The general store was not much more than a gas station, hung halfheartedly with prayer flags, where one could buy snacks, loose tobacco, soft-core magazines, and scoops of substandard ice cream from the little glass case at the front. They had five flavors, which never changed. One of them was rainbow sorbet; this was the only kind Oola could eat.
Sometimes she’d stock up on magazines. Regardless of genre, Oola would read it, which is how she came to know as much about fly-fishing and finger foods as she did about feng shui. She hoarded catalogs too, Lands’ End and lingerie and, for a spell, Prom R Us. I teased her about it. “You’re like a prairie girl waiting for her Sears, Roebuck.” It was from a home and garden magazine that she got the idea of building her Japanese soaking tub—but more on that later.
Of all catalogs, she was especially fond of Williams-Sonoma and its ilk, luxury houses with plumply made beds and gratuitous amounts of hardwood. This is almost certainly why house-sitting suited her so well. “It’s not that I covet that life,” she’d explain, resting her cheek against the 2D grass of a beautifully kept lawn. “It’s just a soothing thing to think about. Like New England. It’s funny, considering we’ve traveled so much, but whenever I need to calm down, I picture myself in New England, eating a crab from a white china dish, with a separate pitcher for butter. Everyone sun-damaged, tall, wearing cable-knit sweaters. I think about … window seats.” Already her eyelids were flickering. “I think about baking pans that make individual cakes in the shape of a shell. I think about the words cut glass. Tennis whites…”
If she minded her less-than-glamorous conditions in the cabin after months of mansions, she didn’t show it. She smiled at the cashier, an ex-surfer made mute by meth, and paid for her cone with small change. She stopped in the doorway to roll up her jeans, exposing her mountain-climbing socks. We ate our ice cream on the curb, feeling, stupidly, like vagabonds, and smiling accordingly. Our hair was dirty, mine to my shoulders already, our clothing somehow always wrong for the weather. We nodded hello to every passing car, cementing our status as people who didn’t get out much, and sat on the jackets that we hadn’t needed.
Though we could never put it into words, these excursions into town were important to us. They were our one guaranteed outing, when invitations from friends in Santa Cruz or the Bay could no longer be counted on, noticeably dwindling as summer blazed on. I couldn’t blame friends for forgetting us or subtly exing us out of group texts; notorious flakes, we were always late, and worse yet, in the soft-edged words of a college acquaintance: You don’t adjust for anyone, do you? When I asked what he meant, he elaborated: It’s clear that you have a few things on your mind. Either let me in, bro, or go with the flow! He rapped a knuckle on my forehead. Be here now! I found this hypocritical coming from a techie-cum-yogi who bent over backward (sometimes literally) to talk about Burning Man. Why were we friends with these people? I got bored of the jabs at our so-called co-dependence and stopped answering texts. I resented the distraction. I resented the shift from admiring glances when O and I sat together to a vulturey solicitude, undershot with something smug, as in, Oola and Leif, at it again! He’s smothering her! No, she likes the attention! Do they do everything together? Go to the bathroom together? It’s sweet, but it’s creepy. He’s totally pussy-whipped. She’s totally depressed. Do you think they have threesomes? Do you think he’s unstable? Do you think that she’s cheating? If she was, he’d know. They’re attached at the hip! Maybe he likes it, you know, a cuckold thing. He used to be fun. She used to be funny. Now they’re fucking domestic. Maybe it’s kinky? Maybe it’s trauma? Maybe it’s cancer?
I resented the inaccuracy of their clichés. Midsummer, a rat nibbled my phone charger in half. I consigned my dead gadget to a drawer and felt frankly relieved. More time to devote to Oola.
One evening, plopped outside the general store, I tried to explain that the WASPy world she fetishized was the very one from which I came, and that it wasn’t all highballs and yachts. She just blinked at me. “You don’t sail,” she said.
“No, but…” I floundered for proof. “My mom was an ex–beauty queen.”
She laughed. “So was mine, if you ask her.” She turned away, having settled the matter. “Perhaps if you sailed, you’d understand.” Yacht clubs were one of her very favorite scenarios.
Or the evening when I asked her how her sorbet was.
