How to Read an Unwritten Language (18 page)

I sat back in my chair and glanced away. Ever since paging through that government booklet on accidents, I'd been reading up on the subject of insurance—homeowner and life policies, major medical and collision coverage. The whole idea seemed so ordinary, but it was all I had to offer, and so I offered, “Maybe insurance.” I looked down at my plate and the dregs of tomato sauce.

“Insurance?”

“You know, as a … career,” I said, now alert for any sign of amusement on her face. Instead, her eyes took on a faraway look.

“Why not? You're a kind of poet.”

“Me?” I said, blushing with pleasure at Kate's compliment—was that how she saw me?

“Sure.”

I thought of the strange, airy feeling that sometimes swept through me, frightening and exhilarating both, when I found words for her drawings. Was this poetry, somehow? “But,” I said, confused, “what's that got to do with—”

“Oh, poets, composers, they like to do that sort of thing.”

“Who? Do what?”

“Oh, Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives …uh, Kafka, too. They all worked for insurance companies.”

“Really?” I said, but when she explained further, I realized with disappointment that their jobs had been merely the source of a paycheck. Still, I remembered reading a few poems by Stevens in an English class, how they flowed with a kind of liquid music that made me go back to them again and again. If I were somehow a poet, wouldn't it be possible—even if right now I hadn't the faintest idea how to go about it—to make a kind of poetry
with
insurance?

The check arrived, yet we lingered at our table, perhaps needing time to broach the still unspoken subject of us. Outside, people sauntered by and the steady stream of couples hand in hand, arm in arm on their way to somewhere else in town, seemed to pull us from our seats, as if, in joining them, we might find a destination too.

So we ambled down the sidewalks, and the reflection of our faces in the storefront windows hovered over kitchenware, antiques, floral arrangements—all of them domestic scenes, cluttered interiors that seemed to welcome us, but we passed them by. Then, at the corner before an intersection, Kate stopped at an art store display: sets of colored pencils arranged in circles like a series of pinwheels. She lingered there so long I felt forgotten.

“Kate?” I asked, tugging lightly at her elbow.

“Okay,” she said, but didn't move, not yet ready to leave.

What held her so? I looked at the art display again and saw Kate's entranced, nearly transparent features in the window. She seemed to me a spirit, floating over those instruments of her inspiration. Then behind us two cars hurtled across the intersection at each other, across the reflection our shocked faces.

Tires squealed, followed by a horrible, grating crunch of metal. We turned to see the two cars twisted at odd angles, steam rising from their mangled hoods, a dark splotch against one of the shattered windshields. A door groaned open and a woman lurched out, clutching a purse, her blond hair already puddled with blood. Dark streams rippled from her mouth, which was somehow loose. She fell, and her purse emptied onto the pavement.

“Do, what do we do?” Kate asked, her voice raw with horror. I gulped, and gulped again, unable to answer.

The woman lay there, her face hidden by a red mop of hair. I approached but was afraid to touch her, so I knelt before her possessions strewn like litter across the road: a lipstick tube, a paperback mystery novel, a rectangular, lime-colored eraser, a foil condom packet, a hairbrush, a tattered train schedule, a small plastic bag of pistachio nuts, all of it ordinary evidence of a life now in danger. This scattering seemed so wrong, so terribly wrong, and I couldn't help myself, I began grabbing without looking, sweeping it all back into her purse and then snapping the clasp shut, as if that would somehow help her.

Kate stood beside me, sobbing, “My god my god my god,” and I managed to say, “We have to, to, to call an ambulance.”

A crowd had gathered by now and a man repeated, “Call an ambulance!” A grim-faced woman, her short hair streaked with gray, shouldered her way through the gawkers and began administering some sort of first aid.

Kate pulled me away, and we huddled together on the sidewalk across the street, listening to the drawn-out wail of approaching sirens. Less than a minute's difference, I thought: if I'd managed to lure Kate from the shop window we might have walked into that accident. But what if I'd lazed in bed a little longer this morning, trying to remember a dream; what if we'd dawdled longer at the restaurant—couldn't any slight change have altered our fate as easily?

