Sign Languages

by James Hannah

  Charles listened for a moment to the buzz of his thoughts and heard his concern for aging faucets, failed cabinet locks, proposals due at work, the muddled melody of something by Brahms.

  He thought about how he hadn’t been this alone in years. He simply couldn’t remember when. He recalled from nowhere the picture of a girl named Brandy sitting astride him, her small breasts jiggling in the firelight. From a camping trip in college. He’d considered camping and canoeing a passion then. But now he thought about how elaborate and purposeful it all was. Choosing this item over that. Being superior and particular. The now-embarrassing extolling of nature’s virtues. And he’d never gone anywhere alone. There was no solitude, communion, whatever those hip phrases had been. He’d sawed off his toothbrush handle to save space. He’d exaggerated his Cherokee ancestry. There was seduction in tents and canoe bottoms. He saw his own bare ass pumping away, the silver canoe drifting between banks solid with pines and French mulberry.

  He wanted something to happen now. He pushed the everyday thoughts away. His life right now was not taken up with his wife, the girls, the office, his blood pressure, taxes, his mother’s failing health. For a moment he remembered he’d promised he’d phone her after Annie and the girls left for his brother-in-law’s wedding in Miami. Then he snagged himself on Annie’s promise to call in the morning before the rehearsal.

  “I’m hoping a woman won’t answer,” she’d laughed. He saw her long, bony face. They rarely kissed, though they made love often and ferociously. She turned her ass up now and he came at her from behind, their only contact the wetness of groin and buttocks.

  Charles took a long, hot bath until his toes and fingers wrinkled. He kept adding the precious steaming water until it was completely gone. He washed his legs and feet; he never got below his knees when he showered. He dozed off in the water and came back in a chill, his watch on the top of the toilet tank fogged on the inside. The cold water raised gooseflesh.

  In the bedroom he turned back the covers then went and locked the bedroom door. He turned off the lights and lay still. But what did he want to happen now? Something unusual, he answered himself. Something wonderful and strange. Something from a pleasant dream or exotic movie. Or maybe not even pleasant. But mysterious. He was sure such things must happen to other people. Isn’t that what shows in some eyes? Or were those rich people, celebrities on TV, and was that just money and drugs?

  He put his fingers to his forehead. He wondered if Annie had ever had such a thing happen. She seemed light on her feet. “Happy,” he said aloud in the dark room, the edges of the blinds rosy from the streetlight at the corner. But I’m fine there, too. It wasn’t happiness. That took place in tents, in canoes, at Molly’s birth, the placenta like some heavy wet scroll rolled up tightly.

  Hush, he told himself. Listen. What is there to happen? And it wouldn’t just happen by itself.

  Charles got up in the dark and straightened the covers. He took some blankets out of the closet and walked to the brick patio. Outside the sky was clear; he had never really learned the constellations, though once, long ago, he’d gone out at his parents’ every night with a star chart and a flashlight. But hadn’t that ended up in a tangle of opened clothes and elbows? Or maybe it’d been too hard or he’d lost interest with no one to impress.

  He made a pallet behind the row of potted, blooming vincas and leaned against the rail, watching the motionless shadows. A dog barked twice. The hedge at the back of the yard needed trimming. Charles lay down and covered up. A gust of warm wind rattled the bamboo chimes; the sound the clatter of bones.

  His head was full of movies and work and images of girls and women and the girls as women, their narrow hard butts now wide and embarrassing. Elvis, the family cat, came up the steps, curious at the strange sight. He put his gray face up to Charles’s, and Charles took him into the bed. He’d never slept with a cat before, or with a dog. For a long time they both fidgeted.

  Saturday

  The third time Charles awoke he swung his legs off the couch and sat up stiffly aching in a dozen places. He rubbed his eyes and noticed he’d left the muted TV on, which now showed some children’s cartoon with animal-people, in ugly colors, locked in dreadful combat.

  Tasting his own sour breath, he saw it was almost one o’clock. He wondered when he’d pulled the den drapes closed. Rising, he turned off the TV, opened the heavy drapes, the bright summer light rebounding off the bricks of the patio, needling his tired eyes.

