Losing It

When I really wanted to torture myself I’d think of Eddie Avilas. He was the guy who, in high school, had most closely resembled someone you could call my boyfriend. And what really stung me about it, thinking back, was his general optimism and knee-jerk decency, how I hadn’t realized what a nice person he was.

I would remember the time he squeezed each of my fingertips on the dusty blue tarp in the middle of the track field. His tiny kitchen and terrifying father. His strange jeans. The beat-up neon-yellow lunch satchel he would always bring to school. (It was only in hindsight that I realized Eddie was extremely poor.) How he would feel like a pile of firewood, all jangly and warm, lying on top of me when we were watching a movie in my basement.

There was the time we were in his small sunlit kitchen with our homework spread out in front of us on the table. We reached a kind of lull, or resting point, in the conversation and he does this thing. I sort of see it from the corner of my eye and then look over, and through some glint of intuition I know that he wants me to see as he tosses his pen up into a flip and then expertly catches it. He looks at me with eyes as hopeful and pliable as a baby bird’s, but there’s also a gleam of pride there. This all happened very quickly, but so much occurred to me in that moment—that he had been practicing this move and waiting for a chance to perform it when it would seem most offhand and casual, like he just had this facility with the world, this capability that he wanted me to see. And in that moment he needed my approval so much that it was embarrassing, and instead of doing what I should have done, which was to just give him that by some flicker of awe or grin of admiration, I ignored him. And he saw me deciding to ignore him. And I guess you could say that it wasn’t a big deal, but a part of me knew that it was in these small transactions that unkindness could be most felling. I would have given anything to go back.

But that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part happened a few months later in a hotel pool in Corpus Christi. Because a few of our friends were going, Eddie and I got roped into a beach trip spearheaded by this Christian organization that was always sponsoring events at our high school. Despite the religious underpinnings, we had heard that the beach trip was basically a free-for-all. It was one of the few weekends I didn’t have a swim meet, so we signed up.

When we got there, however, it wasn’t long before we figured out that it was going to be a super-structured weekend of indoctrination. The second night we were all corralled into a conference room or ballroom-type area at the hotel where we were all staying, and made to watch a Christian punk band play against a bunch of depressingly stacked chairs. Eddie and I managed to sneak out.

We ran through the carpeted hallways. We made out against the empty breakfast buffet in the deserted dining room. We found a sitting area centered around a display of mystery novels and a small tree in a geometric pot. Hopped up on the warm hotel air and sense of escape, we decided to find the roof. Instead we found the pool.

It was deserted, bright, humid, and sultry with a shrine-like stillness and a fake, spiky tree in each corner. We tested the water and it was warm. We stripped down to our underwear and climbed in. Eddie got out, sculpted his wet hair into a Mohawk, and cannon-balled. We breathed into each other’s mouths underwater.

At a certain point, we were kissing against the side, sitting on an underwater outcropping, like a stair or a ledge. Eddie pulled back and said to me, “Do you want to?” He said it without any pressure, as if this was just a one-time thing, a toss-off, the perfect crest to our little escape, and not something we’d slowly, languidly been building toward. He said it with warmth, a sense of adventure.

I spent a lot of time thinking back and trying to trace the exact pathways of logic or reasoning that led me to, after considering it for a few humid seconds, coyly decline. It’s not like I didn’t want to—we had been slowly kissing for a while. It could have been that something about the cold lapping of the water, a less comfortable temperature than it had been before, along with a smudged pelican fixture that seemed to be staring at us from the wall combined to tip the atmosphere just enough the wrong way. It could have been that the stampeding intimacy of not only that moment but the whole half hour before was just too much, and I felt that I just needed a second. But what I think it really was—because I was on the knife’s edge, it really could have gone either way—was that I figured this was just the tip of the iceberg. That this was surely the beginning of many similar escapades. That I could afford to decline, if only to make the next proposition all the more delicious.

How could I have known how wrong I was?

