Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Brittany Newell 2017

Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cover photographs © Jonathan Storey/Getty Images

Brittany Newell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008209797

Ebook Edition © April 2017 ISBN: 9780008209803

Version: 2017-02-28

Dedication

To my rats and my worm: forever, my love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

X

Beach House

London

Arizona

On the Road

Big Sur

Public Pool

Nude Beach

Bad Days

Day Trip

Super 8

The Clinic

Homeward Bound

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

X

OOLA WORE A PONCHO THROUGH WHICH HER NIPPLES SHOWED.

I remember her like this.

Summer. She was browned and sanded by the beach, our second week in Florida. She was sitting on the wooden kitchen table, ankles crossed, eating an avocado. She ate it with her hands. She ran her knuckle around the inside of the husk, stripping off the meat. She licked the soft flesh off her fingers. They were stained an oily, vivid green. Theo, the cat, sat beside her, tail bent into a question mark.

It was three in the afternoon in late May; I was tired in that drawn-out, nonsensical way, when your body assumes a vaguely erotic position no matter the task and despite your actual urges. The humid air was like a hand incessantly smoothing my hair back. I slumped in the doorway, balancing a sack of groceries on one hip. She didn’t notice me. This is how it often was, she the show and I the crowd, but that day I was keenly aware of the fact that this was what she would be doing if I weren’t around.

The idea titillated me. I was reminded of the high school fantasy of being unseen in a locker room, watching the object of one’s fancy strip and gossip about bigger boys. Except my pleasure was tinged by new panic: How many moments like this had I missed?

Very gently, I set the groceries down.

It had never bothered me before, the hard fact that she lived a life outside my range. I had parents, as we all do, and I never thought about them as people who could have once been children or had lovers or liked music or worn skirts, the clouded majority of their lives sans moi. If I ever spared a thought for them, it was to situate them in my memories as witnesses, those two salt pillars of my youth who had watched me become real.

As I watched her suck the green meat from the webs of her hand, something in me shifted. She turned the avocado skin inside out and scraped it with her front teeth. It was not that she looked more beautiful than usual; don’t mistake me for a butterfly hunter. If anything, I was in that moment a mathematician. I realized how truly little of her I laid claim to. I was antsy. I nudged the grocery sack with my foot. I wanted to see all her states of disregard, of neutrality and slobber. I wanted to see her alone, all alone, treading the lunacy that even the briefest periods of solitude induce. To this day, far sexier than the memory of her with no clothes on, hovering her freckled breasts over me, is the memory of her leaning forward to put the avocado skin on Theo’s head, the darker pigment of her nipples visible but oddly frosted by the rain-resistant plastic of the ninety-nine-cent poncho.

Theo meowed angrily. She caught sight of me in the doorway and only then did she laugh. “I made him a hat,” she said.

She got up, began unpacking the groceries. Here was the Oola I knew. Imperceptible changes warmed her to me. She looked exactly as she had ten minutes before. But where did that other girl go, the identical animal?

“Should I make coffee?” she called over her shoulder.

One drunken night early on in our travels, Oola told me about a friend who could always predict when she was ovulating; she claimed she could feel the egg exit her ovary with a tiny pop. We choked on our wine. But truth be told, that’s how I feel when an idea strikes me. I can feel the obsession taking shape. I can feel the click. That afternoon in the kitchen, I stared at Oola and felt it, the snapping into place. “Yes, strong,” I mumbled. I’d watched a tree fall in the proverbial woods and now I struggled to name the sound it had made. Perhaps a low sigh, as when one turns over in their sleep. A muffled oh! or that feels nice.

Why is pleasure so easy to express to oneself, in a half-asleep babble, but so difficult, so awkward, to express to somebody else?

We sat down and drank our coffee. I don’t remember what we did with the rest of that day. We were house-sitting for a family friend, Mr. Orbitson, and his young bride (the ex-nanny), rewiring an underused beachside mansion in Florida with our foreign smells and bad habits. After two weeks, the towels would never be the same. Theo was a stray who’d taken a shine to Oola; after a very short courtship, he slept in our bed.

All I know is that I told her later, as we changed for bed and turned down the duvet (already speckled with cake crumbs and cat hair), that I had an idea for a new project.

“A TV show?” she said. “That’d be good, bring in some dough. If it’s poetry, I’ll kill myself.” She eyed me. “Is it vampires?”

I smooshed a pillow on her face. “Just asking,” she cried. She wriggled free. “So tell me.”

“I’m not sure yet. But you’re the main character. Or she’ll be based on you. Whatever. We’ll see.”

She flipped her hair. “Me? Well, fuck, I’d read it. Guaranteed five-star rating. I turned the light out last night, by the way. So scoot, fatty.”

And that was all. Perhaps she didn’t believe me. I got out of bed and flipped off the light.

“That’s the stuff,” she sighed. In the dark she was a lump. I stumbled across the floor and squatted near her side of the bed. I tried to make out her hair. White-blond—you would think it would glow in the dark. But it graded into the pillow, became the bedspread. Everything that was Oola dissembled at night, aired its joints and swam about in a nameless soup. I needed a cauldron. I needed a net.

I gently bit the tip of her finger.

“Drop dead,” she cooed.

I lay down beside her and fell soundly asleep.

Beach House

DURING OUR STAY AT THE ORBITSONS’ BEACH HOUSE, WE MADE up a game. This was after Europe but before Big Sur, before the pact, when we still had time for minor games. We played it in the evening, after dinner, wearing clothes that we’d plucked from the Orbitsons’ closets.

We entered the living room. I poured us each a drink, choosing from the Orbitsons’ expansive wet bar. We sat down on the davenport, each wedged in a corner, with an empty space between us. Theo liked to hop up and nap in the gap. Gripping our drinks stiffly, we were like children with taped-on corsages, estimating our own depths, guessing at love. The windows would be open, and an ocean smell suffused the room. It ate at the curtains, warped the blond wood, did all the things we as house-sitters were supposed to prevent but as self-absorbed lovers found excusably moving. Suckers for atmosphere, we donned evening attire and welcomed that iconic tang of woodsmoke and salt that would outlast, once absorbed by the drapery, not only the Orbitsons’ marriage but also this era of insouciance, of Oola’s and my self-contained exhibitionism (which is to say, wearing our hearts on our sleeves).

I liked to wear Mr. Orbitson’s gloves of kid leather, partially for how kinky I found that pairing of words, and one of his collection of gray cashmere sweaters. Sometimes I wore a burgundy smoking jacket, and once (and only once) a cummerbund without a shirt. Relishing the glide of my gloves over the stereo knobs, I got up and put on sad music: songs with lost or heart or broken in the title. It was the kind of music that I used to love to listen to when I came back from a party, drunk and horny and alone. Since meeting, Oola and I had fused our music collections; she gently steered me away from hardcore (that shit makes my nipples hurt) and introduced me to Massenet. Feeling rather like a bank robber cracking a safe, I fiddled with the Orbitsons’ state-of-the-art sound system until the chosen drone or wail mummified the room. Then I returned to Oola’s side, ankles crossed. It could be Otis Redding, Maria Callas, Kate Bush, ANOHNI, some droopy-eyed teen with a broken guitar, a spinster giving herself up to Chopin. More often than not, it was Enya. No matter who sang, we sat rock-still and sipped our drinks.

Then, when she felt moved to, Oola would put a pair of nylon stockings on her head. We’d found them draped over the shower rod in the oceanfront guest room, hung up to dry for God knows how long, the shape of someone’s ankles (the original Lady Orbitson? A friend from long ago? The maid?) still retained.

She wore Mrs. Orbitson’s perfume and an unseasonal dress, a long-sleeved velvet number with a skirt that hazed the floor, the hem furry and teasing as a frat boy. For convenience’s sake, she wore her hair back, cleaned and low. This allowed her to stretch the stockings easily over her head, encircling her braid and pulling them down to her collar with the gravity due ritual. With the stockings in place, she turned to face me, and it always gave me chills to see the fucked-up ex-face swivel, seeking mine, like any blind animal that knows to seek heat.

Through the stretched fabric, her features were blurred, as if a left-hander had been penciling her, smudging the last stroke as he made the next. Her eyelashes were crimped, her nose squished, her mouth forced open, her cheeks Botoxed back. As best we could, we made eye contact. Nina Simone would continue to croon, to make promises, as I studied a face not so much ruined as erased.

We would take turns wearing the stockings, swapping after every song. When I wore the nylons, I felt like I was underwater. The living room looked ghostly through my tight beige veil, Oola like the silvery streak on a photograph labeled PARANORMAL. I liked being looked at without being seen. The floor dropped away; Marianne Faithfull started to slur. The atmosphere was violinish. My sit bones turned numb as I tried not to move, to fix Oola’s mouth (a pink postage stamp) in my sight. She could’ve been anyone as she sat there, my grandmother or my first true love, a fine, feminine smear.

We played this game late into the night. The ice in our drinks melted and our eyes began to ache. The ocean smell grew sweet with distant breakfasts. We stopped only when the day’s first rays threatened to penetrate the stockings’ mesh and clarify the face beneath, to recognize its bones and restore it to a gender, a history. At this point, whoever was wearing the hose yanked them off and balled them up in embarrassment, stuffing them into the crack between couch cushions. This is where they stayed until the next evening that we played our game. During the day Theo sat on them, keeping them warm. I gagged on his hairs more than once.

London

THE FIRST TIME I SAW HER WAS AT A PARTY. IT WAS THROWN BY A mutual friend neither of us knew we had in common. It was in London.

Or perhaps I’d met her before, and perhaps I knew she’d be there, and maybe it wasn’t even in London proper but some more obscure borough. When traveling cheaply, one has a tendency to mistake sleep deprivation for an ecstasy. In the beginning of my travels through Asia and Europe, I was guilty of reading a certain eloquence into my discomfort. For months on end, my nose ran too fast for the pretense of tissues. People scooched away from me on the metro. I’d walk for miles to get to an art opening or some second-rate manor. I didn’t care about culture; I just wanted to tire myself out, to distract from the fact that nobody knew me. I found that I liked graveyards because they were conducive to walking in circles. The nonspecific pains of my body entertained me when I finally crashed back at my hostel, a depressing but effective alternative to going out for a drink—never before had I sat at so many little tables alone. Rather than sit at one more with a glass of cheap beer, I took off my shoes with unusual relish or else hid out in undubbed English movies. Sometimes I’d join the dinnertime crowds, thronging up and down High Street or around the train station, and pretend that I too had somebody waiting, some exterior schedule to keep.

Oola admitted to the same self-flagellation. “I couldn’t enter a restaurant,” she told me. “I’d hover outside, reading the menu, then chicken out when the hostess came over. I couldn’t bear the way the diners were looking at me.” Why not? “People are suspicious of meandering women. I couldn’t make decisions quick enough. Most nights I had Nutella for dinner.”

Cold showers at ungodly hours, when I crept naked down the hostel hallway, stirred me into a state I have seldom encountered since that overlong summer I spent traveling alone. I got the axiom backward: The always-cold water aroused me, opening an awareness of my body that was erotic if only for how endearingly human I felt. When I turned off the water and stood with my arms crossed, drip-drying at an excruciating pace, I felt so cold and weak that my mind unscrolled, like at the end of a movie, leaving only the scarred screen. No words could penetrate this glossy white. I thought of a tooth, its hard white enamel, and as I stood shivering, for twenty, thirty minutes on end, I slowly became certain that the hard white surface of the sinks, the shower’s edge, the skidmarked floor, were the dents and pits of my own teeth, that I had entered myself, somewhat surprisingly, via the mouth.

Sometimes this revelation seemed cartoonish, like an anatomy book for children wherein one zips through veins and pulpy valleys, and at other times, when my toes turned blue and strange muscles that I rarely gave thought to started to ache, the entire situation seemed like a surgery, an inevitable violation. I couldn’t remember what city I was in or why I was there. There was often no real reason to remember. I fled back to my bunk and put on every shirt I’d packed (which, sadly, was not many). I would shiver myself back to sleep.

