OCD Love Story Read online

  I like it, and I like the easy access I now have to their voices in my ear.

  It’s no substitute, though, for the real thing. Listening to the album is nice, but it does nothing for the need, the pressing, concrete nature of necessity. And Austin’s voice last night on the phone wasn’t enough either. Nothing’s ever enough, I guess.

  Huh. Minor epiphany happening right now.

  The drive to Dr. Pat’s and the length of the album are almost exactly the same. I arrive a few minutes after Sylvia and Austin’s session is supposed to start, but practically tiptoe in anyway, my body reflexively scared of being seen or heard by Sylvia or Dr. Pat. Still, I am expecting an empty waiting room, and beeline for my chair before seeing him. Austin. Magazine in hand, stubble out in full force, a quiet hum barely brushing his lips, a noise so small it almost blends in with the white noise of the heater. And, most notably, no sign of Sylvia.

  Holy. Crap.

  Austin’s always been the focus, and Sylvia the secondary way to get to him. I knew that, but I know it even more clearly now. My anxiety slips away seeing just Austin. No worry about Sylvia being here, no concern about what it means about her safety or mine, no thought that I have to hear what’s going on in her head this morning. Austin’s got a thermos and a purposefully ugly trucker hat, and I notice (how did I ever miss it? A reminder that I need to be more diligent) a tattoo crawling from his ear to the top of his shoulder that says TRYST. The word settles into me. It’s right there in everyone’s view and he’s semifamous-ish and it’s like now that I’ve seen it on his body and listened to him in my car I feel a sentence forming in my mouth that is going to have to come out.

  I swallow. Maybe I can fight it.

  Nope, I’m going to say something really lame. I mean, I have to. The words are there, he’s there, and as much as I tighten my jaw and bite my lips, I know without a shadow of a doubt that if I don’t say it right now I’m asking for trouble. For me. For him. I’m going to feel like an absolute idiot, but it’s the lesser of two evils.

  “I love your band,” I say. I know there’s a giggle in there and I just sound so much like a teenager. Austin looks up from his phone and smiles. Cocks his head. Remembers the other lame conversation I had with him the other day.

  Awesome.

  “Hey, thanks,” he says. He winks. An impossibly perfect gesture.

  “You guys have a gig coming up, right?” I push some hair behind my shoulder. Bouncing curls that won’t stay put, and bear not even a passing resemblance to the sunny, honey blond silky straightness on his wife’s head. I might as well be ten.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says. He’s got this goofy grin that doesn’t make much sense on his face. There’s no irony in it. And he’s not leaning away from me or looking for the quickest way to get out of the conversation. His eyes are on me. First my face, but then the rest of me too.

  Maybe I don’t look ten after all.

  His eyes linger on the curviest parts of me. I look right back at him, focusing all my attention on his tattoos. He is covered in symbols and dates and names, like his body is some calendar or scrapbook where he records the most important things that have happened to him.

  “Last place you’d think to meet someone, right?” he says, gesturing around the office. There’s a fish tank with sad blue fish and a rack of pamphlets on different disorders.

  “Oh yeah. Sorry. I don’t usually talk to people in the therapist’s office.” I shake my head, like that will somehow help make my point. It’s a lot to take with his eyes right on me and the waiting room empty except for the two of us.

  “I’m glad you made an exception for me,” he says. Whereas Sylvia always has that movie-star, over-the-top, aggressive perfection, Austin’s the other thing: a little grimy, a little unkempt, like maybe he slept in his clothes last night but maybe you don’t care. He kinda jerks his head like I’m supposed to come sit by him. He pats the chair. So I sit by him and he leans in and I can smell sleep on him and something else too: maybe whiskey or maybe coffee or maybe just whatever it is that grown men use after shaving.

  I don’t know. I’ve never been so close to an actual man aside from my father, who only ever smells like Dove soap. Kurt liked cologne and Jeff smelled like cigarettes and cough drops and the dirt under his fingernails.

  “You like musicians?” Austin says.

  “I’m a music nerd,” I say. My mind is spinning through conversations I’ve heard between him and Sylvia. Therapy moments. I know almost everything and almost nothing about Austin at the same time.

