There was something about water that made Camila feel sanctified. When she was younger, she had often gone to the river to think. Even now, a scalding shower or hot bath could reset her when her emotions short-circuited. Now, sitting in the hot tub across from Zach, it felt like the water would be the perfect confessional, too.
Zach had said to lay it on him. So she was going to go for it. The whole thing. From the beginning.
“OK,” she started. If the jets hadn’t been going, the water would have rippled to show her shaking. She sank down to her chin. “So, this story isn’t really about Liam, but I have to tell you about when we were separated. For context.”
He nodded.
“You know how you say you 3D print your feelings? I noticed that just now, the way you spoke about what happened,” Camila said. “Not cold about it, per se, but rational. Matter-of-fact. I don’t think my story is going to sound like that. Because when I think about it, I just go right back into the box of feelings. That doesn’t mean I’m not past it. It just means it’s easier for me to put myself back there. Does that make sense?”
“I think so,” he said.
She took a deep breath and set the scene for the recap of her greatest shame.
* * *
Camila had been staying in one of Era’s guest rooms for several weeks. The word “divorce” was still an absurdity. She and Liam refused to call this arrangement a separation, either. They were simply living apart with infrequent contact while they hunted down an antihistamine that would make them able to be in the same room without the sound of the other person breathing triggering an outbreak of hives. The pharmaceutical industry wasn’t there yet, but they remained hopeful.
To this day, Camila couldn’t quite explain the disconnect, why she and Liam had stopped functioning as a romantic couple but were eventually able to build a healthy friendship.
Well, there may have been an invisible asterisk after the word “healthy,” but that was on her and Miranda’s agenda. The point was, having him as her ally and confidante felt good long after having him as a partner and lover didn’t. She needed Zach to understand that, to know that Liam was a good man and she was to blame for everything that had happened with them, and that the fact he was still in her life was not a testament to her goodness or maturity, or lingering romantic feelings.
“So yeah, I was staying at Era’s house, and there was an exhibit opening at the Warhol that Seth wanted to take Era to, and they invited me to be the third wheel because, I don’t know, there wasn’t a great hiding place in Era’s house for the knives. It was this exclusive preview night. You know, rich people shit.”
“Sounds like Seth,” Zach said.
“Very on brand,” Camila agreed. “So one of the artists in the exhibit was Johan Nyland.”
She watched Zach search for the name in his memory. “You mentioned you’d slept together. The guy in the documentary. I didn’t ask much about him.”
“Barely in the documentary,” she said. “But I’m getting sidetracked.”
Before the exhibit, Camila had recently nurtured an interest in contemporary art. Like many of her hobbies, this one triggered a period of fervent hyperfixation. She read art history books, listened to art podcasts, and wandered around museums because she found staring at large canvases to be an effective way of quieting her scumbag brain.
So she knew about Johan. He was the it guy in the art world that year, and the fact he’d taken up residence in Pittsburgh excited Camila. But she was interested in the art, not the man.
Until she met him.
Johan was a mixed-media artist. He built room-sized art installations using found objects, paint and photography to make flat walls look three-dimensional, and objects look two-dimensional. The effect was disorienting. He was also a master of milking a concept and making it immersive. You could walk through an installation, buy the paintings off the walls of the installation, or buy a photo print of the installation. There was an ephemeral quality to it — the show you’d get in the morning at one of his installations wasn’t the same show you’d get that evening.
The ingenuity impressed Camila. As she walked through an installation, taken by the level of detail that went into every inch to create not just a visual, but a story, she heard polite clapping from the preview attendees. Johan had walked in. He was there to be interviewed and photographed for the local paper ahead of the opening, and took the opportunity to greet the preview attendees.
When he shook Camila’s hand, his metallic blue eyes hooked into her, unblinking. She couldn’t remember what she said when he asked her what she thought of the installation. It must have been something charming and snarky, because he laughed and stroked the back of her hand with his thumb before releasing her hand.
Camila wasn’t the type to get starstruck. But the genius of the work, the champagne, the loneliness, the rich incense scent of him, and that unyielding gaze, were all too much. Divorce still wasn’t on her mind, because nothing was on her mind except the screaming need of her id centered right between her legs.
He bought her a drink and they chatted for who knows how long before Era gave her an annoyed “Um, what the fuck?” look and motioned toward the exit.
