Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  “Of course not.”

  At night she had very little to report. The day had been spent rereading her contract and watching The Bachelor with Laura.

  “Laura’s been watching too much TV” was her only conclusion. “She needs a job.”

  “What’s wrong with watching TV?” Louis asked. “Does she actually need a job?”

  It was around midnight, and it was predictably hot inside. He’d come home late, they’d had sex, he’d showered. She watched while he flicked water off his sides, air-drying. His outline was perfect.

  “Yeah, she needs a job. But she’s treating TV like her job. She’s super deep in all these forums. Like she’s studying up for something. She was nonstop with the trivia today, and she was really, overly upset when her choice contestant got kicked off.”

  “I didn’t know The Bachelor had contestants. I thought it was a dating show, not a game show.”

  “Technically they aren’t called contestants.”

  “Do they win money?”

  “No, they just win a husband. But then they get all sorts of product sponsorships and talk-show-hosting deals, so indirectly, yes, they win money.”

  “It’s always seemed off to me that Laura watches that shit. Didn’t she used to be some kind of anarchist?”

  “Yeah, she used to be full-on black bloc.”

  “Sound like the biggest cliché of disillusionment.”

  “No, not exactly. She’s really anthropological about it. She calls it critical visual engagement.”

  “Or maybe she just loves watching TV. I’d be more on board with it if she didn’t try to frame it as something intellectual.”

  “You should be grateful Laura makes me watch so much TV, otherwise I wouldn’t understand any of your cultural references.”

  “But I never watch TV.”

  “You don’t have to, you grew up in the States. I’m sure you watched TV when you were a kid.”

  “Never. Pat wouldn’t let me.”

  Interesting. This was a new fact for the pile.

  Louis called his mother by her first name, that was a known fact. Anja had learned such facts about Louis incidentally, through osmosis. Unlike most couples, they had never done the background check when they first got together, that protracted period of revealing narratives of self, sharing biographical data and the resulting conclusions about their psychological makeup. From earlier relationships, even from her term with Howard, she had anticipated and even looked forward to this process, and she was disoriented when Louis showed little interest in learning details about her early life and evolution, mistaking it for a lack of interest about her in general.

  But it was obvious that their conversations were infinitely more entertaining and enlightening than the predetermined kind from the relationship handbook; they were learning from each other and rewriting those stale narratives about who they were instead of reinforcing them. Generating new content, that was what they were doing. Did it matter what had actually “happened” to Louis before her? The web of references and jokes and ideas evolving in the present was more real than that cause-and-effect type of historical self-interpretation. They had more interesting things to talk about. They laughed all the time.

  For two years they had sidled sideways together, allowing the steps of monogamy (exclusivity, going to parties as a unit, introducing their friends to each other, moving in) to arrive without fanfare. These were crab steps into logical territory rather than increments of upward movement, the kind Anja had heard many times referred to by women as some sort of accomplishment. And the steps were rarely discussed as if they were momentous decisions. Louis was capable of making plans, but he never made promises. He didn’t need to.

  And yet—she did not try to resist the urge to piece together a basic biographical scaffolding for her boyfriend. She carefully gleaned facts that he tossed off incidentally, crusts from other stories. She compiled the facts carefully. It was important that she knew him better than anyone else.

  Louis’s father had been a mechanical engineer who worked in a blue-and-gray office building across the highway from the diesel engine plant in Columbus, Indiana. Also the Sunday organist at First Christian Church, his father had contracted heart disease at some point when Louis was young (est. 10 y/o), and suffered a pulmonary embolism during choir rehearsal, dead right there on the stool.

  Pulmonary embolism was the only description she ever received of the dad, not even a name, just pulmonary embolism, the face a round blot of coagulated fat and blood, arms dangling loosely at his sides, or maybe his lifeless wrists hitting the keys with a clang. All very morbid.

  Mom, having been alive until recently, naturally had a name. Pat’s story began where the other parent’s left off. After three months deployed and eight months of rehabilitation, Pat arrived home from her tour of Iraq only shortly before the pulmonary embolism happened. She was still adjusting to her new legs when she was stranded alone with Louis—becoming a single mom into perpetuity. But she had also become bionic, superhuman: those remarkable mechanical limbs, which Louis had imagined would look like sausage-logs before he saw them, impressed him deeply. Pat took the loss of her legs, much like the loss of her husband, in stride (there was some evidence of hardness or apathy running in the family; Anja took note).

  Through his teenage years Louis revered Pat and was desperate to impress her. He shadowed her in all her good-person activities. She worked for the veterans’ advocacy group, the city architectural board, the public library, the church cleanup crew. At some point she went from cursory Sunday hits of Episcopalia to mainlining the stuff four days a week.

