by Alix Ohlin
I held my breath. He gave me an address.
15.
When last I’d seen him, Javier wore tight button-down shirts over an emerging belly and cultivated a slight facial scruff that he must’ve thought made him seem more mature but was too sparse to be convincing. It always looked like a smudge I was tempted to wipe off. Now he greeted me in the lobby of a renovated office building in Chelsea, thinner and fitter, and his skin was so clean-shaven it looked polished. He wore dark skinny jeans and black shoes with shiny square toes. In Briar Neck I’d never dressed up for work and of all the items Robin had procured for me, none were clothes. I was wearing brown pants and a light blue sweater that, I’d been pleased to note that morning, lacked stains or holes. I saw Javier register this outfit, which was clearly an aesthetic offense to him, and politely set his reaction aside. He kissed me on both cheeks and said, “You look the same,” a diplomatically stated truth.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“You’re ready to do this? Dip in your toes in the bananas world of reality television? You know it’s insane. Bikram worked here two days before he quit and went back to school for library science. Now he lives in Asheville and blogs about home brew.”
I wanted to reassure him. “I can take it,” I said. “I come from documentaries, the original reality TV.”
He looked pained. “Please don’t say that upstairs.”
“Okay,” I said. I followed him into a rickety elevator with an accordion gate that groaned and fought when he tried to close it.
“People here love the gate, they think it’s so authentic,” he said. “I think it’s a pain in the ass.” After he got the door shut he leaned against the wall with his legs crossed at the ankle, as if posing for a magazine. “So,” he said. “You’re sprung from your cage. Did you jump or were you pushed?”
These questions were the price I had to pay. “Both,” I said. “It was time for a change.”
“Hm,” he said. “I’m not sure I believe you.”
I looked down at his feet, and then at mine, in running shoes with thick, rubbery soles. Although my vertigo had mostly dissipated, once in a while I still had the sensation of falling over, as if the earth had suddenly skewed 90 degrees, the floor of a room gyrating into the wall. In these, the only shoes in which I felt steady, I looked like an elderly American tourist prepared for a museum tour.
“I heard a rumor that the mad genius was stepping out on you,” he said as the elevator crept slowly upwards. “That you finally had enough.”
“Javier,” I said warningly.
“That’s what people say,” he reported, raising his palms in disavowal. “I said I always thought you guys had some kind of understanding. A co-dependent, dysfunctional understanding.”
I would not be baited. “I had enough of Briar Neck, that’s all,” I said sweetly.
Disappointment made his chin jut out. The elevator stopped and he tugged at the gate, muscles rippling beneath his shirt. It stuck. “Let me,” I said, and pulled it aside with a clatter.
“You bitch,” he said, which was a compliment.
* * *
—
Upstairs, Javier and I met with a producer, who brought me up to speed on the storyline to date and outlined my initial assignment. I was given a brief tour of the office by a young woman with her hair in pigtails who cracked her knuckles every two minutes. “I know, it’s gruesome,” Javier muttered in my ear as he handed me off. “She’s related to somebody important.”
I sat down in the editing bay she showed me, the door closed. The producer had told me to take an hour of footage from a tattoo parlor and get it down to forty-five seconds. “Forty-five interesting seconds, obviously,” she added. I watched the hour with earbuds in, making notes on a piece of paper, then set to work. The doctors had told me to limit my time with electronic media lest the headaches and vertigo return, and I hadn’t spent more than ten straight minutes in front of a computer in months. I had fasted, and now I returned with a greedy appetite. I replayed and clicked and sorted, ignoring the pain that crystallized around my eyes. In the restroom I took some medicine and then went back to work, the familiar pixilated buzz soothing my brain. Wheelock had always maintained strong preferences about his editing; he thought the transition from one shot to the next should emulate, as organically as possible, the movement of the human eye, which itself emulated the movement of human thought. When we tire, we blink; when we want to know more, our gaze lingers. He hated any transition that called attention to itself. To replace one field of vision with another, he’d explained, to jump from one place to another, or from one moment to the next, was to journey through consciousness. Viewers shouldn’t notice they’re being taken on a voyage; they should believe they’re navigating themselves. In Britain, he’d told me, filmmakers talked about joining frames, not cutting them. What he wanted was joining.
As his editor, the invisible executor of his ideas, I’d striven to please Wheelock while at the same time following instincts of my own. His desire for unobtrusive editing worked well for informational sequences, but didn’t always bring out the drama in human subjects; sometimes a sharp cut was what you needed to locate the tension in a moment, to shape it as an emotional experience. The hour I was contending with now was pretty dull. The show’s star spent it getting yet another tattoo on her already well-inked back; she lay on her stomach, her face almost completely hidden from the camera. When she talked to the tattoo artist, she mostly grunted. The artist was an ambiguously gendered person with bleached-blond hair grown out to dark roots, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with a skull on it. The tattoo itself was of a bulldog, and it was disturbing to see the round contours of its face drawn on a shoulder blade, the skin stretched and weeping blood. I cut from the bulldog to the star grunting, as if she and the dog were having a conversation; after she grunted I jumped to the tattoo artist sighing, as if they judged her for showing pain. “What?” she said, and I made it sound as though she were prickling with defense. (She’d said, “What are you doing later? I might grab a burrito.”) The tattoo artist’s answer—“Nothing”—became a jab back at her. Editing was the art of heightened reaction. By the time I was done with the first part of the scene, the two of them came off as sworn enemies, the crosscutting a kind of warfare, each passing moment barbed and tense.
