How to Read an Unwritten Language (19 page)

“The horoscope.”

“It's not that I believed, but I didn't really disbelieve
,
either. I found it comforting that a few words might help me influence what happened the next day, especially since every day was so sad and dreary. For a while it gave me something to hold on to. I think that's its main attraction for a lot of people.”

She reached for her water glass, then stopped and rested her hand on the placemat, her fingers tapping
. “
I'm not about to do star charts for my audience, Michael. There's no such thing as Sagittarian or Aquarian weather
—”

“No, that's not what I mean. Remember when you complained that you're as accurate as the horoscope? That's actually truer than you think. I've thought about what you said, about weather predictions being so imprecise. But if yesterday's prediction was completely wrong, then why would people listen to today's weather report? Because they want to believe. If a prediction is wrong now and then, well, they forgive without really thinking about it. The way I used to forgive the horoscope.”

“This is not a joke?”

“No,” I laughed, trying to hide my dismay. “Just emphasize accuracy less
,
and oracle more. I'll bet most people in your audience aren't expecting perfection. They mostly want assurance, and maybe that's enough. They'll remember your concern, not your prediction.”

“Well, I'll certainly mull this over.”

The waitress interrupted my miscalculation and brought our meal. Sylvia glanced out the window at the blue sky, the wispy streaks of clouds. “At least I was right about today
—
there's no chance of rain.”

“It's a beautiful day,” I agreed hopelessly
.

Sylvia smiled a smile of no pleasure. I'd become just another unpredictable weather pattern. She dabbed at her lips with a napkin, then set it down on the table. The faint red image—a disembodied, slightly open mouth—seemed about to speak. Instead we tucked into lunch, my chili, her omelet, and reverted to strained small talk about the co-anchors at her station. I could see us after lunch offering apologetic good-byes and then driving away in our separate cars
.

I almost reached out to our booth's jukebox, but I needed far more than some song's pointed message. That desolate woman in the booth two years ago had whispered to me, “I hear voices.” For too long, she said, they'd taken hold inside: her mother's efficient criticisms delivered with a giggle; a brother's telephoned wheedling and whining; a high school teacher's sarcasm; the dismissive monosyllables of her teenage children; voices that so multiplied they hemmed her in, making any decision impossibly difficult. Yet when I'd offered her the doll's hand she'd gladly accepted. Small as it was, it reached out to pull her from her own drowning
.

I'd welcome similar help, and when the waitress approached our booth I knew she would ask if we'd like to order dessert, offering, without knowing it, the possibility of a small reprieve
.

My first year as an independent insurance agent was less than mildly promising. My ads in the local paper found no takers, and each daily telephone sweep of possible clients met only put-upon silence, my unwanted words leading to the inevitable “No thanks, we're not interested,” or worse. Those faceless voices seemed vastly indifferent to my ambitions, yet what were those ambitions? Whatever hope I had of uncovering any hidden poetry of my profession was lost in volleys of feigned camaraderie over the phone. Again and again I went over my checklist: was my throat tense, my voice shrill or too loud, had I employed enough variety in the pace and timing of my delivery?

To meet our bills, Kate took on side jobs. After a long day at the commercial graphics firm, she kept to her small upstairs study in the evenings and turned out black-and-white renderings of canned groceries for a local supermarket flyer, the cartoonish mug of a bulldog mascot for a high school's fund-raising drive, whatever came her way.

I'd wash the dinner dishes alone and then, after an hour or so of brooding over how I hated the hard sell, I'd climb the stairs and peek in at my wife's progress. One evening I found her at the drawing table, quite still and staring without pleasure at the challenge of a blank sheet. I recalled with a pang those days when we'd create an object's radiant world, and I wished we could collaborate again, if only for our own private portfolio.

On the gray, carpeted floor, beside a pile of art books, lay a phone whose old-fashioned rotary dial might tease out her imagination. So I set it on her worktable and asked, “Think you might try your hand with this? I could probably come up with loads of captions.”

