Losing It (10 page)

My first kiss was with a girl, Marianne Wallace. We were ten. She wore red lipstick and seemed to be always tossing her sexuality around, although maybe you can't call it that at that age. She was always pulling down her underwear for someone's brother or asking people to hypnotize her. One afternoon I was over at her house and we were looking at one of her dad's heavy old
World Book
s, at the same section we always looked at, which were several transparent pages with different parts of human anatomy on them, so that when you laid them on top of one another they would layer, first with the skeleton, then the muscle, then the organs, then the whole naked body. We were flipping back to begin again when she pushed me to the side and shoved her tongue into my mouth. All I could think was that it was like the arm of a starfish.

In high school there was Eddie, and then in college, after I'd quit swimming, there was a guy named Tim Palover. It was senior year and we'd been partnered up for a presentation in our history lab, and so had to meet up at the library several times. He worked for his dad's moving company and had a thick neck and a sweet, concerned face. He would slowly run his fingers along the books,
looking for a specific one, and I liked the way he hovered over everything in a heavy, gentle way. After building up my courage, I asked him out one day, but it turned out that the pleasant, deliberate way we'd had when working together didn't carry over into conversation very well. We sat at a taco place, looking in different directions. I slurped loudly on my soda to fill the silence.

We still ended up going back to his apartment—he lived off campus—and getting stoned and sitting on his sofa. For lack of anything else to do, we silently watched his roommate play a bass-fishing video game where he flung his arm back and forth, to cast the virtual line, with increasing hysteria, until he threw the controller down on the floor and stomped away.

Tim and I looked at each other. We started making out. I'm here, I thought. I'm doing this. It was the middle of the afternoon. I was high, wonky. Sun filtered through a Tibetan scarf tacked to a window. I could tell he wanted to go all the way, that he would do that, and I hardly had to do any paddling to keep it going. He put his hand down my pants and started a rhythmic motion. I liked how he smelled, and the pleasant sensation of his weight on top of me, but this didn't feel good. It reminded me of someone sanding the last drop of varnish off a banister. I tried to want it, to align myself with the grid of pain and pleasure you see on people's faces in porn. His head was now on my chest. He kept doggedly at it. I opened my eyes and looked at the jerking aquamarine waves on the TV, the video game stuck on the menu screen.

He got up abruptly and when he came back with a condom something had changed in me. He could tell. It all fizzled. I gave him a hand job, my first one, and we both had the grim
determination of trying to start a fire in plummeting temperatures. Anything to save the afternoon. He finally came, and we watched TV for another hour, and then I left.

I still wasn't too worried about it, though, because I had Grace. We'd become friends quickly after meeting while waiting in line at the registrar's office and had roomed together ever since. At the time she had shoulder-length, stick-straight brown hair that sliced along the tops of her shoulders, and a faint mustache, and she wore heavy charm bracelets. She was from Pennsylvania, and we had lots of grave conversations about our pasts. She told me about her golden brother with whom she'd had a rivalry and who may or may not have tried to murder their cousin. I told her my biggest secret at the time, which was that I was pretty sure our neighbor in San Antonio, old Mrs. Penman, was selling Oxycontin to the Mexican construction workers who waited at the bus stop on our street. We sat in our tiny room, feet up against the minifridge, or spread out on the hot benches in the rock garden outside the residence hall, or in the dusty bean bags in the un-renovated part of the library. It came out pretty soon that we were both virgins, and I clutched this shared fact. I pulled our friendship over me like a quilt, secure in the knowledge that I wasn't the only one. I was more or less normal. Look at Grace. I mean, yes, she had a faint mustache and sometimes detached the charms from her bracelet and put them in her mouth while you were talking to her and her eyes would float around in a disembodied way, but still.

Then later that year, a guy came out of nowhere and introduced himself to her on the street. The way she told it, she was walking
from the dining hall to the library, and he was on a bike and was suddenly in front of her. He had a stormy expression on his face, but later it turned out that he was just nervous. He had sharp cheekbones and a buzz cut. He'd been in her chemistry class but there were like a hundred students in the same lecture, so she hadn't noticed him. He wanted to know if she'd like to go on a walk or have coffee sometime, and she did, and they started seeing each other.

It wasn't long before one afternoon I noticed that she was looser in her movements. She laughed with an authority I'd never heard in her before, flung her head back with comfortable abandon. It was like she was welling in being herself. We'd be talking and I could tell her mind was elsewhere, thinking rich, faraway thoughts. She seemed more contained, and more spread out at the same time. An internal shift had taken place and I knew, crestfallen, what had happened.

