F*ck Love (17 page)

“Everything else is dirty,” she says when she sees my face. “Let’s go.”

I follow her out, wishing I had changed out of my work clothes. I’m such an underachiever it’s depressing.
Beige bitch.

We listen to oldies as we curve the roads to Marrowstone. It’s unusually dry outside, but the clouds are dark and heavy—an ominous warning of the days to come. It’s like Greer reads my mind.

“Today is the last day before the rain comes. Enjoy it.”

I’ll enjoy the rain, but I don’t say so. It’s considered blasphemy in Washington to not enjoy the rainless summer while you have it. The winery sits on the water where you can watch the cruise ships pass on their way to the ocean. We pull up to a building and hop out of the car into the dirt. A vineyard sits beyond the building; already harvested of grapes, it’s just a dusty shadow of vines and leaves. To my left is a large house, which watches both the water and the winery from a collection of sharp rectangular windows. You can see the remnants of fruit on the ground around the trees: apples, cherries, pears, and plums—shriveled, their juices soaked into the dirt. Greer seems to be frozen on the spot as she looks toward the house.

“What is it?” I ask. “You look like you’ve seen a—”

“I-I’m fine. Let’s drink wine. Can we? Do you want to? Let’s go.” She marches up to the door of the winery. Did we exchange personalities on the ride over? I’m confused. She springs for a bottle and carries it outside to sit on the patio.

“Okay, seriously, Greer. What’s wrong with you?” I take the bottle from her and use the corkscrew to open it.

She points to the house.

“I cheated on my boyfriend,” she says. “Right there, next to that house.” I don’t look; I’d rather watch her face right now. Was this the place of downfall? The end of Kit and Greer?

“We didn’t have to come,” I say, wondering why Kit would suggest this place.
Stupid fuck.
It’s like he was trying to get …
revenge!
OMG!

“Greer,” I say. “Let’s go.”

“No,” she says firmly. “It’s just a place.”

“Tell me about it then,” I say. “Was it Kit?”

Her head turns so hard I’m afraid her little neck is going to break.

“How do you…?”

“A guess,” I say.

Greer is staring at her wine glass, glassy-eyed. All of a sudden she smiles.

“That was a long time ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her.

“It’s cool,” she says. “I got you; it’s the ripples.”

I can’t tell if she’s covering her true feelings, but she just included me in her art—and I like that.

“I was just young,” she says. “I abandon before I can be abandoned. Sometimes that’s been a good thing, but with Kit, it wasn’t. I really hurt him. I’m not as reckless anymore. But I haven’t dated in a long time. I’m on strike.”

“My boyfriend cheated on me,” I tell her. “Before I came here. He got a girl in his office pregnant.”

“Fuck him,” Greer says. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Fuck him, and fuck love.” We clink glasses, and she looks genuinely happy after that. Maybe coming here wasn’t so bad after all. Therapeutic. I look toward the angular roof of the house and wonder who lives there. How many secret things has that house seen? I want to live in a house that’s seen things. I want to live.

You’ll never find a better place to be depressed than Washington State. There are thousands of places you can go to stare at beautiful scenery and feel deeply sorry for yourself. Most days, the sky will even weep with you. And thank God for that—for the absence of light. The setting of a perfect melodrama. Greer offers to take me to all of the best places to be depressed.

“Have you ever been depressed?” I ask her.

“Well, there was this one time…” she says, winking at me. For an artist, her personality lacks the ups and downs, the moodiness.

She makes a list in purple sharpie, and we check off places one by one. It’s all a trick; I know this. She’s trying to wake me up, and I do wake up. The air, the wind, the water, the mountains—they all wake up my senses. My heart is asleep. We are at Hurricane Ridge one afternoon when Della texts to say she thinks Kit is going to propose to her. I turn off my phone and lie back on the narrow wall we’re sitting on until I am looking up at the gray sky.

“What is it, Helena?” Greer asks, crouching next to me. “You’re only melodramatic like this when something is really wrong. Is it Kit who makes you like this?”

