FICTION  |
SEPTEMBER 2006 – NO. 8 |
 |
Here
I.
Ian smelled like ice, like February, the month he was born in. His sharp face was imprinted with its qualities. I was golden, softer, like May, my month. We were 12 then, in 1980. In our first lesson, Ian explained that all words looked like what they meant. Like trapeze. He wrote the word on his pad, every letter in a different color. He drew a T and made it into a swing. Then he drew a man in a red striped costume forming the R, A, P, E, Z, E. The motions of a body through the air. Everything is what it looks like on the page, but there isn't a word for that. Words are for the hearing.
Hear, the thing everyone else's ears did but mine, and here, the place where I always am, sound the same. That is something called homophone. There is also onomatopoetic. Ian drew it for me. It featured a long, complicated octopus squeezing the letters. Words, all words, sound like what they mean. But that was difficult, since sound meant nothing at all.
Aunt Jana, his mother, smelled of spice cake, the result of French face cream and Opium. She perched on things and made them go. Horses, cars, skies. The Welshman she married, because of what was going on in her womb, grew up on one potato a day and hacked up black liquid from the age of eight on and had — perhaps inspired by the regurgitated stuff — gone into the oil drilling business. He made lots of money, drank lots of Laphroig, and had his license taken away in four countries, so Jana drove the Aston Martin. She drove it fast and she was very beautiful. She kept her license when they stopped her.
23 Hazel Road, the brownstone where they, and briefly I, lived in Godalmere, smelled of new paint and old must. Number 23 labored in a perpetual state of semi-destruction. The exhausted front room had been done and redone — never to Jana's liking. Wallpaper was put up and stripped off. Mammoth glass light-fixtures hanged … then came down. Workmen sanded and painted and pounded. Wood slats and piles of nails and power tools stacked up the walls. Old furniture huddled in the middle of the room.
The house was also in possession of an au pair, ostensibly with us to learn English. For reasons that remained unclear — Ian did his best to explain — she was referred to as the blonde girl even though her hair was really light brown. Her breasts, the size of well-fed lap dogs, perpetually bounced before her, announcing her indignation at our likes. She enjoyed an adversarial relationship with the washing machine, which she also extended to the vacuum cleaner, Jana, Ian, and myself.
Late in the summer of my year with them, she stormed out because the dishwasher door refused to cooperate. Jana said, are you stupid, you stupid bitch. Ian wrote stupid and bitch. No explanation necessary. They were words that had come up before. The blonde girl stared at Jana as if she'd been slapped and then ran out of the house.
Ian and I left the breakfast table and followed the action into the front hall. All we caught was the front door slamming shut. Jana seemed prepared to pursue the matter when she stopped and picked up the phone. It must be Uncle Welshman at his office in London because whenever he called she put one hand on the wall above the phone in the front hall, trying to push it down. The effort made it go white. I knew when Eric the riding instructor called because she picked up the phone and carried it into the front room, swishing the long cord like a train, and closed the door. But this was definitely Uncle Welshman wanting something she was reluctant to do. Whenever he asked her for another scotch she would slowly pull a Dunhill out of its little couchette and light it and have a long drag like she hadn't heard him. Then she'd get up and get the bottle.
She had the cigarette out and was about to light it when she slammed down the phone. She squinted at the two of us in the kitchen doorway and said something. I looked to Ian. On the ever-present pad, with his colored pencils, he wrote London.
The blonde girl incident stranded us with no keeper so we were to get into the car. Last time Jana had left us alone we'd painted the front room a deep red I'd found in the cellar. Hard drips had dried in rivers all down the wall before she got home. She wasn't about to leave us alone again.
On the way out I knocked over a pile of knit squares stacked waist-high along the walls of the front hall. I wasn't sure I had actually touched them. It'd been happening a lot lately; walking past things and having them fall without touching them.
Jana, while watching made-for-television miniseries from America, furiously jabbed at yarn with needles, making the squares. She smoked one Dunhill after another; weaving the yarn into the only thing she knew how to make. I dreamt she sewed them together and made a blanket big enough to cover number 23. It was so dark and hot we couldn't breathe. We were found dead by the front door, trying to push it open against the weight of the blanket.
I knelt down to pick up the squares, knowing she wanted me to look up at her but I pretended I couldn't tell she was there. She moved her hand in my peripheral vision. Still I continued to pick up the itchy little patches. Making a show of what a careful little girl I was, I moved more slowly as her anger got quicker. I could imagine her lips moving rigidly. When her anger went like that Ian always faded away. I felt him slipping back into the kitchen behind me.
