The Unknowns (2 page)

“Sure,” I say. There must be more to say than that, although I can’t think of what it could be.

Maya says, “Thanks,” rotates 180 degrees, and goes back to talking to Justin. When I hand her the drink a minute later she takes it without even interrupting her conversation to say thank you—a kind of antiflirting and hence a kind of flirting, an effortless triangulation, arousing hope and jealousy in us both. Well played, Maya.

And I’m still left with no one to talk to except Lauren, and every minute I spend talking to Lauren takes me further out of the game
vis-à-vis Maya. I scan the room as if I’m looking for someone specific who was here a minute ago. Lauren is examining the Magnetic Poetry set on the fridge, the special Lesbian Pride edition, half words like
dyke
and
cunt
and
partner
and
dog
and the other half prepositions. Gretchen is smashing a bag of ice against the counter to break it up. Maya is laughing at Justin, who appears to be doing an impression of Lenny from
Of Mice and Men
. Cynthia’s voice comes from down the hall, and something characteristically trusty about its timbre makes me regret getting her the camera. It is at this moment, as I stand alone in my friend’s kitchen, my right hand fingering a little Ziploc bag in my pocket, that I conceive my ill-fated plan.

Inhale, exhale, commit.

I return to Lauren and pick up where we left off.
See, I just went to get a drink
. I break out some intermediate-level tactics: Asking a Question That Refers to Something I Learned About Her Earlier; Suggesting We Continue the Conversation Sitting Down. We move to the grubby couch in the living room, which is not as comfortable as it looks because the cushions are fifteen years old and have had the buoyancy squashed out of them. The party has finally overspilled the kitchen, and guests stand in clusters around the swept-out room. Lauren and I sit at forty-five-degree angles and turn our heads the rest of the way to face each other. I don’t do anything sexually assertive like holding eye contact or casually touching her arm. I watch closely for signs that her interest is waning. I tell her the How I Was Unfairly Accused of Making Obscene Phone Calls story, probably my number one anecdote: funny, raunchy but not dirty, unbraggadocious. I wait for her post-anecdotal
No way! Really
?s to dry up, and then I pull the trigger.

“Hey, I don’t know if this is something you’re up for,” I say, “but I’ve got some Ecstasy with me.” That’s bold enough, and I pause to let it register, but it’s only step one. “And I was wondering if you guys”—I incline my head toward the kitchen to indicate Maya and Justin—“would be up for doing some.”

“Oh my God, I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, I haven’t done it in a really long time.”

“All the more reason,” I say. Do I sound like I’m pressuring her? Pull back. “Listen, if this isn’t a good night for it, that’s cool. But if you guys feel like it, we can hang out and do it here, or we can go back to someone’s house, or whatever.” Like a salesman I stop talking and let her dismiss her remaining objections herself.

“I think I want to do it,” she says, and how could she not? Everyone loves Ecstasy. “But I have to talk to Maya.”

“I’ve totally got enough for those guys,” I say. It would be great if there were a way to exclude Justin from the invitation, but I can’t see one that doesn’t push the sleaze factor, already dangerously high, into the red. “Go talk them into it.”

I stay on the couch and watch through the kitchen doorway as she engages Maya and Justin in a little huddle. I’m hoping to see a flash of excitement on Maya’s face; what I see instead is Lauren explaining something and Maya touching her arm and nodding. “It’s fine,” Maya says twice. Justin looks over at me with a vaguely cynical expression.

And now Lauren is heading back toward me with a nervous grin, alone, and five minutes later the two of us are in a taxi, hurtling up to the Richmond, where she apparently lives, and I’m leaving the party with a girl but it’s the wrong girl, and I’m unsure whether I should be feeling remorse or triumph.

There’s a right way to do these things. At the corner store I purchase two large packs of sugar-free gum and two large bottles of Gatorade. We sit at her kitchen table, clink glasses of water, down these little aspirinlike tablets. Lauren lives alone, so there’s a cat, which is going to set off my allergies in about forty-five minutes. On the walls are paintings by talentless friends; black-and-white photos, presumably by Lauren herself; Kodachrome snapshots of her parents in their
youth. I conceive the idea of an exhibition of parental photos from the walls of girls’ apartments, a show that would be situated somewhere between found art and ethnography. Maya does not appear in any of the pictures. I am trying hard not to get hung up on Maya and how she’s occurring without me right now. If the world would just freeze whenever I’m not around, I’d be less worried about missing something important.

