Love Sick (3 page)

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 something 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.

It’s easy to apply that last memory, of our separateness, to my childhood, but this winter I made my father have our old 8mm movies transferred to DVD. One of the things that struck me was how patient and kind Dick and Jim were in the Christmas scenes, opening one gift at a time for my father to film, with no tears or pouting or ripping, helping me to extract the big Chatty Cathy box from my mother’s hospital corners and hangman’s knots of wrapping paper and curled ribbons. They showed me how the doll worked, placed her in my arms, and turned me to the camera where I squinted at the light bar that topped the camera like a moose’s antlers.

Because we were all three adopted, I worked out plans to marry one of them. I wanted to marry Dick until I was twelve years old, the day he came home from Vietnam. Jim picked him up from the airport and I came flying down the street from the school bus to see him after nearly a year of not hearing from him and he greeted me by saying, “Hi, Fatty!”

There is much to say about my brothers, who were passionate, bursting with energy and testosterone, rebellious and independent. They also possessed sweetness and protectiveness, which made me love them, and all that crackling aloofness that made me wonder about and idolize them.

• • •

Shakespeare would agree, I think, that first love is the most important love, with the caveat that appearances can and often do mask who or what that first love really is, and that love is as likely to lead to ruin as to paradise.

By the time I met Will, I was doomed to unrequited love.

He was in Sister Mary Martin Joseph’s first grade class and I was in Sister Mary Marcillia’s. It was 1963, and each first grade classroom had fifty kids. I don’t know how I found Will among the hundred kids on the first grade playground, but we both remember that each day I offered him a drink of water and proceeded to shove his face into the fountain. That was the last time I had the upper hand with Will.

Will would beg to differ.

The way he tells it, I bullied him in a Lucy-and-Charlie-Brown sort of way through second and third grade, in which we were in the same classes.