Oola

by Brittany Newell

  “I fucked it up,” he told me. “I fucked it up, but I’m still good.”

  “Of course you are,” I murmured.

  “You must think I’m such a loser,” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.” He ran his hands through his hair, voice pinched in despair. “Of course I’m a loser. No, worse—I’m a creep. I’m the person you hope doesn’t sit down next to you. Jesus! Look at me! Getting fucked up on a Tuesday and going home with some he-she!” He clapped his hands to his mouth. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Please forgive me.”

  He reached for my arm and I flinched. His eyes flared. “God, I’m sorry. You see? I’m a loser. I lose everything.” He covered his face with his hands and let out a moan. It was eerily muffled. “I’ll never get out of this shit.”

  I gently pried one hand away. “It’s OK,” I said softly. “I’ve got a thick skin.”

  He peered at me beseechingly. “You’ve been so nice to me.”

  Without breaking eye contact, I took hold of his other wrist and pulled it down from his face. I held both his wrists in my lap; he didn’t resist. His screwed-up expression slowly melted. I gave one tiny tug on his wrists and he poured down toward me, frothy-eyed. Blood pumped in my ears, blocking out the TV, and the movement of his lips and his voice seemed a beat out of sync when he said, “What’s your name?”

  Every hair on my body was zinging, as if his gaze, long and mournful, were a magnetic field; it degraded my bones, made my teeth swell, and they rushed out to greet his, bold balloons, when I grinned. “Guess.”

  He grinned back, almost goofy, and oozed that critical inch forward until our noses were touching. At last! I screamed to no one. The moment of truth was coming, came—our mouths mashed, he kissed me, I was eighteen years old, he tasted unclean and I died for it, orange soda and booze, plus a tingle of pine-scented afterstuff, a base of tobacco, his stubble marked me, mine had never existed, I loved him, I loathed him, I had him, limp and drunk and deaf but also young and so gorgeous, a half-deaf heartbreaker, our met mouths were a continuum I ecstatically traveled, a Slip ’N Slide of things past, he knew who I was, and of course I knew too, when his hand traveled my leg’s length to land on my thigh, his silver rings cool to the touch, we were one but also multiple but also all over the place and so fucked when he touched on the garter, fingers bumping the latch, my little secret, my time bomb, when he suddenly pulled back, our lips rudely squelching, and ran to the window, knocking over a lampshade, hooting like a little boy (too little to be kissed like that), “For fuck’s sake, did you see that?”

  “What?” I sat up and righted the strap of my dress.

  “It was a UFO! Come closer!” He waved me toward him with furious gestures. “Come look!”

  He knelt by the window, nose pressed to the glass, exactly as if it were Christmas and he was watching for Santa Claus. His enthusiasm was catching. I pushed open the window and studied the sky, but all I saw in the darkness was the motel’s lit sign, blinking its self-evident vacancies.

  “I don’t see it,” I said quietly, as though it were an animal that could be scared away.

  “It’s gone now,” he said, voice thin with wonder. “This is the third time this week. I saw one when I went for a smoke break at Fishbones. It flew over the beach and disappeared into the ocean.”

  “What do they look like?” I drank in his odor, whiskey and pine and something musky like the scruff of a cat’s neck.

  He shook his head. “You’ll know when you see one. I can’t put it in words.” His shoulders slumped and I saw how exhausted he was, adrenaline leaving his body like oil from an overturned truck. “I wonder what they are,” he sighed, resting his arms on the sill and his chin on his arms. “I wonder what they want from us.”

  Face still inclined skyward, he closed his eyes. Looking at him made me tired. I climbed over the bed, its wretched green bedspread relatively unwrinkled, and leaned against the bathroom door. I had to take my face off.

  “Oola might know,” he mumbled, his diction for the first time flagging.

  “What?” But I’d heard him.

  “She told me about them, when I went to go see her.”

  Suddenly I was too tired even to feel curious; a tiny part of me resented the intrusion. “She did?”

