During college, I only found the courage to visit my TA’s office once. We sat in a cramped and lightless room that she shared with a German grad student. He’d left his schnitzel on the desk. I could barely hear her over the whir of his dehumidifier. When I asked her what she was writing her dissertation on, she said softly, “A post-Marxist analysis of avian imagery in Saxon palimpsests.”
In my exquisite nervousness, I knocked over a sickle-shaped paperweight. Silence reigned. “So,” I managed, “do you like to surf?”
I never spoke to her again, though from the back of the classroom, my love still flourished. I soon realized that nicer than taking the thighs, so deliciously framed in that flimsy felt skirt, was finding yourself in the space between them—or, in the case of my TA, five rows behind them, studiously crossed. Or that for all our grand delusions about exploring space, we really prefer our place beneath the stars, rather than upon or among them.
When it was too hot that summer to do anything useful, we took a siesta. It was due not to tiredness but rather to a fed-upness with consciousness that we gravitated toward the bedroom, which we knew to be shuttered, aquarium-quiet, even at 2:30 p.m. Oola took her clothes off and lay down first, on one side of the bed, fetal-positioned on top of the covers. After a respectful pause, I stripped and lay down on the opposite side. We faced away from each other, she toward the window, I toward the wardrobe, which lurked like a watchman. It has been a strange constant in my life that whenever I nap I can always hear, off in the distance, the diffuse violence of children at play. A ball smacking concrete, a chorus of shrieks. We didn’t sleep, but we didn’t touch either. That would be getting ahead of ourselves, cheating our routine. Instead, we listened to the other breathe and approximated the distance between our spines at the point of their most extreme curves. We could’ve been twins, and this room our prenatal chill. We bobbed in the same thought bubble, really fingered the lull. But when she rose, and I followed half an hour later, we’d barely upset the covers. Whatever indents we’d made or odors we’d left would be gone by the next time we entered the room.
Or it was like Oola’s and my conversations in the very early days of traveling together. We played Would You Rather and it felt like a vow. Boring buses were the space of love ten times more than hotel rooms. When our train was halted on the tracks for five straight hours due to what conductors claimed was a large fallen tree but was actually a suicide, we rationed out a Kit Kat and rejoiced in our dim limbo.
“I wish I could live here,” Oola sighed after a more successful bus ride between Ljubljana and Zagreb. We stood under a streetlight outside a café and I held her chin with one hand. She was awfully romantic when hammered.
“In the Balkans?”
She shook her head like a wet dog, relishing the movement. “Leading up to a kiss. In the buildup, the swoosh.”
It was a nice sentiment, but it did make me feel like a bit of a spoilsport when I leaned down to kiss her. “It’s OK,” she mumbled, feeling my hesitation. “There’s a consolation prize.”
What I’m describing so far are the moments that worked. Perhaps of more interest are the ruptures, the Santa Ana gusts that shot through the cabin and made all the doors bang at once.
One hot afternoon, she turned on me. We were in the bedroom and she was trying on a pair of linen shorts she’d found in the ancient oak dresser. She was having trouble buttoning them. “Jesus,” she said. “When did I get so big?” The calmness of her voice indicated danger. She spun in front of the mirror, gesturing haphazardly to the backs of her thighs. “Look at that.” She tugged at the stubborn zipper. “I’m gigantic.”
I did as she said, from across the room, where I had been resting against the window frame. I spoke honestly. “You look the same as ever, O. I think the zipper’s broken.”
She shook her head with a force that surprised me. “Don’t fuck with me, Leif. I look fat.”
She jiggled one leg, which, scout’s honor, scarcely moved. She raked me with her eyes. “See?” she cried. She placed her foot on the corner of the bed frame and slapped her thigh with an open palm, like a peddler demonstrating the sharpness of his knives. “See? Disgusting!”
