Sign Languages (4 page)

Later he turned his nose up at the plate, complained about the small portions though he ate almost nothing at all. There was exotic salad, exotic pasta. She promised she'd bring over her new pasta machine. Then, at the table, at that second, her face toward his which looked away, his eyes on the crossword puzzle book on the table, at his elbow, she saw a lover she'd forgotten who'd run dough through a machine as he stood naked in the kitchen.

It's like he expects all this, she thought, eating demurely, pretending she was in a restaurant with music and candles and aquariums built into the walls. Here, really, it was too warm and awfully humid as if their bodies, the cooling oil, pasta, salad, puzzle books gave off water, sweated into the air. She watched droplets stream down the door behind him that opened onto some room or yard she'd never seen, that she didn't want to see. There at the table she promised she'd never learn about a yard or room or garage or if there was a car or anything else at all.

She took an interest in Mr. Warrant's puzzles. In some other room removed from the kitchen, where there were no odors of expensive oils and seasonings, they sat at a card table in the middle of furniture covered with chenille bedspreads. Onstage like chess champions, she thought. But a ghost audience.

“You're a smart one,” he said. “Yep, you are a smart one.” And she was surprised at his limited vocabulary. Vocabulary, she said to herself, and realized it was a word from school, further surprised she could fill out the puzzles with ease. But they're easy, of course. While he suffered over them. “No, don't tell me now. Keep quiet.” His voice a command. Like Todd in throaty, aroused tones, telling her to roll onto her stomach.

She smelled him, imbibed him. What is this but age? And she couldn't place any of it exactly. Not among the most narrowly focused recollections. Not leather she'd smelled in France. Or fabrics in shops. Or the smell of any man anywhere before. Wasn't it a house whose door she had just unlocked? On a tree-lined street, broken sidewalk a disadvantage. She saw clients stepping over it dramatically, arching eyebrows. A house on the edge somewhere in Pittsfield maybe. Almost a dozen things. Fashionable, ghetto, expensive, cheap. But the air when she opens it first, alone, doing her homework. God, she's devoted, hard-driving, a hell-of-an-agent. Agent, she liked the word. A secret agent. Words and puzzles; she breathed in again. She's not wearing underwear, you know. The young office boys talked at the cooler under the aerial view of the city they sold off piece by piece. She bends over for fun. To tease. But no, she never teased. Or not really.

The odor of this very old man. Only a little like walls in houses that almost sell but never do. They talk about nothing at all. She cleans up but leaves her watch on the window ledge as the excuse for coming back she doesn't need. He sleeps at the card table a deep, dead sleep. There is no snoring, no movement. He is dead, she thinks, and cannot touch him; not the weak-muscled arm, even the shoulder under the thin shirt. She goes out and home and takes a long, hot shower, smells her skin, and ladles it with balm of peaches and placenta.

But every night she is there, at the door. Mr. Warrant's face expressionless. I am a social worker, she thinks. That's what it's like to him.

She moves about the house. It is unsalable. It is huge and amorphous, shifting and dark with those high, narrow windows people sold and bought once which look out into tree-tops and sky sliced by power lines. Add to that the weakness of his small-wattage bulbs. But no, she says, I'll make do with it all like this. Exactly. Though from room to room she is lost. And turning back around, finds the door to the kitchen or the room with him at the card table. As if there were fifteen kitchens and rooms with card tables. All off a room dreadfully dark, the furniture towering. Like her images of the barren mills. His house a closed factory, without production. Waiting for nothing at all. The odor of the shed, of its newspapers and grease, confined her for a time to the two rooms where every night they worked their way through endless puzzles. “You are bright.” I am also beautiful with perfect hips, she told herself. Not many can say that—perfect hips. Absolutely perfect. Sculpture, one had said. Brown. Delicious. Some foreign fruit. A soufflé. Risen to perfection.

Often he dozed profoundly. She straightened the kitchen, put her graceful fingers into deep and obscure cabinets. The cups, those mugs, the plates dulled by a century of bacon grease.