  He didn’t answer. Even from across the room I could tell he had passed out, elbows propped up, nose to glass. It was easy to picture him at the airstrip with Oola, pointing out the King of Pop while choking down peach pie. He in dark glasses, passing the time, playing footsie for infinity; Oola in gym shorts (she’d come straight from PE), finally feeling like someone in this no-nothing town. They never spotted Michael’s plane, but they kept coming back, ordering coffee that tasted like pencil shavings. He doodled on napkins; she’d thumbtack one over her bed. She made fun of the music but they both bobbed along to it. God, he looked good. French fries sizzled, kids laughed. She had nowhere to be until bedtime (her mother worked late), and they had nothing to do except peek at each other, the sweetest state for two people in love. I touched my lips; now I knew what the fuss was about. I was doubly swooning—for her, for him. I’d strip, if he asked me. I’d bottle my blood. I clutched my breasts and fled into the bathroom. I could almost hear the planes taking off. I could almost smell the lard.

  I drank a glass of tap water, blessedly unsalty, and with much effort removed my clothes. I folded them neatly on top of the toilet tank: stockings, garter, yellow dress. They needed to stay nice for twenty-four more hours.

  I couldn’t bring myself to use the bed or the Jacuzzi tub. Its porcelain gleamed meanly. I dragged the blankets off the bed and laid them on Le Roy. I knelt beside the bad ear. “Sweet dreams,” I whispered. He didn’t stir.

  I picked up and dusted off his jacket. Bunching it up like a pillow, I lay down on the bathroom floor. I knew that by morning my lust, like fog, would be burned off. I’d be left with my savvy, our shared sense of sin. What a wild threesome! O’s words floated through me: He kisses rough, like my mouth is a riddle he knows he can solve. I agreed.

  And just before I fell asleep, I remembered something key. “The Crying Game” had been one of her favorites, back when we played our game with pantyhose, one million years ago. “Gorge,” she’d whinnied, “gorge.” I hadn’t heard it since, but I knew every word. They came back to me suddenly. They’d been stored up in me, like data, like eggs, waiting to go forth.

  The Clinic

  Le Roy gave me the address of the clinic where Oola was staying.

  “Been there two months, maybe more,” he said.

  We were drinking instant coffee in the motel kitchenette. It was 10:00 a.m. He had risen early and showered; I awoke to find him standing over me, cowlick dripping. “Sorry to wake you,” he’d said. “But do you mind if I pee?” Chastened, I got up and gave him his privacy. I sat on the edge of the bed, his jacket draped over my shoulders. The early light had turned the curtains the color of buttercups and the bedspread, restored to the bed, penny green.

  Moving around the kitchenette, we were cordial with each other, having gotten from the other whatever it was that we needed. The nocturnal want had drained away. He had seen me with my underwear wedgied, I had seen his hair sans grease or swoop; jerkily, a friendship bloomed.

  “You don’t have any toothpaste, do you?” he’d asked shyly, poking his head out of the bathroom.

  I had to stop and think. “Goddammit. I forgot.” I cupped my hand around my mouth and tested my breath. “Bad.”

  He chuckled. “That’s OK.” And just like that, as in the best and worst relationships, we were complicit in each other’s filth.

  “The doctors can’t figure it out,” he was saying, blowing on his coffee, though it was lukewarm at best. “Her tests come back normal, but she’s wasting away. She refuses to eat. She told me that was how they got inside—the bugs that made her sick, that is. The doctors say she’s delusional, but I saw her—she’s suffering. Her skin’s flaking
off. It comes off in big pieces, like pie crust. Her hair’s going too. And no one knows why.”

  He finished his coffee and stood. He slipped his hands in his pockets and stared out the window. “Want a bump for the road?”

  I nodded.

  Like a gentleman, he stood in the hall while I dressed. In the parking lot, he rubbed my shoulder. His touch was unafraid. His eyes were bright but his body sagging. “Sayonara, girl.”

  He lit a cigarette and watched me drive off; from a distance, he looked dashing, his thinning hair and swollen gut forgiven by the heat haze that already, at 10:30 a.m., had set about softening concrete and loosening the screws on commuters’ worldview.

  It was an easy drive, one straight shot down the freeway. I drove with the windows down, letting my hair whip about. Janis Joplin played on the radio and I felt savage and beautiful. That’s the phrase as it appeared in my head—savage and beautiful. I even said it aloud (bad habits die hard). I stopped at a supermarket to buy a bouquet and a candy bar. The candy bar melted all over the passenger seat. One hand on the steering wheel, I leaned over and attempted to lick it all up.

