We go to a Japanese place where Oliver says he had dinner with his parents when they visited from Ohio. We’re both a little buzzed, and he orders a bottle of wine and barbecued pork belly and lots of meat on skewers. He’s telling me how things fell apart with his wife and then admits that he’s not sure he ever really wanted to get married. He asks me if I’m seeing anyone back in New York and I’m coy about the answer, but he persists and I continue to demur. I can’t put my finger on when things slide into date territory, but at this point we are decidedly there.
• • •
His arms are around me now, both of them. We’re pressed next to each other on a banquette at Chop Suey, a small, kitschy rock club in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. It’s dark; the bar is dimly lit in red with lots of hanging Chinese lanterns, and there’s a flashing glare from the band though we’re turned away from the stage.
A couple of moments have gone by when I’m close to getting the words out, to telling Oliver the real reason I’m here, with him, in this place. But then I look into his eyes and I see that he wants me and I can’t open my mouth. I assume that as soon as I say it, the whole tenor will change, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Maybe I can hold off and just relax tonight, I think. Maybe the big stuff can wait until tomorrow.
The music behind us is practically drowning out my thoughts, and Oliver’s hand is on my upper thigh. I think he’s about to kiss me, and almost despite myself my body tenses and the practiced, sobering line slips out: “I’m here to talk about Ashley.”
• • •
Oliver’s hand stays where it is, his eyes maintain their tipsy, googly-eyed soft focus, and for a second I wonder whether he’s heard me.
“Ashley?” he asks, without any recognition.
“My friend Ashley from LA. The one you slept with who was murdered.”
“Ah. Okay. Yeah.” He stares straight ahead. No shock. No recoiling, not much of a reaction at all for that matter, as if there were dozens of murdered strippers in his past. Oh, that one? Short hair, petite? Oh yes, of course, Ashley!
“That was a loooong time ago.” He takes a sip of his drink.
Okay. And . . . I let the silence—the club music, the girls squealing next to us—stretch out. Still nothing. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell you much,” he says, glancing at the opening band clearing the stage after their set ends. “I don’t even remember when that was . . . Were we still living uptown?” He trails off. Not evasively. Not “Let’s change the subject.” Just flat. Detached. Whatever. His fingers squeeze tighter around my waist.
Wait, what? It had never occurred to me that he might not have anything to say. It was all so crazy! Of course he’d have thought about her over the years. That exceedingly weird night, the 3D porn movie, Ashton Kutcher, the resulting fallout with his girlfriend, the strange feeling of crossing paths, of being intimate, with someone who’s now dead. Really? Nothing? How often does this kind of thing happen to people?
“Yeah. Uptown,” I say slowly.
I feel silly, confused. A slow, tingly realization starts taking shape that the weight, the regret, the hindsight I had attached to all this was mine alone. To Oliver the situation was just one of many blips that had happened ten years ago in another time, another place. Imagine all the people who had come and gone through his life since then. How could he be expected to remember one random one-night stand from when he was twenty-five?
How naive of me. Of course he couldn’t. Oliver hadn’t been caught off guard by my big revelation because it simply wasn’t one. He didn’t look surprised or sheepish. He didn’t shift in his seat or abruptly cease hitting on me. I was the one for whom the switch had been flipped. It was I who was now staring at him, vulnerable, searching, while he sat back calmly drinking a beer, just looking ahead to a good time with a girl who’d come to town, like all those years ago, like when Ashley had parachuted into his living room.
• • •
The rest of the night is a blur of drinks and dizziness and fleeting moments of connection. The headlining band goes on, we move to the center of the floor. A bit of dancing, a bit of feeling Oliver’s hips behind me as I stand facing the stage. The music is anthemic, passionate—at least it sounds that way to me. There are heavy bass notes and insistent keyboards, and when I close my eyes I feel the rhythm in my chest and my ass and between my legs. The beat of the kick drum connects with my heart. I feel overwhelmed. The set ends, and Oliver takes my hand. Where are we going? We leave the club and walk a few blocks to a place you enter from an alleyway where the people are very drunk. Perhaps I am, too?
