Secret Language (10 page)

“Greg and Will are covering the shop,” Joe says to his father. He winks at Faith. “Slow day.”

“The hell,” Joe Senior says. “You just want to see how that kid of yours handles himself at shortstop.”

Faith watches this scene as she has so many others. She still thinks of it as the family dance. The divorce halted the music not a whit, and when she sees them now they’re as relentlessly cheerful as they were the first time she appeared at their door.

Faith is quiet at these games, especially amidst the noisy cadre of Fullers, who follow the nuances of every play with practiced fervor. For Faith the game is something that happens
around
Ben, whom she watches tenderly: his labored movements, his determination, his fierce will. He’s not a natural athlete like his brother; he is gawky, a little hesitant, not entirely used to his body, but he tries hard and never gives up.

Whenever Ben leaves the field, Faith loses interest in the game, the score, who is next at bat. She prefers to watch the other parents, their feverish faces, the way their tightened fists and chewed lower lips seem to will the ball into the sky’s farthest reaches. Faith wonders at them, for in Ben she looks instead for the smallest triumphs: a good swing, the
thwack
of connection. It doesn’t matter to her where the ball ends up.

Today it’s harder than usual to keep her head in the game. The trip to New York with Connie is looming, and there’s a new horror in her constant worry over the boys: this morning she found a condom in Chris’s laundry, casual as a gum wrapper in the pocket of his jeans.
FOR HER PLEASURE
, read the jaunty red packet.

The game ends and the Scouts lose. Faith picks her way down the bleachers to the balding grass and waits alone, watching the Fullers move in a pack to the Scouts’ bench. In the thinning sunlight she hangs back, until they have made Ben smile in the face of defeat. As the crowd dwindles she lifts her hand to him, and he crosses the field: a trudging, crimson, backlit figure, her son. When his face comes into focus, his freckles standing out on his cheeks, she speaks to him.

“You were the best one,” she says.

He squints at her, unbelieving. “Mom, I screwed up a zillion
times. I muffed two grounders.” So serious, so like her. Chris is like his father and will dance his way through the rest of his life. Ben will tiptoe, peering around every turn. One day soon he’ll wake up a man. She missed the moment somehow with Chris; with Ben she’ll be watching.

“No one else looks like you, Ben,” she tells him. “You’re a one-and-only out there.”

He shakes his head, his father’s black hair shivering out the back door of his cap. “You don’t have to say that stuff, Mom. I sucked out loud.”

“Isn’t it all right if I think you’re good?” She puts her hand on his shoulder and steers him toward the car. Joe is standing behind it, grinning, his forearms resting on the roof.

“Hey, lady, can I bum a ride?”

The sight of him—his limbs slung so casually from his torso—can both lift and sadden her still. She waves. No one can say they aren’t friends. If she can’t give him love, she can at least give him friendship. She has to, for Joe is her only friend.

“You came with a whole platoon—they couldn’t fit you back in?”

“Nobody’s going back to the shop. My truck’s still there.”

She turns to Ben. “What do you think?”

Ben rubs his nose, pretending to decide. “The man’s desperate, Mom.”

“Okay.” Faith opens the door. “Get in.”

“I owe you one, buddy,” Joe tells Ben, and they climb in, Joe in front and Ben in back.

“Can you drop me off at the house first, Mom?” Ben asks. “I need a shower something wicked.”

Joe glances into the back seat, but speaks to Faith: “Remember when we had to pay him to take a bath?”

“Just barely,” Faith says, but she remembers it all. She remembers the instant of his birth, and Chris’s. They came to her docile, ignorant, their crimped little faces expecting nothing, and she was the first one to love them. Her love couldn’t be compared with anything else, for it was the only thing they knew. Loving Joe was different—so many people had already loved him first.

As she pulls up to the house, she spots Chris’s bare stomach and
blue-jeaned legs sticking out from under the hapless Corvair. The huge, corrugated soles of his sneakers twist impatiently. His girlfriend, Tracy, sits on the edge of the lawn with Sammy. They both look bored. All around them, on the grass and street, lies an assortment of grimy tools. The Corvair’s hood and engine cover are flapped open like the wings of some extinct bird.

“Not again,” Faith says.

