Shamed at my deception, I could only nod.
Sylvia frowned, hurt. “But why did you say—”
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell the story then, I needed to release it. When you walked by, I was getting ready to leave the tape recorder on the bench, for someone else to find.”
“So it’s gone?”
“As far as I know.”
“Then you owe me its story, don’t you?”
If a story was the price for forgiveness, I gladly accepted the exchange. How easy to imagine this man I’d never met, as he sat on a veranda while the sun set, his face unraveling from the strain of all he felt. “He was in love. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it, because he was already married, and in his culture adultery is impossible. So he was going to—”
“That’s enough,” Sylvia said. “I’m sorry I asked.”
She picked up a set of blue salt-and-pepper shakers and returned them with barely a glance. Her hand briefly hovered over a cat-faced clock, and then she stared off at the crowds milling about the other tables. When Sylvia turned her face to me I saw that odds had already been calculated, the same sort of terrible arithmetic I’d encountered when I first met Kate. She pulled at her turquoise ring, slid it down to the knuckle to show me what it hid: a much thinner, pale band of skin, certainly made by a wedding ring.
A False Road
As we drove from the auction those wooden John Waynes rattled in their box on the backseat, and I kept trying to believe that this woman I’d pursued wasn’t another of my mistakes.
“Yes, I was deceptive,” Sylvia said, answering my unspoken accusation. “But I’ve been fooling myself too, trying to pretend I’m not married.”
Pretending. “But you are,” I replied.
Sylvia rested a hand on my arm. “Look, Michael, you just bid for that statue because you liked its story. Would you like to hear mine?”
Shamed, I nodded, then turned onto the entrance ramp for the highway. We drove a few miles before she began, “I’ve been floundering for months. Last weekend I cranked up an old Stones song—’Gimme Shelter’—and blasted it out the window. There’s this moment when a backup singer takes up the melody and her voice seems to split in two, and I feel like something inside me is splitting too. I played the damn song over and over, hoping somebody passing by would see me in the window and know right away that cracked voice said something about me.”
I imagined Sylvia’s sad face peering out through a screen window, the tight wire mesh like pixels on a television screen. Again my face was pressed close to her image during that weather broadcast, with little shocks of static electricity surging across my skin, and I almost forgot to turn off the highway for the exit back to the diner.
“Anyway,” Sylvia said, “not one taker.”
She picked up the atomizer and fingered its tassel. We passed a few more stands of trees, then the first strip mall. The diner was just ahead. I pulled into the nearly empty lot and parked beside Sylvia’s car. Too soon, too soon. With the engine idling, I turned to her with a wary glance and waited. Then Sylvia said, “So, my husband, he works for a map company. He’s been off on a field survey, checking the accuracy of a new map. His favorite part of the job, though, is working in the office, making trap streets.”
“Trap streets?”
“Mapmaking is pretty competitive—what isn’t, I suppose. Sometimes rival companies copy each other’s maps but don’t give credit, so they don’t have to pay any royalties. That’s why Richard adds a false road, maybe two, on each map.”
“What’s that?”
“A street that doesn’t exist. If it appears on a pirated map, then there’s clear proof of copyright infringement. That’s the trap.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, unhappy with the finality of trap, the constriction of its single syllable. “Didn’t you call them something else?”
“False roads?”
“That’s a better description. You took a wrong turn somewhere.”
*
We straddled the wet spot on my bed until Sylvia inched closer, whispering, “This time it’s your turn to talk.” She clasped my hand, pulled at a finger until a knuckle popped, a little tug that offered release. This woman wanted to be found, and she wanted to find me, and so I confessed the secret knot I’d formed with my brother and sister in the face of our mother’s performances. Sylvia tugged again, setting free my mother’s giddy escapade on the roof, her collapse in the bowling alley, our reflection in her eyes as she lay dead on the lawn. All the stories Kate had refused to hear.