I come from a New England family of some means, the most valuable of which turned out to be a vast network of empty houses. This is partially how I found myself in Europe, fresh out of college and desperate to prove that I was somehow different from all the other bookish boys with backpacks and the star of privilege beaming down on them, illuminating hickeys. Different how, I couldn’t quite say; more in-tune with the world, maybe, or less of a threat to it, preternaturally sensitive instead of just chill. My parents’ friends traveled frequently and were always in need of a semi-responsible young person with few attachments to look after their townhouses, their big-windowed villas or cutely ramshackle cabins, while they were away at some new-age retreat. I think they especially liked phoning me up, the Kneatsons’ wayward youngest son, isn’t that the one, honey? The artist, now I remember, the one with the hair down to here, but polite. I’ll bet he’s available. And I was; after my expensive education and a summer that turned into almost two years abroad, where I tried to rinse myself of WASPery (my #1 tactic being hitchhiking, a hobby every child of my generation had been trained to associate with extravagant rape), I found myself returning to the gated communities and circuitous drives (never called driveways) that as a teenager I’d defined myself against. My truck might as well have had a bumper sticker proclaiming the return of THE PRODIGAL SON.

I remember my first night house-sitting a cousin’s Parisian flat, egregiously sunlit, blue with cream trim and a riotous bidet, the first in a long series of houses I’d inhabit for two to five weeks at a time. After countless months fetaled in hostel bunks, counting the farts of invisible roommates until, however perversely, I was lulled to sleep, this sixth-floor walk-up on a quiet street struck me as more foreign than the silence of Parisian subways (every profile turned to the window, every luscious mouth shut tight). It was like an amusement park, this sparse and tasteful flat, my shut-in Tivoli. I didn’t leave for a week. I subsisted on beans from the cupboard and spent my days in the bath. Sick of sickness, I was only too glad to return to the domestic sphere. I did my laundry daily, stripping the sheets with inappropriate glee. Sitting atop the bared mattress and watching the sunlight alter the room, did I have any idea that this would be my life’s future format? That this solitude would follow me? If I did, I would’ve wept for joy. An empty bedroom still excited me with possibility; I was yet to reach the point at which no bedroom I entered would ever seem empty.

Picture me there, like a pig in mud: sitting cross-legged, shirt off, on the off-white carpet, gnawing a baguette, finishing a pack of cigarettes before noon, pulling the box apart and holding the foil up to the light. What you are witnessing are the early stages of a long, imperceptible, drawn-out transition, the study of which means nothing at all, from bachelor to hermit. The former devotes himself to the study of himself. The latter seeks desperately for something just as interesting. Something only he, in his hermit hole, can master: Soap-carving? Millinery? Conspiracy theories? I watched the noon light play off the foil and wondered what would be next. The answer was so obvious that I could never have imagined it: a girl, introduced to me by the boy I once loved.

When Taylor first invited me to his party, I waffled. I was passing through London in a post-Christmas slump, having turned twenty-five on an overnight bus that smelled resolutely of ham. I’d been alone for so long, snotting into my sleeves, that mingling seemed impossible, especially with Tay’s crowd. He was a childhood friend who worked at a fashionable magazine and loved nothing more than getting so high that he couldn’t remember the day of the week. He would stand on a chair and babble about the Netflix apocalypse, waving the limbs that had always been skinny despite a lifelong defiance of anything active; he was tall, so fat collected in odd places, like the tiny belly that curved (I thought of a lowercase b) from his impossible hips and only made him, in a droopy sweater, all the more attractive. Half Jewish and half Japanese, he’d been an object of erotic fascination in our Greenwich school district since the ripe age of twelve. Your legs! hot moms were wont to croon. So feminine! And he’d say wisely, You can call me Tay.

“C’mon,” he said. We had met for coffee in a poorly lit Soho café, confirming my worst fears about the circles he ran in. The coffee was salty, as only expensive espresso can be, and the clientele’s faces eerily framed by the light from their various high-tech devices. “You’re here now, aren’t you?”

I nodded vaguely from my nest of shirts. This seemed up for debate. The girl next to us was making eyes at her reflection in her blacked-out laptop screen.

Tay poked my arm. “Leif, be real. You could use the company. Besides, I never get to see you.”

This last bit couldn’t be denied. I hacked into a paper napkin and shrugged. I imagined his set to be overeducated and underfed, too witty to be laughed at, too chic to find fuckable, easy to imitate if I didn’t watch out.

He went on. “Music, people, lots of drugs. You can come for an hour and leave if you’re bored, but I promise you won’t be.”

“Scout’s honor?” I leered.

He rolled his eyes. He hated being reminded of the benignity of our past. If I could, I would bury his face in a patch of freshly mown grass, wring his arms until he admitted to having played Spin the Bottle with just his sister and me. Tay’s fancy job and new poise couldn’t fool me; I could see the scar on his lip where there’d once been a titanium ring. I was walking proof that he’d once farted in a bag, that Edward Scissorhands made him cry (I relate, man!). We had made face masks with honey and crushed aspirin and promised not to tell; when our concoction didn’t work, we sent away for a high-tech zit-zapper, which also disappointed us. I thought about attending the party just to spoil his image, to overlay his tall tales of suicidal cheerleaders and Pynchon-worthy pit stops on some unending road trip between Boy (outside Vermont, exact coordinates unknown) and Man (California, of course, on the last virgin beach) with the beery American summers we’d shared in a place too staid, too safe, to merit a name. We’d lain in our rooms and listened to music and none of it had been even slightly ironic. I was a stringbean who loved screamo and Foucault, who wore a bit of lipstick once and thought the earth had shifted. Finally, proof that I was different (if I turned a blind eye to the sea of moms in Raisin, Soft Pink, She’s the One). My chosen shade: Shock Treatment. We considered our pointlessness provocative, sewing Situationist patches to our jackets with dental floss; I was a test tube of his sweat and he knew it. I was suddenly excited to tell all his friends about the night he lost his virginity in a mosh pit (which is to say, only partially); what quote could they pull out of their asses for that?

“Yes, yes,” he sighed. “Scout’s honor. No homos allowed.”

“What’s wrong?” I smiled. “Am I no longer funny?”

Forgive this fratty interlude: Oola will come soon.

“Forgive me if I don’t live in the same weird world as you.” He said it jokingly, but the confession felt grave, and he immediately blushed. In truth, we were well past the days of passing out, side by side, in the top bunk of his bed. Looking at him now, with his hair sleekly parted and faded geometric tattoos screaming FUNKY-FRESH INTELLECTUAL, I wondered if my memories had shifted, like the contents of bags on an airplane, and swapped the face before me with the body of a different boy altogether. I noticed that he took his coffee with cream and sugar, and I felt irrationally superior that I drank mine black. He tried to cover himself. “I’m no poet.”

“Miss Lee would beg to differ.”

He finally smiled, a hint of teeth unsettling the placid scar. “How do you still remember that? Poor Miss Lee. I was a monster.”

“You weren’t her only admirer. Everyone I knew had hard-ons for their teachers.”

“But I crossed a line.”

I considered. “The public suicide threat was a bit much for a fourth-grader.”

He cradled his head in his hands. “Don’t remind me.”

“Sorry.” I wasn’t.

He smiled wryly. “You know, I saw her again.”

“You mean when the middle school band played for May Day? I saw her too. I thought of you.”

“No,” he said. “Later. The summer before senior year. I ran into her at the grocery store.”

“Oh.”

“At first, I did a one-eighty. I was too embarrassed to face her. But she stood right behind me in the checkout line. ‘Is that who I think it is?’ she said. ‘Can it be?’ This was during my punk phase, mind you. I think I only had about seventy percent of my hair.”

“I remember.” I’d been the one to shave it off, cross-eyed on stolen Xanax.

“And you know what she did? She reached out and touched it. ‘All the teachers have bets on how their kids will turn out,’ she told me. ‘I think I just lost.’ She was smiling when she said it, and I could see that she was wearing a plastic retainer. God, I was dizzy. ‘How did you think I’d turn out?’ I managed to ask. She started laughing. ‘I thought you’d be a veterinarian.’ And we both started laughing, and she patted my wrist and told me, ‘Take care.’”

“That’s actually rather romantic.”

“I know, right? And she was just as beautiful as I remembered. You always expect to be disappointed, you know, like once you grow up and look back on the shit you used to worship. But even though she was definitely older, I could still see it.” He waved his hands in the air. “And I remember exactly what she was buying too: disposable razors, frozen macaroni and cheese, a bar of Dove soap, and one clementine. The kind that come in the orange mesh bag. She was buying just one.” He shook his head.

“I’m jealous,” I said. And I was: All my childhood crushes had ended not in heartbreak but in something more like acid reflux. The obsessions that I found so poetical (with Heather, with Jackie) invariably fizzled into ickiness, into: Is there something in my teeth? That Leif kid is staring again. A sunflower seed? Ugh, he gives me the creeps. Like so many, I never got the chance to atone for my awkwardness; even years later, I carried it inside me, like the muscle memory of a major injury, all those jerks and spurts and moments when I clapped my hands to my ears and shouted, OH FUCK ME, for how badly I wanted to say the right thing.

I staged them in my mind. Miss Lee, the landlocked geography priestess. Tay, the disciple, who finally, finally, grew into the lust that he wore plain as jeans. In a way, they had less in common now than when he was a little boy, for he alone was no longer confused by his body. She wore drawstring pants and ChapStick with a tint. He was tall, dark, and clearly debauched. They made eye contact over the magazine rack. A year’s worth of candy bars melted.

In real time, Tay grinned. “Well, listen, if it’s release that you’re after, I know just the girl. She’ll be there tonight. She studied holistic healing at a coven in Helsinki. She’s now a masseuse for the terminally ill. Goes by Pumpkin.”

“Sounds like you’ve got me pegged.”

“If you’re lucky. So you’ll come?”

I threw up my hands. “I guess I don’t have a choice.”

“That’s probably what Miss Lee said.” He rose and I followed suit.

I walked him to his tube stop. We stood at the entrance and embraced. He squeezed my well-padded biceps and gave me a questioning look.

“It’s the shirts,” I mumbled, gesturing helplessly.

He smirked and didn’t look away. “It’s so good to see you, Leif.” He had lowered his voice, and I had trouble discerning his words over the tube’s subterranean rumble. “You’ll always be funny to me, man.”

“Is that an insult?”

“Up to you,” he said. He held my earlobe between thumb and pointer finger. “Fuck, you’re cold. I will see you later, won’t I? Don’t pull a Leif on me.”

“I won’t.” I let my gaze drift to his lip; the scar tissue was like frost on a windshield. If I tried, I could still see the troubled boy that I’d touched dicks with. This had, by no means, been the peak of our relationship, but it came to me then, in a semisweet gust. One more instance of our loose-limbed youth, a foray in the cornfields. I’m kidding. It was in his room, My Bloody Valentine playing. I think his dog watched us from under the bed. Later, we laughed it off, chalked it up to the drugs; we were simple. Sometimes we’d swap T-shirts, Black Flag for Bad Brains, and sleep amid the other’s stink. It was one of our many inexplicable gags that only gained significance after the fact, when folding laundry on a rainy day. I’d pressed the crumpled T-shirt to my nose and yes, it was still musky.

“Excellent.” He released me and hurried down the stairs. I lingered at the entrance for a moment or so, siphoning the body heat of the crowd that hustled past me.

THAT’S HOW I ENDED UP in his East London flat, gripping a drink and wishing for death. I’d only been there for fifteen minutes and already a girl had me pinned to the wall. She was explaining, with some difficulty, the benefits and freedoms of the fruitarian lifestyle.

“There’s no limit!” she panted. “Other diets have you counting calories. Since going raw, I’ve chucked restrictions out the window. It’s heaven.” She waved her glass for emphasis and I was tempted to ask if it was a mimosa. “For breakfast today I ate thirteen peaches.” She grinned and I noticed the stains on her teeth. “For lunch I had watermelon. Three, to be exact. I have to eat out of mixing bowls. After that, I was still a bit hungry, so I snacked on five dates.”

I noticed her fingers were shaking. “What about protein?”

“I get all the protein I need from fruit!” she shrieked. I could see this was a question she got quite a lot. “The most important thing is to stay carbed up. And people say carbs make you fat!” Her laugh was shrill; her knobby shoulders convulsed. “You wouldn’t believe how much sugar is packed into one date. It’s like a little bomb! A tiny sugar bomb!”

