by Alix Ohlin
Evenings I often spent in the Worthen library, watching movies in a media room in the chilly basement, then cycling home in the warm, humid air to sleep.
After two weeks I received my first letter from Gordon, which, he noted on the back of the envelope, he’d given to a hiker nicknamed Hulk to mail in town: THANKS HULK!! I was reassured by the sight of his large, exuberant handwriting, only slightly messier than usual, and by the affectionate, quite sexual content. He missed my body, he wrote, and couldn’t wait until we were together again. I kept the letter, carefully folded, in a side pocket of my bag, and took it out every few hours at work to read it again, until it tore at the creases.
Almost everyone I knew had left for the summer, but I wasn’t lonely. In a magazine I’d found a list of the one hundred best films ever made, and I set about watching them. When Richard heard about this project, he took an interest in it, and almost every morning he’d ask me what I’d just watched and what I thought, contributing his own opinions on The Searchers or Vertigo, which we both loved. Richard’s favorite moment in Vertigo came when Jimmy Stewart begs Kim Novak, a brunette, to dye her hair blond in order to resemble his lost love. “Judy, please, it can’t matter to you!” he says desperately. Sometimes, walking past my desk, Richard would repeat, “It can’t matter to you!” and shake his head, laughing.
A week later I received, all at once, four letters from Gordon, mailed by another trail friend. I spread this treasure out on my card table at Emma’s, sorted them by date, and read them carefully; they were long and cramped, Gordon concerned about running out of paper before he could replenish his supplies. His writing, often edited mid-sentence, escaped the confines of the lines to crawl up the margins of the pages. He loved the trail, he said, it was the first genuine experience of his life. His feet were blistered and his neck and arms were covered with mosquito bites. American masculinity had gotten divorced from the life of the body, he wrote, and now he felt his physical self as never before. Our society is so plastic, he wrote, even language itself is plastic. All we are, he concluded, is animals.
Although I didn’t agree with his positions, they didn’t bother me. I was used to his extremities of thought. It was part of the appeal of Gordon, his willingness to adopt radical ideological postures and then abandon them without difficulty or regret. I was less comfortable with the language of desire in the letters, each one more fervent and explicit than the last. I’d enjoyed sex with him and now I missed it, but in these letters Gordon’s fantasies seemed to have less and less to do with anything we’d actually done together. He didn’t dwell on memories of our past experiences as I did. He imagined and described a new future and new ways of being together. When he wrote about things he wanted to do, I began to feel that it was not my body he was describing, but a body. The more graphic the sex in the letters became, the less it seemed to have to do with me.
Which is not to say that I didn’t read the letters over and over, hiding them under the pillow in my bedroom, removing them at night to be read before sleeping, handling them gingerly, as if my fingers might burn.
The last letter closed by saying how excited he was to see me soon. With his friend Mike, I was supposed to meet Gordon when he made it back down to Massachusetts. He would get more food supplies and we’d go to a motel and spend the night together. I AM GOING TO RIP YOUR CLOTHES OFF!! he wrote, with a row of x’s and o’s, incongruously sweet, beneath.
* * *
—
I was excited about this rendezvous, and pleasantly scared; I wasn’t sure what being with this new, animalistic Gordon would be like (I AM PRETTY RANK!!, he’d also written). But the next group of letters, which arrived soon thereafter, was different. One letter was seven straight pages of sexual scenario, with no preamble or sign-off. Another had been rained on and was indecipherable, but had been sent anyway. I can’t stop thinking, the last letter began, about the Apollonian-Dionysian strands in American life. Though at first this discussion seemed theoretical, it wound back to his thoughts on the primacy of physical experience. He had decided, he wrote, to embrace the Dionysian. What Thoreau didn’t understand was the basic savagery of mankind. We’re primates, that’s all. This last sentence made me think of my roommate Helen, who was spending her summer interning at a conservation society. She was always talking about how animals were more intellectual and sensitive than we gave them credit for, how their forms of language and social hierarchies were as complex as our own. She’d moved on from Jane Goodall to Frans de Waal, whose research on primates had shown that animal societies included principles of altruism and empathy. Obsessed with his book Chimpanzee Politics, Helen believed that bonobo civilization was superior to the human one. “It’s all about love,” she’d told me, “and we could learn a lot from it.” I would’ve liked to put her in a room with Gordon, who apparently wanted to dismantle civilization. It seemed to me that his mind was dismantling itself, and I felt sorry for him, going mad with loneliness and exhaustion on a trip that was proving too much—sorry, that is, until I came to the end of the last letter, in which he broke up with me.
Love is a construct, he wrote, a social invention. I just don’t see a future for it. There were no exclamation marks.
The turnaround from the previous letters was so sharp that at first I couldn’t take in what he was saying. If he was going to embrace his animal self, wasn’t our sexual reunion part of that? He’d seemed to think of little else—I’d read next to nothing, in the letters, about the scenery of Maine and New Hampshire, or even about the other hikers he’d met. I felt he was unhinged. If I could just stand in front of him, and talk with him and touch him, then surely he would recover himself, and change his mind.
