Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

Mark was gone but Tyler was still there, fiddling with his bike at the rack, his violin packed into a wire case mounted on the back. His dad had made the case for him, and when he first started with the orchestra, three years earlier, he’d asked her to come out and see it, assuring her that it secured the violin safely, with no chance of damage. Seeing him there, Lisette felt terrible. Tyler was a gentle, sensitive boy with a dry sense of humor he’d probably inherited, along with his looks, from his father, an engineer. When they first met he’d been stick-thin and given to striped polo shirts, with a strange habit of plucking the front of those shirts nervously, over and over, fraying the fabric just above his right nipple. He’d grown out of this, and filled out in general; he was a young man now, affecting a vaguely punkish look, skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors and a wallet attached by a thick silver chain to his black studded belt. She wanted to tell him that you couldn’t be punk and play in a New Jersey youth orchestra. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry.

“Tyler,” she said, walking up to him.

“It’s okay,” he said immediately. He didn’t want to have to hear the apology, which would embarrass him all over again; he wanted to go straight past it, back into normalcy.

“I’m having a rough time,” she said brusquely. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

He nodded, looking down at his bike.

“I’ll see you, okay?”

He nodded again. As she was walking to her car, he called her name, and she was so rattled that it wasn’t until later, pulling into the driveway, that she realized he’d called her not Ms. Gilson but Lisette. She turned around.

“Whatever’s, like, bothering you — you deserve better.”

This made her laugh. “How would you know?” she said.

That night she couldn’t sleep. Dan snored lightly next to her, a sound as profoundly comforting as any she’d ever known. He was her husband, and almost more than anything else she wanted him to be a father. Her pelvis ached with such emptiness that she couldn’t stop palming it, soothing it, trying to ease its pain. She knew it was psychosomatic but it felt absolutely, unequivocally real. As real as hunger, or thirst, or life and death.

She’d made up her mind before she even knew what she was contemplating. It was like falling down a flight of stairs — no gap between the moment your foot slips and when you’re lying in a heap on the floor below.

This is what she did: at the next rehearsal, she smiled at Tyler. And he smiled back. Just like that, in the passage of one second, she knew she had him. Before a single word had been spoken, or a single gesture enacted, or a plan even hatched. And it was so easy. It turned out all the banks in the world were giving away free money, and all you had to do was ask.

Her body, now, was a cunning machine. It had its hunger and emptiness; it would be taking matters into its own hands. She let it go about its business, not stopping to ask any questions.

“What’s got you so happy?” Dan said to her that night, over dinner.

She looked at him in the candlelight, her sweetness, the love of her life. He was craggy and tired-looking, with bags beneath his eyes. She saw his features overlaid not with the young man she’d first met in college but with the old man he would someday become.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just happy to see you.”

That night, in bed, she ran her hands through his hair, her fingertips tracing his shoulders and back, and coaxed him into sex. She had to believe that, as close as they were, as much as they meant to each other, some part of him had already entered her, was already inside.

After smiles, a little extra attention. Tyler seemed to be waiting for it, to know and accept what was happening. He stayed after rehearsal, packing up his instrument slowly, dropping his sheet music and studiously, laboriously rearranging the pages. She remembered this kind of unspoken agreement between people conspiring to be alone from the old days, so ancient now, before Dan. It had been ages since she took up a flirtation. But she still knew the deal, remembered how it was done. She, too, was slow, and they walked out together into the fall evening, and she offered him a lift. She realized that he’d purposefully stopped riding his bike to rehearsal just in case this would happen, and she felt a rush of gratitude so warm and intense that it was almost like love. He sat in the passenger seat with his long legs cramped, knees high and awkward, violin case tucked between his feet. Outside his house, he thanked her for the ride. He barely looked at her. And that was all.

But from there they built a routine together. Perfect collaborators, they brought a relationship into existence, and nursed it into the world. Soon he was the one she looked to when explaining a concept, a beat, what she wanted, and he would nod. He was the first violinist, and she had him leading the strings in rehearsal while she worked separately with the woodwinds or percussionists. She relied on him. And he waited for a ride home and during that ride told her about his classes, his plans for college. He was a bright kid and had gotten into Princeton, so excited to be leaving home, and for all that entailed. What the other kids thought, if anything, she had no idea. If asked, she would have said he was a natural leader. She would have told his parents, He’ll go far.

At the Christmas concert, the orchestra tackled the Tchaikovsky with shrieking abandon and labored gamely through the Hindemith in front of their families, who smiled dazedly until it was over, then started clapping a little too late. Afterward, she stood for a while chatting with Tyler and his parents. The mother was a bottle blonde, short, well preserved. The father, of whom Tyler was the spitting image, still had all his hair, had stayed trim, and seemed, when he laughed, to have good teeth.

In the car driving home, Dan wouldn’t look at her. Just before they pulled up to the house he said, “What the hell are you doing?”

She said, “Going home?”

“I mean with that father. Staring at him. Laughing your head off. Flirting.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

He parked. He still wouldn’t turn his head. “I’ve never seen you like that,” he said. “You’ve never acted like that before.”

She was defensive, angry, proud — and how perverse was that? Proud of her husband, who knew her well enough to sense, right away, that something was going on, though he couldn’t have been expected to figure out how low she’d sunk. “I was just being myself,” she said.

· · ·

There were no rehearsals over the holidays. On January 15, the first evening they came back, she slept with Tyler in the rehearsal room, on a table. There was no first kiss, only her hungry body and his teenage one, his thin biceps working, his angular hip bones cutting into her thighs, his skunky, hormonal smell mixed with the scent of Doritos and hair gel. It was so different from sex with Dan as to constitute a completely new operation, more like coaxing a squirrel out of your garage, everything jumpy, a little feral and uncontrolled. But she was patient and showed him how she wanted it done, same as conducting. The act itself was over very fast, with most of their clothes still on. To tell him not to say anything to anyone would have insulted his intelligence, so she didn’t.

Afterward, he kissed her neck, a dry, close-lipped kiss, like a thank-you note.

In total there were three times, all of them in the rehearsal room after everybody else had gone, twice on the table, once in a hellacious, back-aching position involving two folding chairs and a French horn case. He seemed to want to experiment, either already tired of their routine or else wanting to make things more exciting, perhaps degraded, in accordance with whatever fantasy he had about adult sex, and she tried to accommodate him. It was the least she could do.