Love Her Madly Read online

  I heard a burst of female laughter and noted a quartet of attractive ladies, all dressed up for a night on the town. They were young, college girls from the look of it. We had been that young not so very long ago. I looked away from their skintight skirts and strappy high-heeled sandals, a truly masochistic choice for such a cold, rainy night. They tittered and teased one another, aloft in a heady world of gritty excitements. So was I, for that matter.

  I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply through my nose, like I did whenever I felt the first tickle of stage fright. Seeing Cyn wasn’t a performance, but I still felt deeply unprepared, unsure how I should face her or what I would feel when I finally saw her up close. In the bar, she would no longer be a phantom, but instead my living breathing ex-lover, close enough to touch. I had so many questions. Of course I was ecstatic that she was alive and well, but I was also extremely pissed off that she had let us believe that she was dead. That was really, truly fucked. I couldn’t think of a reason that would make someone do that, and unless she supplied some really compelling explanation, I couldn’t see how we would ever trust her again.

  The train stopped and the doors opened, granting release to the college girls and access to new bodies; a great human tidal flow. My car remained mostly empty. In four more stops, and a quick walk, I’d be there.

  Printing out Cyn’s picture that morning was the first time in years that I’d really allowed myself to revisit her in detail. After her disappearance, it had been too painful. I missed her, viscerally, even when I wasn’t trying to think about her. Her smell, the feel of her lips on mine, the way that she would let me hold her in the night, whispering stories into her ear until we both fell asleep. More than that, I’d miss talking with her. For months, a random thought would trigger a memory of some debate we’d had, or some big idea that we’d wondered about together, speculating grandly in that quintessential college-kid way. She always saw things differently. Even years later, I would read something that I knew would light her up and feel a dull ache. Her light was out, forever.

  The train stopped again. The doors open and shut.

  I found myself flashing back to my college girls, the two of them smiling up at me from Glo’s bed on the night that Cyn had the big idea for a binary love affair. I felt like I was floating when I drifted down their stairs that night, but within days, reality set in, and I felt the weight of what I’d agreed to like the heaviest acting role ever. My paired audience, the most exacting critics. The green eyes of one following my every gesture, snapping to crystalline attention whenever I moved within reaching distance of her beloved rival. I touch Cyn, I feel Glo’s eyes on my hand, questioning, comparing, calculating, even when she’s not in the room. While Cyn, sphinxlike, watched me flirt with Glo with a lazy disinterest, like we were characters in some mildly engaging television show. If jealousy was part of Cyn’s emotional roster, I never saw it. I convinced myself it was all a mask. I suspected her as the superior actor.

  It had gotten so stressful that I began to avoid them when they were together, sometimes even avoid them alone. I played the part even when they weren’t around, struggling to treat them equally in my heart and in my mind, excoriating myself for signs of preference. But inevitably, my heart made its choice. I loved Glo more, and not just because loving her was easier. I slapped the thought down when it arose and vowed to try harder with Cyn. I didn’t want to be the one to make the experiment fail.

  To cope, I drowned myself in scripts, my socially sanctioned fantasy worlds. The works I loved best were the most clear-cut, their heroes facing death in battle, or loss of liberty or a simple goddamn marriage plot. I envied the characters, even the most miserable, because they at least could take action. I had no idea what actions I could take that wouldn’t end up badly hurting one or all of us. I didn’t want to lose anything, but I didn’t know how much longer I could keep up the act. I was failing, dangerously.

  I looked down at my lap and realized my hands had balled into fists. I eased them open and tugged at the neck of my sweater. It was too hot in the train. I couldn’t wait to get off and get the meeting over with before my mind dredged up all the bad stuff that I had allowed to sink like toxic waste to the depths of my memory.

