The Brooklyn Rail

This issue’s original story, “Her Blue Hat,” plays with the intersection of psychology and voice. In narrating, Ohringer’s speaker runs up and down the register of early adulthood with confident falsetto, stammering fry, and warm imagery deep from the chest. A line like, “I had my sights set on missing the boat,” seems at first to be delivered with the studied slackerdom of Ethan Hawke’s character in Reality Bites but, when taken in context, reveals engaging vulnerability. I had the odd feeling in reading this story of liking these two characters most precisely when they were most annoying. Every word seems selected with great care to faithfully record and represent both the surface-level fumblings and the deeper, unconscious inclinations that set the trajectories of two lives.

*

She wasn’t, I should add, on the way to meet me. So I waited in this cafe, Cambridge, and imagined things; sipped my second americano, contemplated the spliff deep in the chest pocket of my peacoat. I noticed nothing. I delighted in my own failure as a flaneur. Back when she’d had a habit of meeting me—at cafes like this one, at bars where we’d make a show of ordering obscure digestifs, in her apartment by Inman with its rusty radiator that released fumes she was convinced were slowly killing her—I always fell into this odd panic, waiting for her. That she would appear and I wouldn’t recognize her. That I’d mistake another woman for her, or her for another woman. That she’d walk right in front of me and I’d look at her as though she were merely an attractive stranger. I could never master her mutability. Early on in whatever it was we’d shared together, she said to me that the meddlesome professor who’d introduced us had himself fallen victim to this mutability of hers. I think he never knows who I am, she’d said, of the meddlesome professor, who will not go on to play a role in this story.

I walked back into the Square and on Story Street (I’m not shitting you), where I saw a woman wearing a blue hat. She was walking in front of me, this woman, by how many paces I don’t know; she was walking underneath a blue hat. It was, the hat, of a deep rich and enriching blue, and its blue had, beneath its initial and unforgettable blueness, a tinge of black. I was deeply acquainted with this hat, with its blueness and the subtle shade of black underneath its blueness. I told myself that the woman in the blue hat a few paces in front of me was not her but simply a woman in a blue hat a few paces in front of me. It was a bright day of false spring, pigeons flapped meatily in the air, people chattered and loped in their dumb celebration of sunlight. 

Her hat did something to my pulse. I knew it was her, I knew it was her hat, and it almost eviscerated me, to know that she was, on this fine day of false spring, existing so insouciantly in the blue hat, striding down Story Street so uncaring and behatted. And what if it wasn’t her? If it wasn’t her, if it was just a so-called stranger, someone or in this case a woman who was unknown to me who happened to be wearing a blue hat, then I was confronted with a new kind of horror, because all women wearing blue hats would become her, and the fact of their not being her would mock my longing for her. I was adamant about not experiencing longing. I am more or less a stranger to longing.

An hour later, she texted me just as—I think—I knew she would: Did I see you earlier? I think I saw you earlier. 

I wrote back immediately. I’m not above that. I said, “You were wearing your blue hat.”

She had a dead brother and she was famous for this loss. It was unacceptable to talk to her about her brother—not because the subject would generate pain but because she’d already talked about it, the loss, so volubly, to so many people whose ears were avid for her story, that she was, at this point, tired of her own talented narration. If you don’t know the story of her dead brother, what a generous and intricately fucked-up guy he really was—how sensitive and verbal and with a capaciously detailed memory, too, back when he was able to remember things—then I suggest you talk to her yourself. She might at first be charmed when you broach the subject. She might direct you to her first collection of personal essays, which remains, I think, unpublished. She’s prolific, in her way.

I have no compelling losses to speak of. Absences, yes. I entered the world without a father, about which I’ll say no more, and women have historically found this lack of mine compelling. She wasn’t herself above having a certain fascination with my fatherlessness, which is not, however, the subject of this story. But it might, I don’t know, resonate here a little latently. I think she knew, for example, even before the meddlesome professor had introduced us—over drinks, at a book launch, whatever—that I was fatherless. She knew about my silly little myth well before we’d exchanged words, glances, fluids. Here’s a parallel construction for you: just as she was famous for talking incessantly about her dead brother, so I was for talking incessantly about my absent father. We were part of a community of dedicated talkers—we trotted out our tales over drinks and cigarettes. We were stars, she and I, in our little cesspit of prodigious monologuists. It would never work between us;. we were made for each other.

