by J. D. Landis
How, I wondered, was I going to find her? I could go to every shop in the city that sold quilts, but even I knew how popular those vanishing old pieces of American history had become, so that would encompass almost every antique store, and they numbered in the hundreds, I was sure.
Then I opened the book again and looked at the first page. It was blank except for these words:
See. Be.
.Won Ton Disc
She might as well have written: If Found, Please Return To … I knew exactly where to find her. I nearly knew her name.
I remember laughing happily. The sound of it, even within the sounds of the horns in the street and the wheeze and plop of tires and the yapping of passing pedestrians, startled me. It had been so long since I’d heard from myself.
So I marched off to do my good deed. I listened to no music on the way. Instead, I rehearsed what I was going to say. I thought I’d better do that, since I was so out of practice.
Sure enough, right where I thought I’d find her, not at some Chinese restaurant (Won Ton) or a record store (Disc) but at 200 Columbus Avenue (i.e., one-tenth One Ton Discoverer of America), I came upon a small shop ingenuously named Call It Quilts, and after I had pressed the crime button and in my suit and tie was immediately buzzed in and walked up to the young woman who walked right up to me so that we met in the middle of the shop with quilts hanging all around us the way they do now here in this loft of ours, though it is too dark now to see them, I held the notebook behind my back, cleared my throat, and said, “Hello” (my final choice from the trinity completed by “How do you do?” and “Here”).
It was the first word I’d spoken in over a year.
I DO NOT know how to describe her. How I wish I could bring her forth the way Roger Fry does the adulterous Vanessa Bell in a letter I found in the Tate. “I can tell of your beauty,” he informs her, and goes on with the most exquisite description of the queer silkiness of her palm and the waves of hair that ripple round her ears and the great planes of her torso and even the compelling shape of her armpits. I have never been able to see Clara in order to describe her, not to myself, and there is no one else to whom I would have had either the opportunity or inclination. When she is not before my eyes, and I try to see her, she explodes in my mind into a million pieces, and they do not coalesce until she walks through that door, as she will do soon enough though not too soon, I hope, for I am enjoying myself immensely alone here on the bed in the dark while the music from our wedding lustrates my being.
This indescribability of her, as if she were wholly ungraspable, has both perplexed and pleased me. I think, “She is your wife, you ought to be able to summon her image at will,” and I think, “She is your wife, but she remains forever mysterious.”
And so I live with her poised between guilt and beguilement and feel I may never actually see her until I see her in our children. But then, I wonder, will our children be like me and not want to see us in themselves or will they love us enough to be pleased that we inhabit them?
When I think of our daughter, who exists now only in the mirror of the future, then I believe I can begin to see Clara.
Sometimes I think she is not beautiful to anyone but me. I can hear my mother, who had died before I met Clara, saying, “She is an acquired taste, like licorice,” which my mother pronounced like the alternate ambergris. Be that as it may, it was a taste that I, who admittedly had very little experience with women, acquired very quickly.
“May I help you?” she asked.
So unsure was I that I could render language concrete, as if sound itself might be considered lithoid and words little stones tumbling from the tongue, I cleared my throat again. I spoke. I recognized my voice and felt reunited with myself.
“I would like to buy a quilt for my wife,” I said.
“Do you want it for the bed or for hanging?” Her voice was exactly as I’d heard it in the notebook, provocatively world-weary, ironic.
“For the bed.”
“Does the bed get much use?”
“Oh, yes.” I found myself excited to be departing from her script. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m trying to determine fragility.”
“I’m very fragile,” I whispered, a secret between us.
“I can tell,” she said, surprising me completely.
I took a deep breath and, still keeping my hands behind me with the notebook in them, stood up straight and stiffened my body. “How can you tell?”
“I can tell,” she said certainly.
“I’m very strong.” I wanted to show her my hands.
“Fragile things aren’t weak. They’re delicate. The best old quilts are some of the strongest things ever made by hand. Their fabric is supple like skin. Their stitching holds forever. But over time they’ve become fragile. Their delicacy is their strength. It’s their beauty. They don’t want to be lived on anymore. Or touched. Just admired.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“How much do you want to spend?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Quilts have become very expensive. Especially in New York. People in New York know nothing. They’ll pay anything for the right quilt.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said again.
“What do you suppose your wife would like?”
“A Star of Bethlehem.”
She smiled for the first time. Her eyes were the color of the skin of a plum. I remember now how I noticed that then. It was not a color I had ever seen in anyone’s face, not that I had really looked up all that often from my books or out from my mind into the faces of other people. But even I knew how unusual a color it was to find in the eyes of another. (I have since learned that it is a fairly common sort of dark purple used by the Amish in their quilts, combining blue and a kind of carmine red that plays off so subtly against their favored blacks, very much like the two cellos in the Schubert quintet, to which I will be listening soon if this blissful evening proceeds according to plan.)