  As if sensing my rising impatience, the train suddenly screeched to a halt. The jolt sent a teenager, who had been leaning against the door across from me, flying against the side of the seats. He cursed but managed not to drop his phone. There was a pause of a couple of seconds when it seemed like we might resume, but then the train shook with a great shudder and there was a loud hydraulic hiss as the machinery beneath us powered down.

  Attention, passengers: Due to an emergency situation, this train is temporarily out of service—

  Quite unlike the standard incoherently mumbled announcement, this conductor’s voice came through the speakers crystal clear, each syllable vibrating with distress. The intercom remained on, buzzing softly, for a second after the transmission, and I thought I heard her report, “Driver couldn’t do anything. Jumper’s underneath—” The intercom kicked off, and the train car filled with moans of discontent. Passengers who had been standing shuffled toward empty seats and settled in, arms crossed, radiating dissatisfaction.

  It won’t be long, I told myself, adamantly denying everything I’d thought I’d just heard.

  I focused my thoughts on something practical. When I met up with Cyn, in a matter of minutes, how I should greet her. Handshake? Hug? Kiss on the cheek?

  The door leading to the front of the train slid open with a screech, and a Hispanic woman led her tearful preteen daughter to an empty bench. Everyone stared as the mother spoke soothingly to her daughter, stroking the girl’s dark braids.

  An old woman seated opposite them asked if she could be of help.

  The mother shook her head. “We were in the front car. The train hit someone.” She nodded down at her daughter. “She saw.”

  I felt my gorge rise and gripped the seat beneath me. I had an absolute horror of train strikes. I don’t know if I watched Stand by Me at too tender an age, or fixated on Anna Karenina too deeply in high school lit, but I harbored a secret terror of the platform edge. My greatest fear wasn’t even that I would get pushed—I kept my back against the wall whenever possible to avoid a psychopath’s shove—but that I would accidentally witness a suicide. I had nightmares about it. The blaring horn of the train. The screams of fellow passengers. Bright red arcs of blood splashing up against the white tiles.

  I dipped my head and stared at the toes of my shoes, trying to stay calm. Why had this happened now, of all times?

  I stood, feeling the ground beneath me sway, and noted that the car before ours was filling with refugees from the lead car. The door opened and more people trudged through, every face downcast. A woman who had been holding a handkerchief to her face lowered it as she took a seat next to the Asian woman. As the car began to fill, conversations broke out between the witnesses and their seatmates. I didn’t want to listen, but the thing about gory details is, they’re enthralling.

  “You could feel it when we hit her. Like a thump-thump.”

  “Someone said she ended up under the back wheels.”

  “They made an announcement not to move, but the smell, it was terrible. I had to get outta there—”

  “—even worse when the door opened.”

  “I didn’t look, but someone said you could see her. It was some blond white lady. You’d have to be crazy—”

  “You okay, bro?” I heard. I looked up into the face of the teenager who had almost fallen. He was eyeing me warily, as if I might be preparing to puke on his sneakers.

  I managed to nod, and caught my reflection in the black mirror of the door. The sight of my sweaty, bloodless face was not encouraging, and I too began to worry about the future of my neighbor’s shoes. I leaned my forehead against the disgusting handrail, waiting for the spins to pass.


  “This is the second time this has happened to me this year,” announced a middle-aged man who wore the muddy boots of a construction worker as he dropped into my abandoned seat. “It’s gonna be forty-five minutes, at least, till they fish her out. My advice is, get comfortable.”

  No, no, no.

  I yanked the phone from my bag and pulled up some music, pressing the earbuds deep into my skull. Despite my efforts not to, I’d already imagined the dead woman under the car, her tragically bruised organs drifting to rest across those filthy black tracks.

  Some blond, white woman.

  In my mind, I gazed deep into Cyn’s dark eyes in the ­theater. I recalled the lifeless expression she wore as she threw herself into the cab, and the funereal face she’d directed at me in the bar. She was miserable, that was obvious to me now, but she wouldn’t . . . I widened my stance, feeling light-headed as the pieces fell together, forming a truly gruesome picture. She knew I’d be coming from the Owl, knew the train I would be taking. Was it possible that she’d thrown herself in front of my train as some bizarre statement?

