OCD Love Story (31 page)

Beck stares at me like he's never seen me before.

Lights shift a little, to let us know Sylvia and Austin are going to be switching to a ballad, and I know within a note it's definitely my favorite one, “That Lingering Thing.” It's about what happens when someone has left you and all you remember about them five minutes after they're out the door is the way they smell fresh out of the shower.

Something like that. But said in, like, pretty lyrics.

It reminds me of Beck, the shower part. He always smells
like he just got out of the shower because he mostly
did
just get out of the shower. I can smell him now. The clean scent of him rises up from the sea of other smells: tequila and spilled beer and just-smoked cigarettes. I reach for his elbow.

“Can you guys get off each other and just enjoy the show?” Lish says. “We came all the way out here for you, Bea, and all you're doing is staring down your boyfriend or whatever.”

“Yeah, you guys stay, enjoy,” Beck says. “Don't worry, I'm heading out, Lisha.”

“I don't get a chance to explain?” I ask. I give big eyes and feel a hot rush in my sinuses that says I'm going to cry the second he's out the door. I'm going to cry because if he can't understand me, who will?

Beck doesn't leave right away. He pauses, thinking it over. And I know, I
know
I need to focus all my attention right on him and his blue eyes and the perfect shape of his shoulders and ignore everything else. I know if I can do that, if I can hold his gaze, he'll stay. It will be enough, if I can hang on to his stare for this extended instant.

I can't.

There's an instrumental break, Sylvia playing a piano solo, which means I can't hear Austin's voice. I know he's there, but I have to see. I have to look. I have to check. Beck's mouth is relaxing from tight line to slow smile and I wish I could get lost in it but I need one little glance at Austin. And I need it now.

Shit.

When I look back Beck has taken a step toward the door. Then another.

The song's over and Austin's mouth is on the mic. I start saying something to Beck, I open my mouth to call out to him, when Austin's sex-filled voice hits the room.

“My favorite fan is here tonight,” he says. “Bea? Where are you?”

No, really.
Shit.

The crowd rustles and shifts to find me and Lisha bangs her bony body up against me, takes hold of my elbow, and lifts my arm into the air. I don't even fight it. Beck will be out the door before I have a chance to turn back to him.

“She's here!” Lisha screams. You'd never guess she's going to Harvard and hasn't kissed a boy. She's a whole new person tonight, letting go of the million little things she's been holding in all this time.

“There she is! The beautiful Bea!” Austin says with a wave. He plucks a few chords on his guitar and they shake me, not just from the vibrations. They're for me. So is the smile (less quiet than Beck's, more purposeful). He's mine, for just that moment. I don't pinch anything; I don't even worry about someone slipping in the puddle of wine some drunk woman just spilled. It's a glorious moment of not thinking followed immediately by remembering that Sylvia is up on that stage too. The lighting guy has found me with the spotlight. One
fake suburban hipster in the crowd of real rockers and lame posers. Me.

Sylvia finds me the moment after the spotlight does. She gives a little smile, a nervous wave, and I know she and Austin have discussed my superfandom, but I'm still not totally normal in her eyes. And I'm young and maybe okay-looking and Austin is beaming,
beaming
at me. And I am beaming back. She bangs the piano and Austin snaps back to his performance with a last wave my way. Lisha giggles and doesn't let go of my elbow. I have to jerk away from her.

“I'm sick,” I say, meaning it in every sense of the word.

I throw up in the bathroom.

Lisha does too, but it's not the same thing.

I stay until the end of the concert, not because I want to but because I have to. I stay out of Sylvia's sight lines as best I can and Lisha keeps hanging all over me.

Panic hits me the second my hand hits the car door, like the whole thing is charged with an indisputable electric force. I do a quick calculation on my cell phone to consider whether or not four sips of alcohol two hours ago will affect me at all. It keeps coming up fine, but I still can't start the car. Every way I type in the numbers and the timing and my body weight it comes out the same: four sips two hours ago is basically nothing. So I decide on a speed: twenty-one miles an hour. And drive home while Lisha stays at the club because there's a cute boy and some girls from school she knows that have
extra booze. It's not like her to actively seek out other people, but I guess when your best friend turns out to be a psycho, you have to start opening up to other normal people.

I pull into my driveway ninety minutes later and consider it an accomplishment. At least I made it all the way home. Had Dr. Pat been there she would have been crowing in my ear to speed up the whole time, but I am physically unable to press my foot any harder on the gas.

I need the night to figure out who to be most mad at: Lish or Beck or the stupid indie horseshit that is Tryst or (the most likely culprit) me. There are no calls on my phone. I try calling Beck even though it's late. I think his phone's on, and when he doesn't answer the first call, I do seven more, in case the whole OCD goes both ways. I guess it's easier to hope for that than to admit he doesn't want to talk to me.

I play the new Tryst album to help me sleep. It seems to work, because when I wake up it's bright outside and there's a song on repeat, which I must have pressed before I fell asleep. I guess it's been playing all night at a parent-friendly quiet volume.

The song is called “Almost Over but Not Yet.” I couldn't make this stuff up.

I ONLY DRIVE TO THEIR
apartment when i can't stand it anymore. Twenty-four hours have passed, and some people would call that progress. I only go back after I've thrown up a slice of pizza and driven in circles for hours trying to resist. I only go back when the threat of what might happen, what kind of trouble I might get into, is completely obscured by the anxiety, covered the way the sun is in a solar eclipse. I'm thinking of those photographs of eclipses. I've been looking at them pretty often since seeing the tattoo on Austin's neck. I like the photographs because there is a halo of light around the moon, but mostly the sun is entirely blocked by the mass of the moon. It's such a precise representation of my OCD, I'm basically mesmerized by image after image online. Normal thinking is the sun, and the moon just keeps crossing in front of it, sometimes only partially blocking normal thoughts, sometimes obscuring them entirely.

