We Came Here to Forget

by Andrea Dunlop

  I know that everyone in the room has suddenly developed a burning desire to be able to dance like Gianluca and his partner. And in the drunken revelry, they reckon they could. This is what great athletes do: make it look, if not easy, at least possible. I’m not fooled, of course. I know the years and years of training that must have gone into making that spectacle look so effortless.

  “That was beautiful to watch,” I say. We’re speaking English, thank goodness. I’m too drunk to try for much in Spanish. Though everything else about the two men is different, Gianluca has something Luke always had in spades: the warmth of star power radiating off him.

  There’s something else too. From a distance, Gianluca was compelling, but up close, he has such raw sexual energy I’m unsettled. He has a low, sonorous voice, and when he leans in to kiss me hello, I can smell him. He’s wearing some sort of cologne, but there’s something more to it; the scent of his sweat mixed with it is so intoxicating it gives me a contact high.

  “Thank you,” he says, clutching his hand to his heart as though I’ve just made his night. “How long are you in town? You should come take some lessons at my studio.” His English is excellent, with only a faint, indeterminate accent.

  “I’m here indefinitely.”

  “Well then. May I?”

  I pause for what becomes an awkwardly long moment. I can move my body drunkenly to music like everyone, but I don’t dance.

  “Of course you may!” Gemma laughs and pushes me forward into his arms. “Don’t be shy, darling, G is an excellent teacher.”

  He shows me a basico—the rudimentary walking step—then leads me through a few steps and turns encouragingly. Whatever I’d felt before is intensified once I’m in his arms. I’m swamped by an odd mix of desire and comfort: he is new and he is familiar. It’s been a long time since I’ve just been held in someone’s arms like this with no other agenda. He talks to me as we dance, which relieves some of the tension. I’m muted by everything racing through my mind. Edward catches my eye and gives me a knowing smile that I return with a nervous one. I can’t help but feel my new friend has seen something I don’t want him to see.

  When I leave the dance floor, the boys have reappeared, and they hand me a drink. They’re on either side of me on the dance floor when the countdown to the new year begins. One of them pulls my face in for a deep tongue kiss while the other kisses the back of my neck. Hands run all over my body, touching my breasts and creeping up my dress. They turn me around and I’m kissing the other one. I’m numb enough that all I feel is the sensations, and I keep chasing them. A wave of panic hits me that I’m in public until I glance around the dance floor and see that all around us, there’s a similar sense of frenzy, of hands and flesh and tongues.

  I wake up several hours later on a narrow bed in a cramped and filthy apartment. I’m reminded of the crash pads of some of Luke’s dirtbag friends in Ketchum: flats strewn with remnants of food and unwashed clothing that would only be tolerable to men under twenty-five and people with some kind of disorder. I’m sandwiched between Alberto and Santiago, and if anything I’m more uncertain who is who. I don’t know what time it is, but it’s still dark out. I realize with mounting horror—I’m still drunk but not enough to blot out my circumstances—that I’m naked, as are the boys next to me. And god, they’re boys, I realize, looking at their sleeping baby faces. Jesus. I carefully search for my clothes and get dressed. Thankfully the two of them are out cold. Relief washes over me as soon as I’m on the other side of their door, out on the street. It’s quiet so it must be very early. My mind is racing; the only saving grace is that I’m reasonably sure that everyone was too drunk for much more than a lot of messy fondling. I let myself laugh a little at the idea of them waking up next to each other.

  As I make my way back to my apartment, exhaustion hits me and anxiety begins to creep in; darkness crowds the edges of my consciousness. I wait too long to take the pill and find myself curled in a ball on the floor of my small bathroom—it must be nearing morning but I’m divorced from time. Some part of me knows that all I need to do is stand up and go get the Ativan that’s in a bottle on my nightstand. But crossing the tiny apartment feels like an insurmountable task. My breath is short and my throat is freezing cold, my chest in knots, my heart pounding, racing to keep up with the cycle of thoughts in my mind: What are you doing here? Why did you come? You should be training. You gave up your dream. You’ve abandoned your parents. You failed Penny. Nothing will ever be right again. You will feel exactly like this forever. You are beyond redemption. You’re a slut. You’re worthless.