At one point during the hour she said, “I need a coffee. I’m so tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.” I showed the tattoo artist pressing against the small of her back, and looped in the star saying “I’m so tired,” and the moment became tender, as if the needle were dispensing medicine instead of ink. With her head lowered she seemed crushed by the world. I cut to the reaction shot: “I know,” the tattoo artist said, relenting, seeming to pity her, and wanting to make her well. At the end, finally, I offered release: I showed her looking up, and lingered on her face, giving significance to her glance, as if the two of them had bonded, although in the raw footage she was just asking for a break to visit the restroom. I added some soft music, and the scene was done: it had become a love story between them, the tattoo a narrative of conflict, then care.
When I looked up again, it was five in the afternoon. Javier was behind me, examining my work. “Not bad,” he said, and in his voice I could hear the young man he’d been in Briar Neck, the one I’d taught and sheltered. “I guess you figured out they used to date, before Mickey transitioned.”
I shrugged. Around me the office was silent, everyone working behind closed doors. I swiveled in my chair, cracking my neck. Just then the floor sloped and I grabbed the desk to steady myself as pinwheels hurtled across my vision, a neon parade. I closed my eyes and kept them closed. When the lights subsided, I walked carefully down the hall to the windows and stared out at the black rooftops and the distant river. Below me traffic crawled and silently blared. My eyes and ears and wrists and back hurt. I would do anyth
ing, I thought, to get this job.
16.
The producer was pleased. I was given a contract and told to review all the previously aired episodes. I memorized the back stories of the tattooed lady and her several children and ex-boyfriends and ex-friends and current ones. Javier stopped asking prying questions about Wheelock and instead treated me with the casual brutality that, I learned, was his manner with everyone. He was beloved at the office. People brought him treats that he refused to accept, citing his low-carb diet. “I’m not going back to pudgeville,” he’d declaim. “No matter how you guys try to sabotage me!” Later he’d eat them anyway, unable to resist, angrily airing his regrets. He called me Grandma and made fun of my outfits, but the cruelty had evaporated from his voice. The pigtailed woman, whose name was Kenzie, asked if the knuckle-cracking bothered me and, before I could answer, explained that there was nothing she could do about it if it did. “I have OCD and it’s a calming behavior,” she said matter-of-factly. She told me all about her diet, which was gluten-free and dairy-free, except for hard cheeses. Every morning in the kitchen she’d say hello and wave a cheese stick in my direction, saying defensively, “It’s a hard cheese!” as if I’d accused her of eating soft. All the other editors were men, and they bantered in the office kitchen about sports without bothering to try to include me. Sometimes we talked about the weather, or who’d buy the next batch of coffee pods. Our conversations petered out after three to five minutes. I found that I could navigate these small bursts of interaction. I could mention the rain, describe something disgusting I’d seen on the subway. Say good morning at ten and goodbye at six. Almost as if I belonged.
* * *
—
With the question of work settled and my head healing, I still had to reshape the rest of my life. I wanted a child, and this meant looking for someone who wanted a child too—didn’t it? It was hard to imagine myself with any man other than Wheelock; my body continued to fit itself to his, moved automatically to make space for him in the bed. But I was intent on retraining it. Elena Brown informed me that nowadays everyone met online. That was how she’d met her new boyfriend,the local butcher, even though they lived in the same neighborhood. “You can’t just go out there at random anymore,” she told me. “You have to select.” She helped me set up a dating profile and took a picture of me with her phone. “This one’s not terrible,” she said, holding it up. “You could pass for thirty-five.”
I told her I was thirty-six.
“Oh, chicken,” she said, “you can’t say that.”
On the dating sites I scanned and clicked. I indicated my interest. I went on dates. One was with a man who’d said he was six feet tall and turned out to be five foot five. Height wasn’t a requirement of mine, but I was curious about the tactic. Did he not think he’d be discovered?
“I figured once we met in person I’d win you over with my charm,” he said, shoving a fistful of olives in his mouth. I quite liked him. He was dark and ferocious, with glittering black eyes and hair that shone with styling gel. He’d picked a restaurant he knew was terrible so we could bond over complaining about it, a strategy I could see the wisdom of. The waitress brought us the wrong drinks and sighed heavily when we pointed out her mistake. “Whatever,” she said, and took them away, not returning with replacements.
“Keep up the good work, Maggie!” the man called after her. “I come here all the time,” he said. I was enjoying myself, but then he cracked a tooth on the olives—reminding me of Wheelock—and left in a hurry, cradling his jaw in the palm of his hand. I didn’t hear from him again.
