* * *
—
Lindsay was dressing in her room. I admired her in the mirror and she let herself be admired, making fake model poses.
“How’d you get the bruise?”
She looked at the back of her leg. “I don’t know.”
We went out for Thai food. We were both relaxed in that postcoital way where you’re soft as butter and neither traffic nor crying babies can change how you feel.
Plearn was not far from campus, and it was too warm inside, the tables sticky, and the food excellent. Lindsay was always cold, so she held her teacup with both hands. She was looking at me with tranquility. Being with her was beginning to feel like the laws of physics were different. There was a blur separating us from the rest of the world.
“I have a passion for you,” I said, which was a clever way of not saying anything about love.
The smell of the opal basil, the nam pla, the curries, and the two of us not saying we were in love. Instead we told each other stories of how we had mauled each other. I did this to you you did this to me I’ve never done that before I liked the handcuffs it felt great.
She was looking off, over her tea. She asked if I had someone in my past, an old girlfriend, who—every time we saw each other—I just had to fuck?
The right answer, to keep up, would have been “Yes.”
She continued: was there someone who, even if I was dating someone else, even if I was in love with someone else, the attraction was just too hard to resist? Because she did. His name was Charles Blank. They’d dated in high school, and back then they’d spent the summer alone together in a house on the beach. “We banged away like armed policemen. We banged like a screen door in a cyclone.”
By then I’d somewhat invented an old girlfriend who this might be true about. I kept it vague, which was fine, because Lindsay didn’t have questions for me.
“It’s weird about Charles Blank,” she said. “Whenever I see him, there’s no question. It’s this animal attraction that’s unstoppable. No question.”
I felt a tiny weakness, in a way I hadn’t before. I didn’t like the feeling. “What’s so powerful about him?”
“He’s six foot five and has a beautiful body. He has a massive cock. When I sit on it, it fills me up to here,” she said calmly, with her palm against her navel. “But that’s not what actually matters.”
“What does matter?”
“Death. He has no fear of anything, no regard for anything. I do things with him that I’d never do with anyone else.”
“Such as?”
She didn’t say. She just looked at me in her impassive way, as if me asking more would be inelegant and needy.
I was thinking, There’s no question. I was beginning to feel queasy. “Where is he now?”
“San Diego.”
Something was happening to my body. I couldn’t tell if it was getting hot or cold. I was trying to relax my shoulders, and to remember to breathe. Lindsay had been in San Diego the week before. She’d called me from there.
“You’re vibrating,” she said.
I was. It was like a fist had picked me up, shaken me, and thrown me down again to see what would land faceup. “Did you see him?”
“I only saw him for two hours,” she said.
This was a terrible answer. She was holding her tea, a little concerned, like she was taking a child’s temperature. The bruise on her leg.
“Am I still vibrating?”
“Yes.”
I apologized.
“It’s okay. I like physical reactions like that.”
I said, “I’m making it okay. This is what the process of making it okay looks like.”
She understood. She explained she hadn’t fucked him—she was fertile that day—so they’d done other things. I didn’t want to know more, but didn’t want to let her see me thinking about that.
“Has there been anyone else?”
“Since when?”
“Since we first kissed.”
“No. Well…” She wasn’t sure. She’d kissed Dallas, but couldn’t remember if that was before or after me. And another guy, Nick, from Tower Records. She was gazing at a far wall, and nodding. Okay, yeah, wait, there was this other guy at a party. And—was this a problem? She hoped it wasn’t a problem.
“No,” I said. We were silent while I was thinking about my breathing. “I need to—”
“Oh, wait,” she said. “Five guys.” She said some more things I couldn’t quite take in, and I responded with a statement about how cold my heart was, so this was no problem, and she responded, “Thank God. I’m passionate but not loyal.”
I nodded. I thought, This is her right. She owes me nothing. I’m free. She has freed me.
“Wait. Six,” she said.
I have always remembered taking this in without understanding it. This isn’t quite right. I understood. “Oh, right, femme fatale.”
Later, back at the house, I said to her, “I want to tell you a story about Charles Blank. There’s a castle. And there’s a princess in it. And outside the castle walls are all these confident, handsome firstborn sons, and not one of them realizes he’s about to join the pile of dead knights.”
She laughed.
I stopped her. “I’m not one of them.”
She narrowed her eyes, fairly sure she was following me, but not completely sure.
“I won’t rescue you,” I said.
It was kind of a leap. She hadn’t said she wanted to be rescued. Especially from something that sounded as attractive as getting fucked by the personification of death. But I thought she’d told me about him for a reason. Finally she nodded. She was surprised, she said. Every boyfriend had wanted to win. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with me now.
BANK THE QUARRY RIVER SWIM
WE ARE COMING TOWARD A LESSON. It doesn’t seem like much: What’s under your skin is yours alone. People are separate. Your skin is a boundary, as is the rest of you.
