Signs and Wonders (11 page)

Beth, similarly, began to bite. She called Fowler and begged him to come back, and when that didn’t work, she harangued him. She told him the children missed him, involving them in a way she’d sworn she’d never do. She told him he was being irresponsible, distant, uncommitted, sounding like an article in a women’s magazine. Fowler would come over for dinner, but didn’t spend the night, and then he came over less and less often. He was more comfortable in his hovel, in his Platonic cave.

She blamed him. Of course she did. She told herself and all her friends that he valued ideas more than people, that he’d taken advantage. “I think he’s almost
autistic,
” she told them, and her friends nodded sagely.

One day she realized she hadn’t heard from or spoken to Fowler in a week, and she knew it was over. She felt exiled from a country she’d once been a citizen of. When her children asked her where he was, she lied. “He had to go back to Africa,” she said. “They missed him there.”

Reports of Fowler filtered down to her every once in a while. He’d been seen with a divorced real estate broker whose own house
had many extra rooms. He’d arrived drunk at a dinner party and announced that he no longer ate meat. Later someone caught him standing over the stove, spooning cassoulet into his mouth.

“Fowler,” said the woman who told her this story, shaking her head.

Once Beth saw him on the street, too far away to wave at, his long hair tousled in the wind. He crossed her mind all the time, then only occasionally. But he never disappeared completely. Instead he shrank to a figment of himself, partial and pale, stored on the shelves of her brain. He was a thought that cluttered the night, an idea once held close, now scattered and gone.

Adam Leavitt fell in love with me two weeks before our college graduation, and I never knew what brought it on. One minute we were part of the same group of friends, loosely bound by the parameters of dining hall tables and Saturday night parties, and the next thing I knew he was staring at me with the intensity of a lion stalking its prey. He was a musician, and intensity was his thing. He had curly blond hair that fell in ringlets over his eyes, and he wore the same outfit every day: jeans, motorcycle boots, and the piercing, blue-eyed gaze of a man with heartbreak and death on his mind. He staged solo performances in boiler rooms. He had a tattoo of a Chinese symbol on his arm (this was back before every sorority girl had a dainty one etched on her lower back) and another on his neck, some kind of mythological animal, its claws reaching up toward his ear.

One night I went over to his room to borrow a book and he’d lit at least twenty candles in this tiny room that could barely contain a futon—a fire hazard if I’d ever seen one. He handed me the book, his blue eyes glowing radioactively. I thought,
Why me?
I
felt like there might be a hidden camera or somebody behind a curtain waiting for me to fall for this prank.

“Janet,” he said intensely. I worried there was going to be a romantic speech. Let me give you some context. This was the early nineties, at Harvard, in a dorm where we all wore black turtlenecks and thought we understood Derrida, or thought that a display of understanding Derrida was important. I had friends who stayed up all night discussing whether all penetration was rape. There was a couple whose abusive S & M relationship was considered by some to be a radical subversion of the heteronormative paradigm. We were serious about these things. There was no place for romantic speeches in our world.

I grabbed the book and said, “Sorry, I have to go.”

After we graduated and I moved to New York, he sent me a postcard, a black-and-white photograph of himself, unsmiling, glued to a piece of cardboard. On the back it said,
Thinking of you, wishing you well.
What it meant, I understood, was
I’m over it, good-bye.

Eventually I left the city, went to graduate school in the Midwest, and then moved back again, this time as an organizational psychologist. While in grad school I’d met and married my husband. All the French theory in my head had evaporated when I graduated from college; I’d come from middle-class suburbia and those were the values I returned to, undergraduate philosophy sliding off me like the extra pounds from dining-hall food and Everclear punch. My husband had attended a state school where they hadn’t waded knee-deep in identity politics and irony. He professed his love to me in an e-mail, after a chatty message about some repairs
he was having done on his car. He was forthright and direct.
PS,
he wrote,
I love you.

In person, this became his thing. At the end of a phone call: “Well, I’ve gotta go,” he’d say. “PS, I love you.” Sometimes he’d even hang up, then call back to say it.

After the wedding, he joined an Internet startup that was targeted immediately by enthusiastic investors, and all of a sudden we were floating in money. We had salaries and stock options and a brand-new car. My husband began speaking in acronyms. I’d thought
PS
was cute but it turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. He had code for everything. BRB, he’d say when he was going to be right back. IMO, when offering an opinion on current events.

One night, at a dinner party, I heard him say, “LOL!” He wasn’t laughing, or even talking about it using real words; he was using the
code
for laughing instead of just chuckling, as if throwing back his head and laughing would be too much trouble, and take too much time.
What would Derrida say about that?
I wondered. It made me hate him—my husband, not Derrida.

You might think it’s a small thing, the use of Internet-derived acronyms in ordinary conversation, and of course you’d be right. But it became an emblem of everything about my husband’s new and prosperous and grown-up self that I didn’t recognize. And it swelled up right in front of me, inflating like a balloon, until it obscured everything that had once drawn us together. My irritation was so gigantic it filled the horizon; it made me miserable every single moment of every single day, and soon enough, so was he.
What kind of love is this,
I thought,
that can be eclipsed not by infidelity or loss but by irritation? What kind of person am I?
We got divorced.

