How to Read an Unwritten Language (24 page)

My mother's face in the coffin suddenly appeared before me. If any of us had managed to really
see
her, to see through her disguises during those last terrible months, would anything have changed?

Sensing my distraction, Sylvia said, “I'm talking too much.”

“Not at all,” I said, offering a cautious smile
.

“Really, I can't believe I'm telling you this.”

“That's a phrase I've heard more than a few times before.”

“Oh?”

I shrugged. She was near the end of her story, and then we'd never see each other again
.

“So,” she continued, frowning. “That night my mom and dad whispered for hours, though they have different memories of what they talked about.” Sylvia laughed, “When I was a kid that was the source of some of their more amusing disputes. But they both agree that's when they fell in love. While Grampire was sleeping they stole his car, and my mother never saw him again
.”

“I hadn't thought of this before,” I murmured, the words surprising me as I said them, “but my parents never once said anything about when they met.”

“Well, the point of my story is this: I've always tried to imagine my father's face when first he looked down that peephole. Impossible, I know, especially if this was a story he and my mother made up. But I wondered, was he just curious, like the customers who'd soon be lining up? Did horror cross his face, or anger—at Grampire, or at himself for agreeing to dig that hole? Sadness? The expression I've always wanted to be true was a certain kind of attention, a recognition in his eyes that showed he
got
her, even if he didn't know her yet.”

Sylvia looked out the window. Her story wasn't over, but I wasn't sure she was willing to tell me the rest. She turned back to me, her skeptical regard, I thought, a kind of armor, protecting her from whatever words she'd decided to say. “Back at the park, just for a moment, I thought you … looked at me that way. I had a hunch about you. Maybe I was wrong.”

I slumped in my chair at the airport lounge and waited for my boarding call, weary after a three-day conference of independent insurance agents. My mind filled with too much business talk—such-and- such coverage for such-and-such an occasion, the newest payment schedules and benefit packages—I watched people rushing along the terminal hallway or loitering at a nearby newsstand, and I was alert to the grim-faced, the haunted. Here was the true poetry of my profession, a version of insurance I'd been practicing for months now: I searched passing faces for any absence that might fit with one of my objects.

My flight number was called, and as I gathered up my briefcase, I noticed a neatly tailored man with well-kept gray hair hurrying by. One of his arms rose with a slight, warding-off gesture, though no one walked near him—what was he shooing away? Something I couldn't see, perhaps something he couldn't even remember, because when he swiped at empty air again I understood he wasn't trying to protect his expensive suit. That gesture might be from his childhood: his young self inside him, a boy's now forgotten fear or sorrow rising up in nervous motion. He was defending himself, after so many years, from troubles he might never escape.

I could offer him a small comfort, even if I had to miss my flight. I followed him through the crowd and waited nearby while he lined up at his departure gate's check-in counter. When he stopped at a sports bar I sat on the stool beside him. I ordered scotch too, but he didn't notice this or the three video screens above us filled with baseball, basketball, boxing. Under all that furious motion he stirred his ice cubes in circles.

Because he might kick back that drink in seconds and hop off the stool for his flight, I didn't have time for his edgy movements to tell me what I needed to know. So I took a chance.

“Mutual funds?”

He stopped that stirring, turned to me a bored, I-don't-need-this smile. “Excuse me?”

I'd made a mistake, perhaps, so I offered a broad, self-deprecating grin and said, “No, I'm not selling, just asking. I thought that might be your field.”

His face was flat: he wanted to frown, didn't want it to show. He didn't like being guessed.

So I decided not to try, and instead confessed: “Me, I'm a collector.”

Something flared in his eyes, an interest he wanted to hide. I took a sip of my drink, making a show of enjoying it, and waited. If the conversation was over I'd simply catch my flight.

“What do you collect?” he finally asked, his question not quite idle, and to emphasize his seeming disinterest he glanced away at one of the three television screens, where a leaping shortstop made a catch.

