by Alix Ohlin
“You’re the one who cleaned up after Basu,” he said. I nodded, not sure if Basu was in trouble.
“Do you want his job?”
I remembered what the boy had said, how scared he’d seemed of Richard, and hesitated. “Did you fire him?”
“Did I what? No, he quit. Cracked under the pressure of this intensive position.”
I wasn’t sure if this was meant as a joke, but it absolutely was. The work, if you could call it that, was spectacularly easy; there was almost nothing to do. I loved the lab, starting with the contrast between the student union’s old-fashioned brick exterior, with its gingerbread molding and brass door fixtures, and the cool white modernity of the lab in the basement. There were no windows, and all the light was fluorescent. Although Richard was a hulk of a man, well over six feet tall and not thin, his stature seemed to embarrass him, and he did everything he could to diminish it. I sat at the front desk, and his office was in the back of the room. When he needed to talk to me he’d stand a few feet away, so as not to overwhelm me, and speak so softly that I often had to ask him to repeat himself. Even the second time I wasn’t always sure what he’d said.
Sometimes Richard and I chatted, him telling me about his weekend—he and his wife were Renaissance fair people, though you’d never have guessed it from his workweek khakis and collared shirts—but most of the time I was alone. When the phone rang, which it rarely did, it was my job to answer it, and I’d often have to clear my throat, because it had been hours since I’d said a word.
* * *
—
I finished the fall semester in a haze of intellectual and sexual satisfaction. When I arrived home for the holidays, I felt like a stranger there. My sister and mother had grown closer in my absence, with shared jokes and frames of reference from which I was excluded. Robin seemed more anxious to please Marianne than she’d ever been before, fixing her attention on our mother in a way I didn’t remember her doing in the past, and I wondered if this was to punish me for having left. Neither of them was interested in my stories about Worthen, and I often found myself starting an anecdote only to abandon it halfway. The style of speaking I’d picked up at school, a name-dropping banter that relied on the listener’s familiarity, real or pretended, with figures like Foucault or John Stuart Mill, confused them, and they kept saying things like “I don’t know him” or “Who’s he when he’s at home?” I retreated into my silence, watching them from the sofa while they prepared dinner, missing them while they were right in front of me.
The only times I felt at ease were at night, with Robin, in our room. In the darkness, we reverted to our old selves, whispering gossip. Things were going well between Marianne and her boyfriend; Robin thought they might get married. He was very refined, Robin said. “He has his shirts handmade in Italy. It’s called bespoke. He wants to have some dresses made for me next time he’s in Milan.”
Like me, Robin mostly wore thrift-store clothes from a boutique in our neighborhood called Mimi La Guerre, whose owner wasn’t named Mimi and never explained where the war was, but who liked us and would sell us outfits for less than a dollar. The previous year we’d bought, from an Army surplus store, matching navy-blue peacoats that were too large for us.
“So you like him,” I said.
“He’s okay, I guess. I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” It wasn’t like Robin not to have an opinion. The silence that followed was hemmed by the familiar movements of Robin’s body in her bed, the creak of its frame.
“He said I’m beautiful like a spring day when the first flowers come up.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.” She propped herself up on her elbow to look at me, her face a serious mask in the dark.
“It sounds like a commercial. Fresh as a summer breeze that takes you by surprise.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like an ad for a feminine hygiene product.”
Robin lay down, then propped herself up again. “What’s a feminine hygiene product?”
Of her own life she said little, and afterward, on the bus back to Worthen, I regretted not asking her more about it. I’d allowed my discomfort to overwhelm me, and I wrote her an apologetic letter asking how she was doing. She replied with a postcard of a Salvador Dalí painting of a melted clock hanging off a dead tree. I told you everything, she wrote. I found the note strange, and was unable to decide whether this sentence was reassuring or accusatory. I’d never had trouble parsing my sister’s tone before. I showed the postcard to Gordon, who shrugged. “She said everything’s fine, so it’s fine, right?”