He slipped her a card — an actual, thick paper card with embossed edges — and whispered, “In case you ever want a tour of my private collection.”
Camila took a freezing shower that night. It didn’t help. Neither did three days of what a therapist would absolutely call compulsive masturbation.
She went to his studio the next week. She told herself she was a pinnacle of virtue. She didn’t so much as shake his hand. But she stayed for hours, talking to him about his work, about hers, about her marriage and his ex and the places he’d traveled. He’d called her beautiful and placed his cocktail-cooled hand on the nape of her neck, lazily tangling in her hair, and she would have let him have her right there on the concrete floor if an ounce of impulse control hadn’t manifested right then and made her hightail it out of there.
Camila had assumed she and Liam would work things out, or rather that things would magically not suck one day. For a while, she was the one desperate to get him back, and he was the one who was distant and uncertain. He’d seemed to be coming around recently. So she knew how out of nowhere it must have seemed when she asked him to meet her for lunch and said the words, “I want a divorce.”
There was something reassuring about blowing up her life. While everyone worried about her, Camila felt as if for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t acting.
It wasn’t that her feelings for Liam weren’t real. She loved him desperately.
But her marriage had felt like a ring that was too big for her finger, a pretty thing that was not meant for her, that she had to worry about losing. She wasn’t someone’s wife. She was a beast, a vampire flying through the dark, looking for someone to bite. She was racing down the highway like the prelude to a car crash. The reckless choice was what made sense to her.
“Everyone thought I was crazy,” she told Zach, now. “So I guess I thought, ‘I’ll show you crazy.’”
So just like that, she was done with Liam and obsessed with Johan. She packed her meager belongings at Era’s place and shuttled them over to Johan’s. And everything was beautiful, and passionate, and erotic, until it wasn’t.
When Camila was with Johan, she felt this constant sense of peril, that at any moment she would arrive at his studio and find it cleared out, find out he’d changed his number and deactivated his email address. He would disappear, she thought. He would leave her alone and she would be untethered, hollow, the emptiness in her filling with helium and carrying her into the molten center of the sun. And everyone would say they told her so.
She refused to let that happen. Not when she was — she laughed bitterly recounting this — “happy for the first time ever.”
“That wasn’t true, not the being happy part or the first time ever part, but I was, let’s say, not in my right mind.”
“I’ve been there,” Zach said. He was being so sweet and understanding. She wanted to savor that, because she was certain it would take a turn.
“So because I was not in my right mind and I was completely obsessed with him, and I was terrified of him leaving and of proving everyone right that I had made a huge mistake, I tried everything I could to keep him interested,” she said.
Here was the thing about loving someone so much you became obsessed with them. You live and die by whether they want you the same way. And you get desperate enough to keep them to make sure they know that.
She ran up credit card debt buying lingerie, lacy pink teddies one night and faux leather corsets and crotchless panties the next, trying to anticipate which persona would titillate him most at any moment.
Then she had to ensure he was thinking of her constantly. Because what if he forgot? He could. So she’d send him endless strings of texts when he was away, from before her first sip of coffee to when she was so sleepy waiting for him to come back, she’d doze off and drop the phone on her face mid-sentence. With the exception of when she was at work, getting ready for her licensure, she had her alerts on full volume so she’d never miss him. If he was working late at the studio, she’d sleep with her clothes on, her phone on her pillow, so if he took a break and asked if she was still up, she could go to him.
The sex went from euphoric to punishing. Every second, she was focused on performing, on being a showgirl so entrancing he’d buy tickets every night. She’d practice yogic breathing through positions she didn’t care for when she’d rather watch HBO, and get so in her head about the whole thing that she rarely even finished. Johan didn’t seem bothered.
The funny thing was, she became the dutiful wife she’d failed to be for Liam. She became Johan’s de facto personal assistant. Not that he would ever grant her access to his calendar.
One day, he was in New York, attending an event. Camila had no vacation time, and she begged him not to go.
“Will you text me a bunch?”
“Bunches and bunches,” he said, kissing her forehead.
He didn’t text her bunches and bunches. In fact, he didn’t text her at all. He ignored 25 texts in the span of two hours, which she knew because he had read receipts on because he, she had just now realized, was a fucking monster.
