How to Read an Unwritten Language (14 page)

“He asked me to sit on the stool with my back straight, and zombie that I was, I followed orders. Everyone started sketching away. It sounded like this faraway applause, and then I was goosebumps all over again. After a while the professor asked me to try something on my own for the second pose, so I kind of hunched my knees up and shook my hair over my shoulders, hiding whatever I could.”

But the curve of Kate's blouse did nothing to cover the breasts I imagined, and I shifted uneasily in the chair. Kate shifted too, an echoing that seemed to connect us, and she let out a long breath. “After another pose it was time for a break, so I slipped the robe back on, trying really hard not to look like I was in a big hurry. Nobody cared—they were concentrating on finishing their sketches.

“The professor motioned for me to take a look if I liked, and I was surprised that, well, that I wanted to. I made sure I stood behind everyone, though—I wasn't interested in any small talk, no eye contact for me. It was really odd to look at parts of me that I normally never saw—my shoulder blades, the back of my thighs. But only a few of the sketches caught anything I'd draw if I had the chance to watch myself from a distance.”

Kate paused, took one last sip from her glass. I stared at her feet, unable to stop imagining her long legs extending upward without jeans.

“But what I noticed most of all,” she said, “was that the three sketches of any student were pretty different, as if three separate people had been modeling up there. At first I thought they weren't any good at drawing, but then I realized that by shifting my hips, or hunching my shoulders, I'd made them see me in a new way, that somehow
I
was in control. Even though this made the second half of the class much easier, I never posed again.”

Kate sat back, and now that she'd finished I looked up at her, half expecting something—a little flick of her hair, her legs stretching to the point of touching my own, a shifting of her hips—that would bring us together in a tangle of arms in the center of her room.

But Kate's gaze was steady, controlled, the gray in her eyes seeming to absorb the blue. She cleared her throat, sighed. “I thought my silly adventure was over, but a week later I was in the student union, getting a Coke, when I saw one of the art students walking down the hall. I remembered him because he'd gotten me all wrong: too much hip, not enough chest. I practically flattened myself against the soda machine when he passed by. But I couldn't help thinking that any of those art students could bump into me at any time. And then I'd be, well …”

Naked again, I thought as she paused.

“Anyway,” Kate continued, “I couldn't go anywhere on campus without checking for art students, even if I couldn't quite remember all of them. That upset me the most, never knowing who might be beside me in the cafeteria or the bookstore, remembering my body. Sometimes I'd lie in bed at night and try filling in their faces. Then one day someone's stupid little laugh across the quad actually made me blush, and I decided it was time to leave.

“I transferred here. But I couldn't shake the memory of that art studio, so I signed up for a drawing course. That first class, a young guy posed for us. He didn't seem nervous at all. He bent his knees and stretched his arms out together like they were pulling on an invisible rope. I tried to capture the strain on his arm muscles, and I knew right away that I was good at drawing. But I'd been a model too, and when I remembered how a model can control an artist's attention, I felt as if I was being pulled with that invisible rope.

“Well, I didn't want him to do that. I started again and just drew the rope he was pretending to pull, with only a hint of his hands. But what about the other end? I thought. After a few shadings something came to me and took shape like a dream: a lamp, bolted to a wall, two of its hinges coming loose from the strain on the rope.

“When I drew that lamp I actually felt something coming apart inside me. This wasn't a lamp at all—it was me, somehow. My drawing had caught the moment in time, you see, so I couldn't be torn off the wall. I was safe. The professor came by and reminded me that this was a figure class, but when I told her, ‘That's what I see,' she looked again. Now she lets me draw whatever comes out when a model poses, even if it's always an object.”

So Kate's drawings on the wall weren't still lives at all, they were self-portraits. The sketches fluttered again from a stray breeze, a trembling of shadow and light and the revelation of their true identity, and there I sat in that dream-lit room, holding on to the wooden arms of a chair.

