Oola. Brittany Newell

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СКАЧАТЬ the fact that nobody knew me. I found that I liked graveyards because they were conducive to walking in circles. The nonspecific pains of my body entertained me when I finally crashed back at my hostel, a depressing but effective alternative to going out for a drink—never before had I sat at so many little tables alone. Rather than sit at one more with a glass of cheap beer, I took off my shoes with unusual relish or else hid out in undubbed English movies. Sometimes I’d join the dinnertime crowds, thronging up and down High Street or around the train station, and pretend that I too had somebody waiting, some exterior schedule to keep.

      Oola admitted to the same self-flagellation. “I couldn’t enter a restaurant,” she told me. “I’d hover outside, reading the menu, then chicken out when the hostess came over. I couldn’t bear the way the diners were looking at me.” Why not? “People are suspicious of meandering women. I couldn’t make decisions quick enough. Most nights I had Nutella for dinner.”

      Cold showers at ungodly hours, when I crept naked down the hostel hallway, stirred me into a state I have seldom encountered since that overlong summer I spent traveling alone. I got the axiom backward: The always-cold water aroused me, opening an awareness of my body that was erotic if only for how endearingly human I felt. When I turned off the water and stood with my arms crossed, drip-drying at an excruciating pace, I felt so cold and weak that my mind unscrolled, like at the end of a movie, leaving only the scarred screen. No words could penetrate this glossy white. I thought of a tooth, its hard white enamel, and as I stood shivering, for twenty, thirty minutes on end, I slowly became certain that the hard white surface of the sinks, the shower’s edge, the skidmarked floor, were the dents and pits of my own teeth, that I had entered myself, somewhat surprisingly, via the mouth.

      Sometimes this revelation seemed cartoonish, like an anatomy book for children wherein one zips through veins and pulpy valleys, and at other times, when my toes turned blue and strange muscles that I rarely gave thought to started to ache, the entire situation seemed like a surgery, an inevitable violation. I couldn’t remember what city I was in or why I was there. There was often no real reason to remember. I fled back to my bunk and put on every shirt I’d packed (which, sadly, was not many). I would shiver myself back to sleep.

      I come from a New England family of some means, the most valuable of which turned out to be a vast network of empty houses. This is partially how I found myself in Europe, fresh out of college and desperate to prove that I was somehow different from all the other bookish boys with backpacks and the star of privilege beaming down on them, illuminating hickeys. Different how, I couldn’t quite say; more in-tune with the world, maybe, or less of a threat to it, preternaturally sensitive instead of just chill. My parents’ friends traveled frequently and were always in need of a semi-responsible young person with few attachments to look after their townhouses, their big-windowed villas or cutely ramshackle cabins, while they were away at some new-age retreat. I think they especially liked phoning me up, the Kneatsons’ wayward youngest son, isn’t that the one, honey? The artist, now I remember, the one with the hair down to here, but polite. I’ll bet he’s available. And I was; after my expensive education and a summer that turned into almost two years abroad, where I tried to rinse myself of WASPery (my #1 tactic being hitchhiking, a hobby every child of my generation had been trained to associate with extravagant rape), I found myself returning to the gated communities and circuitous drives (never called driveways) that as a teenager I’d defined myself against. My truck might as well have had a bumper sticker proclaiming the return of THE PRODIGAL SON.

      I remember my first night house-sitting a cousin’s Parisian flat, egregiously sunlit, blue with cream trim and a riotous bidet, the first in a long series of houses I’d inhabit for two to five weeks at a time. After countless months fetaled in hostel bunks, counting the farts of invisible roommates until, however perversely, I was lulled to sleep, this sixth-floor walk-up on a quiet street struck me as more foreign than the silence of Parisian subways (every profile turned to the window, every luscious mouth shut tight). It was like an amusement park, this sparse and tasteful flat, my shut-in Tivoli. I didn’t leave for a week. I subsisted on beans from the cupboard and spent my days in the bath. Sick of sickness, I was only too glad to return to the domestic sphere. I did my laundry daily, stripping the sheets with inappropriate glee. Sitting atop the bared mattress and watching the sunlight alter the room, did I have any idea that this would be my life’s future format? That this solitude would follow me? If I did, I would’ve wept for joy. An empty bedroom still excited me with possibility; I was yet to reach the point at which no bedroom I entered would ever seem empty.

      Picture me there, like a pig in mud: sitting cross-legged, shirt off, on the off-white carpet, gnawing a baguette, finishing a pack of cigarettes before noon, pulling the box apart and holding the foil up to the light. What you are witnessing are the early stages of a long, imperceptible, drawn-out transition, the study of which means nothing at all, from bachelor to hermit. The former devotes himself to the study of himself. The latter seeks desperately for something just as interesting. Something only he, in his hermit hole, can master: Soap-carving? Millinery? Conspiracy theories? I watched the noon light play off the foil and wondered what would be next. The answer was so obvious that I could never have imagined it: a girl, introduced to me by the boy I once loved.

      When Taylor first invited me to his party, I waffled. I was passing through London in a post-Christmas slump, having turned twenty-five on an overnight bus that smelled resolutely of ham. I’d been alone for so long, snotting into my sleeves, that mingling seemed impossible, especially with Tay’s crowd. He was a childhood friend who worked at a fashionable magazine and loved nothing more than getting so high that he couldn’t remember the day of the week. He would stand on a chair and babble about the Netflix apocalypse, waving the limbs that had always been skinny despite a lifelong defiance of anything active; he was tall, so fat collected in odd places, like the tiny belly that curved (I thought of a lowercase b) from his impossible hips and only made him, in a droopy sweater, all the more attractive. Half Jewish and half Japanese, he’d been an object of erotic fascination in our Greenwich school district since the ripe age of twelve. Your legs! hot moms were wont to croon. So feminine! And he’d say wisely, You can call me Tay.

      “C’mon,” he said. We had met for coffee in a poorly lit Soho café, confirming my worst fears about the circles he ran in. The coffee was salty, as only expensive espresso can be, and the clientele’s faces eerily framed by the light from their various high-tech devices. “You’re here now, aren’t you?”

      I nodded vaguely from my nest of shirts. This seemed up for debate. The girl next to us was making eyes at her reflection in her blacked-out laptop screen.

      Tay poked my arm. “Leif, be real. You could use the company. Besides, I never get to see you.”

      This last bit couldn’t be denied. I hacked into a paper napkin and shrugged. I imagined his set to be overeducated and underfed, too witty to be laughed at, too chic to find fuckable, easy to imitate if I didn’t watch out.

      He went on. “Music, people, lots of drugs. You can come for an hour and leave if you’re bored, but I promise you won’t be.”

      “Scout’s honor?” I leered.

      He rolled his eyes. He hated being reminded of the benignity of our past. If I could, I would bury his face in a patch of freshly mown grass, wring his arms until he admitted to having played Spin the Bottle with just his sister and me. Tay’s fancy job and new poise couldn’t fool me; I could see the scar on his lip where there’d once been a titanium ring. I was walking proof that he’d once farted in a bag, that Edward Scissorhands made him cry (I relate, man!). We had made face masks with honey and crushed aspirin and promised not to tell; when our concoction didn’t work, we sent away for a high-tech zit-zapper, which also disappointed us. I thought about attending the party just to spoil his image, to overlay his tall tales of suicidal cheerleaders and Pynchon-worthy pit stops on some unending road trip between Boy (outside Vermont, exact coordinates unknown) and СКАЧАТЬ