  “I hear that,” he says.

  I am talking to Austin. Austin is flirting with me. Which isn’t really what I care about, the flirting. I mean, he’s hot, and I have some kind of crush, but not like I do with Beck. With Austin I am eager for relief. I am compelled by him.

  It’s not the same thing as love. But the way I watch him, the way I have to say his name when he’s in my presence, I’m sure it looks a whole lot like something groupies do, like I’m some love-struck teenager.

  Which I am.

  But not for him.

  “I think my therapist is late,” Austin says when no one seems to be coming out to usher him into the familiar room.

  “That’s so weird, Dr. Pat’s never late!” I say before I have a chance to censor myself. There are a few therapists in the building, and only a crazy person would know which one he goes to.

  “You go to Dr. Pat?” he says, tilting his head like shifting the angle might help him make sense of this lapse in logic.

  “Yeah. Yes. You too, right? I think I’ve seen you go in before, maybe. What time’s your appointment?” My cheeks are burning. There is no reasonable way to explain my being here right now, and he’s already shifting in his seat with the knowledge that I’ve noticed him before. My heart pounds and my hands shake, so I scoot them under my thighs to gain some control. I take a huge inhale. I probably seem even more unstable now. But I can’t let him know I don’t have an appointment. I can’t let him know I’m here to see him. That he is my appointment.

  “Eight,” he says. “You?”

  “Oh. I thought, um, mine was at eight. She must have double-booked herself.” I move my hand from under my thigh to the top of it and give a hard pinch, the only remedy I can think of for the massive lie I just told. My voice is shaking. He must be able to hear the strange vibration of the words, the way they leave my mouth with a tremble.

  He shrugs and half chuckles. Like it’s no big deal.

  “Late and double-booked, huh? Dr. Pat’s losing her touch.” There’s that laugh again. It’s part air, part grumble. A deep, untethered, kind sound.

  “God, that’s so not like her.” It’s a funny thing, joking around about your shared therapist. For all she knows about both of us, we have limited ways to make judgments about her. Just the upholstery of her furniture and the routinized way she handles her appointments with us. But we both nod and smile like this somehow says everything there is to say about her.

  One of the other therapists emerges from the back.

  “You Dr. Pat’s patients?” We nod. “She’s out sick. She apologizes.” She has that same neutral demeanor that I thought maybe Dr. Pat invented, but one look at this woman in her oversize suit and thin wire-frame glasses says these therapists are all the same, all have the same set of expressions and gestures and semicomforting words.

  “Lucky us—let me buy you a coffee. It’s early as shit, right? You got school today?”

  “Yeah, but it’s senior spring,” I squeak out. “Coffee sounds great.”

  All this before 9:00 a.m.

  • • •

  “How do you like Dr. Pat?” Austin asks when we’ve both settled into standard-issue Starbucks green armchairs. I officially do not care if I don’t make it to school today. We are out of place in Starbucks, too. It’s all businessmen on their way to work and mothers waiting to drop their toddlers off at daycare, and then me and Austin. I’m wishing I had worn something other
than my school-appropriate but totally ugly olive khakis. I take off the cashmere sweater my mother lent me and at least then I am edgy in a weather-inappropriate, almost-see-through camisole and a black-and-blue-striped handmade scarf.

  “She’s . . . good,” I say, still thinking about the way I look to him.

  I could be in an off-Broadway play about romance and poverty and runaway youth. I could be in Rent. I do this sometimes, when I’m hating the way I look. I think of a play to put myself in, a costume that I could be wearing, and then I delight in the perfection of my outfit in that context instead of the way the khakis are too stiff and fall awkwardly, bunching around my ankles.

  I can’t stop squirming, so I give myself a hard pinch when Austin goes to get sugar.

  “Usually I see you with your wife,” I say when he gets back to the table, like the complete and total psycho I am.

  “Aha,” he says.

  “And she’s your partner, too, right? In Tryst? Which came first?”

  “Fell in love first. We were doing our own things musically. Then we joined forces.”

