Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  “So what’s the guy’s name?” Stewart asks.

  “Marcel.”

  “Marcel. Hm.”

  “I like him.”

  “You’re not in love, are you?”

  “God, no.”

  “Don’t let him get too smitten,” Stewart says. He always says that.

  The wine is beginning to give Connie a headache. She gets up, steadies herself against the TV, and retrieves Isadora’s letters from where Stewart dropped them, succumbing to a compulsion to care for what she does not yet have. She smoothes the pages one at a time, staring at the innocent-looking handwriting.

  “Doesn’t she make you feel old?” Stewart says. “I mean, look at this. How young did you say she was?” He frowns. “This is the handwriting of a teenager.”

  “Don’t be a pill, Stewart.”

  “I’ll bet she’s adorable,” he says glumly. “A morning person, I’ll bet. You won’t be able to stand her.” His face shows his full age and an indefinable sadness. “Cute and healthy,” he says. “Worse than the New Guards.”

  “How many bon mots do I have to hear in one night?” Connie snaps, then a warning disrupts her irritation. “You’re not sick, are you?” Stewart is a careful man, but they’ve lost too many colleagues not to be jumpy.

  He shakes his head, his fire gone. “It’s not that.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t recognize myself lately,” he says. “I don’t want the things I wanted.” Connie creeps up close to him and holds his hand. Perhaps they are best together when one of them is unhappy. “I just want someone to listen to me.”

  Connie squeezes his fingers. “Don’t I know it.” There are other things she could say, about terror, exhaustion, loneliness. “Listen,” she says, brightening. “How long are you here?”

  “Another day.”

  “Perfect. Let’s do something tomorrow. Have you ever seen Versailles?”

  “Only ninety times.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  He smiles. “Sure. We can rent a car, bring a picnic. It’ll be fun.”

  They part with the promise to meet at noon, giving them ample time to sleep in. The next day dawns bright and clear, a good omen. Connie answers her door, expecting Stewart; instead she finds Marcel.

  “Con-stance!” he calls. Her name sounds liquid and lovely in French. Though he speaks to her only in English he always calls her by her French name.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  He taps his temple. “I remember your schedule.”

  She had intended to pass him over on this trip, but decides she’s glad to see him after all. She winds her arms around his neck. He is slightly built, barely her height. She loves his eyes, a rosy shade of brown. She’s not in love, though Marcel is sweet, a graduate student living with his parents on Boulevard Malesherbes, not far from the hotel. He is young, unsettled, his life forever beginning; already she can see he will be in school for years. But she likes his uncomplicated company and the notion of beginnings. She looks forward to telling Isadora James about her Parisian boyfriend.

  “I left my job,” Marcel says. “Quit!” His accent is strong; his every phrase sounds quaint and dear.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He grins, his eyes crinkling at the corners, making him seem older, more attractive. “I said to myself, such a beautiful day, and the lovely Con-stance is here. My lady will come with me for a ride.”

  Marcel’s mode of transport is an ancient motorbike that Connie finds charming, with the full knowledge that in a matter of weeks it will come to annoy her. It makes for a windy, noisy ride, and she’s burned her ankle on the exhaust pipe already; but for the moment it’s perfect, and she likes to ride with her body pressed close against Marcel’s back, her hands fisted into his stomach.

  “But you need your job, Marcel.”

  “There are other jobs, Con-stance! But how many days like this?” He stands back, admiring her. This part won’t last long.

  “Hello, hello,” Stewart says, appearing at the door. A lumpy grocery bag, with two baguettes sticking out the top, crackles as he shifts it against his chest. He stops.

  “Marcel, right?”

  Marcel nods. “You are Stewart.”

  Stewart glances at Connie, pleased. Then his face darkens, figuring out the rest.

  “This is a bit awkward,” Connie says. “Marcel quit his job, Stewart. Just to spend the day with me.” She lowers her voice. “How can I say no? Could you find somebody else—Frank or Debbie, maybe?”