Then I dated a man named Martin Dax. His name was so pleasing to me that I often repeated it to myself just to enjoy the sound, and he had a very short haircut that showed off an attractive skull. He was a scientist from Germany who spoke very plainly and directly, always concerned about whether or not he was being understood. When he said, “Do you know what I mean?” he paused for the answer before going on. He spoke about his childhood afternoons spent wandering in drizzly forests outside of Hamburg, and I furtively allowed myself to imagine family trips we might take there, hand-crafted German ornaments on our Christmas tree. We saw each other five times, and on the last evening, I yawned—I wasn’t used to working all day, then going out at night—which stung him deeply. “I wasn’t interesting enough for my ex-wife,” he said sorrowfully, “and now I see the same is true for you.”
“It was a long day, that’s all,” I said quickly.
“You don’t have to be polite,” he said. “American women are so evasive. One never knows where one stands.”
“Where you stand is fine,” I said, but he kept shaking his head sadly and soon left the restaurant, leaving a crisp hundred-dollar bill on the table. I rode home on the subway, slumped and bleary-eyed. When I got there, I found Elena sitting on the stoop outside our building, smoking.
“How’d it go?”
I shook my head.
“Well,” she said, “at least you’re out there.”
“I’m out there,” I said, my voice wavering.
“Oh, cupcake,” she said. All her endearments were food-related. I leaned my head against her shoulder, and heard her sniff. “Did you have something spicy? I smell spicy.”
I nodded, wiping my nose.
“You might want to change your order,” she said. “A little tip from me to you.”
I wondered if I’d lost Martin Dax to the excesses of spice. That night I emailed Robin an account of the latest fiasco. I tried to be amusing. I wanted the thread that had recently unspooled between us to remain intact, a string between two cans. No loss, she wrote back the next day. She wrote No loss to everything, every canceled meeting or failed date. Sometimes I wondered if she knew what No loss meant.
17.
On a quiet Saturday I was sitting at my laptop drinking tea with five sugars in it, a habit I’d picked up from Javier, when Marianne called. Lately she’d been calling me more often, and she often seemed distressed, though when I tried to figure out why, the reasons remained unclear.
“The problem,” she said when I answered, “is that the squirrels and the birds are competing for the same resources and I can’t keep them apart.”
“Who’s doing what?”
“Everybody wants more than I can provide,” she said. “I’m not the grocery store, tu sais?” Her voice was phlegmy, raspy from smoking, or maybe she had a cold.
“Start from the beginning,” I suggested.
“The beginning! What’s a beginning?” she asked angrily.
I took another look at my screen and then reluctantly closed it. Without an image to distract me her voice was even harsher, and I moved the phone away from my ear. “I’m not sure I understand why you’re so upset,” I said.
“Of course you don’t. No one understands. I’m here on my own. Always on my own, from when I was young.”
“Have you talked to Robin?” I said.
“Robin,” my mother said, like a swear. “She’s away with her animals in her zoo.”
“What zoo?” I said.
“Oh, you know,” she said. The conversation was escaping me, speeding away like a missed train. I listened to Marianne ramble for a few more minutes, until she abruptly hung up, as angry as when she’d started.
I called Robin. Her phone went to voicemail—it always went to voicemail, and I wasn’t sure she ever listened to it—and I left a long-winded message that didn’t make much sense. When I hung up, the air in the apartment felt cloistered and dense, more prison than refuge. The season of American Freaks I was editing was wrapping up, and soon I’d have a break. Before I could change my mind, I opened the laptop again and booked a flight to Montreal.
* * *
—
August in the city of my childhood was torrid and festive: everyone outside, drinking and smokin
g, sucking in as much summer as they could fit in their lungs. On Duluth, where I was meeting Robin for a drink, I saw a couple trip over the cobblestones because they were kissing instead of looking where they were going, and they tried to keep kissing even as they tripped, clutched each other, and righted themselves.
Robin showed up late, wearing jeans, work boots caked with mud, and a faded red T-shirt two sizes too small. Her hair hadn’t been combed that morning, or recently. Before even saying hello she took a cigarette out of a pack and lit it. She had a new line of tattoos on her right arm, a series of dark blue circles that looked like barbed wire.
“Since when are you smoking?” I said, a question that came out sounding judgmental, although I hadn’t meant it to. I was just surprised.
“De temps en temps,” Robin said, shrugging. She ordered a beer and gazed at the street, the passersby seeming to interest her more than I did.
“I wanted to talk about Marianne,” I said. I hadn’t seen her yet; I’d checked into a hotel first and made plans to visit her apartment the following day.
“What about her?”
“She keeps calling me. She sounds upset.”
“Upset,” Robin said. “When is she not upset?”
“I guess. But lately she doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“She’s getting old, that’s all.” Robin put down her cigarette and rubbed her right eye with the palm of her hand, hard, like a window washer working on a stubborn streak. When she opened her eye again, all the white was red.
“She’s not old,” I said.
My sister extinguished her cigarette, sighing out the smoke. “She’s always been dramatic, you know that. She indulges herself in moods. Right now she’s feeling badly because the dentist left her.”