She placed her booted foot on my hand and ground it in. I kept the good girl look on my face. After a long minute she let up the pressure. Cautious as a mime, I released the square, crept my hand out from under her foot and looked up at the underside of her voluptuousness. Her breasts covered the entire front of her, collarbone to waist. Her hips were wide enough to straddle the largest horse with ease. She wore Oxford Street military fatigues, adding to the sexy dictator effect of her sunglasses and her short dark hair. She stared down at me, pointed to the front door and hollered, Out! No need to shout, I thought.
The Aston Martin's radio was on because they were singing. Or mouthing the words, but I didn't know yet that people did that. Ian wrote Queen in purple pencil. Then he drew a picture of Freddie Mercury with a tiara pointing a gun at another man, also with a pencil moustache. Under it he wrote courage. He handed it back to me from the front seat and I laughed.
Years ago, my mother, a well-meaning, anxious sort of person, had taught me how to laugh. In all qualities the opposite of her sister — petite, pale, unassuming — she worried that my unmodulated sounds were upsetting. She spent hours explaining to me through touch and gesture that when I felt a certain kind of joy it made a terrible noise. We practiced placing my hand firmly over my mouth and expressing with my eyes. In Jana's care, however, I'd become lazier. No longer under my mother's watchful eye lest her wanting daughter should offend, I felt my throat creating more sounds.
Jana looked up and said, Stop It at me in the rear-view mirror. I smiled at her like I thought she'd just said I Love You.
In London, on Nicholas Street, Uncle Welshman was standing outside the restaurant. Annoyed to see her entourage, he murdered his cigarette into the cobble with his toe. They didn't greet each other. She stood in front of him in her sunglasses, daring him to hold her gaze. His watery brown eyes, like an iridescent pool of oil in the sun, glanced at Ian and me. I'd had a few sips of scotch and it made my eyes water too.
Uncle Welshman liked me. I didn't talk back. On those rare occasions when he was home, he would play with my hair at the dinner table. Secret chocolates sometimes attended his visits. He would beckon me into the front room and offer them with a finger to his lips, as if I needed to be reminded to keep quiet. It was he who'd bought Ian a pad of paper and encouraged him to tell me what was going on … perhaps he wanted a witness.
We stepped into the cold, dark restaurant. A waterfall trickled down a stone wall. The woman standing behind a desk smiled and held out her hand to Uncle Welshman. Her pale blue eyes were clear and calm. Jana said something and we were seated at a table in the back of the restaurant, closest to the wall of windows looking out on a garden, with bonsai trees and a fountain covered in moss. Next to the window, large white and gold fish rose to the surface of a pool and then recessed into the depths where I could just see the suggestion of their bodies. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass as a waiter brought orange squash for Ian and me, a martini for Jana, and a scotch for Uncle Welshman. I looked at their faces. No one was speaking.
I focused my attention on a silver bowl of tomatoes gleaming in the center of the table. The seamlessly smooth skin wanted to be touched so I picked one up. My hand's hot ache and its cool flesh met, dissolving each other. I held the tomato, feeling them watching me. I closed my eyes and ran the cool skin over my cheek. My heart started to race as I rolled the tomato over my face and neck. I covered all my bared skin with it.
Jana was reaching out to take the tomato away from me when the waiter interfered by placing a menu in front of me. I waited for her to remove it, but shedidn't. I looked at Ian, who shrugged. I was deciding my own food fate. Jana and Uncle Welshman began to talk. She drank her martini in one swallow. Ian's face grew tight as a knot.
My menu, a thing I'd never had before, wanted attention. Half the words were a mystery, probably in another foreign language. In a terrible moment soon after I came to number 23, I'd realized that the blonde girl spoke something besides the language I couldn't hear, and that, in fact, there were thousands of languages around the world that I was not privy to. It wasn't just the one I needed to somehow work a miracle and figure out.
I was puzzling what pois might mean (little p, then an o, what did it look like?) when Jana slammed her hand down on the table, making the silverware jump like nervous ballerinas. They argued. The waiter rested in the shadows at the other end of the room and failed to take our order. Ian shrank further away. I pointed to the fish outside. He wrote the word koi. Then he wrote the word again and drew a Japanese girl with her hands over her mouth looking sideways. Both of these had the same word. He pointed to the fish and then pointed to me. After a moment he pointed to the girl and pointed to me. A coy koi. I took the pad and drew a woman with a fish tail and carefully wrote out mermaid? We'd spent hours in the past few weeks on these creatures. I knew the mer was a French word for sea and maid meant someone kind of like the blonde girl and kind of like me.
