The Pisces(6)

And then Jamie did come back, for a night anyway.

“I feel ready to meet now,” he said, and so we went to our favorite Mexican spot.

After a few margaritas he held my hand under the table and we stared into each other’s eyes. I had not remembered being present for a meal like this, together, both fully engaged, neither of us on our phones, in years. After dinner we made out in his car. He tasted different, like a licorice taste had entered his body in the time we’d been apart. Maybe it was the cilantro. He drove me home and then followed me upstairs. I went to get him a glass of water. When I came into the living room he was sitting on the sofa.

“Come here,” he said.



I walked toward him and sat on his leg. I held the water up to his lips. He drank, then put it on the table and kissed me. He undressed me, still sitting in his lap. Then he laid me down on the sofa and undressed hastily as I watched him in the dark. We fucked on the sofa, quickly, our mouths on each other’s mouths the whole time. I didn’t come. I never did from fucking. Jamie’s lack of initiative in going down on me was a source of contention between us, always. He was willing but not ravenous for it. But his mouth on my mouth as he fucked me felt in a way like he had his mouth on my vagina. He didn’t stay the night.

Then Rochelle called.

“The girl he is seeing is a scientist,” she said. “She’s blond.”

“He’s seeing someone?”

“I thought you knew,” she said.

Apparently the woman’s name was Megan and she was five years younger than me. Rochelle knew nothing more about her. She had bumped into them at a Chinese restaurant.

“Well, can you find out?”

“I’ll try,” said Rochelle.

I could tell she was getting sick of me. Or more than sick of me, actually, she was scared of me. She had always thought we were both safe from the crazy-woman disease: that desperation and need. But now I had fallen into it, fallen all the way under, and she saw how a person could just go. One minute you were playfully complaining to friends about a man’s farts and the next minute you would kill to have the farts back. Could she catch the disease from me? Was her own contentment in danger? I texted her three times to get the info but she just wrote back:

rly busy

I wanted to tell her I was pissed off, that I felt she had abandoned and betrayed me. I wanted to say that the only reason she had any confidence in her Brillo-self—the only reason she was “okay”—was that there was too much inertia in her relationship for her husband to leave. I wanted to say that this wasn’t a reason for confidence, or something to be proud of. As I had seen, that inertia could be disturbed at any moment by an accidental slip of the tongue. But I didn’t want her to quarantine me entirely. I might need her.



So I wrote my own narratives. Megan was not only a scientist but an award-winning geologist. They hiked together and discussed the reproduction of cacti. They fucked on a rock. Nothing is more beautiful than the sex your ex-boyfriend is having with his new lover. Nothing more magical and full of gasps. Meanwhile I was in Hersheyland. I could no longer play it cool. One night I parked down the street from his house until I saw him pull in to the driveway and get out of his car. He was alone. I waited until the lights turned on. Then I got out of the car.

Walking down his driveway I realized that I had butterflies for the first time in years. Maybe this was what it took to maintain butterflies in your partner’s driveway? A blond scientist named Megan.

I rang the bell. He took a minute, did not ask who it was, then opened the door.

“Lucy,” he said.

I felt rage in my chest, in every part of me.

“Fuck you, you fucking asshole!” I yelled. And then I hit him in the face.

I had never hit anyone before. This was not what I had planned. I hadn’t planned anything actually. We were both in shock. I didn’t know what to say. Two drops of blood ran from his nose, down his lip, and splattered onto the floor. He put his hands up to his face.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

“Jamie,” I said. “Jamie, wait, let me see. Let me see.”

“Just go,” he said. “Go!”

He slammed the door. I pivoted on my heel and walked back down the street to my car. I felt worse.



Later that night I got a visit from a police officer investigating the incident. Apparently, Megan had called the police from the hospital—or she had coerced him into it. I had broken Jamie’s nose. The cop said that the couple would not be pressing charges if I agreed to go to therapy. The couple? Now they were making decisions as a unit?

“What did she look like?” I asked him.

“Uh—” he faltered.

“Would you say she’s better-looking than me?”

“Ma’am,” said the cop, “I’m going to strongly recommend that you seek help for your anger issues. This time we’re only going to give you a warning. But if the couple hadn’t been so forgiving, you could be facing serious charges of battery right now.”

“Battery!” I said. “Do I look like a batterer?”

He was silent.

“Can you just tell me. Aside from the broken nose, did they seem happy?”





5.


I had always thought of depression as having no shape. When it manifested as a feeling of emptiness, you could inject something into it: a 3 Musketeers, a walk, something to kind of give it a new form. You could penetrate it and give it more of a shape you felt better about. Or at least you could make a shape inside it or around it. But this was something new, like a thicker, gooey sludge. It had its own shape. It could not be contained. It was a terror. Of what I was terrified I couldn’t exactly say, but it was sitting on me. Every other shape was being absorbed into it. I no longer slept. Was this all because of Jamie? How could someone who got on my nerves so much have this much power over me?