by Alix Ohlin
* * *
—
After that night, Wheelock invited me into the editing room regularly, and those final weeks of August became what I’d hoped the entire summer would be. He needed my eye, Wheelock said, and I was happy to give it to him. He’d show me two sequences—sometimes as brief as ten seconds—edited slightly differently, and we’d discuss them for hours, well into the night, drinking bitter coffee gone cold. At two in the morning I’d go to the shed, where Brian was sleeping, wake him up to have sex, and then lie awake after he fell back asleep, my nerves buzzing from adrenaline and caffeine. Besides the editing, I went through Wheelock’s correspondence and blocked out a plan for the next year: which invitations he should accept, which deadlines he could meet, which could be ignored. I mapped his future. “This is perfect,” he said. “Are you sure you have to go back to New York?”
I laughed and told him I did, gratified by the look of disappointment on his face.
Brian and I said goodbye on a clear night lavished with stars made blurry and thick by the ecstasy we’d taken. We stayed up until sunrise, when he said he had to go home. “My mom always makes me pancakes on my last day.”
I pictured a middle-aged woman in a flowered apron, spatula in hand, a vastly different mother from my own. I hadn’t spoken to Marianne all summer; when I’d told her I was going to Pennsylvania, she’d said, “Watch out for vampires.” I realized later she meant Transylvania, and I wasn’t sure if she was joking; I knew her that little. “You never introduced me,” I said to Brian.
“I know. You’re welcome.”
He kissed the tip of my nose and drove away. Then for the last week it was just me and Wheelock. Emboldened by the screening of Potato, I asked if I could show him some of the work I’d done that summer, and he agreed. I showed him Summertime, PA and Brian Driving. All together the films were twenty-six minutes long, probably the longest twenty-six minutes of my life to date, sitting in a dark room with Wheelock watching his profile, listening to him breathe. “Hm,” he said, and nodded. “I see what you’re doing,” he said, and nodded again. He didn’t say he loved the work; he didn’t say he hated it. He knew—he must have known—how terrifying it was for me to show him the films. He could have chosen to cut me down. But he didn’t, and from this I deduced there was something of worth in what he saw. So he bought my allegiance, not with praise but with silence. That’s how cheap I was.
26.
I came back to the Tunnel in a frenzied mood, convinced that the summer had changed my life. I wanted to show my sister the films I’d made, to recount the twisting course of my time with Wheelock, sharing each detail, from the unexplained vats of cigarette butts to the day he cured my nettle stings with baking soda to the nights we spent talking. So often in my life events did not seem real until I’d narrated them to her. She’d sit on her bed with her knees tucked under her chin, her eyes fixed on mine, listening, drawing from me the confessions I couldn’t make to anyone else.
I burst into the apartment, calling her name. Her shoes were by the front door, her jean jacket hung on a peg in the hall. But she didn’t answer me. The door to her room was closed. I called her name again, thinking she might be asleep—though it was two in the afternoon—and knocked lightly. I could hear movements and maybe low music; she had a little CD player on which she played her repertoire, often falling asleep to the pieces, so that her mind would absorb the rhythms even while she was unconscious. I knocked again. Then I opened the door to see Robin sitting up in bed in her T-shirt and underwear, next to a boy who was, like her, rubbing his eyes sleepily. Though he was older and his shoulders had broadened and his hair was shorter and now in braids, I recognized him right away. It was her old boyfriend from high school: Bernard.
“What are you doing here?” I said stupidly.
“Lark, what’s up? Long time.”
When I looked at my sister, she smiled at me emptily and leaned against him, pushing hard until he got the hint, gathering his clothes and putting them on under the covers. The air in the room smelled skunky and stale. Bernard kissed her on the lips and took his time with his clothes and shoes. They said goodbye calmly, without making plans to see one another again, which I took to mean they already had such plans, regular plans, a routine.
