House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

Annie said, “How was he? I mean the last time you saw him.”

  “The last time I saw him he was sitting on this sofa.” There was such a quietness in the woman’s voice that Annie had to listen closely. A quietness and something else. A stillness. A fright. “He had taken me to the park where your sister was killed. He was tired. We had walked a lot. It was hot, and . . . all the emotions. I thought something was about to happen to us all, and I asked him to call you. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Me?”

  “I think about you a lot. Because I know he does. But to be honest, I wasn’t sure you existed. I knew there was a need for you, I just wasn’t sure you were there. Do you understand?”

  The need for someone to exist? Did she understand that? “Where do you think he is?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think clearly now. He’s checked out of his hotel. When he took me to that park and explained what had happened to Michelle, he told me that he didn’t have any secrets left, but I don’t believe him. He has a secret life, but I’m not sure he knows what it is himself. I believe he’s gone off into another of his secrets. All I have left is your number because it was the last one we called on this phone.”

  Annie didn’t know what to say. She wanted to say, If you’d called a minute later I too would have been gone, we would never have talked, and you would never know if I existed or not. Seconds, really. When lifetimes turn on seconds like that, what can you say?

  Her quietness was like Paula Ortiz’s quietness, and it lasted a long time. Finally Paula Ortiz said, “This is Annie Williamson, isn’t it? Tell me the truth.”

  Annie admitted she was. It was as if she’d never truly had to identify herself before.

  “And you had a sister Michelle who was killed by a bomb in Madrid.”

  Yes. She’d had a sister, largely unknown to her, who’d gone by that name and had been killed like that.

  “I need help, Annie. I don’t want anything to happen to you, but your father and I . . .”

  Yes? She waited to hear more. My father and you . . .?

  “I just can’t let him step off the edge of the world like this.”

  The edge of the world? The world is round. Wait long enough and he’ll roll back around to you. It was what she’d been doing all summer.

  “It’s something my ex-husband said.”

  Is everybody somebody’s ex?

  “I’m sorry,” Paula Ortiz confessed. “School must be about to start.”

  School had started. It had started five days ago. But Annie took down Paula Ortiz’s phone number and address in Madrid, and then she got into her father’s car and drove seven hundred miles north. Once more she’d gone off without any tapes, and once more she listened to Tracy Chapman repeating one reason, one reason, one reason. She drove interstates through Ohio, Pennsylvania, western New York, and with no man in the car to lure her off into a motel where a thankless trip could be offset with a fast fuck, she drove all day and most of the night and arrived at her apartment after two A.M. Valerie woke up and aired all her concerns—she’d doubted if Annie was ever going to come. Valerie’s mother had also been worried—if Annie was not going to return to school, perhaps Valerie should begin to think about a new roommate since it was not good for her to be alone for long. And as Annie was well aware, Valerie’s mother knew loneliness—she spoke and respoke, expounded and embroidered from experience. Valerie was lonely, but Annie arrived in a caffeine stupor that left her leaden-headed and of no use to anybody. She got only four hours of sleep.

  The next day she attended three classes, for which she’d preregistered, but having missed two class days already she’d been bumped out of the two most interesting. In the third, a twentieth-century history of China, she couldn’t understand the professor. He was the real thing, an exiled mainland Chinese man, who spoke with the strange clacking inflections of some exotic bird. Michelle would have sat in the first row and mastered exoticbirdese. Annie stepped outside and consulted the zigs and zags of their glacial-blue lake. A blue to clear your head, to bring you back to essentials. That same day—all in one day—she saw Jonathan and her Tennessee volunteer, Chad, across the Arts Quad. Both looked purposeful—neither was trailing along—and both looked as if they were biding their time until she appeared at their side. She went up to the bell tower that provided an overview of the university and the town, from which she could take her bearings. A spasm of self-disgust brought her down before she even reached the top. She didn’t need an overview to make up her mind. She walked across the quad to the registrar’s office, where she could square herself with the university officials and save everybody time and money. University officials had a code available for every student’s trials and tribulations. It would be interesting to see which code they applied to her. She never entered the door. She walked back across the gorge to College-town, where two travel agencies had offices. She didn’t enter those doors either.

