“How do you mean? Like, hurting you?”
She shook her head. “Half strangling me, half just touching. You know the way you touch the wall when the lights are out and you’re trying to find the switch? It was like that.”
She told me this at the nude beach. It was, of course, her idea to go.
Her plan was to arrive in heavy sweaters and snow boots. “It’s the only way to be indecent among nudists!” she cackled, slithering into her long johns. “Where’s my left mitten?”
She hadn’t calculated how secluded the beach would be, a local legend by the name of Cock Rock Cove. In the end, after hours of following the FKK signs spray-painted onto cliffsides, she’d stripped down to her underwear out of necessity. She was wearing only the boots when we finally mounted the outcropping that shielded the nude beach from view.
An unimpressive bouquet of flesh beckoned. Bellies like Filet-O-Fish and asses griddled by the sand, poofs and pucks and abscesses, each topped off by the nudist’s weirdly level, neutral smile. We tiptoed toward the shore, a bit chagrined. Sex had been stripped from this picture, and the softish cocks and mossy groins were less like genitalia than fragile marine creatures that it was our civic duty to protect. People didn’t come to cruise, as I’d initially expected given what I knew about Big Sur’s secret hookup scene (mostly between heiresses and undergrads, the windswept widow and the self-published poet), but rather to come to terms with themselves, in a quiet and public fashion—to acknowledge their rot with a humbler gesture than seducing the caretaker’s son. One man in particular watched our approach, his hands on his hips, tracking our progress like a sunflower tracking the sun.
Feeling rather depressed, I turned to Oola, who was in the throes of unlacing her boots. “Don’t look at me!” she stage-shrieked. “It’s obscene.” So I peered into the picnic basket. The cold pasta salad and soft-boiled eggs made my stomach flip. Even Oola’s peanut butter popcorn balls offended, given the setting. We ate like paupers and also like creeps. I fixed my eyes on the lighthouse, grotesquely erect, in the distance.
“Ready,” O called, none too soon. She’d spread her sweaters on the sand, and we lay down on top of them. The long johns she balled up and used as a pillow. Too hot to resist, I stripped to my shorts. She watched me with a fishy grin.
“Where’s your modesty?” I asked.
“Don’t mind me. I’m a fly on the wall.”
“I know that line.…”
“You know what my mother always told me?” Her voice was light. “She said to find an ugly spouse. That way, they’ll always love you.”
“Should’ve taken that advice.”
“I guess.” Suddenly I was quite conscious of her eyes sliding over my bare torso, raking through my ratty hair. I must admit, I flexed a bit. “She said every happy marriage she’d ever known of was founded on this imbalance. The ugly loves the beauty for her beauty; the beauty loves the ugly for his love. You give what you got.” She folded her legs and shifted her gaze to the waves. “But I always was a headstrong child. I told her that was sexist shit.”
Unconvinced, I fiddled with my flap and said nothing.
She was in a strange mood and wanted to talk. The nudists sensed our gravity and gave us a wide berth.
“Before you,” she told me, “I’d only ever really been attracted to men with heavy accents.” She bowed her head, as if she’d admitted an attraction to hairless animals.
I nodded, having noticed this susceptibility during our travels with rising unease. Croatia was especially challenging; she’d talk to fishermen for hours, their chafed and veiny forearms too close for comfort. It was one stark reason I was glad to be back in America (the other: peanut butter). “Was there a particular one that got you going?”
“Not really. It’s more about the struggle. The personality disorders go undetected. And it doesn’t matter what someone says; it always feels significant. Like, one looks so heartbroken just asking for coffee. And the most banal shit sounds profound. In fact, everyone should always say you’re sexy with a lisp.”
