Losing It (23 page)

“How does it work?” I said.

“It's picking up electromagnetic radiation,” he said. “All those specks you see, they represent radio signals from, just, satellites, other planets, broadcasts.”

“Other planets?”

“The wavelengths they give off. Every object does that, to an extent.”

“Okay. So that's not the sky.”

“No, no. Well. It's just data. From a huge radio telescope, the one I told you about, in California? It's picking up signals from things that are in the sky. So what you're seeing is a kind of vast amount of indifferent, clashing reverberations.”

I nodded.

“What we're looking for, waiting for, is something that's not random. Something that signals intent and meaning. It would take the form of a straight line, or two lines, down the center. Something targeted. A pattern. Something trying to reach us.”

I sipped from my glass and stared at the screen. “Got it,” I said.

Elliot leaned back in the sofa and nudged his shoes off and then put his feet on the coffee table. He sighed. “So yeah,” he said. “This is pretty much what I've been doing since my divorce.”

I laughed. I sank down into the sofa with him. He took my hand. We watched the screen. We were like that for about ten minutes, and then he kissed me. Just like that, we were kissing.

The feeling of staring at the screen, the roar of the universe, was still in my head. I felt him being cautious, and I thought it had to do with the e-mail—how he'd known that I sent it in some addled state, and probably hadn't really meant it, and so he really didn't
want to be seen as taking advantage of all that. I knew that if this was going to progress in any way beyond kissing, I was going to have to be the one to sanction it. I wasn't quite sure how.

But then he blazed over all that by putting his hand up my shirt. It felt good, all of it—the tilting feeling of the champagne, the silver glow of the screen, the oceanic warmth of the moment.

I pulled away and said something I'd been meaning to say. “I have to pee.”

“Okay,” he said, wiping his mouth. There was something very intimate in the torn tissue of that moment, and that's when I realized that it wasn't just actual mechanical sex I'd been missing out on, but this feeling of free-falling trust, of liking someone and having them like you so much that there was no end to the liking.

When I got back we commenced a heavy-breathing make-out session wherein I felt like I was on a swaying rope bridge. Elliot smelled like cedar, or like the attic in someone's mountain house. A little creaky. But there was another scent there, a kind of behind-the-ear, unwashed-hair him-ness.

“Do you have a bed?” I said.

His bedroom. I stood there, in my socks, while he went to use the bathroom. I wondered if I should take the socks off. There was a fish tank with swaying plants. His bed was really big and had a smooth gray comforter on it. I thought, I'm going to have sex in this modern room next to a fish tank, with or without socks on. There was a bookshelf with lots of fantasy and science fiction paperbacks, all very neatly arranged and alphabetized. I stared at his digital clock. Was I going to tell him I was a virgin? It's not like I felt I couldn't, or that I thought he would balk or make me feel
weird about it in any way, but I knew that saying something like that could change the current—add a hiccup that might throw the whole thing off.

My instinct was not to say anything. I kept staring at the digital clock. He came back into the room but I didn't want to turn around.

He put his hand on my back and we started kissing again and then we sank down onto the bed. I tried to make sure the pace was sustainable, that it would continue at a good clip. Riding a bike, swimming, keeping it all up, up, up with the right balance of moving parts.

Just do what he does, I thought. That's a formula you can follow. He took off my shirt, and then I took off his shirt. He kind of gathered me into himself and I held on to him. He took off my shorts, and I started fumbling with his belt.

Then we were completely naked—two naked adults, with the air-conditioning hitting our private parts. He turned onto his side and propped himself on his elbow and looked me up and down, which I didn't like very much. “A swimmer,” he said. “A swimmer's body.”

“I'm a virgin,” I said all of a sudden. And I realized I told him because I felt about to hang glide off some precipice alone, and I really didn't want to be alone. I wanted someone to be there with me—a friend. I wanted Elliot.

“Really?” he said. “Well, I'm a Unitarian.”

I grinned. It was a stupid joke.

He fished a condom out from somewhere and put it on and lifted himself on top of me and said, “Just let me know if anything doesn't feel right.” But I knew it was going to hurt, and it did hurt.
It hurt a lot. But then the pain subsided. I realized which way was up and got my bearings. I kissed his neck. He laughed a disbelieving laugh—his voice cracked and it felt special, to hear him that way, and I got a sense of his outer reaches, like the sun hitting the sea far away and you can see all this distant surface area.

I then thought of a movie I'd seen at a friend's house when I was a kid, where two people in rugged jean jackets were having sex against a red Porsche in the desert. It just flashed through my mind.

