The Study of Animal Languages

by Lindsay Stern

  “Why’s that?”

  She shrugged. “I’d like to do more fieldwork. There’s only so much you can learn in a lab.”

  Her eyes wandered across the thinning crowd. We were in an auditorium overlooking Lake Michigan, converted by the failing light into a giant void. A single boat, or buoy, shone in the distance.

  “You’re a scientist,” I said.

  “I study birds.”

  “An ornithologist?”

  “Yeah.” She sounded almost resigned. “Lately I’ve been working on spatial memory in crows. Puzzle solving, that sort of thing. I’m doing a postdoc. They promised me another year, but like I said . . .”

  As she spoke I nodded, grateful for the excuse to look at her. She wore no makeup. Yet there was something elusive about her face, with its long, narrow bones. Like the lines of an acrostic, each angle seemed to offer up a new meaning. I felt I could study it always, this face, and never exhaust it.

  “What’s your excuse?” she said, setting down her plate. Her eyes danced between mine.

  “I’m just a candidate.” I drained my glass. “Philosophy. Probably should have waited another year before applying, but I thought—”

  “What do you work on, I mean?”

  I almost rattled off the same gloss of my dissertation that had bored my interviewers half an hour earlier. But the thought of her bright eyes glazing over gave me pause. I blurted out: “Truth. How to know it.”

  “Pray tell.” Her smile was either coy or mocking—the former, I decided.

  “Your crows and I have something in common,” I said, finally feeling the vodka. “There’s a puzzle in epistemology—the Gettier problem, it’s called. I’m trying to solve it.”

  This was half true. On the plane to Chicago, I had begun developing my recent article into a monograph that—while I couldn’t have guessed it then—would take me over a decade to complete. In it, I planned to expose the limitations of three responses to the problem, concluding with a tentative solution of my own.

  “Let’s hear it,” she said.

  As I opened my mouth a man with dreadlocks touched her shoulder. I thought he might be her boyfriend, but then a woman sauntered up to him, her hand on his back. They were meeting some colleagues at a bar around the corner, the man said. Prue should join them, if she could. So should I, the woman told me, pro forma.

  The next thing I knew we were side by side in a dimly lit brewery, shouting over the music to make ourselves heard. She, too, had a weakness for philosophy, she confessed. Before earning her PhD in biology, she had completed a master’s program in critical theory (my bête noire), but she considered herself a dilettante.

  Of the two of us, she was by far the more accomplished, despite the fact that I was seven years her senior. From the way she refused to break eye contact as she answered my questions about her fellowships and publications, I could see that she recognized this too, knew that I knew it, and couldn’t be bothered to spare me the embarrassment. This thrilled me.

  “You were telling me something back there,” she yelled. “About truth.”

  “I was lying,” I joked. She smelled wonderful—not overly perfumed, like the attorney I had been seeing occasionally back home, but fresh. It was all I could do not to kiss her.

  “A puzzle you’re solving?” She sipped her lager, leaving a crescent of foam on her upper lip. It looked so adorable, against her sudden seriousness, that I decided not to say anything.

  “It’s called the Gettier problem,” I said, and paraphrased a classic example, formulated by the philosopher Dharmottara: A traveler, searching the desert for water, sees a shimmering blue expanse near a ravine. It’s a mirage, but when he reaches the spot, he finds water there after all, under a rock.

  “The point is that a belief can be true and justified,” I concluded, hoarse from shouting, “but still fall short of knowledge.”

  Prue’s eyes sparkled. “Oh, he knew.”

  She was fucking with me, I sensed, but I pressed on anyhow. “Take this.” I waggled the fingers of my left hand. “No wedding ring. Ergo, I—”

  “You have a girlfriend,” she interrupted, with such chagrin that my heart soared.

  “False.” I traced the lip of my glass. “I’m allergic to most metals.”

  She stared at me for a moment, and then burst out laughing.