“It was so peculiar,” Kate said, her voice low and vaguely accusatory, “when I drew that tree and then there
you
were on the page, beside the tree and somehow part of—anyway, it was the first time that ever happened. And when you came over to talk to me, it was like you knew you'd appeared.”

Subtle emotions flickered over Kate's face that I couldn't quite read. I felt the strain of my own hinges and leaned toward her. Kate stared back at me, as if memorizing my face, and then she wrenched her gaze away. “I think I'd like to be alone now,” she murmured.

“Alone?” I repeated, nearly breathless with disappointment. “But, um—tomorrow. Can I come by—”

“I'll be too busy tomorrow.”

“Then the day af—”

She shook her head no.

I blushed. “Wait—wait. What do you mean?”

“I'm sorry, Michael,” she replied, her face reddening, her mouth an embarrassed grimace. This wasn't easy for her to say, yet somehow she had to. She waved an arm awkwardly at her own words, perhaps an ineffectual attempt to erase all that she'd revealed, but it was too late for that. Hadn't Kate modeled another kind of nakedness for me, the real confession that was the beginning of this good-bye?

“You don't have to worry, you know,” I said, still unwilling to give up. “I promise, I won't tell anyone.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly, her face hard with resignation. “I know you won't.”

I collected my backpack. Those pictures on the wall still shuddered in the breeze, her secret self waving good-bye. I waved back, then offered the other Kate my stunned, false smile and left her room.

I hurried away from the dorm, filled with the bitter unfairness that I'd finally lost my shyness over someone even more wary of intimacy than I ever was. I turned for one last look at her window, and I saw a dark figure, still as stonework, framed by the fluted curves of her curtains: Kate too wanted another glimpse. Then she slowly stepped back into the room's shadows and I suspected she'd driven me away not because of my desire, but because of her own.

Later that evening I opened my backpack and discovered her sketch of the oak tree, me. Yet my incomplete likeness no longer held any interest, for now I knew that the twists and shadows of bark, the unerring way Kate found conflicting crevices flourishing within crevices, was the real portrait. Then I caught my breath—Kate must have slipped this farewell gift inside my pack when I left for her glass of water. She'd already known what she was going to do.

In the following months, even as the memory of Kate's drawings haunted me day after day after day, I tried my best to keep clear of her dormitory and the fine arts building. But I needn't have troubled myself—wasn't she avoiding me too, in the same way she'd dodged all those art students at her former college? I caught sight of Kate only once, as she walked along a path beneath a trellis of vines, unaware of me and on her way to the student pub, her brilliant blond hair shining in the shafts of sunlight. A large portfolio was tucked beneath Kate's arm and I felt the tug of something strange inside, for that artist's folder kept no secrets from me. I knew it surely held pages and pages of new self-portraits that looked nothing and everything like her.

I huddled over my class notes outside the economics building, certain that the first snap quiz of the semester waited inside. Flipping through pages of my suddenly alien handwriting, I heard footsteps: hesitant, then resolute, then hesitant again. They stopped a few feet away and, as I still sometimes did, I imagined that when I looked up Kate would be standing before me.

I looked up. This time Kate
did
face me. She'd let her blond hair grow long, and now it was coiled into a knot at the back of her head, a few fringes loose and shining. Her face gleamed in the sun, and when she didn't turn from my gaze, for one brief and weightless moment I almost believed that I'd conjured her up.

“Hello,” Kate said, trying for a light tone to make the best of this awkward moment. She shifted her artist's portfolio from one arm to the other.

“Oh, hi,” I offered, somehow able to echo her casual greeting.

Kate cleared her throat with a tight little cough and asked, “How are you?”

“Fine, I suppose—still suffering through my major. How are you doing?” I gathered up my books, waiting to see if she'd take this chance to escape from me and what I knew about her.

Shifting slightly to the side as if to block me, Kate said in a rush, “I'm going to be a cartoonist for the school paper.”

