Folie à Deux (20 page)

Carla’s actions cease to surprise. Her cunning becomes commonplace and I never fight. She continues to confuse my lack of rejection for acceptance because she still fails to realize that I cannot stop her. No other boy in my position would deny my opportunity and she knows that too.

This is my junior year of high school except now she is my teacher again. I co-exist with her for forty-two minutes a day and act like she is just as wonderful as everyone else thinks. I feign fantasized arousal when other boys recount their plans if they could get her alone. There are days when I cannot fathom leaving my bed, I consider staying in homeroom all day, going to a toilet stall in the bathroom simply to avoid hearing about, thinking about, or being bathed in her ubiquity.

My existence continues in the same controlled and monitored manner for perpetuity with seemingly no end. I’ve cultivated a state of mind as a means of protection that disconnects me from my surroundings with a bizarre objectivity. Slight glimpses of hope appear only to be quashed by Carla’s ingenious deceit. She confides in me not only the dilemmas she faces when colleagues confront her but also the solutions she crafts to circumvent prying eyes.

The superintendent and principal call her into a meeting where she is told, “Be careful, Carla. You don’t want to risk ruining your reputation because of a star crossed crush by a student.” They neither know me nor ask who I am. They hear the same rumors as everyone else and dismiss the possibility just as quickly counting on the same infallibility that Carla manipulates. She assuages their suspicions and alters our routine to conceal her actions in minute ways.

She picks me up in an adjacent development and makes me duck down in her car. We sit in the library during study hall to show her fearlessness of being in public together. And most laughably I only go to her room after I’ve eaten lunch in the cafeteria, my body her dessert. Small fixes that only veil the pollution.

My senior year begins and despite my alternate existence I am still swept up in the wave of being at the top of the social ladder. I’m excited to be graduating but for reasons unique to me. Perhaps it’s subconscious, or preconscious, or simply a product of forward looking but as a new year turns familiar, I pull away from her. Once I make the seemingly impossible decision to wean myself it feels instinctive, like survival.

Separating myself is easy when only part of my mind is with her, only part of the time. I ignore her calls more regularly and Kevin’s always. She finds one reason or another to call on my parent’s line and I encourage her, hoping to arouse suspicion. I turn into someone nasty and cold. When I feel crowded and alienated from everyone in my life because she has sequestered me I ignore her too. She softens her approach but it means nothing because I’m beyond the ability to care, beyond distant.

My passive approach replaces what I am petrified to do. I have recurring dreams of walking into her classroom and telling her, “You’re sick and I hope you rot in hell.” Sometimes her room is empty, sometimes full of past and current students to witness my catharsis. It’s the same choreography each time and they are all there to see me make recompense for my objectification. In my waking hours I push back against her just hard enough to make her feel resistance. She cries or begs or sometimes even yells, but whatever her reaction, I relent. In each instance, I surrender.

I know other students and faculty see me treat her rudely but I don’t care. Sometimes, she comes to my other classes and
asks my teacher see me for a moment. She knows I can’t tell my English teacher, “No, I won’t speak to Miss Danza.”

As I walk to the door, I feel everyone’s eyes follow, I hear what they whisper. Before I can prepare myself, I’m standing in front of her and she is asking me questions for which I have no answers. I can’t respond because I don’t know how to articulate these things. I don’t know because I can’t understand anything anymore.

My decision is going to hurt, reminiscent of ripping off a bandage. The pain is inevitable but air has to reach my wounds in order to heal. That’s what I need more than ever before, air. I’ve been suffocating for years. This is what people like me do. We put bandages on our problems, healing not always an immediate option.

Life rolls on at a deafening pace, my mind never able to catch up. Sometimes when the bandage is placed over the wound too tightly or pulled off too quickly, a piece of the scab rips off too. With the flow of blood, old wounds open. Ones that may have been forgotten or worse yet, injuries that were unknown. But I feel them now.

Lying is inescapable, but not until I start lying to Carla do I realize that I am by default, a liar. I lie to everyone. Sometimes for no reason, just to be in control of my own reality. She was a hovel from that unsavory characteristic until my survival depends on lying to her too. Now I have alienated everyone and I’m left with nothing when without her.

Because this relationship lacks any predictability I cannot apply normal logic. This isn’t like breaking up with a girlfriend. I don’t know how to navigate these feelings. The first question I ask myself is, “Did I ever really want this?” I believed so but were they my reasons or hers? Overcome with disarray I choose
subconsciously to act the only way for which I’m trained. Being dishonest, no matter the reason, is for the purpose of self-gain and in some cases, self-preservation.

After months of half-hearted attempts I know she will never leave me alone unless I make it happen. I create issues that anger me even if there is no basis. Fear of the real crisis paralyzes me from telling her how I truly feel. I try to make her feel guilty for normal things to illuminate the real dysfunction. For as long as we have been together, she goes back to her parent’s house, forty-five minutes from school, on the weekends.

“I don’t like when you’re at your parent’s because it cuts into our time on the phone,” I manufacture. I’m not old enough to have mastered forethought, only lashing out with what sounds good at the moment.

To my amazement, the following weekend, she stays at her apartment and tells me, “I stayed here for you, Jimi.” I don’t really want to talk to her any more than already forced but I play rejection tag to ensure she feels the dismissal that she projects on me.

I ask her not to talk about her nephews because I don’t like hearing about someone my age who spends time with her when I cannot. The things for which I choose to needle her only send a mixed message but that’s because they come from my own distorted place. I don’t want to talk to her anymore, I don’t want to be tethered to her for one more second but my lashings only convey the opposite. The appeals I make only exist to wrestle control. It’s the only way to be relevant in my own life. I hear nothing more regarding the close relationship she has with her only sister’s sons.