Her answer: “I don’t really like it.” This was well into the summer, a late-August night.
“Is something wrong with it?”
“No.”
“Are you sick?”
“No-o.”
“Then why don’t you like it?”
She shrugged. “No reason. I mean, it’s always been kind of shitty.”
“But you get it every time,” I said after a heavy pause.
She shrugged again. “Cuz it’s all they have.”
I tried to sound disinterested. “But I thought it was your favorite.”
She shook her head. “To be honest, I’d prefer a steak.”
“A steak?” I took a breath. “But you don’t eat meat.”
“I know.” She continued calmly licking, unaware of the betrayal. After a beat, she glanced at me. “What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t answer. “Nothing, O.”
“You look like someone died.” She stuck her tongue out, stained lurid orange and green.
* * *
WE SPOKE OFTEN OF THE fire. It was our go-to cocktail-party gag, in the early months of summer, when we still went to parties, when we were still #1 on any invite list. We’d interrupt each other to tell it, get excited as the climax neared, our flushed faces like cue cards for the listening crowd.
“It was just after we’d moved in,” Oola would start. “There we were, in the boondocks. Redwoods for neighbors. Nobody, I mean nobody, for miles around. I’d sit on the porch in the morning, butt-naked, reading the paper. I only got dressed to give myself some sort of structure. You know the delicious feeling of unzipping your pants at the end of the day? I missed that, that release. Pajamas begin to feel sickly if you don’t take them off. You know?” Her eyes would shine and people would nod vaguely, not understanding but not wanting her to stop. “They’re heavenly after a long night out; like right now, I’m dreaming of them, the specific nightgown waiting for me. I laid it out on the bed before leaving. Gives me something to look forward to in case the party’s boring. Sometimes it’s almost the best part about going out, especially now that we live so damn far away. I think about my pajamas when I’m putting on my dress. Yes, at six p.m. I look at them lovingly. I tell them, Not yet. This shit has to be earned. Oh, and when drunk! When drunk it’s the best, it’s almost, like, lush. Taking off your shoes, taking off your dress, throwing it on the floor cuz who the fuck cares now.” She would start chuckling. “God, you know what? Most of the time I’m so excited that I fall asleep naked. I flop into bed and fall asleep on top of my nightgown. I wake up and it’s fallen to the floor. It’s lying next to my party dress, as if I wore both of them. How sad is that?”
At that moment I would give her a Look. She’d let the crowd finish giggling and set down her drink, the better to gesture. “Basically, what I mean is, we’re living in the woods.”
“Like outlaws,” I would add facetiously.
“Like outlaws.” She’d nod gravely. “The first week in Big Sur, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We’d moved our shit in, cleaned everything up. Leif hadn’t started writing yet. It was like summer. Time was ours to waste.”
This was an error that I let slide, smiling gamely in her shadow and touching her elbow with my glass. I nodded in confirmation.
“To be frank,” she said, “the freedom was daunting. I would go for a walk and everything would be so peaceful, so quiet, that I’d start to feel nervous. Ironic, right? I guess I wasn’t used to it. I had a friend who grew up by an airport and now she can’t sleep without her washing machine on. She moved it into her bedroom, uses it like a
bedside table. I guess I was like that. I couldn’t trust how quiet it was. The fact that all was still, for now, just meant that something had to give. Entropy, right?”
“She took it out on me,” I’d sigh, playing the stoic boyfriend.
She’d beam in remembrance, press backward into my glass. I’d watch her skin goosebump, upper arm imperceptibly ridging. “What a pussy. But, OK, I was frosty. For God’s sake, I was scared! That’s the only word: scared. It got so that everything scared me. We’d go outside and look at the stars and Leif would say, God, how beautiful! and I’d look up and feel carsick. There was too much space. I wanted to scream, Put a sock in it! Or I’d be washing the dishes and dreading the moment when I had to be done. The stack of plates kept me safe. Once I ran out of plates, what was left? Only trees. The Men, we nicknamed them, cuz that’s what they looked like. The Men were watching. The In-quis-i-tors. I couldn’t let them see me slacking. I had to pretend to be busy. I’d rush from the kitchen to the bedroom and immediately start straightening things. I made the bed, like, three times a day.”