In truth, her babbling was a blessing, for it vindicated my people-watching and protected me from a more involved conversation. I dreaded having to pretend to give a single shit. I metaphorically rested my chin on the top of her head and surveyed the crowd while she rhapsodized over spotty bananas (“Brown! They have to be brown!”). My eyes fell on Tay, holding court in a corner. He wore a black sweater, a headband (oh, he was sleek), and a gigantic homemade clockface around his neck, which he, every few minutes, consulted with a fierce concentration.

“Get ready!” he screamed. “Ten-minute warning!”

The theme of the party was Last New Year’s Eve Ever (despite it being February). Tay had hidden every clock in the flat and confiscated watches at the door. If he caught someone sneaking a peek at their phone, he stormed over and demanded that they not only hand him the offending device but their drink as well. He was a mad king, stalking around the apartment, declaring every hour, then every fifteen minutes, then every time he saw a pretty face, to be midnight. Someone made the mistake of handing him a saucepan and a spoon, which he clanged mightily when, according to his private logic, the time came.

“Countdown, people!” he bellowed, hopping from couch to couch like a little boy convinced that the carpet was lava. “Couple up! It’s the end, the end of time, and this is the last chance you get! To get fucked!” He stopped to consult his fake clockface, with one leg up on the back of the sofa, posing like a New World explorer. “Ready? Three … two … one … HAPPY BOOB YEAR!” And he sprang off the sofa onto the suddenly stable ground and sprinted around the flat with his spoon in the air, holding the backs of people’s heads as they kissed to make sure that it counted.

Even for a party of trim twenty-somethings, the atmosphere was unusually abuzz. Tay’s was a hyperbolic universe of cheek-kisses galore. The effect of the theme was that everybody kept a list of who they wanted to make out with; I guess everyone does this at every party, but tonight the concept of sloppy seconds became inoffensive, and people accepted their middling rankings, flattered to have been jotted down at all. The fact that we’d each spent at least an hour beforehand appraising our worth in the mirror (and still hopped off to the bathroom to do so every now and again) was brought to the fore by Tay’s counterfeit midnights. Yes, we were predators, eyeing all thighs, but we also just wanted to cuddle. In the minutes between Tay’s exclamations, even the most hammered partygoers were hyperaware of their whereabouts, shuffling across the carpet like chess pieces, scheming their way toward a particular ponytail so that when the time came and Tay started banging his pot, one could glance incidentally to the left and catch that particular eye as if to say, God, this is stupid. But if we must …

And if this body was taken, there was always the next round and this OK-looking person beside you, whose mouth you could sample, and perhaps have a chat with, before spying a memorized sweater pass out of the room and suddenly finding yourself needing to pee very badly; you could pursue these hallowed scapulae over the dance floor, down the hall, while you whispered under your breath not the words you would say to her but a countdown to midnight that Tay, draped over an ottoman, had yet to begin. You would pray that the timing would link up, that the last-train apprehension in your gut would resolve in a swooshing open of lips and/or doors, shunting you homeward, toward any bed. Tay announced: It was all a joke, this thing we based our lives on. I thought about you on the train ride here; I wore this dress for you alone, just as I wear my skin for you; but in the humid center of this shit show, let’s laugh while we kiss, because the Moment is a construct and we all get a bit dimply in the end.

I, for the most part, was curious: What would it be like to kiss a fat girl? What about a young techie, with facial hair that I normally found inexcusable? At 11:17 p.m., I got my answer. Afterward he patted my wrist and said, “Awesome.” I drifted back to my corner, like a fish having fed.

“The man, the man!” Tay erupted from the crowd and threw his arms around my neck. “Having fun?”

“Always.” My words were muffled by his sweater. “Where’s Pumpkin?”

“Mono.”

“Oh.” I tested myself for disappointment: none. “Tough break. So how’d you come up with this theme?”

“The Internet, obviously.” He pulled away but leaned on me to keep his balance; he smelled like a medicine cabinet. I hoped, for a moment, that he would call midnight right then and there. He acted so differently now, with a new swagger, new accent; would he still taste the same? He squinted at me. “It’s a good one, right? Very educational.”

I nodded.

“You never get to kiss your friends,” he said, taking on the pensive but authoritative tone of a professor. “Well, you can.” He giggled, as if to say, We would know. “But after a certain age, it gets tricky. Kissing means, like, marking territory. It becomes an act that freezes instead of … unleashes. But what if I just want to tell you I’ll miss you? Wouldn’t it be easier to do it like this?” He grabbed me by the collar and thrust me up against a wall, clockface bumping between our chests. I was laughing and splashing my drink on the ground; he released me before I could catch my breath. “Tonight,” he went on, “I feel absolved of responsibility. I kiss and tell! I kiss and text.” He paused to think, grinning. He was as pretty and pretentious as I remembered. “Honestly, I kind of feel like a Hare Krishna, passing out pamphlets.”

“The Way of Tay.” I considered. “It does have a nice ring to it. Maybe I’ll enlist.”

“Uh-oh.” He smiled. “I can see you mean business.”

He adjusted his headband with a gesture I interpreted as nervous. I flashed back to a similar moment, when he and I were sixteen. We were in his car, knee-deep in fast-food wrappers that never stopped smelling delicious, driving, it would be safe to assume, in circles. I’d made a joke about a girl that Tay was crushing on, a shy salutatorian named Sophie. They’d hooked up once, when she was moderately tipsy, and now he fretted over the likelihood of getting to third base.

“Would poppers help?”

I had laughed aloud. “This isn’t San Francisco.”

He shrugged. “I found some in the medicine cabinet. I think they were my uncle’s. Well, what about weed? I think she’ll let me if she feels relaxed.”

“Fat chance,” I said, not really even listening. I was more interested in the joint that I was rolling on my knee. “If I didn’t really wanna, what makes you think she would? She’s, like, in the choir.”

He’d stopped fiddling with the radio and looked at me sideways. “That was different. We were bored.” His expression was not unkind, but his tight eyes and lowered tone still stung.

I was caught off guard. I focused on the joint.

I knew that I loved Tay; I just wasn’t sure if I was in love with him. I didn’t etch his name into the flesh of my thighs or wonder at the smell of his shit, as if such an angel couldn’t possibly empty his innards of anything other than peach pits and warm wishes. That was the way that we talked about our crushes: as if they were mystical, the lambent coat-hangers upon which life’s true meaning hung to air. Tay made my bed smell bad even if all we did was watch TV; I alone was the expert of his unseemly wetness. Nothing I’d yet read described love like this—as routine, as shambly. I thought love was what grew, weirdly soft, over voids; it could only affect one body at a time, that of the wanter, alone in a room. But having known him nearly my whole life, having been on the swim team with him and seen him naked and dripping twice a day, every day, my access to Tay seemed total. As best friends, we were basically already dating.

Resting my elbow on the grease-yellowed window, my knee two inches from his, I trod carefully. “You don’t have to tell me,” I’d said, and forced a laugh. “She probably has a planner for this sort of thing.” I finished rolling my joint and the conversation quickly returned, as it so often did that season, to the particular translucence of Sophie’s hair in homeroom lighting.

Back at the party, I resorted to the same feigned nonchalance and bottomed my drink. “You know me. Always looking for a lifestyle change. So how many others have you recruited tonight?”

Tay smiled guiltily, becoming expansive again. “I’m not exactly sure. Fifteen, maybe? My cult rejects math.” He was momentarily distracted by a girl across the room. He jabbed a finger in her direction. “Perfect example! Take Lilith. D’ya know Lilith? I don’t want to sleep with her. But I’ve dreamed about her once or twice. In one dream we baked a fruitcake and rode on it toboggan-style while Donald Trump applauded. I don’t know her well enough to tell her this. But tonight I’m gonna kiss her. And that will be that. Lilith! C’mere!”

I turned to see where he was pointing and was struck by the numbing beauty of a pair of shoulder blades.

Thinking this was Lilith’s back, I waited for it to approach. I stared at her unmoving form, oblivious to the real Lilith’s arrival (a delightful dyke in denim on denim) and to her and Tay’s shrill conversation, until the point of my attention must have sensed me watching, browning under the microwaves of scrutiny, and twisted around, one arm wrapped across her waist, the other holding her drink to the hollow of her throat in a posture of deep thought or not-unpleasant boredom.

“Hey!” Tay shouted something that I didn’t realize was a name until its owner wiggled through the crowd, drink still poised against her throat like the center of a circle whose circumference was unclear to me, and grabbed hold of his nipple with her free hand. He made the sound again, pursing his lips and forming the vowels of a doo-wop background singer. “Oola, you dog.”

Oola. A word that sounded funny when you repeated it, like any word said too many times. I used to do this as a kid, repeating my name or the words book, bread, breasts, until these most basic things (human rights, I told myself) sounded foreign and I could barely remember what they meant. Oola similarly cracked open on the tongue, like something cream-filled, a necessary embarrassment, like gasping oh! during a scary movie or hissing slightly when kissed hard. It made one’s mouth suddenly suspect. I practiced reciting the name in my mind, terrified of the moment when I’d have to say it aloud. It reminded me of my parents’ friend Bebe, a film producer whose Austrian ski lodge Oola and I would, in the coming months, trash, then frantically tidy. As a kid, I dreaded having to greet her, chiming, Bonjour, Bebe! at my mother’s prompting. By saying her name aloud, I had no choice but to instantly picture this middle-aged woman naked, whether as the slit-eyed recipient of a pet name or an actual infant, I can’t say.

Oola hosed Tay with a smile. She was the sort of person who took a moment to focus in on her surroundings, rearranging the fray of her thoughts into more coherent forms. At the same time, she herself became solid, body gaining an outline through the baggy clothing she wore, remembering the placement of each of her teeth and offering them to you, one by one, like pistachios, cigarettes, sporadic uh-huhs. She needed a minute to quiet the corolla that made her mood obscure, that fuzziness that attracted one to her in the first place, just as one’s eyes are attracted to the one dumb bunny, now unidentifiable, who moved during a family photo. With Oola, I picture a gas burner clicked on, flaring violet and broad before the flame settles to Low. She was loose-limbed yet distinct; we watched her simmer into place and placed bets on her body temperature.

She seemed to move more slowly than the average person because of this coalescence, this tuning-in of cheekbones and individual arm hairs, like an image on an old TV defuzzing into recognition, a relieved oh, it’s you! It was not that she was spacey but, rather, spaced out: wide-set eyes, long limbs, lank hair, big teeth, and, of course, her incredible height. Let me gather my thoughts, she liked to say, and one could easily picture her doing this, selecting her words the way children in picture books pull stars down with string. As she turned her face toward yours, rotating each eyelash on its tiny axis, she was blowing the steam off the soup of her internal life; she hardened and became haveable.

The more I got to know her, the more it felt like this quality was not so much a trait as a headspace, a lush cavity that she had to be recalled from. She always seemed to be emerging, from a pool or dressing room, no grand entrance but a shy gathering of bags and garments about herself, which only made her sexier. When she spoke, her face filled out, like a pumpkin lit from within, but when she sat quietly, people often asked her if she was OK. She didn’t look sad, but as if she had lost track of something. Preteens sidled up to her with conspiratorial smiles, whispering, Are you high?

She seemed to not realize that her pacing was unusual, because she always reacted with surprise, even as she had to pause—a pause in which she buttoned and smoothed her metaphorical blouse, previously drooping with all the world’s worries—and wrangle up the words to express a jovial nah. And when she smiled, it was the smile of a student in a foreign-language class, earnest and pleading, because Monsieur is tapping his pen against the edge of his desk and everyone’s looking and she can’t for the life of her remember how to say pain. Monsieur prompts, Do you want a piece of …

Me? she offers teasingly, and there, that helpless smile.

That was one of the first things I noticed: how un-self-consciously she kept people waiting, and how we all acquiesced to her queer time, literally stooping to match her low voice.

