The Study of Animal Languages

by Lindsay Stern

  “You sit.” I stood up. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Anything herbal would be great,” she said, as she brushed past me. She was going through a divorce from her husband of eight years, but she looked lovely as ever. Her dark eyes glowed with intelligence, and though she was my age—no older than fifty, surely—her curls were white.

  I filled the kettle and watched the five of them through the window, pocked with bird shit and dried rain. Washing it—yet another chore to keep me from my desk. Just accept it, I thought grimly. You will never publish again.

  The conversation had splintered in two: Quinn, Adaora, and Edson chatting lazily across the table, and Dalton opining to Prue. When he finished she leaned forward, whispering something that prompted him to cover his mouth in astonishment. She laughed, and so did he, and then he composed himself and began speaking again, magnifying her expression with his own, until his story ended and they stared at each other in mock surprise before dissolving again in laughter.

  “What did I miss?” I said, emerging onto the patio with Quinn’s chamomile tea.

  “I was just saying I would put Prue in touch with our friends in Heidelberg,” Adaora replied. As Quinn leaned across the table for a meringue, Adaora murmured: “Honey, you’ve got something. . . .” Quinn glanced at the back of her skirt, cursed, and then rubbed at a tiny smear of chocolate.

  “I’ll be in Munich in April, come to think of it,” Dalton said.

  “When I was there—” Quinn began, and then broke off as Dalton muttered something to Edson, who chortled.

  I faced Quinn to show her I was listening, but she said nothing, still waiting for their attention.

  “You’ll love it,” Edson said to Prue. He was a shy man with kind eyes and a small, doughy face. I still hadn’t read the paper that had earned him the coveted Gruber Prize in neuroscience earlier this year, though Prue had. Something to do with Alzheimer’s.

  Lifting his wineglass, he added, “The Institute’s close to the city, as I remember.”

  Prue glanced at me uneasily, and I realized what he was referring to: the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, whose directors had offered her a half-year research appointment starting in January. A high honor, certainly, but with her tenure review coming up next semester it made no practical sense.

  “She already turned it down,” I said, refilling my glass.

  There was a silence, and then Prue cleared her throat. “Actually, I haven’t yet.”

  “Are you joking?” I searched her face for irony. Trying to sound casual, I added, “What about your review?”

  “I don’t think she has anything to worry about,” Adaora said.

  Heat crept into my cheeks. If she was still considering a stint abroad, I should have been the first to hear about it. I shot her a look that said as much, but was squinting at the sky.

  “You scholars with your golden handcuffs,” Dalton said. He rotated his glass on its stem. “I’d say, go for it. Somewhere in time, you’re dead.”

  There was a round of hollow laughter. Then the conversation drifted on.

  “What was that about, before?” I said, when they had finally left us to ourselves. Prue didn’t answer. She started carrying in another chair, but I stepped in her way.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “The Germany thing.”

  From overhead came the sound of arpeggios, faint at first, and then louder. The pianist upstairs—a slim, reluctant man—was warming up.

  She set down the chair and sighed. It had rained that morning, and in the washed afternoon light her hair looked reddish gold.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You’re up for tenure.”

  “You keep saying that, as though it would hurt my case. I actually think—”

  “To request a leave of absence now?” I interrupted. When she narrowed her eyes, I added, “They’d probably push your review back another year, at least.”

  “Would that be the end of the world?”

  The wind blew her dress against her thighs. Her nonchalance about something I had worked so hard for, something so self-evidently desirable—insurance on the life we had made here, no less—had been surfacing more and more frequently.

  I tried another angle. “It just doesn’t seem like the right time, P.”

  “It’s never the right time, is it?”

  She shot me the same reproachful look she had last month, after I nixed her idea of applying to the Rome Prize together. It would be like when we were dating, she had said. Don’t you miss traveling together? Her feigned naïveté had made me even angrier. It wasn’t as though I would have had a shot.

  “For god’s sake,” I said, goaded by the thought of how sheepish she would be when I surprised her this weekend with the Galápagos tickets. “Give the jet-setting a rest. You’re almost tenured.”

  In silence, she carried the chair into the house. I twirled the empty wine bottle in my hands, read the label, and then set it back down.

  The door opened again, and she returned with a sponge. To my surprise, she said, “You’re right.”

  I waited for her to elaborate, but all she did was cross the patio and wipe down the table.

  “I didn’t realize you were still considering it,” I said.

  She tossed a shard of meringue into the bushes.

  I added, “To bring it up in front of everyone—that guy we barely know . . .”

  “I get it. I fucked up.”

  “If you want to leave for a semester, fine, but at least—”

  “I just said I wouldn’t go.”

  She was blinking fiercely. The pianist had moved on to scales: major, ascending. At each octave he lingered, with obscene feeling, on the seventh key.

  “I’m an asshole, is that it?” I said. When she did not reply, I concluded, “I’m an asshole.”

  She laughed softly. I moved behind her and laced my arms under hers, burying my face in her hair.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “If you want to go, go, I’d just—”

  “No.” She shook her head. “You have a point—it’s not strategic.”

  “I’d miss you.”

