Love Sick Page 2

  The urn of Mexican cocoa in the hotel lobby (the best he’d had since living in Nicaragua)

  The massage with oil made of bergamot, lemon, lavender and rosemary

  The prayer wheel garden

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he wrote back. “I love that you remembered that for me.”

  “Love?” I screech to Kevin. He’s taken to calling me a couple of times a week before he has breakfast and goes off to cosmetology school. We talk about living one day at a time and how much we want and don’t know how to be happy-joyous-and-free, as well as about the chittering Vietnamese students who dyed his hair platinum one slow afternoon and my audition in Santa Fe. “He loves my memory but he doesn’t love me?”

  “That’s exaggerating, Frances, darling. I know he loves you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I singsong back at him. The rest of that sentence doesn’t need finishing.

  “If I’m not easygoing, why did I let him eat my dinner? Why did I smile and go study paintings while he talked to street musicians and gallery owners?”

  “What do you want to remember from the trip?”

  I’m stumped. I liked my shrimp and the lavender ice cream but an overeater has a hard time remembering tastes. A massage is a massage. The prayer wheels in the cool daffodil light will stay with me, though. “I liked the storm drain covers,” I say. “They had the city’s coat of arms on them.”

  “That’s hilarious! Seattle has special drains, too.”

  “I know! I took pictures of them. They’re walking squids or something, right?”

  “I’m not sure. So if you liked the drains, what would he repeat back as the things you wouldn’t want to forget?”

  “Probably the same things he loved,” I say. His mother gave him the trip for graduation—he had finished yet another bachelor’s degree, this time in social work. He’d earned that trip. Having earned the trip, it became a star turn, the Lone Ranger joined by Tonto so that he’d have someone to talk to and be admired by.

  “When you’re . . . uncomfortable,” Kevin says, either searching for words or trying not to offend me, “you get all, you know, arms crossed and frowny-eyed and your voice gets kinda high-pitched. Did you do that?”

  “You mean diffident? You saw the pictures he took of me. I’d give the Phantom of the Opera a shot at homecoming prince.”

  “How much did you apologize?”

  “For how I looked?”

  “Partly. But for the waiter not bringing water on time or the cost of gas or for him ordering the wrong meal?”

  “Or for him not burning CDs to play in the car? Yeah, that was my fault, too.”

  • • •

  The words “you never know what could happen” are still so alive in me that I rattle off Dar’s pleasures in the trip as that last shred of hope that I’m too smart to grasp at very often. Memory and sentiment have always been my province. I’m the one who has family stories from generations back, insists on holiday traditions and cried when the seam of a leather jewelry box my mother gave me forty years ago finally ripped. Maybe it’s being adopted or maybe it’s not having kids of my own, but I worry that my little pod of Kuffels will fade a little around the edges if one of us doesn’t know how to make my grandmother’s sugar cookies or that my great-great-grandfather died walking north from Andersonville when the Civil War ended.

  All that remembering of other people’s stories makes me a sometimes-brilliant gift-giver. Such talents can make me less than easygoing, I suppose, but they are talents, fonts of generosity. Exactly what woman is going to remember bergamot and rosemary when she buys massage oil for Dar? Who will send him a perfect bouquet of daisies for graduation and give him a cotton candy maker for Christmas?

  Do I buy love?

  There has been a succession of such gifts that are so apt that the only thing I can top them with is to go away and leave my friend/crush/lover alone to enjoy them. That solemn teddy bear we named Étienne, the Irish print of the crofter’s cottage, the Grover Washington CD, the book of World War II maps . . . ?

  Or do such gifts demand too much gratitude?

  Dar may find me high-strung, but it’s not like I email him every week or even call him every month or confide my loneliness, depression and agoraphobia in him. In fact, he turns me into an insouciant ingénue. I tend to forget to turn the oven on when he comes to dinner at my father’s house and not be able to make up my mind as to what kind of cheese we should buy: Is this what being un-easygoing is?

  Does he remember how we met, for God’s sake?

