Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  Anja found the new tablet under Louis’s pillow and slid her finger across the screen to unlock it. She swiped through the pages, games upon games, thinking it a healthy sign that Louis had left it behind in favor of other activities, and then remembering that he was out somewhere with Prinz. They had probably met up with some others and gone to a bar. She should have joined them, but she felt weak in the body. Louis’s lungs could withstand the secondhand smoke of social life better than hers could. She would get a sinus infection if she sat in a smoke-filled bar for more than a few hours. Berlin, the last place on Earth you could smoke indoors.

  Automatically her finger opened the email app on the tablet. Seeing the entirety of Louis’s life splay open, she sat up, finger hovering, undecided. She felt around in herself for actual suspicion, for an urge to dig. He’d left the thing at home—unlocked—because he had nothing to hide. And what would be hiding in the machine? The single golden key to his emotional state? The password for feeling completely secure in their relationship?

  If there was no secret, there was no reason not to scroll through the messages. They looked at each other’s screens all the time. That was what intimacy meant.

  She limited herself to a casual perusal of subject lines. Plenty of internal Basquiatt emails. He had all the nonsensitive ones forwarded to his general inbox. It was pointless to artificially separate work and life like that.

  Re: meeting weds.

  PRESS RELEASE urgent :)

  Condolences.

  There were a few of those, from Basquiatt addresses and others. Sending hugs. b well.

  There were plenty from Prinz, mostly without subjects, probably memes. There was one she very nearly opened from an address that looked like a law firm. Next steps: inheritance tax. This was something they had discussed very little. All she knew was that the assets were negligible.

  An unopened message from that afternoon stopped her cold, finger hovering: 4 p.m. howard@finster-pr.de. The address was commonplace in her inbox, but alien here. It sat among the other unread messages like a row of ripe cherries on a slot machine.

  The subject line had its lips sealed. Feedback.

  Her phone dinged and jolted her heart. Louis, on his way home. She exhaled, closed all apps, and nudged the tablet back under his pillow.

  His pillow, impressed and indented by his head. His head on his pillow in their bed. The extra-wide bed you got to have if you were a couple. Anja knew they were just another banal pair nestled in their pocket of intimacy, convinced they were especially unique and worthy, when all around the world there were couples just like them, clutching each other smugly, identical in their uniqueness. Coupling was the most normative thing in the world. It was impossible to know whether you were coupling because it was available or because you really wanted it. Either way, it was a fundamentally unspecial thing to do.

  And yet she had always suspected that they really were special, for reasons that had to do with Louis being special. Louis’s desire to do good for the world was constantly grappling with his desire for success at any cost—these threatened to merge constantly, but with her he couldn’t get away with masking the latter with the former: he couldn’t cloak his aspiration with moral goodness. Her job was to gently remind him of this, to disallow him from lying to himself. It was their love that held him to account, and this was important.

  What did he do for her? Simple: he removed the pressure on her to perform. She was let off the hook. No performing her wealth, no performing outgoingness, no performing a grand vision for the world. These performances could be outsourced to him. She could spend her time under the bright lights of the basement lab, deep underground with the company of congealing and separating cellular matter, secure that he was performing well on her behalf, up above on land. If this arrangement happened to conform to traditional gender roles, so be it. Sometimes the stereotype was also the truth. (But is he a feminist? Laura had asked once, eyebrow arched. Anja had laughed. What did that even mean?)

  She did not worship him, and she did not think he was perfect—he was missing crucial abilities, anybody could see that. Such as time management. Such as the ability to act on his own judgments by, say, openly disagreeing with people he didn’t agree with. But no one could be completely whole. Where he was underdeveloped she was overdeveloped, and vice versa, ergo they fit.

  Those aspects of their everyday life together—the static on the bathroom radio, the way Louis flicked water off himself after a shower, the condensation on the insides of the windows in the morning from their heat in sleep, Anja picking a bright blue label off an unripe pear, the precise kind of mess Louis made (where everything had its place even though objects looked randomly strewn about), the glass of water she kept by the bed, the green seat cushions of the chairs on the back patio warmed in stripes of sunlight, Louis watering the vine climbing up the back of the house, Louis watching an instructional video about how to fold a fitted sheet—those were holy and they amounted to more than the sum of their parts. As an undergirding of the grandiose possibilities of their lives—his life—in public, what could be more sacred than the ordinariness of their love?

  4

  MOST MORNINGS SHE WOKE UP WITH A PAIN IN HER NECK. THE symmetrical tension was always there, clenching on either side of the vertebrae where muscle broadens to clasp neck to shoulder. She could feel the supportive tissue protesting against bone. The morning soreness had always been there, before Louis, before Howard, before anyone else had ever been in her bed. She hadn’t properly evolved, something was missing in her spine’s supply chain upholding her skull. She wasn’t accurately constructed. It was a fact.

  Usually after waking up she did a special set of stretches on the yoga mat permanently unrolled at the foot of the bed, while Louis was still asleep.

