We Want What We Want

by Alix Ohlin

  What astonished Ed was not her intelligence or her vocabulary—though he was bursting with pride over those—but the indefinable personhood of her. He had made her and cared for her and she had become, so quickly, something separate from him, something well and truly her own. She was herself, a girl who knew what a spider should look like, a girl who could name its parts.

  mourning dove (kingdom: Animalia; phylum: Chordata; class: Aves; order: Columbiformes; family: Columbidae; genus: Zenaida; species: Zenaida macroura)

  * * *

  —

  The magic show over, Mordecai spreads his palms out, as if to say, Can you believe that? Ed can’t. He’s never seen anything like it.

  “That was impressive. Please thank him for me later.”

  “I’ll try,” Mordecai says.

  “I should be going.” Ed lifts the rabbit in a kind of salute. “Thanks for this, too.”

  The other man nods and then, as Ed is rising from the couch, he reaches out and grabs Ed’s wrist with a forceful grip. “Tell Meredith,” he says, and his voice is low but urgent. “Tell her he’s here.”

  And Ed understands that this was the reason for the visit, not the plush toy, which may or may not have been earmarked for his daughter in the first place. Maybe Phoebe never wanted her to have anything. It’s Mordecai who wants something, wants it desperately, judging from the pressure of his hand.

  There’s a rustle in the corner of the room and the bird from Magick’s trick—a dove, he thinks, though he doesn’t know anything about birds—is pecking around the base of a potted plant, trying to reach the soil. It doesn’t look good, one wing hanging lower than the other, its walk a drunken stagger. He can’t remember if it looked like that before, or if the trick damaged it somehow.

  He turns back to Mordecai. “Meredith’s off working on her studies,” he says. “She’s going to get her PhD and be a scientist. I don’t see her coming back home much. Just so you know.”

  Whatever you want from her, he’s thinking, you can’t have her. I will protect her from your sad broken-down house and this unfathomable caped boy.

  “He’s her brother, too,” Mordecai says, but the urgency in his tone is already fading into defeat. “It can’t be all on me.”

  “I hear you,” Ed says noncommittally, and the grip on his wrist lessens, then releases.

  When Phoebe first left, she flung a beer bottle at him and it shattered on the wall behind his head. He vacuumed up all the glass, petrified that Meredith would get into the shards somehow, but still he kept finding them, days later, some tiny sliver that could have cut his daughter, could have gone down her throat. It was picking up that glass that solidified his hatred for his wife. When she calls to get the baby back, he thought, he’ll say that Meredith cut herself, and that will be his proof that she can’t be a mother.

  But Phoebe never called. It was her mother who did—a tired, pallid woman with some sweetness at her core. She didn’t make any threats; she was too timid for that. She only wanted to see Meredith, to visit occasionally. Ed said no. “It’s too confusing for her,” he said, though Meredith was barely a year old. Nothing and everything was confusing to her; she wasn’t even walking yet. He knew the door had to be shut completely, or else the crazy would find its way back in. And he will keep it shut now.

  He shakes Mordecai’s hand and leaves the house, picking his way past the goat, the friendly black dog, and the weeds in the front yard. Midday sun has broiled the car and he rolls the windows down, turns the AC up, cool air dissipating into hot. An upstairs window opens and he sees Magick in the bedroom, maybe looking at him, but probably not; he’s too far away to tell. The house is otherwise motionless, the whole animal kingdom settling in for a drowsy afternoon. The plush rabbit joins the lemur on the passenger seat. He’s already decided not to tell Meredith where they came from. He’ll give them to her, and she can do what she wants: name them, cherish them, or throw them away.