They watched TV, “Wheel of Fortune.” He called her Joyce. “Who?” she'd turned to ask over the card table scattered with puzzle books. “What?” he answered her. “Joyce ‘who'?” His eyes snapped back to the expensive gifts for the winning contestant. As exotic and foreign to him as sapphires and camels—an animal she'd ridden with pleasure in Cairo; a gem she'd been given more than once.

She read her magazines, her magnificent suit attracting the chenille to it, mixing with Ms. Bojangles's yellow hair. Even you could never sell this house, she told herself. What did I just say? Joyce, who?

Then she stayed the night. She planned nothing. Why? What do you plan? Planning was for work. She had slept with Marvin again. He had eaten strawberry jam off her clitoris. She had screamed for the first time some sound that had sent Ms. Bojangles tearing down the hall to sit near the heat vent and had jerked Marvin's head up. In the dark his eyes like Negroes' in old movies. Feets do yo stuff. “Nancy, my god, did I hurt you?” But she lay perfectly still, speechless. At first it was because she had no reason to give him, then it was a game, finally she couldn't bear to talk. He dressed and drove away, the rumble of his Lancia like thunder through frozen February air at three in the morning.

They had eaten bacon sandwiches and played the puzzles. She was getting worse; he was improving. They watched “Wheel of Fortune” and, after scouring the ancient black iron skillet, she shook him gently, averting her eyes from the thick strand of saliva connecting the corner of his lip to a liver spot on the back of his hand the shape of Chile. Let's go there, the German lover had pointed at a poster in a window. Santiago de Chile. The street full of assured brown faces.

She led him through the darkness from the card table to the bedroom she had guessed at but never been in. And inside it was the same dark towering furniture, a room from Dickens, she thought, surprising herself with an image of some woodcut from a high school library book.

She undressed in a frenzy, upsetting herself a little. This isn't like me at all. Hurrying is spoiling it, she thought. But she turned off the light, left her clothes in a pile, and slid between the covers. The sheets were clammy, they felt as if they'd never warm. She rolled side to side and finally lay still, turned her eyes to Mr. Warrant, who sat heavily on the opposite edge of the bed. Slowly he took off his slippers. Still sitting, he removed his pants. And in the twilight from some outside light through the half-opened blinds, she shuddered. The more he took off—old-fashioned undershirt like Madelaine Woo wore to picnics, her nipples huge rosettes, the billowing boxer shorts—the smaller he became until lying next to her, letting out a heavy sigh, he was nothing at all. She was the weight in the bed. And when she turned toward him, he rolled to meet her. And the instant they touched his whole body twitched as if he'd been electrified like those TV patients with paddles to their chests.

“Nancy!” he said. “What is this? My God, girl. My heavens. This isn't…” But he didn't finish. And neither could she, though, her hands on his thin leg, her mind snagged the sentence and tried to complete it. This isn't. But positive as always—as they always said, she took the lemons of life and made lemonade—she ran her freshly oiled fingers up his thigh.

Her graceful fingers found his penis and massaged it carefully. She located its thick undervein and followed it with long reassuring strokes. But there was no length to it. His scrotum was a thick still bag in her palm. And when she ducked her head under the covers, her tongue ready to moisten, coax, he held her head still. In the absolute dark her nose touched his hairless chest and she breathed in all the unusual odors. She felt his chest heave in spasms and she listened to him cry through the heavy damp quilts. For a long time she rested, his hand having released her hair, and she heard his stomach rumble from the bacon. She smelled his age like all old things that weren't people. Her own grandparents had died young. She had never sold a nursing home. Old people never came up to her on the streets. Distant grandchildren always put their useless houses on the market.

She came up from the covers into the twilight and listened to Mr. Warrant, on the edge of deep sleep, on the precipice of years of dreams that combined and recombined, mumble about Joyce and his wife and someone else, Bob or Rob, or maybe not that name at all. The tides at Inchon. Her own name, Nancy, called out once as if it were punctuation, an exclamation point. Or was it a question mark? Nancy? This isn't…

She lay stretched out next to him and didn't strain to listen, to decipher his weightless words as airy as his body next to hers. She was substantial, lotioned, perfumed, ready for anything. But slowly she saw herself right in this room lighted by the streetlight she passed every afternoon now when she drove straight here from work. “Hey, I've been phoning you,” Marvin said. The newest man, too. Your machine broken? Yes, it is, she said. And brought Ms. Bojangles and put her out of sight in a far room where they were both sure of mice, the chenille balls offering unlimited entertainment.