There’s Latin music playing and Oliver appears with mojitos and suddenly a woman is gesturing to me. I should dance with her, it is decided. I should take her hand and let her spin me haphazardly around the small space of floor in front of us while her boyfriend smirks approvingly. Oliver is wearing a similar expression to the guy, slouching against his seat back with one leg up on a nearby chair. I feel self-conscious, but I play it off like I’m the amused straight man while this woman undulates her hips. Do I touch her? Do I smile when she grabs my arm and pulls a bit too hard as she loses her balance? There is no protocol in place here. I am relieved when the song ends and I can excuse myself to reconnect with my mojito. More and more I am feeling like Oliver and I might go home together, and somehow a tiny beam of light within me understands that this is less and less of a good idea.
• • •
When had all of this happened? Not just with Oliver but with sex in general. I had trouble with its insistence on setting the agenda. It all felt relatively new to me, this potential to create and destroy at will. The men, everywhere, they seemed to be always looking at you, always available, always so receptive to the slightest bit of attention and always game for bad decisions. You could just pick one, any one at any time in any bar or subway car, and it could turn out to be a spectacular, painful disaster, but no one seemed to know which it would be and no one for sure ever attempted to stop you.
You could take your old pal, a guy who’d known you as a very young woman and respected you and kept his distance, a guy who’d slept with your now-dead childhood best friend and left her disappointed because he’d behaved like all the rest, a guy you haven’t seen in nearly a decade. You could take that complicated, messy history and turn it on its head just by, say, drunkenly sitting in his lap in some crappy basement club. He would just have to squeeze your hip and his other hand might brush the hair off your shoulder and then the air would suddenly get heavy.
“You really do have beautiful eyes,” he might say, staring into them. And you’ve heard that one too many times before in too many crappy basement clubs and are hungry for an alternative, but you know that it means a spell has been cast and that all you have to do is smile. Sip your drink and glance at your shoes and turn off the voices in your head that are telling you this is cheap this is cliché this is how the dominoes start falling.
The stakes are even lower with strangers, the voices in your head almost nonexistent. You could probably change the narrative entirely with that guy across the room, the one with the off-balance date and expectant smile. That one would be easy; you’re from out of town. Perhaps it might cause a fight with them later or even a breakup, but at the moment none of that would matter, none of that would add up to anything at all.
Maybe at first it felt like a fun magic trick, a power play, a portal to another world, but eventually it becomes an annoyance, a burden even. The telegraphing of availability and receptiveness was a constant thing to manage, a feeling that giving just a little—a friendly nod, a “How was your weekend?” to the guy in the elevator, a hand brushing a knee for an extra second at the bar—could set you down a path where there’d be consequences to deal with. Not huge ones, necessarily, but ones that would interrupt your day or your night, or add up to lasting anger and hurt. Consequences that would make you avoid certain streets and people. Consequences that would make you second-guess your clothes, you
r shoes, your choices. Consequences that over time would close you up a bit, have you holding your breath, staring straight ahead, pinching your smile at the root and anticipating the worst.
It was something that had taken me most of my twenties to come to terms with, as I gained confidence in myself and with men from the office to the dating world, but Ashley had understood it at twenty-one, I realized now—probably earlier—and for the most part she’d seemed to handle it with equal parts excitement and world-weariness. It wasn’t as fun as it looked, that knowledge, the recognition that just about anyone could be reduced to a common denominator if given the chance. She was young to lose that wonder, that sense that, hey, maybe, just maybe, he’ll turn out to be great. Sometimes you wished that people would surprise you a little more.
• • •
Did I want Oliver to surprise me? Part of me wanted to push ahead, to be with him for the simple reason that Ashley had done it, too. Maybe that would mean something. That sleeping with him would connect me to her. That when he touched me I’d get to feel what she’d felt, hear the sounds he made that she had heard, see what she must have seen with his body on top of mine. I’d get to be thirty and twenty at once, and maybe all the time in between, too. I’d be experienced and vulnerable and present in the moment with some of me still reaching back through the years to my former self and her former self, falling asleep beside him just as she had done a decade ago. But then what?
