Oola

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“But I crossed a line.”

I considered. “The public suicide threat was a bit much for a fourth-grader.”

He cradled his head in his hands. “Don’t remind me.”

“Sorry.” I wasn’t.

He smiled wryly. “You know, I saw her again.”

“You mean when the middle school band played for May Day? I saw her too. I thought of you.”

“No,” he said. “Later. The summer before senior year. I ran into her at the grocery store.”

“Oh.”

“At first, I did a one-eighty. I was too embarrassed to face her. But she stood right behind me in the checkout line. ‘Is that who I think it is?’ she said. ‘Can it be?’ This was during my punk phase, mind you. I think I only had about seventy percent of my hair.”

“I remember.” I’d been the one to shave it off, cross-eyed on stolen Xanax.

“And you know what she did? She reached out and touched it. ‘All the teachers have bets on how their kids will turn out,’ she told me. ‘I think I just lost.’ She was smiling when she said it, and I could see that she was wearing a plastic retainer. God, I was dizzy. ‘How did you think I’d turn out?’ I managed to ask. She started laughing. ‘I thought you’d be a veterinarian.’ And we both started laughing, and she patted my wrist and told me, ‘Take care.’”

“That’s actually rather romantic.”

“I know, right? And she was just as beautiful as I remembered. You always expect to be disappointed, you know, like once you grow up and look back on the shit you used to worship. But even though she was definitely older, I could still see it.” He waved his hands in the air. “And I remember exactly what she was buying too: disposable razors, frozen macaroni and cheese, a bar of Dove soap, and one clementine. The kind that come in the orange mesh bag. She was buying just one.” He shook his head.

“I’m jealous,” I said. And I was: All my childhood crushes had ended not in heartbreak but in something more like acid reflux. The obsessions that I found so poetical (with Heather, with Jackie) invariably fizzled into ickiness, into: Is there something in my teeth? That Leif kid is staring again. A sunflower seed? Ugh, he gives me the creeps. Like so many, I never got the chance to atone for my awkwardness; even years later, I carried it inside me, like the muscle memory of a major injury, all those jerks and spurts and moments when I clapped my hands to my ears and shouted, OH FUCK ME, for how badly I wanted to say the right thing.

I staged them in my mind. Miss Lee, the landlocked geography priestess. Tay, the disciple, who finally, finally, grew into the lust that he wore plain as jeans. In a way, they had less in common now than when he was a little boy, for he alone was no longer confused by his body. She wore drawstring pants and ChapStick with a tint. He was tall, dark, and clearly debauched. They made eye contact over the magazine rack. A year’s worth of candy bars melted.

In real time, Tay grinned. “Well, listen, if it’s release that you’re after, I know just the girl. She’ll be there tonight. She studied holistic healing at a coven in Helsinki. She’s now a masseuse for the terminally ill. Goes by Pumpkin.”

“Sounds like you’ve got me pegged.”

“If you’re lucky. So you’ll come?”

I threw up my hands. “I guess I don’t have a choice.”

“That’s probably what Miss Lee said.” He rose and I followed suit.

I walked him to his tube stop. We stood at the entrance and embraced. He squeezed my well-padded biceps and gave me a questioning look.

“It’s the shirts,” I mumbled, gesturing helplessly.

He smirked and didn’t look away. “It’s so good to see you, Leif.” He had lowered his voice, and I had trouble discerning his words over the tube’s subterranean rumble. “You’ll always be funny to me, man.”

“Is that an insult?”

“Up to you,” he said. He held my earlobe between thumb and pointer finger. “Fuck, you’re cold. I will see you later, won’t I? Don’t pull a Leif on me.”

“I won’t.” I let my gaze drift to his lip; the scar tissue was like frost on a windshield. If I tried, I could still see the troubled boy that I’d touched dicks with. This had, by no means, been the peak of our relationship, but it came to me then, in a semisweet gust. One more instance of our loose-limbed youth, a foray in the cornfields. I’m kidding. It was in his room, My Bloody Valentine playing. I think his dog watched us from under the bed. Later, we laughed it off, chalked it up to the drugs; we were simple. Sometimes we’d swap T-shirts, Black Flag for Bad Brains, and sleep amid the other’s stink. It was one of our many inexplicable gags that only gained significance after the fact, when folding laundry on a rainy day. I’d pressed the crumpled T-shirt to my nose and yes, it was still musky.

