Sensation Machines

by Adam Wilson

  “That’s a nice shirt,” Wendy says.

  Michael takes the compliment as cue to further unbutton, freeing a carpet of Ashkenazic curls. Sweat drips from the freed curls onto his placemat. The shirt is an L.L. Bean plaid his mother gave him for Chanukah, gold and green and iron-scorched around the collar. It brings out Michael’s eyes.

  “So tell me,” says Michael, but then can’t think of anything to ask. He has go-to topics: eighties comedies, secular Taoism, his interest in urban farming, plus an anecdote about the community service trip he took to the Carolina Sea Islands in high school that mostly involved smoking pot and complaining about having to do community service. The latter usually gets a laugh, then leads to a self-critical discussion of privilege. Instead of playing up the humility of his working-class upbringing, Michael points out that even he, son of a laid-off factory worker, is relatively wealthy in the grand scheme of the global class system.

  None of these topics are right for Wendy; he senses she’d see through to his calculating heart. She says, “Tell you what?”

  Before Michael can answer, Bernice is back with their entrees. The waitress places the shell steak in front of Michael, though he appears more interested in the pendant nestled between Bernice’s breasts. When Wendy catches him looking he turns away with an exaggerated swivel.

  “That’s a nice necklace,” Wendy says to Bernice, encouraging the waitress to lean over the table and further diminish the distance between Michael’s nose and the perfumed expanse of her cleavage. Wendy’s not sure why she’s doing this, if it’s cruelty, perhaps, or a test of Michael’s chivalry, or maybe, perversely, because a sense of competition seems necessary in order to heighten the stakes of her date. If there’s one thing Wendy will learn over the long years in marketing that lie ahead of her, it’s that all action is transaction, and that nothing—not sex, not romance, not marriage—can be completely extricated from capital exchange. But though this might sound cynical to a romantic like Michael, Wendy will come to understand that the transactional nature of these arrangements does not fundamentally degrade them. She will come to understand—and perhaps, unconsciously, she already understands, as Michael attempts to avert his eyes from Bernice’s breasts by craning his neck to look down at his steak—that love’s status as a narrative construct doesn’t detract from its intensity of feeling. It doesn’t make it any less real.

  Bernice says, “Saint Francis of Assisi. I got it for my confirmation. I’m not religious or anything, but I’m so used to it, you know? Most of the time I forget it’s there.”

  “I know what you mean,” Michael says.

  Bernice leans her cocked hip toward Michael and stares intently at his face. “Sorry if this is weird,” she says, “but aren’t you, like, that medical rap guy or whatever? I think I saw you do a show at the Knitting Factory.”

  It’s a miracle that Michael doesn’t fall from his chair.

  “That was me,” he says.

  “That’s so cool,” says Bernice. “You guys were awesome.”

  “We were?”

  “Totally.” She winks at Michael and walks away. Michael consciously avoids following Bernice’s path across the room, but Wendy notes the way the waitress’s feet hardly seem to leave the floor, gliding around patrons and tables as if she’s wearing slicked socks or roller skates. She wonders whether Bernice sees something in Michael that Wendy’s missing. Could his rap group possibly be good?

  “Well that was random,” says Michael, trying to play it cool, though he secretly hopes Wendy will want to harp on the subject and push toward a more in-depth discussion of his musical ambitions.

  “Random indeed,” says Wendy. She inspects her salad: skimpy. Rachel would approve. She sips her wine. Michael cuts into his steak. He feels Wendy watching and tries not to make noise. As a child, he was always being reproached for chewing too loudly. Wendy pokes at her salad, takes a long sip of wine. She says, “So where were you?”

  “I was outside your apartment,” says Michael, realizing as he says it that there’s still food in his mouth. He finishes chewing, which takes a moment because the pressure to finish makes his throat feel swollen shut. “I was circling your block until you came out.”

  “No, I mean where were you? You know, where were you?”

  “Oh,” says Michael. “You mean then.”

  “Then.”

  Michael wonders if he should lie and say he was downtown, sleeping off a hangover at Ricky’s new place. He could say he heard the first plane and saw the second, and though he didn’t run into any burning buildings to save strangers from the flames, he at least, like, assisted rescue workers by doing whatever people do when they assist rescue workers, presumably standing slightly out of the way, like a spectator at a marathon, handing small bottles of water to the firemen.

  “Sleeping,” says Michael. “I actually slept right through it.”

  “I went to class,” says Wendy. “I knew already, I saw it online. But then I didn’t know what to do, so I went to class.”

  This is not exactly accurate. In a purely intellectual sense she understood the protocol, understood upon passing the Lerner Student Center and seeing the dozens of students huddled around a television, that she was meant to join in their nervous pacing and hugging and futile attempts to call anyone who might be downtown. And yet, Wendy refused to accept the campus’s instantaneous transition. To accept it was to concede the proximity of the attacks, to concede the very real impact of what had already become a world-historical event. So she went to class.

  “What class?”

  “Do you know Professor Green?”

