My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (68 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Psyche was in therapy and knew that she was projecting a lot onto Cupid. The fact that he came to her only at night allowed her to project onto him even more. She felt blind with Cupid and panicky, the way she had felt when she was a child playing hide-and-seek and she was the blindfolded one. “It.”
One night Cupid fell asleep after they had made love. Psyche was hoping that he would sleep through until morning so that she could see his face in the light and they could go out to breakfast. She lay awake for a long time watching the clock and waiting for the sun to rise. The room felt hot and stuffy. Finally Psyche could not wait anymore. She got up, lit a candle, and watched Cupid as he lay sleeping beside her. She saw that he was not a beast as she had sometimes suspected when she felt the fur on his chest and the prick of his horn (not that she would have cared if he were a beast; she would still have wanted to buy him groceries and supplements—maybe even more supplements!—and go out to breakfast with him) but a tall beautiful man with eyes like blue irises, as she had also suspected. He did look exactly like his online pictures. He took her breath away and tears came to her eyes suddenly like a pang in your chest. But then some candle wax fell on Cupid’s chest, above his heart. He woke and saw Psyche watching him. There was so much love and need in her eyes and it scared him. He wanted to run away.
“You don’t love me as much as I love you,” Psyche cried when she saw the fear lit in his eyes. “I’ve been in relationships like this before. I can’t do this again.”
This made Cupid more afraid and he said, “I don’t know how I feel about you. I am fond of you and I love being with you but that’s all I know. I haven’t seen anyone else.”
“You’ve been seeing someone else?” Psyche shouted, all her senses distorted now with fear.
This made Cupid angry. He spoke slowly. “No. Psyche. I haven’t seen anyone else.” Then he added, coolly, “But I might have tea with somebody if it came up.”
“Tea?” Psyche shouted. “What does tea with somebody mean? Is tea a euphemism for fucking? I can’t do this.” Psyche said I can’t do this too often. She said it whenever she got scared in a relationship and then she regretted it because the man she said it to heard her and decided, in that moment, he couldn’t do “this,” either.
“I can’t talk anymore,” Cupid said.
“Wait,” said Psyche, softening as the adrenaline drained from her body, as she realized how far she had gone, like the other times with the other men, and that it was probably too late. “I just want to tell you that I think you are wonderful and I don’t want us to hurt each other anymore. No one is right or wrong. We just want different things.”
Cupid, also softening with resignation and with compassion for Psyche, replied, “You are beautiful and wonderful and I don’t want this to get fucked up. It’s no one’s fault. We just want different things.”
Then he blew out the candle, went out the back door, and left her shaking with regret in the darkness.
The darkness was not safety for Psyche. If she disappeared in it she felt she might never return.
But there were so many tasks to do there. It was where she had to be.
Psyche worked hard in the figurative darkness. She taught her kindergartners, marketed, did the laundry, cleaned her apartment, did yoga until she was soaked through with sweat, meditated in her fairy garden, ran on the beach, worked out with weights, paid all the bills. She also tried to keep up her appearance. She got haircuts, facials, manicures, pedicures, and went shopping for cheap cute clothes at thrift stores (she scrupulously avoided the men’s section) so that she would not feel as if she had completely vanished into the dark. Even though her life looked light and bright and happy, and she was happy with her children at school and by herself in her sunny little apartment on weekends—the walls covered with the construction paper, tissue, crayon, and glitter art the kids had made for her—she felt so dark and empty when the sun went down, as if someone had stolen her organs and run off with them and she was left hollow as a scooped-out gourd, rotting in the night. She felt like an old pumpkin that you could smash with your fist, that would crumple in on itself if you even touched it. After Psyche got in bed and read a few chapters of a novel, she cried herself to sleep in the dark. She was always surprised, in the morning, when she was still there.
On Monday afternoons, Psyche saw her therapist Sophia. Luckily, Psyche had a really great therapist who kept the rates low so Psyche could see her every week. (If your name is Psyche you really better have a fucking great therapist like this one.) Sophia had been away for a month in Italy when Psyche confronted Cupid. If her therapist had not been away, Psyche would probably not have lit the candle at all. She would not have attacked Cupid and they would still be making love in the dark. Psyche had a history of breaking up with men while her therapists were away. None of the other therapists had been as good, though. One of them had been an actual psycho and called Psyche a bitch when she told the therapist things weren’t working out and that she wanted to move on. One of them got a rare disease and died soon after the vacation during which Psyche had broken up with her boyfriend at the time. Psyche did not have a good pattern around therapists on vacation and boyfriends. But Sophia, she was very wise. When she got back from her vacation in Italy, Sophia told Psyche a few very important things:
1. Love is pain. You cannot avoid pain. It is part of love. (Psyche hated this one.)
2. The pain can feel like it will kill you but it won’t. (This one was better.)
3. When a baby and a mother are relating to each other, there are more incidents of misattunement, when they don’t understand each other or connect, than attunement.
4. The key to a successful relationship is not how many times you have misattunement, which is inevitable, but how many times you are able to heal those breaks with kind communication.
“Why don’t you call him?” Sophia asked Psyche.
“He doesn’t like phone calls,” Psyche said. “He acts weird on the phone if I call. He likes to be the one in control of the timing of things. Maybe I can send him an e-mail explaining that he made me think he really liked me and so I got carried away and started to like him and then I got scared because he wouldn’t let me see him in the light and I was just curious and so I lit the candle and then I saw how scared he looked and I was more scared because he is so beautiful so I attacked him and then he told me he wanted to have tea with other women which scared me because he had never mentioned anything like that before and I didn’t want to attack him anymore, any worse, so I just pushed him away and ended it for good.”