“Oh, everyday objects, really. But only those that have stories.”

“Stories?” Though he still stared at the screen, at the pitcher and manager conferring on the mound, he waited for my reply.

“I'm interested,” I said, “in objects that once shared a secret with their owners.”

This was something he wanted to hear about, because as he faced me I might as well have been another screen, offering a particularly absorbing show. There went his hand again, averting something invisible. It seemed gentler now, almost a sign of healing. If every conversation is a kind of dream, as I had come to believe, then now he had found the place inside himself where I fit.

I coughed lightly, hesitated. “Before saying any more, I should tell you that I followed you here. You see, I noticed this.”

I swung my arm in a tight, nervous arc: a passable imitation of his gesture, and the man drew back a bit on his stool, as if I had suddenly become unclean.

“I had a feeling,” I continued, “that your gesture is the symptom of a condition that might benefit from something I have with me.”

He nodded, his eyes weary. He was going to have to hear out this pest. He set his drink down on the bar and I looked down at the lacquered surface, at the little trough of uncollected tips by the beer taps. The coins' tiny faces glistened in the light, but what sort of speaking had ever come from those lips, those eyes? Each face in profile stared toward the edge of its circular world, unaware of us. As for paper bills, Lincoln, Hamilton and Jackson gaze out in three- quarter view, as if there's something much more interesting to see right behind our shoulders. At least George Washington regards us from his little oval window, his eyes half closed, his mouth a tight line. Yet they seem unwilling to reveal anything of their mysterious travels or who has held them in their previous lives. That's the power of money—its indifference to us. Also its great emptiness. Certainly what I had to offer would speak to this man in ways his prosperity could not. Money hadn't yet warded off whatever chased him. It never would.

So I set down between us an oval stone: polished dark gray, with a deep nick across it the length of a fingernail. Its smooth surface flickered as if alive from the reflected, shifting images of the television screens.

His hard face told me that he was considering leaving, so I said, “Most people are accustomed to seeing value in objects. I hope you'll grant me that some objects, at least, have value for their stories. Just watch this stone while I speak, then decide if this is a joke.”

He shifted in his seat, not quite the beginning of an exit, and I added, “You think I'm wasting your time. Why would I waste my own?” I took my ticket from my jacket pocket. “I've missed my flight, sitting here talking to you.”

“So you'd like me to miss mine as well?”

“Your choice. My small misfortune creates no obligation on your part.”

“Of course not.” He sat down and motioned to the bartender for a refill.

I showed no satisfaction, merely nodded my head and gestured to the stone. “It's not particularly important how I came by this stone. More important is the man it once belonged to. Years ago he lived alone, in one boarding house after another. He only took part-time jobs, because they gave him just enough money to live on and more than enough time to collect rocks. Every day after work he'd find an old lot or a bit of woods, and he'd get down to his true work—loading stones into a box he'd collected from a liquor store or somewhere else.

“When he was done, he'd haul that box to his tiny apartment. Slowly he filled up the rooms, with more boxes stuffed with rocks and stones until there was room for no one but himself: boxes up to the ceiling, with only a narrow path leading from the door to his bed and hot plate, and from there another narrow path to the toilet and sink. Those boxes had once held canned foods, quarts of paint, bottles of wine, power tools, books, small appliances, and their logos must have faced him along those narrow paths, images of the world he was trying to crowd out.

“He stayed in an apartment for only as long as it took him to fill it up. Then, somehow dissatisfied, he abandoned what he'd built, leaving behind a bewildered and angry landlord. He found a new town, a new part-time job, and settled in again, and over a few years he traveled a zigzag up California. I sometimes think of that path he took as stitches over an enormous wound.”

