The Study of Animal Languages

by Lindsay Stern

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Dad?”

  Josip’s door closes above us. I freeze.

  “You slapped him, too?” She gives a strident laugh. “Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. What the hell is wrong with you, Ivan?”

  She tosses the pot in the air, and then catches it, sending clumps of soil flying.

  “Just tell me one thing,” she says. “When were you planning to tell me?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “Were you ever planning to tell me?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nope, you weren’t. You were never planning to tell me that these”—she brandishes the pot—“did not come from you.”

  She hurls it against the refrigerator. With a bang, it splinters in two, scattering soil across the room. The daffodils flop against the tile.

  “Shit,” I exclaim, involuntarily.

  “Shit is right,” she says. “Don’t you realize they’re the only reason I slept with you last night? All part of your plan, wasn’t it? And this morning”—her voice breaks—“this morning, when you watched me screaming at my father, you knew he’d nearly blown his credit limit on me? You sick fuck.”

  I open my mouth, and then close it. There is nothing to say. She is right.

  “And that’s not even the worst of it,” she continues. “We arrive at the hospital, after he’s apologized for not adding orchids to the mix, and I learn that his last pill was administered by you, at three a.m. Saturday, when you apparently intercepted his attempted escape in our car?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you,” I whisper.

  “You’ve never patronized me, Ivan. Don’t start now.”

  “You’re right, I’m—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice buckles again, and she opens her arms. “I’m your wife.”

  I bite the insides of my cheeks. My face is working in ways I cannot control.

  “I knew things were bad between us.” She wipes her eyes. “But I didn’t think they were this bad.”

  “P . . .”

  “Do you know what it’s like, being married to you?” she says suddenly. “It’s like wearing a fucking straitjacket. I wake up beside you sometimes, and I ask myself, what was I thinking?”

  “I bought us tickets to the Galápagos,” I blurt out.

  She squints through her tears. “What?”

  “It was supposed to be a surprise,” I say.

  Her nostrils flare, and then she frowns. “What is that on your mouth?”

  I touch my bottom lip, confused, as she adds, “Is that lipstick?”

  “Yes,” I say. The truth is all I have left.

  “This is a joke,” she says under her breath. “This is some sick—”

  “You forgot your phone this morning,” I interrupt. “Dalton called. The writer? I picked up. From what he said I thought you were sleeping with him. I . . .” I catch my breath. She is still staring at me, the fury in her eyes fading to disbelief. “I confronted him at his reading. Worse than that. I hit him. And before that, I kissed my TA, Natasha?”

  She steadies herself against the counter.

  “I thought it would neutralize things between you and me, or something,” I continue. “I don’t know. I can’t . . .” I put my face in my hands.

  “What’s happened to you?” Prue says faintly.

  When I face her again she is pale.

  “I’m sorry about the flowers,” I say. “I was going to tell you, I just—”

  “I’m calling Adaora.” She backs away from me, glancing around the room.

  “I’m sorry for shouting at you, on Friday. I’m sorry for—”

  “Where did you put my phone?” She is prowling the kitchen now, kicking a shard of ceramic under the stove. With a flicker of dread, I remember where it is—soaking there in the measuring cup, right in front of her.

  “Where did you put it?”

  I step between her and the counter. But she ducks behind me to check the key caddy and, as she turns back, sucks in her breath.

  “Oh my god.” She glances from the cup to me. “What did you . . .”

  Unable to face her any longer, I grab my coat from the mudroom. And then I am sprinting back over the snow and sunny ice, in no particular direction.

  Eighteen

  Only once I reach the harbor do I begin to cry. The sobs are dry at first, some of them painful. And then tears come, like sweat from a broken fever.

  I have wandered east down a network of side streets, and then along a bike path adjacent to the highway. When I reached the exit for the state beach, I veered off, across an intersection, and down a few back roads, ending up on a parkway that overlooked the sea. I walked along it until I found an underpass, and followed that to a wharf—a hive in summer, no doubt, but empty now except for a few gulls, scattered lobster traps, and a dock bearing a sign for a ferry to a nearby lighthouse.

  I lower myself onto a bench facing the sea. There is no one else in sight, and no sound except the occasional wash of cars. It must be close to dusk, because a pale moon is rising in the east. A gull keens. The ferry hangs from a girder, its belly stained with seawater.

  The lighthouse blinks in the distance. The land around it is studded with young, denuded trees. Two of them walk off together suddenly, and I realize they are not trees, but a couple. From this far away, their gestures seem involuntary.

  I have always believed there is a comfort to be found in despair: namely, from the knowledge that, like a pendulum at its extreme, one is simply gathering momentum for the reversal, the plunge back toward a mood of possibility. If happiness can be tempered by the knowledge that it won’t last, then surely the opposite is also true. For that reason, I have sometimes found it possible to revel in melancholy, just as I am sometimes able to wallow in physical illness. But the misery I feel now is of a different grade. For the first time, I cannot muster my usual trust in the promise of a complementary swing. It is as though the instrument itself has changed, or stopped.

