Chapter Four
In Between
When I met Simon, I was working at a strip club. I believed I was a piece of shit. People treated me like a piece of shit. I worked with many, many pieces of shit, most of them my bosses. This felt normal to me, after being raised by a piece-of-shit mother, and being regularly abused by her piece-of-shit boyfriends.
But Simon was the first person in my life who refused to accept this piece-of-shit view of myself. We didn’t have a lot in common, except that we were both very sensitive souls, and I thought, finally, someone who understands me. He came to see me at my strip club, even though it was gross and seedy. He supported me and tried to pump me up when I tore myself down. He talked me out of a dozen spirals, and then he gave me a copy of A Chorus Girl by E.E. Cummings, and brought me to his studio.
“Look,” he said. And I hadn’t had any idea what I was looking at. It was a huge, rough-edged canvas with scarlet blurs and pink splotches, and big swirls of paint. “It’s you,” he said when I didn’t respond. “I painted this about you. About the poem. See?”
And God, I didn’t see, but I changed during that moment of shock and confusion, because someone had made a painting about me. Not just any old someone, but a real, legitimate artist who had done a show and started a mailing list and whom followers and critics labeled as an up-and-comer.
If I was truly a worthless person, a piece of shit, he wouldn’t have made a painting about me. That painting was acquired by the Louvre in Paris a few years later and hangs there to this day, in a great, white, airy, climate-controlled atrium. It was called Heart-Lust, and we became a couple, and I graduated from stripping to working for the most exclusive escort agency in the city, because I was too good for stripping. I was not a piece of shit.
Even if, most days, I felt like a piece of shit.
W couldn’t have known any of this. Even if he snooped through my bag, even if he downloaded everything on my phone, he couldn’t have known about that evening Simon pulled me into his studio and showed me that painting with a huge smile on his angelic face.
How happy W would be if he knew how much that snippet of poem messed with me, how long it had taken me to stop sobbing in the Viceroy hotel room. Fuck, fuck, fuck him.
I finally pulled myself together and headed home, red-eyed and exhausted. Simon wasn’t at the loft, which was probably a blessing, since I didn’t think I could have looked at him tonight without dying of grief. How had things changed so much between us? Why was he strung out on drugs now, and struggling to make art? Why wasn’t I enough for him? What had happened, where had I fucked up?
I went to our bedroom and knelt beside the bed, and pulled out the decoupaged box from underneath. The Chorus Girl was in there, amongst the other sad, lingering detritus of our relationship. Simon had handwritten the whole poem for me in his arching, spidery hand, so different from W’s square, bold lettering. There were pictures from our trip to Paris, and other trips we’d taken. Dried flowers. Show tickets. Invitations to weddings we’d attended, although the subject of marriage never came up between us, even after ten years.
I closed the box and leaned my head on the edge of the bed. Fuck. There was no love between the two of us anymore, only co-dependency. I needed to be in a relationship to prove I wasn’t a piece of shit, and Simon… Simon needed a caretaker. He needed monitoring and money. He barely made art anymore, and drugs cost a lot. A fortune. An entire world.
I heard the hum of the elevator, heard Simon come in and bang the door shut. There was a time I would have run out there and flung myself into his arms. He would have kissed my temple and my hair and my lips. He would have said, “Hello, gorgeous,” and looked at me with his artist’s eyes that were always bright and curious, and approving. He used to adore me. Now he adored the drugs more, and his artist’s eyes were hazy and unfocused.
He puttered in the kitchen for a while and then retreated to his studio. I shoved the box back under the bed and stayed where I was, feeling too heavy to stand. Even after the thirty-minute shower, even after I put on my softest pair of yoga pants, my ass cheeks still hurt and I could still feel W on me. I wondered if he ever used drugs. I tried to imagine him slurring his words and twitching the way Simon did when he was really high. No. I couldn’t imagine W giving up control in that way. Or maybe I didn’t want to think about W not being in control.
I didn’t like that W was so much in my thoughts, especially when he gave me nothing in return.
Oh, he gives you something, my conscience whispered. Just not the something you want.
I tried not to want anything from clients, except money. I tried not to get involved, but W made me feel involved. Since he wouldn’t tell me his name, or let me see how he looked, I desperately wanted to know his name, and I was dying to see how he looked.
And the worst part of it was, he knew I felt that way. He enjoyed fucking with me. I didn’t believe that he would eventually reveal himself to me, but part of me still wanted to meet him again just in case he did. Because never knowing the name and face of this man—that seemed an impossible burden to bear.
Speaking of impossible burdens to bear…
“Chere!” That was Simon’s angry voice. He came into the bedroom, his hair disheveled, his shirt undone, revealing his chest but not his arms. He never let me see his arms. “Chere, I need money.”
“For what?”
“For life,” he spat back. “I know you just got back from a date. Don’t be a bitch.”
I drew back a little on the bed. “I don’t get that money right away. Henry has it.”
Henry had a lot of my money now, and deposited it in a secret account for me. It was his suggestion, since he knew about Simon’s “problem.”
“I won’t get the money for this date until tomorrow,” I said. “I only have sixty bucks.”
“Well, I need it.”
“Where’s your money? When are you going to sell something?”
He was purposely tuning me out, looking around for my purse. “You went on a date two days ago. You have money.”
“I need that money for rent. Jesus, Simon, you’ve got to stop this—”
He charged at me. I flinched. He saw my bag by the nightstand and grabbed it, and dug for my wallet like the junkie he was.
“I need to eat,” I yelled. I pulled at the purse straps like an old lady being mugged. “You need to eat too. Let’s go to dinner.”
“I don’t want fucking dinner. I need to work, I need to paint something.”
“You need drugs.”
He took my sixty dollars and threw the bag back at me. It was okay. I had money hidden everywhere. That’s what the significant others of drug addicts did. They hid money. They maintained. They walked on eggshells.
“I need to work,” he said, glaring at me. He didn’t look like an angel anymore. He looked like a devil in withdrawal. “I’m going to get off the drugs, so you can stop looking at me that way. But it doesn’t just happen like that.” He snapped his fingers in my face, a sharp, bony click. “I need to build up some work first, so I can take a break and go into treatment. I need to have one more show, to make money, to keep the momentum going while I get clean. I have a career to think about. Why can’t you understand that? Why don’t you fucking give me some time to organize my shit?”
Because your career is dead in the water, and you’re going to die if I give you any more time…
“I’m going to leave you,” I said.
He laughed, knowing me for a liar. “Not if I leave you first.”
He took my money and disappeared. The elevator hummed again. I wasn’t invited anymore when he went out to do whatever he did. Party. Mingle. Sleep with other women. When I confronted him about his clinging art groupies, he silenced my complaints by pointing out that I slept with other men. Sometimes, in his rages, he called me a whore, and I thought, I am a whore. Even if I’m classy and high-priced, and pretty on the outside, I’m still a whore.
And he was a drug addict and a user, so I guess we deserved each other, for better or worse.