The Man I Love (25 page)

It was hot the May afternoon when Erik went to David’s place, looking for coke. He found David in bed.

With Daisy.

No words. No altercation. Not then. Erik stood in the doorway as David flipped a handful of covers over his and Daisy’s bodies. Then the three of them had simply stared at each other, frozen, as the world exploded in slow-motion.

Erik didn’t know what made him turn around and leave. Shock, he supposed. Or maybe a human body could only take so much stress before it went numb. He felt numb walking down the stairs, walking through the living room of David’s apartment, going out the way he came in. He closed the front door without a sound. Politely. So as not to disturb. What a bizarre thing to do.

He had trouble reconstructing what happened next. More shock, he guessed. His mind shutting down what was impossible to comprehend. Up in his hot, airless bedroom, he sat on the bed staring at the wall. Trying to determine if he indeed saw what he had just seen. He couldn’t feel his limbs. His face burned, his lips were numb, but the rest of his body didn’t seem to be present. He was nothing but a head. A head trying to process an impossible math problem where one plus one equaled three.

I just saw David fucking my girlfriend.

He would have laughed. It was absurd.

Then the problem turned grammatical. A matter of tenses to solve here.

He fucked my girlfriend.

He is fucking my girlfriend.

Will he fuck my girlfriend again?

He could not wrap his mind around it. The problem was unsolvable.

He rearranged the factors.

Daisy fucked David.

He stood up. The rest of his body was back and filled with a shaking nausea.

She slept with him. She’s sleeping with him. She will keep sleeping with him.

It was not only unsolvable, but intolerable. He stood up, hands on the crown of his head, pressed down to keep his mind contained.

What would he do?

“It’s this place,” Will had said. “We all need to get out of here.”

He needed to get away. Yes. He picked up his backpack. He could not stay here. Not in this room. Not in this house.

Not in this town. Not anymore.

A panic began to creep over his head. He had to get out of here. Recklessly he stuffed in some clothes. Random things. He didn’t even think. He was getting out. He couldn’t stay.

He stopped. Blinking. What was happening? What had just happened?

How could she do it?
Like a wet bar of soap, the idea she would cheat on him flopped and slipped through his hands. He couldn’t catch it. It made no sense. They were together all the time. They were
together.
They were in love, they were bonded. Their love defied description. They were each other’s sole means to survive.

They were inked into each other’s skin.

What in hell had just happened?

From the window. Voices and action outside. He leaned on the sill and looked out at the backyard. Daisy was hurrying up her back steps. Little blue skirt, a white shirt. Her arms crossed over her middle, her head down. Hurrying. Scurrying.

And a few steps behind, David.

David, following Daisy. Into her kitchen. She was trying to get away. He was following.

Erik’s eyes narrowed.

Betrayal had refused to stay in his hands, but the notion of theft slammed into Erik’s chest and he crossed his arms over it, holding on tight. Now he had his answer. He was certain of it. David wanted Daisy. He had always wanted her. He wanted her but she went to Erik. And David had bided his time, waiting for a chance. A chance to take her away, chew her up and spit her at Erik’s feet.

He should have known.

He never should have trusted David.

“You only want what you can’t have,” Erik whispered.

Erik closed his eyes. Opened them again. Looked down at his feet and the image of Daisy there, used, thrown out, thrown back at him because David was done playing with her.

“You son of a bitch,” he whispered.

Outside, the sky was pale grey, veiled in sickly clouds. The heat was intensifying. Erik walked through a cloud of tiny buzzing insects as he came through the hedge and into Daisy’s yard.

Through the screen he saw David, sitting with his back to the door—at Daisy’s kitchen table.

Sitting in Erik’s place, smoking.

I get a panic attack after sex with Daisy,
Erik thought.
David gets the cigarette.

He pulled the door open. David whirled in his chair, white-faced and trembling. He stood up, crushing the half-smoked butt into a saucer.

“Fish.”

Erik stared at him.

“This is all my fault,” David said hoarsely. “It’s my fault, Fish, not hers.”

Erik advanced on him, fingers opening and closing in fists. “Fishy, fishy in the brook,” he whispered. “What to do with David the crook?”

David started to speak but Erik hadn’t come here to listen. He seized David by the shirt collar, pivoted lightly and threw him against the wall.

Though the fight was vicious, his brain was oddly detached. It kept making up little rhymes to finish
fishy, fishy…

Not his to take, but still he took.

Blood spraying from under his hands. David’s blood spattering onto the walls of Daisy’s kitchen.

I found you in bed, and the walls shook.

Pots and pans clattering from the counter, a shining arc of silverware across the floor, chairs skittering sideways.

For King David, I was forsook.

Hands on his shoulders, pulling at him. Daisy’s hands. She was screaming at him to stop. He shook her off violently, hoping she stayed to watch.

As I kill you, let her look.

Then different hands were on him, stronger ones. “Let go, Fish.”

A forearm across his collarbones and an index finger set into the hollow of his throat, pressing down against the nest of nerve endings there.

“Enough,” Will said, his voice a low growl. His finger pressed down harder—a defense move he had learned in Taekwondo. Fiery pins and needles shot down Erik’s arms, leaving him no choice but to let go.

“Come on,” Will said, pulling him back. “You’re only giving him what he wants.”

Erik got another kick in, into David’s ribs with the hard toe of his work boot. He felt the soft give of flesh and the resistance of bone.