I nodded. She poured sand from one cupped palm into the other. “I suppose, growing up, I had little crushes on kids my own age. But even the act of saying hello to a tourist excited me. Foreign films were like porn to me.” She laughed. “I mean, in other ways besides the sex. I had a phase when I only watched anime—sue me. It finally made sense when I met Beau. He was the stepson of a lady in my neighborhood, two or three years older. He had curly hair and this mysterious full-body tan, one of those French kids from a random village who still thinks free love is a thing. It caused quite a stir among us horny little girls to have a real live Frenchman, and a lifeguard too, in our midst. He worked the morning shift at the public pool and always had his shirt off, even in the fog. Of course, I was no different than the other girls. I wanted to be the one he picked.” She raised her fist. “Winnayr winnayr chickon dinnayr.” This she pronounced with an awful French accent.
“Even after I got to know him and had spent God knows how many hours with him, there was still that language gap between us. Like how after we first met, he said, I call you, Oo-Kee? Like a question. We can make a party. I loved his texts. Bisoux, he always wrote. My cowboy girl, we go nice together.
“Looking back, it seems kinda weird that we didn’t get sick of each other. We had about five conversations that we cycled through and then repeated and mostly went to the beach to make out. Still, it never seemed like he was saying the same thing. The way he tried to sound normal, ending each sentence in an Americanized baybe, or his weird formalness, always saying, I can not or What is up, was beyond sexy to me. And it worked the other way around—I remember once he was smiling so devilishly that I interrupted myself. What’s wrong?
“He just laughed at me. Do not worry, nothing is the matter. Only, I love the way you say the dyood.
“The what?
“He pursed his lips. The dyude. The dude. Non?
“We didn’t really listen to each other and we liked it that way. I liked that I didn’t really know him, because he had no real way to talk about himself, except to say he was a dirty boy, a sun bunny, and he didn’t know me, like, at all. I liked knowing that there was another, realer Beau somewhere, inaccessible to me except in flashes. I expected so little from him, so he was always surprising me. Like when I asked why he used girl’s shampoo. He grabbed my hand and put it in his hair. It makes my curls work togezher! I guess that’s how it always is with teen ro-mance”—she said this with a sardonic lilt—“but with Beau, we didn’t feel the need to pretend otherwise.
“He always wanted to do the dumbass things he’d seen on TV and was convinced all Californians did. Drive around in the convertible he’d rented, play Fleetwood Mac, eat at Del Taco. He genuinely acted like my butthole town was paradise because it had a 7-Eleven down the street from the beach. But I went along with it. Doing these things with him felt less stupid than doing them with other boys, like we were in on some kind of joke. I was fascinated by the way he smoked, which struck me as so girly. Everything about him was funny to me, and since nothing we did would last, we began to take tremendous liberties with everything and everyone.”
I swallowed my lemonade carefully. “How so?”
“Oh, you know. We ate food out of each other’s mouths. We talked through movies. He called me his petite oeuf, which I hated. We blasted our terrible music and made pacts not to sleep. We slapped each other to stay awake. I asked him to suck his thumb once, and he did. All curiosity, like a kid picking a scab. Nothing was binding. I don’t think he even knew I played the piano; it never came up in our few conversations about the size of my hands.” She winked and I kicked sand at her. “I’d sit in the passenger seat, responsible for nothing.” She chuckled to herself and I pictured her legs on the dashboard, skirt blown over her head. “You could say it was mutually beneficial abuse.”
She paused, and it occurred to me that the beach might be what put her in this wistful mood and made her thin
k of him: the familiar setting, too much like the dunes where Beau had petted his beach bunny (pronounced BO-nee). The librarians and octogenarians around us were dissimilar in musculature but identical in bearing to the Beau I conjured in my mind: a browned live wire on a bed, sparking lazily. Splay-legged, tender-gutted. There’s milkshake (I like zem!) on his nominal mustache, which only makes him tastier. We’d only been here for a half hour, but I could feel pretensions ebb away; the waves simulated the unsucking of stomachs as newcomers traipsed down the cliffs. I could even sense it in myself, in my unthinkingly crossed legs. O flicked a nipple, in keeping with the mood, and continued. “You know how you never even think about parts of your body until somebody compliments them? How your lips are just lips until you catch someone staring?”
I nodded. “Or until you put them to good use.”
