Since when do you like flowers? You’re always indoors; that’s why your skin is so bad. How do you turn this thing up? She’s probably sitting in front of it now. Can you smell that?” She leaned forward, eyes weirdly aglow. “Hamster—I knew it. Don’t blame me.”
And she leaned back, satisfied.
In middle school, a teacher lent me Into the Wild. I read it so many times that the paperback cover came off in chunks. I had a raging crush on Chris McCandless, patron saint of adrenaline junkies and fidgety white youth. I was aroused by his arrogance, his stupid boy desire to master the unknown. Would it make sense if I said, then, Oola was my Alaska?
“Wild child,” I whispered. It felt like a code. “Wild child.”
During our desert binge of skin and spit (tangy from dehydration), I thought I’d gone into the wild just by getting inside her. On this night when we began talking (and thereafter never seemed to stop), I realized how hasty I’d been. The absoluteness of Oola spread out before me, like the acres of desert that changed colors at will. There was so much to learn, so many places to go to. Her legs, comfortably flopped in a crisscross position as she lit a cigarette, seemed to signify an endlessness. Sex was only one pasture, the most unoriginal high point, ground zero of closeness. Drifting around the Abode with lips swollen from kissing, I’d considered our liaison poetic, the soft edge of radical because we didn’t know each other’s middle names, when really it was commonplace, kid stuff without even the threat of being walked in on. I felt myself sliding and held on to the bedframe. Wild child. A resolution was forming, ulcer-like, in my gut: I’d go where no man had gone before. I’d travel deep into love and walk all the fuck over it. I didn’t contemplate what would happen when and if I mastered love (Chris forever hitchhiking toward some odder, farther land) or how the extremes of love might leave my body totaled, in need of suppler containers. Naked and shining in the weird blue of the moon, I trusted my body, a rareness in sex. I trusted hers too, splayed before me, like grassland, whipped up by invisible breezes, inviting me in.
“What’s up?” she said, exhaling. The smoke was blue, as was her stomach, as were my jittering hands when I reached out and touched it. I smoothed my hand across it like one wiping leaves off a windshield. “It’s your turn now,” she laughed.
“For what?”
She affected a Valley accent. “To share.”
“What should I talk about?”
“Anything.” She dropped ash on the bed. “I can handle it, babe.”
Oh Oola, so lax and lean and blue. If only she knew what she started.
IT BEGAN AS AN EXPERIMENT, OUR BEING TOGETHER. IT WAS always meant to be lightweight: a test of will, a sort of game that could be TO’d, rained out, as easily as grade school soccer. We pinkie-promised: nothing major. A journey to the outer limit just to prove it’s there.
Oola was the star player of her own peewee soccer league, her first and only athletic accomplishment. She spoke of it with lilting derision, trying to suppress a smile as she described her coach. “Freudian dreamboat. All the little girls were in love with him, or, like, with his mustache. Big honking thing. I would daydream about swinging on it, jungle-gym style. Don’t give me that look! I wasn’t falling for it. OK, the mustache. OK, a little. His accent was duh-reamy. OK, my heart broke that season. But, look, ever since I’ve been with clean-shaven men. What does that tell you? I’m ready now, Doktor, tell me. Out with it! Release me from this cage of feminine devotion.”
Before me, her first experiment in love had been Disco, the family cat. He was a friendly fellow, a dozy tabby who didn’t register when you picked him up, who merely blinked when you swung him side to side or stuffed him in your bag. One day, Oola, age six, got down on all fours. She pressed her nose to his—“warm and scratchy, always reminded me of the pop tab on a soda can”—and nuzzled his face. After a pause, she licked him between the ears. He didn’t so much as meow. She opened her mouth as wide as she could (“I pictured myself as a garbage truck, pressing a button and letting my jaw fall open”) and attempted to swallow his head. “I wanted him to know I loved him,” she explained. “Besides, I was curious to see if I could. He let me give him showers, so I figured, what’s the harm?”
She told me this on a train in Normandy as we zippered between provinces. From Arizona we eventually jetted to France, to attend my third cousin’s wedding. The father of the groom paid for both of our flights, despite thinking our names were Lola and Steve. We’d gotten used to the weirdness of things and accepted this extravagance, bidding the scorpions and toothache-inducing sunsets adieu. “Such a handsome couple,” he drunkenly cried when he met us. “Good on you, Steve-O!” From the wedding, we made our way to Austria, where the ski lodge awaited its whipping.
On the train, we passed fields of rapeseed so yellow our eyes stung. At the time, neither of us knew the name for this plant, which made it all the more magical; Oola leaned against the window and mouthed mustard gas, mustard gas, as the yellow expanses, like lit-up barges, floated by. None of the Frenchies on board seemed to care, or they couldn’t be bothered to look up from their papers. The man sitting across from us was roused from his novella but once, when Oola sat upright and arched her back, stretching her arms from window to compartment door. His gaze was quick, impassive, landing on her décolletage as lightly as a fly. Traveling with Oola, I’d begun to tally the up–downs and backward glances she received from strangers in a day, which soon proved more complicated than I’d first thought, demanding a specific system of categorization that often numbered in the triple digits before dinner. While I obsessed over whether the ticket taker had eyed or ogled her, Oola remained unimpressed, her gaze fixed on the distant hills, which, contrary to rumor, had no eyes with which to return the stare. When she caught me actually tallying my results on the back of a receipt and I tried to explain, she groaned, “This would only seem remarkable to a man.” When I tried to justify my interest as vaguely anthropological, she waved her hand in my face: “Oh, please, Leif! Do what you want, but don’t expect me to play too.” Her words wounded me. I remember we stayed in that night, just us, a quiet meal of cold noodles and an overcompensatingly large TV.
But after, perhaps now that she had brought to light the strangeness of my interest, I no longer tried to curb it. I became all the more committed. I devised a ranking system, from innocuous appraisal to elderly lingering to pure sex stare. I wore sunglasses to hide the fact that I looked not at Oola, whose flesh, by then, I knew, but at the men who were so bold as to guess. That we were constantly traveling only exacerbated my problem: Crowds seemed to fold around Oola, though of course I knew this couldn’t be true, and I often felt like a factory overseer, checking workers off a list as they shuffled past her, the heavenly time clock, punching in to our world with the force of their eyes. This Frenchman, neatly dressed in black, was no exception; for the entire ride I had been waiting, without realizing, for the moment his resolve would waver and he’d have to sneak a peek.
“I managed to fit eighty percent of Disco’s head in my mouth,” Oola went on, unfazed by his attention. Of course she was. Like any pretty girl, she’d learned how to conserve energy. She saved her spit for the men with zero boundaries; I’d seen her scream at a touchy-feely senior citizen that dementia was too kind a fate for the likes of him. “Old Disco didn’t protest. I could’ve gotten it all the way in, but my mother came out to the yard. She screamed and pulled him out of my arms. After that, I earned the nickname T-Rex. Disco still adored me.”
The Frenchman had returned to his book, and Oola had begun to bore herself. Her eyes drifted to the window. It was just the three of us in the compartment; in this rare cell, with only the sound of the train’s internal mechanics to fill the room, no one was looking at her. The countryside tumbled by and I did my best to take it in, but I was no better than my objects of study. I was the doctor double-dipping his IVs, and after a studied minute staring out the window, I glanced at Oola’s inclined neck, which, after so much yellow, was blotted