A tightness begins to spread between my eyes. I’ve lost touch with what my body wants and what I thought I came here to do. I feel alone, and I don’t want to make my own choices anymore. The thought of walking back to the Ace in my too-high heels feels overwhelming. I am a long way from home, and I am tired.
• • •
The next morning I wake up alone. My head pounds. I consider disappearing and cutting my trip short, heading to the airport without a good-bye, but Oliver has already planned to leave work early and take me on a hike in the late afternoon, and I don’t want to deal with changing plans. I want to pretend that last night happened exactly as I had intended it to—maybe in the process I’d even convince myself it was true. I put on yesterday’s dress and flat sandals and walk up Western Avenue, past the coffee shops and condos and tourists lined up at Pike Place Market.
When I reach City Hall Park, I choose a spot of grass to try for a hungover nap in the sun. Nearby, what I gradually gather to be a homeless outreach group is moving gingerly among the single people posted up under trees, many of them with tarps and garbage bags, holding their possessions. “Would you like a brown bag lunch?” the volunteers are asking earnestly. “We have fresh fruit, sandwiches, and water.” My eyes are closed and the voices are growing closer, and suddenly they are above me.
“Would you like some food?” asks a gentle-looking girl in her twenties. “We have fresh fruit, sandwiches, and water.”
“No, thank you,” I say. Do they actually think I’m homeless, or are they just trying to be inclusive? It doesn’t matter. I feel shame and validation all at once.
• • •
Oliver is driving us to Franklin Falls, a hiking spot about an hour outside the city along the Snoqualmie River. It’s cloudy, and I’m sipping from a water bottle, still dehydrated and a bit fuzzy from my hangover. My jeans feel tight.
The air in Oliver’s car is thick. The radio is on, and I’m staring out the window at the greenery rushing by and telling myself that it’s all okay. I think of Ashley and how she’s led me here. What an absurd, confounding thought. My friend, eight years dead, is dictating my thoughts, my movements, my trips across the country, and, yes, my attractions from the grave. What would she make of all of this? What would she make of me?
This is all part of the process, my mind is saying, grasping for trite aphorisms like a newbie yoga teacher. The process of what exactly, I’m not sure, but I try to console myself with the fact that this will soon be over. Spending a final afternoon with Oliver, this too shall pass. People disappoint you in the most unexpected of ways; it doesn’t have to be your fault. Hurt people hurt people. Mojitos are gross.
It’s as if we have nothing to say, but actually there is plenty, we’re just choosing to say none of it. Some thoughts I’m not verbalizing include: maybe this—me finding Oliver, me being in this car—wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe Oliver and I shouldn’t keep in touch after this. Maybe I don’t actually like this guy after all, and maybe I never did. Why does this feel like that weekend with Ashley all over again?
• • •
The night had ended on a confusing, bitter note, with long-ago dynamics sealed in amber somehow emerging again into view. It was nearing last call, and we had passed the moment where something could have reasonably happened in good faith with enthusiasm and spontaneity. We were into sour-stomached, hedging-our-bets territory, but neither of us was quite ready to let go. A bit of jockeying for position was occurring. By that point I had decided I’d prefer for Oliver to simply make a move and for me to decline than for us to actually go through with anything. Was I attracted to him in earnest, or did I just want to win?
For his part, Oliver appeared to be rapidly losing his patience. He suddenly remembered aloud a woman he had recently started sleeping with, Lauren. This was the first mention of her. She was younger, and had been a friend for a long time—had even been at his wedding. Nick had hit on her. Oliver and she had gotten quite close, actually, even before Oliver had left his wife, but the marriage had essentially been over by then anyway. He felt a little bit guilty, but not really. His wife had been hurt by the divorce, he hadn’t been. It had all been his decision, and it was the right one.