  “Elizabeth Green, yeah.” Everyone knew Elizabeth Green, the hotshot young lit prof.

  “Everyone knows her.”

  “I have her for Brit lit,” says Wendy.

  “Huh,” says Michael.

  “Huh what?”

  “I don’t know,” says Michael. “Is it a good class?”

  “Well she hates Brit lit. That’s basically what I’ve learned so far.”

  This is not a dig against Elizabeth, so much as a statement one might apply to most professors in the English department who share an unspoken antagonism toward the source texts—novels—that they treat as data sets. Wendy’s not opposed to theory in theory, and she finds her lit classes more substantive than, say, her wishy-washy nonfiction workshop in which the students read aloud from their choicest sufferings and cry on each other’s shoulders, but there is something about the deconstructionist view of literature that she finds unsettling. It feels to Wendy that her classes provide a whole-earth satellite view of the books they read, and that, by attempting to see the larger picture, they’re sacrificing a truer, more complex comprehension to be gained from a series of close zooms.

  When she interviewed at the ad agency last week, one thing that struck her was the deceptive simplicity of the poster campaigns that decorated the office. One ad in particular has stuck in her mind, a magazine spread that somehow managed, with a single photograph of two kids eating ice-cream cones on a brownstone stoop, to capture the exact feel of a New York summer day, and to create an indelible link between that feeling and the brand of ice cream being advertised. It was the details—the perfectly achieved messiness of the girl’s hair, or the way the boy had one sock pulled halfway up his knee while the other bunched by his ankle—that made the image not just familiar but some kind of ideal, a snapshot that, instead of representing a single moment, encapsulated the paradox of a childhood lost to time, yet somehow still alive in the milky promise of this particular ice cream.

  “Oh,” says Michael, who wonders if he, himself, should offer an opinion on the validity of Brit lit as a subject, and, if so, what that opinion should be.

  “Anyway, nine eleven was our second class meeting,” continues Wendy. “Only a couple people showed up. I was one. Elizabeth was the other.”

&n
bsp; Michael is trying to eat and listen to what Wendy’s saying at the same time, but multitasking is not his forte, and it doesn’t help that Bernice is in the background, slightly swaying as another of the waiters, or maybe a cook, tunes one of the mandolin-like instruments and shuffles out a test melody. Bernice appears to be looking at Michael, but it may be an illusion, some trick of shadow and candlelight. He focuses on Wendy.

  “So it’s just you two in class?”

  “It was just the two of us. But we didn’t acknowledge it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I thought it was her job to say something. But she just started lecturing.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I took out my notebook.”

  “That’s crazy,” says Michael, though he’s become distracted again by Bernice, or if not by Bernice, herself, then by the future she’s opened, a future in which he’s a recognizable celebrity and women approach him in public to flirt.

  Another of the staff has set up a drum and is beating it in time with the not-mandolin. Bernice laughs and shakes her shoulders. She waves jazz fingers at the men.

  “Fado,” Wendy says. “That’s the name of this music. I remember that from Lisbon.”

  Bernice is now, without doubt, staring at Michael. Wendy can’t believe the waitress is even remotely interested—from what she heard in the car, Michael’s rapping is amateur at best—but she must admit that anything’s possible. And, maybe it’s the wine, but Michael’s looking more attractive than earlier, having stilled the nervous tapping and un-stiffened into someone seemingly capable of having a good time.

  “Wait, so what happened in the rest of the class?” asks Michael.

  “It doesn’t matter,” says Wendy.

  “No, tell me,” says Michael.

  “Forget it,” says Wendy.

  “No, no,” says Michael. “I want to know.”

  “Okay,” says Wendy. “Well, the class is a seminar, right? Class participation is a part of our grade. And Elizabeth tends to talk a lot, but every once in a while she’ll pause and ask the class a question. There are these two guys who always answer. They think they’re smart. But then Elizabeth will put them down and explain why they’re wrong. The guys go nuts for it. Anyway, I was sitting there alone, and she asked a question.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Well, nothing at first, but after a few seconds it became clear that she wasn’t planning to continue until someone else spoke. So I raised my hand.”

  Wendy raises her hand. Tentative, like she’s not sure she wants to be called on. She mimes the professor looking around the room, trying to decide which student to choose. Michael laughs.

  “Did she call on you?”

  “Well yeah, she called on me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I gave my answer.”

  “Which was?”

  “It wouldn’t make sense outside the context of the class.”

  “Okay,” says Michael. He wonders if she thinks he’s dumb.

  “I mean, it was something totally specific to something she asked about a particular scene in To the Lighthouse, and about this thing Woolf does, which is sort of not making a big deal of these characters’ deaths by making the deaths happen within parentheses. Like, the deaths are just announced in parentheses without commentary, as if it’s no big deal. Anyway, I think what she was asking was something about how we decide when death is significant and when it’s just death.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said death is significant to the dying.”

  “Huh.”

