by J. D. Landis
“You screamed for your mother,” she said.
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t scream for my mother. How would you know? You weren’t there.”
Unperturbed by my contradicting her, she explained, “You screamed for your mother when you couldn’t play the chaconne on your violin.”
“The sarabande,” I answered. “It was the sarabande I couldn’t play. But yes, I did—I screamed for my mother.”
She smiled at me, not smugly but sympathetically, though she seemed already to have a greater hold than I upon the facts of my life. “You were saying,” she prompted, gratifyingly eager for me to continue.
“I was saying I was lucky I didn’t get arrested. For screaming, I mean. I actually pictured myself getting hauled before my father in court and hearing him say, ‘Make him invisible.’ The clerk looked at me strangely and shook his head and unlocked the cash drawer and took out another quarter and put it down on the counter next to the blank one. I could see he didn’t even want to put it into my hand. So I left it there. I left both of them there. That’s what rich people also do. I walked back here to this apartment trying to put the whole strange incident out of my mind by concentrating on what I was going to read when I got home. But all I could think of was that coin, the emptiness of it, the evidence of time passing and reducing it to a kind of unseen dust, the illusion of its value. And suddenly I knew where that coin had come from. I remembered that very image in a book by Nietzsche called Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense. Nietzsche said that language had lost its sensual power and compared it to coins that had lost their image and were worthless. They were an illusion. Language was an illusion. Truth was an illusion. It was that day that axes became axes. So I did what seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. I stopped talking.”
“Until today.”
“Until today.”
“I’m flattered.” She passed the tip of each middle finger quickly over the end of her tongue like an old person preparing to turn the page of a book and brought each middle finger, now wet, down upon the aureole of each nipple and moved the fingers round and round each nipple, which rose quickly. I had never seen anyone do that. She looked down at them and said, “Oh.”
“You should be,” I said.
“I should be what?”
“Flattered.”
“I thought you meant aroused.”
“Are you?”
“I’m getting there.” She smiled at me in such a way that seemed to be begging my patience. “So just how rich are you?” she asked.
“Rich enough.”
“For what?”
“I don’t need a job.”
“I’m not offering you one.” She laughed. “I’m glad you have money.”
I suppose it might have occurred to me that she might think that I might think that she had come with me tonight because I represented some sort of catch because of my wealth. But I had never considered myself a target for women in search of money. I had never thought of myself as wealthy, only as someone who need never be concerned with earning money. I had never measured myself in terms either of how much money I had or of how little—nothing, really, except continue on, which I suppose is all most people ever do—I had had to do to acquire that money. This absence of a feeling of triumph or guilt over money was another way in which I felt I deviated from the American norm. Jacob Needleman said that only in this culture in all the history of mankind have people longed for money beyond anything else. Not I. I was not quaestuarial. I did not want money. I merely had it.
“Why are you glad?” I asked.
“Because I have money too. I own my business. I work very hard at it. Long hours. Alone. I don’t have any help unless I’m out of town, and when I’m out of town I’m out of town on business, and sometimes I just close the shop rather than hire someone to look after it. I love my quilts. Each one is different. I work hard at finding them and I work even harder at selling them, because I won’t sell them to just anyone.”
I thought of what I’d read in her notebook. I saw her in her imagination spread out on the Star of Bethlehem and now, in what almost seemed like my imagination, spread out on my bed.
“I didn’t have to work hard for my money.” I was not ashamed to admit this.
“Where did you get it?”
“My mother left it to me. I’m an only child. My father told her to. He didn’t want it. He cares more for prestige than money—so he has the perfect profession as a judge. He made her do it. He told me it relieved him of the guilt he felt that I was never going to do anything to support myself. I studied language not to be able to do something with it. I wasn’t going to teach; I’m not even an academic, because I’ve never belonged to an academy. I wasn’t going to write books. I wasn’t going to spew incisive epicrises in The New York Review of Books. I wasn’t going to amuse people at dinner parties with my scholarship. I simply wanted to be able to live with words. I wanted to be a hero. Every boy wants to be a hero, I expect. And I thought I was a hero. I really did. The real hero in this country is the person who does nothing, the propaganda of fecund utilitarianism to the contrary. The person who sits and thinks. Who lies in bed and thinks. Evil is manifest in action, and action is easy. Passivity is hard. Action takes you out of yourself. Passivity takes you into yourself. And where would most people rather be? Outside or inside themselves? Of course my father never understood this. He never understood that there is no more courageous, dangerous activity, as it were, than to face the blank wall of existence with nothing to hand but questions. He used to tell me that there is no room for intellectuals and thinkers, not in America. ‘You don’t do anything,’ he would say. ‘You won’t produce anything. You set no example for anyone else. God help you if you ever become a father.’ He made no secret of the fact that it was he who told my mother to leave me her money. He told me that before and then during the reading of her will. And that was the last thing he ever told me. He hasn’t spoken to me since.”
