“All right, Joe. The jig is up,” you say, too singsongy. “I fell hard for a married guy. I’m a horrible person. I’m not gonna sit here and blame my parents or whatever, because I’m twenty-four years old. A lot of girls have shitty dads. There’s no excuse.”
You gave the wrong answer. Nicky really did a number on you and it’s physically and emotionally exhausting to climb your way out of the trap he set for you, a pig in his rig. You are trying. I see that. I open the MacBook Asshole and announce, “Next question. Reading comprehension of the last exchange between you and Nicky. You wrote: I’m soooo sorry. Nicky, I really believe that I will never love anyone the way I love you.”
You leap up, you object. “Joe, stop. Please.”
I raise a hand. STOP. I read what you wrote:
“I get wet just thinking about you and that’s never happened for me.”
You interject aloud, “I’ve said that to every guy ever, Joe. That’s what guys like to hear. You can’t think that’s the truth.”
I lose focus and I react. “Well, you never said that to me.”
“Because you’re different,” you say, different, hot. “You wouldn’t buy into my bullshit.”
You are charming but I have a test to administer. Besides, you don’t want to get by on your good looks, your sexy cadence. You want to pass the test with your wits. I look down at the MacBook Asshole and continue reading your letter to Nicky:
“I feel like you love your wife more than you know. I feel like I might love Joe.”
You interrupt again. “I do love you, Joe. I do.”
I ignore you. It is still my turn to speak. “Now I’ll read Nicky’s response: You want to know how I feel, Beck? I feel like you’re a selfish fucking cunt. Good luck to you, Beck. You’re gonna need it seeing that you haven’t any morals.”
I close the MacBook Asshole and return it to my messenger bag. I pick up my yellow pad. “You have three minutes to convey the meaning of your last communication with Nicky.”
I give you extra time because you’re a good listener and you’ve been through hell. Nicky should fry for what he did to you. And I failed you when I let him go. He abused you in that sacred “safe” haven of beige pillows, classic rock, and bullshit. I feel sorry for you, Beck. It’s no surprise that you were so demented that you lied and told me your place was being “exterminated.” You needed to get away from your MacBook Asshole and the asshole that gave you the MacBook Asshole. Of course you were climbing into the walls in my home, literally, you poor thing.
You are still thinking, pacing, and I am praying. I want you to give the correct answer. I want you to tell me that you don’t recognize your voice in those e-mails. I want you to tell me that after less than eight hours in the cage you feel born again. I want you to say that you never got wet upon seeing that hunchbacked megalomaniac and tell me you love me and beg for my forgiveness. All I want to do is forgive you.
It’s been thirty-four seconds and two minutes since I started the stopwatch and you look up at me and answer, “The funny thing is, the first time I ever went to see Nicky, he wanted to know what was wrong with me. He was like, ‘Well, Beck, let’s figure out what the fuck is wrong with you.’?”
You laugh lightly and Nicky used the same line on me. Bastard.
You go on. “And I told him that I felt like my head was a house. He didn’t get it but I said that my head is like a house and there’s this mouse in there. And that’s why I’m so anxious all the time.”
You came up with that and he is a thief, low.
“Oh,” I say and I should have killed Nicky the first day I walked into his office.
“He didn’t get it until I told him that the only thing that made me forget about the mouse was hooking up.”
I look at the Pitch Perfect menu on mute. You are nothing like Beca.
“Anyway,” you say and you continue to break my heart. “I told him that I love to be wanted. I told him I love new things. And I told you that too, Joe.”
“I thought you meant crap from IKEA,” I say and you look away.
You try to explain yourself and you talk about your problems like you’re talking about a movie you watched in the middle of the night. You are clinical, detached and you’ve been this way for a while, long before we met. You call yourself a stalker. You say that you’ve pictured the same wedding—the song is “My Sweet Lord”—with a million different guys, “including you, Joe.”
“So you did want to marry me,” I say. You are my love, my sweet lord.
You growl. “You don’t get it, Joe. I’m not like that.”
I think you are wrong and you say that therapy is a joke. You continue. “You can’t get a mouse out of a house. Not unless you blow up the fucking house.”
You are exhausted and hungry and incoherent and I slide the legal pad into my messenger bag and put two cherry pie L?rabars in the drawer for you. You do love to talk about yourself, even in a cage. I play Pitch Perfect and I walk up the stairs and ignore your calls for me to stay. I can’t stay. I have to prepare the second segment of the test.
I hustle over to Popular Fiction and pick up two copies of The Da Vinci Code. I jog down the stairs and find you tearing into a L?rabar with your eyes glued to the Treblemakers “making music with their mouths.” I did good! I pull the drawer out and toss a Da Vinci Code inside.
“Are you kidding?” you say, your mouth gorging with cherry pie woman food.
I point to my copy. “I’m gonna read it too.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the only book I can think of that you and I have both never read.”
We need to share an experience together in order to move forward. You flip through the book and you have a deep confidence, a sexual prowess, a bullheaded pride in the soft, hungry magnet that heaves between your legs. You’re not afraid of me, of anyone. Men love you. You know it. No man can ever be a mouse in your house because you’ll always have someone—a hot clerk in a bookstore, a horny shrink, a closeted rich girl. Someone will always watch over you and you believe that you are special. In the cage, you feel loved, not trapped. Just like me.
49
THERE is a mouse in our house and his name is Dan Brown, lord of our manor, creator of Professor Robert Langdon and keen, mesmerizing cryptologist Sophie Neveu. We are hooked almost immediately and we travel well together. We go to the Louvre and we follow the clues and you lie on your belly and you kick up and down when something exciting happens, which is often. I am on my side, on the other side of the cage, just as hooked as you are.
We take breaks to talk about the Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion and we both wish Robert Langdon were real and I find clips of the film adaptation online for both of us to devour when we need to rest our eyes and our fingers. You have never felt so compelled to read and I admit the same is true for me.
“I mean, I love Stephen King books,” you say. “But that’s different because his work is so well crafted. The Shining is fucking literature, you know?”
I do know and I remember Benji and his refusal to admit that he loved Doctor Sleep. We read late into the night and you wake me up the next day by sliding the drawer back and forth and back and forth. “Come on!” you squeal. “I’m dying over here.”
We start to read but we need coffee and I bolt up the stairs and through the shop and down the street and you aren’t just passing the test. You’re acing it. There is a long line at Starbucks but you deserve that salted caramel stuff you drink every so often and our book club is the best.
“Is it twisted that I can relate to Silas?” you asked me last night. “This will sound sick, but when I found out Peach was dead, I was more angry for myself than I was sad for her. She was the best friend in the world because I was the world to her. She was obsessed with me and I couldn’t even remember the exact date of her birthday.”
“You were the church,” I said.
“And she was the Silas,” you said.
I reminded you of the first conversation we ever had in the bookstore, when you teased me that I was a preacher and I said I was a church.