  “You mean I should let someone else have the pleasure of my company?”

  Connie checks his face to tell how he means this, but his eyes don’t move, and she doesn’t have his talent for reading minds.

  Stewart turns to Marcel. “May I have a word with your friend?” he asks, then steps into the hallway, where Connie follows him. “What, is he nuts?”

  “For wanting to be with me today?”

  “For quitting his job!” He shakes his head. “This guy’s a case, Connie.”

  “You’re mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad. Go break the guy’s heart.” He hands her the bag of food. “Have a ball.”

  “You’ve done this to me plenty of times, Stewart, in case you forgot.” She watches him stride down the hall and bang the elevator button. “Fine,” she calls after him.

  The room is darker when she returns; the sky outside has cast over with low clouds. Another gray day after all. Her good omen is gone.

  Marcel is sitting on the bed, smiling apologetically. “I have spoiled something?”

  Connie shrugs. “Stewart likes to play the brother I never wanted.” She checks the sky again. “Not much for riding weather.”

  He leans forward, his eyes fixed on her. “Then we stay here.”

  She peers into the bag: cheese, eclairs, a Bordeaux Stewart likes. “I guess we’ve just inherited a picnic.”

  They feast indoors. Marcel whips the bedspread off the bed and it floats down, white and bridelike. They drink, eat, make love, nap on the floor.

  Connie stirs. She is naked, lying on her back, unwilling to fully wake. The spell of the Bordeaux is working its way out to her fingers and toes. Their picnic has taken a long time.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” she murmurs.

  Marcel turns beside her, propping himself up on one elbow, gazing at her.

  “Of course. Anything.”

  She smiles. “This is my first picnic.”

  “True?”

  “My very first.”

  “But a picnic takes place in the out of doors.”

  “Don’t say that. We can pretend.”

  She rolls onto her stomach, trying to stay inside her half-sleep. Marcel places his narrow hands on her shoulder blades and presses down.

  “Mm. Nice,” she mumbles.

  He kneads her back, her shoulders, her neck. He pets her hair. His hands, warm and insistent, cup her shape, moving down over the curve of her waist and hips, down over her thighs and calves and ankles. He holds one foot between his hands for a moment.

  She rolls over. “Now do the front.” She smiles at him, then closes her eyes.

  For a long while she lies there, drifting under his moving hands. When she opens her eyes she finds him gazing at her as if she were a fragile, tender thing. She starts, fully awake, embarrassed to have him looking at her—not at her body, but directly at her face, into her eyes. She sits up and draws the blanket around her.

  “Let’s do something,” she says. “How about going to Versailles?”

  He gets up and begins to put on his clothes. “It is too late in the day.” He winks at her. “I am not sorry.”

  She watches him dress, the way he moves, the way the soft cotton slides over his chest, whispery as a slip.

  “My parents want to meet you,” he says. He bends down and lifts her chin with one finger, kissing her chastely on the lips. “My mother would like to cook you a dinner.”
r />   “How nice,” Connie says. “That’s very nice.”

  “You will come?”

  Connie looks around the room. “Uh, sure.”

  He puts his hands together like a prayer. “I knew you would.”

  “You mean now?”

  He grins. “They will like you better if you put on your clothes.” His face is clean as an apple. She wishes she were him.

  “Marcel, I can’t. I’m sorry.” Never in her life has she been to meet a lover’s parents. She can picture his parents’ house: a sitting room filled with modest heirlooms, a crucifix tacked to each wall. Thin, happily worn carpets and a faint, musty smell, the smell of time. On his mother’s sewing table, planted among robustly colored spools, a portrait of Marcel as a child. And his parents—he has spoken of them so often she can see them plainly. His mother is short and plump, a coil of auburn hair wound into a bun atop her head, a rosary hidden in her apron pocket. His father is even shorter, his hair combed back with water. They preside over their home, their son, with the zeal of saints. How could she love a man who is already this much loved?