It’s impossible, of course, to wholly return to that first impression, even as I recall the heat and clamor of the party with frightening veracity, the love songs on the stereo, how dashing Tay looked all in black. Too many associations clog the path to that first, virgin instance, to the unassuming tingle I felt when I caught sight of her shoulder blades. I can’t think about her shoulders, clothed or bare, without a thousand other moments in which they played a part surging to the forefront—a memory of her playing piano (Saint-Saëns) in a beige lace bra battles for precedence. I can’t be sure of what I really thought of her in those first few seconds, because I would have to empty my mind of all things Oola to get back to that stage, and to do so now, after all that we’ve been through and all the time that I’ve spent, would be virtually suicidal. All I know for certain of that moment is that I was surprised to see her walking toward me, this tall, tall girl, and as she neared, I did my best to stand up straight.

“What’s up?” she said.

“We were just discussing how fantastic my party is,” Tay crowed.

“Really?” She looked at me and smiled. “Sorry. What’s your name?”

“Leif.” I was barking, I don’t know why.

“Leif and I go way back,” Tay said. “He knows all my secrets. We’re basically brothers.”

“Have we met before?” I managed.

She squinted at me. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Where are you from?” My voice felt thick. “Your accent. America?”

She nodded. “California. People here are nicer if you say you’re Californian.”

“Maybe they think you’re a movie star.” I instantly regretted this.

She smiled and shrugged. “Or somehow less guilty than the rest of the states. Little do they know. I was raised near L.A., the shittiest place.”

“Are you Scandinavian? Oo-la?”

She laughed, opening her mouth completely. “No. I just had illiterate parents. And you?”

“Only technically. I’m a New England mutt.”

“A WASP?” She smiled in a way that seemed teasing.

“Uh.” I spread my hands. “You caught me.”

Tay had turned back to Lilith, taunting her with his clockface. “I’m not going to tell you,” I heard him say. “You have to guess.”

Oola didn’t move. She wore an expression of wary amusement, smiling tiredly as if her surroundings didn’t quite make sense but she was game anyway. She was six feet tall.

“So what brings you to London?” I asked, suddenly piquantly aware of how long it had been since I’d showered.

“Oh, you know.” She waved her hands meaninglessly. She wore black tights, sneakers, and a sleeveless T-shirt three times her size, emblazoned with the words PLEASURE IS A WEAPON. “I’m a bit of a bum.”

“A student?”

“I was. I would have graduated this year, but I’m taking time off. To do what, I don’t know yet.” She laughed as if she’d had to say this many times before.

“Have you been here before?”

“Yeah. I came with a band, we went all over the place. But I was too young, too fucked up, to really do anything.” The mental image of her puking in a bucket, wearing band merchandise, was oddly arousing. “So I thought I’d come back, as, like, a real person. I flew to Suffolk on a grant, but the money dried up and now I’m just … waiting.”

“What did you study?”

“Music. Like I said, I’m a bum.”

“Is that how you know Tay?”

“Sort of. We met at a museum. We sat down on the same bench in front of a gilded tub of Vaseline. It was called, uh, The Midas Touch. It had the artist’s fingerprints in it and the fingerprints of all the people he’d ever slept with. Tay whispered that it should be titled Greatest Hits. I said Slip ’n’ Slide. The rest is history.” She leaned in closer, eyes suddenly bright. “Tay’s the best. You know what I heard?”

“What?”

“His ex-girlfriend is in love with a wall.”

I laughed out loud, too stunned to be self-conscious. “What do you mean?”

“I think it was him. Or maybe one of his friends.” She pinned me with her eyes. “It wasn’t you, was it?”

“God, I hope not.”

She thought hard. “Her name was … Karma?”

“I think I remember a Karma. The artist?”

“Yeah!” Oola stepped closer, carried by the momentum of a story she knew to be juicy. “The performance artist. I guess she was sort of known for doing extreme shit, like breaking into tampon factories or only eating lipstick for a month or whatever. She started this new project where she visited a wall every single day. It was a random brick wall in an alley in Shoreditch, right behind a Chinese restaurant, the sketchy type with their curtains always drawn. This was way after she and Tay had split up. She brought flowers, magazines, chocolate, just like you would to someone in the hospital. She always brought a huge bottle of Fanta, I remember that. When someone asked why, she said it was the wall’s favorite. When people asked, like, What do you do there? she said they hung out. Sometimes she brought an old boom box and they danced. For slow songs, she leaned her back against the wall and shifted her weight from foot to foot. From afar, she looked like someone waiting for the bus. It’s easy to picture, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“This goes on for months, almost a year, until eventually people realize this isn’t an art project. She is just literally, simply, in love with her wall. Someone told the couple who owned the Chinese place that she was building a shrine to her dead brother, so they left her alone. Besides, their restaurant was almost certainly a front. She was the only person who ever went there, and all she ever got was a pound of white rice, uncooked, which she sprinkled on the cobblestones in some sort of, I don’t know, sexual ritual. A wedding, maybe.”

“That’s sort of sweet.”

“I know. She was a tyrant about graffiti, scrubbing it off with an electric toothbrush. It almost ended when she assaulted a drunk dude for pissing on it. And eventually she named it. Are you ready for the name?”

“I’m ready.”

“Wallis.”

“Come on.”

She raised her open palms in oath. My stomach dropped; she didn’t shave her armpits. Two hazy autumn suns, slightly moist, pointed right at me. To be frank, I felt spotlighted. She went on, unawares. “Karma was devoted. At first her friends tried to convince her out of it, but when they realized that she was in deep, they had to accept it. At least he couldn’t hurt her. They chose not to ask about sex. In my experience, that’s not so different from the way girls handle their friends dating douchebags or, like, libertarians. Just don’t ask about the sex. A few girls went with her one time and met Wallis; they all had a tea party on top of a dumpster. It seemed like a forever deal, until, all of a sudden, she fell in love with a bridge.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not! She fell in love with the Millennium Bridge.”

“So she and Wallis broke up?”

“She, like, cheated on him. As I understand it, he broke up with her.”

I shook my head in amazement. “Just Tay’s type. Petite and unstable.”

Oola fingered the rim of her glass. “Do you think it’s that weird?”

“I’m not sure. Do you?”

She shrugged. “I think I understand it. It’s like kids with their teddy bears, or, like, certain women with horses. Dads with gadgets. OK, in comparison, a wall is a bit, I don’t know, stark, but at least it’s dependable. In fact, it’s the most stable thing she could have done. To fall in love with something that can’t move, ha-ha. Her only true problem, I think, was that they looked weird together. Do you know, on sunny days, she would press her cheek against the warmed-up bricks. I’ve done that before.”

“I’ve done that too.”

“Apparently she would walk up and down the alley for hours, trailing her fingers over every brick. Stroking Wallis’s face. She kept her nails trimmed for this reason. Her friends said that when she came home, her fingers would be bleeding.”

“Wow.”

She looked down, pulsing with the effort of her thought. She blinked at me before she said it, in a frank but slightly wistful tone. “I’d love to be fucked by one of those Japanese bullet trains.”

More versed in books than in real life, I took this to be the moment where we would fall in love. Yes, I footnoted this moment, made a mental note to remember—the song playing (Leonard Cohen), her smile one beat too late, Tay’s fluttering proximity as he arm-wrestled with the couple beside us.

“Really?” was the only thing I could think to say. “The high-speed trains, you mean?”

She nodded once. “Just picture them. So trim, so clean. I don’t need to explain it, do I?”

She didn’t. “No.”

“And what about you?”

Before I could answer, there was a crash behind us. Tay had initiated a party-wide game of Marry/Fuck/Kill. In his excitement he’d knocked over a vase. “It’s your last night on earth!” he howled, waving the displaced flowers. “You can do all three! The question is, to what degree?”

“Oh no,” sighed Oola. She took a long sip. “I certainly don’t want to play.”

“What do you want to do instead?”

She barely considered. “I want to take drugs and move weirdly to music.” She laughed at herself. “Oh my God. Big dreams, baby.”

Could you have resisted her, even if you’d had an inkling that this beauty was an act? I had that inkling, but still dove in; in fact, I was curious to see what lay behind it, what bear trap her luminous foliage hid. On which side of the ampersand did I fall in the S&M construct? I wanted her to tell me.

In middle school, I once placed a cellophane bag of gummy worms in my crush’s gym locker. The next day, she was in hysterics because they’d melted in her sneakers and she thought it was a killer mold. Look at the color! she bellowed. Have you ever seen anything like that? The girls gathered round to inspect the neon monstrosities (or so I’m told). What if it’s radioactive? one breathed. Worse yet, she was marked as tardy by our ex-Marine gym teacher because she’d refused to put the sneakers on, bravely marching out to the track in her ballet flats and regulation sweatpants. I was the king of failed gestures. I planted the flowers that carried the blight.

I should tell you that I’m not a cheery person. Simply put, the sight of an old man eating his breakfast invariably moves me to tears. Pervert, my freer friends bellow. Leave him to his applesauce. But the thought of this foodstuff further destroys me. As a reader, you should be glad of my morose streak. Happy people bake brownies, save lives for a living, only write to unwind or express their innermost feelings to the person they love in a long-winded handwritten letter. They put three stamps on the envelope (pictures of birds, they say slyly, to symbolize freedom) and feel crushed when X never writes back. Being unhappy has made my life generally brighter and better than most of my friends’, because when the shit hits the fan for them, they feel slighted, offended; they look around with their mouths hanging open, as if to say, Can you believe it? They do laps around their mailboxes. They pull out glossy clumps of hair and mail these to their ever-more-horrified exes. Meanwhile, I get off on I told you so. I nod hello to the fuckery.

Looking at Oola then, with her misty movements and delayed laugh, I figured she might also be unhappy, in that deep-seated neutral way that predisposes one to the occult and slow movies, and this, go figure, made my spirits soar. Perhaps, at last, I’d found someone to wring and bitch with, a body who’d been broken along roughly the same axis. Perhaps she’d find my blue genes Springsteen-sexy.

“Listen to this,” she was saying. “I love him so.” Leonard Cohen still played, chosing an invisible woman with his hard words of love. She and I were caught between her invisible thighs, monoliths nudging us nearer together, while the batting of her invisible lashes recirculated the air in the room. “All these lonely musicians with songs about loving women. Do you ever wonder about the logistics of that?”

Was she flirting with me? I couldn’t tell. “Sometimes.”

“I do. A single musician will have, like, so many songs about love, more songs than lovers.” She waved her hand across her face. “By my count, at least. And not love in the abstract but specific love, for a specific girl. Down to the details: Your pale blue eyes. Visions of Johanna. Lola Lola. Aaaaaangie. I’d like to get all these girls in a room together. Do you think they’re real?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Take Serge Gainsbourg. He was ugly.” She splayed her hands, as if to demonstrate ugliness. “Was he really in love every time he wrote a song about it? Or did he have some major heartbreak that he kept coming back to? I read that’s what T-Swift does. She’s cathexed. Maybe these guys write love songs as a form of purging. Or wishful thinking. Or, uh, picking at a wound. Or because they can’t help it. Or maybe they choose a girl at random, whoever they last slept with.” She smiled to herself, revealing her large and slightly rounded teeth. “Maybe songwriting is like, you know, alchemy. Makes a bland girl suddenly babely. What do you think?”

I blushed a bit, thinking of the strange habit I’d developed while traveling alone. In any particularly beautiful moment, when camping in a bombed-out farmhouse on the Bosnian–Croatian border, for instance, I found myself thinking of strangers, girls and boys whose first names, much less a worked-over memory of their light-speckled eyes, I had no rightful claim to. Similar to how one sees a lover’s face everywhere, superimposed onto billboards or kids’ bodies, I hallucinated the most random faces until they eventually took on the familiar quality of the beloved—hazy, sleepy, piqued. I would picture these relative strangers on the beach beside me, equally sunburned, my accomplices in awe. I imagined myself explaining the local delicacies (of which I knew nothing) to the severely scoliotic girl who worked at the front desk of my hometown library. Her name and age were lost, but something in the architecture of, say, Stockholm evoked her bony shoulders. Soccer jerseys emerged from my mind, limp wrists, missed patches on a shaven thigh, or the blond hauntings of a beard. I caught a glimpse of an impossibly young drag queen in a club in Tokyo and carried her with me, by rail and air, her hairless limbs to be unfolded only when I stopped to nap in public parks. With the sun on my face, I pictured her sitting crisscross in the grass, ten feet away, watching me.

