“That’s because you never gave it a chance.”
“Me? You’re saying I didn’t give it a chance?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. All I get is hostility. Like I’m not up to the standards of your boyfriend in Nicaragua. Any other guy would have kicked you out for what you did.”
The anger bubbled up, the desire to smash something over his head. Point out that he was the cheater. Instead, I remembered my commandment and took a few deep breaths.
“Listen, Stan, we don’t get along, so wouldn’t it be better if we got a divorce?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Take me to the cleaners. Get the house, bank accounts.”
“All I want is an even split of assets. You’re a lawyer. Draw up the papers.”
He went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of milk and came back. “Listen, here’s what I’m thinking. Let’s wait until, say, end of the year. Then we sit down and talk about it. In a civil manner. Meantime, let’s don’t throw away four years of marriage.”
“Not even three, for God’s sake. Why can’t you remember?”
“See, you’re losing it again. I’m telling you, girl. You better get a grip on that temper.”
I stormed into the bedroom, slammed the door and began packing. A week later, I said my goodbyes and moved up to New York.
Thanks to Dr. Sutter, I found an apartment with a roommate near campus, on the third floor of a building that had security cameras and a check-in desk. The roommate was a Puerto Rican named Carla, a graduate student in archaeology, about my age and gorgeous by any measure. She also dressed like one of those village people in black, with long dangling earrings, mulberry hair, a lip ring, bracelets, and enough eye shadow to get her a movie role as a vampire.
“Hope you didn’t bring any Neil Diamond cassettes,” she said.
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you look the type, all-American conservative. Are you Republican?”
“Independent.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “You’re not one of those religious fanatics, are you?”
“Look, I’m not going to interrogate you and I don’t like to be interrogated. If you’ve got a problem with me, just say so and I’ll look elsewhere.”
“Ha, this is the city, girl. There is no elsewhere; not unless you’ve got big bucks.”
I looked around at the strewn pizza boxes, the bright colors and the movie posters on the wall. Stan would have called her a bad influence. I figured I could use a few bad influences. Like those fishnet stocking. Or the braless look. Anything to piss him off.
“When can I move in?”
On the second night, after I’d settled in, Carla mixed a carafe of sangria, popped a Country music cassette in her player, and invited me to sit with her on the balcony. Out of the player came the silky voice of Skeeter Davis, singing her tear-jerker about The End of the World.
“Fits my mood perfectly,” Carla said. “Men always break my heart.”
She told me she’d been a student in Tennessee, had fallen in love with a married music professor and had a three-year-old daughter—now living with parents in Miami—to show for it.
I told her I’d also been down that same road with a married man.
She reprogrammed her player so we could both wallow in misery while Skeeter Davis droned on about why her heart went on beating and the stars still shined.
“Happens to all of us,” Carla said, wiping her eyes. She poured me another glass of sangria. “Listen, girl, if you need a guy…as in, you know, to get laid, to put all the bad memories behind, I’ve got this artsy-type friend. Dead ringer for Johnny Depp.”
“No, thanks, Carla. No more relationships for me; not for awhile.”
As the weeks rolled by, I learned—or rather relearned—the ethics, protocols, and practices of my trade. There were new computer applications, new celebrities to read about, and the best of it was that old familiar names in my profession came back to me like labels on vintage wine.
Names like Schele, Morley, Stuart, Knorosov, Pope, Champollion, Thompson and Coe.
I, Jennifer, wanted to be on that list of notables, so not a day passed that I didn’t work myself into a frenzy over the cave text. Who was Glyph Girl? Did the symbol of two full moons and three suns mean two lunar months and three days?
I obsessed about it. I dreamed about it. I discussed it with Sutter in our weekly get-togethers at the French restaurant. And then one warm summer night, the old Indian couple showed up at my bedside again, the man with his machete and straw hat, the woman with her basket of mushrooms.
“Come,” said the woman in the language we shared. “We will show you.”
Out the window we flew, down across Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico. Across western Cuba and into the Caribbean. Active volcanoes in the distance. Warm tropical air. The familiar smell of land meeting water. Birds squawked, frogs croaked, and then I was back in the cave with its stench of bat dung, staring up at the nine glyph plates.
The man rubbed a cloth over the middle plate and pointed to an image of a half moon, beneath which sat a long-eared rabbit. “It is my name.”
“Your name is Rabbit Half-Moon?”
He nodded. There was a flash of light, and then they were gone.
The next morning, energized by the dream, I went over my photos with a magnifying glass, and there it was—a rabbit beneath a half moon.
Chapter 62
When the summer term ended, I was no closer to “cracking” the text than before. Sutter flew to Switzerland for two weeks. Carla flew to Miami, and I was thinking of staying in the city until Stan called. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “We should talk.”
I thought so too, and flew down to see him.
He met me at the airport with roses, and on the way home, we stopped at Evan’s Farm Inn for dinner, wine and candlelight conversation.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” he said. “I missed you.”
I took a sip of Merlot. “You said you wanted to talk.”
“Come on, Jen, lighten up. I’m willing to give it another try.”
