Dead Languages (32 page)

Gretchen worked hard on
Westwords—
it’s the only thing I’ve ever seen her devote herself to with any discipline—and transformed one more college rag into a readable quarterly. The superiority of
Antony and Cleopatra
to undergraduate luv-poetry notwithstanding, she’d always have piles of manuscripts scattered over the bedspread like so many white islands in a blue-green sea. Some of the submissions were so bad they were fun to read, but for the most part I tried to avoid my duties as assistant editor and persuade Gretchen to perform the act that gave me the deepest pleasure: reading aloud my favorite passages from my favorite books. The epilogue to
The English Reformation,
Beth’s birthday present; the ending of
Call It Sleep,
Father’s bible; the “Eumolpus” fragment of
Satyricon;
the last ten pages of
The Unnameable,
supposedly understood by Gretchen; Pandarus’ speech concluding
Troilus and Cressida.
I lived for the endings of things, when life turned into coda.

Gretchen would always read with unfaltering fluency but without a millimeter of emotion. One night when she was going over galleys in bed, she was appalled at the number of mistakes the previous proofreader had missed. The second side of Jean-Pierre Rampal’s jazz album, which I’ve never much liked but to which Gretchen genuflected, was playing over and over again on the stereo in the living room. The only light in the apartment was the pale pool of the reading lamp.

“Gretchen,” I said, “are you awake?”

Though it was midnight, she was obviously awake. She was correcting proof sheets. I just wanted to get her attention. She didn’t answer. I shook her shoulders, wiggled her toes, and said, “Gretchen, honey, it’s true, isn’t it, that in the next issue you’re publishing a newly discovered letter of ‘Pep’ West’s that casts new—”

“Hnnn?” she said, completely preoccupied with her galley slaves, I mean galley sheets. She still hadn’t heard me. She was turned on her side, with a cigarette in one hand and a red pen like an arrow in the other.

I had to do it to get her to look at me. She had a spot of skin just above her right hip that was about as ticklish a four-by-four-inch area as I’ve ever tickled, and I let my fingers frolic until she wriggled, slapped my hand away, sat up and said, “What? What do you want?”

I wanted her to read aloud the only full paragraph on page
192
of “Time Passes.” Gretchen put away her proofs, dragged on her cigarette, capped her pen, pressed her glasses to her nose, increased the crease between pages
192
and
193
.

She read these words with an astonishing perfection of almost British enunciation and an equally amazing atonality, as if she were trying to underline the dichotomy that divided us: the control of which she was capable and the helplessness to which I was prone. She closed the book, turned out the light, and under the covers, in the madness of the post-midnight dark, intertwined my chest hairs, of which I have six, and said, “I like reading to you, sort of, but you should read to me sometimes, Jeremy. Do you really s-s-stutter that bad when you r-r-read aloud?”

“Fuck you. Yes, I stutter that bad when I read aloud.”

I would have died if I had stuttered on that sentence. The bedroom was a black mouth, the pillow was hot and sweaty, her sheets scratched. I wanted to go run in the March wind until I caught cold.

“You know that paragraph by heart, don’t you?”

“Which paragraph?” I said, stalling.

“The paragraph I just read.”

“I know how it goes.”

“Well, you’re here with me now. You’re happy, right? You’re sleepy, you’re relaxed. If you lie back and close your eyes and let me massage your mind while you recite your little paragraph, I bet you’ll be as articulate as I am.”

“Heaven forfend.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

I explained to her what Sandra had explained to me: tension’s travel from the stomach to the teeth. She rubbed my loins while I stared at the ceiling, feared the dark, and asked, “But what after all is one night?”