  Finally the attack wears itself out and I’m able to drag myself up and over to my bed. I take an Ativan, not because it will help but because it will knock me out, and I can’t bear to be conscious another second. As I drift off to sleep, I see the waxing blue light of the morning inching its way along the edges of my blinds. The first day of 2010 is dawning.

  Penny’s Hair

  THE BALD patches on Penny’s pretty head began appearing early in the second semester of her junior year.

  “It’s everywhere!” I overheard her say tearfully to my mother one evening as they sat at our kitchen table. She was finding hair on her pillow in the morning, clumps in the drain in the shower; it came out on her hairbrushes and when she ran her fingers through her hair. “I’m like a chemo patient in a movie.”

  “Oh, honey,” my mom said. “We’ll get to the bottom of it. It could just be stress.” Stress could do strange things. Was Penny stressed? There was the matter of Ryan, the boyfriend from the other school, who my parents weren’t so fond of. He seemed controlling. He had a lot of opinions about what Penny should and should not wear and do and say. Even easygoing Emily wasn’t a fan.

  At school, Penny’s hair loss became the melodrama of the moment. There’d been a much-buzzed-about story in a recent issue of Seventeen magazine about a beautiful teenager who suffered from a disease called alopecia, and so the population of CDA High was surprisingly well-informed on the obscure condition. What could be more horrifying for a teenage girl than having her hair fall out? Worse still, alopecia had no known cause and no known cure. Penny was a sudden and tragic celebrity at school. One of the most popular girls in her class boldly offered to take her wig shopping when the time came. For the good-looking boys who also cared about seeming nice, she became the babe du jour: “Penny Cleary? Yeah, she’s cute.”

  My parents were at their wits’ end, and I’m sorry to say that I was no picnic during this time. For one thing, my competition schedule was getting more intense, with more out-of-state junior competitions. I still talked to Luke all the time on the phone and saw him at the bigger races, but I feared he was slipping away into a life that no longer included me. And I was wracked with envy of peers I was falling behind, like Sarah Sweeny, whose family had just relocated to Vail and who, at sixteen, was competing well at the FIS level with adults, while I had to continue to go to regular school.

  During midwinter break near the end of February, my parents agreed to go to Sun Valley for a visit. They rented a condo on the hill—turning down Tad Duncan’s offer to stay at the chalet. (“With the child bride?” my mom said. “No thanks!”) But they said that it was okay if I stayed in the Duncans’ guest room. Penny stayed home for a week of sleepovers at Emily’s house and sneaking around with Ryan.

  When we arrived at their house, my heart was hammering out of my chest. I’d seen Luke and Blair weeks before at a junior event in Jackson Hole, but we’d barely spent five minutes together. They both leaped on me in a giant group bear hug the moment I walked through the door of the chalet.

  I was relieved at first that things felt the same with them. We settled back into our familiar grooves with one another as they showed me all of their new discoveries about the mountain. But soon the differences between us began to emerge. Blair was dating a snowboarder who’d been the junior champion the previous year, and Luke seemed to be testing out an entirely new identity. On
the second day, he took me up to the snow park, and as we slid into the lift line, it was like I was suddenly seeing him for the first time. He’d gotten taller since the previous year and filled out. He was dressing differently too, and not in a way I liked. He suddenly wore low-slung pants everywhere and T-shirts that went practically to his knees.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Bomber. It hasn’t been the same without you,” he said. The line was long and moving slowly, given the school holiday. Suddenly, a raucous group of guys appeared behind us, several of them leaning over to click their poles against Luke’s.

  “Bro!”

  Luke turned delightedly. “Yoooo, it’s the crew.”