  “I’m serious,” I said. The song changed. When she did not recover, I tapped my upper lip. “By the way, you have—”

  “You’re strange.” She wiped her eyes. “I like you.”

  In my hotel she undressed casually and lay down on the bed. I switched off the lamp, and was drawing the blinds when she stopped me, her legs parted just enough to reveal a gleam where the moonlight touched her.

  “I want to see you,” she said. Then she got up and sat astride me on the window ledge.

  I reached up to clear the hair from her face, but she caught my thumb between her teeth. As she took me in her hand, I tried to adjust myself so that we were leaning against the wall, rather than the glass, but then she was rolling a condom on and guiding me inside her. We were ten stories above the city. She rocked against me, and I imagined the window breaking, the two of us exploding out into the night in a starry burst of sweat and glass. Instead she came, and I whispered, Hold on to me.

  She did, and I carried her to the bed. She was still gasping. I reached under her and tilted her hips toward mine, driving into her with all of my weight. When she came again, I heard myself shout.

  “What’s your name?” she said, once I opened my eyes.

  She was facing me, still flushed, a wisp of darkened hair clinging to her temple. I brushed it back.

  “I mean it.” She stifled a laugh. “That’s the best sex I’ve ever had, and I don’t remember your name.”

  * * *

  —

  WE SAW EACH OTHER whenever we could that next year. She had recently left her long-term boyfriend—he realized he wanted children; she didn’t—and was wary of starting another relationship too soon. I was still shuttling between job interviews. When she won a Fulbright to study the Bornean green magpie, which would take her to Malaysia until the following summer, I was sure our days were numbered. But we kept talking. The less practical our reunions became, the more inevitable they felt. Once I landed a full-time job at the College—and the tripled salary it promised—I flew out three times to see her. We met in Phnom Penh, then Kyoto. We spent Christmas in Bangkok. I was smitten by then, and tormented with longing. During my spring vacation, I rented us a cottage on the eastern shore of Cape Cod. It was there that she first said she loved me.

  I could have wept or screamed. Instead I said it back, and held her, and felt my torment lessen subtly, in the way a diagnosis can relieve a foreign ache—not by altering the pain, but by deciphering it.

  She had grown up in a small coastal town in Connecticut, where her mother, Nadia—the child of Holocaust survivors—taught at a Jewish day school. Frank, a college dropout and autodidact, handled accounting for their local bookstore. His career had been something of a suicide mission, she said. The child of Polish immigrants, he had initially worked as a union organizer, salting construction firms. After three failed campaigns, he picked up a string of blue-collar jobs in which, as far as Prue could tell, he had taken stubborn pleasure. He even seemed to relish being fired. At the bookstore that finally hired him, he was demoted twice for reclassifying books at whim. (The Federalist Papers represented one of the many volumes he exported from History to Religion, a category he later rebranded Self-Help.) His antics exasperated Prue’s mother, but only in principle. Between her salary and a modest inheritance from Frank’s late father, Prue explained, the family had little need for a second income.

  “He’s only medicated thanks to my mom,” she said.

  We had spread a blanket on the beach, and were sharing a picnic
of roast beef and ciabatta. The bloodied paper lay between us, canting in the breeze, pinned in place by a bottle of Malbec. The sea was quiet. We were more or less alone. Besides Prue’s voice, the only sound was the hiss of marram grass, planted years ago to stabilize the dunes.

  “Since she died, he’s been skimping on his pills.” She refilled my Dixie cup with wine. “I can usually tell when he’s off them. Not always, though.”

  The breeze picked up, carrying salt. We had showered before lunch, and her hair—swept back into a braid—was still damp. Golden wisps flickered at her temple.

  As I draped my coat around her shoulders she turned. “Do you really want to hear this?”

  She looked at me. The light, cool though it was, had planted a ripening burn on her cheeks.

  “Of course.” I fished for the sunscreen. I had yet to meet her family, but she had promised to introduce me soon. “I want to hear everything about you.”

  “Okay,” she said, exhaling. Then she gave a doleful laugh. “It’s almost funny, it’s so bizarre.”

