I closed the atlas and dropped it back on the floor.
It’s not that I had never done anything with a guy. In middle school and high school, I’d had kisses, crossed a couple bases, though never all the way. In college I’d made out with a gay boy or two. And it’s not that I’d never known cock: I had encountered them in many sizes and colors. They were silicone and lived in drawers and under beds. But when my hand grazed the one under Ryan’s jeans, I could sense its neediness, its greed. I jerked my hand away.
“You okay?” said Ryan, pausing with his hand just under my shirt.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just adjusting.” Ryan pushed up my shirt and began to kiss my stomach.
I closed my eyes. His hair fell from behind his ears and brushed against my skin, like a girl’s. Human mouth touches human body. Species solace. This is what the species does. Not mating, only pleasure. It was okay. It was all okay. With my glasses off, the bedroom and the person were blurred, nothing more than shifting forms, warmth on my skin. This was relief, to feel an objective sensation of affection. Not to be turned inside out and upside down, and yet still to feel good. No storming inside, just quiet seas, a clear sky.
“You are so beautiful,” he said into my knee. And even though he was a man and I knew I’d never love him, to hear it felt like getting a whole report card of A’s when you thought you’d failed out.
“Come on,” I said. “I haven’t shaved my legs in a decade.”
“I like that,” he insisted. “I like you.”
“I like you too,” I said, and I did.
“See?” he said, and I laughed. Ryan was now kissing the inside of my knee, sneaking his way up my leg, even though I had ushered him away from my underwear twice.
The sex would have been easy; it seemed so uncomplicated in its mechanics. But I knew too well what it was like to be on his end with a girl, the power in it. I’d been there. I’d also given myself up with pleasure, many times, but I didn’t want to for a man. It was too personal.
I drew my limbs in and said, “I can’t. I can’t.”
Ryan looked up at me. His hair fell into his eyes. “You sure?” He bit my inner thigh above the knee and I felt a disarming surge but said, “Yes.” I liked bumping up against my limit, feeling it firm and solid as a fence.
“Think about it,” he said. “It’s so fun.”
“I bet it is.”
“How would you know unless you try it?”
“I’m not bi-curious,” I said.
“But maybe you’re me-curious. Or why did you come over here?”
“Scrabble,” I said. He batted my leg and I laughed. “I like a challenge!”
“So do I.”
“Well then,” I said. “Good luck.”
Ryan sighed and crawled up next to me. We lay on our backs in our underwear and socks. I rested one hand on my bare stomach. He slid his hand into the other one and held it. My webbing stretched. His arm was much longer than mine. His whole body was much longer. Everything seemed of crazy proportions.
“I have to ask you something,” I said. “What happened to that guitar out there?”
He sighed. “I got angry and smashed it. Sometimes I do that to things. Just objects.”
“And you got angry with the guitar?”
“No. I loved that guitar. I’d had it forever.” He put a hand over his eyes.
I felt a spike of concern—poor Ryan, his favorite guitar irreparably wrecked. Then the thought corrected: by him. Unnerving. I squeezed his hand and disentangled myself.
Rummaging around in the dark for my discarded clothes, I attempted a light tone. “We can never speak of this to anyone. Especially Flynn.”
“She might come after me with her blowtorch,” said Ryan. “So would my ex-girlfriend.”
“Flynn of all people would have no right to,” I said, pulling my T-shirt over my head, “but you might be right. Who’s your ex? Recent?”
“Extremely,” he said. “Let’s not ruin a good night by discussing her.”
“Was I wearing a bra?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said. “I only own one.”
“You’ll just have to come back and get it later.” He sat up on the edge of the bed and handed me my glasses. I put them on and the room solidified into focus. There was Ryan, half-lit by streetlights through the window, smiling up at me.
“I think this has to be a one-time venture,” I said. “I can’t get into something complicated.”
“But you can do something uncomplicated.”
“Yes,” I said. “Like go home now.” I put a hand on his face for a moment—warm, still smooth, just the faintest hint of sandpaper by his jaw—and felt an unexpected twinge. He could like me all he wanted and it wouldn’t make any difference. I knew what that felt like. “Trust me, this isn’t worth the trouble it would cause.”
