How to Read an Unwritten Language (21 page)

*

The desire to insure anyone or anything began to seep away from me. Instead, the sound of a police siren, a fire alarm gave me an intense, momentary joy. Let disaster come. One day I visited a prospective client who wanted extensive coverage on his recycling center. The owner—a Mr. Bianci—was proud of his business and gave me a tour through skyscrapered stacks of old newspapers. But I couldn't exult in this environmentally sound enterprise and instead struggled to hide my unease at the countless discarded things. All the people who'd read about the latest property tax increase or inner city murder, or laughed at Dagwood's morning dash out the door, all those people had let these newspapers go and then went on with their lives. What was left was emptiness—ragged towers of ink-stained wood pulp waiting to be crushed and reconstituted. I knew at once I wouldn't agree to extend the slightest amount of coverage to this man's business—let him find it elsewhere. I'd prefer that those huge paper stacks go up in flames.

The following morning's horoscope, as if in reproach, offered advice that I couldn't help reading again:
Do not be afraid to find value in what has been abandoned
. So when I drove to work and noticed a YARD SALE sign tacked to a telephone pole, I followed the printed arrow. After parking at a scruffy front lawn I wandered through an array of card tables loaded with junk: toys that children had wearied of, framed pictures no longer worthy of a wall, shoes outgrown, half-read paperback books, appliances worn from overuse.

I poked through this discarded bric-a-brac with little pleasure, until I held a rusted toy truck: the letters on its cab were so faded that they seemed to be sinking into the surface, and I found myself imagining how Kate might have captured this with her subtle, penciled hues. Then I picked up an ancient blender, turned it this way and that and could almost see Kate's version—the plastic jar's faded scratches artfully heightened so that it seemed to dream of its own lost swirling.

I began searching out yard sales and pretending that Kate was beside me, our old collaboration finally reclaimed. I examined objects for hints of anything that might inspire her, even if that meant pacing through a musty house during an estate sale, as I found myself doing one Saturday morning. Tired of watching antique dealers appraise each piece of furniture, I wandered into the kitchen. There on the bare formica counter sat a white plastic ashtray similar to the one I'd used as a boy to hold stray buttons. Around the curving, outer rim of this ashtray, however, was an ordered line of burn marks. I picked it up and examined its odd disfigurement—a necklace of dark, circular scars.

A sudden hand plucked it away. Startled, I turned to a woman whose lined, pale face was embarrassed by her abrupt action, yet she spoke with determination. “This isn't for sale.”

“Excuse me,” I managed, “I didn't mean to … It just reminded me of an ashtray that I once had.”

Her face seemed to collapse for a moment, then she fingered the plastic rim. “This?” she replied. “There's no other like this.”

She made no move to leave, and because she stared at the ashtray with eyes that somehow gave it life, I said, “I think I understand.”

She flinched at my words. “You think you do? I'd say not. This has its … its own tragedy.”

“Mine did too,” I murmured, recalling my ashtray of buttons, my entire collection of discards' ineffectual magic against my mother's spiraling troubles.

The woman must have caught the truth of what I'd just said because she hesitated, examining my face. Sighing, she began to speak quietly, almost as if I weren't beside her. “It was one of my son's favorite things when he was a little boy. All those expensive toys we bought, but this—this he loved to wear on his head like a crown, pretending he was a king.”

She regarded the ashtray with suddenly uncomprehending eyes, as if it had now become alien. “He was a wonderful child. He could have become whatever he wanted. But he died in that Vietnam war.” I offered faltering sympathy until she cut me off. “And this … I don't even know why … why I'm telling you this, but—don't you move away, you listen—this, this is worse: every year after that, on our son's birthday, my husband would drink too much and put out one of his cigarettes right here, on the rim. ‘Jewels in the crown,' he called them.”

The woman stood so still I didn't dare speak, but when she turned to me again she must have recognized my willingness to listen, for she said simply, “Now they're both dead.”

