Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  “It’s nothing official yet,” said Sara. “We’re just hanging out again.” She looked again across the room. Eye contact was a scarce commodity in this place. Anja glanced back to follow Sara’s gaze, spotting Mahatma, standing beside Sascha, who was present after all. Sascha and Mahatma were leaning into each other, giggling, exchanging a single beer and cigarette back and forth. Flirting in the most ostentatious way.

  Anja tried to pity Sara, whose entire world was made of unstable alliances. Then she recalled all the minor slights Sara had directed at her over the years. Sara would forever be passing the stings she received from her so-called friends on to the next person down. Through repeated subjugation the victim becomes the victimizer.

  “Everything changed after last week at the Baron,” Sara said, apparently unperturbed by the sight of best friend and target boyfriend engaged in flirtations.

  “Oh?”

  “Lou didn’t tell you?” Sara feigned surprise.

  Anja’s face got warm, her body chemistry reacting to the thought—Louis, doing things she didn’t know about—Louis, not telling her things—Louis, Lou. She rearranged her face into a dumb smile. She wished the protective shadow of social confidence would appear over her face, but it wasn’t coming. She was far too raw, too exposed.

  “That’s so weird,” Sara said, shaking her head. “I guess I asked him not to tell people about me and Mahatma yet, but I assumed he’d tell you.” She waited for a reaction from Anja, who didn’t provide it. “Are things going okay between you?” she prompted, clearly knowing the answer. That’s what the shoulder squeeze had been about, hadn’t it? Then why was she pretending she didn’t already know?

  “Um,” said Anja, unsure how to give the illusion of candidness without transmitting any real information. “No, I mean, he’s living at the studio right now, so.”

  Sara was all sympathy. “I know he’s been struggling, it’s so obvious. But I just so hope you guys can work it out. You’re the perfect couple. If there’s ever anything I can do.”

  “Thanks,” Anja whispered.

  “He needs us all to support him right now. You can’t blame him for whatever he’s going through. And some things are more important than us, you know?”

  Ah, the blame. Anja locked her lips into the thin line of a nonsmile.

  “He told us you came up with the name for Oval though,” Sara said. “That’s cool.”

  Anja fidgeted. Heat spread from her face to her body. She squeezed her arms to her side, worried about pit stains. She swallowed this information carefully. He’d already let it leak. This was so far beyond the pale—so reckless. And without her there. “You guys tried it,” she said.

  “Definitely. But for some reason Lou still won’t try it himself.”

  After she’d put him off for more than a week—dolphins, monkeys, thumbs-up signs—he was still waiting. That counted for something. That justified this period of bizarre estrangement. She swallowed. “How was it?”

  “Totally amazing. A total game changer.” She pressed her palms forward in the air, fingers spread wide, as if waiting for a double high five.

  “Is that when Mahatma—?”

  Sara nodded and lowered her hands.

  Of course, thought Anja. So many relationships functioned like transactions already. Oval would simply make those transactions more generous. It would feel a lot like love—at least for a few hours.

  “It’s like we finally get each other,” Sara said. “I mean, he’s still a guy,” she added, looking over Anja’s shoulder again. “They always check in and out when they feel like it. They trap you in this role of waiting for them . . .” Anja nodded uneasily. “But when they come back, you can’t keep them out, because you’ve already wasted so much time waiting.”

  Anja glanced around them, wondering if anyone was close enough to be listening. Groups were clumping together and others were starting to leave, which meant she had better sight lines across the room. She scanned for Prinz—anyone else she knew and might latch on to. She was surprised to find Michel suddenly at her side again.

  “Hey,” he said. “No dice with the shoes. They’re all wearing Moon Boots.”

  “This is Michel,” Anja said to Sara. Michel and Sara exchanged cheek kisses.

  “We were just talking about the performance,” said Sara, instantly switching gears, as if nothing had passed between her and Anja. “What did you think?” she asked Michel, smiling.