“Come on,” he said. “You’re trouble. And you like it.”
“Maybe I am.” The thought pleased me.
“Maybe I am.”
“I’m sure you are.”
At the door he grabbed my sleeve. “Andrea,” he said. “I’m leaving tomorrow. What’s your address?”
I fished a card for the studio out of my wallet, letterpressed brown cardstock.
The dark houses and quiet street were like a movie set of a neighborhood, empty. The only sound was my engine rumbling to life as I backed out and drove away, back to the house where eagle-eyed Summer was mercifully still at work, where the dog would be the only one who knew I’d ever been gone. Animals never tell.
My Type
THE FIRST TIME I SAW ACTUAL TYPE MADE OF WOOD AND LEAD, I fell in love. I picked up a plain, heavy Helvetica O and the weight of its curve, the purity of its shape, made me dreamy. I loved that letters were things you could hold in your hand. I went to the art department’s basement letterpress room every day that semester, earned my own set of keys, and stayed late into the night setting type, plucking the letters like tiny statues from their compartments and lining them up in order. I slid the leading under their feet and over their heads and built the city of letters that became words that became real things. Computer text needed only eyeballs and fingertips. With the letterpress, you walked alongside it, turned the crank with your arms and hands, your shoulders flexing; your whole body brought it to life. I could fall into it for hours, forsaking all other schoolwork. Then I came back from that Christmas in Nebraska, and I had to turn in my keys.
But a few of us soon discovered that a lot of old letterpresses were hanging around in corners of the Northwest, and most people didn’t think the hulking things were worth wanting or asking much money for. Lead ships. Dead stock. Dead ends, like us queers—and yet here we were, more of us than ever, multiplying by convergence and setting up shop in the business of reproduction. Obsolescence was our saving grace.
Four of us formed a small collective, scavenged buckets of heavy lead type, and went in on a space, cheap because it was mostly illegal, down in the industrial part of Southeast, close to the river. Bridges sloped overhead. Old train tracks cut through the asphalt, and cobblestones showed through the worn patches. We set up our print studio in a former warehouse with high windows, big jails of light that slid across the floor. Two Vandercook letterpresses and a few garage-saled tabletop presses and a screen-printing station. The smell of ink, thick paper, sweet oil on old steel.
We all wanted to make art—prints, broadsides, show posters, record sleeves, chapbook covers—and swiftly learned that art paid few bills. But weddings did. Future brides and grooms were the reliable few who found letterpress timeless instead of time-consuming.
I turned out invitations and save-the-dates in scores, each one customized and as special as the bride and groom themselves, yet pretty much exactly the same. If these people put a year and as much effort into art as they did into their own weddings, they could have made feature films and finished novels.
But I needed the mone
y and was glad for the work.
The one I was working on today would be held in a renovated barn in an orchard, fixed up and rented out for urban people who loved the idea of the country. I could hear my mother: “Married in a barn? Where’s the reception, a feedlot?” But I could see it. In Nebraska I stepped into an octagonal barn once, empty and tall with light slanting in through high windows, and it was a kind of cathedral.
I had hand-drawn the barn for this invitation and had it digitally transferred to a plate, and while I was running proofs I imagined myself into my own tiny line drawing. I remembered the barns at my grandmother’s house where my siblings and I used to play. The big corrugated metal one that housed the John Deeres and the combine and echoed your voice; the old wooden one where cows once lived but later only an extended family of skeptical cats. A pang of homesickness hit me. It didn’t happen often but when it did it hit hard, dug deep. That smell of old decades. I even missed the ones I hadn’t been alive for.
When I got home I went looking for the photos.
But my Childhood Part I album was nowhere to be found in my archives. In fact, the entire box of photo albums was neither shelved nor in the stack of things I had yet to unpack. The absence of it swelled. The box contained my whole childhood, the part where my grandparents were still alive and my parents still loved me and we were a family of six. I didn’t want to look through it but I wanted to know I still had it. I pictured mice nibbling at the corners of the box.