  I nod and sip my chai and miss the rightness of being with Beck. I wonder if sitting here with Austin is curing my OCD. Maybe if I just talk to him for an hour I’ll get it all out of my system: The impulse to check on him, to know him deeply and worry about him, will disappear.

  “She’s pretty.”

  “She is.” He nods, all serious, and I think with a flutter that maybe he’s going to tell me I’m pretty. I swallow and he swallows and I don’t want what’s about to happen, but then maybe I do want it, just the teeny-tiniest bit. Etta James is on the shitty Starbucks stereo and chai is burning my mouth and Austin is getting stares from the soccer moms and business douches. I give a closed-mouth smile.

  “Very pretty,” I say again, in some sort of throaty voice.

  “So, speaking of my wife, she mentioned you’ve been to our building.”

  Bam.

  I remember that look on her face when she saw me at Dr. Pat’s. I’m turning red and hot and teary-eyed now. What I thought was intrigue and flirtation and maybe even perversion in Austin’s face and actions is actually sad concern. Something a lot like pity.

  This goddamn armchair is basically swallowing me whole. I don’t know what kind of person sits comfortably in these things. Austin sits at the very edge of his, but I made the mistake of leaning back into mine and now I’m stuck in the plush ugly green monstrosity. Austin looks older than he did a few moments ago. Like a father. Like someone embarrassed to be here with me in my see-through shirt and ridiculous breasts.

  “You seem very sweet. And I thought this might be a good opportunity. Serendipity, sort of, to just let you know how we feel, so we don’t have to talk to Dr. Pat about it.”

  “Oh. Thanks,” I muster up. I bite my lip really hard and I think I taste blood. I need to get out of here.

  “And maybe you’re just a fan of Tryst? Which is great. Hey, when I was your age I wrote about a hundred letters to the lead singer of the Foo Fighters. Who you have probably never even heard of. But there you go. I mean, listen, if I can be someone’s Foo Fighters, that’s just awesome.”

  I’ve heard of the Foo Fighters before, I guess, and I think I should know who they are if I’m going to be hanging at record stores and wearing thrift store clothes, so I make a note to look them up when I get home.

  “Yeah. I’m a fan of Tryst. Really huge fan. I’m sorry.” Maybe my OCD is getting better, because I am about to let fly on a huge lie. “I recognized you when you came out of Dr. Pat’s once . . . and you’re just my favorite band. So I sort of freaked out. I listen to you guys all the time.”

  It doesn’t feel good, the words coming out all silky smooth and false, and I have to pinch myself to make it okay.

  It is still not okay.

  “Totally get it,” Austin says. His face has stopped scrunching into awkward positions and he leans into the side of the armchair like now that that’s all out in the open we can just chat it up.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Nah, we didn’t mind. I mean, we thought we’d ask Dr. Pat if we should be concerned, but look at you. I can tell the scary-obsessed from the cool-obsessed. Sylvia used to go to every single Green Day concert. You know, when they were cool. She thought if she went enough times they’d pick her out of the crowd.”

  “Did they?”

  “Sylvia didn’t used to be such a knockout. I mean, she was cute. But she puts the work in now.”

  “Huh,” I say. It seems like a mean way to put it. It seems like decidedly not the way I’d want to be loved.

  “So, no reason to feel weird, okay? We are fellow music fans, right?”

  “Right.” The word barely comes out. My eyes are glued to the pattern on the linoleum floor and my whole body screams with heat. I am almost certainly fire-engine red from the part in my hair all the way down to my toes.

  “I’ve embarrassed you,” Austin says. “I’m so sorry. If the Foo Fighters had talked to me about my superfandom I would have been embarrassed too. Hey. Hey. Look at me.” I do. “It’s totally cool. I told Sylvia I’d check in about it, and now I have, and I’m psyched we have such a cool fan chick. I mean, how lucky are we to have you, right? You’re, like, exactly who we want to be singing to and about and for. So, please don’t look like that.”

  Austin has probably not talked to a sixteen-year-old girl in years, but he recognizes the change in my breath, knows it’s about to turn from shaky inhales to actual tears, and no adult man can handle that.

