The Study of Animal Languages

by Lindsay Stern

  In swift, irregular strokes, she works the lotion into her thigh. It strikes me, as it has before, how recklessly she handles her body; how it seems to mean more to me than it does to her.

  “I doubt anyone will show up, anyway,” she mutters. “They’re saying we’re supposed to get three inches of snow.”

  “Are you planning to gloss the birdsong study?” I say, softening.

  “Are you interested?”

  A question, an indictment. She has a point. As she stares at me defiantly—or is it hungrily?—a line from the Chomsky biography comes to mind: Animals can no more talk than Olympian high jumpers can fly.

  “Of course I’m interested.” I move toward her. “You’ll have tenure in the bag after this.”

  She snickers and steps out of her underwear, wiping the remains of the lotion on her hips. Then she pulls me against her.

  “Listen.” I press my lips to her forehead. “Let me handle things tomorrow. The day after next I promised May I’d take her to the aquarium. Frank can come with us. You can get some . . .”

  The book on her pillow is that man’s. As she tugs off my belt I register the precious title—Forgive Me Not—dwarfed by his name: Dalton Field.

  “You bought his novel,” I hear myself say.

  “Hmm?” She has moved on to my zipper.

  “That guy from yesterday—the writer.”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “He seemed like a hack.”

  She laughs. “Stay angry, I like it.”

  “Really.” I step back, no longer in the mood, and her face clouds. “Sorry, I just . . .” I scratch my neck.

  “What’s your problem?” she says.

  “I’ve been on the road all day, P. I’m tired.”

  I turn toward the bathroom, hating the sound of my own voice. I had offered to drive Frank, after all, and have no business whining about it.

  “Fine.” She slides under the quilt. “I owe you for today.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” I say miserably, as she picks up Forgive Me Not. “I’m going to shower.”

  Without looking at me, she nods, already settling back into the book.

  Instead I undress and climb into the tub, letting the thundering water creep over my shins, and then my thighs. The usual wreckage drifts toward me—unanswered emails, neglected tasks—synecdoche for the mounting impression that I am doing life wrong, or living the wrong life. Posttenure blues, I remind myself. To scare them off I lean over the rim to dry my hands on my khakis, then pull my phone out of the back pocket to check the news. Today’s headlines only depress me further.

  Already dizzy from the heat, I set the phone down and lather my face. By the time I have wrenched myself out of the water, the strip of lamplight under the bathroom door is gone.

  Prue is still asleep when I crawl in beside her. She is breathing lightly, her back to me, but when I slip my arm under her bicep she doesn’t stir. Her breasts are heavy and warm. I nudge my face into her hair, and hear a soft, plosive sound as her lips separate. Then I thread my hand between her thighs.

  She doesn’t mind being touched in sleep. The first time I did it, I woke her up to confess. She laughed and said she liked the idea. She had probably done the same to me. Her amusement chastened me, but didn’t spoil my excitement. There was something exquisitely strange about encountering her there in her own absence. When she is awake the touch is a disclosure, an invitation. But now it means what it is, and nothing else.

  “I love you,” I whisper.

  She shifts. As I free my hand a phrase leaves her—garbled, beseeching—addressed to some dreamed interlocutor.

  Four

  I wake up to banging. It is still dark, but a bluish light is leaking through the ribs of the venetian blinds. When I switch on the lamp, Prue only groans and burrows deeper under the quilt. My phone reads 6:03. The banging intensifies. Cursing, I roll out of bed and into my bathrobe, but no sooner have I left the room than the house goes quiet. I pause in the threshold, wondering whether I have imagined the disturbance. Then another sound comes, too faint to decipher. At once the banging resumes, accelerated, in low, staccato thumps.

  I edge into the corridor, careful to avoid the loose floorboards that would broadcast my approach. The door of the utility closet has been flung open, its hanging bulb flickering. The noise is coming from the living room. Through its glass doors I see only blackness, until my eyes adjust to a figure brandishing a tall dark rod. Instead of swinging it he is thrusting it upward, hitting the ceiling, the room quaking with each thump. Frank. Of course.

