She smiled.
“To borrow a word from you…sensational.”
Charlie beamed, making no effort to hide his delight.
“Were they what you expected? My poems?”
“I guess I thought maybe they’d be more political. They’re sort of party poems.”
He laughed.
“No, I mean that in a good way!” continued Avery. “Like, they could be read in the middle of a party and not interrupt the flow of festivities. Even when they’re sad they still feel like a celebration.”
Charlie plucked a leaf from a bush and began breaking it into green confetti.
“It’s interesting that you say that. I think there’s an expectation that someone like me has to stand for something political, but I’m philosophical. I’m really into this idea that my ethical code doesn’t have to come from any doctrine. There is no intrinsic right or wrong, only what’s right or wrong for me.”
“So essentially moral nihilism crossed with psychological egoism?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what it is,” Charlie said, giving her an impressed look.
“I studied philosophy at undergrad, a fact that usually renders me insufferable to ninety-nine percent of people.”
“I think you are the opposite of insufferable,” said Charlie. “I suffer you gladly.”
Avery blushed, then blushed some more when she realized she was blushing. She cleared her throat.
“So you act in your own self-interest at all times?” she asked.
“Pretty much.”
“Even at the expense of others?”
“Sometimes.”
“But if everyone acted that way and my interests and yours were in opposition, how would there be order? If there was no agreed-upon value system or moral code?”
Charlie brushed the remains of the leaf from his hands.
“Look, man, all I know is that I was raised in a strictly religious household that told me most of what I wanted made me morally wrong. I felt so bad so much of my life, I thought that was just the way it had to be. Then I started pushing back hard in the other direction and I realized it wasn’t. Total moral independence, that’s what I believe in. Answering to myself and no one else.”
Avery smiled. He sounded like her ten years ago.
“And how do you feel?”
“Free. I feel free.”
Charlie ran ahead of her and leapt up to clasp a bar of scaffolding. He hoisted himself higher in a quick succession of pull-ups, his T-shirt riding up to reveal his narrow hips. He was lithe and muscular as a fish. Avery came to stand beneath him, unable to hide her admiration. She looked up at his face, which was creased with effort.
“Oh, you’re so big and strong,” she teased.
He dropped lightly onto his feet in front of her and stood with his face inches from hers.
“What did you say?” he asked.
His face was cracked open with a grin, but his eyes did not leave hers.
“You’re so big,” she said.
He pulled her into him.
“And?”
“And strong,” she said.
Then he kissed her, and Avery finally understood the true meaning of the phrase Blew my mind. His lips met hers and it was like the hushed pop of a fuse blowing out. Everything inside her was cast into welcome darkness. Her mind was beautifully, blissfully blank. What a relief not to have to think anymore. Not to have to pretend to be whole anymore. They kissed for an hour, his hands grabbing and kneading her body with such force it felt like he could pull her into a new shape, a new person altogether. When she eventually broke away from him to meet Lucky, she already knew that she was too late.
—
Avery stood now outside the address Charlie had given her and exhaled slowly. Was she really going to do this? A kiss was a transgression, but this, this would be a betrayal. Was it worse that he was a man? Chiti had only ever been with women, had always known that was right for her. Avery had been with men as a teenager but not since; boys was probably more accurate. She always said that she had only ever loved Chiti, but that wasn’t entirely true. First, there had been Freja, though equating what she had with Chiti to that relationship was like comparing a fireplace to a forest fire. One was comfort, the other carnage.
Avery met Freja in a class called HOPE: Human Odyssey to Political Existentialism during her final year at Columbia, where Freja was also a philosophy major. She was originally from Sweden, and she looked it. Her eyes were like sea glass with bright white eyelashes and eyebrows, and her skin turned the color of wet sand in the sun. Fiercely intelligent and arrogantly determined to live according to her own principles, she believed that personal satisfaction was the noblest activity, and the pursuit of independence was the moral purpose of life. Naturally, she read a lot of Ayn Rand. She was, Avery thought now with a start, not unlike Charlie. It was Freja who had introduced Avery to heroin—horse, she called it with cool insouciance, insisting it wasn’t truly addictive unless injected. Given her commitment to radical self-determination, it wasn’t all that surprising that Freja left before graduating to join an anarchic, nonhierarchical, consensus-driven community in Northern California, though, with her ethos of independence above all, Avery imagined she might struggle with the consensus part. The group lived on the empty ranch outside of San Francisco owned by one of the founding members’ grandparents, a trust fund kid not quite anarchic enough to believe in abolishing inheritance, who kept Freja hooked to a steady supply of downers. Drug dependency, it turned out, was an effective suppressor of independence.
Salt and pepper, everyone called them, for the way Freja’s white-blond hair looked next to Avery’s black bob, but also because they were inseparable. They belonged together. Freja was the first person Avery truly loved outside of her family, the first woman she’d ever slept with, the first person to give her an orgasm. They were in the tiny furnished bedroom Freja rented near campus from an elderly couple she’d met through the Swedish Church’s housing board. The room had been their daughter’s—since either married or dead, Avery had never confirmed which—and was covered in crochet, china dolls, and Virgin Mary memorabilia.
The first time Freja had disappeared beneath the bedcovers to kiss Avery’s sex, Avery had looked up to see a portrait of Mary smiling down at her. Time melted and slowed; little waves of pleasure lapped and pooled in her like warm rock pools. It felt so good, so right. Freja’s mouth soft and insistent as the sea’s waves, a sensation inside her like light on water. Not at all like with the boys before. Above her, the Virgin Mary smiled down, and, staring up into her benevolent gray eyes, Avery had orgasmed powerfully for the first time. She’d maintained a secret soft spot for the Mother of God ever since.
Avery liked the effects of heroin, but it was Freja she really got high on. After Freja left for California, Avery went through one of the worst withdrawals of her life. She missed everything about her: the silky blond hairs on her shins, her salty-sweet taste, her loud, coarse laugh, her way of adding a questioning no to statements, as if both inviting and daring Avery to contradict her. Too much sunshine is bad for critical thinking, no? Let’s make love in the library, then get ice cream, no? Avery waited until after she graduated and her sisters had all left home, aching with longing all the while, then moved west to follow her. They’d been living on the ranch together for a few months, aimless and increasingly strung out, when one of the other commune members climbed through their bedroom window and raped Freja while Avery slept next to her in drug-stupefied unconsciousness. The next day when Freja told the group, the mostly male members informed her that rape was a choice; she had the agency to view the experience as consensual if only she would exercise it.
