by Alix Ohlin
“I’m not sure I understand. What kind of words and moods?”
“Angry and guttural. Sad and guttural. Zeitgeist. Weltanschauung. Heineken.”
“Isn’t Heineken Dutch?”
“Dutch, Deutsch.” He shrugged, and I sensed he’d had this conversation before. “Anyway. It’s a hybrid Sprockets-revival faux-language poetry kind of a thing.”
I couldn’t tell if this was serious or not. I smiled noncommittally and said it sounded interesting, and he laughed.
“Well, if it’s not, at least the drinks are cheap,” he said. “Maybe you don’t care about cheap drinks at this point in your life, but will you come anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said, catching in his eye a brief flash of disappointment that didn’t seem ironic. “I’ll try.”
I showed up alone. The bar was dirty, small, pulsing with recorded techno, and close to empty. I saw some people I vaguely knew—acquaintances from college, some in designer clothes, others in studied vintage, with uncut hair. I made chitchat, wishing I hadn’t come. Then something hit me lightly on the back of my head, and I reached back to brush away what I thought was an insect. I felt it again and looked down at the floor and noticed that I was surrounded by popcorn kernels. Someone was pelting me. I turned around and saw Adam coming at me from across the room. He literally did come right at me, his chin tucked into his neck. You know how cats walk across the room and stuff their faces right into your hand? They do it to mark you, to release some scent that shows you’ve been claimed. That’s what this was like. He took hold of my arm and said, “You came.”
“You invited me,” I said. He held out the palm of his other hand, with three wizened pieces of popcorn still left in it. I declined them, and he turned his palm over and they fell to the floor. He was wearing one of the strangest outfits I’d ever seen, a striped sailor shirt with buttons on top of the shoulders, like epaulets, and green pants with buttons all down the sides. These didn’t look like clothes bought recently, nor did they look used. I spend a fair amount of time in stores but I had no idea where a person could find such clothes. He looked half a caricature, half a heartthrob. Which is to say that when I looked at him and smiled, my heart buzzed in its cavity like a fly in a jar. Whatever advantage I had on him during the day, as a professional consultant, evaporated.
“I know,” he said in my ear, spittle hitting my left lobe and neck. “But I didn’t think—well, anyway, it’s good to see you.”
A woman with long, dyed-black hair came over and told him they were getting started, and Adam made me promise I’d stay until the end.
“Okay,” I said.
When Das Boot came on, they were so loud I thought my head would explode. I quickly tore some bar napkins into small pieces and stuffed them in my ears, feeling a million years old. Even through the paper wads I could hear Adam murmur a string of words into the microphone; it sounded like he was whispering the word polka over and over again. The woman with the long black hair hugged an accordion wildly. Behind the band, a black-and-white film I didn’t recognize was playing.
They played two or three songs—at least I think they did, but it was hard to tell when one stopped and another began. Adam never once cracked a smile, but I was pretty sure the entire thing was a big joke—maybe his response to his lack of success as a musician, or the cause of it. Or both. There were too many layers. I felt confused and out of my depth, a feeling that made me pleasantly nostalgic for college. And when he sang a song about Wiener schnitzel and Werner Herzog, I laughed. The place was small enough that he saw me laughing from the stage, and this made me happy.
Then they were finished and the recorded techno music started up, and he bounded down from the stage and came straight at me again. “What do you think?” he shouted in my ear.
I took out my napkin wads. “I don’t know,” I said. “Is that what you’re going for?”
“Absolutely,” he said. He seemed very pleased with my comment and I thought I saw him blush. I was standing close enough that I could make out the age spots and wrinkles on his face, which looked better on him, I knew, than they did on me. “Let me get you a drink,” he said.
He was known by the crowd there and people kept coming up and greeting him. I liked seeing him in his element. There were in-jokes I didn’t get and names I’d never heard, and I listened to all of it with a dopey smile on my face. After a while I realized that Adam was holding my hand. He’d just put his hand into mine without looking at me or saying anything about it, still smiling and nodding and talking to someone else. Our palms were hot and greasy, kind of gross. My heart buzzed again. I felt like I was fourteen. Is there an exact opposite to growing up? Can a person grow down?
