by Alix Ohlin
I almost preferred when it was just Min and me. We’d drink tea late at night and she’d tell me about her boyfriends, past, present, and future. She claimed she could envision the men she’d fall in love with before she even met them.
“First there’s going to be a dangerous guy with maybe a speed or credit-card problem,” she’d say dreamily, mangling a bag of chamomile against her spoon. “Then, like, a sweet nerd to settle down with, maybe pop out a kid or two. Then when I’m sixty I’m totally going for hot young guys who want to use me for my connections in the art world. Turning that old male-lecher paradigm upside down.” So far as I could tell, this was all just talk. Her only dates in New York were hookups, guys in their twenties who made as little money as she did and had nothing to offer but their opinions. They seemed to bounce off her like billiard balls, colliding quickly before they rolled into pockets and disappeared from the table.
“But what about you?” she asked me once. “Are you going to be my dad’s concubine forever?”
I let the insult pass. “I’m married to my work,” I said.
“You’re married to my dad except there’s no pre-nup or job security,” she said. “My mum says one day you’ll wake up and find out he’s living in Paris with a new assistant. That’s what happened to her.”
“I thought it was just a fling with them.”
“It was to him,” Min said, raising her eyebrows at me with a look of significance. She wanted so badly to find a wound in me she could poke. But I was impervious, a lacquered surface, a rock worn smooth by water; Wheelock had washed over me, and I was clean. I liked my quiet life. I’d seen a documentary about a group of Carthusian monks in France who took a vow of silence, living together in the Alps for years. They communicated in a system of hand signals and moved through their days in a routine that never varied: eight hours of labor, eight hours of sleep, eight hours of prayer. Their lives were empty of noise, music, speech. They lived in small cottages and mostly prayed alone. When a visitor from the outside world was asked what he found most remarkable about his time there, he said it was that the monks lived without fear.
* * *
—
When Wheelock and I were alone we often talked about Min. He worried about her health and her professional future, and he went to New York more often, to see her. Her mother wanted her to find a backup career, like art therapy or law school. Min pointed out that both her parents had been able to survive in artistic professions. Survive, Soo Jung said, is the operative word. Min complained about this to Wheelock, who discussed it with me, all of us a daisy chain of concern for her, circling around her future.
The pace of his work was wearing on Wheelock; his hair turned grey, and he kept losing weight. Once I found him outside punching an extra hole in his belt with an awl. His face was sallow and lined from overwork, but he never took vacations.
“What, and leave all this?” he’d say when I brought it up, gesturing at the office. I didn’t point out that leaving all this was something he did constantly, for work. He wrapped his arms around me and set his pointy chin on my shoulder, digging in, so hard it hurt. “I like being home,” he said, and it was true, until the time came for him to leave again.
I took my own trips. I flew to Costa Rica for my old roommate Helen’s wedding—she was a zoologist at a field site there, studying white-faced capuchins—and stood in the sand drinking a syrupy cocktail and making strained conversation with people I hadn’t seen since college. “Remember that guy Gordon?” one of her track teammates said to me. “Didn’t you date him?” I admitted I had. “I ran into him in a bar in Atlanta.” She lowered her voice, and I braced myself to hear what had become of him: he was a professor, he was a farmer or a beekeeper, he’d gone insane. All seemed plausible. “He runs a hedge fund that cleared five hundred million last year,” she said. I tried to reconcile this information with the burly guy of my memory, and failed. Seeing my face, the woman laughed and squeezed my arm. “The one that got away, right? Don’t feel too bad. He’s fat and bald.”
Later I went to London to visit Olga, and we spent the week in movie theatres and cafés, arguing pleasurably over the films we’d just seen. At a repertory cinema we sat through All About Eve, which I enjoyed more with Olga because she loved it so much, often muttering the dialogue along with the actors. She claimed that as a dissection of how misogyny pits one woman against another it was vastly ahead of its time. When Lloyd Richards called Margo “a body with a voice,” Olga clucked her tongue; and when he said, “It’s about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto,” we both hissed so loudly that the people sitting in front of us turned around to glare. The line made me think of Robin, inevitably, and of Boris Dawidoff, who was every bit as imperious as Lloyd. Afterward, at a bar, I told Olga about the clipping Robin had sent me, showing Dawidoff with the actress, and she said, “Women are necessary instruments to him.”
As I was packing to go home, she kissed me on both cheeks and told me she was moving to Germany.
“Why?” I said stupidly. It was the first she’d said of it. She smiled at me, her eyes bright. She’d gained quite a bit of weight, her face and her body rounded and soft, and I wanted to lean into her and burrow there, though I refrained. She was, I see now, a kind of mother to me, though she would probably have found the idea laughable, and often, by instinct, I concealed from her the depth of my affection.
“Berlin’s very exciting at this moment,” she said. “Not everyone stays in the same spot like you.”