  I dabbed the sunscreen on her face as she began: “I was eight at the time. My mom drove me home from Hebrew school, dead of winter, and he was gone. Walt”—a toddler at the time—“was wandering through the house, crying. My mom called the bookstore, the library, all Dad’s friends. Nothing. That he could have abandoned Walt was just unthinkable—he was a helicopter parent before it was fashionable—so we were totally at a loss.” She scratched the corner of her mouth and took a breath. “My mom starts saying that everything will be fine, which is when I get scared. It gets dark. She calls the cops. I’m entertaining Walt, trying to hold it together. The heater’s blasting, so the windows are fogged over, and we’re doodling on the one facing the yard. At one point Walt presses his nose against the pane, then spazzes out—laughing, flapping his hands. I try it too, for kicks. That’s when I see him.”

  “Your father?”

  Although a cloud had come over the sun, she was still squinting as she added, “He was outside, naked, staring at me.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  She dug her toes into the sand. “I don’t remember much after that. I know I screamed, and Walt started bawling. My mom sent the two of us upstairs before she dragged him inside, but I could still hear him through the floor. He kept shouting at her, even after the cops showed up, that he’d discovered the truth about the universe.” She smiled unconvincingly. “New Age crap.”

  I took her hand. “That’s so frightening.”

  “Yeah.” She withdrew her hand and ripped off another wedge of ciabatta, which she did not eat. “It was a one-time deal, though. The doctors got him on Depakote and it never happened again. They called it late-onset bipolar, which he never bought, even though he promised my mom he’d stay medicated. The thing is . . . ” She folded a layer of roast beef over the bread. “He kind of changed, after that. He started watching TV, which he used to hate. He stopped telling as many stories.”

  She blew a fly off my shoulder and took a bite, gazing out at the corrugated sea. A small sailboat had coasted into view, steered by a lone figure. The boat was tacking, the sail rippling and then wagging comically as the figure scrambled to rein in the boom.

  “He’d had this whole repertoire,” Prue went on. “Like, every time Walt or I lost a tooth we would bury it in the yard. He said it would grow into a tree with moons on the branches.” She laughed. “The tooth fairy really pissed him off. He had this spiel about exchanging body parts for cash. A Faustian bargain, in his mind.”

  “And he stopped doing all that, after the diagnosis?” I said, guiding her back to the thread of our conversation. Across the sand, a bird pecked at the shadow of a wave.

  “Not entirely.” She stretched, her voice warped by a yawn. “But yeah, for the most part. And it kind of poisoned my memories of him, because it meant his old self was actually sick. So I felt horribly guilty for missing it.”

  I kissed her shoulder as she added, “He did the craziest shit when I was little. There was this time he drove us to the town landfill. We spent two hours wading through trash. His idea was to gather materials for a gramophone small enough to play our fingerprints.”

  “Thrilling your mother, I’m sure.”

  As she laughed, I wondered whether it was the contrast I posed to her father that had attracted her to me. It seemed possible that his turbulence could solve the puzzle that still haunted me occasionally: how a beautiful, gifted person with the world at her feet could have settled for a fusty scholar with three papers to his name.

  To dispel the thought I asked, “Does that old version ever reappear, when he’s off his meds?”

  “Not really.” She hesitated. “Or maybe I just don’t find it magical anymore.”

  A gull swerved toward us, wailed its high flat note. I glanced ahead, past the sailboat, looking for the stroke that distinguished the sky from the glittering surf. But there was fog in the distance, and all I made out were gradations of blue.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN PRUE FINISHED HER Fulbright she moved in with me, and we eloped the following spring. That summer—six years ago, come June—we moved into our apartment on the bottom floor of an old Victorian house near campus. Her career took off after that. The College hired her immediately as a lecturer in biology, then as an assistant professor. By her third year she had even marshaled funds for the new Center for Ornithology: the first of its kind at a liberal arts college. She still teaches her popular seminar in evolutionary psychology, while I lecture in epistemology and introductory logic. My monograph on the Gettier problem—finally finished after more than ten years—has been turned down by all but one of the major academic publishers, but I have hope for the smaller houses.

