You

35

AT my next session, I told Nicky about how I feel high when I leave his beige office. He said my reaction is common—I’m normal!—and it’s all about a new perspective.

“I have a place upstate,” he said. “I get out there into the woods every couple of weeks. Not because of the fresh air, but because of the fresh perspective.”

In my third session, we talk all about the video (you) and Nicky tells me about what he calls the cat strategy. “I used to have this neighbor who rented her cat out. You know why?”

“To help depressed people?” I ask. Wrong.

“If anyone in the neighborhood had a mouse problem, Mrs. Robinson would lend her cat for a day or two,” he says. “And, Danny, the thing about mice, if they so much as smell a cat, they’re out of there.”

“So if I started watching something else, I’d stop watching the video.”

He nods. We don’t talk. Sometimes that happens in here, an abrupt silence. Nicky says it’s normal; you have to process things. I process the idea of a life without you. I’d date other girls (unimaginable) and go on walks and maybe I’d find people to play basketball with or sit in a dark bar watching the news and fall asleep in my bed without your phone in my hand and wake up without our phone pressing into my flesh. My hands hurt from obsessively checking your e-mail; maybe it would be nice to have fingers that don’t sting. I don’t know what it would be like to be here without you inside of me, Beck. I do know that you are a lot to handle. I am tired.

Nicky can sense when I’m done processing. He readjusts in his chair. “Give it a shot this week,” he says. “Journal on it and let me know how it goes.”

I like having homework and I leave his office and find that the world is full of women. So maybe I do want to find out about life without you. I’d almost forgotten about girls. They’re everywhere, Beck, on the subway platform there are college girls in tight jeans with their heads buried in Kindles and round old chicks hanging on to reusable bags of vegetables and middle-aged housewives heaving with raggedy bags from Macy’s and Forever 21, and there’s a hot blond chick who’s so little she makes you seem like a jolly green giant and she’s in scrubs and she looks freshly scrubbed and I’m totally fucking staring and she smiles. Game on.

“Do I know you?” she says and she has a little bit of an accent, Long Island City, I think.

“No,” I say and she walks toward me, not away from me and she smells like ham sandwiches and rubbing alcohol. I like her tits.

“You don’t know me at all?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Then why the fuck are you staring at me?”

“I don’t know,” I say and I wonder what Nicky would say. “I guess I must just like staring at you.”

The train screeches to a stop and her electric green beady little eyes home in on me and random women go onto the subway as random women get off and the two of us lock eyes like animals in heat. She has thin eyebrows and long painted fingernails, nothing like yours, which is good. I could never love this girl. But I sure can practice on her.

She starts, “Who kicked your ass?”

“I had an accident.”

“You had an accident,” she sneers. “That’s a good one.”

“I got jumped.”

“So you just fucking lie about it before you even know my name?”

“I guess I just felt like lying.” And I am good at this and Nicky would be impressed.

“Well, what if I don’t go out with liars?”

“Then it sucks to be you.”

“What the fuck is happening right now?”

“You know, who cares?” I say and I am on like Donkey Kong. “If this conversation were happening in a dark bar and we were both shitfaced it would be perfectly normal.”

Her name is Karen Minty and she bites her glossy lip and gets in my face. “And if your grandmother had balls she’d be your grandfather.”

Karen Minty decides right there that she’s going to have sex with me and I know it. She is so much easier to read than you are and I couldn’t ask for a better cat and it starts with an obligatory drink at some fuckface bar packed with NYU kids who drink American beer out of buckets. You’d hate it here but she loves this place. This bar was her choice so now it’s my choice and I take her to a hole on Houston that I know will impress her—I was right, she is from Long Island City—and she is impressed by Botanica Bar and she drinks Greyhounds and says shit you would never say like:

“Do you know how I know about this drink? Leonardo DiCaprio drinks these. It’s true.”

“Do you know why food in hospitals sucks my ass? Because they do want you to die. It’s true, Joey. It’s true. It’s fucking cheaper and not as many people have to work doubles if you got more empty beds.”

“Do you know that I had this feeling like I was gonna meet someone tonight? I shouldn’t be fucking saying this, fucking Greyhounds, but, Joe, I had this fucking feeling. And then you were staring at me.” She burps. “That needs to come off, Joe.”