“I guess,” I said. Later, I blamed myself for not suspecting that something was wrong. But almost immediately I was swept up in the rhythms of the new semester. I was back at the computer lab and with Gordon, and then I fell in love again, this time academically.
I’d enjoyed all my classes at Worthen, but it was in a film class that something extraordinary happened. I enrolled in the course without much thought or intention; as a child, I’d loved going to the movies, and I wanted to learn more about how they were made. My ambitions weren’t much greater than those of the guy who sat next to me on the first day of class, winking as he said, “Who wouldn’t want to watch movies for credit, right?”
But we didn’t watch a movie. The professor was a dark-haired Russian woman wearing bright red lipstick and a blue scarf that trailed down her back, almost to the floor, and I kept worrying she was going to trip over it, since she was also wearing very high heels. She launched into her lecture without preamble, discussing the nostalgia of the modern. In my notebook, I wrote down: Nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time. It is a romance with the fantasy of loss. I didn’t know what she meant by this, and nobody asked her to explain; I didn’t want to reveal myself as the only ignorant one. Nostalgia is to memory what kitsch is to art, she also said, a homesickness for the home that never was. As she spoke she passed around strips of film and asked us to examine their material qualities. I had never seen a film strip before, and I held mine by the perforated edges, afraid of the damage I might do. My fingerprints smudged the strip anyway and trying to wipe them off only made it worse. On the strip itself, reddish-black and mysterious, I could make out nothing at all.
Then the professor—her name was Olga Ivanov—fished a reel of film out of a round metal container, fed it into a projector, and then, to my surprise, projected the film against us, the students, not onto the screen at the front of the room. We were bathed in barely perceptible colors that flitted and fell; we could both see and not see. Whispers filled the room. According to my notes: Cinema is a museum of memory, an artifact that both enshrines and falsifies.
Then she reversed the projector and showed the same film on the screen: it was of another group of students, sitting slack-jawed in a classroom. They whispered at us; we whispered at them. Then, abruptly, she shut the projector off, packed up the equipment, and left the room, her heels hammering the floor as she went.
“What a gimmick,” said the guy next to me who’d just wanted to watch movies.
“She’s amazing,” I said.
“Oh, you’re going to be an acolyte,” he said. And I was.
12.
Olga Ivanov had come to Worthen from Moscow via Paris and New York. Whatever pressures of academic job market and personal circumstance had led her to a tiny college in Massachusetts, she didn’t act as if the place was beneath her. She treated her work with high seriousness and expected us to do the same. She made no allowances for our youth and lack of sophistication; she showed us Tarkovsky and Deren and Eisenstein, who called montage the nerve of cinema and constructed a grammar of film adopted by Hitchcock; and if we didn’t understand what she was saying, she looked at us over the rim of her glasses and talked dialectical materialism until we were
even more confused, dizzy with our confusion. Why is it, she seemed to say, you think understanding should be easy? From an enrollment of fifty on the first day, the class shed students week by week until it was down to nine people, all of us who remained entranced by her.
One day in class we were discussing the film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, a documentary in which the director is shown living up to his promise to eat his shoe if Errol Morris finishes his film Gates of Heaven. Olga Ivanov described this as an example of sublimated sexual desire reinforcing the bonds of the patriarchy, “which is not to say that both men are not great filmmakers,” she added. “Merely that the camera operates from a position of male hunger and appetite.” She made asides like this which I wrote down, word for frantic word, wanting to preserve not just the insight but also her cadence and intonation.
After class that day I worked up the courage to visit her office. I stood at the door, peering in. It was dim—she refused to use the fluorescent overhead lights, and only a single lamp cast a meagre glow—and cluttered. Stacks of books and files leaned on top of cabinets and on the floor, landslides waiting to topple. She sat at the desk wrapped in a shawl and didn’t look up when I cleared my throat. I was so nervous that I forgot to knock, instead simply launching into the question I’d rehearsed in my mind on the way over.