So I told him, “Not tonight,” and pushed back, swimming away. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time; Eddie smiled at me quizzically and we hung out for a little longer and then got out, but things never culminated for us in the same way again. I kept assuming they would, but I think he thought he had been too pushy, and I was too shy to bring it up. It was as if that moment kicked off a series of misunderstandings that caused us to fall slightly out of step. He went away for the summer and by the time he got back things had ramped up for me swimming-wise; I hardly had any free time, and that was that.

I began to think of that moment, when I pushed away from him and swam to the other side of the pool, as being where my fate changed, where I branched off and started living a parallel life that wasn’t supposed to be.

In the other life, having lost my virginity at a young age in a hotel pool, I’m sexed and supple and swanning through a series of relationships, through life. The hang-up of losing my virginity would never have impeded me. It would never have started to worry me, only slightly at first, but then more and more as my friends each lost theirs and I got older and it seemed that I had lost some beat, some essential rhythm.

It would never have been something that started to curdle inside me, that I started to think about all the time. I’m a twenty-four-year-old virgin, I’d think, as I hit my hip on a gate and sneezed at the same time. I’m a twenty-five-year-old virgin, staring at the tiles of a mural on a city street. I’m a twenty-six-year-old virgin, catching my reflection in a car window.

Untouched. Like a flower suffocating in its own air. Like something pickling in its own juices. Something that badly needed to be turned inside out, banged right.

I watched a bumblebee leadenly explore a rose next to the porch. In the distance were the faint sounds of construction, something grinding and then hammering.

I thought, The further down this path I go, the more freakish I’ll become. The stranger of a species I’ll be, curling with my own horrible, weird hair. It was time to jam the key into the lock and force it, because I didn’t have time to step back and meditate my way onto the right path.

I needed to make a plan for the summer, a surefire strategy. I had to shed whatever preconception I had before about how it was all going to be.

Three

I stood in a room in Viv’s house filled with hanging plates. There was a tall cabinet in the corner, and on top of that was a clock embedded in what looked like a porcelain flower bank. It ticked heavily.

The plates were lined up in sets of four or five, and on each one was a meticulously painted scene. There was a jellyfish, painted in purples and pinks, gliding through the water toward the surface. It was part of a series that had to do with the ocean. Another one showed a craggy turquoise mountain under the sea. Another an underwater city, with clusters of towers and twinkling lights. A school of fish swam through, giving a sense of scale.

A different group showed a bright, teeming garden outside some kind of ominous estate with dark windows. There were twisting rosebushes, sculpted shrubs, and orange paths; flowers spewed out of small pots and the tops of statues. The perspective was all off, as if a child had done it. It was like the ground leading up to the estate was tipped up, slanted wrong. One plate showed the property from a different side, where a gray wall cast a shadow across a birdbath, and it looked like someone had just left a picnic, a golden fork and knife strewn on the ground. They were meticulously detailed. You could see the designs, some flicks of a thin brush, on the pots, and the small wells of shadows on the statues.

Other plates showed scenes of horses and cowboys, migrating bison and teepees on great plains, a Wild West theme. In another series was a line of camels following a colorful sultan across the desert, their bodies making long shadows across the sand.

It wasn’t so hard to see why people would buy these. On each of them were Viv’s tiny initials, “VG.” My favorites, or the ones I stared at the longest, depicted two mice constructing a multi-tiered card house on a red carpet in a dark living room. In the last plate, a mouse was standing on its tiptoes, balancing the final one on top. You could see tiny dots on each card—spades, hearts; it must have taken forever. Next to each mouse was a gold goblet. I stared at them for a really long time.

I then wandered with my laptop into the sunroom, a frayed, faded area with a row of windows you could crank open. There was a pouchy purple velvet couch and a glass coffee table with some craft books stacked on it.

