by Karen Olsson
I didn’t even see him so much as I intuited him viscerally. An intuition of a fancy coat and the shaved back of his neck. It had been years, but his name dropped into my brain like a raider from the clouds, like a Meal Ready to Eat, even though the names of people I’d met more recently so often escaped me. Rob Golden, golden boy. At seventeen he’d been a heartthrob and well aware of it. My father and his stepfather had been friends, and so we knew him that way too. He’d gone out with Courtney for a little while, and I’d been jealous but also anointed, cool by association.
To say he was the same, what does that mean? That he was the same person? That he had the same effect on me? A river I stepped in again, maybe. Or a pile of shit—I would argue that you actually can step in the same pile of shit twice.
Having been around each other so long ago, it was as if we’d known each other intimately, though that was in no way the case. I’d had a crush on him, and my sister had dated him, so he’d been very present in my life for a minute or two, but I hadn’t been a part of his life at all. As though that crush had just been in remission for two decades and now had returned, I had trouble saying his name. I gurgled it—“Rob?”
And then he turned around.
“Helen?” he said, and I was all too flattered, that he remembered my name after so many years. That he’d even known it to begin with. He’d been considered gorgeous, though it was more his energy and the twinkly leer in his eyes than his features, which were slightly skewed, as though someone had come along and tried to adjust something and done a poor job of it. And he had a heavy face; it would’ve been no surprise to find he’d grown fat since high school. In fact his body was lean as a runner’s. Other than the shadow of a beard that covered his fleshy jaw, he looked exactly as he had, down to the clothes, which were the designer versions of what he might have worn in high school, high-end jeans and sneakers.
He asked whether I lived in D.C. and told me he’d only just come back there himself. I pretended to know less than I did about him, for the truth was that news of Rob had continued to circulate, just as it had in high school, when his activities—fucking a girl in the darkroom, casual drug sales—had been widely noted. Later, instead of courting detention (or worse) he did work in far-flung countries, Bosnia for one, and in the Green Zone he’d been some kind of consultant, and now he was back here, doing something else weighty and unclear.
Your hair is short, he said. As if the only thing I’d accomplished in the meantime, while he was intervening around the globe, was to get a haircut.
Yeah, I said. I was in L.A. but now I’m here, I said. There was no way to explain all that had led up to this shorter haircut, all the styles and colors preceding, the layers, the products. I had this impulse to apologize for it, for my hair, that is, because of the way he was looking at it and at me with his head atilt. I’ve never been able to acknowledge attraction as such, not until a person is actually kissing me (and sometimes not even then), and so I couldn’t have said for sure whether the tilt of his head and the steadiness of his stare expressed sexual interest or mere curiosity. I only knew that I myself felt all the old tingling and that it was uncomfortable. Even when he asked for my number, I told myself he was just being polite.
* * *
My parents used to throw pool parties. All through the late spring and summer they heaved these outdoor occasions into precarious existence, inviting a handful of people over for a “casual” afternoon party and then straining from Friday evening until Saturday afternoon to ready the house and yard and bar. Up until the last minute they would go on desperate hunts for a missing chair cushion or count the number of good towels. The narrow strip of flowerbed had to be weeded, the pool vacuumed, leaves and dead insects (and once, a drowned rat) removed from the drain baskets. My mother would make curried chicken salad and walnut brownies. My father would undertake last-minute runs for more gin, lemons, ice.
There had been summer vacations when my sisters and I never had dry hair during the daytime, when we were continually diving into the pool, lifting ourselves back onto the flagstone, racing in and out of the house, trailing little puddles behind us. But then Courtney started high school, and she would “lie out” for hours, trying to tan herself, which was slow going in muggy D.C. Not me: I burned before I tanned, and I’d become self-conscious about how I looked in a bathing suit. Even when I went in the pool I would wear an enormous T-shirt, which billowed around me in the water, trapping spheres of air. The T-shirt said RELAX in big black letters, but in the pool that message was distorted into something splotchy and sinister. After I hoisted myself out of the water, I would wring out the bottom of the T-shirt and then pull the wet cotton away from my body to keep it from clinging. Once Dad had started to ask why on earth I was wearing clothes in the pool, but Mom had shushed him.
I’d just finished eighth grade, and my father was everything at once: the dad of my childhood, who knew all there was to know, who could fix anything, and the clueless dad of my teenage years, who understood nothing, and the elusive dad who was seldom home. I would seek his attention, but on the rare occasion I actually won it I wanted only to shuck it off again.
The first time I spoke to Rob was at one of those parties. Dad’s friend Dick Mitchell had brought along his infamous stepson. Rob was older than I was, but friends of Courtney’s talked about him and sometimes bought pot from him, or so I’d overheard them say. The common understanding was that he had slept with a teacher. In person, he was dimpled and cocky in a way that maybe only a teenage male in a letter jacket can manage without coming across as a pure numbskull. He had black hair and eyes so intense that I would think of them as green until I studied him again and found that they were brown.
