House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  Her mother began to run the windows up.

  Annie made a roll-down motion with her wrist.

  “Did you really try to fix Dad up with one of your clients? Or is that just part of the legend?”

  “I offered to introduce him to a woman who I thought suited him just fine. She also happened to be a woman I was hoping to sell a house to.”

  “Didn’t work? A package deal, a house and a husband, and she wouldn’t bite?”

  But Annie’s mother wouldn’t bite either. Good for her. As always, there was a small boisterous part of Annie cheering her mother on.

  “No, it didn’t work. That doesn’t mean I stop trying to sell houses to people who need a place to live. And that doesn’t mean I should stop trying to make your father happy when it’s within my means. Does it?”

  Annie agreed that it didn’t.

  “Women love to see their ex-husbands happy and settled. It means they can turn the page.” She paused a moment and added, as though passing along privileged information, “Some women do,” then ran the window back up.

  Alone in the parking lot, before she dealt with the heat in her father’s car, Annie admitted to herself that her mother was more than one daughter could handle, and in that sense, she mourned the loss of her sister acutely. If Michelle had been alive, whom would her mother have tried to fix up with the eligible young man from San Francisco? Michelle, whose involvement with men, as far as her sister was aware, had ended with a high school sweetheart named Jimmy Spaulding? Or Annie, who was in and out of beds far more frequently than her mother knew? If, that is, there was anything in that respect her mother didn’t know or hadn’t imagined vividly enough that it could stand as knowledge. Michelle, who needed help, who needed supplementary experiences of almost every sort, and Annie who needed . . . what? Guidance? Call it guidance.

  The truth was, she didn’t want anything Michelle had had.

  Her father’s was the last car in the lot. She got in and closed the door and left the windows rolled up. She didn’t turn on the air. Her mother was all over the place, but when she was right she was right. Annie had not come to terms with her sister because Annie was doing what she had always done, cutting her losses and letting Michelle go off and have her way. When Michelle was alive it had been a way for Annie to survive; now that Michelle was dead it was a way to pile up loses, that was all. The losses no longer redounded to her older sister’s discredit. Annie was being deprived so that her sister could forge greedily out ahead? No longer. Her sister had been deprived once and for all. Now if Annie was being deprived, it was because deprivation was her middle name.

  Who are you? I’m Annie Deprivation Williamson. Don’t come too close or I’ll deprive you of me, and me of you too.

  She laughed, then she breathed down that stifling heat in her father’s car. She took another quick breath—if need be she’d deprive herself of oxygen too. The logic was unassailable. If she was gasping for air now, it was because Michelle had just been here and gotten more than her share. Dead, Michelle was more hungry for air than when she’d been alive. Dead, Michelle had lured her father to Madrid, leaving Annie fatherless in a scorching parking lot in a car slow to cool down.

  The air conditioner was blowing, but Annie could hear Michelle drawing those breaths. She was taking them right out of her sister’s mouth. Which, of course, she wasn’t.

  Which, of course, she was.

  IX

  A summer evening and he had been walking among the crowds around the Puerta del Sol. He’d felt some pressure from behind, a faint nudge, and then an even fainter nibbling in his hip pocket. The plaza was well lit, the crowd perhaps even more numerous than normal. Ben discovered he’d been able to whirl and, all in one motion, seize the wrist of the young man who had his fingers in his hip pocket. He’d moved so deftly that no one had seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. The crowd flowed around them and he was left squeezing the thin wrist of a boy of no more than eighteen. When the boy tried to break and run, all Ben had to do to keep him there was squeeze some more. If he’d needed to, he felt sure he could have snapped the bones.

  The boy had startled, extraordinarily alert eyes. In the streetlight’s orange glow his face was jaundiced. It rose out of the shadows along the crest of the nose and the point of the chin. He had a predator’s face. He looked like a fledgling hawk.

  When Ben released the wrist he did so by stages, as if he were telling this would-be pickpocket, Wait, wait. Now, you can fly.

