How to Read an Unwritten Language

by Philip Graham

  Naked again, I thought as she paused.

  “Anyway,” Kate continued, “I couldn’t go anywhere on campus without checking for art students, even if I couldn’t quite remember all of them. That upset me the most, never knowing who might be beside me in the cafeteria or the bookstore, remembering my body. Sometimes I’d lie in bed at night and try filling in their faces. Then one day someone’s stupid little laugh across the quad actually made me blush, and I decided it was time to leave.

  “I transferred here. But I couldn’t shake the memory of that art studio, so I signed up for a drawing course. That first class, a young guy posed for us. He didn’t seem nervous at all. He bent his knees and stretched his arms out together like they were pulling on an invisible rope. I tried to capture the strain on his arm muscles, and I knew right away that I was good at drawing. But I’d been a model too, and when I remembered how a model can control an artist’s attention, I felt as if I was being pulled with that invisible rope.

  “Well, I didn’t want him to do that. I started again and just drew the rope he was pretending to pull, with only a hint of his hands. But what about the other end? I thought. After a few shadings something came to me and took shape like a dream: a lamp, bolted to a wall, two of its hinges coming loose from the strain on the rope.

  “When I drew that lamp I actually felt something coming apart inside me. This wasn’t a lamp at all—it was me, somehow. My drawing had caught the moment in time, you see, so I couldn’t be torn off the wall. I was safe. The professor came by and reminded me that this was a figure class, but when I told her, ‘That’s what I see,’ she looked again. Now she lets me draw whatever comes out when a model poses, even if it’s always an object.”

  So Kate’s drawings on the wall weren’t still lives at all, they were self-portraits. The sketches fluttered again from a stray breeze, a trembling of shadow and light and the revelation of their true identity, and there I sat in that dream-lit room, holding on to the wooden arms of a chair.

  “It was so peculiar,” Kate said, her voice low and vaguely accusatory, “when I drew that tree and then there you were on the page, beside the tree and somehow part of—anyway, it was the first time that ever happened. And when you came over to talk to me, it was like you knew you’d appeared.”

  Subtle emotions flickered over Kate’s face that I couldn’t quite read. I felt the strain of my own hinges and leaned toward her. Kate stared back at me, as if memorizing my face, and then she wrenched her gaze away. “I think I’d like to be alone now,” she murmured.

  “Alone?” I repeated, nearly breathless with disappointment. “But, um—tomorrow. Can I come by—”

  “I’ll be too busy tomorrow.”

  “Then the day af—”

  She shook her head no.

  I blushed. “Wait—wait. What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” she replied, her face reddening, her mouth an embarrassed grimace. This wasn’t easy for her to say, yet somehow she had to. She waved an arm awkwardly at her own words, perhaps an ineffectual attempt to erase all that she’d revealed, but it was too late for that. Hadn’t Kate modeled another kind of nakedness for me, the real confession that was the beginning of this good-bye?

  “You don’t have to worry, you know,” I said, still unwilling to give up. “I promise, I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly, her face hard with resignation. “I know you won’t.”

  I collected my backpack. Those pictures on the wall still shuddered in the breeze, her secret self waving good-bye. I waved back, then offered the other Kate my stunned, false smile and left her room.

  I hurried away from the dorm, filled with the bitter unfairness that I’d finally lost my shyness over someone even more wary of intimacy than I ever was. I turned for one last look at her window, and I saw a dark figure, still as stonework, framed by the fluted curves of her curtains: Kate too wanted another glimpse. Then she slowly stepped back into the room’s shadows and I suspected she’d driven me away not because of my desire, but because of her own.

  Later that evening I opened my backpack and discovered her sketch of the oak tree, me. Yet my incomplete likeness no longer held any interest, for now I knew that the twists and shadows of bark, the unerring way Kate found conflicting crevices flourishing within crevices, was the real portrait. Then I caught my breath—Kate must have slipped this farewell gift inside my pack when I left for her glass of water. She’d already known what she was going to do.

