by Alix Ohlin
22.
Robin and I moved into a place in Hell’s Kitchen we called the Tunnel. It was a railroad apartment, skinny as a snake: you entered into a hallway, and from there into a combined living room and kitchen where the two of us could just barely sit down on a futon. Then there was my bedroom, which you had to walk through to get to Robin’s bedroom, which was no bigger than the mattress we put in it. The apartment didn’t matter much, because we were hardly ever there. In order to make ends meet I enrolled in classes part-time and worked full-time at the campus store, where I stood behind the cash register and rang up overpriced sweatshirts with the school logo. I often grabbed a few hours of sleep on the couch in the student lounge rather than bothering to take the subway home. Nobody thought this was weird; nobody paid any attention to me at all. In film school everyone seemed more confident and sophisticated than I was; they argued for hours about Jim Jarmusch, could dissertate on Wong Kar-Wai. I was back where I’d been as a first-year student at Worthen, listening to Gordon’s speeches, acutely conscious of all I didn’t know.
Robin picked up new friends with whom she shared impenetrable inside jokes about “J-yard,” as they called it; a mention of twelve-tone scales sent them into spasms of giggles and groans. They sat around listening to CDs and rating the performers as “Rach 2” or “Rach 3.” Some of them had done nothing, it seemed, but play the piano since they were four years old. They were like veal calves who’d spent their lives in cages, fattened to bursting with musical technique; they could barely walk on their underdeveloped legs, but their Chopin could make you cry.
Maybe in response to this atmosphere, or maybe not—she didn’t talk much about her decisions—my sister dyed her hair blue and wore men’s clothes. To her existing nose piercing she added another hoop, and one at her eyebrow; one day I noticed bloody bandages in the trash and learned she’d gotten a spiral tattoo on her ankle. Later she added others—a heart, a flower—on her bicep and the small of her back, doodling on herself as if she were a notebook. Nowadays these kinds of tattoos are common on young women, even expected, but at the time I was mildly shocked by them, less by their appearance than by her belief that these symbols were worth carrying permanently. What did a spiral mean to her, or a rose? When I asked, she shrugged casually and said it was something to do. She dated a woman named Sheri who accused her of “using lesbianism as a fashion accessory” and then dumped her, leaving my sister sobbing and bereft, just as she’d been with Bernard. She drowned her sorrows in rum and I’d wake up to hear her retching as she ran through my bedroom on the way to the toilet.
She spent as much time at school as I did, and sometimes a week passed without us speaking. Our lives overlapped at the edges, never the center.
Even with all these changes, I was cautiously, timidly happy. The city confessed itself to me, as if in secret confidence. My New York was a study in negative space. It was Washington Square at five in the morning, mostly deserted except for me and the addicts and the early-waking joggers, or the view from the editing lab at midnight, when the streets were full of NYU undergrads heading to bars. It was a man walking with his head down, cigarette in hand; another reading a book on a park bench; a woman I saw on the bus, looking out the window, tears rolling down her face. The bulk of my time I spent alone, the quiet of my work-study job with Richard now tuned to a professional frequency. The membrane I’d felt before in college, separating me from everyone else, still endured, but now I considered it protective, and I hummed with activity behind it, purposeful, unseen.
23.
In my second semester of grad school, I took a documentary film course. In class we screened Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman, about life inside a prison for the criminally insane. Produced in the sixties, it had been banned for decades and released only in 1992. I watched it with horror-struck fascination; at times I covered my face with my hands and then peered through my fingers. What I was seeing was terrible—abuse, violence, illness, degradation—and the fact of seeing it felt transgressive and monumental and implicating. I wrote an essay about it, twice as long as the assignment was supposed to be, receiving for my efforts a failing grade and a note from the professor that said, I asked for analysis, not fan mail. My cheeks burning, I planned to drop the class, too embarrassed to face him again. But when I looked at the syllabus, I noted that the following week was scheduled to feature as a guest speaker a filmmaker named Lawrence Wheelock.
At Worthen, Olga had talked to me about Wheelock’s film The Habit of Despair. We were sitting in her office on a typically dark winter afternoon, the wind making the walls of the building creak. She tipped back in her chair and looked at the ceiling, speaking more to herself than to me. When she first saw The Habit of Despair, she was around my age. The title came from Camus—“the habit of despair is worse than despair itself”—and Olga, who loved Camus, recognized the quote immediately. Other than this, she knew nothing about the film. She had the habit herself, at that time, of wandering into films she knew nothing about. In fact she purposefully wouldn’t read about them in advance, would sometimes even buy a ticket to a showing that was halfway through, or leave before the film was over. It was, she told me, a test of her own receptivity to the image: whatever was projected, she’d make sense of. “Or maybe,” she said, “it was just a silly game of chance.”
Wheelock, she’d learn later, was just twenty-five when he made this, his first film. Intending to watch for a few minutes, she stayed for the entire thing. She was the only person in the theatre, and at one point she looked up at the projection booth and saw there was no one in it; afterward, when she exited to the lobby, there was no one working there either. The whole experience was so vivid and odd that it felt like a lucid dream.
