Oola. Brittany Newell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