We Came Here to Forget

by Andrea Dunlop

  One morning, shortly after everyone had returned from Nagano, we overslept, and I woke in a panic that we’d be found out.

  “You’ve got to get out of here,” I whispered, laughing and tossing Luke’s swim trunks at him. He caught them and pulled me in for a quick kiss.

  “The wine bottle!” he said with a mock horrified face—we’d left an empty one by the fireplace—and winked at me as he crept out the door to hide the evidence.

  I wasn’t really worried about being blamed if Tad did find it. Luke was the designated troublemaker in the household. Tad traveled frequently and had to know Luke brought girls around; this definitely wasn’t his first foray into his father’s wine cellar. The only time I’d really seen Tad get angry was when he’d busted Luke with cocaine; drugs were different—drugs showed up on tests. I also knew, though, that the rules were different for me. However much Tad talked about my being family, I wasn’t.

  As I was coming down the hallway, I heard Luke nearly collide with Blair in the kitchen.

  “Hey, man,” Blair said.

  “Oh hey, bro.” I could practically hear his nervous heartbeat.

  “What were you doing last night? You were gone when I came in.”

  “What do you think?” Luke said with a laugh, both avoiding and implying the answer. The last place Blair would expect Luke to be was in bed with me. I suddenly felt the grip of nerves; how would we tell him? How would he take it? It felt like we’d violated some unspoken pact.

  “You dog,” Blair said, and then the two proceeded to go into their training schedules like nothing was out of the ordinary.

  Dismayingly, at first, it seemed that nothing was out of the ordinary, at least not when we were around other people. At night, Luke would sneak into my bedroom, where we’d make out for hours. We’d let ourselves get down to our underwear but no further, burning ourselves up with unsated desire. In retrospect, I’m glad I had this time with Luke. Making out is best done by the young, where the fear of going too far adds an extra kick of adrenaline; and we were both junkies for that.

  But when we were with Blair or our teammates or Luke’s freeskier buddies, it was the same as always, which left me feeling confused and isolated. I couldn’t very well talk to my best friends about it, since one was Luke and the other was Blair. My mom and I were close, but we didn’t have the kind of relationship that some girls have with their moms, where they can talk about things like love and sex, and I certainly wasn’t going to talk to my dad about it. This left me with Penny, weird religious phase or no. I called her one evening to break the news about Luke, and she was delighted.

  “I knew it!” she said. “Emily, my sister hooked up with Luke!”

  “Jesus Christ, Pen, really?”

  “Emily is dancing around our apartment right now, just so you know.”

  I laughed despite myself. It felt like such a relief to tell the two of them: my two big sisters.

  “I’m putting you on speaker. Tell us everything!”

  They were thrilled that we’d broken through the friendship barrier, but clucked knowingly at his confusing behavior around everyone else.

  “He wants to have his cake and eat it too,” Emily said. “I hate it!”

  “Katie,” Penny asked, her voice serious, “do you want Luke to be your actual boyfriend?”

  I paused; it felt strange to put it in those terms.

  “I don’t know . . .” I said. “I mean, he’s my best friend.”

  “But you’re into him!” Emily crowed. “I called this, by the way, I forgot to mention that. Penny had her money on Blair.”

  “I’m glad my love life is so hilarious to you two.”

  “Of course, it is,” Penny said. “Listen, you obviously like Luke as more than a friend. I know you’re in a committed relationship with your skis and all, but I think you want him to be your boyfriend.”

  “Definitely,” Emily chimed in.

  I knew that I didn’t want to go back to being just friends and watch Luke chase after every cute liftie who landed in town on a work visa. The desire I felt for him now was both reassuringly comfortable and thrillingly new at once: it was intoxicating. And I definitely knew that I didn’t appreciate him treating me like a buddy when we were around other people. But what I couldn’t quite explain to Penny and Emily was that it felt a little unfair to expect him to make the leap on his own. All these years, especially with Luke, I’d never wanted to be treated like a girl, and now I suddenly did.

  “Time for a DTR,” Emily said.

