Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  “Ingrid’s the one spearheading that,” he said. “I’m a bit of a Luddite really. I just need a phone to work. She and Walter know way more about that stuff than I do. She hasn’t forgotten that I once called that thing she does, with the pins, Pinteresque.”

  “Like the playwright,” I said quickly.

  I decided that I liked way he spoke. The professorial cadences. He asked me lots of questions about studying philosophy and physics, and I was flattered by his interest. I regretted not bringing my difficult books with me from Silvia’s (books I still had not touched), as I wanted to impress him by leaving them around the house. When he gave someone his attention, I could see how Ingrid would have fallen for him.

  Other than his rivalry with Walter, his borderline OCD hygiene tendencies, and a vague sense of entitlement, he was the enigmatic figure within my new family. At least at first, I could not guess much about his feelings towards me or my presence in his house. When I Googled him the first time, the search unearthed surprisingly little compared to when I did the same for Ingrid. She was everywhere. Answering questions about work-life balance and how she raised her children as much as architectural projects. Then it occurred to me that Rooiakker was not his name. I couldn’t remember his real last name, and didn’t want to ask. But then it came to me when I was in the middle of doing something else. In fact, as I was lying in my long bed making a collage of what Dwight and I had been up to recently. I typed in Robin Quinn. When I did so, I felt certain that Nat had not done her due diligence, or was secretly as digitally illiterate as Silvia.

  Robin Quinn had studied at an architecture school in London and, after a few years in a large practice, returned to be a professor there. But he left England for New York in 2004, after a third-year student alleged that, following months of inappropriate comments, he’d tried to force himself on her in a car park after a university function. He was seen leading her semiconscious body away from the coat check and outside—he claimed to call her a cab. The police had found a number of online dating profiles and a lot of photographs on his computer of women, mainly bound and gagged, but the harassment case had been dropped. In its wake, however, a number of other misconduct allegations were made against him by other women at the university, Robin had been advised to leave rather than dismissed, and Cooper had welcomed him to New York a year later.

  After this, I viewed Ingrid and Robin’s marriage with greater interest. It was impossible she did not know. Whether or not she believed in his innocence, she had both exonerated him and proven him guilty by allowing herself, his student, to become his wife. And yet it did not seem that that transition had fully occurred. Ingrid appeared to seek out her husband’s attention very little, or, as I watched them more closely, in strange ways. I got the impression that she was trying to rouse jealousy in him by the way she acted with Walter, and that it wasn’t really Walter that she liked best at all. Evidently whatever student-teacher dynamic they’d had was deeply ingrained, as they continued to behave as if their relationship were clandestine.

  Walter spent a lot of time dropping by their apartment, which was also an office. When he was there, Robin usually found excuses to go out, like walking JJ. The first time he invited me was the first time I knew for sure that he was not averse to my presence.

  “Why don’t you come, Alice? We deserve respite from the Yanks.”

  We would talk about the British school system, science, or Spinoza whilst dangling little bags of JJ’s warm shit.

  On one occasion, having asked me many questions about my time at university, my thesis, and my desire to please a female professor who had taken a particular interest in me (the same who had advised me to go wild after my exams and unintentionally reduced me to tears), Robin decided to raise the subject. He’d stopped walking and rested his hand on his forehead for a moment, his expression pained.

  “It’s so hard,” he said, “to tread that line between interest and intimacy with a student.”

  I didn’t say anything and he didn’t look at me.

  “It cost me my job—did you know that?”

  I shook my head. How did adults of a certain age not understand how the Internet worked? How foolishly they assumed anonymity. JJ sat patiently on the sidewalk, looking philosophically into the distance.

  “You have all these beautiful women coming and going from your office, and some of them are so unbelievably smart and passionate, and you spend a lot of time investing in them. All you want is for them to do well, to help them make contacts after their studies are over, get them into the good firms.”

  He paused. He seemed to be gauging my reaction so far. I remained silent, and he started walking again.

  “A female student made a complaint against me. Two women, actually. They said I made offensive comments and touched them inappropriately. I think that means the shoulder or something. I’m a tactile person. Or I used to be. I used to talk about my feelings openly with my students, and ask them about theirs. Now I have to be so, so careful. It’s even worse in America.”

  My face must have given me away.

  “Yes, Ingrid was my student, but we became a couple only after she left Cooper. I always honoured the student-professor boundary with her. But we talked about setting up a practice. Or I talked about doing it and her joining me. When you spend all day with someone, and in the faculty it’s often all night too, you forget age differences and those kind of boundaries. You’re just two people with a shared interest and a connection.”

  I shook my head sympathetically; I’d felt the same about my tutor.

  We returned with a bag of shit because JJ waited until he was right outside his own front door.

  As soon as Ingrid heard the elevator doors open, she called out, “Oh, you’re back? I was about to send out the search party.” She stared hard at me. “Walter and I have decided we are going on vacation.”

  I scuttled guiltily past her with the plastic bag to the bin.