Here was the list I made:

– Take some kind of community class

– Hang around the university or audit a course

– Internet dating

– Go to a bar

– Join a gym

– Go to a sales conference or a convention at a local hotel

– Join a singles-outing group

– Take a language class

– Get a job

– Don’t think too much

– Just be relaxed about it

I studied the profile picture of a man with the screen name “TheMeeksShallInherit.” He was outside, at what appeared to be an electronics fair, standing next to a table with a neon-orange tablecloth on it. There was another picture of him against the Golden Gate Bridge. Then a picture of him holding a huge kite and giving the thumbs-up.

“He sounds like an alien. Those are the kinds of pictures an alien would put up,” said Grace, my old roommate whom I’d lived with in Tempe and who was now my closest friend.

“Really?” I said.

“To convince you he was human and knows how to do things.”

“Sure,” I said.

I clicked through a few more pictures.

“Well, at least he’s not holding a huge pencil at an imaginarium,” I said. “Like, ‘Look at me!’”

“Totally.”

After I’d left, she’d stayed in Arizona and gotten a job at the historic public library in Tucson. I’d been there once. As we talked, I could hear her heels click on the marble floor as she walked around in the giant, day-lit atrium.

“He’s sent me a bunch of messages. Lots of exclamation points. He seems really jazzed about everything.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s not a bad quality, necessarily.”

I could feel her choosing her words. I’d let her think, over the years, by alluding to it or not correcting her when she made assumptions, that I’d had sex. That I’d been having sex. But there was something about the wide berth she gave the subject that made me think she knew the truth. Once, when she’d visited me, I told her about a flirtation I had at Quartz to keep apace with a story she was telling, and a troubled, questioning look had come over her face.

“So what’s she like?” she said. “Your aunt?”

“She’s nice,” I said. “She’s polite. She’s got a kind of inner poise. She’s very poised.”

“Okay.”

“She’s artistic. She has been to Orlando.”

“Okay.”

“Recently.”

“Got it.”

I heard the shrieks of children over the phone. A school group, bustling by.

“You’re really painting a nuanced picture,” she said.

“There’s a sort of hard quality to her. Like, if you said, ‘What do I do with this hen that’s bullying all the other chickens?’ and you were having all these qualms, she would take it from you and snap its neck, just like that.”

“So she has leadership qualities?”

“I’m not not saying that.”

“I get it.”

“I do think she’d be a good person to have in some survival situation. Like some kind of space mission that crash-landed on another planet and lost touch with Earth.”

“I’d be like, ‘Might as well rampage through the dessert rations!’” said Grace.

“Me too,” I said. “Except if it was only little boxes of golden raisins. In which case I’d be like, ‘Has anyone gone ahead and tried these cyanide tablets?’ Oh, hey, Aunt Viv.”

She stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her come in.

“Grace,” I said, “I have to go.” I put down the phone.

She was wearing a sheer white cotton overshirt-type thing that seemed to float around her body.

“Hi.” She looked around the room. “I didn’t know you’d be in here.”

“Yeah, I— It’s nice and calm.”

“I agree.” She tried on a bright smile. “Did you have a nice day? I was afraid you’d be bored.”

“No, I got a lot of writing done,” I lied. “It was great. No, this is just what I was hoping it would be like.”

“Good, good.”

We both looked at my bare feet, which were up on the coffee table. I lowered them. She pinched her ear. “It’s my friend Alice’s birthday tomorrow. She’s having a small get-together. I was wondering if you’d like to come?”

There was a slight quaver beneath her veneer that made me realize that perhaps she, too, had thought our conversation at dinner the other night had been lacking and that she was trying to make up for it, reaching out.

“Sure, yeah,” I said. “What time?”

“Three o’clock. In the afternoon.”

I nodded with a little too much exaggeration. “Great.”

“Great,” she said.

And then, because the moment seemed to require something more, I said, “I really like your plates. The hanging-up ones? In that room? They’re really good.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Those are from earlier. When I was first starting.”

“Oh, okay.”

She hesitated in the doorway. Then we started talking at the same time. “So, did you just get home?” I said. She said, “I’ve actually submitted a few of my latest ones to an art show.”