“But then…” I would prompt gently, raising my eyebrows toward the tolerant crowd. I was practically winking, all while icing Oola with the glass’s edge. She steeled against a bout of shivers and didn’t give a thing away. “But then,” she sighed. “Ah, yes. It was Friday. We were sitting in the kitchen, reading. For no clear reason, we both looked up. Exact same time. Something … well, I don’t know how to say it.” She would look out the window, musing, then drag her eyes across my face. “It was a beautiful morning. Not so quiet. For the first time I could hear the trees crackling, swaying. Leif and I had been avoiding each other all week, walking on eggshells if the other was around. But that day…” She faux-blushed. “Did I mention it was morning? That means I was naked.”
I offered the room my chummy grin. She tucked her hair behind her ears and said with enviable simplicity, “We fucked all afternoon.”
She used the term loosely.
There was a tittery pause, and rather than fill it in with a joke or throwaway phrase (it was special; we felt connected), she looked at me solemnly. She was passing along the story’s baton. My glass curved perfectly to the small of her back.
I cleared my throat. “Afterward, we went around opening all of the windows. Suddenly it was evening, unusually warm. We couldn’t stop saying how good the air smelled.”
“It was like incense,” O said. “We lay down on the porch, breathing it in. Leif said it smelled like the saunas in Sweden.”
“It wasn’t until later, nine o’clock, that we heard the news,” I continued. “I like to have the radio on while I cook. I wasn’t even listening. ‘Did you hear that?’ Oola asked me. ‘Put down that knife! Did you hear that?’”
“A fire,” she murmured, imitating her tone of reverent horror.
“Two thousand acres burned to a crisp. The entire region was at risk. They gave the coordinates, and it was basically our backyard. We tuned in just as they were lifting evacuation orders.”
Oola shook her head wonderingly. “And we’d just sat there on the porch, as if we were drugged or something. Naked, for fuck’s sake! Can you imagine the damage?” She laughed, a surprisingly gruff sound. “Sitting ducks.”
She lifted her drink to her lips. While the crowd ooh’ed and ah’ed, she’d stare at me over the rim of her glass, daring me to say otherwise.
“I’ll drink to that,” I always said, hearty and ironic, cinching the story shut. I’d take a long swig from my drink, its ice cubes melted by her body heat. The booze tasted like nothing now, and the lip of the glass tasted a bit like her lotion. I was determined to choke it all down.
We’d go our separate ways to schmooze, and while I nursed my watered-down drink, I imagined that I swished her essence in my mouth, or at least pursed my lips around her absence. She moved through life by melting things; her absence was marked not by a void or lack but by subtle change. Like now: The crowd broke up, but each listener carried a bit of her with them, the porch, her fear, the smell of smoke, reassembled into something different but whose origins were definitively Oolish. Her image was promiscuous, because everyone held on to it. Her hair was promiscuous too, turning up on sweaters or the rim of a drink. Even certain mannerisms got around—her habit of running a tongue over her teeth cropping up, unexpectedly, in another man’s mouth. I couldn’t count how many times an acquaintance began a conversation with, I don’t know why, but this made me think of you … In this way, she was soon diffused throughout the room, despite standing quite still in one corner, locked in conversation with a friend of a friend of a friend. I could see that she was bored out of her skull; I didn’t need to catch her eye to know. Remember, I held her like an egg in a spoon in my mouth.
We would laugh about this person later, on the drive back to the cabin. “She was telling me about her favorite book,” she said. “She said that I reminded her of the main character. I asked her which book, and you know what she said?” She rocketed forward in her seat, hands in the air. “Fucking Carrie!”
“What were you expecting? Lolita?”
“That ship has long since sailed, babe.”
“Justine?”
“Dream on.” She could barely speak for laughter. “I actually thought, I have no idea why, but I actually thought she was going to say Alice—as in, Alice B. Toklas. I’d prepared a reply in my head.”
“So I’m Gertrude?”
She pawed at my crotch. “There’s no there there.”
“You bitch!”
We were in hysterics for no apparent reason. I drove recklessly, not wanting to look at the road.
