Dead Languages (16 page)

Once track practice was over, we’d run together around the playground until the last school bus came to take her home. The Bayshore track consisted of nothing more than a painted white circle describing the width of the asphalt field. We’d run round and round the circle, holding hands, me in baggy gray sweats and
de rigueur
Adidas, and Audrey in absurdly brief briefs, white tennis shoes with pink laces, a San Francisco Giants baseball cap, and sunglasses (“shades, man, to obstruct reality”). There’s a particular feeling, when you are young and sweaty and exhausted, that gathers around dusk and macadam and has much to do with a delusion of immortality—with the pervasive sense that the world is dying but you are indestructible. There’s no feeling the physical world produces which is quite so fine, but you’re only supposed to get it when you’re alone and, even then, only once or twice a year. I was getting the feeling every day: every afternoon, at dusk, on the paved track with Audrey.

She didn’t say anything about cement or everlasting life, and at the time I wasn’t one to ruin paradise by conversing about it. “Running like this, with you, sweet Jeremy, it almost makes me want to quit smoking,” Audrey said. The pavement was starting to give her shin splints, though. One Saturday morning she called and said we were going running in Muir Woods. Muir Woods was like the High Sierras in that just its name sent shivers down my spine: it was formally framed and therefore, to me, beautiful. We took a bus across the bay, then hitchhiked through the mountains to the forest. While other people were taking guided tours of the trees, looking at labels in Latin, feeding chocolate bars to chipmunks, counting year-rings and exclaiming, Audrey and I ran deeper and deeper, higher and higher into the woods, back where the trail narrowed, vegetation rioted, and big trees were kings.

Audrey had brought a backpack of snacks. When we’d run far enough that we could no longer hear the troops below, we stopped and she spread a table cloth across a patch of pebbles and crab-grass, offering apples, processed cheese, Ritz crackers, and a bottle of Ripple. The entire gesture—the white tablecloth, the prepared lunch, the Saturday morning excursion to a local landmark—was so uncharacteristically and hopefully domestic of her that I passed into a state of such profound happiness nothing could perturb me. I lay back, looking at timber, tiny bugs, and bluebirds, with cheese and crackers in my mouth and Audrey’s head in my lap.

That head, into which so few thoughts usually entered, was, in such an idyllic setting, receiving more data than it knew what to do with, and Audrey finally blurted out: “Damn! Sometimes, you know, I wish I had parents. Some people seem like they have parents. Other people seem like they don’t. You do.”

“Do what?” I said. I was studying a tree twig and didn’t want to talk.

“You heard me. Have parents. You seem like you have parents.”

“Yes,” I said. “I have parents.”

“Don’t play dumb, Jeremy. I’m talking seriously for once. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t grown up—if that’s what you want to call it—in an orphanage. Sometimes I get tired of filling out forms and telling people I live with my aunt. Sometimes I wish I had a home to, you know, go home to.”

I couldn’t believe anyone was so innocent she actually believed that houses were great hearths of banked fires, that families were healthy groups offering comfort and reassurance. I pulled her hair back, kissed her somewhat awkwardly on the nape of the neck, and said, “You can always come home to me.”

It was a sentimental thing to say. It was meant as nothing more than metaphorical consolation. But maybe she never had anyone tell her that before. Tears came to her eyes and she fairly attacked me with kisses. She kept saying she loved me and banging my head against the ground. I couldn’t tell whether she was hysterical or just very happy. I thought it best, in either case, to let her do what she wanted to do and not interfere. She seemed to have been through all the motions before, while I had no idea exactly what my responsibilities were. She licked my ears, unbuttoned my shirt, tugged at my trousers, and I just lay there. I wasn’t only afraid of serious arousal. I was incapable of it. I don’t know about other boys at twelve-and-a-half, but I was still prepubescent. I was perfectly content to run and clasp hands and kiss on the lips.

Audrey, bored, rolled off me, took solace in a Ritz cracker, and said, “What’s the problem?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why did you stop?”

“Stop?”

“Don’t you want to go all the way, man?”

“No,” I said. “No, Audrey, not here, not yet. Maybe soon. Indoors, somewhere, at night, in a week or two. Do you mind?”

She waited three long weeks for me to grow up, during which time I consulted numerous anatomy texts and even visited an East Bay medicine man who, in a
Berkeley Barb
classified advertisement, promised Organ Increase. At the end of three weeks was the eighth-grade graduation dance. It was tradition for couples who had yet to sacramentalize their unity to do so on mattresses along the side of a hill that overlooked the gymnasium. Audrey wasn’t waiting any longer.

She came dressed in a black evening gown she’d borrowed from Elaine; stockings, which I’d never seen her wear before; and high heels, in which she was slightly taller than I was. With my hair combed across my forehead and my shirttail flapping, I must have looked like her younger brother or eldest son. Everyone, absolutely everyone including my basketball coach, invited Audrey to dance, but that night she had eyes only for me and said no to every last one of them. We danced every dance—the fast ones, at which she said I looked like a skittering jackrabbit, as well as the slow ones, during which I smelled the miscegenation of the sweat on her back with the perfume behind her ears. Whenever the jukebox broke down, I’d buy plastic cups of orangeade and we’d go kiss in dark corners.

As the dance progressed, there were fewer and fewer people in the gym and almost no couples. Audrey’s hints that we ought to take a walk in the dark or get a breath of fresh air became increasingly persistent and obvious. I finally agreed to leave. Walking along the base of that hill was like coming into a war zone: hearing bodies collide, great screams of pain and expectation. It terrified me. When Audrey took my hand and suggested we—as it was called—climb the mountain, I panicked and ran. At night it always seems like you’re running faster than you ever have in the daytime, and I felt like I was flying. I ran all the way home. I didn’t look back once.

