Dead Languages

by David Shields

  None of these hesitations seemed to matter anymore when I was sitting with twelve other people in the back of Elaine’s brother’s red pickup truck, smelling spilled beer, feeling Audrey’s fingers crawl across the floor toward mine.

  “I hope you brought the bracelet,” Audrey said, rubbing her wrist.

  I patted my shirt pocket and nodded.

  The motel was something of a disappointment. It wasn’t on the edge of a cliff overlooking the bay, as its brochure said it was, but on a dirt road with an unobstructed view of an abandoned filling station. Although the swimming pool was indeed heart-shaped, it was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence—no obscurity to this motel’s symbolism—the gate to which had to be opened for you. The room Audrey had rented was a dusty, dark affair, with gold bedspreads, sliding doors that wouldn’t slide, and Venetian blinds that blinded. A color TV hung from the ceiling like a dead turtle. Quite a few of Audrey’s pals wanted to watch late morning cartoons as desperately as my Mission district playmates had, but, as the station announcer insisted on informing us every thirty seconds, we were experiencing difficulty with the audio portion of our program. “Cartoons without sound ain’t shit,” one of the partygoers observed and everyone agreed, so the television set was turned off.

  Apparently, Audrey had told everyone not to bring presents but, if they really wanted to bring something, a carton of Tareytons and a six-pack of Double Bubble would be great! because everyone handed her exactly the same thing. Some people had brought bottles of liquor or water pipes for themselves. While they drank and sucked, Audrey blew smoke rings and popped gum bubbles. I sat at her side on the gold bedspread, reading Double Bubble comics. Someone asked the manager of the motel to unlock the gate to the heart-shaped pool. None of them wanted to swim. They just sat along the edge and watched me tread water. They were extremely impressed with how long I could keep bobbing up and down, but it’s nothing, really. I’ve always been able to stay barely afloat forever. After a while, Audrey grew bored sitting in the sun and watching me swim. It was her party, so when she asked me to bring her the bracelet I jumped out of the pool and ran across the rocky parking lot to the room. When I returned, Audrey was leaning back in the lounge chair, and they were all gathered festively around her.

  “Here it is,” I said, handing it to her.

  “Well?” she said.

  “‘Well?’” I said.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well, here,” I said, taking the bracelet out of her hands and giving it to her again. “Happy Birthday.”

  “Won’t you be so kind as to wrap it around my wrist, sweet Jeremy? For as of this moment you and me are goin’ steady.”

  Most laughed. I thought maybe I’d been brought here as a comic example of pubescent sincerity or that Audrey was sexually slumming—going through initiation rites she’d outgrown when she was nine. But she, if not the rest of them, also seemed deadly serious. Her perfect blue eyes were aching with emotion, with a thirteen-year-old’s thirst for romance. Maybe her mock-epic tone was for the amusement of her friends. I knelt down and clasped the chain around her wrist. I didn’t know what it meant to be going steady, but I supposed it meant I couldn’t see other girls, and I wasn’t, so going steady seemed fine.

  “It’s beautiful. It’s so silvery. I’ve never owned silver before. Never owned J.J.Z. before, either,” Audrey said, digging her fingers into the carved initials, tugging on my trunks. “To celebrate, I’m gonna go slippin’ down the slide, but I don’t know how to swim real well, so you catch me when I hit water, okay?”

  Everyone else stood off at a distance. I dove in; Audrey climbed the ladder. At the top, she stopped and spat the chewing gum out of her mouth, as if she were doing away with whatever was silly juvenilia. Her legs were spread, her arms were flapping, the straps to her suit were slipping off. She was lying when she said she couldn’t swim. She could swim as well as or better than I could. She grabbed my hair, wrapped her legs around me, and pulled me under. The deep end was only six feet, so we went all the way to the bottom. Through air bubbles and chlorinated water, she kissed me. One always wonders what the first kiss will be like; suddenly one is in the midst of it and it doesn’t seem to matter any more what it should or would or might be like. It is. What it is is something entirely different from familial good night and good morning kisses. It’s a different thing altogether. The shaking of heads, the rubbing of bodies, the touching of tongues—all this seemed excellent enough. But what I really thought was too wonderful for words was that someone finally liked my mouth, someone finally liked me and was concentrating all her admiration on my mouth: on my trepidant lips. I came up for air first. Then, a second later, Audrey rose, looking for all the world like a mermaid in love.