Sylvia listened in silence, her eyes filled with a strange recognition. “My parents played parts too. Every reaction had to be operatic. If Mom burnt the toast, it was a forest fire. For my dad, finding a lucky penny was like breaking into Fort Knox. I remember when I learned how to tie my shoes, they acted as if I was miraculously fluent in Sanskrit. But they enjoyed their acting, enjoyed it so much that I did too—each day was a kind of show, and I think you would have loved them. I miss them.”
“Do you mean—”
“A car crash. With a truck on some icy road, my second year of college.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s taken me a long time to appreciate the irony of such a melodramatic exit, because sometimes … I wonder if it really was ice that caused the crash, or if they were in the middle of one of their B-movie scenes and … Anyway, I’ll never know, will I?” She offered a brittle smile and sighed. “If only they’d been around on my awful wedding day.”
“Awful?” I repeated, my voice a frail echo of itself.
“It’s difficult to talk about.”
I couldn’t reply, still shocked.
“We’d just cut the cake,” Sylvia began. “Richard picked up the fork, flicked it in an odd way I couldn’t help noticing, and then he speared a piece of cake for me. When I opened my mouth his hand slipped and the tines scraped the roof of my mouth. I nearly gagged, but stupidly enough, all I could think was, Don’t throw up, don’t spit out the wedding cake, and somehow I managed to choke down the taste of my own blood. Richard acted as if nothing had happened, I managed to smile and everyone applauded.”
I groaned at Sylvia’s words but I was far from her, standing on a dais with Kate, champagne glasses tinkling all about us. Kate flinching as I searched her eyes, violated by her own husband before our guests. “My God,” I heard my distant voice asking Sylvia, “What did you do?”
She let out a slow breath, stared at the white ceiling. “We danced. Richard threw my garter belt to the grooms, I threw the bouquet to the girls. Then we left in the car for the hotel and I worked up enough shouting and crying to rival my parents—and Richard kept insisting he hadn’t meant to hurt me, he’d just slipped, and then he’d been too embarrassed to say anything in front of everyone. I wanted to believe him. When we first met, he was resisting his family’s tough guy ideal, and I was attracted to his struggle. I think I missed my parents’ melodramas. But now I think he’s fighting a losing battle.
“If we’re having an argument and really going at it, he makes this little gesture, this little offhand flick. Maybe it’s unconscious, maybe not. I can’t tell. But it reminds me of the way he shook that fork, and I can’t help myself, I just have to give in. And I hate myself for that.”
Sylvia’s face so filled with uncertainty that once again I saw her on the TV screen, surrounded by flashing weather maps and longing for ambiguity’s antidote. I reached out to stroke her hair, but she held my hand and again chose a finger to pull. I heard the soft pop of the joint, felt its pleasurable loosening, and I told her of my father’s stony facade and the unexpected tenderness I’d heard in his voice when he fired me. She pulled another finger and I described his battles with Laurie, then another and I told her of my courtship with Kate. Then I finally confessed my own wedding day.
When I finished she lay quietly beside me, offering no comment.
“I know I should have protected her better,”
I said, “but I failed her.”
Sylvia’s hand reached out again. “You hurt her. You did, even if you didn’t try to. But if it was intimacy you wanted, she should have given that right from the beginning.”
*
Sylvia’s confidence grew before the camera, and then one evening she stood with a sly smile before a new display of color graphics: a flutter of tiny wings in one corner of the screen rippled into a bank of cumulus clouds, which swirled into a tornado that dissipated into clear skies.
With a flourish of her pointer, she announced, “Tonight I’m beginning a new feature for the weather report: Sylvia’s Mea Culpa Corner.”
She paused. “You may remember that we had scattered showers throughout the region this morning, then two straight hours of rain in the afternoon. Perhaps you also remember that last night I predicted sunny weather. I was wrong about the temperature too—by eight degrees. And the rain completely blew my humidity count. So I’d like to apologize to anyone caught without an umbrella, to any family that had a picnic spoiled. Mea culpa! Unfortunately, there’s not much any meteorologist can do about it. Let me tell you about the Butterfly Effect.”
