Dead Languages

by David Shields

  “Look, you,” she said, “I don’t know who you are. You’re probably just some lowly assistant sports editor or something, but for ten days I’ve been trying to build up the courage to come into this office and you’re not making it any easier. I transferred here just to work on the Journal. I love your layouts, your editorials, your twenty-one-point headlines. No one at this stupid school has yet to say a kind word to me. I heard people at London were real cold, but I didn’t expect them to be this bad. Are you all like that? Don’t any of you ever stop for a second to catch your breath? The course load is criminal, the teachers are frightening, the students are insanely intelligent and they know it, the modular schedule is confusing, the courtyard is too clean, the swimming pool is too long. I was hitting a tennis ball against the backboard, the girls’ tennis team came and kicked me off, I stayed for a while to watch them, and even they were imposing. Aren’t there any normal people around here?”

  I refused to define myself as normal chiefly to make her feel better, but she had expressed her admiration for the Journal and I thought the least I could do was look up. She was crying. Her hair was in her eyes. Her tennis dress was, as Father would have said, “oishkispieldt”—in disarray. Her socks were down around her ankles. Her left shoe was untied. She was crying. Her aluminum racquet was in one hand, her satchel of books was in the other; I took the racquet and books out of her hands, pulled up a chair for her, poured her some coffee from my thermos, presented her with a box of tissues, and brushed the bangs off her face.

  “You’re real nice,” she said.

  “You’re real upset,” I said.

  “Do you have any more coffee?” she asked.

  “So,” I said, pouring another cup, “you play tennis?”

  “No.” She knew my question was a straight line and thought her answer was the quintessence of wit. “I carry this thing around to swat mosquitoes.”

  I laughed loud to make her feel good and said, “We’ll have to get together sometime to play.”

  That Sunday overweight husbands and white-socks-with-pink-puffballs wives were playing doubles to either side of us and arguing about proper application of the territorial imperative, while we were content with the pleasure of new balls bouncing from my racquet to hers, tight strings, the song of a good rally. We lay down on the grass and used opposite ends of a bath towel Barbie had brought and drank Cokes charged to her father’s account.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, while stirring her ice, she said, “You limp a little on balls hit to your left.”

  I wanted to kiss her for uttering a line with such perfect sonic balance, but instead I told her the story of the day at the beach, the summer in traction, the brace on my thigh. Complications. She touched where the stitches had been, the scar tissue around the bone.

  “Does it still hurt?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Not really. Only when it rains.”

  “When it rains?”

  “Yes,” I said, wiping my face with my part of the towel. “When it rains I get a twinge in my left leg. When it rains”—I exaggerated to make myself appear brave—“I can feel the pin rubbing against the femur.”

  “When it rains it pours,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, smiling, though I had no idea what she meant by this, which didn’t matter, because language doesn’t represent life: it prophesies it. Within thirty seconds of Barbie’s curious remark clouds collided, precipitating precipitation.

  Although Father vociferously urged us not to see it because he felt both the book and the play romanticized and thus exploited mental illness, we saw a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest off-Geary. Brandenburg Concerto Number Four, the happiest moment in human history, played over and over while Barbie drove us there in her fast-back Mustang. Her window was down. Cold, clear air blew through the air like promises. High school seems like it happened such a long time ago. Barbie sipped diet soda. Traffic was thick. The play was just well lit, overacted insanity—maybe Father was right for once—but Billy Bibbitt, the guy who played Billy Bibbitt, I explained to Barbie, who was so sympathetic she nearly cried with compassion, the guy who played Billy Bibbitt was God.

