“Why won’t you tell me things?” she says. “I tell you things but you—you shut down, you won’t tell me the real deal. Why don’t you tell me how you saw Pitch Perfect? Because no, Joe. You didn’t see it randomly on Netflix. It’s not on Netflix and even if it was, a lie just feels different. I know you know that. And I think about this shit, you know, in the middle of the night, when you’re asleep, this is the kind of shit I think about. Why won’t you tell me?”
“Love,” I say, and I can’t explain it but I want to tell her. I want her to know.
“You know,” she says. “When you do stuff on your phone, I mean since the very beginning, like the whole time we’ve been together, I know you are doing something. Sometimes I think you have cancer. I actually console myself by thinking he just has some disease and he’s gonna die and he doesn’t know how to tell me that I’m gonna get my heart broken.”
“I don’t have cancer,” I assure her. But then I do; I have the mugofurine. It is a tumor spreading, malignant, infiltrating my love, my Love. She’s still wearing her coat.
“I know you don’t have cancer, Joe. That’s the point. But I have to know what you have. I can’t take it anymore. I have enough problems. I have a brother who disappears and a father who can’t even pretend he wants him to come back and a mother who wishes he wasn’t here in the first place. I can’t do this.” She is crying. I go to her but she doesn’t want me. “No,” she says. “You can’t be in this with me if you won’t be in this with me.” She wipes her eyes. “What the fuck are you even doing here? Why are you in Rhode Island? Is my brother here? Who are you? Because I can’t fucking ask you anymore. I can’t ask you anymore.”
“I’m sorry.”
She’s right. You can’t be in love, not fully, not eternally, if you can’t tell the truth. It builds up on you. She told me about fucking Milo in the Chateau. But how can I tell her my truth? I killed her brother. It’s like the atomic version of that universal truth: you can talk shit about your mother, but nobody else can, no matter what you say, no matter what she does. I can’t tell Love what I’ve been up to and to talk to her is to lie to her.
“I should just go. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
I kneel at her feet. “Please stay.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
She shakes her little head. “Love isn’t enough, Joe. It isn’t nearly enough. I want more.”
“I know you do.”
“I don’t know what else to say,” she says. “But I can’t stand the way you make me feel so good, like, better than I ever felt, and then you tear it all away, like deep down, you don’t want me to be happy.”
“Of course I want you to be happy.”
“Then tell me who you are. Tell me why you said you watched Pitch Perfect on Netflix.”
“Love,” I say, and if we were married, if I had let her go with me to Vegas and we had eloped, she would not be able to testify against me in a court of law. But we are not married and the justice system does not acknowledge relationships like ours. I want to marry this girl. I want to stay with this girl. I want our ashes mixed, our crumbling bodies buried side by side. I want her to know how badly I want that. I don’t want to live without her. I don’t want to let go of her. If she leaves me, what then?
“So that’s all you have to say. That’s fine. Fine.” She sounds cold and she is inching away from me. “Joe,” she says. “It’s over.”
I look up at her. This is like Homeland when he’s going to cut a wire and the bomb might explode. I might kill us, everything we have. But maybe I can live with that because without her, I will die. I know it. I accept that she might hit me, call me names, run to the cops. This could be the end. But this could also be the beginning.
When you get baptized, you fall back into the water, your entire body. Some people hold their noses. Some people don’t. But there is no way around it; you have to get wet if you want to be in God’s hands.
I take Love’s hands. I choose love. I accept risk. I breathe. I speak. “The first time I saw Pitch Perfect was when I broke into a girl’s apartment.”
WHEN I am done, when I have told her everything—everything but Forty, of course—she just sits there. The minutes tick by and her face gives me nothing, the way Matt Damon’s face never looks all that fucked up when he’s being Jason Bourne.
I think about what I’ve done, about how it all must seem to her. I did not do that thing where you leave out the grotesque details to make yourself seem like some kind of unstained, impervious hero. I told her how I stole Beck’s phone and strangled Peach on the beach. I told her about the blood of The Da Vinci Code in Beck’s mouth when she slipped away, how I buried her upstate. I told her about the mug of piss.
I gave her as much as I had, but it’s like the difference between a movie and a book: A book lets you choose how much of the blood you want to see. A book gives you the permission to see the story as you want, as your mind directs. You interpret. Your Alexander Portnoy doesn’t look like mine because we all have our own unique view. When you finish a movie you leave the theater with your friend and talk about the movie right away. When you finish a book you think. Love grew up on movies and I have just read her a book. I give her the time to digest.
I am preparing for the worst, for Love’s face to change, for her to run out of here screaming. In a funny way, all the women in my life helped me brace for this moment. My mother. Beck. Amy. Women leave me, and Love will leave me. She has to. She believes in love and decorates her home with it, carries it on her passport, in her heart. She is going to walk out of this room and feel like she’s done it again, chosen the wrong man, blown those other two out of the saltwater infinity pool we’ll never go in again.
I’ve never opened up like this, never said it all out loud before, and I hold my knees to my chest and tell myself that what happens next is out of my control. I can’t make Love love me. But I did the right thing. I told her what she wanted to know. I stopped lying.
The wait is eternal, and her eyes are fixed on a stain on the floor. I think of all the people who stayed in this room before and wonder if any of them have been like me.
And then, finally, she looks up.
“Okay,” she says. “I’m gonna tell you about Roosevelt.”
Roosevelt was a puppy they had when they were babies. Forty named him. She didn’t know why then, doesn’t know why now. “He’s weird that way,” she says, as if he’s still alive. “I mean, what six-year-old calls a puppy Roosevelt? And also, it’s not like he was precocious and into politics or whatever. He just liked the word Roosevelt.”
“It’s a good name,” I say.
She ignores me. “Anyway,” she says. “Roosevelt disappeared. And we looked everywhere and put up signs and all that. But then Forty woke me up in the middle of the night and he took me outside and showed me that Roosevelt wasn’t missing. He was dead.”
“Oh dear.”
She looks at me. She holds my hands. Now she is the one who’s not blinking, staring at me directly. “He tied Roosevelt to the wall,” she says. “He was mad at him because he kept wanting to sleep in my room instead of Forty’s. So he punished him. He starved him and muzzled him.”
“Love,” I say. I’ve never harmed an animal; I can’t imagine being that sort of monster. “Jesus Christ.”