Waiters were the easiest prey. I fell in love at a merciless rate: For four days I thought nonstop about whomever I’d last sat beside on a particularly bumpy bus ride, so long as they were young. I used their profile as a sort of shelf upon which to rest my brain, a soft (or so I imagined) body to split life’s rarebits with. That is, until another waitress called me sir or fiddled, so disastrously, with the string of her apron. The violation (and I knew it was one) was not how I imagined these bodies or in what positions, but simply that I recalled them at all, dug up the 0.001 percent I knew and took fantastic license with the rest—more kleptomaniac than common creep. Could Oola already sense this neediness in me?

“Maybe they write the songs in advance,” I said carefully, addressing a point just above her head, “and have to find someone to fill them after the fact. Have to find a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket, or however that one goes.”

“Could be.” She nodded vigorously, carried by the conversation’s momentum. “It’s funny too how love songs are, like, always in the second person. Have you noticed that? Hey, little girl, is your daddy home; your body is a wonderland; you make me feel like a natural woman.” She spoke these lyrics briskly. “So even if the girl’s not named, she’s there. She hovers. It’s a weird instinct, isn’t it, the second person? I—want—you—so—bad. It’s so public. Girls and boys everywhere will pretend to be that You or Your. Even if it’s your Your, like if you know that you’re the one! How many poor girls don’t even know that they’re the subject of a song? Or think that their boyfriend is writing about them, when he’s reflecting on some past affair?” She laughed again. “I’m babbling.”

“I like it.”

She attempted to focus on me, actually squinting as if that might help her disparate aura firm up. “What is it you do again?”

“That’s a contentious question. But I try to write.”

At the time, I hated writing, yet I called myself a writer. Join the club, Tay might say. I had to trick myself into writing, most often in the thoughtless limbo between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., just as I had to trick myself into talking to attractive people, at roughly the same hour, when high standards (witty, busty, kind) degrade into a medical exam (two breasts, youngish, still breathing). With both writing and flirting, I hoped for the best and loathed myself afterward.

She considered this. “That’s bold of you.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe I write young-adult fiction about Midwestern lesbians with eating disorders.”

“Do you?”

“Nah. Just bi-curious spelling-bee champions with cancer.”

“Ha-ha.” She said it like it’s spelled. “That’s OK with me.” There was a pause, like an ember glowing on the rug between us. Our banter had petered out; the moment had come for a genuine assessment. What did we want? What could I give her?

When I was in college, I wrote a screenplay. You might as well know that. To quote the Lower Connecticut Bee, it was a semi-feminist sci-fi joyride about a mermaid named bell (lowercase) who falls in love with a paraplegic war vet. It was sexy and sad. I drafted it on index cards during introductory seminars on Thing Theory and wrote it, 70 percent stoned, over the course of a long weekend in May. In a jumbled moment just before daybreak, I titled it Flipped Out. I remember renting the back room of an iffy pizzeria and holding a table reading with all my friends. Whoever laughed during the love scenes (there were five) had to finish his or her drink in one go. This led to the script’s denouement being derailed by several sets of hiccups and lots of premature applause. Nevertheless, I actually sold the thing for a fair amount of money, passing it along to one of my parents’ many contacts, an ulcery exec whose Finnish villa I would house-sit for two and a half depressive weeks. I went through all his self-help books and nearly killed his koi.

Even now, three years later, the film has yet to be made. I hear production’s been grounded by a producer who finds the script’s sex scenes unsettling and the protagonist too queer. Nonetheless, the check came through one week after I graduated. I’ve been able to more or less live off the money ever since, freelancing for a handful of highbrow erotic magazines with names like Rubberneck and J.A.Z.Z.Z. whenever I need to feel useful (here loosely defined). How could I possibly encapsulate this information for Oola? Instead, I began counting the hairs on her arms.

It was she who broke the silence. “We’d better get going, before it’s too late.” She was referring to Tay’s game of Marry/Fuck/Kill, which had inexplicably devolved into musical chairs.

So we did as she wished. We got high and went to a chain movie theater in a twenty-four-hour mall and walked around without buying a thing. The building and the people in it were spectacle enough. Muzak filled the space: more outdated love songs. We threw pound coins in the fountain. We went up and down the escalator, giggling stupidly. On our fifth time down, she looked at me, eyes shining weirdly. She said something that I didn’t catch. “What?” I bellowed. My voice echoed off the polished floor and nobody looked twice at us. She said it again: “You’re addictive.” She grabbed my wrist and opened her mouth as if to laugh, but closed it before the sound could come out. “That reminds me. I want popcorn.”

Suddenly ebullient, I sprinted to the top of the escalator and waved toward the concessions. “You’ve come to the right place,” I howled, blocking the entrance. Be patient if I linger on these images, on us as we were, annoyingly young and already falling in love, smug in our bodies despite their soft reek. The shit will hit the fan, soon; the wit will blink out into undressed pain. She rolled toward me as if atop the world’s slowest tidal wave. “Thank God,” she said, “thank God.”

Arizona

THERE CAN BE NO DENYING THAT IN THE BEGINNING, THAT FIRST heady spell, ours was a relationship based largely on sex.

I’m hesitant to state this so plainly—that we fell fully in love while fucking—because it gives the wrong impression of us, me as sexed up, she as free. In fact, I was near to virginal when we first met, and she downed a bottle of wine each night in order to “get loose.” Despite these obstacles, we found ourselves enamored of the other’s body, knowing the taste of each other’s armpits before it occurred to us to ask the basics. I remember so clearly the night when we first started talking, three weeks into our companionship. We were alone in Arizona. It was a full moon, fuller than I had thought possible, and everything in the desert, including our dishes and bedspread and blurred, upturned faces, was spookily blue. When I peered over the edge of the bed, at our sneakers lined up in a row, the soles and the laces were also soft blue.

After Tay’s party, I hung around London for a couple weeks more, accepting his invitations to dinners and parties only when I suspected that O might be there. I guess you could say that I had a crush, a hunch about the tenderness she reserved for a select few. She and I conversed a bit more at these parties, heads bent together in the corners of bars, the better to hear and also to bask in the other, I sometimes daring to tap her, hot and soft, on the forearm and say, “Come again?” After ten minutes of chatter, she seemed to reach a limit and would find some thin excuse to flee. She portrayed herself as one with a very small bladder. I didn’t mind; after any period of unadulterated nearness to the body I’d started to picture while falling asleep, I too needed a moment to gather my wits, to lean against the wall and take a deep breath. I was nervous; I interpreted this as a good sign.

On my last day in London, we met in a park. On a whim I asked her to fly with me to Arizona; after a pause (in which I sang “Happy Birthday” twice in my head), she said sure. “Nothing but a death wish keeping me in London.” She shrugged. It was an especially sleety, shit-tinted day. “I could do with brighter horizons.”

If the night at the movie theater was our impromptu first date, and all other encounters the willed coincidence of mutual attraction, then this walk in the park was our second real outing. We hadn’t yet touched in any game-changing way; our most intimate exchanges to date were cheek-kisses, and it was only because we were Americans, bound to the concept of personal space, that these routine smooches gave us pause. It’s weird to look back on that afternoon, the two of us strolling through some lord’s estate, transfixed by the pebbles in the neatly raked path, overcome by the shyness of a second date in which all the favorable things you remember about the first date are suddenly suspect and one wrong word, a bit of spittle on lip, can make the heart seem sham. Oola was wearing a goose-down parka that obscured her from the waist up; I had two pieces of cake in my pocket that I’d meant to share but forgotten about the instant we cheek-kissed hello. It’s even weirder to realize, after all that’s happened since that day, that the rain, most chancy and banal of forces, influenced Oola heavily when she decided to tie herself to me. More than flashing lights or funny feelings, the arbitrary designs of weather played a role in our romance. You’ll see. She wanted to be warm; she would find, incidentally, heat in me.

I brought up Arizona partly because I had nothing to say. While at Tay’s parties we’d been unstoppable, I was embarrassed to find, on this grim afternoon, dizzy stretches of silence. It didn’t feel normal. Shyness, I tried to remind myself, indicates interest. Shyness is the sister to seduction. I took comfort in glancing at her face, inclined away from mine as if the park’s anemic roses were of especial concern. I’d been thinking of her all night long, and now I couldn’t bear her downy nearness. It’s not unfair to say that stubbornness, alongside attraction, prompted me to face her, take her mittened hand in mine, and announce, “You’ve got yourself a deal!” and then, in a tragic spurt, “Yabba dabba doo!” at which she was generous enough to laugh.

I booked our flights using my parents’ mammoth store of frequent-flyer miles. We were destined for a plot of desert somewhere outside Phoenix, where a family friend and failed architect had a house of glass and steel. He called it the Abode and filled its yard with ugly sculptures. Oola liked the birdbath made from an old toilet; I found especially appalling the mobiles made from Barbie heads. There was a saltwater pool on the roof and a basement so extravagant I could only assume it was meant as a bomb shelter. During our stay I used the basement as an office. Its multiple bunk beds with their Native blankets and the pantry stocked with s’mores supplies made apocalypse seem campy, fun. There were woven rugs on the concrete floor, Arcosanti bells in the doorways (but who would hear them ring?). I had a couple of articles to finish for a pseudo-academic magazine called Wingdings. When I needed to procrastinate, I sketched cathedral windows on butcher paper and tacked them to the hard-packed walls or wandered into the pantry and made astronaut ice cream. Oola spent her days hiking in the dizzying acres of land that stretched all around and made the Abode seem almost lewd in its glamour, the harsh shine of wall-to-wall windows and tinkle of sculptures disrespecting the deadbeat desert hum of fussless death and owls hooting. Every night the coyotes raised their alarm; every morning ice clung to the wind chimes.

It’s possible that Oola interpreted our setup as in part economic, and that was why she slept with me our first night in the Abode. I had to stifle a yelp when I walked into the bedroom to find her totally naked, sitting on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, like a patient.

“It’s hot,” she said, half-smiling.

My mind was a blank, as it had been for a while, preoccupied by an amoebic sense of foreboding, as if waiting for the whole world to lean in and kiss me. The post-party silence had followed us to the States. We’d spent the previous night in LaGuardia, listening to audiobooks on separate devices and sharing a box of Girl Scout cookies—“I missed America!” I’d cried at the same time that she sighed, “How did those little twits get in here?” I’d asked what she was listening to, and she showed me her screen: American Psycho. “God,” I said, “you’re one morbid chick.” She smiled serenely, headphones in, not hearing me.

Her smile, in the master bedroom with its turquoise tiles and sliding glass doors, was similarly calm, though her eyes’ slittedness belied unnatural urgency. She was here, all of her, in this pause, just for me. When chatting at Tay’s parties, this was what she looked like right before she cried, “Gotta pee, be right back!” waving over her shoulder as mine relaxed into the wall. It was my privilege now to study her face, the shifty expression of hunger she’d run to the bathroom to hide.

“Too hot for pajamas,” I said, stiffly nodding, and sat beside her on the bed. I unlaced my shoes.

“Are there scorpions here?” she asked, leaning forward as if to check under the bed. Her breasts swung forward and their mass, their place in space, stupefied me. I looked down. “I think so,” I whispered, though I didn’t want to be whispering. “Remember to shake out your shoes.”

She laughed, as if this were funny. “Can do,” she said. “Do they sting?”

“I think so.”

“Ouch,” she mouthed. “Will you kiss me?”

Shyness, like a skirt, dropped softly to the tiled floor. The profundity of the relief I felt is impossible to convey to you after the fact; the best way to put it is that I suddenly remembered, with a delirious lurch, placing one hand on Oola’s knee and the other on her neck, which pulsed hotly, that I was not the only writer—duh!—and that I too could be written by somebody else (Oola? God?), that I too could be caught unawares. As I stared at her throat, so improbable in loveliness that I saw spots, I was able to recognize, finally, the narrative in which we’d found ourselves stuck and were helplessly furthering, the narrative that to any onlooker was plain as day, even boring—two young strangers, in an empty house, counting down the minutes until their bodies can recline and their inability to speak be reconfigured as sexy. Our first kiss, with its tiny squelch, alchemized the awkwardness of every prior conversation, every oops and mumbled hi; of course, of course, I wanted to laugh, my hands on her shoulders, this was where we were headed, this was what couldn’t be voiced. Everything felt easy, now that we’d finally faced it—the obvious horror of sex. I flung my jeans on the floor, and the sound of the belt buckle hitting the tiles surprised us. We laughed, jittery. In the absence of words, we had only our bodies, and on this night so hot as to seem heavy, they were far more accommodating.