Ian smiled, pleased I'd understood the riddle with so little prompting. He took the pad back and wrote the word divorce on his pad and put it on my knee under the table. No picture. I knew what that word meant. The V in the middle said it all. When I looked up he was still smiling, but he was no longer pleased.
Jana and Uncle Welshman were pointing at me as they talked. I waited, staring out at the coy mermaid koi in their dark pool. Ian drew a picture of Uncle Welshman in his three-piece pinstriped suit with the pink tie next to another woman. A woman so long and slim she might shatter. It was Birch — wavy like a tree. Birch who worked with him. She was an oil broker. I imagined her hands covered in oil, trying to get enough together to break.
So Jana had riding instructor Eric and Uncle Welshman had Birch, her real name was Eva, Ian had parents, even if they were lush adulterers, but who had me?
The year before, after my mother died of a dark spot in her breast, my father sat in his leather armchair for three days, and no one fed me. Jana came and brought me home with her on a plane. As far as I knew my father was still sitting in that chair staring into the middle distance.
Jana had taken a look at me and concluded that something called hippotherapy was the thing. Hippotherapy was supposed to help challenged children integrate into society by teaching them how to ride and care for horses. The plan backfired when I turned out to be terrified of hippos. I didn't want to get near one — let alone on one. This was the beginning of my career as disappointment-to-Jana.
She pushed back her chair. Her water glass splashed into my lap and rolled onto the pale carpet. She stood there with her hands firmly pressed to the front of her like a breastplate and took a long look at the three of us. Then she walked out of the restaurant.
Uncle Welshman left a hundred-pound note on the table and herded us in front of him. I'd grabbed the tomato, still next to my plate, and held it close to my chest, hoping no one would notice and tell me to put it back. On the way out the woman with the crystal blue eyes touched his sleeve. Ian and I stood next to the waterfall, little pricks of freezing water tingling our bare arms. While they spoke, she silently eyed the tomato. When I glanced at her she smiled. Uncle Welshman gave her a kiss on the cheek and we went out into the sharp afternoon sun.
The war goddess was standing by the car with a half-inhaled Dunhill. As soon as she saw us she got in and turned the key. Back — both of you, she said. There was barely enough time to slip into the backseat before she ejected the car onto the street. Uncle Welshman stood on the curb, watching us tear away. I waved the tomato to him.
On the A3 going south out of London, against the violent orange of the afternoon sky, my hand began to throb. It lay next to me on the seat. I tried placing the tomato on it for its cooling properties, but it had absorbed the heat of the car. Not sure whether its tightness was something to worry about, I was considering how to broach the subject when Ian did something he'd never done before. He reached out and touched it.
Jana scowled at us in the rear-view mirror but all she saw were two silent children, behaving.
*
We got back to number 23 at dusk. Jana slammed the car door and stomped down to the stables at the end of the street. Ian and I remained where we were. Here, I thought, quite clearly even though most of my thoughts were murky. H for the constricted space of now, E for being forced to stay, R for relaxing into it, other E moving to the next thing. And that's when it happened for the first time. The quivering, like the ripple fish make in water, awoke inside me.
My hand, the one I dared not move in case he touched it again, was making a wet imprint on the seat. The chill of sweat against leather ran up my arm. I shivered. I stared at my refugee hand until it seemed no part of me. After an eternity of six or seven minutes Ian got out of the car. I watched him through the rear-view mirror as he opened the front door and disappeared inside.
Simkin, the gray tabby, was in the curtain-less window of the front room. New curtains had been delivered the week before but Jana had taken one look at them and demanded they be redone. I knew Ian had reached the stairs because Simkin jumped down from the sill to follow him up. Simkin was unconvinced he was Jana's cat.
I sat in the back seat, unsure what to do. It seemed best to stay and wait for something to happen. No one had fed us since the morning. Usually we were yelled at if we went into the kitchen, but perhaps an exception could be made tonight. Should I wait until Jana returned? It would be night by then, quite late. I knew how long these things take. The car was freezing in the dusk but I was still sweating. A thin layer of clammy damp frosted over my skin. The cotton T-shirt Jana bought me at a flea market on High Street felt invisible.
