We Want What We Want

by Alix Ohlin

  “It’s nice she cares about you,” she offers to John, who barks again.

  “That’s what women always say.”

  Meg’s most recent text, ignored this morning, buzzes inside her head. What are you finding out? Hello?? “So this house,” Amanda says, “with these dudes? You’re happy here?”

  If she expected defensiveness or euphoria, she is disappointed. He only shrugs, crumpling the sandwich wrapper into a ball that he tosses, tidily, into a trash can on the other side of the car.

  “It’s a lot better than where I was before.”

  “Which was where?”

  He shrugs again. “By myself.” For a second she thinks he’s going to turn the question back at her, and girds herself to answer; but instead he cocks his head at the groceries in the back of the car, as if the food might be impatient to get home.

  * * *

  —

  As they unload the groceries, they reminisce about meals from their shared summer vacations, and Amanda relaxes until Jason Wilson comes in and starts talking to her about pie. He seems to think that as a woman she should have some intrinsic expertise. “I know nothing,” she tells him, “except how to order pie at a bakery,” and he stops and gives her a long look. She realizes that he doesn’t expect her to know how to make pie; he expects her to learn, because it’s the task he’s giving her. That’s what he does: he assigns. Somewhere in the middle of this her cousin disappears, and she and the guru are alone in the kitchen.

  “Don’t worry,” he tells her, “I’ll help you. We’ll do it together.”

  Though it’s only ten thirty in the morning, he pours them each a shot of vodka from a bottle he pulls out of the freezer. The alcohol shivers down her throat, bringing cold and heat at the same time. As he sets out ingredients, he asks her to read from an ancient cookbook he produces from some pantry shelf. It’s the kind of recipe written by women in the early twentieth century, with inexact measurements and instructions that assume a certain familiarity with the kitchen. Early in the process, she is drunk and lost. At one point she’s standing with her elbows in a bowl of shaggy, sticky crust, her shirt ghostly with flour, her nose itchy, while the guru frowns at her, displeased.

  “I don’t think we had the butter cold enough. It says the butter should be cold.”

  Does he know, she wonders, that they stopped for ice cream? She swallows the urge to apologize. She doesn’t understand how he manages to exert such authority; he’s soft-spoken and not exactly frightening. But she knows she doesn’t want to displease him.

  In the end he adds some milk and she’s able to work the dough into a rough, chillable ball. Then he takes over, cutting the fruit while she slumps on a stool, her elbows on the counter. He’s not unattractive but there’s something fussy about him, an old bachelor in the making, a man who will complain when things aren’t done just his way.

  Late-morning sun invades the kitchen, already oppressive with the oven’s heat. Wiping his hands, the guru smiles at her.

  “You know, Schopenhauer loved pie,” he says. “It was one of his weaknesses, his sweet tooth. One of his unpreventable desires, you might say.”

  From his tone she guesses this is a joke, though she has no idea why. She could ask, but doesn’t. He leans back against the counter, crossing his feet. “Schopenhauer knew that human desire caused pain and difficulty in the world, but our will is intractable. We want what we want. So what do we do about this? How do we find relief?” He pours them each another shot. “The only sublimation is through the aesthetic. Through the appreciation of art. Especially music.”

  Amanda listens to this dreamily, thinking of her mother and aunt, who sometimes danced together in a theatrically romantic fashion, their arms around each other. Sometimes her aunt laid her head on Amanda’s mother’s shoulder. When her father saw this, he’d tell them to quit it; it embarrassed him.

  “My mother loved music,” she says. “Especially the Beatles. George was her favorite. She said the mark of a sensitive person was to pick George.” What she says next makes her realize she’s drunk. “I wish I knew things like you do.”

  The guru smiles again, and now he seems not fussy but gentle, and kind. “You could learn them, if you joined us here.”

  The idea that she would stay here, with these khaki-clad scholar-men, Wendy to their Lost Boys, Snow White to their dwarfs, is so absurd that she can’t even think of how to answer. And yet she doesn’t say no. To learn about art and music and literature and philosophy, wouldn’t it be a good life?

  And also: it’s like a drug, to be wanted.

  * * *

  —

  After the pie goes in the oven, she heads upstairs with a book Jason Wilson loans her, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which puts her to sleep, and wakes ravenous and thirsty in the late afternoon. From downstairs comes a tinkle of glasses, and classical music. She puts on the same dress as last night—she brought only one—and makes her way down. Almost immediately, the young blond guy, whose name she was told but can’t remember, hands her a gin and tonic, and she sips it while taking in the scene. Her cousin is changing a record, and two men are talking by the bookcase, two others seated on the Chesterfield; Jason Wilson reclines in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, his eyes meeting hers neutrally. The smell of aftershave wafts through the room.

  As she starts to take in more of the conversation, she understands that a debate is at hand, between the two men on the sofa and the two at the bookcase. Nietzsche is mentioned, and the nature of the will, and something about the representation of the world, and though she tries to get a handle on it, she’s both stymied and bored. She wishes she hadn’t left her phone upstairs; she needs to google everything they’re saying. Twice Wilson intervenes to redirect the conversation, or ask some dense question (“But what of…” the question usually begins) and the men scramble after it like seagulls over scraps.