In the film, a woman goes about her daily life. She feeds her children breakfast, kisses her husband, cleans the house, then goes off to work at a paper factory. She answers the phone and types letters while behind her, on the factory floor, massive rolls of paper spin from machines and are pulled from conveyer belts into bins. These industrial movements are so noisy that the woman’s voice can’t be heard at all. At night, she puts her children to bed, lies in bed herself reading a magazine, turns out the light. She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t speak to the camera or give any sense of being watched. The narrative is artless, seemingly unshaped. When it finished, Olga was sobbing. “It was the saddest film I had ever seen,” she said.
Slowly she lowered her gaze from the ceiling to me. “So you see,” she added, spreading her palms.
I didn’t see. I didn’t understand the point she was making, and yet it was probably the most intimate confidence she ever shared with me. I remember she was wearing a red scarf and brown lipstick, which was fashionable then, and a bulky navy-blue turtleneck sweater that fell just below her hips. Somehow, this blanket-sized item of clothing looked chic on her and not ridiculous. In the semi-darkness of her office the planes of her face tilted into shadow. I lingered there, hoping she would say more, but the moment passed, and she turned to the book manuscript on her desk and chided me for some sloppiness in the proofreading.
* * *
—
Because of Olga, there was no way I’d miss Wheelock’s lecture, so I returned to the class and hid at the back. When he entered the room, accompanied by my professor, I had the rare experience of seeing a person who was more uncomfortable in front of an audience than I was. And perhaps it was for good reason: his appearance made the two students seated in front of me, a couple who worshipped Hal Hartley and wore matching Doc Martens, snicker. I flushed with vicarious embarrassment and hoped he hadn’t heard.
Wheelock was wearing frayed khaki pants belted high at the waist—just under his ribcage—and a thick white shirt gone yellow at the armpits. The clothes were stained, not with romantic paint splatters but with what was clearly food, coffee, and dirt. His glasses were thick and his dark brown hair hadn’t b
een cut for months. He squinted at a point above our heads while our professor fussed with something at the lectern. He kept wiping his hands on the seat of his pants, then staring at whatever residue he couldn’t get off his palms. Dark-eyed, very thin, he resembled the physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Looking at him, I remembered reading that Oppenheimer only learned about the Wall Street crash of 1929 six months after it happened, in a conversation with a friend. He was that removed, as a young man, from the things of this world. Wheelock had an air of absent-mindedness that made me imagine he, too, lived at some incalculable distance from the mundane reality the rest of us shared.
I expected him to stammer and pause, but in fact once the projector was set up Wheelock was confident and articulate. I thought he was brilliant. He didn’t discuss his own films, even in passing. He showed a scene from Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (“predictable,” sniffed the couple in front of me) and took apart its composition, comparing it to Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas. He talked about the camera as a kind of mirror held up to the content of the scene, making its presence felt even though the equipment is itself unseen. He said any filmmaker embodied the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, affecting the proceedings by observing them, and that the best filmmaking embraced this complication rather than attempting to smooth it away. He discussed how Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line led to a man being released from prison, and how in it Morris used re-enactments except for the scene he argued had really taken place, and in this way the truth, if there was such a thing, lived in the viewer’s mind instead of on the screen. Then, abruptly, almost mid-sentence, he stopped. He’d been talking for an hour, and our professor, flustered, noted that we’d run out of time for questions. Seeing the flicker of a smile pass over Wheelock’s face, I understood that he’d talked too long on purpose.
Students from the next class were already filtering in, taking their seats. I walked over, drawn as if magnetized, to where Wheelock and my professor were standing in the hallway. “Espresso?” the professor was saying, and then, laughing nervously, “or whiskey?” It was eleven in the morning, but Wheelock looked interested.
“I know a good place for whiskey,” I said. This behavior was so uncharacteristic of me that I can’t, even now, explain it. My professor looked startled; I never spoke in class, and I’m not sure he knew who I was.
“Well, if you know a good place,” Wheelock said. I noticed his lips were chapped and there were circles beneath his eyes. I didn’t, in fact, know a good place; I knew no bars at all. But New York was full of bars, and surely they all had whiskey. I led the two men down the elevator and out of the building, operating on bravado alone. When we reached the street, I remembered a bar I’d seen on the way to the subway during a snowstorm; a man and woman had been sitting at the window, their heads bent close together, cozy and romantic. Now we walked there through the kind of characterless March day that was cold but not biting, wind flinging trash around the street like a child bored with its toys. I opened the door and said, “After you.”
Inside it was dim and cold, not at all cozy or romantic. One man sat at the bar with his coat on, drinking what looked like a glass of milk, an empty shot glass next to it. The bartender came out from the back. He had a shaved head and a bruised lip and didn’t seem pleased to see us.
“Perfect,” Wheelock said behind me.