I didn’t realize it until I’d joined her in the foyer at the end of the party in question, where she kissed the hostess goodbye five times and I put a hand on both women’s shoulders and chided, “Now, Oola,” and all within earshot had laughed: that since separating, I’d been mouthing the word, my lips pursed in anticipation, and that every conversation I’d had up to that point was mere practice for the moment when I could say it again—Oola, now.
* * *
EACH NIGHT BEFORE WE WENT to bed, I plumbed her.
It always began with a kiss on the backs of her knees. It was like the tapping of a conductor’s baton; when she felt my tongue there, strumming that most under-loved cartilage, she relaxed the rest of her body in preparation. Every evening I was pleased to discover that she was a palindrome. It took me the same amount of time to scale down as it did to feel my way back up. I always ended, brava, with a kiss on the brow. This wasn’t sex. We’d gone as far as we could go with sex, in that first manic desert dream, and then somewhere along the line contentedly abandoned it, compelled by other toils.
Her reciprocation was minimal. I knew Oola, as has been made clear, and I knew how much she liked to take a backseat role in all matters of bluster or stress, and so I knew that we both viewed this exam as an exceptional chance for her to cut loose, in the opposite manner than is expected. Instead of girls gone wild, O gave going, going, gone. Her mildness was luminous. She unfurled readily upon the bed, petal-limp, completely free. Sometimes I was reminded of Virginia Woolf, soft pockets full. Mostly, she looked out the window. Sometimes, she ran her hands over my cheeks and neck. “Stubble is disgusting,” she’d mutter. “It always looks unnatural.” On the most active of nights, one finger would stray to my Adam’s apple. She thrummed it like a bass string. “Plum pit,” she’d breathe. “Yucky yuck.”
She had a prominent red scar on the back of her knee, roughly in the shape of California. When I mentioned it, she giggled. “California? I call that my hot dog.” Running my finger over the rubbery tissue, I could see she had a point. She had blond fur behind her ears and on the small of her back, much thicker than on her arms or legs. She was less ticklish than most other people. Her slight scoliosis (left bend, five degrees) and the overdeveloped hump of muscle on the good side of her curve was a site of endless fascination. “All pretty girls have scoliosis,” she said pr
oudly. “Have you noticed? It affects the long and lean.” Her nipples were empirically pink.
I loved her mosquito bites, which pulsed radioactively under my lips. I followed the formation and fade of her tan with the same interest with which one follows the movement of planets. I traced her scabs with my thumbnail and interrogated her bruises, of which there were many. “How did you get this?” I intoned, pointing out each fresh or fading mark.
She usually didn’t know. “I think I banged it on the bedpost?”
“You’re lying,” I said, and fitted my thumb to the oblong bruise on her shin. I pressed down slightly and watched her shiver with pain and delight. “Please, Officer,” she sighed, “I know nothing.”
One balmy evening in late July, the purple sort that makes you doubt death, I pulled back mid-inspection.
“Oola!” I cried. “You’ve got a tick.”
She giggled weakly. “I know.”
I examined the tiny black pebble embedded in the flesh just above her tailbone. An undiscerning eye might have mistaken it for a bow on the band of her underwear. Gentle as a doctor, I pulled the fabric down another inch. The surrounding skin was flushed and glossy, a pink aureole around her coccyx, the blush diffusing at her crack. I was admittedly tantalized. I flicked the tick; it didn’t budge. Its tiny body was hard with blood. I got level with the bugger, until I could see his hair-like legs pinwheeling. My stomach lurched. “How long has this been here?”
She thought about it. “About twenty-two hours.”
“Are you serious?” I sprang off the bed, trying to remember where we kept the tweezers. “Jesus, why didn’t you say anything? Don’t you know about Lyme disease?”
She stayed on her stomach, resting her face in her arms. There was an edge to her voice. “Actually, yes.”
“Well, we need to get him off. Right now.”
“Or her.”
“Yes, him or her or it or Ingmar fucking Bergman.” I found the tweezers atop the dresser, half-hidden by her festive city of nail-polish bottles. I rounded on her, steadying the flesh of her backside with my free hand. The skin felt warm and strangely puffy, shining like a boil. “This might hurt.”
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