by Alix Ohlin
“The fact is, they have roles and personalities. Some wolves are sweet and some wolves are jerks.”
“And you know them? Their personalities?”
“Of course I do,” she said.
She talked for fifteen minutes about a particular species of turtle that was endangered in Quebec and whose habitat she was intent on protecting. A speck of foam bubbled on her lips as she talked. She was writing a will that would ensure that the land would remain undeveloped in perpetuity. I didn’t see any of the animals; we were parked by a fence behind which the land rose and fell, pocked with boulders and pine trees; anything could have been hiding there.
I asked her why she’d never mentioned the wolves to me before, and she shrugged. “I didn’t think you were interested,” she said.
“I’m interested. But how did this start—all these pets?”
Her eye-roll made clear I’d said the wrong thing. “They aren’t pets. I’m returning this land to them. The wolves have been here longer than people.”
“But you live here,” I said. It was yet another question that came out sounding like a judgment, and I winced at myself.
“We coexist,” she said.
The truck bumped across a muddy field and I held tightly to the armrest, bracing myself. With the windows rolled down the truck’s exhaust and engine noise surrounded it. Suddenly Robin stopped again, got out, and started walking. I followed behind her. So far as I could tell there was no trail; I saw no path, no directional marks on trees. But she stayed sure-footed, never stumbling. She opened a gate in the wire fence and we passed through it, strolling beneath a pine canopy where the air was startlingly cool, like a cave. I kept expecting to see the wolves stealing out from the cover, to greet us or warn us away. But there was no sign of them.
My vision narrowed to Robin’s back as I followed her, the dark fabric of her shirt, the waves of her hair. Her shoulders, her neck. Then she stopped walking. The trees thinned, and we found ourselves at the top of a bluff on large slabs of granite rounded by water and time. Below us was a narrow creek running clear. Above, a vulture circled high and dreamily over some invisible carcass. Robin didn’t say anything. We sat down and watched the creek flow down the jagged bed it had cut through the rocks and disappear into the woods. I could hear my sister breathing, and noticed that I was trying to match her rhythm with my own. We sat for a long while without talking as the sky changed from pale morning to the deeper blue of day. Bright clouds clustered cleanly at the horizon. There was no darkness anywhere. No loss.
20.
That evening, Robin and Derya made dinner again. While Bernard and I set the table, he told me his life story in a version so brief there was almost nothing to it. After he and Robin broke up in Europe, he returned to Baltimore and resumed dealing drugs, for which he was arrested and sent to prison, twice over. During the last stint he joined a twelve-step program, and when it came time to make amends, he wrote to Robin, who wrote back. Eventually she told him about the land she’d bought and invited him to visit. Now he spent weeks at a time here, working as a handyman in exchange for room and board. “And you?” he said.
My version was even shorter. “I had a job, and a sort of partner, and then I moved to New York and started over.”
He smiled at me, and his eyes were calm.
“How’s your mother?” I said.
“She died.”
I told him I was sorry, and would’ve asked more, but Robin and Derya had begun to argue, and we turned to look at them instead. Derya was shouting about his family: Turks who’d fled their country, first for Switzerland, then to Canada, and fought to establish themselves in a place that spoke of warmth and welcome but in practice provided neither. This is a summary. The actual speech was scattered and angry, and Robin kept interrupting him, defending Canada and Canadians—I think?—and her own life, her commitments, her ideology. “I am open,” she kept repeating, as if he should know what this meant, as if her meaning were universal and clear, and Derya would say, “What my family has lived through, you’ll never understand,” and this seemed to outrage and inflame her, and on top of all this, the lasagna was burning. I looked to Bernard for help, and he shrugged as if to say, We’re not a part of this. My sister’s face grew ugly with defense, and Derya was pointing a finger at her, his spit flecking her face as he spoke.
Without thinking I stepped between them. “Don’t talk to her like that,” I said. “Stop talking. Leave her alone.”
To my surprise, both Derya and Robin laughed.
“You see, Derya?” she said to him. “Yours isn’t the only family with loyalties.”
He grinned. “I didn’t know you two were so close,” he said, his tone mocking. I felt myself shaking, like you do after an accident in which you thought you might be badly hurt but weren’t.
“Please, the lasagna,” Bernard said from the other side of the room, his voice as unsteady as mine, and Robin laughed again, her tone also mocking, and said, “Simmer down now, friend, we’re scaring the children.”
* * *
—
Though we took our time with dinner, evening had barely fallen. Through the window the light was silvery blue and darkness seemed a long way off. I began clearing the dishes, but my sister said, “Leave them,” and gestured for us to go outside.
She took off down the path that led to the barn, which I guessed was an invitation. I followed, with Derya and Bernard a few feet behind; I could hear their low voices but not what they were saying. The smell of cigarettes mingled with the smell of pine trees, a combination that struck me as both pleasant and artificial, like the men’s section at a department store.
My sister, ahead, was already sliding open the barn doors, and Bernard sprinted up to offer her help, though I doubted she needed any. I looked around and saw Derya lingering, talking on his cell phone. He waved my glance away as if it offended him.
