The Pisces(35)

“That’s the dopamine talking,” said Chickenhorse. “You want your high. Is it that you don’t know how to stop or you don’t want to stop?”

“It’s that I can’t,” said Diana.

Suddenly I felt a wave of compassion for her. I knew what it was like. I thought about what Claire said, about being careful to stay away from the freaks or else you become a freak. Diana was so hot and polished—the wealth pouring out of her Spandex—with her diamond rings, chypre fragrance, and golden highlights. Did she see everyone at the meeting as sad and pathetic? Did I look as sad and pathetic to Diana as the other women looked to me when I came in?

But after group she came up to me in the parking lot.

“You seem like you’re the only one there who isn’t totally insane,” she said.

“I wouldn’t bet on that.” I laughed.

“Can I call you? If I have questions about what to do?”

“Sure,” I said. “I don’t know that I will have the answers. But I can listen.”

I saw the sadness in her eyes and the mess of it all. I saw her delusions and the way that things started between her and the older tennis pro as just friends. It was like Theo: you wanted to believe they liked you as a friend. She pretended that’s what it was, because if she admitted to herself what it really was at first she would have never gotten in his car. And she had needed to get in his car.

“I’m just afraid of getting worse,” she said. “My son has a friend. He is sixteen and gorgeous. And I see the way he looks at me. I used to think it wasn’t that, it couldn’t be that.”



“You’re so beautiful,” I said. “How could it not be that?”

“Thank you,” she said. “But I’m…you should see the young girls at their high school. I thought there could simply be no way. But now that I’ve been with Ryan, the younger tennis pro, well, I realize what it is with my son’s friend. I’m not going to go there. At least, I don’t think I would go there. But it scares me that I feel tempted.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s heavy.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t want to admit that to the group. I didn’t want to say I’ve thought about, you know, having sex with my son’s friend…I didn’t say it, because…it would be very illegal. I don’t know what the group’s policy is on that. If someone is tempted to do something illegal, are they forced to report it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But your secret is safe with me. Do you feel any better now even just telling me?”

“Not really,” she said.





27.


I didn’t go back to the rocks that night. I could see myself too clearly in Diana and her suffering. If there was anything in the universe, any kind of guiding force, any kind of greater power, I saw now that it probably hadn’t brought me Theo to show that I could be friends with a beautiful member of the opposite sex. Maybe it had brought him to me at the same time as Diana to teach me a lesson. I didn’t know if the universe actively taught lessons. But if it did, the lesson was that I could not handle what I thought I could handle. The lesson was that I didn’t need to act out with Theo to learn the lesson. I didn’t have to suffer again. The suffering of others, Claire and now Diana, could remind me of my own suffering: the suffering of the past and my potential future suffering. Maybe this is why we did things in groups. Maybe this is why people had friends: so we could see ourselves and our own insanity in them.

Instead I went over to Abbot Kinney with Dominic. A few people stopped and commented on him, how beautiful he was, how regal. I felt proud of him, not eclipsed by him, as though being with him somehow made me better. He made me feel purebred. What was money anyway? What was polish? Why was I so susceptible to flights of fancy, my perception of other people’s views of me? Look at Diana. I thought she had it together and she was a mess. She actually liked me.

Maybe I didn’t need someone else to define me, but oh, I still wanted it. How vacuous was I? How empty was I that I needed a border drawn by someone else to tell me who I was? It didn’t even matter whether the person was real, a lover, a new friend, or even a dog. The person could even be imaginary, like the fancy people I saw on the street, who were not themselves imaginary, but became whatever it was I projected onto them. Seeing myself through the eyes of a projection, however uncomfortable the judgment, made me feel safe in a strange way. It was like a box in which to live: a boundary against the greater nothingness, to think one knew something about what others thought of you. It was there I could begin and end. And perhaps it was a prison, to have to begin and end, but it was also a relief.



This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over nature, there were better versions of them in control.

Or perhaps it was not for the sake of control over the terror of nature at all that they created their gods. Perhaps it was because the world, with all its beauty, was not enough. Simply being alive was not enough. The Greeks needed a new fantasy to make the world more exciting. With their war, wine, poetry, gods, and food, they needed to get high. Maybe we all did.