An hour later we left the bar together. We started walking purposefully down the street as if we’d agreed on some destination, then stopped at a grim little park—these apparently being our venue of choice—and sat down on a bench.
Adam put his arm around me. “It’s strange to see you again,” he said, “after you broke my heart.”
“What?” I said. “Seriously?”
“Ever since you, I’ve been wary of women. I let them chase me, and usually I leave them before I get left.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You never even asked me out. It was just some unspoken thing.”
“I adored you. I’ve never felt that way about anyone else, before or since.”
It wasn’t the kind of thing you hear every day, and I took a moment to drink it in. “I didn’t know,” I finally said. We were meeting each other’s eyes and then glancing away, light bouncing off corners, all goose bumps and indirection.
“Of course you knew. You just acted like you didn’t.”
I didn’t know what to say next. College was all about banter and flirting but now I was used to speaking directly; my husband and I had been to couple’s therapy and learned to use I statements to express our feelings. I felt like I was attempting some sport I hadn’t played since childhood.
We went to his apartment, not far away. He poured me a glass of wine, and as he was handing it to me he kissed me on the lips. “I want to be with you,” he said.
I kissed him back, then stopped. I didn’t want him to see me naked: I had veins mapping my breasts and clustered like bruises on my thighs. My skin was creped in some places, bumpy in others. I put my hands under his shirt and felt his muscled chest and then, lower down, the sweetly reassuring padding of his paunch.
In his tiny bedroom, no larger than the dorm room of years past, we pressed ourselves close together and wrestled ourselves into submission. Afterward I exhaled deeply, satisfied and relieved that it had gone so well. Then we slept.
I could say that the poor ethics of the situation—I was making recommendations that would affect him and his friends at work—made the relationship exciting. I could say that it was like recovering some part of my lost youth. Or that it was about sex, or abandon, or fun. And all these things could be true yet still not capture the whole truth of its slippery, sexy reality. Adam and I went driving around Brooklyn in his twenty-year-old BMW, smoking cigarettes and listening to eighties music from our teenage years on cassette tapes he’d gotten free off people’s stoops. We had dinners out, in small cheap restaurants; I never cooked for him or asked him over to my place. There wasn’t much of the domestic between us, nor a sense of the future. With my husband, almost immediately after getting together we’d started playing house, cooking dinner, washing up, and watching movies at home, curled up on the couch. We had a chore wheel on the fridge. Everything was a rehearsal for the real performance of adult life. Adam and I didn’t rehearse. We never talked about where things were going or not going. We went out to dinner, the movies, to parties, then talked about the dinners and movies and parties, and after that I slid my fingers through his hair and took him to bed, or was taken.
But it would be wrong to say, because it wasn’t grown-up, or an audition for some permanent household situation, that it wasn’t a
lso soulful and moving and important. It was. At night I sometimes ran my hands over his tattoos and marveled at his existence. I learned what he liked in bed, and when I did those things he produced this one special sound that gave me a shiver right through my chest. I was pretty close to being in love.
At work, I soon realized that Adam’s days were numbered. From all reports, he did little and had no true function, apparently hoping no one would notice. The company was riddled with these redundancies, and the resentment felt by those who had real work to do was enormous. Whenever I asked about this inequality, I got long explanations of how various departments that once were joined had since been separated, or had been separated and now were collapsed; apparently, a guy who’d left the company ten years earlier had orchestrated this particular structure, which still remained but held no actual contents. History dictated the current molds of any company, much as our adult personalities are informed by our childhood. It was my job to retrain this psychology and reform the molds. And no matter what I said about the company climate and its potential for change and growth, that Adam had done so little for so long couldn’t possibly look good.