The kinder lesson is that sometimes, the world gives you a connection, and it’s like a miracle. Love does go some distance running on miracles. But not that far.
* * *
—
I got a job that summer writing film reviews for Dow Jones. My contact was a colleague from Hunter’s Books who had to explain the gig to me. It wasn’t going to be in print, but in a technical place called “online,” which would be accessible to people with computers who paid for a service whereby they could access a central database. My job consisted of sitting in the library, going through the 1930 and 1948 bound copies of Variety and Billboard, and writing out cast lists and plot summaries of every film known to have been produced. It paid well.
Lindsay auditioned for and won a job at the Rockridge Cafe as their baker. She got up at five a.m. to heave sacks of flour and make pies. She still worked at the French-American school as a bookkeeper. She got me a part-time job there, a couple hours a day, as a day care worker. My French accent was terrible enough that the kids were deliberately bad so they could hear me speak. Some of them laughed so hard they pretended to fall over, which made me wonder if ridicule was genetic or learned.
Rachel, whom I’d gone to high school with, moved into the Rose Street sunroom. She and her boyfriend had recently done Ecstasy, a drug that had simultaneously appeared on the market and been made illegal. I’d done mushrooms a few times. But after reading what I’d written so impatiently during trips, I was annoyed to realize that I’d been fervently, carefully, obsessively describing only the effects of the trip itself. A psychedelic trip was a narcissistic friend.
Rachel said Ecstasy wasn’t hallucinatory, not really. The insights tended to linger. Plus the sex was indescribable.
That was all I needed to hear.
Lindsay and I got a piece of paper folded into an origami triangle by some o
bsessive chemist. In it was a beige powder we dissolved in apple juice. Drugs are about ritual, and Ecstasy’s ritual included fasting for the day (to increase its effects), finding a comfortable place to be, settling in with plenty of water, and then waiting. If we were already close, what would happen now?
The new R.E.M. album, Lifes Rich Pageant, had just come out. I’d already listened to the first side, once. Mostly, the songs sounded like anthems. I noticed Stipe singing “gather up” kinds of lyrics, wanting to get people organized, mostly singing “we” instead of “I.” Mobilize the masses, what a rock star might do if he wanted to direct his audience’s energy toward some purpose beyond trying to figure out what his lyrics were.
The first chord of “Cuyahoga” made me stare at the record revolving on the turntable with a sense of déjà vu. I didn’t move for the rest of the song. It reminded me of seeing an old photograph of a place, and staring at it to figure out whether I was in the landscape or not. I couldn’t tell if I liked it. I put the album away, and figured I’d listen more carefully later.
After drinking the juice, Lindsay and I looked at each other the way everyone does while waiting for drugs to start, wondering if a given flicker of perception was from approaching headlights, far in the distance.
A few minutes later, the phone rang, and I—starting to feel something changing—answered it. It was the guy who’d sold us the Ecstasy.
I said, “How odd to hear from you.”
Why? he asked.
Well, I said, I’d just taken it.
A long pause. Okay, then.
What?
Nothing. Just, he’d been calling to tell us it was a strange batch, people had had weird trips on it.
Weird bad?
No, weird weird. Really, everything was fine, enjoy it, he was being overly cautious. Just know that whatever happened, it wasn’t quite Ecstasy, chemically speaking, but something else.
Wait, what?
Yeah, there had been some kind of issue in the lab, but enjoy. Really, man, enjoy.
I was off the phone, staring at the receiver, and yet feeling strangely untroubled. Not just untroubled, but actually good. It was like I’d gotten the best news possible. I wasn’t worried, which puzzled me, as I am built to worry. It was becoming very hard to focus on anything dire.
I saw Lindsay and I started touching the fabric of her undershirt. I felt as if I were now strapped to the front of a locomotive, but pleasantly. Fingers on skin felt so intense it was like they left vapor trails behind them. I could hear how my fingers slid across Lindsay’s shoulders.
Our conversation made intuitive sense and then every once in a while, a fresh push of energetic pleasure would race through her or me, and a jaw would clench, pupils dilate, and a feeling would overtake her or me, I want to share a revelation.
In a moment of calm, I could see her eyes were flashing. She wanted to talk. “I know secrets,” she said.
“Like what?”
“I’m the softest girl you’ve ever touched.”
“How do you know that?”
She smiled. “Heidi is the second-softest.”
“I don’t know how you know that either.”
“I know things. It drives boys crazy.”
“You like that.”
“Boys are easy. I was a man once in a previous life. I died in a duel. When I got shot, it didn’t kill me immediately, because I got shot in the stomach. I lay there, bleeding out, and as I died I was composing a poem no one ever got to hear. I don’t remember it except for one line, where I was comparing how my mistress teased my cock with the slow, cold hands of death finally coming for me.”
“So is that real or is it a metaphor?” I asked, because reincarnation wasn’t real.
She looked at me patiently. “Regardless,” she said, “I know what men’s orgasms feel like. For some of you guys, it’s like death.”