  In an hour’s time, I found myself circling a two-story building of cream-colored stucco, situated inconspicuously in a middle-class suburb, leafy and bland, across the street from a pizza parlor and a Planned Parenthood. The parking lot was strangely devoid of life. There were only two other vehicles in the lot besides mine. The sound of my heels reverberated over the asphalt. I fixed my hair in the reflection of the clinic’s front entrance, the glass of which was dazzlingly clean. The lobby was also empty, as were the halls. No Muzak played. No patients coughed. The receptionist in the first-floor waiting room looked almost surprised when I walked up to her desk, although that could’ve been due to my outfit, planned to look smashing, and what I suspected was an aura of semi-sexual rumplement.

  “Slow day?” I asked, unsure if this was an insensitive question.

  But she smiled. “Our patients require more peace and quiet than is often considered normal in our hyperactive modern world.” She laughed, a bit tinnily, and typed in a few numbers. “But if TLC is considered abnormal, then I’d happily be called a freak. Wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded uncertainly. She was young and tastefully dressed, with a low bun the color and luster of hot buttered toast. Her beige lipstick was flawlessly applied.

  “I’m here to visit a patient,” I said. “Her first name is Oola.” I smoothed out my dress with one hand. “I’m a friend.”

  She locked eyes with me. “How nice. A friend?”

  I readjusted my grip on the flowers. “Yes. A friend.”

  “One moment please.” I didn’t know if it was the drugs, or the barrenness of the building, or the previous night’s activities, but I detected something cult-like in the receptionist’s tone, something off in the way that she smiled and said, “Oola! Oo-la. What a beautiful name.”

  “I know,” I said, nodding a bit too emphatically. “Oh yes, I know.”

  She rose like a ballerina. “Follow me, please.”

  She led me down the hall and into an elevator. When she pressed the button for the second floor, her French-tipped nail made a satisfying click against the plastic. As the elevator went up, she stared frankly at my legs. “You have a beautiful body,” she said. Her smile was toothy and benign.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  On the second floor, she stopped in front of the last room on the left. The door was shut. A card above it read: MOON ROOM.

  “Here we are,” she said, hand on the doorknob. “We name all the rooms.”

  “How nice,” I said honestly.

  “Have a good visit.” She smiled once more; I identified the shade of her lipstick as Dustbowl. I took a deep breath and edged inside. She closed the door gently behind me.

  New Oola lay in bed.

  You almost couldn’t tell that her hair was falling out, because you almost couldn’t see her, so white were the sheets and the pillow and the walls and her skin, whiter than white, like clouds viewed through a screen as I walked across the big empty ultra-clean room.

  I stood at the foot of her bed, clutching the flowers I’d bought to my chest. It was a mixed bunch, the Sympathy Blend, roses and sunflowers and zinnias, wrapped in shiny rainbow paper that crinkled when I took a step. I couldn’t give them to her. Her arms barely existed now, reduced to the width of electrical cables and only sporadically activating the dead lightbulbs that used to be her hands. So I held the flowers close to me and peered through the petals at the sketch of her face.

  It was as if she had been put through the wash too many times. The sharp bones of her face had given way to a general puffiness, while her collar- and wristbones stood erect. My wild child, privatized. Her right arm was hooked up to an IV that steadily dripped soft pink fluid, the pole and her forearm about the same width. It reminded me of the cherry-flavored hand soap you find in gas-station bathrooms. Her cheeks and forehead were dotted with scabs, raisins in bread dough. She was tucked so tightly into bed, white blanket flat across her breastbone and drawn under her armpits, that the rest of her body seemed to disappear. What use had she for legs now? Even the shape of her breasts was obscured by the tautly drawn sheet. Only her long bare arms, resting on top of the blanket, suggested a formerly fuckable frame. These too were dotted with black clots of blood. The tips of her fingers were a familiar blue.

  When she opened her eyes, I felt vertigo. I teetered. Looking at her in that moment was like lying on my back in bed and staring at the bedroom ceiling, blank, ready to be dreamed upon, her eyes two water stains. She licked her lips and a long pause snowed us in.

