We Want What We Want

by Alix Ohlin

  But Iris Dolores was not old ladyish. She was twenty-one—having failed out of two previous schools, she was, she told me cheerfully, starting college for the third time—and a drug addict. She’d brought almost no stuff, and her side of the room was decorated only with the thin institutional blanket and pillow provided by the school. She had long dirty-blond hair and wore ripped jeans and a men’s button-down shirt with a parka over it, even inside. “You don’t mind if I fix, do you?” was the first thing she said to me, and she took out her kit and prepared a needle and shot heroin between the toes of her left foot. I’d been around drug users before—my town was full of them, my father’s job was full of them—but I’d never lived with one before. When she was done she lay back against the flat pillow and smiled at me dreamily. “Tell me something good,” she said.

  I considered. I wanted to do something to jiggle her composure, while at the same time I resented the feeling that I was auditioning for her. So I said: “Last year there was an avalanche.”

  She raised her eyebrows—I had gotten her attention.

  “Three juniors were snowshoeing on the trails behind Massey when the snowpack loosened and all of a sudden it just…descended on them. They were buried for fifteen minutes but fortunately they had enough of an air passage to breathe.” It wasn’t technically an avalanche, the school had been at pains to report, but it was nonetheless a dramatic story that had been repeated to every incoming student by the current ones, and the surviving students themselves walked around with an aura of wan celebrity. Fear of being trapped in an avalanche was one of the reasons my previous roommate had cited for not getting out of bed.

  “Just to be clear, which is the part you think is good?” Iris asked. “The avalanche, or the rescue?”

  “It’s that when you step outside this dorm, anything could cascade on top of you,” I said.

  Iris bit her lip, which was chapped, and chewed off some skin. She did it slowly, as if she enjoyed it, and then she smiled at me again. I felt I’d succeeded in wresting something from her.

  “Anything could,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Iris and I lived together for the rest of college, first in the dorm and then in a drafty, noisy, second-floor apartment above a pub on Main Street in town. I’d initially assumed that she’d failed out of her two previous schools because of her drug habit, but this turned out not to be the case. She was regimented about her using, compartmentalized and discreet. With academics she was the opposite—spectacularly lazy and undisciplined. She went to class spottily, and even if she liked the subject she rarely completed the work. She enrolled in a studio art class and spent hours painting, but didn’t show the professor anything she’d done. “I’m not interested in his verdict,” she said when I asked her why. I assumed that anyone who could afford to be so casual about school must be wealthy, but her financial aid package was similar to mine, and we both had work-study jobs. She used to watch me study at my desk, my head in one hand, my highlighter in the other, as if I were some kind of marvel. I was both embarrassed by her attention and pleased by it. I liked to think I was a good influence—after realizing she wouldn’t be able to distract me from my work, she’d sigh and open her own books, at least for a while. At any rate she did better in school in Vermont than she ever had before.

  Neither of us went home much. Iris’s parents traveled often, and mine had already downsized, with typical practicality, to a two-bedroom condo; when I went back, I slept in the spare room like any other visitor. We nestled in at school. We ate dinner in our apartment by candlelight, drinking Sangre de Toro wine, and lining our windowsills with rows of the little plastic bulls that came with it. We read on the couch, our legs under a shared quilt. Sometimes she crawled into bed with me, and we kissed and touched each other and fell asleep that way, and sometimes we slept separately, and that was fine also. Each of us had boyfriends who came and went, and we never had any discussion about what our commitment to each other was or how far it should extend. It would have seemed beneath us, somehow.

  At graduation my parents presented me with a check for five thousand dollars. It was my share, they said, of what they’d saved by selling the larger house I’d grown up in. They hoped I’d use it to get a foothold on my life after school, specific plans for which had yet to materialize. Iris was moving to New York, and I was going with her, because I had no other ideas. The money from my parents was a generous gift, and it was also, I understood, their final one. After this I would be on my own.

  Iris’s parents came from San Francisco. Her mother, Tamsin, was tall and thin like her, with the same aura of hanging back in judgment, waiting to be impressed, and her father, Gregory, was curious and bossy, wandering around our little apartment, making wisecracks. He laughed out loud at our collection of Sangre de Toro bulls, picking them up and setting them down, and I wanted to shield them from him as if they might break. Then he browsed the bookcase for a while, saying, “I’m guessing these are all yours, right? Iris never read a book in her life.”

  Iris ignored him. She had her dreamy armor on. She claimed her parents never noticed when she was high, and as far as I could tell, this was true.

  “So you’re a fan of Iris’s dad, are you?” Gregory said.

  I was confused. He’d pulled down Mulvaney’s book, with the woman drawn on the cover, one of ten or so books I’d brought from home.

  “My bio dad,” Iris corrected mechanically, from the couch. When she saw me stare at her, she shrugged. “I hardly ever see him,” she said.

  “John Mulvaney is your father?”