But the letters were a one-sided conversation. There was no way to respond.
In agony, I sat down and wrote him one letter after another—some angry, some pleading. In some I tried to be funny. In others I reminded him, tentatively—I didn’t have his freedom with sexual language or imagination—of our physical connection. Then, desperate, I called Mike, who was at home in Boston, and asked him to deliver my letters.
“No can do,” he said jauntily. With the blinkered narcissism of love, I’d always assumed that Mike—whom I’d steadfastly ignored and knew virtually nothing about—liked me and wanted me and Gordon to be happy. How could anyone feel otherwise? But it was evident he was enjoying this drama. “Gordo wrote to me too, and I’m under strict orders to protect his decision.”
“But why is this happening?” I asked, too upset to be embarrassed by how pathetic I sounded.
Mike’s tone softened. “It was always going to happen,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“You know what it means,” he said. “Gotta go.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about; I refused to believe that the intensity of Gordon’s attention, which had wrapped itself around me so completely, could be anything but permanent. At night I sobbed so hard that Emma knocked softly at my bedroom door and asked if I was all right. I wasn’t all right, I was far from all right. I’d grown used to seeing myself through Gordon’s eyes, and now I was invisible to both of us. I would have done anything, changed any part of myself, to bring him back to me. Judy, please, it can’t matter to you. But he wasn’t asking.
14.
Gordon had been the cornerstone of my life away from home and now, in the thick heat of summer, I felt more lost than when I first arrived at Worthen. Noting my swollen eyes and slumped posture, Richard was too tactful to ask questions, but he must have guessed that sitting at the desk, thinking all day, was the worst thing I could have been doing. So he assigned me a project that involved cataloguing and re-shelving inventory in a back room, moving boxes of printer paper and old floppy disks, work that was tedious, physical, and perfect. I stopped watching so many movies; instead, I went for long bike rides on the industrial roadways surrounding
Worthen, watching forklifts load and unload their freight with mechanical grace, trucks arrive and depart, the men operating these machines small and insignificant in comparison.
By late July, I was still miserable, but I’d begun to collect some shards of self again. Richard, who was a very sweet man, went on vacation to San Francisco and returned with a gift: a mug featuring the original poster from Vertigo, the figure of a man in black falling into a swirl of red. I placed the mug on my desk and went back to working on Olga’s manuscript, wanting her to be pleased when she returned in August.
The days were unrushed and uneventful, and I had no reason to expect otherwise when the phone rang one afternoon and a woman said, “Lark, someone’s here for you.”
I tried to speak, croaked, coughed, tried again. “Who is this?”
She let out an irritated sigh. “It’s Emma.”
She’d never called me at the lab before. Since moving in I’d avoided her, as she was almost always in a bad mood. She worked up so much irritation during the school year that it was taking her all summer to clear it out. When we spoke in May, she asked only about my social life—did I have a lot of friends, would I want to have them over—and nothing about my finances. She kept saying she needed peace and quiet, “inside and out.” I was exceedingly quiet, but even my footsteps in the hallway bothered her, even the sound of my shower in the morning. Later, she moved to the Berkshires to make cheese. But she hadn’t yet discovered cheese that day, was off all dairy, in fact, and I could tell she was annoyed. “There’s a girl here asking for you,” she said. “She wanted to come in but I don’t know her so I had her wait on the steps outside. You know about the cats. They’re not used to strangers.”
She used the cats as an excuse for everything. The cats needed the shoes to be cleared out of the hallway. The cats needed lights out by ten. I wanted to tell her that the cats were nocturnal, and they rarely moved anyway; they were bony, fuzzy lumps who sat by the windows gazing reproachfully at a world they weren’t allowed to explore.
“She has luggage,” she added.
I couldn’t imagine who it was. Everyone I knew was at home or traveling or working somewhere else for the summer.
“Who is she?” I said.
I heard Emma set down the phone—even the clack of the phone on the table sounded peeved—and go outside to ask the girl her name, then come back in.
“She says she’s your sister.”
How this information hadn’t come out earlier, I wasn’t sure. “Could you put her on, please?”
Another annoyed clack, another pause.
Then: “Hi, it’s me,” Robin said. At the sound of her voice I burst into tears; I’d forgotten how beautiful it was. My own voice, which I hated, was flat and nasal, and whenever I had to leave a phone message I rushed so fast it was practically incomprehensible. But Robin’s was a musical instrument, making even three words a song.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to visit. I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I didn’t have your number.”
I’d given the number to Marianne, but it didn’t surprise me that she hadn’t passed it on. I’d been too mired in heartbreak to wonder how Robin was doing, and now I felt guilty and purely, simply, thrilled to see her.
“Wait there,” I said. “I’m on my way.”
