About a Girl (3 page)

All of this might have been bearable had my passions been gentle, but they were most emphatically no such thing; the dissatisfaction of my prior forays into the field notwithstanding, sex with my best friend now seemed the only possible resolution to the terrible forces that raged within me, and I was unable to think about anything else—electrons, stars, planetary orbits, the grocery list—in his presence. Watching the dirty parts of movies with him was an extended study in misery; I could be unexpectedly rendered speechless if the two of us wandered past a couple making out in the park; when he hugged me goodbye, careless and oblivious, I had to will myself not to lick his skin. His long, lovely hands, bitten-nailed, working the Nintendo controller or moving up and down the neck of the guitar, would come to my mind unbidden later, in the humming air-conditioned dark of my own room. I would think of those hands actively engaged in doing deeply unchaste things to my person, and bring myself nightly to new heights of lust before becoming overcome with terror that he could somehow see through walls and blankets and the thick pane of my skull to observe the pornographic spectacle of my thoughts—or, worse still, my own hand as it moved beneath the sheets—and then I would desperately attempt to turn my imagination to other, less salacious imagery.

I told myself at first that I was coming down with something, that I had been watching too much television and my formidable mind was going soft as a result, or that I had been reading too much Shakespeare and too little Wheeler (although Wheeler himself is prone to unscientifically poetic fits of exegesis), but finally even I had to admit that my feelings for my best friend in all the world had abruptly leapt the track from the blissfully platonic to the mundanely carnal. Oh, for god’s sake—

Can I help you find anything? The red book that was on the third shelf down? Or the fourth one? No, I don’t know what book that would—Well, how long ago? A
month
? I couldn’t possibly tell you—Oh, you mean that stupid fake economist who writes for the
Times
—Well, you can’t argue that his data is questionable—Yes, it’s over there. Seventeen fifty-seven. Do you need a bag? No? Okay, have a nice day—

Shane had girlfriends in high school—not many, and none serious, and none remotely threatening to the umbilical bond that united us. I’d never been jealous because none of them ever registered: a short lineup of pretty, bland-faced girls with shiny hair whom Shane occasionally perambulated around school dances or took out for dim sum but who were nowhere near as smart as I was, did not know every word Shane would utter before it left his mouth, and were not invited to the womblike environs of our respective apartments, where we regularly holed up on his or my couch watching eighties slasher movies and eating microwave popcorn by the bagful, Shane occasionally and unsuccessfully trying to beguile me into smoking marijuana out of a soda can with a hole punched in its side.

Every morning this summer, since we graduated (me, naturally, with a 4.0, Shane by the skin of his teeth) and launched ourselves into the last months before the rest of our lives began, I told myself upon waking, firmly and with conviction, that I would spare myself the torture and stay home, go in to work on my days off and dust the bookshelves, insist Raoul accompany me to a museum, take up oil painting under the tutelage of Aunt Beast—anything but open the door of my apartment and walk, with bated breath, down the hall to his. Every afternoon I abandoned my resolve and capered, aquiver with anticipation, to his door, imagining that day would be the day he would at last fling it open, take me in his arms, and kiss me until our knees buckled; every day, instead, I curled up in a state of frenzied anguish in his bed while he, oblivious, lit another joint. As June wore on I stayed over later and later, hoping against hope that my patient, enduring presence in his house would evoke in him the same disgusting and inconvenient emotions that had taken hold of me—that he would be seized, as I was, by the overwhelming urge to bring our friendship out of the phenomenological world and into the sublime. But the forceful (and admittedly silent) messages I beamed at him continuously went entirely unheeded—and some part of me, the last bit of my brain still operating under the auspices of reason, was relieved.

When not distracted by lust, I existed in a more or less constant state of seething rage—I was furious with him for making me feel something that was outside of my control and even more furious with him for not, at the very least, reciprocating it; I was furious with myself for having feelings; and I was furious with biology in general, for wiring me so faultily—adolescence had been bad enough, without its sending a wrecking ball careening through the perfectly satisfying equilibrium I had enjoyed up until the moment oxytocin went riotous in my brain and turned me into a dithering idiot, ruining the last summer I would have with my favorite person in all the world.

