Signs and Wonders

by Alix Ohlin

  “No, in South Carolina. He’d been back home for quite a while, I think.”

  “How did you hear about this?”

  “The usual. Friends forwarding e-mails. Facebook.”

  “Martin was on Facebook?”

  “No, but Millie is, and she heard about it from his ex-wife. I guess they were friendly. She’s an art dealer or something and Millie knows her.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I should’ve guessed something was up. Martin used to send all these funny group e-mails, especially during the election, he was really worked up about that, but then he went pretty quiet.”

  For some reason my fingers were trembling. Learning that Martin was dead—he would’ve been forty, maybe forty-five?—was part of it. To think of his dying, to think of the pain that must have accompanied it, made my stomach hurt. But I was also shaken to learn that Sarah had been in touch with him, and with Millie, who’d been in touch with an ex-wife I hadn’t even known existed. A web I was no longer part of.

  Across the table, Sarah squinted as the afternoon sun hit her face. “Oh dear,” she said. “You have that look on your face all over again.”

  “What look?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know he broke your heart.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. When I thought back on that time, I didn’t register any heartbreak. I did recall Martin, vividly: his hunched shoulders; his attentive, watery eyes; and his disappearance, a loose thread unraveling a world I was just beginning to know. But I could barely picture the person I’d been back then, probably because I was vague even to myself. I hadn’t become anybody yet.

  Sarah put on her sunglasses. She’d paid the bill, and now she stood up.

  “Remember when he licked Millie’s knee that time?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think I was there.”

  Bruno

  The kid came out of the airport security area with his face turned to the windows, scuttling sideways like a crab. He was wearing skinny dark jeans and a red plaid shirt too hot for summer, and his dyed black hair jetted down over his eyes in an aggressive point. Inès had said, “He looks like a dirty little bird you would see in Buenos Aires or somewhere like that. Don’t worry, you will recognize him.” It was typical of her, this description: fanciful, excessive, weirdly accurate. He knew right away that this was his boy.

  “Bruno,” he called.

  The boy gave a minimal nod, came through the exit, and kissed Art on both cheeks. “Salut, Papa,” he said.

  “Welcome to New York.”

  Bruno said nothing. As they waited at the baggage carousel, Art asked how the flight was, if he was hungry or thirsty, and received three shrugs in return. So he gave up. Silence accompanied them through the taxi line, and on the ride to Brooklyn. The boy’s eyes were trained out the window as the city came closer, his white earbuds firmly implanted. Though it had only been a few years since they’d seen each other, he seemed a stranger. Between twelve and fifteen was a lifetime, Art knew, but the last time he’d visited Bruno was still a child, and they’d strolled through the fields around Inès’s country house in Provence holding hands, he was amazed to remember. They’d played catch and wrestled. For a couple of summers he’d been too sick to make his yearly trip, and now his son was a teenager with an eyebrow ring. Inès had said he was having trouble in school, alluding vaguely to the wrong kind of friends. Maybe you help him on the straight road, she’d written in her e-mail, another unidiomatic phrase that made perfect sense.

  They were almost at his apartment when the boy started nodding and singing along to whatever music was on his iPod. “Hey, baby, you gonna get with me, I show you what to do with that perfect ass. I slap you, I tap you—”

  Art poked him and gestured for him to take the earbuds out. “We’re almost home.”

  The boy nodded, taking in the brownstones, the trees, the stores. “It’s good, this place,” he said sweetly. “I’m glad I come live with you.”