In the following weeks, we moved slowly, ate sparsely, did our own things during the day, came together at night. Perhaps this was the purest way to get to know each other, starting at square one and feeling no pressure to progress, to pursue deeper chutes or taller ladders. In the clear desert sunlight, her cunt was deep enough. Watching her pace the sculpture garden and sing ABBA hits softly, I sometimes feared, in a vague, cheerful way, that she might be planning to kill me, take pictures of the carnage, and feed my liver to the birds. I locked the door when I showered. She was so cool, anything seemed possible, and it’s partially true, that she managed to harvest my organs, in the cool blue master bedroom, where we tussled and hissed without breaking our vows of silence. I don’t mean to suggest that we didn’t talk at all; we gossiped, thought aloud, decided what takeout to order, but it was all present tense. We were careful to avoid the past or anything as mucky. Out of bed, we maintained our relation as convivial strangers.

For despite how queer our setup seemed, when she told me to chomp on her nipples because it reminded her of something she’d seen in a Saw movie, I must confess, the wrongness moved me. When I traced three perfectly straight lines of scar tissue, each an inch long, on her innermost thigh and asked what had happened, and she answered lightly, “It was almost an accident,” I sensed, deeply tingling, that I was nearing an edge. Sometimes, when I kissed her, she was so limp as to seem half-alive, but when I reached between her legs, she was already wet. She possessed a chillness so total it matched my intensity. While I hustled toward ecstasy, she sighed and let God enter somewhere else. At times, I read her as a masochist. There was something in her easy way of lying back, received by pillows, or her eyes’ beatific glaze when I pulled back, mid-lick, to stare at her, that suggested the unnatural extent of her laxness. But she would surprise me too, by breaking off suddenly to make a stray comment like, Who invented anal beads? Or, When I have sex with girls, I always feel like there’s straight boys watching—is that wrong? then lying back in that easy way as she awaited my answer, and we would chat, relaxed as sisters, she fluffing her pubes like a pedant stroking his beard, and I would be forced to reconsider her. We agreed that anal beads seemed like something Socrates would have loved.

There were times, before dawn, when we could be nowhere but Mars, when the land was pocked and moony, flecked with spurts of oily grass, and disc-shaped clouds came ever closer, periwinkle flying saucers, and not even boots on gravel made a sound. Paranoia felt endemic to the landscape, to the horizon choked off by the sky and the vast flats of white sand that were suddenly, savagely, purple by nightfall, as did a certain sexiness, the thrill of being scraped out, of waiting with hands tied. One could get in stare-downs with the moon, so slim and indifferent, presiding over this nothing where anything goes, the broken heart of America, giant and pinkish and crinkled, left to the elements, left to air out. If desire makes you tongue-tied, Arizona had it bad. It is certainly weird that we began our affair a ten-hour drive from Big Sur, where we’d eventually end up, hog-tied, but such is the holy scattershot of life in the drone age, when we bought tiny bottles of conditioner in citadel-sized supermarkets, zigzagging over oceans just to end up in a cabin one mad drive from where from Oola was born, a town I still didn’t know the name of at that point in our tryst. The desert days swirled on: baby oil, pad Thai.

“Do you think there are ghosts out here?” she asked one evening, cheek pressed to the sliding glass, a glass of wine on the floor beside her.

“No,” I said calmly, though I thought otherwise. “Do you?”

“Oh yeah. How could I not?” She smiled with excruciating slowness, the corners of her mouth pushing the planets out of line. “I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.”

“Have you seen any?” I played with the fringe of a pillow. My weak heart had begun to thud, as loudly as when she undressed; perhaps this was the source of the bumps in the night.

She shook her head. “No. But I feel them.” Her expression was deadpan.

“And what do they feel like?”

“That game, Telephone. Or …” She mused. “A tongue in the belly button.”

I insisted she demonstrate, the marble-blue moon illuminating the back of her neck while the rest of her body went grainy. “Heebie jeebies,” I screamed when her tongue hit its mark.

“There have been mornings,” she said, “when, I swear to God, I wake up with my hair braided.”

We moved on to the topic of moths in the cupboard; they’d made a home in our unsealed cereal boxes. They died soundlessly, added crunch to our breakfast. As we spoke, they cluttered the lamps in the garden, polluting the light. How we hated those fay motherfuckers. We gazed outside at the lamps grossly strobing and plotted how best to annihilate them.

Everything we did in the desert felt subversive to me, a classic New England romantic. Instead of romancing, we tried not to be interested in each other. Instead, we stuffed our shoes with newspaper in fear of scorpions and felt aroused by the sky (so big, so blue). Instead, I bit her nipples until they bled and came on her chest and we both mixed our hands in the fluids, half-smiling. In this landscape that felt limitless, we were equally curious to see how far we could go, who would be the first to cry uncle, to get hurt and not find it sexy. A moment when I felt myself tipping was when I asked, somewhat reflexively, mouth full of her, “What feels good?” and she tilted her head back and said happily, “Everything!” and I was struck with so much tenderness that I couldn’t make a joke, couldn’t speak, all I wanted to do was embrace her, say thank you. But before I could, she put my whole fist in her mouth and garbled, “Chubby bunny.”

We lived like this for twenty-one magic days, until the night she rolled over and said, “My mom would think that I’m a prostitute.” She chuckled from deep within. “Like, literally, a prostitute.”

It was a full moon, and the desert throbbed with little lives, innumerable transactions taking place just outside the sliding doors, ajar.

“I haven’t given you money,” I said, too stupid to realize how stupid I sounded.

She smiled and traced a spiral on her thigh. “Not explicitly, no.”

I sat up, confused. “That’s not fair.”

She traced her nails over my nipples. “Life’s not fair,” she murmured, completely unfazed. “Yabba dabba doo.” There it hung, our first cliché as real lovers. I could picture them accumulating, like glass balls on a Christmas tree.

I leaned forward, wiping my mouth. “What do your parents do?”

Here was the crux. She paused, and I could see that she was weighing her options. Something outside screamed, just once. To answer would be to tear down the partition we’d carefully built, to let me in deep without a clear exit.

She switched on the bedside lamp and sat up. There were bruises forming on her breasts, yellow blobs, our poor rendering of the California poppies that dotted the highways. “My dad was a roadie for metal bands. Now he sells jewelry and rocks. My mom is a hostess at the Gold Rush casino.” She laughed. “Have you heard of it?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

Then, without bothering to put on clothes or wash her mouth out, hands folded patiently over her lightly creased stomach, she proceeded to give me the Story of Her Life, something she’d clearly recited many times and tweaked into a monologue she could rattle off with eyes half-closed. As she spoke, I felt funny; I nodded along, though my pulse was racing. Up until that point, I’d assumed she came from money. Something about her quietness, her way of leaning back, her queenly limbs, bespoke privilege, or perhaps I’d been dense enough to associate her long blond beauty, the sort that I fell for, with good breeding, good luck. I found myself scanning her body for remnants of hardship, for giveaways (her quietness evoking resilience? Her thin arms the result of PB&J for three meals? Her masochism really a familial relation to pain?) that I’d previously been too besotted to notice. The white lines of scar tissue on her thigh caught the light. Where before she’d been a twist, a bit of newness in my life, I was watching her rapidly become something more—a destination, perhaps. A landscape. I blinked and tried to listen. The cunt I thought I’d come to know was suddenly a tunnel; I was standing at the mouth. The desert clatter fell away. I didn’t hear the coyotes that night.

“Papa was a rolling stone,” she said, then cracked up. I smiled weakly. She wiped her eyes. “I always used to say that. It’s kinda true: He was on the road a lot of the time, and he’s always been obsessed with rocks. Hence the jewelry business. He makes them into necklaces. Now he drives up and down the coast, selling his rocks at flea markets. He’s happy, I think. He was happy then too. He’s a pretty carefree dude, my dad. If you saw him in a bar, you might think he’s a Hells Angel or something, but once you get him talking, he’s totally harmless. He remembers everyone’s name, their birthstone too. He and my mom were drifters—you know, a bit harder than hippies; they met at a forty-eight-hour Beltane party, both tripping. According to Dad, he was starstruck. Mom was wearing rubber pants so tight she couldn’t sit down; he says that’s why they danced all night. I saw him probably three times a month, and those were always good times. It’s not like he was trying to get away from my mom and me; it was just part of his job. We had Marilyn Manson over for dinner a few times. He told my parents I was the most self-possessed ten-year-old he’d ever encountered. I always remembered that.

“I grew up in a dinky town north of L.A., just around the corner from Neverland Ranch. You know, Michael Jackson’s place. That was our town’s one and only claim to fame; everyone’s parents either didn’t work or worked far away. My mom drove across the border into Nevada every single day for work. Sometimes she slept over at the casino, which was also a hotel. She would come home smelling like a totally different person: twenty different types of perfume. I think she and I would have been close, if she’d had the time. Sometimes we hung out on weekends, and we’d fill out our birth charts; most of the time, though, if she was home, she made a beeline for the shower, asked me how school was, asked Grandma how I was, didn’t listen to her answer, and then went to bed. She slept all day Sunday, her one day off. At a certain point I think we both realized we had nothing to talk about, so she clung to the idea of me as a good student. You should be a lawyer, O, she always told me; I don’t know why. Go to college. Don’t stay here. As if I could anyway. But so long as I kept my grades up, I could get away with murder.

“When I was nine, my grandma moved in with us, allegedly to keep an eye on me when Mom and Dad were working. But all she ever did was watch TV and yell at me. She’s the only person I’ve ever hated. She told my mom I was bad news, mostly because I stole her cigarettes. She was too senile to prove it was me. I always thought grandparents were supposed to know how to cook, but the only thing she ever made was hard-boiled eggs. She put them on a paper plate with baby carrots, because she was too lazy to do dishes. When I went vegan, she freaked. Is it because of a boy? Do you have anorexia? She couldn’t understand it. Who the fuck cares about motherfucking chickens?

“When I was thirteen, she sent my pictures to some modeling agency in L.A. This was her fixation: that I should be a model. She talked endlessly about how she’d once been a model, back in the day, but I could never find any evidence. When I asked to see pictures, she said her portfolio had burned in a fire. When I asked why she didn’t come up on the Internet, she said she used a different name. She was certainly tall enough, taller than me, and skinny because she didn’t even eat the eggs she cooked, just the carrots, dipped in mustard. When the agency called back and wanted to meet me, she was ecstatic. It was one of the only times she’d ever been happy to see me. The other time was whenever we watched American Idol. I had to burst her bubble with the modeling thing. How the fuck am I supposed to get there? Neither of us could drive. You think there are modeling jobs out here? Like, maybe for a D.A.R.E. campaign. She blew up. You’re so selfish, she said. Don’t you want to support us? She threw everything in the fridge at me, including a carton of eggs. I had to go sleep at a friend’s.

“I got into piano just to get out of the house. We had a neighbor with a Steinway who would let me practice in his living room. Sometimes he stood in the doorway to listen, which gave me the creeps, but nothing bad ever happened. He was the loneliest dude I think I’ve ever met. His name was Carlton. As far as I knew, he never worked. He just puttered around in his living room, watering his plants, smoking crack in the bathroom, as if I didn’t notice. His age was a mystery. He put on his robe when I came around, but I suspected he didn’t leave the house very often. I assumed he was living on some sort of inheritance. I asked if he could play. I don’t play anymore, he said. But I used to be good. He was the one who set me up with a teacher. Her name was Miss Spoons. She lived somewhere else, but she’d drive to Carlton’s every week, and they both praised the fuck out of me. Such rare talent; totally untrained; best I’ve heard in years, blah blah blah. I didn’t stop to think about what it actually meant to be the best in a fuck-off town like mine. Like, of course I was the best. Who was my fucking competition? The crackhead next door? Oh well. They made me feel good.