  He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot he’d made at daylight after the neighbors’ whispering had first wakened him. Sitting rigidly over the cup in the dainty, cheerful breakfast nook where he’d always felt too large and clumsy, he winced in embarrassment.

  “Shhh… come look. See him? Over there on the patio. See?”

  “Good lord. You think he’s okay?”

  Charles had barely opened his eyes, his face wet with dew, cat hairs on his tongue and lips.

  “Maybe it’s a heart attack.”

  “Maybe Annie kicked him out or something.”

  They had both laughed like naughty children.

  Charles had realized he was the topic of the Hallistons’ conversation, the whispered voices as faint as the early morning light. But already the temperature was in the eighties, and though he wanted to lie still until Sam and Karen left the low hedge twenty feet beyond his head, he was terribly hot and miserable. Finally, their whispers lower now, more conspiratorial, he hurried them by groaning theatrically and tossing this way and that. Then he listened carefully over the sound of early mowers and the clink-clink of sprinklers until he heard their patio door open and close. Charles tried to sit but couldn’t, his spine a complicated network of aches. He had to turn gingerly onto his stomach and work himself to his knees by using the outdoor furniture until he sat, breathing shallowly under the shade of the pastel-striped table umbrella.

  “Jesus Christ.” He pulled a damp sheet over his twisted boxer shorts. He’d popped two buttons off his pajama tops. He’d kicked out in the night and overturned two pots crowded with the white stars of vincas. The black dirt had been taken up into the bedding and his legs were streaked with the grime. Charles shook his head and began cleaning up. He scooped the dirt into the pots and gathered the bedclothes. It was full daylight before he finished and realized he was soaking with sweat and still outside in his underwear. Elvis sat on the steps down to the yard and stared at Charles, who, passing by, gently pushed him off the terrace.

  The second time he’d awakened, he’d been asleep on the couch. It was nine by the VCR when Annie phoned. His mind had been full of retreating dreams, the voices of the Hallistons in the hedge, mortal embarrassment.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

  And she’d talked on in her level voice full of straightforward information. Good descriptive details of their flight, her parents’ health, the progress of the wedding. He’d talked to the girls, their own voices full of cheer, the sound of birds, of innocent animals celebrating without any heaviness at all.

  Now it was afternoon and Charles went to the kitchen and poured out the bitter, hours-old coffee. What foolishness, he thought. “Silly bastard.” His concerns now including the patio business, Sam’s and Karen’s voices, the tone of his wife on the phone. Her voice like a stalactite, fifteen years of accumulation. Steady in the face of operations, death, weddings, pain, and disappointment.

  Make me like her, he thought, and was surprised because he had thought he was almost exactly like her already. Aren’t I? Isn’t that why we married, live together?

  The rest of the day he worked hard at all the tasks he should already have done. He hosed down the brick walk and the front porch. He touched up the faded picnic table. He waved brazenly at the Hallistons as they left for the tennis courts.

  So I’m alone for a day and I come unglued, huh? He laughed at himself and shook his head at the whole vague idea of something wonderful and exotic. That’s the movies talking, not me. An
d, for the longest time, he considered the devilish power of movies and rock music and commercials over our lives as he trimmed a hedge, even combed out the cat’s gray, shedding hair, its desperate claws scratching at the bricks.

  But it must have been darkness, twilight, the end of activity, that brought last night back again over all those objections of neighbors, Annie, the kids, misplaced currycombs, slices of cucumber from the Tupperware bowl in the bottom of the fridge. Bob Davis not carrying his weight at work. Hadn’t for almost a year now.

  Instead of showering, Charles took another hot bath. Gradually unclenching his muscles, the water worked on his mind, too. Looking up and over the lavatory, he saw the sky in its last dark blue light after the first star has appeared but not the rest.

  He knew he’d only been deadening his mind, keeping it away paying penance, too—all at the same time—for some vague desire.

  “I’m going crazy, is that it?” Charles’s voice ruffled the surface of the cloudy, steaming water.

