Crazy Love You (7 page)

“I need to take a leak,” I said.

I went into the bathroom and closed the door, a vein in my neck throbbing with anxiety, a flush creeping up my cheeks. I took a few deep breaths. I got these minor panic attacks sometimes when Priss was around. I stayed in there a few minutes, trying to pull myself together. She was in the kitchen when I came out.

“So what's her name?”

She was drinking from my carton of coconut water, drained it. Then she set it down on the marble countertop. Outside someone leaned hard and angry on a car horn. The sound seemed to go on for ages, before wailing up the street.

“Meg,” I said. The word caught in my throat and ended with a little cough.

“Cute.”

She snaked her arm around my neck and pressed her body tight into mine. My arms moved around her as if they had minds of their own.

“Priss, I really have to work,” I said. “This is a bad idea.”

“Is it?”

A familiar electricity connected us, drawing us into each other, blurring the lines of our bodies. And then her mouth was on mine, and I could feel everything else slipping away—Megan, my plans for work that day, all my good intentions. Priss was a drug. One hit and I was in her thrall. Her breath was hot; her flesh was soft. There was no way for me not to have her. When she was good, she was very, very good and all that.

I lifted her easily and she wrapped her legs around me, let me carry her to my bed. She had always made me feel like a man, even when I was just a kid. She was raw power, until she was in my bed, where she was suddenly so sweet, so yielding when she wanted to be.

“I miss you,” she whispered. “Don't leave me.”

Her words were vines, twisting and pulling at me. She was a little girl, alone in the woods. She needed me.

I lowered her down and slowly pressed my weight on top of her. The sound of my name on her breath shot me through. We were tugging at each other's clothes. Then her soft, hot lips were on mine, her arms around my neck. The power, the pull of flesh on flesh. Was any man ever strong enough to resist it? Then I was inside her, the heat of it almost too much to bear. Her helpless moaning rolled through me.

I always lost myself to her, the goodness that I knew dwelled deep inside her. She was bad, very bad sometimes. Still, I loved her and had for most of my life. Even as I drowned in pleasure, I was distantly aware of how terrible I'd feel later. But in that moment, it didn't matter, not even a little.

•  •  •

I woke up and it was dark. There was something unpleasant in the air and it took me a second to realize what it was: smoke. I leaped from the empty bed and stumbled to the kitchen. There was a stack of drawing paper, or what was left of it, on top of the Wolf range. All the burners were raging with blue-orange flame, and the industrial hood vent was humming like a tornado, lifting the smoke and ashes up into its powerful vacuum. I ran over, quickly turning off the burners and reaching under the sink for the fire extinguisher—which I couldn't figure out how to work. But the pages were all gone by the time I got there anyway, consumed to ash. I didn't spend any time wondering what Priss had set on fire. All my drawings of Megan.

The days after my sister died were characterized by silence. There was a small, grim service in the Episcopal church in town, a tiny coffin draped in white roses standing beside a spray of lilies. My grandmother wept, a choking, inconsolable sound that was part moan, part cough. My father was stoic, a firm grip on my thigh his only concession to grief. His big hand shook. I hated his touch. But I felt bad enough for all of us not to brush him away. My mother was a zombie, drugged and locked away in the hospital.
Your mother needs to rest. It's the worst kind of grief, to lose a child
, my grandmother told me. No. Worse to lose a mother, surely. No one had said the words to me; no one told me what she had done. But I knew.

These things happen, son
, my father said.
It's horrible, but sometimes babies stop breathing. We all have to try to go on.

Do kids sometimes stop breathing?
I asked.
Kids like me.

He looked at me strangely, something sad and frightened twisting up his face. He put his hand on my shoulder.
No, Ian
, he said.
That's not going to happen.

I believed him. Because even though he was often harsh, often distant, I knew he was strong and right about most things. He'd never told me a thing that later turned out not to be true. I didn't like my father that much. But I trusted him to take care of me in the important ways—food, clothing, shelter, the naked truth about the world.

