The Truth. Neil Strauss

identify it. “If you put what you just shared together with all the other pieces of your childhood, a clear pattern emerges.”

      “Which is what?”

      She starts to speak, then stops herself. “I don’t know how you’re going to take this.”

      “Just say it,” I snap, imitating her, just to be an asshole.

      This gives her the resolve she needs. She sucks in a breath of air, then exhales. “Okay, I’ll just say it.” The pause is long, the room is quiet, my heart is hammering, and then she says it. “Your mom wants to be in a relationship with you.”

      It hits me like a ton of bricks. I sit there dazed, and a cold wind blows from somewhere inside me. Images from my life flutter in the current, each one a disturbing fragment of evidence: Why else would my mom come into my room at night and tell me all her problems? Why else would she not let me go on my first date? Why else was I grounded all the time and told that my classmates weren’t really my friends? Why else wasn’t I allowed the keys to the house when my brother was? Why else did she cut off all support and communication when I moved in with my first girlfriend, even though I was in my twenties? And what was I in this whole investigation of my father if not her intimate partner?

      The tears come fast now. The statement seems so preposterous, yet something in my body recognizes the truth in it.

      Joan’s got me. She’s won. The pride, the ego, the defenses, the algebraic equations are all gone. I am at her mercy. And that’s when she hammers once more on the stake she’s just driven into me: “That’s why you’re unable to be in a healthy relationship.”

      “Now it makes sense why there was a double standard between my brother and me,” I choke out between sobs, regressing with each one. “Like, after college, he could have his girlfriends spend the night at my parents’ place, but I never could. Even to this day.”

      “And why was that?”

      “She said they were never good enough for me. That I chose badly.”

      “It’s not that you chose badly.” She’s found the blood in the water now. “It’s that you didn’t choose Mom.”

      My head is spinning. My mom didn’t do this intentionally, I’m sure, but it was unconscious. She hated Dad, she didn’t trust her friends, and I was the oldest, most reliable male around. So she probably wanted me all to herself, or at least safely under her control.

      “When your mom is emotionally dependent on you and has intimate discussions with you that she should be having with her spouse, there’s a name for that.” Joan looks at me like a prizefighter sizing up a dazed opponent, then lands her final blow. “It’s called emotional incest.”

      And I’m done.

      STAGE III

      ▪ Functional Adult ▪

       THE TRUTH MAY BE OUT THERE, BUT LIES ARE INSIDE YOUR HEAD.

       —TERRY PRATCHETT

       Hogfather

      Mexico City, Many Years Earlier

      “Ready for school, princess?” her father asked.

      She glanced up at him. He was wearing a dark suit and looked like a movie star. An actor. She hated it when he talked to her like that. He had no right. He was rarely around and had never taken her to school before.

      He bent down and found her hand. She let it lie limply in his, like dough in an oven. She couldn’t remember ever feeling the warmth of his hand before.

      Instead of taking her to the front door of the school, he led her to an alley alongside the building, where he met a short-haired brunette woman in a pencil skirt with high heels. He kissed her, but not the way the girl’s grandmother kissed people. They kissed like lovers in the movies.

      In the days that followed, she conducted an investigation of her father, like in the detective shows she’d seen on TV. In an evidence box underneath her bed, she collected her father’s beeper, full of messages from random women; his scheduling book, documenting appointments with them; and, finally, tape recordings her father was secretly making of her mother talking on the phone.

      When she was ready to make her case, she sat her mother down and handed her the box. The little girl was nervous, not because of the effect it would have on her mom, but because the phone recordings contained evidence that she and her brother had been prank-calling the butcher. (“Hello … do you have pig’s feet?” “Yes.” “Why don’t you wash them!” Click.)

      Her mother didn’t say a word as she went through the box. First she looked confused, then uncomfortable, and finally she started crying.

      The next day, her mother started her own investigation. In addition to discovering that her husband had several girlfriends on the side, she found out that not only had he never divorced his previous wife, but he was actually still living with her—and having more children with her. So she confronted her husband about his double life and told him it was over between them.

      That night, the little girl was woken by screaming and a loud crash from her parents’ bedroom. She ran to their door and pushed against it, but it was blocked by a broomstick. The doorknob had fallen off a few weeks back, so she looked through the hole to see what was going on.

      Her father was sitting on top of her mother, his face red and twisted as if possessed. His hands were over her mother’s mouth and nose, squeezing tightly. She struggled to breathe, her hands clawing at his. Her eyes, grotesquely enlarged, appeared to turn toward the little girl, pleading, “Help me!”

      “Please don’t kill her!” the little girl yelled between sobs as she tried to open the door. She rushed to her older brother’s room and woke him up, and he ran into the hallway and slammed his body against the door. Over and over again.

      As the door burst open, her father released his grip from her mother’s face and backed away, telling his children that they were just playing. Her mother stumbled toward her—gasping violently, her face pale blue, her eyes blood red—and the little girl grabbed her hand and ran into the bathroom with her. She locked the door, and the two of them cried together.

      The boy ran to the phone to call their mom’s brothers. They were all big men and very protective of their sister. But as the boy was yelling “Help!” into the receiver, his father tore the cord out of the wall, pulled open the window of their fourth-floor apartment, and threw the phone outside.

      Ten minutes later, the girl emerged from the bathroom. The house was completely still. She heard classical music coming from the kitchen. There, she saw her dad sitting at the table, his legs crossed gracefully. He was holding a glass of cognac, swirling it slowly, gazing at it with a look of complete peace as he breathed in the notes of the drink, the music, the night air.

      She yanked the needle off the record. “What are you doing?!” she yelled, furious, confused, terrified.

      “I’m waiting for my death to arrive,” he said calmly.

      That was the last time Ingrid saw her father.

      I wake up alone in the rehab dorm, the sun diffusing through a small dirt-filmed window, the muffled mating calls of birds and cicadas announcing another morning, and a raging hard-on pressing against my boxer shorts.

      My mind drifts to an image of Carrie and the suggestive way she handed me her note. I remember she’s roommates with Dawn and I start picturing a threesome with them. I think about how her caretaking qualities must extend to the bedroom and I imagine her