Here's something I appreciated: that Elliot wasn't being so sensitive or mincingly polite that he wasn't enjoying himself. He sighed really loudly when he first went inside me, and it was not at all horrible to watch the raw expressions cross his face.

It seemed to go on for a long time.

“Here,” he said, and he turned us over so I was on top of him. “Some girls like it better this way.”

“I can't tell if I do,” I said.

“It's a lot to take in, all of this,” he said, looking a little sweaty.

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, and then we were back in the first position, with me on the bottom. “Do you mind if I . . . ?”

“No, no,” I said, “go ahead.”

He came inside me.

He lay down to the side. I was lost, in between channels of white noise, but not in a bad way. The sheets were wrinkled and my pubic hair was wet and there was a drop of semen on my stomach.

“Look,” I said, pointing to it.

He propped himself up on his elbow. “Yup,” he said. “That's America.”

I stared at him. There was so much I didn't know about this person.

“Do you want me to touch you?” he said.

“What? No,” I said. “I don't know.”

“Don't worry,” he said, resting back on his pillow, looking up. “You'll learn. You'll learn what you like.”

I looked around. I slowly drummed my fingers on my stomach. I picked up a paperback that was on his night table.
“The Afternoon Planet,”
I said.

“It's a fantasy book,” he said, “part of a series I'm reading. It's a little too . . . I'm not sure if I'm going to finish it. I'm all for empire and rebel shit, but sometimes these books get a little too heavily militaristic, with battles and battles and battles.”

I put the book back. By the little bit of sun I could see through the blinds, I could tell the light outside was getting all ripe and late-day.

I thought of other moments I'd gotten something I desperately wanted: when I qualified for the Junior Nationals when I was thirteen; the phone call about my full scholarship to Arizona State; even when I was a kid—this certain kind of gourmet chocolate egg I was allowed to eat only on Easter; in fourth grade, when Shelly Goodall finally realized, exactly when I wanted her to, that, because she'd ruined my Advent calendar, I was the one spreading rumors that she once French-kissed a prairie dog at Epcot Center.

Elliot was looking at me playfully. He was still him—I still liked him. I was still me. I should have known not to worry so much about any of it, about all of it. But I would never have been able to not worry.

“What should we do now?” I said.

“I've got some ice cream. Do you want to go up to the roof?”

“Yes, that's what I want to do.”

So that's what we did. We sat on the warm tar roof and ate soupy ice cream. We talked about what it was like for him to grow up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And about my parents and Costa Rica and Texas. We talked about the office, and about Jeannette, and what was up with his ancient secretary, Caroline. “She's just a nice old lady,” he said. The late-day sky billowed pink, and below in the street, restaurants started to get crowded and lights turned on and twinkled in the distance. I felt frayed, wise, and alive.

“You know what I've always been interested in?” I said.

“What?” He was sitting cross-legged. His shirt was on inside out.

“Medieval stuff. Like, the Black Plague and all of those kings and queens, the Wars of the Roses and things like that. Catapults and wheels. Braveheart. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I want to learn about all that. The Yorks and the Lancastrians. All of that stuff.” I readjusted my position, shifted so I was leaning back on my elbows. “I feel like I never really got an education. I wasn't really paying attention.”

“Maybe you should study history,” he said. “Go back to school.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe. I guess that's something a person would do.”

“You could do anything,” he said. “You're young. You're lucky.”

“I couldn't be more lucky,” I said.

Sixteen

You think you'll be different. You always think you'll be different. But then normalcy quakes and breaks the ground beneath you and takes over. And then you're just you, like you always were, on a hot day.

It was a week later. I was standing in the warm, sunny upstairs gallery of a bookstore in a town called Sperryville about twenty minutes from Durham. “Can someone tell me where to put this vase?” I said, looking around. Elliot came up the stairs holding a crate of wineglasses. He put it down. “Last one!” he said.

“Is the wine— Should we bring the wine? . . . Hi, excuse me!” I said to a teenage guy wearing an apron who had just trotted down the stairs from the roof. “That vase, do you know where it goes?”

He put his hands up helplessly. “I don't really work in this part,” he said, backing away.

A grim lady in a turtleneck was packing up her exhibit of clay pots. She was sitting on the floor, surrounded by crumpled newspaper. I was supposed to be putting up Viv's plates, but everything had taken longer than expected and we were running late. I went over
to the lady, who was slowly wrapping something in tissue paper. “Is that vase”—I pointed—“is that part of your display?”

