Stray City

by Chelsey Johnson

  The thing is, I’d never known a person quite like Ryan. The guy was rootless without the ache, unlike everyone else I knew. He was hydroponic. He got everything he needed from the air, it seemed. You could put him anywhere with decent light and clean water and he’d be fine. He’d just grow there. That’s what made him so amenable to touring. And touring was what made it possible for me to keep falling back into his company, carefree. He never stuck around long enough for anything to stick.

  Ryan and I made a deal.

  “I don’t ever want this to outgrow the fun part,” I said one evening as we drove along the river toward a bar in Linnton. He was leaving again in a week for the long East Coast and European tour and I was all revved up with liminal abandon.

  “Sounds good to me,” he said.

  “Promise we never have to get to the processing part? The part with all the annoying habits and the noticing of them?”

  “The part where we start saying how the other person does that thing just like their mother?”

  “Exactly,” I said. I thought of her then—imagined calling to tell her about Ryan. Her delight would kill me. Would erase me. I shuddered. “Thank god you’ll never meet my mother,” I said, too strongly. He shot me a glance. “I mean, it’s not personal, no one does, since even I haven’t seen her in, like, four years. Believe me, it’s for the better. For all of us.”

  “Mine came to visit in January,” Ryan said. “That was enough for a while.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “You think I’m going to tell you, now that I know you could use it against me?” He grabbed me at the ticklish spot above my knee, so I squeaked and swerved. “We’re staying with the good part, right?”

  “Right,” I said. That’s all I wanted to give him and get from him. The good part, the curated part, the part a person could fall for. Except without crossing over into the falling-for part. Just far enough to catch yourself in time. Good practice for the future true loves we would meet. I swatted his hand away from my leg. “Don’t distract me. I need to steer.”

  And then he was gone. That was the thing: Ryan was always gone or about to be.

  The evening of his red-eye flight to New York, I rode along to the airport with him and his bandmate Jesse in the Cold Shoulder van. The Econoline was tall and stiff, the inside spangled with scattered CDs and loose change. The last seat had been removed and the space walled off with an iron cage for gear storage. Jesse was the singer and guitarist. He had clearly perceived a need for The Cute One in the band and stepped up to fill the role. Where Ryan had a lurking, offhand grace, Jesse was all I’m-here-now assuredness. He was friendly the way celebrities are friendly in interviews, a flawlessly smooth niceness. The band was not famous but Jesse seemed to be prepping for it. You got the feeling that when he looked at you he was bestowing an honor.

  They had offered me the passenger seat but I didn’t want it. It seemed too much the girlfriend seat. The back was the friend-who’s-parking-the-van seat. That was me. When we picked him up Jesse had eyed me and given Ryan a look, which Ryan ignored. I knew he was thinking, So there’s the girl Ryan’s fucking, and I wanted to say, No I’m not, I’m not that—but I was that. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be that girl in the eyes of men. I wanted to give off as neutral a scent as possible.

  When we pulled up at PDX, Jesse got out first and headed to the back of the van to unload. Ryan reached for the door handle but I put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I said, low so Jesse wouldn’t hear.

  He glanced back at me, softening. “Are you?”

  “But while you’re gone,” I said, “I don’t want you to pass up any . . . opportunities.”

  One corner of his mouth tightened, a small twist. “Because you don’t want to.”

  I shrugged.

  He unclipped his seat belt and it zipped up with a whoosh. “Believe me, I won’t either,” he said. The door closed behind him with a neat, firm thud.

  I felt a funny competitive twinge in my gut. I hauled open the side door and met him at the back of the van. “I meant opportunities to play Scrabble.”

  “I would never pass up the chance to beat someone at Scrabble.”

  Jesse wanted a hand with an amp flight case the size of an oven. Ryan grabbed a handle.

  “I’m two games ahead,” I said. “Just remember that. No one plays Scrabble as well as me.”

  “True.” Ryan slung a duffel over his shoulder. “Maybe I need to practice more while I’m away.”

  “Maybe I do too.”

  He smiled and shut the back doors of the van.

