Willa & Hesper Read online

  “When I was younger, I hated it here. I was convinced somebody was going to jab me with a hypodermic needle in that giant Macy’s.” Willa laughed, although that particular visual made me a little queasy. “Once I got older, and all the concerts were here, I got obsessed with it. I used to take the bus in on weekends and walk to the Village, and think about Kerouac and Gertrude Stein, and all the other writers who were inspired by the city…you know. It sounds cliché.”

  “A little. Maybe more romantic. Capital R romantic.”

  “I love it,” she said. “I love it even when I have to haul my laundry two avenues and it’s so heavy that I have to rest a few times. Plus, living with my parents was…” She paused.

  “No more peppermint patties?” I asked.

  That dimple. She lowered her chin, bashful. “Yeah. Less peppermint patties. A few years ago, my dad was in a car accident that really fucked up his back. It caused all this damage to his disks, and once the damage started, it’s just gotten worse. He had to go on disability and now he’s really…out of it, from all the painkillers.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. My mom is super resentful about caretaking. She’s more of an executive type. So…I’m loving having my own place,” Willa rushed on. The Great Lawn stretched before us, an expanse of manicured green. In the distance, a children’s birthday party with paper plates and red and yellow balloons bobbled in the wind, like living creatures straining against their leashes. “I live with Chloe—do you know Chloe? Straight hair, gold glasses?”

  “Everybody knows Chloe.”

  “We went to Vassar together. She was my sophomore year neighbor; we’ve been really good friends since then. We live right around the corner from Lion’s Head,” she said, “and we have this little basement, so whenever a group of fictioneers go out and somebody gets too wasted, they usually end up staying over on our couch, and I make them tea in the morning. It’s a good routine.”

  “So you’re good at taking care of people,” I said. She looked at me with her dark eyes.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I am.” Her purse swung listlessly at her side. We folded into single file as a woman with an enormous, bearlike dog passed us, and I felt the current between us then, the presence of her body right behind me. She could have kissed my neck, I thought, and imagined her lips finding my pulse.

  “Do you think the trees are healing me?” I asked.

  “Definitely,” Willa said. When she reemerged at my side, her thighs brushed mine.

  We kept walking, deeper into the park than I’d been in a long time: past the bandshell, a bird-watching tour with their binoculars clutched in hearty anticipation, the Boathouse with its grand, pastel tiles. The lake glowed its algae-laden green. We talked about our favorite writers, about the best kind of jam, about where we’d traveled and where we wanted to go. Willa, mysteriously, had never been on an airplane. I felt the leaden drumbeat of my hangover start to dissipate. Feathery leaves skirted white clouds, arranged in bunches as if they’d come from a spout. Willa’s face was smudged with light.

  “What would be your ideal day?” I asked her. “If there were a Willa Greenberg day.”

  “First, I’d get the pancake special at Community. Do you know the pancake special?” she said. “It’s ten dollars for the best pancakes in New York, plus coffee and orange juice, but it’s only until eight a.m.”

  “That’s obscenely early.”

  “They’re the world’s best pancakes. I work at the business library—in real life, not in my ideal day—at eight-fifteen, so sometimes I treat myself and get there at seven, right at opening.” She absentmindedly twirled a curl around her finger and it bounced back, in perfect formation. “Then I’d go to Neue Galerie and see the Klimt paintings they have. He’s my favorite. And at the museum, they have this Austrian cafe with perfect cake and Viennese coffee with whipped cream. It’s my favorite place.”

  “So your ideal day is just dessert and art?” I said.

  “Basically. I’d probably see a concert at night. A female singer-songwriter with a guitar.”

  “That’s my zone, too,” I told her. “Cat Power. A side of Laura Marling.”

  “Yeah?” Willa said brightly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’d go to bed early,” she said. “That would be the end to my perfect day. Sleep.” She smiled at me. “What about you?”