  We are happy, as far as I can tell. Still passionate. Comfortable, especially in light of my recent (and her imminent) promotion. Lately, though, I have had the impression of a rift. The signs—dropped glances, rushed embraces, abbreviated meals—are so subtle I have probably imagined them. Nonetheless, I can’t shake the sense that we are living in a minor key. “Has something changed?” I want to say, and almost have. But each time I formulate the question in my mind, she preempts it with a warm look, or laugh, and my fears seem asinine.

  I wish we would fight to clear the air. We almost did just yesterday, when we had some colleagues over for drinks after a faculty meeting. Prue proposed the gathering spontaneously, as a group of us were leaving the hall, so I had no choice but to parrot her invitation. I would much rather have gone home to work.

  Although it was supposed to snow on Friday, the weather was ludicrously warm—in the high fifties—so we pulled some chairs around our glass table out back. There were six of us: Prue and me; Adaora Ironsi, an economist and close friend of Prue’s; her husband, Edson Gerlach, a chaired professor of neuroscience; Quinn Bates, an anthropologist; and a new faculty member we hadn’t met before, who knew Edson from graduate school. “That’s Dalton Field,” Quinn whispered to me as we walked over from campus. He was a prominent novelist, apparently, though I had never heard of him. Unlike Prue I don’t read much fiction.

  “Back in the eighties, the point was to offend,” Dalton was saying now, as we sat around the table. “This generation finds it sexier to get offended.”

  He helped himself to more of our Chablis. He was a tall man, black, and garishly handsome, dressed in a gray cashmere sweater and Italian wingtips. There was a fat gold band on his wedding finger. Nonetheless, when Quinn stood up he glanced at her ass.

  “Were you even alive in the eighties?” Adaora said, as I pointed Quinn toward our bathroom. Wind rattled the dry leaves overhead.

  “Come on, Daora.” He spread his arms, incredulous. “The left has sold its soul to political correctness.”

  While I happened to agree, I disliked him already. It was unseemly, this readiness to hold court on our turf. His tone smacke
d of that complacent breed of pessimism I had indulged back in my twenties. The world is rotten, it went in my case, so even those who move through it gracefully are suspect. Everyone, that is, but me.

  I tried to catch Prue’s eye but she was smirking at him. She said, “Something you’d like to share?”

  She was conscious of being beautiful, of the special power that came from being both beautiful and smart, and of how to exercise that power in conversation. The more incisive her contributions, she once remarked, in a rare display of cynicism, the more likely they were to elicit from her male interlocutor a bashful deference, disguised as respect. He would nod, even toast her point, all in order to conceal his surprise that the two—intelligence and beauty—could intersect. Men like Dalton were the ones I’d thought she’d had in mind.

  “Nothing kosher, I’m afraid,” he said, holding her gaze as she plucked the second-to-last truffle from the case I had set out.

  Adaora glanced at me. When I caught her eye, her mouth sprang into a smile.

  I said, “I wouldn’t say Phil Barker speaks for liberal America.”

  Before Dalton’s segue, Adaora had been complaining about Barker—the new dean—who had announced a mandatory training module in “inclusion and professional respect” at the faculty meeting. It seemed reasonable to me, given the recent harassment allegations by a postdoc in psychology, though I resented the bureaucratese.

  “He’s not saying that,” Prue said, so dismissively that Edson—who had been murmuring something to Adaora—fell silent. “The point is, if you try to say anything new these days, you become a persona non grata.”

  “Case in point.” I raised my hands, and Edson laughed.

  Dalton was watching her too now, steadily. Could they have met before? Impossible—Adaora had just introduced them today. But their silence had a covert, inward quality, sure as a fever hatching in the bones.

  “Prue, can you tell me where you keep the tea?” Quinn called, leaning through the back door.