Dead Languages

by David Shields

  I swigged my Coke, poured the rest into her lap, and left as the first trailer screamed on.

  At a Christmas party Gretchen tried to teach me the mambo. It was a very sophisticated party. Her thesis adviser was there. The chairman of the English department. Some people from the chancellor’s office. A candidate for Santa Monica city council. The femme fatale of the comparative literature program. When the music began I sat down and out. Gretchen, who had an ardent admirer wrapped around her arm, came up to me and said, “O wazza maz-zer with Jeremy poo? He no like to choreograph?” I ignored her by pretending to spot a long lost friend on the far side of the dance floor but, later, dead drunk, she dragged me into the bedroom and attempted to demonstrate. She could hardly stand up and I couldn’t learn when to lean forward, when to lean back, when to snap her wet little wrist, so we wound up wrestling on the waterbed while everyone else was singing Christmas carols and motioning toward the mistletoe.

  26

  FOR OUR FINAL meeting of the semester, Sandra pulled out all the stops. Once we got a lot of hand-holding and teary hugging out of the way, it was quite the informative session. As a kind of hortatory prologue, she asked if I knew why American Indians didn’t stutter and, before I could guess, she explained that there’s no pressure upon Indian children to speak and very little tension in the culture as a whole. I saw myself running away to join the Iroquois—shooting buffalo, raindancing, sending smoke signals, and finally asking Yellow Feather, “What’s my nickname going to be, Yellow Feather?”

  “We call you,” Yellow Feather says, smiling wide, adjusting his headdress, “Chattering Teeth.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, you can take your bow-and-arrow and your leather m-m-moccasins, too,” I say, sprinting down the mountain to civilization.

  Sandra then launched a quick survey of the principal attempted cures. Guy DeChauliac, a French doctor, recommended embrocations to desiccate the brain—an advance for which the Academy of Science gave him an award. Sir Francis Bacon thought the tongue was too cold and dry and suggested hot, steaming wine. Thomas Dieffenbach, a German surgeon, thought a triangular wedge should be excised completely across and nearly through the tongue. A Pythian princess urged emigration south to Libya. Emile Coué, a nineteenth-century physician, invited stutterers to join him on stage, where he shouted into their ears: “You can talk! I know you can! Believe me! You can talk!”

  What was the point of these pathetic anecdotes? To get hope hanging in the atmosphere like low-flying smog? To hear the sound of one word flapping? The window was open, for once, in the clinic room. Air circulated. Light did whatever it does: collect dust motes whatever. I took my notebook out of my backpack and handed my hierarchy of feared situations to Sandra, who said she assumed I’d ultimately overcome every anxiety on the list. She looked straight at me and asked, “Is that your goal, too?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But it’s not a very realistic one. At least right now.”

  She rubbed my hands together, like she was trying to start a fire, and said, “Why not?”

  “Because it just isn’t. In at least ten of those situations, I can hardly talk.”

  “Well, what makes, say, providing information over the phone a tough task and talking to your father in person a relatively easy one?”

  “I-i-it’s hard to explain.”

  “Try it again.”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Good.”

  “Sometimes I feel happy, relaxed, and confident, while other times I feel like I-I-I’m throwing words down a well.”

  “Again.”

  Sandra reiterated her favorite theme that, while it was perfectly natural to be more nervous and self-conscious in certain situations than others, it wasn’t at all natural to let these emotions interfere with speech. As brutal proof she wasn’t kidding, she took out of a deep desk drawer a plastic skull which, half the size of a human head, she held easily in her hand. On both sides of the skull was a square cutout so you could see gray and white matter, but Sandra wasn’t interested in the interior of the brain. She pointed with her pencil to the levels through which language passed on the way outside. With a pull on the lever she could make the mouth open wide and suddenly contract or make the jaw bounce or make the teeth clench. It had no eyes.

