Songs Without Words

by Ann Packer

  “I’d like to make some suggestions,” she went on, “that will enable potential buyers to really see that, but before I start I’d like to hear your thoughts about how you want to present the house, what you’re thinking we might do to make it show well.”

  Melissa nodded happily. It was so easy and important to ask this question, though when Sarabeth first started this work she didn’t get the emotional part at all. Early on, she nearly cost Jim a client: a middle-aged woman with a collection of frogs to rival—well, the amphibian population of a hell of a big pond. This woman had plush frogs and ceramic frogs and frogs made of wood and metal and fabric. They were everywhere. Sarabeth’s very first comment was that they should be removed, and the woman went into a great huff, saying she didn’t see the value of taking away the house’s charm, and did Sarabeth even understand what made a place appealing, did she even know? Jim happened to be there, and when he and Sarabeth exchanged a look—just a quick, careful look, a tiny posy of a look given their vast garden—the woman said she needed to rethink everything, selling at all, moving, really her whole life. In the end the house was listed; the frogs were boxed and put in storage, the bad furniture was removed, and Sarabeth did her thing with window treatments and sisal; but, oh, it had been a warning. Jim was the most loyal guy she knew, but he’d been on edge, and she’d wondered if their old friendship would depend on their new business arrangement and not vice versa.

  Melissa said she thought the living room was pretty much OK, the kitchen OK, the office—she and Henry exchanged a glance—a bit crowded, and the bedroom OK. Sarabeth spoke generally about neutralizing the furnishings and opening up the rooms so they could be more clearly seen, and then she told them a very few of the specifics she was considering. Most of it she would save for the next visit, when they’d have begun to think editorially themselves, which would allow them to feel that even her ideas were theirs.

  She said goodbye and went out to her car, but as she drove down the street she found that she was worrying a little. One of the few things she had suggested removing was the étagère in the living room, and as Melissa passed it on the way to the front door, she stopped and micro-adjusted the position of a glossy black platter. Sarabeth hoped she wasn’t hurt.

  Next on her schedule was Emeryville, Mark Murphy’s shop. She turned on the radio, and there was a woman’s voice, singing: Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree. She turned the radio back off, but the silenced song had taken hold, and in her mind she heard Na na na na, na na nah na, na na na na na na, I grow misty just holding your hand. She imagined a little girl walking hand in hand with a woman, and it was the day that was misty. They were both wearing dark knee-length coats, as in the sixties. It was like a scene from a movie, piano music on the sound track: you saw them from the back, and you knew they were walking toward something scary or dangerous or sad. Switch to the girl’s point of view as she looks up: the woman’s face is pale. The girl looks for another moment, then focuses on her feet, the step, step, step of her black maryjanes.

  Sarabeth gunned the engine as she merged onto the freeway. It was late morning on a Tuesday, not much traffic. How she lived made sense in a certain way, the bits and pieces of work she did that added up to a living—a life. Sometimes, though, like now, the energy it took to haul herself from place to place seemed out of reach.

  Mark Murphy’s shop was in a refurbished warehouse in the industrial part of Emeryville. He shared the lease with an artisanal bakery, and as Sarabeth entered the high-ceilinged space she breathed in the aroma of baking bread. He was at his desk, on the phone, but he waved her forward, then held up his forefinger to show he wouldn’t be long.

  He might be, though—he often was—so she set the box she was carrying on the floor and wandered back to his display area, where a couple dozen lamps were grouped in vaguely roomlike configurations: a few on tables, several standing lamps set near armchairs, wall sconces at almost believable intervals. Mark had done a good job here, and Sarabeth thought it was sort of too bad he was doing so well now; these days, most of his business happened through his handsomely produced catalog, or online, and the showroom was—well, just for show.

  “What do you have for me?” he said, approaching her from the front of the shop. He had a way of giving almost everything he said a slight sexual gloss, and Sarabeth blushed lightly. He was attractively tall and narrow hipped, and he wore his Levi’s tight.