  In the following months, even as the memory of Kate’s drawings haunted me day after day after day, I tried my best to keep clear of her dormitory and the fine arts building. But I needn’t have troubled myself—wasn’t she avoiding me too, in the same way she’d dodged all those art students at her former college? I caught sight of Kate only once, as she walked along a path beneath a trellis of vines, unaware of me and on her way to the student pub, her brilliant blond hair shining in the shafts of sunlight. A large portfolio was tucked beneath Kate’s arm and I felt the tug of something strange inside, for that artist’s folder kept no secrets from me. I knew it surely held pages and pages of new self-portraits that looked nothing and everything like her.

  A Form of Floating

  I huddled over my class notes outside the economics building, certain that the first snap quiz of the semester waited inside. Flipping through pages of my suddenly alien handwriting, I heard footsteps: hesitant, then resolute, then hesitant again. They stopped a few feet away and, as I still sometimes did, I imagined that when I looked up Kate would be standing before me.

  I looked up. This time Kate did face me. She’d let her blond hair grow long, and now it was coiled into a knot at the back of her head, a few fringes loose and shining. Her face gleamed in the sun, and when she didn’t turn from my gaze, for one brief and weightless moment I almost believed that I’d conjured her up.

  “Hello,” Kate said, trying for a light tone to make the best of this awkward moment. She shifted her artist’s portfolio from one arm to the other.

  “Oh, hi,” I offered, somehow able to echo her casual greeting.

  Kate cleared her throat with a tight little cough and asked, “How are you?”

  “Fine, I suppose—still suffering through my major. How are you doing?” I gathered up my books, waiting to see if she’d take this chance to escape from me and what I knew about her.

  Shifting slightly to the side as if to block me, Kate said in a rush, “I’m going to be a cartoonist for the school paper.”

  She didn’t try to hurry off. Instead, she tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ears. Still I was wary: after so long, why this small talk?

  Kate misunderstood my silence. “It’s true. The art director is in one of my classes. He likes my work.”

  “That’s … great,” I ventured.

  “The problem is, I don’t have the best sense of humor. But how can I refuse?”

  “You’re right. A challenge is a challenge.”

  The bell rang inside and I glanced at the door of the economics building. I was going to be late. Kate pulled a sheet from her portfolio. “Do you see anything funny in this?” She handed me a sketch of a snail shell, its rounded spiral imbued with strange life: dark, edgy markings ran along its surface like the mysterious notations of electrocardiograms, recording my excitement as I held the page.

  A little dizzy at what she’d done, I managed to say, “Well, it’s not funny ha-ha. Funny weird.”

  “Weird?”

  “It might help if you added a caption,” I said, and again I examined this shell that now seemed to twirl madly in space. “How about something like … ‘No more carnival rides for me!’”

  Kate frowned slightly in concentration. “I think I get it.”

  “Well, I know it’s not much. If I had more time I could probably come up with something better.”

  “You think you could?” Kate said, the waver in her voice an apology, a confession.

  Th
is wasn’t a chance meeting at all. Kate had sought me out. I forgave her, forgave her so easily because she needed me, or at least she needed my words to translate her self- portraits. “Absolutely,” I replied. “Show me a drawing and I’ll come up with two or three lines to choose from. Then we can pick out our favorite.”

  “Our?” she said, so softly I might have imagined it.

  “Our,” I repeated—I knew all about business propositions. “We’ll have to share the byline too, of course.”

  *

  I’ve often wondered if I should have made Kate court me more, even at the risk of losing her, yet I never wanted to exact a punishment. I knew how it felt not to be forgiven. We never once mentioned that afternoon in her dormitory room, however its memory may have hovered over us, and instead we devoted ourselves in the following weeks to combining her uncanny drawings with my captions. A straight-backed chair, so alone on the page, said to itself, I remember there was wind and rain, but where? A half-eaten sandwich abandoned on a bench mused Why must I be denied digestion? A flat stone, hurtling in mid-skip across a pond, declared above its echoing shadow, If only I could float!