  I shrugged. I was never the planner; that was Ada’s job. I thought of the night before, with Adam and Haniya, who I’d known since high school, and their new friends from Stanford who’d thought it would be funny to tinfoil the walls of their living room, and their drug dealer, Q. It was easy to be with people who plotted their destinations in terms of procuring drugs, then reclining at someone’s apartment, then finding garlic knots or fries blanketed by saucy cheese. Dancing at a place with no cover. Getting thrown out of that place with no cover because Adam, even on Molly, couldn’t help fighting if there was a line for the bathroom. I didn’t really think about what I wanted to do, most days. I went along with a plan, or I read glum stories about blue-collar Americans from the ’80s and ordered pad see ew. I liked to feel the noodles slide down my throat. I barely even chewed.

  “With the exception of my hangover,” I said. “I guess… this is.”

  “Yeah?” Willa said. Her smile had taken over the bottom of her face and it lightened me.

  “Yeah.”

  We’d been next to each other, but now her body faced mine.

  “Come here,” she said. And then, I didn’t realize we were kissing until we were. It was a kiss that spread wide inside of me, an eagle’s wingspan. Her hand reached for the top of my spine and stayed there, the lightest possible contact, and I felt it traipse all the way down the length of my back. Her lips were even softer than I’d imagined. I found the rhythm of her kissing: furtive, but constant, a surge of wanting. She tasted like the orange juice. Our mouths matched, I thought.

  I had kissed girls before, but at parties, and not soberly. Not without plausible deniability.

  And: I had wanted to kiss girls before, but I had not.

  In a faraway place in my head, the place that wasn’t thinking of Willa’s body against mine, or the ebb and flow of my breath hot on her neck, or the quiet crunch of foot traffic avoiding us, here, in the leaf-laden park on a beautiful day, I thought of yesterday. I thought of the bruise that squinted out from underneath her pale skin, and whether there were others. Whether it was right to make out with someone who’d just been sexually assaulted, even if she tried to downplay it by saying it was a little assault, and what did that really mean? Was I supposed to stop her? She’d kissed me. She was definitely kissing me now. She’d slept on the floor of my sister’s apartment to conjure this moment, I thought.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, mid-kiss. My voice rumbled. I touched her bruise, the evidence, to show her what I meant. She lowered her gaze from mine. Beneath us, the ground was spongy, pockmarked with mud in places where yesterday’s rain hadn’t yet been absorbed.

  “I don’t want to think about that,” Willa said. Her fingers pressed against my neck. “I just want to think about you, Hesper. Okay?” She adjusted her posture so her lips were flush against my earlobe. “I’ve been thinking about this since the first time we saw each other. I’ve been thinking about this every time we’re in workshop, across that giant table.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re even better than the peppermint pattie,” she said, and pressed her lips to mine.

  * * *

  IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE, AS we headed back to the subway, that the previous night had been less than twenty-four hours ago. It felt like time had unshuffled from its usual pattern to deliver us into a new, shinier reality, in which a person that couldn’t wait to kiss me, and a person that I couldn’t wait to kiss back, was at my side. Dopey, doe-eyed, we sat so close to each other on the train that I could feel Willa’s exhales balloon, then shrink. All of the other passengers nearby seemed out of
focus, painted in sepia tones somehow, with their earbuds and phone swiping. Couldn’t they feel it, the frenzied, hamster-wheel energy circulating from my legs to hers? Didn’t they see we were radiating?

  All other infatuation I’d experienced was like having too much coffee: heartbeat rapid, a little nauseating. Willa made me feel as if my life was about to get so much better, that the current motion of the F train was interminable. I was walking in circles in the rising action and then, I’d be where I was meant to be, hiking up the narrative of my own life. The F train skittered through Brooklyn, sweeping out from Gowanus to look out over the water, sunshine glinting metallically, before we plundered back into the darkness underground. Jay Street: Metrotech. We transferred to the A, where a panhandler played a large steel drum with his hands and, for the first time, I gave him a quarter.

  “You’re so generous,” Willa said, brushing her shoulder against mine. I was not terribly self-aware but knew that I was distinctly ungenerous. But it occurred to me that I could fall in love—not just with Willa, but with Willa’s idea of me.