Kate regarded the phone's black plastic sheen, which seemed to sit there as silently and reproachfully as the modern one in my rented office. She turned a weary face to me and her eyes, glinting from the overhead light, divided the tiny image of her husband standing before her. “Oh, Michael,” she replied in a half-whisper, “I'm just not inspired.”

“Well, maybe some other time,” I murmured, clearing the phone from the drawing table. In my disappointment I set it back down too harshly. The bell inside pinged in protest, and once again I was standing with Kate before our wedding guests, surrounded by the tinkling champagne glasses of all those toasts.

Now I glanced at Kate—did she too hear this unhappy echo and remember when celebratory clinking mimicked the sound of shattering? She simply sat at her table, staring at an empty corner of the room, her eyes so clear with concentration that I knew she
was
drawing, but without the aid of any pen or paper. I waited for Kate to complete whatever design inside herself she needed to complete, waited patiently for her to return from wherever she was. Perhaps one day she'd share with me her backlog of secret images. Hadn't she come back to me once before?

*

The following morning I returned to my office and an image of my own that I hadn't shared with Kate. A batch of old
Life
magazines had been left behind, by a previous tenant, and I'd often page through them in between the disappointments of my phone sweeps. That's how I discovered a photo taken during the Depression, though it could have come from any time of trouble: a black-and-white close-up of a girl standing before a shack, her face streaked with dirt, her eyes holding in a starved childhood, lost innocence. As far as I could see, this young grim face held nothing else. Perhaps this was why I kept staring at it, for even in my deepest unhappiness as a boy, I knew I'd managed to find brief solace in a book of mazes or some goofy cartoon stunt on TV. Sadness and illogical joy would flicker through me at any moment: despair could indeed contain its own escape.

This was what seemed absent in the photo of that girl—it didn't begin to hint at the hundred little contradictory births that percolate on a face. All of us have more than one—we just don't give them names, as my mother did. How many had there been? Margaret, who disliked cooking; Tamara the Magnificent, who juggled; Rosario, the nurse; Valerie, a photographer; Tina, a dancer; Daisy, the furious artist; and many more whose names I'd forgotten. All of those women, I now knew, were hands reaching up out of something inside Mother, hands searching for a firm hold.

Then I knew what I had to do. Skillful listening might be a watchword of the insurance business, but words aren't all that one can listen to. So, suppressing what pride I had left, I called an old classmate who'd already become a successful local broker and I begged for a lead, anything that would bring me face to face with a potential client. With a head-shaking pity clear to me even over the phone, he offered me a tip. He said it couldn't miss.

*

The next day I sat across from a young couple in their living room cramped with upholstered furniture and, in one corner, a baby bassinet. In the brief pause after our introductions, Pete plucked at his shirt collar, coughed, and announced, “Well, I suppose it's time to talk about buying some life insurance.”

“Because of our daughter,” Judy added. “She'll be a month old next Tuesday.”

“Well, congratulations,” I said, opening my briefcase while the couple waited with a hint of skeptical silence—I didn't exactly project an air of authority, fumbling through a stack of policy literature. Contact, make some personal contact, I thought, and so I said, “This sure is a nice house you have here.”

They nodded and shifted in their seats, now even more ill at ease, for they knew as well as I that their home wasn't much more than a square little box painted dull green. I tried to recover from my mistake but my voice rose nervously with each word as I asked, “Is this your first home?”

A gurgling arose, then a tiny groan and a shifting in the bassinet. Judy hurried across the room and leaned over, her hands gently plucking and soothing. I said nothing, ashamed that I'd disturbed their baby, and then I stood, with no sense of why I'd done so. I offered an apologetic smile. Pete's hand rose and tried to hide his frown.

Suddenly afraid that he was about to ask me to leave, I padded over to the bassinet—how could he possibly throw me out while I gazed at his child? I saw little wisps of brown hair, delicate eyelids closed in sleep and tiny puckered lips echoing the tuck of the blanket. This was a face that knew no trouble, and I found myself at the center of a vast stillness.