“No,” she said. “Mine are examples of traditional Apache wedding—”

“Okay, well, do you know where the manager is?” She just looked at me. “Maybe he can help. I was told you'd have all of your stuff out of here by four.”

She straightened up and said indignantly, “My friend is supposed to be here any minute to help.”

“What about that?” I pointed to a box of decorative antlers. “Is that yours?”

Her eyes narrowed and she was about to say something when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around. Elliot. “I can help you move it,” he said. “The vase. We can put it in that back corner, by the radiator.”

He'd come through and gotten me an opening here, his friend's gallery. When I'd first seen the space, it looked perfect—wooden floors and big windows letting in lots of light, and plenty of blank walls to hang the plates. But I hadn't realized it would be oppressively hot in the afternoon because the windows were painted shut and the air-conditioning wasn't working. I was disheveled and sweaty from all the crates we'd brought up the stairs, along with the boxes of wine and wineglasses, some chairs, a few tables, and a cooler. There were lines of chalk on my dress. My makeup was running down my face. There were boxes and newspapers and crumpled things everywhere. Elliot looked at me searchingly. I breathed in quickly. “Okay,” I said. “Let's just move it.” As we turned to walk in that direction, my knee hit a stool and three wineglasses
wobbled, fell, and broke on the floor. I looked around frantically. Everything was dusty and coming apart.

Two hours later, I stood talking to Viv's friend Karen. “It is,” I said. “It really is important to have good posture.” After we'd moved the vase, I went to the bathroom and washed my makeup off. Then Elliot and I helped the turtleneck lady clean up her stuff quickly, and then we slowly hung Viv's plates with brass hangers. We put everything out—the wine, the glasses, jars of fresh flowers. The hors d'oeuvres had finally arrived from the catering company. I'd spent most of the money I'd saved that summer on the event. It looked good—not exactly like I had pictured but still nice. But it was too stuffy, and Viv had come too early. She was standing by herself, looking cool and unencumbered, wearing a long ivory skirt and a tunic, a little satin scarf slung over her arm as she held a glass of wine and looked at the display.

“Excuse me,” I said to Karen. Elliot was coming up the stairs. I went up to him. “I want to introduce you,” I said.

“Aunt Viv,” I said, a moment later. She turned around. “This is my friend Elliot. He helped me set this up. This is his friend's gallery.”

She looked at him, slightly bewildered. His hair was out of the ponytail, flowing down and around his shoulders. He was wearing a purple shirt, like a magician would wear.

“Oh, hello,” she said, in the voice I imagined she used when talking to a salesperson.

We'd been exceedingly polite to each other since the episode in the kitchen. I'd told her at one point that I was going to leave two weeks early, after the show, essentially, and she'd nodded quickly
without really looking at me and returned to her book. I could tell she was still angry, but it was almost like she didn't have the energy for any real vitriol and so was just tiredly indifferent. Even when I told her about the show itself, she'd been polite, but I got the feeling she was humoring me. She'd dismissed me, the whole summer, and was just waiting for it to shove off and be over.

I'd invited everyone I could think of, all her friends, people from her job, Gordon. I'd asked the local newspaper to put a mention of it on their website. I wanted her to walk in and see people admiring her plates and be quietly delighted. Muslin curtains would ripple picturesquely in the breeze. Maybe it would even be better than the original reception would have been. She would feel healed. The afternoon would suture whatever had been ripped between us, and we would both leave feeling sage and replete in our newfound friendship and lessons learned.

But now we stood in a tense circle. Me, Elliot, Diane, Karen, and Viv. No one was drinking. The hors d'oeuvres were untouched. Everyone was glancing around nervously, not sure what the center of this was supposed to be, when what was supposed to be achieved was going to be achieved. The weight of it all was snuffing out any spontaneity or ease. There was a terrible silence until Karen said, “It's wonderful, Viv, it really is.”

And it really was. I hadn't arranged the plates into their original groups, because so many of them were missing, but rather put them all together in a sort of patchwork. Some of them had gold trim, some of them had the cursive writing on the bottom, explaining the scene. I felt that whenever I looked at them, I noticed
something different. This time, it seemed that they were created with an off-kilter sensibility, as if there was an inherent strangeness to them that made you want to keep looking.

“Thank you,” Viv said. An employee on the lower level of the bookstore erupted into a coughing fit. The door squeaked open, and we all looked in that direction, hoping it would be someone coming in for the show, but it was just a man leaving. I could tell Viv was feeling burdened, because not only had her previous opening been ruined, but now she had to persevere through this tortured gesture where everyone looked at her with fragile smiles.