“Come on, Fish, let’s get you out of here.”

Erik fought, struggled, writhed, but Will’s strength was absolute and his arms were a straitjacket about Erik’s torso.

As he was being dragged away, Erik looked back just once. Looked at David lying on the floor, arms over his head. And Daisy, on her knees, in the wreck of her kitchen. Daisy, her hands in her hair, pulling it from her temples. Daisy, her mouth open, and those eyes, dear Lord, those beautiful blue eyes he had stared into so many times, making time itself stop, making the world go away.

The eyes he had let look into his soul.

He had trusted her. He had put himself into her hands, been vulnerable with her in the dark of night, let her see him at his weakest. And she had gone to David.

Through the doorway he stared into her eyes. Time did not stop. The world stayed as it was. The connection was gone. The bond was lost. She had killed it.

“Erik,” she said, her hands coming out of her hair, falling into her lap.

Then the screen door slammed shut.

“I don’t want to see her,” he said to Will.

“You shouldn’t,” Will said. “Cool off. Nobody will fault you if you get out of Dodge a little while.”

Erik sat on his bed, staring straight ahead.

“Fish,” Will said. He crouched down by Erik’s feet. “There’s an explanation.”

Erik flicked his eyes to Will. Stared at him.

“I mean,” Will said. He floundered for words, reaching to run his maimed hand through hair no longer there. “This was just something reckless and stupid. You can work it out…”

Erik looked away. “Leave me alone.”

Will shut the door. Erik remained in his room the rest of the day, with the door shut, although the house was empty. Will did not come back. Erik lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, watching it get dark. The silence inside the house screamed. The ambient noises from outside puzzled him. How could the world just be going by? Didn’t anyone realize what had happened?

The slam of a screen door made him sit up. He looked out the window, through the hedge to the girls’ backyard. Daisy was sitting on the back stairs. He could see her white shirt in the dusk, and the glowing red tip of her cigarette. The minutes slipped by as she smoked, her arms around her shins, chin on her knees. She lit a second cigarette off the end of the first and smoked it. Then a third.

He could go over.

They could smoke and talk. She could explain.

They could work it out.

He fell back down on the bed again, unable to stop the tears. Great, shuddering sobs in his chest and throat, a lament smothered into the pillow. She was sitting there smoking, wearing the same skirt and shirt and carrying David on her skin. David was all over her body. Maybe even dripping out of her. She had taken her clothes off for David. She had opened her mouth for David, opened her legs for David. She had let David inside her, moved under him like a lover. Her arms up around his neck, her knees hugging his hips.

Was he supposed to sit there and smoke and listen to her explain all that?

How could you do it?
Erik went to the window. Stared through his tears to the tiny, balled-up figure on the back steps.
How could you? What were you thinking, what made you go? What did you need?

Then he knew what the explanation was.

She needed the pain Erik wouldn’t give her anymore.

He was useless to her.

She went to get it from David.

Erik sat up and threw the pillow aside.

He picked up anything within reach and threw it.

It wasn’t to be borne.

“It’s over,” he said. “We’re finished. You’re useless to me now.”

He drew in a deep breath, balling his hands into fists, setting his jaw.

Feel nothing.

He picked up the backpack he had started filling and set it on the
bed.

It’s over. You will feel nothing.

He began to gather more things together.

Through the night he sorted and packed. A swift and brutal triage of what had to be taken and what could be left forever. He pulled together his belongings and pushed aside Daisy’s. He loaded trash bags and duffles into his car, and before the sun came up, he left.

“I will explain,” he said to his mother, six hours later. “But not now. I’m home but pretend I’m not here. I just need some space. Then I’ll explain.”

He shut himself up in his room and slept for two days. The house was quiet around him. Christine was working. Pete wasn’t home from college yet. Lena was there, though. She lay on the floor by Erik’s bed, occasionally putting her paws on the mattress and licking his face. He pushed her away.

The morning of the third day, he summoned his will and got up. He was brushing his teeth, staring in the mirror at his haggard face and scruffy growth of beard, when his hand flew up to his neck.

His necklace was gone.

He dropped the brush, minty foam dripping from his mouth. His hands felt his neck and chest in wild desperation.

Gone.

How could it be gone?

He looked in his bed, yanked sheets and blankets and shook them out, waiting to hear the clink of gold links on the floor.

Nothing.

He went through his backpack, his pockets. He combed the floor. He went all over the house. Through all the boxes and bags of possessions he had brought from Lancaster.

It was gone.

Was it on him when he left school? Of course it was.

I think it was.

Of course it was. It was always on him. He must have lost it on the way home. At a gas station. Or a rest stop.

Devastated and crushed with guilt, he sank onto his bed, weeping for all that had been lost. Lena put her nose in his neck and whined high in her throat. Erik hooked an arm around her, pulled her close, felt her solid weight and warm panting. She rested her muzzle on his shoulder, licked his ear, whined again and laid her silken face against Erik’s wet one.

I am here now. And I understand.

She was here now. But she’d die someday and be gone. Like everything else. Everything was temporary. It all left in the end. Sooner or later it pulled down the driveway in the middle of the night. Or it was shot down or sliced open. It dissolved into bloody drips in the toilet or it ended up in bed with another man. Nothing good would stick around.

Pain, however, was in it for the long haul.

Pain stayed.

Erik let go of Lena, turned from her comfort and buried his head beneath the covers.

This was his life.