  Armando Ordoki was no longer in Spain. He had gone to Brussels to plead the Basque case before the European Union. In the company of two other men he’d gone to Geneva to plead for self-determination before a United Nations commission. Afterward there’d been a press conference during which claims of torture at the hands of the Civil Guard had been made. Ordoki had been photographed there, wearing a dark windbreaker, a card of some sort attached to his lapel, his hands in his pockets, his legs spread. He fronted the camera while his two companions, also pictured, angled in, creating a triptych of which Ordoki was the centerpiece.

  In one of the papers there’d been a short bio. Born in 1955. Armando Ordoki Urtain. Hometown of Eskuibar in the province of Guipuzcoa. Born into a socialist family. Member of the Eskuibar comando of ETA in his early youth. Fled to France when the comando was disbanded. Jailed in 1983 for assault and extortion. Released in 1990 after serving his sentence. Stepped out of the shadows and into the light of electoral politics. Elected representative in the Basque parliament. After rising through the ranks, assumed leadership of Borroka, a militant nationalist party, in 1997. Degree in philosophy and letters. Married, two children. Favorite pastimes: hiking, reading, walking through the town with his family.

  Ben bought a Michelin road map that, unfolded, covered a good part of his bed. He found Eskuibar on a river called the Deba. It was in the mountains and looked to be roughly equidistant from the three largest Basque cities, Bilbao and San Sebastian, on the Atlantic coast, and Vitoria, the inland capital.

  Armando Ordoki walked its streets with his wife and two kids. If he now lived somewhere else, as Juan, the Regina desk clerk, did, he came back on Sundays and brought his family. He’d wouldn’t walk with that bear-like swagger on those streets; he’d have a different stride, and there were moments when he, Ben Williamson, on the streets of Madrid, thought he’d matched it. Lordly, at ease. A man on the way to his own coronation. El hijo predilecto. The town’s favorite son.

  Ben and Paula met at the Café Gijon at the evening hour, but they began to meet in other places too. She wanted to show him Madrid. He should think of Madrid as a hub with radiating spokes. Paula had a small car. He’d seen Toledo and Segovia. She’d show him Aranjuez and Avila and Alcala de Henares and Salamanca with its medieval university and its crown jewel, the Plaza Mayor. Follow the spokes out and she’d show him Seville and Granada and Valencia and Barcelona and Zaragoza and Pamplona . . . and he had to stop her. He didn’t want to see Spain. He got in the Metro with her—as good as a blindfold—and went to her apartment, where she fed him and where, as a great consolation for whatever the first prize might have been, they made love. He didn’t spend the night, but retraced their Metro route. Once they made love in the Regina, but that was neutral ground, not Paula’s, and the warmth they generated between them seemed climate-controlled. Plus, Paula saw some of his clippings, the ones he’d left out on the desk. The clippings lay on the map.

  He made another mistake with her. Out walking, they strayed into Retiro Park, with its wide sandy promenades full of performers and vendors and rowdy kids. Which was fine. But on the way out he let himself be tempted into that formal garden at precisely the hour when the couples took the evening’s stroll, and he and Paula became one with them, up the park’s main axis, around its geometrical subsidiary paths. The fountains, one in each quadrant, made their settling splash. He and Paula smelled the muted flower smells and the aging odor of the boxwood bushes. They promenaded in the timeless way the Spa
niards did, and before they’d exited through that arched stone gate, it was as if he’d survived a fever during which he’d sweated out all his individuality. He remembered those processions of Goya’s ghosts, massed in fungoid browns. Then those starkly drawn men, battling to the death.

  He took her out to dinner, but mostly he wanted to go to her house and eat so that later they could undress in her wardrobe mirror, look at themselves and laugh, and then, united before all the breakdowns the flesh was heir to, tumble into her bed. He didn’t mind that blindfolded Metro ride. When he walked around the Puerta del Sol he kept his wallet prominently displayed and waited for a nibble in his hip pocket. He was prepared to test his reflexes against another petty street criminal.