  When Jesse turned his back to head inside, Ryan wrapped his arms around me, quick but firm, and gave my neck a nip that sent a little vein of lightning down my spine.

  Then the glass doors closed after him and his rolling suitcase stuffed with undeclared band merch.

  I had to pull the seat forward a foot to reach the pedals, and the brakes needed a heavy foot. I tried not to whack another car with the van’s unwieldy tail end as I pulled out from Departures. I needed to get back to my real life.

  Once again I had split myself so neatly in two. One slender stem of my life was characterized by evasion, ducking, doors closed swiftly, a dark room with only me and Ryan inside, an escape hatch. But in the main life, I was an organizer in the Lesbian Mafia and printed art and commerce and went to shows full of girls who looked like boys and made my heart stop, and when I walked into any of these places someone knew me. Someone knew me. We knew each other. I’ve never known anything like it and won’t again. To recognize someone anywhere you go. To recognize each other everywhere: the coffee shop, the sidewalk, the bicycle commute, the bookstore, the bar.

  Even the woods. The Washougal River tumbled down forested slopes toward the Columbia, clear and cool and gouged with swimming holes along the way. On hot afternoons my friends and I would park along the road at mile marker 7 and work our way down a steep path to a deep pool canopied by trees. We congregated there, one carload after another, all kinds emerging from the trees to spread towels, blow up air mattresses, pull on river shoes to navigate the rocky banks. I loved all the bodies we revealed there, fat and thin, and how we uncovered or contained our bodies and their scars. Some wore bikinis or one-pieces, some pressed themselves into sports bras and boy trunks. All the hidden tattoos came to the light, beautiful and tacky, badges of courage and impulse and youthful poor choice. I had always meant to get a tattoo but my design perfectionism had interfered. There was too much pressure on the image. I still hadn’t committed.

  Bullet stood knee-deep in the water, sniffing the air, or flopped down in a sandy patch to sunbathe, graciously accepting the affections of friends and strangers.

  One late-July afternoon, Meena and I floated in the middle of the swimming hole on inner tubes, me in a navy one-piece, Meena in a sodden tank top and trunks. “Don’t look downriver,” she said, so of course I did, and she promptly chastised me.

  It was Flynn and a girl I didn’t recognize. They walked along the shallow part, stepping from rock to rock. The girl’s shiny black hair was piled on her head and her stomach was taut. A tote bag hung from her bare shoulder. Flynn, tanned and in long cutoffs, watched the girl’s steps with unnecessary chivalrous attention.

  “Wonder what became of Vivian,” Meena muttered.

  I slid all the way down through the center of the inner tube, let go, and swam underwater as far as I could, upriver, away. And while I swam I turned my thoughts instead to Ryan, how every time I touched him he responded, a simple power but it felt like magic, and the glances I’d sometimes catch him giving me. What? Nothing. I swam until my lungs couldn’t take it. My feet touched down on pebbly sand and I straightened up.

  I was at the other end of the swimming hole, not far from the rope swing. The water came to my chin. I was immersed but still breathing, eyes open.

  This was what I liked about Ryan. I would always be able to touch bottom. My feet would
always meet the floor.

  This time, there were no postcards. No transatlantic calls. I was slicing huge sheets of paper into cards and posters, I was inking machines, I was sweeping the shop, I was swiping credit cards and pricing furniture, I helped Lawrence convert Meena’s garage into a recording studio, my friends and I played Scrabble at kitchen tables with animals draped over our feet and laps, we were grilling in backyards, splitting three-dollar burritos at La Bonita, oiling bike chains, trading mixtapes, reading novels and zines, forming and dissolving bands, we were emerging into the dark of cleared living rooms and basements and clubs, stuffing sherbet-orange foam plugs into our ears or blowing out our hearing for a night. The Ryan affair was little more than a radio song in the background, a refrain that caught in my head every now and then.