  “Sure,” Art said nervously. He and Inès had only discussed a three-week visit. But he didn’t say anything to his son, who he now noticed had flecks of sleep in his eyes. Bruno rubbed them with his fists, the gesture rendering him again the child of Art’s memory. He got Bruno inside, gave him a sandwich and a glass of milk, and put him to bed on the futon in his office. Then he took his laptop into the living room and e-mailed Inès: Wanted to let you know that he got here safely. He said something about coming here “to live.” He means for the month, right? Just checking that we’re all on the same page.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t want Bruno here. The whole week he’d been nervous, cleaning up the apartment and rearranging the office; he even found himself, bizarrely, going on a diet, wanting both his place and his person to look their best. But he was never confident about any communication with Inès, who tended to listen to other people’s points of view and then do whatever she wanted. This free-spirited determination was part of her charm, and probably also the reason why she’d never married. When they’d met and had their fling, he was on vacation in Paris, recovering from his divorce. Inès had shown him a great time, and he remembered laughing so hard that his stomach muscles hurt. They got really drunk night after night and smoked a ton of pot and had sex in a cemetery. They agreed it was just for fun, a weeklong thing, a release they both needed. Three months later she called to say she was pregnant and going to keep the baby.

  The contours of a new life sketched themselves in Art’s vision, a French wife, an apartment in Paris, a child. “Should I, uh, move over there or something?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Inès said. “You don’t need to do anything. I am thirty-five, this is my chance for mothering. I want to grab this.”

  She’d cleared him of all obligations, but he hadn’t cleared himself. So he’d taken to spending his summer vacations in France to be with his round-cheeked, blond-haired son, who treated him like the distant relative he supposed he was. Bruno always seemed happy enough to see him arrive and never particularly distressed to see him go. And Inès was also happy—motherhood agreed with her. When her parents died she inherited a stone house outside of Aix, and the summers there were like living in a Cézanne, all haystacks and brilliant sunsets. It wasn’t how Art had ever expected to become a father, but it wasn’t bad.

  He fell asleep in his armchair, the laptop balanced on his knees, and when he woke up Bruno was in the kitchen making eggs. He moved confidently around the kitchen in his tank top and jeans, a cigarette pursed between his lips. He looked like a forty-year-old ex-con fresh from the joint. Bruno nodded for him to sit down, doling some eggs onto a plate and adding buttered toast. There was also coffee.

  “Thanks,” Art said.

  Bruno shrugged Gallically. “I always make for my mother.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “Her cooking is garbage. I cook so I can eat.”

  Bruno sat down, throwing his cigarette into a glass of water he’d apparently designated for that purpose, since three butts were already floating there. The eggs were creamy, the coffee strong. By the time Art had taken two bites, Bruno had finished his. Then he leaned back in his chair and lit another cigarette.

  “So,” he said. “Are you still sick?”

  Art met his gaze. “No, I’m well now.”

  “But you had it … removed?” The boy’s hand fluttered ambiguously around the seat of his chair.

  The question started as bravado, but ended in nerves. Art thought, You little fucker. He didn’t stop staring at the boy, whose gaze finally dropped to the ground.

  “I had one ball removed. You know what a ball is, right?”

  “Of course I know.”

  “What’s it called in French?”

  “Testicule.”

  “So, I still have one test-ee-cool,” Art said, drawing out the pronunciation. “Which is enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “For whatever,” Art said tigh
tly.

  Suddenly they both laughed.

  Bruno shook his head, grinning. “It’s funny how you say testicule.”

  “I know. I speak French like Inès cooks.”

  His kid laughed again, and the tension between them eased. Bruno cleared the table and washed the dishes, which impressed Art, and he also emptied the butts out of the glass and set it aside, marking it as his ashtray for the summer. They spent the rest of the day in the neighborhood, Art showing him the grocery store, the park, the Italian social clubs where old guys hung out, monitoring the street traffic. For dinner they ate outside at a café, Bruno ordering and being served, without question, a glass of red wine. Art remembered himself at fifteen, pimpled and sweaty, with three hairs on his upper lip that refused to coalesce into a mustache, agonizing for hours over an excuse to call Alison Kozlowski on the phone. Bruno couldn’t have been more different. But they talked easily enough, laughing about Inès, remembering a trip they’d taken to Marseilles when Bruno was very young. When they got home, Bruno went to sleep and Art checked his e-mail, finding an enigmatic one-line response from Inès: Why don’t you see what happens?

