Oola

“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.”