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, I tried to remind myself, indicates interest. Shyness is the sister to seduction. I took comfort in glancing at her face, inclined away from mine as if the park’s anemic roses were of especial concern. I’d been thinking of her all night long, and now I couldn’t bear her downy nearness. It’s not unfair to say that stubbornness, alongside attraction, prompted me to face her, take her mittened hand in mine, and announce, “You’ve got yourself a deal!” and then, in a tragic spurt, “Yabba dabba doo!” at which she was generous enough to laugh.
I booked our flights using my parents’ mammoth store of frequent-flyer miles. We were destined for a plot of desert somewhere outside Phoenix, where a family friend and failed architect had a house of glass and steel. He called it the Abode and filled its yard with ugly sculptures. Oola liked the birdbath made from an old toilet; I found especially appalling the mobiles made from Barbie heads. There was a saltwater pool on the roof and a basement so extravagant I could only assume it was meant as a bomb shelter. During our stay I used the basement as an office. Its multiple bunk beds with their Native blankets and the pantry stocked with s’mores supplies made apocalypse seem campy, fun. There were woven rugs on the concrete floor, Arcosanti bells in the doorways (but who would hear them ring?). I had a couple of articles to finish for a pseudo-academic magazine called Wingdings. When I needed to procrastinate, I sketched cathedral windows on butcher paper and tacked them to the hard-packed walls or wandered into the pantry and made astronaut ice cream. Oola spent her days hiking in the dizzying acres of land that stretched all around and made the Abode seem almost lewd in its glamour, the harsh shine of wall-to-wall windows and tinkle of sculptures disrespecting the deadbeat desert hum of fussless death and owls hooting. Every night the coyotes raised their alarm; every morning ice clung to the wind chimes.
It’s possible that Oola interpreted our setup as in part economic, and that was why she slept with me our first night in the Abode. I had to stifle a yelp when I walked into the bedroom to find her totally naked, sitting on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, like a patient.
“It’s hot,” she said, half-smiling.
My mind was a blank, as it had been for a while, preoccupied by an amoebic sense of foreboding, as if waiting for the whole world to lean in and kiss me. The post-party silence had followed us to the States. We’d spent the previous night in LaGuardia, listening to audiobooks on separate devices and sharing a box of Girl Scout cookies—“I missed America!” I’d cried at the same time that she sighed, “How did those little twits get in here?” I’d asked what she was listening to, and she showed me her screen: American Psycho. “God,” I said, “you’re one morbid chick.” She smiled serenely, headphones in, not hearing me.
Her smile, in the master bedroom with its turquoise tiles and sliding glass doors, was similarly calm, though her eyes’ slittedness belied unnatural urgency. She was here, all of her, in this pause, just for me. When chatting at Tay’s parties, this was what she looked like right before she cried, “Gotta pee, be right back!” waving over her shoulder as mine relaxed into the wall. It was my privilege now to study her face, the shifty expression of hunger she’d run to the bathroom to hide.
“Too hot for pajamas,” I said, stiffly nodding, and sat beside her on the bed. I unlaced my shoes.
“Are there scorpions here?” she asked, leaning forward as if to check under the bed. Her breasts swung forward and their mass, their place in space, stupefied me. I looked down. “I think so,” I whispered, though I didn’t want to be whispering. “Remember to shake out your shoes.”
She laughed, as if this were funny. “Can do,” she said. “Do they sting?”
“I think so.”
“Ouch,” she mouthed. “Will you kiss me?”
Shyness, like a skirt, dropped softly to the tiled floor. The profundity of the relief I felt is impossible to convey to you after the fact; the best way to put it is that I suddenly remembered, with a delirious lurch, placing one hand on Oola’s knee and the other on her neck, which pulsed hotly, that I was not the only writer—duh!—and that I too could be written by somebody else (Oola? God?), that I too could be caught unawares. As I stared at her throat, so improbable in loveliness that I saw spots, I was able to recognize, finally, the narrative in which we’d found ourselves stuck and were helplessly furthering, the narrative that to any onlooker was plain as day, even boring—two young strangers, in an empty house, counting down the minutes until their bodies can recline and their inability to speak be reconfigured as sexy. Our first kiss, with its tiny squelch, alchemized the awkwardness of every prior conversation, every oops and mumbled hi; of course, of course, I wanted to laugh, my hands on her shoulders, this was where we were headed, this was what couldn’t be voiced. Everything felt easy, now that we’d finally faced it—the obvious horror of sex. I flung my jeans on the floor, and the sound of the belt buckle hitting the tiles surprised us. We laughed, jittery. In the absence of words, we had only our bodies, and on this night so hot as to seem heavy, they were far more accommodating.
In the following weeks, we moved slowly, ate sparsely, did our own things during the day, came together at night. Perhaps this was the purest way to get to know each other, starting at square one and feeling no pressure to progress, to pursue deeper chutes or taller ladders. In the clear desert sunlight, her cunt was deep enough. Watching her pace the sculpture