I told myself I'd wait until the pink tinge in the sky turned black. It happened quickly. Like being on the diving board and knowing the jump is inevitable, I watched the air go dark and then I got out of the car. On the front walk, I wondered if Ian could see me from his bedroom window, but I didn't look up.
The blonde girl had not returned. The house was vibration-less. I stood there in the hall, surrounded by the woolen squares and the waiting paint cans lined up at attention.
Simkin was at the top of the stairs. Cat. The C, the round cat body, the A the smaller round head, and the T, feet and tails. We made eye contact and he rubbed his soft body against the banister. If Ian were in his room Simkin would be with him, which meant that he must be out in the hall. I held onto the banister and slowly made my way up the stairs. Steps. S for the slide of the foot, T for the next step up, E for one stair after another, and P the floor at the top. As soon as my foot hit the top step I saw Simkin's tail coil into Ian's room and the door shut. My heart pushed against the bones containing it.
I went into my room with the sheepskin rug and leather furniture and sat on the edge of the steel framed bed. A brisk evening breeze coming through the open window seeped into my T-shirt and goose bumps rose from the small of my back to my neck. My bedroom door, exactly opposite his, was open. I lay back with my legs dangling over the edge of the bed and arched my neck so I could look out the window behind me. My hand felt thunderingly angry. I imagined flying out the window, naked and cool against the sky.
At some point, I smelled cigarette smoke. Worried Jana had come home without my feeling it, I sat up. It was Ian, however, standing in the doorway smoking like he'd been doing it for 20 years. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked at his face. It was too dark to see his eyes. He held out his hand.
We went into the main bathroom — the only finished room in the house. The bathtub, sink, and toilet were yellow, with thick mauve carpet and wheaten grass wallpaper halfway up the wall and then mirror to the ceiling. Everywhere we looked we saw ourselves, sickly purple in the grayish tinge of the light reflected off the carpet and walls. With the cigarette between his lips, he turned on the water and began to fill the huge bathtub. He sat down on the edge and brought my red, puffy hand to the surface of the water. I watched our hands floating together on the surface. The bubbles collected over our skins, congressed, and disappeared. Water filled the tub, spraying our faces as it got higher. The stillness of our hands floating together made me feel like I needed to run around the yard until I was out of breath. I scooped up some water and threw it at him. He said something and splashed back at me. Then we climbed into the tub in our sneakers, hurling water in waves up the wall and onto the mirrors until the room was dark and dripping. We were wading up to our knees, laughing with uncovered mouths. He was pushing me under the water when he suddenly stopped, leaned over and pushed off the spigot. He jumped out of the tub, pulled me out, and pushed me towards the linen closet. I got in and pretzeled myself onto a shelf of towels.
After a few minutes of the vibration of someone stomping on the carpet and then a firmer feeling of the door being slammed shut, I peeked out. He was looking at the closet door from the bathtub. He'd obviously been obliged to strip and get in under Jana's eye. What she thought of the water drenched walls and carpet I could not imagine.
As I was stepping out of the closet I caught the reflection of my nipples, pale but clear, through my T-shirt. I knew from looking at myself alone that the pale freckles faded into white around them. I squatted quickly, pressing my knees into my chest, and dug around in his pile of hastily removed clothes for his sweatshirt. I pulled it over my head and left.
Jana was standing in my room with her hands on her hips. It was near midnight so the room was almost black. She couldn't see that I was dripping wet. She laid eyes on me and pointed at the bed. It takes a lot of energy to cross-examine someone who can't hear and Jana wouldn't be bothered. She left and went downstairs to talk on the phone in the front room, smoking cigarettes until they piled up like a crumbling Mount Everest next to her on the floor.
For the first time I could remember, I went to bed naked. I tugged off the wet clothes, slipped in under the cotton sheets, and felt like an adult who lived in a better world. Although it was cold and damp I kept the window open so I could look at the sky, imagining it coming into the room and enveloping me. Sky. S for its neverendingness, K for connecting the earth to it, and Y for standing with arms lifted to embrace it.
I must've fallen asleep because sometime later I woke up with a burning feeling on my chest. It took me a moment to realize someone's arm was around me. I rolled over, my eyes straining to form the shape and shadows of his sleeping face. As bands of light slowly grew in the room he became more distinct. After the light turned from blue to yellow he opened his eyes and looked into mine. Later, he tiptoed back across the hall to his own room.
