Signs and Wonders

by Alix Ohlin

“This is the frigate bird,” the guide said. She was a young, pretty biologist with her hair in a long blond braid, her sturdy legs in cargo shorts planted firmly on the ground. “They’re named after a warship and they steal catches from other birds. During mating season, the male’s red air sac inflates like a bullfrog’s neck.”

  “What is this air sac?” Hans asked Reena.

  She tried to answer him by gesturing, but he still looked confused.

  After the frigate bird they spent a long time looking at iguanas, everyone silent as their cameras whirred and clicked. It was as if they were a group of robots, these mechanical sounds their only language. Iguanas, Reena learned, are quite hypoallergenic and would make good pets, if only they were not endangered. Hypothetically good pets. Hans was taken by one that looked like a dinosaur, its neck ringed by sharply pointed, prehistoric skin.

  “Motherfucker,” he marveled sweetly, almost under his breath.

  She wanted to ask him why he was here, if he was pursuing a lifelong dream or escaping some disappointment. But this question—why are you here?—was too loaded. After all, she wouldn’t want to have to answer it herself.

  Laureen and Benjamin were standing next to them, and she hadn’t even noticed. Reena smiled at her and said she was having a good time.

  “You don’t have to be so polite,” Laureen said. “You don’t even have to have a good time. Just be, okay?”

  At this, without warning or choice, Reena burst into a full-grown sob attack.

  Alarmed, the tour guide came over and put her hand on Reena’s shoulder, her blond braid gently brushing her arm. “Is everything all right?”

  Suddenly the world was in motion. Everyone was looking at Reena, muttering and whispering. The endangered species scrambled to take flight. Medical emergency personnel were summoned. Before she knew it, Reena was sitting in the incomplete shade of some equatorial tree, drinking water, taking aspirin, and applying sunblock while anxious crew members loitered nearby, scribbling notes on clipboards, conferring about dehydration and liability. How had she become such a spectacle? She knew what her ex-husband would say, if he were here, if they were still speaking. You go to one of nature’s most spectacular places, and you make it all about you. He would say that, and he’d be right.

  After insisting she was fine at least a dozen times, Reena was allowed to stand up. Laureen took her arm, as if trying to support an invalid. Smelling powerfully of some floral perfume, she was wearing a black-and-white striped blouse, gauzy and slightly revealing of her bra, and red Capri pants, and gold hoop earrings. She looked fantastic. Reena leaned against her as birds disappeared over the horizon. And then they were gone.

  · · ·

  Back on the ship, they dressed for dinner. At Laureen’s command, Reena had brought two new outfits, clothing with no past associations. She put on a blue dress, hoping to feel pretty. Her skin felt pleasantly scorched and dry.

  In the dining room she and Laureen were seated at separate tables, a procedure designed to encourage further mixing among the guests. Hans, sitting on her right, kept smiling and offering her more wine. He asked what she thought about Martin Scorsese.

  “Is he the one who did The Godfather?” she asked. “Most movies are so violent. I don’t go very much.”

  Judging from his expression, this was the wrong answer.

  After dinner, the bar stayed open and people milled around, loose and friendly. Reena stepped outside to get some air. She’d spilled some of her dinner on her new dress; it was just that kind of day. A hand touched her arm, and she turned around with a prepared, chipper smile—expecting Laureen—but it was Benjamin Moore.

  “Your aunt’s organizing a card game,” he said.

  “I’m not big on cards,” Reena said.

  “Neither am I. I thought I’d come out and join you. Is that all right?”

  “Of course,” Reena said, though it was more confusing than all right.

  He inquired in a gentlemanly way about her health, and together they stood looking at the black water and the indecipherable landscape. Darwin, birds, the understanding of our humble origins that science gave us: that was what you were supposed to see. All Reena saw in the dark was water and rocks.

  “I have a son who’s twenty-five,” Benjamin said musingly, not looking at her. “He’s gay and he thinks I don’t know it, but I do. It upsets me more than I’d like it to. He’s an actor on a soap opera. It’s on every day at one in the afternoon. He plays what you might call a rake. I have a TV in my office, and every day I sit there eating my lunch and watching my gay son seduce women wearing too much makeup.”