  “Do you see what happens?” she said. “It’s all interconnected. Tension in your abdomen produces tension in your thorax, which produces tension in your neck, which produces tension in your glottis, which produces tension in your articulators, stopping airflow at the larynx.” She shut the skull’s mouth. “You fixate your thorax glottal, and mandibular areas.” She shook its jaw. “You increase your subglottal air pressure until your glottis is forced open.” She opened the skull’s mouth. “You reduce tension. You reinitiate voicing.” The skull relaxed.

  Sandra manipulated the mock-mini-mind as well as Beth ever used to operate her marionette. Who or what, I wondered, is pulling me every which way at once? Why can’t I do what I want with my mouth?

  “We can do good work with this,” she said, making the skull form a smile, “if you’ll stop pushing this into overdrive.” Pointing to the gray matter.

  Next, for several minutes, I had to practice saying feared words by “bouncing,” which necessitated neither the rubber room nor the trampoline. Instead, I softly repeated the first letter of words I otherwise would trip over: S-S-Sandra to circumvent SSSSSSSSSSSS-Sandra, with the implication that I’d slowly decrease the number of times I bounced until I wasn’t bouncing at all. I’d be talking. We role-played a couple of situations in which I pretended to introduce Sandra to someone else or called stores to inquire about camera prices. These exercises went so much better than expected that she handed me an intrainstitutional phone number.

  “What’s this?” I said, turning over the page but recognizing the extension of Dr. Driessen, my Latin professor.

  “Your final exam.”

  “What are you talking about? This isn’t a class. I don’t—”

  “Jeremy. Sweetheart. Relax. I just want to show you or, better, have you show yourself that you can control your speech, at least a little, even when your heart’s racing.”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “I never stutter when I’m playing sports.” Having answered her trick question with a trick answer, I got up to go.

  “Whoa, cowboy.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to call somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Driessen. Talk to him about your final grade or something.”

  “I already know how I did.”

  “This is what we in America call a telephone,” Sandra said, sliding the communications system over toward my side of the table. “See these little square buttons? Push them.” While I practiced picking up and putting back down the receiver, she kept up her pep talk: “Try to bounce on five feared words in the course of the conversation. And especially try to get a couple in right at the beginning to get you going.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Come on. I have someone else coming in in two minutes. Give me a Christmas present, Jeremy. Call.”

  Dr. Driessen’s extension was composed entirely of odd numbers and possessed the potential, it seemed to me, for being busy during the next two minutes. In his absence the classics department secretary answered, a matronly white-haired lady to whom I had no trouble conveying a long if somewhat vague message about my Petronius paper. I hung up all flush with fluency.

  “You forgot to bounce. You didn’t bounce once,” Sandra said, kicking open the door to the null but noxious smell of Christmas in L.A.

  27

  I WAS RELIEVED to have a holiday from school and speech and sex and sentences. Neither, though, was home haven. Father had been fired from his job as city housing inspector for spending too much time in the periodicals room of the public library and was now studying all day in the library for his realtor’s license. Beth had moved to Oakland to be out of whimpering distance from Michael, who
“has decided he doesn’t love me. His feelings don’t go beyond ‘caring.’ Nothing can interfere with his Work.” I suspected Mother’s illness of being just another career move; she was now bragging that Linus Pauling (“a real scientist,” as opposed to her brother Gil, who was one more atom exploder) looked in on her at Stanford to discuss the acidity of her urine. As with most of the other crucial events of her life, Mother sought escape from pain by seeing it as part of some sort of crusade: Dr. Pauling’s lionization of vitamin C. In this case, though, the escape route wasn’t appropriate or even possible, since the pain was physical and the pain was so bad. She had simultaneous chills and fever, and her right foot and leg swelled into elephantiasis until five days’ I.V. of penicillin brought her home from the hospital woozy, sore, a bit dim in the brain, but at least diagnosed. Phlebitis, Nixon’s disease. She lay on the den couch with her leg propped on three huge pillows, snuggling with that wrinkled, ridiculous excuse for a dog, listening to KKHI, becoming a one-woman phone bank for the California Council on Health Plan Alternatives. Mother’s friends adored her in a purer light than her family did, and hardly a day of vacation passed without one of them dropping off dinner to listen to Mother’s evidence that the American Cancer Society funded only research that couldn’t possibly lead to a cure.

