Problems (2 page)

A few more lines. You shouldn't do too much because then you will have to do more to get the same effect, but then again this was the last of it, so you may as well get blasted.

Nothing was on television.

Raymour & Flanigan. I could hear the catchy jingle just seeing those words on the
TV
. Then some middle-aged man looking out a window. A commercial for DeVry University. Can you imagine your life being so shitty you'd call up DeVry University to get a degree in computer animation?

Drip down the throat. Warmth spreading out, like pee on a blanket. Music from the speaker plugged into the laptop.

“And the sun pours down like honey / On our lady of the harbor, / And she shows you where to look / Among the garbage and the flowers . . .”

Dope felt like leaning back in a chair, and right before the chair tipped over, it froze, and there I was, suspended in midair but not falling at all.

I heard Peter's alarm go off. Eight o'clock. I snorted what was left on the book.

The door wasn't easy. You had to jerk it.

“How're you feeling?” Peter asked, without looking up from the iPad. The light came through the wooden Chinese blinds, making his brown hair look golden.

When Peter woke up he looked like James Dean. I woke up looking like I had been in a barroom brawl: matted hair, hunched over, scrabbling for a lighter that still worked, my body feeling like it had been slammed against pavement.

When we walked down the street, I could hear people's thoughts,
Why is that handsome man with that scowling, smoking hag?
People would always ask me what was wrong. I must have looked pissed off all the time. People probably thought he was gay and I was a fag hag secretly in love with him.

Women don't have trophy husbands the same way men have trophy wives. Men can be disgusting and walk into a party with a sexy bitch on their arm and feel like hot shit. But being a woman walking into a party with a handsome man on your arm, the only thing you feel is insecure.

When I imagined myself through Ogden's sixty-three-year-old eyes—my smooth, wrinkle-free skin, my long dark hair, my unsagging breasts, my flat stomach—I felt hot. Sometimes my hair fell over my eyes, and I grinned and looked up at him, and I loved being in my own skin.

Peter stared at me as I put my hair in a ponytail. “Are you high?” he asked.

I shook my head no.

I lied to Peter because he didn't understand shit. He didn't understand how snorting a bag of dope didn't mean I would end up becoming a toothless, cracked-out skank, or whatever clichéd Hollywood bullshit was implanted in his brain. When I tried explaining things to him, he would hear someone with a drug problem trying to rationalize her drug problem.

He made me feel like I was someone with a drug problem trying to rationalize her drug problem.

I'd been a chipper since I was eighteen. The trick was you never did it three days in a row. I knew enough junkies to know I had to
stop for a while, because if I kept using, it would stop providing any relief and become one more problem.

He apologized.

I could tell by the way he touched my face he wanted to do it.

“I love you,” he said. His breath smelled like shit. His hand rubbed between my legs, and I made all the sounds, then his hand went over my tits, pinching the nipples, making them hard so it hurt when they rubbed against my rough thermal shirt.

He fucked me from behind. Felt like a baseball mitt, stretching. Inside, it was everywhere. Visualize it. Ugly, veiny thing beating in and out of softness, pinkness, perfectness. That's the attraction, a kind of ruining. I liked it hard.

He played with my clit while he fucked me from behind, and I came because I liked feeling like his bitch on all fours.

After I came, I wanted to sleep, and he was taking forever. You couldn't say, “I'm going to rest my eyes but feel free to keep going.” You couldn't say, “Stop pulling my hair, it was cool at first but now it's just pissing me off.” You couldn't say, “Are you bored? I'm a little bored.”

Please come already
.

He sped up, pulled out. I turned on my back and lifted my shirt, and he came all over my tits and belly.

I loved how much there was when Peter came. I loved being drenched in his come. I loved lying there in it. I rubbed it into my skin with my fingertips.

I felt warm, and I thought of going somewhere new. I wanted to see his same face with a new background behind his head.

He wiped my stomach with his boxers and threw his boxers into the hamper.

