Signs and Wonders (10 page)

“I cleaned myself up a bit,” Fowler said.

“Did you call the police?”

“No, I just came over here,” Fowler said.

“Why didn’t you call the police? I mean, that’s a pretty serious thing to have happen.”

“I didn’t want them involved.”

There was a pause in which everyone’s credulity evaporated. The newspaper guy squinted and said, “Did this even really happen?”

“Of course it
happened,
” Fowler said.

“
I
think you’re making the whole thing up.”

It wasn’t that much of a challenge but Fowler shriveled in the face of it. His tall, thin frame curled in on itself, disappearing like
paper on fire. “You’re right,” he said. “I made it all up. I went to a dark place inside myself. I apologize.”

Beth looked around the room. No one seemed that surprised.

“Fowler,” the newspaper guy muttered, shaking his head.

Beth got Fowler another drink. He took it and looked deeply into her eyes, then seemed to shudder. “What’s the matter with you, exactly?” she said.

“It’s under investigation,” he said, “by a task force of analysts, scientists, the legislature, and my ex-girlfriends. I’ll let you know when they release their findings. Excuse me.” He walked out of the room. Ten minutes later he came back, wiping his mouth. “When I’m upset I throw up,” he said.

Fowler told her he was an ethnomusicologist, studying the performance practices of a tribe in Africa. She pictured drums and tribal costumes. Fowler told her that the tribe’s language was remarkably clean of diphthongs. She didn’t know how this compared to the Western diphthong situation, and didn’t want to ask because she was afraid the explanation might be overlong. Instead she asked him if he wanted another drink.

“More than I can say,” Fowler said.

When she returned he was being questioned by a woman in a cashmere poncho. They were discussing Plato’s cave. Fowler said, “I used to live in a cave. In South Jersey.” Then he winked at Beth.

The woman looked perplexed. “I just thought you might know something,” she said, and left.

“I’m the idea man,” Fowler explained modestly. “I’m the intellectual go-to guy.”

“I think it’s your vest,” Beth told him.

“What ideas do you want from me?” Fowler asked her.

“Tell me what a diphthong is,” she said. “I learned it once but I’ve forgotten.”

“You combine two sounds together to make a new one,” he said.

“That’s it?”

“In a nutshell,” he said. He drained the third drink and looked into her eyes again. He wasn’t distracted or looking over her shoulder at the other possibilities, and this she liked.

“Do you want to come over to my house tomorrow night?”

Fowler nodded. He seemed accustomed to sudden invitations.

“All right,” Beth said, writing down her address. “Don’t get beat up on the way over.”

The kids were at their father’s and she served beer and Indian food, using several complicated recipes that required the purchase of special spices. Fowler ate little and didn’t say much, either. The mood was cordially awkward. Then the kids came home unexpectedly, having forgotten their backpacks and homework, and refused to leave. They were forever leaving their possessions in the wrong place and screwing up the custody schedule. It was their way of participating in the chaos of the divorce, proving that they, too, could cause upheaval. They settled themselves around the table, eating the food Fowler was ignoring. Sometimes she felt this was her finest parental achievement—that her kids weren’t picky eaters.

Megan, who was younger, sat next to Fowler and touched his long, wavy hair. Mike, who was older, sat on the other side of the table and talked to him. She’d thought they’d be jealous, resistant, freaked out that a strange man was in the house. Instead they took
to Fowler immediately. They seemed to think of him as a stray animal she’d brought home. He talked to them about the music of Africa, which he’d refused, or been too shy, to discuss with her.

“Here’s a charming tribal folktale I’ll share with you,” he told them, and they watched him with their heads balanced on their chins. Why they were sitting at the table instead of watching TV, Beth couldn’t figure out. Fowler had that effect on people. They wanted to hear what he had to say.

The story he told was about a snake that ate a goat that ate a lion, or maybe it was a lion that ate the goat—she missed parts of it while clearing and washing the dishes. The children listened seriously. Later, after he’d gone, Megan asked whether Fowler was homesick. Further questioning revealed that she thought he was from Africa.

