat on the dick. I moved up and down saying, “Yeah, fuck me,” even though I was the one doing the fucking. A few of my pubic hairs got caught in his zipper. I kept hitting my head on the roof of the car with every few humps. Each time I hit my head I said sorry.
“That’s okay. Rub your clit,” he said.
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“And don’t come inside me.”
But he came inside me, and in less than a minute, making a face that looked like a dying warrior, a hissing sound escaping his open mouth.
“Damn,” he sighed after he had finished expelling his load of little Uta Hagens into my vagina. “That was great. Did you come?”
“Um, definitely not.” I laughed.
Was he kidding? I would have to be a better actress for that. I guess he thought I was hypersexual and came instantly, tossing orgasm after orgasm into the wind. Who else would fuck a stranger in his car? Most people wanted to avoid being fondled by their driver.
I imagined his sperm in there, trying to talk to my egg, and my egg ignoring them. What were his sperm saying? It’s a tough town, but I’m hoping to get an agent this year, said his sperm. Just shut the fuck up, said my egg.
“Well,” he said, patting me on the ass. “I hope you give me a good rating.”
“Oh, for sure,” I said. “Five stars.”
51.
I got into the bathtub and ran the water, soaking and scrubbing away Chase’s semen, which had formed a crust on my thigh. I could see it leaking out of me too in the bathwater, like passing clouds. Really, what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I be a person who was content to just lie around and watch the clouds, without trying to consume anything? Was there something wrong with just being alive? Why was I so defective? Then again, it wasn’t my fault we were put on the planet and left to make our own meaning. I was making mine and doing the best I could. Drying off, I put on one of my sister’s silk kimonos, then went downstairs and got a glass of white wine. Was I cool? Was I glamorous? Was I living a life that others would crave, or was I out of my mind, fucking some strange driver? Part of me felt glamorous and part of me felt insane, the two feelings rotating over and over.