Signs and Wonders

by Alix Ohlin

  “Do you want to move in?” she asked him.

  Fowler said, “Oh. Oh.”

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to,” she said. “It’s just that you spend so much time here already.”

  “Right. True.”

  “It would save you some back-and-forth,” she said. “It’s a matter of convenience, really.”

  Fowler looked deep into her eyes, into her soul, as was his wont. “Well, let’s not do it out of convenience,” he said.

  She blushed. “I mean, I like having you here. I’d like to have you here more often.” He drew these statements from her, from a well she’d thought had long ago run dry.

  “I snore, you know,” Fowler said.

  “I’m past minding,” she said.

  She went to his place to help him pack up. She’d only been there once before, after a party where she’d gotten a bit drunk, and her impression had been of a scholarly hobbit-hole, cozy and knowledge filled. In a sober light this turned out to be overly positive. It was a studio apartment with books along one wall, floor to ceiling, and what she’d thought were bookshelves were boards and cement blocks. There was a bed and, in one corner, primitive instruments, gourds and sticks of wood. Fowler went to the closet, got out a suitcase, and packed his clothes. He owned two pairs of jeans, three white shirts, a sweater vest, and a blazer. This was his wardrobe in its entirety. Once he was done he closed the suitcase and looked around.

  “I might as well just leave the rest of it,” he said. “I’ll probably wind up coming back here to work.”

  Although she considered Fowler a scholar, a person who lived in the mind, Beth didn’t exactly think of him as someone who worked. What he did was less like a job and more like an atmosphere he moved in, a thick clear jelly that surrounded him and in which he was suspended, like aspic. Her ex-husband, after hearing about Fowler from the children, had called her up and said, “Just who is this guy? What does he do?” Fowler’s not a person who does, Beth wanted to say. Instead she said, “He thinks.” Her ex sighed and asked her to put the children on.

  But now she had the same question. “What kind of work, exactly?” she said.

  “I’m writing a book,” Fowler said, looking at her with the same expression with which he’d told the lie at the party: a little sheepish, his eyebrows and shoulders raised, as if he expected to be found out. But she didn’t care if he was lying, or if he wrote a book or not. She opened the door for him, and he picked up the suitcase and led her out.

  They developed a routine. During the day Fowler went back to his hovel, and Beth went to work. She was an office manager, and all day long she coordinated appointments and ordered supplies; then, at home, she coordinated her children’s appointments and bought groceries. Management was her specialty. When work was over Beth made dinner and Fowler either read or spent time with the children, if they were there. Their favorite story was about a turtle who steals a calabash from the gods that contains all the wisdom in the world. He hangs it around his neck and hurries home. But then he comes to a tree trunk lying across the road, and he can’t cross it because the calabash gets in his way. For some reason—stress, excitement, lack of time—he forgets that he can put it on his back, and instead he gets so frustrated that he smashes it. And ever since that day, Fowler told the children, wisdom has been scattered all over the world in tiny pieces. Beth couldn’t understand why her children liked this defeatist story, though Fowler did a great imitation of the turtle smashing the calabash into a million pieces. Later she discovered they had no idea what a calabash was. They thought it was a little animal, and the ending a killing scene. They were bloodthirsty in their misunderstanding, but she didn’t want to correct them, because they enjoyed it so much.

  Fowler said he had to go to a conference and discuss his work with other ethnomusicologists. Beth bought him the ticket and sent him on his way. What she hadn’t realized was how much she’d miss him. The children moped too. The days were long, the nights longer. The world felt empty. One afternoon she left the office early and went to Fowler’s apartment, her excuse—not that anyone was asking—being that she ought to take in the mail. The room was dusty and the gourds were thick with grime. She thought maybe she could clean them for him, so she took an abandoned T-shirt and began wiping them off. The gourds varied in size and shape, from large and round to long and phallic. Touching these last ones reminded her of Fowler in bed, and she missed him more than ever.