“You shouldn't go to the doctor alone tomorrow,” he said. “I'll go with you. I'll be late to work. It's at four?”

“It's not a big deal,” I said. I ran my finger down his back, zooming around all the moles that had never been checked for cancer because Peter didn't have health insurance.

“You don't need to be there, sport,” I said. I called him “sport” because he drank a protein shake every morning.

There was no doctor's appointment. I'd made it up. I was supposed to meet Ogden.

I lied all the time. Sometimes I lied so I didn't have to answer questions, like saying my father was still alive so I didn't have to talk about him dying. I regularly told people my father was white. Not because of some deep-seated issue with being Indian, but because I didn't know much about Indian culture, and I felt more American than anything else. I lied because it felt true. I said it to get off the hook for answering questions about why cows are sacred or whatever.

You can't help the truth, the mundane details that frame people's perceptions of who you are, like where you were born, what your father does for a living, how many siblings you have. In our lies we offer the world a presentation of how we would be if we had complete control over our existence. That's why it's so embarrassing to get caught in a lie. It offers a glimpse into how you want to
be seen.
These are the things I am insecure about
. You take things off the table, clean up your stories, edit out the parts that don't make sense, and think,
Now that's better
.

I ran my hand through Peter's soft, sleepy hair. I lied to Peter about Ogden because I didn't want to hurt him. In a different world, maybe he would have understood that I was only trying to protect him. How if I didn't, I would drown him with my neediness and insecurities. Peter wasn't capable of helping me. He knew how to love, but he didn't know how to talk me through the layers of my neuroses.

“I don't wanna go to work today,” he whined, stretching.

Peter was a bartender at a high-end restaurant on the Upper West Side.

He must have casually mentioned “my wife” in stories to customers at the bar. They'd imagine the kind of woman a handsome, charming man like Peter would have as a wife. The character in the book never looks like the actor in the movie playing them.

I straddled him and kissed him as if I was paying a toll on my way over him. I picked up the seltzer from his bedside table and chugged it in front of the window.

“Put some clothes on. You can see everything through those blinds,” he said.

“Who cares? It's my apartment. What are they going to think? A woman is half-naked in her own apartment?”

Peter was always caring about things that didn't matter.

In the bathroom, I plucked hairs out of my upper lip with tweezers. I liked the feeling of the hairs being pulled out of the follicles underneath the skin. Some of the hairs the tweezers could never grasp. I ended up drawing blood, and the hair was still right there. I rubbed the hairs off the tweezers onto my finger. The fat part like the top of a comma. I touched the ends with my fingers. Black and wiry.

Peter materialized in the bathroom mirror behind me like some kind of bizarro vampire. “How long have you been lying to me?” he said. He took out exhibit A: a rolled dollar bill. “I found this on the coffee table.”

I shrugged. “That is a rolled bill. It is not a drug,” I said, high.

“Maya, c'mon. You don't have to lie to me.” He called me by my name when he was serious.

“Don't be serious,” I said, as if I didn't want to hear it.

“I'm not an idiot. Whatever. It's your life. I don't even know why I try—” And then he said more things. Things I didn't care to hear. Things that made me try hard to think of other things until he left and I could get more high and not think about anything.

Ogden never gave me shit. Ogden only listened.

The ways Ogden drove me insane were the ways I wanted to be exactly like him.

I wished Ogden could love me the way I loved him, but he never would, because I cared too much and was always opening up to him. Nobody wanted anyone who talked so easily about everything. They wanted a big puzzle and a goddamn treasure map. Find my heart by going through all these torture chambers. That's what people wanted: challenge and mystery. Poor Ogden. I was like, “Here are all my scars. I'll tell you my secrets as you die of boredom. Here are the answers to questions you never cared enough to
ask.” I lifted up my shirt and said, “Please love me.” I lifted up my skirt and said, “Please don't leave yet.” I felt empty when his cock wasn't in me. I wanted him to order me around. I wanted to be his personal come dumpster. I loved when his whole body was on top of me and his arms and legs surrounded me on all sides, like he was a big insect about to rip my head off.