The answer—as Virgin, Sandra, Gretchen, Mother, and I knew—was not an easy one. “A short space,” though neither correct nor incorrect, seemed coy. “Night succeeds to night,” though inarguable, seemed evasive and obvious. The answer, as with all true answers, was in the words themselves. Just as the sounds seemed to stutter out successive nights (“cool cathedral caves,” “bones bleach and burn”), I stuttered out the sentences. It was the first time Gretchen had ever heard me mumble for more than a moment. It was worse than I’d feared. It was much worse than she’d anticipated. It was like the mimesis of an imitation of a parody of bad behavior.

I stuttered on every
S,
of which there were seven in the second sentence. I didn’t stutter on the
L
s or I might never have made it to morning. I faltered so long on
fingers
that Gretchen, with reluctance, had to say it for me. I never got in the vicinity of
sands,
and the sentence that concluded the paragraph wasn’t within my purview. I backed up all the way to “Some” to get a running start, which succeeded only in raising my pitch. I gulped, shook my head, tried to say
Indian. Ih-Ih-Ih-Ih. Ih-Ih-Ih-Ih.
By now our eyes had become adjusted to the darkness. She could see me wince, see me raise my right eyebrow with each attempt to implode my Adam’s apple; could see, swimming on my face, the gaudy mix of sweat and tears. Finally, from me, silence, then my tired tongue rolled back into my mouth. It seemed like about time for someone to do something. She covered my lips with hers.

GRETCHEN WOULDN’T
let me wallow in my woes and by the end of the week she’d planned, organized, and publicized:

This poster was tacked to every bulletin board in the department, taped to every elevator wall and glass door. It was in the window of every Westwood Village bookstore, every restaurant, every cute little clothes shop. It was in at least two places on every floor of every library. It was so prominent in the cafeteria it disrupted the color coordination of Ackerman Union.

I went to the
Westwords
office to congratulate Gretchen on the excellence of the idea as well as ubiquity of the blitz. She was seated at her desk, typing happily, when I walked in and asked: “Who are the three up-and-coming, soon-to-be-famous student writers?” I knew and I didn’t know.

She back-spaced, pulled out her little packet of Ko-Rec-Type, and said, “Jesse Ragent, Mimi Hammer, and….” She was concentrating upon positioning the white tab of opaquing film. The sun flashed off the floor; her typewriter twinkled. An advertisement for the upcoming issue was tacked to the front door, covers of back issues were spread across the walls, a submissions poster was taped to the ceiling, dozens of different editions filled bookshelves, all over were manuscripts, order forms, form rejections. She stood, hugged me, and whispered, “You.”

The office was on the third floor of the oldest building on campus. I stood near a window, looking out at the lucky, mechanical swimmers in the pool. The window was large and round and could be swung open from the inside. I had a deep, jittery urge to jump. I was certain I could get someone, anyone, to substitute for me, but Gretchen said she’d already mailed announcements to the
Bruin,
KCRW, the
Evening Outlook.

“You can’t violate an expectation that’s already been aroused,” she said. “As a writer, even a beginning one, you can appreciate that.”

The clear, round window looked inviting again. I tipped over a rickety table as I chased Gretchen around the room and asked her why she had done this to me. Arrested for streetwalking, she could have explained the high heels, the black hose, the hand-held purse in such a way that she would be given a citation for exemplary citizenship. I knew any attempt at inquiry was useless, but, still, I was curious what was going through that amazing mind of hers when she conjured up this fiasco. She said she’d never heard me babble that bad before and was so determined to erase my feelings of failure that she decided to orchestrate a triumphant night of eloquence. Gretchen was certain that once I was wearing a three-piece suit, speaking into a microphone, and looking out only at friends and admirers, my trembling difficulties would die a quick death. I had, of course, heard previous versions of this remedy: Mrs. Sherfey’s suggestion that I play Iago, Mother’s hope that I’d become fluent through the forensic society. This time, though, for reasons that remain a little fuzzy—deluded about the transformative properties of art? weary of my own despair? who knows?—I was weirdly sanguine about the solution. I avoided Gretchen’s kiss and trotted off to my afternoon class, which was, if I remember right, Moral Problems in Philosophy: Kant, who languished in limbo between noumenon and phenomenon, to Camus, who got all chilly inside when Maman dropped dead.