* * *
—
When I rode up to the apartment fifteen minutes later, my sister was still sitting on the steps, with a threadbare brown suitcase next to her, like a street urchin in an old movie. She was wearing a boxy red flowered shirt that didn’t quite fit, a jean skirt, and Converse running shoes. I was startled to notice, as I got closer, that she’d pierced her nose with a tiny gold stud. Her dark hair was in a messy ponytail and I felt, seeing her, the pride that had warmed me throughout our childhood. To me she was the loveliest person in the world.
When she stood up she leaned against me and hugged me so hard my spine cracked, a violent, happy pressure. When we pulled away, I saw she was crying.
“What’s wrong?” I said. I could see Emma and her cats at the bay window in the living room, all of them staring.
“Can I stay with you?”
“Of course,” I said, glancing doubtfully at the window.
Inside, on my single bed, we sat together and whispered. My sister said she’d come to visit, that she needed a break, things weren’t good at home. I nodded; I knew how our mother could be. But when I pressed for details, Robin was evasive. Expecting our usual late-night gossip sessions, in which we analyzed and dissected Marianne endlessly, I was surprised that she had no anecdotes to offer. She seemed less angry than uncomfortable, ill at ease in her own skin; she’d always carried herself with grace, and now her posture was slumped and awkward. She crossed her arms over her chest and crossed her legs twice, both at the knee and ankle, rope-twisted.
“I just need to stay here a little while,” she said at least twice, adding, “please?” as if I needed to be persuaded, which I didn’t.
After a while I went to the kitchen and made us peanut butter sandwiches. Emma had gone out but the cats still stared at me suspiciously. When I came back to the room with the sandwiches, my sister was asleep in my bed.
15.
In the week that followed, I brought Robin with me everywhere. She rode with me to work, doubled on my bike, and ate lunch with me outside under a tree; afterward we watched movies in the Worthen library, curled with our knees up to our chins in the freezing basement media room. At night we took our shoes off, tiptoed silently past Emma’s closed bedroom door, and took turns sleeping in the bed or on the floor. After a while I hit on the idea of giving her my student ID and showing her where the practice pianos in the music building were, and soon she was happily occupied there for hours each day. I knew Emma wasn’t pleased about my houseguest, but she was attending a wedding in New York on the weekend, and I’d long ago agreed to take care of the cats, who required a complicated regimen of liquid food and medicine. One was diabetic and the other arthritic; Emma had given me extensive training in their care and written out a list of instructions that was two pages long.
“Don’t worry,” I told her on the day she left. “Beowulf and Grendel are going to be fine.”
She came over and held my hands in hers. She’d never touched me before. She was a strawberry blonde with eyebrows and eyelashes so pale they were invisible, offering her eyes no protection; she always looked as if she’d ordered something in a restaurant and was unpleasantly surprised by what arrived. “I’ve had these cats since I was fifteen years old,” she said. “I’ve had them through my parents’ divorce, my first boyfriend, my eating disorder, my second boyfriend, my disappointing my father and deciding not to go to med school, my third boyfriend, and my realizing that I didn’t want any more boyfriends because I like girls. The cats have been with me through all of that. Do you understand?”
I told her I did. I squeezed her hands and she scowled at me dubiously, then said she had to go.
The night she left Robin and I celebrated with Kraft Dinner and a dance party in the living room, the cats hunkered down on the window seat, turning their backs to the festivities. To be with Robin in an empty apartment, to listen to music and make dumb jokes and eat junk food and watch television, felt like releasing a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding for months. I told her about Gordon, editing out the sex in his letters, and she listened intently. Then I told her about Olga, how I wanted to think like her and act like her and maybe make films. Robin told me that the piano was going well and her teacher thought she should get serious about it.
“Aren’t you serious already?” I asked her. “Marianne told me you practice all the time.”
At the mention of our mother’s name, she flinched so briefly only I would have noticed it. “More serious. Go to music school.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.”
The only awkward moments came when I asked her about home. She kept changing the subject, with increasingly obvious excuses, and when I asked her directly why she wouldn’t talk about it she only shook her head and said she didn’t know what I meant. “I’m not telling you anything because there’s nothing to tell,” she said, and the lie hung in the air between us, a single discordant note in an otherwise harmonious song.
* * *
—
In the morning, when we woke up, one of the cats was dead. At first I didn’t notice—the cats, being elderly, didn’t move that much to begin with, and I was used to seeing them as still as statues by the window—but after I had prepared their morning “soup,” as Emma called it, and carried the bowls over to them, I saw that Beowulf was lying on his side with his mouth open and his eyes staring straight ahead, his legs rigid. The other cat ate her soup, accepted her medicine, and did not seem perturbed.
I swore, long and loud, bringing Robin out to the living room. She was always groggy in the morning, her hair in chaos and her eyelids thick with sleep; she moved around a lot while sleeping, sometimes walked and talked too, and when she woke up she often seemed exhausted from her labors.
