YOUR HAIR! PEOPLE LIKED IT. I LIKED IT TOO. I FELT LIGHTER, closer to myself. Wet, I was a seal. It stuck up in new and better forms of bedhead. I had new cowlicks.
“I have to get a picture of this one,” Ryan said. It was morning. I had just sat up in bed, my tank top all stretched out from sleep.
I had never meant to sleep with him again. But there was the Scrabble rematch where we drank too many Moscow mules, and he tried to kiss me in the back of the bar but I said, Not here, and went upstairs with him intending to only make out a little, but once it started, the momentum picked up and it was as good as done. It was easier to do it than to push him away and have to discuss it. Then there was the Queer Night at La Luna where I saw Flynn and Vivian entwined on the dance floor and immediately ducked out, and Ryan’s place, right down the block, offered the nearest refuge, and I turned off every light and pushed him down onto the hard living room floor. There was also the Monday afternoon he called the letterpress studio and said into the phone, quietly but matter-of-factly, “I can’t get anything done because there’s only one thing I want to do, and it’s to you,” and a warm shock rose from the arches of my feet to my loins. It was flattering. It was that easy. I told no one else. I took what I wanted when I wanted it, and we both benefited.
“No fair,” I said now, trying to conceal my alarm. “It’s too early.” Flynn had always taken pictures of me like this and I had never stopped her. I liked waking up to her gaze. But this photo would be evidence. I covered every track.
“But the formation is incredible,” Ryan said. He had already picked up a disposable camera and was winding the film, a crickety sound.
I buried my face in my knees as he snapped the shutter. Before he could wind it again, I was up and out of the bed.
When the photos came back from the developer, two months and a tour later, they were grainy and brownish, backlit: one of me as a small mountain with a tangled crest on top; the next, the slant and tumble of my back and legs, blurred, as I escaped the sheets.
But that wouldn’t be until he finished the camera. First the Cold Shoulder was touring Europe for a month, where they would be in tiny print on many festival posters.
Do you want to come along? he asked. Come to the New York shows before we fly out. It’ll be fun.
I thought about it—I could go to New York for the first time, maybe take a bus to visit Annabel at Boston College. But I had no money. And I had no explanation to my people for why I’d suddenly go to New York. And even if I did, to be outed to his bandmates, to anyone who came to the shows—it might follow me back to Portland. I told him, and it was true, that I couldn’t afford to take the time off work. You can sell merch, he said, we’ll pay you. I’ve got to work on my own stuff, I said. I have so much going on here.
July in Portland. The rain had cleared town for the season, and the colors went from gray and evergreen and black to blue, bright green, gold, with long hot-pink sunsets. The studio was filled with warm daylight well into the evening; when I locked up Artifacts at six there still seemed to be endless hours ahead. The light was like food—I slept little and ate less.
I was also charged with the nervous energy of my secret affair. Ryan and I sneaked off on field trips: a taco joint in Hillsboro, a pawnshop in Scappoose, a diner in the tucked-away Lair Hill neighborhood, karaoke over the river in Vancouver. My adrenaline rose each time. For me it was the secrecy, not the sex, that radiated this contained heat. If you think it’s no big deal for a lesbian to fool around with a guy on the sly, you’re right, sort of, but you are also not living in Portland, Oregon, at the end of the twentieth century as a card-carrying member of the Lesbian Mafia. It was as good as treason.
It shouldn’t have been so easy to get away with it. But no one was paying attention. There were a million things to do and people were caught up in their own lives, following more flagrant dramas, setting up tours, traveling. I’d been off the radar for a while and I stayed that way. I moved among them with my private knowledge like an illicit gold coin in my pocket.
Double life was my specialty, honed during my teen years, my formative mode. I picked it right back up. I remembered how alert a secret makes you, how the fear becomes sharpness and widens your eyes. When you’re always watching out, you see more.
The thing is, I’d never known a person quite like Ryan. The guy was rootless without the ache, unlike everyone else I knew. He was hydroponic. He got everything he needed from the air, it seemed. You could put him anywhere with decent light and clean water and he’d be fine. He’d just grow there. That’s what made him so amenable to touring. And touring was what made it possible for me to keep falling back into his company, carefree. He never stuck around long enough for anything to stick.
Ryan and I made a deal.
“I don’t ever want this to outgrow the fun part,” I said one evening as we drove along the river toward a bar in Linnton. He was leaving again in a week for the long East Coast and European tour and I was all revved up with liminal abandon.
“Sounds good to me,” he said.
“Promise we never have to get to the processing part? The part with all the annoying habits and the noticing of them?”
