The Pisces(60)

44.


One afternoon I received a call from Rochelle. I could tell right away that she had been sent by Jamie as a spy to suss me out and see where I was in my feelings for him. She played nice-nice with me, as though we were still seated across the table from each other at the Colombian restaurant—as though I had not seen the scared look in her eye, despite her feminist branding, when I went from safely-coupled-off confidante of inane relationship stories to single-and-psycho nosebreaker. While I knew Rochelle was not to be trusted, I enjoyed her sniffing around me again: that I was once again desirable enough to her to be allowed back into her fold of banality. It wasn’t that I liked this fold more than I liked being in Claire’s inner sanctum of sexual camaraderie or the group’s nest of pathos. I found her truly intolerable now, and vowed that when I returned to Phoenix she would never again be rewarded with my presence at another dinner. Let her pontificate to someone else about her husband’s farts. But it felt good to know that I was welcomed back into her fold if I wanted, that I was approved, as though I had once been sane, then gotten sick, then gotten well again.

The truth, of course, was that I had done nothing to indicate to her I was in any different place than I was when I left town. It was all on Jamie’s end, this mirage of “health”—his renewed desire for me made me safe and appealing to her once again. After she lectured me on the differences between beach culture and a landlocked lifestyle from an anthropological perspective, she lowered her voice.

“Do you want to know what?” she asked conspiratorially.



“What?”

“Jamie has been asking me about you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I keep telling him we haven’t spoken, but he keeps asking.”

“Well, that’s fine, because I talk to him too. He texts me all the time. Sometimes I text back,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, sounding dejected that she was not the sole liaison. “Well, I just figured I would tell you.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“You know, I think he really misses you.”

“Yes, he tells me that too.”

“Oh,” she said.

“But if he really missed me he’d break up with the scientist,” I said. “Then I’d know he’s serious.”

But I knew why he hadn’t broken up with the scientist. Nobody broke up with anyone unless they had someone else locked down. Even Jamie, who—when we were together—seemingly only wanted to be free, had not initiated the breakup. In fact, that had been my fatal error: breaking up with him before I had anyone to trapeze onto. Of course, all of that had led me here, to Venice and Theo, so perhaps it hadn’t been such an error.

“Well, we’ll just have to see what happens when you’re back in Phoenix,” she said knowingly.

“If I come back,” I said.

“Really? You might stay there?” she asked.

She sounded impressed.

“I don’t know, maybe. I just love being so free right now, not beholden to anyone or anything,” I said, lying completely.

I was only trying to fool her, as I hadn’t really planned out the idea of staying. The truth was, I couldn’t fully admit to myself that I wanted to stay. To do this would mean putting an end to the peach pit, blasting it to smithereens. And though it was parked in the far corner of my mind, I needed it. I didn’t actively acknowledge that I needed it—this escape or safety valve—but on a primal level I knew. Perhaps this was what living in the moment was about: an active state of denial about the future. I also felt that somehow Theo just “knew” that not only would my sister be returning soon but that I would be leaving. Maybe this was what past men had assumed of me? That I simply knew everything was temporary between us.



I felt as though it would be evident to anyone, even Theo, that Venice was not my natural habitat. As beachy as I looked in my long white dresses, which I wore solely now—never black anymore—there was something about me that didn’t belong. I was like a cactus, a storer of water, and not a creature who naturally immersed in the water. I didn’t take things lightly. I hoarded. And our differences were evident each morning when his tail would begin to go dry and crack, and we would rush him back to the ocean. I couldn’t hoard him. He did not ask to hoard me. And so I assumed that he never asked if my sister would be returning, or when I planned to leave, because on some level he already knew.

But he didn’t know. And sometimes when we were fucking, despite the relegation of the peach pit to a far corner of my mind, I would begin to cry. There would be the eternality and then a sudden break in the eternality that brought tears. Before the doughnuts, I didn’t even know I wanted to die. Now, I attributed my crying to joy. I hadn’t known that I’d wanted joy either. I had not ever known that I could have it. Now I was crying because it felt like a miracle—not only that I would want to live at all but that I actually could.

The time I cried the most was the day at dawn when he fucked me in the ass. The ass fucking did not hurt, or not in a way that made me wince. I did not cry from pain. This ass fucking was the tenderest fuck I could ever have imagined. Earlier on, when we were whispering to each other on the rocks, he had said, “I want to make you feel things you’ve never imagined and explore places you didn’t think could be explored.”