When I tell her, “It bothers me when you stop to talk to another teacher while we are walking together,” she raises her voice the next time, “Sorry. In a hurry. I’ll catch up with you later.”

This even extends to the principal one day as we are walking through the cafeteria. Now I wonder how far she will travel to ensure my contentment. My own sway frightens me. I have no such power over myself. How do I have it over another person? The power imbalance shifts daily without warning.

I feel in control but not how I want. I don’t want to regulate her, but me. Instead, I create a two way street of a strengthened bond where she expects correspondence. I have no valid reason why I don’t reciprocally ignore other students who talk to me. Why I don’t spend more time on the phone with her on the weekends in lieu of time with my parents. I don’t have the maturity, emotional or otherwise to outline the sacrifices a healthy relationship needs. I oblige her and kick myself for digging a deeper pit. Slowly I realize her power over me is imaginary.

I learn the power I have beyond the scope of what she gives me in the closet. I understand just how badly she needs sex with me. My only solution to feeling powerless is to battle back. I become sullen prompting her to ask me what is troubling me.

I say, “Nothing,” with a dishonest pout.

“I’m worried because you aren’t acting yourself,” she attempts to pull me out of my funk. Her attempts to console me are more heartfelt on the days we have a scheduled tryst. She is willing to bend and flex around whatever my complaint du jour is when the threat of cancelled sex is on the line, entertaining my gripes as if they are legitimate.

I push the limit each time toward the inevitable, increasingly nervous to test her boundaries. One argument, I hold my line all the way through the car ride, the ten minute conversation outside her apartment and even after she asks, “Please come inside where we can talk.”

I refuse her apology for whatever the contrived offense and see her agitation grow as banishment from my penis looms.

While sitting on the loveseat in her apartment she finally asks, “Do you just want me to take you home?” I sit silently, searching for what seems like an eternity although I’m not debating a response. I’m focused myopically on one issue. What will her reaction be? I’ve always surrendered to her litany of explanations but this time I want to test her. I have a knot in my stomach, worried about what hinges on my answer.

“Yes, take me home.” I say coldly.

Without a word she stands and stares. I’m frozen, she takes me seriously. She walks toward her purse so I stand up and head to the door but she cuts in front. She grabs the knob, swings it wildly open and it slams against the nearby hutch. The noise forces me back in fear. The door bounces off the hutch and closes, prompting her to open it again just as forcefully. This time she catches it as it bounces and slams it against the curio once, twice, three times and then slams it shut. She bounds at me.

I’m afraid she is attacking but instead wraps her arms around me, buries her face in the crook between my neck and shoulder and sobs uncontrollably. I immediately snap out of my attempted torture. All I can think about is that I have hurt her such that she is irrational. I’ve never seen her raise her voice in class, never heard her say anything hateful. Never has she slammed a door, or shown any temper. This outburst is a direct result of what has happened between us, concocted by me.

She shakes as she cries and all she says is, “I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

I don’t know why she is sorry but I rub her head, “Shhh. Don’t cry.”

As she nuzzles her face into my shoulder it turns into kissing my neck, which leads to my cheek and naturally my lips. The kiss is reminiscent of our first, soft and unassuming. It grows with steady intensity to be erotic just before she pulls me to the ground in front of the recently abused door. Quite voraciously she places one hand on each of my shoulders and pushes me down.

She orgasms and her entire body collapses after its rigid stance for, what had to be an uncomfortable amount of time. Carla pulls me up, grabs me and shoves me inside her bareback, all in one motion. The shock of everything that has just happened has its culmination with her warmth now enveloping me. I feel like I can come immediately but restrain myself because I know she has plans for something greater. My emotions and my knees are raw with rub burn for how long we spend in the spot where we fell. After we’re done she rises, puts her clothes back on and continues unfazed by her own volatility.

I am consumed by boundless longing. I want my life back but am powerless to retrieve anything that would seem normal. I would like there to be a moment of epiphany where the course and justification are blared as if from a trumpet. Instead, it happens as ambivalently as the rest of my actions. I decide that I will no longer subject myself or anyone else to the torture that has been my life.

On the phone I tell her, “Carla, I’m done. I don’t want to be with you anymore.”

She begs and pleads through sobs, “What is it supposed to mean that we got married in Paris?”

I don’t answer because I know she remembers that decision differently than me. I’m certain that it is committed in her memory as a joint conclusion between two people madly in love but I have that event framed otherwise.

Just yesterday, she brought me backstage in the auditorium and for the first time, we have sex in school. At her prodding, she pulled her oversized black sweater up, followed by her purple mini skirt and put me inside of her, moaning too loudly for my comfort.

“So what was yesterday then? Were you just throwing me a bone?” She says through her tears. I don’t think she means the pun. She insists upon making me feel as though I guide the course of action in this abortion of a relationship.

“No Carla, that was your choice,” I reply shocked at my conviction. After hours on the phone, I think I agree to give us another chance.

One week later I wake up with the same suffocation and tell her again, “I cannot do this anymore.” The response is the same wailing and gnashing of teeth.

She points out, “Jimi, we belong. More than any other man and woman have ever belonged together. Don’t you see all that we have overcome to get this far?”

She quotes lyrics from various mix tapes, “Jimi, like Peter Gabriel says, ‘I see the resolution of a thousand fruitless searches.’” I feel embarrassed for her desperation but can’t bring myself to correct the misquote. By the end of the several debates over the coming weeks, I leave them all believing she is my destiny. She wears me down and eventually I cease broaching the subject. What she keeps well hidden is that I wear her down too.