  “Walter has a house in the Hamptons,” she informed Robin as Walter stood by her, nodding that it was all true. “It would be good for the kids to get out of the city and for us to put our feet in the ocean, right?”

  “That’s all very well, but we can’t leave Alice,” Robin said.

  There was a tense silence.

  “Well, she can come,” Walter said at last, “and Dwight too, of course.” Ingrid walked away and into her bedroom without a word. “Everyone’s welcome,” Walter insisted. “You guys are family.”

  “Oh you little devil,” Thom murmured from the floor. “That’s how they teach us to spell would and could at school.”

  “What are you writing, Thom?”

  “A story.”

  “What about?”

  “About you coming to stay.”

  14

  * * *

  Dwight and I sent the spit tubes on June 23. For most people, it takes a couple of months after sending away their spit tubes before they get back a list of likely relatives and/or genetic diseases. For Nat, it was only one. Likely this was due to Dwight’s suggestion of dropping his name into the part of the form which asked “How did you hear about us?” Because I’d been the one to oblige her by setting up the account, using my email, I got the alert in the car with Dwight on the way to the Hamptons.

  They hadn’t yet got the results for potential diseases, but they had found a DNA match. I decided not to tell Dwight yet; I hated the way he competed with me to ingratiate himself with the Rooiakkers, and read the contents of the email in silence. The match was for Robin and the twins but not Nat or Ingrid. Just as I was reading, I got a text from Ingrid asking how we were doing and saying that Nat had been reading the company’s website and now also really wanted to know if she had the empathy gene—was it too late to ask the spit people? I didn’t reply. The email alert had an option to “notify matches,” which I decided not to press.

  Instead I looked up the match myself. She had written quite a detailed biography. Then, not satisfied, I looked he
r up on Google.

  Mizuko Himura

  Whereas at first it seemed like Robin and Ingrid’s home had opened up to me randomly, like a pop bumper or paddle in a pinball machine, after I discovered the match with Mizuko, this chain of events began to feel fated. I leant back in the passenger seat as the car sped along, ignoring the view. It seemed that I was meant to find her. A mysterious power had drawn her towards me, coincidence by seeming coincidence. That feeling deepened as I did more research over the course of the holiday, until it felt like I had found myself, or the self that I would like to be, as Silvia had assured me I would. Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates.

  “What are you doing?”

  Dwight leaned towards me and I turned my phone over.

  “Looking at Columbia masters?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For you, or . . . ?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  Once he’d turned his eyes back to the road, I deleted my search history.

  Silvia claimed that Long Island was actually a peninsula, not an island. Dwight drove me out of the city along the Long Island Expressway, the LIE. In Queens the traffic was solid. From where we were, we could see the Queens Giant, a tulip tree that was supposed to be the oldest living thing in New York.

  “Look it up,” Dwight said, pointing.

  “‘Its estimated age,’” I read aloud from my phone, “‘is four hundred years or more. It was most likely an established young tree when the Dutch East India Company sent a group of Walloon families to Manhattan in 1624. This tree is perhaps the last witness to the entire span of the city’s history from a tiny Dutch settlement to—’”

  Dwight interrupted. “How tall is it?”

  “‘—one of the greatest metropolises of the world. It grows on fertile, well-watered land,’” I continued, “‘part of a glacier-formed moraine created by the Minnesota Ice Sheet when it reached its southern terminus some fifteen thousand years ago.’” I made my voice stern. “‘Treat this oldest sylvan citizen of our city with the respect that it deserves. It has survived miraculously from a time when native Matinecock people trod softly beneath it to an age when automobiles roar by, oblivious to its presence. If we leave it undisturbed, it may live for another hundred years or so.’”

  “Cool,” Dwight said. “I’m going to put the top down.”

  I had never driven in a roofless car before. The sun was hot while we were stationary, but when we started moving at speed again, the wind became angry in my hair, buffeting me so that I had to close my eyes and smile, even though I did not feel like smiling. I let it batter me, pummel my ears. The wind roared so loudly we couldn’t talk above it, and we couldn’t hear Dwight’s road-trip playlist. After ten minutes he put the top up again. There was a strange, civilising quiet as the car sealed shut.

  I was in charge of keeping an eye on the GPS. I was finding it impossible to concentrate on giving directions, so I turned the voice on and magnified where we were headed. I liked the names of the roads. Egypt Lane. Further Lane. Abrahams Path. Promised Land Road. Red Dirt Road. Crooked Hill Road. We stopped for lunch at an Applebee’s. When we got back into the car, I began again:

  MIZUK

  MIZUKO

  MIZUKO KUYO

  MIZUKO ITO

  MIZUKO MEANING

  MIZUKO HIMURA

  I guess I’d been hoping to establish that there had been some kind of error, some spilt spit or tangle of bodily secretions, twenty-three chromosomes that had been improperly filed, that I would put right through this research, but the more I read, the worse I felt.

  “What’s wrong?” Dwight asked, turning to me again. “Have I done something wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” I wanted him to feel anxious too, but not to tell him what I’d found. Besides, I did feel like this was his fault. I looked up news articles which mentioned the company. This sort of surprise connection had been uncovered before and ended in divorce.