I am in a full-on solar eclipse when I light up on the patch of pavement in front of their building. I don't even check to
see if the doorman who kicked me out (is it Kevin? I think his name tag said Kevin) is manning the front desk today. I just lean against the building and wait.

And though I'm waiting for Sylvia or Austin or a sign that they are fine and I can leave, it's of course Kevin who finds me.

“I'm Sylvia's friend,” I try, like the conversation the other day never happened. Like he won't remember me now that I'm in wool tights and a bomber jacket and a huge floppy purple hat.

“So I've heard. Sylvia's home,” he says, not breaking eye contact, not blinking. He crosses his arm and widens his stance, so I won't be able to get by, I guess.

“Oh, great,” I say. I stare right back. I have to see her. “. . . with her husband?”

Eyes on me, Kevin takes out a cell, dials, and smiles when someone picks up.

“You have a friend waiting for you down here, Ms. Bannerman,” he says, but I will not move. I can do this, I can find some way to make this whole thing okay. I try to brainstorm excuses and reasons for being here and casual ways to convince Sylvia that I'm not whatever it is she thinks I am.

God. I'm in for it. Even superkind Austin will think it's messed up that I'm visiting right now.

Kevin uh-huhs and mm-hmms a dozen times. He is probably (definitely) figuring out how to have me arrested or put
in the psych ward. He is probably taking down my vital stats (is that a thing?) and—

“I'll bring her up,” he says. There was no announcing my name or what I look like, so I get the distinct impression that they were expecting me.

• • •

Kevin hangs in the door of the apartment and it weirds me out for a second. Sylvia's funny too, squirrely and not acting anything like the rock star, plastic-surgery goddess she is. She keeps raising her eyebrows at Kevin, and I could easily get caught up in the weird back and forth of their expressions and nonverbal ticks, but Sylvia says to come on in.

“Take a look around,” she says. She stays by the door with Kevin. I think it's weird to just walk around their place like I'm a real, live guest, but with the open invitation and the two of them guarding the door, I don't really see a way to say no.

Here's what I notice right away:

Sylvia and Austin have portraits of themselves in large gold frames. They've signed them, like they might at some point forget their own celebrity. I stall in the living room like any normal person might do, but everything in my body screams at me to explore more, and Sylvia hangs back, not stopping me.

“Um, can I . . . ” I gesture to the rest of the apartment and blush. My mother would murder me, being this rude, and in a few hours I'm sure I will relive the awkwardness of the request and want to vanish forever, but my feet move regardless of
what my rational mind is telling them to do, and Sylvia nods after a quick glance at Kevin.

The bedroom is worse than the living room. Mirrors. Everywhere. Reflecting on each other. Mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, and the idea of Austin and Sylvia fucking in between.

No matter how far gone they think I am, there's nothing sexy in that. Besides, their inherent lustiness is a sidebar to the main event: my needing to vigilantly watch them and thus somehow protect them.

Sylvia and Kevin hang a few steps back, but follow as I push open different doors and lean into different rooms.

There's no room for anything else here but their perfect faces, the unmistakable lines of their bodies, the way love and success fit them. In their CD rack, which hangs next to an expertly installed stereo system, there's a few embarrassing holiday compilations and a stack of blanks, and then two full rows of their own albums. I recognize it all from my google binge the other night: everything from their self-produced
Boho Love Story Redux
to the most recent
HotDirtyLonely
.

“Cool,” I say, making fleeting eye contact with Sylvia. Her smile is tense and her lips are blown up to twice their normal size, but she seems at least a little bit proud to have someone check out her digs.

“I love this place,” she says with a shrug, in a way I know she's done probably one hundred times.

There's something inherently and impressively embarrassing about these details. I want to look away. Which is of course saying a lot. I've made a career lately out of looking more intently, staring down the details of their existence.

In the living room their wedding pictures are in a cluster above the fireplace. None of family or sad hipster bridesmaids or chubby, poorly lit nieces and nephews. Just Sylvia in her vintage lace and rhinestones and Austin in an ironic top hat and their look of devotion, their movie-star kisses, the shape their bodies make when leaning against one another.

In the bathroom: more mirrors with expert lighting and a marble countertop with a department store worthy collection of makeup, organized by color, the rainbow moving from light to dark in a perfect parade. A collection of fake eyelashes, varying in size and shade. Like there's a perfect eyelash length for every possible scenario. I'm a little shocked at the effort it takes to become Sylvia.

That's not all.

Once I start looking I realize the apartment is full of monogrammed
everything
. I make my way back to the living room and notice Sylvia vanished to the kitchen at some point. She emerges with two steaming mugs of tea. The mugs are the same silver color of their self-titled second album, and I wonder if those, too, were once promotional material. The mugs seem decidedly self-satisfied.

I don't see Kevin but I smell his cologne: cheap, heavy, young.

“This is a little something special I've been brewing up just forever,” she says, fascinated with herself. “You probably wouldn't think it to look at me, but I know a lot about herbs and tea leaves and, well, this is my signature blend.”

It's a sweet kind of Earl Grey that needs milk and then stays coated on your tongue for hours after.

And it hits me: It's not just me obsessed with them. They are ferociously obsessed with themselves and that makes the whole thing immediately simpler and sadder.