YOU won’t be happy when you wake up alone in the cage. But I have done my best. I left you a plastic bottle of root beer, a plastic bottle of water, a bag of pretzels, some crayons I found in a drawer, and a notepad. It’s not like you can ever say I starved you or deprived you. You’re safe. I even brought the shop’s laptop downstairs and put the Pitch Perfect DVD on with speakers on a chair outside of the cage. You’ve seen the movie enough to know that Beca does some terrible things to Jesse. She rebuffs his advances, she mocks his interests, she bites his head off, and she won’t let him get close. But in the end, she makes a bold public proclamation of love in the form of a song and he forgives her for all the terrible things she did. And I am going to forgive you, Beck. I kiss you good-bye and I lock the basement doors and text Ethan:
Hey buddy, no need to come in tomorrow. Pipe burst. Gonna be a few days!
The miracle about love is that I’m still not angry with you. I feel sorry for you. It must be so hard to carry all that anger around. I don’t have that kind of anger in me. You were so vicious and I wish I could reach inside of you and suck the venom out.
I unlock the door to your place and I prove my forgiveness: I take out the trash. It reeks of bananas and womanhood. All of this might be your way of punishing me for the mistakes I’ve made, for my hands on Karen Minty, for my thoughts of Amy Adam.
I flop onto the couch in your living room. Something jabs my ass and I stand up and jam my hand between the cushions and it’s my copy of Love Story. I don’t remember you asking to borrow it. It’s soiled with milky coffee, shards of tobacco from the cigarettes you smoke for no reason, a gum wrapper, ink stains, sand. How the fuck did sand get in there? Sand.
And I’m still not angry with you. I love you, my little piggy. I flip through Love Story and wonder why you stole it from me, why you tarnished it with an 800 number for a rice cooker you’ll never buy. I would have given my Love Story to you. I would have given you anything. I look at the blank television set and wonder if this is my fault too? Was I stingy with you? Did I miss a hint you dropped about Love Story? I can’t sit here anymore and I go into the kitchen to clean my book. But of course you’re all out of paper towels and I remember one of my favorite nights in this kitchen, a few weeks ago, a few eons ago.
We’d had a great day together even though you’d been tied up with school and I’d been slammed at the shop. I joked that I’d be arriving at your place at seven sharp and that I expected dinner to be on the table, the joke being the fact that you can’t cook. But when I hopped up those steps that lead to you, you saw me coming from out the window and I didn’t have to buzz. You ran to the door and grabbed my hand and told me to close my eyes. And I did.
You led me into your apartment and guided me to the sofa and I didn’t peek and you told me to open my eyes and I did. There you were, in your robe, holding a paper plate with a sweet potato you had sliced down the middle and molded into the shape of a heart. I looked up at you and smiled and you teased, “Welcome home, honey.”
I fucked you like the glorious animal that you are and you told me the long-winded story of how you bought a sweet potato—the first one was rotten and you had to go back!—and poked holes in it and gutted it and splayed the skin, the way a high school sophomore splays a frog’s abdomen in biology.
I laughed at the still untouched sweet potato. “Now all I see is a frog.”
You were serious and soft. “No, Joe. That’s my heart.”
Then we ordered Chinese because one sweet potato was never going to be enough and I love you. But now I am here alone.
I use one of your little tank tops to wipe down Love Story and you won’t be knocked out for that long and it’s time to get to work. I’m gonna need your computer so I go back to your bedroom and take it off the nightstand where it lives and I go to the end of the bed I built and I sit and immediately, I am on my feet. Under the tangled sheets there is something hard and flat: a MacBook Air. You don’t have a MacBook Air and I don’t like the MacBook Air and I take it out of your room because I don’t want that thing in the bed that I built.
I need a drink and I open the freezer and there’s our vodka but there’s something else in here, gin. Since when do you drink gin and own a MacBook Air? I take the vodka into the living room and sit on your filthy couch. I take a swig. Maybe your father got it for you. Maybe your mother got it for you. Maybe Chana left it here and maybe there was an intruder and maybe I should grow a set and open it. How bad can it be?
I’m an imaginative guy and I picture a lot of scenarios, but what I find in the MacBook Air blows my mind: a screensaver shot of you and Dr. Nicky taking one of those motherfucking pictures they call a selfie. You’re both naked in my bed, the one I brought back on the ferry, the bed I built for you, for us. He’s in our fucking bed and I go into the kitchen and take the gin out of the freezer and pour it into the sink over all the dirty dishes. Fuck you, computer. Fuck you, Nicky.
But when I reenter your living room, the MacBook asshole is still on the coffee table and if computers could smirk, this flimsy piece of shit computer would be smirking at me. I have to calm down and who knows? Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. Maybe this MacBook asshole is actually old and you made a mistake a long time ago. But the homepage of this MacBook Asshole is a Gmail account for [email protected]. You opened the account a couple of weeks ago, right before I met Amy Adam, when you started to get quiet on me, when I started to get suspicious. You opened it for Nicky. You are a bitch and you told him that you thought I might be reading your e-mail. Cunt. I read.
Nicky: Wasn’t I right? Your boyfriend can’t read what he doesn’t know exists.
You: You’re terrible but you’re also right.
Nicky: You like your new toy?
You: It’s too much a whole computer ahahahha
Nicky: Stop.
You: Make me
That’s all I need to see. There are over 437 e-mails between you and Nicky and I’m not crazy. That middle-aged hunchback has been defiling you and taking advantage of you and letting you pay him to fuck you. When I felt like you were pulling away, you were in fact pulling away. You’ve been reduced to secret e-mail where it’s all about Nicky. All those times you apologized to me for being late/tired/overwhelmed with work/busy/in class/full, you were either sleeping with Nicky, talking about sleeping with Nicky, or writing to Nicky. I open the photos and there’s one thumbnail of particular interest. Nicky stands over my bed holding your naked calf. He’s laughing and he’s wearing my Holden Caulfield hat you were going to bring back to Macy’s.
I’ll admit it, Beck. That hurts. But I can’t put all the blame on you. I’m the one who fucked up and let you down. I knew something was wrong. I have instincts and I ignored them and now you’re locked in a cage because of me. I had the opportunity to take the mouse out of your house and I didn’t. No wonder you couldn’t stop screaming at me. You have every right to be mad at me for failing to protect you from this lecherous, Vans-clad semidoctor. I send Lynn and Chana a note from your secret account:
Things got ugly with Nicky. I’m so afraid Joe is going to find out and I am sooo behind on writing. I’m running away from it all to write for a few days. Love you girlies xo Beck