  Valerie stood in Annie’s bedroom door and watched her recently arrived roommate pack one carry-on bag. Since Valerie never stopped asking questions and mixing in dire forecasts about what was about to befall her friend, Annie really didn’t have to say a thing, except “Don’t tell your mother.” Then she added, “Don’t tell mine either.” But she said nothing about where she might be going. Halfway down the stairs she remembered her passport, and even though she’d aborted every other activity she’d undertaken that day, she went back and got it. Valerie saw her do that. But Annie did not let Valerie take her to the airport. She drove there alone, left her father’s car in long-term parking and paid a staggering over-the-counter sum to fly from their small town in upstate New York to Madrid. A half-hour later she was in the air, and although she had to switch planes at Kennedy, she would not turn back there. Once Annie was in the air she let them take her.

  If she didn’t count Canada, she’d never been out of the country. With her family she’d been to Hawaii, the island of Maui, during a Christmas break and had seen long waving sugarcane fields and tough bristly pineapple fields, and cavorting whales and iridescent schools of fish through her snorkling mask, and big glossy flowers and oiled and overweight natives performing their pageants. But in the end it was MTV in their rooms. She had gotten her passport when Michelle had gotten hers—her father had seen to that—but hers was still virgin. In Kennedy they made sure she still looked like her three-year-old picture, and then in Madrid a young man in a gray, tobacco-smelling booth pounded a blank page with a seal-affixing stamp, and she was officially abroad.

  On the flight she’d sat beside a Spanish woman who had just been to St. Louis, where she’d visited her sister. This Spanish visitor to the American heartland had been on a riverboat, she’d gone to a baseball game, she’d stood beneath the arch to the golden West. She’d spoken to Annie in a mix of English and Spanish. In a test of her Spanish and nerve, Annie replied that she too was going to visit her sister, who was a student abroad, and together they would visit the great cathedral in Toledo, the even greater Moorish palace called the Alhambra, and the city of Seville, where orange trees grew along the city streets. The woman, who was from Valencia, said orange trees grew along Valencia’s streets too, and even though it might not be a prime tourist attraction, Annie was not to omit Valencia from her travels. Then the woman went to sleep. When a Spanish boy across the aisle began to flirt with her, Annie risked trying out another story. She told the boy she was going to Valencia to meet her fiancé’s family and was nervous about the impression she’d make. The boy taught her a line from a song: “Valencia, es la tierra de las flores, de la luz y del amor.” In low festive voices they sang it together across the aisle until she got it right. With that line of song she’d make all the impression she needed.

  At the Customs booths they all parted. The Spanish woman and the Spanish boy went off to collect their luggage, and Annie learned the first advantage of traveling light. If your travel companions were of the clinging sort, it was a surefire means of breaking fre
e. If your ultimate objective was to be alone, you were alone.

  She got into the first in a line of taxis and told the driver the Palace Hotel. She sank into the back seat and kept her eyes open long enough to see that Madrid was ring after concentric ring of high-rises growing out of an arid plain. There was almost no green, and the morning light was shattering. When she woke up they had just passed an enormous fountain, topped by a statue of some goddess riding in a chariot, and were headed up a side street that ran parallel to a six-lane avenue. Between the side street and the avenue she had all the green she wanted. Charming outdoor cafés were located there, and along a promenade people strolled. Café Recoletos was one name she remembered. Café Gijon was another. At the Palace Hotel a top-hatted doorman dressed in tails held the door for her. She had to pay the driver in dollars, which he didn’t seem to mind since she was sure he’d jacked up the price. The doorman, used to informality in today’s jet-setting elite, kept his composure when Annie told him, no, no luggage, just this carry-on bag. She was what he saw, wrinkled jeans and blouse, a wadded sweater she’d worn against the air-conditioned chill, uncombed, slept-on hair. She had a credit card good as gold. The Palace Hotel came at her in opulent waves, but she stood her ground and took a room overlooking another plaza, this one with a god, not a goddess, riding a chariot, standing as erect as the trident he held at his side. Gods and goddesses riding their chariots through recorded history, back into the mythic past. Europe. The Old World. The continent of the killer cornices.