  We called our cartoon strip “True Confessions,” though Kate always preferred her own suggestion, “Thing Thoughts.” Conflating our names, we signed it “Mite,” but no one on campus seemed particularly interested in uncovering our identities. At best, the strip was mildly popular among our small circle of friends. I suspected that the art director, an anxious sort of fellow who called Kate at all hours about each impending deadline, kept the strip running only because he was interested in far more than her drawings. Nearly every work session I’d have to answer the phone and field his halting attempts at nonchalance before he asked if my collaborator was there.

  I was willing to double as Kate’s bodyguard because the more we worked together the more it became clear that she and I were kindred spirits. Her desire to both hide and reveal herself made her objects come alive, and understanding this helped me add something of myself to the struggle seeping out of her precisely drawn lines. Kate always considered my captions with a sort of quizzical acceptance, as if my words had all along been her inspiration.

  I loved to sit beside Kate and watch her draw. Her fingers barely held the pencil—a light touch for such clarity—and her careful movements became a form of floating, a sign language somehow caught on paper. One evening, as Kate was about to begin another illustration, I placed my hand next to her notepad.

  “Draw my hand?”

  “Michael. You know—”

  “It’s not a person,” I said, “it’s a hand. Quite an interesting piece of machinery, actually. C’mon, give it a try.”

  Kate closed her eyes, sighed, and then looked down at my patient hand. Slowly she began sketching the whorls of my knuckles, as if they were separate little whirlpools pulling her in. Next she drew those long-ridged bones that fanned from my wrist, and slowly the individual parts took hold of each other and grew fingers, took on the contours and shadows of flesh.

  Finally she set down her pencil. My hand lay twinned before us. I gave her no time to choose between them: I turned mine over, palm up.

  “Draw it again?” I asked.

  She did, first extending the particular curves and intersections of the lines of my palm, though no palm yet existed on the page. She continued that seemingly chaotic crosshatching until they led to my fingerprints, where she stopped. After a long pause, she drew the outline of my hand, then gave dimension to all the rounded slopes that circled the center of my palm. Again she hesitated, staring at those five fingers and their empty faces. Meticulously she gave expression to the delicate, echoing curves of my prints, adding slight shadows that hinted at sadness and anger, subdued joy, the possibility of laughter.

  When she was done I stared at my hand and its image; indeed, both seemed filled with conflicting emotions.

  “Now touch it?” I whispered.

  Kate hesitated, then laughed quietly with a hint of resignation. She slid one long-nailed finger along the lines of my palm, just lightly touching my skin: now we were pencil and page. But before she could finish tracing me, my fingers reached up and held her hand. Neither of us moved. I pulled her gently toward me. Her eyes narrowed with pleasure, then closed as we settled and twisted on the carpet, and I let her imagine a private sketch of what we did together.

  *

  And so we began our entry into sexual mysteries that were breathtaking for their very ordinariness: the borders between ticklish and arousing that we’d chart on each other’s bodies; an unexpected stomach gurgling or surreptitious fart mingling with the cries and moans we were capable of; the shifting map of our sweaty scents as we accomplished exquisite unfurlings in each other’s arms.

  Before curling into sleep together we’d practice an intimate ritual. Kate would stretch with languid grace and pull a tissue from the box. “Want one?” she’d ask lazily. When I whispered yes she’d lift out another. Then Kate would sop up the excess sperm that dripped from her, while I dabbed her moistness from my penis.

  Kate always threw her tissues at the wastebasket in the corner, one by one, and I tossed mine too. We rarely made the target, and our failed shots—crumpled balls of sticky tissue—lay scattered on the floor. Yet in the morning, while on my way to open the bedroom curtains, I saw those little balls as flowers blooming out of the hardwood floor. I’d bend down to gather them up, always surprised how light they’d become overnight—our dried sex was now a delicate white crust, enfolded in the tissues’ twists and curves.