“I don’t have a Star of Bethlehem,” she responded. “The only star quilt I have is a Broken Star. It’s hanging over there.” She pointed toward a quilt on the wall (a quilt she says remains there to this very moment, for she refuses to sell it in honor of our meeting that day). It looked like some sort of geometric optical illusion. Its pattern was shaped from diamonds, squares, and triangles with one red-and-black eight-pointed star in the middle surrounded by a wholly beige star, also with eight points, and that was encircled by wedges of red and black that resembled some vast circular star with an uncountable number of points.
“It’s also known as a Carpenter’s Wheel,” she said.
“It’s very beautiful.”
“Do you think she’ll like it?”
“Who?”
“Your wife.”
“No.”
Anger flashed in her eyes. They deepened almost to black. She looked ready to defend her quilt to the death.
“We just don’t like the same things,” I explained.
“How long have you been married?”
“Twelve years.”
“You must have been married very young.”
“Yes.”
“Think of all you’ve missed.”
I did. I stood there thinking of all I had missed, but I could think of nothing. To miss something implies a desire for it. I had never desired anything I didn’t have or couldn’t get, and I desired very little. My books. My CDs and tapes. I had never wanted a woman. Or a wife. Or a child. I was still an ascetic priest and before even having them had given up most things. Speech was the only thing I’d lost, along with my faith in language, and now I had speech back and was actually talking to someone and enjoying it immensely, though I seemed to be easing into the reality of conversation by carrying on a fiction.
“I haven’t missed anything,” I told her.
She shook her head. “Done it all?”
“To the contrary,” I explained. “I haven’t really don
e anything.”
Her hand moved toward me. I thought she was going to touch me and prepared to swing one of my arms around in front of me when she held her own hand back. “You haven’t done anything? Really? That’s so refreshing. Everyone who comes in here does everything. Lawyers, doctors, brokers, architects, contractors, decorators, designers, writers, painters—they’re always just back from skiing or South America or skiing in South America and they’re getting divorced and married and they all have interviews and book contracts and their children are auditioning and they’re using their cellular phones to call a Town Car and they think if they buy a quilt and put it on their bed or their wall that everything is going to slow down for them. Have you ever noticed how people drive themselves crazy to be sure that every minute of the day is filled and then want to spend their money on things they think are going to make them contemplative.”
Her question had turned into a statement. Even the movement of her voice bespoke conviction. And she disdained her customers. What better formula for success in New York than that.
“People want to be at peace,” I answered.
“People say they want to be at peace. So do countries.”
“You’re a cynic!” I blurted out before I realized I didn’t have the least idea how to speak to a woman.
“I hope so,” she said and laughed for the first time. It was the laugh I had heard when I read of it in her notebook, full of delight and utterly without weight. It was the ultimate cynic’s laugh, for it displayed only joy at knowledge of the truth.
“I have a confession to make,” I said. “I didn’t come here to buy a quilt.”
“I know that.”
“You do?”
“You came here to bring me flowers.”
“I did?”
“Why else would you be standing there looking ridiculous with your hands behind your back?”
I felt stricken. If I could have made flowers sprout out of that notebook, and that were to squander the one supernatural feat I had been granted in my life, I would have done it.
“I’m sorry. I don’t have flowers for you.”
“I’m relieved to hear that.” Her hand moved toward me again as if to receive whatever it was I might be holding behind my back. “I like more permanent things, like quilts and paintings. And if you did have flowers, I’d have to wonder just who you are and why you’re bringing flowers to someone you’ve never met before.” She signaled with her hand for me to show her what I was hiding.
I fought hard within myself to avoid informing her that permanence is absolute and brought the notebook out into the space between us. “I found this in the street. I believe it may belong to you.”
She didn’t seem surprised to see it. For a moment I thought it wasn’t hers after all and was confused over my attraction to this woman to whom I would then have been led by the false trail of someone else’s confession and fantasy. But if it weren’t hers, how could she have followed the script? Why would she have said, “I am trying to determine fragility”?
“Let me see it.” She didn’t grab for it. She made me put it into her hand. It was our first touch, shared through the binding and pages of that blank book.
She opened it up and read something to herself. I watched her eyes move back and forth over the page. Her distraction offered me my first opportunity to stare at her. I could not take my eyes from her eyes. I longed to know what part of herself she was encountering on that page. I tried to read those mangled words as they were reflected in her irises, in vain.
When she came to the bottom of the right-hand page, she was tempted to turn over the leaf and read on, but then she seemed to remember I was there and looked up. She had on her lips the half-smile of someone who is being entertained by images passing through her own mind. “Is it yours?” I asked.
“It’s my diary,” she said matter-of-factly. “Did you read it?”
“No.”
“Did you try to read it?”
“No.”
“Did you look at it?”
“Only to try to find out whose it might be.”
“And?” She raised her face to mine. I loved where her head sat in relation to my own. As I have said, we are the perfect height for one another. Even then, I could feel what it would feel like to have her head on my chest and the claret highlights of her hair sanguinating my face and the smell of her hair, which I inhaled then for the first time, purifying me.