*
That morning I ate my Weetabix with a ripe bruise on my hand, risen in the night. The blonde girl was back. She'd come home in the night and smashed all the bottles of scotch and gin into the kitchen sink. Jana hadn't been mad, she'd laughed. Then she and the blonde girl smoked a pack of Dunhills in the back yard, gesturing like mad monkeys. The evaporating alcohol in the air burned my eyes and throat. Ian sat across from me at the kitchen table sketching the broken glass.
In the afternoon we went for a walk and found a hidden pool of water with a resident frog. The summer heat had broken in the night and there was a cozy chill to the air, the first sign that another season was coming. It started to rain so we came home. I took a hot bath and we had tea on the back terrace in the drizzle. Jana was in a good mood so we had brandy in our tea. Later, I fell asleep by the electric fire in the front room. I awoke around midnight to a feeling of Ian's soft fingers on my face.
We went upstairs to my room. Uncle Welshman hadn't come home since yesterday and Jana and the blonde girl had gone out with Eric hours ago. We were supposed to be asleep and therefore not in need of a keeper. He undid the tie on my robe and pulled my T-shirt over my head. I helped him out of his T-shirt and he stood close, naked and skinny in his pajama bottoms. I reached out and touched his chest, the bones moving with his lungs. He touched the place where my cheekbones became the blue under my eyes. We stood in the night chill and felt the shadows and the raised places of each other's bodies. My teeth were shaking as I led him to the bed. We pulled the scratchy blanket effortlessly over what no one saw but us.
In the gray morning he went back across the hall. Every night he stood in the doorway to my room until we could neither of us delay it a moment longer and he came in. His mouth left momentary impressions on my skin, like footprints in grass. His penis pushed against my thighs, never sliding into the space of my body. We sat more quietly during the day. Jana commented on how little trouble we gave her.
In those weeks nothing fell or broke when I was around.
Lazily, autumn started to arrive. The first day we wore jackets in the garden Jana sought us out and pointed at me. Ian listened. He face took on the smile he held when something wasn't good. My heart raced, my mind quickly trying to form a plausible explanation for how deaf children don't know any better and I'd corrupted him. It was my fault. How would I convey this? She picked up the pad and shoved it at him insistently. Ian turned his smiled on me. I was worried I might throw up. He wrote Basingstone and pushed the pad across the bench towards me. I looked at the letters. They meant nothing. He'd never just written a word before without context. Jana was staring at me. She pointed emphatically at the word.
Over the next hour, it became clear that Jana would be driving me to this Basingstone in a few days. A school for the deaf resided there. I was momentarily relieved that it wasn't about the other thing, until I realized what Basingstone was about. Birch had recommended it, her sister couldn't hear, and since it was expensive, Jana decided it was good. Ian drew endless pictures of prison cells with peaked faces staring from behind barred windows.
The morning I was to leave he didn't come out to say goodbye. The few days we had left to us had been spent in suspended daytime quiet, waiting for the moment Jana and the blonde girl left for the evening. Then we crept up and slid over each other with even more intensity. Ian would grab me, his lips moving. When I asked him to show me what he was saying he just kissed me and dragged the blanket over our heads.
Uncle Welshman sent me a cashmere sweater. I put it on for the journey. Only the blonde girl stood on the walk and waved cheerfully when we drove away. When I waved back I noticed that the bruise was entirely gone, not even a yellow tinge remained. As I climbed into the back of the Aston Martin, I stepped on the molding, dried tomato. I must've left it in the car the night we came back from London.
II.
P is for pois, pad, paper. When I arrived at the former convent, built a very long time ago, at the time of the tapestry in France, as Ian had told me, I waited for paper so I could begin to explain myself. None was forthcoming. I imagined being able to show the school all that I now knew. A pois was the same as a pea, not to be confused with pee, both of which sounded like the letter. A homonym. I didn't even need to think about it. I knew so much.
I is for invisible, illegal, impotence. The impotence Basingstone seethed with. Its walls contained an exhausting insistence that its inmates conform. In time, with a will like wire cables, I learned to read more than one word at a time. I learned that an E was always an E, it wasn't dependent upon the meaning of the word, and the word was not dependent upon the personality of any particular E, particular to any word in which it resided. It was only there to hold a place for a foreign meaning I had to memorize.
L is for language, lost, London. The wordless instructors painstakingly forced sign language into me. I was already 12, well beyond the age when it was effortless to learn it. My foolish, genteel mother had always felt I shouldn't become a part of this gesturing underworld. She had gone to inspect institutions where they taught children like me and always left resisting the idea that her daughter could be that: freakish, grunting, unable to communicate with any but their own. She decided it would be best for me to learn to be like the hearing, not crudely flailing my hands around and grimacing to convey myself. What she did not, could not understand was that this was really my only choice of language. The myth of lip reading or being able to just read whatever I needed to know held her imagination even as experts assured her it was merely a fancy of the hearing.
