Читать книгу Oola - Brittany Newell, Brittany Newell - Страница 8

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.”