  Walter messaged Dwight, which I read aloud for him, noting before I did so the number of messages he had from Hatta and Hae, the identical twins he was in a prodigious WhatsApp group with. Walter’s message told us to look out for the swingers’ mailbox. Number 69. With a crazy-paving drive. His implicitly more tasteful house was two further along from that. The crunch of the gravel drive churned my stomach. I had not decided what to do with the unwanted information. I did not want to take it over the threshold and into the house with me. We climbed out and stretched. I lifted up my arms and flexed them, right into the fingers, until the part between my shoulder blades made a noise like a fire spitting. I stayed for a few moments in the glare of the sun. The house was low and surrounded by dense hedge. Cicadas stopped as we passed through a wooden gate, then restarted. The grass on the lawn glowed white in the sunlight like the fine hair on a child’s arm.

  Thom came running out to meet us, slowing as he transitioned from soft lawn to gravel. Though he had bare feet, he had men’s sneakers on his hands like big white oven mitts. I realised that Robin might have a holiday wardrobe that did not include black, but the sneakers turned out to be Walter’s.

  “We’ve stolen them!” Rosa shrieked. “Now he won’t have any shoes!”

  The twins were wearing matching basketball outfits Walter had bought them as a recent birthday gift. Orange-and-blue New York Knicks vests and shorts. Thom looked ridiculous, Rosa less so—in fact the clothes made her look older, but you could see her tiny buds through the armholes. Thom wanted to show me and Dwight the house they had made for a tree frog and a snake that lived together at the base of an enormous tree in the garden. They had arranged a ring of gravel stones around it.

  “And then this is the human garden,” Thom said.

  It was large and landscaped, and there was a long dining table, much like Ingrid and Robin’s, with two white canvas umbrellas over it, and woodland beyond. Suddenly there was a deafening blast of classical music, which stopped as abruptly as it had started. Walter had installed a sound system off in the woods so you couldn’t hear the cicadas at mealtimes.

  “Whaddya think?” The music stopped and Walter appeared from inside.

  “Awesome,” Dwight called back.

  The twins dragged me inside. Above ground, the house was all glass with sliding walls. Below, Walter had a basement that was the exact blueprint of the floor above, a carpeted cellar with no windows or natural light, where his housekeeper lived and where Walter sometimes tinkered with the pool system. The twins raced around in it with JJ and their scooters, Rosa tailing Thom like the boy in The Shining.

  Though it was the height of summer and all the sliding glass doors were left half open, a wood fire was burning inside, and three ceiling fans were whirring. Ingrid and Robin were standing at a kitchen island, which made it look identical to their own home. Robin, slicing basil with a demilune, was still wearing black, but Ingrid was wearing white holiday jeans.

  “Hi.” Ingrid greeted us without taking her eyes off the tomatoes she was chopping. Robin didn’t look up or say anything. I sensed they had been having an argument. “Did you just arrive?”

  “Yup,” I said. “Did you get here okay?”

  “Sure did,” Ingrid said, still not making eye contact. “Sure did.”

  “C’mon, guys,” Walter said, entering, “arguments in the car don’t count.”

  In the kitchen there was a black lacquered table with an ornamental black bowl like a warped record, with only a very slight depression, perhaps more of a dish. Above it a low-hanging white lamp came down, head height. The dish had something in it that I had never seen
before. It seemed to be organic, perhaps a vegetable, but in case it was some kind of art object I didn’t want to ask. I later found out it was “white eggplant.” Everything in the Hamptons, I came to see, had to be white. There were even, Walter pointed out, white canvas coverings for the fire hydrants.

  Walter insisted on a barbecue every day. He liked to stand before its smoking altar, waving wings and legs and breasts, and look at his own chest, hairless beneath his beard. The grill was the kind I imagined people could be cremated in. It was set up at one end of the garden, where a steady throb of dark bees were humping the lavender. By day the house smelt of burning flesh, and by night it smelt of burning insects as moths incinerated themselves on the spotlights on the wooden decking and the darkness rained insects onto the citronella candles.

  For that first lunch, we sat down to barbecue number one, and as Walter said, “Welcome Rooiakkers! And Quinns, and Nutts, and—” He looked at me, and I felt yet another twinge of guilt for being there while Silvia was stuck in Amsterdam.

  “Hare.”

  “And Hares!”

  “And thanks to you, Mr. Ruse!” Nat held her glass of lime cordial in the air.

  “Mom!” Rosa came running up to the table. “Mom, Thom’s putting Dad’s electrical tape on everything.”

  “Okay. Thom! Lunch is ready!”

  Dwight, now discernibly “out of office,” as he kept saying to anyone who’d listen, put on a neon-orange cap which said SAN JOSE SHARKS.

  Nat, who hated being excluded from anything, had of course come too, but it was still a surprise to see her. Ingrid looked at the tops of the trees and inhaled deeply, as if she were about to sink to the bottom of the pool and stay there for the whole of lunch. A train horn—I can’t stop I can’t stop. Stop! Stop!