by Alix Ohlin
“Fine,” Dawidoff said brusquely. “Do that.” He hung up. Robin held the receiver with shaking hands, the dial tone humming A and F notes, a chord she couldn’t unhear.
* * *
—
She was determined that if she left Juilliard it would be her own decision and no one else’s. So in the spring semester, around the time that I met Lawrence Wheelock, she changed her playing style. She broke herself of all her old habits—what she considered her entire personality as a musician—and assumed new ones. She obeyed every instruction. She found the performance style dry and limiting but not, ultimately, difficult. She made of herself a perfect robot. When her teachers smiled thinly, still not convinced, she pressed on, stripping everything away, all color, all spontaneity, all romance.
“It’s nice to see you maturing,” a teacher told her at last. “We’ll make a Glenn Gould of you yet.” People at school were always making Gould jokes because my sister was Canadian. She wished they’d find some better material.
“Excellent, I’d love to be a disturbed shut-in who dies at the age of fifty,” she said.
“Still,” her teacher said. “We like to see you moving away from all that self-indulgence.”
Robin thought it made no sense that indulging the self was considered a bad thing. What was there in music besides the self? And if you took out the self, where was it supposed to go? When she told me this story, years afterward, I could see how she still bristled at the memory, how she was both proud of her ability to give her teachers what they wanted and resentful of their demands.
“Do you wish you hadn’t given in?” I asked her.
“I didn’t give in,” she said sharply. “I only pretended to.”
Pretend or not, Robin made a great success by the end of that first year. She was invited to a prestigious summer festival in Aspen; her grades were excellent. At school one day she received a bouquet of flowers, and tucked among the daylilies and roses was a small card. I guess you aren’t going to community college after all. Boris. Robin carried the bouquet, pink and yellow sprays tickling her nose, through the hallways and down to the street. She walked across Lincoln Center and west on 66th Street, the wind flapping her hair into her eyes, so that she was half-blind but unable, because of the flowers, to push it aside. If people stared she didn’t see them. She kept going until she hit the Hudson and there she set the bouquet down. She tore the flowers into pieces and flung them into the choppy water. When she ran out of flowers she threw the vase, which bobbed briefly before sinking below the surface with a disappointing lack of fanfare.
A man in a business suit was eating lunch on a bench, his bento box perched on his thighs, and observing her with a smirk. Holding a piece of salmon between his thumb and index finger, he waved it at her while a seagull eyed it jealously. “Don’t worry, baby,” he said, “there are a lot of other fish in the sea.”
Robin turned on him. “What an incredibly wise saying! I’ve never heard anyone put it that way before.”
He wasn’t fazed. “So we’re in that mood,” he said, still smirking.
His name was Saul and he was a management consultant. Robin followed him back to his apartment on the Upper West Side and had sex with him but only, she told me all those years later, still percolating her rage, to get rid of that smirk.
25.
Robin and I spent the summer apart. She went to Aspen and then Chicago for a summer intensive program, returning to New York and the Tunnel before I did. She earned scholarships and stipends, enough to cover her share of the rent, and I took this to mean that everything was on track. I had no doubt that she’d become famous, performing in fancy gowns and recording music that would be listened to for decades, just as she and I had played countless albums on Marianne’s Magnavox turntable. Because of this certainty, some tension that had gripped me for years—the pressure of being responsible for her—lessened. I went to central Pennsylvania to work for Lawrence Wheelock, who lived in an old yellow farmhouse decorated with peeling hex signs the previous owners had left behind. When I arrived, he came to pick me up at the bus stop in a dark blue pickup truck scabied with rust.
“Pleased to have you,” he muttered as we rumbled along the gravel road, “I look forward to your contributions.” He showed me to a garden shed behind the house, where I would be staying. “For your privacy,” he said, raising his eyebrows awkwardly. The shed had been fixed up by some previous occupant: there was a four-poster bed with surprisingly nice sheets and blankets, a nightstand, and a little bookcase. It was wired for electricity and had a small sink and toilet in the corner, like a deluxe cell.