  On New Year’s Eve Father was attending a party thrown by Price, Finch, Poole, and Fenimore, the real estate company he hoped to join; Beth was volunteering as an usher in order to see Butley Off-Geary; and Mother and I were alone in the living room, watching the city below celebrate the cessation of ’76. She couldn’t walk on her swollen leg. I fluffed and piled pillows behind her head and under her ankle. Her eyes closed. She sipped pink champagne, waiting for better luck next year.

  Guy Lombardo babbled in the background while Mother and I played cards. It hurt her to sit up or even turn on one side and she had trouble holding onto her hand. I sat in a chair next to her and dealt. I won consistently, as Mother’s mind wasn’t on Seven-Card Draw.

  “So tell me about this girl you’re dating,” she said.

  “‘Girl’?” I said. “‘Dating’? Mother, we’re not talking about the senior prom.”

  “Oh, then, what are the proper Bicentennial terms for romance?”

  “First of all, she’s not a girl. She’s a woman.”

  “What, she’s thirty-seven and has two kids?” Mother was fifty and soon would look sixty.

  “She’s twenty-four, a summa cum laude graduate of Stanford, a doctoral student in American literature, and the editor of Westwords. ”

  “Well, la-di-da.”

  “And I believe the correct phrase is: I’m s-s-seeing her.”

  “‘S-s-seeing her’?” Mother said, trying to gather into a neat deck the cards that spilled under her body into the crevices of the couch.

  “Yes.”

  “Just how much of her are you s-s-seeing, Jeremy?”

  “I’m seeing all of her all the time,” I said as Guy Lombardo chronicled for us on tape delay what had long passed into aftermath at the site of transmission.

  “Is it permissible to ask what you see in her other, of course, than all of her?”

  This was silly, self-conscious dialogue, like the worst of the Hamlet-Gertrude exchanges. Mother was usually not that prone to wordplay. She was interested in what words meant, not how they sounded; but this was New Year’s Eve, she was slightly tipsy, and the last eighteen months of her life she made a self-conscious attempt to be wiser and wittier than she had ever been before. She shuffled the cards and shifted her weight on the sofa, then said, “You’re trying to play the reluctant source of information. But tell me—what’s this girl like?”

  I removed from my wallet a wrinkled black-and-white photograph of Gretchen staring into space with one less shirt button than usual buttoned. So vulgarly masculine, so impotently possessive, I held the picture in the backlight of the reading lamp for Mother to see. Mother prided herself on her ability to “psych out” photographs and she looked at it for the longest time, looked at it again for the longest time but with her glasses on, and finally said, “She doesn’t love you.”

  “Mother, please.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what I said: she doesn’t love you.”

  “What a dumb thing to say. I’m not even in the picture.”

  “Jeremy, please. She doesn’t. Any mother could see that. She loves herself first and only.” This last formulation devolved into a long lecture about the inevitability of a bad marriage, the insubstantiality of physical beauty, and the ephemeral quality of love, at the end of which—her lecture, not love—she said, “Promise me you’ll never marry this girl.”

  “Marry her? We’re not even going steady.”

  Mother sat up on one hip to lean over and say, in a voice halfway between whispering and talking, “Promise.”

  I promised.

  Mother and Guy Lombardo let out a happy yell.

  28

  HAVING VOWED never to marry Gretchen, I’m afraid I avoided her a little when I returned to Los Angeles. In an attempt, I suppose, to recapture the scholastic purity of my sophomore year, I started spending all my time in the last carrel on the southwest side of the fourth floor stacks of Powell Library. Gretchen would study at home, then come get me to give her a backrub or help make dinner or go into Beverly Hills with her to buy a dress. I enjoyed it more when she stayed for a while rather than drew me outside, when she sat with her chair to my chair, her toes on my toes, and I could almost hear her difficult mind at work. I’d always whisper too loud for the fourth floor isolationists to tolerate, and Gretchen and I would wind up at the bottom of the stairwell, eating oatmeal cookies she’d baked, drinking chocolate milk she’d bought, laughing at the silly library.