  Reena had no idea what to say. Maybe this was part of the cruise-ship experience, along with the dinners and the wildlife tours: you went on board and told strangers the story of your life.

  “Sometimes they look like their entire faces are coated in Vaseline,” Benjamin went on. “Why do they do that? Sometimes I think that if I had to look at those women all day and kiss them and such, maybe I’d be gay too.”

  “I’m not sure why you’re telling me this, Benjamin,” Reena told him.

  “You can call me Ben,” he said affably.

  The ensuing silence didn’t appear to make him uncomfortable. It lasted so long that Reena felt compelled to speak.

  She took a breath, then said, “I got divorced because I cheated on my husband. Electronically cheated. I started e-mailing my high school boyfriend and we fell in love all over again, and my husband found out, and my high school boyfriend wasn’t interested in leaving his wife, but my husband left me, and I don’t blame him.”

  What her mother had said: Reena, you’ve never known how to take care of things. You were always breaking your toys and messing up your clothes. This is the same, only bigger.

  What Laureen had said: Well, honey, everything happens for a reason.

  What Reena had said: I’m an idiot and a fool.

  “This Internet,” Ben said, “it’s changing our lives.”

  Reena’s laugh sounded like a bark. “Yeah, it’s definitely the Internet’s fault.”

  “That’s not what I said,” he said.

  She looked at him. There was no absolution in his voice but no blame, either. She couldn’t figure out what he was doing there with her while her charming, vibrant aunt was off playing cards.

  “Everything changes and nothing stays the same,” he said after a while. They stood looking into the darkness as if there were something to see.

  By the time Laureen came out to say good night, Reena was by herself; Ben had gone back to his cabin. “You doing okay, kiddo?”

  “Better, thanks.”

  “I think Hans has a crush on you.”

  “Laureen, how old are you?”

  “A girl’s never too old for a crush,” she said. This was the kind of statement that made Reena dread the idea of imitating her aunt’s life. Shouldn’t a woman at some point stop being a girl? Shouldn’t there be an end to crushes? It was too terrible to contemplate, all that starting and blushing, over and over again.

  “What about Ben, is he your cruise-boyfriend?” she said, trying to shift the focus from herself.

  “Maybe,” Laureen said coyly. “He’s awfully cute. But there are a lot of fish in the sea. Or, as we learned in our nature talk, there are many fewer fish than there used to be. But still fish exist and we can fish them.”

  “Are you drunk, Aunty Laureen?”

  “You bet, honey pie,” her aunt said, and kissed her cheek.

  · · ·

  Reena woke early, Laureen snoring woozily in the other bed. It wasn’t even five yet. She rose as quietly as she could and went out on deck. The sun was pearly, kind. When she was married, this was the only time of day she’d had completely to herself. Then she’d contaminated that lovely solitude with time spent on the computer and desperate, yearning e-mails she now cringed to think of. The man she’d grown so close to, whose words she’d read so feverishly, she could hardly remember. What she missed
was the need of him, how it prickled her skin, how she jonesed and ached, her blood in a kind of fury. She’d ruined her solitude with wanting, and then she was alone in a different way.

  This morning she was not alone, as it turned out. Ben was there too. She smiled when she saw him, unexpectedly pleased. He looked as if he had been up for hours, and without speaking he offered her a cup of coffee from the leather-encased thermos by his side. She nodded and sipped. In front of them were islands, behind them were islands. Ancient, inhospitable places. It should have soothed her, seeing them, should have reinforced her smallness in the world. If it didn’t, then it was not the islands’ fault.

  Though the day began on a magical note, later it began to unravel. First there were complications with the scheduled activities and logistical delays that went unexplained, and the crew members smiled tight-lipped as they attempted to behave as if nothing was wrong. Then came rain in great torrents, trapping them on the ship and moving them beyond the awkward pleasantries of early acquaintance into the annoyances of familiarity. You could notice the strain in people’s voices, hear previously affectionate couples now snapping and bickering. Everybody agreed that lunch was substandard.