  We chatted around lukewarm topics—not going to talk about the press of her finger on my wrist, or the way that she licked her bottom lip, not going to talk about the long, rapt eye contact that defined our conversation on the subway even as we were discussing our professor’s socks and clogs combination, and would it be more comfortable to wear clogs barefoot, but then if you were barefoot, would your feet get cold in the overly breezy classroom? Clogs, Willa said, and she continued to talk but all I heard was clogs clogs clogs, and all the while her eyes lobbed with possibilities that involved: me, my body, her, and hers. I saw it all. I was latticed with wanting and distracted by the squeaky brakes and the guy across from us eating a strawberry yogurt with his face in the absence of a spoon. Anticipation spread, a rush of toppling dominoes. Then we were on the 1 train, and 79th, 86th, 96th, and soon if no one did anything it would be Willa’s stop, which was not also my stop.

  I could have said: Come over. I could have said: I want to see your apartment. I knew she would have agreed happily. But I remained soundless, skittish. Anxiety fluttered up my throat like a moth searching for a source of light. The truth was, for all of my yearning, for all of the time I’d been gathering queer signifiers and incorporating them into myself—collecting fedoras, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix, the Virginia Woolf quote underneath my senior portrait—I’d never considered that I might not be good at sex with women until this moment. Or that there was such a gulf between knowing something and acting upon it, when acting upon it was a possibility that grazed your arm.

  When we got to 110th Street, Willa squeezed my hand. “See you tomorrow,” she said. For class. For a class that would be my turn to hand in a story, and that story didn’t exist yet. But for now, that didn’t matter. For now I was going to get a paper cup filled with sour frozen yogurt and eat it until my teeth went numb with cold, and I wouldn’t even notice.

  * * *

  IN LINE AT THE frozen yogurt store, I stared at a man in a 49ers jersey with a rainbow ribbon pinned to his backpack. I thought about saying something to him, but I didn’t. I’d grown up just outside of San Francisco, perhaps the gayest place in the world. Gay pride flags swung vibrantly in front of brunch spots with huckleberry smoothies and waffles dotted with raspberries. Cable cars chugged uphill. Whole neighborhoods of bandana-wearing folk music fans with rescue dogs handed out fliers for social justice. But: still. I’d never tried to talk about it, and the longer I tried not to talk about it, the stupider it felt, since the only person making it an issue was me. I could so easily imagine Mom’s tone of voice on the phone as she called Dad to tell him—a little too loud, with her syllables crisp and practiced, adding some comment about how she’d never thought I cared much about any of my (many) boyfriends, anyway, it all made sense now. I could so easily imagine a bouquet of rainbow-hued flowers in my room with a little card about how my happiness mattered more than anything, and I didn’t want it. I didn’t want an announcement or a premade, sculpted tale of acceptance that may as well have come in a kit called “Supportive Liberal Parents of LGBTQIA+ Children!!”

  Besides. I’d never had any reason to tell.

  I texted my sister: I think I’m in love.

  She texted back: You better be, Lemon. The roommates are chewing me out so hard. Don’t ever have a sleepover in my living room without asking again. (But: !!!!!!)

  * * *

  THEN IT WAS THE afternoon and I realized I had a document with no words, not even a handful, to describe a plot that everyone had read already. I had a stomach full of overpriced Pinkberry and a computer that I’d very recently spilled coffee on, so each word came with a trail of R’s afterward as a frustrating bonus to my writer’s block. I’d been a procrastinator for my entire life and the deadline hummed merrily in my ears as I snacked on almonds covered in cinnamon sugar and looked at pictures of baby hedgehogs and returned to Willa, to our kiss, to the tunnel of trees that sheltered us in the park and the way her breath had percussively slowed, then quickened.

  I couldn’t think of anything else. Every time we’re in workshop, across that giant table.