When I turned back, the barn had swallowed Robin and Bernard. I stepped inside, the building stinking faintly of manure. The air was pale and blue, smoky with dust, and only a few small windows, high up on either side, let in any light. The stalls that once housed cows remained, and they weren’t empty; I could see the great hulks of some silent animals in each one. I couldn’t see my sister, or Bernard.
Slowly, as my eyes adjusted, I took in more. The windows were open and small birds flitted amidst sloping wooden rafters, busy with their tasks, chattering among themselves. My own footsteps scuffed softly in the dirt, and as if my hearing were adjusting too, I could make out voices.
Soft muttering laughter. The sounds of a private language. At the other end of the barn, Robin and Bernard were sliding another door open, the breeze sweeping through. With more light, I recognized that the shapes in the stalls weren’t animals; they were pianos. I walked past each one in turn, taking them in, somehow feeling as if I were the one being observed. I saw a baby grand, a console, a spinet.
Where the rows of stalls ended was a large space cleared as if for a stage, and two upright pianos sat facing each other. Derya sat down at one.
I looked at Robin, who was conferring with Bernard over a piece of electronic equipment. She said offhandedly, “My other rescues. No one wants them nowadays, so I take them in.”
“Ready?” Bernard said, and she nodded.
She crossed to the piano across from Derya’s, and the two of them gazed at each other, protracting the pause, their four hands raised over the keys. I was so taken aback by the turn of events that I didn’t know what to do—I stood still, balling my hands into fists for some reason. I felt it would be dangerous to move, as if any speech or gesture might bring to a halt something I’d thought I’d never see again: my sister playing the piano. I tried to be invisible. Maybe it sounds precious to say that time seemed to slow down. Maybe it’s better to say that I felt time more. I felt each sec
ond give rise to the next. No lapses, no jumps. The traffic of birds, the creak of barnwood, the wind.
Afterward, when I exited the barn, the light outside looked exactly the same as when we’d entered, although we’d been inside for ages—as if the evening had been stretched in the sky, indefinitely suspended.
But before that: they played. It was a duet for four hands—Beethoven, I guessed, though I hadn’t listened to classical music in years and could easily have been wrong. It began with a sprightly melody, exact and almost priggish, which seemed an absurd contrast to the surroundings. People should have been minueting to it, tiptoeing in fancy dress. The notes sounded gaunt and dry. I remembered that when Robin was at Juilliard, she and her friends used to talk about the acoustics of the rooms they played in: rooms where the sounds reverberated were wet and ones where they were absorbed were dry. Before I heard that, I’d never thought about sound being spatial, tied to its location. Now I stood wondering if the music was dry, or the barn was; I wasn’t sure, but I felt obscurely disappointed by it. I’d been expecting something wild, modern and eccentric; perhaps something of Robin’s own composition. It would’ve made sense to me if she’d decided, hidden away in this place, to make her own music. But she was performing as if in a concert hall, her face serious and set.
The theme asserted itself, advanced, revolved. She and Derya were in conversation, though the two pianos weren’t in harmony. I don’t even know if they’d been tuned. Every few seconds a note would jar and clang. After a while I got used to it, the constant discordance, as if it were part of the score. Then there were the birds, still occupied above us and not at all interested in the music; during the occasional silences I could hear them, and also crickets, and at one point the dull mechanical roar of a plane overhead.
Robin played without the drama or romanticism she’d been criticized for when young. She was restrained, even casual. But I could still hear the training she’d had, the precocity of her playing. The exactitude and fluency of it. How she made each note heard. Derya didn’t have her skill, but he mostly kept up, and when he didn’t, when he stumbled over notes, neither of them seemed to care.
They played another piece, and then another. When they finished, Robin stood and stretched and nodded at Bernard, who clicked the tape recorder and ejected a cassette, which he labeled with the date and threw into a cardboard box. There were heaps of tapes there. So far as I know, she never listened to any of them.
21.
I stayed with Robin for a week, learning the rhythms of her life. Most days were structured around tasks involving the care and maintenance of her property, and most evenings she waitressed. She seemed to have almost infinite energy. Though her place was secluded, she hadn’t isolated herself there. People came and went constantly: a contractor who was helping her build a greenhouse, university students from Laval who were writing a grant to study birds of prey, an entrepreneur from Slovenia who’d detoured from his business trip to Montreal because he was interested in wolves. How he’d heard about Robin’s wolves I didn’t know. Robin wanted to ask him for money, and she showed him around, fed him, took him to the fenced enclosure to see the wolves. I could have asked to go along—I still hadn’t seen the wolves myself, had only heard them howling in the night—but I felt timid about it, no matter how solid the fencing was, and also Robin didn’t invite me. At the end of the tour, the businessman wrote her a check whose amount I didn’t see but which I took, from her satisfied glance, to be significant. The next morning a sleek black car came to pick him up, juddering down the long dirt road.