“Do you think Herzog eating the shoe is an homage to Charlie Chaplin eating a shoe in The Gold Rush, or is that just a coincidence?”
If she expected more of a conversational preamble, she didn’t show it.
“There are no coincidences,” she said. “Only versions of the image.”
Like many of her remarks, this answer was more gnomic than illuminating. It seemed designed to provoke further conversation, and indeed she gestured for me to enter. “Would you like some tea?”
I nodded, and she poured some from a small clay teapot. The mug she passed to me had no handle and burned my fingers, so I almost dropped it. I squinted at her in the semi-darkness. Outside, the sun had already set, the Worthen lamp posts gleaming in the January afternoon, snowflakes visibly churning around students as they passed into the light and out again. She began talking about Herzog and his integrity, a lecture I was barely able to follow but that thrilled me nonetheless. Only in retrospect do I understand that she must have been lonely; at the time she seemed impossibly glamorous and self-possessed. Her talk was a winding path through the world, with signposts of the artists and writers and filmmakers she’d met in her travels. She told me about living in London when she was my age and watching films by experimentalists like Chantal Akerman and Lawrence Wheelock, names that meant nothing to me at the time.
“And you?” she said on that first day. “What do you do?”
Every answer that came to mind seemed inadequate, pedestrian. “I want to make films,” I said impetuously.
“Ah?” A smile tilted her red-lipped mouth to the left. “What kind of films?”
I was already in over my head, and I groped for a response that would please her, rendering me worth her attention. “Films with integrity. In which the camera isn’t just an apparatus of the male gaze.” I had little to no idea what this meant. I was merely throwing back to her words she’d flung out in class, a human echo, vague and faint.
“How will you do that?” she said, and laughed when I told her I wasn’t sure yet.
She didn’t give me any advice, much less encouragement. But she allowed me to visit her regularly, to share my primitive opinions of the films we’d seen in class, and she talked to me about her work as we sipped tea. I became her unpaid assistant, filing her interlibrary loan requests for items not available in Worthen’s library, searching microfiche documents, proofreading her manuscripts. “You check for grammar and spelling only,” she told me, with the severity of a parent instructing a child. “Nothing else.” I wouldn’t have dared to consider anything else.
Toward the end of the year, she invited me along on a trip to New York City. She drove a battered old Toyota with a stick shift through the chaotic traffic, muttering what I assumed to be Russian curses, and parked on the Lower East Side in a lot operated by other Russians, with whom she argued violently before handing over her money. We spent the afternoon at a film archive before meeting a friend of hers for drinks at Yaffa Café. I wasn’t included in their conversation, but I didn’t mind. I was happy that no one expected me to participate, as I was more than a little distracted by the burlesque decorations and zebra-print furniture and strands of lights, not to mention the arguments and flirtations going on all around me. Afterward, as we walked past the record stores on St. Marks Place, Olga asked me to drive home, and I had to explain that I didn’t know how.
“Stick shift is not difficult,” she said stubbornly.
I told her this wasn’t the issue. I didn’t know how to drive, period.
Olga, vexed, didn’t believe me. “All Americans learn to drive,” she said. When I said I was Canadian, she was nonplussed. I understood with chagrin that the drive home was the entire reason that she’d brought me along.
“All right,” she said at last. “All right. Your job now is to keep me awake.”
She downed an espresso and reclaimed the car. As we jostled over the threadbare highways out of the city, I tried to entertain her with stories about my mother and sister, the devil and angel of my life, exaggerating both the bad and the good. I made Robin and myself sound like orphans out of Dickens, and Marianne an abusive tyrant. We all changed in my telling, squirming into new relief. Olga squinted at the road—I learned later that she hated to drive at night—and gave no responses. I moved on to Gordon and how, though we’d been together for months, I still sometimes called him the burly guy inside my head, and this made her laugh. Being with her in the car as the traffic thinned, following the wooded curves of the Saw Mill Parkway, then hitting the almost absolute darkness of the county highway that took us back to Worthen, reminded me of being with Robin at night in our room. I talked and talked, ransacking my life for material—Todd and Bob; Mrs. Gasparian; Hervé of the bespoke shirts—and I was almost sorry when the drive ended. It was past midnight when Olga dropped me by the college gates. It occurred to me, as I trudged the final steps back to my room, that I didn’t know where she lived.
