How to Read an Unwritten Language (27 page)

Sylvia turned to me. “Is he joking?”

“Hear anyone laughing?”

“No. So what's with him?”

“I've never quite figured out Jack. It might simply be a tactic to make people feel they're getting bargains, but I think his attitude actually tamps down the prices he's trying to raise.”

Soon one of Jack's helpers was holding up the atomizer. “Lovelycut crystalcutcrystalcutCRYSTAL, whatdolhear? Bid'em atFOUR bid'ematFOUR bid'ematFOUR, FIVEoverthere, Iseeyou, FIVE.”

Sylvia raised her card twice, warding off the interest of a stout woman in a flowery dress. When the bidding hit seven dollars the woman dropped out.

“OnlysevenonlysevenonlySEVEN?” Jack glanced over the crowd, then scowled at Sylvia as if he wanted her to bid against herself. “SOLD at seven dollars.” He turned to the young woman recording the sales, his voice just audible as he said, “Mark that cheap.”

One of the assistants brought the atomizer over, and Sylvia turned it and watched the crystal design catch light.

“It's pretty,” I said.

“Mmmm.”

“Hey, how do you feel?”

“Well, to be honest, a little stained.”

“You're right. Jack can take the pleasure out of an auction.”

When the John Waynes were offered, I picked them up as a single lot, for eight dollars and another of Jack's cracks. “Step right up folks, we're giving it all away here,” he said, and I was glad he did, because I realized that Jack—poor, bitter Jack—might have something of value to offer Sylvia.

“He goes after everyone, doesn't he?” she said.

“I'm beginning to think that Jack has an idea in his head about what something is worth, and he gets annoyed if the bids don't match.” Then, as casually as possible, I added, “He must have a thing about precise measurements.”

Jack started the bidding on a tea cozy, and Sylvia turned to me with a quizzical smile that slowly widened. “So if this Jack fellow worried less about, say, the exact temperature or barometric pressure for tomorrow, then everyone would be having a much better time at the auction.”

“Well, you're being a little too hard on old Jack”

“No, I think you're right. Jack needs to loosen up.”

She picked out my John Wayne statue in the box—his shoulder chipped and waist imperfectly glued in place—and sprayed air behind his ears with the atomizer. “The horoscope, medicinal knick-knacks—Michael, you're more complicated than you look.”

“Thank you, I think.”

We continued along the tables, past an international spoon collection, swimming goggles, a muffin tray holding earrings and bracelets, when Sylvia stopped and said, “Wait—that tape recorder? The one with the sad voice. Was that one of your objects with a story?”

Shamed at my deception, I could only nod.

Sylvia frowned, hurt. “But why did you say—”

“I'm sorry, I couldn't tell the story then, I needed to release it. When you walked by, I was getting ready to leave the tape recorder on the bench, for someone else to find.”

“So it's gone?”

“As far as I know.”

“Then you owe me its story, don't you?”

If a story was the price for forgiveness, I gladly accepted the exchange. How easy to imagine this man I'd never met, as he sat on a veranda while the sun set, his face unraveling from the strain of all he felt. “He was in love. But there wasn't anything he could do about it, because he was already married, and in his culture adultery is impossible. So he was going to—”

“That's enough,” Sylvia said. “I'm sorry I asked.”

She picked up a set of blue salt-and-pepper shakers and returned them with barely a glance. Her hand briefly hovered over a cat-faced clock, and then she stared off at the crowds milling about the other tables. When Sylvia turned her face to me I saw that odds had already been calculated, the same sort of terrible arithmetic I'd encountered when I first met Kate. She pulled at her turquoise ring, slid it down to the knuckle to show me what it hid: a much thinner, pale band of skin, certainly made by a wedding ring.

As we drove from the auction those wooden John Waynes rattled in their box on the backseat, and I kept trying to believe that this woman I'd pursued wasn't another of my mistakes.

“Yes, I was deceptive,” Sylvia said, answering my unspoken accusation. “But I've been fooling myself too, trying to pretend I'm not married.”