  She picked a gourd up and fondled it, and while putting it back she dropped it on the floor. Fortunately it was sturdy and didn’t break. But it could have, and she knew she was crazy if she thought Fowler would appreciate any cleaning she did. He didn’t care about cleanliness any more than the other mundane details of the world. Quickly, as if he were coming home at any second, she returned everything to its original place and left.

  When Fowler came back he knew at once what she’d done. He was sensitive to any change in his environment, any object out of place. He came over to the house late at night and said, “You were in my apartment.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I wanted to do something nice for you.”

  He didn’t believe her. He thought she was there to check up on him, to prove he was not in fact writing his book. Convinced that she didn’t trust in him or his work, he ran to the bathroom and threw up. Beth followed and talked to him through the door. She couldn’t understand getting so upset over something so minor, but this was Fowler all over, almost too sensitive for the world.

  “It was just because I missed you,” she said.

  “You want me to be something I’m not.”

  “I want you to be here, with me.”

  “I’m not conventional, Beth. My work is abstract. I’m not the man in the gray flannel suit.”

  “But I don’t care,” Beth said.

  “Everybody cares,” Fowler said. She could picture him crouched on the tile floor, his long thin limbs curling and twitching like an insect’s. “They don’t see how much of it is here, inside my head. How much real work is going on. Everybody thinks I’m lying about the book, that just because I occasionally tell stories I can’t also be truthful.” When upset he was prone to italics. “But the book is real and truthful. It’s the most real and truthful thing about me. Maybe the only thing.” He was moaning, kind of.

  “I was just cleaning,” Beth said.

  “Everyone wants to see results. They want objects,” Fowler said. “They don’t measure the quality of ideas.”

  She saw that she’d hit a nerve and there was no hope of unhitting it. She also saw that explaining she had no investment in the quality of ideas wouldn’t help. But she thought that maybe she could distract and soothe him alternately.

  “I’m happy you’re back,” she said, putting her hand on the door, trying to put sex in her voice. But Fowler wouldn’t budge.

  He stayed in the bathroom until she went to bed, and then he went back to his place.

  In one of Fowler’s stories—not that they were his, but that’s how she nonetheless thought of them—a mosquito falls in love with an ear. Why an ear? The story doesn’t explain. The mosquito doesn’t consider the union’s prospects unlikely. It has an idea about the ear and will not be denied the rewards of that idea. It doesn’t understand why the ear won’t reciprocate its affection and only when repeatedly, permanently rebuffed does it start to bite.

  Beth, similarly, began to bite. She called Fowler and begged him to come back, and when that didn’t work, she harangued him. She told him the children missed him, involving them in a way she’d sworn she’d never do. She told him he was being irresponsible, distant, uncommitted, sounding like an article in a women’s magazine. Fowler would come over for dinner, but didn’t spend the night, and then he came over less and less often. He was more comfortable in his hovel, in his Platonic cave.

  She blamed him. Of course she did. She told herself and all her friends that he valued ideas more than people, that he’d taken advantage. “I thin
k he’s almost autistic,” she told them, and her friends nodded sagely.

  One day she realized she hadn’t heard from or spoken to Fowler in a week, and she knew it was over. She felt exiled from a country she’d once been a citizen of. When her children asked her where he was, she lied. “He had to go back to Africa,” she said. “They missed him there.”

  Reports of Fowler filtered down to her every once in a while. He’d been seen with a divorced real estate broker whose own house had many extra rooms. He’d arrived drunk at a dinner party and announced that he no longer ate meat. Later someone caught him standing over the stove, spooning cassoulet into his mouth.

  “Fowler,” said the woman who told her this story, shaking her head.

  Once Beth saw him on the street, too far away to wave at, his long hair tousled in the wind. He crossed her mind all the time, then only occasionally. But he never disappeared completely. Instead he shrank to a figment of himself, partial and pale, stored on the shelves of her brain. He was a thought that cluttered the night, an idea once held close, now scattered and gone.

