Between the Two Worlds (Part 1)
Bad Apple
Rio’s fucking someone else, the floating voice said to me.
That’s a ridiculous thing to think, I thought back at the floating voice. Why would he ask me to be his monogamous girlfriend, I rationalized, and besides, where would he find the time? He sleeps at my apartment almost every night of the week.
It was easy to rationalize.
This floating voice must be trauma speaking. Not that I’d been cheated on a lot in the past. I didn’t really have an official relationship history. Not much on the books. They were more like ‘arrangements,’ minus the functionality that one hopes might accompany the word ‘arrangement.’
I wasn’t seeking a boyfriend when I met Rio, which is why the notion that my first official boyfriend was cheating on me seemed preposterous. Leading up to it, I was the one who felt uneasy about the merger. I had to give up quite a lot, namely a couple of ‘arrangements’ and the notion of any future ‘arrangements’ that might come my way. In agreeing to assume the title of Girlfriend, I had to retire certain liberties and certain privacies that did not want to be retired. This stirred a skirmish within. I was 25 years old. The hour of domestication was upon me, and my inner feral fuckgirl was fighting back hard. I took the floating voice to be one of her weapons. I lost a good two weeks of sleep over it. I’d wake up in a nightmare sweat and write exhaustive letters I’d never send to him explaining why I was fully unfit for this or any pairing. I managed to quash the rebellion, only because I knew it was in my best interest to settle down and let the nice boy love me.
Rio is fucking someone else.
I warmed up to the idea of him. He was a killer boyfriend. 5 stars. He respected and admired my independence, which basically amounted to not overloading my phone with extraneous messages, leaving my apartment early in the morning so that I could be alone, and then being available later when I was ready for more. I was getting the hang of it.
It didn’t feel like I was settling for the first attractive man who wasn’t drowning in his mommy issues, but that’s exactly what I was doing. Though I did genuinely like him. We made each other laugh although I wouldn’t say he was particularly funny. One can have a good sense of humor without being particularly funny. I actually grew to love him once I accepted him as my fate. He was present, he was supportive, he was positive. He told me he’d never grappled with the scarlet darkness I knew so well, which started to feel like a well-earned break once I got used to all the disorienting optimism. He seemed free of internal conflict. He wasn’t morose. And it rubbed off on me. It was like I’d been living as a ghost, and I was getting the good news that I wasn’t dead at all. It was revolutionary. I was breaking patterns. I was shedding. I was growing. This was the new me. Living Girlfriend.
Rio is fucking someone else.
He was beautiful too. Blond. Gigantic sea-green eyes. Taller than me. Fit. Crossfit fit. That’s where we met actually. I’d seen him around. We’d exchanged friendly words. One night in July I had a dream about him. It was just his face. I knew we’d spend time together the next day. I didn’t bring my lunch with me to class like usual because I was sure he’d take me out. And I was right. It was ordained. The brush was clearing for us. I was having visions of him. It was right. It must be right.
Rio is fucking someone else.
The first time he saw the inside of my bedroom, I caught him looking around with an expression of awe on his face. When he saw me seeing him he said, “I’m just really happy to be here.” His sincerity moved me.
We slept well together. And when does that not feel significant? My head fit snug in the space between his shoulder and his chest.
My cat liked him. Or rather, she didn’t dislike him, and that was more than most people got from her. My roommate wasn’t a fan, but why would he be?
I went at Rio’s pace, since I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I took all of my cues from him. “I want to date you exclusively” (Okay) “Will you be my girlfriend?” (Sure, that seems normal). I felt mature. A picture of emotional health. So this is how you relationship.
Rio is fucking someone else.
He was organized. I liked that. Plans were made, and then those plans were kept. I liked that a lot. He was on time. Suddenly my entire life was unchaotic. My small private cheffing business was starting up efficiently. I no longer wondered if my roommate would be climbing into my bed at 3am for sex that we would not speak of the following day. My weeks were orderly, and I saw a sharp uptick in productivity. He was even cool with my side gig as a professional dominatrix. “The answer is probably always going to be yes with me,” he said. How convenient it was to be free and claimed at the same time.
Rio is fucking someone else.
I met his dad. We cooked him dinner for his 70th birthday. He met my dad, which is next to impossible. He’s like Big Foot, but with debilitating social anxiety. He met my mom. I would have met his if she hadn’t died in a freak elevator accident when he was a few weeks old. My sisters loved him. They loved him for me too. “How’s my sweet Rio,” Adair once asked. “He’s good and sweet,” is probably how I answered.
