In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  She remembers thinking that maybe wishing could make your dreams come true. Then they talked about the notion that you can never step into the same river twice. He was a serious young man, brooding and intense, a deep-thinking young man who was often preoccupied with the contents of his own excellent mind and frequently depressed in a philosophical manner, flinging his long-fingered delicate hands about in paroxysms of existential despair. They were in university, had met in a second-year philosophy course.

  She remembers nodding and smiling wisely while he talked, but inside her a voice was chanting, I love you, I love you, I love you. Also she was hoping he didn’t get into the question, if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? He was inordinately fond of this discussion. There were trees all around them, not falling, not making a sound save that of the wind in their leaves.

  Today he did not question the trees or what they might or might not do when there was no one around. Instead he told her about his high school friend who had drowned in this same river, perhaps in this very spot. There was no way of knowing because the boy was alone when it happened, gone for a swim in the middle of a hot August night. He said he was still haunted by the image of his friend’s body going over the falls. He said he could not free his mind from the idea that river equals death.

  Joanna remembers nodding and making sympathetic mewing sounds but her crotch was getting tender and wet and she was wishing that he would reach over and undo the ribbon of her halter top and lick her smooth small breasts. She was wishing that he would press her back into that flat wide rock and ravish her. But she knewthat wishing this time wouldn’t work. This was not the kind of thing this young man would ever do. She also knew that this sad story was bound to lead him to a discussion of either the River Styx, that river which circles Hades nine times and across which the dead must be ferried, or the River Lethe, that river of forgetfulness, that river of oblivion which leaves travellers unable to remember who they are or where they’ve come from once they’ve reached the other side.

  She suspects now that she never did have sex with this young man. At least she hopes not, because much as she can remember the river, the heat, and the dead boy, she cannot remember his name.

  28. WHITE

  THE COLOUR OF THE SNOW in which you make angels all afternoon three days before Christmas. Your snowsuit is red, your hat and mittens are blue, your mother is inside ironing, you can see her through the picture window and from the outside she looks beautiful and friendly, maybe even happy, maybe she is humming. You are lonely but peaceful. You make angels all over the front yard and then go through the white picket gate and make them again all over the back until there are dozens and dozens, some of their wing-tips touching, so that when your father comes home from work just at dark, he claps his hands and says to your mother, “Aren’t we lucky? There are angels all over the yard. Does this mean we are saved?” You are too young yet to know much about the need for salvation, but as the darkness fills in the angels you imagine them rising, fine feathery shadows floating up to the roof of your house where they will perch all night long with their wings wrapped around their knees (do angels have knees?) and also around dozens of perfect Christmas presents especially for you.

  The colour of the snow in which you make angels with your lover. Your jacket is purple, his mittens are black, and as you step carefully into his angel, he kisses you full on the mouth in broad daylight in your own backyard which, after all the secrecy, lies, and afternoon rendezvous, is such a flagrant disregard of the danger, such adramatic declaration of desire, that you might as well be making love in the driveway for all the world to see. You take this kiss as a sign, a sign from God that yes, he really will leave his wife and the two of you will live happily ever after together. But he does not leave her, not today. Today he goes home to her once again, sad, he says, depressed, devastated even, guilty and ashamed of his own cowardice, he says, with white snow in his black hair, and you are left alone with six angels prostrate in your own backyard.

  The colour of the snow in which you make angels with your son. His snowsuit is blue, his hat and mittens have penguins on them, and he is giggling and rolling around with snow in his mouth and his eyes and you do not have the heart to tell him that his angel looks more like an elephant. You tell him it is perfect, he is perfect, a perfect angel. He says, “That’s not what you called me this morning when I knocked over the milk.” He, like you, is too smart for his own good.

  The colour of the snow in which you have made angels all your life. No matter what else, the snow is always white. No matter where you go, what you do, who you love, how well or poorly you love them, the snow in which you make angels will always be white.

  29. BEAUTIFUL

  “YOU’VE GOT BEAUTIFUL EYES, little girl,” Clarence often said. “Just like your mother.”

  Esther said, “Don’t you roll those big brown eyes at me.”

  “You have beautiful eyes,” Thomas Hunt told Joanna while his penis softened in her hand.

  “You have beautiful eyes,” Henry told her across the breakfast table when she knew damn well they were puffy and red from having been up late drinking and arguing the night before.

  “You have beautiful eyes,” Lewis said, at least a thousand times, every time he looked at her, it seemed, every time they made love. “You should get contacts,” he often suggested.

  But Joanna would just roll those eyes and laugh, saying, “No thanks, I’ve got enough trouble. At least this way I’ve got my glasses to hide behind when I need to.”

  Sometimes after Lewis left her (if you could call it that: after all, he’d never really been with her, he’d always been with Wanda, just sleeping with Joanna on the side, if you could call it that; usually they did it from the top or the bottom or the back, occasionally standing up, very seldom on the side), Joanna would stand in the bathroom and peer at her own eyes in the mirror. Yes, they were big (big enough) and brown (brown enough) but they looked ordinary to her. She could not see in them what other people (mostly men) proclaimed to see. This was akin to trying to tickle yourself. It just never worked.