  My lungs ache. When I have no tears left, I lean forward and rest my head between my knees. As my vision clears, a patch of coarse, wet grass resolves between the slats of the bench. Nestled in it is a spherical, thorny object. I reach down and pick it up. It is a husk of some sort, resembling an oversized burr. I close my fist around it, firmly enough to feel a bright, uncomplicated sting. When I open my fist, four dots of blood bloom on my palm. Against my misery, the pain feels almost like pleasure.

  Something vibrates against my thigh. My phone, signaling an incoming email. I pull it out of my pocket and stare down at the screen, waiting for the marks to resolve into words.

  “RE: Book Proposal,” reads the subject heading. It is from Angela Axel, editor in chief of Cornell University Press.

  “Dear Ivan,” the preview reads. “This is unusual for us, but I wanted to let you know that I read your proposal overnight. It’s . . .” There the preview ends.

  I open the email. It continues: “. . . excellent. I’m blown away. I’m still waiting to hear from one of our editors, but consider this a tentative yes. Let’s talk by phone? AA.”

  On impulse, I press Forward and type Prue’s name. Then I stop myself and reread the message. Here it is, the news I’ve always dreamed of, and I cannot even tell her.

  * * *

  —

  I CALL A CAB HOME, hoping she will be there, but only Josip’s car is parked in the driveway. There is a note on the kitchen counter, held in place by a bowl of dried rice. One corner of her phone peeks through the kernels.

  “Went to Walt’s,” it reads in her terrible handwriting, which I have always loved. “Need some time.”

  The broken pot is still lying on the tile. Dirt radiates out from it in all directions. The daffodils, clinging to hunks of soil, slump against the re
frigerator.

  I rescue the flowers and sweep up the dirt. Then I gather the shards of ceramic, wrapping them in paper towels so they won’t scrape the young man who collects our garbage. When I am finished, I take a long shower.

  The moon is bright by the time I emerge. I draw the bedroom blinds and peel the soaking bandage from my cheek, leaning close to the mirror to inspect the wound. The angriest part has scabbed over, the new skin flaky with moisture. I find a fresh bandage in the hall bathroom and cover it again, less dexterously than Prue had. There are rings under my eyes, but other than that my face looks the same, somehow: my thin mouth and lantern jaw, my long nose, my chin with its old acne scar. I turn off the light, not bothering to pause, as I usually do, to check whether the lines in my forehead have deepened.

  I have eaten nothing all day, but I have no interest in food. Nonetheless, I force down a banana and some toast, and then—after feeding Rex—pull a fresh sheet of paper out of the printer.

  “Dear P,” I write. “There are no words to express how sorry I am. I have been a terrible husband to you.”

  True, but false. I start over.

  Dear Prue,

  I don’t know how things have come to this. But I do know that I have no more lies left. I’ll start at the beginning.

  Your father was florid when I drove him home on Thursday. We stopped at a diner, and he kept going on about your finches. He even grabbed our waitress—not sexually, but still. I gave him the car key and told him to go get his meds, and he went out to the parking lot. When he came back inside, he said he had taken them. I thought he might be lying. I didn’t tell you.

  He was still manic a few hours later, when he woke me up in the middle of the night. You were sleeping. I came into the living room and found him banging the ceiling with a broom to stop Josip from practicing. I took it away from him and he went back to bed. I didn’t tell you that, either.

  In the kitchen, during our party, he fumed to me about how nobody “got” your speech. I didn’t warn you. That was a few minutes before his first outburst.

  At two o’clock the next morning, our car pulled out of the driveway. I didn’t wake you. Frank was driving to Noboru’s to apologize. I stopped him and, as you now know, watched him swallow one pill’s worth of Clozaril.

  When we spoke the next day, I didn’t mention the incident. I didn’t even tell you about his gift. You wondered aloud whether a zoo was the best place to take a manic vegetarian. I took him there anyway. I took May, too.

  I cannot imagine the horror and anger and disbelief you must feel at having been lied to, in these multiple, unforgivable ways, by your partner—especially given that, had you known the truth, perhaps your father wouldn’t be in the hospital right now, your rib bruised, your niece traumatized.

  What was I thinking? I wish I knew. I can’t bring myself to imagine that I wanted this to happen, but maybe you were right: maybe, on some level, I wanted to undermine you. It’s not always easy being married to someone so talented, and with so much courage. Let’s just say your speech hammered that home to me.

  I know I have to apologize, but I don’t know what to say. I lie to you, attack your friend, and cross the line with one of my students, and “I’m sorry” is supposed to cover that? Is that supposed to mean anything to you? I can understand why you wouldn’t accept it.

  Though I don’t deserve it, I hope you’ll come home.

  Love,

  Ivan

  I type the letter up and email it to her as an attachment, copying Walt in case she deletes it. In the body of the email, I ask after May.

  Then I take a sleeping pill.

  Nineteen

  There is a new face at the department meeting the next day: Peter Chao, a philosopher of mind, on leave from Peking University. Though his research appointment begins in January, our chair has invited him to this meeting—our last of the semester—so he can get a feel for the rhythm of things.

