A dozen pie shells covered a long scarred table. A small buff woman with a tattoo of the god Shiva on her bicep was pouring quiche filling into each. Jess recognized her from leafleting. Her name was Arminda, and as she poured, she talked to another leafleter, a blond, blue-eyed girl from Idaho who went by Cat.
Arminda was telling Cat, “I had one more conversation with Aisha where I said there are things that are so structural I didn’t know if we could repair them.”
“And that was it?” asked Cat.
“Well, not exactly. We’d have this post–breakup sex where it was supposed to be the last time, and then the next time was going to be the last time, but I was kind of into the idea of being single, and I thought I might have a straight moment, you know?”
Cat giggled.
“Because there was this guy who was kind of eying me. But then—you know Johanna, right? I had this thing with her, but afterward I felt so bad because she was such a sweetheart. She’s so sensitive! How do you tell someone you were just going through this crazy thing and you aren’t really interested in that person herself? I was behaving really badly. But that’s how I got the stomach flu—probably from Johanna. It was this really, really contagious, really virulent …”
Jess eyed the quiches on the table.
“I was trying to break up with Aisha and I was behaving so badly with Johanna, but I had to get everything out of my system,” Arminda continued as Jess walked out, feeling strange, and also invisible.
No one acknowledged her as she walked down the hall. She saw couples in the bathroom, but no one looked at her. She didn’t recognize anybody. Were the other guests all strangers? That couldn’t be, but at the moment she couldn’t tell any of them apart. She felt light-headed in the hazy, mazy house. The smell of beer mixed with the cloying smoke upstairs and made her queasy. She stepped out the back door and descended creaky steps for air.
How overgrown the garden was. Picking her way through ferns and banana trees, she almost stepped into a pocket-sized pond choked with lily pads. The Save the Trees office looked like a witch’s house in the dark, its peaked roof and walls overhung with ivy. Behind the witch’s house, a massive oak filled the sky. No stars pricked this tree’s canopy, no moonlight sifted through these leaves, but a swing hung down on ropes so long that, in the dark, Jess scarcely saw where they began. She tugged at one; the rope held, and the wood swing bumped her hip. Shivering, she sat down and tucked her skirt under her legs.
Suddenly Leon appeared behind her. She jumped up.
“You forgot your jacket.”
“How did you know it was mine?”
“Wallet in the pocket,” he said. “Probably not a great place for it, by the way.” He looked amused when she tried to take the jacket from him. It took her a moment to realize that he was holding it for her so that she could slip her arms inside. “Too many friends of friends in there.”
“Well, that’s what I am,” she pointed out. “Or was.”
“You and Noah?” Leon asked.
“Is that what he told you?”
Leon hesitated a moment, but only a moment, before he nodded.
“I barely know him.” Jess sat down again and pushed off with her feet to start the swing, but the ropes were so long she only swayed a little. She kicked off again.
“Do you want a push?”
“Sure.” She hoped that sounded diffident enough, as if to say, Since you’re just standing there, you might as well, but she wasn’t diffident at all. She lifted off as he pushed gently, hand between her shoulder blades. When she returned to him, he pushed lower on her back. A strange sensation, the brief contact, and then the long downstroke of anticipation. “My sister used to push me,” she told him.
“I have sisters.”
“Really?”
“Are you surprised?”
She stretched her legs and leaned back to swing higher. Her hair blew over her shoulders. Her skirt came loose and billowed over her knees. He was watching her, and as she rose and fell, she felt his gaze as radiant warmth. Of course she knew all about the male gaze, and she resented being gazed upon, but she was young enough that her resentment was purely theoretical. She was a paper feminist, just as Emily was a paper millionaire.
“You don’t look like the kind of person who has sisters,” she said.
“What do I look like?”
She thought for a moment as she swung forward. When she returned to him, she said, “An only child.”
“Too selfish for siblings?” She was almost horizontal now, leaning back as she held the ropes.
“Way too selfish.”
He pushed hard with both hands, and she shot forward, laughing. It felt so good to plunge feetfirst into the night. She felt a rush of air as she vaulted up into the dark branches. Too quickly she sank down again, the ground rose up, and the blood rushed to her head and dizzied her. She dragged her feet to slow herself, but she couldn’t stop all at once. Twice, then three times, she braked with her feet, until Leon caught the ropes from behind. He was close enough for her to feel his breath against her hair. “Are you all right?”
“Just tree-sick.”
He held her by the shoulders, as if to steady her, but she still felt the garden rushing toward her, and the sickening rush of air.
He touched her collarbone with his fingertips. “I remember you from Brandeis.”
“Really? You remember me! Why didn’t you say something?”
“I thought I’d wait,” he said.
“How do you remember me?”
“I remember you as … lovely,” he said.
She slipped off the swing to face him, laughing in disbelief—not just that he’d find her lovely, but that he would use such a delicate word.
“I asked people about you.”
She shook her head at him and he couldn’t help smiling. She was so innocent. Delicious. “Why didn’t you ask me about me?”
“I was shy,” he said, and that was true enough, although his shyness had been situational. He’d been unhappily involved.
“Shy?” She remembered him as arrogant, eloquent, and also tough. She’d heard him at a press conference, denouncing violence against the logging industry. He never hesitated at the microphone.
He couldn’t resist asking, “Did you start volunteering because you remembered me?”
“Not only shy, but vain!”
The swing hung between them, but he grasped the ropes above her head.
“I was interested in halting systematic deforestation of the planet and petitioning for the ballot proposal to ban clear-cutting in Northern California,” she said, “… and I did remember you.”
“Oh, you did.”
“Well, vaguely.”
“Only vaguely?”
“Very, very vaguely. Just that you were busy, and you never even looked at me. When I got to Save the Trees you stayed true to type.”
“Now I’m a type.”
“Well …”
They were standing so close their noses almost touched. She looked up at him and wondered how his eyes were so blue and his skin so dark, and how he could be shy and also confident, and most of all, what he was thinking, but she didn’t dare ask. And he saw her wondering, and he gazed at her delicate upturned face and felt a sudden tenderness for her, a little pang of responsibility. I’ll never never hurt you, he promised silently, even as he imagined taking her into the office and locking the door. He spoke with a cautious sincerity he didn’t feel. “I know you’re dating Noah and I won’t interfere with that.”
“Dating is a relative term.”
“Relative to what?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Really?” His lips brushed hers.
“I didn’t take offense that you ignored me,” she explained, “because what interests me is what you do.”
“That’s good to know.”
“I meant your work.” Her mouth grazed his. “I wasn’t talking about … right now.”
At first they kissed so lightly, there was no decision. They kissed the way they might trail their fingers in the water. I’m not really standing here with him, Jess thought, and she kissed him more deeply, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. She touched the corner of his mouth with the tip of her tongue; she sucked his lower lip and tasted wine, and he was surprised, and also charmed, because he saw that she’d surprised herself. She was so curious. She trembled with curiosity.