  “Elizabeth had the same reaction. I finished my answer and she just kind of stood there for a long minute without saying anything. I could hear the buzz of the overhead light.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  “It was at first. But after a second I realized something crazy, which is that Elizabeth was actually thinking about what I’d said, which, it occurred to me, is the exact thing most professors don’t do. Usually they already have a kind of automated response, you know? Like they’ve heard all your answers before and they’re just waiting for someone to provide the right one so they can move to the next part of the lecture. Maybe that’s what makes Elizabeth a good teacher. And when she finally responded, she didn’t, like, really respond, she just kind of said, “That’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it like that.”

  “Cool,” says Michael. “So what happened in the rest of the class?”

  “It just kept going. She kept lecturing, and occasionally asking questions, and I would raise my hand and answer, and she’d either engage with my answer and we’d have a short discussion or else she’d pause and say ‘huh,’ and move on. At some point I got up to go to the bathroom. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to raise my hand and ask or not, but I just got up and sort of mouthed bathroom and she nodded and I went. When I got back it wasn’t like she’d kept on with the lecture in my absence or something creepy like that, but she was just standing there, perfectly still, and I got the sense that she’d remained kind of frozen while I’d been gone, and that as soon as I re-entered the room she’d broken back into motion. Maybe I was imagining it.”

  “Weird,” Michael says.

  There’s more to the story that Wendy can’t get at, something beyond weird. She’s felt an unacknowledged intimacy with Professor Elizabeth in the month since, a feeling as if, although they don’t talk or otherwise interact, they are bound in an almost familial way, both complicit in something neither completely understands. Some days she thinks of going to Professor Elizabeth’s office hours and sitting silently opposite her desk, maybe taking out a book and reading while Elizabeth grades papers.

  Music plays in earnest now. Bernice sings in a wilted, mannish voice that suits the thin strum of the instrument. The rest of the waitstaff have cleared tables toward the front, and the large party in back, probably friends of the waiters, has moved into the table-less space and begun to dance. They’re all on the young side—twenties or thirties—but they dance in the hand-holding style of old, men leading ladies, dips and spins.

  Bernice’s voice cuts through with a depth of emotion one wouldn’t expect. Wendy wonders about the waitress’s world, both the world inside her brain, and the one beyond these restaurant walls; the local traumas that imbue her song with a certain beauty, sultry and melancholy, but also something else—pure, maybe—a voice that rises, in its highest registers, above the bullshit of our armored public selves.

  “Pretty good,” says Michael. He nods toward Bernice.

  “Makes you wonder,” says Wendy.

  “Wonder what?”

  “I don’t know,” says Wendy.

  Bernice spots Michael and enthusiastically motions him over. Michael worries he’s being teased.

  “Go on,” Wendy says.

  “I shouldn’t,” says Michael.

  “I don’t mind, seriously,” says Wendy.

  The band continues to play, instrumental now. Michael half stands as if still undecided, and Wendy says “go on” again. Michael walks over to Bernice who takes him in her arms.

  Michael’s eyes are on Wendy, watching for a reaction she refuses to give. Instead she inspects one of the tapestries, coming to the slightly buzzed insight that the love scenes and fight scenes are more or less interchangeable. She turns her eyes from the tapestry to catch Michael in periphery. Bernice has a finger through one of his belt loops. Wendy knows she’s in one of those magical New York moments when something out of the ordinary will become, in the form of a dinner party anecdote, an emblem of American resilience, evidence that in our darkest hours, people must and will come together to take comfort in the small things that make life worth living: a minor-key melody, fingers through belt loops, feet moving in unison. Wendy’s never a participant in these stori
es, and she’s not now either, eight feet away in her chair.

  So even though it’s out of character, Wendy stands from her seat. She walks over to Michael and tugs at his elbow, loosening him from the waitress. Bernice goes without argument and begins again to sing.

  Later, in Michael’s parked truck, overlooking the Hudson from the edge of the West Harlem docks, Wendy will lean uncomfortably across the truck’s wide center console and lay her head on Michael’s shoulder. The windows will be cracked, and the river will smell of fish and refuse, New Jersey on the other side, a shimmering mass of white light, so close you could swim if you had to, launch yourself into the black water and let the current take care of the rest.

  Wendy will try to recall Bernice’s voice, its tone and timbre, its breathy texture. She will place a hand on the damp unbuttoned area over Michael’s breastbone. She will hold her palm to his sternum. She will twist a lock of his chest hair so that it loops around her finger like a ring.)

  American Americans in America

  Michael

  The wind’s too strong to ride roofless, but we brave it, gun in the glovebox. My Porsche clanks along in the right-hand lane. It’s been due for a tune-up for years. The car crosses the Taconic, paced by Vermont-plated Subarus and shit box hatchbacks bearing Red Sox insignia. White-bearded riders on Harleys from New Hampshire zip past like they’re late to audition for the ZZ Top reunion tour. New York plates are bolted to an absurdly high number of vans and SUVs, which gives me pause to wonder where they find city parking. Maybe in the badlands out beyond the limits, like Westchester. Rachel’s on my right, wind in her hair, sun on her scorpion. She speaks, but I can’t make her out over the noise.

  “What did you say?”