Again, she had little patience with my polite words of condolence. “All that's over now, over,” she said and then stopped, surprised at her own words. “Yes, that's right. Why should I want to see this thing again?” She held out the ashtray, her voice now edged with a terrible resolve. “You want this? You can have it.”

“No, really, that's all right—”

“Take it.” She shoved the ashtray in my hands. “
Take
it.”

“Th-thank you,” I said, the ridge of burn marks rough against my hands. “What, what should I…”

But this unhappy woman was no longer aware of me—she stared out the kitchen window, her lips moving slightly, silently, and I wondered who she spoke to now: her son, her husband?

I left her to that private conversation. Lingering in the living room among the milling groups of buyers, I prepared myself to return the ashtray if she changed her mind, though I hoped I wouldn't have to: my hands gently cupped that wavering line of blackened craters, each little circle a mouth offering eloquent secrets. After an hour, when she still hadn't appeared, I finally walked to my car, understanding that what I held was more than an ashtray, and now I was its caretaker.

*

So once again I became a collector. What I sought out, though, was a different variety of archaeology from the sort Kate practiced at her drawing desk in the evenings: I recovered what wasn't yet buried. I haunted yard sales and estate sales, attended auctions and listened to the caller's rapid urgent voice coaxing the price higher. Over the following weeks I managed to find a sugar bowl, a pencil holder, a shoehorn, a stepstool and even the single plastic arm of a doll, each containing its own story, for I discovered that if I inspected an object carefully enough, someone might stand beside me, willing to reveal its secret.

Sometimes I stared into my bathroom mirror and searched my ordinary features for whatever drew such yard sale confessions. Did those strangers sense what I needed and therefore tried to give me what might help? I thought of Kate, how I longed for her approach, and realized that pursuit had all along been my mistake. She had to come to me. So I collected more objects and placed them strategically around the rooms of our house. They were my own silent singing, like the statues of Indian whale hunters that I'd learned about in school long ago. One day Kate might actually be moved to capture the intricacies of one of these objects and then, instead of offering a caption, I'd confess to her its hidden life.

“What's this?” she asked once, her hand gently sweeping over a doily I'd arranged on an end table. Its snowflake pattern had once belonged to a newly blinded child: for a time it was her own personal Braille and late-night solace.

I looked up from my book at Kate and this was the moment I'd been hoping for, the possibility of a return to another time. Yet caution ruled my casual reply. “Oh, just something I picked up. An interesting texture, don't you think?”

Kate's fingers played at a delicate corner, testing its complex weave. I waited for her reply. A subtle gleam of recognition surfaced in her eyes and her lips moved slightly, as if struggling to speak. Her hand continued stroking the doily until a nail caught at the nubby pattern. She hesitated, finally pulling it free, and then her face became its own veil, in the shape of her familiar features. She only allowed herself a polite nod of appreciation and stepped from the room.

If my wife ever drew one of my objects I never knew it. Before long my anticipation hardened into a proprietary pride—at least those presences spoke to me. There were evenings when, as Kate watched a crime drama or paged through a magazine beside me, I scanned the room and silently savored my objects' stories one by one, inevitably leading to the tale of the wooden stepstool that now rested before our bookshelves. It once belonged to an elderly man who stood on it when his memories threatened to overwhelm him, who reached up and let his palms press against the ceiling as if the rigid pressure in his arms held something unspeakable in place. I could feel my own arms tremble from that imagined exertion. And so slowly, before I understood how much I relied on these private moments, each of my objects became a secret I kept from Kate.

*

A postcard from my sister arrived one day, her first message since the day of my wedding: “Hi. I'm in my third month of
Who's Next?
, a comedy/ mystery: it's a mystery why anyone thinks it's a comedy, and it's a laughable mystery. Cheers, your sib.”

How dare she write to me so casually after what she'd done? Yet those breezy words were at odds with her handwriting: each narrow loop and slash evoked Laurie's wild, improvised dancing years ago.

I heard Kate's footsteps.

“Did the mail come?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. Nothing interesting,” I replied, hiding my sister's postcard behind a clutch of junk mail, turning it into another secret.