This dreadful torment continued until a fateful afternoon a week ago. “I got something you have to hear,” he said—me, freshly showered, hair brushed, even a dab of Aunt Beast’s vanilla oil at my wrists and throat, as close to pretty as I could make myself; him, stoned and oblivious (“Something smells like cookies,” he’d said, confused, when he hugged me hello)—both of us sprawled on his floor, gazing vacantly at the ceiling (his stupor drug-induced, mine a paralysis of lust). He sat up and fiddled with a pile of cassettes next to his record player. (
Turntable,
he always corrected me.) “Unbelievable,” he said, “this album is unbelievable. I finally tracked it down. Hold on.” He selected the cassette he’d been looking for, extracted it reverently from its plastic case, and inserted it gently into the tape deck. The soft click of the play button, a rustling hiss of static, and then, low and sweet, a honeyed drift of chords on an acoustic guitar, and a man began to sing. The sound was furry and muted, but the voice that came out of Shane’s speakers was like something out of another world, deep and pain soaked and full of loss. We listened to the entire tape without speaking: one bittersweet, yearning song fading into another, weaving together a rich and gorgeous and strange tapestry that carried me out of my body and its perilous wants into some other, more transcendent place of sorrow and hope and waiting. At last the final, aching chord faded and I sat in stunned silence, slowly coming back to my body, the messy familiarity of Shane’s room, the feel of cool air moving across my human skin. My heart was pounding as hard as if I’d just gone running with Aunt Beast. “Holy shit,” I said.

“Jack Blake,” Shane said reverently. “He was the real deal. Total mystery: never did interviews, never made music videos, never did any press. Just released one album—it doesn’t even have a title—and then he disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to him or if he’s still alive. There’s, like, books about him, and all of them say the same thing. Nobody even knows how old he is or where he was born or anything.”

“Like a myth,” I said, intrigued.

“There are all kinds of crazy stories about him. People who were at his shows would say they had these ecstatic visions. Supposedly he played one show at the Coliseum in LA, and when he finished the crowd was surrounded by all these animals—wolves, bears, cougars, animals that don’t even
live
in that part of California. Like they had come to see him play. People would try to record his shows, and their cameras would break.”

“Huh,” I said; we had ventured into wildly speculative—and, I thought, although I did not wish to burst Shane’s excited bubble, highly dubious—territory. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Nobody has. They don’t say stuff like that about, like, Keith Richards. Just that he did a ton of drugs and banged a lot of chicks.”
Banged chicks,
I thought.
Bang this chick, son.
“But this guy—there’s practically a cult devoted to him, all these people who saw him back in the day and still get together to talk about it. He played a few shows up and down the west coast, and then he vanished. Never played a live show again that anybody saw. You can’t get his records now, no one can, they’re worth thousands of dollars. I finally got the guy at Bleecker Bob’s to tape this one for me but it took me, like, years of harassment.”

“I didn’t know they still made cassette tapes. Even
Raoul
doesn’t listen to cassette tapes.”

“
Obviously
they still
make
them,” Shane said, in a tone that I often used myself to emphasize the inferior intelligence of the querying party.

I ignored his temerity, which I would not have done pre–Great Lust. “I should ask Aunt Beast about him,” I said. “I think she saw every band that existed back then.”

“Oh man,” Shane said, excited, “you
have
to. That would be amazing. I’ve never met anyone who was at one of his shows. He was supposed to be the most incredible live musician in, like, the history of ever.”

“He must have been,” I said drily, “if wolves came to see him.”

“Right?” he said. “I mean, even if it’s not true—”

“It seems pretty likely that it’s not true.”

“Who would make up something that weird? We’re talking lots of people saying things like that happened, not just one or two loonies.”

“Come on,” I said, “
wolves
? I don’t even think there’s a wolf in the entire state of California. Wolves are quite endangered.”

“What do you know about California? You’ve never been to the west coast.”

“Neither have you.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he said. “The point is, this guy is a total legend, and you would have to have had a telescope up your ass for your entire life to never have heard of him.”

“I’ve heard of him now, and I like his music.”

“You should,” he said, mollified. “My mom made sushi last night, you want some leftovers?”

“Do I ever.” His parents were neither of them ambitious or enthusiastic cooks, but once in a while his mom would go on a tear and spend all day constructing an immense platter of variegated sushis, with which we supplemented our more habitual fare of bologna-and-Velveeta sandwiches on Wonder Bread.