“What?” I said.

“I’ve submitted a few. To an art show. I’m doing a series about Arthurian legend. The Knights of the Round Table.”

“Cool,” I said. “Great. Like a local, community type of deal?”

“Well,” she said. I had insulted her. Something shifted between us and I immediately felt terrible. I also realized why Viv’s first impulse was to pull back and be aloof, because otherwise her face would unlock and every raw emotion would visibly travel across it. In this case, she flashed with hurt.

“It’s actually much bigger than that,” she said. “It’s sponsored by the folk art museum of Durham. It’s widely known. Have you heard of Southern Living magazine?”

“I think so,” I said quickly.

“Well, they do a feature.”

“That’s awesome,” I said. “That’s really cool. So are you—”

“Well, I’m going to eat something,” she said. “There are leftovers in the fridge.” And then she turned around and walked away.

And that was how I ended up driving into town the next day with Aunt Viv in her Honda Civic. It was hot and bright and everything was bursting with full summer lushness, the sky a chesty blue.

“Alice is in the last stages of lymphoma,” she said.

“Oh.” I was picking the sticky protective shield off the screen of my cell phone. I put it down and looked at her. “That’s horrible. I’m sorry.”

“Well, she’s got a good support system.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Many years,” said Viv. “We worked together.”

She was wearing diamond-shaped emerald earrings and her hair was swept back into an elegant French braid.

She glanced at me. “Have you spoken to your parents?”

“A little,” I said. “They seem to be doing fine. They’re, like, meditating every day and doing psychic weaving with a shaman or something.”

This little dash of sarcasm did not seem to go over with Aunt Viv. It was quiet for a while. We passed someone hanging up a row of small white dresses for a yard sale.

“It must be very interesting,” she said. “It must be a very interesting culture. There in South America.”

“Yes. Yes! It must be,” I said, nodding. “So, would you— Is that somewhere you’d want to go?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “I think I’d rather go to Europe. Verona. I haven’t really been out of the country much.”

“Why there?”

“The music,” she said. “The opera at the outdoor amphitheater, with everyone holding candles at night.” She sang a tune, a few notes of something, as if she were in a daydream, and then looked at me expectantly. My eyes darted around the car.

We drove along a street with many old Southern mansions set way back from the road. After a while we turned onto a narrower street, with smaller houses, and pulled up in front of a shady, flower-petal-covered walkway.

We got out of the car at the same time as a woman with long, earth-mother gray hair who was carrying some kind of pickled thing leaking out of a plastic bag and so had to hurry in ahead of us.

We were greeted at the door by a large woman named Karen wearing a purple dress with many layers. Her face was filled with happiness, her eyes dancing, her cheeks flushed. “Vivi!” she said, and then gave my hand a vigorous shake.

She led us down a hallway into a living room with zebra pillows and decorative spears on the walls and other foreign-looking artifacts. Viv introduced me around, and then the crowd parted to reveal Alice, swaddled in purple scarves, sitting stoically in a wicker chair like a village elder or seer.

She had a weak chin and warm brown eyes, and a trembling shine about her—like a bulb of water on a leaf right before it breaks. She smiled up at me and said, “I’m so glad to meet one of Viv’s relatives.” Viv knelt down beside her and took one of her hands and held it like it was the most fragile thing in the world while her face broke into a smile of bald admiration and sadness.

I said hello and then backed away to give Aunt Viv and Alice some room, and then weaved back through the house to find something to drink. It felt like I was intruding to stay talking to them longer. I was wearing tights even though it was a hot day, and they were itchy and sagging down and I had an eyelash in my eye.

“This was my aunt Cassie,” said a woman named Diane, who had intercepted me and then led me into a room—it was her house—where she showed me how she’d lacquered old pictures of her relatives onto the top of her desk. Cassie stared sternly out from a rocking chair.

“Great,” I said.

“And this is my great-grandfather Francis. They called him Franny.”

“Oh, okay.”

