The Pisces(14)

“Dominic, no,” I said. “Absolutely not. We don’t growl. We never growl at Mama.”

Suddenly, I felt giddy and silly. No longer scared, not even at all. I wondered if the gods or maybe the universe had actually heard my amethyst prayer. Everything was so strange. Life was okay, though. Life was maybe even kind of cute. You simply had to expect nothing from it. That’s what the Stoics believed—Zeno and Seneca, those ancient fuckers. The trick, I now agreed, was you had to remain unattached to any future wishes or vision. You had to never get attached to any other person or expect anything good to come to you, and that was how you fell in love with life and how maybe certain fun and good things could happen to you. They only happened as long as you didn’t need anything from anyone. As long as you didn’t take anything from anyone or give any part of yourself away to another person, but you just sort of met the other person in space, good things could happen. You had to fall in love with quiet first.





10.


But in the morning the beach was filled with tourists and the amethyst was just a rock. The quiet was gone again and replaced with nothingness. The candle had melted all over the deck and I spent a good half hour scraping wax, which was congealing—thinly—in the sun. I decided I would take Dominic for a walk over to the Santa Monica farmers’ market, try to be like other humans on a Sunday. Maybe buy some fruit and be swept away in some bullshit of the day. Maybe I could just be a woman and her dog buying fruit.

The farmers’ market was full of families. I don’t like families. There was a band doing covers of Crosby, Stills & Nash and children getting pony rides. It made me want to never eat anything organic again. By the locally farmed corn I ran into Claire, the redhead from group. She smiled and waved. I guess she was a little better. At least, she was no longer crying.

“I’m never going back to that group again,” she said. “Fuck them and their shite, they know fuck-all about me. I don’t believe in love addiction. I don’t believe in withdrawal or taking time off from dating or anything that puritanical or black and white can fix my problem.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty depressing.”

“The worst,” she said. “And I just had a date with a hot younger man. His name is David, a total crumpet. I’m already enamored, probably on the road to obsession. But I think that if I can just keep them coming—you know, have more than one boy I’m fucking, maybe two or three—then I won’t get so fixated on one of them.”



“That seems smart,” I said.

“I’m already interviewing a harem. I’ve been going to polyamory events. I met this one guy, Trent, at an event in Topanga. He is a little older, did porn. He has a ponytail and I can’t tell if it’s scraggly or scrummy, but I think scrummy. He has a wife. She has boyfriends. I’m going to fuck him tomorrow night. I also met this other guy named Orion; he’s, like, barely eighteen, very twee. He was wearing a kilt. He’s pansexual. We made out all night. But he lives in Vermont and already went back, so I’m still looking for a third. I might shag this guy who works at Best Buy. We’ve fucked in the past. He’s a Jamaican guy, super cut, really nice to me.”

“Are they all poly? Is David poly too?”

“No, he’s, like, I don’t know what. A computer programmer. Might be on the spectrum. Does yoga, though. Huge cock.”

“So fun,” I said. “I’m jealous.”

“You should really be doing Tinder,” she said. “Or come with me to these poly things.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m worried about getting obsessed with someone else. And Dr. Jude said—”

“Rubbish,” she said. “How else do you think you are going to get over him? You think you are going to just heal? Nobody heals. You need to replace! That’ll be the thing that makes him come back in the end, but by then you won’t want him. Men can smell it when we’ve moved on. Especially to a bigger cock. Bald Brad texted me.”

“Don’t text him back!”

“Oh, I won’t,” she said. “I have no need.”

“Well, that’s interesting,” I said. “I’m glad you found a way to balance it all and not get attached.”

“For women like us? I’m convinced this is the only way. The only way you’re going to get over him is by having a lot of sex and seeing what else is out there. You might even surprise yourself. You might see that you can do it, you can just fuck and not get attached. I guarantee I will not be getting attached to Trent.”



“Ponytail man?”

“Yes.” She laughed. “Also, you need to see how hot you are. To feel it.”

“I am so not hot,” I laughed. “I’m gross.”

“Oh, bugger off. You have the disheveled waif ingénue thing going. Like that bitch from Les Misérables.”

She looked at her watch.

“Fuck, I have to go pick up my kids. Never have children. They’ll ruin your life.”

“Not planning on it,” I said.

“You should just try Tinder,” she said. “Just try it.”





11.


That night I thought about going to the rocks to see if Theo the swimmer was there again. It made me feel stupid. What was I doing chasing down some boy? Instead I made a fake Facebook profile (I’d shut mine down since I saw Jamie and Rochelle toasting over flan) and created a Tinder account, using old photos: some from five or ten years ago. I was not consciously thinking I will kill the old me and in her place will grow an electronic me, but that is what I was doing. I wanted to negate myself somehow, as if you could just sign up to vanish. As if you could sign up to really be alive, but as someone else. Well, I was going to be somebody who didn’t care. I was going to be free about sex, my body. I wanted to be the one to no longer give a fuck. Could you sculpt yourself into one who does not give a fuck? Could I remove the giving a fuck from the time in my life before I met Jamie, where I had sex with a lot of people, but always seemed to care whether they loved me after? I had to go into it with a professed mission of not giving a fuck. So I wrote my bio: