“Your eyes are always closed.”
She laughed at the obviousness of it. “I guess that’s true.”
“As are most people’s, in my experience.”
“And just how extensive is this experience?” she asked with a glint.
I’d walked right into that one.
I don’t know what first planted the idea, whether porn or my parents or the worst poetry, but all my life I’ve had a strange conviction in sex’s ability to save me. That’s why I didn’t have it for so long. From age thirteen to twenty-one, I lived in fear of the question how far have you gone? and invented a series of flamboyant tall tales—pedagogic babysitters, neighborly girls next door—to administer should I ever be forced to pick Truth.
Seeing me at a high school party, DJ’ing to no one (turn that emo shit down!), trailing Tay and his bevy, fucked up for nothing, you might have put me down as classically shy and confused. I was both of these things, but I was also content. Lonely, of course, but at peace. I went for many a lovely night swim in friends’ pools, dodging Solo cups. When I watched the twenty-four-hour live stream from Sarajevo at age five or got lost, far too stoned, in the frozen-food section of multiple Walmarts and the wastefulness of daily life threatened to overwhelm me, I saved myself with thoughts about that milder, wilder realm (SEX!), both dining-room dimmed and paradisiacally specific—things will make sense, will seem worth it, when I finally fuck. So I twiddled my thumbs while periodically smelling friends’ fingers. I sublimated my hormonal curiosity into online erotica (I amassed quite a fan base) and spitting competitions with Tay. It was not a question of readiness, as in that breathy interrogative Are you ready/sure? but one of despondency—I could never be ready for it (isn’t that the nature of heaven?), only sad enough, low enough, to finally break fast.
I was a college junior when I finally caved. It took the death of a classmate (bad molly) to drive the point home: One can, and will, die a virgin. Four days later I met and fucked Mazzy.
She was a fashion student and minor club kid. She was visiting her sister—who in the banal black magic of family life had been given a less flouncy name (Kate) and thus studied history of math at my school—and had nothing to do in the long afternoons. She’d shown me her sketchbook over coffee in the student canteen. She had an entire page dedicated to Genesis P-Orridge and another one listing popular Puritan names. She quoted queer theory and Britney Spears lyrics. “It’s fantastic,” I assured her. I held the book open to a photo of Cicciolina, under which she’d printed Be Just and Fear Not. “I mean it.” She nipped and tucked at the world’s excess, wearing, on this boring Tuesday, hot-pink Crocs and a mink fur (secondhand, she explained, so it was already dead). Poring over the pages, I recognized my own hunger for beautiful things, a leaning not to the left (I suspected she despised politics) but toward the horizon, an immense tenderness spent on all the wrong things. She did lots of K and spoke so softly that I had to order for her. In short, our appetites aligned.
We walked to the woods behind the local elementary school, a thin group of pines overlooking a stream where the kids pretended to fish during recess. Their branches were scraggly, but they filtered the sun in a way I considered romantic. It was five o’clock. It was unclear why we went there rather than to my or her sister’s room. One could chalk it up to the so-called heat of the moment, but we were both quiet and rather subdued (I’d paint the scene in shades of lavender, with spurts of pale light); really, I think it was due to a shared belief in the cleanliness of nature. We didn’t voice this belief, because saying it aloud would surely reveal how ridiculous it was, how young we were; but I felt the thought hanging between us, strong as cologne.
At age twenty-one, I wanted so badly to believe that the things I valued were ethical. I was, after all, studying literature and thus overwhelmed every day by the radiant pointlessness of all my favorite things. Beauty, surely, topped the list. Weren’t pretty places spared by war? Wasn’t there some inherent goodness to a street lined with trees, if the cherry blossoms littered the concrete in May? If beauty was ethical, and nature was ethical, or at least neutral territory, then sex in the woods had to be pure. The reverse was true too: It felt morally wrong to watch a movie at noon, when the sun shone just outside one’s curtains. Matinees were the province of the ill or depraved. That was one reason I could never get used to Berlin when I visited; it felt unseemly to lay my desires flat out, like a deli man slapping down beef cheeks, to take drugs when I could’ve been picnicking, to prefer a dark room to a clean well-lit space, and to party in grim bunkers without a buffer for my lust. Could a quality of light redeem a bad place, revamp the trauma by changing the tone? I wondered this as I strolled through my neighborhood, in sweet, awful New England. Every Fourth of July I’d sit in a family friend’s garden, gardenias in bloom, the air sagging with perfume, so warm as to be textured, like a very smooth cheek pressed to every inch of one’s body, and, beneath that, the zing of the ocean, keeping everyone’s cocks hard, and I’d wonder how something so beautiful (summer! bodies! the beach!) could ever be questioned or ever be anything other than what it seemed.
It would only be later, July 5, in the heavily curtained guest bedroom of my family friend’s house, sleeping off five mojitos, that I’d recognize this force as coercive. I’d been bound and gagged and loved every minute. Confronted by world tragedy, I wanted to stammer, B-but today we went plum picking! The tart is cooling on the sill. Today she showed me her cleft, and the music played low. The music, soft music … no can do, Casanova. We’re taught our poetic cues with the same rigor with which one is taught their national anthem. We learn very early to ooh and ahh fireworks. There I’d stand, violently tipsy, watching the sun set over, or rather into, the Atlantic, mistaking the surge in my gut for unique. It would be a few years as a sexually active adult before I realized that in fact we do terrible things just for beauty. We make excuses for it. We let it delude us. We use it as a bribe, a screen, a blinding gloss. Who knows what goes on twenty feet from the cherry blossoms? Even in Big Sur, I’d find myself staring at Oola, facedown on her towel in a dazzle of sunshine, and feel certain that the twin dips of muscle on her lower back made everything I did OK, that no bad could befall us so long as we kept our union picturesque. The only thing that’s changed between teendom and age twenty-five is that now I know these thoughts are stupid, rigged. My heart continues liquefying. Things continue to get worse.
Back to Mazzy. We sat down on a bed of leaves and shared a joint, grateful for the semipermeable privacy of drugs. When I took off my shirt, she couldn’t hide her disappointment. I felt her appraise my zitty shoulders, my chest fay as a child’s, and my embarrassment charged me, made me feel foolhardy and a little depraved, and so I lunged for her own body, of obvious perfection, daring her to withdraw, to ask, Can we take a breather? She didn’t. She carefully folded her mink and laid it under her head. She was wearing an aqua lace bra that unclasped in the front—secondhand, I imagined her saying. She looked up at me, patient. The contrast between our torsos made me feel a brief flash of tenderness toward her, so obliging, petite, and then, surprisingly, toward myself, my bitten body v. her premium flesh, she bravely coming and I going, going, gone, lost in the interplay between shadow and light that another lad might just call her rib cage. We did it. Afterward, as in a movie, she pulled out a packet of Vogue cigarettes. We smoked and talked quietly about nothing at all. I didn’t feel disappointed, nor did I feel elated; in a strange achy zen, I felt nothing and liked it.
I found out later that she was en route to a rehab center in rural Vermont. She’d stopped off at my college to say goodbye to the sister she wouldn’t have contact with for the next seven months. What she was sick with, I never found out, but for the rest of the semester I fell asleep pondering the various things—animal, vegetable, mineral—to which she could have been addicted. Of all the images that stuck with me, the one that I replayed most often was that of her standing to leave (I’m having dinner with Kate; she h
ates when I’m late) and tenderly brushing the leaves off her mink.
With this image on loop, I’d fall asleep, a scrim of dream thick on my teeth. Poor Mazzy. Who knows how long she stayed up north, playing checkers with junkies on the Canadian cusp, waiting for a sunset to save her.
On the beach, I stood quickly. “Let’s go for a swim.”
Oola cocked an eyebrow but allowed me to sidestep the question. “Au naturel?”
“I guess so.” I glanced around at the other beachgoers, trying to spy a seminude. The closest I saw was a middle-aged man in the act of removing his boxers, a sight that struck me as painstakingly private. I could handle the scrota from various angles, but a banker in only his socks broke my heart. I turned away, blushing, as he folded his shorts and gently set his glasses on top of them.
Oola waited for no man. I blinked and she was bounding into the surf, buttocks mottled by foam.
“You missed the show!” she called to me.
Taking a deep breath, I slivered out of my shorts. I waited for something to happen—someone to scream, to applaud, to shout, Put it away!—and when nothing did, I minced toward the water, trying to act casual. A strange part of me was disappointed by the other nudists’ indifference; the most one did was glance over, blink, then return to her Nicholas Sparks. By the time I entered the water, I’d started to wonder if I’d misunderstood the appeal of nudism; perhaps it was a bit sexual, a contest like everything else in life, which differed because there was nothing to win. It was a memento mori, this assortment of perishables, livened up by a nautical breeze.
I considered my penis, gently lifted by a current. I’d never felt especially attached to my dick. I was always the type to piss sitting down. “Are you doing lines in there?” Tay’d tease when we went out, banging on the stall door. “Share the love!” But he too avoided urinals, claiming they were tacky. “I can’t bear the manly throat-clearing,” he confessed. Underwater, my penis was blurry and pale, little more than a typo. I looked at the old man on the far side of the beach, still standing guard with his cock at three o’clock. He let me look at him, and I, in turn, let him look at me, a clown’s showdown. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel intimate.
Oola splashed to my side and followed my gaze. Her presence disrupted the connection between the old man and me, and I kissed her hello. She seemed perfectly comfortable, as if unaware of her nudity. “He reminds me of a classical musician.” She nodded in the old man’s direction, setting off the tiniest of tremors in her breasts. I blinked hard. It felt anachronistic to regard my favorite body in this strange new space, like leaving a nightclub at noon and watching responsible people catch buses, take lunch break. I struggled not to stare as her pubes were jostled by waves. “How come?”
“He has that look. Have you ever watched a pianist’s face when they play?”
Did she know who she was talking to? “Yeah.”
“They get this orgasmic look, you know? Rapturous, blank. Like they’re communing with the great beyond.”
We regarded him together, our shoulders rubbing. This time, he looked past us. I was reminded of a similar evening in Dubrovnik.
I guess I haven’t written much about the early days, when we traveled together and bounced between house-sits. What is there to say? As with children, traveling is only interesting to the people directly involved. Everyone else grins and bears the cheery litany. We were comfortably criminal, our transgressions merely minor, of the safest S&M—smelling gasoline, not sleeping—and criminally comfortable, as only the in-love can be. We fried ourselves in the fat of it; oh, we were delicious. Every place we went, we were grocery-store superstars. We were the cover of magazines, an eternal montage of blue skies and good vibes set to jangly post-punk. We were every slogan set to life—Never Looked Better; It Happened to Me. Where words failed, our bodies took over with gusto. We were gaunt and tan and inconsistently muscled. She wore a crop top in an Austrian village and stopped a horse-drawn wagon in its tracks. In Romania I literally got ants in my pants. We ate baby food outside a bus station and our bus never came, but we found a carton of unopened cigarettes in the trash. We camped on a beach in Croatia, and I went for a dip.
It was 7:00 p.m. in Dubrovnik, the beach deserted and bowing under the weight of a sunset so vibrant that I felt uncomfortable, as if intruding on nature’s self-love. The Adriatic rubbed itself into the sky, a throbbing red, and I entered the water as one enters a recently defiled bedroom. Oola had gone off in search of a bottle opener; I was alone but for a yacht anchored a mile from shore. I paddled toward it.
As I neared, four or five figures emerged on the deck. The sun cut my eyes, but I could tell they were naked, snapping their towels in the air. From afar, they looked like figures in a Egon Schiele painting, lithe and kinetic. I could hear the faintest din of laughter, and I guessed they were a family, though age and gender were unclear. Curious, I swam a bit closer. They frolicked like Muses, their lean limbs distorted and made even longer, more russet, by the expiring light. Pale flashes evoked buttocks, thumbprints in the sunset’s red, while jerky elbows and harsh voices insinuated puberty. I couldn’t wait to tell Oola about them, whoever they were, this lambent clan of boneless babes. I pumped my arms, desperate for a better look.
The yacht was farther away than I’d thought. I wanted to call to them, to tell them to wait. By the time I approached, they’d gone back inside, leaving their towels draped over the railing. A middle-aged man remained on deck, far more solid than I had thought possible. He was leathery and tired, like the clerk in a shop. He pretended not to notice me, or perhaps he didn’t care. He stood with his potbelly facing the sun, eyes slitted with pleasure, pissing off the side of the yacht into the sea.
Together, we watched the sky darken.
Thinking of that sunset triggered something moist in me. On Cock Rock Cove, I turned to Oola. I watched her belly button irrigate. “You look beautiful,” I squelched. My heart was a rotating fridge case, the kind lit from within, showing off layer cakes and pies of the day, and I wanted her to choose a flavor, take a bite, so that I could watch her stomach swell, then flatten. “Like a nymph of the sea.”
She smirked and crossed her arms. “That’s me. Never the poet, always the trope.”
Her tone worried me. “I didn’t mean it condescendingly.”
“Don’t worry about it.” She was bounding away. “I’m glad my body can inspire.”
Before I could ask her to elaborate, she’d disappeared under a wave.
Bad Days
Things went wrong when Oola stopped sleeping.
I have had ample time to consider the precise moment when the weight of things shifted, when the tooth turned ever so slightly out of place, a misalignment visible only in select expressions (of hilarity, grief, surprise): I have since made it my full-time job to consider this moment, to collect and study all photos, to drill through the pink gummy substance that clogs up most memories, and this is the conclusion I’ve come to.
She wasn’t an insomniac—not naturally, at least. As August slimmed to September, she just stayed up later. She spent more time in the bathroom, drew out her meals, and took hours to get ready for bed: An average bath was like a séance in grandeur and length. It seemed normal at first, a response to the solitude and changing of seasons. But as the nights became colder and leaves clotted the driveway, I eventually observed a grogginess to her movements, a heaviness as she peanut-buttered her bread or searched for her lighter. The fray of her thoughts had come loose, like a braid one has slept in, and I mistook it for the new style.
I wish I could say more about the early stages of her sleeplessness, but as a rule I left her alone between dinner and our usual bedtime routine. This was when I reviewed and revised the day’s notes, sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor. Oola presumably bathed in her Japanese bathtub, did the dishes when it was her turn, smoked, and combed her hair. We were separated by one flight of stairs, and I regret to say that critical information has bee
n lost to me because of this courtesy. I can only make an educated guess as to her mental state in the hours between 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., then 11:00, then pushing midnight. I waited in the bedroom, trying not to feel stood up. She did, after all, have a right to some time of her own; it was my job, as researcher, to deduce how she’d spent it from the soap-clean scent of her hair when at last she walked in and, later, from the position of the abalone shell as she’d left it on the railing. I have but a few clues from this time period, that long-burning autumn, in which trouble rose slowly like smoke in a bong: These I’ve arranged in a patchwork around me, waiting for something (a high heel on hardwood?) to click.
“Ready?” I’d ask when she drifted into the bedroom. The sight of her instantly quelled my annoyance. I felt like a cuckold, chastened by her long bare limbs as they folded accommodatingly over the quilt. I was lucky to have her, of course.
“Ready,” she’d say.
But she wasn’t.
I found her one midnight on the porch, sitting on the railing, puffing away. Theo kept her company, his belly spilling over both sides of the railing. She wore, inexplicably, a bikini top with old silk boxers; I could see that her hair was still wet from the bath and had dampened the seat of her shorts. If I didn’t notice anything odd about her behavior right then, I blame it on how fragrant a night it was. A jasmine bush must’ve been dying nearby. The heavy, sexy scent of flowers hung in the air and was enough to make anyone act a bit moony.
“What’s the matter?”
She stared at me through her veil of smoke. “Nothing,” she said, and seemed genuine.
“You look worried.” I slid a cigarette from the pack she had tucked in her waistband.
“So do you,” she said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
She laughed. “See? Blame my Nordic roots, if you must. We’re prone to brood.”
I nudged her with my foot and she handed me her lighter. We smoked together for a few moments in silence; it was peaceful, and the smoke fused us in our mutually unfocused fear, fogging over our clenched jaws.
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