We make a kind of prelapsarian small talk.

“Do you do this kind of thing a lot?” she asks me.

“What
kind of thing
are you referring to?” I have my teasing face on.

“Oh, going home with strange girls and taking Ecstasy,” she says.

“Are you a strange girl, then?” It’s almost too easy.

“I’ve done it three times,” she says. “And the first time I only took half, so it doesn’t count.”

“So tonight you’ll have to take two to make up for it.”

She laughs, like that’s preposterous. “No, to make up for it I’d only have to take one and a half.”

“You’re not adjusting for inflation.”

I’d be more anxious if we were about to have sex. It’s certain that the next few hours, at least, will be very pleasant. I’m greedy for it already, smiling hard and getting an anticipatory buzz, even though it’s only been five minutes and the drug has barely made it to my stomach lining. But I’m impatient, and I don’t want to be sitting in this wooden chair anymore. The apartment is tiny; I leave the kitchen and I’m in the bedroom. Sometimes you just have to accept these things.

In the cab I had worried about her CD collection, and a close examination bears out my fears. It’s frustrating, because I’ve got my iPod right here, and if I had a Y-cable I could hook it into her little bookshelf stereo. (Then I’d have to reposition the speakers to achieve
a proper left-right spread.) For the fiftieth time I consider carrying a Y-cable around with me, and for the fiftieth time I realize how lame that would be, and I am momentarily paralyzed, stretched across the gulf between my life’s twin goals: experiencing uncompromised happiness and not being a loser. I sneeze.

At some point I have become aware of my heart beating and my blood pumping, and I feel a twinge of admiration for my body, which somehow keeps functioning through everything, although I so rarely stop to enjoy it. And I realize I’m really glad the evening is going this way: I can’t think of a better outcome than making a new friend, a really nice girl, and getting to hang out with her and do Ecstasy.

“You know what we should do?” I tell her. “We should take our shoes off.”

“My shoes aren’t bothering me at all,” she says.

“And yet once you take them off you will be astonished at how much comfort is available simply by removing your shoes.” I am sitting on the bed, hungrily removing my shoes.

She is playing. “What if I’m more comfortable with my shoes on?”

“I suppose there is the remote possibility that you are more comfortable with your shoes on,” I say, “although I don’t believe it for a second. But I seem to have acquired some kind of neurotic fixation on you experiencing the state of shoelessness right now, and so it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that your shoes are making
me
uncomfortable.”

“What a terrible situation!” she says, and for a moment it looks as if she really does think it’s a terrible situation. “Incompatible desires! What should we do?”

“I will propose a solution,” I tell her. “It requires that you do me a small favor. You remove your shoes—no, you don’t even have to put in the legwork—
legwork
, ha! Anyway: I will remove your shoes for you. You will spend thirty seconds assessing the resultant sensation. If at the end of that trial period you wish to return to your previous shoe-clad state, I will gently replace the shoes, and my mind
will rest easy in the knowledge that you are enjoying your personal optimum comfort state as regards footwear. If, on the other hand, you decide that you prefer to go without shoes, I will do a little dance of vindication.”

“That could work,” she says, sitting down next to me on the bed.

“This way, neither of us will have to sacrifice comfort, physical or psychogenic, for more than an instant.”

“That’s a great plan,” she says.

I get up off the bed (just standing is extremely enjoyable, and I sit back down and stand up again so I can experience it for a second time) and crouch at her feet. She’s wearing some kind of black dress shoe. I cradle her foot by the ankle, fiddle with the buckle, slip the shoe off. I repeat the process with the other shoe. I place the shoes carefully next to the bed, side by side, then stand up.

“Oh wow,” she says. “That’s really comfortable.”