  “It’s not made up,” she finally croaked.

  I nodded, making the flowers rustle.

  “Nobody knows what it is,” she said, “but it’s not made up. They say it’s psychosomatic. That’s bullshit.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “How did you find me?” She smiled by opening her mouth a bit wider. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  I smiled too, being careful not to ruin my lips. “It wasn’t hard,” I said. “Le Roy told me.”

  “Roy?” She licked her lips again, buying her rotted brain time. “Roy who?”

  I said nothing. Her eyes drifted from my face down to the flowers, then to the body behind them. They seemed to get stuck on my neckline, pierced by the bones of my chest.

  “What are you wearing?” she managed. She squinted but couldn’t raise her head or come closer. All she could move were her eyes, which strip-searched me. As she scaled my bare arms and legs, panic flashed across her face. A healthy woman would have jumped up, maybe tugged at one spaghetti strap or grabbed my bangled wrist. All Oola could do was stammer: “Leif?” Her voice was stocking-thin. “Is that my dress?”

  “The one Le Roy likes.”

  “What?”

  “I was wearing that yellow satiny nightgown, the one with a rip in the back that LR said he likes.” I took a breath. “Plus, he told me so himself. He showed me.”

  “Leif.” She seemed to be having trouble breathing; the midsection of the white rectangle into which she’d been subsumed twitched vaguely. “This isn’t funny.” Tears split her voice, made runs in her nylon invocation. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You don’t know?” I laid the bouquet at the foot of her bed. I slipped off one heel, then bent my leg and rested my foot beside the flowers. The skirt rode up, bunched at my hip. Oola watched as I ran my fingers down, then up, my stockinged leg. I could feel her eyes tracing its veiny, sheathed length, racing my hands, orbiting them when I lingered on my knee to massage the hollows or slowed as I neared the top of my thigh. I twiddled the white garter that held the nylon in place, a flimsy number thrown away by some peroxide bride, eighteen and slightly chubby, or so I had imagined her to be when I’d fished it from the bargain bin the day before. Oola might’ve snipped it with her eyes before I could unlatch it, singed the imitation lace with her incre
dulous stare. I rolled the stocking down with a rapt, nurse-like attentiveness that seemed to fit the mood. I eased it over my ankle and pulled it off.

  Freed, my leg swung off the bed. I gripped the limp stocking like a garter snake, its head bashed in by a hoe—petty victory. I was tempted to swing it, pendulum-like, side to side, but resisted. Instead, I limped toward her. Our roles as lover and beloved, active and passive, the doer and the done-unto, had never been more obvious. I can’t lie: I was excited. I wanted to show off. I rested a hand on the bedside table and knelt so that our faces were close, noses almost brushing. I could smell her breath, made foreign by sickness: mildew and broccoli soup.

  “It’s not funny at all,” I agreed.

  “I didn’t ask for this,” she gasped. Her voice was soft and strained. “I wanted you, I really did.” She searched my face for a reaction to this breaking news. I didn’t blink. “How could I know it would turn out like this?” she said. “How could I ever be ready for how much you wanted? My way of wanting is different from yours, Leif. We can’t all sacrifice ourselves. I’m sorry if I’m more … reserved.”

  My silence only urged her on. An internal filter had been broken and she couldn’t stop now. “Have I been unfair?” she hissed. “There was never a contract. I never knew the terms.” I had to imagine that her eyes would flare if they still could, that she might grab my arm for emphasis. “I was stupid. I liked the way you looked, you were sexy, you made me feel good. Was I so wrong in thinking that that was enough? Of course I was. You were interesting, Leif, but you scared me. Every time I saw you at a party I was scared. But the party would be worthless if you never showed up. I wanted you, OK?” She was shouting now, as much as she could. “I guess I didn’t understand what that meant. I was curious, and flattered, and attracted to you. And scared, the whole time, of the way that you looked at me. But you can be all those things toward a man in the streets. Toward whoever sits behind you on the bus.” I noticed the fingers of her left hand spasming. “I know that it hurts to want something, Leif. But it also hurts to give things away. Why do we have to eat the whole fucking cake? Why is it so wrong to just want a taste? You”—as if to point at me, her left pinky twitched—“would eat till you puked. Do you know that?”