But I honestly couldn’t. I walked around to the other side of the room, rubbed my eyes, even lay on the ground and looked up at the offending limb. But at every angle, it was the same leg—longer than most girls’, slim as rolled newspaper, stubbled at the knee, and 85 percent browned—that I’d studied in depth and assertively labeled as lean. I tried to offer my expertise, but she didn’t seem to hear me. She looked past me. She began twisting her torso from side to side, watching the flesh bunch. She flicked her tits and distended her stomach by gulping down air. She became fixated on the looseness of her inner thigh. Everything I’d memorized she was seeing anew, until I got the odd feeling that this must have been what I’d acted like when we’d first gotten together, when I too had marveled at a stranger’s mottled span, the silvery striations of the inner thigh, the unexplained texture of not skin but flesh.
“I’ve never seen a leg that didn’t dimple under the butt,” I tested.
She began doing a series of aggressive aerobic lunges, seemingly more to punish her legs than to tone them.
“It is in the nature of a stomach to be soft,” I intoned over the sound of her exhales.
Again, she ignored me. She’d moved on to jumping jacks.
I entertained a brief daydream in which we drove to the courthouse to file for divorce, despite not being married, due to what we both agreed were irreconcilable differences. She’d wear skintight camel suit pants that would make the jury cheer. The case would be filed beside similar blows over canola v. olive, skim v. full fat. I couldn’t make her see the light! I wanted to tell O this, maybe make her laugh, but she appeared to have established a rhythm. Rather than disrupt her flow, I returned to my post at the window, with one last apologetic glance at her thighs, each barely grabbable, the width of a bunch of roses, maybe, or a queen-sized bedpost, and moving just as much as a bedpost during a normal night’s sleep, a Tuesday, with only a few bland caresses, spaced over eight hours, to rustle the sheets and make the old oak headboard creak; her lambasted legs jogging in place, and Oola’s face blank, as she stared at something I just couldn’t see.
On a different, more harmonious afternoon, I wasn’t as quiet as I should’ve been. She was sitting on the porch, drinking her third cup of coffee. She sat with her knees to her chest and her elbows on her knees, hands angled down to steady the mug between her thighs. I lingered in the doorway, tempted to hum because of how perfectly the light hit the porch, enhancing the blond in her hair, creating an almost white glare and mixing it up with the steam from her mug. She wore her tatty blue bathrobe. It was an empirically disgusting rag, rainbow-stained by countless meals, whose inch-thick terrycloth absorbed all odors and Picasso’d her body into one long blob. Any normal lover would have loathed it. Today, it was loosely belted with a satin cord. It had slipped off the shoulder nearest to me. I was staring at her collarbone, thinking about how much it looked like a dog biscuit. She looked up, and to my surprise, she was smiling.
“You caught me,” I muttered from the doorway.
“It’s OK,” she said, still smiling. “It’s sad to look pretty with no one around. I’m glad to have a witness.” Again, that supernatural smile. It was as if the world were one of those dollhouses hinged in the middle, and by jimmying it open she could see herself perfectly positioned in the sun’s spotlight without ever spilling a drop of her coffee. She turned away from me and resumed the pose, gently re-latching the dollhouse’s front.
Only in retrospect does her statement strike me as morbid.
* * *
THE HOTTER THE DAYS GOT, July morphing into a long August, the more I got the feeling that someday soon I would get what was coming to me. The household appliances confirmed this suspicion; I was too happy, like a child in the hallucinatory last days of summer, trusting in his time-telling devices (th
e oven, the TV, the ice-cream truck’s ditty) to sustain the afternoon ad infinitum. I was too tickled by the piece of bread Oola had left in the toaster, now perforated by mice. I was too pleased when she spent the afternoon tanning, not just because it made my job as stalker easier, looking on from the shaded side of the porch, but also because it gave her freckles, tiny deviations from her confirmed shade of brown, as if I were in danger of running out of things to know about.
Something was afoot. In all my comings and goings, I accepted, and eventually coddled, this soft sense of dread. Looking back, I was always preparing: When I noticed that Oola had leaked a bit of blood on the beach towel that we’d used for a picnic, I quickly and quietly folded it, knowing without knowing that I would eventually cover my pillow with it, would level my mouth with the kidney-shaped stain.