  In the afternoon the weather cleared and moods lifted. Scuba diving had for some reason fallen through, and the replacement activity was to visit a beach where sea lions lay napping. Though people complained about the insufficiency of this program—“It’s not like we can look at animals all day,” Reena heard one woman tell Stavros angrily—they all filed onto the beach, because what else could they do?

  Laureen was wearing a white swimsuit bedecked with gold jewelry and a red sarong and she looked like some aging goddess, sensual and distended. In her striped blue T-shirt Reena felt sexless and uptight. They embarked in their small clique—Hans, Ben, and Reiko and Tomo, the Japanese couple. Hans was acting peculiar. Deeply flushed, he kept slapping his hand against the side of his leg; as he was wearing long swim trunks, the nylon made a swishing sound each time. Everyone kept looking at him, but he was too agitated or preoccupied to notice.

  Laureen nudged Reena. “I think he’s jealous of you and Ben,” she said happily.

  “What do you mean?” Reena said, startled.

  “I heard about you two up drinking coffee with the birds. Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ve got lots of opportunities. You play the field, honey. I deed him over to you.”

  “You deed him?” Reena said. Tears clustered once again in her eyes, though this time they were tears of anger, or maybe anguish, she wasn’t sure; certainly it felt adolescent and hormonal. “Laureen, could you just stop, please, acting like this is high school? I know you mean well but I don’t need to go back to high school.”

  Laureen put her hands on her hips. “It wouldn’t kill you,” she said, “to have a little fun. You act like having fun would actually hurt, like you’re allergic to it or something. Men like women who like fun. I’m sure Jason and Bobby would have liked a little fun, too.”

  It was the first time on the trip that either of them had spoken those names. Reena felt sick. She’d never get away from it, how much everything was her own fault.

  “Oh, honey,” Laureen said. “Forget I said that.”

  Reena shook her head. She felt as if her arms, her neck, her ears were on fire. If she could have, she would’ve jumped into the water and swum to the ship, gotten into bed and pulled the covers over her head.

  “Hey,” Laureen said. “The sea lions.”

  They lay in a line on the beach, flopped down like cushions, vulnerable and dopey, like overweight puppies. They were almost preposterously cute. Reena immediately wanted to touch them, even knowing that she couldn’t, that they weren’t pets, wouldn’t even be good hypothetical pets. But how could anyone resist them? The fight she and Laureen were having disintegrated, shelved until there was less-pressing cuteness in front of them. Ben took Hans by the arm and walked him down the beach, pointing out some feature of the landscape, a soothing, fatherly gesture. The Japanese couple crouched and bent calisthenically, their telephoto lenses zooming.

  Laureen and Reena stood quietly, not too close and not too far, listening to the occasional thwapping of the sea lions’ glistening tails. Two raised their heads, but overall they didn’t seem disturbed.

  Maybe they were used to tourists. Or maybe this invasion was so far down their list of sea lion priorities—fish, swim, bask on the beach—that they had no concept of it.

  The biologist guide had joined them, and was talking about threats to the sea lions, from skin infections due to polluted waters to plastics that could strangle or choke. She talked about how their mothers nursed younger and older pups at the same time; if the younger one was too much weaker than its sibling, then it would die. She droned on relentlessly, reciting these terrible things so matter-of-factly, without emphasis. Without tears.

  Reena’s heart squeezed. She reached out and took her aunt’s hand in hers.

  “Look,” she kept saying, even though she knew Laureen already saw. “Just look.”

  The Assistants

  “If I died, would you come to my funeral?”

  “Why would you ask me that? We barely know each other.”

  “That’s why I wondered,” Martin said. We were drinking Red Stripes, just the two of us, in a dive bar on the Lower East Side. “Would you come? Would you be that person who everybody at the service was wondering about? You know, whispering in the pews, ‘Who is she?’ ”

  “Nobody would say that.”