  Nights Back Then

  Nights back then, I liked to go to a coffee shop on Eighth Street and sketch. I sat in a corner with my blue notebook, fixing an unseeing stare on the grainy wood of the table. This was during the first Gulf War, which—it was commonly agreed by everyone I knew—was motivated by oil, so images of oil snaked through all my drawings, viscous and shadowy, the secret bloodstream of the world. I also drew soldiers, those young men and women who were being asked to risk their lives for oil, sacrificing for a cause that didn’t deserve them. That I did not personally know any soldiers, that my friends were all grad students and aspiring artists, didn’t prevent me from drawing them. Around me in the coffee shop, couples—gay, straight, young, old, they were all couples—held hands, flirted, argued, broke up, and I sketched none of this, though looking back it’s what I most remember. How the coffee shop seemed full of couples, each positioned at a different point along the spectrum from meeting to parting, as if the coffee shop were a laboratory for romance, an incubator of it.

  I always went to the coffee shop alone, but when I was done drawing I’d head back up to Second Avenue, and to Robert. Home was a third-floor walk-up I’d originally shared with a roommate, Sasha, who left the city after a year, complaining it was too noisy and crowded. It’s possible she meant the apartment specifically was too noisy and crowded, given that Robert spent so much time there. Sasha moved to Chicago and almost immediately reported that she was dating a friend of ours from college; that they were probably going to get married; that they were saving for a condo. I rolled my eyes at all these choices. I saw her move as a failure of will. She was giving up on life in New York for being too hard, I thought, and taking refuge in some normal suburban life. As if there were refuge anywhere.

  Robert was an artist. He made large, brash paintings plastered with encaustic, abstractions that included found materials like magazine pages, CD liner notes, grocery store circulars. Stenciled on top of all this were repeated shapes: circles upon circles, squares upon squares, the letter e in a thousand different fonts spaced at intervals across a canvas. The impression was not of neatness but of a person ferociously—and not entirely successfully—exerting control, trying to tamp down chaos with a pattern. Which is exactly how Robert was. To me he was the kind of person who only made sense in New York, who perfectly belonged there. He made use of everything he found in the city. One day, at the Astor Place station, he took a liking to a movie poster covered in graffiti tags and spent over an hour carefully cutting the whole thing out as I watched. When he finished, turned to go, and saw me on the platform, he seemed surprised that I was there; not that I was still waiting, but that I existed at all. Far from being offended by this, I admired the intensity of his concentration. When I came home from the coffee shop, he was often about to head out to his studio in Gowanus. He’d stay up all night then crawl into bed with me, waking me to have sex in the lightening dawn. That we rarely spent a whole night together didn’t bother us. We had an unspoken agreement to be different from other people.

  I’d met Robert at the restaurant where we both waitered part-time. It was a crowded, overpriced Mediterranean place in the West Village where we made excellent tips, enough to live on by working three dinner shifts a week and the occasional brunch. The food was standard upscale yuppie, and Robert and I used to make fun of it during our breaks. All the dishes, we noticed, were made with babies: baby arugula, baby artichokes, baby eggplant. Spring lamb. Veal. New Yorkers love to eat babies, we used to joke. Every shift we came up with new reasons why. Because we’re monsters. Because babies are succulent. Because babies are soft, and life here is hard.

  The owner, Dmitri, was heavy-lidded and good-looking and before deciding to be a restaurateur—as he referred to himself—had aspired to be a painter himself. As a lingering artifact of these youthful ambitions, he employed a lot of artists. He hired Robert and me at around the same time and seemed pleased when we fell in love, as if matchmaking were
yet another profitable business venture. A few years older than I was, Robert was thin and blond, with eyes such a light hazel that they looked gold. His wrists were delicate and bony, his fingers long. His slight frame looked even slighter when he was dressed, as he usually was, like a construction worker, in Dickies work clothes and thick-soled boots. During our breaks we smoked cigarettes he rolled and discussed the war, our scorn for the president uniting us, though it was hardly a unique point of view for artsy people in their early twenties. Despite talking easily with me, he was painfully shy with others and seemed to have no friends in the city. Sasha called him the Ghost, or Little Mr. Rauschenberg. She could be pretty snide, and I wasn’t sorry when she moved away.