  She guesses they’re smart; it’s hard for her to tell, just like it would be hard to tell if a crowd of Italians were smart. All she’d know is that they could speak Italian. She has the same feeling she used to get in high school English classes, when the A students would get worked up over The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice, waving their hands in the air. Amanda could never understand how something so abstract, these words on a page, could inspire such interest. She’d daydream and draw, until by the end of the period she’d have made a landscape or a castle or a city, and even though she almost failed English she’d always wind up feeling satisfied with herself, thinking, Hey, I made something.

  Without looking at him, she can sense the guru’s eyes on her, again that penetrating but not sexual gaze. The two men closest to her are arguing about “the sponsorship of the elite.” Cocktails are being refilled; there’s no sign of dinner.

  “What do you think?” Wilson has materialized beside her, his tone quiet but clear.

  “I’m out of my depth.”

  “But the conversation interests you?”

  “I don’t know,” she says honestly. “I guess the idea of it interests me. The idea that a place like this exists, where a conversation like this is happening, that sort of interests me.” She’s slurring her words.

  He nods gravely. “That was exactly my feeling. What I wanted to do. I was a teacher before, you know. A high school teacher. Spending year after year hammering ideas into the heads of children who couldn’t care less. Then they’d graduate and whatever tiny bit of knowledge they’d absorb along the way would just…evanesce. So I decided to make something. I made this.”

  This repetition of her own internal thought, her memory, is so uncanny that she can’t help staring at him, wondering whether he’d heard her say it out loud. His brown eyes are intent on her. “You could make something, too, if you want.”

  She both wants and doesn’t want it. She opens her mouth without knowing what she’ll answer, a
nd is saved by her cousin, who enters and announces dinner, shepherding them from one room to the next. He’s been the one cooking, she sees now, and he has made roast chicken and salad and new potatoes, all of it delicious. She eats too much of it, and drinks three glasses of wine. Over dinner, Mozart is discussed, and Schrödinger’s cat, and briefly the Obama administration’s assassination of a terrorist who was an American citizen, but Amanda notices that the guru doesn’t care to talk politics. He steers the conversation to the history paintings of Delacroix. Could she become a person with opinions on Delacroix, too? She slumps in her chair, knowing she looks glassy-eyed, as the river of talk wends around her.

  The pie is served. It’s edible, so far as she can tell, but everyone makes appreciative noises like it’s the second coming of pie, and she takes a few bites, the peaches slippery and gelatinous down her throat, and then she’s choking, and she has to run upstairs and rid herself of all of it—the pie, the wine, the chicken, the conversation—because she can’t stand it, this thing they made.

  * * *

  —

  When she wakes up, John Lorimer is in her room. He’s sitting in a chair by the window, not staring at her, not reading a book, just sitting. Her mouth tastes like chalk and fur.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles. “I’m not used to drinking so much.”

  “It’s okay. Do you feel better?”

  “I must have embarrassed you.”

  “I’m thirty-two, Mandy. I’m an adult. I can handle it.”

  “This place is a little much,” she says, because she’s still drunk. “I can’t wrap my head around it.”

  “Jason told me he asked you to stay. He likes you.”

  In the darkness she can barely make out his face, but his voice is steady, serene.

  “How long are you going to stay here?”

  “I don’t know. I put enough in that I can stay indefinitely. You could, too, I think.”

  Something cold pierces her skin through the gauze of alcohol, and Amanda sits up in bed, propped on her elbows, squinting at him. “What do you mean, you put enough in?”

  “This place doesn’t pay for itself, obviously. What Jason has built—it costs money to create and maintain. You can’t just be here and not contribute. That’s not how it works.”

  “I see,” she says. “And what did you contribute?”

  Her cousin leans forward, and there’s enough moonlight that she can make out his eager, childlike expression. She remembers him one long-ago summer, beckoning her behind his house, where he opened his cupped palms to show her, trapped in his hands, a brown frog.

  “You remember the beach house we had. Where we used to go in the summer.”

  “Of course I do.”

  He flings his hands out in the air, palms up, as if releasing that frog he held when he was ten. “I sold it.”

  Amanda’s elbows give out and she lies back down. “John.”

  He smiles. “She left it to me, and that’s what I wanted. You still own the place in Bethlehem, right? I saw the pictures on Facebook. I told Jason about it. If you sold it and put the money in, you could stay here, too.”

  “But that’s crazy. I’d never sell my house.”

  “Sometimes the best thing is to give up everything, you know,” he says. From beneath the chair he pulls something out. “I want to share this with you.” She can’t see, but a rustling sound alerts her that he’s turning the pages of a notebook. The room spins a bit, but lazily, like a merry-go-round someone stopped pushing a while ago.

  When he speaks next, her cousin’s voice is quiet but compressed with the importance of what he’s about to say. “This is what I’ve been working on. It’s a collection of poems. Every morning I get up at five and write for two hours.”