She confessed it to me one afternoon in the library. The mixture of hesitation and guilt with which she told me only confirmed the direness of my situation. I remember how much I wanted what she had. We were the same two people. Our cells hadn't changed. We were both sitting at the same circular table, at this point in time, in Arizona, like we always did, but now instead of being in it together it felt like we were two separate rotating plates in a rare moment of syncopation and would soon wheel away from each other. And that's pretty much what happened. Sophomore year she moved in with her boyfriend.

It was then that I looked around and started to sense that something I'd previously thought was a given did not seem like such a
sure thing anymore. It made talking to guys way more complicated. It was like when an appliance that's been humming along stops working, and you take it apart and realize you don't know how all the parts function or how it ever worked in the first place.

I discovered that I had a haughty way about me. It was something I'd picked up as a kid and never been able to shake—straight blond hair, broad, pointy shoulders, and an aloof manner that I was on some level aware of and yet completely unsure how to dismantle.

After college, I thought moving somewhere completely different would change things, would change me, that I would be shunted into a different humming world with new opportunities and friends and possibilities. I would get a knack for it, like I had with swimming. I'd find the right instincts. I pictured myself in an oval of sunlight on the street outside Arlington Cemetery, the smell of wet leaves, and a different grain to my life. Instead I found myself in a sterile, prefabricated housing complex with no friends. I hadn't realized how much the infrastructure of swimming and college had made it easy to meet people. If I wanted to do so now, I had to crank my life in a way that didn't feel natural—Internet dating or having difficult conversations at bars where you're holding yourself still to talk to someone but the rest of you is floating around the room like a potion. Or, I went to a cooking class for singles once, and everyone there was astoundingly wrong: the stocky man with darting eyes who kept adjusting his belt buckle and mentioning his new duplex, the Canadian guy with womanly hips who disgorged his divorce story after two seconds of conversation.

And then I'd started to feel something I'd only glimpsed as a teenager, when it had been much easier to disregard—actual, corrosive,
adult loneliness; a crystalline, desolate feeling of abandonment. Did other people feel this way? I hadn't thought it would be like this when I was a kid.

It sat in me like a jumble of luggage I couldn't put right, no matter how I rearranged it. Everyone else's happiness seemed like a personal affront. I'd walk down the street, shivering in the shocking East Coast cold, and my insides would grind as I watched a couple leaning against the wall, pawing at a manila envelope together and laughing as they shook out its contents. What winds were pushing them and why weren't they pushing me? How did they get lives with all the proper moving parts? I'd study a girl sitting across from her boyfriend at a lazy brunch restaurant, her face blooming, her hair mussed, perfectly nestled in her life, and it seemed impossible, totally out of the question, that that could ever be me. And there was no amount of practicing or trials or laps, no strengthening program to make it better. That helplessness added to my anger. This is a strain of it, I thought, that no one tells you about, this is a strain of being an adult. Desperation seeps into your bones as you lie alone in bed at night, wide-awake.

On my way home from some lackluster night out in D.C. with Jessica, passing lonely newsstands and fogged-up restaurants, and groups of friends jostling one another as they walked down the street, one question would blare in my mind: If things had been slightly different, if certain turns had been taken, could it just as easily have been another
way?

Six

Elliot Grouse leaned back in his chair. His hand was slung over a paperweight. His desk was covered in papers. There was a completely different atmosphere to his office today—strewn manila envelopes, crumpled pages on the floor. There were cups of old oversteeped tea on the shelves. It looked like he'd been working on something nonstop for days. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other. He was on the phone.

“It's just a swipe card,” he said. “A swipe card. A
swipe
card
. Mom? We'll get it figured out, okay? I'll call them tomorrow. I gotta go. I'm at work. I gotta go. Okay, Mom?”

I wondered when Elliot ever took the hair out of his ponytail, and if he only did it when he really wanted to relax. I wondered if it melted over his shoulders when he did, and if he would be shirtless, standing in front of the fridge in the middle of the night, or sitting on his bed, staring at his laptop, his hair draped over his back, and he's cupping his chin in this way I'd seen him do, his eyes swimming with sleep.

“I'm getting off the phone now. Joe Cutty,” he said. “Yes, Mom, it's still Joe Cutty, and I'll call him tomorrow. Yes. I'm going now. I'm going now, Mom, bye.”