  I fling open the door, switching on the overhead light, and he squints toward me, broom in hand.

  “Do you have a tenant?” he says.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I thought you owned this place.”

  “It’s a duplex, Frank.”

  A piano chord sounds overhead, tentative. Before I can stop him he is at it again, so I lunge forward and wrench the broom away from him.

  “Who plays scales at six a.m.?” He opens his arms. “Dvořák, okay, but scales?”

  By the time I have cajoled him back to bed I am hopelessly awake, and famished. Prue has finished all the bacon. I resort to a toasted bagel with cream cheese, eating over the sink to watch the sunrise. The stars have receded, leaving a chilly, lunar glow. The bagel has slaked my hunger, but not that different grade of hankering—for catatonia, oblivion—that usually goads me into a binge.

  Nine days since my last. I do my best to space them out. When enough time passes—two weeks, say—I delude myself that I have kicked the habit. Almost as soon as the thought occurs to me, the hankering rears up again, as if on cue, and makes a mockery of my resolve. Fuck it, I think, and stuff the last of the bagel in my mouth, compensating with the thought of a trip to the gym before class.

  The fridge is ripe with options, including Prue’s Terra chips— open, fortunately—five meringues left over from Wednesday, and the small red cheese wheels we keep around for May. I start with the chips, forcing myself to leave a good handful, and then yield to the cheese. After demolishing two wheels, I raid the stash of soppressata we save for guests, finally close to the zenith—the sense of plenitude that washes over me before disgust sets in. While I would never admit it, I prefer the feeling to sex. It is the closest I have felt to transcendence: standing here on the linoleum before the spoils of our lives, sating the thing that’s reaching through me, into the cool white light.

  In the freezer I locate my habitual finale: chocolate sorbet. I hold the carton under steaming water, and am closing my mouth around the first ambrosial bite when someone speaks.

  “Save some for me, kid.”

  I nearly choke. Coughing, I shrink away from Frank, but he reaches out and pounds my back.

  “Needed to ask,” he says. “Do you have a camcorder by any chance?”

  I switch on the overhead light—anything to gain some distance from him—and find that he has changed out of his nightclothes. The same plaid shirt he wore yesterday hangs from his frame, half of it stuffed into his boxers.

  “We use our phones.” My face burns. “Why?”

  “Prue’s speech—”

  “The College tapes it.”

  The taste of sausage lingers in my mouth, revolting me. I turn to stow the sorbet carton in the freezer, but he catches my forearm.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I told you, they—”

  “That.” He gestures at the pint. “Can I have a little?”

  “It’s dawn, Frank.”

  “Didn’t stop you.”

  As he wolfs down his scoop he roams the dining area, pausing now and then to inspect the books—most of them Prue’s—that litter the table and chairs. I boil myself a cup of ginger tea, trying to conjure some semblance of poise.

  “
Cordelia loves this crap,” he says.

  His cat, he means—a tabby he coaxed out of a drainpipe late last year. I dip a spoon in my tea to cool it, counting to ten to settle my nerves.

  “Landlord wants me to chuck her,” Frank adds. “Man’s a born-again, and he’s evicting her in Christmas season, of all times.”

  “It’s his house,” I can’t resist replying. “His terms.”

  “Hey.” Frank jabs the air with his spoon. A drop of chocolate sails from the tip onto Prue’s windbreaker, still prostrate over the stool. “Prue said you finished your book?”

  She has proofread countless drafts of my monograph, and comforted me when the first rejections trickled in. I have yet to tell her about the latest, from Routledge.

  “Says it’s not too shabby.” Frank watches me tear off a segment of paper towel and run it under hot water. As I dab the spot on her windbreaker he adds, “About the relation between data and knowledge, or something? How the one’s never a sufficient condition for the other?”

  “I should pay you to pitch it at conferences,” I say.