After he left I sat down on my own bed and Robin joined me there, knees up, shirt pulled over them. On the front of her shirt was a picture of Snoopy and Charlie Brown, both of their faces swollen and distended by her knees. “It happened a few months ago,” she said.
“Months ago? When I was still here?”
She didn’t answer. “I was walking across Washington Square Park on my way to see you. I’d had a bad day at school and I had this idea that I could surprise you. It was really cold out and I just wanted to find you and we’d maybe drink some hot chocolate or something. Go to a movie.”
“Months ago?” I said again.
“Then this guy in a Rasta hat said Smoke, smoke and I shook my head but then I doubled back. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that said ‘Worthen’ on it and that made me stop. I didn’t even see his face but I recognized him, Lark. Something about his shoulders. His feet. I said his name and we hugged, for a really long time, until we were just standing pressed up against each other. I was so happy. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt happy like that. Like finding a hundred dollars in the street—something really good happening that you never expected.”
“Like getting into Juilliard?”
She shook her head. “Something without strings attached,” she said. We were lying next to each other now, stretched out head to head, Robin telling her story to the ceiling. When we were kids we used to sleep in each other’s beds if we got lonely or sad or scared. We never minded being on top of each other.
“So instead of finding you I went to a bar with Bernard. He has his GED. He lives in Jackson Heights with his aunt and he works at Foot Locker.”
“And sells pot in the park.”
“Retail doesn’t pay anything, you know that.”
“What happened to his mom?”
“She’s back in jail. Of course. I could have told him that would happen—I did tell him that would happen—but he always said she was his mom and that was that.”
At this, she and I exchanged looks. We were the opposite of Bernard; we were mother fleers, self-chosen orphans.
“Anyway, we made out in the bar for a while.”
“I don’t need this level of detail,” I said.
“I know you probably think it’s weird, but he calms me down.”
“Of course he does. He’s a pot dealer.”
“It’s not that,” she said. Her face was creased with sleep but her eyes, it’s true, looked calm and clear. Her fingers weren’t drumming her thighs in spastic practice of whatever piece she was committing to memory. I thought about Glenn Gould, whom everyone brought up to my sister, and the chair he always sat in to play. His father had sawed off the legs to give him the perfect height from the ground. The chair was shabby and often the subject of jokes, even from Gould himself. He could sway back and forth in it, balancing. By the end of his life the stuffing was falling out and you could only sit on one wooden plank that bisected the seat, but Gould wouldn’t part with the chair. It must have brought him so much comfort. Or maybe it was just an eccentric attachment. My sister, I knew, needed both comfort and attachment. I should have made her a special chair, I thought.
“You can disappear into the editing room for days and not think about anything else,” she said. “It’s not like that for me.”
“What’s it like, then?”
She flopped down on her back again and stared at the ceiling. She put the palms of her hands on her ears, then her stomach, then crossed her arms to rest a palm on each shoulder. “It’s like…everybody’s pulling at me,” she said. “I have no control
. I’m not allowed to feel what I want to feel.” Her hair was growing out from a short punk asymmetrical adventure; one side of her head was severe, with a blue streak getting paler with time, her natural color re-emerging at the roots, and on the other a new tuft of baby hair was curling out shyly below her ear. She looked so pretty; trying to blunt her beauty only made it more obvious.
“I know school is stressful,” I said, feeling how unhelpful it was.
“My teachers say my craving for drama is holding me back. That I should aspire to be a vessel without ego. That if I focus on technique expression will follow. That I need to have faith in the piano, not myself. One of my teachers, Stanley, he stands next to me while I’m playing and whispers over and over, More fingers less brain. I can’t even listen to him anymore, Lark. I hear his voice and I want to strip my own skin off. I want to be naked, more than naked, I want to be stripped down to the bones. I want to be nothing.”
“Smoke, smoke,” I said, and she nodded as if I understood her at last.
27.
