THERE WAS HIS VOICE, IN MY PHONE. IT WAS NEARLY SEPTEMBER. I biked over to his place, chest all fluttery with what could have been anticipation or dread. He came to the door and at the sight of his face for the first time in two months, a little stubbly—“I haven’t even had time to shave yet, come in”—and his hair still wet from the shower, his eyes tired but brighter for the shadows beneath them, I felt shy with pleasure and recognition: There you are. Hi, face.
“Hello, friend,” I said.
Ryan leaned in to kiss me right on his front step. “I’m not even going to say sorry,” he said. “I’m just happy to see you.”
He looked good to me, the careless jeans hanging low, the holey T-shirt, and I longed to press up against something that warm again. I followed him upstairs.
He poured me a glass of water and said, “Let’s go away for a few days.”
“You just got home.”
Ryan gave the apartment a look like it had been lying around watching TV. Useless. “I can’t get used to sitting still yet,” he said. He was flush with cash and wanted to enjoy it before they did the actual accounting for the cost of the tour. “Someplace we don’t know anyone. Like the other side of Mount Hood. Or the Painted Desert.”
I hadn’t meant to pick things up again but here I had all this fondness, and that fever had kicked up again at the base of my spine, a sweet low burn. I wanted to see something that went on forever. Something that would put me in my place. I suggested the coast.
“The coast it is,” he said.
“Except I can’t afford it,” I said. “I wish I could.”
“It’s on me. Really. Let me do this for you. Early birthday present.”
We drove to Manzanita on a Tuesday. The town was quiet. Our cottage was on a narrow street with no sidewalks, where gnarled salty trees crowded around the homes. The locals had started to emerge again, post–Labor Day. We took Bullet with us—I’d left a note on the table for Summer saying that a letterpress client had offered two nights at a beach cottage in trade, and that I’d taken the dog with me for company—and she galloped in gleeful laps on the beach, scattering seagulls. Ryan threw her tennis ball over and over, while I let the cold, cold waves lick my shins for as long as I could stand it before running back up to the warm sand, where Ryan and Bullet and I chased each other around until we were all panting. Riding the tandem bike we rented along the quiet streets and dunes, salt water drying on my legs where I’d run into the icy ocean, I felt so good. Sunblown, my muscles working hard, Ryan behind me to help propel us forward. I’m steering, I thought. I had never been the one in front, the one who called the direction. I was used to always looking to the other person for guidance.
When we disembarked, I impulsively slid my hand into his. My fingers were cold and his palm was warm and callused. They locked into place.
So this is what it’s like, I thought as we walked down the main street. To hold hands and not garner a single glance. How strange. It reminded me of one time at a show when, bored, Summer let me try on her six-inch platforms and suddenly the whole space was different. I inhabit a small body, five feet two. The world of shoulders is one I know well. But now I could see clearly, my head level with all the others, an unobstructed view. Behind me the regular-sized girls were patiently, miserably tiptoeing and peering through the gaps between necks and heads. This is what it’s like to be tall? I had said in wonder and indignation and envy. They just walk around able to see everything. And they take it for granted.
This too was like being tall. I opened my mouth to explain this to Ryan but when I glanced over at him I saw a look on his face that I hadn’t seen before. Contentment. No slyness, no skepticism, no wry guard. He looked completely himself.
He caught my glance. “What?” he said. A vulnerable smile.
I was walking in his country now. This was what it was like for him to be Ryan. This was his nature. I suddenly did not know what to say. I just wanted to look at him. And I did.
“Are you hungry?” I said.
He slid a sly look down my body—there was the one I knew, there was our default, the shield of the easygoing tease—and said, “Always.”
It was easy to walk into that café with him, easy to slide into a table by the window, easy to drink a whole bottle of wine with him, easy to laugh, easy to be with him, not because or despite that he was a man but because he was my friend Ryan, my friend I was having an affair with. It was easy when we stepped out into the cooling night, drunk, to wrap my arms around his neck and impulsively kiss him in the open air for the first time. And when he started to say, “I love . . .” and I tensed, he took the easy way out and finished with “this.” Easier for everyone.
Those few days in Manzanita I was another person. I was exactly myself, in one way: impetuous, unafraid to be seen, for once not skulking and periscoping; but in another way, I was an alternate Andrea Morales, inhabiting a character that someone else had intended me to be—my parents, biology, God, et al. Me, flipped. A mirror side. It looked like me but it wasn’t.
The night before we left, he said, “Tell me about girls.”
I was in a T-shirt and underwear, knees straddling his sides.
“What do you mean?” I said, unbuttoning his jeans. “You’ve been with girls.”
“What is it you like about them?”
I studied his eyes. “No,” I said. I leaned forward and kissed his lips: a quick, firm, closed-mouthed kiss.
“What’s it like?” he persisted.
I said, “It’s not like in porn. And it’s not like this. And it’s not for you to know.”
I kissed him again, purposefully, planting a seal, and he wisely let it go.
Back in Portland I said good night and drove home with the passenger seat empty. I unlocked my front door, let Bullet run in ahead of me, and dropped my backpack on the couch. “Summer?” I said, switching on a lamp.
No answer. I could hear the dog lustily drinking in the kitchen. She sauntered to her bed, flopped flat, and descended down a long sigh directly into sleep.
I stood alone in the quiet dim house, one lamp lit. I inhaled the smell of home. I wondered if this was the scent of my T-shirts, of my hair, if this was what another person smelled on me when we hugged. You don’t notice it until you leave for a while.
I looked at the telephone. I could ask Ryan. But there was a problem. I love, he’d started. The Fun Part was over.
So I didn’t call. And the next day I cut a postcard from a letterpress test run—layers of type on the front, crisscrossed dates and words and images—and wrote Thanks for coasting. What a trip it’s been. I’m headed underground for the next few weeks to get this art show up. Consider me on an extended tour. See you on the other side. I signed it with only an X—a kiss, a rating, an illiterate signature, an unknown—and dropped it in the mail.
When I turned twenty-four a week later, Summer and I hosted a massive family dinner at our house, replete with a cake shaped like the state of Oregon. Folds of frosting mountains, blue veins of rivers, a candy heart marking Portland. I took the slice of coast where Manzanita lay unmarked. I ate it all, every crumb, and scraped my plate clean.