  “Conferences.” He chuckles, loading his dirty bowl into the dishwasher. “So that’s what philosophers do.”

  As he retreats into the corridor I feel the cold, damp wind of this contempt, and realize I have had enough.

  “You know what, Frank?”

  He turns.

  “You can shut your goddamn mouth.”

  Delight, mingled with sadness, crosses his face. He waits in silence, and to my chagrin only seems to brighten when I add, “It might come as a surprise to you, but I don’t happen to care what you think of my life.”

  We stare at each other. The only sound is the refrigerator’s hum.

  At last he says, “That’s what I like to see.”

  “What are you—”

  “Rage.”

  “For Christ’s sake . . . ” I sidestep him and angle toward the study, forgetting my tea.

  “Follow it,” he calls. “Or it’ll keep on chasing you.”

  Shutting the door I stand for a moment in darkness. Gradually the shapes announce themselves: the lamp, the couch, the hump of Rex’s cage.

  As a child, shunted awake by a nightmare, I trained myself to slip from bed and stand like this in the center of my room, the point from which I could regard each of my toys. Armed with shadows, the silhouettes of my tin soldiers and Tonka trucks petrified me, but I forced myself to face them down. In a low voice, almost a whisper, I would repeat their names. Night had stripped each object of a kind of cage, or embankment, I felt—whatever boundary ensured that it remained itself. The boundary kept the object from becoming something else, something hysterical or mad, and my naming restored it, somehow. The ritual haunted me well into my preteen years, though I managed to keep it from my mother. An early flare of OCD, perhaps.

  I turn on the lamp. On my desk is a paper I have agreed to review for the Journal of Symbolic Logic. “On Algebraic Closure in Pseudofinite Fields,” reads the title. I turn the page. “ABSTRACT: We present the automorphism group of the algebraic closure of a substructure A of a pseudo-finite field F. We show that the behavior of this group, even when A is large, depends on its roots of unity in F . . . ”

  I let the page fall and open my laptop. Into Google I type “Dalton Field.”

  The results number in the tens of thousands. Most of them are reviews of Forgive Me Not, his third novel, which has been called “searing” by Esquire. The sidebar features several head shots, some black and white, and all of them heavy on the contrast. It also reveals that he is thirty-nine years old, a Princeton graduate, and married to someone named Robin Rothschild.

  It figures; he has the look of money, and as a writer he can’t have made much of it himself. The images page shows him at various galas, his arms thrown around women, while the first video result depicts a commencement address he apparently delivered this year at Haverford College. I click on it.

  “Congratulations,” he booms, tassel swinging. I skip ahead, lowering the volume.

  “. . . fear and heartache . . .”

  I skip again.

  “. . . what a novelist actually does all day . . .”

  Once more.

  “Here is life: I shave. I shit. I run the bathwater so hot that the steam empties the mirror. I check the forecast, forget the figure, read the newspaper so I can complain more knowledgeably. Meanwhile, offstage, all that news is converted into History—plausible, suddenly, because it was the road that led to now. Dictators fall. The landlord dyes his hair. It is an effort not to live as if asleep—trusting myself to dress and eat, chat with my friends, run errands. Months pass that way, and then in flashes I am back—watching the velvet seats reappear after a movie, sneezing, hacking the ice off my car. I find myself in restaurants, sometimes joyful, more often numb, telling the difference by whether or not I’ve noticed the breeze on my skin, the applauding leaves, the housefly cleaning its face. Wondering, throughout, whose life I’m walking through. Disliking the person I love.”

  I can’t help but smile. What had he been thinking, subjecting thousands of strangers to his poetized weltschmerz? It’s not that the man seems boastful, exactly. But he radiates a familiar, masculine impatience, the bravado of the spiritually passive. It seems important to him that—out of envy or awe—his listeners will come away from the talk having failed to grasp his point.