Maybe she wasn’t wrong. Fowler did seem to live in Africa in his mind, which was where most of his living went on. The functions of his body were secondary. On their third date—the children again at their father’s, having sworn to take all their possessions with them—Beth led Fowler into her room and to what had once been the marital bed. He allowed her to touch him, passively watching her, his body responding, then crawled on top of her and again looked deeply into her eyes. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “I’m so into you.” Without a doubt he was sincere. Then it was over, and he put his clothes back on and took a book out of his bag.

Her friends thought Fowler was a hobby she’d taken up, like volunteer work or a subscription to the opera—something to
broaden her horizons, post-divorce. They didn’t disapprove but didn’t expect it to last long, either. Nor did her children take him seriously as a father figure. They tugged at his sleeves and sat on his lap and told Beth when he needed more water or wine. Once the two of them were playing in their bedroom and Beth, passing by in the hallway, heard them arguing over some project that kept collapsing and needed to be rebuilt. She peeked in the door: they had their old jars of colored putty out and were trying to sculpt a Play-Doh cave. Fowler had told them it was the most perfect place in the world.

But she thought she might be in love with Fowler. She looked forward to his coming over, and when he was gone she waited for him to come back. Her body fat felt curvaceous; she slept better at night. She told her children jokes she knew they wouldn’t understand. She bought a new dress, not minding that Fowler would neither notice nor care. She began clipping articles out of the newspaper for him, stories she thought he might find interesting. A man driving through the city had set his pants on fire while lighting a cigarette in his car; things escalated and somehow the whole car exploded. “We’re investigating the pants,” a police officer was quoted as saying.

“Maybe he was a liar,” Fowler said, as she’d known he would, and she smiled.

“Do you want to move in?” she asked him.

Fowler said, “Oh. Oh.”

“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” she said. “It’s just that you spend so much time here already.”

“Right. True.”

“It would save you some back-and-forth,” she said. “It’s a matter of convenience, really.”

Fowler looked deep into her eyes, into her soul, as was his wont. “Well, let’s not do it out of
convenience,
” he said.

She blushed. “I mean, I like having you here. I’d like to have you here more often.” He drew these statements from her, from a well she’d thought had long ago run dry.

“I snore, you know,” Fowler said.

“I’m past minding,” she said.

She went to his place to help him pack up. She’d only been there once before, after a party where she’d gotten a bit drunk, and her impression had been of a scholarly hobbit-hole, cozy and knowledge filled. In a sober light this turned out to be overly positive. It was a studio apartment with books along one wall, floor to ceiling, and what she’d thought were bookshelves were boards and cement blocks. There was a bed and, in one corner, primitive instruments, gourds and sticks of wood. Fowler went to the closet, got out a suitcase, and packed his clothes. He owned two pairs of jeans, three white shirts, a sweater vest, and a blazer. This was his wardrobe in its entirety. Once he was done he closed the suitcase and looked around.

“I might as well just leave the rest of it,” he said. “I’ll probably wind up coming back here to work.”

Although she considered Fowler a scholar, a person who lived in the mind, Beth didn’t exactly think of him as someone who worked. What he did was less like a job and more like an atmosphere he moved in, a thick clear jelly that surrounded him and in which he was suspended, like aspic. Her ex-husband, after hearing about Fowler from the children, had called her up and said, “Just who is this guy? What does he do?” Fowler’s not a person who
does
, Beth wanted to say. Instead she said, “He thinks.” Her ex sighed and asked her to put the children on.

But now she had the same question. “What kind of work, exactly?” she said.

“I’m writing a book,” Fowler said, looking at her with the same expression with which he’d told the lie at the party: a little sheepish, his eyebrows and shoulders raised, as if he expected to be found out. But she didn’t care if he was lying, or if he wrote a book or not. She opened the door for him, and he picked up the suitcase and led her out.