“Excellent.” He released me and hurried down the stairs. I lingered at the entrance for a moment or so, siphoning the body heat of the crowd that hustled past me.

THAT’S HOW I ENDED UP in his East London flat, gripping a drink and wishing for death. I’d only been there for fifteen minutes and already a girl had me pinned to the wall. She was explaining, with some difficulty, the benefits and freedoms of the fruitarian lifestyle.

“There’s no limit!” she panted. “Other diets have you counting calories. Since going raw, I’ve chucked restrictions out the window. It’s heaven.” She waved her glass for emphasis and I was tempted to ask if it was a mimosa. “For breakfast today I ate thirteen peaches.” She grinned and I noticed the stains on her teeth. “For lunch I had watermelon. Three, to be exact. I have to eat out of mixing bowls. After that, I was still a bit hungry, so I snacked on five dates.”

I noticed her fingers were shaking. “What about protein?”

“I get all the protein I need from fruit!” she shrieked. I could see this was a question she got quite a lot. “The most important thing is to stay carbed up. And people say carbs make you fat!” Her laugh was shrill; her knobby shoulders convulsed. “You wouldn’t believe how much sugar is packed into one date. It’s like a little bomb! A tiny sugar bomb!”

In truth, her babbling was a blessing, for it vindicated my people-watching and protected me from a more involved conversation. I dreaded having to pretend to give a single shit. I metaphorically rested my chin on the top of her head and surveyed the crowd while she rhapsodized over spotty bananas (“Brown! They have to be brown!”). My eyes fell on Tay, holding court in a corner. He wore a black sweater, a headband (oh, he was sleek), and a gigantic homemade clockface around his neck, which he, every few minutes, consulted with a fierce concentration.

“Get ready!” he screamed. “Ten-minute warning!”

The theme of the party was Last New Year’s Eve Ever (despite it being February). Tay had hidden every clock in the flat and confiscated watches at the door. If he caught someone sneaking a peek at their phone, he stormed over and demanded that they not only hand him the offending device but their drink as well. He was a mad king, stalking around the apartment, declaring every hour, then every fifteen minutes, then every time he saw a pretty face, to be midnight. Someone made the mistake of handing him a saucepan and a spoon, which he clanged mightily when, according to his private logic, the time came.

“Countdown, people!” he bellowed, hopping from couch to couch like a little boy convinced that the carpet was lava. “Couple up! It’s the end, the end of time, and this is the last chance you get! To get fucked!” He stopped to consult his fake clockface, with one leg up on the back of the sofa, posing like a New World explorer. “Ready? Three … two … one … HAPPY BOOB YEAR!” And he sprang off the sofa onto the suddenly stable ground and sprinted around the flat with his spoon in the air, holding the backs of people’s heads as they kissed to make sure that it counted.

Even for a party of trim twenty-somethings, the atmosphere was unusually abuzz. Tay’s was a hyperbolic universe of cheek-kisses galore. The effect of the theme was that everybody kept a list of who they wanted to make out with; I guess everyone does this at every party, but tonight the concept of sloppy seconds became inoffensive, and people accepted their middling rankings, flattered to have been jotted down at all. The fact that we’d each spent at least an hour beforehand appraising our worth in the mirror (and still hopped off to the bathroom to do so every now and again) was brought to the fore by Tay’s counterfeit midnights. Yes, we were predators, eyeing all thighs, but we also just wanted to cuddle. In the minutes between Tay’s exclamations, even the most hammered partygoers were hyperaware of their whereabouts, shuffling across the carpet like chess pieces, scheming their way toward a particular ponytail so that when the time came and Tay started banging his pot, one could glance incidentally to the left and catch that particular eye as if to say, God, this is stupid. But if we must …

And if this body was taken, there was always the next round and this OK-looking person beside you, whose mouth you could sample, and perhaps have a chat with, before spying a memorized sweater pass out of the room and suddenly finding yourself needing to pee very badly; you could pursue these hallowed scapulae over the dance floor, down the hall, while you whispered under your breath not the words you would say to her but a countdown to midnight that Tay, draped over an ottoman, had yet to begin. You would pray that the timing would link up, that the last-train apprehension in your gut would resolve in a swooshing open of lips and/or doors, shunting you homeward, toward any bed. Tay announced: It was all a joke, this thing we based our lives on. I thought about you on the train ride here; I wore this dress for you alone, just as I wear my skin for you; but in the humid center of this shit show, let’s laugh while we kiss, because the Moment is a construct and we all get a bit dimply in the end.