  That morning she woke to find him already on the mat himself, doing some kind of bastardized yogic movement. She dangled her head over the bed, tilting it sideways to watch him as he leaned forward and tried to maneuver his elbows into the triangle of his groin.

  “When I was little, my sister used to tell me that if I could lick my own elbow I’d turn into a boy,” she said to him. He flinched and glanced up, surprised for some reason to see her.

  “Did you ever get there?”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe all that trying is why your neck always hurts.”

  Sometimes he massaged her neck, which helped in an emotional more than a physical way. She thought of asking, since she was feeling particularly out of sorts, but he was busy on the floor forcing his forearms further into his crotch.

  In the bathroom she switched on the radio above the toilet before unscrewing the shower nozzle to give permission for that morning enemy, gravity, to slowly empty the bladder of collected rainwater in a shower-like drizzle. An upbeat German voice spoke from the radio. Reassuring weather words. Mostly sunny all day, calm, sun showers in the afternoon. Wholly untrustworthy and untethered from reality. She couldn’t remember when the discrepancy had expanded from acceptable error to flagrant contradiction. In Dam’s mind, the inaccuracy of all official weather reports was not an accident, but a surefire conspiracy on a massive scale. Whose conspiracy, he was not so sure. Sometimes the news stations, sometimes the internet service providers, sometimes the city government. Anja found it difficult to muster the paranoia to get behind any of his rotating hypotheses, but she also had a hard time coming up with another, less sinister explanation. Dam wasn’t the only one speculating; there were plenty of others staying up late on Reddit swapping theories. There was something pitiful about hanging life’s meaning on the borrowed scaffolding of the conspiracy plot, but Dam did give it a certain poetics. She remembered his blast from the night before. friendly skies, calm waters / immense gratitude / 30º

  She tuned the radio to NPR. This was the second element of the morning ritual after her stretching. Louis said the English-speaking voices reminded him of morning car rides to school, harkening nostalgically back to a swift
ly disappearing kind of neolib Americana. The sound of NPR was a message in a bottle from the homeland, written by someone who would only have had to pay attention to the content of the message to know the medium of its transmission was no longer valid. And yet the voices still carried on in genial two-minute news segments, even now, even here in Europe, reassuring generations of expats that the hegemony of the English language would endure and that at least All Things would still be Considered, whether those things were true or not. There’s nothing inherently immoral about nostalgia, Louis had said in defense of his radio.

  The water was lukewarm and didn’t smell quite right. Anja cut the shower short and enacted element three of the routine: tracing an emoticon with her finger in the shower mist on the mirror. She drew a face with a question mark for a mouth :-? When Louis’s shower fogged up the glass again, the face would reappear, and this way he would know her mood of the day, even if she’d already left the house by the time he woke up. She toweled off carefully and left the radio on for Louis, noting that the seeming remoteness of the American voices was compounded by the bad reception in the bathroom.

  Thursday. It was only his fourth day home, and already they’d rope-led each other back into mornings as usual. Howard and Laura may have reassured her—Laura more than once—but Anja was still unsure that normalcy was the best policy in the wake of tragedy, vexing herself with the worry that she was repressing Louis by not talking about it. It wasn’t like he’d said so—but he was undeniably different now, whether he admitted it or not. His body was a different body: a body without any parents. There must have been a physical trace, a scoop missing out of him somewhere, but she couldn’t identify where it was.

  Scooped out or not, the Louis she knew was aware of how to act in any situation, and this was not the way to act like a grieving man in touch with his feelings, who was supposed to be able to talk about those feelings. More than anyone she had ever met, Louis understood the patterns of behavior that kept consensus social reality running comfortably—he knew the rules so innately that he could mess with them as he saw fit, but he never broke the rules by accident. He knew what he was doing. He must have known that acting sad after the death of a parent was the way to act. He must have known that acting fine was not normal and that, even if he really did feel fine, he should give some indication of awareness that this did not match the expectation; he should act just a little bit sad. He was the one who was supposed to take the lead on these things, and without any real guidance from his side, she had no clue how to act, how to complete the pattern that he was supposed to lay out.

  One possibility was that Anja was dead wrong about the social expectation here, and that acting fine was actually the right and normal thing to do. In that case, Louis was simply parroting being a man in denial. And if he was actually setting the pace, she should follow suit. What bothered her about this possibility was that a man parroting denial was indistinguishable from a man in denial. Even if he was faking denial, he was also in it.

  The other possibility, which was much more disconcerting, was that Louis had really broken the script, that grief had plunged him so far underwater that he had lost the ability or the desire to adhere to the rules. In a circular way, she thought, this possibility offered the strongest evidence that he was in an unprecedented amount of pain.

  She moved into the kitchen to start preparing smoothies, the final event in the morning series, and as she took out the blender, it occurred to her that her mental articulation of the morning steps was something new. She had never exactly conceived of the mornings as a routine; she was doing so now only because the routine had gained symbolic importance. She had become aware of the norm because she was on the lookout for any minor deviation. So concerned was she with the After resembling the Before, she was seeking a barometer for measurement.