My companion's hand flickered beside his untouched drink. He seemed about to speak, but then thought better of it, and I continued, “Whenever I think of this man's story, I always wonder: When he first moved in, did he feel the emptiness of the rooms opening inside him, so he had to fill them up? What was worse for him: an apartment with all that space, or one with almost none? Well, whatever he felt, I often think how methodical his strange life was: stone by stone, box by box, apartment by apartment. But one day the floor by his bed gave way under all those heavy boxes. Fortunately, no one was home in the apartment below. He was gone too, at a day job washing dishes. But when he returned, more than just the curious were waiting for him.

“This stone here, the man kept it with him for all the years he was institutionalized, working it over in his hand, trying to split it down the middle with his fingernail, until he died. But what's most interesting to me is its mystery: I look at the stone, with its scar from his fingernail and its polish from his handling, and what I see is an unfinished battle between anger and forgiveness.

“It's yours now if you'd like it. You can start up where he left off—continue the groove until you cut the stone in two. Or you can rub it until it's even glossier.”

“So,” he said, as interested as I knew he would be, “now we negotiate a price.”

“No problem there. I give away objects to anyone who needs them.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “What?”

“It's yours. No obligation,” I replied, but he'd gone somewhere inside himself. I watched a couple free throws on one of the screens above us, and I waited for him to return. Quickly enough his eyes fixed on me again, now with an odd mixture of bitterness and amusement.

“All right. I accept your stone, Mr. Storyteller. I have a lot of reasons for my interest, though they really all boil down to just one. And now, if you'll indulge me, I have a story for you.”

I nodded, pleased with this unexpected bargain—the telling of a secret I'd never otherwise hear.

“It's about a woman who hated men most of her life, and from what I know she had good cause,” he began. “She deserted her first husband when she discovered she was pregnant, and when the child turned out to be a boy, she gave him away. She refused to ever remarry, though she couldn't entirely keep away from the company of men. But whenever she became pregnant she dismissed her latest man, and if her child was a boy, she sent him away too. She did, however, raise two girls. Most people would say her behavior was unaccountable, and leave it at that. But I can't afford that particular luxury. That woman was my mother.”

He stopped, reading more than surprise on my face, and said, “You like that little twist? Well, I can tell a story too.

“My father was the first husband, the one who started it all. He somehow found out about me when I was six. He took me out of the orphanage and then took me along to where my mother lived. I didn't know this man—'Daddy' was a word I didn't know what to do with at the time. I watched him while he drove, watched him talk to me, watched one side of his mouth moving. He talked about this Mother I was about to meet, all the shame she was going to feel, and his voice grew more and more bitter.

“I wanted him to stop talking. In fact, I wanted him to stop driving, too. Just pull off to the side of the road and look at me. Give me a friendly grin, extend a hand, touch my shoulder, squeeze it. Or maybe I didn't wish it at the time, maybe that's something I wished for later, much later. He wasn't the sort of man who dished out large helpings of love—far from it. But in his favor I'll say that the way he treated me drove me to excel in the world in ways that he never could.”

I set my drink down on the bar, shook my head. I'd seen far more in this man's nervous gesture than I at first realized. He paused, not especially surprised at the effect of his words, and then continued. “My father drove for hours until he stopped in a little town, on a street filled with whitewashed, boxy houses. Whenever I see a house like that now, I think of my mother. Hers had a small open porch, with bright white curtains in the windows. While my father stood at the door, not quite ready to knock, I stood at one of those windows, and when I looked in through a crack between the curtains I saw a woman dressed rather formally—high collar, dark hair pinned up—sitting in a cushioned chair and doing nothing but watching a little girl toddle around the floor.”

The man's voice was low, I could barely hear him above the noise of the bar, and I leaned in to listen.

“I was certain that woman was my mother, and the little girl her daughter, and I couldn't help wondering why wasn't I inside there too? Then I noticed the girl held something—a comfort rag I sometimes think, but it also could have been a doll, or a child's white cup. It was white, I remember that. The girl—my half-sister, of course—walked unsteadily, and my mother's arms reached out, ready to balance her. Or to hold her. I'll never know, because my father's fist was pounding the door.