And even if he didn’t have read receipts on, he was posting pictures from the event on his social media accounts.
She sat in their apartment, refreshing the feed over and over. Progressively, she got more and more enraged. No read receipt for 15 minutes. No new photos posted. No response to any of the 30 texts she’d sent.
She clicked on the event’s hashtag and scrolled through images, searching for his icy blonde head.
In one livestream, she found him in a corner, chatting with a tall redhead in a bejeweled gown, a slit showing her slim thighs.
She watched him swirl his cocktail glass. Watched him smile. She wanted to break the glass in her own hand, crush the pieces against her palm.
The camera looped around. The videographer was now talking into the camera, blowing kisses and making duck faces.
“Go back, dammit!” she screamed. She pushed the scowling emoji over and over, clogging up the stream of tiny hearts from the other viewers.
Camila put on her sneakers and filled her glittery pink water bottle with vodka. She’d give him another chance. Text No. 33.
He read it instantly. This time he replied.
“Camila calm down,” he wrote, not even respecting her enough to use proper punctuation. “Youre acting like a crazy fucking bitch.”
Crazy bitch. Crazy fucking bitch. How often had those words been hurled at her? How did he know the exact worst thing to say that would both knock her to the ground, and fill her with giant, hulking rage?
“This is unacceptable,” she said to no one, taking a deep gulp from her bottle. She left the apartment, power-walking the five blocks to the studio where Johan did his work, sipping vodka like it was Gatorade and she’d just run a marathon. And hadn’t she? The adrenaline coursing through her felt like she had.
She snapped back from her story and looked at Zach. “Are you OK? I’m about to get into some pretty dark details about my drinking, and I don’t want to put you in a dark place, too.”
Zach took a breath with more than a little shake to it. “Yeah, I’m OK. I’ll tell you if I’m not.”
She paused for a beat, observing him, before feeling like she could go on.
As she walked through the studio, filling herself with the colors, the tiny, methodical details, she was dazzled once again by Johan’s talent. The hours of work. The days. The way he spoke fast and touched her for emphasis when he had made progress on a challenging piece. The sleeplessness she’d soothed when he failed to manifest his vision on the canvas.
She had been there for all of it at the expense of her life. And this is how he repaid her? By ignoring her like she was an itch it would be impolite to scratch in public?
Nope. This would not do.
The studio was as much a construction zone as it was an art space, and had enough power tools to fill an aisle at a hardware store. She thought of starting with something small, like the nail gun.
But she wasn’t a fan of doing things half-assed.
Camila watched a quick YouTube tutorial before firing up the chainsaw.
At this point in the story, Zach stopped her.
“I’m sorry, did you just say a chainsaw?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did. May I continue?”
Zach nodded.
Back in the past, Camila rooted her feet to the concrete. The dust of disintegrating canvas and wood and drywall coated her lungs. It was oxygen, the destruction. A cacophony of unraveling beauty. What a pair she and Johan made, creator and destroyer, evenly matched.
The bottle was almost empty. She stepped back to evaluate her work. It was still missing something.
Textiles were piled high on a workbench, thick brocade and whisper-thin gossamer. Milk crates were full of oil and acrylic paint tubes, dried streaks of paint revealing the color inside. Ah, here was something. Five-gallon buckets, tightly lidded, filled to capacity with powder pigment, the kind used for Holi and color runs.
Camila carefully pried one of the lids off. A magenta cloud swirled. The next buckets held emerald, sunset orange, chrysanthemum yellow.
She shoved both fists into the orange powder and propelled them toward her wreckage. A bright burst whizzed past her head. The powder made her cough something vicious. It descended on her hair, her eyelashes.
Clumps of green polluting the air. Purple, smeared across the floor. She dipped her right index finger in red and wrote ASSHOLE on the floor-length mirror Johan kept here.
This was neon, Lisa Frank Pompeii, and she was the motherfucking volcano.
At some point, Camila blacked out. She had gotten into Johan’s studio stash of bottom-shelf vodka when she needed a refill. Johan said it helped him tap into something primitive and unpretentious when he created. Or some shit.
She came to on the floor. Her clothes were caked with plaster, her hair a damp, matted mess of blue and green pigment. Her head felt like an elephant had played soccer with it.