  “But really—would you come?”

  “Would it be in New York?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I doubt it, then,” I said. “I doubt I could get off work.”

  “They wouldn’t give you time off for a funeral?”

  I drank my beer. “I just started,” I said. “I’m just an assistant.”

  Back then, we were all assistants. We worked at magazines, galleries, or nonprofits. We lived with roommates in tiny apartments in questionable neighborhoods. My bedroom was just big enough for a twin mattress. My friend Sarah shared a room with a guy who was a bartender in Chelsea; she slept there at night, and he slept there during the day. Martin lived by himself, which sounded luxurious until we went over there one night and discovered his studio was a converted supply closet; he washed his dishes in a deep sink spattered with stains. Millie also lived by herself, we assumed under similar conditions, until we went over one night and found she had a corner one-bedroom in the West Village with Pottery Barn furniture and jute rugs. It was a surprise to us, learning that Millie was rich, and it upset me in particular; I was shocked anyone under thirty could live like that, which will tell you something about how young I was at the time. It would have splintered our group, except that things were coming apart already.

  Sarah and I worked together, at a literary magazine whose downtown office was a dusty shambles of manuscripts and review copies and file cabinets stuffed with carbon copies of letters, author contracts, galleys, and production details. At first Sarah was my only friend in the city, and she’d gotten me the job. I knew her from high school; she’d gone to college with the bartender roommate, who knew Millie from his hometown in Connecticut, which he’d always presented as hardscrabble and blue-collar but which description, after seeing Millie’s apartment, we began to doubt. The five of us invited one another to whatever work-related parties we knew about, improvising dinners out of the cheese cubes and cheap wine; we bartered the tickets and CDs and passes and book galleys that were the currency of assistants, and cadged free drinks at the bar in Chelsea if it was a busy night and the manager wasn’t around. Six months after I moved to New York, straight out of school, we’d become a running pack. We hung out on the weekends and called one another nearly every day. When my mother, back home in Toronto, worried I might be lonely, I laughed and said, “I have three roommates, I’m never alone,” but the running pack was a secret I clutched close to myself, better than money.

  H
ow Martin got involved is something I can’t remember. He was tall and gangly and perpetually stooped over as he listened to what other people had to say. He came from the South, with a lilting, musical twang, and was an assistant at a foundation that dispensed grants to artists; this suited him perfectly, because he himself seemed both courtly and impoverished. He wore chinos and bucks and looked less preppy than messy; his clothes didn’t fit well, his hair too long and his skin pocked with acne damage. He sweated even when it wasn’t hot. I remember one night, Sarah and Martin had planned to see a movie, but she went on a date instead. So Martin picked me up at work and we headed to the theater. After a block or two he abruptly said, “Excuse me,” then ducked into a bodega and emerged carrying two tallboys in a paper bag, one of which he was already drinking. “I can’t sit in the dark without drinking a bit,” he said. He sounded both apologetic and matter-of-fact. He finished the first beer before we got to the corner and the second as we reached the theater. As the movie started, he pulled out a silver flask and sipped.

  I liked the flask. I was charmed by this kind of apparatus, the accessory of a more glamorous time.

  Afterward, we went to a bar on Ludlow, and that’s when he asked me the question about his funeral. I asked if he thought about dying a lot, and he shook his head. He had other fears, he said. Darkness. Confined spaces. Wide-open spaces. Elevators. Escalators. Chewed pens.

  “Pens?” I said.

  “Those tips,” he said, and shuddered. “Bite marks in plastic. People hand you one and expect you to pick it up? With I don’t know what germs?” He shook his head again. “That’s just crazy.”

  I looked at him. “It must be hard for you to get around.”

  He studied me back, his head cocked to one side. His eyes were blue, watery, and kind. I felt the full force of his attention, which was not sexual but not asexual either; it felt complete somehow, as if he were taking in every aspect of me.

  “Not you, though,” he said, with that soft Southern lilt. “I bet you can go anywhere and do anything. You’re made of stronger material.”