  Tamsin was sitting at our kitchen table, scene of all our candlelit dinners, smoking a filterless cigarette and picking the tobacco off her tongue with one long fingernail, which seemed both impossibly glamorous and completely affected. She’d been a model in her youth, and she still moved like someone who expected to be looked at.

  Of course I’d told Iris how much the book had meant to me. In all our time together, there was nothing of myself—my earnestness, my confusion, my desire to have a different life than my parents’, without any idea of what that might look like, or who I might have to be to inhabit it—that I had held back from her. I may even have talked about it while we were in bed together. It was impossible to me that she could have withheld this information.

  That night, after her parents were gone, we sat among the cardboard boxes we had begun to pack and passed a bottle of Jägermeister back and forth. One side of the apartment was stacked with all the art Iris had made in college, her sculptures and ceramics and paintings, which she’d been required to clear out of the studio on campus. She wanted to throw it all out, and I’d been trying to convince her to keep at least some. It angered me that she cared so little for these things she’d made.

  “You talk about him like he’s a legend,” Iris said without preamble. “To me he’s pathetic. He’s a weird little wreck of a man. I haven’t seen him in years. I didn’t want to ruin your fantasy of him.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. I loved Iris, and she was many things—talented, affectionate, fun to be with—but she was rarely selfless. Like most addicts, she was a narcissist, and I’d never had any illusions that she placed other people’s feelings before her own.

  “What do you mean by wreck?” I said.

  She pulled out her kit and I shook my head at her, something I never did, and she set it aside. Sighing, she told me things. Tamsin and Mulvaney—she called him Mulvaney, as I did, as if reading his name off a syllabus—had been together on and off throughout her childhood. (They couldn’t agree whose last name Iris should have, so they left her with the two first names, Iris after Tamsin’s mother, and Dolores after Mulvaney’s.) They moved around either for Tamsin’s modeling jobs or Mulvaney’s writing and research—Paris, Buenos Aires, New York—fighting and breaking up and then reuniting in some new location they thought migh
t solve the problems between them, whatever they were. When Iris turned ten Tamsin declared she’d finally had enough. She moved to San Francisco with Gregory and quit modeling. What Iris remembered from this time was Mulvaney coming to the apartment in Pacific Heights begging Tamsin to take him back. He was homeless, Iris said, and drinking heavily, and his beard was scraggly and he smelled rancid and unbathed. Tamsin, wearing a short purple dress, went down the steps to the sidewalk and told him to leave. He kneeled down on the pavement and took the hem of her dress between his fingers, rubbing it. Tamsin was unmoved. Iris watched him from the window, wanting only for him to disappear.

  Which he did—he went to Mexico to dry out and didn’t come back for years. She’d seen him only occasionally since then, and they had little to say to each other. For a while he wrote her letters, in ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, and she found the letters condescending and didn’t answer. She considered her father nobody who should offer her advice. He was back in California now, living in Los Angeles, and once or twice they’d had coffee, facing across a small table, making small talk like strangers.

  “I think he means less to me,” Iris said, “than he does to you.”

  I didn’t know enough then to dispute this statement. Or maybe I couldn’t afford to. Iris was my path forward in life, and I took it. We moved to New York together, and Iris got a job at an art gallery and I went into teaching, as my parents had suggested. I taught at a high school in Brooklyn that was under-resourced and overcrowded. The students slept in class, they fought each other, they were angry and often hungry and when they didn’t see the point of being in school I was hard-pressed to explain it to them. I came home at the end of each day more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life. Iris went to parties, and I did lesson planning. There were no more candlelight dinners. She stopped doing heroin and started taking Adderall, which helped her stay up late and charm buyers and artists. She was very good at it and soon got promoted. She had beautiful clothes. I wore chinos and cardigans from Old Navy, and every month I swore I wouldn’t dip into the savings account I’d started with my parents’ money, and every month I did. Some people swim in New York and others drown, and Iris and I no longer made sense together as we had in school. I lasted in the city eighteen months before I moved home.

  * * *

  —

  People use the phrase lost touch as if it’s a casual negligence instead of what it can also be: a grief, a lack. At least that’s how it was for me. Iris and I lost touch when I left the city, because whatever strands wove us together in college no longer held, and as much as it felt inadvertent—there was no falling-out, no ill will—it also felt deeply sad. I lived in New Hampshire, not far from where I’d grown up, and taught middle school, and it turned out that I was better with younger kids, at ease with their awkwardness, their protean flashes between childhood and adolescence. I saw my parents every two weeks and babysat my brothers’ children. I started paying off my student loans; I joined a food co-op; I wore clogs. I dated a few women, and then I was with a man named Lucas for five years and almost married him, and then he got a job in Chicago and asked me to move with him and I realized I didn’t want to go.