“It was like that, but times ten, because he found what I ate for breakfast equally stunning. Avocados. I do not understand zem. Said while drinking coffee from a bowl. What if I kissed you every time you said like? Said while holding a joint between his pointer and middle fingers, like a cigarette! And because I knew he’d never figure me out, I was never self-conscious with him. At sixteen, this made the sex much easier.”
She left it at that.
“How long did it last?”
“Only a summer, thank God. He left in September, to follow ze waves, and I started my junior year of high school. For a while we wrote each other emails where how little we’d known or liked each other became embarrassingly clear. I thought maybe it was a one-time thing, until I met Le Roy.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Québécois? Haitian? Swiss?”
She shook her head. “This is where it gets complicated.”
She waited for a sunburned scavenger, his metal detector thrust forward at a rather lurid angle, to pass before continuing. I flopped on my stomach with my chin in my hands, eager for more. She sat with her knees to her chest and looked out at the sea, combing her hands through her hair.
“I met Le Roy a year later. I was a senior in high school and, like, totally over it. All I wanted was to get into conservatory and fuck the rest. I loved my parents, but…” She seemed to have trouble finding a fitting word. “They were in their world and I was in mine. By then I was working at this bakery called Sweet Jane’s after school and on the weekends. Whenever a tourist came in, I’d rush to the front to help them. Just hearing them ask for a coffee excited me. I always undercharged them.
“One day, this older man came in. Heavy Slavic accent, probably a businessman, only bought a coffee. I wasn’t attracted to him sexually, in case you were worried, but he did intrigue me, and I kept finding excuses to go over and talk to him. I probably gave him, like, four refills. The first time I went over to him, he was quiet, polite. But the second time, he had this eager look in his eyes, like he recognized me from somewhere. My Gad, he said. What are you doing here? I was like, Good question, man. But he kept going. I can tell you’re built for better things. I was embarrassed and said thanks and went back to the counter. The last time I went over to him, he had his coat on and was ready to leave. I guess I said see you later. Yes, he said, I’ll be seeing you on the big screen very soon. And he left.
“I was used to customers commenting on my height or asking if I had a boyfriend. This one dude used to always ask if I’d been partying enough. Another guy said I had perfect skin and it should be illegal for me to work in a bakery, lest I get pimples. I was like, Are you fucking for real? But what the businessman said didn’t feel pervy. It felt … considered. Prophetic. For God’s sake, I was seventeen. Every shower was a revelation. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the day I was fucked, true and proper. Like, if my life up till then had been a game of Jenga, he’d pulled out the bottom brick. Ever since, I’ve been on the lookout. It’s stupid, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking, in the back of my mind, that something big is in store for me. All because he implied I was special. The big screen. What the fuck. I’ve never even wanted to act.”
Her words were soft and measured, but a certain light had entered her eyes, gray and despairing, like when she spoke about her conservatory days. I rubbed my jaw with both hands. This wasn’t the direction I had expected her to go in, but I didn’t dare interrupt now.
“My mistake was in thinking that something happens to everyone. That life is a waiting game. I’ve always been passive. You know that. Like, while all my friends complained about their summer jobs, I secretly enjoyed Sweet Jane’s. Leaning on the counter, waiting for my break. Supervised boredom—it suited me. I preferred the long shifts. That’s when I first started smoking, you know; it gave me something to look forward to. Immediately after the Slavic guy’s comment, my passivity became total. It was like all I had to do was tread water, chill out, until something fabulous happened. Every boring-ass day brought me closer to glory. Honestly, those were some of the happiest days of my life. A great big cake was baking, and as long as it was in the oven I was free to fuck around, to sit. Even sleeping brought me closer to my goal. So I was primed, in a way, to see Le Roy as the answer. He entered my life quietly, but the timing made it seem climactic. Two weeks after the Slavic man ruined me, Le Roy dropped by Sweet Jane’s. He ordered a cruller, and kaboom.” Her hands fluttered up. “I was glazed.”
I laughed weakly. It unnerved me to see her shoulders set patiently, fingers laced in her lap, as if she were regurgitating this story, as if we were both at a bus stop, chatting to pass time—as if she were waiting for the seven-fifteen, for the moment she could shut her eyes and reappraise his ghost among chatter.
