Signs and Wonders by Alix Ohlin

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 househad 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.

Who Do You Love?

    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?
Ifelt 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