“Fuck,” I said, and called Flynn at home. Ex-home.
“It’s in the attic,” Flynn confirmed. “I’ll be around until six.”
Then where? I didn’t ask.
The wisteria vines on the porch were shooting long green tendrils everywhere. “You should cut those back,” I said when Flynn opened the door.
She shrugged. “I know. Hello.”
“Hi.” It was strange to get so basic, no nicknames or babys. “Is anyone else here?”
“No.”
I lowered my eyes and walked inside.
The tiny house had absorbed my absence and regenerated disappointingly fine. A vintage lamp there, an armchair moved here, the gaps in the bookshelves filled, a couple of unfamiliar objects on the mantel. I tried not to look for the evidence of another aesthetic at work. The place still smelled potently the same, like home.
“Do you want some coffee?” Flynn said. “I brought home some of this new single-origin we just got in from Guatemala. Really good stuff.” Coffee was both science and religion to Flynn.
“I’m good. It’s almost five. I don’t want to be up all night.”
“I can bag some up for you to have in the morning.” What was with the charm? Guilt or reflex?
“It’s okay, Flynn. I just want the photos.”
I pulled down the attic trapdoor and unfolded the staircase. I paused halfway up, head and shoulders afloat in the dusty attic and the rest of me weighted below in the hallway. To my eyes, a floor; to my feet, a ceiling. The box was behind an unused ottoman toward the back. I crawled to it like a thief and extracted the last of my past from the house.
“Got it?” Flynn said, standing at the base of the steps. “That looks heavy.”
“It’s okay. I can handle it.” On the day I moved out, I had made Flynn leave the premises. There was only so much assistance I could take.
“I found this of yours too. It was in the dishwasher.” Flynn held out a mug that read ERRORS WILL BE MADE. OTHERS WILL BE BLAMED. I had taken it from a temp job at a financial office.
“You can keep it,” I said, sidling past her into the living room. “I hate passive voice.”
“Isn’t that the whole joke?”
“It’s not worth it.”
Flynn dropped the hand holding the mug to her side. I felt like a jerk.
“You should contribute something to this group show we’re putting together,” I suggested, conciliatory.
“Already on it. Kate told me about it.”
“Oh. Kate.” A light sting. I had known her first. “Good.” Please don’t put in any photos of Vivian, I thought, but I couldn’t bear to say it—as if verbalizing it would give her the idea. Flynn was The Photographer among us. It got her into shows and it got her into beds. By now, at age thirty, she had an impressive body of work on both counts. Flynn had photographed me in the woods, on the street, at the coast, in fields, in bed, close up, far off, in black and white, in color—so prolifically that her record of me felt permanent. I had been in her shows. I was a whole series. I was one in a series.
“I’ll let you know if I find anything else,” she said.
“No,” I said. Flynn looked quizzical. And the dreaded tears began to line my eyes. “I don’t think I can come back here. Not just for five minutes.”
“I want us to be friends,” Flynn said. “I really do.”
“I’m not clear on what that word means anymore.” I thought, If we were “friends” you would have sex with me. “Maybe Vivian can tell me. She seems to have a new definition.”
“Oh, Andy.” Flynn tilted her head, brown eyes warm. Her hair was damp from the shower, peroxided forelock falling into her eyes. She reached a platonic hand toward me, my arms wrapped around the box of photos. “We didn’t mean to—”
“Stop, I don’t want to hear any more we.” I shied away from the hand and wiped my teary eyes off on my own shoulder. “Sorry to be a baby. I should get going. I don’t want to keep you.” Flynn was dressed to go somewhere: jeans and boots and belt, a form-fitting T-shirt. Her chest looked muscular—no, flattened. I did a double take.
“Are you binding now?” I asked.
Flynn glanced down. “Uh, yeah. I’m trying it out.” She looked up at me, a nervous certainty in her eyes, not far from the look that first time she paused by my table at the coffee shop and asked if she could call me sometime.