  “It’s a new one,” she said. “I was thinking about the mocha, and I thought, Let’s try something for people who aren’t afraid of color.”

  He tilted his head to the side and smiled his dry, slightly mocking smile. At first this smile had put Sarabeth off—it had taken months for her to realize it didn’t necessarily reflect what he was thinking or what he was going to say. Although it could.

  “Color,” he said. “I’m intrigued.”

  She headed past him to where she’d left the box. Opening the flaps, sliding away the tissue paper: he was standing behind her now. She took hold of the piece by the wire spokes and pulled it clear of the box.

  “Oooh,” he said. “That’s nice.” He pushed papers out of the way so she could set it on his desk. “That is nice.”

  “Thank you,” she said primly, but in fact she was quite pleased. She’d found some handmade dusty-rose paper and fashioned a lampshade unlike any she’d made before. She’d glued braid around the narrow top and the prettily flared bottom, and the shape was almost saucy.

  “It’s very McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” he said. “Kind of ‘welcome to our bordello.’”

  She cracked a smile.

  “But in a good way,” he said with a wink. He lifted the shade and looked underneath, his eyes squinting as he faced the high ceiling. The underside, yes: she was particularly proud of the lining. Racing into the future, she wanted to try sea green, apricot. Maybe midnight blue on a perfect cube.

  “How much paper did you buy?” he asked.

  “Only enough for the prototype.” This wasn’t quite true—she’d bought all that was left on the roll, three yards and change. But Mark was your classic hard-to-get guy, and she played fire against fire. (And wondered about his twenty-year marriage. Did he have affairs? Or was it perhaps enough to flirt, to be forever sought? His wife, Mary, was a friend of Sarabeth’s friend Nina—that was the route Sarabeth had taken to him in the first place—and at the beginning, on meeting him, she had thought: Why didn’t Nina tell me they were splitting up? Now she thought: Why didn’t Nina tell me they were so solid?)

  “What if I wanted to place an order?” he said. “A dozen of ‘Welcome to Our Bordello’?”

  She suppressed a smile. “I could check back with my supplier.”

  “Why don’t you do that, Sarabeth?” He leaned against his desk and crossed one long leg in front of the other. He had big hands, big knuckles, and his wedding ring nestled in the fine hairs on his ring finger. It had swirls carved into the gold. It said: We got married back when Zen gardens first got popular.

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll leave you a voice mail.”

  She started to put the lampshade back in the box, but he reached out a hand to her forearm, and she stopped. “Do you have a sec?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  He pushed away from the desk and headed toward the back of the shop. Past the display area, he opened a door and led her into a dark workroom. “Come on,” he said, crooking his finger. In the back, against the wall, was…a canoe? He stepped to the loading dock and hit a button, and a grayish fluorescent light flickered on. He looked up at the blinking panels. “Irony of ironies.”

  Now she could see: a canoe, yes, but not just any canoe. It was beautiful, long and sleek and glossy, made of a light wood but with a darker wood inlaid into a geometric design on the front. “Wow,” she said.

  “Pretty, huh?”

  “So business is good?”

  “I try to do something nice for myself every once in a while.”

  She walked
the length of the canoe, then walked back. “When’d you get it?”

  “It was just delivered this morning. You’re the first to see it.”

  At this she looked away from him. She squatted, and when she ran her fingertips over the seams around the inlaid area, there wasn’t the slightest alteration in how the wood felt.

  “Where do you go canoeing?” she said.

  “I tend to like rivers.”

  She couldn’t tell if this was snide or not. “You know, I should actually get going, but thanks for the look. It’s beautiful.”

  He said, “Sacramento River, Feather River. Or if I have more time I go up to Oregon.” He watched her in an intent, focused way, and she wanted to say: OK, you win, I’m not woman enough for you, buddy. Instead she said, “Does Mary like canoeing?”

  He smiled a different smile now, a pained smile she couldn’t quite read. “Mary does,” he said. “Mary likes canoeing.”