The blue hat had been her brother’s. It still carried his accruals and accretions. It was truly a unique hat—telling not showing, fuck it—made of thickly-whaled wool (or so I think; I’m no expert in sartorial matters). It was a winter hat, constructed for a colder epoch. I loved seeing her in her brother’s hat, I think. We all loved seeing her in her dead brother’s hat.

“Such an entrancing shade of blue,” I wrote to her, another text, an addendum to my own response. I was trying consciously to sound manic about her hat. Probably I still sound this way. In a classically composed narrative, I would give you a more sensuously alert description of this hat, but that’s not what I’m doing here. I hope you believe me when I say I was mad about her dead brother’s hat. I think she believed me then. She wrote back right away: “I promise I won’t talk about my hat if you come over. Which maybe you should.”

I’d never actually heard her unspool her famous tale. Not with my own ears, I mean. I pictured her brother as pale, as tall, though I’d never seen him; I hadn’t even seen him in or through her words. I knew what people said. I’d heard what they said about what she’d said. Her story, from what I gathered, featured little in the way of physical description. Her telling had all the hallmarks of quiet unconventionality. I wrote back: “I’ve never heard the story from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”

In those days, not so far in the past, honestly, I was up to my ears in my own story. I would parade my self-exhaustion. I would cry, I’ve had it up to here with myself! I need more of me like I need a fucking hole in the head! I would drink 12 beers and say things like this. I was insufferable and possibly still am. My own voice soothed me, though, just as her own voice soothed her. She’d sort of left me.

She lived in a whimsically rotting little apartment by Inman Square. There was always a desperate grad student living in this apartment; it was passed down among them. She’d inherited it from a girl whose alluring and chronic suicidality we all adored. My friends and I would sit around for hours rhapsodizing on these women. They were logorrheic, histrionic: they let themselves leak lovely language. They performed crises to give us something to write about. We wrote nothing. We talked. I’m still talking. In any case the apartment, as I said, had an old rusty radiator that released a noisome scent. “It’s filling my lungs with toxins,” she would say, in the middle of night, in her sleep. Despite her brother’s untimely death she wasn’t phobically committed to survival. I’d heard about her snorting questionable substances, heard about her drinking herself into questionable states. For a brief moment I accompanied her into these states.

I arrived with a grotesquely-large bottle of cheap, caustic red wine. This was the same wine we would drink together when we were, so to speak, together. We’d gotten drunk together three or four times, is what I really mean, when I speak of the moment, the episodes, of our being together. We’d made a pact, when we started drinking the caustically-cheap wine, that we wouldn’t exhaust each other with talk. We were sick of our friends and ourselves, sick of our ceaseless spillings of story. 

Okay, she and I did not co-narrativize. So you’ll ask what we did talk about, when we were together, inasmuch as we were together, back in our era of acidic wine. I’m not sure that deserves much adumbration, really. We talked about fucking indie-rock guitar textures, I don’t know, certain moments in a Conrad novel that she’d been haunted by, a professor who’d once said something ruthless about me. Stripped of repertoire, we flirted with unoriginality in a real way. Sometimes we sang songs. We used her moldy Greek yogurt to make meatballs of remarkable tenderness and tang. We waited ecstatically for choruses to arrive, her old bluetooth speaker always cutting out and dying. We smoked cigarettes but made no mention of childhood asthma (mine, if you must know). She wore her brother’s blue hat sometimes. I don’t think it beamed with significance for me, then.