Those pale faces of the crowd milling about the crushed cars, were they too tallying the day's events and what might have been? Perhaps we'd all walk home haunted by the fear that every day was a gauntlet of possible disasters.

By now paramedics rushed about and police directed traffic. The ambulance strobe lights cast an eerie, skittish dance of light and shadow over the intersection, reminding me of that bat's shivering wings on its predatory flight, how it swooped down without warning. I held Kate, as she held me, and I kept repeating, “Don't worry, it's going to be all right, all right.” She turned to me, eyes softening with the need to believe, and at that moment I glimpsed a secret that the jargon of insurance texts had promised and yet disguised: we all longed for refuge, for a private sanctuary. Was this something of the poetry I hoped to discover? If so, I wanted to always bestow this sort of comfort on Kate, and not only on her, but on myself as well, and every frightened face around us.

*

Kate and I sat stiffly at the center of a curved dais, facing the round tables of guests, a long table piled with presents, an open bar, and I couldn't help thinking of our farewell cartoon in the student newspaper: her drawing of a wedding gown and tuxedo hanging together in a closet, with my caption,
Someday we'll dance, we'll unbutton, we'll slip to the floor
. While a quartet of potbellied rockers cluttered the small bandstand and checked their sound system, Kate picked daintily at the catered plate of roast beef and sculpted mashed potatoes. I hadn't yet touched a knife or fork, hadn't even placed the cloth napkin on my lap, still amazed that merely a month after graduation we were married and about to begin a new life. Already the vows we'd exchanged in a nearby church, my nervous shoe tapping during the minister's short homily, her father's chronic coughing in the front pew, Kate's hand trembling as I awkwardly slipped on the ring, already they seemed like the intense memories of some distant event.

A delicate clinking now began. Spoons tapping against half-filled champagne glasses, the guests invoked us to stand and display our now official union with a kiss. Kate and I obeyed, bending our faces gently to each other, lips touching lightly, so much like that first, stunningly familiar kiss at the end of the wedding ceremony.

This time Kate whispered, “I love you, Michael,” intimate words that were rarely easy for her to offer. I accepted them with a goofy grin of joy at what I felt was the first golden moment of our marriage, and our audience clapped with real warmth, as if they understood just what my wife and I had exchanged.

We sat down, and the tables settled back into their individual circles of chatter, with the exception of one pocket of mutual unease—the table just below us, where Father and Dan sat together with Kate's parents. I couldn't imagine her father or mother had much to say beyond their already voiced disapproval over my upcoming job as an independent insurance agent in a minor, distant city, or Kate's too modest starting salary at an ad agency just a little too small in that same minor, distant city. Their eyes kept to the table of presents—quietly counting, perhaps, or considering what disappointing gifts might lay hidden within.

Next to them sat Father, stiff and stoical, a sentinel with knife and fork before the meal on his plate. Beside him sat Dan, who had indeed taken on more of Father's restraint—having already disposed of the main course he seemed to hope, with a cautious glance here and there at passing waiters, for the arrival of seconds. I found it hard to believe that this grown brother of mine now worked full-time at the nursery and still lived at the same home where years ago he used to shake the rungs of the banister like prison bars.

The chiming of glasses started again. Kate and I dutifully stood and kissed, and when with patient smiles we ended our clinch, I saw Laurie framed in the faraway double doorway. She'd actually appeared. Fresh from a world of low-rent theater productions, she'd certainly prepared for a dramatic entrance, with a long, dark dress and brightly patterned shawl, and her hair dyed a shocking red. Her eyes searched the room, and then with determined steps she made her way through the maze of tables toward Father and Dan.

But it wasn't her table. Much woe had passed between Father and me about this. Still furious at Laurie's quitting school mid-semester, he'd declared she wasn't to sit with him. He wouldn't attend the wedding otherwise, and out of one last, ignoble hope of healing my own rift with him, I'd finally given in, sure that Laurie would never show up.