This was a moral problem, and I approached it very philosophically. With Camus in my pocket and Kant in my mind I realized I’d probably be able to read if I read under the influence, and I could get back at Gretchen if I wrote and read a story about her. I told Gretchen I was writing a story based on my grandfather—the pawn shop, the bowl of pennies, the ancient clock, the white whiskers, the glass of bourbon, the Sunday paper open to the obituaries—and needed the entire weekend to myself.

My ambition was to write about someone I hadn’t grown up with, to make someone else matter. It didn’t help a lot to receive a flurry of calls and letters all weekend from my family. Mother photocopied a publisher’s dismissal of her book about “civil liberties for young people.” The editor said that “if, instead of answering your own questions yourself, you developed a series of inquiries through which you led the student to arrive at the proper conclusions, you’d have a more marketable product. Unless you involve the students in each of the episodes, you run the risk of losing their interest; let them uncover for themselves the facts and principles that underlie each unit.” I felt like maybe he was onto something. Beth passed along a joke that passed right over my head:

Father sent me a two-sentence, homemade postcard that said: “If a shirt comes to you from Macy’s it’s from me, Dad. The shirt is from Dad.” On the front was a photograph he’d taken of the Transamerica Building, never a good omen with Father. Then Beth called and got caught on her favorite complaint: “Sometimes I wish people didn’t have to look at me at all. I don’t know who I feel more sorry for—them or me.” I wrote twelve hours a day; slept six; ate two; read three; masturbated, in anger at Gretchen, one. She, and everybody else, and even I at first, thought the story was about her, but it wasn’t. Not really. All I’ve ever fixed on is my nonfictional family in its perfect righteousness.

Gretchen thought I’d written about my grandfather’s drinking habits and untimely (at ninety-six, he was guiding one of his best customers through the back room of his junk shop when his heart suddenly hurt) death. She invited Charles to come to the reading, and Sandra, and a number of classmates whose language I’d declined when I was helping Gretchen with
Westwords.
All these people were sitting in the most comfortable chairs of the Crystal Room in Sproul Hall when I entered, drunk as a skunk. I’d been drinking pure gin in a plastic cup since mid-morning and it was now four. I grabbed the arms of couches; I didn’t recognize Gretchen or Sandra (Beth couldn’t come, though Charles was a surprise witness); I took a thin blue pattern in the rug for a river and leapt away from it; I thought the top of my head was going to twirl off; I had the pleasant sensation of a gauzy veil separating me from everyone else as I made my way to a seat up front. The Crystal Room had that gorgeous, riverlike rug wall-to-wall, velvet-covered chairs, foot rests for important people, unfathomably deep cushions, color portraits of past presidents, and one immense crystal chandelier that refracted everything.

While Gretchen stood at the podium, giving some sort of benediction, I kept seeing the crystals convert into snow, ice, falling glass. The room had a maximum capacity of seventy-five, but there must have been a hundred and fifty people there, standing, sitting on the floor, leaning against lamps, listening to Gretchen, who was urging everyone to subscribe to or join
Westwords
and emphasizing beyond common decency the coincidence that all three up-and-coming, soon-to-be-famous student writers had published first in her magazine. She got a big hand at the end of her subscription drive, then sat down. I haven’t the faintest idea whether the first act of Jesse Ragent’s screenplay was any good because I wasn’t listening, and I can remember only the two totally explicit tableaux in what Mimi Hammer called a “cruel pastiche of shy pornography.”

When Mimi was finished most of her friends left, but everyone else stayed and watched me take my manuscript out of my coat pocket, watched me clip the recording microphone to my tie, watched me grip the podium with both hands. The room twirled. The chandelier kept shattering. People’s faces lost integrity.