  “No. That’s crazy,” I said, loud enough, and with enough conviction, to make people back away from me. I looked up and saw a collection of wary eyes checking me out, darting away like rabbits the second I looked their direction. I was that guy on the train.

  I shouldered my bag, and the crowd in the car parted, relieved to be rid of me. I walked through the masses and stepped out onto the small platform bridging the cars, where I paused, inhaling the darkness of the tunnel. If death was present, I didn’t smell it in the air.

  It was a perverse thought. What the fuck was wrong with me?

  I slid open the heavy metal door and moved to the next car. Then the next, trying to focus on my music and outrun my imagination. To get out of my head, I made an effort to notice other people. A bad feeling had settled into the train. I saw it echoed on the faces that surrounded me, all of us hired mourners, destined to get stiffed on the pay. I shrugged off my sweater and scarf as I moved. Finally I reached the last car, the farthest-possible place from the body that I had decided, definitively, was not Cyn’s.

  She was never, I convinced myself, that sick.

  I took a seat, feeling my anxiety abate. But then it rose afresh as I checked my phone. It was already 11:50. If Joe Construction was right, I would be an hour late. Would she still be there? I had no idea. I could never predict anything with Cyn, ever, which is probably the biggest reason that things fell apart for us so spectacularly.

  It all went down right before the girls left for Costa Rica. Cyn and I were alone together for a week, something that had never happened before. I was feeling a little sorry for myself because I knew as soon as Glo returned, they would both be heading off to Costa Rica. Immature asshole that I was at the time, I held Cyn’s excitement against her, mostly because it was happiness that had nothing to do with me. There was also the sex thing, the supercell disturbance over our relationship that only darkened and never broke. Whenever we were alone together in a room with a bed, it thundered, or, at least, it thundered for me.

  At first I didn’t ask for anything. But as the months wore on, I couldn’t hold that good-guy posture, and soon, even to myself, I was the dick boyfriend from every TV movie ever, pressuring my virtuous girlfriend into something she “wasn’t ready for.” There were very dark moments, like when we’d be making out in my bed at night, and she’d abruptly stop, pull on a shirt, and roll onto her side, cutting off her affection like turning off a tap. Or the times when I would drop her off at Ecstasy II. She would kiss me good-bye, and I would drive off nearly blind with rage. How different, I fumed, was what she gave me from what she gave her paying customers?

  I wondered if she didn’t want me. If she didn’t think I knew what I was doing, or thought I couldn’t please her. Maybe despite what she said, she didn’t actually find me all that attractive. I needed some answer to wrap my mind around, other than the simplest one: that she was frigid, or cruel. I sometimes thought maybe she was crazy, that her parents had planted some ineradicable virgin complex in her head, which applied only to her behavior with me, while to the rest of the world she flaunted herself as the South’s most willing whore. I hated myself for having such thoughts about someone I loved. But I was greedy. I was hungry. I felt entitled. I was, and this is true, desperate to connect with her. Despite all of our big deep talks, I still felt like I didn’t really know her. She had this unreachable secret core that seemed impossible to penetrate. Sometimes her face would turn distant and she’d go quiet, and I’d know she was there, in that place that she wouldn’t acknowledge and to which I couldn’t journey.

  My mind insisted that sex was the way forward, since that was the only road we hadn’t taken. If she just gave me a chance, maybe we could find each other that way, and even if we failed, even if her secret core remained intact, surely we would be closer without the mutual resentment that perpetually fed the great, horrible storm cloud. If we made love, so many questions and frustrations would be resolved. I would no longer lie awake asking myself Why, why, why? Why do this? Why dream up this mad experiment of a three-way relationship, if it could never be balanced?

  So I sought that balance, persistently.