  “Please don’t tell me I have beautiful eyes,” Joanna says.

  “All right, I won’t,” Gordon says. They have just met, they are drinking margaritas at a party, flirting and flitting around each other like butterflies. As far as looks go, Gordon is not Joanna’s type but she likes him anyway. He is a graphic designer, currently working for a local book publisher. She has seen him around but this is the first time they’ve actually met.

  “Tell me something I haven’t already heard,” Joanna says.

  “You have a beautiful nose,” Gordon says.

  “Thank you,” Joanna says. “I’m sick to death of hearing about my eyes.”

  “Ah yes,” Gordon says, “the eyes, the windows of the soul.”

  “I hope not,” Joanna says. Her soul is her business. She does not want people peering into it whenever they feel like it.

  Sometimes there are eyes in her dreams. Her own eyes, brown. Other people’s eyes, other colours. Crying eyes, smiling, laughing, staring, accusing eyes. Closed eyes, somebody sleeping or dead. Eyes with no face. A face with no eyes. Once she dreams of her eyes being poked out with a hot stick but she can’t tell who is holding the stick.

  Once she dreams of having her eyes scooped out with a spoon and then thrown against the wall where they bounce and blink but she can’t tell who is holding the spoon. Often she dreams that she has gone blind.

  Clarence, cradling Samuel, six weeks old, says, “Yes, he’s definitely got your eyes.”

  Joanna says, “Oh no.”

  30. WINDOW

  JOANNA’S BEDROOM WINDOW faced directly into the kitchen window of the house next door. This house in those days was owned by a young couple named Sandra and Larry Irving. They had a new baby girl with the unlikely name of Cassandra. Esther said it was a shame to saddle a sweet little baby with a weird name like that.
Clarence said the baby would grow into it. Joanna thought it was glamorous. A girl with a name like that was bound to grow up and be somebody. Herself, she’d been trying lately to convince people to call her by her middle name, Isabelle, which she thought had more promise, more flare than her first. Esther said she was being silly. Clarence called her Izzie just to make her mad.

  From her bedroom window, Joanna could peek right into Sandra and Larry’s kitchen. She knelt on her bed to spy on Sandra at her kitchen sink doing the supper dishes while Larry bounced the baby on his knee behind her. Sandra and Larry’s kitchen was exactly the same as theirs. They even had the same sheer white frilly curtains with a Venetian blind underneath. If Joanna squinted, she could see the flowers on their wallpaper and the mountains in the picture hung over their kitchen table. At night in the summer with the screens open, she could hear Sandra and Larry laughing, singing to Cassandra, arguing half-heartedly once about buying a new car when the old one was still good.

  Joanna, falling asleep every night with her bedroom door propped open a few inches to let in the light of the kitchen becauseshe was afraid of the dark, found it comforting to imagine the seven houses on their side of the block squatting in a row, theirs in the middle, flanked on each side by three other families doing (or so she imagined) all the same things in the evening in all the same rooms with all their windows lit-up yellow squares against the accumulating darkness. She imagined other mothers doing the dishes or ironing in their bright kitchens, other fathers doing paint-by-numbers or crossword puzzles in their cosy living rooms, other children curled up in their bedrooms listening to cars passing in the street, the occasional snatch of music or voices raised in laughter, sometimes the sound of a bicycle or footsteps hurrying home. She imagined that after all the children were fast asleep, all the parents watched the same TV show and then went to bed all at the same time, all the lights winking out in all the houses as the whole block settled simultaneously into sleep.

  Sometimes on a stormy night, when she could hear the wind driving the rain against her window, Joanna lay stiff and breathless in her bed, sweating with the knowledge that nothing but a flimsy, infinitely fragile pane of glass stood between her and the fury outside. She kept both her fists and her eyes clenched against the lightning, and when the thunder rattled the windowpane, she thought she would faint with fear.

  Living in the basement apartment, Joanna quickly learned to recognize her visitors by their shoes and the look of their legs from the knee down. The apartment was in an ordinary suburban three-bedroom red-brick house with a two-car garage. One of Joanna’s living-room windows looked into the garage where she could see hoses, rakes, shovels, and two black tires on her landlady’s small yellow car. Occasionally neighbourhood cats got accidentally shut in the garage. They looked in the window at her, meowing. Her landlady was a retired schoolteacher, widowed many years before. She lived quietly and expected Joanna to do the same.

  In the winter, bright but not warm sunshine came through the bare branches of the lilac bushes in front, casting a tangled pattern upon the far wall of Joanna’s living room, lobes of light changed intodiscs or gold coins on the dark wood panelling. Some winters the snowbanks got so high she couldn’t see over them. Inside there was an inch and a half of ice on the bottom of the windowpane.