My allegiance was temporarily torn between him and my professional discretion, but Adam won. He never asked me about my job, much less my conclusions, and after that first lunch we rarely spoke at the office. I was busy conducting interviews, and from what I heard he was busy surfing the Internet, making coffee, and using the company’s Kinko’s account to produce posters and ads for his band.
But at dinner one night, I brought it up. “Have you thought at all about what might happen at the company?” I asked, putting it as vaguely as I could.
“Not really. I’m not all that attached to the job,” he said. I knew he was lying. It protected him from having to worry too much about not being more successful; it was at once a cover story, an excuse, a disguise.
At ICS I spent the final week collating my findings, typed up my notes, and put them in a report filled with charts and graphs. I recommended certain dramatic changes, assessing their future efficiencies with a clear eye. I knew they were necessary; whether they would be implemented was another issue, but I was good at my job, a fact that brought me neither great satisfaction nor anxiety. I’d already lined up my next client, a clothing manufacturer in New Jersey, which would require me to commute on a PATH train every weekday for a month.
There was no doubt in my mind that Adam was going to get fired. I told myself this was the best thing that could happen to a thirty-seven-year-old musician: he’d get six months of unemployment benefits and during that time he could devote himself fully to his music, get to where he needed to be, or decide that he’d had enough of the struggle and reconcile himself to a regular job, one he liked enough to work hard at. I told myself I was doing him a favor, but didn’t believe it, of course, and didn’t expect that he would, either. The night before I was scheduled to hand in my report, I finally had him over to my place for dinner. I put on an apron and cooked, and he sat on my couch and laughed at me, wearing his crazy, clownish musician’s clothes, a blue guayabera and purple cargo pants.
“You’re like Betty Crocker or something,” he said, laughing.
I felt tears welling up. “Adam,” I said, “I adore you.”
“Baby,” he said, drawing me down on the couch.
“I mean it,” I said.
“I wanted you my whole life,” he said, his hands roving over my back.
There were things I needed to say and hear, and in counseling I’d learned that you shouldn’t preempt communication with sex, but at a certain point you have to say, well, fuck that, and this was such a point. With him inside me I felt centered, anchored, pinned. At the height of things I said, “I love you, I love you,” and he might have heard me, or he might’ve been too wrapped up in the sex to be listening.
He didn’t spend the night. At the office the next morning, we didn’t see each other. I packed up my files and laptop, then gave Melissa my report in her office, which was filled with pictures of cats she’d adopted or foster-cared for. Many of them were injured and ignored the camera, dismayed by the indignities of their head cones, stitches, and casts. She slapped the laminated cover of the report and said she’d have fun reading it over the weekend.
I felt like I had to prepare this compassionate, sentimental woman for the unpleasant realities inside. “There might be some difficult decisions to make.”
She cocked her head at me, and I could tell she knew what I was implying, and that I’d offended her. “I’m sure that with your help we’ll be able to make some wonderful improvements to our organization,” she said smoothly. “Thank you for all your hard work.”
From beneath her desk, I heard a sickly meow.
Melissa paled. “Don’t tell anyone, okay? We’re not supposed to have animals here, but I really couldn’t leave Snickers alone.”
I stood up. “Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.”
She shook my hand as the cat bellowed again. “Will do,” she said.
I’d grown used to spending part of every weekend with Adam, but Friday and Saturday passed and he didn’t call. Late that afternoon I tried his cell, but he didn’t answer. It seemed unlikely he’d already been told he was getting fired, but sometimes office grapevines work at the speed of light.
By Sunday night I was going out of my mind, unable to sit still, my skin itching. I caught myself thinking crazy things, like: The only thing that bothers me is that he didn’t even say good-bye. Or: I just want to kiss him one more time. My heart was rattling with upset, jumping around as if bent on escape. But there was no escaping this.
On Monday I headed to New Jersey. I greeted the bosses and set up my office and began arranging meetings. This place had no old college acquaintances to add intrigue to the assignment, which was fine by me. The day went by quickly, and so did the week, but the real me was somewhere else.