  I sat in my carrel twelve hours a day and wrote grandiloquent essays on purely formal matters: “Style in Troilus and Cressida: Infecting the Myths”; “‘I Laid the Ghost of His Gifts at Last with a Lie’: The Problem of Language in Heart of Darkness”; “Poem as Passion: Rhetorical Strategies and Seduction Techniques in Ovid’s Amores”; “The Echo Chamber of ‘Time Passes’: Language as Metaphor for Memory.” When I was trying to write an exegesis of “Time Passes,” the short middle section of To the Lighthouse, I contracted urethritis—the honeymoon disease—from Gretchen. I’d lie awake, itching, scratching, tossing, turning, moaning, applying a gooey ointment, visualizing a white box in which Virginia Woolf bounced hundreds of letters and sounds against one another, for “Time Passes” is a cacophonous twenty-six pages. I couldn’t think about “Time Passes” without thinking about bouncing sounds inside a white box, so I wrote this as a thesis:

  She presents a verbal surface that, in its alliterative and rhyming schemes, its punning, its inverted syntax, its broken-record repetitions, its ceaseless metamorphosis, parallels the chaos of time received by memory. Her metaphor for consciousness haunted by the past is language that stresses loud sound rather than literal sense and produces a superficial reality for the reader that is incomprehensible and absurd until he acknowledges there exists no meaning other than scattered sounds, and enters—as reader, as historian of the self—the rhythms of reprise.

  I refer to the writer as “she,” the reader as “he,” and if that isn’t commentary upon the consequence of growing up under Mother’s semantic shadow I don’t know what is. The prose, as the professor herself typoed, “doesn’t violate Virgin’s own prose,” which might tell us less about Virgin or me than Dr. Kerr. Most interesting to me, though, were phrases such as “inverted syntax,” “broken-record repetitions,” “language that stresses loud sound rather than literal sense,” “the rhythms of reprise”—what I was trying to talk about here, without even knowing it, was the repeater gun in my mouth. That’s the subtext of this explication. That’s the UCLA Speech and Hearing Clinic reading of “Time Passes.”

  I was so excited by this discovery that, although I wasn’
t scheduled for an appointment, I ran down into Westwood Village to see Sandra, but when I told her she only swiveled in her chair and said, “Well, of course, Jeremy. We’ve been trying to get you to see that for a full year now. The Nowness of Forward Moving Speech. If you’re ever going to gain complete control of your communicative skills, you have to pay attention to each successive moment of utterance—now and now and now; in other words, the continuously moving present, not previous moments of poor performance and certainly not upcoming feared words.”

  Mother had a different reaction to my interpretation of To the Lighthouse. She said she’d always regarded “Time Passes” as a powerful if abstract evocation of the First World War and wondered why I hadn’t discussed “primary questions of content rather than secondary questions of form.” Gretchen, who could be so harsh on everyone else’s efforts but had a blind spot to any defects in my work, said she admired the essay’s “empathy between the male critic and female writer, its pretty rhetoric, its (for you) uncharacteristically tight structure, its subtitle, its elaboration of metaphor into metonymy,” and printed it on pages 1–7 of the Winter ’77 issue.

  Gretchen worked hard on Westwords—it’s the only thing I’ve ever seen her devote herself to with any discipline—and transformed one more college rag into a readable quarterly. The superiority of Antony and Cleopatra to undergraduate luv-poetry notwithstanding, she’d always have piles of manuscripts scattered over the bedspread like so many white islands in a blue-green sea. Some of the submissions were so bad they were fun to read, but for the most part I tried to avoid my duties as assistant editor and persuade Gretchen to perform the act that gave me the deepest pleasure: reading aloud my favorite passages from my favorite books. The epilogue to The English Reformation, Beth’s birthday present; the ending of Call It Sleep, Father’s bible; the “Eumolpus” fragment of Satyricon; the last ten pages of The Unnameable, supposedly understood by Gretchen; Pandarus’ speech concluding Troilus and Cressida. I lived for the endings of things, when life turned into coda.