  August 2005

  Because of the heat wave stretching from coast to coast that prohibited dogs from flying, I had to leave Daisy, my boon companion, with my brother in Montana when I was due to go back to New York. Daisy is not an easy dog, but she’d been my blessed bane for the past two years. She is ageist and racist, and highly suspicious of wheelchairs, canes, crutches and walkers. Walking the broad length of the Promenade at night, she will sniff out and want to take down the drunks, drug addicts and mentally disabled from four blocks away. She comments on these people in a manner not dissimilar to Sandra Bernhard. For the last two years, I’d spent a couple of hours every day in the dog run lobbing balls while she shrieked “throw-the-ball-throw-the-ball-throw-the-ball” in a voice that disintegrated glass.

  Finding myself alone was disorienting. My bed was too big. If the buzzer went off, there was no torrent of protest. I didn’t have dirt in my shoes and mud stains on my shorts. I cleaned my apartment and threw out bags of dog hair and grit and it didn’t stack up again by suppertime. I was forced to find something to do as I watched the weather reports in Missoula, Minneapolis and New York, and I decided to take advantage of my bachelorettehood.

  What better statement of liberation could I make, then, than posting on craigslist? In the two years I’d had Daisy, I had had one sort-of boyfriend. In the few months before I got her, I’d gone through a mildly slutty period, but in my momentary independence I went, shall we say, a little over the top.*

  I could have paid for any number of useful things—teeth whitening, having my apartment painted, a plane ticket to Milan, taxes—with what I spent on corsets, high heels, push-up bras, hose and garter belts in the summer of 2005. I got some good use out of them and when, after three weeks of record high temperatures, Daisy was finally able to fly home, I had been paddled, whipped, flogged and fucked in a number of creatively organic and inorganic ways. I was down to one or two emails of interest from the original post. If I was going to finish this project, I’d have to find a way that didn’t excite her wild defense of me. Anyway, I was losing interest. I like kink as much as the next girl, but I think it’s kinkier to be ball-gagged by someone whose mother has asked me to pass the mashed potatoes.

  One of those lingering emails was from Dar. He thought my posting was quirky and too literate not to respond to. We spoke and I had no opinion of this younger man with a rather flat voice but I agreed to meet him for a movie.

  Which he slept through.

  We must have found something to talk about over iced tea afterward. I remember finding out that he has an MFA in creative writing and was from the West, which was enough to invite him to dinner at my apartment that week.

  He arrived in a state of extreme nervousness. Daisy took one look at him and started humping him, something she’d done once before, to a fireman. She broke some of the tension he carried with him but as soon as he peeled her off he turned to me and said, “I have to tell you something before we go any further.”

  I shivered a little at that.

  “I’m a crack addict.”

  I cocked my head and sized him up again. “I didn’t know white boys could be crackheads.”

  “I’m a criminal,” he said.

  “You’re an addict.” I shrugged my shoulders and went into the kitchen to fetch the chamomile iced tea he
’d mentioned was his favorite. “So what? I’m an addict, too.”

  “Not to crack. It’s not the same.”

  I handed him a glass and sat down at my computer to pull up a research file. “Sugar and cocaine both affect dopamine receptors. Tolerance grows for each. The two substances are cross-addictive. Do you want to know more?”

  He gulped his tea and then took another long sip. “I can’t believe you remember I love iced chamomile,” he said.

  • • •

  The company Dar had been working for had thought it wise for them to part ways. His lease had run out and, at the time we met, he’d decided to head to a friend’s beach house to go cold turkey. He was in the midst of saying good-bye to ten years’ worth of friends. After meeting up with old pals, he took to dropping in; when he was through with his farewells, he asked to stay for a night before hopping a bus to Georgia.