  “You mean that racist shit we just saw?”

  Sara raised her eyebrows, signaling that this was out-of-bounds. Only sanctioned critiques, please. “Racist? How so?”

  “Snow Yellow?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a comment on racism, it’s not doing racism.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Um, it’s sort of an interrogation into . . . I don’t know, notions of authenticity in the Western world. Like gestural marks that are meant to—maybe—provide like, a feedback loop into network ecologies of beauties, and like, other ways of interaction conceived as data flows?”

  Michel looked at her incredulously and laughed. “Who has done this terrible thing to your speech?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s like you’ve memorized the press release and are trying to make it sound like it’s spontaneously coming out of your mouth.”

  “Um.”

  “Or are you just recombining random phrases from thousands of press releases you’ve read?”

  Sara narrowed her eyes at Anja instead of Michel. Anja had brought this uncouth animal into her range.

  Michel persisted. “Seriously, where do you get this stuff?”

  Normally Anja would have shifted visibly away from Michel, signaling a distance, but instead she found herself laughing. Michel joined in and the giggling fit that had possessed them at the lab lately took hold again. She shrugged helplessly at Sara.

  “I’ll leave you guys to it,” said Sara. “I have to get to this dinner now anyway.”

  Sara made the type of abrupt exit that Laura was always complaining about: a demonstration of dominance in the conversation by simply choosing arbitrarily when to end it. “The minute you try to start an actual conversation they literally run away from you,” Laura would say. “The whole goal of going out for these people is to rack up goodbyes.”

  “I can’t take you anywhere,” Anja said to Michel once they were standing outside, still laughing. “You just pee on the carpet.”

  “I don’t want to be taken anywhere. These people are gremlins. I can’t believe you hang out with them.”

  She cast her eyes downward and stopped laughing. “They’re more Louis’s friends than mine.”

  “I see.” He walked to the edge of the curb to wave down a taxi. The street was crowded with cars and people, which made it difficult to hail one. “Where is this Louis, anyway?”

  Michel had never met Louis. He’d never met anyone, really. This was the closest they’d come to doing something together unrelated to work.

  “I don’t know where he is.” She wasn’t sure how to explain any of it, and she wasn’t going to try. “Things are kind of amphibious lately.”

  She had never confided in Michel about her relationship, but it dawned on her that he wasn’t exactly unobservant. He had seen her obsessively checking her phone for messages, had heard her complain about her current sleeping arrangement on the sofa of her friends’ house, had eaten the leftovers of the muffins that she only picked at sorrowfully. She could assume he’d pieced things together. If nothing else, he must have noticed how much time she was spending with him, and how little with Louis.

  He opened the door and shooed her into the cab before him. “Let’s drop you off first,” he said. She gave the driver Laura and Dam’s address.

  “So you’re half in the water, half out,” he said, once they had seat-belted themselves.

  “Something like that.”

  “If the water is full of things like whatever we just watched, w
ith the people we just watched it with, for the record, I think you can do better.”

  She folded her hands tightly together in her lap. “Why are you in such a bad mood?”

  “I asked one O’Reilly guy what the deal was with his Moon Boots, and he told me they’re the only footwear to have been proven to enhance not only productivity but authenticity in the workplace. Fucking Moon Boots.”

  “Authenticity?”

  “Authenticity! Moon Boots!” He tapped the side of his head against the window in anger. “I don’t give a shit about any of this! I’m doing pretend field research at a racist product launch. I miss my lab coat and my antisocial routine.”

  “Me too. I miss empiricism.”

  “I miss cartilage.” He leaned forward to see what street they were turning down, and when he sat back he said, “Fine. I’m convinced.”

  “Of Moon Boots?”

  “No. Of what you said.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Let’s do the experiment.”

  It took her a moment to register what he was talking about. She’d scrubbed the idea from her mind. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, fuck it. To split the difference is to side with the oppressor.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t want to be a consultant anyway. I don’t care if we get fired.”