Bernard did seem to mellow her, or maybe it really was the weed. Whichever it was, she spent less time at school and more at the apartment, the two of them lounging in her bed. Learning that they’d been together for months without my knowing it had startled and alarmed me; I felt that I’d abandoned my responsibility to take care of her, and I too began keeping more regular hours, coming home for dinner a few nights a week. Sometimes we even cooked together while listening to music, never classical but bootleg hip-hop that Bernard bought somewhere in Queens. The bands were from Slovenia or Senegal or Israel, and they sampled American songs while simultaneously playing the accordion or the drums or the kazoo. Bernard could repeat all the words, though he didn’t speak the languages, and would bop around the kitchen singing along as he chopped vegetables or opened cans of Tecate. When I asked what the lyrics meant, he’d shrug. When I asked why he liked the music so much, he’d say, “How could you not like it?” He had no answers for anything and no interest in the questions. He was happy all the time. He had no edges, he was completely rounded; he seemed to have decided the world would bounce off him and he’d made himself into something ragged but buoyant, the personality equivalent of a rubber-band ball.
He loved my sister, I could see that much. He brought her gifts from the street: books scavenged off stoops, little shoplifted toys. She lined these totems up on the shelf above her bed, where they spent hours together, Robin going over her sheet music, Bernard smoking a bowl and staring at the ceiling, apparently thinking about nothing. Fingers without brains.
He made her happy, but I couldn’t bring myself to like him; I was forever suspicious. One time he tried to pour some Coke from a bottle into a glass and the cap was still on and this made him laugh for five minutes. He was a clown.
Maybe it was also true that with Bernard around Robin didn’t need me as much. At night I could hear them rustling, like two animals in a terrarium. Sometimes Bernard would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and his knobby-kneed legs would brush past my bed, close enough that I could have touched them if I wanted, although I didn’t. He was very thin and his legs were hairless and stringy. Robin never woke up in the night. When she slept she dove far beneath the surface of consciousness, fathoms deep. I lay awake, turning problems over in my mind. I knew Bernard often lay awake too because I smelled the pot he smoked after he came back from the bathroom. He and I were like two sentries, vigilant by my sister’s body, standing guard over the temporary dead.
* * *
—
Bernard more or less lived with us that year, still working at Foot Locker and selling in Washington Square Park. He wanted to enroll at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and study fire science. When I asked him why he said that fire was a holy spirit and to control it was the greatest challenge known to man. Then I asked if he was doing more drugs than just pot and he didn’t answer. I said, “You know being a fireman is hard, right?” He didn’t answer that either.
Besides fire science his other life dream was to take care of his mother, on whom he still doted, despite the thousand times she’d disappointed and betrayed him. She was getting released in six months and he wanted to bring her up to New York and find her an apartment. He was saving all his drug money toward this goal. Like a lot of things Bernard did or hoped to do, it seemed both commendable and misguided.
Robin’s asymmetrical hair grew out to a bob, and as the weather turned warm she wore short, flowered dresses and combat boots. Once, coming back to the apartment at five in the afternoon, I saw a beautiful couple dancing in the street ahead of me: as they held hands, the man lifted his arm into an arch and the woman twirled beneath it like a ballerina in a music box until she landed against him and he dipped her. It was Robin and Bernard.
In April Robin performed in a recital at school, and to my surprise, Boris Dawidoff was there. She played a baroque piece I didn’t enjoy, a sonata in which her fingers picked and stabbed at the keys with tidy, dry precision, the music folding and turning back on itself in intricate, nearly mathematical variations. But when she finished she was flushed, and her quick side smile to the audience showed me how hard she’d worked. In the lobby afterward she was surrounded by friends and other performers and I stood off to the side, clutching a few shortbread cookies in my left hand. Boris was in front of me before I knew he was even close.