She sat up in bed, holding her breasts but no longer moving her fingers upon them. “Have you tried to talk to him?”
“I left messages. It was years ago. Now I talk to him only in my mind.”
“What do you say?”
“I tell him I’m still looking.”
“For what?”
“Nothing.”
“What about the truth?”
“I found it.”
“What is it then?”
“Nothing. It’s that coin. It’s nothing.”
“So why are you still looking?”
“Because once you know it’s nothing, it becomes everything. ‘All I know is that I know nothing’—Socrates. So you keep looking. You can never get enough.”
“Of nothing?”
“Of everything.”
“It’s like sex,” she said.
“I wouldn’t know,” I admitted.
“I’ll teach you.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I need a hard surface. The floor.”
She put her feet down on the rug and started slowly to pull down her underpants.
“Did you see Truth or Dare?” she asked.
I watched as her fingers stayed under the elastic and peeled those simple white pants off her body.
“You probably think I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“I didn’t ask if you’d heard of it,” she said with a testiness that made me blink. “I asked if you’d seen it.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“You made me think of it when you mentioned Truth and Lie. And music. Are you a Madonna fan?”
“Of course.”
“I’m not talking about the Madonna dal Collo Lungo.”
I laughed. She’d caught me.
“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “I told you before: you don’t have to tell me the truth, but don’t lie to me.”
She stood on one leg and lifted the other to remove her underpants from that foot. She stood before me completely naked now
except for the white pants in her hand. I envied the shadows that hovered on her skin. I felt I had never seen anyone or anything so beautiful. I felt I had never seen nakedness itself before and not simply because I had no memory of when I had seen it. Her breasts were full, particularly in contrast to her thin, taut arms, their nipples still tight from her having massaged around them. Her pubic hair, positively musteline in its softness, had been pressed down by her clothes and opened only slightly where the lips of her vagina were soft parentheses swollen around that place to which I felt I was being sentenced for life.
“I won’t lie to you,” I said, compelled to stand up now and come to her. “And certainly not in bed.”
“Sit down,” she said and motioned with one hand for me to do so while the other rose into the air with her underpants still upon it.
I sat back down as she said, “I lied to you. I said I was a free spirit but I didn’t go around swinging my underpants over my head. And I do!”
And she did. With a giggle, she twirled her underpants over her head on one finger round and round until finally they flew off her hand and landed right at my feet.
“Lucky shot,” she said, giggling some more as she sank slowly before me to the floor onto the inscription cartouche at the edge of the dark Bakhtiari rug upon which I had once tried, unsuccessfully, to sleep.
And there she sat, legs crossed and spread, both hands beneath her buttocks, as she said, “So tell me what it’s like not to talk for a year.”
I tried to remember what it had been like. Here, I’d broken the fast of language—or, more accurately, of talking aloud—for a mere few hours, and it was as if I had never abstained in the first place. The joys and confusions of communicating with another person had come rushing back through my throat and over my skin. I felt I wanted to talk forever to this colorful, young, malicious woman, as Nietzsche might describe her, full of thorns and secret spices.
She was sitting there on the edge of the rug, almost at my feet, upon her hands, looking up at me with impatience, the way one does at a door that is supposed to open and stays shut.
“There really isn’t much to tell about,” I said quickly.
“There has to be. Everybody talks. Most people talk all the time. They talk. They move. They say things. They do things. And they still end up dead. But you didn’t say anything for a whole year. You did what other people only dream about. And you don’t do anything, not the way most people do things. You’re like somebody with the secret of life who doesn’t even know he has it. I’ve never met anybody like you. I want you to talk to me about everything.”
“About not talking as well?”
“I want to know what it’s like.”
“It’s not as profound as you might imagine. It’s more inconvenient than anything else.”
“Go on,” she said.
“Aren’t you cold sitting down there?”
“Thank you for asking. I’ll get back on the bed soon.”
“But why are you on the floor?”
“I told you. I need a hard surface.”
“Do you have a back problem?”
“Hardly.” She smiled and looked down at herself. “I’m so supple I can kiss my own toes. Without bending my knees.”
“So why are you sitting like that? On your hands? Are they cold? My violin teacher used to make me sit on my hands in the winter to warm them up before I played my lessons for him.”
“I’m numbing my fingers.”
I thought of her notebook and wondered if she was still trying to find out if I could read her writing. I remembered how, back in her shop, I had wanted to be that diary so she would tell me everything about herself, as she now seemed to want me to tell her everything about myself. Could it be that we would have no secrets from one another?
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what? Why am I on the floor? Why do I have my clothes off? Why am I sitting on my hands? Why am I doing this with a stranger?”
“Why are you numbing your fingers?”
“Watch.” She rose to her feet. “Watch me. I’ll show you.”
She lay down on the bed again and drew up her knees and put her left hand under her left buttock and her right hand between her legs.