“My wife and I don't have children yet,” I said quietly. “I wish we did.”

Such a thought, so unasked for, surprised me, and I tried to push it away and hide it. But returning to my seat I saw that Pete and Judy had heard in my voice that I'd confessed something, offered a secret part of myself. Now they sat back together on the couch and served up their own secret: they were afraid they could barely afford the right policy.

I had a number of options to offer and I spoke softly, careful not to disturb their daughter again. Pete and Judy had to lean forward to catch my words, and as they did I searched for the tiny, revealing changes that rose up in their faces. The faint wrinkling of Pete's brow, and Judy's pursed lips easing, then slightly crimping, helped me understand just what they were willing to sacrifice, just what level of coverage made them feel secure.

*

My first success generated another, then another. Soon I began receiving calls, and my days filled with house and office visits. As my clients spoke I listened and watched and tried to understand the vague unease on their faces and match it with the right policy, because I was always more concerned with their comfort than their money. Sometimes business picked up when a disaster dominated the news, whether it was a national park eaten up by huge fires or a Midwestern trailer park mauled by a tornado. Before making my recommendations I probed any averted glances, sudden sighs or brittle chumminess. I knew all of this masked my clients' fears that within them hid their own flood or conflagration, their own condemned building or quarantined sick ward.

I shouldn't have revealed to Kate that reading others was the source of my recent success, for now her blue eyes rarely met mine, and when I watched her smallest movements about the house she tried to keep my unrequited curiosity at bay by living in a dream of neatness: no piece of paper could be out of order, no pristine surface was ever dusted too often, no carpet long left un-vacuumed.

Kate still worked evenings in her study. I paced through our house, and though it had more fire insurance than we needed, I was easily seized by the thought of a frayed wire, a stray spark. One evening, as I passed our bedroom doorway, I stopped and watched Kate kneeling before her dresser, arranging her shoes in straight rows. What sort of carefully constructed barricade was this? Then she crawled over to my adjacent wardrobe and did the same for my shoes, after first tying their laces into neat bows.

With a little grunt of satisfaction she stood, and when she saw me a tremor of surprise ran through her. I waited for Kate to speak. She said nothing, her face so studiously casual I almost cried out in alarm, but then she smiled and her fingers unbuttoned her blouse down to her waist. Then she tugged at her skirt until it fell to the floor. Moments later she beckoned to me with a flip of her hair.

Later, with Kate breathing gently beside me, I lay too long on the edge of sleep. My eyes closed, a black field of barely defined shapes and colors drifted before me, only slowly blending into the face of a client considering replacement cost insurance, squinting and struggling to account for the contents of his house as I helped him recall his objects, one by one. Then another face rose up, a woman whose lips produced a wheezing intake of breath at the mention of accident liability for her car. Again and again my clients' features appeared, superimposed over a pale floating disk that I eventually realized was Kate's face. The swift play of their features became a flickering of shadows over that eerily calm expression that Kate had first offered me in our bedroom, a gaze as smooth as the contours of her skin.

I bolted up in bed and scattered those ghostly faces, my hands clutching at the blanket. Kate stirred briefly, then settled, and I looked down at her dark outline, a fear slowly growing within me that even her body was just another line of defense. Had those paths we'd traveled tonight been nothing more than a series of dead ends?

I slipped quietly from bed and hurried downstairs in the dark as if being stalked. It was true, true—no matter how many disasters appear in the form of car collisions or flooded basements, they more often arrive from some secret place inside us. I circled through the rooms, passing the dark outlines of our furniture without touching a single hard edge, walking like some stunned sleepwalker until it seemed I might actually disappear into the darkness. Exhausted, I simply slumped on a couch, longing to vanish, yet all the while hoping that somehow Kate would come downstairs and find me before I could.