Apparently, things were over between Adam and me. I’d gotten the message but the crazy part of me, the heart-skipping, cage-rattling part, wanted a final conversation or, at the very least, one last glimpse. And so on Wednesday morning instead of taking the PATH train, I went to Midtown and sat in the park where we’d first had lunch. Looking at the building, I tried to invent an excuse for returning to the office. Maybe I’d left something there, a pen or some important folder. But I’d trained myself in efficiency, and never left anything behind.
At lunchtime, Adam came out of the building with Melissa. They went into the deli, then crossed the street to the park and unwrapped their sandwiches, balancing them awkwardly on their suited laps. They weren’t sitting especially close or touching each other or anything, but I could tell, just from seeing them, that they were sleeping together. So I guessed he’d keep his job.
I’m no spy, and I don’t do surveillance. “Hey, Melissa,” I said, walking up to them.
“Oh, hi,” she said.
“Adam, could I talk to you for a second?”
“Of course.” He stood up and we walked a few feet away, into the shadow cast by some monstrous, ambiguously shaped steel sculpture. We met each other’s eyes—we were adults, we could do this—and his were so, so blue.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
He looked perplexed. He didn’t seem mad, or even uncomfortable. “For what?”
I’d prepared a little speech in my hours of waiting for him to appear. “Although I couldn’t have altered the facts of my report, I could have recused myself, or not gone out with you, or given you some advance notice of my findings, and I’m sorry that I didn’t do any of those things. It was inappropriate, and I apologize.”
He looked down and laughed, and when his blue eyes met mine again, he winked. In all the time we’d spent together, he’d never winked, and the distance it put between us cut me like a cold wind. “Sometimes,” he said, “we were very inappropriate.”
“Well—”
“Listen, I understand you feel bad, and that�
��s sweet, but you don’t have to worry.” He gestured vaguely behind him. “I’m not getting fired but Melissa’s taking the spirit of your suggestions to heart and ICS will be the better for it.”
“I never realized that you were so concerned about the company’s welfare.”
He stepped closer, and his voice softened. “I think you were the one getting concerned. A little too invested. I just figured it was best not to get even more, you know, when it wasn’t going to be what you wanted.”
Understanding came over me in waves. “This isn’t about my saying your job should be eliminated? It’s because I said I love you?”
“I told you—when we first saw each other again—that I don’t do that anymore. I leave first, always. You can’t say I wasn’t honest.”
“So this was, like, your revenge?”
“No, Jan,” he said softly, and I’ll swear there was real caring in his voice. “It’s just who I am now.”
It wasn’t something you could argue with, so I nodded and left. I’d like to say I didn’t cry on the subway, but I did. And back in my apartment, I curled up under a blanket on my couch. I asked myself what I was thinking, scolded myself for getting involved with him and for acting like a crush-struck teenager, told myself that I’d survived a divorce and surely I’d survive this, commanded myself to grow up, and when I was done saying all this to myself I thought: Oh, great, another failure.
The difference between being a teenager and an adult is, I guess, that the next day, I took the PATH train out to New Jersey and got on with it. The days were okay but at night I could feel my heart pacing like a restless and unhappy animal. It was probably the first time I’d felt lonely in years. Usually I was comfortable spending time alone, but I’d made a space for Adam in my life and my body; now that he was gone, I felt hollow.
This is the only teenage thing I did: I went to a bar in Hoboken where Das Boot was playing. This time the place was crowded and a fake French band was playing. Next up was a fake Japanese band. Fake bands were all the rage. I couldn’t find any napkins at the bar, and my ears were ringing. I didn’t see Adam anywhere, and should have gone home, but instead I stayed and drank Red Stripe with people ten, maybe twenty years younger. At one point, gesturing to the bartender, I knocked over a bottle sitting in front of the girl next to me, who was very pretty and had silver piercings dotted all along her eyebrows. When I apologized, she put her hand on my shoulder and said sweetly, “I think it’s great you still get out.”