I learned the flailing at Basingstone but it was a closed world to me. It was like those children who are shut away from all language before they're five or six. The rest of their lives they play catch up. My mother's pristine fantasy ensured my alienation from the deaf world, as surely as I could never be a part of the hearing.
Jana did not come … and so neither did Ian. Uncle Welshman sent me occasional gifts, which ceased after he sent a letter describing how he and Birch had to move to Norway nearer the offshore drilling sites.
During free periods and after tea I would swing on a trapeze in the gymnasium. I could spell trapeze and gymnasium and swing without images now. I taught myself to jump on the upswing and land on the mat. Eventually, I started holding on with my arms, then one, then my ankles, then one. Somewhere there was always the little thought that I might fall and die and then they would surely have to come.
My waiting grew into flying. I set about forgetting Ian, and Jana and Uncle Welshman. After all, I hadn't been with them very long. One year. There was no reason to believe I was important to them. No reason to think they should remember me. Reason, spelled r, e, a, s, o, n. To think and make clear. On the test I wrote the definition as to justify but got a red check.
It took years, but in the end I had become an expert flyer. I could read, I could write, and I was more comfortable in the air than on the ground.
III.
Last year the Chunnel was finished and people started taking the train under the sea. We, Cirque d'Adamantine, have been in Calais five months. England so close. After a week of ignoring the idea when it came to me, I decided to visit for the first time in 12 years. The day after the school ceremony no one attended, I'd left, thinking never to return.
Two weeks before the date I'd fixed on, I sent him a brief note saying I could be there on the third of November at five o'clock. He'd replied simply, fine. I've always felt the letter F was one of the more delicate and lovely in the alphabet so it is a fitting beginning to that word.
On Cirque d'Adamantine's dark day, without giving Marley, the circus manager, an explanation, I took the Eurostar from Frethun to Waterloo. He was in London doing his last year of a journalism program. I knew this because every year I sent Jana a Christmas card telling her where I was and within days I'd receive a card back, large and embossed with gold, telling me what she was doing, skiing or riding, and what he was doing, going to school, not working for his father. Her news never read as I remembered her. She seemed chatty, friendly almost. Her cards all said, "Ian was fond of you, he'd like to hear from you."
When I arrived at the stone house that matched the address on Jana's most recent card, I gave the man who answered the door my name on a piece of paper. In these situations I always take care to prepare a note to save myself the tedium of a pantomime. He looked at me and then went up the stairs in the front hall. After a time he returned and motioned me to follow him. His behavior had changed. Obviously Ian had told him so he was being clear with his gestures like everyone does when they figure it out. They invariably go from being normal to acting like clowns.
I followed him up the stairs. At the end of the corridor he knocked on a door and opened it with a grand flourish. I would've rolled my eyes at him as I passed except my heart was beating too fast for me to do much of anything. Before this moment, I hadn't really considered what my body might do. My palms and feet were sweating. I felt hot and light-headed. I opted to examine the beige carpet.
Someone moved towards me. I stared at the feet of a man. A man I did not know. I moved my gaze up and saw those familiar eyes, the hazel eyes I see in the mirror. He hadn't shaved in a few days and smelled strongly of whisky. He'd become colorless. He touched my arm awkwardly, guiding me to the bay windows overlooking the front of the house. The trees were stark and unfriendly against the sky. Lights came on in the dusk. He pointed to a few things and spoke. Although I could lip read as well as anybody can, which isn't very, I didn't bother. It was enough to stand next to him looking out a window.
Near the windows were two dingy armchairs, facing each other. We sat with our knees a meter apart. The light from the window illuminated his head in profile so that I could see the glistening under his eyes. I hadn't noticed in the shadowed light when he faced me that he was crying. Automatically, I slid off the chair onto my knees and put my head in his lap. He felt my hair, vaguely, as if I was hardly there. We fell into a trapped suspension. I didn't move, my legs cramping on the filthy carpet, until it was completely dark in the room. I shifted and suddenly he jumped up, digging through piles of paper. He found what he was looking for and showed it to me, grinning. It was a yellow, tattered pad of paper. I examined it for some time before I realized it was the same pad of paper.