They developed a routine. During the day Fowler went back to his hovel, and Beth went to work. She was an office manager, and all day long she coordinated appointments and ordered supplies; then, at home, she coordinated her children’s appointments and bought groceries. Management was her specialty. When work was over Beth made dinner and Fowler either read or spent time with the children, if they were there. Their favorite story was about a turtle who steals a calabash from the gods that contains all the wisdom in the world. He hangs it around his neck and hurries home. But then he comes to a tree trunk lying across the road, and he can’t cross it because the calabash gets in his way. For some reason—stress, excitement, lack of time—he forgets that he can put it on his back, and instead he gets so frustrated that he smashes it. And ever since that day, Fowler told the children, wisdom has been scattered all over the world in tiny pieces. Beth couldn’t understand why her children liked this defeatist story, though Fowler did a great imitation of the turtle smashing the calabash into a million pieces. Later she discovered they had no
idea what a calabash was. They thought it was a little animal, and the ending a killing scene. They were bloodthirsty in their misunderstanding, but she didn’t want to correct them, because they enjoyed it so much.

Fowler said he had to go to a conference and discuss his work with other ethnomusicologists. Beth bought him the ticket and sent him on his way. What she hadn’t realized was how much she’d miss him. The children moped too. The days were long, the nights longer. The world felt empty. One afternoon she left the office early and went to Fowler’s apartment, her excuse—not that anyone was asking—being that she ought to take in the mail. The room was dusty and the gourds were thick with grime. She thought maybe she could clean them for him, so she took an abandoned T-shirt and began wiping them off. The gourds varied in size and shape, from large and round to long and phallic. Touching these last ones reminded her of Fowler in bed, and she missed him more than ever.

She picked a gourd up and fondled it, and while putting it back she dropped it on the floor. Fortunately it was sturdy and didn’t break. But it could have, and she knew she was crazy if she thought Fowler would appreciate any cleaning she did. He didn’t care about cleanliness any more than the other mundane details of the world. Quickly, as if he were coming home at any second, she returned everything to its original place and left.

When Fowler came back he knew at once what she’d done. He was sensitive to any change in his environment, any object out of place. He came over to the house late at night and said, “You were in my apartment.”

“Yes,” she said. “I wanted to do something nice for you.”

He didn’t believe her. He thought she was there to check up on him, to prove he was not in fact writing his book. Convinced that she didn’t trust in him or his work, he ran to the bathroom and threw up. Beth followed and talked to him through the door. She couldn’t understand getting so upset over something so minor, but this was Fowler all over, almost too sensitive for the world.

“It was just because I missed you,” she said.

“You want me to be something I’m not.”

“I want you to be here, with me.”

“I’m not conventional, Beth. My work is abstract. I’m not the man in the gray flannel suit.”

“But I don’t care,” Beth said.

“Everybody cares,” Fowler said. She could picture him crouched on the tile floor, his long thin limbs curling and twitching like an insect’s. “They don’t see how much of it is here, inside my head. How much real work is going on. Everybody thinks I’m lying about the book, that just because I occasionally tell
stories
I can’t also be
truthful.
” When upset he was prone to italics. “But the book is real and truthful. It’s the most real and truthful thing about me. Maybe the
only
thing.” He was moaning, kind of.

“I was just cleaning,” Beth said.

“Everyone wants to see
results.
They want
objects,
” Fowler said. “They don’t measure the quality of
ideas.
”

She saw that she’d hit a nerve and there was no hope of unhitting it. She also saw that explaining she had no investment in the quality of ideas wouldn’t help. But she thought that maybe she could distract and soothe him alternately.

“I’m happy you’re back,” she said, putting her hand on the door, trying to put sex in her voice. But Fowler wouldn’t budge.

He stayed in the bathroom until she went to bed, and then he went back to his place.

In one of Fowler’s stories—not that they were
his,
but that’s how she nonetheless thought of them—a mosquito falls in love with an ear. Why an ear? The story doesn’t explain. The mosquito doesn’t consider the union’s prospects unlikely. It has an idea about the ear and will not be denied the rewards of that idea. It doesn’t understand why the ear won’t reciprocate its affection and only when repeatedly, permanently rebuffed does it start to bite.