I, for the most part, was curious: What would it be like to kiss a fat girl? What about a young techie, with facial hair that I normally found inexcusable? At 11:17 p.m., I got my answer. Afterward he patted my wrist and said, “Awesome.” I drifted back to my corner, like a fish having fed.

“The man, the man!” Tay erupted from the crowd and threw his arms around my neck. “Having fun?”

“Always.” My words were muffled by his sweater. “Where’s Pumpkin?”

“Mono.”

“Oh.” I tested myself for disappointment: none. “Tough break. So how’d you come up with this theme?”

“The Internet, obviously.” He pulled away but leaned on me to keep his balance; he smelled like a medicine cabinet. I hoped, for a moment, that he would call midnight right then and there. He acted so differently now, with a new swagger, new accent; would he still taste the same? He squinted at me. “It’s a good one, right? Very educational.”

I nodded.

“You never get to kiss your friends,” he said, taking on the pensive but authoritative tone of a professor. “Well, you can.” He giggled, as if to say, We would know. “But after a certain age, it gets tricky. Kissing means, like, marking territory. It becomes an act that freezes instead of … unleashes. But what if I just want to tell you I’ll miss you? Wouldn’t it be easier to do it like this?” He grabbed me by the collar and thrust me up against a wall, clockface bumping between our chests. I was laughing and splashing my drink on the ground; he released me before I could catch my breath. “Tonight,” he went on, “I feel absolved of responsibility. I kiss and tell! I kiss and text.” He paused to think, grinning. He was as pretty and pretentious as I remembered. “Honestly, I kind of feel like a Hare Krishna, passing out pamphlets.”

“The Way of Tay.” I considered. “It does have a nice ring to it. Maybe I’ll enlist.”

“Uh-oh.” He smiled. “I can see you mean business.”

He adjusted his headband with a gesture I interpreted as nervous. I flashed back to a similar moment, when he and I were sixteen. We were in his car, knee-deep in fast-food wrappers that never stopped smelling delicious, driving, it would be safe to assume, in circles. I’d made a joke about a girl that Tay was crushing on, a shy salutatorian named Sophie. They’d hooked up once, when she was moderately tipsy, and now he fretted over the likelihood of getting to third base.

“Would poppers help?”

I had laughed aloud. “This isn’t San Francisco.”

He shrugged. “I found some in the medicine cabinet. I think they were my uncle’s. Well, what about weed? I think she’ll let me if she feels relaxed.”

“Fat chance,” I said, not really even listening. I was more interested in the joint that I was rolling on my knee. “If I didn’t really wanna, what makes you think she would? She’s, like, in the choir.”

He’d stopped fiddling with the radio and looked at me sideways. “That was different. We were bored.” His expression was not unkind, but his tight eyes and lowered tone still stung.

I was caught off guard. I focused on the joint.

I knew that I loved Tay; I just wasn’t sure if I was in love with him. I didn’t etch his name into the flesh of my thighs or wonder at the smell of his shit, as if such an angel couldn’t possibly empty his innards of anything other than peach pits and warm wishes. That was the way that we talked about our crushes: as if they were mystical, the lambent coat-hangers upon which life’s true meaning hung to air. Tay made my bed smell bad even if all we did was watch TV; I alone was the expert of his unseemly wetness. Nothing I’d yet read described love like this—as routine, as shambly. I thought love was what grew, weirdly soft, over voids; it could only affect one body at a time, that of the wanter, alone in a room. But having known him nearly my whole life, having been on the swim team with him and seen him naked and dripping twice a day, every day, my access to Tay seemed total. As best friends, we were basically already dating.

Resting my elbow on the grease-yellowed window, my knee two inches from his, I trod carefully. “You don’t have to tell me,” I’d said, and forced a laugh. “She probably has a planner for this sort of thing.” I finished rolling my joint and the conversation quickly returned, as it so often did that season, to the particular translucence of Sophie’s hair in homeroom lighting.

