Sinner

“Right,” I replied. “Off to play right now. Ta.”

It wasn’t that I had been dismissed, but I felt dismissed.

Sierra really did think I was going to flit off with my newly fluorescent face and meet her cool friends. This was a party of children, and children loved other children.

Maybe I didn’t even know how this was done.

I made my way through a dark living room (a pale sofa was smeared gently with glow-in-thedark paint) to a dark kitchen (the counter was spattered with luminescence) and then a dark somewhere else (no glowing besides a glass coffee table imperfectly reflecting my face). The music was coming from everywhere. The air smelled like oranges and pretzels and neon pink.

As I wandered slowly through conversations between people who had just met, I thought about how L.A. was a place to not be alone. Every place was a place to not be alone, but L.A. was a city that gloried in connections, that eased them and facilitated them. It was a city that made it more obvious how goddamn impossible it was for you to make connections if you couldn’t make them in L.A. This was a place for smiling at strangers and holding hands and kissing strangers, and if you weren’t doing those things it was because you did not smile and you did not hold hands and you did not kiss. The strangers part was irrelevant.

How long had I been here?

“Isabel!”

It was Mark, Sierra’s Mark. He was in a group of guys that all kind of looked like him, pretty and harmless and tan and cheerful. They were visible because they stood beside a wall of windows. Behind them, the ground sloped off and L.A. moved restlessly.

“You guys aren’t glowing in the dark,” I said.

“We’re bright enough,” Mark replied. His friends laughed. I didn’t. “You want a drink?”

“Something not glowing?” I asked. “Does plain water exist in this place?”

“Water!” said one of his friends. His goatee was immaculate.

“Here? That’s not kosher, man.”

“I think it is probably the only kosher thing here,” I replied testily. “Do you actually know anything about Jewish people?”

“I’m circumcised,” he replied. “That’s Jewish, right? Oh, wait, Jesus, are you Jewish?”

I looked at him. I did the slow blink. I parted my lips. He watched. I said, “I thought you were getting me some water.”

He scrambled off to find it. Mark laughed in admiration.

“Well done.”

I narrowed my eyes in acknowledgment. Really, the secret was to say pretty much nothing at all, and when you did open your mouth, say something awful. Then they all did what you wanted.

Mark hurried to fill the silence. “Grubb here and I were just talking about, like, this guy who landed a fighter jet after the wing had fallen off. Apparently, it fell, like, right off and he landed it anyway.”

Grubb said, slow as lava, “Isn’t that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard?”

I said, “Crazy.”

Mark touched his neck and his chin, but he was looking at my neck and my chin. “Where is Lars with your drink? He’s taking forever.”

“Just as well. I wouldn’t trust him with anything someone else poured anyway,” I said. I didn’t look away from Mark’s eyes. It wasn’t that I wanted to flirt with him, or that I wanted him, I just wanted to see what I could do. “Might have glowworms in it.”

Mark’s teeth grazed his bottom lip as if he were thinking about the water, but I didn’t think it was a beverage he was imagining. My heart beat a little faster with the power of it. It was a tease, but what could it hurt? I just wanted to know. I wanted to know that if I wanted someone else, could I get him, and how much effort would it take? Was it as easy as just being there, saying nothing, letting them imagine who you really were?

“Look, let’s go find you one,” Mark said. “You can watch me pour it. No glowworms.”

My palms were suddenly sweaty. This wasn’t actually a tease. Not anymore. This was a real thing.

I wondered how Cole felt when he slept with a girl on tour.

Was it this? The game. The chase. The kick to the ego, the warmth in my guts, the knowledge that my lips wanted to be kissed and I wanted someone to unzip this dress and see how good I looked in my bra.

I could tell him I’d get the drink myself. I could wait for Lars, although there wasn’t a chance in the world Lars was going to bring something nonalcoholic, because I knew guys, even if I didn’t know him.

I just wanted something to happen. I just wanted to stop walking around this party alone, waiting for . . . I didn’t even know. When I would know I was done. When I would know I had partied, past tense.

I said, “Let’s go find something.”

“Be right back, man,” Mark told Grubb.

Right back. Right back. Because this was nothing.

I followed Mark. To my surprise, he really did lead me to the bar, where he drew a glass of water. He offered it to me, his gaze holding mine. He waited. My heart was jerking. I wanted to accomplish something, anything, even if that something was making out with Mark.

I said, “Where am I going to drink this?”

It was all Mark needed. He said, “Come on, I’ll show you something.”

Something turned out to be a circular-walled concrete observatory at the end of one of the stretching balconies. It turned out to be a little bedroom inside, with a curving custom mirror on one wall and a chic red mattress just inches from the floor, all lit by skylights that let in the floodlights. It turned out to be Mark closing the door behind us and taking my glass from me and setting it on a low end table.

Then he grasped either side of my waist on the vinyl-orleather dress and kissed me.

It was probably vinyl. There was no way it was real leather at the price I’d paid for it. But on the other hand, I’d gotten it at the secondhand shop. So it could have been someone’s expensive castoff.

We were still kissing. He was as fierce and urgent about it as Cole had been. It didn’t matter that Mark didn’t really know me. He still approached my mouth as if it were limited edition, going out of style, get it now before it’s all gone. It was somehow freeing and depressing to know that love didn’t seem to have anything to do with passion.

He gripped my hips, hard, and it didn’t feel disagreeable. So this was what it was like to be an object. This was what it was like to objectify. If he had no name, how did it change things?

If he had no face? If he was only his hands or only his pelvis pressed up against mine — He pulled back, just for a second.