How to Read an Unwritten Language (29 page)

*

Sylvia sat beside me in a corner coffee shop, her hand groping for mine. The door to the coffee shop jangled open and she lifted her head sharply, but only two young women in identical black dresses had made their entrance.

She turned back to me, her lips tight. “Last night I had that dream again. We were at the movies this time, something noisy and violent. His hand was stroking my shoulder, and the more people on the screen that screamed and died, the more my shoulder hurt, it hurt until
I
felt like screaming—and I woke up. My shoulder throbbed, and I got out of bed to check in the bathroom mirror. I had to twist a little, and the pain had faded, but right where I still felt tender, I'm sure there was this faint pink line, like the imprint of a fingernail.”

Sylvia hesitated. “But maybe it was a, a rash? It could've been …”

She hedged and reconsidered and though I said nothing to contradict her, by now I knew how possible it was for anyone to be overtaken by a fierce and frightening urge. I kept to myself my spying and the easy violence I'd discovered within me, or Sylvia might find me as suspect as her husband. To chase this thought, with the same ease that I'd slipped into someone else's voice at the mall parking lot, I assumed the inflections of another me and asked, “Can't you just leave him?”

Sylvia crumpled her paper coffee cup. “I've got to go, the bus'll be here in a minute.”

“Bus?”

“Richard's borrowing my car while his is in the shop.” She tossed the cup in a wastebasket. “Somebody backed into him, or something.”

So her husband had heard no warning in that story about the black shell. My face a casual mask, I kissed her good-bye.

That night I parked near Sylvia's house, prepared to wait out the night, telling myself my presence might somehow prevent trouble. Before an hour passed, Richard tramped down the brick steps and drove off in Sylvia's red compact. Was she all right? Ready to leave my car, I caught a glimpse of her slim figure passing by the living room window, so I sped after Richard, now nearly two blocks away.

I expected to be led back to the mall, but after a few miles he cruised down the center of our small city's modest downtown, slowly exploring block after block for a parking space. Since Richard knew what I looked like I kept as far back as I dared, and when he managed to find a space on a dark side street I quickly drove past, my face averted.

I circled the block, returning to Main Street just in time to see him open the door to Tammy's Tavern and vanish inside. I smiled. If he'd taken to haunting a bar, maybe he wasn't so sure he could manage whatever trouble came his way. I could even imagine he'd found the shell and kept it hidden in a drawer, a secret waiting to reveal itself.

Again and again I rode around the block, waiting for Richard to settle into his first drink, and each slow circuit echoed that distant carousel ride with Kate when we'd both realized just how relentlessly I'd been pursuing her. One last time I turned down the side street where Richard had parked and I idled a few yards away from the red compact. I hated the thought of ramming into Sylvia's car, but how else could I fulfill the prophecy of the mysterious shell, show her husband what kind of trouble could be had when you ignored the warning signs? Richard needed to feel singled out by fate even more.

Twisting my front wheels carefully and using all my experience as an insurance agent, I gauged exactly how I might do the most damage. The driver's side door should collapse, and the window glass shatter to sharp rain. The side mirror should easily shear off from the impact, and already I could feel its untethering. Was this another secret poetry of my profession, an intimate familiarity with wreckage and ruin?

I scanned the rearview mirrors for any passersby. With only the empty street as my audience, I gunned the engine and tore into the little import. It groaned and crumpled and I urged against the seat belt that held me in place. I sat there a moment, utterly calm, even satisfied—Good, let Richard consider what could have happened to him if he'd been in the car. The ease of this thought so shocked me that I almost forgot to escape. But I managed to back up and speed away, searching for the safest, most deserted route home.

*

I turned from one side of the bed to the other, haunted by that battered car: I'd disfigured my love for Sylvia while trying to release her from her husband. And if he didn't take this latest warning, what was I prepared to do next? Something had begun within me, something that might not stop. I pressed my hands against my closed eyes, afraid of any further escalation, yet still it faced me: Richard's car forced off the road and upended in a ditch, its dark wheels slowly spinning, like a carousel, spinning until elusive sleep slowly offered me an escape.