  13

  IN THE WAY that all people in any deep passion attempt to separate themselves from their society, Audrey said goodbye to her group and, while I didn’t bid farewell to my family, I temporarily stopped seeing them as the center of my universe. Audrey sent me ungrammatical love letters in geography class. I wrote poems (very free verse) to her during math. It was eighth-grade romance, spring passion, a flush feeling in the face.

  Although Audrey was still smoking too much to be in very good athletic shape, she joined the girls’ track team, principally, I think, to look at the color of my legs in the natural light of the playground in the afternoon. Soon enough she’d turned herself into a tough little sprinter and was running anchor leg for the girls’ quarter-mile relay team. I ran the last hundred and ten yards for the boys’ team. Sometimes the boys would race against the girls. I’d receive the baton a second or two before Audrey did, wait for her, run shoulder-to-shoulder for ninety yards, then let out a little kick at the end. It’s always seemed to me that, if you’re really fast and know in your own mind how fast you are, from time to time you’ll let the other person win. I’ve never been that fast in anything. I’ve always had to prove how superior I was.

  Once track practice was over, we’d run together around the playground until the last school bus came to take her home. The Bayshore track consisted of nothing more than a painted white circle describing the width of the asphalt field. We’d run round and round the circle, holding hands, me in baggy gray sweats and de rigueur Adidas, and Audrey in absurdly brief briefs, white tennis shoes with pink laces, a San Francisco Giants baseball cap, and sunglasses (“shades, man, to obstruct reality”). There’s a particular feeling, when you are young and sweaty and exhausted, that gathers around dusk and macadam and has much to do with a delusion of immortality—with the pervasive sense that the world is dying but you are indestructible. There’s no feeling the physical world produces which is quite so fine, but you’re only supposed to get it when you’re alone and, even then, only once or twice a year. I was getting the feeling every day: every afternoon, at dusk, on the paved track with Audrey.

  She didn’t say anything about cement or everlasting life, and at the time I wasn’t one to ruin paradise by conversing about it. “Running like this, with you, sweet Jeremy, it almost makes me want to quit smoking,” Audrey said. The pavement was starting to give her shin splints, though. One Saturday morning she called and said we were going running in Muir Woods. Muir Woods was like the High Sierras in that just its name sent shivers down my spine: it was formally framed and therefore, to me, beautiful. We took a bus across the bay, then hitchhiked through the mountains to the forest. While other people were taking guided tours of the trees, looking at labels in Latin, feeding chocolate bars to chipmunks, counting year-rings and exclaiming, Audrey and I ran deeper and deeper, higher and higher into the woods, back where the trail narrowed, vegetation rioted, and big trees were kings.

  Audrey had brought a backpack of snacks. When we’d run far enough that we could no longer hear the troops below, we stopped and she spread a table cloth across a patch of pebbles and crab-grass, offering apples, processed cheese, Ritz crackers, and a bottle of Ripple. The entire gesture—the white tablecloth, the prepared lunch,
the Saturday morning excursion to a local landmark—was so uncharacteristically and hopefully domestic of her that I passed into a state of such profound happiness nothing could perturb me. I lay back, looking at timber, tiny bugs, and bluebirds, with cheese and crackers in my mouth and Audrey’s head in my lap.

  That head, into which so few thoughts usually entered, was, in such an idyllic setting, receiving more data than it knew what to do with, and Audrey finally blurted out: “Damn! Sometimes, you know, I wish I had parents. Some people seem like they have parents. Other people seem like they don’t. You do.”

  “Do what?” I said. I was studying a tree twig and didn’t want to talk.

  “You heard me. Have parents. You seem like you have parents.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have parents.”

