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 m
ovements 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?”
Oola Page 3