  The fluorescent lights still flickered and the typewriters still had jammed margin releases, but soon the Journal walls were bright with posters of Mrs. Levine’s from various shows at the De Young Museum and “funky” tapestries (Barbie’s word). We took ourselves too seriously and had an office in which to work—all those long tables and folded proof sheets, reams of faded mimeo paper, grade-school scissors. I was the editor and Barbie was the assistant editor. I scribbled the story assignments in pencil, so no one could read them and Barbie and I could write all the articles. The newspaper was, to me, the unwilling child, the final truth-teller of the school, not that the students or teachers read it. The more unpopular the Journal, and Barbie and I, became, the more vengeful my satires and the more allusive the paper as a whole tended. With deepening desperation and frequency, we retreated to the white walls of the little office, where we hated everything except each other and the sound of the door being closed from the inside—a sound I believe I may have mentioned before. By the end of the year it would have been difficult to argue that what we edited was anything other than a five-column, four-page biweekly private correspondence.

  Barbie was chief photographer as well as assistant editor, clicking pictures wherever she went, the Instamatic camera strapped over her shoulder like a purse and the pink gloss applied like a kind of lipstick. She was such a demure and polite interviewer that most people, especially less good-looking vice principals, felt compelled to fill the silence with sensational revelations. She also had the ability, which never ceased to wow Mother, to write a headline that not only precisely fit the line’s word count but also contained some semi-obscure pun. And she cultivated a smooth writing style, although sometimes her coy confessions and subtle self-mockery dominated a story to such an extent that the casual reader was soon more interested in the dark recesses of Barbie’s soul than the pressing need to recycle aluminum cans.

  The first time we drove together to the printer in South San Francisco the bay hadn’t been visible from 101, but as we exited the off-ramp, spiraling onto a gravel road, we suddenly saw the sun backlighting the water. Suddenly we were looking at not license plates and guard rails but the benediction of white beams on a circle of blue lead. Like Charles’s whisper when we counted change or the Last Tier Quintet’s song in dark silence, the refracting shimmer made conversation sound absurd, so we drove the rest of the way to the printer and most of the way back without a word spoken between us.

  MOTHER GAVE ME all sorts of advice as to proper etiquette—napkin placement, knife position, witty repartee, that kind of thing—and Father said, “Whatever you do, be true to yourself,” four words of which rhyme but which I accepted, nevertheless, as sound counsel. Difficult to follow, however, when I was greeted on the front porch by a Venezuelan maid in white hat and apron, offering what must have been a dozen choices of cheese, while the three of them—Dr. and Mrs. Levine and Barbie—came forward in excellent attire.

  Dr. Levine was wearing a suit and vest and those special brown shoes with air holes in the toes that seem less than ludicrous only when worn by members of the medical profession. With a yellow corsage pinned to her pink dress, Mrs. Levine looked like spring, though clouds swirled from the west. Barbie was wearing white buckled shoes, a white lace dress, her hair in a pony tail, and a watch on her wrist that gleamed. The only suit I owned was too short in the sleeves and it was this too-short, quite faded outfit in which I was sweating when Dr. Levine said, “Barbie tells me you’re a perfect genius at running the newspaper.”

  “Barbie said that?” I said. “Well, that’s very nice, but it’s not really true. After a while, the paper practically runs itself.”

  “Oh, now, I know that’s not true,” Mrs. Levine said. “At least with creative writing that’s never true. I mean, my Harlequin Romances never writ
e themselves. Down to the last line of dialogue, I’m inventing and cogitating and analyzing mood and character.”

  The dining room was dark except for candles on a white tablecloth with white roses. I assumed the maid had prepared the delicious dinner—brown rice and fruit salad, beef stroganoff, asparagus, honeydew—because Mrs. Levine looked like she hadn’t lifted a finger, except to type up mood and character, since she was in college.

  “So, Jeremy,” Dr. Levine kept at me, “so what do you see yourself becoming?”

  “Becoming, sir?”

  Barbie kicked me with her buckled white shoes.

  Dr. Levine dabbed more butter on his rice and said, “Yes, Jeremy. Becoming. Don’t young men want to become anything any more? Your mother is a fine journalist. Your father is—still? Am I right?—director of the poverty program. I’m an ear-nose-and-throat man, as is Barbie’s older brother. What profession do you want to enter, Jeremy?”