Pretending. “But you are,” I replied.

Sylvia rested a hand on my arm. “Look, Michael, you just bid for that statue because you liked its story. Would you like to hear mine?”

Shamed, I nodded, then turned onto the entrance ramp for the highway. We drove a few miles before she began, “I've been floundering for months. Last weekend I cranked up an old Stones song—'Gimme Shelter'—and blasted it out the window. There's this moment when a backup singer takes up the melody and her voice seems to split in two, and I feel like something inside me is splitting too. I played the damn song over and over, hoping somebody passing by would see me in the window and know right away that cracked voice said something about me.”

I imagined Sylvia's sad face peering out through a screen window, the tight wire mesh like pixels on a television screen. Again my face was pressed close to her image during that weather broadcast, with little shocks of static electricity surging across my skin, and I almost forgot to turn off the highway for the exit back to the diner.

“Anyway,” Sylvia said, “not one taker.”

She picked up the atomizer and fingered its tassel. We passed a few more stands of trees, then the first strip mall. The diner was just ahead. I pulled into the nearly empty lot and parked beside Sylvia's car. Too soon, too soon. With the engine idling, I turned to her with a wary glance and waited. Then Sylvia said, “So, my husband, he works for a map company. He's been off on a field survey, checking the accuracy of a new map. His favorite part of the job, though, is working in the office, making trap streets.”

“Trap streets?”

“Mapmaking is pretty competitive—what isn't, I suppose. Sometimes rival companies copy each other's maps but don't give credit, so they don't have to pay any royalties. That's why Richard adds a false road, maybe two, on each map.”

“What's that?”

“A street that doesn't exist. If it appears on a pirated map, then there's clear proof of copyright infringement. That's the trap.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, unhappy with the finality of
trap
, the constriction of its single syllable. “Didn't you call them something else?”

“False roads?”

“That's a better description. You took a wrong turn somewhere.”

*

We straddled the wet spot on my bed until Sylvia inched closer, whispering, “This time it's your turn to talk.” She clasped my hand, pulled at a finger until a knuckle popped, a little tug that offered release. This woman wanted to be found, and she wanted to find me, and so I confessed the secret knot I'd formed with my brother and sister in the face of our mother's performances. Sylvia tugged again, setting free my mother's giddy escapade on the roof, her collapse in the bowling alley, our reflection in her eyes as she lay dead on the lawn. All the stories Kate had refused to hear.

Sylvia listened in silence, her eyes filled with a strange recognition. “My parents played parts too. Every reaction had to be operatic. If Mom burnt the toast, it was a forest fire. For my dad, finding a lucky penny was like breaking into Fort Knox. I remember when I learned how to tie my shoes, they acted as if I was miraculously fluent in Sanskrit. But they enjoyed their acting, enjoyed it so much that I did too—each day was a kind of show, and I think you would have loved them. I miss them.”

“Do you mean—”

“A car crash. With a truck on some icy road, my second year of college.”

“I'm sorry, I—”

“It's taken me a long time to appreciate the irony of such a melodramatic exit, because sometimes … I wonder if it really was ice that caused the crash, or if they were in the middle of one of their B-movie scenes and … Anyway, I'll never know, will I?” She offered a brittle smile and sighed. “If only they'd been around on my awful wedding day.”

“Awful?” I repeated, my voice a frail echo of itself.

“It's difficult to talk about.”

I couldn't reply, still shocked.

“We'd just cut the cake,” Sylvia began. “Richard picked up the fork, flicked it in an odd way I couldn't help noticing, and then he speared a piece of cake for me. When I opened my mouth his hand slipped and the tines scraped the roof of my mouth. I nearly gagged, but stupidly enough, all I could think was, Don't throw up, don't spit out the wedding cake, and somehow I managed to choke down the taste of my own blood. Richard acted as if nothing had happened, I managed to smile and everyone applauded.”

I groaned at Sylvia's words but I was far from her, standing on a dais with Kate, champagne glasses tinkling all about us. Kate flinching as I searched her eyes, violated by her own husband before our guests. “My God,” I heard my distant voice asking Sylvia, “What did you do?”