  “You aren’t happy with this anymore, are you?” she murmured a few days after Christmas. She was sitting cross-legged on my floor, silhouetted against the sliding glass door, idly stroking a red felt Santa hat that Glo had given to her. The lights from the airport made the edges of her hair appear gilded as she fluffed the white polyester fur with her fingertips.

  I turned off the video game I’d been playing, thinking, Good, we’ll finally have this out. I turned around to face her. “Now, why wouldn’t I be happy with this anymore?”

  She stared at me coolly, noting, no doubt, the thinly veiled sarcasm.

  “You aren’t happy because you aren’t getting everything you want.”

  “That’s right. Because you won’t let me have it.”

  “That’s right,” she echoed. She looked away from me and out at the world beyond the glass door.

  We sat there in silence. I’d been expecting more of a reaction. I was at least hoping to learn why she was consciously torturing me, since she’d just admitted she knew what I wanted. But she just sat there, gazing at the airport.

  Exasperated to the point of rage, I got to my feet. I suddenly felt like I couldn’t even be in the same room with her. I had my hand on the doorknob when Cyn stopped me with a whisper.

  “If you really want an answer, my biggest fear is what might happen if I do sleep with you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m terrified that it’ll mess everything up. But everything is already so messed up. You’re going to start hating me, if you don’t already. I don’t know what to do. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

  She was crying. I stood there stupidly, my anger fading as my confusion rose to a new high water mark. I had no idea what she was talking about. But at the same time, I loved her even more for finally acknowledging what was happening between us.

  “You can’t wreck this,” I told her. “You just can’t.”

  She looked up at me and smiled, tears rolling down her face. “Yes, I can. But I really don’t want to.”

  I pulled her into my arms on the futon, and she pressed her damp face into my neck. My head was spinning questions and theories, uselessly. So uselessly.

  “Did something bad happen to you? Something bad, with sex?” It seemed the only explanation.

  “No.”

  “Oh. Okay, good.”

  “That’s not it. It’s not.” She sighed, her body shuddering against mine. “It’s not anything I can explain in a way that makes sense. It’s not about you. It’s not about Glo. It’s me. I’m just kind of fucked.”

  “I think you’re wonderful.”

  “I know.
It terrifies me.”

  “It terrifies you that I love you?”

  I’d never said it; to her, or to Glo. It was a dangerous word, and it had escaped before I could stop it. I meant it, and I regretted it, simultaneously.

  Her eyes became softer than I’d ever seen them, and she kissed me. We kissed for a long time, and to my wonder, she began to undress me. Then she lifted my hands and placed them on the buttons of her blouse, smiling coyly. I undid each button, slowly. Then, one by one, removed the rest of her clothes, expecting to be stopped, but hoping not to disturb the spell that was drawing us closer. I swear, that night held a magic that seemed tangible, like some mystic energy was carrying us over the barriers that had risen between us, where we could finally, fully meet.

  She didn’t stop me. She was quiet throughout, and in the darkness of my room, I couldn’t tell whether she was looking at me or her eyes were closed. I kept it simple, standard missionary position, because I was afraid that if I moved, if I did anything unusual, it might upset the balance that had made the moment possible, and everything might abruptly stop. When it was over, we splayed out naked, side by side. I reached for her hand and squeezed it.

  “I need a smoke,” her voice said in the darkness.

  I bounded out of bed to fulfill my queen’s wishes. As I flicked on the light and opened my stash box, the world felt full of fresh promise. I caught her looking at me as I rolled the joint.

  “You’re so happy now,” she observed.

  “Guilty as charged.” I leaned down to kiss her mouth, and she turned her head, offering me her cheek. “Was it okay for you?”

  “Uh-huh.” She closed her eyes.

  We smoked the joint without saying much, and she went right to sleep. It was early, only ten o’clock. I read a book and watched her as she slept. I had no idea that anything was wrong, and by the time I figured it out, it was too late.