  “I see what you mean,” I said, stalling, pouring myself and Barbie more milk. “I think—I think I w-w-want to become a writer, sir.”

  “Call me Lew.”

  “I think I w-w-want to become a writer, Lew.”

  “Really? What kind of writer?”

  “A real writer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Honey, you know what Jeremy means,” Mrs. Levine teased her husband. “There’s no more noble calling than good work with words.”

  “Fill me in, Jeremy,” Dr. Levine said. “Explain it to the cultural ignoramus. What’s a real writer? And why do you want to become one?”

  I wanted to become a writer because it struck me as my last opportunity to cease being the victim of language. However, I didn’t think such an unhappy insight was appropriate dinner table discussion—it was the very kind of faux pas Mother had coached me against committing—so I said, “Well, my mother is, as you know, a journalist and my father used to be a reporter and he reads a lot of books and tells funny stories and writes good letters. I want to be like them but different.”

  “Good,” Mrs. Levine said, clapping her well-preserved if highly lotioned hands over her head. “More power to you. Very good.”

  “Different?” Dr. Levine said.

  “Not be a journalist. Make stuff up, I guess. I don’t know yet.”

  Dr. Levine didn’t much like either of my ideas—that children could surpass their parents or that words might be used in an unusual way—and he shifted the topic to his strong impression that Barbie was going to follow his footsteps into medicine.

  “Maybe, Dad” Barbie said. “I said that last year. But that was before I met Jeremy.”

  “What?” Dr. Levine said with such violence that he blew out the candle at his end, and we sat in semidarkness until Mrs. Levine—the very embodiment of the creative principle—relit the wick.

  “I’ve so enjoyed working with Jeremy on the Journal that I think maybe—I’m just thinking about it, so don’t get mad, Dad—I’d like to become a writer as well, maybe a magazine writer like Jeremy’s mom. You should read some of her articles in The Nation, Dad. They’re really good.”

  Dr. Levine did not want to read Mother’s articles in The Nation. He didn’t care if they were really good. He swirled his finger in his coffee cup saucer and refused to touch his eclair, which Mrs. Levine offered me and which I, never sated, saw no reason to reject. That upset him even more and he said, “Come on, Helen, we’re going to a movie,” which Dr. and Mrs. Levine always did whenever Dr. Levine was irate. Apologizing to Barbie and me for her husband’s behavior and telling us to let the maid clear and wash the dishes, Mrs. Levine followed Dr. Levine out the back door, the sharp slam of which caused Barbie to exclaim: “Do you realize they won’t be back for at least two hours?”

  Well, yes, I said: the drive to the theater, the feature film, the drive back. Two hours. Easily.

  “In most things you are, as Dad said I said, a ‘perfect genius,’ but in some things”—she started tickling—“you’re so stupid.”

  Barbie’s room was what her mother called “classic anal-retentive.” For all my impulses in this direction, by the time I was seventeen my room had receded from view as the repository of any portion of my selfhood. Shirts and shoes fell like maps and mice all over my carpet while Barbie’s room was a series of right angles, everything tucked and fitted in girls’ colors. Every book was shelved the same way, nothing floated on the thick red sea of the rug, her electric typewriter was shrouded. There wasn’t anywhere to relax. Her mother was always urging her to throw a slumber party. This, I suppose, was it.

  We lay on her bed with all its pillows and panda bears, brushing the hair out of each other’s eyes and slowly removing each other’s clothes. When you get older you undress yourself, but the first time and for a while thereafter you undress each other. It takes a lot longer, but it’s really much nicer.

  “Ear-nose-and-throat?” I said, taking off her watch. “You were really once going to—”

  “Damn straight,” she said, employing the vernacular to suggest this wasn’t her house on Nob Hill—she had lived. She kissed my ears, my belly button, the soles of my feet.