  Back in the car, she sat still for a moment, watching as a homeless man passed by pushing a shopping cart piled high with bloated bags. Half a mile away was the new Emeryville with its terrifying Ikea, its nightmare version of a suburban shopping mall. Here, in front of Mark’s shop, the last thirty years might never have happened.

  Seeing Mark always sparked something in Sarabeth: lust, but also loneliness, too. Starting her car, she thought of Henry and Melissa, the brief time with them and the brief times to come and the void that would follow. My grandparents’ backyard. What did that mean to Melissa? What did Swarthmore mean? To Liz it was the backdrop of early memories, first memories: one having to do with using a big piece of cardboard to slide down a leaf-strewn hill in autumn; another concerning corn on the cob—driving to a farm and buying corn that had just been picked, and Liz’s mother cooking it right away and then serving it to the kids at the picnic table in the backyard, steaming ears of corn dripping with butter in the middle of the afternoon. Some of Liz’s memories were so vivid to Sarabeth, it was as if they were hers.

  She turned her phone back on and called Liz, getting the voice mail at home and then trying her cell.

  “I was going to call you in maybe twenty minutes!” Liz said by way of answering.

  “Beat you to it.”

  “I’m in line at the grocery store. Can I call you when I get home?”

  “Sure,” Sarabeth chirped, but when she’d stowed her phone, she lowered her forehead and rested it for a moment on the steering wheel.

  She started the car and headed home, taking Adeline for no other reason than to pass the Berkeley Bowl. The infamous Berkeley Bowl, where she’d met Billy. She’d spotted him at the heirloom tomatoes—this tall man with small gold glasses and thick, gray-blond hair—and she noticed even before they spoke, before that opening remark of his about the tomato that looked like George Bush, that he wore a wedding ring. She laughed at the tomato—it did have these flaplike things on the sides, like ears—and he mentioned a book his kids had that contained photographs of fruits and vegetables that seemed to have faces.

  And then there he was at the baked goods. And then in line at the cashier. It was a hot September day, and there was a fresh juice stand, and they bought smoothies and sat on the curb in front of her car and talked for forty-five minutes while her peach sorbet melted and her free-range chicken got busy welcoming colonies of bacteria.

  And he was so interested in her! And he thought her lampshades sounded so cool! They met for coffee a few days later, and for lunch a week after that, and then for sex every Monday noon and Wednesday evening for the next thirteen and a half months.

  And then they didn’t. Now they didn’t. It was coming, the anniversary of their breakup. She longed to be someone who could face such a thing with equanimity, who would not joke to her friends, as she had been doing, relentlessly, that when the day came she would mark it somehow: by lighting a candle, calling him, slitting her wrists.

  Enough, she thought. Enough.

  She was driving. The sky was the intense blue of early autumn, and there were pumpkins on porches—pumpkins already. Halloween was around the corner, and all at once the entire holiday season loomed up on the bare calendar in her mind like a group of massive fortresses coming into view on an otherwise empty horizon.

  It came back then, the girl and the woman. Walking in the mist. They were walking toward an empty horizon: a horizon that was all mist. She saw them clearly: the girl and the woman walking, and the girl looking up but not speaking, not speaking, never speaking.

  3

  Brody worked at a company called Oiron, where he was VP of business development; he’d been on board almost since the beginning, moving from one position to another as the company went public and grew to its current size of five hundred employees spread over three continents. The best-selling product was Parapet, a comprehensive Wi-Fi security system; Oiron was the name of a fortress in France.

  It was Friday now, the end of a long week. Brody was in front of his terminal, triaging the afternoon’s e-mails and thinking about tonight, when he and Liz were taking the kids to his favorite restaurant in North Beach, a tiny, crowded place where you could almost taste the garlic from the sidewalk, and the waiters jostled your chair as they passed behind you, and the only difficult moment you could possibly have was choosing from among the twenty-seven different pastas on the menu. He’d discovered it his first year in California; he and a bunch of guys from work had landed there by accident one Saturday night, and his whole concept of Italian food had changed in an instant. He was looking forward to a plate of fettuccine Genovese, the kind with thin slices of potato mixed in with the noodles.