She let out a slow breath, stared at the white ceiling. “We danced. Richard threw my garter belt to the grooms, I threw the bouquet to the girls. Then we left in the car for the hotel and I worked up enough shouting and crying to rival my parents—and Richard kept insisting he hadn't meant to hurt me, he'd just slipped, and then he'd been too embarrassed to say anything in front of everyone. I wanted to believe him. When we first met, he was resisting his family's tough guy ideal, and I was attracted to his struggle. I think I missed my parents' melodramas. But now I think he's fighting a losing battle.

“If we're having an argument and really going at it, he makes this little gesture, this little offhand
flick
. Maybe it's unconscious, maybe not. I can't tell. But it reminds me of the way he shook that fork, and I can't help myself, I just have to give in. And I hate myself for that.”

Sylvia's face so filled with uncertainty that once again I saw her on the TV screen, surrounded by flashing weather maps and longing for ambiguity's antidote. I reached out to stroke her hair, but she held my hand and again chose a finger to pull. I heard the soft pop of the joint, felt its pleasurable loosening, and I told her of my father's stony facade and the unexpected tenderness I'd heard in his voice when he fired me. She pulled another finger and I described his battles with Laurie, then another and I told her of my courtship with Kate. Then I finally confessed my own wedding day.

When I finished she lay quietly beside me, offering no comment.

“I know I should have protected her better,” I said, “but I failed her.”

Sylvia's hand reached out again. “You hurt her. You did, even if you didn't try to. But if it was intimacy you wanted, she should have given that right from the beginning.”

*

Sylvia's confidence grew before the camera, and then one evening she stood with a sly smile before a new display of color graphics: a flutter of tiny wings in one corner of the screen rippled into a bank of cumulus clouds, which swirled into a tornado that dissipated into clear skies.

With a flourish of her pointer, she announced, “Tonight I'm beginning a new feature for the weather report: Sylvia's Mea Culpa Corner.”

She paused. “You may remember that we had scattered showers throughout the region this morning, then two straight hours of rain in the afternoon. Perhaps you also remember that last night I predicted sunny weather. I was wrong about the temperature too—by eight degrees. And the rain completely blew my humidity count. So I'd like to apologize to anyone caught without an umbrella, to any family that had a picnic spoiled. Mea culpa! Unfortunately, there's not much any meteorologist can do about it. Let me tell you about the Butterfly Effect.”

While Sylvia described chaos theory for the viewing audience, behind her the satellite video of the curve of the globe thickened with clouds. She snapped her fingers and those weather patterns began gliding across the continental United States and Canada, then flipped back to the beginning and kept repeating at unlikely intervals as if affected by Sylvia's words. That same dizziness I'd felt when I'd first watched her forecast returned, not because of the computer graphics but because Sylvia had found her solution, asking forgiveness for mistakes large and small. I felt certain that her viewers would grant her absolution.

Sylvia turned and waved her pointer at the clouds like a wand and the sky cleared, presaging sunny days, rain arriving only at welcome intervals. “Even though I try to look like I'm in charge, I still goof up. So tomorrow, I'm going to tell you just how well tonight's prediction went.” She paused, the camera moving in as she said, “And on Friday, I'm going to give you my win-loss percentages for the week. I challenge my competition to do the same.” Then Sylvia rattled off the numbers for the next day with a modest authority that somehow redeemed the limits of her predictive powers.

*

Sylvia's ratings rose enough for her to be featured in the local paper and a radio call-in show, and then she received invitations to give speeches at the Elks and Rotary Clubs, a high school science class, the Women's Business Council, and even the Mood Disorder Association. We met when we could, brief moments that wouldn't arouse suspicion, and her weather reports served as a substitute: knowing I was home and watching, she added a new nightly feature offering a tidbit of meteorology for her audience that was also a secret aside for me. With her face in giddy close-up she explained how air pressure is caused by the bouncing of uncountable molecules, creating “a microscopic tingling against our bodies”; she revealed how clouds warm up the night.