  … with the lights off because we were still only seventeen, with the air conditioner on so the maid couldn’t hear, with blankets and pillows on the floor and pretzels and soda in bed, with both male and female contraceptives to correspond to our feeling that the future didn’t exist. My bad leg tightened up and she misinterpreted my scream. She herself did not scream. She patted my head. It was over much too soon. The sensation was unsensational. The experience was disappointing. We repeated the disappointing experience and—if memory serves—repeated it again, looking, I would imagine, for increasingly profound revelations about ourselves and each other and finding, instead, only the regressive frustration that exists at the core of any act of communication. I thought her parents would be returning soon. I told her I loved her, gathered my clothes, and tiptoed out the room, looking for light.

  The maid was partial to police dramas or shows, at any rate, that featured flashy gun play. Whenever a criminal tiptoed into view, she’d rub the Levines’ butterscotch candies like rosary beads and imprecate: “Bad man, bad man, bad man.” Never one to sidestep a chance to crucify myself mercilessly, I scooted through the dark living room around midnight and heard her address an assailant peeking in a patio door, which I took as the simple truth from someone who knew.

  21

  FATHER WAS—STILL? am I right?—the director of the poverty program and hired me as a teacher’s aide in a Hunters Point summer school for black children who’d been bussed uptown during the school year, failed their courses, and now had to attend this remedial session in their own neighborhood. The second-grade teacher I was assigned to assist called in sick the first day; boys stood on top of desks, pushing one another off, and girls gathered in a circle, flashing pocket mirrors and combing their hair. One little boy was hanging out the window, another was climbing in: they collided. Kids were eating crayons, spitting water, wrestling. I removed my coat and said, “I’m in charge here.” Louder I said, “My name is Mr. Zorn. Jeremy Zorn. I’m teaching this class.”

  “You what?”

  “I’m teaching this class.”

  “The fuck you are.”

  “Shut you mouth, white boy.”

  “Big nosed motherfucker.”

  “I-I-I’m teaching this class and would appreciate your undivided—”

  “You what?”

  “I’d—”

  “Get out of my face, jewboy.”

  “Faggot.”

  I called roll and nobody answered except a little girl with crooked teeth and her coat still on named Lorraine Warren, who raised her hand, said she was here, walked to the front of the room, picked up a yardstick from the chalkboard tray, and smashed it against the desk in front of her. “The man said he was in charge here,” she said. Silence obtained.

  The second Monday of the six-week session the teacher called in sick aga
in and I said, “Close the windows. Stop running. Stop wrestling. Stop drinking. Stop eating. Stop talking. Shut your dirty little mouths and sit down in your seats. Give me your attention because I’m in charge of this classroom.” I unrolled a map of the world. “Do all of you know what this is?”

  “Atlas.”

  A little boy who squinted and needed glasses but couldn’t afford them explained that it was an encyclopedia. Lorraine said it was a map.

  I said, “Yes.”

  They said, “Shut your face, girl.”

  They said, “Kissass.”

  They said, “Niggergirl.”

  They sang words.

  Lorraine wriggled in her seat and zipped up her coat. It was the middle of summer and she was cold.

  “What does the blue mean?” I asked.

  “Blue means crayon.”

  “Blue means paint.”

  “No, sucker, means air. Blue means blue sky.”

  I asked Lorraine what the blue meant.

  “Don’t know.”

  I asked her again.

  “Don’t know.”

  “The blue means water,” I said. “Ocean. The Pacific Ocean. The Atlantic Ocean. The Arctic Ocean. The Indian Ocean. Is the world flat or round?”

  “Flat.”

  “Flat as J.J.’s sister.”

  “The world is round,” I said.

  “Get off.”

  “White man’s crazy.”

  “Do you know where your ancestors came from? Can you point on the map to where they came from?”

  “They come from uptown.”

  “They dead.”

  “Have you heard of A-A-Africa? Do you know where it is? Can someone come up and point to A-A-Africa?”

  A girl with ankle bracelets walked to the map and pointed to Paris.

  “Do you know what country you live in? What state? Do you know what city? Do you know where you are?” The bell rang and I said, “Nobody’s leaving until someone comes to the map and points to what city we’re living in.”