  That was how Louis ended up at Saturday School and Sunday School and After-school Choir and Fellowship Luncheon and Youth Raise Hands Camp and more than one Lock-In. He didn’t have to be prodded; church was a sanctioned place to play basketball and meet girls. He never once believed in God, but he did believe in those two things, and he believed in Pat. Pat had no interest in remarrying, from what Louis could tell, and carried on driving Louis to school and to basketball and to the movies in her fully automated, army-financed van, right up until he left for college. (That Louis hated to operate a vehicle himself became clear during that terrible road trip to Hamburg, when he veered off the autobahn.)

  As soon as he made it to undergrad in New York, not the city but the state, Louis learned that having an army veteran for a parent did not carry the same moral heft it did in the Midwest. He learned to downplay his middlebrow upbringing, studying frantically to compensate—not his homework, which he could do with his eyes closed, but the highbrow references he had been so cruelly denied by his provincial origins (much as Anja acquired them now from him, second- or thirdhand). He was embarrassed by Pat for the first time in his life when she visited him at school, driving up in the brown van with veteran bumper stickers all over its rear end. She assumed he was embarrassed by her disability—though this was not at all the issue—and a period of distance ensued between them. She burrowed deeper into church.

  During the two MFA years in California the shame of Indiana wore off. A lot of the friends he made in his program had emerged from similarly cultureless deserts, climbed the dunes of liberal arts, and surfaced at the top with the satisfaction of having overcome unfair circumstances. That shared climb from mediocrity was precisely what gave them the right to be artists—unlike all those jacked-up trust-fund sons and daughters of collectors and curators. Pat was welcomed back into his life as evidence of how far he had come.

  In California, he started to produce artwork in earnest. He spent most of the second year on a single project, producing a series of tiny drone helicopters. The drones had wide-lens cameras, with which they could scout wide areas and zero in on telltale signs of poverty: dilapidated roofs, litter, distance from water source, proximity to dangerous waste. These factors were built into its image-recognition system. Based on what the drone found, it was hypothetically possible, Louis said, to determine the zones where developm
ent aid would be best spent. For his final thesis exhibition he showed wall-sized and remarkably high-resolution prints of an area the drone had captured from above and highlighted as a danger zone: the university campus. Crumbling buildings, piles of trash, and dangerous proximity to a chemical plant had identified the underfunded campus as a candidate for targeted aid.

  His five-year contract with Basquiatt was already halfway over by now. They’d hired him onto the payroll straight out of his MFA, ticket to Berlin the week after graduation. He was the only one from his class to shoot straight to consultant. Many of his classmates would end up on that track, but they’d have to at least develop the pretense of having done something upon which to be consulted first.

  (His Berlin period was pretty clear; Anja had lots of data on him from the past three years. Plenty of mutual friends to suck details from. There had been a few women before her, but only a few.)

  These were the facts upon which she built her assumptions about what Louis’s return to Indiana for the funeral had been like, the story she told herself. Some information he volunteered—for instance, kidney failure. It’s a common cause of death for women over sixty, he’d said. She was over sixty? Fifty-nine.

  So Pat hadn’t let him watch TV. The fact itself was information number one. But the detail also had secondary import: he was voluntarily bringing Pat into conversation now. He hadn’t mentioned her name since he’d gotten home.

  “You haven’t mentioned Pat since you got home,” Anja said.

  He nodded. “I know, it’s weird. I’ve barely thought about her. And I haven’t cried since the funeral.” He was fully dry from the shower now and was putting shorts on. She stared.

  “You cried at the funeral?”

  “Yeah, the way they’ve ripped up the church is fucking awful.”

  “The church?”

  “First Christian, where my dad used to play.”

  Cross-check: yes.

  “What’s happened to it?”

  “They tore down the pulpit, which was this beautiful off-center wooden throne, because apparently it’s not hip for a preacher to stand still anymore, they’re supposed to walk around like Jesus’s salesmen. They installed a huge pull-down screen for movies and a stereo system for Christian rock. I guess nobody has the attention span to sit through a sermon that isn’t a multimedia experience anymore. What they don’t get is that this building is incompatible, it’s just not suited to become a megachurch.”

  “It’s the one by Eero Saarinen, right?” Supplementary information, thank you, Google. Columbus, Anja knew, was a hotbed of modern architecture. A shining beacon of culture in the Midwest, its landscape was dotted with big names. Louis had returned to this topic many times before, rewriting its significance each time.

  “No, Eliel, his dad. It was the first big architecture ever built in Columbus.”

  “Aren’t there historical preservation laws?”

  He sat on the side of the bed and pulled on his socks, which he usually slept wearing. “There’s a high-low twang to Columbus that’s really hard to explain. Architectural masterpieces are interspersed with strip malls and run-down garages and trailer parks. People don’t even notice the public library is an I. M. Pei, teenagers just know there are dark corners to make out in. Then there’s this huge ring of industrial buildings all around town, since the engine company paid for the fancy architecture but they never updated their own factories. So most people actually live and work in those shitty buildings, even though the town still looks nice to tourists.”

  “The engine company paid for the architecture?” Scanning. No hit.

  “It was a corporate philanthropy thing. One of the first corporate philanthropy things ever.”