  When she woke it was dark—she hadn’t reset her watch and had no idea of the time. Not even of the day. It didn’t matter, though, because she wasn’t through sleeping yet. In the interlude she did place a call to Paula Ortiz. The voice that answered sounded eager and anxious and exhausted in a way that might last for years. Or maybe that was just how Annie was hearing things these days. She told Paula where she was and the state she was in and asked her to set a time and place they could meet. Annie had been riding along on momentum she’d generated when she’d walked out of her father’s front door, and it had finally run out. Paula told her the time, the day. She mentioned an outdoor café close to Annie’s hotel, the Café Gijon, and Annie felt less lost, less cast adrift, since it was a place she’d identified on her own. She was to rest and regain her strength. She was to take care of herself as if she were an invaluable resource, and Paula would meet her there in the afternoon.

  Her father? No, nothing.

  There was a vacancy in her head, which seemed to extend around her wherever she went, but she was awake and clean and dressed in a fresh change of clothes. The second she stepped out of the Palace Hotel she entered a dailiness of life that caught her entirely by surprise. She’d known people shopping, people going off to lunch, people passing between offices, people killing time, but that had been at home and this was Madrid, Spain, where the ordinariness of things suddenly seemed extraordinary. A sweater in a shop window could possess a special luminosity. A bouquet of carnations could. Hardware—plumbing joints and drain pipes and lavatory fixtures—was no longer the stuff of the utilitarian world. In her jetlagged vacancy, she let herself be carried along. She might find herself in a small plaza, with a fountain and a sycamore and a statue of some saint, where that ordinariness seemed enshrined, or she’d pass along arcaded walkways and emerge into much larger plazas, presided over by kings on horseback, where the sunlight flooded down on her like a hot, dry and very public bath.

  She passed a large restaurant-deli of some sort called the Museum of Ham, where hams from all regions of Spain hung from hooks in the ceiling and dripped their last drops of fat into little paper cups. She fed the vacancy in her stomach there, ham from Extremadura and slices of cheese from La Mancha, little rounds of bread and a glass of red wine. She sat in a park that looked across an avenue to a palace. Older women walked their dogs, and younger people, people her age, dressed like her, some with nose and lip rings and some with tattoos, tattoos like hers, sat and sprawled on the benches or stretched out in the sparse grass or strolled in front of her with their fingers hooked into each other’s hip pockets. As she had done. What was the difference?

  She found a store and shopped for something to carry, just to see how it felt. She bought a small moleskin notebook and a pen. She paid with her credit card, a transaction so routine she felt a sudden kinship with the woman who carried it out for her. At a café close by she ordered an espresso and, in the space headed, “In case of loss, please return to,” wrote her name in the notebook. Annie Williamson. The address she gave was not the Palace Hotel’s but Paula Ortiz’s. She wrote Paula Ortiz’s name. Then she wrote her father’s. Then, shaping the letters as deliberately as if she were incising them, she wrote her sister’s name, Michelle Williamson.

  Paula Ortiz was waiting for her when she found her way down to the Paseo del Castellana and the Café Gijon. Paula’s face was freckled, and Annie had always had a special fondness for freckles. She’d never seen a mean-spirited person with freckles, except for one boy, whose hair was so red it flamed out at you. Paula’s hair was red like the last glow of an ember, softened by a scattering of ash. She wore a gauzy blouse and skirt, of a pale gray-green, that trembled in the breeze. Her glasses magnified her eyes and gave their blue an aquarial glow. When Annie approached, Paula stood, and Annie saw the weight she carried, nothing like her mother’s, which was an exercise in transportation every time she moved, but a ripeness of weight along the neck, in the bare freckled arms. She could imagine her father holding Paula Ortiz.