  The first time I saw Robert seize, I was visiting his studio. He was in the middle of a sentence—“I’m still working on this,” he was saying—when his whole body clenched, his eyelids screwed shut, and he fell to the floor, narrowly missing hitting his head on a metal file cabinet where he kept clippings and sketches. For all its terror, the seizure was the most mechanical-looking thing I’d ever seen: the body like a robot on the fritz, all rigid angles and jerky spasms.

  “Robert!” I said. I had no idea what to do. There was no phone in the studio. I cradled his head, saying his name melodramatically, like a woman in a movie. He was making strange guttural sounds at the back of his throat. I tried to hold his hand but he swatted me away with his robot strength. I ran to the door and opened it, looking down the long, empty hallway. “Hello?” I said. There was no one around. When I turned around, Robert’s honey-colored eyes were open, staring at me.

  “What happened?” I said.

  He shook his head. He seemed angry with me, as if I’d intruded on a private moment.

  “Does this happen a lot?”

  He didn’t answer, simply lay there looking at the ceiling. After a minute I said, “What is this?”

  He sat up gingerly, ignoring me. I was annoyed and so, it seemed, was he. Slowly he got to his feet, turned his back to me, and busied himself rearranging canvases. The one he’d been about to show me, an enormous, lurid red-and-orange painting that looked like an explosion, he returned to the stack without comment.

  I lit a cigarette. “I should call somebody,” I said.

  He shook his head. He was willful, Robert; he rented his own studio and though he spent most of his time at my apartment he still kept his own. He didn’t like to share, and he worked at the restaurant as much and as well as he did only so that he could afford not to. I knew that if I called someone, if I tried to take him to a doctor, he’d walk away—from the situation and from me.

  Later that night, or the following morning, he showed up at the apartment, laid his head on my chest, and started talking, assuming I was awake to listen, which soon enough I was.

  “The meds stop me from seizing but they also flatten everything out,” he was saying. Either I’d dreamed it or he’d said it while I was still sleeping: epilepsy. “It’s not that I can’t execute while I’m taking them. It’s that I don’t see the point. I get lazy and dull.”

  I lay there with his body tangled up in mine, his blond head just below my collarbone. I put my fingers in his thin dirty hair. He smelled like sweat and turpentine. “What’s it like?” I said.

  “I told you,” he said irritably. “It’s a flatline. I don’t think clearly. I don’t see clearly.”

  “No,” I said. “The seizure.”

  He rolled off me and turned his back. My bed was small and we were pressed up against each other just as tightly as before. I put my arms around his waist and rested my head next to his, my nose against his neck.

  “It’s like being struck by lightning,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  My own work was small. I drew on a paper tablet that I balanced on my knees, in bed or on the tiny tables at the coffee shop. I was experimenting with faintness: I’d make a drawing and then rub it away, leaving only faded lines behind littered with the pink dust of my eraser. A soldier peered out from the page, ghostly and lost. An oil tanker shimmered on a vanished horizon. That my work was self-effacing while Robert’s was large and drenched with color was not a fact lost on an educated young female artist such as myself. But what could I do? This was how I saw the world: powered by forces that were either forgotten or just out of sight.

  I watched Robert the way a zoo animal watches its keeper: to see what it was like to live beyond the cage. He was what I thought an artist should be—lonely, volatile, ill at ease in the world—and I took my cues from him. He didn’t do drugs or even drink coffee but he somehow worked a dinner shift at the restaurant then headed straight to the studio after, fueled by the ideas burning inside him. Sometimes, imitating him, I’d go home to my bedroom and try to sketch for a while, invariably waking, the next morning, to find a bold pencil line that shot across the drawing at an erratic angle and the creased indent of my head where it hit the paper. I’d wonder what it was like to be him, to have lightning inside you, instead of coaxing out shadows bit by bit, line by line.