“They helped me apply to a performing-arts high school in L.A. Every morning at 6:00 a.m. I’d wait outside the town library, which was really just a trailer full of romance novels, and a special bus came just for me. I was pretty popular at my new school; I think people found me exotic. One girl said that I was cute. You always wear clothes that don’t fit! It’s so cute. I befriended some models, girls even taller and skinnier than me. If I hung out with my new friends, I stayed at their houses in the Valley or the Palisades. We did normal things like watch movies and get pizza and text boys to come over, then cancel last minute, and I’d be so happy I could cry. I never brought people back home. For one thing, our house smelled. For as long as I lived there, it smelled—not bad, just strong. Like hamsters and milk. Maybe that’s why I went vegan. I was always so afraid that the smell would follow me, get trapped in my clothes. I smoked menthols to try to cover it up. For another thing, I didn’t think my old friends would get along with these girls. As it was, they thought I was snobby, which I probably was, and eventually stopped hanging with me. Oh well. More time to practice. I was alone all the time. No wonder I eventually became a bit of a slut. On the weekends I would practice for twelve hours a day, make dinner for Carlton, and still have time on my hands. The summer after my freshman year, that’s when I went a bit crazy. I had no choice, really: suck dick or die of boredom. It got so that I couldn’t bear to spend the night alone, with my grandma watching TV until five in the morning, when my mom got up to go to work and made her turn it off. I had a series of boys I would text from all over. Some were losers; some were rich. I gave head to a kid with a Rothko on his wall. Isn’t it boring? he said. The ones that lived in my town also found me exotic, I think, because I didn’t smoke crack or go to raves or have kids. Have you ever seen a celebrity? they asked, and I’d lie to make myself look glamorous, when the only celebrity I ever saw was Danny DeVito, in line at the drugstore.

“Since I couldn’t drive I basically biked everywhere, from one boy’s house to another. I got into some sketchy shit that summer, but it never caught up to me. I’m the queen of sticky situations. You probably already know that. I could be high off someone’s parents’ painkillers, then go get stoned with another group of boys and have to snort half an Adderall just to bike home, and I’d still practice for five hours at Carlton’s, reeking. He didn’t mind. You’re a wild child, he always said. He meant it nicely. One time a cop pulled me over when I was high out of my mind. Do I know you? he asked me. He smelled exactly like my grandmother, and the more I stared at him, the more he looked like her. I’m a model, I whispered, and he got this weird smile. I knew it. Must have seen you in a magazine. He told me to wear a helmet and drove off. Protect that pretty head of yours! I’ve been lucky, that’s for sure.

“I thought for a long time that I got a full ride to my high school, but I later found out that Carlton sponsored me. How he got the money, I’ll never know. I also found out that he’d been convicted of statutory rape when he was eighteen and that was why he couldn’t get a job. My mom showed me his house, marked with a pink dot, on that website where you look up sexual predators. I asked her if she was worried about how much time I’d spent with him. She shrugged. Depends on how old the girl was. Poor Carlton. This was after he’d moved on to meth and stopped answering the door. I was a senior in high school. I just practiced there. I would have liked to tell him about my acceptance to Curtis. He was one of the only people at home who would’ve known how to react. My parents were pleased, but anything pleased them. Oola’s so responsible, my dad would tell people. Always on her own, a little lady. I played for him sometimes and he’d always tear up. That’s a skill you’ll have for life. Can you play “Danny Boy” for your pop?

“When I hugged Miss Spoons at graduation, she told me Carlton had OD’d in the bathtub a few weeks before and left the Steinway to her. At the time, I was hurt. But what would I have done with it? My parents’ living room could barely fit my grandma’s new flat-screen. She bought it as soon as I announced my plans to go to conservatory. Conservatory? she spat. Since when do you like flowers? You’re always indoors; that’s why your skin is so bad. How do you turn this thing up? She’s probably sitting in front of it now. Can you smell that?” She leaned forward, eyes weirdly aglow. “Hamster—I knew it. Don’t blame me.”

And she leaned back, satisfied.

In middle school, a teacher lent me Into the Wild. I read it so many times that the paperback cover came off in chunks. I had a raging crush on Chris McCandless, patron saint of adrenaline junkies and fidgety white youth. I was aroused by his arrogance, his stupid boy desire to master the unknown. Would it make sense if I said, then, Oola was my Alaska?

“Wild child,” I whispered. It felt like a code. “Wild child.”

During our desert binge of skin and spit (tangy from dehydration), I thought I’d gone into the wild just by getting inside her. On this night when we began talking (and thereafter never seemed to stop), I realized how hasty I’d been. The absoluteness of Oola spread out before me, like the acres of desert that changed colors at will. There was so much to learn, so many places to go to. Her legs, comfortably flopped in a crisscross position as she lit a cigarette, seemed to signify an endlessness. Sex was only one pasture, the most unoriginal high point, ground zero of closeness. Drifting around the Abode with lips swollen from kissing, I’d considered our liaison poetic, the soft edge of radical because we didn’t know each other’s middle names, when really it was commonplace, kid stuff without even the threat of being walked in on. I felt myself sliding and held on to the bedframe. Wild child. A resolution was forming, ulcer-like, in my gut: I’d go where no man had gone before. I’d travel deep into love and walk all the fuck over it. I didn’t contemplate what would happen when and if I mastered love (Chris forever hitchhiking toward some odder, farther land) or how the extremes of love might leave my body totaled, in need of suppler containers. Naked and shining in the weird blue of the moon, I trusted my body, a rareness in sex. I trusted hers too, splayed before me, like grassland, whipped up by invisible breezes, inviting me in.

“What’s up?” she said, exhaling. The smoke was blue, as was her stomach, as were my jittering hands when I reached out and touched it. I smoothed my hand across it like one wiping leaves off a windshield. “It’s your turn now,” she laughed.

“For what?”

She affected a Valley accent. “To share.”

“What should I talk about?”

“Anything.” She dropped ash on the bed. “I can handle it, babe.”

Oh Oola, so lax and lean and blue. If only she knew what she started.

On the Road

IT BEGAN AS AN EXPERIMENT, OUR BEING TOGETHER. IT WAS always meant to be lightweight: a test of will, a sort of game that could be TO’d, rained out, as easily as grade school soccer. We pinkie-promised: nothing major. A journey to the outer limit just to prove it’s there.

Oola was the star player of her own peewee soccer league, her first and only athletic accomplishment. She spoke of it with lilting derision, trying to suppress a smile as she described her coach. “Freudian dreamboat. All the little girls were in love with him, or, like, with his mustache. Big honking thing. I would daydream about swinging on it, jungle-gym style. Don’t give me that look! I wasn’t falling for it. OK, the mustache. OK, a little. His accent was duh-reamy. OK, my heart broke that season. But, look, ever since I’ve been with clean-shaven men. What does that tell you? I’m ready now, Doktor, tell me. Out with it! Release me from this cage of feminine devotion.”

Before me, her first experiment in love had been Disco, the family cat. He was a friendly fellow, a dozy tabby who didn’t register when you picked him up, who merely blinked when you swung him side to side or stuffed him in your bag. One day, Oola, age six, got down on all fours. She pressed her nose to his—“warm and scratchy, always reminded me of the pop tab on a soda can”—and nuzzled his face. After a pause, she licked him between the ears. He didn’t so much as meow. She opened her mouth as wide as she could (“I pictured myself as a garbage truck, pressing a button and letting my jaw fall open”) and attempted to swallow his head. “I wanted him to know I loved him,” she explained. “Besides, I was curious to see if I could. He let me give him showers, so I figured, what’s the harm?”

She told me this on a train in Normandy as we zippered between provinces. From Arizona we eventually jetted to France, to attend my third cousin’s wedding. The father of the groom paid for both of our flights, despite thinking our names were Lola and Steve. We’d gotten used to the weirdness of things and accepted this extravagance, bidding the scorpions and toothache-inducing sunsets adieu. “Such a handsome couple,” he drunkenly cried when he met us. “Good on you, Steve-O!” From the wedding, we made our way to Austria, where the ski lodge awaited its whipping.

On the train, we passed fields of rapeseed so yellow our eyes stung. At the time, neither of us knew the name for this plant, which made it all the more magical; Oola leaned against the window and mouthed mustard gas, mustard gas, as the yellow expanses, like lit-up barges, floated by. None of the Frenchies on board seemed to care, or they couldn’t be bothered to look up from their papers. The man sitting across from us was roused from his novella but once, when Oola sat upright and arched her back, stretching her arms from window to compartment door. His gaze was quick, impassive, landing on her décolletage as lightly as a fly. Traveling with Oola, I’d begun to tally the up–downs and backward glances she received from strangers in a day, which soon proved more complicated than I’d first thought, demanding a specific system of categorization that often numbered in the triple digits before dinner. While I obsessed over whether the ticket taker had eyed or ogled her, Oola remained unimpressed, her gaze fixed on the distant hills, which, contrary to rumor, had no eyes with which to return the stare. When she caught me actually tallying my results on the back of a receipt and I tried to explain, she groaned, “This would only seem remarkable to a man.” When I tried to justify my interest as vaguely anthropological, she waved her hand in my face: “Oh, please, Leif! Do what you want, but don’t expect me to play too.” Her words wounded me. I remember we stayed in that night, just us, a quiet meal of cold noodles and an overcompensatingly large TV.

But after, perhaps now that she had brought to light the strangeness of my interest, I no longer tried to curb it. I became all the more committed. I devised a ranking system, from innocuous appraisal to elderly lingering to pure sex stare. I wore sunglasses to hide the fact that I looked not at Oola, whose flesh, by then, I knew, but at the men who were so bold as to guess. That we were constantly traveling only exacerbated my problem: Crowds seemed to fold around Oola, though of course I knew this couldn’t be true, and I often felt like a factory overseer, checking workers off a list as they shuffled past her, the heavenly time clock, punching in to our world with the force of their eyes. This Frenchman, neatly dressed in black, was no exception; for the entire ride I had been waiting, without realizing, for the moment his resolve would waver and he’d have to sneak a peek.

“I managed to fit eighty percent of Disco’s head in my mouth,” Oola went on, unfazed by his attention. Of course she was. Like any pretty girl, she’d learned how to conserve energy. She saved her spit for the men with zero boundaries; I’d seen her scream at a touchy-feely senior citizen that dementia was too kind a fate for the likes of him. “Old Disco didn’t protest. I could’ve gotten it all the way in, but my mother came out to the yard. She screamed and pulled him out of my arms. After that, I earned the nickname T-Rex. Disco still adored me.”

The Frenchman had returned to his book, and Oola had begun to bore herself. Her eyes drifted to the window. It was just the three of us in the compartment; in this rare cell, with only the sound of the train’s internal mechanics to fill the room, no one was looking at her. The countryside tumbled by and I did my best to take it in, but I was no better than my objects of study. I was the doctor double-dipping his IVs, and after a studied minute staring out the window, I glanced at Oola’s inclined neck, which, after so much yellow, was blotted with blue. I remembered this phenomenon from childhood: staring at my green plaid bedspread with watering eyes, willing myself not to blink, then looking up quickly at the blank wall of my bedroom, which would be, to my delight, superimposed with red squares. Older now, I found it easy to not blink. There was too much to miss out on.

Thus, the rest of the train ride passed in peace: the Frenchman reading, Oola drifting in and out of sleep, and me knowing just when to look up and witness bits of her (a wrist, her widow’s peak) turn blue.

SHE COULD HAVE STOPPED ME at any time. All she had to do was cry no fair! to call it off, hold up! to halt the game indefinitely.

Sports? I can hear her sneering. Know your audience, Leif.

All you had to do, Oola, I would patiently explain, was say enough.

Enough’s enough, eh? That’s one of those words that sounds weirder the more you say it.

Or just say no.

Ahh, I see. A wry smile. Now we’re talking about a different game.

It’s true that the thought of Oola murmuring no still has a licentious ring to it. I picture her at age fourteen, lip-glossed to hell and back, practicing saying it in the steamed-up bathroom mirror. Hold your horses, mister. No means no. It would take us a while to get to the point when she actually meant it, when all forms of touch merited an apology, when Oola wore long sleeves.