Back at the party, I resorted to the same feigned nonchalance and bottomed my drink. “You know me. Always looking for a lifestyle change. So how many others have you recruited tonight?”

Tay smiled guiltily, becoming expansive again. “I’m not exactly sure. Fifteen, maybe? My cult rejects math.” He was momentarily distracted by a girl across the room. He jabbed a finger in her direction. “Perfect example! Take Lilith. D’ya know Lilith? I don’t want to sleep with her. But I’ve dreamed about her once or twice. In one dream we baked a fruitcake and rode on it toboggan-style while Donald Trump applauded. I don’t know her well enough to tell her this. But tonight I’m gonna kiss her. And that will be that. Lilith! C’mere!”

I turned to see where he was pointing and was struck by the numbing beauty of a pair of shoulder blades.

Thinking this was Lilith’s back, I waited for it to approach. I stared at her unmoving form, oblivious to the real Lilith’s arrival (a delightful dyke in denim on denim) and to her and Tay’s shrill conversation, until the point of my attention must have sensed me watching, browning under the microwaves of scrutiny, and twisted around, one arm wrapped across her waist, the other holding her drink to the hollow of her throat in a posture of deep thought or not-unpleasant boredom.

“Hey!” Tay shouted something that I didn’t realize was a name until its owner wiggled through the crowd, drink still poised against her throat like the center of a circle whose circumference was unclear to me, and grabbed hold of his nipple with her free hand. He made the sound again, pursing his lips and forming the vowels of a doo-wop background singer. “Oola, you dog.”

Oola. A word that sounded funny when you repeated it, like any word said too many times. I used to do this as a kid, repeating my name or the words book, bread, breasts, until these most basic things (human rights, I told myself) sounded foreign and I could barely remember what they meant. Oola similarly cracked open on the tongue, like something cream-filled, a necessary embarrassment, like gasping oh! during a scary movie or hissing slightly when kissed hard. It made one’s mouth suddenly suspect. I practiced reciting the name in my mind, terrified of the moment when I’d have to say it aloud. It reminded me of my parents’ friend Bebe, a film producer whose Austrian ski lodge Oola and I would, in the coming months, trash, then frantically tidy. As a kid, I dreaded having to greet her, chiming, Bonjour, Bebe! at my mother’s prompting. By saying her name aloud, I had no choice but to instantly picture this middle-aged woman naked, whether as the slit-eyed recipient of a pet name or an actual infant, I can’t say.

Oola hosed Tay with a smile. She was the sort of person who took a moment to focus in on her surroundings, rearranging the fray of her thoughts into more coherent forms. At the same time, she herself became solid, body gaining an outline through the baggy clothing she wore, remembering the placement of each of her teeth and offering them to you, one by one, like pistachios, cigarettes, sporadic uh-huhs. She needed a minute to quiet the corolla that made her mood obscure, that fuzziness that attracted one to her in the first place, just as one’s eyes are attracted to the one dumb bunny, now unidentifiable, who moved during a family photo. With Oola, I picture a gas burner clicked on, flaring violet and broad before the flame settles to Low. She was loose-limbed yet distinct; we watched her simmer into place and placed bets on her body temperature.

She seemed to move more slowly than the average person because of this coalescence, this tuning-in of cheekbones and individual arm hairs, like an image on an old TV defuzzing into recognition, a relieved oh, it’s you! It was not that she was spacey but, rather, spaced out: wide-set eyes, long limbs, lank hair, big teeth, and, of course, her incredible height. Let me gather my thoughts, she liked to say, and one could easily picture her doing this, selecting her words the way children in picture books pull stars down with string. As she turned her face toward yours, rotating each eyelash on its tiny axis, she was blowing the steam off the soup of her internal life; she hardened and became haveable.

The more I got to know her, the more it felt like this quality was not so much a trait as a headspace, a lush cavity that she had to be recalled from. She always seemed to be emerging, from a pool or dressing room, no grand entrance but a shy gathering of bags and garments about herself, which only made her sexier. When she spoke, her face filled out, like a pumpkin lit from within, but when she sat quietly, people often asked her if she was OK. She didn’t look sad, but as if she had lost track of something. Preteens sidled up to her with conspiratorial smiles, whispering, Are you high?

