True Love Read online

  Dedication

  FOR PATTY COTTRELL

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sarah Gerard

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  My mother reached out to me again this morning, trying to reconcile. Odessa asks me what I would say to her if I could say anything. “I guess I would thank her for teaching me to be so kind,” I say. I put her on speakerphone and hold my camera up to my crotch. I send Brian a picture with my underwear pulled to the side. My bedroom looms in the background.

  It’s been three years since I’ve spoken with my mother, since she said to me: “Why don’t you cut yourself, take some pills, starve yourself, drop out of school, and suck some dick, Nina?” I had just told her I was considering not returning to college. I was two months out of rehab, talking to her on my bicycle en route to my second job as a line cook at the Pizza Shack. I told her never to contact me again.

  You’re my only child. You know I love you, she said in her email. You’ve learned so much about yourself since then. You’ve had a difficult recovery. She said we could resolve our differences on my terms. She offered to come back to St. Petersburg.

  “Have you responded?” says Odessa.

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  I touch myself and send Brian a picture of the gloss on my fingertips. “I don’t know why she would come here if she knows I’m leaving in a month,” I say. I place my fingers in my mouth.

  “How would she know that?”

  “She talks to my dad.”

  I imagine Brian wheeling over to the senior editor in his chair. Having to cross his legs.

  He texts me. You’re killing me.

  “Hang on,” I say to Odessa.

  You should touch yourself, I type.

  “What are you waiting for her to say to you?” she says. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

  I’m at work, says Brian.

  So go to the bathroom.

  “Yeah,” I say, “I just don’t think she’s sincere.”

  Odessa has known her since we were five. I expect her to agree with me. She’s quiet. A picture of Brian’s dick appears on my phone. It’s thick and curved, with trimmed hair, dark and tight against his groin. He snapped the photo in the mirror of an employee bathroom. It’s lit from above.

  Are you making yourself cum? I say.

  You should help me, he says.

  “Hang on, Odessa,” I say. “Seth is texting me.”

  “No worries.”

  Brian and I make plans for him to pick me up at eight. This gives me a few hours to file my article with him about the ongoing effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. If I have time after that, I’ll read Numina submissions and wash my pussy.

  “Let me call you later,” I say to Odessa. “He just asked me to help him with something.”

  “Okay.” She hangs up.

  BRIAN ARRIVES AT eleven. I meet him down the street and climb into his black Jetta. He offers no explanation for how late he is, but carries on a side conversation as he drives, holding his phone down by his left thigh. We pass Seth’s apartment, where a gauzy white bedsheet hangs in the window, illuminated by the light over his worktable. I imagine him smoking weed, listening to Kurt Vile, painting color studies in his sketchbook. He texted me just as Brian arrived and invited me over. I was disappointed by his tenderness, his willingness to have me in his space. It makes me look like a bad person.

  We park down the street from the beach and walk hand in hand down the brick road, past craftsman houses cloaked in darkness. We cross the last road to the Gulf of Mexico and are met with the sulfurous stench of red tide. We look out at the water, but it’s too dark to see the fish kills lying along the shore. Brian turns toward me and lifts my shirt to find the small of my back. My body lights up. I realize I’ve stopped breathing and inhale, coughing at the smell. He pulls me over to a dune, and I kneel to take him in my mouth.

  IT’S PAST MIDNIGHT when he drops me off at Seth’s apartment. The light above the worktable is off, but the light beside his chaise is on, which means he’s reading. I take the alley down the side of his building, past the group home for teenage mothers, so I can enter from the back to give him the idea that I’ve walked to his house from my own.

  I cross the crushed-shell parking lot and climb a set of sun-bleached wooden stairs. I knock on his kitchen window. The warm light from his bedroom spills down the hall when he opens the door. He moves to let me in. “Odessa said you told her you were helping me with something,” he says.

  “I didn’t want to talk on the phone anymore and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” I say.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Finishing an article.”

  He closes the door behind me and gestures toward his room. “I walked by your apartment and didn’t see a light on.”

  “I might have been in the bath.”

  He’s covered the rugs with plastic tarps. A vertical canvas, recently primed, leans against the wall atop a waist-high bookshelf of tattered monographs. He’s pulled out two by Richard Diebenkorn and Gerhard Richter and laid them open on the worktable. Several color-field paintings lean together against another shelf of paperbacks.

  I sit on the chaise longue. “What were you doing so late at the gallery?” I say. As the artist-in-residence at Black Box, Seth is paid for nine hours of work there every week, but as it happens, he ends up working almost forty. Last week, I went with him to the home of the gallery’s owner. Their conversation centered on small-town gossip, gallery business, and light flirtation of the kind gay men employ with straight men. Seth reciprocated and deflected, ever aware that his reputation, his future, and his self-image were in Theo’s hands. My mind was two mirrors facing each other. I pretended to be absorbed by Theo’s collection of African diaspora art. I wasn’t actually engaged until Theo asked me about my progress on the inaugural issue of Numina, the gallery’s flagship publication, which Seth volunteered me to edit. “People are submitting,” I told Theo. “I’d be happy to go over it with you this week.” It’s clear he continues to hope that I’m temporary, two years after meeting me. He refers to me sarcastically as Dorothy Parker. “That would be fine,” he said.