Your mother will get better and come back to us.

And even though he was wrong about that, I know he believed it at the time.

After the service, I couldn't wait to go home, and to rush out to the woods with Priss. There was a long procession of cars behind us, following us to the reception the ladies of the neighborhood had put together at our house. When we got out of the car, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and people I'd never met formed a circle around my father, offering their condolences. I slipped away, stopping near the edge of the woods to see if anyone noticed me. But no one did.

Priss was waiting by the pond, holding a revoltingly large bullfrog.

“Look,” she said. She held up its gelatinous, black brown body. “It's HUGE.”

She handed it to me. I sat beside her and started to cry. At first it was just a whimper.

“Are you okay?” she said.

Then I was choking on sobs, wailing. The frog hopped away, and I laid my head in Priss's lap, where I wept in a way I had never wept before. She never touched me, just sat there waiting.

“How did you know?” I asked her finally, when the sobs subsided, even if the tears hadn't dried up yet.

“I just know these things,” she said. And she didn't sound like a ten-year-old girl. “They told me.”

I knew she meant the Whispers, even though I didn't have a name for them yet. I kept weeping, and must have eventually fallen asleep. It was the sound of my father's voice that woke me.

“Son,” he said. “Wake up. I was worried.”

I looked around for Priss, but she was gone. I let my father take me home, even though it was the last place I wanted to be.

•  •  •

After she set fire to those drawings of Megan, Priss didn't come around. She was mad at me, mad enough to stay away. And I was relieved, even though I didn't imagine that the separation was permanent.

Megan brought up meeting her again, one afternoon after we'd returned to my place from Whole Foods. Megan had been spending more time in the loft and was dismayed by the total lack of anything edible in the kitchen—nothing fresh in the fridge, no pasta, rice, or beans in the cabinets. So we'd decided to stock the kitchen, and we were both a little giddy about it.

I wasn't one of those guys who was afraid of commitment. I
wanted
to play house with Meg. I loved that she had a toothbrush in my bathroom, that her T-shirts and undies came back with my stuff in the laundry delivery. It seemed very serious, very intimate to be in a grocery store together, wandering the aisles, discovering new stuff about each other—how I'm allergic to apple skins, how she hates olives but loves olive oil.

She was stacking cans of San Marzano tomatoes in the cupboard when she said, “So I've been thinking about Priss. You said I could meet her sometime. Are you ready for that?”

The question made me freeze. It was obvious that Sunday-afternoon grocery shopping was a big tell about the course of our relationship. We were getting more serious and it was time for our lives to merge a bit more. It was right for her to want that. But I didn't want Priss anywhere near my relationship with Megan.

“Yeah,” I said. “I've been meaning to talk to you about it. Priss and I have had a really big falling-out, actually. I haven't seen her or even talked to her in quite a while.”

Clunk. Clunk. Clunk
. Now she was shelving some black beans.

“A falling-out about what?” she asked.

She closed the cabinet door and folded up one of the reusable sacks we'd bought to haul home the groceries. God forbid we should use the free brown paper bags. I put the sparkling mineral water in the fridge, hiding behind the big metal door.

“Uh,” I said stupidly. I let the door close and she was leaning against the countertop, looking at me in that way she did, sweetly inquiring, curious, concerned. “You know, there's never been anyone serious in my life, except for her. And she feels we're outgrowing our friendship. It's not working anymore. We don't bring out the best in each other. The last time I saw her, we fought. She stormed out and we haven't spoken since.”

It sounded lame, but Megan was nodding. Anyway it was better than:
I fucked her and then she set all the pictures I'd drawn of you on fire.
I was trying to be honest with Megan, but telling her this would be going too far. She didn't even know about those pictures; I'd shown her one and that was it. She didn't need to know that there was a stack of fifty. Or had been. And she definitely didn't need to know I'd slept with Priss. You probably think I'm a jerk, and you might be right.