  Who Do You Love?

  Adam Leavitt fell in love with me two weeks before our college graduation, and I never knew what brought it on. One minute we were part of the same group of friends, loosely bound by the parameters of dining hall tables and Saturday night parties, and the next thing I knew he was staring at me with the intensity of a lion stalking its prey. He was a musician, and intensity was his thing. He had curly blond hair that fell in ringlets over his eyes, and he wore the same outfit every day: jeans, motorcycle boots, and the piercing, blue-eyed gaze of a man with heartbreak and death on his mind. He staged solo performances in boiler rooms. He had a tattoo of a Chinese symbol on his arm (this was back before every sorority girl had a dainty one etched on her lower back) and another on his neck, some kind of mythological animal, its claws reaching up toward his ear.

  One night I went over to his room to borrow a book and he’d lit at least twenty candles in this tiny room that could barely contain a futon—a fire hazard if I’d ever seen one. He handed me the book, his blue eyes glowing radioactively. I thought, Why me? I felt like there might be a hidden camera or somebody behind a curtain waiting for me to fall for this prank.

  “Janet,” he said intensely. I worried there was going to be a romantic speech. Let me give you some context. This was the early nineties, at Harvard, in a dorm where we all wore black turtlenecks and thought we understood Derrida, or thought that a display of understanding Derrida was important. I had friends who stayed up all night discussing whether all penetration was rape. There was a couple whose abusive S & M relationship was considered by some to be a radical subversion of the heteronormative paradigm. We were serious about these things. There was no place for romantic speeches in our world.

  I grabbed the book and said, “Sorry, I have to go.”

  After we graduated and I moved to New York, he sent me a postcard, a black-and-white photograph of himself, unsmiling, glued to a piece of cardboard. On the back it said, Thinking of you, wishing you well. What it meant, I understood, was I’m over it, good-bye.

  Eventually I left the city, went to graduate school in the Midwest, and then moved back again, this time as an organizational psychologist. While in grad school I’d met and married my husband. All the French theory in my head had evaporated when I graduated from college; I’d come from middle-class suburbia and those were the values I returned to, undergraduate philosophy sliding off me like the extra pounds from dining-hall food and Everclear punch. My husband had attended a state school where they hadn’t waded knee-deep in identity politics and irony. He professed his love to me in an e-mail, after a chatty message about some repairs he was having done on his car. He was forthright and direct. PS, he wrote, I love you.

  In person, this became his thing. At the end of a phone call: “Well, I’ve gotta go,” he’d say. “PS, I love you.” Sometimes he’d even hang up, then call back to say it.

  After the wedding, he joined an Internet startup that was targeted immediately by enthusiastic investors, and all of a sudden we were floating in money. We had salaries and stock options and a brand-new car. My husband began speaking in acronyms. I’d thought PS was cute but it turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. He had code for everything. BRB, he’d say when he was going to be right back. IMO, when offering an opinion on current events.

  One night, at a dinner party, I heard him say, “LOL!” He wasn’t laughing, or even talking about it using real words; he was using the code for laughing instead of just chuckling, as if throwing back his head and laughing would be too much trouble, and take too much time. What would Derrida say about that? I wondered. It made me hate him—my husband, not Derrida.

  You might think it’s a small thing, the use of Internet-derived acronyms in ordinary conversation, and of course you’d be right. But it became an emblem of everything about my husband’s new and prosperous and grown-up self that I didn’t recognize. And it swelled up right in front of me, inflating like a balloon, until it obscured everything that had once drawn us together. My irritation was so gigantic it filled the horizon; it made me miserable every single moment of every single day, and soon enough, so was he. What kind of love is this, I thought, that can be eclipsed not by infidelity or loss but by irritation? What kind of person am I? We got divorced.