  Seth closes the monographs. “Theo entrusted me with the deinstallation of the emerging artist show,” he says. “Taking down a show involves removing artwork from the walls, wrapping it properly for shipping, patching the walls, repainting them, mopping the floors. It’s not glamorous, but it affords me time for contemplation.”

  “What were you contemplating?”

  “The situation I find myself in.”

  He swirls a paintbrush in a yogurt container filled with water. He taps it gently on the brim and lays it on a paper towel.

  “A studio practice utilizes various discoveries,” he says. “My recent discovery is that direct confrontation leads to a personal clarification of environmental relations. The most urgent themes in art break down barriers between people. Yet a studio is a place of isolation. A contradiction. And in the present period, my studio practice is not solitary.”

>   “Are you saying you want me to leave?”

  “I don’t believe that’s what I said.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

  “The polemic push of the organism against the uncontrolled dynamics of his environment can be very generative.”

  I look at him.

  “What were you doing tonight, Nina?” he says.

  “Writing in the bathtub,” I say.

  “I knocked and you didn’t answer.”

  “Sorry about that. I was wearing headphones. Would you like to hear what I was writing?”

  “Sure.”

  I take my phone from my purse. In my email, I find the latest finished story in the Ira Cycle, my new series of thinly veiled meditations on my relationship with Seth, which I began after abandoning my novel. This story is called “An Opening.” In it, Ira has invited Liz to an opening at the art gallery where he works, and has hung a solo show of his paintings. A nice-sized gathering has convened on the space, among them his high school art teacher and the gallery’s owner. He’s introducing Liz to a small group of people, but is describing her as a friend and new collaborator rather than his girlfriend, though they have been dating for almost two years and have never collaborated on a project. Liz is playing along. She doesn’t want to contradict and embarrass him, or humiliate herself, and though she wants to be known as his girlfriend, it is also validating to be described as an artist.

  Afterward, Liz stays at Ira’s apartment. They spoon on a chaise longue, which functions as his bed, in his bedroom, which is also his studio. Ira acquired the chaise longue for twenty dollars at a yard sale. The original fabric is worn through, so he’s tucked layers of blankets around it rather than repair it. When they share it, Liz is trapped against the wall, so she can’t turn or stretch or adjust her position. She is never comfortable, and always wakes in pain, but she would rather be in pain than sleep alone. Ira never stays at her apartment. He can’t paint there.

  She disappears in the morning before he wakes. She knows he would be annoyed to find her there. He would solemnly make her toast, as if it’s his duty. Ira’s bedroom window faces east, she writes in her journal. The sun shines on him every morning when I leave him.

  “Is that a threat?” he says when I finish.

  “What do you mean?”

  He snickers. I light the roach in his ashtray. Outside, headlights streak past on the freeway on-ramp. Gulls take flight from the guardrail. Four Post-its taped to the window correspond to miniature empty canvases beneath them: EPIC VOID, PREGNANT SPACE, EMPTY HOLE, HOLLOW LOT.

  “I passed a mother and two young children this morning on Ninth Avenue petting a dead squirrel,” I say.

  “How maudlin.”

  “Isn’t she worried about disease?”

  “Some people aren’t.” He smiles at me, then pulls his shirt over his head and drops it on the tarp at his feet, where he also deposits his underwear. He disappears into the bathroom and takes a long shower while I wait. When he emerges, he smells like tea tree and Fast Orange. His long hair drips down his back. “You can stay here, but I can’t guarantee you’ll enjoy it,” he says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not going to sleep with you.”

  “You think that’s why I’m here?”

  “I think physical intimacy is more important to you than it is to me.”

  He sits beside me. I undress and press myself against the wall, and he lies down in front. I wrap my arm around him and lower my face into his hair.

  “I know you love me,” he says.

  Two

  I began cutting myself and sneaking pills in middle school, resentful, bored, and unsupervised. I suspected my feelings were more intense than other people’s. My parents were preoccupied with their mutual hatred of each other, inspired by the acrimonious divorce and my mother’s new residence in a trailer park in Lutz. She has since moved to a nudist colony in Kissimmee to live with her polycule.

  I moved to New York for college. I stole Adderall from my suitemate. I fucked her boyfriend on a weekly basis. I fucked people without condoms. I especially liked men who already had girlfriends. The hope was always that they’d leave their girlfriends for me; for them to leave their girlfriends would have been the ultimate victory, proof of my irresistibility, but they never did.

  I believe it was my suitemate who called my father upon the advice of other students whose identities remain a mystery to me. I lived for eight weeks in a Tampa facility named after one of the twelve steps. My official diagnosis was drug addiction, but I was never picky, and any numbing or mood-altering agent would do. Weed, wine, sex, starvation. I signed up for trauma counseling because I felt something had happened to me, although I was unable to articulate a single event. Others in the group shared stories of incest, combat, rape, dead children.