These episodes of quaint quiet togetherness had taken place in the fall. Now it was early spring (a little seasonal context; I remember that I encouraged you to forget the pigeons), the streets salted still in advance of snow that had never fallen. I saw her on Story Street, it was unpersuasively perfect, and now I wanted to extract from her the story of the hat. Or: I wanted, finally, to allow her to spin her fucking yarn. Or: I wanted to inflict upon her the boredom of listening to her own precious story. I wasn’t sure what to do with my limbs, my body, when she let me in. We didn’t hug, didn’t kiss. I pointed at the wall. “Rohmer poster,” I said, merely to say something, but I was off-topic and unthematic. “I forgot about that poster.”

She was wearing the hat. How did I manage to exclude this detail from the moment where I enter her claustral little apartment? Let’s say I was just trying to inhabit my confusion, my comfortable panic. We hadn’t seen each other, truly seen each other, in six months. “I thought you always said that the French nattering in his films was—what?”

“Exasperating,” she said. 

We really talked like this. 

“I think that’s the word I used.”

I stood there by the door, still holding the bottle of wine, and she brought both hands to her hat and pulled it down, all the way over her forehead, so that her face began only at her eyebrows. I resented the hat in this moment because it deprived me of the sight of her forehead, which was and is a lovely forehead, one that makes you think of beautiful breeding gone a little too far. Her mother was of real suicidal Boston Brahmin blood—uncles throwing themselves out of windows in polished verse, great aunts writing staid self-censored memoirs. Allow me the caricature. Her father’s grandfather was a Viennese Jew who’d helped Freud discover the sex organs of eels or whatever. This is entry-level lore. You probably know it already yourself. She’d never shared it with me directly. “So our pact’s over,” she said, still gripping the hat, like it might blow away in the wind.

Her brother died a mysterious and horrible death. She was 16 when it happened, a junior at Andover (she was neither repulsively nor alluringly Salingerian, for what it’s worth). Her phone, a flip phone, this being 2005, started vibrating like crazy at four in the morning, her mother calling from Vermont. The night before—and this is a detail I glommed onto but which also, I think, haunted her—she’d been fingered, for the first time, by a boy. The boy, not even her boyfriend but just some lit-mag loser with an expensive vocabulary, had been bewildered as she was by the penetration. The act itself was just a canonical-type early sexual experience which, but for its happening on the eve of getting the news of her brother’s grisly death, would probably have held, for her, little significance. I won’t linger on it.

I wanted to be hungry for detail. But I was rather rigorously committed to becoming a writer manqué. I had my sights set on missing the boat. On missing out. When I knew her in a love-adjacent context, I routinely drank myself into blackout. More than once I showed up at her door spinning; often I had only the haziest memories of our nights together come morning. I routinely vomited upon beautiful cashmere sweaters, mine and hers. I was 25, 31, 19. There was so much future left in the tank that the present hardly mattered. A prestigious educational institution had awarded me a generous stipend. Once a week I talked to undergraduates about Bob Dylan. I don’t know.

We sipped the terrible wine but it didn’t help with my lucidity problem. “We’re over, it seems,” I said. “The pact no longer holds.”

“But you already know the story. The story of the hat. My brother’s hat.”

“I know certain versions of it. I know the conversationally anthologized one.”

“Does it really make any difference? At this point?”

I heard in my mind’s ear where this exchange could go: I heard myself forcing the story out of her. I heard myself torturing the tale out of her. “And you’ve already written about it, too,” I said.

“You always said you hadn’t read a word of my work.” She picked up the absurdly large bottle of awful wine. “I missed this elixir of yours,” she said, pouring herself another glass, another jar, another Mason jar. I made a point, silently, of not asking her for more myself. “Let’s sit down,” she said. Our custom was to sit on her floor. Our tradition was to spill red wine on the rug. Once or twice we’d had sex on this floor, this rug, knocking over jars and bottles and laughing. The fibers of the rug contained a history of our juices and fluids. We sat down on the rug, Indian style, like little kids at a sticky assembly. Her hand, I saw, was creeping towards my knee. “I’m sorry about that weird message I sent,” she said. Almost in a whisper. “It’s just—you know. A weird time for me.”