  Of the real criminals there was only one. Other ETA members would have their photographs in the paper occasionally, when they were caught, when their comandos were “desarticulados.” One, a middle-aged man who’d been released from prison only to be charged again, captured Ben’s attention for a few days. That man had an ashy line for a mouth and a face of such chalky pallor that he appeared to have risen from the dead. He was said to have been the most sanguinary leader of all that ETA had had. But he wasn’t the criminal who counted.

  Ben lost touch with himself. It was not as if he were drifting away with the crowds. He could collect himself, sit quietly apart, and still not be able to trace the thread of his life back to the man he’d been. The thread had either broken or been drawn too thin. He could remember a whole host of biographical facts, but it was as if they belonged to an acquaintance, not even a very close friend.

  Paula caught it, of course. She said, “It’s no use asking what’s worrying you. Judging from the look on your face, I don’t think you’d know.”

  She taught him a word, ensimismado. It meant to be withdrawn, turned in. Say it out loud and you could hear yourself spiraling out of sight.

  “Hey, Ben,” she hailed him, “when you’re ready to go, just let me know, okay? We’ve had some good times, but this doesn’t seem to be the place for you.”

  “I’m not ready to go, Paula.” And he reached out and cupped the back of her head. Her hair was short, her head perfectly round. He might have been cupping the back of one of his daughters’ heads—there was such a naturalness to the fit of his hand there.

  “You’re thinking about your family,” she surmised.

  “I haven’t got a family.”

  “Your daughter.”

  “Annie’ll be all right.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You’d have to know her. She laughs a lot, but she’ll never give in.”

  “Who’s missing, Ben?”

  “Her sister.”

  “Her sister?”

  “She was killed.”

  There was a pause. The world went quiet around them.

  “What was she like?” Paula said.

  “I don’t know. She was very private. She had a private vision.”

  “I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a child and then lose her. Children should lose their parents, not the other way around. It seems like a violation of nature.”

  He nodded. They were talking about somebody else. Somebody he knew, not really a close friend. They watched the passing crowds. Four generations were represented, and their dogs.

  She took his hand over the table. She searched him with eyes the glasses enlarged. Their blue was watery, but not the crystalline watery blue of Michelle’s eyes. Not those mountain-lake eyes that could, as though through an act of intelligence, suddenly freeze over. Paula’s eyes were in a constant state of thaw. The freckles were breaking down. The crooked bottom teeth were shifting. It was the secret to her warmth, this breakdown, this thaw.

  “When it’s over, it’s over, Ben,” she said. “You tell me. Like I said, I’ll understand.”

  “No,” he protested, even though he nodded.

  “What is it?” Paula said.

  “Why don’t you have a child?” he asked.

  Her expression turned wan, absent. Suddenly it was just two chapped lips. Now she’d turned away to look at the passersby.

  “Is it too late? I mean biologically.”

  She shook her head. “Another question. Another topic, please.”

  “It’s the only quantitative change that is truly qualitative. You’re two, then you’re three, and nothing will ever be the same.”

  She twisted back to him abruptly. He’d touched a nerve. “That’s a clever way of putting it,” she said, and for the first time he heard mockery, masking real temper, in her voice. “What are you doing here, Ben? I’m tired of these secrets. I know this: if I were down to one child I wouldn’t let her out of my sight.” She paused, as if she were about to apologize for such an indelicate way of putting it. Then she did it again. “If you’re going by numbers, be careful when you get down to one.”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t do this to me,” Paula warned him.

  With his large hand he cupped the back of her head again, and she tensed against him. Her eyes sharpened and held, and for a moment they maintained this strenuous standoff.

  As if on the count of three, they relented together. Her neck yielded and he lowered his hand. Any onlooker might have read it as the completion of just one more caress.

