Secret Language (12 page)

“How nice,” Connie says. “That’s very nice.”

“You will come?”

Connie looks around the room. “Uh, sure.”

He puts his hands together like a prayer. “I knew you would.”

“You mean now?”

He grins. “They will like you better if you put on your clothes.” His face is clean as an apple. She wishes she were him.

“Marcel, I can’t. I’m sorry.” Never in her life has she been to meet a lover’s parents. She can picture his parents’ house: a sitting room filled with modest heirlooms, a crucifix tacked to each wall. Thin, happily worn carpets and a faint, musty smell, the smell of time. On his mother’s sewing table, planted among robustly colored spools, a portrait of Marcel as a child. And his parents—he has spoken of them so often she can see them plainly. His mother is short and plump, a coil of auburn hair wound into a bun atop her head, a rosary hidden in her apron pocket. His father is even shorter, his hair combed back with water. They preside over their home, their son, with the zeal of saints. How could she love a man who is already this much loved?

“My parents are very pleasant,” Marcel assures her.

“Of course,” Connie says. “It’s not that.” She gets up quickly and pulls on her clothes.

“You will love them,” Marcel says. He is pleading. He is—all at once—impossibly young. “You
must
come.”

“No,” Connie tells him gently. “No.”

He leaves bewildered, and Connie watches him go without a word. As soon as she hears the elevator’s whine, she makes straight for Stewart’s room.

“She returns,” Stewart says, looking at his watch.

Connie walks in past him, drags a chair from a corner and turns on the TV. “I’m sorry about today, Stewart,” she says. “I’m rotten to the core.”

Stewart folds his arms like a schoolmaster. “I take it Marcel is history?”

Connie stares absently at somebody singing and dancing on the screen. “Too young,” she says. “Too goddamned happy.”

“Hah! I hear you, sweetheart.”

Connie kicks off her shoes and curls her legs under her. She watches Stewart pull a new bottle of wine out of the dresser.
“Stewart, do you ever get the feeling you’ve lived the same year over and over for the last decade? The exact same year, time and again?”

“Yes,” Stewart says. “But look on the bright side—that would make us about twenty-six.”

They pass the bottle back and forth for a few minutes.

“We drink too much, Stewart.”

“Speak for yourself.”

Connie snaps off the TV. She looks at him. “I know you’re not happy.”

His voice is ragged. “Some night I’d just like to lie down with somebody, you know?” His eyes are such a mild blue, she thinks, like violets at the end of their season. “No sex, no nothing.”

“True confession, Stewart.”

“Shoot.”

“I’m sick of sex. It’s ready-set-go all night long with a guy you won’t remember in a year.”

“Bingo.”

Connie grins, takes the bottle from him. “Don’t you have any glasses?”

He gives her one. “You know what I wish?”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Stewart,” Connie says quietly. She puts her glass down and turns to him. “I’ll lie down with you.”

He waits a moment. Without a word he stands up and strips down to his shorts, while Connie turns down the bed and slips in, propping her head against the pillows. She opens her arms to him.

Stewart gets in beside her, wriggling down so that his head rests on the soft cotton of her blouse, in the warm hollow between her shoulder and the curve of her breast.

“This is so nice,” he murmurs.

She closes her eyes. “I agree.” His hair, downy as a child’s, grazes her chin.

“Sing to me, Connie.”

“I can’t sing.” As a child she listened to Billy and Delle many nights, always in some other room, their voices rippling over the scales, pelting the filmy quiet. She had wanted her parents so badly,
without knowing what it was she meant.
I want, I want
, was as far as she ever got.

“Sing a lullaby. Anyone can sing a lullaby.”

She waits, follows her memory as far back as it will go, until she finds a fragment, something half-remembered, in her grandmother’s voice.

“All right,” she says. “I’m warning you, Stewart, this won’t be pretty.”

It isn’t pretty, and it doesn’t put Stewart to sleep. Connie doesn’t mind. Stewart’s weight on her is substantial, even grave. But he is no burden, this man who expects her to do nothing but lie here and sing.