  The first week was great. They went to the movies, out to dinner, to Coney Island. In the mornings they drank coffee and read the Times in the kitchen. Art had taken the week off and was glad he had, not only because a break from work was always welcome. When he’d met Inès, he was an editor at a leftist magazine. He’d made it sound like a bigger magazine, and his own position there more important, than reality could support—foolishly, in retrospect, because Inès couldn’t have cared less. In the manner of many intellectual Europeans he’d met, she somehow cobbled together a life out of occasional freelance work and government assistance and for months at a time appeared to do nothing at all. Art’s magazine, inevitably, had folded. Now he was editing online content for a website designed for seniors, who ironically were probably the last people alive still buying actual magazines. His twenty-two-year-old assistant did the blog aggregating and headline writing while Art fixed comma splices and assigned pieces on investment strategies to protect your nest egg and the health benefits of broccoli. In staff meetings he was often the oldest person in the room, and sometimes the young faces would turn to him automatically, like tender plants to the sun, when questions about “what seniors wanted” arose. Art was forty-seven and it made him want to scream, but he held his tongue. Too many of his friends were out of work.

  Bruno had a little notebook that he took with him everywhere, often spending an hour or two making sketches in a café or jotting down his observations of Brooklyn. Occasionally he left it around the apartment, not seeming particularly protective of it, and Art couldn’t resist taking a look. Most of his sketches seemed to be of women (clothed or naked) or of homeless men (clothed, thankfully). He also made a lot of lists: the restaurants they’d been to in Carroll Gardens; movies they’d seen; other mysterious two-word phrases Art decided had to be band names or songs, because in themselves they made no sense.

  beneficial worm

  power sham

  lettuce amazement

  trifecta bin

  shirts trophy

  Since he didn’t want to admit he’d looked, Art couldn’t ask him about these. But he was often tempted to reference the phrases—to exclaim, “Lettuce amazement!” over dinner, for example, or to say, “Shirts trophy,” when he handed Bruno a stack of clean laundry—and found they stuck in his head, sometimes popping into his consciousness at night as he was falling asleep.

  He was impressed by Bruno’s ability to get around New York, by the attention he paid to the subway map, by his friendliness to people in stores. He’d hang out on the stoop of the building for hours, smoking cigarettes and petting the landlady’s beagle. As this kept the dog—ordinarily a howling, roly-poly monstrosity—quiet, he grew popular among the neighbors. One of them told Art, as they chatted on the street corner, how lucky he was that Bruno had come to stay.

  “Yeah, Bruno’s great,” Art said.

  “And he’s got his future all mapped out already. I mean, NYU,” the woman said. “My son wants to be a nightclub promoter. This is a profession? I think he saw it on TV or something. Pathetic.”

  “Right,” Art said, and quickly went upstairs. Bruno was lying on the couch in the living room, listening to his iPod with his eyes closed.

  Art shook his foot. “Hey,” he said. With the boy’s guileless face in front of him, Art didn’t know where to start. He wasn’t great at confrontation. The cruelest thing his ex-wife had ever said to him, right after the divorce was final, was, “You never even cared enough to fight.” He couldn’t believe she thought their marriage had failed because they got along too well. Of all the things a man could do wrong, this had been his error? Refusing to be a dick?

  Bruno lit a cigarette.

  “Are you having a good summer?” Art asked him.

  “It’s not bad.”

  “Are you lonely, being away from your friends? Your mom?”

  “I don’t have many friends. My mother—eh, you know her.”

  Art wasn’t sure what this meant. “Are you looking forward to going back, though? At the end of the month?”

  Something like resignation dawned in Bruno’s eyes. He swung his feet down to the ground and rubbed his forehead with one hand, the cigarette still blazing in the other. He seemed weary beyond his years. “I’ve been meaning to talk with you about that,” he said.

  “Okay,” Art said. “Talk.”

  “I think school in Paris is stupid,” Bruno said, then launched into an explanation in French that Art had trouble following: something about there being channels, or tunnels, that students were slotted into and couldn’t escape from. He’d had fifteen years to improve his French and never gotten around to it; until now it hadn’t seemed like a big deal.