I took it as a rebuke, and I was about to respond when she pressed my hand and told me the taxi was outside. Later, I wrote her an email defending my life in Briar Neck. I’m pleased you are so happy, she wrote back. To me it sounds very dull. Come see me in Berlin.
5.
When Robin ended her travels, she didn’t return to the US, whose post-9/11 political climate she declared unlivable. Instead, to my surprise, she moved back to Montreal, settling in a small apartment in Mile End, and took a waitressing job at a resto on St.-Laurent.
This news came to me from Marianne, who was herself living in a new place, an apartment in Laval that belonged to her boyfriend. He was a dentist and, “in spite of that,” she told me over the phone, “very kind.” She said Robin looked terrible, skinny as a stray cat. “When she comes over she stands in front of the fridge and eats everything with her hands. She’s a savage.”
In Briar Neck, in the early mornings, when I heard noises outside—birds, dog walkers, a slow-moving car from which newspapers were tossed onto porches and driveways—I sometimes imagined it was Robin walking up to the door, luggage in hand, as she had all those years ago when I was at Worthen. But she never came, and for that matter I didn’t invite her. We’d learned how to live without each other. After she’d been back a year, I went to Montreal for Christmas, and the three of us sat in Marianne’s living room, making polite conversation with the dentist about gum disease. He put packages of floss for us under the tree. I stole glances at my sister, who looked both the same and yet so different; it was hard for me to take in the entirety of her presence. She wore a bulky red sweater pocked with white snowflakes, dirty at the cuffs; her hair, once dyed and then left to grow out, was dark brown from scalp to ears, then blond to her shoulders, all of it an ashy tangle. Marianne had been right: she was thin and raw-boned, skin peeling and lips chapped, stripped and weathered like a house untended.
Marianne, by contrast, looked well-kempt; her hair had been cut and colored, and she wore a turtleneck and pearl earrings, like a proper middle-aged lady. We ate tourtière and watched snow fall outside as if it soothed us. Robin took two helpings of everything, sometimes three. The dentist stared at the wall and spoke about recent advances in fixed partial dentures. Marianne rolled her eyes and pulled her coat on over her shoulders, arms free, standing outside in the cold to smoke; the dentist wouldn’t let
her smoke inside because he wanted her to quit. Among other things, he remarked, it was terrible for your gums. While she was outside with her cigarette the three of us sat at the table in silence, strangers connected to one another only by the thin filament of Christmas.
Robin gave me a book about maps. I gave her a scarf.
On Boxing Day I kissed everyone goodbye and drove back across the border and home to Briar Neck. My sister and I had had no conversation of consequence. When I was leaving she clutched my arm tightly, her fingers like talons on my sleeve, but said nothing. She was bony and strong. She clutched her coffee cup with that same grip, pulled her boots on with it too. If I’d responded in kind, if I’d pulled her close, I was convinced, she would have pushed me away.
6.
I never thought about whether I’d live in Briar Neck for the rest of my life; time passed without remark, in the flow of the editing room, and never stopped long enough for me to take its measure. I was thirty-two years old. At work I supervised Bikram and Javier, along with a few others. The woman who ran the bakery invited me for dinner and walks, and I grew fond of the elderly couple who lived next door, looking in on them during cold snaps and power failures. At home, I hosted “plague nights,” when people came over to see movies like the 1950 noir Panic in the Streets or The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston, from 1971. Nothing relaxed me like watching the last few survivors on earth cling to life against shattering odds. Word got out about these movie nights to the point where I had to start holding them at the community center, though I refused to give introductions or do what the woman there called “talk backs.” Wheelock, who flitted in and out of town, still an enigma to most people, teased me that one day I’d be mayor.
His plague programs were widely viewed on public television and received awards, a success that both Wheelock and I now took for granted. His travel schedule, always busy, became constant, so I hired him a personal assistant while I stayed in Briar Neck to edit and supervise the staff. Our lives both knitted together and unraveled. When he was back, he often slept in my bed, without sex; sometimes I woke to him holding me around the waist, his head on my lap or hip, gasping in his sleep, slipping down the bed as if about to drown. Though he kissed me less, he confided in me more. Sometimes he talked about his childhood in Pittsburgh, where his father had worked in a steel mill and his mother cleaned houses. Because their parents were at work so much, he and his brother had raised themselves, filling the hours after school with games of stickball. It was strange to discover, after so many years, how similar our childhoods had been, as if we’d been drawn to one another for this reason without knowing it. When Wheelock was seven his brother almost died of pertussis, and he had a strong memory of seeing his brother hooked up to machines to help him breathe, his body thin and wasted, his face almost blue. In filming the plague project he’d seen countless children suffering and at night he dreamed about them, their expressions gone flat, ravaged by contagions they couldn’t understand.
This was yet another new side of Wheelock: sensitive, openly injured, strangely and suddenly forthcoming. I knew I was the only person in the world to whom he said these things, and it bound me to him even more.