Ben is already out, on his stomach, peering at his brother, his own cleated shoes twisting in empathy.

“I thought that thing was all fixed,” Faith says. “You said it was mint.”

Joe looks amused. “This is a rite of passage, Faith,” he says. “A boy’s first car is supposed to break down.”

She smiles. “Is that right.”

“How else do you get to take off your shirt and show your girlfriend what you know about cars?” The light of sudden memory seems to lift up his face, peeling years away. She feels as if she’s caught him at something.

“Huh,” Joe says, and flicks it all away in a blink. “I loved that car.”

He gets out and heads over to the boys. They slide from under the belly of the car to confer with their father, then all three of them assemble at the Corvair’s back end, the exposed engine their sole focus. Watching them, Faith wonders about men and cars, one of the many relationships in life that she does not understand.

Her own car looks suddenly ridiculous: reliable, undistinctive, stodgy. Compared to Chris’s Corvair it isn’t zany or crooked or impractical, there is nothing noteworthy about it in any way. A word comes to her, a word she types dozens of times a week at Dr. Howe’s:
unremarkable
. At first she thought it a blunt, indelicate way to describe a person’s hematocrit or glucose level or general physical state; she translated it to mean
Don’t worry, you’re fine
. But lately the word depresses her, as if in typing it she is somehow passing judgment on a stranger’s chances for happiness.

Faith gets out of the car slowly, watching her sons and their father deliberate over an antique that is younger than she is. They are all talking at once, leaning over the engine. The tops of their heads—
Chris’s blonde flanked by the dark of his father and brother—shine up at her like shells. She waits a moment, listening, basking in the sound of them, the shimmer of their hair as they move their heads, the way their shoulders bump together over the engine’s dark hold.

Sammy trots over to escort Faith into the house. “Hello, Tracy,” she says as she passes over the lawn.

“Hi, Mrs. Fuller.” Tracy’s brown hair is sporting some yellow strips, and she’s had it cut short. She looks older, vaguely dangerous.

“Car trouble?” Faith says, just to make conversation.

“What else?” Tracy grimaces in a knowing way that gives Faith pause. The look is full of a smoldering knowledge: men, life, the future. Faith herself has never, as far as she can remember, looked like this. Tracy sits patiently, waiting for Chris to finish up, all the while exuding the unmistakable impression that it is she who is in complete control.

Joe and the boys stare at the car as if they expect it to move on its own. They stand in a semicircle, their hands stalled in their back pockets.

“What’s wrong with it?” Faith asks.

Chris turns around, his gaze falling on Tracy. “Fuel pump. At least Dad thinks so,” he says, then wipes his grease-blackened palms across his sweaty chest. The gesture is shockingly sexual, a rite of passage in itself.

“Me too,” Ben says. “I think it’s the fuel pump.”

She hears a snort from Tracy. “It’s the only major organ they haven’t already replaced.”

Faith looks at her watch. “How much longer?”

“Twenty minutes, tops,” Joe says.

That means an hour, an hour and a half. Faith knows at least that much about men and cars.

“Are you staying for dinner?”

Joe nods. “Sure.”

It is after eleven when Faith finally drops Joe off at the shop to retrieve his truck. Her bland gray wagon crackles over the gravel. She turns the ignition off.

“Got a minute?” she says.

“Two, even.”

Outside the night is still. Though the shop is only a few miles outside the city, it is on a heavily treed, rural road. She fancies she hears an owl.

“What is it?” he asks. “Cold feet about going to New York?”

She reaches into her pocket for the red-wrapped condom. She hands it to him—its lurid message face up—as if it weighed a hundred pounds.

“I found this in Chris’s jeans.”

“Huh,” he says.

“I suppose this means he’s having sex.”

Joe pushes his hair off his forehead. “Safe sex, at least. I suppose we should be glad the kid has a brain.”

“A
kid
, Joe. Sixteen, God.”

“Seventeen in a month. He’ll be a senior next fall.”

“So?”

Joe shifts in the seat, facing her squarely. “I just don’t want to turn this into a crisis.”

“What should we do?”

“Nothing, I guess.” He doesn’t sound convinced. She waits, expecting something more.

“Will you talk to him?” she says.

“Faith, I’ve talked to him.” He looks surprisingly helpless.

“You have?”

