The Death of Small Creatures (35 page)

We go grocery shopping, make gourmet dinners. He buys food I would never think of buying: quinoa, ricotta cheese, challah bread, eggs, fennel, a fresh basil plant, capers, potatoes. My culinary aptitude is greatly lacking. For years I have been sustaining myself on yogurt, cheese, rice cakes, cereal and noodle soup. I have not been able to afford or appreciate a more evolved and healthy food regime.

One night Richard is making carrot soup from scratch. Another night he bakes banana bread. Another night he makes Mexican fried rice and burritos with vegetarian ground round.

We gaze at each other across my green wood coffee table. He touches me frequently, always wanting to be connected to some physical part of me, but his touch is soft and non-threatening. So delicate are his artist's fingers upon the various parts of my body that not once do I feel panic to escape and run screaming from the room.

When Richard isn't touching me, I don't feel a desperate need to cling to him, to harangue him in and suffocate him in the midst of my own fear of abandonment. We just fit together, nicely, sweetly, without angst or despair.

Richard comes to see me every month and returns to his house on Bainbridge Island between visits. His marital situation is peculiar. His wife knows he's seeing me. They live separate lives under the same roof; Richard occupies a bedroom in the basement and his wife sleeps upstairs. They are parents to the boys but otherwise estranged from each other. Our goal is to one day live together while maintaining a close relationship with his children. It's the best we can do for now.

“I still seek
out the highs in this relationship with Richard,” I say. “I long for the rush. I worry about what will happen between us when things settle down.”

Dr. P smiles. He looks sexy in his blue and white checkered shirt with the three buttons undone down the front. I have always been drawn to his middle-aged man's aesthetic, the wholesome clothing, the sexy collared shirts and sensible trousers. He's just gotten his haircut. I gaze upon his haircut, the nape of his neck as he walks ahead of me into his office, holding the door open for me as he always does, and I am reminded again of my theory that it is at the nape of a man's neck where his boyhood resides—all those unwanted haircuts, little by little his boyhood wilfulness severed until what's left is a man's resolve.

“It's the polarity of your heart, Trish,” he says. “It's your genetic makeup.”

I am wearing my vintage white lace strapless summer dress and brown leather sandals. It's a hot summer day. Richard is visiting. The dress is lace, from bust line to hem with a solid white slip all the way down to the knees. I have lost some weight, enjoy my bare shoulders and décolletage, sense Dr. P gazing upon this open region of my flesh as he sits across from me now, and it makes me feel beautiful, it makes me feel like a woman, like a whole and healthy woman with a light tan on her skin and joy in her disposition.

“You need a lot of stimulation. You always have and you always will. This is part of your pathology, part of your genetic makeup. You will have to find a way to temper this need with the ordinariness of daily existence.”

My biggest problem has always been the bipolar tendency to seek out highs when the platitudes kick in. I have always needed a great and sprawling rush to ride. Or I have needed its opposite—crisis.

“You have a lot to look forward to now, Trish.”

“I hope we can always see each other,” I say. “I want to always know you.”

He smiles, leans back and stretches casually. “You keep saying that,” he says.

“What do you think the future holds for us?” I ask.

“There's the ‘you' in ‘us,' and the ‘us' in ‘us.' You have to go forward in your life pursuing your humanity.”

“There was a time when I could not have fathomed leaving you,” I say. “I think I'm getting better, but I'll always love you.”

When I leave he gives me a hug for the first time. This is the first time we have embraced. For years I have longed to touch him, have him touch me. But this is not sexual, and I am okay with this, miraculously, I am okay with this. I no longer need to be sexualized and lusted after by a man in order to feel valuable. He is patient and lightly holds me too. I smell his cologne, feel the warmth of his chest against my cheek, his arms around me, and for the first time in two decades, since I was a troubled teenager living in a small town, dying with grief, I feel a great and presiding sense of hope.

Clinical Note:

Splitting of erotic transference. Trisha may be using Richard to distract herself from me. She is dating him now. Sex and romance may be overriding their friendship. She is, however, doing well.