At first I thought Robin was involved with Derya; then I thought she was involved with Bernard again. Sometimes I thought she was with both, a shifting set of attachments lacking definition or constraint. I didn’t ask; we’d never regained the habit of confiding. Though she seemed happy enough to have me stay, she was also detached, aloof, and I felt there was little distinction between me and the other guests. Since she was busy at the restaurant or working on the property or entertaining people, I didn’t see her very much, at least not alone. Strangely enough, the person I spent the most time with was Bernard. In the mornings we made tea, and drank it outside if the weather was good. I noticed that he still drew in a notebook, little sketches of people who came through or the house or the woods, just as he’d done as a teenager. He spent most of his leisure time reading, old paperbacks with tiny print he had to squint to see, so that when he glanced up, his face was crumpled, like a map that had been unfolded but maintained its creases. His selection was improbable. The poetry of Emily Dickinson. How to Win Friends & Influence People. A murder mystery called The Body on Mount Royal, its cover luridly old-fashioned, a femme fatale in skimpy clothes striking a man in a suit. It turned out these were books he’d found in a summer cottage down the road, when he was helping the new owners renovate. The books smelled of mildew and the smoke of long-ago fires. Reading didn’t come easily to him, and he went slowly, occasionally asking me to define this or that word. After supper we did the dishes together, rotating the washing and drying, at ease together in the task.
The night before I left, it was Bernard who stayed up with me. Robin and Derya had both gone to bed, and he and I found ourselves in the kitchen after the dishes were done. I’d enjoyed the easy camaraderie that Robin’s house fostered, and was sorry to be leaving.
“Maybe we could email,” I said.
Bernard smiled apologetically. “I don’t have a computer,” he said.
I nodded. “Where do you live usually, in Baltimore? What do you do there?”
He shrugged. “Crash with friends. Make some money. Wait to come back here.”
“You could come visit me, in New York,” I said impulsively. “I have a couch. Robin stayed there.”
“You got work?”
I hadn’t thought of it, and I was embarrassed. “I mean, I’m sure I could find something.”
“Sure,” he said, in a way that meant the opposite. He put his arm around me, and it was companionable, like an uncle to a niece. He’d been working all day, and his body odor wasn’t good. For that matter neither was mine. After a couple of minutes, we disengaged. Before Robin drove me to the bus stop the next day, I slipped a scrap of paper with my phone number and address into one of the books he hadn’t read, but I don’t know if he ever found it. I didn’t hear from him.
22.
Back in Brooklyn, I was hired on another reality show. This one, unimaginatively called The Meat Market, centered on a group of twenty-somethings who worked at a steakhouse in San Diego and had fights and affairs with one another. They did coke in the bathrooms and spat in the food of rude customers and lived together in groups of two or three, in apartments subsidized by the show, to maximize conflict and romantic entanglements. Also it made shooting easier. I found the drama entertaining and enjoyed playing it up. From the chaos of their lives I sculpted narrative arcs about anger and jealousy and love. The villain was a girl named Mikaela with sharp, expressive brown eyes, and soon I knew her face better than my own, could map her every mood by the raise of her eyebrows, the set of her collagen-injected lips. She was competing against two other girls for the attention of a guy named Chad and I could tell that she would win it, and also that as soon as she had it she wouldn’t want it anymore and would break his heart. Despite knowing these things, despite watching the footage over and over again, I was still drawn in. These people were not exactly actors but they were professionals at being themselves and they understood what they’d been hired to do. They were in a performance of real life, heightened for effect.
When I had lunch with Olga, who was visiting from Berlin, I explained how interesting I was finding it. I told her that reality television straddled the boundary between the real and the fictional; that it was not unlike the experience of watching the work of Kiarostami, whose film Close-Up had made such an impression on me years ago. I’d recently w
atched his film Certified Copy, in which Juliette Binoche and William Shimell drive through the Italian countryside. She plays an antiques dealer and he plays a writer whose book argues that issues of authenticity are irrelevant, that a reproduction of a work of art has just as much value as the original. Over the course of a day the two of them argue and they seem, during this time, to transform into a couple who’ve been married for years. Or are they simply play-acting this transformation? The film doesn’t explain. You see, I said to Olga at a café, the same thing is happening in reality television. The audience knows it’s watching a fabricated reality and both the fabrication and the reality have equal weight.
Olga shook her head over her cappuccino. “It’s good you enjoy your work,” she said dismissively, and changed the subject.
It’s possible that she was right; that I was so happy to be editing again that I found more value in my profession than it deserved. But if so, I didn’t care. My headaches were gone and I was able to sit for hours in placid solitude, engrossed. I felt happily unseen. The guys I worked with treated me with indifference. If I stood next to two of them getting coffee, one might bump against me—not rudely, just surprised I was there. I didn’t mind. The existence of my own territory—a desk, a monitor, a spot for my mug—was enough. I brought my own lunch and ate it quickly over the keyboard, brushing the crumbs away before resuming my tasks. That I was good at my work, there could be no question.