  “A what now?”

  Penny and Emily both groaned and laughed.

  “You’re hopeless.” Penny sighed. “It means define the relationship. What are you to each other? Friends with benefits or boyfriend and girlfriend?”

  “And what if we have different answers to that question?”

  “Nope!” Emily said.

  “Either get on the same page or be done with it, go back to being just friends. I know how close you guys are,” Penny said. “It’s not worth it unless he’s serious about you.” I was moved to know that Penny still felt a little protective of me; she’d always claimed to find my friendship with Luke weird.

  “Exactly,” Emily jumped in. “There’re other boys you can mess around with down there.”

  “DTR,” Penny said. “Do it. And report back.”

  Liz Is a Tiger

  CALI, THE beautiful teaching assistant, has become like a celebrity in my mind, and so I can’t help taking her up on the invitation to Red Door, however casually she’d thrown it out. She’s behind the bar when I show up around nine on Wednesday.

  “Oh hey,” she says, putting down the glass she’s polishing. The place is almost empty. “Nice to see you, Liz.”

  “Hey, Cali.” I feel my cheeks burning; I wonder if my loneliness is obvious.

  “What can I get you?”

  I pull myself up onto a stool. I’m wearing my now-uniform of T-shirt and jeans. I’ve chosen a T-shirt with a V-neck, trying to appreciate my new body as best I can. It’s worked maybe a little too well; I felt the eyes of every man I passed between the Subte stop and the bar. I’ve noticed that men are more open with their admiration here than in the States. A woman brings a kind of disruptive energy when she walks down the street: it’s uncomfortable and, if I’m being honest, a little thrilling.

  “What’s popular here?”

  Cali considers. “Fernet and Coke, do you want to try one?”

  “I’ve never had Fernet.”

  “It’s bitter. Kind of like Campari.”

  My tastes when it comes to cocktails are hopelessly unsophisticated; I’ve only ever been into beer and wine.

  “Doesn’t sound like my thing,” I venture.

  “Tell you what, I’ll make you a caipirinha. I’ve gotten really good at them, and I hate making them when it’s packed but it’s my favorite cocktail.”

  I watch as she muddles the mint and measures the drink expertly and quickly.

  I take a sip. “Oh wow, this is delicious.”

  “Hat-cha,” she says. “I knew it. Franco!” she calls out to the other bartender polishing glasses and tending to the sole patron at the other end of the bar. “Mi caipirinha está perfecta ahora, yo te lo dije.”

  He smiles warmly and rolls his eyes. His gaze lingers on her, and I’m certain he has a crush on Cali; I am certain everyone who comes near her has a crush on Cali.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot, Shirley.” She looks up from the lime wedges.

  “What brought you to Buenos Aires? Other than perfecting your caipirinha.”

  She smiles a Cheshire cat smile at me, and it occurs to me that, as much as I want to know, maybe I shouldn’t have asked her this.

  “If I wanted to do that, I’d go to Brazil, honey, it’s their cocktail. But as to why I left New York, that’s a very long story. I couldn’t stay in my job anymore. I had to go somewhere, so I came here a year ago. I guess I had a vague notion that I�
��d like it here and I turned out to be right.”

  Before it happened, I never considered other roads my life might’ve taken, and now I think of them all the time. Specifically, I think about how my choices might have altered Penny’s. We were so close in age that, growing up, our lives seemed calibrated to each other’s, like the one wouldn’t exist in the same way without the other.

  “Nice,” I say. So Cali is a free spirit. She came on a whim rather than as a last resort, depending, I suppose, on what the rest of that long story contains. “And how did you meet Gianluca?”

  “Here,” she says. “It’s one of his regular haunts.”

  “Huh, I thought this place was a bit of an expat bar.”

  “It is. Haven’t you noticed that he collects them? Us. He comes in here all the time to play pool and recruit.”

  “Try to get pretty girls to come to his studio?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And somehow he convinced you.”

  She smiles and shrugs. “I ignored him for a while, since I just thought he was trying to sleep with me.”