  There were a few girls I gave it a go with. I made eyes at a butch with a fox tattoo, and watched her go home with Robin. A painter who made mixtapes and cited contemporary fiction and queer theory seemed promising, even if she mispronounced Nabokov. We hung out twice, made out once; then I went to her art opening at a neighborhood coffee shop. Womyny nude paintings, self-serious and defensive. I imagined myself rendered poorly by her hand and ordered my coffee to go. There was a guitarist, a friend of Marcy’s who had just moved from Chicago, who had a cool haircut and always wore gray T-shirts and yet when she moved in for a kiss, I had to fight an instinctive recoil—it was the scent of her skin, earthy and sweet in a faintly rancid way. There was the house party where I lured an enigmatic andro visiting from Seattle into a dark hallway make-out, then she suddenly confessed she had a girlfriend when she thought I was about to leave a hickey on her neck.

  The only one who ever made it into my bed was Bullet, a dense sleek doughnut who stashed herself under the covers. As Summer stayed at Marcy’s more and more, the dog came to depend on me. Together we would secretly eat meat. In a few years vegans would become butchers, but at this point everyone was still vegetarian, and I craved the forbidden despite myself. I’d pick up a few pieces of roast chicken from Nature’s and we’d sit on the living room couch, watching the Buffy episode I’d taped on TV, and eat the evidence. Bullet rested her heavy head on my knee between bites, drooling on the cushions, and we’d fall asleep together.

  Yet occasionally these nights would come where I would walk through the kitchen, opening and closing every drawer and cupboard, unable to find anything I wanted to eat. I would read the same page three times and then set the book down. I would change the record after only one side, or one song. It was then that I would sometimes fall back on the thought of Ryan, the uncomplicated warmth of his attention. I would close my eyes and imagine touching a hand to his chest and springing a trapdoor into which we could disappear. I could disappear. He became my fallback thought, a neural pathway I’d follow toward an idea of comfort. What was I to him? I wondered. A fallback in my own way? No strings. A girl who didn’t require maintenance, processing, commitment. Easy. The person across the room with a little extra shine.

  He was nine hours ahead, half a world away, waking up as I was falling asleep.

  The Coast

  THERE WAS HIS VOICE, IN MY PHONE. IT WAS NEARLY SEPTEMBER. I biked over to his place, chest all fluttery with what could have been anticipation or dread. He came to the door and at the sight of his face for the first time in two months, a little stubbly—“I haven’t even had time to shave yet, come in”—and his hair still wet from the shower, his eyes tired but brighter for the shadows beneath them, I felt shy with pleasure and recognition: There you are. Hi, face.

  “Hello, friend,” I said.

  Ryan leaned in to kiss me right on his front step. “I’m not even going to say sorry,” he said. “I’m just happy to see you.”

  He looked good to me, the careless jeans hanging low, the holey T-shirt, and I longed to press up against something that warm again. I followed him upstairs.

  He poured me a glass of water and said, “Let’s go away for a few days.”

  “You just got home.”

  Ryan gave the apartment a look like it had been lying around watching TV. Useless. “I can’t get used to sitting still yet,” he said. He was flush with cash and wanted to enjoy it before they did the actual accounting for the cost of the tour. “Someplace we don’t know anyone. Like the other side of Mount Hood. Or the Painted Desert.”

  I hadn’t meant to pick things up again but here I had all this fondness, and that fever had kicked up again at the base of my spine, a sweet low burn. I wanted to see something that went on forever. Something that would put me in my place. I suggested the coast.

  “The coast it is,” he said.

  “Except I can’t afford it,” I said. “I wish I could.”

  “It’s on me. Really. Let me do this for you. Early birthday present.”

  We drove to Manzanita on a Tuesday. The town was quiet. Our cottage was on a narrow street with no sidewalks, where gnarled salty trees crowded around the homes. The locals had started to emerge again, post–Labor Day. We took Bullet with us—I’d left a note on the table for Summer saying that a letterpress client had offered two nights at a beach cottage in trade, and that I’d taken the dog with me for company—and she galloped in gleeful laps on the beach, scattering seagulls. Ryan threw her tennis ball over and over, while I let the cold, cold waves lick my shins for as long as I could stand it before running back up to the warm sand, where Ryan and Bullet and I chased each other around until we were all panting. Riding the tandem bike we rented along the quiet streets and dunes, salt water drying on my legs where I’d run into the icy ocean, I felt so good. Sunblown, my muscles working hard, Ryan behind me to help propel us forward. I’m steering, I thought. I had never been the one in front, the one who called the direction. I was used to always looking to the other person for guidance.