He scrabbled around on the floor for a pen and wrote can you read? Annoyed, I took the pen from him and wrote yes. He grabbed it back and wrote what do you do? I had never told Jana why I moved around so much so there was no reason to think he might know. Wondering what he would think, I put down the words trapeze artist. He looked at it for a moment and then laughed. He had the same queer face as the day he'd written down the word divorce. Then he wrote are you with anyone? No, I said aloud, risking letting him hear my voice. He looked at me sharply and smiled, nodding. Then he said, We never... . I watched for the verb but he didn't supply one. There was no way to respond so I sat there.
He placed his hands over my knees, leaned close to me and put his mouth on mine. His breath smelled of cigarettes, the same as it had then, only older. His hand smoothed down my back to my waist and raised the red cashmere sweater I'd sheepishly gone into Calais to buy for this meeting. It didn't really suit me. I helped him pull it over my head. He placed his cold forehead on my chest and rolled it back and forth. His lips brushed my breasts. The waves I now only had on the trapeze rippled. I wondered if they made a noise.
Then I wondered if you could hear a racing heart. Did it make a noise like a cat does? What was that called? A purr. P like a sound rising to the head, U a secret kitty smile, and the two Rs like the gentle waves of sound coming out. He took my hand and placed it on his chest. It was moving rapidly. I looked up, expecting to see his eyes, but they were clamped shut, as if he was in pain. I opened my mouth to venture the word purr but his face pinched even harder so I decided against it. There was no asking him about hearts purring. Our language was gone. There was only silence between us, just like with everyone else.
I pulled my hand away from his chest and shook my head. He got up and poured me a glass of whiskey. I accepted it but didn't drink. I've never liked the taste of alcohol. I felt small and somehow more like him than I ever had before, sitting shirtless on the floor, holding the whiskey. He sat down heavily next to me. We leaned against the chairs, not looking at each other, for a long time.
Later, he dragged the pad over and drew a beautiful circus tent. I nodded. Can I come, he asked aloud. I nodded. I looked around for a clock and when one wasn't visible I said, time? He stared at my mouth and then slowly showed me the expensive watch on his boney wrist. It was 11:15. I'd missed the last train back to Calais. He made a driving motion but I shook my head, thinking of Marley waiting for me, worrying. It would be better to stay here tonight and face that tomorrow.
The wreck of a bed was made with help from the man who'd answered the door. Sheets were found, blankets straightened. I wanted to tell them how unnecessary it all was, that I was comfortable being uncomfortable, but I was too exhausted. I just sat on the floor and watched, wondering what the man thought of all this. When the production was finished I took off the red sweater I'd messily pulled back on before he came in and tossed it on the floor. I peeled off my trousers, leaving them to wrinkle in a heap. Pulling the covers up, I wondered if he would sleep with me in the bed. How nice it would be to be 12 again, I thought and fell out of consciousness.
Hours later I woke up suddenly. He was sitting in one of the chairs, silhouetted by the streetlamp. Like a priest, he carefully inserted a needle between the first two fingers of his left hand. The light from outside glinted off the plastic. I sat up on my elbows and watched him. After a time he felt me observing the ritual and he shifted. I couldn't see his face but I stared at the black shadow of him. He put the needle in an ashtray on the floor and came over to the bed. He sat down beside me, touching my face, my lips, my throat. I fell asleep again and when I woke it was full daylight. He was slumped over next to me on the bed, his feet still on the floor.
On the return train I felt dried and itchy. We had stood in the early morning looking at each other outside the station. I couldn't see him, his features were hazy. My eyes hurt. Never knew you came into my head. My insides shifted a bit, as if they had been kicked.
*
Marley, in his turtleneck and overcoat, slept on my bed. He often slept fully clothed. We made love with all our clothes on for a year before I saw the poem of tattoos: an airplane, veins, a kneeling geisha with one breast, like an Amazon. He would've had to wear gloves to cover the a, d, a, m, a, and then n, t, i, n, e on his knuckles.
Usually when he stayed he left at dawn to finish his dreams in his own caravan. I examined his Gaulish face in the sunlight. We used to explore each new place together until I couldn't bear the moment in a market or a park when he'd reach out to touch my hand. Pulling it away hurt him. I often wonder how much you can reject a person before they go away.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around the caravan. It seemed different, as if I'd been gone a long time. On the wall, I'd hung a white dress with a blue ribbon round the waist on a tiny wooden hanger. I bought it at a flea market in Alsace-Lorraine. It looked like one I'd had as a little girl. The tulle of the skirt is tattered just like Degas' dancers.