“When I'm with
you, I feel like my essential self,” Richard says. He is standing at my kitchen sink, scrubbing a glass bowl with baking soda and water to remove the dough residue left behind from making fresh pasta earlier in the evening. “When I go back, it feels like I'm putting on clothes.”

“I'm sorry,” I say.

He scrubs my bowl, tells me not to be sorry.

We make love. I let him make love to me. It's my choice this time. I lay upon the bedspread exposed, the light of the streetlight outside making me silvery. He leans down, kisses me on the cheek, the forehead, my neck and collarbone, says, “I love you, Trisha.” I say, “I love you too,” and mean it.

We go on a walk to Moss Rock Park. He speaks to me of boundaries between people in love. “Sometimes, people forget where they begin and where the other person ends.” Then adds, “Marriage is political.”

“Yes,” I say.

“I want to marry you, Trisha,” he says. “I'm going to come live here, live with you, and I'm going to marry you.”

And I want to marry him too: not to be kept or saved, not to be resurrected or redeemed, but simply to love and be loved.

On the way to Moss Rock Park, in the middle of the street, Richard pauses to take a picture of the Garry oaks on the other side. He walks into the middle of the street, seemingly oblivious to traffic that could come around the bend any moment. He tries to frame the trees, adjusts the focus, then decides not to take the picture after all. “Another time,” he says.

I love this little fraction of time, this mysterious hesitation.

Our future exists inside this blank palate, this subtle interlude in which no image is captured.

At the summit of Moss Rock, we gaze at the city, Victoria's lush greenness, so many trees: Garry oaks, cherry blossom, sequoia. We marvel at the bays, the peninsulas jutting out into the ocean like arms reaching for light at the edge of the glimmering horizon.

On the way down I say, “Shoot, I wanted to take a picture up there.”

He says, “Everyone has that picture.”

I ask him what path we took to get to the top. My footing is unsettled. I almost slip and fall, but he catches me, steadies me in his arms.

Richard sends me
an email near the end of June:

June 22, 2012

Sweetheart,

When you wrote me in February, I had my feelings about you locked away in a huge box. It had a high fence around it, and outside of that perhaps a moat. With sharks in it. I had tried to break this huge love I had into parts by analyzing it. I wanted to store everything separately. I wanted to discredit the memories. “It wasn't like that, it was like this.” It was a series of unfortunate misunderstandings masquerading as some kind of relationship. It was like it hadn't even happened.

I had been tilting at windmills in the fog (or making sweet love to them).

This approach did not work. My love for you was indivisible; in order for me to destroy it I'd have had to destroy myself. I was, after all, immensely proud of myself for finding you and for following your thin, broken trail of breadcrumbs to your Prior Street cave. I did fall in love. I couldn't escape that I loved that Richard. I loved the Richard that loved you. I wanted to be more like him. He wanted to be more like you.

So I made the box. I built the fence and then I dug the moat, found sharks for the moat. If I couldn't dismember this love, this prisoner, at least I could build a dungeon. It took kind of a long time, especially since you wrote me every once in a long while to check in. Hey! This box is supposed to be locked. Prison is full.

So when you came and asked very nicely to visit the prisoner, you know, open the box, I hadn't thought of that. You're nice, and I love that about you.

You're also a badass, and I love that about you, too. You may get tired of me. I know badasses like to hit the road just for the hell of it. Or you could very legitimately get tired of my relentlessly mixed metaphors. I might be uninteresting to you after a while (or by the end of this email) for any number of reasons. Our love is not mine or yours, though. It's something we made together. You can stop regarding it, but it's real. It's very durable.

I love you, Trisha.

RLT

I'm twenty-five years
old. My hair is long and blonde. My body is soft and voluptuous. I have very blue eyes. I'm sitting on driftwood, China Beach, looking out at the Pacific Ocean, hazy and white. There are smooth shining black stones in the water. The waves are crashing upon the rocks and pebbles, making the sound of rain beating hard against the trees, that sound of a steak sizzling in a pan. I am contemplating my existence, what I have done with my life so far. I am at peace in this moment, one of the few peaceful moments I will experience in the next fifteen years. I have done so little, travelled so little, written so little. Leigh is not yet a glint in my eye. My life stretches out before me.