  He stayed for ten days. The studio portion of the Bat Cave is about 15 by 40 feet, barely room for a single occupant. Now there were three, and one of us didn’t sleep. Except for forays to see his dealer, Dar worked frantically—downloading weird software, writing fragments of bopper poetry or base-crazy wisdom—on his laptop as I worked on a book. It was unaccountably comfortable, each of us in our own bubble of thought, emerging occasionally to share a good line, a website or a song. I gave him Frou Frou’s “Let Go” and he gave me the Postal Service’s “Clark Gable.” I would set a salad or bowl of yogurt at his side and two hours later he’d realize he’d eaten it and loved it. At night he created an elaborate ritual of tucking Daisy and me into bed.

  The problem, he explained, was that, high, he found it hard to get an erection.

  “But you would if you could, right?” I asked him about twice a day.

  And one evening I came in from walking Daisy and he was splayed along the couch like Manet’s “Woman Reclining in Spanish Dress with Kitten.”

  Except there was no kitten and he wasn’t dressed.

  “So?” he said as I stood in the door and gaped. “Ready?”

  “Uh,” I stuttered.

  “It’s time. You want to do this, right? Let’s do it.”

  I laughed as nervously as hair dancing over a flame. He stood up and walked over, unleashed Daisy, inspected the leash for a moment and then flung it into the kitchen behind us.

  “So you don’t want to.”

  I stuttered some more. “I do. I’m just . . . taken aback.”

  “Abashed, disconcerted, out of countenance . . .”

  “Surprised will do.”

  I had never giggled, cried and come at the same time. That conjunction of silly orgasmic stars would happen once more in my life, the second and last time Dar fucked me and I made love to him. At least he was long-sober the last time. At least he got it up on a whim and at least he came.

  Still. Twice in five years can make a girl kind of tense.

  April

  A couple of weeks after Dar loved the memories I’d saved for him, I ask him for music suggestions. Knowing we are now at a permanent impasse there cannot be a more stupid request I could make. Whenever one of my students goes through a breakup, I urge her to go out immediately and buy an album by an artist she did not listen to with her ex. “Cut your hair, take a juggling class, rearrange your furniture,” I advise. “Do whatever you have to do to become a person he doesn’t know anymore.” It begins with replacing the music because all she needs to do is run into 3 Doors Down on her iPod to start a day-long crying jag.

  I am obviously bored out of my mind to invite Christopher O’Riley playing Radiohead into my life. With a lump in my throat, I listen to one tune and respond that I like it, then go back to playing Farm Town on Facebook.

  Dar slams back. “What do you mean, you ‘like’ it? I sent you a playlist of songs I love and you listen to one and you ‘like’ it. You know music is one of the most important things to me. I think you owe me more consideration than that.”

  I stare at the email, wondering what to say to make it right. I’ve gotten myself into one of those dumb arguments that is about one thing but is really about deeper matters of the heart, and although I started it, I’m pissed off at the fierceness of his response. I can listen to the song again, apologize and find something profound to say about it, or I can inform him that he’s overreacting to my mistake in asking for music that would remind me of his loose-hipped dancing forever.

  Which I tell him. I might be a thinner, happier person if I felt and expressed my anger at the moment it’s roused, so this spat is important. This is progress. I have never argued with a man I loved.

  In fifteen minutes, we descend into an email tug-of-war of I-told-you-how-I-felt versus that’s-exactly-why-I-can’t-listen-to-these-songs. By the time he circles back to my lack of going with the flow, I’m browbeaten. “Stop this,” I snap. “Let’s just stop.”

  I mean a full, complete halt to all proceedings, but having argued my point of view I’m too tired to emphasize that to Dar.

  What I say to Kevin is, “What the fuck does he mean I don’t ‘go with the flow’? We met on craigslist, for God’s sake. I was letting men spank me that summer. He’d lost his job and apartment and was ten thousand bucks in crack debt when I took him in and kicked him out at the right time. You know I really want to move to Seattle, right? I have a life there. I have you and Grace and a family the size of the Osmonds within 500 miles. What’s here? I walk dogs. I have about four friends here, and the only ones I actually socialize with are Ben and Jean. There isn’t room to turn around in the Bat Cave. But I can’t make the decision because maybe I should move to Phoenix. I hate that city, but I could take care of Dad and see Dar on a regular basis. In the five years I’ve known him, we see each other a couple of times a year. All I do is wave good-bye.”