I hadn’t come to her rotting little apartment for an explanation. You know this already. Everyone knows everything about me. “Dreary explanations aren’t necessary right now,” I said.

The first night we’d spent together, something a little awful had happened. She told me about it in the morning. She said she’d woken up to feel me trying to pry her open. With fingers, mine, the middle of the night. I had no memory of this intrusion. Sitting there with her on the rug, I remembered the way she’d told me, that morning. She’d been quiet and plain in the telling and seemed embarrassed, for me or herself I wasn’t sure. Is it too neat to invoke this memory now—a memory which isn’t quite mine?

“Sometimes I envy him,” she said.

“Your brother.”

She nodded. Sometimes people really do nod like that. 

“Not because I don’t, like, appreciate life,” she said. “Living.”

“Elegant cases have been prosecuted against it. Or so I’ve heard.”

“You’re not fluent in nihilism.”

“That’s true.”

“Then don’t say things like that.”

She tapped my knee with the hand that had been creeping towards it. I put my Mason jar down on the rug, inviting spillage, and covered my knee with my own hand.

Our fingers did mingle for, say, a moment. “That’s not why I came here,” I said.

She stretched her legs out on the rug and lay back, propping herself up by her elbows. Her feet were very close to me. She was wearing thick woolen socks. She suffered in the cold, turned purple and livid, something to do with circulation. “We can, though, if you want. It won’t change anything.”

I tried something new: “Was he a virgin when he died?”

“How would I know that?”

“You were close.”

“We didn’t talk about things like that.”

“How would you feel if you knew he died a virgin?”

She laughed, as if to herself, as if remembering a funny something. “Again, envious.”

“Don’t be flirtatious right now.”

She moved a foot lazily towards my jar of wine. “You’re going to spill it,” I said.

“That’s our tradition. I’m trying to suggest that you drink some more.”

“You don’t like my interrogation.”

“What if I told you that I’m on good terms with my brother’s death? That I simply wear his hat because it’s warm and I often feel frigid. Physically frigid.”

I won’t say that I grabbed one of her feet. I just put my hand on it and closed my hand around it a little bit. Her brother had been found mutilated, bones emerging from flesh, at the bottom of an elevator shaft. 

I said: “Okay, why did you text me earlier? Saying you’d seen me.”

“I don’t know—why are you fondling my foot? I thought you came here to force a story out of me. You could have at least tried to, like, seduce me first. Seduce the story out of me, I mean.”

“You know I don’t believe in foreplay. We’ve been over this. Even your friends told you that. Before anything happened between us.”

“Imagine being a guy famous for disliking foreplay.”

I considered saying, imagine being a girl famous for having a dead brother. I stretched out on the rug, propped myself up on elbows so that I wasn’t confronted only with her ceiling. I mean, I could see her eyes and she could see mine. She had hazel eyes. She was left-handed and a little prideful of that fact. “Can I try the hat on?” I asked.

“Oh, so you want to be my brother? Is that it? You look nothing like him. Maybe the hair is similar but that’s it. He never force-fed girls wine and made them tell stories of their terrible grief. He’d have loathed you. He was very protective of me. Unlike my father…”

I shuffled across the rug so that I was lying parallel to her. We both had long legs and I liked seeing them extend together, hers and mine. She let her head fall on the rug so that she was staring up into the ceiling.

“Will you swat my hand away if I go for the hat?” This is what I said.

“Will you swat mine away if I go for your dick?”

Was this how she played with her brother, back when he was a living kid? He was 20 when he died, the bottom of that goddamn elevator shaft, somewhere in Central America. On the rug, the rotting apartment, we had the air of cats pre-pounce. We were giddy. We were a little violent. She lifted her arms straight up towards the ceiling, slowly, yoga-like. “I’m going to serenely let my hands fall onto my brother’s hat, and you’re not going to touch it. Then my hands will stay there for the rest of this afternoon.”

She was smiling, I think. I think she was laughing, laughing like a little girl with a delicious secret. I looked up at her fingers, her knuckles, the purplish certainty of her hands.

I waited for her hands to fall.