He put it down. “Julia,” he said, looking at me with a hassled smile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” And then, before I could say anything, he pointed to my hand. “What's that?”

I was holding a gift I'd gotten for him at a store that sold healing crystals and menstrual calendars and homemade soup spices that I happened to pass one afternoon downtown. It was a transparent disk filled with layers of different-colored sand on a small plastic platform so you could put it on your desk. It was his birthday—which I knew because Jeannette had invited the whole office to cake later—and I'd planned to give it to him in a casual way, like an afterthought, no big deal. It was meant to strike a balance: to encourage him if he was interested in me but not seem too pushy. I hadn't seen him too many times since our last conversation. He'd stopped by my desk once, as if to say something to me, but I'd been on the phone.

“It's for you,” I said. I held it out. “For your birthday.”

“Really?” he said.

I handed it over. It was wrapped in many layers of tissue paper with mystical glitter in it.

He started unwrapping it.

“You really didn't have to . . .”

He continued unwrapping it.

“The anticipation is killing me,” he said.

Finally, he withdrew the sand disk. “Look at that.” He held it up. “Are you supposed to shake it?”

“No!” I said. “Well, you can. If you want to. That's up to you. But I don't think you're supposed to.”

He slowly lowered it with a perplexed smile and then looked at me, and in the short silence that followed I'm pretty sure it became
clear to both of us that any leverage I'd had by being more conventionally attractive had just been canceled out by this naked and unasked-for gesture, as well as the fact that the sand disk was, I now realized, a complete piece of crap that could even be considered faintly insulting. I watched, with mounting unease, as he registered all of this and started to form a response that would probably have attempted to politely paper over the whole thing, but then, instead, his face became alert and he looked behind me.

“Grousey Grouse,” said James Kramer, walking into the office. “Grousey Grouse Grouse.”

James Kramer was the head partner, and when we'd met I'd immediately disliked him. He was a big, rotund man, white-haired and jowly, who steamrolled everybody with a loud, aggressive good cheer. He was the kind of older man who seemed to take it as a challenge when a woman sustained eye contact with him or countered him in any way.

“James, hello,” said Elliot, putting on a pleasant smile.

“Just wanted to pop in and say a quick happy birthday,” said Kramer, “because I won't be able to make it to Jeannette's little get-together.”

“Ah, got it,” said Elliot. “Well, thanks.”

James leaned back, his eyes ran over us, assessing. It seemed like he was going to leave but then he said to Elliot, “How are the little green men? Are they gathering?”

“Ha-ha,” said Elliot. “No, I don't think so.”

“Have they started a conference? Are they going to invite you?” James's eyes flitted over to me with a mean sparkle.

“No,” said Elliot, smiling thinly. “I don't think so, not yet.”

“Are they gonna”—James made a phone gesture with his hand—“are they gonna phone home?”

“Probably not.”

“Well, you'll let me know if they do,” said Kramer loudly.

“You know I will,” said Elliot.

“You know I want you to,” said Kramer, pointing a folder at Elliot, walking backward out of the room. I looked quickly back and forth between them.

“Will do,” said Elliot.

“Happy birthday!” yelled Kramer as he walked away from the office.

Elliot glanced at me, shook his head, and started straightening the papers on his desk.

“What was that all about?” I said.

I could tell the interaction had been unpleasant for Elliot, but a part of me was glad it had short-circuited the awkwardness of the previous few minutes and put us back on regular footing.

“It's nothing.” He sighed. “It's . . .” He scratched the back of his head. “I made the mistake a couple years ago of telling the guys about this thing—we were just making small talk—this project I was interested in.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” He squinted at me, gauging my actual interest. “It's this thing out of SETI.” He put down a pen and leaned back. “They—this started years ago—but they started releasing data they were collecting from a radio telescope in California, where they're sort of sifting for signals from distant technologies, or other civilizations.”

“Oh, cool,” I said. “UFOs?”

“Yup,” he said, “well, exactly. And for the first time they've made all of this data available to the public—you just have to download a program—because they figure a human brain is actually better than a computer algorithm at detecting whether something is just interference from our world, or an actual message from, you know, from outside.”

“Got it. Wow,” I said.

“So yeah,” he said, “and anyone can participate.”

“That's pretty cool.”

“I just like the idea that you, me, or any old person could identify the first signal like that—what would essentially be the biggest discovery of humankind.”

“How much data is there?”

He slowly exhaled. “It would be a needle in a haystack,” he said. “A million times that.” He smiled. “Are we alone?” he said. “That's the question.”

