He didn’t care.
Sex remained an unpredictable pleasure. Sometimes he was fine, other times, too many for his liking, the horrible anxiety flooded him when it was over. He wanted sex, outright jonesed for it, but he hated when the wolves came afterward. He hated even more being in the throes of the act and struck with a wicked compulsion to scratch his partner’s skin or pull hard on her hair. To have “hurt me” on the tip of his tongue. To want the bit of pain nestled gently in his teeth, clamping down just hard enough.
He kissed differently, he noticed. No slow, gentle buildup with fingertips caressing the woman’s mouth. He got straight to it and, frankly, past it as soon as possible. Just a checkpoint. First base. He didn’t want to kiss. It was too intimate, his mouth a vulnerable gateway to the depths of his wounded, shivering soul.
The mindless, heartless coupling was his sole vice. He didn’t smoke anymore—cigarettes only reminded him of Daisy. He couldn’t afford coke and even if he could, he wanted nothing more to do with her cruel high. He would forever equate cocaine as a wintry bitch, cloaked in wanton destruction, full of empty promises she could make everything all right.
*
His mother had sold the house and moved in with Fred, so Erik stayed in Geneseo the summer of 1994, working at the playhouse and coaching basketball at the Y’s summer camps.
Daisy’s calls had tapered off while he was still living at home, and she began writing instead. Simple postcard bulletins. The missives then followed him to Geneseo—Christine must have given her his address. Sometimes he read them, sometimes he didn’t, depending on what kind of mental state he was in. The Philadelphia postmark let him know she was still with the Pennsylvania Ballet—just enough information to process. Opened or not, he threw out the letters afterward. To spare himself the pain of lingering over and dissecting her words, he saved nothing.
Then one night she left a message on his machine. His mind nowhere near a good state, he stopped the playback after hearing, “Erik, it’s Daisy,” and deleted it. Then he called his mother and chewed her out for giving Daisy his phone number.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” he said. “If anyone from Lancaster calls for me you can tell them—“
“I’m not your goddamn secretary,” Christine said. “And I don’t lie for you. Answer the phone and tell them yourself.”
They each slammed down their ends of the line. They rarely argued and it made Erik feel sick. Later he called back and apologized but the malaise didn’t go away. He wasn’t feeling well. He seemed to be spiraling down into a funk. He wasn’t hungry, he couldn’t sleep. The piano wouldn’t talk to him, his guitar was sulking. Work felt empty, he couldn’t find his three-point shot. Sex was as appealing as a stomach flu. Time turned back into the enemy. Some days it was a chore to get out of bed. Some days it was an ordeal just to breathe through his mantras.
You will feel nothing. There is nothing more to feel. They died. What happened after was a dream. They are gone. You are left. It’s time to go.
One evening the playhouse was rehearsing You Can’t Take It With You and a thunderstorm rolled through Geneseo. It was biblical outside, with multi-branched lightning illuminating the skies and thunder rattling the windows. A tree came down in the park across the street, falling slowly and majestically onto the power lines where it teetered for a moment.
Inside the playhouse, the entire circuit panel shorted out. A Fresnel over the stage exploded. The sound system let out a horrid shriek of feedback, followed by two short bursts of static. A beat of silence. Then a third angry buzz.