Rio is fucking someone else.
It was early October. We were making plans for December. We’ll have my birthday dinner here. We’ll do Christmas like this. “This is where we’d be living if we’d been dating longer,” he said of a beautiful one-bedroom he managed. We started referring to it as our apartment and pretended to be annoyed when new tenants signed a lease.
Rio is fucking someone else.
We had a ritual called Song of the Day. I don’t remember if we actually called it that, but you get the idea. There would be a new song in my inbox every morning. And I’d send one back.
Rio is fucking someone else.
“Let’s rent a car next weekend and go apple picking,” he suggested one Sunday morning in my bed.
“Let’s definitely do that.”
Rio is fucking someone else.
“See you Tuesday,” he kissed my forehead and walked out my door. He texted me later something about how amazing I am. This wasn’t uncommon, and the old me would have cringed at how thick he was laying it on. But not the new me. I was embracing the gush. I was Girlfriend and it was goddamn working for me.
That afternoon I heard the voice. It came from the upper back of my head. I was strolling along Classon Avenue, feeling weightless, which was how I’d felt since August. Since I’d let love win.
Rio’s fucking someone else, the floating voice said to me.
That’s a ridiculous thing to think, I thought back at the floating voice. The voice was a saboteur, no doubt about it. Except doubt crept in when it hung around after my initial dismissal.
Rio had made it a point once to not tag him in any photos on instagram. I didn’t take a lot of pictures, and it only struck me now that maybe the reason was bigger than a disdain for social media. I went to his instagram. Empty basically. I went to the tagged photos, and there it was. So easy to find.
Rio was fucking someone else.
In the picture, he is standing next to a smiling woman around my age. The photo had come from her account. She held an overflowing bag of apples that had the date scrawled in sharpie. 10/12. The caption read: This is 25. Best day, Best guy.
It was posted the Sunday he’d left my apartment and said “see you Tuesday.” It was the day I heard the voice.
I called him.
No answer.
I texted.
No response.
I called again.
No answer.
I called again because a Girlfriend has a goddamn right to understand what’s going on.
Straight to voicemail.
The moment he screened my call, I knew it was over. I knew that no matter what he said, if he ever bothered to say anything, that the future we’d planned and everything we’d built was gone. But the part that gave me vertigo was the realization that it was never there in the first place. He wasn’t cheating on me. He didn’t accidentally in the heat of the moment take another woman on our apple picking date. You don’t get too drunk at the bar with some chick and make a reckless decision to drive upstate for her birthday. She was his girlfriend too.
He called me back that night, but my boyfriend was gone. This new person didn’t care and didn’t pretend to. “I’ve been doing a dumb thing. I’ve been dating two people at once.”
A dumb thing.
I would go on to have the privilege of meeting the woman holding the bag of apples. It felt safe to assume she was getting played just as hard as I was. When I reached out, she reached back, and we held hands across a table at a bar in Cobble Hill and built a timeline. We corroborated events, moments, conversations that he’d had with both of us. We talked about how the whole dead mom thing was a little weird, or rather the fact that he seemed wholly unaffected by it. She got the Song of the Day too. I think it was probably the same song, but what difference did it make? He even met her at Crossfit. Evidently she only took the evening classes, and I reliably took the 10am, which gave a haunting feeling to the memory of him suggesting that we write on the public white board ‘Rio and Callie are an item.’ He was flirting with the edge. He was daring to be found out.
The discovery had blind-sided her. She’d had no idea. She marveled at how I figured it out. She praised my intuition, but her subconscious was roiling with it too. She’d had a dream one night while they were in bed together. They were standing on a balcony of a large building in Manhattan. Some sort of rooftop bar facing the Hudson. She could see a storm in the distance. A wild storm - swirling clouds bursting with lightning, howling winds birthing twisters. She screamed at him to leave with her, but he stood at the ledge and watched. He wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t anxious. He just watched. She peeled his fingers off the railing and wrenched him away. As they turned their backs to the storm, she felt someone grab her other hand. A woman. She couldn’t see her but she could feel her. And together the three of them ran.
When Lara got engaged 8 years later, I felt it the day before I found out. I heard it in a floating voice actually. I always thought the original message I received that October 12th was born of a psychic cord with Rio. It was a warning of his machinations meant to dispatch me from our dreamy love nest. But now I think the more important part of the phrase was the someone else. It was an invitation to a connection rarer than a first boyfriend. Rarer even than that first boyfriend turning out to be a sociopath.
