Oola

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?”