Because of his reputation I was fascinated. Trying not to look while he moseyed along the pool’s edge and sized up the water. Trying not to look when he pulled one-handed at his red T-shirt and then lifted it—and yet I did see the patches of brown hair under his arms and the strip that began below his navel and ran on downward. A smirk bided its time on his face, illuminated from below by the reflections off the pool.
Underneath my own large shirt, there was not much difference between me at fourteen and me at eleven, aside from the fact that I was a couple of inches taller. I imagined that I had made an impression on him, though, that he was secretly intrigued by my androgynous style, that if I were to duck inside the house he might follow—though my idea of what would happen next was indistinct. (There was a television commercial in which a woman would take off a baseball cap and toss her head so that her hair swooped in slow motion around her face. In my dream life I did the same, despite the fact that my own hair wouldn’t swoop at any speed.) I was able to partially sell myself on notions that some boys did like me, in secret, and maybe if I hadn’t had an older sister I could have insulated myself with those notions, kept up a belief that I was secretly very attractive, but the fact was that without leaving the house I could easily observe the way boys, sometimes the very same boys, treated certain other girls. It wasn’t the way they treated me.
Rob nodded at my hat. “Are you an Orioles fan?”
I shrugged. “We went to a game. I got a hat there.”
“I used to play baseball.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“The coach had it out for me. I was more serious about wrestling anyway.”
Was Jodi Dentoff at that party too? My parents’ friend Jodi, who was a reporter for The Post, would show up in her giant sunglasses, wearing a sarong tied over her black one-piece. A tiny woman, she would sink into a chair with a Bartles & Jaymes and pronounce her contentment—“Oh Eileen, I feel like I’m in the Bahamas, not Washington.” But she would’ve left our number with someone, and as soon as the PIO or Deputy Assistant So-and-so called, she’d dash inside and take a seat on the stairs with the phone cradled against her neck, a notepad balanced on her petite knees.
Courtney strolled outside in a terry-cloth cover-up, and as soon as she appeared, Ro
b had no more use for me. I remember him cannonballing into the pool right near where she was standing, and her hopping back as though the splash might singe her. “Don’t be a jerk!” she called when he came like a seal to the surface. “Don’t be a jerk!” he echoed in falsetto. She rolled her eyes. They didn’t speak beyond that, but it was obvious that everything they did was for the other’s benefit. And when she went back inside, he waited maybe a minute or two before asking where the bathroom was. That was almost a year before they actually started dating, but there you have the humid onset.
I held on to the edge of the pool and kicked, gradually increasing the force of my kicks to see how much of a wake I could generate, and forgot the party, briefly, until my mother told me I was splashing too much. I climbed out of the pool and volunteered to go inside and get more ice.
Rob and Courtney weren’t on the first floor. I thumped my way up the stairs. Her room was empty, and I thumped back down, then went down some more. Our basement was cold and grubby, with exposed, foil-wrapped pipes above and cracked concrete below, only barely a “finished” basement: dirt seemed to seep in from the edges of the walls, from beneath the floor, from behind the flimsy blackened doors. There was a laundry room and next to that a furnace room, into which I had only dared to peek sidelong, and that only once or twice, for it seemed to be the place where the house blended back into the ground. Beyond those two doors, in an open area, boxes were stacked against one wall, an old Ping-Pong table folded up against another. Always I had the sensation that I was not as alone down there as I might have wished, that animal life lurked nearby, pawing at the walls, sliding through cracks.
I’d descended with bated breath, expecting I might see something scandalous, my sister pushed up against the wall by a shirtless, hairy boy. But that wasn’t happening. They had found a crate of my parents’ old records and were kneeling next to each other, looking through it and giggling at the likes of the Kingston Trio.
“I found you guys,” I announced.
“Here we are,” Courtney said.
I was still soggy, my sister oiled. Without being too obvious, I tried to determine whether the two of them were discreetly touching each other in any way.
“It’s getting wiggy out there,” I said. “They’re all just like eating chicken salad with their hands and shit.”
“Yeah right,” Courtney said.
“What are you guys doing?”
“Rob wanted to look at these records.”
“He was just like, ‘Hey, do your parents have any records in the basement?’” I was too timid to address him directly.
“Pretty much,” Courtney said.
“Do you guys want to play Ping-Pong?”
I thought I saw a flicker of interest in Rob’s face, but Courtney said no.
“I think there’s some rum in one of these boxes,” I said.
“Barf,” Courtney said.
“Too bad we don’t have a record player down here,” I said. “Or should I say, a hi-fi. We could get down to some Harry Belafonte.”
“So did you come down here to do laundry?”
“Day-O!”
“Why are you talking so loud?”
“What is that one you have?” I asked, suddenly desperate to hear Rob say something.
“Bill Haley and the Comets.”
“Shweet.”
“So your parents don’t listen to these?” Rob asked.
“Did they ever listen to them?” Courtney said. She had freed her hair from its elastic, and when she bent over the crate it fell against Rob’s brown arms. Naturally it seemed then as though music would always matter to us and that our parents’ silly LPs couldn’t ever have mattered as much to them.
“At crazy, crazy parties,” I said with a hiccup. Rob laughed, and I tried to laugh at myself.
“Let’s go back up,” Courtney said to Rob.