  This meant she was surely blowing the deviations out of proportion. That Louis had been awake before her that morning couldn’t really be significant. There must have been hundreds of mornings that also didn’t conform to the schedule. He must have woken up earlier than she had any number of times. But in that moment, smoothie machine grinding away at chunks of fruit flesh, she could not remember a single one.

  She was finishing her smoothie when Louis entered the kitchen. He made a twisty expression with his mouth that was meant to resemble the face in the shower mist. He didn’t want the rest of the green material in the blender, he said, he wanted an English muffin. The spirulina will go bad if you don’t drink it, she was about to say, but caught herself and opened the toaster. At all costs, she would not let her obsessive thoughts out; she would not pressure him to drink a bad-tasting smoothie. He could never know that she was scrutinizing him. She must not take his coolness as a dare, because she had no empirical proof that he was daring her at all—because she had no empirical proof that he was in pain and hiding it. Pretending to be fine and being fine looked the same from the outside, and the outside was all she had. She must not admit she desired to see him in pain, for that would suggest that she desired for him to be in pain. Either desire was perverse. She had to focus on loving him, very normally.

  A flash of pink appeared below her on the path as she turned at one of its many joints. There was no reason, as far as she could guess, for the path to curve around so much according to variations in the terrain, given that every centimeter of the mountain was designed and therefore could have been designed for a straight path from top to bottom. No reason but propping up the silly pretense of naturalness. When the path straightened out again, she saw Matilda, one of the neighbors, who was wearing a hot pink cardigan. Encountering Matilda was a surprise. It had been at least two weeks since she’d crossed paths with anyone ascending or descending the mountain.

  “Hey,” Matilda called out, huffing slightly as she climbed toward Anja. In one arm she was holding a small, fat dog with yellow fur. Its tongue was poking out of its mouth, which was rimmed with a light froth of drool. “He gets tired on the hike up,” Matilda said as she walked closer, patting the dog. “I always have to carry him part of the way.”

  “I feel the same,” said Anja. “I wish someone would carry me.”

  Matilda stopped half a meter away, hoisting the dog so his nose was near her ear. “How are things? We haven’t seen you in ages.”

  By we, Matilda meant herself and her husband, whose name Anja couldn’t remember. They were the Danish couple, in their forties probably, both very handsome. Stately, even.

  “Oh, all good here. Minus, you know. A few house things.” She gestured upward.

  Matilda rolled her eyes and they both laughed. “Well, we signed up for it, didn’t we?”

  “We did.”

  They would not talk about the specifics, that was clear. The neighbors were all private about their situations; there was no sense of camaraderie. Maybe she and Louis had just cut themselves out of the group, but she didn’t think so. Everyone had moved in at different times and had been briefed separately. “I’m glad everyone is trying to maintain the delusion that this is high-status,” Louis had said. “Campfires and barbecues would ruin the game.”

  “We aren’t allowed to have any open-air fires here anyway,” Anja had pointed out.

  Matilda and her husband lived in the house closest to Anja and Louis, maybe a hundred meters downhill. They couldn’t see each other’s houses from their own lots, due to the placement of the foliage, and it was easy for Anja to forget that anyone else might be within earshot at a given moment. Isolation by design.

  “It’s partially our fault we haven’t seen you lately,” Matilda said. “We’ve been back and forth to Copenhagen a lot.”

  “For work?”

  “Yes, and family. Our daughter. We still have our place there.” She cleared her throat.

  Primary residence was supposed to be the Berg, but of course nobody was going to chase them down and insist they stay there all the time. A lot of the others probably still had apartments elsewhere, places they could re
treat to when tired of lukewarm showers.

  “And you?” Matilda smiled. “Still working in biology?”

  Anja nodded and said it was going very well, thanks. She wasn’t grateful for the reminder. She thought, with guilt, of Michel, who had been texting her with some regularity. This was the longest she’d gone in ages without seeing him. She’d taken his reliable Monday-through-Friday presence for granted. It made sense to talk to him about what was happening to them now, to him more than anyone else, actually, but she couldn’t bring herself to call him just yet. She wasn’t sure why. It also made sense to ask Matilda whether her garbage disposal system had ever worked, which she wouldn’t do either.

  Matilda asked about Louis, and it took all of Anja’s powers of self-presentation to keep a placid face. She didn’t know Matilda well. She couldn’t just go around telling everyone.

  “He’s fine,” she said. “Busy, like always.”

  The conversation was boring and they were both glancing behind each other, signaling that it was time to move on.

  “You should come over and see us one of these days,” said Matilda. “We’d love to make you dinner.”

  “I’ll talk to Louis about what day would be best.” They both knew she wouldn’t.

  Matilda took a step up the path and Anja took a step down the path and they said how nice it was to see each other. When they had reversed altitude, Anja now looking up to make eye contact and Matilda looking down, Matilda said, “Also, if you wouldn’t mind not mentioning Cheeto to anyone.” She lifted the dog again and let him wet the side of her face with his little snout. “He doesn’t normally stay with us. It’s just, you know.”