She didn't try to hurry off. Instead, she tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ears. Still I was wary: after so long, why this small talk?

Kate misunderstood my silence. “It's true. The art director is in one of my classes. He likes my work.”

“That's … great,” I ventured.

“The problem is, I don't have the best sense of humor. But how can I refuse?”

“You're right. A challenge is a challenge.”

The bell rang inside and I glanced at the door of the economics building. I was going to be late. Kate pulled a sheet from her portfolio. “Do you see anything funny in this?” She handed me a sketch of a snail shell, its rounded spiral imbued with strange life: dark, edgy markings ran along its surface like the mysterious notations of electrocardiograms, recording my excitement as I held the page.

A little dizzy at what she'd done, I managed to say, “Well, it's not funny ha-ha. Funny weird.”

“Weird?”

“It might help if you added a caption,” I said, and again I examined this shell that now seemed to twirl madly in space. “How about something like … ‘No more carnival rides for me!'”

Kate frowned slightly in concentration. “I
think
I get it.”

“Well, I know it's not much. If I had more time I could probably come up with something better.”

“You think you could?” Kate said, the waver in her voice an apology, a confession.

This wasn't a chance meeting at all. Kate had sought me out. I forgave her, forgave her so easily because she needed me, or at least she needed my words to translate her self- portraits. “Absolutely,” I replied. “Show me a drawing and I'll come up with two or three lines to choose from. Then we can pick out our favorite.”

“Our?” she said, so softly I might have imagined it.

“
Our,”
I repeated—I knew all about business propositions. “We'll have to share the byline too, of course.”

*

I've often wondered if I should have made Kate court me more, even at the risk of losing her, yet I never wanted to exact a punishment. I knew how it felt not to be forgiven. We never once mentioned that afternoon in her dormitory room, however its memory may have hovered over us, and instead we devoted ourselves in the following weeks to combining her uncanny drawings with my captions. A straight-backed chair, so alone on the page, said to itself,
I remember there was wind and rain, but where?
A half-eaten sandwich abandoned on a bench mused
Why must I be denied digestion?
A flat stone, hurtling in mid-skip across a pond, declared above its echoing shadow,
If only I could float!

We called our cartoon strip “True Confessions,” though Kate always preferred her own suggestion, “Thing Thoughts.” Conflating our names, we signed it “Mite,” but no one on campus seemed particularly interested in uncovering our identities. At best, the strip was mildly popular among our small circle of friends. I suspected that the art director, an anxious sort of fellow who called Kate at all hours about each impending deadline, kept the strip running only because he was interested in far more than her drawings. Nearly every work session I'd have to answer the phone and field his halting attempts at nonchalance before he asked if my collaborator was there.

I was willing to double as Kate's bodyguard because the more we worked together the more it became clear that she and I were kindred spirits. Her desire to both hide and reveal herself made her objects come alive, and understanding this helped me add something of myself to the struggle seeping out of her precisely drawn lines. Kate always considered my captions with a sort of quizzical acceptance, as if my words had all along been her inspiration.

I loved to sit beside Kate and watch her draw. Her fingers barely held the pencil—a light touch for such clarity—and her careful movements became a form of floating, a sign language somehow caught on paper. One evening, as Kate was about to begin another illustration, I placed my hand next to her notepad.

“Draw my hand?”

“Michael. You know—”

“It's not a person,” I said, “it's a hand. Quite an interesting piece of machinery, actually. C'mon, give it a try.”

Kate closed her eyes, sighed, and then looked down at my patient hand. Slowly she began sketching the whorls of my knuckles, as if they were separate little whirlpools pulling her in. Next she drew those long-ridged bones that fanned from my wrist, and slowly the individual parts took hold of each other and grew fingers, took on the contours and shadows of flesh.

Finally she set down her pencil. My hand lay twinned before us. I gave her no time to choose between them: I turned mine over, palm up.