“The part where we start saying how the other person does that thing just like their mother?”
“Exactly,” I said. I thought of her then—imagined calling to tell her about Ryan. Her delight would kill me. Would erase me. I shuddered. “Thank god you’ll never meet my mother,” I said, too strongly. He shot me a glance. “I mean, it’s not personal, no one does, since even I haven’t seen her in, like, four years. Believe me, it’s for the better. For all of us.”
“Mine came to visit in January,” Ryan said. “That was enough for a while.”
“What’s she like?”
“You think I’m going to tell you, now that I know you could use it against me?” He grabbed me at the ticklish spot above my knee, so I squeaked and swerved. “We’re staying with the good part, right?”
“Right,” I said. That’s all I wanted to give him and get from him. The good part, the curated part, the part a person could fall for. Except without crossing over into the falling-for part. Just far enough to catch yourself in time. Good practice for the future true loves we would meet. I swatted his hand away from my leg. “Don’t distract me. I need to steer.”
And then he was gone. That was the thing: Ryan was always gone or about to be.
The evening of his red-eye flight to New York, I rode along to the airport with him and his bandmate Jesse in the Cold Shoulder van. The Econoline was tall and stiff, the inside spangled with scattered CDs and loose change. The last seat had been removed and the space walled off with an iron cage for gear storage. Jesse was the singer and guitarist. He had clearly perceived a need for The Cute One in the band and stepped up to fill the role. Where Ryan had a lurking, offhand grace, Jesse was all I’m-here-now assuredness. He was friendly the way celebrities are friendly in interviews, a flawlessly smooth niceness. The band was not famous but Jesse seemed to be prepping for it. You got the feeling that when he looked at you he was bestowing an honor.
They had offered me the passenger seat but I didn’t want it. It seemed too much the girlfriend seat. The back was the friend-who’s-parking-the-van seat. That was me. When we picked him up Jesse had eyed me and given Ryan a look, which Ryan ignored. I knew he was thinking, So there’s the girl Ryan’s fucking, and I wanted to say, No I’m not, I’m not that—but I was that. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be that girl in the eyes of men. I wanted to give off as neutral a scent as possible.
When we pulled up at PDX, Jesse got out first and headed to the back of the van to unload. Ryan reached for the door handle but I put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m going to miss you,” I said, low so Jesse wouldn’t hear.
He glanced back at me, softening. “Are you?”
“But while you’re gone,” I said, “I don’t want you to pass up any . . . opportunities.”
One corner of his mouth tightened, a small twist. “Because you don’t want to.”
I shrugged.
He unclipped his seat belt and it zipped up with a whoosh. “Believe me, I won’t either,” he said. The door closed behind him with a neat, firm thud.
I felt a funny competitive twinge in my gut. I hauled open the side door and met him at the back of the van. “I meant opportunities to play Scrabble.”
“I would never pass up the chance to beat someone at Scrabble.”
Jesse wanted a hand with an amp flight case the size of an oven. Ryan grabbed a handle.
“I’m two games ahead,” I said. “Just remember that. No one plays Scrabble as well as me.”
“True.” Ryan slung a duffel over his shoulder. “Maybe I need to practice more while I’m away.”
“Maybe I do too.”
He smiled and shut the back doors of the van.
When Jesse turned his back to head inside, Ryan wrapped his arms around me, quick but firm, and gave my neck a nip that sent a little vein of lightning down my spine.
Then the glass doors closed after him and his rolling suitcase stuffed with undeclared band merch.
I had to pull the seat forward a foot to reach the pedals, and the brakes needed a heavy foot. I tried not to whack another car with the van’s unwieldy tail end as I pulled out from Departures. I needed to get back to my real life.
Once again I had split myself so neatly in two. One slender stem of my life was characterized by evasion, ducking, doors closed swiftly, a dark room with only me and Ryan inside, an escape hatch. But in the main life, I was an organizer in the Lesbian Mafia and printed art and commerce and went to shows full of girls who looked like boys and made my heart stop, and when I walked into any of these places someone knew me. Someone knew me. We knew each other. I’ve never known anything like it and won’t again. To recognize someone anywhere you go. To recognize each other everywhere: the coffee shop, the sidewalk, the bicycle commute, the bookstore, the bar.