“I couldn’t read a word of it.”
She smiled like a lawyer. “See, you did try to read it. You’re not as innocent as you look. What kind of person could pick up something like this off the street and not try to read it? You did try to read it. But you couldn’t, could you? Or could you?” She seemed disappointed, and this confused me, but I remained afraid to tell her I could read it.
“It’s my handwriting,” she went on. “Nobody can read my handwriting. Nobody. I kept failing in school because of my handwriting. They said I was dysgraphic. It freaked my parents. They thought I was brain damaged. They talked about having me institutionalized. I used that as an opportunity to leave home at a very early age. I’d always wanted to leave home. It was the best decision I ever made. I never went back to school again either.” She gazed into my face as if to see whether I understood the implication of what she was saying—that she had been a free person for a long time and had experienced life in a way that she could not have done had she lived at home and gone to school—and shrugged her shoulders in a worldly way. “But why am I telling you all this?”
I didn’t want her to question why she was talking to me. I wanted her to tell me everything about herself as if I had become that diary she was holding open in her hands. So I ignored her question and asked, “Did you always write like that?”
“Always.”
“Then you aren’t brain damaged. Dysgraphia is evidence of brain damage only when it appears in someone whose writing has theretofore been normal.”
Her laughter mocked me. “‘Theretofore’! You sound like an old fart. You even dress like an old fart.” Her eyes roamed over my body. “But you don’t exactly look like an old fart. What are you, anyway? What brings you out walking the streets and finding women’s diaries in the late afternoon?”
“I’m a young fart.” What a stupid thing to say. But I had no idea how to talk to someone like her.
“But how do you know about dysgraphia? Are you a speech therapist?”
“I used to be a rhetorician.”
“Oh, there’s a practical occupation!” There was glee in her sarcasm. “I’ve been waiting all my life to meet a rhetorician. And just what do you do as a rhetorician—or what did you do before you quit?”
“A rhetorician is someone who studies the power of language.”
“To do what?”
“To do whatever language does. Explain the world. Display the truth. Define beauty. Influence others. Teach and persuade them.”
“Seduce?”
“Oh, most definitely.”
“Somehow I don’t see you as much of a seducer.”
“I’m not.”
“I am. So does that make me a rhetorician too?”
I didn’t know how to respond to her claim or boast or confession that she was a seducer, which itself was seductive, so I said, “Yes, that does make you a rhetorician. And that really is a coincidence, because it’s not a very crowded field.”
“I’ll bet it isn’t. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up, Johnny?’” she said in the gruff voice of a demanding father. “‘Oh, a rhetorician, Dad,’” she replied in the puling voice of a lad who’d wear his trousers suspendered just under his nipples.
“Another coincidence,” I remarked.
“What?” she said, as if it were nothing. “Your father didn’t approve?”
“Actually, he did approve. He said what he always said: that I don’t belong here. He told me he thought I’d found the perfect profession for myself.”
“As a rh
etorician?” she said disbelievingly. “You have a father who wanted you to be a rhetorician? How refreshing.”
“I didn’t say he wanted me to be a rhetorician. I said he thought it was the perfect thing for me to be. He used to tell people that his son was a born diaskeuast. Can you imagine the effect that had on me?”
“Frankly, no.” Her eyes registered … what? Contempt? Admiration? How to tell the difference when you have so rarely looked into a woman’s face?
“It was devastating,” I confessed.
“I’ll bet.” She was smiling. But was it with me or against me? “It’s a wonder he didn’t have you put in a zoo.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“With all the other diaskeuasts,” she explained.
“A zoo?”
“Exactly.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Are you sure you understand?”
“May I be honest?”
“Oh, please.”
“I don’t have a goddamn clue.”
“Do you know what a diaskeuast is?”
“Oh, sure.” She opened her arms to encompass the entire shop. I wanted to run into them. “I get them in here all the time. Some of my best customers. I call them diascuties.”
“Diascuties?” It was either a brilliant agnominative response or a defensive logodaedaly of the first order.
“That’s right. And if they’re cute enough, I have sex with them.”
“Holy Christ!” I didn’t know what else to say. “Holy Christ almighty!”
“So tell me,” she said.
“Yes?” What was she going to ask me? Would I be able to confess to her that I wasn’t a diaskeuast after all? And if I did, would I, then, never possess her?
“What’s a diaskeuast?”
“You really don’t know?”
“I really don’t know,” she said with disarming frankness.
I was surprised, as I always am, when a word, any word, is not known to someone else. I have assumed that those of us who are meant to communicate therefore share the same body of sound and meaning. But, then, I had also believed that words were the most benevolent of man’s gifts to himself and had come to learn that they were also the most discrepant (a word whose ugly sound and even look are mirrored in its meaning when it’s used to signify, as I do here, discordance). It was I, after all, who had stopped speaking altogether. It was fortunate she could understand anything I was saying. And she had, in diascutie, concocted a lovely logodaedaly after all. Imagine my delight, meeting a woman who creates her own whimsical neologism.