  · · ·

  My husband cashed out his stocks before the Internet bubble burst, we sold our car, and he moved to California. I stayed in New York, the city’s hard times seeming entwined with my own. After a while people asked me when I was going to start dating again, but truthfully I couldn’t get interested. It seemed to me that I wasn’t relationship material, that all those dreams I’d had back before getting married—of a house with a yard, a life with children, a couple growing old together—were meant for other people, not for me, in the same way that I just can’t wear orange. Sometimes my husband and I talked on the phone, and we were friendly, solicitous, but our failure hung in the air between us, even across thousands of miles. I still thought of him as my husband, not because I still wanted to be married to him but because he was the person I’d chosen to marry, and the subsequent collapse didn’t change the facts. Our failure made me more of an adult than getting married had. I was thirty-six but felt middle-aged, as if the best I could hope for was to maintain. I spent my disposable income on facials and manicures, grooming my carapace, which was how I thought of my body, something to be buffed and polished but never used, like a car in a showroom, gleaming inside glass walls.

  A year passed, and I had a new position as an organizational consultant. I went from company to company with a laptop and a pad of yellow lined paper for taking notes. My job was to improve company performance by assessing its existing climate. I handed out questionnaires and conducted interviews, and in the process, I’d inevitably find out who was competent, overworked, or lazy, resented, or loved. Part efficiency expert, part psychiatrist, I diagnosed the health of these companies, and recommended treatment for their future well-being. Sometimes, people got fired.

  I was introduced to the staff of ICS, a corporate marketing firm, by Melissa, a short, skinny woman in her thirties whose long curly hair made her look even smaller. An animal lover, she had her employees bring in pictures of their pets and post them in the lounge; this, she told me, created community. At the weekly staff meeting, she said, “This is Janet. She’ll be with us for a month or so, conducting interviews. Janet, you’re welcome to put up a picture of your pet in the lounge.”

  “I don’t have any pets,” I said.

  Everyone in the room shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Afterward, I was shown to my temporary office, and was looking over the departmental flowcharts when a voice said, “Janet.”

  I looked up. Adam Leavitt was standing in the doorway, his hands in the pockets of his black pants. His hair was shorter, darker, with a few gray strands in it. He was wearing a white button-down shirt, and above the collar I co
uld see the claws of his tattoo.

  “You work here?” I said. I was too surprised to sound friendly, though I was happy to see him. “I didn’t notice you at the meeting.”

  “I was in the back.” Stepping forward, smiling, he placed his index finger in one of the flowchart boxes on my desk. “It’s just a day job,” he said. “I still play out at night. You look good.”

  “Thank you,” I said calmly, not without pride, as if he were complimenting my car.

  “Let’s have lunch.”

  “I just got here.”

  “I didn’t mean now. I meant at lunchtime.”

  “Right,” I said. On my notepad I wrote down lunch. “You can show me where to go.”

  “I’ll give you all the inside dope,” he said, and before leaving he shot me a look that reminded me of college—a shade more intense, somehow, than a lunch date ought to provoke.

  Three hours later we walked to a deli, bought sandwiches, and ate them sitting across the street in the kind of shoe-boxy Midtown park where corporate workers sit on or next to corporate sculpture. Depressingly, we caught up on fifteen years within ten minutes. Our lives went like this: starter job, disillusionment, graduate school, new job, major relationship, stasis. I asked him about his music, and he shrugged and muttered something about a record deal that fell through. He’d worked at ICS for five years and the line between its being a day job and an actual job had blurred to invisibility. He didn’t say he was miserable about it, but I could tell. After we finished eating he gave me a postcard advertising a show by his band, Das Boot, at a bar in Williamsburg on the weekend.

  “Das Boot?” I said.

  “We pretend to be German,” he said. “But we aren’t.”

  “I didn’t know you spoke German.”

  “I don’t. Well, sometimes I use German words, and sometimes it’s more of a German mood,” he said.