Lauren reclines, moving all of her limbs at once as if swimming through some viscous medium. Something is happening. She opens her eyes and sees me smiling down at her and she smiles back. She looks lovely. I lie down next to her and start stroking her neck. It’s awesome to be stroking her neck. I’m seeing her hair with a kind of hyperclarity that reminds me of something I can’t place. I look at her face, and suddenly the Ecstasy is doing what we pay it to do. We kiss for a while, gently, like deer. The part of my brain that compares whatever’s going on in real life to whatever might simultaneously be going on in some parallel universe has shut up. And now we’re naked, and there’s these breasts right in front of me, these things that have no purpose but human comfort, and the skin of her neck is so soft, and her pubic hair grazes my leg. Thanks to the Ecstasy my penis is resolutely flaccid, but I know she understands this. She gives it a tender look, as though it’s her newborn baby. It feels like we’re both bouncing now, like we’re moving up and down in giant arcs, like we’re floating in space. We lie there awhile.

“God, it’s been such a long time since I’ve felt close to anyone,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “I’m so glad you were up for this.”

“I almost didn’t, you know. I was like,
Who is this guy, I’ve never met him, Justin hardly knows him, I shouldn’t go and do drugs with him
.”

“You were just being sensible.”

“I was being scared. I go around being scared all the time. I’m usually scared to be naked with boys.”

“Everybody is.”

“Really?” She seems surprised by this, as though it’s never occurred to her before.

“Absolutely. Everybody is.” This seems true as I say it. “We spend all this energy hiding ourselves, and then when we’re having sex or whatever, we’re supposed to be naked with each other, but we get so scared, and then we’re more wrapped up and guarded and closed off than ever.”

“I’m so scared that I make it like I’m not even there at all,” she says. “I just remove myself, mentally. But that’s what sex should be about. It’s about being close to each other.” She’s running her fingers through my hair.

“It’s not about having an orgasm,” I say.

“Orgasms are nice, though.”

“They certainly are. But it’s—do you want to have an orgasm right now?”

“No.” She’s beaming.

“Can I tell you something about having orgasms?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never told anyone this in my entire life.” It’s true. I haven’t. Why not?

“Tell me.” She nods rhythmically. She really wants to know.

“Every time I have an orgasm with another person, every time, it
doesn’t matter who she is, right before I come I hear these words in my head.”

“What are the words?”

“
I love you, Mom
. Every time, just like that.
I love you, Mom
.”

She looks like she’s just been given a Christmas present. “Really?”

“I spend my whole life being ashamed of that.”

“There’s no reason to be ashamed!”

“I know! I know!”

“Because it’s a good thing in you! It’s a good feeling!”

“It’s love!” I tell her, and I’ve figured it out for the first time. “It’s just love! It’s all the same thing!” And I get up and start dancing, naked, while she stares at me, her pupils wide as saucers.

Four hours later the tide is going out. I’m pacing the room and starting to narrate.

“So I’m getting a little cold, so I’m going to put on my T-shirt and my boxers now, if that’s all right with you. Wait, where did they… oh, here’s my T-shirt, it got lost under the comforter. And I’ll bet—yup, here’s the boxers, right next to it. There we go. You know, until I was about twenty I bought all my T-shirts in extra-large because on some unconscious level I think I thought I was going to grow into them.”

“God,” she says, “my stomach really hurts.”

“That sucks. Do you have any Pepto-Bismol? I don’t really get stomachaches. There’s stomach people and head people, apparently, and I’m a head person. I feel stuff in my head. Maybe I should put my pants on too. I feel weird walking around your apartment in my underwear.”

We spend another hour waiting out the symptoms—her stomach, my jaw, my monologue—and then I make well-I-should-get-going noises, patting my pockets for my keys and wallet and phone.
We hug goodbye at the door, a quick chest press, a take-care-of-yourself hug. Neither of us mentions seeing each other again.

It’s just after dawn and everything looks weirdly bleached out, as if the color saturation hasn’t caught up to the brightness. I have chemical energy to burn off, so I start walking home through the unfamiliar neighborhood, past stuccoed seventies houses and Chinese seafood restaurants. I feel like shit but I’m glad to be alone, in a place I have no reason to be, at a time when I shouldn’t even be awake. The cold feels good, and I’ve got my coat. I shouldn’t have told her about the thing.