Before I could rise and head her off, try to explain, Dan stood to greet her. Laurie grinned flamboyantly, certainly aware of the stares from the nearby tables as she approached. But Father gazed past his own daughter, as if she wore a disguise he refused to see through. He actually leaned over to my new mother-in-law and attempted a bit of chat, managing to elicit a few monosyllables from that tight-lipped woman. Laurie stood across from them, her face for a moment surprisingly defeated. But that unguarded look hardened when she saw that there was no place for her at the table.

Dan's face at least filled with shame, mirroring my own, and I waited for Laurie to make a scene. Instead she accepted Dan's offered arm and he led her to a remote table featuring an aging Aunt Myrna and a clutch of Kate's distant cousins. I turned to my wife, relieved that I'd kept the misery of these table arrangements a secret from her. She stopped picking at her scalloped potatoes, looked up at me and smiled, unaware of the family drama below.

Settled at her table, Laurie drained her champagne glass and waved for a refill, exuding a sharp sadness that I knew too well. She wouldn't look my way, and why should she? My sister knew that she couldn't have been banished without my compliance.

The glasses began clinking, and once more Kate and I stood and kissed. We'd barely sat down before that insistent tinkling began again. With a weary sigh, Kate rose to embrace me.

“Don't worry,” I murmured in her ear, “dinner'll be over soon. Then we'll all be dancing.”

But every minute or two that silly ritual repeated. The requests became a giddy, collective joke, much enjoyed by our college friends who, rowdy with drink, couldn't resist the impulse to tease us. With each clinch Kate grew increasingly grim-faced, until finally she turned her back to the crowd. I peered over her shoulder at the tables and saw my sister beaming drunkenly. Our eyes met, and with a flourish of her spoon Laurie tapped her glass, starting up another round of chiming. She was the ringleader of this prank, this was her revenge: she was trying to goad my wife to finally come out onstage and reveal herself.

When Kate and I kissed again, I tasted tears on her lips and understood that for her my tuxedo and her bridal gown might as well have been invisible—we were naked to everyone's eyes. Yet I couldn't resist the temptation of searching Kate's face for whatever stood poised within her, any hint I might find of what she kept hidden. But her moist eyes remained a blue sky obscured by strange gray clouds and she shuddered at the sight of my probing face, the opportunism of my tenderness.

Once again Laurie didn't allow us to sit down, and our guests' celebratory glasses echoed through the room, a tinkling that now resembled the sound of shattering. I bent to kiss Kate but she crumpled into my embrace. Chastened, I stroked her back, tried to maneuver her weeping face away from our audience. Everyone lapsed into an embarrassed silence, the room so still that they might have heard me whispering urgently what I wanted my wife so much to believe, that everything was all right, all right, and that I would always, always protect her. But Kate pulled away from these reassurances, and my reflection in her wide eyes seemed so small, as if, having run far away, she'd turned back, briefly, to regard me.

Sylvia sat across from me in the booth, her face once again in close-up, the weather map replaced by this Saturday lunch crowd's bustle—mostly young families heady from a morning's shopping at the nearby mall. How uncanny that she had chosen to meet
here:
this was the same diner where almost two years ago I'd given away one of my objects—a doll's soft plastic hand—to an older woman whose face couldn't contain her misery. I'd given away so many objects since then
.

We let the easy chatter of our neighbors serve as our conversation. Sylvia hid behind her outspread menu while I recalled how that unhappy woman had searched through the circular song file of her table's jukebox
.

“The rice pudding is great here,” Sylvia offered
.

I nodded. “So's the peanut butter pie.”

Our eyes met. Yes, we both knew this place
.

After we'd placed our orders, Sylvia said, “Well, you have some grand plan?”

I hesitated, suspecting more than the weather fueled Sylvia's caution
. “
My advice may sound pretty strange, actually. But bear with me
.
What you do is science, but because of that butterfly thing, uncertainty is built in. So why not simply give it your best guess?”

Sylvia's stiff face told me I'd have to speak with care. “There was a time not so long ago when I went through real trouble in my life, and I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but what helped me through it was the horoscope.”