Wheelock’s house testified to his immersion in his work. There was almost no furniture; the living room was a mess of an archive, with filing cabinets and shelving units on which were stored reels of film, and the long kitchen table was stacked and scattered with newspapers and yellow legal pads crammed with enigmatic notes. Though the arrangement of papers seemed chaotic and random, if I got anywhere near them he would say quickly, “Don’t touch that,” from which I gathered there was some system only he could understand. Against one wall, beneath the windows, sat a series of glass urns filled almost to the brim with cigarette butts swimming in a dingy, dark liquid. I never saw him smoke.
On the second floor were Wheelock’s bedroom and two other rooms he used for editing. The kitchen he used for drinking. Sometimes, lying in the garden shed at night, listening to the wind throwing pine needles down on my roof, I saw a light shining in the kitchen well past three in the morning. The shed itself creaked and juddered, with tiny scurrying movements across the roof I couldn’t identify, and I took some comfort from this light even while knowing that I wouldn’t see much of Wheelock the next day. Other times he went to bed early—by eight o’clock—and rose at five, working for hours without stopping.
From our correspondence, I knew Wheelock was making a film about farms. He wanted to capture the life of the small farmer still trying to make a go of it in an era when corporate agriculture had taken over almost everywhere. And he was particularly fascinated by farming equipment, the rhythm and noise of it; the whish and hum of milking machines, say, or the throttle sound of a tractor plowing a field. The film, he said, would be wordless and black-and-white, with close-ups so tight the machines would become abstractions. Before I arrived, I’d thought that I would be traveling around with him to farms; I’d imagined myself lugging equipment and setting up shots, perhaps sharing a cup of tea with the farmer’s wife in the kitchen while Wheelock talked crop yield with the farmer outside. Maybe, I’d thought, Wheelock would give me a sequence to edit; we’d confer over footage late at night, watching one version and then the next, squint-eyed with exhaustion but determined to continue, denying our fatigue in the service of art.
In reality my duties were mostly custodial. Wheelock had me clean the kitchen and buy groceries. He asked me to tidy up the basement and sort his tools. Sometimes he asked me to make coffee. Most of the time, he asked me for nothing at all. If I pressed him for work, wanting to make myself useful, he’d rub his face with the heel of his hand, his eyes watery and squeaking, and say, “Lord, I’m tired.” If he didn’t say, “Lord, I’m tired,” he’d say, “Well, listen to you.” Most of our conversations consisted of these two phrases. I felt as if we were a married couple whose fights of many years had worn him down.
Wheelock gave me the keys to the pickup truck, and I learned to drive by edging cautiously out his driveway and gingerly nosing my way along the country roads. Once I felt comfortable I ran errands in town, mostly for something to do; I waved to the guys at the hardware store and chatted about the weather with the ladies at the supermarket. Out of boredom more than anything I decided to make a film, having brought with me a hand-held camera that I’d bought second hand from a graduating student who was giving up film and going to law school. I called it Summertime, PA, and I filmed the men who cha
tted on benches in the town square; I set up long shots filled with nothing but gnats swirling in the yellow glow of a porch light, while the sound of cicadas rolled by in waves like an engine trying to turn over. I filmed the teenagers who gathered at the ice cream parlor, the girls flirting by pressing their hands quickly to the boys’ arms and then recoiling from their muscles as if burned; the boys yelling insults to each other or calling out from the rolled-down windows of passing cars, everyone performing, summertime a stage. I was recording an adolescence I’d never had. In the garden shed I cut the film together, cicadas and girls, old men and moonlight. All my life I’d gathered tidbits—things I read, a picture that lingered, the memory of an afternoon in a movie theatre, the face of my sister as she laughed—and sometimes my head felt cluttered as an attic with them. But stitching a film together satisfied this collector’s itch perfectly, my magpie treasures woven and spackled into a nest.