  “You know what I’d love?” he says, patting my shoulder with a timid hand. “For you to be our special guest at our show next week. It would mean the world to me. And just so you know, there’s no weirdness, we’re totally cool. We’re happy that we have a real fan.”

  “Yeah, I mean, I was planning on going,” I say. My voice is still not my own, but my body temperature drops a little and the sweat rolling down my back seems to have slowed, chilled, and changed into goosebumps. Sweet.

  “We’ll hook you up,” Austin says. “With tickets I mean.” Then he pats my knee, and I’m still stuck wondering if there was actually some sexual charge earlier, or if this was only ever pity and concern about the crazy teenage stalker girl.

  Probably the latter.

  “Being in high school sucks, huh?” he says. Patronizing smile.

  I shrug and try to smile and look like a harmless troubled teenager, which shouldn’t be too hard because I am a troubled teenager. And according to Dr. Pat and my mom and Lisha and all the literature I’ve read on OCD, I’m allegedly harmless.

  “So, you won’t tell Dr. Pat that I, like, got all creepy with you, right?” I say, like it’s a joke. Austin grins and I know exactly what this is now. I am a charity case. I am there to make Austin and Sylvia feel like in the midst of their completely bat-shit crazy marriage, they can help a troubled teenage fan who is lonely and desperate and pathetic.

  There are celebrity stalkers who end up killing their celebrity fixations. I can’t think of a specific example right now, but stalking has a kind of violent implication, and I wonder if all the time I’ve spent worrying about hurting people and about Austin and Sylvia’s safety are actually related. Maybe I am the real threat against them.

  I survey Starbucks. Plastic knives, but they’re behind the counter. I can’t do much harm with napkins and soy milk and tiny wooden stirrers. We’re all safe for the moment.

  And that realization makes me a zen princess of calm, despite the embarrassment.

  “Let’s get you to school, right?” Austin says. “Can’t have you skipping classes to hang out with rock stars.” Wink. Pause. Wink again.

  We walk back across the street to Dr. Pat’s office together. Austin pats the top of my car, which is only a little bit less demeaning than him patting the top of my head.

  “Hang in there, Bea,” he says. I let him drive away first, so he doesn’t see what kind of driver I am.

  And for
four hours afterward I’m an unwavering line of coolness and calm and I don’t feel the need to do anything other than take notes on The Great Gatsby for English class and think about admiration and obsession and how Austin is every bit as flawed and beautiful and unattainable and incorrect as Gatsby is. When the teacher assigns a paper on the book, I’m almost excited to tackle the subject. I know exactly what to write about. I know exactly how to feel about Gatsby and Nick and the world we’re never quite a part of, no matter how hard we try.

  BY MY FIRST ENGLISH CLASS the next day (yep, I take two English classes, prep school at its finest), I have written down the conversation with Austin no less than five times. I try to explain it all to Lisha again, but I keep losing details, and the mounting certainty that I’m not getting it quite right starts to press on my chest. Soon it feels like a whole Austin-size person is sitting on my chest, collapsing my rib cage, and I have to try again to write it down just right.

  Lisha shrugs. “Yeah, I mean, I think I’ve got the basics,” she says, and tries to smile, but it comes out more like a grimace.

  It’s funny how badly I want to tell Beck that I finally spoke to Austin, that I spoke to one of the patients I told him I listen in on, but he’s starting to have too much information. If he tried hard he’d be able to connect the dots and make a constellation of my craziness and I can’t have that. So I’ve ignored eight texts and eight missed calls and I know that will be it for a little while at least.

  Lucky for me, we’re just droning through advanced vocabulary today. I’m a vocab machine, so I don’t need to use any extra parts of my brain.

  “ ‘Ineptitude,’ ” Ms. Peters says. She’s giving each of us a word to define aloud, one by one. “ ‘Clemency.’ ‘Mendacious.’ ” That last one’s me, lately: given to lying. “ ‘Flout.’ ” Reject. Also totally relevant at this moment. “ ‘Venerate,’ ” she says. I know that one too. To worship. I venerate Austin. It’s like a fucking vocabulary test of my life right now. “ ‘Punctilious,’ ” she says when she gets to me, and for the love of God, of course I know this one.