Oola. Brittany Newell
idea for a new project.
“A TV show?” she said. “That’d be good, bring in some dough. If it’s poetry, I’ll kill myself.” She eyed me. “Is it vampires?”
I smooshed a pillow on her face. “Just asking,” she cried. She wriggled free. “So tell me.”
“I’m not sure yet. But you’re the main character. Or she’ll be based on you. Whatever. We’ll see.”
She flipped her hair. “Me? Well, fuck, I’d read it. Guaranteed five-star rating. I turned the light out last night, by the way. So scoot, fatty.”
And that was all. Perhaps she didn’t believe me. I got out of bed and flipped off the light.
“That’s the stuff,” she sighed. In the dark she was a lump. I stumbled across the floor and squatted near her side of the bed. I tried to make out her hair. White-blond—you would think it would glow in the dark. But it graded into the pillow, became the bedspread. Everything that was Oola dissembled at night, aired its joints and swam about in a nameless soup. I needed a cauldron. I needed a net.
I gently bit the tip of her finger.
“Drop dead,” she cooed.
I lay down beside her and fell soundly asleep.
DURING OUR STAY AT THE ORBITSONS’ BEACH HOUSE, WE MADE up a game. This was after Europe but before Big Sur, before the pact, when we still had time for minor games. We played it in the evening, after dinner, wearing clothes that we’d plucked from the Orbitsons’ closets.
We entered the living room. I poured us each a drink, choosing from the Orbitsons’ expansive wet bar. We sat down on the davenport, each wedged in a corner, with an empty space between us. Theo liked to hop up and nap in the gap. Gripping our drinks stiffly, we were like children with taped-on corsages, estimating our own depths, guessing at love. The windows would be open, and an ocean smell suffused the room. It ate at the curtains, warped the blond wood, did all the things we as house-sitters were supposed to prevent but as self-absorbed lovers found excusably moving. Suckers for atmosphere, we donned evening attire and welcomed that iconic tang of woodsmoke and salt that would outlast, once absorbed by the drapery, not only the Orbitsons’ marriage but also this era of insouciance, of Oola’s and my self-contained exhibitionism (which is to say, wearing our hearts on our sleeves).
I liked to wear Mr. Orbitson’s gloves of kid leather, partially for how kinky I found that pairing of words, and one of his collection of gray cashmere sweaters. Sometimes I wore a burgundy smoking jacket, and once (and only once) a cummerbund without a shirt. Relishing the glide of my gloves over the stereo knobs, I got up and put on sad music: songs with lost or heart or broken in the title. It was the kind of music that I used to love to listen to when I came back from a party, drunk and horny and alone. Since meeting, Oola and I had fused our music collections; she gently steered me away from hardcore (that shit makes my nipples hurt) and introduced me to Massenet. Feeling rather like a bank robber cracking a safe, I fiddled with the Orbitsons’ state-of-the-art sound system until the chosen drone or wail mummified the room. Then I returned to Oola’s side, ankles crossed. It could be Otis Redding, Maria Callas, Kate Bush, ANOHNI, some droopy-eyed teen with a broken guitar, a spinster giving herself up to Chopin. More often than not, it was Enya. No matter who sang, we sat rock-still and sipped our drinks.
Then, when she felt moved to, Oola would put a pair of nylon stockings on her head. We’d found them draped over the shower rod in the oceanfront guest room, hung up to dry for God knows how long, the shape of someone’s ankles (the original Lady Orbitson? A friend from long ago? The maid?) still retained.
She wore Mrs. Orbitson’s perfume and an unseasonal dress, a long-sleeved velvet number with a skirt that hazed the floor, the hem furry and teasing as a frat boy. For convenience’s sake, she wore her hair back, cleaned and low. This allowed her to stretch the stockings easily over her head, encircling her braid and pulling them down to her collar with the gravity due ritual. With the stockings in place, she turned to face me, and it always gave me chills to see the fucked-up ex-face swivel, seeking mine, like any blind animal that knows to seek heat.
Through the stretched fabric, her features were blurred, as if a left-hander had been penciling her, smudging the last stroke as he made the next. Her eyelashes were crimped, her nose squished, her mouth forced open, her cheeks Botoxed back. As best we could, we made eye contact. Nina Simone would continue to croon, to make promises, as I studied a face not so much ruined as erased.
We would take turns wearing the stockings, swapping after every song. When I wore the nylons, I felt like I was underwater. The living room looked ghostly through my tight beige veil, Oola like the silvery streak on a photograph labeled PARANORMAL. I liked being looked at without being seen. The floor dropped away; Marianne Faithfull started to slur. The atmosphere was violinish. My sit bones turned numb as I tried not to move, to fix Oola’s mouth (a pink postage stamp) in my sight. She could’ve been anyone as she sat there, my grandmother or my first true love, a fine, feminine smear.
We played this game late into the night. The ice in our drinks melted and our eyes began to ache. The ocean smell grew sweet with distant breakfasts. We stopped only when the day’s first rays threatened to penetrate the stockings’ mesh and clarify the face beneath, to recognize its bones and restore it to a gender, a history. At this point, whoever was wearing the hose yanked them off and balled them up in embarrassment, stuffing them into the crack between couch cushions. This is where they stayed until the next evening that we played our game. During the day Theo sat on them, keeping them warm. I gagged on his hairs more than once.
THE FIRST TIME I SAW HER WAS AT A PARTY. IT WAS THROWN BY A mutual friend neither of us knew we had in common. It was in London.
Or perhaps I’d met her before, and perhaps I knew she’d be there, and maybe it wasn’t even in London proper but some more obscure borough. When traveling cheaply, one has a tendency to mistake sleep deprivation for an ecstasy. In the beginning of my travels through Asia and Europe, I was guilty of reading a certain eloquence into my discomfort. For months on end, my nose ran too fast for the pretense of tissues. People scooched away from me on the metro. I’d walk for miles to get to an art opening or some second-rate manor. I didn’t care about culture; I just wanted to tire myself out, to distract from the fact that nobody knew me. I found that I liked graveyards because they were conducive to walking in circles. The nonspecific pains of my body entertained me when I finally crashed back at my hostel, a depressing but effective alternative to going out for a drink—never before had I sat at so many little tables alone. Rather than sit at one more with a glass of cheap beer, I took off my shoes with unusual relish or else hid out in undubbed English movies. Sometimes I’d join the dinnertime crowds, thronging up and down High Street or around the train station, and pretend that I too had somebody waiting, some exterior schedule to keep.
Oola admitted to the same self-flagellation. “I couldn’t enter a restaurant,” she told me. “I’d hover outside, reading the menu, then chicken out when the hostess came over. I couldn’t bear the way the diners were looking at me.” Why not? “People are suspicious of meandering women. I couldn’t make decisions quick enough. Most nights I had Nutella for dinner.”
Cold showers at ungodly hours, when I crept naked down the hostel hallway, stirred me into a state I have seldom encountered since that overlong summer I spent traveling alone. I got the axiom backward: The always-cold water aroused me, opening an awareness of my body that was erotic if only for how endearingly human I felt. When I turned off the water and stood with my arms crossed, drip-drying at an excruciating pace, I felt so cold and weak that my mind unscrolled, like at the end of a movie, leaving only the scarred screen. No words could penetrate this glossy white. I thought of a tooth, its hard white enamel, and as I stood shivering, for twenty,