  *

  At first Kate kept even our artistic collaboration a secret from her parents. “They wouldn’t approve,” she said simply, and though they apparently disapproved of nearly everything she was in no hurry to include me in that long list. As for me, during my periodic phone calls to remind my father that he had another son, I’d occasionally make a few cryptic comments that hinted at a girlfriend, but Father’s terse telephone formality invited little more than another rundown of my latest courses and an estimation of future grades. And Kate was certainly in no rush for introductions. The few stories of my childhood that she could bear to hear made her draw such ugly pictures—the chipped face of a toppled doll, a stain on a rug that looked alive—that I held off any further confidences.

  Kate claimed her own childhood wasn’t worth the telling. “I’m glad I don’t have the kind of stories you do,” she’d say, responding to my skepticism. Though ordinary daily details would have satisfied me, I didn’t press her, suspecting that I loved Kate at least partly for her need for privacy—I wanted to embrace whatever was frightened inside her and make it mine. So I was startled, thrilled, and made more than a little anxious when Kate asked me to accompany her home for the Thanksgiving holiday.

  *

  Kate’s parents met us at the front door, their mild faces so nondescript I couldn’t quite grasp where her delicate features came from. Her blond hair, though, was clearly a gift from her mother, even if Mrs. Martin’s resembled a doll’s wig that had been fussed with too much.

  “Welcome, dear,” her mother said with a brush of cheeks before stepping back and adding with a smile, “Oh, your hair will look so beautiful when you finally get a decent cut.”

  When Kate winced, I saw for one fleeting moment my sister flinching before Father’s words after her school play. Then Kate’s father reached out and without a word shook my hand, forcing me to introduce myself. We all stood together for a clumsy moment, none of us quite meeting the others’ eyes.

  “Well …?” Kate murmured.

  “Oh, of course,” Mrs. Martin replied with a glance at her husband, and they led us into a home thick with upholstered furniture and yellow shag carpeting. Heavy living room curtains closed out the crisp blue autumn sky, yet even dull light couldn’t hide the cold gleam of the porcelain figurines lined up in a curio cabinet: a little band of musical frogs, Jack and Jill lugging a pail together, a barefoot student asleep at his desk, a family of elep
hants, a quartet of drunks crooning beside a lamppost.

  Kate vanished into the kitchen with her mother. I settled onto the couch across from Mr. Martin, who grunted as he fit into a chair, turning a bland gaze on me that I’d been warned was deceptive. Anticipating a fatherly grilling, I was especially nervous about any question touching on life after college—I was still marching through an array of business courses without a clear idea of what I’d do with my degree. What I most cared for at school was the comic strip Kate and I worked on together, but this was another of the many subjects that had to be kept secret.

  I needn’t have worried—Kate’s father hoarded words as if they were in limited supply. He so efficiently parried whatever conversational gambit I came up with that I began to suspect this was his way of drawing me out, of making me give away something he wasn’t supposed to know. Adding to my unease were the snippets of casual criticism I heard Kate’s mother offer her in the kitchen: “Straighten your shoulders, dear … what do you have against lipstick, anyway?”

  Finally Kate murmured an excuse and joined us in the living room. She tucked herself in a corner chair, but instead of speaking she simply joined her father’s lingering silence. In the dim light Kate’s face began to resemble her parents’ bland features, her cheeks so smooth that I imagined her skin was as cold as those tiny figures in the curio cabinet. If only I could reach out and gently stroke life back into her face, her arms.

  One slow minute after another passed, and Kate sat so still she might as well have been one of her own sketched objects, waiting for a caption. Afraid she was somehow sinking into her family’s gravitational pull, I realized I had to offer her a way out—with words, words, any words I could think of, and I soon found myself in the middle of a slightly manic rundown of my current classes, piling one trivial detail onto another, from the relative weight of each course’s textbooks to the statistical likelihood that at least one of my professors per semester would smoke a pipe.