It was no escape at all. I dreamt I was that damaged John Wayne statue, my glued pieces coming undone—first an arm, a shoulder, then the bottom of my legs lopped off, and I divided at the waist and tumbled to the ground. I tried to reach out and repair myself, but my body was wooden, and my unblinking eyes could only stare at the sky.

I rose to the alarm's grating buzz and faced the familiar bedroom walls, frightened by what I'd done and might still do. This crazy knight-to-the-rescue spiral had to stop, and I reached for the phone and dialed Sylvia's number, prepared to confess everything.

She answered in the middle of the first ring, as if she'd been waiting for my call.

“Sylvia, I have to tell you—”

“Michael? You wouldn't believe—it's … so strange—”

“What?” I rasped out.

“I don't know how to describe—”

“Richard?”

“He came home last night with a tow truck. My car was so messed up, and his breath … but he swore he hadn't been driving and drinking. He told another story about some hit-and-run with the parked car. But he was subdued about it. And then this morning, after he called a car rental he rang up the repair shop and told them to stop work on
his
car—”

“Stop work?” I repeated, not sure I'd merely heard what I wanted to hear.

“He told them to quit working on his brake light. But he didn't stop there, then he told me not to bother fixing
my
car and I said, What do you mean, how am I going to get around, and he screamed at me that the car was totaled, we'd just have to live with it, and then he flicked his hand in that way and I thought he was going to … but he stopped. He looked terrified, scared of himself.”

I clutched the receiver, its dangling cord a weak tether. Somehow my foolish risks had succeeded, and now, before I could reconsider, I took one more. “Sylvia, now's the time to ask for—”

“Oh Michael.”

“No, listen, if he seems scared of himself, don't wait for something else to happen.”

“This doesn't have anything to do with the horoscope, does it?” Sylvia replied and I knew she was nearly ready, if only I'd keep at her.

“Look,” I said, “tell him somewhere public, like a restaurant, where he can't give you any trouble.”

Sylvia said nothing. She wanted to hear more.

“I can wait nearby if you need help,” I said, pacing along the edge of my bed. “Call him now.”

*

I set my glass down again, adding another weak ring to the spirals on the counter, slowly working my way through this ale that grew more sour with each sip. The morning's exhilaration now lost, I stared in the mirror at the reflection of the restaurant's front door, directly behind me, and waited.

They were late. Perhaps Sylvia had resigned herself to living with the ambiguity of Richard's intentions. I took another sip and considered the bleak possibilities even if she were able to leave him. How could I tell her what I'd done—for all Sylvia's fear of her husband, he'd never accomplished the sort of violence I'd proved myself capable of. Yet if I didn't confess, I'd have to remain a stranger to Sylvia, my secret transforming our intimacies into a sham.

I heard the door behind me open and I glanced up at the mirror again. An elderly couple made their way to the hostess' table. I turned back to my reflection, at those calculating eyes, and there, clearer than ever, was the family resemblance to Mother and Laurie. Playacting had brought me to this, and now I understood their great loneliness, the isolation created by the stories they'd woven around themselves.

Again the door opened and Sylvia and Richard walked in. With a nervous sweep of her eyes she located me at the bar, and I stared down at my drink. If Richard followed her gaze and noticed me, everything would be ruined. Yet perhaps that's what some part of me wanted.

When I looked up again I easily found their reflection in the mirror: an ordinary couple, sitting at a table near the window. Richard kept working away at something buried in his jacket pocket, and I knew he turned that little black shell over and over in his hand, miles down that false road. And what of all the other objects I'd given to people, or allowed Preston to sell at his gallery? I'd been so certain they'd be a comfort, but some of them might have proved to be delayed explosions, shards slowly working themselves into the lives of their new owners.

As we'd planned, Sylvia sat facing me. I took in through the mirror the tense lines of her distant mouth moving silently, her voice lost among the nearby conversations and the sound of food served and enjoyed. Richard nodded, following whatever it was she said, those words that were about to change her life, and his, and mine.