“Yes,” I said. “That is the ultimate question.”

We made some uncomfortable eye contact. I started blushing.

“Anyway.” He shifted in his seat. “Thanks again for the . . .” And he held up the sand disk.

“You're welcome,” I said. I hesitated. I wanted to keep standing there. “See you at the thingy later.”

“Sounds great,” he said, and watched as I turned around and left.

About forty minutes later we all gathered in the kitchen, a fluorescent-lit area that smelled faintly of rotting banana. Jeannette was elaborately cutting the cake she'd made, hustling around the table and moving things back and forth. I was talking to Allison by the refrigerator, but all I could do was glance over at Elliot. This
was the first time I'd seen him in a social setting, interacting with other people. He was talking to Ed Branch, his hands under his armpits and leaning forward as if he was really hunkered down in thought.

“My college roommate was from there,” Allison was saying. “Where did you go to high school?”

“Wilson,” I said. I watched Elliot absentmindedly take a bottle of seltzer from the table and twist off the top. His eyes wandered over to me for a second. I thought about what he did when he got home. If he loosened his tie and untucked his shirt and walked around like that. Maybe that was when he took his hair down. I wondered if he sometimes absentmindedly tossed a grape into the air and then craned his neck back to catch it in his mouth, exposing his Adam's apple.

“. . . outside of Plano,” said Allison, “but it was more like a lodge than a hotel.”

“Uh-huh.”

He was still nodding slowly and considering what Ed was saying. Did he pull his cheek taut when he was shaving like men did in movies? And then did he wolfishly towel off the rest of the shaving cream?

Now Jeannette was with us. “Cute haircut,” said Allison.

“Thank you, thank you,” said Jeannette. “I went to that place Reflections?”

“Oh, just around the corner?” said Allison.

“Yup. I told them—‘I wanna look like I have a lot of
fun.
'”

Allison smiled.

Every guy has a different way about him, I thought. Like this guy
Michael Turner, from elementary school. He'd had a serious manner, almost like he knew about some catastrophe that was going to happen in the future and was always staring ahead at it with a troubled expression, like the burden of this responsibility was too much. Eddie had been friendly, with his soft brown eyes, and a foot-forward, confident way about him that assumed everything was going to line up, and perhaps it was this quality about him that caused things to do so. Then there was someone like Kramer, who was rigid beneath all his forced jocularity. He was probably a tyrant to his wife, though maybe not in any way that was technically illegal, and took everything for himself. That was the type of guy he was—he got out in the front and took everything. What would it be like to be with Elliot? He wouldn't be a tyrant, not in big ways or small ways. I pictured him leaning back in his chair—world-weary but game. He'd look at you with knowing warmth. You'd maybe be at a gas station, in the middle of nowhere, run ragged and tired from driving, and you'd be paying for something at a cash register and you'd feel Elliot's gaze on your back like a soft rain.

Wes came in with Caroline. We all watched uncomfortably as he helped her into a chair, her dress riding up against his arm. When she was finally positioned, she looked around angrily as if the whole world itched.

Jeannette was usually really good at putting people at ease with a salty and hilarious remark, but even her powers were no match for the silence that descended on the kitchen after we sang “Happy Birthday,” and Elliot said, politely, “Thank you,” and smiled at everyone impersonally, and all the activity of handing out pieces of cake was finished.

The fridge stopped humming. Ed coughed. I started picking at a sticker on the side of the microwave. Elliot furrowed his brow at his plate.

“That's a great platter,” Allison finally said, referring to the plate the cake was on, which was shaped like a large sunflower.

“Thanks, hon,” said Jeannette. “Just, Elson's Crafts, down on Comstock Road.”

I'd been picturing the cave piano a lot, since I'd had that conversation with Elliot. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, nodded at Ed. I wondered what it would be like to be there with him—where everything was absolutely still, and absolutely quiet, and there was a pond with the surface like a mirror. A cave was the most inside you could be, the most private place. Maybe it would be completely dark, like I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face. I'd wave my arms around and touch his chest, that place where his work shirts fell in a relaxed way. I'd stumble over there and into him and against the weight of his body.

I was thinking these cave thoughts, and eating my cake, when Ed, motioning with his fork, said to Elliot, “How's that pretty wife of yours? You all still out there in Callan Mills?”

Elliot quickly looked at me. “Fine, yes,” he said, turning to Ed.

I stopped chewing.

“That's been a good investment for you all?” said Ed.