Jade Sharma - Problems

When we walked down the street, I could hear people’s thoughts, Why is that handsome man with that scowling, smoking hag? People would always ask me what was wrong. I must have looked pissed off all the time. People probably thought he was gay and I was a fag hag secretly in love with him.

Women don’t have trophy husbands the same way men have trophy wives. Men can be disgusting and walk into a party with a sexy bitch on their arm and feel like hot shit. But being a woman walking into a party with a handsome man on your arm, the only thing you feel is insecure.

When I imagined myself through Ogden’s sixty-three-year-old eyes — my smooth, wrinkle-free skin, my long dark hair, my unsagging breasts, my flat stomach — I felt hot. Sometimes my hair fell over my eyes, and I grinned and looked up at him, and I loved being in my own skin.

Peter stared at me as I put my hair in a ponytail. “Are you high?” he asked.

I shook my head no.

I lied to Peter because he didn’t understand shit. He didn’t understand how snorting a bag of dope didn’t mean I would end up becoming a toothless, cracked-out skank, or whatever clichéd Hollywood bullshit was implanted in his brain. When I tried explaining things to him, he would hear someone with a drug problem trying to rationalize her drug problem.

He made me feel like I was someone with a drug problem trying to rationalize her drug problem.

I’d been a chipper since I was eighteen. The trick was you never did it three days in a row. I knew enough junkies to know I had to stop for a while, because if I kept using, it would stop providing any relief and become one more problem.

He apologized.

I could tell by the way he touched my face he wanted to do it.

“I love you,” he said. His breath smelled like shit. His hand rubbed between my legs, and I made all the sounds, then his hand went over my tits, pinching the nipples, making them hard so it hurt when they rubbed against my rough thermal shirt.

He fucked me from behind. Felt like a baseball mitt, stretching. Inside, it was everywhere. Visualize it. Ugly, veiny thing beating in and out of softness, pinkness, perfectness. That’s the attraction, a kind of ruining. I liked it hard.

He played with my clit while he fucked me from behind, and I came because I liked feeling like his bitch on all fours.

After I came, I wanted to sleep, and he was taking forever. You couldn’t say, “I’m going to rest my eyes but feel free to keep going.” You couldn’t say, “Stop pulling my hair, it was cool at first but now it’s just pissing me off.” You couldn’t say, “Are you bored? I’m a little bored.”

Please come already .

He sped up, pulled out. I turned on my back and lifted my shirt, and he came all over my tits and belly.

I loved how much there was when Peter came. I loved being drenched in his come. I loved lying there in it. I rubbed it into my skin with my fingertips.

I felt warm, and I thought of going somewhere new. I wanted to see his same face with a new background behind his head.

He wiped my stomach with his boxers and threw his boxers into the hamper.

“You shouldn’t go to the doctor alone tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll be late to work. It’s at four?”

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. I ran my finger down his back, zooming around all the moles that had never been checked for cancer because Peter didn’t have health insurance.

“You don’t need to be there, sport,” I said. I called him “sport” because he drank a protein shake every morning.

There was no doctor’s appointment. I’d made it up. I was supposed to meet Ogden.

I lied all the time. Sometimes I lied so I didn’t have to answer questions, like saying my father was still alive so I didn’t have to talk about him dying. I regularly told people my father was white. Not because of some deep-seated issue with being Indian, but because I didn’t know much about Indian culture, and I felt more American than anything else. I lied because it felt true. I said it to get off the hook for answering questions about why cows are sacred or whatever.

You can’t help the truth, the mundane details that frame people’s perceptions of who you are, like where you were born, what your father does for a living, how many siblings you have. In our lies we offer the world a presentation of how we would be if we had complete control over our existence. That’s why it’s so embarrassing to get caught in a lie. It offers a glimpse into how you want to be seen. These are the things I am insecure about . You take things off the table, clean up your stories, edit out the parts that don’t make sense, and think, Now that’s better .

I ran my hand through Peter’s soft, sleepy hair. I lied to Peter about Ogden because I didn’t want to hurt him. In a different world, maybe he would have understood that I was only trying to protect him. How if I didn’t, I would drown him with my neediness and insecurities. Peter wasn’t capable of helping me. He knew how to love, but he didn’t know how to talk me through the layers of my neuroses.

“I don’t wanna go to work today,” he whined, stretching.

Peter was a bartender at a high-end restaurant on the Upper West Side.

He must have casually mentioned “my wife” in stories to customers at the bar. They’d imagine the kind of woman a handsome, charming man like Peter would have as a wife. The character in the book never looks like the actor in the movie playing them.

I straddled him and kissed him as if I was paying a toll on my way over him. I picked up the seltzer from his bedside table and chugged it in front of the window.

“Put some clothes on. You can see everything through those blinds,” he said.

“Who cares? It’s my apartment. What are they going to think? A woman is half-naked in her own apartment?”

Peter was always caring about things that didn’t matter.

In the bathroom, I plucked hairs out of my upper lip with tweezers. I liked the feeling of the hairs being pulled out of the follicles underneath the skin. Some of the hairs the tweezers could never grasp. I ended up drawing blood, and the hair was still right there. I rubbed the hairs off the tweezers onto my finger. The fat part like the top of a comma. I touched the ends with my fingers. Black and wiry.

Peter materialized in the bathroom mirror behind me like some kind of bizarro vampire. “How long have you been lying to me?” he said. He took out exhibit A: a rolled dollar bill. “I found this on the coffee table.”

I shrugged. “That is a rolled bill. It is not a drug,” I said, high.

“Maya, c’mon. You don’t have to lie to me.” He called me by my name when he was serious.

“Don’t be serious,” I said, as if I didn’t want to hear it.

“I’m not an idiot. Whatever. It’s your life. I don’t even know why I try—” And then he said more things. Things I didn’t care to hear. Things that made me try hard to think of other things until he left and I could get more high and not think about anything.

Ogden never gave me shit. Ogden only listened.

The ways Ogden drove me insane were the ways I wanted to be exactly like him.

I wished Ogden could love me the way I loved him, but he never would, because I cared too much and was always opening up to him. Nobody wanted anyone who talked so easily about everything. They wanted a big puzzle and a goddamn treasure map. Find my heart by going through all these torture chambers. That’s what people wanted: challenge and mystery. Poor Ogden. I was like, “Here are all my scars. I’ll tell you my secrets as you die of boredom. Here are the answers to questions you never cared enough to ask.” I lifted up my shirt and said, “Please love me.” I lifted up my skirt and said, “Please don’t leave yet.” I felt empty when his cock wasn’t in me. I wanted him to order me around. I wanted to be his personal come dumpster. I loved when his whole body was on top of me and his arms and legs surrounded me on all sides, like he was a big insect about to rip my head off.