“Eat!” I said. “Please, everyone, have something to eat. There's so much food.”

We wandered over to the food table. Elliot put his hand on my shoulder in consolation. Then two strangers came up the stairs—an older couple. The man was tall and stooped and wearing a leather vest. The woman had a pixie face and bright white hair and said, kindly, “Is this the Vivienne Greenfield exhibit?” I could have kissed her.

“Yes!” I said, and motioned around the room. “Welcome.”

They floated over to the plates.

Twenty minutes later I stood talking to a large bald gentleman with thin wire glasses.

“It's a great organization,” he said. “Once they had a fund-raiser—who could paint a chair in the most creative way! You could sponsor an artist. One person painted it to look like a cow.”

“Cool,” I said, looking around. There were more people now. A few more of Viv's friends had come. I watched a woman stroke her
hair as she talked to Diane. A group from the bookstore had wandered up, probably attracted by the free wine and food, but they were looking at the plates. Viv was talking to Gordon. I'd been really surprised when I'd seen him and had avoided eye contact. Viv gestured with her hand as if she was measuring an inch. He laughed. Maybe their friendship couldn't be characterized by that one interaction at the restaurant. Maybe the old cells of that night had sloughed off, and a new skin was generating underneath.

“It was on peach schnapps!” said Viv's friend Diane, a little later.

I was talking to her by one of the windows. She had a red wine mustache. She was telling me about the first time she'd gotten drunk.

“Ha!” I said. “I think for me it was the Amaretto at the back of my parents' liquor cabinet.”

“No!” she said wildly. “We were in a
library
. It was actually very
serene
. There were marble
elephants
.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

More people had trickled up the stairs. There were many different conversations happening, and there was just enough chatter, enough sporadically erupting laughter, to lend a sense of activity and festivity. I said goodbye to Elliot and went back up and started gathering plates and empty glasses and crumpled napkins. I looked over at Viv. Her cheeks were red. She was motioning with her arms. Someone tapped her on the shoulder and gave her a card. She seemed pleasantly pulled in all directions. An image would stay with me—Viv, pointing something out on one of her plates, tracing a line with her pinkie finger, her eyes generous, engaged, her face
knitted with the strain of trying to explain something, nodding, showing off a little but also wanting everything for you.

I stood outside the gallery, thanking people and saying goodbye. The small town we were in seemed to be made up of one main street and nothing else. After a series of shops ended, there was nothing but fields and trees and power lines in the distance. Viv came out, talking to a stranger. They said friendly goodbyes and parted ways. She had her bag and was ready to go, and it seemed that she was going to walk right by me, but she stopped there and gave me a resigned smile. “Are you all packed?” she said, folding the small satin scarf she'd been wearing.

“Pretty much,” I said.

“It's a long drive,” she said.

“Yup. But I've got my phone. I've got directions.”

She was squinting at me, looking at me distantly, almost nostalgically, the way you'd look at a sunset. It was another humid, hot day, with everything slumping in the late-day haze. There was a charcoal smell from somewhere, and a tall redbrick building cast a long, lazy shadow across the street. Her eyes wandered over my shoulder. We stood there. She seemed to be wrestling with herself. Finally, she said, “I think it went well.”

I felt a rush of relief, grateful she'd given me that. She looked, not happy exactly, but fortified.

“Yeah?” I said. “You do? I mean, I do, too. Your plates. It's obvious. People love them.”

She smiled—she knew it, too. She adjusted the shoulder strap of her bag.

“Well,” she said, and continued walking to her car.

—

I saw Elliot twice more before I left. Both times it was the same—I went to his apartment and he made dinner and we watched the screen for a while, searching for a signal, and then we had sex. It wasn't a whole lot different from the first time we did it, but I became more comfortable, more aware of what was going on. It was interesting, and involved, and companionable, and like going out of time for a little while. You could see how it could get better and better. You could see why someone would just want to do this thing, and not do anything else. I liked his lean body, and the way he'd prop himself up on his elbow when we were done, and we'd talk. But there was never any mention that we'd see each other after I left.

My last night there, in his bed, I stared at the cover of the same paperback,
The Afternoon Planet
. It had a sphere on it, and in that sphere was an entire city, and it was all imbued with hazy 1970s light.

“Keep it,” he said. “Take it with you.”

“I thought you said it wasn't any good.”

“It got better,” he said. “You can remember me by it.” He took it and then opened the cover and pointed at something. “See.”

It was a stamp. It read: “Please return to Elliot Grouse at 1117 Willowtree Road, Allentown, PA.”