Oola. Brittany Newell
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“I like it.”
She attempted to focus on me, actually squinting as if that might help her disparate aura firm up. “What is it you do again?”
“That’s a contentious question. But I try to write.”
At the time, I hated writing, yet I called myself a writer. Join the club, Tay might say. I had to trick myself into writing, most often in the thoughtless limbo between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., just as I had to trick myself into talking to attractive people, at roughly the same hour, when high standards (witty, busty, kind) degrade into a medical exam (two breasts, youngish, still breathing). With both writing and flirting, I hoped for the best and loathed myself afterward.
She considered this. “That’s bold of you.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe I write young-adult fiction about Midwestern lesbians with eating disorders.”
“Do you?”
“Nah. Just bi-curious spelling-bee champions with cancer.”
“Ha-ha.” She said it like it’s spelled. “That’s OK with me.” There was a pause, like an ember glowing on the rug between us. Our banter had petered out; the moment had come for a genuine assessment. What did we want? What could I give her?
When I was in college, I wrote a screenplay. You might as well know that. To quote the Lower Connecticut Bee, it was a semi-feminist sci-fi joyride about a mermaid named bell (lowercase) who falls in love with a paraplegic war vet. It was sexy and sad. I drafted it on index cards during introductory seminars on Thing Theory and wrote it, 70 percent stoned, over the course of a long weekend in May. In a jumbled moment just before daybreak, I titled it Flipped Out. I remember renting the back room of an iffy pizzeria and holding a table reading with all my friends. Whoever laughed during the love scenes (there were five) had to finish his or her drink in one go. This led to the script’s denouement being derailed by several sets of hiccups and lots of premature applause. Nevertheless, I actually sold the thing for a fair amount of money, passing it along to one of my parents’ many contacts, an ulcery exec whose Finnish villa I would house-sit for two and a half depressive weeks. I went through all his self-help books and nearly killed his koi.
Even now, three years later, the film has yet to be made. I hear production’s been grounded by a producer who finds the script’s sex scenes unsettling and the protagonist too queer. Nonetheless, the check came through one week after I graduated. I’ve been able to more or less live off the money ever since, freelancing for a handful of highbrow erotic magazines with names like Rubberneck and J.A.Z.Z.Z. whenever I need to feel useful (here loosely defined). How could I possibly encapsulate this information for Oola? Instead, I began counting the hairs on her arms.
It was she who broke the silence. “We’d better get going, before it’s too late.” She was referring to Tay’s game of Marry/Fuck/Kill, which had inexplicably devolved into musical chairs.
So we did as she wished. We got high and went to a chain movie theater in a twenty-four-hour mall and walked around without buying a thing. The building and the people in it were spectacle enough. Muzak filled the space: more outdated love songs. We threw pound coins in the fountain. We went up and down the escalator, giggling stupidly. On our fifth time down, she looked at me, eyes shining weirdly. She said something that I didn’t catch. “What?” I bellowed. My voice echoed off the polished floor and nobody looked twice at us. She said it again: “You’re addictive.” She grabbed my wrist and opened her mouth as if to laugh, but closed it before the sound could come out. “That reminds me. I want popcorn.”
Suddenly ebullient, I sprinted to the top of the escalator and waved toward the concessions. “You’ve come to the right place,” I howled, blocking the entrance. Be patient if I linger on these images, on us as we were, annoyingly young and already falling in love, smug in our bodies despite their soft reek. The shit will hit the fan, soon; the wit will blink out into undressed pain. She rolled toward me as if atop the world’s slowest tidal wave. “Thank God,” she said, “thank God.”
THERE CAN BE NO DENYING THAT IN THE BEGINNING, THAT FIRST heady spell, ours was a relationship based largely on sex.
I’m hesitant to state this so plainly—that we fell fully in love while fucking—because it gives the wrong impression of us, me as sexed up, she as free. In fact, I was near to virginal when we first met, and she downed a bottle of wine each night in order to “get loose.” Despite these obstacles, we found ourselves enamored of the other’s body, knowing the taste of each other’s armpits before it occurred to us to ask the basics. I remember so clearly the night when we first started talking, three weeks into our companionship. We were alone in Arizona. It was a full moon, fuller than I had thought possible, and everything in the desert, including our dishes and bedspread and blurred, upturned faces, was spookily blue. When I peered over the edge of the bed, at our sneakers lined up in a row, the soles and the laces were also soft blue.
After Tay’s party, I hung around London for a couple weeks more, accepting his invitations to dinners and parties only when I suspected that O might be there. I guess you could say that I had a crush, a hunch about the tenderness she reserved for a select few. She and I conversed a bit more at these parties, heads bent together in the corners of bars, the better to hear and also to bask in the other, I sometimes daring to tap her, hot and soft, on the forearm and say, “Come again?” After ten minutes of chatter, she seemed to reach a limit and would find some thin excuse to flee. She portrayed herself as one with a very small bladder. I didn’t mind; after any period of unadulterated nearness to the body I’d started to picture while falling asleep, I too needed a moment to gather my wits, to lean against the wall and take a deep breath. I was nervous; I interpreted this as a good sign.
On my last day in London, we met in a park. On a whim I asked her to fly with me to Arizona; after a pause (in which I sang “Happy Birthday” twice in my head), she said sure. “Nothing but a death wish keeping me in London.” She shrugged. It was an especially sleety, shit-tinted day. “I could do with brighter horizons.”
If the night at the movie theater was our impromptu first date, and all other encounters the willed coincidence of mutual attraction, then this walk in the park was our second real outing. We hadn’t yet touched in any game-changing way; our most intimate exchanges to date were cheek-kisses, and it was only because we were Americans, bound to the concept of personal space, that these routine smooches gave us pause. It’s weird to look back on that afternoon, the two of us strolling through some lord’s estate, transfixed by the pebbles in the neatly raked path, overcome by the shyness of a second date in which all the favorable things you remember about the first date are suddenly suspect and one wrong word, a bit of spittle on lip, can make the heart seem sham. Oola was wearing a goose-down parka that obscured her from the waist up; I had two pieces of cake in my pocket that I’d meant to share but forgotten about the instant we cheek-kissed hello. It’s even weirder to realize, after all that’s happened since that day, that the rain, most chancy and banal of forces, influenced Oola heavily when she decided to tie herself to me. More than flashing lights or funny feelings, the arbitrary designs of weather played a role in our romance. You’ll see. She wanted to be warm; she would find, incidentally, heat in me.
I brought up Arizona partly because I had nothing to say. While at Tay’s parties we’d been unstoppable, I was embarrassed to find, on this grim afternoon, dizzy stretches of silence. It didn’t feel normal. Shyness, СКАЧАТЬ