Serge Gainsbourg. He was ugly.” She splayed her hands, as if to demonstrate ugliness. “Was he really in love every time he wrote a song about it? Or did he have some major heartbreak that he kept coming back to? I read that’s what T-Swift does. She’s cathexed. Maybe these guys write love songs as a form of purging. Or wishful thinking. Or, uh, picking at a wound. Or because they can’t help it. Or maybe they choose a girl at random, whoever they last slept with.” She smiled to herself, revealing her large and slightly rounded teeth. “Maybe songwriting is like, you know, alchemy. Makes a bland girl suddenly babely. What do you think?”
I blushed a bit, thinking of the strange habit I’d developed while traveling alone. In any particularly beautiful moment, when camping in a bombed-out farmhouse on the Bosnian–Croatian border, for instance, I found myself thinking of strangers, girls and boys whose first names, much less a worked-over memory of their light-speckled eyes, I had no rightful claim to. Similar to how one sees a lover’s face everywhere, superimposed onto billboards or kids’ bodies, I hallucinated the most random faces until they eventually took on the familiar quality of the beloved—hazy, sleepy, piqued. I would picture these relative strangers on the beach beside me, equally sunburned, my accomplices in awe. I imagined myself explaining the local delicacies (of which I knew nothing) to the severely scoliotic girl who worked at the front desk of my hometown library. Her name and age were lost, but something in the architecture of, say, Stockholm evoked her bony shoulders. Soccer jerseys emerged from my mind, limp wrists, missed patches on a shaven thigh, or the blond hauntings of a beard. I caught a glimpse of an impossibly young drag queen in a club in Tokyo and carried her with me, by rail and air, her hairless limbs to be unfolded only when I stopped to nap in public parks. With the sun on my face, I pictured her sitting crisscross in the grass, ten feet away, watching me.
Waiters were the easiest prey. I fell in love at a merciless rate: For four days I thought nonstop about whomever I’d last sat beside on a particularly bumpy bus ride, so long as they were young. I used their profile as a sort of shelf upon which to rest my brain, a soft (or so I imagined) body to split life’s rarebits with. That is, until another waitress called me sir or fiddled, so disastrously, with the string of her apron. The violation (and I knew it was one) was not how I imagined these bodies or in what positions, but simply that I recalled them at all, dug up the 0.001 percent I knew and took fantastic license with the rest—more kleptomaniac than common creep. Could Oola already sense this neediness in me?
“Maybe they write the songs in advance,” I said carefully, addressing a point just above her head, “and have to find someone to fill them after the fact. Have to find a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket, or however that one goes.”
“Could be.” She nodded vigorously, carried by the conversation’s momentum. “It’s funny too how love songs are, like, always in the second person. Have you noticed that? Hey, little girl, is your daddy home; your body is a wonderland; you make me feel like a natural woman.” She spoke these lyrics briskly. “So even if the girl’s not named, she’s there. She hovers. It’s a weird instinct, isn’t it, the second person? I—want—you—so—bad. It’s so public. Girls and boys everywhere will pretend to be that You or Your. Even if it’s your Your, like if you know that you’re the one! How many poor girls don’t even know that they’re the subject of a song? Or think that their boyfriend is writing about them, when he’s reflecting on some past affair?” She laughed again. “I’m babbling.”
“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