by Alix Ohlin
28.
On a Monday morning in June they left from JFK on a flight to Reykjavik, where they’d connect to Oslo. I’d seen Bernard’s luggage—a backpack with two T-shirts, a pair of rust-colored corduroys, and a copy of Siddhartha he’d found on a stoop—and it didn’t inspire confidence. I packed Robin’s things myself, with care, like the replacement mother I still wanted to be. We rolled her dresses instead of folding them, because they’d take up less space, and bought travel-sized shampoos and a little first aid kit with Band-Aids and antibiotic ointment. It seemed inadequate. I sewed a hundred American dollars into the lining of her backpack, and then I sewed a Canadian flag on the outside of it. We said goodbye in the doorway before they went down to the car. My sister threw her arms around my neck and squeezed me quickly but hard, whispering, “See you soon,” and then I went to the window and watched them fling their bags into the trunk of a black Crown Victoria that had seen better days. I waved at them, but there were bars over the window, and I don’t think they saw me, or even looked.
* * *
—
The following week I too left the Tunnel, exchanging the city’s spitting air conditioners and hot gusts of subway air for the easier humidity of Pennsylvania. Brian had an internship with an aeronautics company in Seattle and didn’t come back home, I was told by one of his former customers at the feed store, who lamented the absence of quality “product” and raised his eyebrows hopefully at me, disappointed when I couldn’t step in to fill the void. I moved back into the garden shed, noting that a few things had changed while I was gone; there were new books in the bookcase (Ways of Seeing by John Berger, which had been read, and Plato’s Republic, which hadn’t) and a little plastic pot of African violets that had wilted from neglect. Whoever the interim occupant had been, Wheelock didn’t mention her. (I assumed it was a her.) He was hard at work on Potato, and now that I had more distance from the film I could see how little our work had in common, and how superior his was to mine. I was retroactively ashamed that I’d shown my work to him. Still, he treated me with respect, listening to my opinions so intently that it took me weeks to notice how thoroughly he ignored them. We settled back into our routine of early-morning coffee and shared dinners in the kitchen, and once I noticed that he wasn’t drinking, I didn’t drink either. The only other difference was that the vast urns of cigarette butts had been removed. One day I asked him where they’d gone—thinking that the answer might reveal why he’d had them in the first place—and he only looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about.
Though I’d brought my camera and sometimes drove around in the truck looking for things to shoot, nothing seemed to spark my attention as it had the previous summer. Instead I wrote email messages to Olga, with whom I was back in touch; she’d expressed interest, in her offhand way, in hearing about my time spent working with Wheelock, and so I began to record notes about the days, his work on Potato, his method in general, typing them up at a computer café—Wheelock didn’t have internet service—in a town forty-five minutes away. I never felt I quite captured the experience of living next to his yellow farmhouse with the fireflies that blinked in the evenings as if attempting to communicate with the larger glow of Wheelock’s upstairs rooms. What I would have liked, really, was to film him, the S of his spine as he slouched in the chair in the editing room, gnawing at a pen until the plastic turned white. But Wheelock would never have allowed that; he never even let his picture be taken in interviews, and when magazines profiled him they often had to resort to photographs from decades earlier, a vastly younger Wheelock with shaggy hair that fell in waves around his sensitive, unlined, handsome face.
While finishing the current film, Wheelock was planning the next, which was to follow a group of scientists working on animal cloning. He was obsessed with the subject and often talked about it while we ate dinner, feverishly wiping his hand on the tablecloth, a tic of his. To finance the film he had to apply for grants, a task he largely deputized to me, although I had no experience writing them and little idea how to approach it. I went through his files, looking for previous proposals to emulate, but generally getting lost in the minutiae of his personal archive—typewritten letters on onionskin paper, old carbon copies, tax records, ancient check ledgers. He trusted me to look through all of it, which I knew was less a mark of high esteem for me than low esteem for the papers. Once I found a check for a thousand dollars he’d never cashed. It was ten years old. When I showed it to him, he shrugged. “Too late now,” he said without apparent regret.
I did my best. I wasn’t particularly skilled, but I learned how to do what he needed, because I wanted to please him.
In addition to his work at the farmhouse Wheelock had accepted a number of speaking engagements, only because he needed the money. He asked me to travel with him, and since he hated to drive, we took the train to Albany and Boston, flew to Chicago and Denver. On all these trips I stayed by his side carrying two notebooks: one a calendar with all his engagements, and the other a diary, in which I noted people we met and what Wheelock said. I had no official job title, and he usually introduced me awkwardly as “my…Lark,” the words blurring together. Once at a reception I found Mylark printed on a name badge.
At the end of each evening he’d thank me gravely for my work and disappear into his hotel room. In the morning he’d order coffee for breakfast—room service was one of his few indulgences—then meet me in the lobby, always showered and shaved and dressed neatly, if shabbily, in his old collared shirts and frayed pants, like a farmer come uneasily to town.