“Like Charles Blank?”
“It’s like lightning striking the ground for him,” she said. “It’s meaningless. It dissipates. He knows the same things about death that I do.”
I am not threatened by him, I thought.
“You don’t have to be threatened,” she said. “You won me. Trust your intuition. I’m not going anywhere. But you enjoyed the feeling.”
“What feeling?”
“When I told you about Charles Blank. The writer in you wanted to feel the worst it could get.”
She was right. I asked how they’d met and she said that when they were teenagers they’d both worked at the same fast-food place.
“What place?”
She said, carefully, “Doodle Burger.”
She told me that she no longer wanted to kiss anyone else. I said it was okay if she did. She said of course it would be okay. She just didn’t want to. She liked me enough. She hadn’t said that to a boy before. She had never felt this way.
“Because we’re on Ecstasy.”
“I felt it already. I’m telling you because we’re on Ecstasy.”
On one of those intoxicated, standing-tall, I-have-indeed-won walks down the hallway to the bathroom, I looked in the mirror and noted that this was the face of a man having fun. I yelled down the hall, “Wait, no, don’t put that on yet. Don’t put ‘Cuyahoga’ on until I come back in.”
I came back into the room. Unlike earlier, my brain was crystalline clear now. Lindsay was crouched in her white cotton undershirt and boxer shorts, hennaed hair falling forward over her face, the new R.E.M. album in her hands. She was looking at me with fear and pleasure.
“How did you know?”
“What?”
“How did you know I was about to put on ‘Cuyahoga’?”
“I could see you.”
“But you were in the other room.”
Then, the clarity was gone and I was swept up in talking. She kept finishing my sentences for me. When I talked about visiting a quarry at Wesleyan, she filled in details about what it looked like, how people sat in the sands around it. When she talked about San Diego, I could see her memories unfolding as if I were riding alongside her. Gymnastics classes. Boys she’d ruined.
She said, “You’re starting to see me for real.”
“One day in eighth grade,” I said, “I went to school and at five minutes to three, I got a phone call. I had to go to the principal’s office. It was my mom calling from New York. She’d gotten on a plane with her boyfriend. I was alone a few weeks, I think.”
“I wish I’d been there with you,” she said. “I would have held your hand.”
“I would have hated you,” I said.
She looked wounded, and then she understood. “It made you independent,” she said. “You stand outside things, like how I do. You know no one is coming for you.” Then, she choked up. “But sometimes someone is, and it’s okay. Sometimes people just come for you because they love you.”
She put on “Cuyahoga.” The music was a dirge, the bass line distorted and glum. The lyrics were about tourists visiting the Cuyahoga River, where native tribes used to live. It’s hard to be a citizen of a place when your very presence is destructive. You might be smart enough when starting your own country up to see how your ancestors hurt people when they started theirs, but you’re doomed to do it all again.
This isn’t about Indians, one of us said. It’s about opening yourself up to a new relationship, because you have to take a chance even if it’s going to ruin you. It’s a love song from the old country to the new one that destroyed it. We’d watched our parents ruin everything. What happens when it’s time to start your own country up?
It was obvious that she and I were starting our own country up. A sweet drug, a lovely way to feel, I thought.
“How am I ever going to explain this?” I asked.
“Do you need to explain it?”
* * *
—
The next day I felt what everyone who took Ecstasy felt. My jaw was clenching, my cheekbones popping out. I was hearing wisps of conversations from the night before, and they were vivid and consuming, but also fading as my brain was on the ferry from vacation back to reality.
We are entering here the part of a summer where I no longer traveled down rational lines. There are easy ways to make fun of it. But to imply with a smirk it was only wishful thinking, the folie à deux of two hopeful kids, is to betray that memory a bit. I’ll say that we wanted all of what is coming next to be true.
I went to my job at the library, but there was something that prevented me from sitting where I always sat—construction, I think—so I took my archives into another room and sat down to work, which was difficult. Some image would flash in my mind, a gym class, a man shot in the stomach, and I couldn’t tell if it was something I’d heard from Lindsay or if I was seeing her memories. I heard “Cuyahoga” as if it were playing in the library. I wrote down the time, 10:30.
Twenty minutes later, I looked up. Lindsay was standing in front of me. She handed me roses, gave me a kiss, and left without saying a word. I didn’t have time to ask how she found me.
That evening, she told me she’d put “Cuyahoga” on the turntable, and when she had, she’d known where I was. She looked at the clock to see if she could bring me roses before she had to go to work, and saw it was 10:30.
There was still a lot of the drug in our systems, so we took this as a gift of chemistry.
It was a few days later. My brain was back to normal.
I put on “Cuyahoga.” I was trying to understand if I liked it.
The way that both Lindsay and I had reacted to it in ways clearly beyond what any rock band could have meant was a little embarrassing. I wanted to tell people about it but I also wanted to say it with caveats. I know this is insane, but…
I Will Be Complete Page 39