I spent the whole day at Shane’s house. “Sleep over,” he said when the unholy June sun had gone down at last, lessening slightly the unseasonable heat. “You never do anymore.” He undressed in front of me, careless as we’d always been, and I had to look away. The T-shirt he gave me to sleep in was a faded New Order shirt, so ancient its band logo was nearly illegible, which I thought might once have been Raoul’s or Aunt Beast’s. I turned my back on him to put it on. “What’s gotten into you?” he asked, finally noticing. “You’re, like, the least modest person in the world.”

“I finally hit puberty,” I said faintly.

“You look the same to me.”
Therein lies the rub,
I thought. The shirt smelled like him; it was all I could do to keep from burying my nose in my own armpit. I could hardly tell Shane that the reason I never slept over anymore was because it had become a project freighted with peril to lie next to him in his narrow bed, acutely conscious of every accidental touch of his body, the soft curve of his hips, the dirty-sweet smell of his unwashed hair.

Oblivious to my suffering, he put on Jack’s tape again before he crawled into bed. The rough, low voice was so rich, so near, that I could almost imagine the singer was in the room with us, the quiet sorrowful chords of his guitar bringing a veil of starlight through the window and casting a spell over us so heady I nearly forgot I was a fraction of an inch away from the person I most wanted, and was least able, to touch. The song went on around us, all the sadness and hope and longing in the world constellated into that single voice, that single guitar, and I thought,
This is the moment when it all changes
.

You were the bullet in my gun,
Jack sang,

the needle in my vein

however far we’ve come

you were ever the only one

and when the song came to an end at last I let out a deep, shuddering breath, and Shane wriggled around and worked one arm around me. I froze in terror and then let myself pillow my head on his shoulder.

“I don’t want to grow up,” I said thickly.

“We don’t have to.”

“Everybody has to.”

“Not us.” He kissed the top of my head. His shirt had ridden up, and my hand somehow found its way to his bare belly, and I moved my chin, just barely, and he tilted his head on the pillow and then his mouth found my mouth, or my mouth found his mouth—whose mouth found whose, I don’t know, it didn’t matter, we were kissing, kissing like we had neither of us kissed anyone before in our lives, kissing like the world would end in the morning, kissing like we had invented it, his chapped lips tasting of Blistex and pot, his hands tangling in my hair, cupping my cheeks, tracing a line down the ecstatic length of my spine and up over my hip again to find its way between my legs, gentle at first and then more insistent as I arched my body up to meet him. My breath catching in the dark, the feel of him even more tantalizing, more deliciously new, than I had hoped for; his musky boy-smell heady as wine, his sweat-salted skin under my tongue, his mouth at my throat, between my breasts, moving down the curve of my belly to meet and match the work of his hand—
oh dear god,
I thought,
I believe
this
is why people have sex
—the tape had flipped over, Jack’s rough low voice filling the room as I buried my face in Shane’s pillow lest his parents overhear my wails of ecstasy—all that Nintendo had done tremendous things for his manual dexterity, it was a wonder any of the girlfriends had let him go—and it flipped over again more than once before we fell asleep at last in a tangle of sticky limbs, just a few hours before the hot sun rose into the merciless furnace of a new day—

No, sorry, we don’t have a public bathroom, try the Starbucks—

—but in the morning nothing was different. I woke up alone in Shane’s bed, my eyes crusted over with sleep, his shirt bunched in my armpits and soaked with my sweat. I blinked at the watery light, disoriented, unable to place for several moments where I was or why I was looking at a poster of Iggy Pop and not my own pale walls, before the memory of what had transpired in the night flooded in and I gasped aloud, trying to assess what kind of damage I’d done. Or not done. The close, hot, boy-reeking air of his room was overlaid with an unfamiliar, animal scent that I realized—belatedly, and with horror—was the heady aroma of sex.
Oh god,
I thought,
oh god oh god oh god.
I considered climbing out Shane’s window and fleeing into the anonymous morning, but we lived on the fourth floor. At last I kicked away the covers, pulled on my shorts, and stumbled into the kitchen, where his mom had made us coffee and where he sat, staring sleepy eyed into a bowl of cereal. He did not look up when I came into the kitchen.