  As she detached herself I gestured at the fiery clouds.

  “It’s still beautiful,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “A walk would be nice.”

  It was an invitation, but she only smiled absently.

  “Come back soon,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I’ll heat up some food.”

  She kissed me nearer to the corner of my lips than the center. Then she turned and went into the house.

  Three

  How the hell’d he not know about your article?” Frank asks, as I follow the two of them into the kitchen. The light is low, the heat on high, trapping the sweet, resinous odor of whatever she cooked for dinner.

  “Am I a journalist now?” Prue tosses her windbreaker over a stool and rubs her bare shoulders. She has Frank’s square jaw, his freckles. It always unnerves me, mildly, to see him reflected in her.

  “He means the shout-out in the Times,” I say.

  “Oh . . .” She wrinkles her nose. “That was weeks ago.”

  Frank drags out a stool and perches at the counter, not bothering to take off his coat. “Don’t play it down, pumpkin.” He cracks the knuckle of his middle finger against his jaw. “This is big.”

  “You feeling okay, Dad?” Prue says. To me she murmurs, “How was the drive?”

  “We hit some traffic on 95.” I drop my keys on the windowsill. “Smooth, other—”

  “Never been better.” Frank slaps the counter. “You renovate? Place is looking good.”

  “No,” Prue says. She opens the dishwasher, releasing a gush of steam. “I would have told you that.”

  From the upper tray she r
emoves a glass and dries it against her shirt—the beige tank top she usually sleeps in, streaked with burns from the dryer we have since replaced. There are shadows under her eyes.

  I am about to offer to show Frank into the guest room when her phone chimes with a text. Peering down at it she says, “Walt wants to leave May with us overnight, tomorrow.”

  “So she can spend more time with you,” I tell Frank.

  And he can have Julia over, Prue does not add. She shoots me a warm look. After three painful years, he is finally seeing someone new.

  Frank seizes her phone. “See how the world has migrated since the hieroglyphs?” he says. “Stone to trees to light.”

  We stare at him. The furnace clicks. He addresses us with a ferocity—exultant, somehow comic—that I have encountered in no other human face.

  “Words,” he adds. “The home of words. First in caves, then on paper, now in light.”

  “I’m going to need that back, Dad,” Prue says slowly.

  He brandishes the phone, which trembles in his hand. To my surprise, I find myself intrigued, relieved by her impatience of having to play the sensible one.

  “Holiest of elements,” Frank says. “Question is, where do they go from here? Nowhere”—he tosses the phone onto the counter—“nowhere left.”

  Prue pockets it and strides back to the dishwasher, yanking out the bottom tray. As she unloads the utensils, the color rising in her neck, I feel an unexpected flare of irritation. If this is too much for you, I think ungenerously, try sharing a car with him for three and a half hours.

  To repent, I lift Frank’s bag. “Why don’t we get you set up?” I say. But he ignores me.

  “For most of time, machines were breaking laws,” he says. “Rockets to flout gravity, trains and telephones to conquer space. Then they stopped defying God and started playing Him.”

  Prue slides a stack of plates into the cupboard and turns, wiping her palms on the rear of her leggings.

  Meeting her gaze, Frank throws out his arms. “We’re remaking the world in our little light boxes, and destroying the earth in the process.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been reading your Kant,” I say, but he only cracks another knuckle, his eyes sparkling.

  “Come on, Dad,” Prue says, taking his duffel from my hand. “It’s getting late.”

  Frank salutes me, then follows her into the corridor. As they disappear their voices come to me as music, stripped of consonants: Prue’s calm, declarative; Frank’s adrenalized. I take a breath. In three days, she will be driving him home. We will be back to our usual rhythms.

  Chirping filters from the study: our cockatiel, Rex, my gift to Prue on our first anniversary. Pushing open the door, I find that she has forgotten to feed him, so I shake a bag of pellets over his plastic trough, fighting his attempts to clamber up my arm.

  Prue claimed the study initially, but after she opened her lab at the College—and the second office it afforded her—we decided I should take it. I prefer the room to my glorified cubby in the Philosophy building, where students come knocking outside my office hours, and whose walls are so thin that my colleagues can practically hear me think.

  I close the cage before Rex can escape, accidentally trapping his wing.

  “Shit.” I open and shut it again. “Sorry, buddy.”

  He lurches back, beak parted, and clicks his tongue. Then he attacks the pellets, his yellow plume bobbing as he eats.

  I had meant to give my monograph a final read tonight, before submitting it tomorrow to Cornell University Press. My half sabbatical has left my schedule emptier than usual—I am teaching one course, logic, rather than my standard two—but the easing of one burden has magnified the rest. The paradox is familiar: the more time I have, the more daunting my lessened obligations seem, suffusing my weekdays like a gas.