I dreamed about international hand-to-hand combat and the next morning got what was coming to me—a letter from Audrey, delivered by Elaine with knowing condescension.

Yes, maybe we could still be friends. Maybe we could do some running together this summer. Maybe the Golden Gate Bridge would collapse. It was eleven o’clock (“oc’lock”: I loved that) on a Saturday morning in May. I sat in a chair in the living room and read the letter six or seven more times, to savor all the misspellings but also to make sure I hadn’t misinterpreted its overall message, then staggered down the stairs to my bedroom, where I drew the curtains, killed the lights, took out a black-and-white photograph of Audrey, crawled under the covers, and made my first prolonged attempt at self-abuse. It took nearly forever. Twenty minutes later I was still squirming on the sheets, holding the snapshot in one hand and my barely increased organ in the other, shaking the latter like a pen that wouldn’t work. I created blood blisters around the rim, producing fluid that was neither as yellow as urine nor as white as semen, and I finally quit when I’d reached not so much orgasm as utter anguish.

“Here’s the church that will wake me up Sunday morning at eight,” Audrey wrote in her minute script on a postcard she sent last summer from Port Townsend, Washington,

In seven years she’d moved seven hundred miles north and learned how to spell “o’clock.”

Nothing ever changes for anybody.

The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.

MOTHER WAS HAPPY
my junior high school education had come to an inglorious end. She thought my two years at Bayshore had been a disaster: playing basketball with drug addicts, going steady with an orphan girl. Mother was quite disappointed in the public school system for which she was working and decided to give me another go at private education. Beth entered her first year at Stanford—she contemplated the first double major ever in set design and the English revolution—and the hope was that with four years of rigorous secondary school instruction I might still be permitted to migrate south to Palo Alto.

The joke one heard about the Jack London Memorial Preparatory Academy in the Arts and Sciences was that if the Chinese New Year and Jewish New Year were ever on the same day the school would shut down. Most of the students in the sciences division were Asian and punched the buttons on their calculators during recess. Most of the students in the arts division were Jewish and disliked the Asians for not being political enough. I drifted toward the arts division and Father thought that, surrounded by “my people,” I might stop mumbling. Guess again, Father. London was fanatical about sending its students to the best colleges in the country, which meant London was the only high school in the city that had an art gallery, an air-conditioned theater, or an aquarium of tropical fish, but which also meant, if you weren’t producing, they pounced on you. I wasn’t in school three weeks before Loud Blazer, instructor of Psychoanalysis and Literature, came up to me in the hallway and said, “You’re Jeremy Zorn, aren’t you, Beth’s brother?”

“Yes.”

“Has there been some trauma in your family recently?”

“No. Why?”

“Are you upset about the onslaught of adolescence?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you uncomfortable, coming from the poverty of Bayshore to the luxury of London?”

“Not really, no. Why are you asking me all these questions, sir?”

“Not one, not two, but three of your teachers, Mr. Zorn, have recommended that you receive speech therapy or, at the very least, undergo comprehensive diagnostic verbal examination. Mrs. Sherfey is one of the very best adolescent speech therapists in San Francisco. That is, she herself isn’t an adolescent—she must be in her early thirties by now—but she’s a top-notch expert at ridding adolescents of their speech problems. Why don’t you go see her? I wouldn’t mind spending an hour a week with her, myself. Heh-heh. She’s one of the prettiest little things to occupy a counselor’s office in years.”

I hadn’t seen a speech therapist since I fled Mrs. Fletcher eight years before and wasn’t all that eager to start up again with metronomes on the table and buttons on the tongue. I’d temporarily resigned myself to the fact of stuttering and was more interested in casting about for all-encompassing compensations than trying one more remedy, but Loud Blazer insisted I see her at least this once, to the point of dragging me into her office by the collar when I attempted to postpone the appointment. Heh-heh, indeed. She was a pretty little thing, though not especially my type: high cheekbones, long blond hair bound in a bonnet, glassy eyes, alabaster skin, silver earrings, much makeup, a lot of fall colors in her wardrobe. A little too cherubic to be truly inspiring. Most speech therapists must order their rooms from the same catalogue because, just like Mrs. Fletcher, she had a flag on the wall, a tape recorder and metronome on a Formica table, a desk for her, and a chair for me. The idea, I learned later, was to create a “verbal surround,” as if language might be disassociated from existence.

The only difference between Mrs. Fletcher’s room and Mrs. Sherfey’s room was that Mrs. Sherfey had tacked up a number of optimistic posters on the walls, and this made perfect sense, for not only were these extremely popular at London—thought to be high motivational forces—but Mrs. Sherfey was an insufferable optimist herself. There was a poster of a seagull in the sky, with a quotation from Langston Hughes to the effect that a dreamless life was a wingless bird; a gaudy color one of a peacock fanning Emily Dickinson’s observation,
‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers;
Beth’s poster of the Sierras, with the same inscription; an unillustrated one consisting of Camus’s request that humanity walk neither ahead of nor behind but, rather, beside him and be his friend; and a picture of a burning sun, underneath which was written,
Each day comes another dawn—E. K. Lorrenson,
whom I’d never heard of but whom I assumed had it on excellent testimony that tomorrow the sun, having no alternative, would rise with a handful of fire. Going into that room was less like reporting to a counselor’s office than entering an estuary. My first impulse was to shield my face from the meridian sun and descending seagull, but I simply shut the door and shook her hand.