  16

  “IF YOU REALLY WANTED TO BE POPULAR, ALL YOU’D HAVE TO do is devote all your time to hanging out.”

  Laura reminded Anja of this whenever Anja was feeling insecure about her social shortcomings. “If you went to every party,” she’d say, “you’d be invited to every party. All they want is proof of your dedication.”

  Anja knew this was true, but she still couldn’t help but blame her ongoing feelings of social alienation on her inadequacy. She knew what not to do at an opening, at a club—she could recognize it when she saw it, e.g., Michel—but she didn’t know what to actually do. There was a roof on the acceptable conversation topics that felt so low it wasn’t worth standing up. She was perpetually nervous in crowds. Her inner monologue didn’t slow down. She got exhausted, even ill, after more than one long night out in a row. Those long stretches required a particular kind of endurance she just didn’t have.

  “You can’t just go to parties,” she’d protest to Laura, “you have to know what to do when you get there.”

  “Going out is not a skill. Literally anyone can stand around and take drugs.”

  “I get sick if I do too many drugs.”

  “Why do them at all, then?”

  “Nobody can dance for ten hours sober.”

  “Then go home after two hours.”

  “Then you’re the person who always goes home early.”

  Sometimes Laura would shrug her off by muttering “first world problems,” and Anja would back off. But more often, Laura indulged her. Anja understood the conversations could become pitiful, even harassing, but she also knew that they were polarizing each other to work something out that bothered them both. The question at the base of it was: Why do we willingly submit ourselves to social defeat at the hands of those we don’t respect? Why do we play a game with such idiotic rules?

  This was mainly posed as a question for Anja to answer, but over time she came to realize that it was also relevant, in a different way, to Laura. Why else would Laura engage in these circular arguments at all?

  Laura also cared what people thought. She cared so much that she hated everybody. Hating everybody worked for her—it covered up the fear. She performed the hatred online, where several thousand followers could enjoy her rants. This way of relating to the world suited her. “You’re so of the moment,” Dam would say, reading her feed over her shoulder and sarcastically reciting her posts out loud.

  As for going out into the world of physical bodies, Laura did it mostly within a safe sphere of gay men. She’d infiltrated and eventually pirated Dam’s nightlife to make it her own. As a bonus, gay guys constituted the demographic most likely to follow reality TV, and so she had an endless mine of content to discuss with them—this relieved the anxiety of inventing topics, of finding common ground, that so plagued Anja.

  “Just repeat gossip,” Laura said. “Nobody invents content at parties, they just repeat it.”

  And yet they were both in need of content. (Louis, it seemed, was able to find content everywhere. Here was the main jealousy Anja felt in their relationship: that Louis could find content in a social world that she found barren. It energized him; he needed it.)

  “It’s a waste of time,” said Laura of partying. “You have better things to do.”

  I do? Anja thought. Am I “above” partying? Am I fulfilled by my work? Do I hold a vestige of the belief in the goodness of work?

  People who spent all their time out there—people like Prinz—could no longer even draw a distinction between productive and unproductive time. The act of partying had become an act of production: they were producing relations—relations as objects. And objects as opportunities. Content was subordinate.

  To liberate herself from the pull of opportunity, she’d worn her career as a jacket of legitimacy: the Real Job jacket. A scientist, really? Wow, sounds intense. She had a real place to be on Monday morning. It was all she could use to justify a life not governed by late-night invitations; it was all she could use to prove to herself—to Louis—that she wasn’t a social animal because she had more important things to do, not because she was incapable. And now? The excuse of the Real Job was gone. She was exposed.

  When Anja got home from Snow White’s performance, exhausted, Laura was waiting for her at the kitchen table, scrolling her feeds, poised to listen to Anja’s recap.

  Anja sat on the floor at Laura’s feet. She leaned against her legs.

  “Bad night out?” said Laura, squeezing the sides of Anja’s head with her shinbones.