“That must be hard for you,” she said. There was no edge to it, nothing sharp or sarcastic. “She means a lot to you. You've loved her a long time.”

There was a twist in my middle, and my cheeks suddenly burned hot—I did miss Priss. But it was a toxic relationship. She connected me to a dark part of myself; I wasn't sure I could finally grow up with her in my life. I said as much to Megan.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She moved into me and I held on tight to her. “Maybe after there's some distance, you can renew your relationship. She might need some space to change and grow, too.”

This made sense—for normal people. But Megan didn't know Priss. Megan had a whole stable of friends—from childhood, from college. All her old boyfriends were still hanging around in the guise of friendship. She was a magnet, drawing people to her and keeping them forever.

“I don't know,” I said. I took in the scent of her hair. “She's volatile, unstable. A lot would have to change.”

And not just with Priss. With me, too. I'd have to stop wanting her so bad. I'd have to stop getting high and hopping into bed with her every time she showed up.

“Well,” Megan said. She moved away and patted me on the chest, looked up with that sweet smile. She was an angel. Really, she was. “I still want to know her. So, if you repair your relationship with her, maybe we can work on that.”

“Okay,” I said. “Definitely.” It was never going to happen.

She took some “ancient wheat” (whatever the hell that means) pasta out of the sack and put it in the cabinet next to the fridge.

“So,” she said. She closed the cabinet and looked at me shyly. “Speaking of meeting people.”

Megan asked me to come out to her parents' Long Island beach house for the weekend. It was a big step, but I surprised myself by accepting. Her mother was a research librarian; her father was an author of some note—nonfiction, big historical books about wars, and periods in history that no one remembered except your grandfather. But he had racked up the big reviews, had been twice nominated for the National Book Award. And he'd won the Pulitzer for a series of articles he'd written decades ago for the
New York Times
on Nazi war criminals who had remained at large. So, yeah, I'd already Googled him.

He didn't have a website, too old school for that. But there were some pictures of him online. And honestly? He looked like a prick. In the author photo on his publisher's website he gazed at the lens down his long nose over a pair of reading glasses, holding a pen in one hand, his arm resting on a desk. He was unapologetically bald and wrinkled. There were tall shelves of books behind him, the obvious backdrop. What would he think of a guy who wrote graphic novels for a living? Not too much, I guessed. I felt the niggle of inferiority that comes from being a genre writer. People always think you're not as good as “real writers.” Of course, most people don't know shit about art or writing or anything else.

“My dad's a sweetheart,” Megan said. She had squealed with excitement when I said yes, and she'd been chattering ever since about the house, about her parents, about how excited they were to meet me. “You're going to like him.”

But then girls like Megan always think their daddies are sweet. And they may actually
be
sweet to their daughters. It was everyone else in the world who found them to be intolerable gasbags. In fact, she still called him “Daddy,” as in: “Daddy wants us to be there by three on Friday so we can walk on the beach before dinner. It's kind of a thing.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds good.”

I cringed, imagining what Priss might say if she'd heard Megan say those words, and how easily, how eagerly I acquiesced. I already loved Megan truly, madly; maybe I had from that first day in the park. I thought of little else. I would have done anything for her even in those early days. (Except put her in a room with Priss.)

“Meg,” I said. My heart was thumping with nerves. “I love you. I mean it. I crazy love you.”

We hadn't said it before, though I'd come close a couple of times. I'd always chickened out. She put her hands to her mouth and her eyes filled.

“I love you, too,” she said. She laughed a little. “I crazy love you, too.”

We made out in the kitchen for a while, and then I picked her up and carried her to the bedroom. And we made love the way we did—sweetly, tenderly, respectfully. There was no pain, nothing rough, no grunting or deep, involuntary moaning. There was no moment where it seemed like a struggle for dominance. There was no nail digging; I didn't try to hold her down while she fought against me. It was normal-people sex. It was the way real, not-deeply-fucked-up people expressed physical love. I could get used to it.