So, Greta had taken another stab at therapy. After hearing her whole story, which had taken ten weeks to tell, the shrink diagnosed her with emotional detachment disorder, which seemed like a stretch to Greta, who preferred to think of it as “poise” on a bad day, “grace” on a good one, and, when she was feeling full of herself, “serenity.”
She loathed official documents of any kind, which was why she hadn’t filed a tax return in six years and didn’t have health insurance. Her own birth certificate made her sick to her stomach. She also hesitated to sign anything, even credit card slips, because she’d never liked her signature. She’d tried changing it over the years, but it was like trying to change her voice. On the other hand, Hudson was overflowing with people who’d successfully reinvented themselves. I was a corporate lawyer in the city for years, and then I moved to Hudson and became a flower farmer/doll maker/antiques dealer/chef/arborist/alcoholic, and I never looked back. “I moved to Hudson to reinvent my handwriting,” she imagined telling someone over drinks. “It’s been an incredible journey.”
She told him about her last boyfriend. He’d had money, a new experience for Greta, but zero upper-body strength. He could barely hold himself on top of her, and when he did, she felt like she was being made love to by a large, trembling finger. They were together two years.
She’d heard plenty of extreme stories, but shed never known anyone who’d taken such a beating, not even a man, without luxuriating in self-pity. Big Swiss didn’t possess the impulse to please, to match anyone’s needs or desires. Her only need, seemingly, was to satisfy her own curiosity. That’s what drove her into the house and up the stairs. Granted, curiosity killed the cat, or, in this case, broke its jaw in two places. Of course, no one should get their face pummeled for climbing the wrong stairs or rejecting the wrong person, but, given the ridiculous number of red flags—the kidnapping, the prison time, the dumpy house, the super-sad dog—Big Swiss had not only courted disaster, she’d practically bought it a boutonnière.
Greta considered her own behavior around red flags. Her habit was not to ignore them so much as to ingest them, a somewhat laborious mental production that involved placing them in a stockpot with butter, herbs, and mirepoix; cooking over low heat without browning; adding red meat, additional red flags, a jug of red wine; and voilà, four hours at a lazy simmer later, an extremely rich red-flag stew that she forked into her mouth every day like a fucking moron, sometimes for years on end.
Big Swiss kissed Greta’s cheek. Then she kissed Greta’s other cheek. Then the first cheek again. A Swiss goodbye, Greta assumed, except it happened in slow motion. Greta leaned forward and kissed Big Swiss’s barely parted lips. Big Swiss smiled. Kissing Big Swiss’s teeth was jarring and humiliating, like kissing a bathroom sink. But maybe that was too unkind. It was like kissing a baptismal font full of holy water.
“It’s incredible to me that you’re still getting mileage out of your mother’s suicide. You’re still using it as currency, even though it has nothing to do with what you did. In fact, it’s kind of psychotic that you’re spending that currency on this moment. When will it run out?”
Never, Greta thought. I’ve been living on it all my life.
Big Swiss went on. “If everything can be explained by your trauma, then nothing is really your fault, right? You always have this convenient out. Your mother killed herself, and so that gives you permission to do whatever you want? To eavesdrop on my therapy sessions? To fuck me?”