  In the spring, the lilacs came into bud and sprouted small tender leaves which infused the whole room first with a soft green light and then, as the bushes blossomed, a dreamy mauve fragrance. By midsummer, the bushes were covered with dark green shiny leaves, the room was always in shadow, and again Joanna could hardly see the street. But with the forced intimacy of hot summer nights, doors and screens flung wide open hoping for a breeze, she could smell the bushes and the damp black earth, she could hear the noises of the neighbourhood at night. She could hear footsteps, laughter, a boy bouncing a basketball as he walked past. Sometimes she heard a mysterious tidbit of conversation which might recur that night in her dreams:

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “He’s been like that for years.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  Mostly she could hear the couple in the house across the street fighting, always fighting, usually outside in their driveway. It was impossible to keep secrets in the summertime. For months she didn’t even know their names, but she knew all about their money problems, the man’s ex-wife, the woman’s crazy mother, the time the man got picked up for impaired driving, the good job he used to have until he got himself fired and it was all his own damn fault. She even knew about their sex life and how the woman had been trying to get pregnant for a year but couldn’t, and that was probably his fault too.

  By the end of August, they were at it every night. They would yell and yell at each other in the driveway until finally one of them, sometimes him, sometimes her, cried, “I’m going to leave you! Just you see if I don’t!” and then the other one yelled, “Go ahead! Leave me! See if I care!” Then there was the sound of one car door slamming, the engine gunned hard, the tires spitting up gravel as one of them, sometimes him, sometimes her, made their getaway. The one left behind, deserted in the driveway, would call out after the speeding car. The woman would call, “David, don’t!” Or the man would say,“Sherry,” with no exclamation at all in his voice. This was how Joanna finally came to know their names.

  Early the next morning, six or seven o’clock, when Joanna was still in bed or just getting up, shuffling around the kitchen in her underwear because it was already hot, too hot to drink coffee really but she would have it anyway, then the car would come back quietly. It was a big old two-toned Chevrolet, the kind of car that used to be known as a boat, now usually referred to as a gas-guzzler. The car would pull slowly into the driveway, and one of them, sometimes him, sometimes her, would get out and go up the steps to the front door and knock and wait until it was opened, then step inside, pull the door softly shut, and stay there all day with the curtains closed.

  When Joanna flew home for Esther’s funeral, she discovered that the Irvings’ house next door was owned now by a real estate agency that rented it out. Clarence said he had told her about this but she had forgotten. “They rent it out,” Clarence said, shaking his head, “to anybody who comes along. Riff-raff.”

  The house was run-down now, shingles lifting, paint peeling, windows cracked and clouded with dirt. Bricks were falling out of the chimney and the front steps were rotting away. The grass was seldom mowed—the tenants, it seemed, expected the real estate people to do it, and the real estate people expected the tenants to do it, and so it almost never got done.

  Clarence said, “It always made your mother mad to see that mess next door. And now she’s dead.”

  The night after the funeral, there was a commotion next door. Joanna, sleeping uneasily in her old bedroom, dreaming of coffins and doves, was awakened at three in the morning by a woman yelling, a door slamming, then fists pounding and a man crying out, “I love you, damn it! Please let me in! I promise I’ll never hurt you again.” His voice echoed in the small space between the houses.

  Then came car brakes in the street, two doors opening, then slamming shut. Red lights flashed around her bedroom.

  Joanna got up on her knees and peeked through the curtains. Twopolicemen had the man up against the wall below the kitchen window. His arms and legs were spread and they were feeling him up and down. They were all silent. The woman watched from the window above.

  Clarence came up behind Joanna. He knelt on the bed beside her and together they watched as the policemen turned the man around. He stumbled, nearly falling into their arms, so they propped him against the wall and put the handcuffs on.

  “Drunk,” Clarence whispered. “He always comes around when he’s drunk. His name is Frank. I’ve heard her call him Frank.”

  The policemen led Frank up the sidewalk between the houses. Joanna and Clarence sneaked into the front room and peeked through the curtains there. They co
uld hear the police radio crackling as the cops pushed Frank into the back seat. They got in the front and the interior light flicked on. One cop spoke into the radio while the other made notes. Frank in the back seat held his head in his handcuffed hands. His shoulders were heaving as if he were crying or trying to throw up. Red lights still flashing, the cruiser drove away.

  “See?” Clarence said, and they went back to their beds.

  After she stopped seeing Lewis, Joanna took to driving past his house at odd hours of the day and night, sometimes very early in the morning when she supposed they were still in bed. She never knew what she was hoping to see but she cruised past slowly and studied the front of their house, looking for clues.

  Perhaps she thought the position of the curtains in the windows would tell her what was really happening inside. Sometimes the curtains of what she knew to be the spare bedroom were closed and she hoped this meant they were sleeping in separate rooms.

  One night, returning very late from an evening out with friends, she saw that all of Lewis and Wanda’s lights were still on, upstairs and down, the whole house blazing. She hoped this meant they were finally having it out, weeping and wailing from room to room, Wanda trailing Lewis upstairs and down, shouting accusations and throwing things.

  What she really hoped to see was the window of Lewis’s studio Standing wide open, the curtains billowing out like sails, and his easel, his canvases, his brushes, and paints all in a heap on the front lawn with his shirts, socks, and underwear scattered everywhere.