She wanted to get up to vomit, but two fears gripped her. One, that she wouldn’t make it to the bathroom. One and a half, that she was so out of it she wouldn’t be able to find the bathroom. And two, that her legs, folded under her for who knows how many hours, would give out on her and she would fall, crack her head open, and bleed to death.
Johan would be sorry, then, she thought with bitter glee.
Camila weighed her options. She could not call an Uber. They’d for sure call the police. Plus, she would get charged for detailing their car, and it would be rude to mess up someone’s seats with all the paint and plaster and whatever else. Possibly vomit.
Definitely vomit.
She could not bear a lecture from Era. No fucking way. The disappointment on her face would kill her, and she’d probably throw up all over the leather seats of Era’s new electric luxury car.
She needed to enlist someone who could not possibly think less of her. So Liam it was.
“Liam,” she slurred when he answered, after her brain had struggled to make her dirty thumbs select the right contact. “I did something bad and I know you fucking hate me, but I need your help, OK?”
There were some stern words and tutting, an errant fuck you here and there, and then he asked her to drop a pin to her location.
When the doorbell rang, Camila crawled to the door and stood to open it.
“Um, you’re not Liam,” she said.
Era stormed past her, Seth close behind. Seth held Camila up when she swayed as Era yelled, “What the fuck did you do?”
“Just a little craftermath,” she deadpanned. The ground under her tilted like a trapdoor. She ran, stumbling, to the bathroom. She just missed the toilet.
Era made his way to her side and stroked her back. She had brought a bottle of water. Camila took the tiniest sip and nearly wretched again when she felt a chunk wash back down her throat.
“We need to get you out of here before someone calls the cops,” Era said. “Though that’s just delaying the inevitable. Rich motherfuckers love pressing charges.”
“You’re rich motherfuckers!” Camila shouted. “I don’t want to go to prison. I don’t want to go on a grippy socks vacation. Why aren’t you Liam? I want Liam!”
She sounded like a toddler. Era crouched down to eye level with her as if she was one.
“You and Liam are getting divorced,” Era said. “He didn’t want to come to your boyfriend’s pretentious loft and drag you out. So he called me.”
Seth cleared his throat. “Babe, maybe wait until she’s coherent and cleaned up.”
Era glared at Seth, then at Camila. “Fine. You will be paying for the detailing of my car.”
Camila nodded, and her brain thudded against the inside of her skull. “Yes mom,” she said, before she puked again.
At Era’s, she showered sitting down, watching the once beautiful colors swirl together into muddy streams. She could already feel the red pinpricks blooming on her cheeks from the force of her tears.
Seth had left, thank God. Camila hated him seeing her like that, seeing the mess of a friend his girl was saddled with. She slept in Era’s guest room, right back where she started. The next day, Era brought her a cup of coffee.
“Thanks.” She sipped. “Hair of the dog?” she asked shyly.
“Which one bit you?” she asked, making her way to a tasteful mid century-style bar cart.
Camila ran through what she could remember about the night. “Vodka would probably be the best.”
Era dutifully poured her a shot in her red, white and blue AOC shot glass. Camila gulped it down. After the initial disgust, her headache eased.
“Feeling better?” Era asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” Her kindness was humiliating.
“So,” Era said. “I called Liam back. He wanted an update. He’s coming by.”
It felt like the shot might make its way back up her throat. “This is an intervention, isn’t it? You’re going to send me away.”
Era sighed. “I guess it is an intervention, yeah. But no one’s sending you away. People care about you, you know. We want to help. Even Liam. And you need the help. You made kind of a big mess.”
“I know,” Camila said, and started crying. Not because of the mess she’d made, but because Era told her people still cared.
Liam showed up with a fried chicken biscuit with an egg on top, packets of maple syrup alongside. She was so anxious seeing him. Era gave him a hug and said she was going to be out on the patio while they talked.
Liam sat across from her, silent, while she ate.
“OK,” she said, her mouth full of buttery fried happiness, “say what you’ve gotta say.”
Liam breathed deeply and set down his hash browns. “The drinking has gotten out of hand, Mila. You know this, right?”
She tried not to blink. “It’s... not great, I guess.”
“When was the last time you saw a therapist?” he asked gently.
She thought about it. “I think it’s been a few weeks.” Or a few months. Time didn’t matter in a simulation.