I can’t lie to her after everything she’s done for me. I try to turn my face away, but she grabs my chin with her long, smooth fingers and studies my face, frowning.

“Della thinks he’s going to propose,” I say. And then, “It’s no big deal.”

“Shit,” she says. And then, “Shit.” Again. “What are you going to do?”

“Oh, you know … nothing.”

Greer laughs. “You should at least tell him.”

“Hell no. Tell him what?”

She doesn’t say anything; she’s thinking. I pull out clumps of grass as I wait for her evaluation. “Don’t hurt the grass, Helena. We need everything on our side from here on out, especially the earth. Tell me about that dream you had. The one you said started all of your troubles.”

I dust my hands on my pants. “No. You’ll think I’m crazy.”

Greer sighs. I’m trying the pixie’s patience.

“You’re his ex,” I hiss. “I’m the psycho who’s in love with him. Forgive me for not wanting to talk about my inappropriate feelings with the woman who chased him out of town.”

“Ahh, Helena!” She spreads her arms out, and the wind whips the tassels on her purple jacket. “The best kind of love is the love that isn’t supposed to happen.”

I chew my nails, spitting them out the side of my mouth.

Greer slaps my hands then motions for me to start talking.

I tell her about my dream as we sit on a wall on top of Hurricane Ridge. I’m terribly embarrassed by it. When I’m done, she’s quiet.

“When Kit was a little boy, he had this recurring dream.” She shakes her silver hair at the mountains, smiling some long ago smile. “It was about lions. A pride of them. They’d come for him, only him. Pace the empty streets of Port Townsend looking for him. He’d hide, but no matter where he hid, they’d always find him. He was terrified. He said he could smell their rancid breath, feel them ripping into his body with their teeth, and he’d wake up screaming.”

I grimace.

“So, we went to see this ‘witch.’” She makes air quotes around the word ‘witch,’ and smiles at me. “She had this new age store, sold dream catchers and whatnot. She doesn’t have the store anymore, but she lives near the winery on Marrowstone. People still go to her. Anyway, she told us that Kit needed a talisman to chase away the dreams. First, she gave us a dream catcher. Of course it didn’t work. So we went back to her the following week. She gave us these stones next—said that Kit was to put them under his pillow and they’d trap the dream.”

Greer hands me a bottle of water from the cooler. She opens and sips her own, and I notice that her lips leave a strawberry pink mark on her bottle.

“When the stones didn’t work we went back, and when the tonic didn’t work we went back, and so on and so on. Finally, when we went to her for the fiftieth time, she sat us both down. She told us that something in Kit’s life was causing him to have the dream, and we could stop it together.”

I feel uncomfortable now. I know so little about Kit’s life, and she knows so much. It makes me feel like I have no ground for this thing I feel for him.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“Kit said that sometimes he was aware that he was dreaming, and it was still frightening, but less so because he knew he’d wake up. So we talked about him fighting back during those aware dreams. Hurting the lions before they could hurt him. He was skeptical, but he said he’d try. A week later he came running up to me at school, said he’d done what I’d told him. He’d ripped the lions’ jaws open with his bare hands. Fought them off.”

“Did he have the dream again?” I ask.

“Yes,” Greer said. “But, less and less frequently. Sometimes he still had it before he left PT. But he conquered some sort of subconscious fear, and he wasn’t afraid of it anymore.”

“Ah,” I say.

Now that the story is over, I’m not sure why she told it to me. And then it clicks. The night Kit and I took a walk through my apartment complex. My asking him about having a Greer-inspired tattoo. ‘Don’t fear the animals.’ That was hers. I feel sick with jealousy. So much more meaning than a flower, or cross, or even her name. It is their history. Their bond. And what right do I have to be jealous? He isn’t even mine. I am not in the chain of girlfriends; Della is.

“He’s going to be in Santa Fe next weekend,” Greer says.

“What? How do you know?”

“His cousin’s wedding. I’m invited, and I’d love it if you came along as my date.”

I shake my head. “No. I can’t. Della will—”

“Della will not be there,” Greer tells me. “Her mother’s birthday or some shit like that.”