  “Dude.”

  He looked up and saw Mike Patterson standing in his doorway. Mike was big, maybe six feet five, with thick shoulders and arms—high school football, Brody was pretty sure. Mike was in marketing, where Brody himself had been for years; Brody’d been in on the hire, in fact. Mike was a good guy. Brody and Liz had done dinner out with him and his wife several times.

  “Who are you duding, dude?” Brody said.

  Mike grinned as he came into Brody’s office. “My brother put his foot down when his kids started calling their mother dude.”

  “Joe does that,” Brody said. “‘Mom, dude, will you make some brownies?’”

  “And Liz?”

  “Liz just laughs. You know how she is.”

  Mike had stopped at Brody’s bookcase and was looking at the tennis ball Brody kept on a stand there, a wild shot off Andre Agassi’s racquet during a practice session Brody’d happened by at the U.S. Open one year. Mike said, “I’m still shocked you stole this.”

  “‘Kept it,’” Brody said. “I ‘kept’ it.”

  “Sure you did, pal. So are you coming?”

  “Where would that be?”

  Mike mimed drinking something, and Brody looked at his watch: late on Friday afternoons the helium balloon that was Oiron’s usual corporate urgency started making its way to the floor, and to cushion the landing there was generally a beer bash in the cafeteria. “Whoa,” he said, “it’s later than I thought.”

  “Brody, it’s not about time,” Mike said, “it’s about the change in synergy. I’m surprised you didn’t notice.”

  “Up yours.”

  “HR’s going to have to schedule another sensitivity-training retreat for us if you don’t shape up.”

  Brody rolled his eyes. “Promise you’ll shoot me if that happens.”

  “I would, but I’ve already got someone lined up to shoot me.”

  Downstairs, there were already several dozen people gathered, talking mostly in their work groups, though some ventured laterally across department lines. At the keg Mike drew Brody a cup of beer, then gestured with his head that he was going to try to get to the food. Brody moved to the wall. The beer was thin and foamy and almost tasteless: terrible but in its own way also delicious. He drank half of it in a few gulps, liking the way it felt both warm and cool as it spread through him.

  “Brody Macka
y, how goes it?”

  He turned and there was Russ Conklin, holding not beer but, as was his custom, a bottle of Odwalla carrot juice. Russ was short and muscle-bound and perfectly bald, his head shaved where hair still grew. He was Oiron’s founder and CEO, not to mention Brody’s boss, but Brody went way back with him, to when they’d been in side-by-side cubes at Wells Fargo twenty-odd years ago. Long after they’d both moved on, Russ had tracked Brody down at another start-up and sold him on Oiron in a five-minute phone call. Actually, Russ had sold Brody on Russ, and it had turned out to be a very good buy.

  “Just fine,” Brody said. “And yourself?”

  “Very well. Give me the ten thousand foot on your conversation with Harker.”

  Harker was the head of I.S. Solutions, a small software company with some very clever algorithms for the detection and blocking of the latest sniffer devices. Brody’d spent an hour on the phone with him that morning, working out the details of a licensing agreement.

  “He’s sending it to his legal guy on Monday,” Brody said.

  Russ raised his juice bottle in a toast. “What I like to hear.” He took a swallow and said, “So what are you up to this weekend?”

  “Not much. How ’bout you? Cycling to Santa Cruz? Parasailing at Stinson Beach?”

  Russ smiled. He’d gotten divorced two years ago, and since then he’d been incredibly active, departing from his workaholic ways for weekend scuba trips, helicopter skiing in the Canadian Rockies. He was also dating like crazy, though Brody suspected he was lonely; it was only after his divorce that he’d begun sending e-mails time-stamped at 3:00 a.m. The witching hour, the hour of Ambien and cable TV.

  Brody’s phone rang, and he pulled it from his pocket, saw it was home.

  Russ clapped his shoulder. “I’ll let you get that.”