  “Don’t play dumb, Jeremy. I’m talking seriously for once. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t grown up—if that’s what you want to call it—in an orphanage. Sometimes I get tired of filling out forms and telling people I live with my aunt. Sometimes I wish I had a home to, you know, go home to.”

  I couldn’t believe anyone was so innocent she actually believed that houses were great hearths of banked fires, that families were healthy groups offering comfort and reassurance. I pulled her hair back, kissed her somewhat awkwardly on the nape of the neck, and said, “You can always come home to me.”

  It was a sentimental thing to say. It was meant as nothing more than metaphorical consolation. But maybe she never had anyone tell her that before. Tears came to her eyes and she fairly attacked me with kisses. She kept saying she loved me and banging my head against the ground. I couldn’t tell whether she was hysterical or just very happy. I thought it best, in either case, to let her do what she wanted to do and not interfere. She seemed to have been through all the motions before, while I had no idea exactly what my responsibilities were. She licked my ears, unbuttoned my shirt, tugged at my trousers, and I just lay there. I wasn’t only afraid of serious arousal. I was incapable of it. I don’t know about other boys at twelve-and-a-half, but I was still prepubescent. I was perfectly content to run and clasp hands and kiss on the lips.

  Audrey, bored, rolled off me, took solace in a Ritz cracker, and said, “What’s the problem?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why did you stop?”

  “Stop?”

  “Don’t you want to go all the way, man?”

  “No,” I said. “No, Audrey, not here, not yet. Maybe soon. Indoors, somewhere, at night, in a week or two. Do you mind?”

  She waited three long weeks for me to grow up, during which time I consulted numerous anatomy texts and even visited an East Bay medicine man who, in a Berkeley Barb classified advertisement, promised Organ Increase. At the end of three weeks was the eighth-grade graduation dance. It was tradition for couples who had yet to sacramentalize their unity to do so on mattresses along the side of a hill that overlooked the gymnasium. Audrey wasn’t waiting any longer.

  She came dressed in a black evening gown she’d borrowed from Elaine; stockings, which I’d never seen her wear before; and high heels, in which she was slightly taller than I was. With my hair combed across my forehead and my shirttail flapping, I must have looked like her younger brother or eldest son. Everyone, absolutely everyone including my basketball coach, invited Audrey to dance, but that night she had eyes only for me and said no to every last one of them. We danced every dance—the fast ones, at which she said I looked like a skittering jackrabbit, as well as the slow ones, during which I smelled the miscegenation of the sweat on her back with the perfume behind her ears. Whenever the jukebox broke down, I’d buy plastic cups of orangeade and we’d go kiss in dark corners.

  As the dance progressed, there were fewer and fewer people in the gym and almost no couples. Audrey’s hints that we ought to take a walk in the dark or get a breath of fresh air became increasingly persistent and obvious. I finally agreed to leave. Walking along the base of that hill was like coming into a war zone: hearing bodies collide, great screams of pain and expectation. It terrified me. When Audrey took my hand and suggested we—as it was called—climb the mountain, I panicked and ran. At night it always seems like you’re running faster than you ever have in the daytime, and I felt like I was flying. I ran all the way home. I didn’t look back once.

  I dreamed about international hand-to-hand combat and the next morning got what was coming to me—a letter from Audrey, delivered by Elaine with knowing condescension.