”Don’t be the lawyer,” Sophia said.
“Oh,” said Psyche. “You’re right. He wouldn’t like the lawyer.”
“Just send him a single line asking if he would be willing to talk to you.” And Sophia added, “In person. In the daytime. So you can really see what’s what.”
Sophia smiled. Sophia was so beautiful, Psyche thought. She had hair that softly framed her gentle face. She wore soft colors and a mix of beautiful jade and metals and saltwater pearls. Her office had a large stone Quan Yin statue, which watched Psyche lovingly from the corner, and a midnight-blue rug with pink peonies. Sophia was a painter before she became a therapist and had raised three children on her own. She never spoke about herself, unlike all the other therapists Psyche had had who always talked about themselves. Sophia was smarter and kinder than all of them combined. She had better boundaries and more love.
Psyche trusted Sophia and sent Cupid a one line e-mail asking if he would be willing to talk with her. In person. During the day.
Cupid had felt pressured by Psyche and then wounded when she suddenly rejected him. It had all happened so fast. One moment they were making love, then he was asleep in her arms, then he was awake and she was telling him he didn’t love her enough. and then, that she didn’t want to see him anymore. After Cupid left Psyche’s bedroom he had become mildly depressed. Although he had had a series of unsatisfactory romantic relationships, he usually had a positive effect on people. He had been elected secretary of his AA meeting three times and everyone seemed to perk up when he walked into the room. He was always introducing people to each other and some of the people he had introduced had fallen in love and two couples had gotten married. Cupid was proud of this and liked to consider himself a pretty good guy who generally made people happy. So it disturbed him that he had hurt Psyche, that she had been harsh with him because of it, and he began to withdraw. His term as secretary ended and he didn’t take on any new duties. He still went to meetings but he kept to himself. Women flirted with him—they always flirted with him—and he had gone to tea with a few of them. While he drank the tea he thought of Psyche, who he had never had tea with in the light, and then of all the other failed relationships in his life, and he became more depressed. His heart felt heavy and sore.
He wrote back to Psyche and said maybe, maybe he would meet her. Psyche waited a week and didn’t hear from him. At last he wrote to her and asked what she wanted to talk with him about. Psyche said she wanted to apologize for being overreactive and she wanted to see his face.
Cupid was still hurt. He wrote, “I’ve moved on. But I’ll think about it.”
Psyche pretended she was not devastated by this response and kept doing her tasks. She forced herself to get up every morning, wash her hair, get dressed in something halfway cute, make breakfast, pack her lunch, go to work, go to the gym, go to the grocery store, eat dinner, do the dishes, get in bed with a book, and not give in to the black hole that wanted to swallow her up. She fell into it a little though, every time she checked her computer for a message from Cupid that didn’t come.
He has moved on, she thought. But I can’t.
But then Cupid e-mailed her. When she saw his name in her inbox—she had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night to check, and as it turned out he had just sent the e-mail five minutes before—her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might faint. The e-mail said, “I’m not ready to meet with you at this time.”
Psyche could no longer pretend not to be devastated. She told Sophia what had happened with Cupid.
“I think we just need to dig in here,” Sophia said. “And look at you, your past, your unconscious. Everything else will work itself out from there.”
Psyche usually avoided talking about her childhood, her relationship with her parents, her fears. She spent most of her therapy time talking about the men she was dating. Sophia told her she thought she was distracting herself from the truth. So Psyche started keeping a journal of her dreams and bringing in childhood photos as Sophia had suggested so she could put the focus back on herself. She spent the next few months crying in Sophia’s office, teaching her kids, and walking around in a daze most of the rest of the time. She let her online dating subscription expire so that she wouldn’t compulsively check the site over and over, sometimes accidentally coming upon Cupid’s smiling picture. She felt like she was sorting endless tiny seeds of grain or stealing something precious from a vicious creature or going down into the underworld again and again.
Even on bright days it felt like the middle of night when you lie awake in despair waiting for morning. Once Psyche had believed in love. She had believed, as a little girl, that you meet your twin flame quite easily, that you are naturally drawn to each other across time and space, and that you know right away and as soon as you meet you embark on a journey together until you die. If problems arise you work through them together. Even if the days are long and hard you have the comfort of knowing that the other person will be there beside you in the quiet and peace of the night to soothe you with their body and their voice as you are there to soothe them. She had learned this by watching her parents, who had such a relationship. But when Psyche’s father had died, her mother had been so broken-hearted that she had died within a year. Psyche’s mother had said, “I don’t want to live without him,” and Psyche had begged her to stay, but she had died anyway because nothing was more important than the pain of living without her husband, not even her daughter. From that time on, Psyche was dubious about true love because she knew that even if you find it, it will one day come to an end, leaving you devastated. Perhaps that is why she picked such inappropriate men over and over again, even though they did not necessarily appear that way on the surface. They were men who were easy to project a lot of fantasies onto. They were usually quiet men who didn’t express their feelings a lot and who had experienced childhoods where it was necessary to adapt to dysfunctional situations by staying under the radar. More than one was an alcoholic. More than one was an actor. Psyche was a pretty, nice, well-educated young woman with a job she liked and a cute beach apartment. People who met her were surprised that she was still alone. But Psyche was beginning to understand.
One day at school one of her kinders was crying. Psyche knelt beside her and asked her why. The little girl said, “It’s my birthday tomorrow and no one is going to come.”
“How do you know?” Psyche asked. “Because I am going to come.”
“I just do,” said the little girl. “No one will come.” And she began to cry again.
Psyche thought that the way she had pushed Cupid away was not unlike what the little girl was feeling. If you were sad about something that hadn’t happened yet you couldn’t be disappointed.

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