At the grocery store I met a guy named Brian who claimed to be home from college for the summer, though when I asked him where he went to school he said only, “Elsewhere.” Tall and rangy and fair, with an angry-looking sunburn on the bridge of his nose and the back of his neck, he liked to wear loose tank tops and long basketball shorts. He had a job at a feed store and we’d meet up at seven or eight when he was done, the sky still light, to drive around, or park and make out, or listen to scratchy music on the truck radio. The feed store, it turned out, doubled as Brian’s drug-dealing headquarters, and he often came to meet me with a bag of wizened shrooms or some quality weed. On a hot night in early July we took ecstasy and went for a hike on Wheelock’s rambling property, stopping to have sex in a field, and when I woke up in the morning I discovered my ankles and calves were lashed with red wounds from stinging nettles I’d walked through without noticing. Wheelock, passing me in the kitchen, said nothing. But later that day, as I sorted and filed some of his mail—he hadn’t dealt with his mail for years, and I kept finding letters and contracts and invitations to festivals that had taken place long ago—he suddenly appeared in front of me with a bucket of hot water.
“Here,” he said. I was so startled by it I didn’t say anything. He bent down and lifted my feet, one at a time, into the water, which was cloudy white. As he knelt before me I could see thick patches of dandruff in his hair.
“Baking soda,” he said. “The alkaline neutralizes the sting.”
“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded and went back to work.
That evening I made spaghetti and jarred sauce, the extent of my cooking repertoire, and knocked on the door of the editing room. I could hear indeterminate rustling noises. “I made dinner,” I said, and went back downstairs. I wasn’t expecting anything, but five minutes later Wheelock came downstairs and served himself from the stove, then sat down at the table. We didn’t speak. Outside the kitchen window a couple of swallows were dive-bombing the eaves. We watched them, or I watched them and Wheelock stared into space as he chewed.
* * *
—
I began working on another film, this one called Brian Driving. I told him he was my muse, and he laughed and asked if I wanted him to pose naked. “Maybe,” I said thoughtfully, and he got a queasy look and changed the subject. I never asked him about his family, or where his friends were, or what he did when we weren’t together; but I shot hours of footage of him at the wheel of his car, close-ups in which I focused on his ear, the dashboard, his hands on the steering wheel, while he talked about what he’d do when he became rich, which was one of his favorite topics. He wanted a Cadillac Escalade and a McMansion. “Not a real mansion?” I asked him, and he shook his head. “I want a normal life in the suburbs. But also better than most people. That’s a McMansion.”
Wheelock and I ate dinner together more and more, still without much conversation, though every once in a while he’d swallow and speak, usually a sentence or less: “Wasps’ nest outside, gotta deal with it,” he said once. Or: “They say thunder’s coming.” He spoke to no one, and I didn’t know who “they” were. Though I couldn’t have taken any credit for it, I did notice that his hours, as the summer passed, grew more regular. He didn’t stay up until three in the morning as often, and he usually materialized in the mornings as soon as I’d brewed coffee and in the evenings once I’d made dinner. The smell of alcohol was less pronounced, and his fingers didn’t flutter as they had in the bar on the day we’d met. Maybe what he’d needed all along, I thought with disappointment, was a housekeeper.
* * *
—
In early August, Brian told me he’d be heading back to school before long. It turned out “Elsewhere” was MIT, where he was studying mechanical engineering. I asked him why he’d never mentioned this before, and he shrugged. “Around here I’m just your friendly neighborhood drug dealer who works at the feed store.”
Knowing that our time together would soon end lent it a sweetness that was sharp and concentrated and lovely. We touched each other tenderly, freed to act out romantic gestures that we knew would have no consequences. Nights he spent with me in the shed, rolling out of bed at the last possible moment before heading to the store for work. One morning I looked up and saw Wheelock watching from the upstairs window of the farmhouse, his expression impossible to read. Was he always watching us? I shivered, but told myself defiantly that I didn’t care.