Then she was eager for it all to be done with—the dinners with little variation between fried foods; endless puzzles; television—so in the twilight she could listen to his weightless digressions and fill herself with his odor, the pungency of the room, the licorice smell of all the photographs, the gray underwear. The carpet full of pieces of paper; underneath the bed, the exposed springs a jungle of cobwebs and lint. There must be remnants of her in there, Nancy said to herself. For now, in the afternoons, before fried pork chops, strips of mealy steak, she would come in here and raise the blinds, her one act of alteration, and examine drawers and closets.

But there was nothing left of hers except a closet of empty hangers wrapped in yarn, cloth flowers entwining the crooks. And empty bureau drawers; his dingy clothes all in one shallow top drawer. Under pajamas never out of their wrappers, she found a pistol but jerked away from it. The chill on its handle like the cold of all inanimate metal. She recalled the shed, the gloom of all the closed factories lining her route here.

She drank in everything, you know. Her father wouldn't have been a bit surprised; her mother, always out of mind, would have been properly scandalized. Her fellow workers remarked on her calm. Someone thought she was pregnant; impossible given the impossibility of such from the small soft penis she only cupped as he told her about the drowned boy at Inchon; the brother who'd stolen his girl when they were teenagers and who lived for thirty years in a VA hospital because he lay down on the outskirts of Metz and refused to advance or retreat, to take any further actions against the enemy.

Madelaine Woo said, “You look tired,” and they both saw her face left unpampered. The emollients, placentas, balms of tarragon, and avocadoes at home in the empty house.

She took herself a history. She forgot Ms. Bojangles in the far room living off mice and quickly forgetting about people. The boy at Inchon became her lover. The penis in her hand swelled in her mind and took her so huge it filled her anus too. Sometimes she moaned as Mr. Warrant talked. At puzzletime she brought out yellowed ones she had found and carefully erased. So that the answers were references to men and events thirty years ago. Mr. Warrant was surprised because he thought everyone had forgotten. “My God,” he'd say. “Nancy, look at this. Nancy, see here?”

She moved more slowly. Sensuous; she's practicing for something, someone, they'd said at the office. She dropped out of fashion but they all opened their mouths in excitement. She is beautiful, they all agreed. She is magnificent. Her hips are perfect. A delicious soufflé.

In the mirror she examined her face. She scrubbed away the makeup. She had passed a point somewhere recently, she knew. Once, without it, she was a child, a featureless girl. But now she was almost eyebrowless and a painful plain. I'm this way now. Belonging to this mirror and this unsalable place. I do my work, but I move more slowly. I think, but often I am there waiting for twilight and the absence of his body. I have always had the passion of pursuit, so I'll pursue this. All of this. This isn't… she remembered. But now nodded at these eyes in the mirror and said “Yes, it is” out loud.

She discovered the cat and called it Ms. Bojangles again. She abandoned the plates high in the dark towering cabinets to all the up wafting grease. She cut her hair too short. They were surprised. Her father slammed into the treetops in 1969 and wished her luck, never thought of his wife, cried out a moment before dissolution at his daughter's terrible purposefulness which could always give pain.

And here's the contrast: As limbs whipped the metal to shreds, he only wanted to live. And live everything again at once—to be her age, younger, older, older than anyone he'd ever met. Be an ancient man protected from harm on a screened porch. The very last thought the amorphous face, constantly changing in some movie he'd seen once.

But not Nancy, not now. Now she came to Mr. Warrant's and fried foods, worked puzzles, watched TV, lay next to his minute body, her own body more weightless from not soaking in herbed butters and comfit of womb of lamb.

What is she doing? they began to wonder. Did you notice too? And Madelaine Woo nodded her flat moon face like the affirmation of an Asian goddess. Her clothes aren't straightened. And no one but the two “gopher” boys talked about her odor. The smell of sour milk or of meat grease poorly doused with Chanel.