  But there is a chapter by my undergraduate logic TA, Natasha Díaz—a double major in philosophy and biology—that I have promised to return tomorrow. It is finely written, so far, if overambitious: a Wittgensteinian critique of the quest for an “ideal language” that animated early analytic philosophy. The concept electrified me when I first encountered it in graduate school: a language comprised exclusively of factual statements and logical propositions, capable of representing the world with perfect accuracy. Like the symbols of mathematics, the words of this language would accommodate no ambiguity. Within it, philosophical problems would vanish, because they could no longer be articulated. There would be no controversy over definitions, no margin between what was meant and what was said. The purpose of philosophy, as the early analytic school saw it, was to distill ordinary language, into this ideal language eliminating misunderstandings once and for all.

  Perhaps out of sympathy for that beautiful—albeit doomed—endeavor, I have never been drawn to Wittgenstein’s work, and have made my reservations clear to Natasha. Nonetheless, she requested me as her spring advisor, and with our resident philosopher of language on leave, I agreed to play the part.

  Rex starts flapping madly—a habit of his—a sound like the shuffling of cards. He does it to exercise his wings, Prue explained to me once, even though we give him free rein of the apartment during the day. When I bought him, I thought it might bother her to lock him up at all, until I remembered that she spent her days with captive birds. The aviary she helped design at the College’s Center for Ornithology bears no resemblance to a cage, however. With its acre of outdoor land and lush, glassed-in indoor wing, it rivals the enclosures at major research universities. “The bird McMansion,” I call it. The alumnus who underwrote the project—a former veterinary surgeon—enjoys full access, much to Prue’s irritation. I think the privilege is the least he deserves, given what he shelled out.

  The flapping intensifies, punctuated by a trill. Rex’s noises usually soothe me, but tonight they shatter my focus. After reading the same paragraph twice, I give up and face the window, massaging my temples. My reflection stares back, looking older than it should.

  Giving up, I switch off the lamp and move into the hallway. The light is still on in the kitchen; Prue must be snacking or reading. Relieved at the thought of having the bedroom to myself, I push open the door, and nearly jump to find her standing at the bureau.

  “He’s bad,” she says.

  She is braiding her hair, which she has blow-dried. Steam wends from the mug before her.

  “You heard him in there.” She meets my eye in the mirror. “He’s talking like he’s a fucking prophet.”

  I lift her mug to check for a stain on the dresser—none, thankfully—and slide a copy of her alumni bulletin from Pomona underneath it. She must have been in here for a while, because a hardcover is splayed across her pillow.

  “You’re sure he took it?” she says.

  I nod, wrapping my arms around her. As she tips her head against my chest I picture Frank in the diner’s parking lot, downing the pill in the frosty cabin. The scene carries the force of a memory. Why shouldn’t I take him at his word? And even if he had been lying, one pill can’t make much difference.

  “He’s going to pull something during my speech,” she says. “I can feel it.”

  She speaks as though he has some power over her. Can’t you see how diminished he is? I want to say. He’s a batty old man, P. Practically broke. Soon he’ll be beholden to you and Walt.

  My own mother saved so assiduously that I never spent a penny on her care. When her dementia worsened, I moved her into a nursing home outside of Boston, where I had returned after finishing my PhD. Glaucoma had narrowed her visual field to a single point of light, the doctors said, which I would occupy, briefly, leaning down to kiss her. I probably registered only as a shadow. So much the better that she couldn’t see the fluttering room dividers, I reasoned, the mounted televisions spouting infomercials, the beige of her corn bread, and every other anodyne assault on personality in that place.
I would sit in the faux leather chair beside her bed, reading aloud from her battered copy of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, often in counterpoint to the voice of her roommate, a former news anchor, who joked and nattered long into the night. After a few months her pupils clouded and her murmured greetings stopped. It still disturbs me how, if my sense of duty toward her signaled nothing but abiding love, her death could have carried such relief.

  “How was he in the car?” Prue says.

  “Effusive, the usual.”

  She takes a premature sip of tea, flinches, and then toys with my wedding band. At some point over the past few years, she developed an allergy to the nickel in hers, grafted to the silver plate to help forestall corrosion. I keep meaning to surprise her with a bronze version like mine, but I have yet to get around to it.

  “He’s a proud dad.” I disengage and unbutton my shirt. “Why didn’t you tell me about the Times piece?”

  “Thought I did.” She glances at the painting above the bed: a lake at evening—half of it frozen, the other half scalloped by wind. “I’ll send it to you if you want,” she adds. “It was nothing huge.”

  From the tone of her voice—suddenly flip—and the deepening color in her cheeks, I can tell that her modesty is insincere. She is understated in general, especially about her work, but she has been conspicuously tactful lately. This most recent study marks her twentieth published article—albeit as a coauthor—to my four. I lob my shirt into the hamper, trying to catch her eye. Though she is only trying to spare my pride, I can’t help but feel that she is pandering.

  “Frank seems to think it was a national headline,” I say, more sarcastically than I’ve intended.

  “See?” She props her left leg on the bed, pumping a coil of lotion onto her palm. “He’s manic.”

  “He’s excited for you.”

  “I know you don’t take him seriously, but I’m worried about the lecture, what he might—”

  “What’s he going to do, shout profanities? He’s a passionate old man, P, not a maniac.”

  “Fine.” She tosses her free hand. “Let him interrupt me, if he wants. Keep things interesting.”