  I became infatuated with a Kevin Spacey look-alike in facility-wide group therapy. He sat across from me and never looked at me, but I felt we had a connection that ran deeper than flirting. We were warned not to start a new relationship until after a year of sobriety. I never said more than two words to him, but I continued masturbating to his memory until he called me one morning, a month after I’d left. I’d never given him my number. Hearing his voice, I remembered that he had a family. He had stolen his daughter’s Girl Scout money for meth. He’d hired prostitutes on business trips to Thailand.

  IT’S SWARMING SEASON, and my building is infested with termites. I awake to their wings beating against my cheekbones. I gather some into a plastic lunch bag to bring to my landlord, who has insisted she needs to see a “living sample.” My duplex neighbor composts in a plastic trash can five feet from my back door. I drag the can in front of their sunporch screen and ride my bicycle to the hypnotist’s office.

  “My mother disappeared and my father was always working,” I tell her. I’ve been seeing the hypnotist on a sliding scale for the last month because I have a deep intuition that something is wrong with me, somehow related to my unnameable trauma, and hypnosis seems compatible with my daily wake-and-bake habit. She is white, in her late forties, with dreadlocks and carved wooden gauges weighing down her ears. The henna on her hands looks like Spanish moss, and her office is plush with amber lighting, palo santo, and embroidered pillows. She told me in our first session that after ten years of working with children in foster care, and five years in disaster relief, this is the field where she feels she can make the most difference. “I wish I could offer it for free,” she said.

  “I’d have a babysitter three or four nights a week, and it was always some teenager who would invite her boyfriend over,” I say. “I’d call boys in my class who didn’t want to talk to me, who would answer the phone and hear my voice and hang up. Sometimes there were friends, but everyone eventually leaves me. When I moved back to Florida, none of my college friends even called me.”

  AFTER REHAB, I attended NA for two weeks, then hooked up with a crust punk I met smoking outside after a meeting one night. The topic had been loneliness. I was gazing at a light fixture where moth after moth incinerated itself. “I’m an only child, too,” he said to me, bumming a cigarette. Though drawing him closer into my emotional sphere seemed risky at that critical stage in my sobriety, I couldn’t bring myself to prefer being alone after that. I couldn’t find it in me to reject him when he’d shown me such kindness as to ask me for a lighter.

  I moved him in with me. He began smoking crack again, but I couldn’t kick him out because then he’d be homeless. This went on for weeks, until I met Seth riding my bicycle home from the Pizza Shack. He was two blocks from my apartment, unloading bags from the back of the gallery’s pickup. I recognized him as a moody artist from my high school. He invited me upstairs to drink tea, and a week later, we fucked on his mite-crawling rag rugs. I continued fucking him for another month until I worked up the nerve to dump Mission. Mission skipped town to go train-hopping again. Seth has never let me forget this series of events, even two years lat
er. Whenever he can, he subtly alludes to “the way I live my life.”

  “SETH DOESN’T TRUST me,” I tell the hypnotist. “It’s his Lutheran upbringing and his parents’ divorce, and then, of course, his dad died. Hit by a Mack truck. I think he blames his mother on some level and, by extension, all women. I don’t know how to leave him, or if I should, or how I even could, or how I can fix things between us. He’s moving to New York with me, which seems to suggest he loves me.”

  “You love him,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Love is a trance.”

  “Is that a song?”

  “A trance is an ‘inwardly directed, selectively focused attention.’ It’s a story in which you become so absorbed you can’t see anything else.” She opens a drawer to her left and removes a smudge stick. She lights it and waves it back and forth until the smell of sage fills the room.

  “Pretend you’re alone,” she says.

  She’s obscured behind a curtain of smoke.

  “THEY’RE ORCHIDS,” SETH told me that first day upstairs. He was reading my mind, brewing tea in a thick jar. He set a timer on the kitchen counter in a beam of late afternoon light. The room was dense with tendrils of hanging flowers, which I’d been admiring. “They’re not always the most beautiful, but they have bilateral symmetry, so when they bloom, they look like human faces. They watch you.”

  He kept his eyes downcast, then looked directly into mine. He was taller than me by almost a foot, so I tilted my chin up to him. His cotton shirt was worn through, nearly transparent. “Do you smoke weed?” he said, inviting me to sit on the rug while he sketched. He passed the joint down to me. Chrysanthemums bloomed in the golden water of my jar. The sound of him enchanted me; his confidence convinced me he was wise. “What is art, Nina?” he asked me. “I still am not sure. What faculties does it command? Which aspects of our humanity, of ourselves? It may be easy to talk about, but it’s hard to accept. What do I want out of it? Where do I want to go with it?”

  He turned on a lecture by Alan Watts, and talked alongside or over it for my benefit, filling in the details for my full understanding. The topic, coincidentally, was how to attract your soul mate. “On the deepest level, a person on the whole can get in the way of his own existence,” Watts said.