Faith crosses the white swatch of sidewalk in front of the Sheraton and enters the sumptuous lobby with a sense of relief. It’s all so changed: the sidewalks fixed in her memory are gray and narrow, the lobbies strewn with mean, low chairs.

Within a few minutes she is walking down a long corridor with her sons and sister, their footsteps a dull drumming on the carpet. The boys install themselves noisily in the room next to hers, and Connie disappears behind the door across the hall. Faith can hear her sons on the other side of the wall as she unpacks: Chris’s low, lively commentary punctuated by higher, tentative comebacks from Ben. She moves to the window. She is high up, looking deep into an alley. The last light of day clings to the brick in a sinister way, barely delineating some human or animal shapes—she can’t tell which—from the wall they hunker against. She feels afraid, as if something down there were dead or dying.

In the books she read as a girl, beautiful heroines languished over their deaths, filled with exquisite regrets. She used to play at death herself, pressing the back of her hand to her forehead. She had seen Delle die this way on stage, swooning into Billy’s arms. But when real death came, it was not the same. After Billy ran his car into the shallow depths of a pale Maine field, it was Faith whom Delle asked to identify the body. She waited till morning, lying awake, envisioning how he might look, and what she found was worse than everything she had seen in the fits of her sleep. She couldn’t look long, but long enough.
Good
, she remembers thinking, then a rush of remorse and horror.

And when they found Delle on the couch one day, white, stinking of brandy, her mouth slung open to expose the steel-gray fillings in her back teeth, Faith was once again cowed by the ugliness of death. While Connie dragged a washcloth over Delle’s unyielding face, Faith pulled the pant cuffs down to hide her unshaven calves. She picked up the bottles one by one and set them on the coffee table, labels facing front, as carefully as if they were her mother’s stiffening fingers. No matter what she did, she couldn’t make death look like anything else.

She and Connie had sat at the table of the kitchenette for a few minutes, staring at Delle’s gaudy silence, her reproaches and admonitions and self-pity gone for good.
Are you glad?
she had wanted to ask Connie, but she didn’t, for if Connie said yes there would be two of them in the world, two awful girls with no feelings.

A knock at the door startles her unreasonably, but it is only the boys and Connie, a trio of expectant faces. The boys seem younger in this monstrous city, a benefit Faith hadn’t banked on. Connie is telling them about a baseball player she met on a flight. “William something,” she says.

The boys look at each other.

“No, wait.” She frowns. “William was his last name. It’s
something
Williams.”

Ben’s mouth drops open. “Mitch Williams?”

“No …” Connie says. “I’m sure if you said the name I’d remember it. I think it might have been French.” It touches Faith that Connie is trying so hard to please them.

“White or black?” Chris asks.

“Black,” Connie says. “Really tall.”

Ben begins to look suspicious. “Aunt Connie, are you sure he’s in baseball?”

“Actually, no.” The boys exchange a faint smile that Faith has seen a hundred times. It puts her instantly in cahoots with Connie: two ignorant adults.

“Wait,” Connie says. “His first name is Donovan. Donovan Williams, is that anyone?”

Nothing registers on the boys’ faces, but they’re still trying. By
now Faith is trying, too, though she knows very little about sports. “What did he look like?” she asks.

“Let’s see, he was good-looking, with”—Connie puts her hands up around her head—“you know that squared-off haircut the black kids wear now?”

Ben slaps his forehead and groans. “Oh my God,” he says—to no one, to God himself, to the world at large. “Aunt Connie met Dominique Wilkins and I bet she didn’t even get his autograph.”

“That’s it!” Connie looks at Faith, then at the boys. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry, Aunt Connie,” Chris says. “He’s only the best forward in the NBA.”

“
Highly
debatable,” Ben says, and Faith laughs. Her children are still children in some ways. She cheers up.

They all head for the elevator, Ben running ahead. “I just talked to Armand,” Connie whispers. “He expects us at ten tomorrow.”