I feel guilty that I forgot about her mom’s upcoming birthday. I used to be very close to her family.

“Either way, it’s not right. I can’t do that. They’re a family, her and Kit.”

“Not until they’re married,” Greer says. “And we have ample time to stop that from happening.”

“It’s wrong,” I say.

Greer shrugs. “Suit yourself.” She stands up and stretches, her purple shirt bright against the green backdrop. “Let’s go hike,” she says. “Stop the talk about Kit and Della, yes?”

I stand up, too, and follow her. We make it half way up the hill before we stop. And then we decide that we’d rather go get hot chocolate. Or chocolate. Or not hike.

A day later, an e-mail arrives in my inbox. It’s from Greer. I open it to find an airplane ticket to Santa Fe.

“What is this?” I call to ask her.

“You’re my date, remember?”

“I don’t think I ever agreed to this. In fact, I’m sure I didn’t.”

“Don’t be such a coward, Helena. You have to fight for what you want. Hasn’t anybody ever told you that?”

No one ever had, and I didn’t feel good about fighting for something that someone else had already laid claim to. I think of ways to get out of it all week, but in the end I pack a small carry-on and pretend I’m doing this for Greer. All I have to take with is a beige dress; in fact, most of my clothes are beige, and cream, and white. Creamy colors aren’t offended by Florida’s heat. But now I live in Washington, and I’m just some beige bitch with too many pairs of cutoff shorts.

We land in Santa Fe mid-afternoon, and our cab drives us through the antique streets of the city, and my eyes hang large. It looks like another place. Most of America looks like America, but Santa Fe looks like Santa Fe. I love it, and I’m scared of it. I ask Greer about this cousin of Kit’s who is getting married, and she tells me her name is Rhea and she’s marrying a guy named Dirt.

“He’s an artist. He makes pottery from sacred dirt.”

“Is that why he named himself Dirt?” I ask.

“His name was already Dirt; he went on a search for himself, and then incorporated his name into his art.”

I want to laugh, but I realize it’s the accountant side of me that wants to make fun of Dirt’s journey. As someone who is inartistic and trying very hard, I will respect Dirt’s creative vision. Maybe I will learn from it.

We check into our funky hotel, with its uneven concrete floors and rickety furniture. Greer tells me it’s actually really expensive to stay here because it’s all about the authentic experience.

“It was a Spanish mission in the 1800s. You’re sleeping in the same room conquistadors stayed in!” she says brightly.

I look around at the patchy walls, and the bloody toe I got from the cracked floor, and feel lucky to live in the 21
st
century.

“Freshen up,” Greer says. “We can hit the town.”

I am fresh. But I change, put a new band-aid on my toe, and put on lipstick.

“Uh uh,” Greer says, when I walk out of my bedroom. “We aren’t going to a Mommy-and-Me group.”

She digs around in her suitcase and produces a sleeveless black dress with tassels running from under the arm to the hem.

“That’s not your style at all,” I laugh. “I can’t believe you bought that.”

“You’re right. I brought it for you. It’s your style.” She tosses it at me.

“Greer, I have never in my life worn something like this. It’s not my style.”

“Just because you haven’t worn it doesn’t mean it’s not your style. Some people are too reserved and stuck in their ways to really know what suits them.”

Okay. I have nothing to lose, so I put on the dress. All of a sudden I have breasts and an ass.

“Yikes,” she says. “You’re so ugly. Maybe you should take that off.”

I make a face at her. I’m not stupid. I’m a fast learner.

We go to a fancy bar. We drink fancy wine. We dance to eighties music. My hair is askew, tumbling and stuck to my face. And when I sway, so do my tassels. So I sway. God, this is fun. Della never wanted to dance because it made her sweaty. Greer is dancing so hard I can see the sweat running down her neck.

And then Kit walks in. And I don’t stop swaying. I blow him a kiss, and dance with Greer, and watch him watch me. My heart is aching just from the sight of him. I’ve never wanted something so bad in my life. He looks different, but I know that’s probably not true. My eyes are different. In my eyes, Kit grows more beautiful every time I see him.