  He pauses for effect, his eyes laughing. “Not so, in literature,” he is saying now. “Literature, assuming it’s any good, conforms to a shape that human lives don’t actually assume.” The Sophoclean dramas, the bildungsroman, what have you. They are compelling because they endow the lives of their heroes with a pattern—comic, tragic, ironic—and for that reason they are also cruel. How can you read them without suspecting that your own life is flawed, anemic? That you are to blame for the fact that the plot you’ve undertaken has no climax and would not, therefore, make for a particularly absorbing read?”

  I stop the video, sliding the cursor over the button shaped like a downward thumb. A strip of text appears: “I dislike this.” Click. The tally of “dislikes” rises to 7, beside the 302 “likes.” Ashamed, I close the laptop.

  * * *

  —

  ONLY THREE-QUARTERS of my students show up for my logic class later that day, probably thanks to the impending snow. A few come late, missing the exam review sheet I handed out at the beginning.

  “Julius Caesar had twenty-six teeth at the time of his death,” I say. “True or false?”

  They stare at me blankly, probably thinking of food or sex. The question is rhetorical, to be fair. Having finished my lecture early, I am killing the last few minutes with a thought experiment.

  “According to the verifiability criterion, that question should be nonsense,” I continue. “It can’t possibly be confirmed or denied now that the evidence is gone. And yet . . .” I lean against the blackboard, tossing my nub of chalk from one hand to the other. “Intuition tells us that it has an answer.”

  My stomach churns. Between editing Natasha’s chapter and rereading my monograph one last time before submitting a proposal and excerpt to the editor at Cornell, I hadn’t made time for a workout after all.

  “It is nonsense, to some people,” a boy named Jacob calls out.

  He is one of my problem students—your gadfly, Prue calls him, although she knows him only through my complaints. Initially, I worried he would derail the class, but the other students quickly turned against him. Now he rarely pipes up.

  “Like that tribe in the Amazon,” Jacob adds, “who don’t have numbers, only words for ‘one’ and ‘many.’”

  There is a general shuffling.

  “Even if that’s true,” I say, “it happens not to matter for our purposes.”

  A few students click their pens closed, a signal that class has ended, even though
we still have three minutes left.

  “But those people wouldn’t make head or tail of a sentence like that,” he persists. He rakes his fingers through his greasy blond hair. “Any more than we would make much sense of the fifty Inuit words for snow.”

  So he is still impressed by relativism, cultural chauvinism’s latest guise. Before I can shoot him down Natasha comes to my rescue.

  “Save it for section, Jacob,” she says, from her perch at the end of the second row. As she smiles at me knowingly, winding her ankle, a few students laugh.

  * * *

  —

  “NATASHA!” I CALL, as they stream out.

  She turns, surprised, and I wave her thesis chapter in the air. As she strolls toward me, a group of stragglers—Jacob among them—sidle up for the review sheet.

  “I’m heading to Mudd, by the way,” she says over their heads. In a short skirt and tights, she is underdressed for the cold. She takes the chapter, her painted nail grazing my thumb.

  Her voice, with its clipped vowels, has always reminded me of Madeleine’s. She is not Swedish, however, but Mexican, the child—I learned after Googling her, idly, late one night—of a coal magnate. That she has taken the liberty of addressing me as “Ivan” in her emails, ever since I became her advisor, should irritate me. But the shyness in her huge brown eyes, combined with her eagerness to please, has stopped me from correcting her.

  Registering my confusion, she says, “To see Professor Baum?”

  “Yes, of course.” Prue, she means. I have to get over there, in fact—the lecture is set to begin at three.

  It is snowing when we emerge onto the quad. The shortest route to the science building has been cordoned off, thanks to a ruptured pipeline, and the fumes are everywhere. Men in fire suits drift across the frozen grass, closing the wound in the ground, rerouting foot traffic, like astronauts patrolling virgin soil. I tuck my nose into my scarf, doing my best to economize my breaths.

  Natasha opens her umbrella, lifting it high enough to shelter both of us. But the wind carries the snow under the canopy, stinging my cheeks and frosting her knees.