“Okay,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“I’m supposed to stay down here?”
“You can do whatever you want to do.”
I folded my arms and waited for them to go upstairs, thinking up witty things to say later, and then I sat down by myself with the crate and began to look through the same records I’d looked through many times before. I unfolded the table and for a while I served Ping-Pong balls to no one. Then I went upstairs and found Maggie in her room, and we played board games for what seemed like hours, until everyone went home.
* * *
I’ll cut to the chase, or lack thereof. Just a few days after I bumped into Rob in the bookstore, I slept with him. The lead-up was more like a summons than a date. I remember that night as if he’d seized me by the arm and dragged me from one place to another, because that was the kind of pull he had, all instinct and snap decisions and that flashing quality to his eyes, a simulacrum of delight. He alluded to his time over there, and “there” meant one place and then another, the heat, the bartering, the cats and dogs, the deserts. He didn’t bring up his stepfather’s death, and naturally I didn’t either, but I was aware of it, this thing that had happened sixteen years earlier. Dick Mitchell had shot himself late one night in his garage.
After our drinks I made to leave, but he took my hand and said, “You can’t.” “Are you wanting to get me drunk?” I asked, already drunk. “I want you in your element,” he said. When he invited me back to his apartment I did drunkenly convince myself that we were going there to watch television.
Was it against the rules, to go for a drink with someone your sister had briefly dated in high school? We didn’t talk about Courtney.
His hair was shorn close to his head and his grin was waggish; he was gliding behind me, guiding me, après vous, s’il vous plaît. The power of an overcoat and a scarf: picture your ninth-grade crush now wealthy, or wealthy enough, youthful silliness retained but with a sophisticated veneer over it all, the illusion at least of giddy invulnerability.
Suffusing his apartment was a coziness I didn’t immediately recognize as purchased, part and parcel with the catalog furniture, everything beige or gray or crimson. There was bamboo in a glass vase with polished stones at the bottom. There were ivory pillar candles that had never been lit. He moved around the apartment, shoeless, quick, as I stood there waiting to see what would come next. I had stepped away from myself, not knowing what my own reactions might be.
The whole thing had the feel of a ritual, like some ceremonial bath for which I was a distillate tossed into the water, both necessary and beside the point. In his practiced way he brought the drinks, he brushed my arm with his fingers. We shared a cigarette at the window. An acrid blue kiss: I went limp.
And then we burrowed into our bare selves. He was exact in his wants, pushing at my shoulder, lifting up my ass, pinching my nipple, frisking my chest with his sleek head. Here was a person in a cage and trying to find a key, drilling inside me to see whether I had one, as I sank into water, deep, deeper, then surfaced to hear him ask did I want this, and this, and this. I gasped. He paused, waited, straddled me, waited. Yes please: I hung the words from my throat. He went slowly, whispering the things everyone whispers, watching for what he already knew I didn’t have, and then one-two-three-four-five. Afterward, I heard him put music on and saw that the sheets were pin-striped like a suit.
We slept far apart. I say slept. I listened to the rain, walked out into it, realized I’d forgotten my shoes, and woke back up and started all over again. The night leaned its weight on me. It went on and on. I was sore and sour, and it kept raining, so that dawn never really came. The sky traded its inky tarp for a drab gray uniform. I dozed again, and when I opened my eyes he was tucking in his shirt, headed out. It’s okay, he said, take your time. The door will lock behind you. He reached for my hair and set a piece of it in place, then cocked his head and backed away and made a conducting motion with his finger. “You’ve got my number,” he said. Did I? The heavy door swung closed in slow stages, years passing before I heard it latch.
Without him the apartment was cool and deflated, but I wasn’t inclined to leave. I would’ve liked to belong there. I investigated the place, though Rob’s weren’t the sort of secrets you pulled out of a drawer. Laundry bills, takeout menus, ticket stubs, those were what I found. Soon I was bored with snooping and got dressed.
Once I was out on the street all the judgment I’d managed to stave off the night before, the misgivings, came swashing up and then disappeared again. (Hardly for the first time—I am all too prone to delayed reactions, that is to say that I experience things as they happen more or less neutrally and then later develop feelings about them.) I realized that it was Thursday, that Dad was probably at home wondering where I was, and that I was still in the thrall of the night before, the night now leaking all over the morning.
When I was a kid the news was full of hostage takings and faraway bombings, so that I can remember lying in bed, turning over in my head the problem of whether to “negotiate with terrorists,” which the president had declared we would not do. I would imagine some member of my family, usually Maggie, taken hostage on a hijacked airplane, and picture myself arguing with her captors, heroically winning her freedom with the sheer force of my logic (“You are bad people!” etc.). During the same period of time, as Americans were continually reminded of our vulnerability, the talking heads would debate what it meant to be a superpower, which I recall even though I had no special childhood interest in international affairs. There was the question of whether America was willing to act like a superpower. Our nation was failing to do its superpower duties, some people said. And after the Iran-Contra schemes were made public, the same critics would paint them as a consequence of our weakness: because the nation was too divided, too hamstrung to act boldly, a small group had been pushed to take matters into their own hands.