“And have you been taking your medication?”
Her cheeks flushed. She’d had a mishap with insurance after the divorce filing. Long story short, her meds were now prohibitively expensive, and just like in Orwell, gin was cheaper and more plentiful.
“Camila?” Liam asked. His voice was so soft.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t been taking them.” She started to cry.
Liam sighed and reached for his phone.
“What are you doing?” she asked. This was it. He was finally going to have her committed. Who was going to pay for that?
“I’m texting Marcella.”
She tried to snatch the phone away. “No!” she growled. “You are not telling my mother!”
“Let’s go over facts, shall we?” Liam said, his voice infuriatingly even. “I assume you don’t want to go back to Johan’s. You’re likely to be too embarrassed to stay with Era again, you sure as fuck aren’t staying with me, and you probably don’t have enough for an apartment deposit. Sound about right?”
She hated him.
“Right, then. It’s sorted. Marcella will fly in from New York to help you find and pay for an apartment, Seth and I will collect your things from that bohemian miscreant, and we will find you a new therapist and set up an appointment. Era will pick up your prescription, and persuade that man to not press charges. What pharmacy were you last using?”
She looked at him, dumbfounded. “Why are you doing this?”
He paused his rapid texting and considered her. “I may not want to be your husband, but funny thing about having been married to someone. You keep this little kernel of fondness under the homicidal resentment.”
She felt that. And for the first time in ages, she saw Liam. Not Liam the perfect angel she was unworthy of, or Liam her motherfucker of an ex-husband. Just Liam, a flawed person doing their best.
Camila decided that day that even if she was a horrible disaster of a person, she didn’t want to die that way. Maybe she could salvage something from her life. There would be time to make amends, to face the consequences of everything she’d done to Liam, to Johan, to her friends, shit, to herself. But she couldn’t do any of it until she got well enough to function, to know her emotional elbow from her emotional ass.
Two weeks later, after several sessions with a new therapist, Miranda, and many apologies and phone calls, Camila had several shiny orange bottles of pills, a duplex rental bereft of alcohol, and a diagnosis she would spend the rest of her life reckoning with. She wasn’t ready then to admit Liam had helped her save her own life. But that was the thing about facts — everyone knows them even when they don’t rattle them off.
“Wow,” Zach said.
“Yeah.” She hoped he’d at least give her a ride back to the city before dumping her.
Zach stared into the water as if trying to scry with it. “I don’t think I hate Liam anymore.”
It was the last thing she imagined he’d say, and took her so off guard that she started to laugh.
“I knew it!”
“You knew what?” Zach asked, seemingly more perturbed by her out of control laughter than her horror story.
“I knew you didn’t like Liam!”
He splashed water at her. “Of course I don’t like him! He’s your hot British ex-husband! Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
They were both laughing now. She couldn’t stop. She was wheezing. She’d need an inhaler. She hadn’t told that entire story from top to bottom, all at once, to anyone who wasn’t her therapist, and now it was out and she was just laughing about it.
“Wait,” Zach said, trying to compose himself. “So what happened with Johan?”
“Oh!” Camila said. “Fuck. Well, I was right. He was totally cheating on me. But that’s like a foregone conclusion, right? It’s banal. And it still wasn’t as bad as what I did to all his art. He didn’t mean to hurt me. He just, I don’t know, couldn’t help himself. I hurt him on purpose. That’s not OK.”
“But what happened when he found out?”
“We had a few conversations after the Rampage. He got to call me a crazy bitch, and I got to confirm the terms of my payment plan. Johan turned the wreckage of his work into an exhibit, as if the destruction was part of the work. Critics loved it and praised it as a genius exploration of the dark side of modern love.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Zach said.
“So, that’s the story,” Camila said. “I think I saw myself as his muse, when really I was just a fuck doll. We were never going to work. I regret all the terrible things I did to him, that we did to each other, but I can’t bring myself to regret the relationship itself. I did love him, even if I was bad at love.” She felt tears come before she asked the next thing. “Do you think I’m a terrible person? Do you think I’m a crazy fucking bitch?”
Zach shook his head and waded toward her, scooping her back into his lap. “No. Not at all. I think you’re a fucking miracle.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek and squeezed her. “But no more chainsaws, OK?”