  When we disembarked, I impulsively slid my hand into his. My fingers were cold and his palm was warm and callused. They locked into place.

  So this is what it’s like, I thought as we walked down the main street. To hold hands and not garner a single glance. How strange. It reminded me of one time at a show when, bored, Summer let me try on her six-inch platforms and suddenly the whole space was different. I inhabit a small body, five feet two. The world of shoulders is one I know well. But now I could see clearly, my head level with all the others, an unobstructed view. Behind me the regular-sized girls were patiently, miserably tiptoeing and peering through the gaps between necks and heads. This is what it’s like to be tall? I had said in wonder and indignation and envy. They just walk around able to see everything. And they take it for granted.

  This too was like being tall. I opened my mouth to explain this to Ryan but when I glanced over at him I saw a look on his face that I hadn’t seen before. Contentment. No slyness, no skepticism, no wry guard. He looked completely himself.

  He caught my glance. “What?” he said. A vulnerable smile.

  I was walking in his country now. This was what it was like for him to be Ryan. This was his nature. I suddenly did not know what to say. I just wanted to look at him. And I did.

  “Are you hungry?” I said.

  He slid a sly look down my body—there was the one I knew, there was our default, the shield of the easygoing tease—and said, “Always.”

  It was easy to walk into that café with him, easy to slide into a table by the window, easy to drink a whole bottle of wine with him, easy to laugh, easy to be with him, not because or despite that he was a man but because he was my friend Ryan, my friend I was having an affair with. It was easy when we stepped out into the cooling night, drunk, to wrap my arms around his neck and impulsively kiss him in the open air for the first time. And when he started to say, “I love . . .” and I tensed, he took the easy way out and finished with “this.” Easier for everyone.

  Those few days in Manzanita I was another person. I was exactly myself, in one way: impetuous, unafraid to be seen, for once not skulking and periscoping; but in another way, I was an
alternate Andrea Morales, inhabiting a character that someone else had intended me to be—my parents, biology, God, et al. Me, flipped. A mirror side. It looked like me but it wasn’t.

  The night before we left, he said, “Tell me about girls.”

  I was in a T-shirt and underwear, knees straddling his sides.

  “What do you mean?” I said, unbuttoning his jeans. “You’ve been with girls.”

  “What is it you like about them?”

  I studied his eyes. “No,” I said. I leaned forward and kissed his lips: a quick, firm, closed-mouthed kiss.

  “What’s it like?” he persisted.

  I said, “It’s not like in porn. And it’s not like this. And it’s not for you to know.”

  I kissed him again, purposefully, planting a seal, and he wisely let it go.

  Back in Portland I said good night and drove home with the passenger seat empty. I unlocked my front door, let Bullet run in ahead of me, and dropped my backpack on the couch. “Summer?” I said, switching on a lamp.

  No answer. I could hear the dog lustily drinking in the kitchen. She sauntered to her bed, flopped flat, and descended down a long sigh directly into sleep.

  I stood alone in the quiet dim house, one lamp lit. I inhaled the smell of home. I wondered if this was the scent of my T-shirts, of my hair, if this was what another person smelled on me when we hugged. You don’t notice it until you leave for a while.

  I looked at the telephone. I could ask Ryan. But there was a problem. I love, he’d started. The Fun Part was over.

  So I didn’t call. And the next day I cut a postcard from a letterpress test run—layers of type on the front, crisscrossed dates and words and images—and wrote Thanks for coasting. What a trip it’s been. I’m headed underground for the next few weeks to get this art show up. Consider me on an extended tour. See you on the other side. I signed it with only an X—a kiss, a rating, an illiterate signature, an unknown—and dropped it in the mail.