  It took all my will to get out of bed this morning. Nonetheless, I replied to the editor at Cornell, turned in the logic exam, and forced myself to campus in time for the meeting, refreshing my inbox every few minutes to check for a reply from Prue.

  “You were in a hurry, yesterday,” says Clarice Hussein, as we settle around the table in the reading room. She adds, smiling, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you run before.”

  Only then do I remember that she had intercepted me on her way into the building yesterday afternoon, as I bolted from my office. Natasha must have shown herself out after I left, and then returned to her dorm room or—hopefully—to a friend’s. The memory of her stricken face fills me with shame.

  “Didn’t mean to embarrass you,” Clarice whispers.

  “It’s not your fault,” I assure her, and the business begins.

  On the agenda is a preliminary review of the finalists for our postdoctorate position, followed by a reopening of the debate our resident historicist sparked during our last meeting, about whether to expand our course offerings to include classes on non-European thought, a notion I found reasonable. Barring that—and here I had disagreed, though I couldn’t care less anymore—we should consider renaming ourselves “The Department of Western Philosophy.”

  “. . . a lot to offer,” Rhonda Patel—our metaphysician—is saying, referring to the postdoctoral candidate. “But I don’t see him linking this stuff to broader trends.”

  Dominic Kensington, our Hegelian, murmurs his assent. “We don’t want too much overlap, besides.” He pats my shoulder. “We’ve got our epistemologist.”

  I smile. Partly out of shyness, and partly to respect the preference I have always assumed they share for segregating work and life, I have never made much of an effort to befriend my colleagues. Nonetheless, they have always been kind to me. When, on an impulse, I solicited their advice about a paper submission on our department listserv, each of them responded—most within a few days’ time—with thoughtful comments. At our annual holiday party, when the accumulated cost of my reticence is most conspicuous, they and their spouses go out of their way to make me feel included. Late last year, when I got tenure, almost all of them sent me congratulatory notes.

  They fall silent now, staring at me. We have been going around the table, I realize, sharing impressions of the candidate’s dossier.

  “Sorry.” I riffle through his CV. I reviewed his application last week, marking my comments in the margins, but am suddenly unable to decipher them.

  Feet shuffle. The radiator ticks. My annotations might as well be gibberish.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and look up.

  There is an awkward silence, broken by Gordon Cage, our chair: “Didn’t get to it?”

  I shake my head. “I read it. But I don’t remember what I thought about it anymore. I’m sorry.”

  As people shift in their seats, Gordon says, “Okay, then. Clarice, what did you—”

  “My book is getting published,” I interrupt.

  They stare at me.

  “That’s fabulous,” Rhonda says at last. Peter, our newcomer, glances around the table.

  I add, “Cornell’s putting it out.”

  “Try to sound a little less excited,” says Dominic, prompting a round of warm, nervous laughter.

  “I want to thank you all for something,” I say, cutting it off. I take a breath. “I know I’ve never been an especially generous presence around here. I’m self-involved. Not good with people. And you’ve extended yourselves to me anyway, more than I deserve.”

  Marsha Petrov, our ethicist, locks eyes with Clarice.

  Rhonda says, “Ivan? What is this about?”

  “Sharing a department with all of you has been the highlight of my career.” I stand up. “I wish I’d made more of it, when I had the chance.”

  I gather my briefcase and coat.

  “Hey!” Mar
sha calls after me, but I am already on my way out the door.

  Downstairs, I shrug on my coat, pull out my phone, and call a cab to All Saints Hospital.

  Twenty

  Morning visiting hours have ended by the time I reach the psychiatric ward, but the receptionist offers to check with the attending physician to see if they can accommodate me. He takes my name, pointing me toward a waiting area flanking the bolted yellow door.

  When Walt calls I pick up immediately, thinking it might be Prue, but then his voice comes through the earpiece.

  “Hey, man. I think you cc’d me on something by mistake?”

  “I just wanted to make sure it got through to Prue,” I say. “You can read it, if you want.”

  “Don’t plan to,” he says. From the gentleness in his voice, I know she has told him everything. “Anyhow,” he continues, “you asked about May? She’s home sick today, but she’s been a champ. She’s right here, if you want to say hi.”

  “I’d love to.”

  There is a rustling, and then May’s voice says, “Uncle Ivan?”

  “Yes sweetie, it’s me. How are you?” I fish in my briefcase for Frank’s story, thinking I might read it aloud to her, and then remember I have left it at home.

  “Are you sleeping over, too?” Her nose is audibly stuffed up. “Aunt Prue went to work, but she said she’s coming back tonight.”

  “I wish I could, but I—”

  “You have to see my new glasses!”

  “New glasses already? No way. What color?”

  “One sec, I’ll show you the picture my dad took.” There is a silence, and then I hear the swoop of an outgoing text. A moment later, my phone vibrates.

  The image shows May sprawled on her living room rug, smiling tentatively. The thick, circular frames on her new glasses make her look like a young teenager. I zoom in, studying the surroundings for any trace of Prue. A peach comforter is draped over the couch cushion, seemingly dented by some recent, human weight.