“It suits you,” I said. It was true. Flynn was a beautiful boy—those big wrists, that saunter.
“It feels right.”
Maybe Flynn at thirty was still becoming, I realized. Maybe the Flynn I loved was on the way out. Or maybe the Flynn I loved hadn’t been around for some time now. It was easy to mistake proximity for closeness.
Pride
AT THE STUDIO, A POSTCARD HID BENEATH A PILE OF INVOICES and flyers in the mailbox. The image on the front was of a beach at night with a dubiously superimposed smear of greenish light hovering in the sky. I turned it over. The edges were yellowed and bent. The handwriting was fast but neat, sharp edges, no loops.
JUNE 8
Dear Andrea Morales,
Sipping a “moonshake” here in Florence, OR, a favorite flyover spot for UFOs, per our atomic waitress. Mateo insisted on a detour. He’s a closet ufologist (←apparently a real word). I’m skeptical but holding my tongue. Who am I to say what’s real? Maybe I’ve got my own version of lights on the horizon.
OK, back to the road—
—R. Coates
The caption on the postcard read, JULY 1981—Five different people reported an unidentified object moving across the water near the dunes of Florence, OR.
I read it twice. I turned it over and examined that smear of light. Along its curve was a suggestion of windows. I tried to imagine what those passengers saw, to look at the familiar coast with alien eyes. Would they find it beautiful or terrifying? Did they ever disembark, or merely cruise overhead, gazing down, like tourists on a double-decker bus? I supposed they risked death if they stepped outside. But otherwise they’d never know how cold the water was, how soft the sand, the long whiskers of dune grass brushing their legs.
The postcard was futuristic and already hopelessly past. I wanted to tell those people standing on the beach of Florence, The future isn’t this. It’s less alien and way weirder than you think.
I came home to a note from Summer: MEENA & I ARE AT HOLMAN’S W/ MARCY. COME!
I was intrigued. Marcy Barnes was our equivalent of a village elder or an ex-president; she’d played minor and major p
arts in several legendary Northwest bands, and she fixed amps out of her garage in Northeast, tucked under the bungalow she’d bought for, like, twenty grand in the eighties. She had a knack for dating girls before they went on to minor fame: the performance artist, the songwriter, the one who got a story published in the New Yorker.
Holman’s was an ancient family-run bar with dark wooden booths and breaded mushrooms on the menu, the kind of old dive that young people took to—something about the sense of permanence, trendproof-ness, the scenic weathered elders at the bar for authenticity, a place that promised little but offered it reliably. The three of them had a booth in the corner and a pitcher of beer already under way. Summer was gazing raptly at Marcy as she told a story about Dead Moon. I slipped in beside Meena and listened. Marcy was old to us—thirty-nine—but she was a punk too, only the lines were deeper in her face and she had more stories. She wore her hair long the way a guy wore it long, and she wore men’s jeans that rode low on her hips and motorcycle boots. Thirty-nine, I thought. When my mom was thirty-nine, I was sixteen. My mother and Marcy were two entirely different species. All the women of Westerly, Nebraska, were, by that age, of a gender unto itself. They wore their hair practical. Dressed medium. By choice or default, their lives cycled around the school day and the working week and the national holiday. They bought milk in plastic gallon jugs and baked bars. Television commercials for food and household products targeted them. They were consumers, savers, caretakers, voters. Marcy was a bass player, a smoker, a lover, no one’s parent, no one’s partner. She was a whole other possibility. She was a protagonist. She was wise and not wise. She had just kept on living, as herself.
When the waitress came over for me, Summer ordered deep-fried macaroni-and-cheese wedges.
“How’s your veganism?” Meena said.
“Oops. I’m lapsing.”
“That was quick.”
“When these are gone I’ll be vegan again.”
“We’ll pretend it never happened,” I said, and splurged on a whiskey ginger. Beer was cheap but I was tired of cheap. I figured I’d get a two-buck grilled cheese so I could blow an extra couple of dollars on a whiskey ginger. This was how I was always thinking then, one dollar to the next. I would never entirely shake it.
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