  “Wasn’t he?”

  “Well, sure, but I started hearing from other people how good the studio was, so I gave it a try and I was hooked. Anyway, Gianluca is pretty easily distracted by shiny new things, so we’re friends now. I got to know Edward, and then Gemma when she came here a few months back, and yeah. It’s been a blast, actually.”

  “So have you heard this story then, about how he and Edward know one another?”

  She laughs. “I’ve heard about eighteen different versions of it. I’m sure none of them are true. Something about a countess on a yacht and a jealous husband. In some versions the countess is young and beautiful, in others she’s old and rich. In all of them, the husband ends up dead.” She laughs at the alarm on my face. “Like I said, I’m sure it’s not true. I’ve also heard that Gianluca is a disgraced matador and the illegitimate son of General Pinochet.”

  “I heard it was Perón.”

  “Well, there you have it. And what about you?” she asks. “What brought you here?”

  “Also a long story. But part of it was a really bad breakup.” I guess if Cali hasn’t recognized me yet, she isn’t going to.

  “Buenos Aires Lonely Hearts Society.” She smiles.

  “Hey.” I smile and take another sip of my drink, which is going down fast. “That’s Gemma’s joke.”

  “Busted. She’s right, though.”

  A memory of Blair comes back to me as Cali goes off for a moment to tend to a new set of customers. He and I walking down a wide street, near the Plaza Serrano maybe?

  “I love it here,” I said to him. “Wouldn’t this be a fun place to live?”

  He nodded, smiling at me in a way I hope I remember forever as clearly as I do now. I was so happy that night, all the sweeter because it felt like I hadn’t been happy in a while. I hadn’t spoken to Penny in over a year by then, and the worry over her and Ava felt like a stone lodged permanently under my heel. It was unimaginable then that the worst was yet to come, that a reconciliation would never happen. But a new season was about to start, and I was healthier than I’d been in a while. Our country was on a hopeful precipice of history: poised to elect an inspiring young senator from Illinois.

  “We could,” Blair said. “It’s close to the Andes.”

  “We could be tango dancers!” I said to him, grabbing his hand and marching him down the street singing “Dum, dum, duhhh dum,” dramatically.

  “All that, Katie, all that,” he said, laughing. “Whatever you want.”

  Would it have been better or worse to know then that it was all about to end?

  I swear I feel Gianluca walk into the room. God, I’m crushing hard. Though maybe I’m mixed up between the appeal of the dancing itself and the man who’s brought it to me. I know Luke would find this man ridiculous. Luke was narrow-minded about masculinity: he felt that his way—athletic, dominant, his whole body and being just screaming “I’m a man!”—was the only way to be male. He dismissed anything that diverged from that: the flabby, the weak, the effeminate, the artsy. At least Blair and I had gotten him to drop his habit of saying “Dude, that’s gay” whenever he found something unimpressive. Gianluca, with his flair, was an entirely other kind of masculine.

  He calls out to Cali before he notices me, and she glides across the bar to kiss his cheeks and give him a long hug as though it’s been weeks rather than days since they’ve seen each other. I wonder still if Cali has slept with him, realizing now that she sort of glossed over it. Gianluca has a friend with him: handsome but rough-looking with a thick neck and tattoos up his muscled arms.

  “You remember my friend Mauro,” he says in Spanish as they order a round of drinks. Cali goes to find another bottle of Fernet, and I feel the unsettling weight of Gianluca’s eyes landing on me.

  “Oh, hello.”

  “Hi, Gianluca.”

  “G, please. My name is a mouthful.”

  The way he says mouthful sounds obscene, and I think, from the way he’s smiling, that he means it that way.

  Mauro nods a hello and tells G he’s going to get them a pool table, leaving us alone for a minute while G waits for their drinks. He’s standing so close to me, leaning forward on the bar with one hand, unnervingly in my space.

  “Che, I have a nickname for you,” he says, smiling.

  “Excuse me?” His eyes are sparkling. I have the stomach-dropping anticipation of impending humiliation.