He’d left Worthen, I learned, for a position at the Manhattan School of Music, and he gleamed with success. He was beautifully dressed, in a blue shirt, pressed wool pants, expensive loafers. A navy silk scarf coiled around his neck. He looked like a playboy millionaire on a cable TV show. I asked him how Olga was—although I thought of her often, I hadn’t written to her much, mostly for fear of imposing on her time—and he shrugged and said he didn’t know. Their relationship was, as ever, a mystery to me.
“The performance was not bad,” he said. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”
I’d just popped a whole cookie in my mouth, and it took me an awkward second to get it all down. When I spoke, I spat some crumbs on his shirt. “I’m not doing anything,” I said.
“If you say so,” he said. “But she’s growing up, our girl.”
I said nothing, unhappy at his proprietary our but unwilling to contradict it; so much of Robin’s life we owed to him.
“She seems happier these days,” he said.
“She has a boyfriend,” I blurted, instantly regretting it.
But he nodded without surprise. “Yes, Bernard,” he said. “Not the brightest man I ever met, but therefore no threat to your sister’s confidence. A smart choice, if an obvious one.”
I stuffed another cookie in my mouth. To hear Robin spoken of like this, dismissively, as if she tabulated her needs and insecurities on some kind of sheet, made me queasy.
“She’s like all artists,” he said. “She’s the top part of the stool”—here he hovered his palm over the floor, to illustrate—“always looking for the legs that will prop her up.” I thought, inevitably, of Gould’s chair, which was now on display in a glass case in Ottawa, no stuffing left. I pictured Bernard sitting in a glass case, cross-legged, smoking a bowl while arts-minded tourists checked him out.
The cookies were turning to grit in my fist. “I should go congratulate her,” I mumbled.
“In a minute,” he said. “I need to talk with you.”
I waited. A space cleared around my sister, and she looked at me across the room, raising an eyebrow to ask, What’s going on? I shook my head slightly in answer, as in, Don’t worry. Then more well-wishers came up, blocking her from my view.
“I have an opportunity for her,” Boris said. “Some performances in Europe, this summer. Do you know Leda Makarovich? Lovely pianist and a good friend of mine, but unfortunately she’s having some health problems and had to cancel her Scandinavian tour.
They’re looking for a replacement and I suggested Robin.”
“Isn’t she a little unknown?”
“The tour is a little unknown itself,” Boris said. “Small venues with local orchestras. Let’s say it’s no frills. They need someone without a big ego, who can ride a bus and carry her own bag. Someone cheap and available. It’s a perfect opportunity for her. Wonderful experience.”
“Why are you asking me?” I said. “Instead of her?”
“Because she will listen to you,” he said. He held his palm above the floor again. “You are the legs of the stool.”
“I can’t go with her,” I said. “I have my own thing.”
“Of course you do,” Boris said impatiently, as if he had explained everything to me long ago. “She’ll have company with her the whole way.”
“Who?”
“Bernard, of course,” he said.
It was as if he’d orchestrated all of it, perhaps even plucked Bernard out of Baltimore and set him up in Washington Square Park, just in time to intercept Robin. I pictured the two of them in some European city, holding hands as they gazed up at the churches, strode down cobblestoned streets. Robin, I knew, would love the travel, a different city every day; she’d joke with all the members of the orchestra and come up with nicknames for them, even the mustached guy who played the clarinet, and they’d all fall in love with her, especially the mustached guy, but the existence of Bernard would protect her from the adulation; and every night she’d play before rapt audiences, smiling her sideways smile, and everyone would love her. I could see it all.
“It’s time,” Boris said, but he only meant that the lights were blinking on and off. Intermission was ending. I could see Robin drifting out of the room, still flanked by an admiring crowd. We made our way back into the auditorium. I dropped the fistful of cookies, now sand, into a trash can, and found my seat, wiping the residue on my dress. Later, at the apartment, Robin would burst out laughing, and point at the stain across my abdomen, a spray of butter and oil that made it look as if I’d soiled myself. Washing it only made the stain worse, and I never wore the dress again.