  She knew where this was going. This was going very far away from Pat, from emotional to intellectual content. And he’d accused Laura of masking her engagement with a pretense of academic interest. It took one to know one.

  She went along, following the script. “What did the engine company get out of paying for the architecture?”

  “That’s the thing about corporate philanthropy, it’s not obvious what you get out of it. You do it for a lot of reasons, like public image and employee morale. But also in a bigger sense, it’s one way big business convinces people that you don’t need the government to support public services. If corporations are benevolent and investing in plant-a-tree day and nice buildings then people won’t pressure government to do its job and interfere. Philanthropy is the cornerstone of neoliberalism, as they say.”

  He walked back into the bathroom and came out again with his toothbrush in hand. “Wait, how long has The Bachelor even been running? I thought it came out twenty years ago.”

  “Longer than that. It’s the longest-running reality show ever. Aside from maybe Big Brother.”

  “Hard to believe,” Louis said, back in the bathroom, brushing his teeth.

  She called out: “How does an engine company get into modern architecture, though? Seems like a bit of a niche interest.”

  “There was a mastermind at work,” he garbled back. She listened for the spit, the drain.

  “A mastermind, you say.” He emerged from the bathroom and perched on the side of the bed.

  “Yes, a mastermind!” He pulled back to look at her. “J. Irwin Miller, the proto-ethical CEO of the future.”

  She laughed. “Would you care to tell me the whole story?”

  “A bedtime story. Let me think for a second.” He mimicked stroking his chin, obviously not needing to think about anything. He was born prepared. “Let’s begin in the 1940s.” She laughed again.

  “It’s the middle of World War Two.”

  “Okay.”

  “J. Irwin Miller, a native of Columbus, takes over the Cummins Engine Company when his uncle dies.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “The company isn’t doing so well. But even though he doesn’t know anything about running a company, he turns it around really fast. He’s naturally a great manager and everyone loves him. He’s a humanitarian and a Christian and he’s developed this fetish for the working class while he was away in the Navy working alongside the masses. He’s all for workers’ rights. He actually helps his own workers unionize.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch.” Louis smiled, half-serious, as always. “He’s a good Christian. So eventually the company has grown so much that the size of the whole town has doubled. None of the schools or public buildings are big enough anymore, and the government is building all these shitty buildings really fast to try to fit people. So our hero, J. Irwin, decides to use company profits to pay for real architects to come design them instead.”

  “He pays for the whole thing?”

  “He pays the extra on top of the government budget that it costs to get a good architect instead of a prefab thing.”

  “So he builds your church first.”

  “The church is his own special project. It’s kind of a test run to convince the town that modernism is okay. The backwater Midwesterners don’t ‘get’ modernism until he shoves it down their throats via religion. He convinces the congregation to do it by making them feel involved in the design process. He asks them what they actually want in a church.”

  “Participatory bottom-up spatial praxis!”

  “Exactly.” Louis laughed. “So ahead of his time.”

  “How do you know so much about this?”

  “I wrote a paper in college.”

  “What was the paper?

  He cleared his throat and mimed pushing glasses up his nose.

  “Well, I argued that Irwin invented the creative city concept, by building architecture to suck smart young people to the middle of nowhere to work for his engine company. He built up the town’s cultural capital and he got to hang out with famous architects. And all the while he created this elaborate tax dodge. He invented corporate philanthropy as an advertising scheme and a way of getting out of taxes. He made public, private, a
nd personal interests align. The perfect trifecta.”

  “What’s Cummins doing today?”

  “Nothing really. Diesel’s not a thing anymore. And after Irwin died they stopped innovating. No money left to build new architecture or keep my church in shape.”

  My church. An odd indication of ownership. Ownership arising through lack.

  “Maybe they need a new Irwin,” she said.

  “The world needs a new Irwin.”

  “Maybe you’re the new Irwin.”

  “Probably not.” He looked away, toward the window, the total darkness outside. “You know what I realized when I was home?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have any reason to go back to Columbus again.”

  They had come full circle, as she had assumed they would. She could let him spin his hands in the air, drawing loops around concepts, following his own train of thought while she drew new loops silently on her own. Eventually he would return to base camp and she’d be able to decipher why he’d gone where he’d gone. The route was new each time—that was why she went along with it—but the method of leaving in order to return was so predictable, and so inefficient.

  For the first time, she felt acutely annoyed that Louis had to leave himself in order to return to himself. If he could articulate the world, he should also be able to directly articulate his own being. Otherwise, what was the point of all that traveling in circles?

  5

  ON FRIDAY, LOUIS WAS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT GOING OUT. PRINZ was at a tiki bar in the west, and they were going to meet him. This seemed normal and fine, and Anja was fine with it. On the other hand, she felt soggy and incapable of small talk. All her clothes smelled like they’d been left in the washing machine for too long. She selected a damp knitted yellow top, white linen pants, and platforms with little plastic flowers separating the toes, then spritzed her whole body with a spray bottle of Febreze.