When Ogden told me it was going to be okay, I believed him, because he was old and knew stuff about life that I didn't.

After Peter told me he loved me for the first time, I said, “Peter, I am fucking crazy, and I will fuck this up.” And he nodded. Maybe he saw it as a challenge. Maybe he thought,
Well, at least this will be interesting
. But he kept coming over, and he kept watching me turn from sane person to insane person to sorry child, and then we'd hug, and I was forgiven. And so you had to ask yourself:
Who is the crazier one?

Peter and I met when we worked at the same bookstore. Peter's on-again, off-again girlfriend didn't show up to the store Christmas party. I played chess with him, and then we went back to my place. We talked on the couch. I went to the bathroom and shaved my pussy and thighs. When I walked back in, he was just standing there. We kissed. His beard itched my face. His pubic hair was wild. He put it in me without a condom. His necklace was swinging as he fucked me, so he flung it onto his back. He said, “What do you want?” He had a cold so he sniffled as he fucked me. There was something sweet about the way he sniffled, like the whole thing already felt normal.

It felt as though Peter had followed me home one day and never left.

Sometimes men are like cabs with their lights on, and you just have to be there to pull them over.

Later he told me I hurt him that night. That he wanted to cuddle and he felt bad because I rolled over and went to sleep. He fell in love with how I didn't give a shit he was there.

“Don't move,” he said to me, when I was sitting naked in a chair. “You look like a painting.”

We touched so much it didn't feel like someone else's skin.

In the beginning we listened to music and everything was new. Five years later, we watched television and everything felt old.

Peter hated me for not being there, and then he hated me for being there. I had to keep remembering he loved someone who didn't exist. As soon as he saw who I was, he would get the fuck away from me like any man in his right mind would. Ogden saw me for who I was, all the bad and all the good. He could keep it all in his mind and still want to fuck me.

Excerpt from conversation 12,983, Peter to me: “You live like a homeless person indoors.”

Excerpt from conversation 20,939, Peter to me: “You make me feel like an employee.”

Excerpt from conversation 56,543, Peter to me: “You don't understand why it makes me feel bad that you asked me not to speak when Benedict Cumberbatch is on television?”

In the beginning, I wanted to put Peter in the right clothes. I wanted to dress him up, take him around, and then bring him home and say, “Now take off your clothes and fuck me.” He wore brown, pleated corduroy pants, shirts with corporate logos, and sad brown shoes that his mother had bought him for Christmas.
I put him in dark jeans, cool
T
-shirts, beaten flannels, and motorcycle boots.

If I divorced him, another woman would get him already fixed up.

After we got married, I encouraged (i.e., nagged) Peter to get a bartending job.

This was what Peter did when I tried to improve his life: he told me to leave him alone. A few days later, he would say that after thinking about it, he had come up with a plan, and his plan was exactly what I had told him to do. I couldn't say how it was my idea to begin with, or he wouldn't want to do it anymore.

Peter's parents were born-again Christians and brought him up in a renovated barn with no heat. For no conceivable reason, his mother didn't work. The kids were raised on the meager salary of his father, a preacher. His parents took pride in not collecting the welfare or food stamps they were doubtlessly eligible for. He was raised to believe that instead of being sad for what you don't have, you should be happy having nothing. Nothingness was close to godliness. I was sad for him that they didn't let him dream.

He saved change so he could buy a brand-new baseball cap. When he brought it home, his father yelled, “Do you know how much food you could have bought?” When Peter told me this story, I said, “Probably not very much.”

It broke my heart to think of this little kid who wanted a dumb baseball cap. Paging Dickens. It broke my heart again that his father had won—that he did break Peter in some fundamental way. Instead of teaching his son not to be brainwashed into thinking having things would ruin your life, he made his son believe he wasn't good enough to have things. Peter would always think
the world was divided between those who were served and those who were servers. That was probably why he drank. Achieving anything was hard enough without someone kicking the dreaming out of you.