Even the woods. The Washougal River tumbled down forested slopes toward the Columbia, clear and cool and gouged with swimming holes along the way. On hot afternoons my friends and I would park along the road at mile marker 7 and work our way down a steep path to a deep pool canopied by trees. We congregated there, one carload after another, all kinds emerging from the trees to spread towels, blow up air mattresses, pull on river shoes to navigate the rocky banks. I loved all the bodies we revealed there, fat and thin, and how we uncovered or contained our bodies and their scars. Some wore bikinis or one-pieces, some pressed themselves into sports bras and boy trunks. All the hidden tattoos came to the light, beautiful and tacky, badges of courage and impulse and youthful poor choice. I had always meant to get a tattoo but my design perfectionism had interfered. There was too much pressure on the image. I still hadn’t committed.
Bullet stood knee-deep in the water, sniffing the air, or flopped down in a sandy patch to sunbathe, graciously accepting the affections of friends and strangers.
One late-July afternoon, Meena and I floated in the middle of the swimming hole on inner tubes, me in a navy one-piece, Meena in a sodden tank top and trunks. “Don’t look downriver,” she said, so of course I did, and she promptly chastised me.
It was Flynn and a girl I didn’t recognize. They walked along the shallow part, stepping from rock to rock. The girl’s shiny black hair was piled on her head and her stomach was taut. A tote bag hung from her bare shoulder. Flynn, tanned and in long cutoffs, watched the girl’s steps with unnecessary chivalrous attention.
“Wonder what became of Vivian,” Meena muttered.
I slid all the way down through the center of the inner tube, let go, and swam underwater as far as I could, upriver, away. And while I swam I turned my thoughts instead to Ryan, how every time I touched him he responded, a simple power but it felt like magic, and the glances I’d sometimes catch him giving me. What? Nothing. I swam until my lungs couldn’t take it. My feet touched down on pebbly sand and I straightened up.
I was at the other end of the swimming hole, not far from the rope swing. The water came to my chin. I was immersed but still breathing, eyes open.
This was what I liked about Ryan. I would always be able to touch bottom. My feet would always meet the floor.
This time, there were no postcards. No transatlantic calls. I was slicing huge sheets of paper into cards and posters, I was inking machines, I was sweeping the shop, I was swiping credit cards and pricing furniture, I helped Lawrence convert Meena’s garage into a recording studio, my friends and I played Scrabble at kitchen tables with animals draped over our feet and laps, we were grilling in backyards, splitting three-dollar burritos at La Bonita, oiling bike chains, trading mixtapes, reading novels and zines, forming and dissolving bands, we were emerging into the dark of cleared living rooms and basements and clubs, stuffing sherbet-orange foam plugs into our ears or blowing out our hearing for a night. The Ryan affair was little more than a radio song in the background, a refrain that caught in my head every now and then.
There were a few girls I gave it a go with. I made eyes at a butch with a fox tattoo, and watched her go home with Robin. A painter who made mixtapes and cited contemporary fiction and queer theory seemed promising, even if she mispronounced Nabokov. We hung out twice, made out once; then I went to her art opening at a neighborhood coffee shop. Womyny nude paintings, self-serious and defensive. I imagined myself rendered poorly by her hand and ordered my coffee to go. There was a guitarist, a friend of Marcy’s who had just moved from Chicago, who had a cool haircut and always wore gray T-shirts and yet when she moved in for a kiss, I had to fight an instinctive recoil—it was the scent of her skin, earthy and sweet in a faintly rancid way. There was the house party where I lured an enigmatic andro visiting from Seattle into a dark hallway make-out, then she suddenly confessed she had a girlfriend when she thought I was about to leave a hickey on her neck.
The only one who ever made it into my bed was Bullet, a dense sleek doughnut who stashed herself under the covers. As Summer stayed at Marcy’s more and more, the dog came to depend on me. Together we would secretly eat meat. In a few years vegans would become butchers, but at this point everyone was still vegetarian, and I craved the forbidden despite myself. I’d pick up a few pieces of roast chicken from Nature’s and we’d sit on the living room couch, watching the Buffy episode I’d taped on TV, and eat the evidence. Bullet rested her heavy head on my knee between bites, drooling on the cushions, and we’d fall asleep together.
Yet occasionally these nights would come where I would walk through the kitchen, opening and closing every drawer and cupboard, unable to find anything I wanted to eat. I would read the same page three times and then set the book down. I would change the record after only one side, or one song. It was then that I would sometimes fall back on the thought of Ryan, the uncomplicated warmth of his attention. I would close my eyes and imagine touching a hand to his chest and springing a trapdoor into which we could disappear. I could disappear. He became my fallback thought, a neural pathway I’d follow toward an idea of comfort. What was I to him? I wondered. A fallback in my own way? No strings. A girl who didn’t require maintenance, processing, commitment. Easy. The person across the room with a little extra shine.
He was nine hours ahead, half a world away, waking up as I was falling asleep.