Was I missing something? Earlier in the night Oliver had said he was only a few weeks out of his marital home, that he felt shell-shocked, unstable. That he didn’t even have a new bed yet—he’d been sleeping on a futon. Earlier in the night, he had seemed like a reasonable guy, one I understood. Why was he telling me this now?
It was nearing 2 a.m., and I could still feel all the places his hands had touched me in the preceding hours. Our thighs were pressed together, and I instinctively backed away.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“You know.”
Oh, did I? I thought I was looking at him the exact same way he had been looking at me, if not a bit more skeptically. That the mirror neurons in the back of my brain were just reflecting back the buzzy, flirtatious, will-we-or-won’t-we energy he had been giving off all night, rolling it around in a loop and shooting it back out again with occasional detours into second-guessing. This was not something I could do on my own.
If I were a slapper—I wish I were a slapper—this would have been the moment. But instead I was stunned and had misplaced my voice. Oliver didn’t let up: it’s not cool, he said. If Lauren or one of her friends saw us right now, he’d be really embarrassed. And all of this was my fault, clearly. What the fuck.
How quickly the once-mighty buzz had fallen. A tiny part of me recognized that Oliver was condescending to me, throwing off a sense of shame and feeling of rejection within him and pasting it onto me because he couldn’t deal with it. That I had done nothing wrong, neither had he, really—well, until then—but that truly if one of us had behaved badly, it was he.
Alas, it was a small part only. In the moment, the trick worked. His decidedly cocky, reactive move, what I later understand to be a textbook dose of gaslighting, knocked the wind right out of me. I felt stung, unprotected, not chosen yet again.
At the beginning of the night I’d thought I was a woman, but suddenly I was a girl again. I was self-conscious and ashamed and swallowing the labels some dipshit was applying to me because he was older and a man, and he had a bigger ego that assisted him in talking down to people. I remembered the way Ashley had stone-faced the guys when we had been out for drinks in Manhattan and later, Nick. She’d kept her power; she’d raised the game.
She would not have stood for
this, I felt sure of it.
I got up, an attempt to regain some sense of stability, but I was wobbly in my shoes. I grabbed the railing on the nearby wall and looked toward the door. There were smokers gathered on the sidewalk, laughter, couples pressed into each other as they walked.
• • •
On the trail the ground is slippery and my Converse sneakers do not offer much traction. Oliver and I are climbing in silence up a sloping, wooded path with trees all around us and branches overhead and moss-covered rocks to hop between. A few people are descending as we’re on our way up; most nod in that friendly, earnest hiker way as they pass us. How do we look to them? A sullen couple: the woman with her hands in her pockets, staring straight down at the dirt beneath her feet. The man, pinched and dutiful, occasionally looking back to see that she’s okay, but mostly he’s in his own head. What’s their deal? What could make them so uptight in the middle of the woods?
More steps get climbed, and there’s a steep little hill to scale, and then just like that the trees open up and we are there. The waterfall is stunning. It’s loud and rushing and calming all at once, white rapids pouring over dark rocks from high overhead, the wet surface slicked with murky algae. For a moment my mind is mesmerized. A bubble of mist surrounds us, with light breaking through the clouds catching the droplets here and there, making the air appear to sparkle. I have given up on protecting my hair, my once-sleek blowout now a mess of damp and matted frizz. There’s no going back. We walk to a clearing where there’s a couple with kids, and I’m looking at the sky and Oliver is beside me and suddenly everyone else is gone.
“Ashley pushed me down on my bed when we got home that night,” he says out of nowhere. “She tore my clothes off.” A long pause. “To be honest, I was sketched out.” The words hang in the air. I want to shove them back where they came from. This feels wrong, even though technically it’s what I want to hear—the intimacies, the insider knowledge I could never have been there for. But we are in nature, and I don’t want this anymore, not now, not this way. Not so callously, not after last night. This isn’t fair.
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