  The next seizure was at the restaurant, and it was worse. Robert was in the middle of setting down a large metal tray on which several hot dishes were balanced. When he seized, the food flew into the air in a high, steaming arc, landing on the table next to him—people yelling “Hey!” as if the food were a stranger who’d bumped into them on the subway—before clattering in a riot to the floor. Robert hit his head on a chair on the way down, and he was making terrible noises, much worse than I’d seen before, angry moans, half-words of protest. It sounded as if he were not just dying but being killed. I ran to him and cleared the furniture and said his name over and over, as if it would calm him, which it didn’t.

  It took a moment for me to realize that Dmitri was there, too. Usually he watched everything from a distance with his heavy-lidded eyes, whispering directions into the ear of the hostess or the chef, never seeming anything other than mildly amused. But now he took charge, ordering another waiter to call 911, then sitting on the floor and holding Robert’s head in his lap, cushioning it from the blows it was trying to inflict upon itself.

  “Where are his meds?” he asked me.

  “He won’t take them,” I said.

  “Idiot,” he said, and there was no fond indulgence in his tone. He let the seizure play itself out, staying just close enough to Robert to make sure he didn’t hit his head and that he wasn’t choking. He told the hostess to comp every meal, every drink, and to stop serving. The paramedics arrived, and the restaurant emptied. I spent the night with Robert at St. Vincent’s, and the following afternoon called Dmitri to let him know everything was okay, and to thank him.

  “Don’t mention it,” he said. The next time Robert reported to work, Dmitri gave him two weeks’ severance and told him he was fired.

  * * *

  —

  I quit in solidarity. I was livid. I thought of Dmitri’s large hands on either side of Robert’s head, the relief I’d experienced when he took charge, and felt as if I were the one betrayed. I was still seething when he called me two days later.

  “I understand you’re angry,” he said calmly. I could picture him talking on the phone by the front desk, wearing his designer jeans and collared shirts. He was rich and good-looking and I’d never seen him upset. “But I can’t have scenes like that at the restaurant. If he won’t take his medication, he has only himself to blame. Not me, and not you. Come back to work.”

  “No,” I said, and hung up.

  I like to think I would have held to it. But Robert was ignoring me; he was sleeping back at his own apartment, and rarely returned my calls. When I did reach him his voice was thick tongued, sullen, and he didn’t want to see me. I had no idea if this was due to his mood or the medications. I had no idea about anything.

  “He’s probably embarrassed,” my friends said pragmatically when I
complained to them. “Give it time.”

  I refused to believe that Robert would be given to an emotion as pedestrian as embarrassment. But whatever he was feeling, by Friday night, a week later, he still wasn’t talking, and I went to the restaurant to work my shift. I needed the money. Dmitri welcomed me back with little more than a nod. When I signed out for the night I saw I’d been scheduled for extra hours that week, to make up for what I hadn’t worked the past few days.

  He came over when he saw me studying the schedule. “It’s okay?” he said. He wasn’t Greek from Greece—he’d been born and raised in Brooklyn—but every once in a while he used this old-world intonation that I found pretentious. I told him it was fine. I stood still, waiting for him to ask me about Robert, but he didn’t.

  “How is your painting?”

  “Drawing,” I said.

  He looked at a spot over my shoulder, and it took me a second to realize he was blushing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought it was painting. You don’t talk about it very often.”

  “It’s not going well,” I said. He was the first person I’d admitted this to, and I’m not sure why I did, except that he was virtually a stranger and I didn’t care what he thought. “I think I’m about to give up on it and go to law school or something.”

  He reached out and clasped my hand tightly in both of his, which surprised me. I’d seen him dating a variety of tall beautiful women he brought to the restaurant, never sticking with any of them very long. He didn’t strike me as a serious person. The fact that he had majored in studio art at Pratt had always seemed like a weird anomaly, a blip on an otherwise blank screen.