Oola. Brittany Newell

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СКАЧАТЬ away from mine as if the park’s anemic roses were of especial concern. I’d been thinking of her all night long, and now I couldn’t bear her downy nearness. It’s not unfair to say that stubbornness, alongside attraction, prompted me to face her, take her mittened hand in mine, and announce, “You’ve got yourself a deal!” and then, in a tragic spurt, “Yabba dabba doo!” at which she was generous enough to laugh.

      I booked our flights using my parents’ mammoth store of frequent-flyer miles. We were destined for a plot of desert somewhere outside Phoenix, where a family friend and failed architect had a house of glass and steel. He called it the Abode and filled its yard with ugly sculptures. Oola liked the birdbath made from an old toilet; I found especially appalling the mobiles made from Barbie heads. There was a saltwater pool on the roof and a basement so extravagant I could only assume it was meant as a bomb shelter. During our stay I used the basement as an office. Its multiple bunk beds with their Native blankets and the pantry stocked with s’mores supplies made apocalypse seem campy, fun. There were woven rugs on the concrete floor, Arcosanti bells in the doorways (but who would hear them ring?). I had a couple of articles to finish for a pseudo-academic magazine called Wingdings. When I needed to procrastinate, I sketched cathedral windows on butcher paper and tacked them to the hard-packed walls or wandered into the pantry and made astronaut ice cream. Oola spent her days hiking in the dizzying acres of land that stretched all around and made the Abode seem almost lewd in its glamour, the harsh shine of wall-to-wall windows and tinkle of sculptures disrespecting the deadbeat desert hum of fussless death and owls hooting. Every night the coyotes raised their alarm; every morning ice clung to the wind chimes.

      It’s possible that Oola interpreted our setup as in part economic, and that was why she slept with me our first night in the Abode. I had to stifle a yelp when I walked into the bedroom to find her totally naked, sitting on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, like a patient.

      “It’s hot,” she said, half-smiling.

      My mind was a blank, as it had been for a while, preoccupied by an amoebic sense of foreboding, as if waiting for the whole world to lean in and kiss me. The post-party silence had followed us to the States. We’d spent the previous night in LaGuardia, listening to audiobooks on separate devices and sharing a box of Girl Scout cookies—“I missed America!” I’d cried at the same time that she sighed, “How did those little twits get in here?” I’d asked what she was listening to, and she showed me her screen: American Psycho. “God,” I said, “you’re one morbid chick.” She smiled serenely, headphones in, not hearing me.

      Her smile, in the master bedroom with its turquoise tiles and sliding glass doors, was similarly calm, though her eyes’ slittedness belied unnatural urgency. She was here, all of her, in this pause, just for me. When chatting at Tay’s parties, this was what she looked like right before she cried, “Gotta pee, be right back!” waving over her shoulder as mine relaxed into the wall. It was my privilege now to study her face, the shifty expression of hunger she’d run to the bathroom to hide.

      “Too hot for pajamas,” I said, stiffly nodding, and sat beside her on the bed. I unlaced my shoes.

      “Are there scorpions here?” she asked, leaning forward as if to check under the bed. Her breasts swung forward and their mass, their place in space, stupefied me. I looked down. “I think so,” I whispered, though I didn’t want to be whispering. “Remember to shake out your shoes.”

      She laughed, as if this were funny. “Can do,” she said. “Do they sting?”

      “I think so.”

      “Ouch,” she mouthed. “Will you kiss me?”

      Shyness, like a skirt, dropped softly to the tiled floor. The profundity of the relief I felt is impossible to convey to you after the fact; the best way to put it is that I suddenly remembered, with a delirious lurch, placing one hand on Oola’s knee and the other on her neck, which pulsed hotly, that I was not the only writer—duh!—and that I too could be written by somebody else (Oola? God?), that I too could be caught unawares. As I stared at her throat, so improbable in loveliness that I saw spots, I was able to recognize, finally, the narrative in which we’d found ourselves stuck and were helplessly furthering, the narrative that to any onlooker was plain as day, even boring—two young strangers, in an empty house, counting down the minutes until their bodies can recline and their inability to speak be reconfigured as sexy. Our first kiss, with its tiny squelch, alchemized the awkwardness of every prior conversation, every oops and mumbled hi; of course, of course, I wanted to laugh, my hands on her shoulders, this was where we were headed, this was what couldn’t be voiced. Everything felt easy, now that we’d finally faced it—the obvious horror of sex. I flung my jeans on the floor, and the sound of the belt buckle hitting the tiles surprised us. We laughed, jittery. In the absence of words, we had only our bodies, and on this night so hot as to seem heavy, they were far more accommodating.

      In the following weeks, we moved slowly, ate sparsely, did our own things during the day, came together at night. Perhaps this was the purest way to get to know each other, starting at square one and feeling no pressure to progress, to pursue deeper chutes or taller ladders. In the clear desert sunlight, her cunt was deep enough. Watching her pace the sculpture garden and sing ABBA hits softly, I sometimes feared, in a vague, cheerful way, that she might be planning to kill me, take pictures of the carnage, and feed my liver to the birds. I locked the door when I showered. She was so cool, anything seemed possible, and it’s partially true, that she managed to harvest my organs, in the cool blue master bedroom, where we tussled and hissed without breaking our vows of silence. I don’t mean to suggest that we didn’t talk at all; we gossiped, thought aloud, decided what takeout to order, but it was all present tense. We were careful to avoid the past or anything as mucky. Out of bed, we maintained our relation as convivial strangers.

      For despite how queer our setup seemed, when she told me to chomp on her nipples because it reminded her of something she’d seen in a Saw movie, I must confess, the wrongness moved me. When I traced three perfectly straight lines of scar tissue, each an inch long, on her innermost thigh and asked what had happened, and she answered lightly, “It was almost an accident,” I sensed, deeply tingling, that I was nearing an edge. Sometimes, when I kissed her, she was so limp as to seem half-alive, but when I reached between her legs, she was already wet. She possessed a chillness so total it matched my intensity. While I hustled toward ecstasy, she sighed and let God enter somewhere else. At times, I read her as a masochist. There was something in her easy way of lying back, received by pillows, or her eyes’ beatific glaze when I pulled back, mid-lick, to stare at her, that suggested the unnatural extent of her laxness. But she would surprise me too, by breaking off suddenly to make a stray comment like, Who invented anal beads? Or, When I have sex with girls, I always feel like there’s straight boys watching—is that wrong? then lying back in that easy way as she awaited my answer, and we would chat, relaxed as sisters, she fluffing her pubes like a pedant stroking his beard, and I would be forced to reconsider her. We agreed that anal beads seemed like something Socrates would have loved.

      There were times, before dawn, when we could be nowhere but Mars, when the land was pocked and moony, flecked with spurts of oily grass, and disc-shaped clouds came ever closer, periwinkle flying saucers, and not even boots on gravel made a sound. Paranoia felt endemic to the landscape, to the horizon choked off by the sky and the vast flats of white sand that were suddenly, savagely, purple by nightfall, as did a certain sexiness, the thrill of being scraped out, of waiting with hands tied. One could get in stare-downs with the moon, so slim and indifferent, presiding over this nothing where anything goes, the broken heart of America, giant and pinkish and crinkled, left to the elements, left to air out. If desire makes you tongue-tied, Arizona had it bad. It is certainly weird that we began our affair a ten-hour drive from Big Sur, where we’d eventually end up, hog-tied, but such is the holy scattershot of life in the drone age, when we bought tiny bottles of conditioner in citadel-sized supermarkets, СКАЧАТЬ