  I felt myself become momentarily invisible in the cacophony as Luke’s new friends overwhelmed the space around us. Looking at the ragtag group of them, I saw where Luke was getting his new fashion sense. They looked older than us, but it was hard to tell by how much.

  “These lines are fucking gnarly, bro,” one of them said, crunching a lit cigarette beneath his ski.

  “Fucking gapers,” another added.

  “Guys,” Luke finally said. “This is Katie. She’s visiting from CDA.”

  The introduction seemed to have a cooling effect; had Luke never mentioned me?

  “What’s up, Katie? Brad,” one said. Eric, said the other. Chad, said the third. I didn’t think I’d be able to keep them straight, but it seemed unlikely to matter.

  The three warmed up a bit after our first run in the park when I nailed a respectable 360. I was glad I could even still do it. Luke and I had always messed around in the park but I was more focused on my downhill.

  Late in the afternoon, Tad caught up with me as I was raiding the fridge. Even with the new wife, I was plenty comfortable in the house.

  “Hey, Katie. How was the hill today?”

  “Not too bad, we were mostly in the park.”

  “So I take it you met some of Luke’s new friends?” His tone left little doubt as to what Tad thought of them.

  “Yeah. They’re all right.”

  Tad looked at me askance. Somehow it felt like he was talking to me as an adult, something he’d never done before. I laughed.

  “Okay, I don’t really get it.”

  “They’re absolute losers, and they’re dragging him down. He’s never going to qualify for FIS if he keeps this up. Now, he’s going on about the X Games and wanting to shoot videos instead of train. There’s no future in that, and those boys are reckless. They don’t even wear helmets.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said. Tad nodded. This was why I was here, I suddenly understood.

  We all went out to dinner on our last night in Sun Valley, and after Tad insisted on paying the bill, he asked my parents and me to hang back for a moment.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said, matter-of-factly, “about bringing Katie out to Sun Valley.”

  It probably would have been much more appropriate for Tad to approach my parents before he looped me into the conversation, regardless of how grown-up I thought I was at fifteen. But Tad knew how to persuade people to do what he wanted. He knew if my parents watched my eyes fill with hope at the opportunity he was presenting, that would outweigh any other misgivings. Given how close I was with his sons, he also likely knew that Penny was having trouble, though he made no mention of it now.

  “Listen,” Tad had said, a knowing look on his handsome face, which was so like Blair’s, “Katie’s done amazingly well as it is, but the opportunities the kids have in Sun Valley”—he shook his head—“are unmatched. Luke is doing great with his tutor, and Blair’s already been accepted to Dartmouth—it will take him more than four years naturally, but that could eventually be a great place for Katie too; they’re fantastic about working with skiers’ schedules. For now, it would be easy to integrate Katie, she and Luke being the same age. They’re all smart, disciplined kids. We’re not going to let their education go by the wayside, we would never do that.” The “we” he spoke of was always endlessly inclusive and open to interpretation: we were all on the same team. Team Katie, Team Luke, Team Blair, Team U.S.A. “But if they’re going to get where they want to go, the focus has got to be there. They need the right support and access to the right resources. And we could get you out here as much as you wanted.”

  It would be hard to leave home, but the idea of a bigger mountain in my backyard—not to mention being able to leave school and having Luke and Blair back—was too much. Tad knew it. He was a man who got what he wanted. Tad was a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps Libertarian, a social Darwinist who felt that his own ascent in the world gave him permission to take anything he wanted. And what he wanted right now was for his sons to be surrounded by potential champions, in order to sharpen them into ones. He didn’t want Luke to be distracted by the fact that his best friend lived elsewhere, didn’t want him to fall in with the freeskiers, who he saw as burnouts. Defying his father was giving Luke no shortage of satisfaction. If Tad brought me here, he’d be the hero again. He had spent the year rallying the support of other rich local ski fans, and now he needed to deliver additional talent that was not his progeny.

  “We’ll think about it,” my father said once Tad had laid out his offer.

