I’m a mad submarine—I’m a liar, an idiot, a ghost.
So there’s this river house on the Chesapeake. My stepmother owns it. It’s the perfect place to take a new girlfriend if you want to impress her, especially if you’ve been working at a grocery store and living in your dad’s basement for the past eight months. And so that’s where I brought Anne. It was a weekend in early April 2007.
We sat together on the screened-in porch that overlooked the yard and the water. Anne drank whiskey and I drank beer. We were goofy, laughing and telling each other stupid jokes. It was fun. Then after a while, everything turned serious.
“I love you,” she said.
I hadn’t expected that. Things had seemed so casual up until then. But I was drunk and everything seemed all right. So I said, “I love you too.”
Later, around midnight or so, I asked her to go out to the dock with me.
“OK,” Anne said. She started toward the back door.
“No,” I said. “Let’s take our clothes off.”
“You want to just run out there completely naked?”
“It’s dark out,” I said. “No one’ll see us.”
Soon we were running naked and barefoot through the grass. Anne passed me and I slapped her on the ass. Finally, we were on the dock and looking out at miles of oil-black water. Anne glanced nervously at a neighbor’s house. Most of their house lights were on. I beat my chest and howled at the moon. I laughed and reached out and tickled Anne.
“Enough of this shit,” I said.
And then we ran back to the house.
It was a wonderful night. Almost perfect. It only took me a week to fuck everything up.
“I don’t love you,” I said.
We were in my room. Anne was over by my desk, putting a shirt on. I was still in bed, still naked. Still probably with a morning erection. I had to be at work in an hour or so and Anne was getting ready to leave.
Her eyes went almost instantly wet with tears. Her pale Polish face grew red with anger.
“Why the hell’d you lie to me last week?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just felt like I needed to say it.”
“I was just being honest with you. I didn’t expect to hear anything back. That wasn’t why I said it. I’ve got to go.”
She finished putting her shirt on and left the room. She went upstairs and out the front door.
I lay in bed, feeling a wave of guilty relief. I felt free, somehow.
But when I was at work, I had a drastic change of perspective. I kept slicing turkey and corned beef and bologna and all the other stringy meats that fell like paper into my hand. I got lost in the rhythm of my hand catching the meat and slapping it down onto deli paper. I looked at my hand inside my plastic glove and I thought about how foreign it looked to me. Nothing seemed right. Why was I here in Maryland in the early spring, in a supermarket in the middle of nowhere, twenty six years old and college dropout and wearing an apron and the bourgeois horror-faces watching me cut their food? I had a woman who didn’t seem to care even slightly about these things. She loved me. Christ knew why, but she loved me.
I still wasn’t sure if the things I had said at the lake house or the things I had said in my bedroom were true. I was still as confused as hell. But I knew that I needed to err on the side of love.
On my break I went outside and sat on a bench, lit a cigarette, and called Anne.
“Can you come over tonight?” I asked.
“Why?” she said.
“I want to talk to you. I just—I need you to come over. Can you do that?”
“Fine. Whatever.”
It was around seven when she got to the house. My dad and stepmom were out, we had the place to ourselves. I was sitting on the couch in the living room, watching TV. She sat down next to me and I turned the TV off. Her jaw was clenched. She wasn’t looking at me. I turned toward her and moved some of her hair from her eyes, placing it behind her ear. I touched her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I just panicked. But I do love you.”
“You can’t just say that and expect everything to be all right again,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“No more lies.”
“OK,” I said. “No more lies.”
I hugged her and held her. She smelled so good and everything felt fine again.
Sometimes the person I’m most alienated from is myself.