Without our usual breezy jostling and teasing, Sylvia and I prepared dinner together in silence, just as we'd done the night before and the night before that. She stirred a cream sauce for the chicken breasts with tight turns of her wrist and stared down at the tiny white whirlpool she'd created, brooding, I imagined, over Richard's sad decline. I chopped away at a thick, sweet onion as if I could somehow rearrange the pieces of his story, this man who'd turned out to be far more complicated than the character I'd decided him to be. Sylvia had kept me a secret, as I had asked, and after Richard agreed to the divorce he'd insisted on giving Sylvia his own car, and he had hers towed off to a junkyard—a mystery to Sylvia, though I knew he was trying to reverse the influence of that scallop shell, perhaps even win her back. He took the bus to work, then he walked to work, and when it was clear that Sylvia wouldn't return, he walked but didn't always make it to work. Eventually he quit his job at the map company, and he split the sale of their house long before the divorce was finalized, and left town.

I reached for a tomato, slit it in half, and thought of the postcard that had arrived last week: an image of an oversized slice of cake, layered with dark gummy icing, and on the other side a faraway postmark but no return address. One little word—
sorry
—repeated as many times as a cramped handwriting could squeeze into such a small space. “Too late,” Sylvia had murmured, crying as she read it, “too late,” while I'd held her in my arms.

“Michael?”

I turned to see Sylvia with her hand hovering above the wok cover. She lifted it off the counter with a flourish, and there was the Felix the Cat night-light that I'd kept hidden on a corner of a closet shelf.

“I'm sorry to be so dramatic,” she said, “but when I found this thing I was sure it had a story. You're collecting again, aren't you?” Sylvia held the night-light in her hand. “Well, I like the stories too, so why keep them from me? Please, Michael, don't turn me into Kate.”

My own false face was growing as hard as these objects that I indeed now secretly collected. There were others she hadn't discovered—a set of Swiss Alps coasters, a hand-painted doorknob, and a Davy Crockett toothbrush—but none of them had stories. They were merely things I'd picked up, small, empty stages for a playacting I tried to contain. Whenever I was alone I whispered to their quiet surfaces, confessing the gift of a black shell and its consequences, and at the end of each telling I imagined confessing to Sylvia as well. Sometimes she forgave me.

“I don't know what you mean,” was all I could offer.

“Then let me ask you this,” she said, her eyes uncertain. “It's been weeks since my papers were signed—when are you going to pop the question?”

“I don't know,” I said, miserable, and I reached for another tomato.

“Why not? It wasn't that long ago you said it was what you always wanted.”

I nodded, concentrating on cutting through the soft red pulp, sliding the knife down until a sharp ache stopped me. I puffed out a shock of breath and reached for a paper towel.

Sylvia grabbed my finger, examined the neat flap of skin and welling blood. “Oh no, you need some first aid here.” Pulling up her t-shirt, she held my hand to her belly and smeared my blood against her warm skin. “You want to be chased? Is that it? I'll chase you.” Sylvia led my finger under her pants until it fit snugly inside her. The cut tingled with pain and I tried to move away, but she pressed against me.

I slipped my finger part ways out, and then in again, my palm pressing against the thick coils of her hair. My other hand groped for hers, held it, squeezed, just as I'd squeezed the tiny hand of that doll's arm I'd given away so long ago. But our hands were warm and alive—so much better able to see us through the world together. It is possible, I thought, and though our mouths sucked at each other I managed to say, “Marry me?”

“Marry you?” She laughed. “I've had a minister on hold for a long time now.” She unbuttoned my shirt. “He's a member of some Protestant denomination you've never heard of. I know you won't believe this, but in his spare time he's an auction caller.”

*

We drove through long stretches of gently sloping landscape, the rise and fall lulling my fears, letting me hope that a single ceremony might fade my deforming secret to a faint white scar. We arrived at the outskirts of a small town and stopped before an ordinary, one-story, whitewashed building. Besides the sign, NEW LIFE CHAPEL, only a cross on the lawn and a tiny stained-glass window on the front door lent the place the look of a church.