“Tell me about not talking,” she said as she spread the lips of her vagina with the index and middle fingers of her right hand and then let those same fingers settle in between. “You were saying it was inconvenient.”
“Well, you can’t really take cabs very easily or order food over the phone at all. And of course you don’t have to talk on the phone at all. That becomes quite a relief, though at the beginning I found the ringing of my phone to be a terrible distraction and even a mockery of my silence. But by the time I began to get used to the ringing of a phone that I knew I was not going to answer, the phone pretty much stopped ringing altogether. I must confess that sometimes when the phone did ring, I would pick it up. I would never say anything, just listen. The sound other people make when they talk becomes purer when you don’t talk yourself, though no one talks very long to silence on the other end of a phone line. You do become a bit of a dolt when you’re out among people and you eschew the common courtesies, the ‘pleases’ and the ‘thanks yous’ and the ‘excuse mes’ that are inevitably part of social interaction, not to mention how disdainful you must seem to a waiter when you merely point out on the menu what you would like to eat. But I have not been very social anyway during this time. Whatever friends I had have through their own silence disinvited me from their homes. And I had had friends. Quite a few. I had visited them. I had dined with them. I had gone to concerts with them. I had discussed the world with them. I never had managed to get a television, or even to watch one, but I had listened to the radio sometimes and had read the newspaper every day and for years had lived in what I had thought was the world and had gotten along quite nicely, thank you, for a scholarly celibate. But one day it all went blank. Words failed me. I could understand nothing, but I couldn’t even describe what I failed to understand. So I stopped talking. I moved, as it were, au-dessus de la mêlée, pardon my French. But even in my silence and my withdrawal, I believe I have offended as few people as possible. And I set out to offend no one. In fact, I never set out to be silent in the first place. It’s the kind of thing that just grows on you, or in you. You don’t talk to anyone for a day or two, and then you don’t talk to anyone for a day or two more, and pretty soon, even before you’re really aware that there is a new pattern in your life, it’s become a kind of habit. You need not talk to anyone. You become addicted to something you don’t do rather than to something you do, until the thing you don’t do becomes the thing you do. And then the thing you are. I became silence. It was not a matter of Wittgenstein’s ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’ It was wholly secular. It seemed the most natural thing in the world—not to talk. And the most comfortable. There were times when I thought that no one really wants to talk, no one. It takes such an effort, and the pitfalls are so great—using the wrong word, saying the wrong thing, giving the wrong impression, because words are nothing but impressions, are they, and always, always, suffering ambiguity, which grows greater with each word spoken. Of course, you do go on talking, even in the midst of silence. You talk to yourself. Not aloud, at least in my case, thank goodness. It’s not words you’ve given up or language, even if it was language you were trying to escape in the first place. It’s just sound. The sound of words, of talking. You can never escape from the language of your thoughts. I could see my thoughts. I could see words spinning silently from my mind and was afraid I would get all wrapped up in them and disappear and die. So I wandered around during every waking minute and tried to sleep in the corners of these rooms and tried to kill the language in my mind with music. So I listen to music. I don’t play it. I don’t write about it. I don’t teach it. I don’t make a living at it. I just listen to it. I try to let it lead me to feel myself in the midst of its sound, the way I once did w
ith language. I believed I would never talk again. And listen to me now.”
I laughed. I thought she might laugh too. But she didn’t, and I wasn’t even sure she had heard a word I’d said. Her eyes were locked into mine, and mine were locked onto her fingers, first of one hand and then, when she would put that first hand back under her bottom, of the other hand, moving back and forth, and then quickly, fleetingly, up and down, upon herself.
When I stopped talking, I became aware of her breathing, which intensified and then subsided according to how she moved her fingers, and as I listened more intently I could hear the liquid click of the juice she was drawing out of her body and the small, almost breathless words she was saying.
“There. There. Right there. Pardon my French. There. Do it. Oh.”
I stood up. Was she making fun of me? I didn’t care. My penis had grown hard and caused the front of my trousers to stand out.
“Sit down!” she whispered. “Just watch me. Watch me. I’m going to come. Watch me come. Sit down. Watch me.”
I obeyed. With both hands now working almost frenziedly she raised her buttocks from the mattress and her head too and stuck her tongue out and seemed desperately to be trying to lick her breasts, though no matter how supple she might be, and how gracefully long, I noticed, her neck might be, and how much she might be able to push her breasts together and raise them by moving her shoulders toward one another with her arms pushed against her sides, her tongue could reach no farther than the tops of her breasts and the beginning of her cleavage, where drops of her saliva collected and glowed faintly in the soft peach light.
But she didn’t seem to mind. She was smiling now beatifically as she said, “Oh there, oh there, oh there. I’m there. Oh please. Help me. Help me. Help me.”
I didn’t get up this time. I knew enough to know she wasn’t talking to me.