That night, Wheelock opened a bottle of wine with dinner. He’d brought it up from the cellar, shaking off the dust, and poured with care. I drank the glass he gave me nervously, wondering what was coming, but he stopped when the bottle was finished and asked me to come upstairs. For the first time that summer, I was invited into the editing room. Unlike the rest of the house, it was fastidiously tidy. Everything was neatly labeled in his block-letter handwriting, dates of footage shot, cuts made. On the table was a black composition book in which he kept neat, detailed notes. He flipped through the notebook, outlining the work he’d done so far. “This is from the shoot in Lancaster. This is from the shoot near Centralia.”
“Isn’t Centralia where the coal fire has been burning underground for decades?” I said. “I didn’t think there were farms there.”
“Anthracite, yes. It burns very slowly. Could last hundreds of years. You’re right, it’s a ghost town. But there’s a potato farm nearby I’ve been visiting. I like the idea that something’s growing underground not far from the fire.”
“Maybe they’ll come up French fries,” I said.
He didn’t laugh. “They aren’t that close together,” he said, as if I were an idiot.
“I know. It was a dumb joke.”
“I keep forgetting,” Wheelock said musingly, “how young you are.”
Mortified, I fell silent. I was concerned that I’d broken the mood irrevocably, ruining my one chance to garner access to his work; but he continued to show me around the space, at last feeding a reel into a projector and turning off the lights.
“Here,” he said, “watch.”
I held my breath. What he showed me was a piece of a film, Potato, which was released two years later, but not widely seen. It’s not hard to understand why. The film is slow, densely composed, exquisite. Every shot shows how he labored over it, and this is perhaps part of the problem: his fingerprints are on every frame, urging the viewer, Look how beautiful this is. It’s as if you’re not allowed to see anything for yourself. The other problem (besides the title, which encouraged bad behavior among writers, unable to restrain themselves from headlines like Spud Flick a Dud) is the film’s level of abstraction. The tight composition focuses on the threshers, the planters, the rolling escalators in which the trembling potatoes are fed into the gaping maw of the processor, the camera so close to the equipment that it becomes difficult to tell what the machines are doing. The whole experience is aestheticized, and for all the nearness, there is no intimacy.
I didn’t necessarily understand t
his at the time. In the moment, I was overwhelmed by the privilege of seeing his work in progress. And I know now that he showed me some footage that didn’t make it into the final film: three minutes of Isaac Hoberman, the potato farmer, talking about his work while holding a potato in his hand. One end of it is clustered with wart-like shoots. There is no sound. As he talks, he keeps rubbing the skin of the potato with his thumb, with gentle familiarity, as a man rubs the cheek of a child or a woman he loves. And then, without warning, he suddenly throws it over his shoulder and walks away, the camera gazing without judgment at his back. This sequence was so comic and unexpected—like something out of Charlie Chaplin—that I gasped and laughed. Wheelock grinned at me. I still don’t know why he didn’t put it in the film. Sometimes, when I’m being vain, I imagine that he left it out as a secret between us—a gift. That he saved it for me.
Another thing about the footage he showed me that night: the relentless tightness of composition, so many close-ups without a break, and the level of abstraction, all of it was unusual for Wheelock. The change in his style was notable and strange. Strange because the film I’d made of Brian had been shot in more or less the same way. I knew he hadn’t seen my footage, nor had I seen his. Had I picked up something from Wheelock by osmosis, simply by sleeping in a garden shed next to his yellow farmhouse? Or was it possible that we’d simply arrived at the same destination by chance? Later I would read about simultaneous invention, the notion that scientific discoveries are often made independently at the same time, as calculus came to both Newton and Leibniz, or evolution to Darwin and Wallace, or even the crossbow, which was invented over and over again in countries around the world. Not that I considered myself a Newton or a Darwin or even an inventor of a crossbow. I was a girl in a garden shed, and I figured I must have plucked his ideas from the air, without even knowing how I did it.