  “Not great.”

  “Whose fault?”

  “Women’s. And men’s.”

  Laura laughed, and then Anja sighed and opened the valve she had been keeping shut. She’d barely lasted a week without spilling. There was no point in keeping quiet. Oval was apparently in the world. Laura would find out soon enough.

  But instead of starting with Oval, she found herself starting with Sara. She could only seem to explain things through the lens of Sara’s meddling—it was the only thing that made sense. It didn’t make any sense for Louis to be estranging himself on behalf of a newfound rainbow of idealism—the estrangement had to be blamed on someone, and Sara had offered herself.

  Anja didn’t seriously think anything was actually going on between Louis and Sara. This was highly unlikely. Sara had only tried to incite jealousy on the social level, not the sexual. Nonetheless, Anja found herself describing the conversation as if some genuine infidelity had happened.

  “Thank god,” Laura said when she’d finished. “You’re articulate again.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been clammed up for weeks. We haven’t gotten a true word out of you.”

  “What’s a ‘true’ word?”

  “We count on you to speak the truth. You always point north. Lately not so much.”

  Laura was speaking in the plural, which meant that she had talked about this with Dam. “You mean I’m usually more needy,” said Anja.

  “That’s a very sober, truthful way to think about it. See, you can’t help but be honest.”

  If truth was her territory, which she had not supposed until that moment, then Laura was right that she had been skirting it.

  “I don’t want to tell you the truth, because I don’t want you to get sick of me,” Anja confessed. “I’m always complaining.”

  “Everything in the world is terrible. You’re not going to blow our minds by saying that. And we’re not going to kick you out of the house for being depressed.”

  “I’m not depressed!”

  “I’m not blaming you for it. Depression is structural at this point.
”

  “You think everything’s structural.”

  “Everything is structural. Even or especially this Sara situation. The two of you are just following the script.”

  “What script?”

  “The script. You know. I’ve seen it on like every season of The Bachelor.”

  “Go on.”

  Laura clapped her hands together loudly. “Fine. So.” She clapped again. “Straight couple goes through relationship difficulties that become publicly obvious. Close female friend of couple plays both sides, absorbing the complaints of both and sympathizing. While she’s doing face masks, watching movies, and bringing tissues to the girlfriend, she’s partying and acting like the cool girl with her friend’s estranged boyfriend. Basically massaging the suffering of the girlfriend while flattering the boyfriend into thinking he doesn’t need his relationship. She isn’t overtly trying to hook up with the boyfriend, but she’s definitely treating him like he’s single. So the girlfriend stays miserable, while the guy gets to have fun. Unknown to himself, convinced he’s simply having a good time to escape from the difficult entanglements of romantic love, the guy lets himself get pulled away from his girlfriend, who now seems lame and melodramatic.”

  “That’s so, so bleak,” said Anja.

  “I know. Men deal with heartbreak by destroying women. Women deal with heartbreak by destroying each other. Don’t fall for it.”

  Anja shook her head, jostling against Laura’s legs.

  “It’s true,” said Laura. “We think we’re all struggling here in private, unrelated to the identical struggles of people all across the western hemisphere with internet access. Sara thinks she’s living in a unique reality—but she’s actually just reliving season three of The Bachelor.”

  “Season three?”

  “People just don’t get how predictable they are.”

  Anja spun around to face Laura, and leaned back on her hands, staring up at her. “So according to your structural analysis, where do I fit in?”

  “I’d say your version of the story is a bit more complicated,” Laura said, without missing a beat, “because you have this death thing in the center of it. So Sara’s involvement is also positioned as some kind of caretaking thing. Obviously, by acting maternal to Louis and then weaponizing the knowledge she’s gained from it, she’s trying to make you jealous. The jealousy is meant to drive a wedge between you and Louis. The more jealous you act, the more you’ll drive Louis away, and the cycle perpetuates itself.”