Over the next few days Laurie's dashed-off scrawl grew inside me, but now its subversive, infectious energy reminded me of her terrible grin as she'd led the wedding guests in those rounds of tapping champagne glasses, and once again I could hear the delicate chiming that altered my marriage before it had even begun. Yet if Laurie had known how to make Kate curl inside herself, then maybe she also knew of some way to unfurl her.

I bought a plane ticket to the small city where Laurie was performing and concocted an excuse for Kate about some pressing business. Soon I was soaring above the airport, glancing out my window at patchy clouds and the drifting shadows they cast on the ground below: long stretches of dark ovals sailed over farmland like a pod of whales, while other shapes suggested the slow geologic drift of undiscovered continents. A single huge, shadowy crescent might have been the jaws of some indefinable creature sneaking up on an unsuspecting town, just as I was traveling toward this sister of mine I hadn't forgiven. I almost believed that I cast those shadows below.

I settled into a hotel far from the theater, to avoid any chance meeting with Laurie before the show. I wanted to see my sister perform on an evening that was no more out of the ordinary than any other night. I made it to the theater with enough time to study the playbill and discovered that
Who's Next?
allowed the audience to choose the ending. Flipping to the back pages, I read Laurie's bio: she'd appeared in versions of popular plays and musicals in small cities across the country. No hint of a relationship that might keep her from traveling. I turned to the cast of characters and saw that Laurie played a maid, and when the curtain finally rose, there she stood onstage before the gaudy interior of a mansion, dusting antique furniture. If I hadn't known my sister's role, I might not have recognized her from this distance, with her curly hair now straightened and black.

“Millicent!” an older man's offstage voice called out.

“Coming,” Laurie replied brightly, her stagy voice an odd version of the one I knew. She walked across the set, just as two suspiciously quiet characters—a well-dressed young man and, of course, a butler—entered from the opposite side.

As the play progressed, Laurie served the other characters with a dutiful efficiency, yet her square-cut uniform and air of innocence was undermined by stiletto high heels. She was, I thought, a prime suspect, and by the final scene Laurie was the only surviving staff member of the large mansion. Legs firmly planted between the recently deceased bodies of the butler and the cook, she stood at the front of the stage while a disembodied voice declared over the p.a. that the time had come to vote.

Though I suspected the young fellow whose parents had been disinherited might be the culprit—if I remembered correctly, only he was present when each victim flopped to the floor, gasping for breath—I joined the applause for Laurie. I clapped and clapped and clapped, and even after others in the audience had stopped, still I went on. I wanted Laurie to be guilty, I wanted to see her confess before being hustled offstage to prison.

But the audience's nod went to Walter, the hunched and frail grandfather and head of the family who, he reluctantly revealed, had shot tiny dissolving darts of slow-acting poison from the footrest of his wheelchair, aiming under the dinner table to kill his only slightly less wrinkled younger brother Harold.

“But I kept
missing
,” the old man moaned, wheeling his chair in circles as the other actors ducked. “I had nothing against Raymond—he was the finest butler in a hundred miles. And Jacques, who could rival his goose liver tarts? I was even sad to see cousin Sophie die, conniving bitch that she was. …”

“So why did you try to kill your own brother?” the hapless, greasy-haired detective asked, pointing to Harold, who cowered behind a suit of armor.

“He was trying to blackmail me.” Parking his wheelchair center stage, the old man's voice cracked with emotion as he continued: “He threatened to expose my relationship with Millicent!”

All eyes turned to Laurie, who shed her modest demeanor with one piercing cry as she rushed to Walter's side. She ripped the top buttons from her uniform, revealing a sexy black teddy. “It's true, we love each other so,” she proclaimed huskily. “Every wrinkle, every liver spot makes me seethe with passion.” Laurie wriggled in elaborate ecstasy, both hands kneading the old man's chest and shoulders.

“All you want is the family fortune!” Harold howled, brandishing the suit of armor's gilded sword. Before anyone could stop him, he impaled his older brother and crowed triumphantly, “Now it's too late.”