  I heard from Iris occasionally, enough to know the facts of her life if not the animating spirit inside them. She returned to California to direct an art gallery there. Tamsin and Gregory divorced, and Tamsin remarried another wealthy businessman Iris called the Oligarch instead of using his name. She never mentioned Mulvaney. I was buying groceries at the co-op when I saw a flyer on the community bulletin board advertising a talk at the local college. They often put posters up for their chamber music concerts or history lectures, and I would glance at them on my way out, thinking I should go and then never going. But this poster was for a reading and talk with their visiting writer, John Mulvaney, celebrated author of The Woman I Knew and other novels. Next to the author photo—a serious, bearded man in a turtleneck—was an image of the same book jacket that had mesmerized me at the age of thirteen, the woman seen from behind, her rounded back, its thick black outline.

  I had to go. I drove to the college on a Wednesday evening in March. It was just after the time change and the lightness in the sky felt like an astonishment, a reprieve. My hands on the steering wheel prickled with sweat. The talk was held in the library, in a small room with an unlit fireplace. I sat at the back, the oldest person there. When Mulvaney entered with a professor and they took their places in two wing chairs by the fireplace, I scrutinized him intently. He was stooped—he must have been seventy-five—but he looked prosperous and healthy, in a collared shirt, cable-knit sweater, and corduroy pants. He could have been a retired oncologist. There was nothing in his posture of the derelict Iris had described, down on his knees on a San Francisco sidewalk. In his introduction, the college professor described Mulvaney’s career and all the books he had published since The Woman I Knew. I had never read or even thought about his other books—they never existed to me—and I was brought up short by this evidence of my lack of curiosity. Mulvaney read for fifteen minutes from his latest novel, about a man whose son commits a crime, and who covers it up. The man and his wife disagree about the ethics of this, and in the passage he read, the two of them fight toward the brink of divorce. The wife was described as elegant and stubborn and I couldn’t help but wonder whether she was based on Tamsin, even knowing that there were vast swaths of Mulvaney’s life I knew nothing about, perhaps even other wives.

  Mulvaney’s voice was rich and melodious. When he read the dialogue, he shifted tone slightly so that it was perfectly clear which person was speaking. He was a practiced reader of his work, and the room was silent in that specific way that indicates collective attention. I felt utterly immersed in the story, wondering what I would do in the situation he described, and also judging the characters as if they were real people—I found the husband bullying, and the wife high-handed, and my sympathy with each of them wavered and revolved. When he stopped reading, I let out an involuntary groan—an oh!—because I wanted the scene to keep going, and the students in the audience turned around to look at me, and I flushed.

  Then there were questions. Evidently the students had been reading Mulvaney’s work in class, and their questions extended beyond what they’d just heard. Some asked about his writing process, and his influences. Others picked apart the themes and subject matter of his work, with impressive sophistication. I was taken aback by the breezy confidence of their tone, which I could never have adopted when I was in school. A young woman with purple hair asked him about the objectification of women in his books, specifically The Woman I Knew, and how it reduced the main character to the sum of her sexuality and nothing more. Hearing it phrased that way, I couldn’t deny it was true. The novel follows a woman who has an affair with a man at a hotel where they’re both staying for a week. She is younger, less experienced, at times even unwilling. The man pursues her, then abandons her. Much of the book is devoted to his ambitions as a painter, and how the affair galvanizes his creativity; there is nothing in the book about her ambitions at all. And yet—when I’d read it, as a young teenager, I’d noticed nothing of that. I’d read the sections about the woman’s body, her frank and complete enjoyment of sex, how the affair, to her, had nothing to do with wanting love or marriage or romance but about feeling something important, a craving for experience for its own sake. To me it had been a manifesto, an instruction manual, enlarging rather than reducing the possibilities of my life.

  And what had my life actually become, as a result? Was I so free, so full of possibilities? Maybe I’d read it wrong. I felt angry at the student then, a fury that escalated fast, arising out of defensiveness—not about Mulvaney but about my own young self.

  Mulvaney wasn’t angry. He answered each question openly, wittily, often making the students laugh. To the young woman who asked about objectification, he nodded in agreement.

  “You’re absolutely
right,” he said. “I don’t disavow the book, but I see it as an artifact of its times, and a very limited one at that. I would write a different version of it now. But of course that kind of book, a novel exploring female sexuality, isn’t mine to write anymore, if it ever was. It’s yours. I look forward to reading it.”

  The student tilted her head, if not persuaded, then silenced.

  Afterward there was a book signing. I hadn’t brought my copy of The Woman I Knew, which I still owned. Instead I lined up behind the students and bought the new one, about the parents with the criminal son. I kept letting other people in front of me, and watching how Mulvaney interacted with them. He took his time with the students, often following up on a question they’d asked, or asking about their own writing. They seemed less flattered than accepting; they took his attention for granted.

  When at last it was my turn, I gave Mulvaney my name. “Are you a student here as well?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, my throat constricted. “I live nearby…I know Iris. We were at school together.”