Marley woke up and pulled a little notebook out of his pocket. He quickly wrote Ou etiez vous? London, I wrote. Avec qui? My family. Je suis ta famille. Non, Marley, j'ai une famille.
All we could do was write these words on a page.
He shifted his dense body off the bed and out the aluminum door. I watched him walk across the yard, stepping over a mud puddle. Henri, the elephant man, stopped him on the way, probably to discuss the tent leak from a few nights ago. Marley glanced back at my window. I turned away and began to undress, excavating myself. I had the sensation I have when I'm excited, that I'm in the air, floating.
IV.
I get into my tights and wings at 7:30, same as every other night.
I sit on my small dressing room bed and wait, looking at the wrapped, callused hands in my lap. A half-hour passes. I wait. At 8:45 Marley peeks his head in, same as every other night. I'm the only one he escorts to their entrance. Everyone else is just told when the show starts and expected to get there at the right moment. I step into the darkness next to him. My eyes adjust as I follow him to the heavy black curtain and wait for his sign. He listens for the ringmaster's announcement. When he hears it, he nods at me to make sure I'm ready, I nod in return, then he pulls the material aside and I enter the darkness behind the ring.
A bright swooping light cues me to run out into it, flooding my white and gold costume with pink. I keep up with the light's journey around the ring. My escort and I then stop, dead center. It fades to a deep red and the trapeze is lowered. I step onto it. As soon as my second foot leaves the ground it flies upwards. When it tenses in the air I begin to swing. In those brief moments it takes the swing to respond to the coaxing of my legs I breathe in the smells. Rosin, sweat, dusty ropes, elephant shit. Every night I catch the sweetness of someone's perfume in the higher seats. Dark smells that get into the corners of the brain and cannot be washed out.
As I swing up this time I close my eyes and imagine what it would be like to be blind. Blind and deaf, because I cannot, no matter how hard I try, imagine what it would be like to hear. Hear and here sound the same. Ian. Onomatopoetic, the octopus. All words sound like what they mean. Ian. Like the word trapeze. The T looks like a swing and the R, A, P, E, Z, E are the motions my body makes through the air. Everything is what it looks like on the page, but there isn't a word for that. Words are for the hearing.
From my perch I watch people hearing, see them react as I swoop down over their heads like a phoenix. I watch the muscles in their faces tense and their mouths open to make the sound oooo, the o's of round emotion escaping their bodies, hoping I will fall … and not fall. The ringmaster introduces me as "the deaf firebird of the heavens." I know when he's said it because their faces look up at me in unison. There's an extra pique to their curiosity — as if I am doubly fragile in my silence. But even a blind person can use a trapeze once they're used to the inertia and how their body should be in space. No different than making love in the dark.
I close my eyes again on the down swing and the quivering warmth ripples through my torso. There was a first time I had this feeling. Tonight the memory of it collides with my body in the air.
*
After the show Ian stumbles to my dressing room and lies on my bed, talking while I take off my tights. I try to watch his lips in the hopes of catching something, but since he has failed to provide any context, and I am too tired to ask for one, I just stare at the distended, throbbing veins in his forehead. He gestures me towards him. I move to the bed. His mouth rests delicately between my legs, breathing deeply. After a while he puts his arms around my hips. I push him away and he slumps back onto the bed, staring at the ceiling. I burn from the alcohol coming off him. His face looks old, unwell. His eyes close and I feel him slowing down into sleep. After a moment I decide to leave him and go to my caravan. Marley says nothing about the drunken man in my room. He sleeps sitting up in a chair.
In the morning Ian is gone. He has left a drawing of a woman with red wings and the words Anyway, I've always thought of you.
I sit at the mirror and place the piece of paper on the dressing table. I look at the words, how the letters are shaped. The ink has sunk into the paper unevenly. I stare so long the letters no longer form words. They're just strokes on a page. Strokes made by a hand with which I am achingly familiar. I pick up a brush and scrape it through my hair. It grazes my ear. I turn my head and examine its reflection. There it is, growing out of the side of my head like everyone else's. I should have it removed, like any useless organ. But I guess that would be like having my breasts cut off because I'm childless.
Wanting should be a sense. I wanted Ian because for a very brief time I could taste, touch, smell, see him. I will never know what his voice sounded like. Perhaps it doesn't matter.
Fly. F for climbing up to the sky, L for stepping out into space, and Y for the soaring when I let go.