  Jeremy: I am writing this lettter at three oc’lock in the morning in my dingey little apartmint the lectricity the gas the heat none of them paid for and none of them probably ever will. Goddam you, anyways! I have given you 4 hole months of my life, and what do I get out of it, a lousy crushed Dixie cup of orangeaid! Why did you run away from the hill like a scittering jackrabbit? Scared, huh? Afraid? Mama told you not to? Well, I’ve had enough of Little Boy Blue and his goody-good-iness all the time. I just can’t take it any more. Inclose pleez find your ID bracelet (slitely scrached a bit on the back—sorry!—twenny minutes ago got mad and took my penknife to it!) Maybe we can still be friends kinda like Elaine and Rob, and I know I’ll always value your advice on things, and your buying me all that gum and cigarettes (musta cost you a fortune!) and the nice nervis way you talk and all the running we did together waiting for my bus to come and my birthday party at the motel (First kiss is always best!) and, most especilly, sweet Jeremy, your legs in the gym’s flooresent lights right around quarter a four in the afternoon. But I’m sorry! All the lovey-dovey handholding and kissing is fine for awhile, but finully I want someone who’s willing to climb the mountain with me at least once in awhile, doncha know? I’m sorry, Jeremy, you just aren’t giving me enough action. I need someone a little older or at least a little more experienced. It was just too embearassing to be alone at midnight at the bottom of the hill at the graduation dance. Maybe like I say we can still be friends, and I do still love you but only like friends.

  Luv:

  Audrey

  P.S. Maybe we can do some running together this summer!

  Yes, maybe we could still be friends. Maybe we could do some running together this summer. Maybe the Golden Gate Bridge would collapse. It was eleven o’clock (“oc’lock”: I loved that) on a Saturday morning in May. I sat in a chair in the living room and read the letter six or seven more times, to savor all the misspellings but also to make sure I hadn’t misinterpreted its overall message, then staggered down the stairs to my bedroom, where I drew the curtains, killed the lights, took out a black-and-white photograph of Audrey, crawled under the covers, and made my first prolonged attempt at self-abuse. It took nearly forever. Twenty minutes later I was still squirming on the sheets, holding the snapshot in one hand and my barely increased organ in the other, shaking the latter like a pen that wouldn’t work. I created blood blisters around the rim, producing fluid that was neither as yellow as urine nor as white as semen, and I finally quit when I’d reached not so much orgasm as utter anguish.

  “Here’s the church that will wake me up Sunday morning at eight,” Audrey wrote in her minute script on a postcard she sent last summer from Port Townsend, Washington,

  and, if I linger, at ten. The only time I ever hear the bells is while I’m in bed, trying to sleep. I’ve probably seen half a dozen weddings. Somehow, maybe because everyone looks so small, these scenes (caught from the upstairs window) seem like movies. I’m always imagining ex-husbands, kids from previous marriages. No one is young, no one wears white that I remember. My favorite groom was a fat man in his fifties. The young ones must marry in a bigger church, not this tiny one on a side street. They must look bigger, even from a distance. I don’t think I’d be as impressed. I have also become a fan of the ferries across the sound to Victoria and San Juan Island—it doesn’t matter much where, so long as I can sit on the deck reading my latest detective novel. It’s very late at night and I bet the ten o’clock bells will ring for me tomorrow.

  In s
even years she’d moved seven hundred miles north and learned how to spell “o’clock.”

  Nothing ever changes for anybody.

  The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.

  14

  MOTHER WAS HAPPY my junior high school education had come to an inglorious end. She thought my two years at Bayshore had been a disaster: playing basketball with drug addicts, going steady with an orphan girl. Mother was quite disappointed in the public school system for which she was working and decided to give me another go at private education. Beth entered her first year at Stanford—she contemplated the first double major ever in set design and the English revolution—and the hope was that with four years of rigorous secondary school instruction I might still be permitted to migrate south to Palo Alto.

  The joke one heard about the Jack London Memorial Preparatory Academy in the Arts and Sciences was that if the Chinese New Year and Jewish New Year were ever on the same day the school would shut down. Most of the students in the sciences division were Asian and punched the buttons on their calculators during recess. Most of the students in the arts division were Jewish and disliked the Asians for not being political enough. I drifted toward the arts division and Father thought that, surrounded by “my people,” I might stop mumbling. Guess again, Father. London was fanatical about sending its students to the best colleges in the country, which meant London was the only high school in the city that had an art gallery, an air-conditioned theater, or an aquarium of tropical fish, but which also meant, if you weren’t producing, they pounced on you. I wasn’t in school three weeks before Loud Blazer, instructor of Psychoanalysis and Literature, came up to me in the hallway and said, “You’re Jeremy Zorn, aren’t you, Beth’s brother?”