While Sylvia described chaos theory for the viewing audience, behind her the satellite video of the curve of the globe thickened with clouds. She snapped her fingers and those weather patterns began gliding across the continental United States and Canada, then flipped back to the beginning and kept repeating at unlikely intervals as if affected by Sylvia’s words. That same dizziness I’d felt when I’d first watched her forecast returned, not because of the computer graphics but because Sylvia had found her solution, asking forgiveness for mistakes large and small. I felt certain that her viewers would grant her absolution.
Sylvia turned and waved her pointer at the clouds like a wand and the sky cleared, presaging sunny days, rain arriving only at welcome intervals. “Even though I try to look like I’m in charge, I still goof up. So tomorrow, I’m going to tell you just how well tonight’s prediction went.” She paused, the camera moving in as she said, “And on Friday, I’m going to give you my win-loss percentages for the week. I challenge my competition to do the same.” Then Sylvia rattled off the numbers for the next day with a modest authority that somehow redeemed the limits of her predictive powers.
*
Sylvia’s ratings rose enough for her to be featured in the local paper and a radio call-in show, and then she received invitations to give speeches at the Elks and Rotary Clubs, a high school science class, the Women’s Business Council, and even the Mood Disorder Association. We met when we could, brief moments that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, and her weather reports served as a substitute: knowing I was home and watching, she added a new nightly feature offering a tidbit of meteorology for her audience that was also a secret aside for me. With her face in giddy close-up she explained how air pressure is caused by the bouncing of uncountable molecules, creating “a microscopic tingling against our bodies”; she revealed how clouds warm up the night.
She had forgiven me for Kate. I could try to do the same for her, help her forgive Richard his own wedding day disaster. Then we might go our separate ways, and perhaps that’s why we had met. But I didn’t want that. Here was a woman who could read a sunset, who loved to tell a story, a woman who’d heard what Kate hadn’t in that tape recording. So I hid my relief when Sylvia told me her recurring dream: she stood beside Richard on a windy boardwalk, waiting on a long line to what seemed to be a bakery in the distance, and he caressed her shoulder gently until his touch turned into a sharp ache, like the stab of a fork.
The dream began to insinuate itself into Sylvia’s weather report, and doubt returned to her voice while announcing barometric pressures. Then one morning she called and I lifted the receiver to a breathless tumble of words. “Michael, I had that dream again last night, but this time it woke me up and my skin was tingling right at the spot where Richard touched me in the dream, like he really had been working at my shoulder while I was asleep. But he was lying there in the dark, sleeping. Or maybe he was only pretending, because—”
“Wait, slow down. Do you mean—”
“I swear he must have touched me, it felt so—”
“Was there any mark?”
“I, I didn’t think to check. I just lay there, afraid to let him know I’d woken up. Then the tingling faded away. Am I imagining this? Maybe I’m making too much of nothing.”
We both fell silent, until Sylvia cut in, “I can’t talk any more. Richard wants to go to that new mall, and he’ll be here any minute. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Okay,” I replied to the dial tone buzz, and before replacing the receiver I decided to drive to the mall too, see them together, and judge Richard for myself.
I worried the gas pedal through traffic and minutes later I sat at a pizza concession at the corner of the mail’s huge main thoroughfare, aptly dubbed The Sprawl. My back to the passing crowds, I stared at a wall mirror and hoped I could catch sight of Richard and Sylvia passing by.
Nursing a diet Coke and a gooey calzone, I did my best to take in the throngs of shoppers. I might have missed Sylvia if I hadn’t heard a burst of her laughter. Yet wasn’t it tinged with a hint of falsity? Her sleek image passed across the mirror too quickly for me to get more than a glimpse of the wiry man beside her, the sheen of his dark hair. I eased from my booth and followed the back of their heads.
The crowds thinned and I kept my distance. Richard reached for Sylvia’s hand as she lingered before a storefront, to tug her away. A man who couldn’t control his impatience. She shook off his grip and I tried to draw closer, waiting for Richard to make that flicking gesture that so undid his wife, but too many people passed between us—a clutch of hard-eyed teenage girls, a weary couple pushing at a stroller, an array of boys with baseball caps on backward—and then, whatever had passed between them, Richard and Sylvia continued along too.