  He knew he’d wasted the entire day. There was tomorrow and then, on Monday, he’d leave work early to drive back down to Nashville.

  So at dusk, the stars all out now, he brushed a dried piece of chicken liver off the car seat and backed out of the driveway.

  It’s not at home; he knew that. What’s not at home? He shook his head and drove past the office, the homes of friends.

  Turning off Bledsoe onto Poplar, he slowed down as he passed Melanie Kirk’s house. At the empty four-way stop he put the transmission in park and stuck his head out the window to look back. Her kitchen light was on. He ducked back in when he realized she was right there in the shadows watering the lawn. Her face, arms, legs, all pale in the dark up under the maples, catching the light from the street lamp directly over his flushed face.

  What is this? He drove on, quickly, his foot pushing hard on the accelerator, going faster than he’d driven in twenty years. Speeding down streets crowded with homes, people in their yards, children he saw at ballet lessons, parents he recognized from soccer, piano. So once, years ago, she’d come up behind him at some party—Christmas, Halloween, or, back then, they had parties for no good reason at all. Where had they lived then? Over on Childress, before the oldest was born? Or was it even at their house at all? Charles was bent over the sink, twisting at an ice tray, and she’d fit her body snugly against his, run her fingernails down his spine. And he’d jerked around, popping ice cubes all over the place. They’d laughed, picked them up, talked too forcefully, not looking into each other’s eyes.

  That was years ago. Before Nick Kirk’s second and last heart attack. Nick was small-boned and handsome. And though they were only casual acquaintances who played awful golf twice or three times a year, Charles had liked Nick. And now, oddly enough, missed him after neglecting his memory for ten years. Nick Kirk, who lived very carefully after the first heart attack. He had grown even thinner, more sunken-chested, but somehow that had only increased his handsomeness. He was thirty-two and had gone to bed without complaint and not gotten up.

  Outside town, south on Antietam Road, he gathered speed. The car floated around the curves. Charles concentrated on the road. He moved the red needle past seventy. The tires squealed. He drifted over the twin yellow stripes. A blur of a sedan honked at him. The Buick brushed the high grass just off the shoulder.

  He sped all the way to Madison County and the river. There at the Minit Market he filled the car with super unleaded and, sitting on the curb, drank a beer from a paper sack. He listened to the tick of the cooling engine. There were other roads in his head. He’d wanted a Mustang 289 for graduation.

  “Then what the fuck do you want? What the Jesus fuck will get you to?”

  Charles looked over his shoulder past the ice locker to the man on the pay phone. He paced between the rusted-out hood of a lime-green Gremlin and the minute privacy booth, the short silver cord limiting his range. Charles saw the pile of cigarette butts at his feet. He snuffed one out on the plastic side of the booth, the black pockmarks like bullet holes.

  “Oh just hold that shit right there. Hell no I didn’t. Not for a minute, you hear me? Goddamn right. Absolutely right. Well, so he’s a motherfucker, too. You tell him that for me. Coming right from me. Go, tell him. Right now.”

  “Just fuck you too!”

  The young man slammed down the receiver and stood a minute. Then, lighting another cigarette, he put in a quarter and dialed.

  “So, we have to talk, right? Am I right?”

  At home Charles loaded in the vidéocassette and pushed the fast forward until the image became what he expected. He turned the sound off and lay on the couch.

  No one knew him in Madisonville. He’d just walked right into the adults-only section and picked a number off the rack on the wall. Number 58. He hadn’t flipped through the catalogs on the shelf.

  He hadn’t seen the title. And now he watched something he’d never seen before. Long tongues and penises as thick as beer sausages. The reds and pinks of women’s genitalia. All the semen spent on backs and breasts. On opened lips. Lapping tongues. Charles had never had a woman take him in her mouth. And every single moment of sex, even then, in tents, canoes, cars at drive-ins done without such detail, without really looking.

  Standing, his penis bulging in his pants, Charles went from window to window, lowering blinds, drawing drapes.