At the outset of the experiment, though, we packed and repacked our belongings with glee. We were on the road. We flaunted our passports, extravagantly mobile in a fast-condensing world. We didn’t even have to decide where to travel to next; an email from my mother so often directed our fate. From Austria we went to Romania, from Romania to Croatia, from Croatia to Dubai, from Dubai to Montreal, from Montreal to Vermont, from Vermont to the Orbitsons’ beach house in Florida, from there to the patiently mildewing cabin in the deep seat of Big Sur. We liked bouncing around, bound to nothing but each other; our digestive schedules quickly synced. We were American children and thus no strangers to false gods. Xanax, college, travel, core strength, hardcore sex … being together was one more monolith to cling to.

As a freshman in college I took a seminar called (De)facing the Face of God. It was faddish then to talk about nostalgia, though I wonder if this is the case for every class of eighteen-year-olds. I made it through four years at one of those preposterous liberal arts colleges where students design their own majors amid marble and maples and fuck frequently to ward off S.A.D. Fresh from the codes and clubs of a Connecticut prep school, I got a bit carried away. I started out strong with Critical Kiwi Studies and dreamed of a life as a poet-cum-shepherd in the wilds of New Zealand; sophomore spring I saw the light and switched to the ever-more-employable Philosophy of Porn. But when my academic adviser asked me to specify my interest—kiddie? kink?—I got cold feet. I settled, at last, on Contemporary Thought and Literature, because I thought it sounded vague enough to accommodate my then obsession with the understudied leitmotif of dessert in modern fiction. Some of my notes still exist from this period:

ice cream (choc) as default signifier of femme shame. originates w/ Sex & City?

mary gaitskill vs. lorrie moore: masters of sad pastry

devil f. cake=neocapitalist undertones?

PUDDING!!!!

As critical thinkers in the loosely grouped humanities department, we were expected, in this seminar, to be militants against nostalgia and its pearly ilk. Like cakes (!) in a bake sale, our memories were unwrapped and arranged on a seminar table, Loss of Virginity and the Moment That I Felt Alive and the Scent of X’s Perfume. Then, like naughty boys, we stomped on them. We squished Mother’s Cooking beneath our faux-leather shoes. “Don’t hold on to these false gods,” the professor coaxed. “Purge!” For some reason, no girls had signed up for this class. We hunkered down and listened to Chad’s tale of the Moment He Knew He Would Die. We analyzed Luke’s fetish for high school locker rooms, “which is weirder than it sounds because, well, I didn’t even play a sport.”

We watched IKEA commercials, spaghetti westerns, footage from Rolling Stones tours. “Lies!” our prof screamed. Mick Jagger’s face fucked the window behind him. “Lovely lies!” The college quad was swallowed by Mick’s lips, or, I should say, the concept of that hallowed pucker. We spent two weeks debunking the Crush, alternately named the Great Romance, Head Cheerleader, and/or the One. “I didn’t know it then,” Dale moaned, “but looking back, I think she was it.” I was floored by our collective lack of originality. Meanwhile, the teacher thumped Dale on the back. “Expunge,” he soothed, “expunge. It’s not Beth you love, it’s the figment of Beth. Clear out your attic. She’s for sale.”

Though we knew her to be fictional, we were all in love with Beth, sweet Beth, with her kneesocks and her scruples regarding pubic hair. Never mind the fact that she was forever fourteen or holding us back with impossible longing. Beneath the analysis, we thought only of her pubic bone, which Dale described as slippery. I pictured a moonstone, which had sat on a shelf in my childhood room (damn nostalgia!). It was a small seminar room and the steamed-up windows had always to be open, even in the height of December.

After class, I lay awake and thought of home, of all the things I’d loved and thus used up. Punk, Tay, Cape Cod in July—the professor’s voice haunted me. Send off those ships! I brushed the memory of cracked crab from my furthermost teeth and silently grieved for my golden retriever. Hadn’t her love been real? When I was young, Bubba had been the only one able to withstand the torque force of my hugs. “Ouch!” my mom—and, later, girls like Beth—would say when we held hands. “You’re cutting off my circulation. Quit it!”

Compared to other people, I always wanted more, more than expected, more than OK. Even as a little boy, I pushed too hard; I broke screen doors. While the other kids sniffled and dozed in the glitzy ruins of a fourth-birthday party, plunging their hands in their pants and unearthing entire pieces of cake with world-weary expressions, I trolled the perimeters, popping every balloon. It was in a fit of passion that I decapitated my teddy bear. Bubba had looked on solemnly.

“Born heartbroken,” the elementary school nurse had sighed. “Official diagnosis.” She was a buxom ex-hippie who taught Pilates to our mothers on Sunday and used us to practice her unpatented alternative therapies, healing our energies when we came in with scraped knees and having us chant boo-boo, boo-boo, until the pain suddenly subsided or we got bored. She cracked our little knuckles and gave us rosemary lozenges. “Empathic stomachaches,” she pronounced. “Poor little looker.” For a while, I loved her. I came up with endless reasons to be sent to her office; at least once a week, I pretended to have lice so that she’d sit behind me and comb my hair with a plastic drink stirrer. All this ended when the school, fearful that my itching was a liability, accused my mother of negligent parenting. She scrubbed my head with molasses-colored shampoo and made me swear not to go to the nurse anymore. “If it itches,” she told me, “keep it to yourself. Teacher doesn’t need to know. Just tell Mommy. No more nurse. Itchy equals ice cream. OK?”

I wagged my lying scalp: OK. She handed over the promised push pop. I ate it alone in my room, knees drawn to my chest. I wept, another pastime. There’d be no more conversations about chakras in a clean beige room for me, the nurse palpating my lymph nodes and using words I couldn’t know. I’d been exiled from her sterile harem of gadgets and chai, just as I’d already been exiled from the library (another sterile harem, with more bodily an odor as I shadowed the spinsters who shelved books for a living) for reading too much and needing fresh air. Forced outside, I stood on the blacktop and gulped down this air, which I found overrated, and still couldn’t seem to fill my lungs up. Even this, I wanted too much of. I’d received yet more proof that I was a vacuum, that that was what it meant to be a little boy: You drained people, like the banana-colored babies I’d seen sucking at the neighbor’s tit as if she were a playground water fountain.

“The babies are hungry,” my mom had said happily. Her adjective choice only horrified me more, and thus began my two-week anorexic spell that Mom will bring up to this day, shushing the table at Thanksgiving to tell it.

“Such a waif,” she will laugh, no brick wall herself. In the dining room candlelight, her hollow cheeks resemble cellar doors. Expensive jewelry traffic-jams her wrists. “Such a sensitive thing. You think he’s thin now? You should’ve seen him back then. I caught him sneaking his dinner out the door, pot roast in his pockets. Just what do you think you’re doing, mister? And he looked up and said, Feeding the moles. The moles need food too, Mom. It would’ve been sweet if I wasn’t afraid he’d pass out. Honestly, he could’ve worn one of my bangles as a garter belt.”

“Mom—”

“I’m not saying you did. But you could’ve, if you wanted. I’m not telling the bra story, don’t worry.” She winks over her brimming glass. “I’ll save that gem for Christmas.”

The bra story: yet another example of me wanting more than was possible, more of the silky-smooth substance I associated with women, more robust of an answer to the question I eventually became fixated on—Who are you?—something more believable than her blithe I’m your mommy! which sounded as cryptic to my third-grader’s ears as I’m your first dose of the Other or I’m the sack of flesh from whence you came.

Perhaps my obsession with being a drain, my conviction that there was some funnel inside me that could never be quenched, not by good deeds or ice cream or, later, by ketamine, was due in small part to having so frail a mother. I would never dare to suggest that her struggles with weight, with depression, with the little pink pills she called Good Guys, had anything truly to do with me or that she is to blame for how I ended up: Just like Nurse told me, wiping my tears with patchouli-stained fingers, some babies are born breech, others brokenhearted. But it can’t have helped my doughy heart, still in the process of rising and taking on shape (braided? Bundt?), to watch my mother wax and wane, her chic black slacks tailored in vain. Before I had even the faintest notion of fleshiness as a personal preference (d’ya like em knobby or plush? the older boys cackled), I hugged her leg and wanted more, if only to know that she would still be there the next morning, shaking her head to the story read aloud on the radio and scrambling my eggs without ever touching the yolk.

On the afternoon in question, her underwear fit me surprisingly well, the panties puckering only slightly in the back and the bra like two yarmulkes glued to my chest. I was a nine-year-old bombshell. What I remember with the most pain is not the embarrassment of my parents discovering me (doing jumping jacks in front of the mirror) and laughing until they cried, my father practically killing the cat in his haste to get the camera, but rather the fine lace trim of my mother’s underwear and the print: pomegranates on one, Swiss dots on another, a bow the size of my pinky nail on the pair that I, after much deliberation, wriggled into. Just like a girl’s, in style and size. At the time, I was astonished. I hadn’t been privy to this sense of humor, reflected in a pair of panties with two kitty paw prints on the back, or ever considered that amid my hand-wringing and eye-rubbing, my mother, despite her modest black garb, might be wanting something too.

This is no Oedipal sob story. Now I only feel sad for my mother, an unbearable tenderness when I picture her getting ready for bed, steadying herself on the bedpost. She is still a private person. I’m not supposed to be in the bedroom with her, even via my eunuch’s imagination, and yet I long to offer her a hand. Thinking of her handwashing the peach lace bra she barely needed, laying out each intimate, it strikes me that by having the numbers on her scale go down (99, 97 …) she was also trying to go backward. Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong: Maybe she didn’t want to get any lower or younger or less than she was but just to hold tight to the scraps that she had, pause her life on an approximation of perfect, like someone playing poker while their toddler waited in the too-hot car some hundred feet away. If she kept playing, she could get more, could hit jackpot, but she could also lose big time or lose a little more every round, so why trouble the waters? That is a difference between us, I think. I would play until dawn, until my desire supinated me. If she were the one in the parking lot, waiting in Nevadan silence, I’d play until the car reached boiling and she nodded off with her head on the dashboard.

Staring at my dorm room ceiling, I thought about my mother, my childhood, and I thought about Beth, the girl made a celebrity because she’d been so plain, doomed to lisp a class of boys to sleep each autumn night. So lava-hot were our desires, her puberty had been Pompeii’d: We combed the ash from her erogenous zones with hushed, professorial care. Lying awake at 3:30 a.m., I was both a budding writer and an archaeologist. Well, really, I was neither; I was just a kid, undressed, with my bare legs splayed and ideals, like knickknacks, lined up on the little ledge that overlooked my bed. Was it on these sleepless nights that I first realized how at risk I was of being exactly like everyone else? I thought of the other boys in my class, deep-feeling, big-talking, rosacea’d with passion: Did we share the same bookshelf, same background, same visions of love, and thus the same trauma of suddenly finding ourselves, for the very first time, disadvantaged, in the face of flavored ChapStick, of unbearably soft breasts? Our imaginations were tragically tidy, like a cartoon drawing of said breasts (circle and dot). If Beth didn’t trim, we’d do it ourselves, quoting Barthes, saying baby. As I tossed and turned, one thing became clear to me: I had to find a hot new way to love, or risk obliteration.

I listened to my roommate breathe. I felt a nonsexual tingle when he turned over and sighed—a long, hard fwuhhh. They soothed me immensely, these human sounds. When he coughed, I could’ve kissed him. During the day I tried to fit the mold of the acerbic student, marked by tatty sweaters and a monolithic brow; but for all the books I waded through, my academic distaste for society was diluted the instant I stepped out of the library and realized it was dusk, that slow disaster, when one more day wicks down and all the world can’t help but sigh and let their shoulders slump. I shared this daily tragedy with the joggers and the elderly as we moseyed through the lilaced air, dinner on our minds. The sight of someone’s shoulders slumping, at this haunted hour or on the bus or one nook over in the library, meant more to me than sex (I swear), because it was the body at its purest: not the blank-brained thrall of sex or selflessness of books, but the quiet click of resignation as one slips into herself. This is why, much later, in our various house-sits, I loved to watch Oola in the shower. Even with the curtain drawn, I found myself enthralled by the long blur of her body as she went about its tasks, moving her hands in varying circles as she rinsed, washed, and repeated.

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