Faith nods, holding her breath, trying to calm herself. Connie, too, is tense; Faith can see it on her face, though she looks beautiful, a fuchsia shirt blousing over her shoulders.

“You look so different,” Faith says. “I guess I’ve never seen you dressed like that.”

“Stewart calls them my go-get-’em clothes.” She adjusts the comb that fastens her hair. “I get ’em, all right, but I can’t seem to keep ’em.”

“Who’s Stewart?”

Connie looks puzzled. “My friend.”

“Oh.”

“He’s my best friend, Faith. I’ve known him forever.”

“Stewart … yes. I remember.” But Connie has so many friends, Faith thinks. Dozens and dozens of colleagues, how is she supposed to know one from the other?

On their way down in the elevator, Faith steals a long look at her sister. She tries to picture Connie in an airline uniform, gliding among the passengers, chatting them up. As the elevator door opens, Faith says, “You look pretty, is what I meant to say.”

“Well, thanks.”

They take a cab to Little Italy. The boys choose a restaurant:
busy, authentic, filled with families. While they wait for the food, Ben tells Connie his favorite joke.

“These two monks live in a cave,” he says, shouting a little to be heard over the bustle and chatter.

“
Three
monks,” Chris says. “You’ve told this joke a million times.”

“Aunt Connie’s never heard it, have you, Aunt Connie.”

Connie smiles. “I’m sure I haven’t.”

“See?” Ben looks at his brother, then starts over: “These
three
monks live in a cave. One day a horse walks by. Five years later the first monk says, ‘That was a nice-looking horse.’ Ten years later the second monk says, ‘That wasn’t a horse, that was a zebra.’ Fifteen years later the third monk says, ‘If you two don’t stop this endless argument, I’m moving out.’ ”

Faith, who has also heard this joke a million times, chuckles politely. Chris groans and tips back on his chair.

Connie puts down her wine glass, snickering softly. She clamps her hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking, until her hand drops away and she begins to laugh out loud, her cheeks going pink, the day’s tension draining from her features, her laughter musical, warm, filled with relief. Suddenly she’s howling, clutching her stomach. “Monks!” she shouts gleefully. “Monks!”

Faith is struck still: has she ever seen Connie laugh like this? Is this how she is with her friends?

“Get a hold of yourself, Aunt Connie,” Chris says, looking around self-consciously.

But she doesn’t, or can’t, stop. Faith watches her, puzzled, until, infected by Connie’s melodious giggles, she herself gives up to a fit of laughter. She covers her face and lets it go, bubbles of sound released like a fistful of balloons. They laugh together, helpless, their voices crossing in the air like a two-part song.

Chris is still monitoring the crowd, as if he expects somebody he knows to catch them, but Ben looks as pleased as a game show host. “It’s all in the delivery,” he tells his brother. He pats his chest a couple of times.

This triggers another howl from Connie. She puts her palms on the table as if she’s afraid of falling. “Hoo!” she sighs, wiping her
eyes. “That was a good one, Ben.” She giggles again. “Faith, those monks remind me of us.” She fishes a tissue out of her purse and blows her nose.

Faith isn’t sure how Connie means this. “I suppose,” she says. Her laughter drains away, she already misses it. “That felt good.” She remembers sitting across the kitchen table from Connie and Joe in her new married home, the three of them laughing over a poker game.

“Can we please act like normal people now?” Chris asks. After all the years of helping his father get Faith to move, loosen up, let go, he’s looking at her as if she might spontaneously combust. Dressed in a shirt and tie—a deliberate try at sophistication—he’s the soul of decorum. She’s the unpredictable one, foisting her laughter on strangers. This fleeting reversal amazes her. She wishes Joe were here to see it.

When dinner comes they eat heartily, mounds of spaghetti, lasagna for Faith, baskets of bread. For the moment, Faith forgets why they’ve come to New York in the first place. For the moment, they might be a family from Indiana on their first vacation.