  “You write poetry?” Amanda says. When she closes her eyes, all she can see is the beach house in Virginia, her mother and aunt cooking dinner in the kitchen, the floor gritty with sand she and John were supposed to rinse off their feet.

  “It’s a book, about her. Some of them are about your mom, too. A lot of them are about those summer vacations. I’m pretty sure that’s when my mom was happiest.”

  Amanda swallows, her throat constricting. Her tongue is thick, inert.

  “Do you want to hear some of the poems?”

  His reedy voice pokes through Amanda’s ears, past her skin, past every defense she wants to erect. She wants to run outside but she can’t get out of bed; she can’t even open her eyes. With chill and silent precision, she knows that this—this—is the reason she left home to look for her cousin. Here’s what she came for: to be with the person in the world who remembers what she does, who needs what she needs.

  But now that she’s got it, she can’t abide it. The strain of her two desires—to seek the connection and to reject it—paralyzes her, and she lies rigid, every muscle tensed. If she were to speak, she would dissolve, or break in half.

  Don’t be like the stubborn oak, bow and bend like a willow tree.

  “Amanda, are you still awake? Amanda?”

  She says nothing and the silence grows long and longer until there is nothing else. And then there is a shuffle in the dark, and her cousin is gone.

  * * *

  —

  When her mother died, Amanda’s back was turned. After the months of chemo, after the multiple consultations with multiple doctors, after her mother smoked pot for the nausea and smiled at her family through the haze of it, after she squeezed Amanda’s hand, her thin fingers like a baby’s grip, after months of preparing to say goodbye, she slipped away while Amanda was out running errands. Amanda didn’t know that the end was near. When she came back to the hospital, carrying a CVS bag of lip balm and magazines—these little, little offerings—her father’s eyes were hooded slits and he met her outside the room. Death was a secret he and her mother kept between them. Amanda found she could not forgive him, could not forgive her mother, and most of all could not forgive herself for missing the moment she had dreaded for so long.

  * * *

  —

  She doesn’t know if John was there when his mother died, if he’d been holding her hand as she drew her final breath. If he got to be there—this is how she thinks of it, if he were that lucky—she’d be jealous. She plans to talk to him about this as she pulls her hair into a ponytail the next morning, now that she’s sober and awake. But when she goes downstairs, the house is empty. She helps herself to the coffee, reads the newspaper, hears no hum of mower or clang of tools. She goes for a walk around the grounds—though it’s only nine in the morning, the heat is already thick and strong—and sees no one.

  When she comes back, though, the men are gathered on the front porch, some sitting, some standing. They are all dressed exactly alike, blue button-downs and khakis, hair wet and combed. The guru sits at the center, in an Adirondack chair. She’s halfway up the steps before she understands that this is a line of defense. She pauses, one foot raised on a step, and glances questioningly at her cousin.

  The look he gives her is beyond cool; it has eliminated expression altogether. There was a test, and she failed it. But how could she have failed it when she was drunk and unprepared? When she had received no warning?

  Jason Wilson makes some gesture, and the young man who answered the door on the first day disappears inside the house, returning moments later with her bag, which has been packed for her. She doesn’t have to look inside it to know that the clothes are neatly folded, the toiletries zipped into their kit. The guru puts his arm around Amanda and leads her back down the steps, his tone as warm as ever. “It was wonderful to meet you, Amanda,” he tells her as her bag is stowed in the trunk and the door opened for her. “I hope you’ll come see us again sometime.” Nothing in his manner betrays upset.

  “Wait,” she says. “Wait.”

  “Oh, you’re right,” the guru says
, “We forgot something important,” and her heart lifts with the reprieve. He sends the young servant running back into the house. When he comes back, he’s bearing a silver shield that glints in the high sun; it’s the leftover peach pie, wrapped in foil. “Take this,” Wilson says, resting it on the passenger seat. “For later.”

  Amanda, defeated, gets in the car and turns the key in the ignition. What sends her away isn’t the brush-off; it’s the expression she sees in all their eyes, which is not anger but pity. She has been cast out.

  “Tell him—” she begs the guru, who smiles kindly, his face armored in friendly wisdom, and says, “I know.”

  The Detectives

  When I was twelve years old my father hired a private detective to follow my mother around. He believed she was having an affair, which she was, and he wanted proof to show a judge, in order to fight for custody of my sister Nicole and me. The detective was a short, dark-haired, overweight man named Sam Postelthwaite, who came to our house one evening with a manila envelope clutched in his meaty hands. My father introduced him, stupidly, as a colleague—stupidly because my father kept the books for a few local businesses and didn’t exactly have “colleagues”—and then hustled him into my parents’ bedroom, where they spoke in whispers for a few minutes, then emerged with somber expressions on their faces and hugged goodbye, as if they’d been attending a funeral service in there. Years later I waited on Sam Postelthwaite at the Blue Dragon Café. He was even more overweight and had not aged well, and I knew he could sense me staring at him from behind the bar while I pulled his beer, but he didn’t seem perturbed by it. Probably it happened to him a lot, in his line of work.