  For hours I tried to construct a world as far away as I could imagine. A middle-aged accountant describing the death of their daughter’s pet turtle. An entire page devoted to the methodical ritual of rolling one’s own cigarettes. I teetered through the story, constantly glancing at my phone (had she…? No. Not yet. But maybe she would. Or maybe I should…?) The child mourned her dead turtle. She blew through a kazoo. She had asthma now. Was she dead? Not dead. Just sad about her turtle. I drained cup after cup of coffee that my roommate had definitely brewed for herself. We’d run out of regular sugar so I substituted confectioner’s, and it clumped eagerly along the surface like a powdery rash. It wasn’t such a bad story. The asthmatic kazooer learned how to masturbate, alone in her polka-dotted bed, remembering the shell of her turtle’s body. Was that…okay to write? It was edgy, I decided, my head pumping with wanting, so much wanting that I couldn’t block it out long enough to write this paragraph.

  I closed my computer. It was definitely done, I thought, my fingers already starting to move.

  * * *

  IN THE HAZE OF Tuesday morning, after a desultory conversation about the humidity with my roommate and another cup of coffee, the first thing I thought of was Willa. Willa Greenberg. It took longer for me to remember that, for my first story in my graduate-level creative writing workshop, I’d decided to write a story about a child masturbating to the memory of her dead pet. Scrolling through my ten mealy-mouthed pages with one finger while I funneled cereal into my mouth, I confirmed that it was, in fact, just as bad as I remembered.

  I knew how gossip went. I’d overheard enough catty conversations from the plush, brown sofa that served as the epicenter of the computer lab about people’s repetitive sentence construction or use of old-man idioms to know that this was the thing that people would remember about me next week, and the next month, until we graduated. A faint but insistent purr of dread amplified in my ears. Gracefully, the dredge of the coffee swished against the bottom of the pot, and I couldn’t even bring myself to drink it, I just put it back down; rubbed the makeup from my eyes and rushed to the computer lab to try to salvage whatever reputation I would have after today’s class.

  At school, I darted into the lab and stood uncomfortably behind someone I didn’t recognize until they relented their seat. Come on, come on, I thought, logging in to a blank screen decorated with anonymously pleasing fireworks. I had to make the child older; that seemed the most obvious way to subvert at least some of the controversy. A teenager. Sixteen, I thought; nobody was uncomfortable with a sexually curious teenage girl. Frantically I scanned through every tag of dialogue, every mention of age, and I hunched toward the computer as if it were an enemy in a duel.

  I didn’t even notice Willa there, in my extreme focus, until I heard her. “Hey, Hesper.”

 
“My story is garbage. I need to change…all of it. Everything.”

  Willa bent behind me to glance at the screen. “I’m sure that’s not true,” she said, her voice balmy. I could feel the sway of her hair against the back of my shoulder blade and it was enough to make me start to cry a little.

  “I’m at a tipping point,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I used to be a proofreader as part of my job,” Willa said. “Tell me what you want to change and I’ll do it fast.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she said, dragging an orphan chair closer to my screen. I mumbled the changes about the girl’s age, and how I wanted to make the kazoo a clarinet, and for her mother to be older so they didn’t seem too close in age, all the while keeping an eye on those digital numbers in the upper right hand corner, ticking down closer to my workshop humiliation. On the other side of the wall, the copiers pleasantly spit out stapled, collated packets of other people’s thoughtful, researched stories. I could hear the crunch of the staples and, even as Willa wound through my story correcting, restitching the connective tissue that held my words together, I braided and unbraided my hair so that my fingers had something to do.

  “Five minutes,” I said.

  “Almost…there. Print it. Print!” Willa exclaimed. She looked at me with that smile. “We did it.”

  “You did it. I just turned myself into Heidi,” I said. The printer rushed, warmly, in a paginated flurry of something resembling my work. “Thank you. Seriously, I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Willa said, pausing before she added my name at the end. “Hesper.”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” I said. “I’ll build you a castle of peppermint patties.”

  Willa scanned the room to see if anyone was looking near us. She touched my hand. “Okay,” she said. “I accept.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT WEEK, WHEN it was my turn to be critiqued, our professor—a lanky woman with sleeves of floral tattoos and an eyebrow ring that was maybe ironic—stretched her arms out on the table. She drummed all of her fingers in unison. “This next one is a real doozy,” she said. “Hesper, you want to read a page to get us kicked off? Then you’re in the cone of silence.”