  “Dad!” I wailed, as though taking a night or two to consider sending your fifteen-year-old daughter to live with someone else was deeply unreasonable.

  “It’s a very generous offer,” my mom added. “But it’s a big decision.”

  “Of course you should think about it,” Tad said. “Just so you know, the tutors can pick up wherever Katie leaves off. There will be no interruption in her studies whatsoever. And they’ll work around the kids’ training so that they’re not having to squeeze everything in all the time. It will be so much less stressful for them.”

  I was relentless on the five-hour drive home the next day. I was half ready to divorce my parents as Macaulay Culkin had recently done—inspiring an entire generation into childish fantasies of freedom. Yes, I would emancipate myself! Of course I’d never have done it, I loved my parents too much, but I was so obsessed with glory, I was ready to bulldoze anything in my path. My parents tried to hold me off while they discussed it between themselves, but I thought the decision should be mine.

  “Why don’t you just let me go?” I hollered at them over dinner one night while Penny was out with Emily. “God! Why don’t you worry about your other daughter?”

  I wish I could bring myself to forget that I’d ever said such a thing, that I’d unintentionally cut to the quick the way only a teenager who both knows and doesn’t know the impact of her words can.

  So it was decided, and in the midst of everything, I prepared to move to Sun Valley. I felt sad about leaving Pen, but she’d be off to college with Emily after the next year anyway.

  I wouldn’t find out until years later that it was not alopecia that was making Penny go bald. My parents didn’t tell me when they discovered she was shaving her hair off, and the revelation never spread. Either the kids at CDA High were credulous enough to believe she’d had a miraculous recovery, or they just moved on to something else. Penny’s half-bald head: a harbinger of everything. Later, my mom would tell me that she’d tried to get Penny into counseling, but she was seventeen by then and resistant. And their friends had problems with their own daughters—cutting and eating disorders, underage drinking and boys—maybe it was all on a spectrum. A girl shaving her hair off—for attention? In an act of rage? Self-harm?—was a strange thing to do, but it wasn’t so serious, was it?

  I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had my parents and I resisted the wealthy and formidable Tad Duncan. What if I’d been there that next year, living at home with my sister? Would I have seen other signs of her illness picking up speed? Do I blame Tad Duncan for intervening? I don’t know. Some days I blame everyone, some days I blame no one. But always I blame myself.

  Liz Learns Tango

  WHEN I wake up for the second time around noon on Ne
w Year’s Day, I expect to be devoured by shame. Sadly, drinking myself into oblivion and hooking up with strangers has become fairly routine and so has the spiral that follows. The last time I saw Blair he was in CDA for the weekend seeing his sister, but I’d left his messages unreturned. He’d spotted me at one of the local dives, surrounded by a true group of creepers, and nearly dragged me out.

  “You never called me back, Katie, and what are you doing here?”

  “Blowing off steam,” I said, wrenching my arm out of his.

  “This isn’t like you.”

  “And it’s not like you to be so patronizing. Since when are you my babysitter?”

  “Since you started trying to annihilate yourself.”

  But this is different. No one knows me here, there’s no one to hurt, no one to disappoint. The night will be just another secret swallowed by this sprawling city that has soaked up the lust and longing of so many before me. And it hadn’t been a waste. I’d met Gemma and Edward; perhaps they’d become my friends. And then there was Gianluca. That dance.

  Despite the alcohol and the sensory deluge of Edward’s party, the memory of those few minutes, of Gianluca’s arms holding me with such control and authority, is stunningly clear. It had released me for the briefest moment from myself, and I’d felt the dense knot of grief that lives in my chest breaking up. I want it again. I guess I’m taking tango classes.

  Tango Fortunato occupies a glass storefront in the Microcentro, not far from where my Spanish classes are. The main studio is one large room, and students congregate on the periphery, lounging on the large L-shaped sofa that occupies one corner or sitting on the floor to change into dance shoes.