  “Shouldn’t you say that to Dar?” Kevin asks mildly.

  “I can’t. It’s been such a hard month already.” I imitate Dar’s voice: “‘I love you but I’m not in love with you; you’re too stressful; I love the way your brain works; you don’t take me or my interests seriously.’ I feel like one of those felt bull’s-eyes with Velcro arrows of Dar’s statements all over me.”

  Besides, if I let him keep arguing our way back to that night in the car outside his house, he’d have to clarify what he meant by my lack of easygoingness and I’m not sure I want to hear it.

  “You gotta disengage, Princess. Stop emailing him. Start saving your money and come back to Seattle. I’m lonely for you.”

  All the tears of rage and love coalesce around my vocal cords at that. I miss Kevin, too. As ready as I’ve been for the last couple years to massacre my Visa card and move to Arizona, I’ve never woken up every morning hoping he will call me that day or text me a picture of the tomato seedlings in his kitchen window. Kevin does that. Kevin’s genius is for making me feel part of his life by sharing the small things in the day. Dar’s genius is for making room to twit witticisms between final exams or full appointment rosters.

  “If I ever get it together to move out there,” I tell him, “can we have one night a month when we watch sad movies and cry until midnight?”

  “No. We have other things to do.”

  I think of our stop in the International District on the way back to his house. He had to buy some fish to feed his three adolescent turtles.

  “Maybe feeding neon tetras to Me, Myself and I will be catharsis enough,” I say.

  “Yes,” he purrs in his speaking-to-a-kid-with-a-scraped-knee voice. “Only pretty fishies for my babies. It’s so much fun to watch them snap them up.”

  It could be our version of a reality TV family: food, love and gore.

  Two

  It takes Galapagos tortoises forty years to go through puberty.

  The most important love is first love.

  Freud would say that my first love was my father, and there is somet
hing to that. Little girls say their fathers can do anything, but mine really could. He set my broken arm, fixed my doll furniture, made the best spaghetti sauce, built a nineteen-foot sailboat, knew which mushrooms were poisonous and missed a lot of dinners because in our town, he was the first doc called for an emergency. My mother didn’t know how to work the Magnavox stereo but I did because my dad and I listened to music together in the evenings when he was home. He wasn’t just a hunter—he made his own bullets, an exacting and exciting hobby of molten lead and a delicate balance scale. He sewed up our Thanksgiving turkey with one hand and made new shoes for my Red Skelton doll. My father respected all those little girl things about me, but he didn’t treat me like a child. One Sunday afternoon he had forty-five minutes to teach me to ride a bike and I was flying down Dore Lane with five minutes to go. Later he taught me to drive his Oldsmobile 98, a small atoll of a vehicle, in the April mud up Miller Creek, saying one lesson in turning, stopping, accelerating and backing up in that mess was all I’d need.

  As I write this, he’s nearly ninety-one and blind from macular degeneration. Nonetheless, we spend the first day of our 2011 Christmas vacation together comparing the birth narratives in the Gospels, figuring out that stigmata is a bunch of hooey because Jesus could not have been nailed through the palms of his hands, and reading up on the census that occasioned Mary and Joseph’s return to Bethlehem. (There wasn’t one.)

  I still adore him.

  As a kid, I also adored my brothers, who are seven and nine years older than I. They didn’t have any of Daddy’s powers to make things but they both had a glorious balls-to-the-wind aura that terrified and mesmerized me in equal parts. I would do anything to remind them I was alive and I made a fine target for the missile launcher on Dick’s Lionel train and gave away all my allowance to Jim for the firecrackers that scared me. Sometimes the three of us or the two of them were an unbreachable whole—my aunt Mildred considered us juvenile delinquents when she tried to take care of us while Mother was in the hospital—but mostly we went our own ways.