  “I. Have. A. Nickname,” he says, cocking his head at me, “for you.”

  “You barely know me.”

  He puts a hand on my shoulder, laughing off my defensiveness. “Relax,” he says, squeezing it. I’ve absorbed everything from the past two years into the space between my shoulders. “I have nicknames for all of my favorites. And you need a nickname if you’re going to live here, you know. Your Buenos Aires name.”

  Is he flirting? Is this how people flirt?

  “Well,” I finally say.

  He raises his eyebrows at me.

  “What is it? What’s my nickname?” I turn my stool to face him, trying to get my bearings. I feel myself leaning in, close enough that I can smell him.

  He seems delighted that I’m taking the bait.

  “Tiger,” he says.

  “Why Tiger?”

  He shrugs. “Fierce feline. Tiger, tiger burning bright. Eye of the tiger.”

  I flush. “Because I remind you so much of Rocky?” My childhood nickname comes back to me with a jolt. Manly Cleary. In a thousand ways big and small, I’ve gotten this message since I was a kid: don’t be so strong, so big, so fast, so aggressive, so you. When people referred to me as a big, strong girl—which I always was—it wasn’t always meant as a compliment. I didn’t care so much when I was an athlete, but now I’m just a woman.

  “Yes!” G says. “Exactly. It’s your eyes. You look so intense in class, like you must learn tango. It’s adorable.”

  I nod, bemused. Adorable? Fuck him. Well, fuck me. The armor is gone and he sees a fleshy, ordinary girl.

  “Actually, it’s mesmerizing.” He leans in. “I can tell your heart is in it. But we’ve got to get you to loosen up a little. To tell you the truth, you’re my special little project.” Just then, Cali returns with his drinks. The bar’s gotten busier, so I just ask for a glass of wine when she asks if I want another. I tell her she can choose.

  Is my heart in it? I realize that I want to become a good tango dancer while I’m here; it would be nice to stop feeling so useless. I want more of whatever it is I’ve been feeling on the dance floor. Perhaps if I had that focal point, that goal to work incrementally toward each day, it would give me some relief. Perhaps it would make me feel that my body was my own again. Right now, it’s a padded cell that houses my addled brain.

  “G,” I say, as he is getting ready to take his drinks to his friends.

  “Tiger.”

  “I’m wondering about . . . that is, if yo
u offer private lessons.” I don’t mean this to sound suggestive, but once the words are out of my mouth, they’re absorbed by the air of sex that surrounds him and transformed. “I’d like a coach,” I continue, trying to anchor myself in that familiar, anodyne word. “I’m not happy with my progress.”

  He is smiling at me in that maddening way, as if I am just too amusing. As if I am not a fucking former world champion. And I find myself nearly saying this out loud. Do you know who I am? What I was?

  “Is that right? That’s funny because you’re one of my best students, but those are always the ones who want to work harder. And, as a matter of fact, Tiger, I do teach privates. But only for very special students. Only if I know I’m going to enjoy it.”

  I feel my face twisting with incredulousness, as if to say, I don’t have the time for this nonsense. Except I have all the time in the world for this nonsense.

  “It’s a yes, for you, Tiger. Of course. When do you want to begin?”

  I want to be irritated that he calls me Tiger, but I can’t be. It reminds me of the nickname that Luke gave me when we were kids, one later adopted by the rest of the team—Bomber. So Tiger it is. It gives me comfort that maybe this man, however improbably, sees something of what I was. He sees Katie Cleary. He sees Bomber, wrapped in the unimpressive shell of Liz Sullivan.

  “Tomorrow,” I say, not caring how he interprets my urgency. “Does tomorrow work?”

  “Tomorrow,” he says. “Four p.m. is my only time.”

  I nod. I have a tour from two to four, but I will cut it short to be there in time. I will reroute it to end at Casa Rosada. I am filled with heady anticipation at the idea of slotting back into the familiar role of protégée, of being coached, especially by him.

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Penny Is a Good Big Sister