Diane obviously had a lot of time on her hands. I sensed she had more money than the other women. From what I’d gathered, they were all part of a core friend group that met while working at a hospice before it closed.

“It’s so I can have them all around me,” she said, sweeping her hand around the room. “All my ancestors, whispering from the eaves.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling, trying to seem appropriately receptive to that concept. “I can see how that would be nice.”

After about twenty minutes, I managed to extract myself by saying I was thirsty and wanted to get some water. Then I slalomed between a few other people who looked like they wanted to talk and ended up positioning myself by a set of glass shelves. I pulled out various photography books and pretended to look at them, but really I was studying the women.

I watched Karen—the one who greeted us—walk around offering people cups of juice, stopping now and then to chat. Her arms were mottled red and she had a bustling and helpful way about her. I wondered if that’s how she’d be in bed—cheerfully helping things along in a brusque and no-nonsense manner, like a fishwife who’d seen it all. She would probably just want to get to the next thing and it wasn’t that complicated. I wondered if she was married and thought about how the right man could have a lot of happiness with a woman like that. She wasn’t what you would call attractive in a conventional sense, but now and then she shrieked with laughter and seemed to find mischievous humor in everything and you could probably have a kind of ribald joy with her of the kind that wasn’t seen in movies or porn.

I watched Diane massage the back of her neck and tilt her head serenely to the side while talking to someone. She was sort of beautiful in a strategically tousled way. She had a self-consciously throaty manner, like she wanted the world to know how deeply she felt things. I imagined she was really theatrical in bed and had deep, oaky orgasms and saw herself from the outside the whole time and threw a bunch of colored scarves into the air when she came.

Then there were people you couldn’t imagine having sex. I studied a woman sitting on the couch whom I hadn’t been introduced to. She had the prim face of a prairie schoolteacher and was irritably rummaging through a lime-green bag. She pulled out a bunch of receipts and pawed through them in her hand. I noticed middle-aged women like that sometimes. They’ll be wearing a hand-crafted vest over a turtleneck or something and pretty much expressing to the world that sex or the idea of sex was generally not on the table. But I couldn’t tell if, this lady for instance, if she had done this to herself or if everyone else had done it to her.

My thoughts were interrupted by Karen. We got into a conversation about how her father had been a door-to-door salesman in Nevada.

“‘It’s a forgotten art,’ is what he always used to say,” she said.

“Gosh,” I said, thinking about walking around hot, flat, gridshaped neighborhoods wearing a business suit.

“How long do you think you’ll be staying with your aunt?” she said, turning back to me and reaching for an olive. We were now standing in the kitchen, where some snacks had been laid out.

“A few months, until the end of summer.”

A wistful look came over her face. She looked into the distance. “You’re lucky.”

“What do you mean?”

“To get to spend so much time with Vivienne. She’s such an adventurous soul.”

“Yeah,” I said, somewhat confused.

“We were all so impressed when we heard about Bora Bora.”

“Bora Bora?”

She nodded, popped a cube of cheese into her mouth. “You know, not that many people would do what she did—just go and live there by themselves for a year. It takes a lot of guts. She’s hilarious about it, too. The coconut pantomime? You should ask her about it. I wish I could have gone.”

“Yeah,” I said, impressed. “I will.”

Someone came up to us and said it was probably a good time to start thinking about serving the cupcakes and our conversation ended.

I talked to a few more people, and then wandered around a little with a cup of juice. I was studying some framed pressed flowers when I happened to look over and see Aunt Viv talking to a group of the women. She was holding up a decorative crystal goblet—the light glinted through it—and telling a story. She was talking quickly. Her hair was coming out of her braid a little, and her face was flushed. It was something funny; the people listening were giggling and paying close attention. I could see that in this context, with these women, she had a kind of power. She was presiding, divvying out attention and eye contact while they all stood around with open faces. Everyone burst out laughing at the same time, and she looked around in a happy, calculating way.

Later, in the car, I asked her about it.

“So you went to Bora Bora?”