About a Girl Read online

  Yes, it’s cool in here, thank you—Yes, awfully hot for this time of year—No, I only read the first one and thought it was sort of badly done—Yes, children seem excited about them—No, I don’t have a problem with wizards, I just prefer science fiction, and I think the rules of magic in her world-building are so arbitrary, it’s clear she’s just making things up as she goes along—why is it always a boy wizard, anyway, it’s clear the girl wizard is significantly more intelligent; it’s always the case, don’t you think, that less-talented young men take credit for all the work done by women who are much cleverer than they—Fine then, go find a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan, I’m sure no one will argue with you there—

  As I was saying, Shane and I did not excel in high school so much as endure it; he, like me, is a genius, but his gifts lean in the direction of being able to play guitar riffs back perfectly after hearing them only once, unknotting the tangle of chords and distortion and tying the resultant bits back together again in flawless replicas of whatever he just listened to. And, of course, he writes his own songs, a skill that seems as elusive and astonishing to me as the ability to, say, walk cross-country on stilts. I have always been considerably more intelligent than people around me are comfortable with, and unskilled at concealing it, and I had in addition an unfortunate habit of reading science-fiction novels in public long after such a deeply isolating quirk was forgivable. Other students were disinterested in the finer points of celestial mechanics, and I, once I thought about it at any length, was disinterested in other students. I was not lonely (how could anyone be lonely, with the heavens overhead? All the motion of the stars, and the planets turning, and beyond our own humble solar system the majesty of the cosmos), but I was grateful to have my family, who were boundless in their affection for me, and of course I was grateful beyond measure for Shane. Only he—and thank god I had him, boon companion, coconspirator, confidant, and literally my only friend—would let me ramble on ad nauseam about Messier objects and telescope apertures. Only he never made me feel odd or untoward for my outsize and grandiose ambitions, my unwavering passion for Robert Silverberg, and my penchant for quoting particle physicists in moments of great strife or transcendent happiness. I had the sense sometimes that even my teachers were frightened of me, or at the least had no idea what to do with me. It was only Shane’s friendship that insulated me from any greater miseries than being the person no one wanted to sit next to in AP calculus. People were afraid of me, but they all liked Shane, and I suppose they imagined that even such an easily ostracized specimen of humanity as myself must have had some redeeming qualities if he was willing to put up with my company. Shane, a stoner Caramon to my bitchy and superior Raistlin, acted as a generous and often oblivious buffer between me and the outside world. People gave me a wide berth, but they left me alone.

  I do not blame Aunt Beast or Raoul for failing to educate me in the delicate task of disguising myself enough to make other people understand how to talk to me. Aunt Beast barely graduated high school herself, and although I have never asked Raoul about it I do not imagine growing up a poet and gentleman homosexual is a thrilling experience for teens of any era or clime. I am an only child—so far as I know, anyway—and never had friends my own age, save Shane. Even as a small child, I spent my evenings in the company of Aunt Beast, Raoul, and Henri’s witty, funny, brilliant friends, who treated me as though I were a person in my own right with opinions of interest—which, obviously, I was. Aunt Beast and Raoul raised me to have a kind of fearless self-possession that is not considered seemly in a girl, and I cannot help being smarter than the vast majority of the persons who surround me. The prospect of college was the only thing aside from Shane that got me through the sheer unending drudgery of adolescence.

  Shane has no plans to go to college, preferring to eschew the hallowed halls of higher education for the chance to make a career as a rock musician, and if anyone I know is capable of this feat it is indeed he. He is forever trying to get me to listen to better music. He was, anyway, before—oh, god. I am not accustomed to this sort of—anyway. I have ruined everything—but I can’t—oh, god. He has an insatiable and catholic palate, his tastes ranging from obscure Nigerian jazz to obsessively collected seven-inches from long-forgotten eighties punk bands. He likes a lot of the same old stuff—goths weeping into synthesizers—that Aunt Beast and Raoul listen to; he likes hip-hop; he likes, although he would never admit to it in public, hair metal, a clandestine affection he shares with Raoul, to the extent that they sometimes swap records with as much furtiveness and stealth as if they were dealing narcotics. His record collection takes up an entire wall of his room and is sorted alphabetically and by genre, and if you let him he will discourse extensively about stereo equipment with the obsessive focus of—well, of an astronomer citing observational data. I am prone to frequent bouts of insomnia, and sometimes I will call him late at night and ask him about different kinds of speakers, and drift off to sleep at last with the murmur of his voice in my ear.

  I used to do that, anyway. I have not for—well.

  The problem, of course, is feelings. Of all the banal and pedestrian impediments! The florid indignity! Shane and I had marched along for years, platonically intertwined, inseparable as glass-jarred conjoined twins bobbing in a formaldehyde bath, until one day without warning I looked over at Shane as he played video games with the fixed intensity of the very stoned, and felt a sudden and astonishing ache in my loins. I was quite sure I had gotten a cramp, and went home and took several ibuprofen—and then I thought of the delicate beadwork of sweat along his upper lip, the burnished glow of his skin under his nearly worn-through white undershirt, his perfect mouth slightly opened in concentration—and the ache blazed forth into a fire, and I understood (belatedly, to be sure, but the landscape of the heart is a country I have with determination left untrespassed) that something awful had befallen me, and our friendship—our blissful, majestic, symbiotic bond—was under the most dreadful threat it had ever faced.

  Matters only worsened from there. Where last summer I would have thought nothing of lounging about in my underwear, dozing in his bed in the hazy June heat and watching him play Super Mario Brothers on his old Nintendo, or practice the guitar, brows knitted together in concentration, thick dark hair falling over his high forehead, now the elegant line of his neck and the soft slope of his shoulders, his rounded back (his mother is forever trying to get him to sit up straight), summoned forth in me an all-pervasive nervousness that sent me pacing around his room until he snapped that I should calm down or leave. I could no longer look at the curve of his mouth without imagining it on my own, no longer punch him on the shoulder without wishing he would retaliate in turn by pinning me to the ground and ravishing me, no longer grab carelessly at his hand without willing the electricity I now felt at his touch to spark an answering flare of light.

  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 move
d 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 n
ever 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.”