13.
The summer after my first year at Worthen, I didn’t go home. I’d felt so uncomfortable at Christmas that I decided, dramatically, there was no longer a place for me there. Richard said I could work at the computer lab, and Olga, before departing for Europe, gave me some research projects for which she offered a small stipend. The two jobs added up to just enough money to live on. Required to move out of the dorm, I answered a flyer for a roommate posted by a woman named Emma, who was twenty-four and taught at a nearby elementary school. The room came with a single bed and a card table with a folding chair. It was the first time I’d ever slept in a room alone.
When I told my mother over the phone that I wouldn’t be returning, she was indifferent. “If that’s what you want,” she said with the air of someone who’d washed her hands of the situation. I asked to speak to Robin, and she laughed harshly. “She’s never home anymore,” she said. “All she does is play that piano. For years I couldn’t wait to get rid of you both—and now, poof! You’re gone.” She sounded less pleased than defiant. As always with Marianne, her emotional reactions were mixed and difficult to parse. I had the feeling she missed us, and also that she wished she’d kicked us out herself.
At graduation, I met Gordon’s parents. His father was a larger, stouter version of him, with an even bushier beard shot through with grey, and his mother was a dowdy, fair-haired woman in enormous glasses behind which her eyes blinked owlishly. True to reputation, they showered me with questions about growing up in a Commonwealth country and were gratified that I knew the words to “God Save the Queen.” They took the two of us out to dinner at the nicest r
estaurant near Worthen, an Italian place noisy with other graduating students and their families, where I ordered plain spaghetti and an iceberg salad and sipped Coke with crushed ice from a tall glass. The next morning they drove off with Gordon’s things. His roommate Mike was going to drive him up to Maine to begin his Appalachian Trail hike. As Gordon and I kissed goodbye outside his dorm, Mike gazing discreetly at the horizon, I burst into tears. Everything I’d become at Worthen had taken place under his tutelage.
“Hey, hey, Looks Down at the Ground,” he said, circling his arms around me. “I’ll write you all the time, and we’ll meet up later this summer. What do you think my trail name should be? Apparently everybody has one.”
“Burly guy,” I said, wiping a palm across my wet cheek, and he scowled.
“I was thinking Thoreau,” he said. “You know, I really feel like I’m going to find something essential on this trip. I’m going to get boiled down to myself, you know? The inner resources. The measure of a man. I’m going to figure out what’s underneath this bluster. Why I’m such a pedantic mess.”
“I don’t think you’re a pedantic mess,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I’m a work in progress, anyway.” He kissed me again, and got into the car.
* * *
—
After his departure I moped around for a while until the tranquility of the summer restored me. I loved the campus in June, lush, green, and underpopulated, and at a garage sale I bought a second-hand bike, which I rode from Emma’s apartment to work each day.
I’d leave home in the morning earlier than I had to, to avoid both the heat and Emma, who scared me a little. She rarely spoke to me or, so far as I could tell, anyone else. Every morning she performed an elaborate breakfast ritual involving ground hemp seeds and soy milk for herself and mashed slurry for her elderly cats, who possessed five teeth between the two of them. The route to campus was tree-lined and quiet, and the lab was fluorescent and quiet. While sitting at the desk I went through Olga’s manuscript—a book about nostalgia and the image—making an index, which involved painstaking scrutiny and record-keeping. Fortunately, I was rarely disturbed. The few people using the lab in the summer were mostly other international students, so devoted to their projects that they sat in front of their terminals for hours on end, the only noises the click of keyboards, the occasional sneeze or cough or sigh.