“Of course. Ben, too.”

She pushes some air through her lips and taps her fingers on the steering wheel, imagining the three of them together, the big talk.

She shakes her head. “I don’t even like her,” she says. “She’s such a little know-it-all.”

Joe is grinning slightly, the way he does when he wants her to say something, his eyes bright on her.

“You and your normal,” she says, struggling to smile. “You and your rites of passage.” She grips the steering wheel, pleading. “Joe, I’m losing him.”

He slides over on the seat. “We’re both losing him. Faith,” he
says, picking up her hand. “I think that’s the way it’s supposed to go.”

She relaxes, leaning back. He smells like supper, her house, her yard. “Oh, Joe,” she says. “That
car
. One of these days he’s going to drive off into the sunset and we’ll never see him again.”

Joe squeezes her fingers, then lets her hand go. “He won’t get far in that thing. Trust me.”

Now she does smile. It astonishes her sometimes how much she still feels married. It’s Joe who will leave someday, she realizes now; Joe who, in the absence of his sons from her house, will fade from her life.

In the glow of the shop’s night lights, the dark looks purple. After a long silence she checks her watch, by now nothing but a gray shape on her wrist.

“I should go,” Joe says. “It’s late.” He gets out of the car, then knocks on the window. Faith leans across the seat and rolls it down. He sticks his head in, his teeth showing through the dark. “Don’t worry, Faith,” he says. “We’ve got two good kids. We’re doing fine.”

She watches him get into his truck and rev it. As he pulls out of the parking lot, he sends her a friendly blast of the horn, and she listens, hard, until the sound of his engine disappears into the silence of the road.

Connie keeps the two letters from Isadora James in a dark pocket of her purse, hidden, as if they were parts of a treasure map. She carries them back and forth across the Atlantic as she goes on with her work, waiting for summer and the trip to New York, trying not to hope too hard. She reminds herself that Faith is probably right—Isadora James is writing a book, or crazy. Still, what would it hurt to meet a person like that?

Paris has been cold all spring, the flowers late, the sky low and solemn. Connie hardly notices. She’s turned herself into a tourist, turned Paris into more than a place to sleep at the end of a long working flight. She visits the hushed cavern of Notre Dame cathedral, walks the Champs Elysées, roams through le Louvre committing names of paintings to memory. All this she does with an imaginary presence at her side; she’s rehearsing for the day Isadora James asks to see this magnificent city. Connie has even thought of engaging a little apartment here, some high-ceilinged refuge with an ancient concierge guarding the door. She hopes Isadora will turn out to be the type to come to Paris by herself, to borrow Connie’s keys and seek harbor in her big sister’s rooms.

After one of these sightseeing excursions, Connie returns to her hotel—Le Perreault, the same one she’s been staying in for years—with the frail hope of finding Stewart, who sometimes works the Paris run for Pan Am. Her eyes smart, and her feet hurt from too much walking. She peers into a mirror in the lobby; her hair needs another touch-up. She thinks of the crew she came over with,
her
crew—beautiful boys and girls with hair the color of copper, mahogany,
dandelions, ink. Invariably cheerful, chatty, perfectly turned out, no matter how many sleepless nights. She calls them the New Guard. They are young. She is thirty-six and old.

She enters the lobby, looking around halfheartedly. It’s been a month since she’s seen Stewart, longer than usual—his work schedule is less routine than hers. She hears him before she sees him—a voice sputtering out of the lobby bar, emphatic cadences that make words sound like vows. She brightens, feeling lucky. Since Faith said yes, Connie’s life has turned.

She finds him just inside the bar’s arched doorway, talking to Frank and Debbie, two other Old Guards from Pan Am. His back is to her, but she can see he is trying to convince them of something. His shoulders move with his voice, his short hair quivers as he nods his head. Connie laughs out loud: Stewart has never been one to conserve energy, especially in the throes of an argument.

Frank sees her first. “Hey, Connie!”

Stewart whirls around. “Connie! Christ, I thought you were dead!” He picks her up and squeezes her, then lets her down with a thunk.

She pats his cheeks, frowning into his face. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be on this run?”

“If you called once in a while, you’d know these things.”

“You’re never home,” she says. “And I’m boycotting that ridiculous message on your machine.”