When the caterpillars first started dying, carpeting the porch and the garden and eventually the bathroom with their translucent skeletons, no bigger than nail clippings and the color of green tea ice cream, neither of us was surprised. I thought of the Abode. We swept up the bodies, which crumbled at the touch, and, after a brief conversation, lit the pile with Oola’s Las Vegas lighter, a last-minute and long-lived souvenir. They burned quickly and gave off an odor like tealights, which is barely an odor at all.
I made these preparations peacefully, because while I’d learned to coexist with my eventual unhappiness, I also still believed in its distance from me, as distant as my father’s beer belly or my mother’s blank stare were from my current body, knobby and bright. It’s a bit hard to explain. Things were too good for us, Oola and me, and had been for too long; I knew it was only a matter of time before something shifted or struck. It was similar to the feeling I used to get when I was little and visited my cousins. They were teenagers, bulky from lacrosse, with a criminally delicious smell: smoke masking something primal and jammy. Driving to and from the country club, they often forgot that I was in the backseat. They complained about girls whose very names were provocative—Cecily, Sasha—and listened to music at hair-raising volumes. They never had anything good to say about these girls but couldn’t stop talking about them. From the backseat, I sensed, however hazily, that whatever pain compelled them to bad-mouth Helene would one day hit me, that a Samantha smelling somehow even better than they did would waltz into my life and deny me as diligently as Sam and her clan denied them. I was receiving a preview, even if the smoke from the front seat obscured its dimensions, and I felt flattered and nervous, excited in the bad way.
The anticipation resurfaced a few years later when I went to a punk show and basically tripped over, in the bare-bulbed bathroom, a beautiful girl who was also a boy or perhaps something new altogether. “Sorry,” I yelped. They zipped up their jeans. Our eye contact was brief, but the memory of their indifferent “Don’t freak” looped in my mind for the rest of the night. They wore all black, like I did, and had shaved off their eyebrows. Six of their nails were painted black, and they’d tied a white shoestring, choker-style, around their neck. Their beauty broke my jaw. Later, I found them in the crowd and grabbed their elbow between sets.
“Hello,” I bellowed.
“Hi.”
“What’s your name?”
“Shenandoah,” they sighed, and walked off. Even the back of their head was too cool.
“What’s up?” Tay asked when he found me.
But I just shook my head, unable to put my excitement into words. I couldn’t tell if I’d seen who I wanted to be or who I would, like it or not, one day become. I nearly got killed craning my neck in the mosh pit to spy them. As it turned out, they were the bassist for a semi-famous queercore band called Something Wicked This Way Cums.
I’m not crass enough to think of Shenandoah as an omen but rather as someone who was older and bigger and knew better than me. You never forget that first person, do you, who waves the red flag in your face, who both awakens and condemns you? Who pinches your thigh and lets you know, in low tones, that flesh is dispensable but so-o-o much fun? Quiet, the kids scream. Somebody’s coming! But what do you do when this someone approaches you slowly and hands you a cigarette, already rolled? Surf’s up, they say with a wink. And it is, oh, it is, at the sight of their jeans. After that show, I dreamed fitfully for the rest of the year.
This feeling drifted back to me one more time in Big Sur, carefully washing the dishes from which Oola had eaten and would, come six o’clock, dirty anew. I was nervous, despite needing nothing and having absolutely nothing to do. It was the same despair as that which dogtails a gorgeous spring day, because you know it must eventually peter out into evening, and for every minute of birdsong there is a future minute of bloat. Happiness taxes. I peeked out the window over the sink and knew, in a flash, that the gig was up. The center cannot hold. This turn of phrase came to me, a slogan I’d first seen in an ad for super-strength Kotex and never forgotten. This was in June; our best days were still ahead of us.
Thus, falling asleep that summer and smelling the salt in our hair, it was difficult to separate the edge from the beauty, because one made the other, just as my sad, stoic parents had somehow made me. Oola and I sat on the porch, a tin plate of saltines between us, sharing this feeling like the bulb of a flower soon to spring up through our bellies and froth out the throat. If we’d had drugs, we’d have done all of them, just for an excuse to stay put, listening.