“My shirt?”

“That bandage on your hand.”

I forgot it was there. Look what you did to me. It started when I burnt my hand in the candle. Then the healing was interrupted because I picked at the scab because of what you did to me. Then Curtis beat me up while I was rushing to get ready to go see you. And then of course I crashed my car while I was looking for you. I see a pattern here and Nicky says life is all about patterns and now Karen Minty grabs my hand like it belongs to her. Karen Minty is fucking strong, and she whispers in my ear, “Save your energy, Joey. You’re gonna need it.”

She yanks the bandage off my hand and before I can wince, she kisses me. As it turns out, Karen Minty’s lips are strong too. My hand doesn’t hurt anymore.

By the time we get on a train I don’t think either of us knows which way the train is going. It’s a miracle that the train is empty, not even the random bum or gangster or ho. It’s a miracle that Karen Minty licks the place on my face where Curtis fucked me up and her tongue is sharper than yours and I fucking tear off her scrubs—she’s wearing a thong—and she grabs at me and we go at it on the fucking subway at four in the morning and when Karen Minty cums, she screams—yeah Joe yeah I’m yours cum now NOW—and she digs her claws into my back and her eyes roll around in her head and when she finishes, her legs are still wrapped around me, vibrating. I hold on to her tight, wishing she were you. She sticks that pointy tongue down my throat and she takes it back and she looks at me.

“I love you,” she says and what have I done and she bursts out laughing and hops off of me and wraps herself in my coat. “Your face, Joey, omigod. You should see your fucking face right now, I’m just fucking with you.”

“I know,” I say. And I will not worry; most girls go fucking insane for a few minutes after they fuck. That’s just the way it is.

She is defensive. “Obviously, I don’t even know you.”

“I know,” I say and she curls into me, not away from me and I look at us in the window. We come and go as the lights flicker in the tunnel and I will sleep tonight for the first time in a long time and Karen Minty will make me an egg sandwich and give me a blow job in the morning. I can just tell, something about those Greyhounds, something about that mouth. She does love me.

I am the best patient ever because already, I have found a stray cat.

THE next day, I get to the shop and I’m hungover as all fuck and full of an egg sandwich that was a bad idea. Karen Minty meant well, but Karen Minty was probably still too drunk to cook. I told her it was a nice time. She told me she’d come by the shop. I didn’t encourage her, Beck. And now I have Ethan up my ass—he’s early, again—and he wants to know if I’m sick.

“Do you have a cold, Joe? Or did you just have too much sauce?”

Only Ethan calls it sauce and I unlock the door and if I were a therapist like Nicky I wouldn’t have to deal with Ethan. I send him to Fiction to find staff picks and I turn on the music. Karma is a bitch. The first song that comes on is “You Are Too Beautiful” from Hannah and Her Sisters. I slam it off. Suddenly it hits me. I cheated on you, I cheated on us.

My head pounds. The doorbell chimes and every noise hurts, especially the one that comes now, the girl I just banged, Karen Fucking Minty. I want to slit my wrists.

But at the same time, I’m dying for coffee and she’s holding two hot cups—Starbucks, surprising—and she shrugs. “I didn’t know how you guys take ’em so I just got fucking everything.”

She plants a heavy paper bag on the counter. Ethan comes bounding to the front of the shop and she is scary friendly to him right off the bat. “You must be Ethan, right? Joe told me all about you.”

How drunk was I last night? Ethan can’t contain his joy at the idea of me telling some chick about him and he practically drools all over Karen Minty. She wastes no time making herself at home and she looks at me. “So, how do you take coffee, Joe?”

I tell her I’m fine and she rolls her eyes and winks at me and calls, “Hey, Ethan?”

He trips over himself running back. Only Ethan. And he tells her that I’m black, two sugars and he’s “Cream and Stevia. Or Truvía. Or Splenda. And if they don’t have any of that the real sugar in the brown packets. But never Equal!”

All the while, Karen is looking deep into my eyes and she thinks she’s gonna bring me coffee for the rest of her life. I love you, not her and oh fuck she’s one of those girls. She smiles at me hard and winks. “Thanks, Ethan.”

And there’s no way around it. I didn’t just pet this cat. I adopted it.