They approached the entrance to a video arcade, where a crowd circled a demonstration of a virtual reality game: six or seven people stood in their own railed-in pods, harnessed to wired gloves, a helmet with opaque goggles, and a futuristic gun connected to various tubes. I stopped beside a snack shop’s canisters of caramel popcorn while Sylvia and Richard watched those strange warriors squirming and twitching as they aimed their weapons at invisible targets.
Richard stood in line for the game, and Sylvia walked off to a nearby fashion outlet. He took in her slow, careful weaving among the racks of dresses and skirts until two teenage attendants fit him with the game’s unwieldy paraphernalia. Once those dark goggles were in place he aimed the gun, and his body hunched and dodged and sidestepped enemies only he could see. He pointed here, he pointed there at only the air, clicking the trigger again and again. Who knew what target he was stalking in that virtual world? But I wouldn’t fall prey to Sylvia’s uncertainty. I chose who Richard must be, and I let myself track every ominous move he made.
*
The following morning I parked five doors down the street from Sylvia’s home, a small colonial bounded by neat evergreen shrubs, its bright blue shingles gleaming and strangely heightened in the early summer sun. I unwrapped a sticky bran muffin and settled back in the front seat. Inside my shirt pocket nestled the hollow, quiet presence of a gift shop trinket I’d bought at the mall for this occasion: a scallop shell, both sides glued together and painted a glossy black, a shell that had no story. With luck, it would have one soon enough.
The front door opened and Richard sauntered down the brick steps in his slippers for the newspaper. He idly slapped the morning edition against his hips, surely a gesture of something coiled inside him, not merely some nervous tic. He turned back to the house, and before long the garage door opened and Richard backed a blue sports car down the driveway and pulled away from the curb.
I waited until he nearly turned the corner before following and kept a car or two behind, just as I’d seen in countless TV dramas. Each time I pressed the accelerator o
r flipped a turn signal I felt that, if I wasn’t traveling on my own false road, I was far off any map I’d ever imagined for myself.
Instead of heading for work, Richard skirted downtown and drove along a road lined with strip malls and fast food franchises. After much start-and-stop traffic he pulled into the parking lot of the same mall he and Sylvia had visited the day before.
I cruised slowly, one lane away, until he parked his car. He made his way to the entrance. No need to follow, I was sure he’d returned for another try at that virtual reality game. When the glass doors closed I continued down the lane, still not sure how to approach him, or even if I should. I neared Richard’s parked car, the rear lights and trunk framed by my windshield as if I faced my own video screen, and I was not merely following him but actually chasing him, about to smash into his car as he tried to escape. That was when my foot pressed on the gas pedal, and with a terrible there’s-no-turning-back twist of my arms I spun the wheel to the left and my car tore into his, the bumper shattering his brake lights.
Red plastic shards broke into the air. My shaking hands thrummed against the steering wheel and I remembered in quick succession Mother slamming the broken glass into a cantaloupe, Laurie flinging the inkwell at a mirror. Was this violence the secret place where I’d been heading?
Somehow I managed to put the car in reverse, and in the rearview mirror I saw a white-haired woman, her hand waving like a flag in distress. She’d seen everything. With a sleepwalker’s muted energy, I waved back, pointed to a nearby parking space and eased in.
Stepping from the car, I turned to the woman and exclaimed, “Can’t understand it! The engine just revved up and took off—it’s never done that before.” And this lie slipped from me so suddenly that I surely did appear shaken, for the woman nodded, seemingly convinced.
Encouraged, I continued, “I feel so bad about this,” and then stopped: I couldn’t possibly let anyone else know what I’d just done. Quickly I added, “But I’ve got to … rush home. So I’ll just leave my name and address here on the dashboard. Could I borrow a piece of paper, a pen?”
How to Read an Unwritten Language Page 21