  Still, this wasn’t the only woman here. Others were sitting singly or in groups at the tables, and some of them were stunning, women of the fantasy sort a daughter might once in her life be willing to wish on a father.

  “Are you Paula Ortiz?”

  “Annie.”

  They sat. On one side traffic surged by. Annie had been in one of those taxis the day before, or perhaps days before that. On the other side the foot traffic of Madrid passed in a steady stream. Paula asked how she felt, if she was hungry or thirsty, and tried to determine the hours of her jet lag. If she were still home, on campus, she’d be between breakfast and lunch. Whether Annie, who’d almost never traveled, knew it or not, she was in two places at once.

  Paula mothered her just a bit. She ordered a ration of sepia a la plancha, a dish the Spanish loved. But there came a moment when Paula couldn’t help herself. She gave up small talk and mothering and gazed at the young woman in front of her. She searched over Annie’s features. Had she been a doctor she might have peered into her nose, ears and throat. In that moment of fine, itemizing abandon, she actually reached out and stroked the ends of Annie’s long brown hair, rolling the thickness of a strand between her fingertips.

  Annie said, “Michelle looked like him. Michelle had that sunny openness in her face, although that’s not how she was. I don’t look like either one of them.”

  But I am Annie Williamson.

  “I know you’re his daughter, though,” Paula said.

  “How? How do you know?”

  “Because of all the things he wouldn’t say about you. I know it sounds strange, but you’re just like the things he kept to himself.”

  It did sound strange, but she understood what her father’s friend and lover meant, because he was just like the things she kept to herself. Knowing those things, she couldn’t imagine him any other way.

  “Whether I exist or not, his need for me does. That’s what you said on the phone.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think he needs me for?” Annie asked.

  Paula shook her head. When Annie’s mother shook her head in that way it meant Annie had dumbed down or, for reasons of her own, was playing dumb, and her mother wasn’t going along. Paula shook her head like that, and it meant there just weren’t any words. “Life,” she said. “A reason to go on.”

  It was a heavy burden to bear. “There’ve got to be other reasons.”

  Again Paula shook her head. �
�A woman knows,” she said in a sad and considered tone that would have caused Annie’s mother to cringe. If knowledge meant surrender it might be better to really be dumb or play dumb, just stay dumb at all costs. Paula met Annie’s eyes across the table, then covered her hand with hers. “You’re his reason to go on.”

  Paula applied a calming pressure to her hand. Annie knew boy-girl jealousy. She knew how a girl looked at you when you’d taken her boyfriend away, and on one occasion, at least, she knew with what powerless scorn she’d looked at a girl. Paula Ortiz could have been her father’s reason to go on; instead, Annie was. What she felt in the warmth of the older woman’s hand was not rivalry and not a questioning, nor was it the protectiveness a mother feels for a child; it was not a mother’s defeated longing to live through a child, which could get very intense if you happened to be Valerie and Valerie’s mother; it was not a clinging and it was not a sisterly act of seeing a friend through a bad stretch; it was not like any kind of closeness Annie had ever felt before. She reminded herself that she was tired, not fully recovered from her trip, not reassembled, as if she really were in two places at once. She was vulnerable and on foreign soil.

  Annie said, “How do you know he’s not coming back? It’s only been . . . how many days?”

  Again Paula shook her head. A woman knows.

  “He called it ‘an interlude,’” Paula said.

  “That’s how he described it to me too.”

  “He came to see the spot where your sister was killed, and then he went away. In between we had our moment. I won’t call it a ‘fling.’ That’s too stale a term, like some old dance routine. Like one of those old love songs. ‘Interlude’ probably is the best word.”

  “He liked those old songs, you know.”

  Paula shook her head again. Annie Williamson would have to have been there in Paula Ortiz’s skin, age, say, forty-five, and she hadn’t been. She’d been home, waiting for her far-ranging father to roll back around.