  “My parents are very pleasant,” Marcel assures her.

  “Of course,” Connie says. “It’s not that.” She gets up quickly and pulls on her clothes.

  “You will love them,” Marcel says. He is pleading. He is—all at once—impossibly young. “You must come.”

  “No,” Connie tells him gently. “No.”

  He leaves bewildered, and Connie watches him go without a word. As soon as she hears the elevator’s whine, she makes straight for Stewart’s room.

  “She returns,” Stewart says, looking at his watch.

  Connie walks in past him, drags a chair from a corner and turns on the TV. “I’m sorry about today, Stewart,” she says. “I’m rotten to the core.”

  Stewart folds his arms like a schoolmaster. “I take it Marcel is history?”

  Connie stares absently at somebody singing and dancing on the screen. “Too young,” she says. “Too goddamned happy.”

  “Hah! I hear you, sweetheart.”

  Connie kicks off her shoes and curls her legs under her. She watches Stewart pull a new bottle of wine out of the dresser. “Stewart, do you ever get the feeling you’ve lived the same year over and over for the last decade? The exact same year, time and again?”

  “Yes,” Stewart says. “But look on the bright side—that would make us about twenty-six.”

  They pass the bottle back and forth for a few minutes.

  “We drink too much, Stewart.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  Connie snaps off the TV. She looks at him. “I know you’re not happy.”

  His voice is ragged. “Some night I’d just like to lie down with somebody, you know?” His eyes are such a mild blue, she thinks, like violets at the end of their season. “No sex, no nothing.”

  “True confession, Stewart.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I’m sick of sex. It’s ready-set-go all night long with a guy you won’t remember in a year.”

  “Bingo.”

  Connie grins, takes the bottle from him. “Don’t you have any glasses?”

  He gives her one. “You know what I wish?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Stewart,” Connie says quietly. She puts her glass down and turns to him. “I’ll lie down with you.”

  He waits a moment. Without a word he stands up and strips down to his shorts, while Connie turns down the bed and slips in, propping her head against the pillows. She opens her arms to him.

  Stewart gets in beside her, wriggling down so that his head rests on the soft cotton of her blouse, in the warm hollow between her shoulder and the curve of her breast.

  “This is so nice,” he murmurs.

  She closes her eyes. “I agree.” His hair, downy as a child’s, grazes her chin.

  “Sing to me, Connie.”

  “I can’t sing.” As a child she listened to Billy and Delle many nights, always in some other room, their voices rippling over the scales, pelting the filmy quiet. She had wanted her parents so badly, without knowing what it was she meant. I want, I want, was as far as she ever got.

  “Sing a lullaby. Anyone can sing a lullaby.”

  She waits, follows her memory as far back as it will go, until she finds a fragment, something half-remembered, in her grandmother’s voice.

  “All right,” she says. “I’m warning you, Stewart, this won’t be pretty.”

  It isn’t pretty, and it doesn’t put Stewart to sleep. Connie doesn’t mind. Stewart’s weight on her is substantial, even grave. But he is no burden, this man who expects her to do nothing but lie here and sing.

  IV

  ISADORA

  ONE

  Faith crosses the white swatch of sidewalk in front of the Sheraton and enters the sumptuous lobby with a sense of relief. It’s all so changed: the sidewalks fixed in her memory are gray and narrow, the lobbies strewn with mean, low chairs.

  Within a few minutes she is walking down a long corridor with her sons and sister, their footsteps a dull drumming on the carpet. The boys install themselves noisily in the room next to hers, and Connie disappears behind the door across the hall. Faith can hear her sons on the other side of the wall as she unpacks: Chris’s low, lively commentary punctuated by higher, tentative comebacks from Ben. She moves to the window. She is high up, looking deep into an alley. The last light of day clings to the brick in a sinister way, barely delineating some human or animal shapes—she can’t tell which—from the wall they hunker against. She feels afraid, as if something down there were dead or dying.