One weekend we traveled to a fancy awards ceremony in New York. It was 2008, and I hadn’t been back to the city in years; I thought how different it looked, with chain stores and corporate coffee shops on each block. You could buy frozen yogurt everywhere. Of course we were in different neighborhoods than where I’d lived, and I wasn’t a student anymore. Wheelock fidgeted in a suit he’d had for decades, broad-shouldered and out of fashion, and I wore a black dress I’d bought in Briar Neck. It was a vintage black shirtwaist with a white lace collar that had looked shabby chic in Pennsylvania and in New York looked only shabby. I blinked at the city lights like a mole. Circulating in the theatre lobby, I was surprised to note how comfortable Wheelock was speaking with people, his hand pressing casually on the small of my back, steering me from one conversation to the next. He no longer needed me to whisper in his ear and keep him steady; instead, he kept me steady. I wasn’t used to this kind of event, and I labored to keep up with the banter. I excused myself to the restroom, and when I came back, I paused at the top of a staircase, surveying the lobby. Below me, Wheelock was chatting with a woman in a red cocktail dress, her hair coiled in a wispy bun at the nape of her neck, revealing a serpentine tattoo that crept up from her spine to lick her collarbone. Below the cocktail dress she wore knee-high combat boots. Wheelock, towering over her, tilted his head at something she said, and they both laughed.
He and I had an understanding; he was allowed to do anything he wanted. We were both allowed. But only one of us could make a woman like that laugh. Only one of us was famous.
* * *
—
Wheelock won the award and—despite the confidence I’d noted earlier—was awkward before the microphone. He read a speech I’d written for him, speaking so quickly that the words ran together, incomprehensible if endearing. I hadn’t included my own name among those he thanked for their contributions, because it felt narcissistic, and as he got to the end of the speech he wrinkled his forehead before shaking the trophy in my general direction and hastily departing the stage. Afterward, we skipped the party and went to dinner with Min.
“You guys clean up nice,” she said, kissing us. She was still living in Bushwick, but the loft had emptied down to her and her boyfriend Jake, a financial analyst from Schenectady. On weekends now they went to farmer’s markets and baked their own bread. The economic downturn had given Jake some doubts about his profession; he was, he told us over pasta, “really getting into artisanal ice cream” and the “alternative comedy scene.”
“It’s alternative because it isn’t funny,” Min said drily. She loved to bait him, and in response he’d only push his glasses higher up on his nose and blush. I mentioned my old roommate Emma, whose cheese-making empire in the Berkshires had now expanded to include yogurt and ice cream, and he leaned forward excitedly.
“Emma from Emma’s Dairy?” he said. “You’re friends with her?”
As it happened, Emma had recently sent me an email, and we’d begun writing regularly, finding in our small-town lives points of connection. “Today I bought tampons at the drugstore from a woman who bought pumpkin ice cream from me yesterday,” she wrote. “Is it claustrophobic or reassuring to have no privacy in your life? I’m not sure.” No membrane, I thought. She asked about Robin, and I shared what news I had without mentioning how little I saw her myself. Emma was married to a goat farmer named Gretchen. She had another pair of cats, Itsy and Bitsy, and a four-year-old child, Oak, who’d named them. I told Min and Jake the story of the cat funeral and how it prompted Emma to change her life. It was rare for me to tell a long story, and I could sense Wheelock watching me, a small smile playing around his lips.
“It’s funny,” Min said when I was finished. “You hardly ever talk about your sister.”
I took a bite of my food. I’d been talking while everyone else ate, and the other plates were empty. “We aren’t close,” I said.
“But she lived with you all that time.”
Wheelock put his hand on my knee, beneath the table, and I leaned against him, grateful for his weight and warmth. “She’s back in Canada now,” I said.
“Does she still play the piano?” Min said.
Wheelock shot her a look. I noted his protectiveness with surprise—I was surprised both that he’d been paying enough attention to think I needed it, and that I did, in fact, need it. I put my hand on top of his. “I don’t know,” I said, and turned back to my food.
* * *
—
Later, at the apartment, Wheelock said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“I didn’t get to say it in the speech,” he said. “So I’m saying it now.”
Wheelock’s studio h
ad just enough room for a couch that pulled out into a bed. He had one of everything: one small table, one chair, one cup, one plate. One fork. But the apartment wasn’t spare. It was cluttered with trademark Wheelock touches: tin cans filled with pennies and buttons; pictures cut out of the newspaper and taped to the walls; by the door, a pair of men’s shoes he’d found on Fifth Avenue. They didn’t fit him, but they were “such nice shoes,” he said. It was true they were beautiful, the leather a burnished cognac color, and a stamp on the inside said they were made in Italy. Perhaps they were bespoke, I thought, thinking of Hervé. On the windowsill was a lineup of pebbles in various shades of grey. The apartment made me nostalgic for the old yellow farmhouse, and even those urns filled with cigarette butts I’d never understood. He was a collector of things; he loved weighting his pockets and emptying them at home, spilling the contents of his day on the table, his progress through the world made visible. Perhaps this as much as anything else was what I loved in him.