  His eyes locked on the large screen that had shown him, Annie, the girls, Swiss Family Robinson, The Sound of Music. He felt a tremendous guilt.

  Later he lay on the bed and masturbated—something he hadn’t done in years. It was awkward, unnatural for him. Turning the light on in the bathroom, washing his hands and stomach, he felt caught. Before he went back to bed he rewound the tape and snapped the box shut. He’d mail it back to the store; he’d use the book mailer they’d gotten the latest Book-of-the-Month Club offering in, just last week.

  Sunday

  The morning began cool, but by eleven it was cloudy and humid. Charles’s aftershave remained sticky, his wet hair soured slowly as he sweated in front of the TV. He finally got up and turned the air-conditioner down to sixty. He watched “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press.” He tried keeping his attention focused on this week’s familiar faces. The country had discovered the poor again.

  Often he looked out the window at the sky. He considered mowing now that he’d trimmed the hedges. Balancing everything out. Finally, a weed-whacker trim at the base of the flowerbeds, the swingset.

  Charles grew despondent. He wasn’t, he knew, the sort of person who dwells on things, who takes something and probes it, picks it to death. But in twenty-four hours he’d leave work and drive to Nashville and, by late tomorrow, the house would be filled with them again. The girls arguing like magpies; Annie making lists, catching him up on her family and the wedding. He lay back on the couch and tried his best to take comfort from those scenes sure to happen. He heard their voices and footsteps and his chest seemed difficult to lift, his breath shallow. He sat up.

  Perhaps he should have gone to church; it would have helped pass the time.

  He watched the Cubs lose until almost six, then he sacked the fridge for sandwich materials. Again in front of the television but looking out at the sky, he felt the same. “I really am going nuts, huh? Is that it?” He remembered a movie he’d seen years ago. In the very last scene Gene Hackman has gone nuts and, looking for a hidden microphone, had destroyed his beautiful apartment room by room. Stripped the wallpaper, pulled up the thin slats of oak flooring. Finally sat and played his saxophone in the middle of it all.

  Charles turned off the TV and dressed in his yard clothes. But once outside he couldn’t find pleasure anywhere. He mowed a strip from front to back but the grass was so short it barely showed. His mind seemed locked up tight by nothing at all. The mugginess drenched him and his damp underwear chafed. There was nothing unexplained, exotic, mysterious. Only the Sears mower belching, acting up. The Hallistons’ terrible poodle bar
king.

  Charles stopped the mower and drove off in the pickup. This time he drove slowly, carefully, through the neighborhoods. He chose streets he liked. He looked at the huge, tree-covered lots, the tremendous houses at the apex of circular drives. Then there were the narrower streets and smaller lots but older, too, with a more luxurious growth of lawns, trees, shrubs.

  He drove all the way through town and out toward Mt. Carmel to the south. Five miles out he pulled off into an empty gravel parking lot. Here some huge international company had built and maintained a nature trail which looped through the hilly, forested countryside for two miles or so. It was a payback for a hundred years of corporate robbery. He and Annie had brought the girls out once and made it a quarter of the way around before insects and tired feet had turned them back. Charles shrugged his shoulders and locked the pickup. His sweat had left the dark outline of his back and legs on the upholstery.

  He walked leisurely on the trail of pulverized wood bark. Every so often he stopped and read the slanting red metal plaques and stared off into the deep woods, his eyes searching hopelessly for certain types of maple, oak, ash. He remembered his silly canoeing trips, the dappled sunlight on bare flesh.

  At plaque number twenty-seven Charles just stepped off the trail and walked down the hillside, crossed a dry stream, the water in its pools stagnant, covered with a hairy scum, and pulled his bulk through the thicket of undergrowth. He had scared himself already, and each step was taken with dread. Charlie, he kept saying to himself. Charlie, what are you doing? You idiot, the sun’s going down. My God, man, turn around. You’re not that teenage trailblazer. His thoughts kept hammering in his head trying to stop him, drag him back to the pickup. But after a while he’d sweated them away, and by sunset he only considered his raw thighs and heavy calves.