  In the books she read as a girl, beautiful heroines languished over their deaths, filled with exquisite regrets. She used to play at death herself, pressing the back of her hand to her forehead. She had seen Delle die this way on stage, swooning into Billy’s arms. But when real death came, it was not the same. After Billy ran his car into the shallow depths of a pale Maine field, it was Faith whom Delle asked to identify the body. She waited till morning, lying awake, envisioning how he might look, and what she found was worse than everything she had seen in the fits of her sleep. She couldn’t look long, but long enough. Good, she remembers thinking, then a rush of remorse and horror.

  And when they found Delle on the couch one day, white, stinking of brandy, her mouth slung open to expose the steel-gray fillings in her back teeth, Faith was once again cowed by the ugliness of death. While Connie dragged a washcloth over Delle’s unyielding face, Faith pulled the pant cuffs down to hide her unshaven calves. She picked up the bottles one by one and set them on the coffee table, labels facing front, as carefully as if they were her mother’s stiffening fingers. No matter what she did, she couldn’t make death look like anything else.

  She and Connie had sat at the table of the kitchenette for a few minutes, staring at Delle’s gaudy silence, her reproaches and admonitions and self-pity gone for good. Are you glad? she had wanted to ask Connie, but she didn’t, for if Connie said yes there would be two of them in the world, two awful girls with no feelings.

  A knock at the door startles her unreasonably, but it is only the boys and Connie, a trio of expectant faces. The boys seem younger in this monstrous city, a benefit Faith hadn’t banked on. Connie is telling them about a baseball player she met on a flight. “William something,” she says.

  The boys look at each other.

  “No, wait.” She frowns. “William was his last name. It’s something Williams.”

  Ben’s mouth drops open. “Mitch Williams?”

  “No …” Connie says. “I’m sure if you said the name I’d remember it. I think it might have been French.” It touches Faith that Connie is trying so hard to please them.

  “White or black?” Chris asks.

  “Black,” Connie says. “Really tall.”

  Ben begins to look suspicious. “Aunt Connie, are you sure he’s in baseball?”

  “Actually, no.” The bo
ys exchange a faint smile that Faith has seen a hundred times. It puts her instantly in cahoots with Connie: two ignorant adults.

  “Wait,” Connie says. “His first name is Donovan. Donovan Williams, is that anyone?”

  Nothing registers on the boys’ faces, but they’re still trying. By now Faith is trying, too, though she knows very little about sports. “What did he look like?” she asks.

  “Let’s see, he was good-looking, with”—Connie puts her hands up around her head—“you know that squared-off haircut the black kids wear now?”

  Ben slaps his forehead and groans. “Oh my God,” he says—to no one, to God himself, to the world at large. “Aunt Connie met Dominique Wilkins and I bet she didn’t even get his autograph.”

  “That’s it!” Connie looks at Faith, then at the boys. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry, Aunt Connie,” Chris says. “He’s only the best forward in the NBA.”

  “Highly debatable,” Ben says, and Faith laughs. Her children are still children in some ways. She cheers up.

  They all head for the elevator, Ben running ahead. “I just talked to Armand,” Connie whispers. “He expects us at ten tomorrow.”

  Faith nods, holding her breath, trying to calm herself. Connie, too, is tense; Faith can see it on her face, though she looks beautiful, a fuchsia shirt blousing over her shoulders.

  “You look so different,” Faith says. “I guess I’ve never seen you dressed like that.”

  “Stewart calls them my go-get-’em clothes.” She adjusts the comb that fastens her hair. “I get ’em, all right, but I can’t seem to keep ’em.”

  “Who’s Stewart?”

  Connie looks puzzled. “My friend.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s my best friend, Faith. I’ve known him forever.”

  “Stewart … yes. I remember.” But Connie has so many friends, Faith thinks. Dozens and dozens of colleagues, how is she supposed to know one from the other?