We ate. We talked. We drank. Stan made promise after promise, and by the time we reached the house, my head was spinning and I was in a giddy mood. Stan followed me around like a little puppy, pouring more wine, telling me how pretty I was, even trying to kiss me.
I pushed him away with a giggle, arranged the roses in a vase, and when I turned back, he was on the sofa, crying, tears running down his face.
“I know I’ve been awful,” he said between sobs. “Isn’t there any way you can forgive me?”
His confessions went on—his cheating, his harshness, his anger. “Please, Jen. The thought of you leaving me, staying up there in New York, is almost unbearable.”
I drank more wine and listened, even held his hand. Then I changed into a robe, padded to the entertainment center and looked though my CD’s.
Patsy Cline? No, that would make me cry.
Edith Piaf? No, too overwrought and melodramatic. What we both needed was something happy, something to stir the soul, something like…the piano music of Raul DiBlasio.
I popped a disc into the player and danced around the room to the strains of Aguas de Invierno. Drums beat, cymbals clashed, the tempo picked up, and the haunting words, “Hasta que te conocí”—Until I met you—spread over the room like a gypsy ghost, taking me back to Ana Maria Island. Alan rubbing Merlot on my breasts and licking it off. Whispering exactly what he was going to do and how many times he was going to do it.
But the arms I felt around me, pulling me into the bedroom, were not Alan’s arms.
The next morning I despised myself. How could I? A little wine, a few tears, memories and music, and I’d thrown away all my principles. Turned into Florence frigging Nightingale. I needed someone to talk to, someone like my mom. Or a priest.
I called Diane, and at noontime we were sitting across from each other in a noisy little restaurant in Georgetown.
Chatter all around us. A glass of white wine in front of me. Diane in her headband and moccasins. She laughed when I told her.
“What’s so funny about it?”
“Oh, come on, Jen. I do it all the time. It’s called a sympathy fuck.”
“Well, I’m not into sympathy fucks. He’s just going to want more.”
“So what? Lie back and pretend it’s Alan. Enjoy it. Sure beats a dildo.”
I thought about it, decided I’d prefer a dildo, and flew back to New York.
Summer melded into fall. Students returned from their break. Classes resumed. When I wasn’t in the classroom, I read everything I could find on glyph interpretation. I compared the signs in the cave with glyphs from other sites. I consulted mathematicians, attended conferences, and became so absorbed in the subject that I saw spirals in my dreams.
“It’s driving me crazy,” I complained one day to Dr. Sutter at our little French restaurant.
“Have you tried the Schele method?”
I hadn’t. Dr. Linda Schele was the best known expert in Maya epigraphy in the country, and had begun her studies of glyph interpretation by sketching one symbol at a time.
“You should try it,” Sutter said. “One symbol each day, then go to bed and sleep on it.”
I sketched five or six a day, and after each sketch, I’d lie in bed trying to interpret the meaning. Was a snake a river? Was a flying bird a direction marker?
Sometimes I’d find three or four scenes that seemed to be sequential, but the next wouldn’t fit. Or it would end—nothing related above it, below it, or on either side.
Ditto for Glyph Girl. Get laid here, there, and everywhere, but not in sequence.
I sketched a second plate, and a third, and when I finished, I felt I could interpret—or at least guess at—the meaning of almost a hundred symbols.
A bar and three dots = the number eight.
Three suns + one moon = three days and one night.
A snarling jaguar = danger.
But it was still a jumble. No message, no commandments, nothing that formed a text. Even more confusing was that it used the Mayan numerical system of bars and dots and other symbols of Mayan hieroglyphs. Even the Mayan calendar. But it wasn’t Mayan.
Again I discussed it with Sutter. “Maybe it’s time to meet with the experts,” he said.
The next day, I sat in a conference room with Dr. Frieda Gruber, Professor of Iconography, and Dr. Abby Stern, department head. Both insisted I call them by their first names. Sutter closed the door and locked it. “What you are about to learn,” he said, “doesn’t leave this room.”
Everyone nodded. I opened the canister that was labeled Plate 3, took out the enlarged photo and spread it on the table. Abby put on her glasses.
“Where is this from?”
“Nicaragua. The cave of the commandment glyphs.”
“Are you serious? People have been looking for that place for years.”
Explanations followed. Then the questions began. Had I tried such and such mathematical sequence? Yes. What about such and such celestial cipher?
“Useless,” I said, “I might as well consult a psychic.”
Frieda chuckled and took a sip of coffee. “Have you consulted Dr. Hosmer?”
“I don’t know any Dr. Hosmer.”
“Then you should meet him. He’s our resident expert in epigraphy, a Harvard graduate.”
I made an appointment with Dr. Hosmer, went back to work on the sketches in my bedroom, fell asleep in my chair, and found myself back in the cave with the old couple.
The woman stepped forward and pointed a bony finger.
“Evil is in the wind,” she said, and then I was awake.
Chapter 63
The dream troubled me, and I was still thinking of it when I went to my office the next morning and found two letters. No return addresses. Beware, I told myself, and opened the first letter as carefully as if it contained a bomb.