·    ·    ·

My husband cashed out his stocks before the Internet bubble burst, we sold our car, and he moved to California. I stayed in New York, the city’s hard times seeming entwined with my own. After a while people asked me when I was going to start dating again, but truthfully I couldn’t get interested. It seemed to me that I wasn’t relationship material, that all those dreams I’d had back before getting married—of a house with a yard, a life with children, a couple growing old together—were meant for other people, not for me, in the same way that I just can’t wear orange. Sometimes my husband and I talked on the phone, and we were friendly, solicitous, but our failure hung in the air between us, even across thousands of miles. I still thought of him as my husband, not because I still wanted to be married to him but because he was the person I’d chosen to marry, and the subsequent collapse didn’t change the facts. Our failure made me more of an adult than getting married had. I was thirty-six but felt middle-aged, as if the best I could hope for was to
maintain.
I spent my disposable income on facials and manicures, grooming my carapace, which was how I thought of my body, something to be buffed and polished but never used, like a car in a showroom, gleaming inside glass walls.

A year passed, and I had a new position as an organizational consultant. I went from company to company with a laptop and a pad of yellow lined paper for taking notes. My job was to improve company performance by assessing its existing climate. I handed out questionnaires and conducted interviews, and in the process, I’d inevitably find out who was competent, overworked, or lazy, resented, or loved. Part efficiency expert, part psychiatrist, I diagnosed the health of these companies, and recommended treatment for their future well-being. Sometimes, people got fired.

I was introduced to the staff of ICS, a corporate marketing firm, by Melissa, a short, skinny woman in her thirties whose long curly hair made her look even smaller. An animal lover, she had her employees bring in pictures of their pets and post them in the lounge; this, she told me, created community. At the weekly staff meeting, she said, “This is Janet. She’ll be with us for a month or so, conducting interviews. Janet, you’re welcome to put up a picture of your pet in the lounge.”

“I don’t have any pets,” I said.

Everyone in the room shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Afterward, I was shown to my temporary office, and was looking over the departmental flowcharts when a voice said, “Janet.”

I looked up. Adam Leavitt was standing in the doorway, his hands in the pockets of his black pants. His hair was shorter, darker, with a few gray strands in it. He was wearing a white button-down shirt, and above the collar I could see the claws of his tattoo.

“You work here?” I said. I was too surprised to sound friendly, though I was happy to see him. “I didn’t notice you at the meeting.”

“I was in the back.” Stepping forward, smiling, he placed his index finger in one of the flowchart boxes on my desk. “It’s just a day job,” he said. “I still play out at night. You look good.”

“Thank you,” I said calmly, not without pride, as if he were complimenting my car.

“Let’s have lunch.”

“I just got here.”

“I didn’t mean now. I meant at lunchtime.”

“Right,” I said. On my notepad I wrote down
lunch.
“You can show me where to go.”

“I’ll give you all the inside dope,” he said, and before leaving he shot me a look that reminded me of college—a shade more intense, somehow, than a lunch date ought to provoke.

Three hours later we walked to a deli, bought sandwiches, and ate them sitting across the street in the kind of shoe-boxy Midtown park where corporate workers sit on or next to corporate sculpture. Depressingly, we caught up on fifteen years within ten minutes. Our lives went like this: starter job, disillusionment, graduate school, new job, major relationship, stasis. I asked him about his music, and he shrugged and muttered something about a record deal that fell through. He’d worked at ICS for five years and the line between its being a day job and an actual job had blurred to invisibility. He didn’t say he was miserable about it, but I could tell. After we finished eating he gave me a postcard advertising a show by his band, Das Boot, at a bar in Williamsburg on the weekend.

“Das Boot?” I said.

“We pretend to be German,” he said. “But we aren’t.”

“I didn’t know you spoke German.”

“I don’t. Well, sometimes I use German words, and sometimes it’s more of a German mood,” he said.

“I’m not sure I understand. What kind of words and moods?”

“Angry and guttural. Sad and guttural. Zeitgeist. Weltanschauung. Heineken.”

“Isn’t Heineken Dutch?”

“Dutch, Deutsch.” He shrugged, and I sensed he’d had this conversation before. “Anyway. It’s a hybrid Sprockets-revival faux-language poetry kind of a thing.”

I couldn’t tell if this was serious or not. I smiled noncommittally and said it sounded interesting, and he laughed.

“Well, if it’s not, at least the drinks are cheap,” he said. “Maybe you don’t care about cheap drinks at this point in your life, but will you come anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said, catching in his eye a brief flash of disappointment that didn’t seem ironic. “I’ll try.”

I showed up alone. The bar was dirty, small, pulsing with recorded techno, and close to empty. I saw some people I vaguely knew—acquaintances from college, some in designer clothes, others in studied vintage, with uncut hair. I made chitchat, wishing I hadn’t come. Then something hit me lightly on the back of my head, and I reached back to brush away what I thought was an insect. I felt it again and looked down at the floor and noticed that I was surrounded by popcorn kernels. Someone was pelting me. I turned around and saw Adam coming at me from across the room. He literally did come right at me, his chin tucked into his neck. You know how cats walk across the room and stuff their faces right into your hand? They do it to mark you, to release some scent that shows you’ve been claimed. That’s what this was like. He took hold of my arm and said, “You came.”

“You invited me,” I said. He held out the palm of his other hand, with three wizened pieces of popcorn still left in it. I declined them, and he turned his palm over and they fell to the floor. He was wearing one of the strangest outfits I’d ever seen, a striped sailor shirt with buttons on top of the shoulders, like epaulets, and green pants with buttons all down the sides. These didn’t look like clothes bought recently, nor did they look used. I spend a fair amount of time in stores but I had no idea where a person could find such clothes. He looked half a caricature, half a heartthrob.
Which is to say that when I looked at him and smiled, my heart buzzed in its cavity like a fly in a jar. Whatever advantage I had on him during the day, as a professional consultant, evaporated.