  In a subdued and seemingly civil voice, she said, “You have no right to talk to me about the children I might have had. You can be as mysterious as you please and hint at some awful tragedy and make me feel a terrible pain—because I care for you, Ben. You were right. We do share something, this need for a place, I give you that. You told me I can’t be a spectator forever and I told you I wasn’t, but I’m enough of a spectator to know what you mean. Would a child make the difference? Maybe. A child might. But you can’t come into my life dropping your hints like breadcrumbs about children of yours, touching and heart-wrenching stuff, and then tell me to get with it and have a child before the clock runs down. The only person I’m sleeping with is you. Are you proposing yourself as a father? You aren’t exactly your own best recommendation, are you, Ben?”

  “I’m loyal,” he said.

  “Are you?”

  “I’m loyal to my children.”

  “What if I told you I’m pregnant already? Would you be loyal to a child of mine?”

  The picture he saw in the wardrobe mirror was not of two people capable of making a baby. The picture he saw was of two people reaching back into their infancy to have a good time. Two baby-soft people. The little cupids that were always tumbling around Venus.

  “You aren’t,” he said.

  “If I were.”

  “Show me the child and I’m loyal,” he heard himself say.

  “Not to your daughter Annie. Does she even know where you are?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You mean as far as she’s concerned, you could be on the banks of the Zambezi?”

  Annie would know where he wasn’t. He wasn’t in a tent on the muddy banks of a river. Any river.

  Still, he was loyal to Annie. He would never betray her. He was loyal to her survival. The world could come to an end, all except the cockroaches, and Annie would survive the cockroaches. He’d see to it.

  “If you’re not loyal to her, you’re loyal to her dead sister,” Paula kept it up, her reading of his mind, “which means you’re loyal to a ghost. I can’t talk about ghosts, Ben, it gives me the chills. What was her name?”

  “Michelle.”

  “Michelle. It’s Michelle’s turn, for you to be loyal to her. Is that what you’re saying?”

  The names were familiar, intimately familiar—they were his daughters—but he no longer knew the man she was talking about. Loyal to Paula, to her freckles, round head, fading red hair, two twisted teeth, the thaw in her eyes, her warmth. “Loyal to you.” He made it public, a public utterance, as he finished his wine and stood. As with all people watchers, there came a moment when he wanted to join the crowd. It was amazing, really, something
in the nature of an instantaneous conversion. After being seated so long, all it took was one step and he became an object of other people’s attention.

  Who is that man?

  He was loyal to her. She was loyal to him. The next afternoon he came back to the Café Gijon, and she was there. She was with a man. She introduced him as her ex-husband, Jorge. He had a rumpled face, a flattened nose, a disarming grin off on the right side of his mouth, and serene green eyes. When he stood it was with an effortless poise up on the balls of his feet. His shoulders were powerfully sloped. He might have been an athlete, used to pivoting this way and that.

  She introduced Ben Williamson as her very good friend, and her ex-husband gripped him on the upper arm. He said, “Hombre,” as if he were addressing someone he hadn’t seen in years, his pleasure palpable. His voice was deep; Ben heard good-natured laughter churning along its lower reaches.

  This was the man who had good-naturedly divorced his wife and cut his scheming brothers off without a peseta.

  This was the man who supposedly could gaze through you off into the future and see it all. According to Paula, he had the long look, an endless depth of field. She had described him as a friend’s friend.

  He hadn’t been summoned. If Ben believed Paula, Jorge had just happened by, and this being a place where he and his wife had sometimes met, he had taken a moment to sit down with her. But while he was there he might as well provide a service. What kind of cloudy future was Ben Williamson about to step into? Jorge cleared up clouds.

  He said, “What I like about America is the freedom you have to inquire into everything without feeling as if you’re betraying your country. Spaniards can’t do that. Americans can piece together the country they want, but a Spaniard has to swallow it all, from the Iberians and the Romans to the present day. You and Paula,” and he swung his gaze over them both, “are very lucky.”