It was a photo card from Niro in Costa Rica. There he stood, this scrawny little man, in front of a volcano with his arms about a pretty girl who couldn’t have been more than a teenager.
I put it aside and opened the other letter, slowly.
Out came another photo of the rotting corpse of Lieutenant Fuentes. Scribbled across the back were the words, Look over your shoulder, bitch. I’m coming for you.
The door opened. I jumped and turned around to see Carla.
“Don’t you have a nine o’clock with Dr. Hosmer?”
The clock on the wall read eight minutes past nine. Damn, what was I thinking? I put away the letters, breezed past Carla, and raced down two flights of stairs.
Dr. Hosmer sat behind his computer, a slouchy little man in an office as sloppy as his jeans: books on the floor, desk cluttered with journals and papers, the nasty odor of dirty feet and old leather. Obviously, they didn’t teach interior decoration at Harvard.
Manners either, as he kept hammering away at the keyboard.
When he finally looked up, he spoke in a sharp Massachusetts accent. “Who are you?”
“Jennifer McMullen. I called for an appointment.”
“Ah, yes, Moses with her commandments—no order, no sequence, no context.” He pushed back in his chair, propped a foot on his desk, and linked both hands behind his head.
“Have you given any thought to how your discovery will play with the Vatican?”
“What does the Vatican have to do with it?”
“Everything. They don’t like challenges to the Scriptures.”
“But it’s not a—”
“Then you’ve got fundamentalists who believe in a literal interpretation of the scriptures. You could stir up a hornet’s nest.”
“I’m not trying to stir up anything. All I want is to decipher what I found.”
He snorted and looked at one of the enlarged photos. “How many symbols total?”
“Roughly a thousand. Less than a quarter are pictographic.”
“From different locations?”
“No, from the same place.”
An eyebrow shot up. “That all you got, a thousand? You’re going to need a much larger database.” It came out as daterbase.
“Why? It seems to me that all I need is to get them in the correct sequence.”
He rolled his eyes. “Do you know anything about old Etruscan?”
“Only that it’s never been deciphered.”
“Do you know why?”
“Of course. It’s a dead language, and you’ve got to know the language to decipher it.”
“My point exactly. Do you know the language of the people who did these symbols?”
“That’s not the issue. We’re talking about an ideographic form of expression—the communication of a concept or idea through the use of symbols.”
“The correct word is semasiographic.”
The nerve of this man, as if I didn’t know the language of epigraphers, words like morpheme, rebus, and semasiographic. “What difference does it make? A red traffic signal means stop. A sign with a slash through a burning cigarette means no smoking. It’s universal, the same in any language, like Arabic numerals. Couldn’t this be the same?”
“No way, miz, uh…”
“McMullen.”
“McMullen. Anyway, that’s an outdated theory—a throwback to the days of Morley and Kircher. I’m surprised you’d buy into that concept. Where’d you go to school, anyway?”
“Florida State and Duke.”
“Figures.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t answer. I stood, rolled up my photo, and headed to the door.
“Ms. McCullum?”
I stopped and turned around. “It’s McMullen.”
“Whatever. Next time we have an appointment, try to be on time.”
I slammed the door behind me, marched to the ladies’ room and pulled myself together. Afterward, I went to my ten o’clock class and got back to my office in time to answer a ringing
telephone. It was Abby Stern.
“I don’t know what you did to impress Dr. Hosmer, but he’s agreed to be the third member of your dissertation committee. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“What do you mean, third member? I already have three members.”
“No, you’ve got me and you’ve got Frieda.”
“What about Dr. Sutter?”
“The dean doesn’t vote. You need three members in addition to Sutter.”
Not until that evening, lying in bed and listening to a distant pulsating siren, did I surrender to tears. My attempt at decipherment was killing me. I wasn’t getting enough exercise, not eating right, not socializing. Now it had come down to seeking the advice of an old Indian couple in a dream and an obnoxious Harvard type whose only contribution had been to shatter my self-confidence. Worse, Gonzales knew where to find me.
Chapter 64
The semester ended. Students abandoned the campus. Carla dumped her latest boyfriend and flew to Miami for Christmas. I bolted the door behind her and went to work on my sketches, but every creak in the building became Gonzales’ footsteps. Then the dreams came back—the old Indian woman telling me I should ask my child for advice.
“I don’t have a child.”
“Your friend has a child.”
“The child is only three.”
“Ask her.”
I didn’t like being alone, didn’t like intrusive dreams either, or the fear Gonzales would come climbing into a window. So I called Stan, said I was flying down and asked if we could talk.
He picked me up at the airport. Late. Like the old Stan. It was snowing, and on the way home, he told me he’d committed to work on another big case over the holidays.
“Wait a minute, I came here to talk. I thought you understood that.”
“I’m off Christmas day, but that’s about it.”
We crossed Chain Bridge and headed for the beltway. The traffic was heavy, the snow falling, windshield wipers slapping, his heater blowing warm air.
“Listen, Stan, all I want is to talk about the divorce. It shouldn’t take long.”
The Girl in the Glyphs Page 20