And so these perfect afternoons, with the light bucketed down on us through a layer of leaves, vibrating with birds and the noise of small creatures, carried a dulled but very real thrill, as we sucked on our good days like lozenges, only dimly aware of their dwindling size.
“Hey,” she said at dinner one evening, mouth full. “How come you don’t read anymore?” She folded her napkin in half and carefully spat something into it.
“What do you mean?” My heart was pounding like an adulterer’s.
She shrugged, more interested in the discolored mound in her palm. “I never see you reading.” She extended her napkin while I struggled to recall the last book I’d read.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. But the truth was, she was right; I had stopped reading books. Because I was not lacking in information, or beauty, or meaningfulness, or fictions, or whatever else books can give you, I hadn’t even noticed until she pointed it out. I felt traitorous and scrounged for something to say.
“Look at that,” she said wondrously. “I think it’s a tooth.”
Upon closer inspection, I had to agree. A gray pearl poked out from a liquid pile of parsnip. This discovery rocketed me from my guilt. We cleared the dishes, and I laid her down on the table. Her awwww was positively operatic. I examined her mouth for over an hour, but no teeth were missing. We rinsed the tooth in the kitchen sink and held it up to the light: It looked human, like a first grader’s, smooth on one end and bumpy on the other, where a sandy substance was embedded in the grooves. In the end, we had to ascribe the tooth to a myriad of other mysteries.
Living in the boondocks, we were subject to all sorts of fuckery. We accepted nature as perverse, just as we’d once accepted movie theaters and racist neighbors as the norm. With no electric lights or street noise to disturb us, we were peeled along with the night in Big Sur. This lack of distraction laid bare the sorcery of everyday life, like a stripper with a proudly distended stomach. Was a rogue tooth really weirder than the fact that flowers had phalluses, or that mushrooms grew in rings, like mean girls, or that the downiness of mold looked for all the world like leg hair? We tallied the coincidences up without judgment, swept the dead bugs away, and ultimately found stranger things in our own interactions—Oola’s sudden obsession with the Apollo 13 conspiracy, for example, which led to a two-hour car ride to the closest special-interest bookstore, i.e., an incense-choked shack that sold birthstones and faux maps to J. D. Salinger’s house. “You don’t actually think the moon landing was real, do you?” she quizzed me at least three times a day.
“I’m not sure.”
Thi
s was her cue to explode. “Oh, but it was so obviously staged. Just look at these pictures. It was a Hollywood production. Who was filming? Did you know that Australian viewers reported seeing a Coke bottle roll across the screen? Don’t be a sheep, Leif.”
After two weeks of constant discussion, her interest stopped short. She never mentioned it again.
Or, weirder still, the reactions neither of us could predict: Oola bolting upright when I asked if she remembered Dubai. “Did I tell you about the one and only time I went to dinner with my grandparents?” she asked. “I was five. The waiter wrapped my leftovers in tinfoil and gave it a handle. It was like a little basket. I loved it. Do you know what I’m saying? I left it in a taxi.”
Why she even said that, I’ll never know.
Or the day I found her watering the garden, wearing a man’s polo shirt and galoshes, she herself more doused than the flowers.
She directed the stream at me. “This is what your brain’s like,” she said, silently laughing. She put her thumb over the mouth of the hose. Water sprayed chaotically outward, a scattered cone. Refracted rainbows pierced my eyes.
I was surprised that she saw me that way; I was more surprised that this hurt me. I’d come to define myself in contrast to her blurriness, her whims, and her ellipses. At least I wear clothes that fit, I wanted to protest, and chew before I swallow. At least I don’t eat margarine.
So I said the first thing that came to me, smiling blandly. “You’re a whore.”
We were both shocked by the strength of my voice, implying that the statement was not completely untrue. Still laughing, she twisted the hose around and aimed it at her chest. She soaked her shirt through. It plastered itself to her body like frost on a butcher-case steak. First the dashes of her ribs became visible, then the punctum of belly button. There was so much water in her eyes that she trampled the zinnias, but she only stopped when I wrestled the hose from her hands. She had to spit out water to speak. “And?”
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