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“I’d never seen him before. He looked about twenty and had a strange way of speaking.” She smirked, and a familiar flame entered her eyes. “You were waiting for this part, weren’t you?”
I nodded. “Don’t leave me hanging. Was he a Belgian baron passing through? A Bolivian educated at various boarding schools?”
She shook her head. “He was deaf.”
She said it so plainly, with such a kind smile, that a shiver ran over the backs of my legs. An inchoate sense of violation, as if she’d said he was retarded, made my blood ice up in revolt. Perhaps it was a jealous lover’s intuition; Le Roy had something that I did not. And, sure enough, she’d shut her eyes—she’d tapped him on the brittle wrist to ask, Is this seat taken? He was taking off his headphones, preparing a reply.
“Deaf?” I said dumbly.
“Well, technically half-deaf.” She tapped her right ear. “It wasn’t obvious if you didn’t know him. He spoke very carefully, by using his entire mouth to speak and pronouncing every—single—sound. No one does that. Like, when he said hello, you could hear both l’s. He said please with a real s instead of a z. Sometimes he hummed without realizing it. I was fascinated. I thought maybe he was tripping.”
“What did he look like?”
“Death,” she laughed. “Young Nick Cave meets Harry Potter. He was wearing cigarette pants and a black turtleneck. I was into it.
“He came every day for the rest of the week. He sat by the window, writing in a notebook, and took two and a half hours to finish his café au lait. We were engaged in the same game, I guess. After a week I finally worked up the courage to ask him his name. Le Roy, he said slowly, like the name of a fancy hotel, in honor of JT LeRoy. I pretended to know who that was. I about died when he said he was a musician. Actually, he said rock and roller, which, when pronounced correctly, sounds hilarious. He claimed to be preparing for his first U.S. tour. Always wear earplugs, he told me. Have you ever heard a deaf person laugh? Rusty hinges.”
“What was his band’s name?”
“Prosthetic Thigh Gap.” She slapped her knee in fond remembrance. “But after his eardrum burst, they renamed it. Judith Butplug.”
My heart jumped territorially. “Was he a punk?”
“I suppose.” She pushed a hand through her hair and seemed to pedal forward in memory. “I f
ell in love when he asked me my star sign. It was barely a fling.” Her brevity slayed me. She opened her mouth to say more but thought better of it. “Fucking Le Roy” was her conclusion, and though she said it gently, I thought I detected a trace of heartbreak in her tone.
She pretended to be distracted by the picnic basket, and I could tell by the color in her cheeks and lines around her mouth that she was tired of talking, and try as I might, the topic of Le Roy could not be reopened. I was battered by questions: Where did he come from? Nonsensically, I assumed Nebraska. One of those thin, windswept nihilists. Did his band make it big? Did he respect her? How long was his hair? Did he always get a doughnut, and, if so, what kind? Blueberry, buzz-cut? Was he a jerk? Did he stop in the street to pick daisies, or to piss? A boy was forming in my brain, and I was anxious for her to short-circuit this imaginative scabbing with the facts: quickly, before I grew attached to my spin-off, before I imbued him with the scent of my mother and the scowl of a singer I used to like, some proto–bad boy who had never been and was therefore way better than me.
But she’d grown quiet. She unwrapped a popcorn ball and faced me, expectant. It was my turn to wave a dirty sock, to air some cherished tidbit. She receded, picking at her popcorn. The pitted plums and honeysuckle (rarely sucked) of our companions leaned in for a moment, sensing the attention shift, then resumed their tidy contemplation of the rocks and sea. Their owners returned to the exhausting application of sunscreen. With great effort, I turned my thoughts away from Le Roy, leaving an ersatz lover, perhaps just Roy, or a misheard Lee, to cross his legs on the outermost edge of my consciousness, waiting.
“I do have an odd habit,” I began, feeling a bit lame.
“Oh yeah? What?”
“I kiss with my eyes open.”
It impressed her. “You do not.”
“I assure you, I do.”
“How come I’ve never noticed?”
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