  “Anyway,” Bruno continued, “so I thought, maybe I come here and study in America. I stay with you for a time, then I go to university here as resident. For you know, for cheaper.”

  “For a time?”

  “Sure,” Bruno said. “For high school.”

  After that he stopped talking. Art knew this must have been a plan Bruno and Inès had cooked up together. It bore her stamp, which read, Ask forgiveness, not permission. Art glanced around the apartment. It had been two years since he’d had a woman here, Vivian from the magazine, who wanted him to pull her hair during sex and whom he’d never called again. Later he heard she’d moved to Colorado and become a Pilates instructor. In other words, he could hardly worry about Bruno cramping his style, when there was so little of it to cramp. But still.

  “What is it that you want to study, anyway?”

  “International relations,” Bruno said.

  “Why do you have to do that here?”

  “Because here,” Bruno said, “is where you need the most help. You need to be educated. To learn that America is not the center of the world.”

  Art’s annoyance quickened his pulse. “I’m pretty sure you go to school to be educated, not tell other people what they don’t know.”

  “Yes, of course,” Bruno said. “But Americans really need help. They are messing up the whole world with their terrible foreign policies. Maybe I can work with them, to change minds.”

  It was in fact Art’s own opinion that America was messing up the whole world with its terrible foreign policies. But hearing it articulated so airily by a Parisian teenager made him defensive. Plus, the idea of Inès and Bruno conspiring together pissed him off.

  “The world sits back and forces us to take command,” he said, “because nobody else is doing anything.”

  “Nobody is forcing America to do anything. In France we opposed the Iraq war.”

  “Yeah, you guys are perfect,” Art said. “I’m sure the Algerians agree.”

  Bruno’s thin, pointy face reddened. “You know nothing about France.”

  “And you’re not an expert on world affairs either, you little punk.”


  Bruno spread his hands wide. “That’s why I go to school here, to become expert!” he said triumphantly. He grinned as if his case had been won, and with it the battle to stay. Art felt not anger but a sudden torque in his chest that he barely recognized, it had been so long, as excitement.

  The dynamic between them shifted, or rather lurched, in a new direction. The relaxing days gave way to activity. Bruno was his charge, and there were things to do. They had to deal with the paperwork, get him registered at school, buy supplies, procure a medical checkup. Art started to give him a hard time about the smoking, too. Before, they’d been acting almost like roommates but now Art flexed the muscles of authority, and he was surprised how easily the benevolent dictatorship of parenthood came to him; he should have been doing this all along. Bruno, on the other hand, was not pleased. “What happened to you?” he grumbled. “You used to be calm. Now you are like, I don’t know. No fun.”

  “That’s right,” Art said. “America is no fun.”

  He cleaned out the office, having determined that if Bruno was going to stay on, he’d need a real bedroom. The boy had been using his laptop occasionally and Art gave it to him permanently, setting him up at the desk. He brought Bruno to work one day, enjoying the looks of surprise on his coworkers’ faces when he introduced them to his son.

  “I didn’t know you had a son,” said Samantha, the receptionist.

  “I do now,” Art said, not stopping to answer when Samantha said, curiously, “Now?”

  Within two weeks it was all settled: Bruno’s curfew, his route to school, his summer reading assignment of The House on Mango Street. As Art became more parental, the boy predictably rebelled. He stopped making eggs and doing the dishes. He spent his evenings on the stoop, muttering to himself and blowing smoke in the beagle’s face. And the notebook’s word pairs grew ominous:

  Merciless hot

  Satan machine

  Glad down

  One morning, late for work, Art grabbed his favorite cup out of the cupboard, poured himself some coffee, and choked at the first sip. There was a cigarette butt in it. Bruno was still asleep, or pretending to be, but Art imagined him laughing. When he got to the office, he e-mailed Inès and updated her on the situation. Her reply came almost instantly. He often behaves this way. Send him back if you want, she wrote languidly. You don’t have to keep him.