Torment Me (Rough Love 1)

I was so angry, I almost didn’t notice the replacement skirt and blouse hanging on the back of the chair, or the note pinned to the plastic overlay, written in his rough, blocky hand.

Her heart breaks in a smile—and she is lust

Mine also, little painted poem of God.

I stared at it a long time before I placed it, and then my throat went tight. He knew at least one E.E. Cummings poem. It happened to be the one with the most power to make me cry.

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.