We settled into a booth. The professor went to the bar and came back with three whiskeys, and a Coke for himself, explaining that he had to teach in an hour. Ignoring him, Wheelock lowered his head to a glass and slurped carefully, smacking his lips. Then he picked it up and drank the rest, his fingers flailing. The professor’s eyes met mine. He slid his whiskey over to Wheelock, who drank it, too, then sat back in the booth, his relief palpable. Up close, his chin was graveled with stubble. “I don’t sleep well,” he said to no one in particular. “I’m not much of a public speaker.”
“I thought you were amazing,” I said, and the words evaporated in the dark bar, ignored. I remembered my professor’s comments on my essay: I asked for analysis, not fan mail. I started to talk about Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, about a man who wants to build an opera house in the Amazonian jungle. I’d watched it earlier that semester because other students were talking about it. They loved to use the word Fitzcarraldian as a casual adjective. “I have a Fitzcarraldian ambition to write this paper,” they’d say. The film was famous and I hated it, feeling, as I often did, conscious of my failure of taste. Wheelock didn’t seem to be listening, and my professor was rifling through his backpack, muttering about missing lecture notes. This freed me to talk without any expectation of being heard. I said the movie made me angry, that it collapsed male ambition and high culture as if the two were one and the same; I said—and these were Olga’s positions more than my own—that the camera’s male gaze supported this vapid ideology, in which there was no self-questioning. “What I want in a movie is more uncertainty,” I said, having no idea what I meant. “More room for randomness and chance.”
But somewhere in the middle of my musings Wheelock had begun to pay attention, and he interrupted me with questions. What did I mean by uncertainty? Could I give an example of it in a film? By this point I’d drunk my whiskey—the first of my life, I think—and it was burning in my stomach and brain. I talked about Sophie Calle, a French artist I’d recently learned about and by whom I was fascinated. She’d once asked her mother to hire a detective to follow her around Paris. The detective recorded her movements as she recorded her experience of being watched. She was both in control of his gaze and not; both observer and observed. Wheelock rolled his eyes. “A stunt,” he said. “Artificial reality, no better than the formula of a studio film.”
Soon we were arguing. Wheelock raised a finger, and more whiskey appeared. At some point I noticed my professor was gone. I was very drunk. I began ranting about the movie Pretty Woman and Wheelock, to my surprise, was laughing. There were more people in the bar now—all men—and he was so loud that they turned around to look at us. It wasn’t the kind of bar where people laughed. It was a quiet hovel for daytime drinking, but I didn’t have enough experience of bars to know that. When I saw Wheelock laughing, I knew I’d embarrassed myself. But I also knew he was transformed; he had a beautiful smile, with two dimples that sucked his stubble into sweetness.
When we stumbled out of the bar into the bleak windy afternoon, Wheelock handed me his card. He lived and worked in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania, and he promised me a summer job.
“Are you going to remember this?” I asked, swaying on the sidewalk.
“I forget nothing,” he said.
24.
Perhaps if I’d been less wrapped up in my own life, I would have noticed Robin’s troubles, but it wasn’t until much later that I understood how much she struggled. At Juilliard, there was nothing but rules. Robin’s technique was considered sloppy; it was said that she’d been allowed too much freedom and her playing was inexact. Her teachers raised their eyebrows at her interpretations and she was given to understand that her bad habits would have to be unlearned. They wanted to break down her technique at the most basic level; they were teaching the Taubman approach, which was supposed to reduce injuries. So they would make her play—over and over again—the first three measures of a piece she’d learned when she was ten years old. They stood beside her and made her tuck in her chin; they worked on micro-rotations of her elbows and wrists; they changed her fingering and pressed their hands on her shoulders. Everything she did was too much. Sometimes she caught them rolling their eyes, and rather than hastening to please them, as I would have, she went in the opposite direction, playing her pieces with mannered exaggeration. “Is it possible to play the piano sarcastically?” one of her teachers said. “Because I think that’s what I just heard.”
Unlike me, Robin never retreated into herself. Charismatic and opinionated, she made friends easily, and they
went out for coffee after class, complaining about their workload, their teachers, the theory courses that made Robin’s head ache with boredom. But after coffee, her friends would go back to work, and Robin wouldn’t. She went out for drinks or dates. She went dancing by herself and didn’t come home alone.
Then, in December of her first semester, Dawidoff called. They’d never spoken on the phone before, not even at Worthen, and for a moment his low, thick, familiar voice warmed her, until he said, “I’m not hearing good things.”
“No?” she said. “Your new students can’t live up to me, is that it?”
“Don’t be cute,” Dawidoff said. In his Russian accent, which Robin imitated later in telling me the story, the word came out long and icy, quooot. “You are there because of me,” he said. “I realize you do not know this. You think everything comes to you because you are so special and lovely, pretty Robin with the beautiful music, la la la. You are a talented girl. But you are not as special as you think. I made this happen. I called in years of favors for this. When you fail, it looks very bad for me.”
Robin buttoned her lips.
“I didn’t ask you for anything,” she said finally. “I could just go to community college or whatever.”