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, zigzagging over oceans just to end up in a cabin one mad drive from where from Oola was born, a town I still didn’t know the name of at that point in our tryst. The desert days swirled on: baby oil, pad Thai.
“Do you think there are ghosts out here?” she asked one evening, cheek pressed to the sliding glass, a glass of wine on the floor beside her.
“No,” I said calmly, though I thought otherwise. “Do you?”
“Oh yeah. How could I not?” She smiled with excruciating slowness, the corners of her mouth pushing the planets out of line. “I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.”
“Have you seen any?” I played with the fringe of a pillow. My weak heart had begun to thud, as loudly as when she undressed; perhaps this was the source of the bumps in the night.
She shook her head. “No. But I feel them.” Her expression was deadpan.
“And what do they feel like?”
“That game, Telephone. Or …” She mused. “A tongue in the belly button.”
I insisted she demonstrate, the marble-blue moon illuminating the back of her neck while the rest of her body went grainy. “Heebie jeebies,” I screamed when her tongue hit its mark.
“There have been mornings,” she said, “when, I swear to God, I wake up with my hair braided.”
We moved on to the topic of moths in the cupboard; they’d made a home in our unsealed cereal boxes. They died soundlessly, added crunch to our breakfast. As we spoke, they cluttered the lamps in the garden, polluting the light. How we hated those fay motherfuckers. We gazed outside at the lamps grossly strobing and plotted how best to annihilate them.
Everything we did in the desert felt subversive to me, a classic New England romantic. Instead of romancing, we tried not to be interested in each other. Instead, we stuffed our shoes with newspaper in fear of scorpions and felt aroused by the sky (so big, so blue). Instead, I bit her nipples until they bled and came on her chest and we both mixed our hands in the fluids, half-smiling. In this landscape that felt limitless, we were equally curious to see how far we could go, who would be the first to cry uncle, to get hurt and not find it sexy. A moment when I felt myself tipping was when I asked, somewhat reflexively, mouth full of her, “What feels good?” and she tilted her head back and said happily, “Everything!” and I was struck with so much tenderness that I couldn’t make a joke, couldn’t speak, all I wanted to do was embrace her, say thank you. But before I could, she put my whole fist in her mouth and garbled, “Chubby bunny.”
We lived like this for twenty-one magic days, until the night she rolled over and said, “My mom would think that I’m a prostitute.” She chuckled from deep within. “Like, literally, a prostitute.”
It was a full moon, and the desert throbbed with little lives, innumerable transactions taking place just outside the sliding doors, ajar.
“I haven’t given you money,” I said, too stupid to realize how stupid I sounded.
She smiled and traced a spiral on her thigh. “Not explicitly, no.”
I sat up, confused. “That’s not fair.”
She traced her nails over my nipples. “Life’s not fair,” she murmured, completely unfazed. “Yabba dabba doo.” There it hung, our first cliché as real lovers. I could picture them accumulating, like glass balls on a Christmas tree.
I leaned forward, wiping my mouth. “What do your parents do?”
Here was the crux. She paused, and I could see that she was weighing her options. Something outside screamed, just once. To answer would be to tear down the partition we’d carefully built, to let me in deep without a clear exit.
She switched on the bedside lamp and sat up. There were bruises forming on her breasts, yellow blobs, our poor rendering of the California poppies that dotted the highways. “My dad was a roadie for metal bands. Now he sells jewelry and rocks. My mom is a hostess at the Gold Rush casino.” She laughed. “Have you heard of it?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.”
Then, without bothering to put on clothes or wash her mouth out, hands folded patiently over her lightly creased stomach, she proceeded to give me the Story of Her Life, something she’d clearly recited many times and tweaked into a monologue she could rattle off with eyes half-closed. As she spoke, I felt funny; I nodded along, though my pulse was racing. Up until that point, I’d assumed she came from money. Something about her quietness, her way of leaning back, her queenly limbs, bespoke privilege, or perhaps I’d been dense enough to associate her long blond beauty, the sort that I fell for, with good breeding, good luck. I found myself scanning her body for remnants of hardship, for giveaways (her quietness evoking resilience? Her thin arms the result of PB&J for three meals? Her masochism really a familial relation to pain?) that I’d previously been too besotted to notice. The white lines of scar tissue on her thigh caught the light. Where before she’d been a twist, a bit of newness in my life, I was watching her rapidly become something more—a destination, perhaps. A landscape. I blinked and tried to listen. The cunt I thought I’d come to know was suddenly a tunnel; I was standing at the mouth. The desert clatter fell away. I didn’t hear the coyotes that night.
“Papa was a rolling stone,” she said, then cracked up. I smiled weakly. She wiped her eyes. “I always used to say that. It’s kinda true: He was on the road a lot of the time, and he’s always been obsessed with rocks. Hence the jewelry business. He makes them into