The Pisces(80)

“I fucking hate you,” I said coolly.

I was shocked that these words came out of me. Immediately I thought to correct them, but I didn’t.

“Lucy.”

I looked at him carefully. Did he really love me, or had it been just a game?

In a way it was both. It was a game he was playing with himself, a very serious game, in which I had occupied a crucial role. Theo had hoped that I could fill his emptiness, at least for a little while. Then, once he had me under the water—once my want for him was proven—he would have no need for me anymore. I would begin to dissolve in that emptiness and he would need someone else to fill it. This was a game I knew well. Like Claire, I too wanted a thousand cocks. Didn’t we all just want a thousand hard cocks attached to the bodies of boys who have died for us, still warm, to plug our infinite holes? It was a whole way of life, really, the pursuit of that satiety. And it felt like life or death for him too.

I wondered if I was looking at myself. Was I that beautiful and cold? What had always felt to me like an overabundance of want, too much desire, had not been the problem. It was my fear of having to feel it that hurt me. Theo was afraid too. That innate desire was something warm, lovely even, but his fear had turned it into something cold.



Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to need, even if you risked rejection. Annika needed me now. When she put it out there on the line it moved me. In her it didn’t seem weak or disgusting, but like a beautiful quality. Her need brought something out in me that I didn’t know that I could be. It was transformational.

I could go back to the beach house. I could go back to the house and I could stay, she told me so. In fact, she not only wanted me to do that—she needed me to do it. Maybe I could even finish the book on my own terms. Fuck the university. I could find a real publisher, at least the book wouldn’t be garbage.

“Never come to this beach again,” I said to him.

“Lucy—”

“Do you hear me? I never want to see you again.”

“I am so sorry,” he said.

“Sorry I’m not dead.”

He was silent. We both knew that I was oversimplifying things. But he didn’t correct me either.

“I do love you, Lucy,” he said.

I loved him too. But at the same time, who knew what love was exactly? I still didn’t have it figured out. I remembered what Dr. Jude had said. The question is not what is love, but is it really love I’m looking for?

“I just thought—I don’t know what I thought,” I said.

“You thought that we were better than some mythic story.”

“Yes,” I said. “I thought that your choosing me made me special—special enough to defeat the story.”

“You are special,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “But I don’t want to be part of that story.”

He looked paler than ever, as though the full moon or my rejection had blanched all the blood from his face. He was beautiful and yes, I loved him, in one of infinite ways a person could love. I knew that I would wish a thousand times that things could have ended differently. But I also knew, somewhere in me, that there was no soft ending. That kind of ending—the soft and loving ending—would have me back on the rocks, then under the ocean, for dead. One of the dead.



“Goodbye,” I said.

“Lucy.”

But he knew I was not coming. We both knew it was the end.

“Goodbye,” he said.

I watched him push off the rocks and dive into the ocean. It looked like he was entering a giant vagina, as though another woman had come to take him from me already. I wondered if he would always have other women, if he had loved me the most. Even if the other women were just bones in the sea, even if they were nothing, they had dissolved for him. They were his nothing.

But what, then, was he? Was he really even anything? Mythical creatures were born and died all the time. They were born when we needed them and they died when we no longer saw them through the same eyes. In that way he wasn’t so special. How many had been born before him? How many died when a human vision, powerful but ultimately fragile, was effaced by time and dirt? He would be reborn when the next woman needed him. He would come to occupy another space again.

I picked up my suitcase and walked back across the beach. A line of palm trees at the edge of the boardwalk rustled in unison in the wind.

“Fuck me,” I said to the palm trees.

I still didn’t love myself. I wasn’t sure how or when that was going to happen. But maybe it would if I continued to stay alive.

“Forgive me,” I said.

When I got back into the house, Steve was in the kitchen eating cereal again. He eyed me skeptically over his reading glasses. In front of him was the newspaper, with a headline that read FIRES IN THE VALLEY.

“I made a mistake,” I said.



He blinked and kept chewing.

“I’m not going to leave yet after all.”

“Is that so?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He was silent. He rose and put his bowl in the sink.

“Try not to bleed on anything,” he said, and shuffled up the stairs.

It dawned on me that I hadn’t gotten my period in a while, not since Theo and I had bloodied the sofa. That was at least five weeks ago. Maybe I was hitting menopause? Did women hit menopause at thirty-eight?