The many hours we spent together, on trains and in airports and in the yellow farmhouse, cocooned us. I mentioned in passing my sister, our mother, my own shyness and sense of estrangement from people, including my fellow students in the film program. Wheelock neither encouraged nor discouraged these confidences; he always seemed to be listening, but rarely asked follow-up questions or expressed opinions. Because of this, I felt more comfortable with him than I did with other people; talking to him was like talking to myself.
Although he didn’t reciprocate about private matters, he did talk about his films, muttering under his breath about the editing or camera work, or the scenery we passed on the train. Once on the way to Albany he spoke about the Hudson River School for fifteen minutes straight, describing in great detail a particular mountain scene in a painting he admired. I came to think that these talks were as personal as he got simply because his work was his life. I believed that we were very much alike, in that we were both at ease with solitude; we both preferred watching other people from a distance. It made me feel special to believe this, affiliated with his genius.
Once, as we waited in an airport security line, watching bags feed themselves slowly into the maw of an X-ray machine, he said, “Were you sickly as a child?”
We hadn’t been discussing sickness, or my childhood. “No,” I said, “not especially.”
He didn’t elaborate, only pushed his bag forward, so that I had to say, “Why do you ask?”
“You seem like you were.”
“I seem sickly?”
“You seem like someone who spent their childhood watching other kids play out the window.”
I took a moment to digest this. Wheelock removed his belt, dropped his keys in a waiting basket. The security agent frowned and scrutinized the camera equipment in his bag as it went through.
On the other side I said, “Were you? Sickly?”
“Pretty much,” Wheelock said. “Sometimes. Well, not that much.” Then he picked up his bag and strolled over to examine the tourist souvenirs for sale at a kiosk. He was always wandering off in airports, his attention drawn by some object for sale or the view of baggage handlers from a window. In Cleveland one day he was so absorbed in a display about Amelia Earhart and the International Women’s Air & Space Museum that we missed our flight and had to spend the night
in an airport hotel.
* * *
—
At the end of the summer, Wheelock asked me to leave school and work for him full-time. He’d received some financing from a private foundation, he said, and he could afford to pay me a decent wage, he said, not specifying what “decent” meant. I could take breaks when I wanted to and continue to make my own films, but thirty or so hours a week I’d continue to help him as I had the last two summers. In the year to come he would begin shooting the cloning project, and I would accompany him to interviews, get the releases signed, organize everything else. “You could even talk to the people for me and save me the trouble,” he said, his mouth set in the especially grim line I understood by now meant that he was joking.
I was flattered, I told him, but I had to finish school.
“You’ll learn more from me in three months than in that entire misbegotten program,” Wheelock said, which was the closest thing to braggadocio I’d ever heard from him. “Also, you hate it,” he said. “Which is a mark of good taste on your part.” This drew me up short. I wouldn’t have said that I hated the program, and I was surprised that Wheelock had been listening closely enough to have an opinion about what I felt.
I wasn’t about to leave my program, however uncomfortable I felt there at times, because of Robin. She had two years left at Juilliard and our plan had always been to live together until she graduated; I paid two-thirds of the rent and bought the groceries. I couldn’t leave her behind.
Wheelock didn’t seem offended when I declined. “You’re a careful sort,” he said. “I wasn’t like you. Probably should’ve been.”
We were sitting in the kitchen after an evening meal of cheese and olives and bread. I remember Wheelock was wearing one of his ragged button-down shirts, and his beard, three days grown, was black and white as static. In his upturned palm he cradled three small green olives, like eggs in a nest. The sky was dark and hot and in the distance thunder was rolling in. It had been a summer of intense mugginess broken but not relieved by intense storms, and I’d grown to love them, even as the rain hammered the roof of the garden shed and kept me up at night and formed mud patches that squelched underfoot as I walked to the farmhouse in the mornings. I would miss it here, the focused, energetic quiet, much of which emanated from the man sitting across from me.
“What were you like?” I asked him.
He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling, which was splotched with peeling paint and water stains. He never felt the need to answer any questions I asked. Instead, he popped an olive in his mouth, chewed it carefully—he’d once broken a tooth on an olive in Italy, he’d told me earlier that summer, one of the few personal anecdotes he’d ever shared, and had to visit a dentist who used tools that had belonged to his great-grandfather—and said, “You let me know if you change your mind.” I was sure I wouldn’t.
29.
In New York, I waited for Robin’s return. I hadn’t heard from her during her trip, and I’d had to imagine her summer for myself. Now I was restless with anticipation, wanting to know how closely the reality would conform to the pictures in my mind.
But Robin wasn’t doing any of the things I’d imagined. She wasn’t testing the keys of a ramshackle piano, feeling its bones shift as she rehearsed before rows of empty red velvet seats in an auditorium that had been resplendent a hundred years ago. She wasn’t nursing a coffee at an outdoor café, steadying herself for the evening performance, or sipping some aromatic liqueur the owner insisted she should try at least once. She wasn’t dipping her toes in foreign rivers. She wasn’t playing Rachmaninoff—I knew now that she was a Rach 3 pianist—to adoring crowds. She wasn’t holding Bernard’s hand as they walked over a footbridge in the early morning, his hair skunky with potent local hash, their eyes pleasantly glazed. She wasn’t thinking about me, back in New York, in the Tunnel. She wasn’t getting ready to come home.