She seemed to not realize that her pacing was unusual, because she always reacted with surprise, even as she had to pause—a pause in which she buttoned and smoothed her metaphorical blouse, previously drooping with all the world’s worries—and wrangle up the words to express a jovial nah. And when she smiled, it was the smile of a student in a foreign-language class, earnest and pleading, because Monsieur is tapping his pen against the edge of his desk and everyone’s looking and she can’t for the life of her remember how to say pain. Monsieur prompts, Do you want a piece of …

Me? she offers teasingly, and there, that helpless smile.

That was one of the first things I noticed: how un-self-consciously she kept people waiting, and how we all acquiesced to her queer time, literally stooping to match her low voice.

It’s impossible, of course, to wholly return to that first impression, even as I recall the heat and clamor of the party with frightening veracity, the love songs on the stereo, how dashing Tay looked all in black. Too many associations clog the path to that first, virgin instance, to the unassuming tingle I felt when I caught sight of her shoulder blades. I can’t think about her shoulders, clothed or bare, without a thousand other moments in which they played a part surging to the forefront—a memory of her playing piano (Saint-Saëns) in a beige lace bra battles for precedence. I can’t be sure of what I really thought of her in those first few seconds, because I would have to empty my mind of all things Oola to get back to that stage, and to do so now, after all that we’ve been through and all the time that I’ve spent, would be virtually suicidal. All I know for certain of that moment is that I was surprised to see her walking toward me, this tall, tall girl, and as she neared, I did my best to stand up straight.

“What’s up?” she said.

“We were just discussing how fantastic my party is,” Tay crowed.

“Really?” She looked at me and smiled. “Sorry. What’s your name?”

“Leif.” I was barking, I don’t know why.

“Leif and I go way back,” Tay said. “He knows all my secrets. We’re basically brothers.”

“Have we met before?” I managed.

She squinted at me. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Where are you from?” My voice felt thick. “Your accent. America?”

She nodded. “California. People here are nicer if you say you’re Californian.”

“Maybe they think you’re a movie star.” I instantly regretted this.

She smiled and shrugged. “Or somehow less guilty than the rest of the states. Little do they know. I was raised near L.A., the shittiest place.”

“Are you Scandinavian? Oo-la?”

She laughed, opening her mouth completely. “No. I just had illiterate parents. And you?”

“Only technically. I’m a New England mutt.”

“A WASP?” She smiled in a way that seemed teasing.

“Uh.” I spread my hands. “You caught me.”

Tay had turned back to Lilith, taunting her with his clockface. “I’m not going to tell you,” I heard him say. “You have to guess.”

Oola didn’t move. She wore an expression of wary amusement, smiling tiredly as if her surroundings didn’t quite make sense but she was game anyway. She was six feet tall.

“So what brings you to London?” I asked, suddenly piquantly aware of how long it had been since I’d showered.

“Oh, you know.” She waved her hands meaninglessly. She wore black tights, sneakers, and a sleeveless T-shirt three times her size, emblazoned with the words PLEASURE IS A WEAPON. “I’m a bit of a bum.”

“A student?”

“I was. I would have graduated this year, but I’m taking time off. To do what, I don’t know yet.” She laughed as if she’d had to say this many times before.

“Have you been here before?”

“Yeah. I came with a band, we went all over the place. But I was too young, too fucked up, to really do anything.” The mental image of her puking in a bucket, wearing band merchandise, was oddly arousing. “So I thought I’d come back, as, like, a real person. I flew to Suffolk on a grant, but the money dried up and now I’m just … waiting.”

“What did you study?”

“Music. Like I said, I’m a bum.”

“Is that how you know Tay?”

“Sort of. We met at a museum. We sat down on the same bench in front of a gilded tub of Vaseline. It was called, uh, The Midas Touch. It had the artist’s fingerprints in it and the fingerprints of all the people he’d ever slept with. Tay whispered that it should be titled Greatest Hits. I said Slip ’n’ Slide. The rest is history.” She leaned in closer, eyes suddenly bright. “Tay’s the best. You know what I heard?”

“What?”

“His ex-girlfriend is in love with a wall.”

I laughed out loud, too stunned to be self-conscious. “What do you mean?”