* * *
—
Instead of Robin, a postcard came, bearing a picture of a little blond girl wearing flowers in her hair. Above her head was the word Ytterby. Robin’s usual taste in postcards was kitschy; she liked to find the tackiest one available, with cartoon animals or neon lettering, and I couldn’t tell if this little girl was cute or too cute, in Robin’s opinion, or merely the only postcard available.
I spent a long time dwelling on the image because the message on the back made so little sense. Robin had written only a short sentence: Don’t look for me.
I was confused. Why would I look for her when she was on her way home?
On a Tuesday morning, the phone woke me. I’d had trouble falling asleep the night before, and the ringing filtered only gradually into my groggy brain. When I picked up, the man on the other end sounded annoyed.
“It’s about time,” he said, vexed. “Where were you?”
It seemed a rhetorical question, and I said nothing in response.
“Are you there?” he said.
“Yes.”
I recognized the low register and unconcealed impatience as belonging to Boris Dawidoff. I wandered into Robin’s room, the only one with a sliver of window. Outside, the day was spectacular, the kind of sleight-of-hand morning only New York can provide. Yesterday had been oppressive and terrible, but this day was fashioned from different material. The last of the summer flowers clung bountiful in the trees, but fall had snuck into the air. The sky was a wide and cloudless blue. There was for a brief moment no traffic, no yelling, and no car horns: a pocket of perfection.
“Can I speak to Robin?” he said.
“She’s not back yet.” I was puzzled.
“Have you heard from her?”
“I got a postcard,” I said.
“I received a call last night from Nils Anderssen.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Hold on and I will tell you,” Boris said, his tone even more vexed and irritable. “He’s my contact who set up Robin’s trip. He had been trying to reach me for days but I’ve been in Durban, working with a composer on a commissioned piece about the new South Africa.” I said nothing during the pause he left. “Anyway, we finally spoke last night. Robin walked off the tour.”
“Walked off?”
“She told Nils one night after the performance that she couldn’t feel the music. He asked if she needed more practice time, less practice time. It wasn’t his first encounter with a diva. She said she was very sorry, but she had to go. He reminded her that she had certain obligations. She said her heart wasn’t in it right now. He suggested perhaps her heart could get in it with the aid of a small financial bonus. She shook her head and said something about her soul. Nils is furious with me, and I will have to bow and scrape to him.”
I shook my head. The picture I’d held in my mind, of Robin and her shabbily elegant touring life, was so vibrant that I couldn’t dislodge it even in the face of this new information. “What about Bernard?”
“Nils said the boy departed separately.”
“Do you mean they broke up?” I said.
“I cannot emphasize how little I care whether they did.”
“But is she okay?” My voice rose higher, an anxious squeak.
“Your guess,” he said, “is as good as mine.”
“But this happened a while ago? So where is she?”
He said nothing, and I understood that he wasn’t worried about Robin; rather he was angry, deeply and perhaps permanently angry, and since Robin wasn’t available he was prepared to be angry with me instead. “I don’t know,” he said, “but if I don’t hear from her soon—”
Rather than let him finish the sentence I hung up, and sat in the quiet of my sister’s empty bed, looking at the beautiful morning in my pajamas.
30.
I didn’t know what to do. Call our mother, call the police, get on
a plane to Europe and look for Robin myself? Maybe my sister was heartbroken; maybe she’d lost her mind. I’d read that after Agatha Christie’s husband fell in love with somebody else and asked her for a divorce, she disappeared for eleven days. Some people think she was trying to frame her husband for murder, or at least embarrass him, but others believe she was so traumatized by heartbreak that she lapsed into a dissociative fugue and forgot who she was. She was found in a hotel in Yorkshire, registered under the last name of her husband’s mistress, and never spoke publicly about what had happened during those eleven days. It’s possible she didn’t know herself.
I could call all the hotels in Scandinavia, asking if they had a young Canadian woman staying there who didn’t seem to know who she was.
I could look for Bernard, but I had no idea where to find him. I didn’t know his aunt’s name, or his mother’s.
In the end I called home, not having anywhere else to turn. My expectations for help were low, and still weren’t met.
“So, she’s gone off somewhere,” Marianne said without distress once I’d explained the situation. I could hear her heavily exhale, then inhale.
“Are you smoking?”
“Of course not,” she said, and the exhalations stopped. She was a terrible liar, probably because she didn’t care very much whether anyone was fooled.
“I’m worried about her.”
“And you want me to do what?” she said.
Standing in the Tunnel’s tiny kitchen, I closed my eyes in irritation and wished I’d never called.