Dead Languages (30 page)

THERE ARE DEFINITE
difficulties here: the swollen syntax; the compulsive subsets; the near-absence, and refusal to place quotation marks around what little there is, of dialogue; the repetition in the extreme to the point of echolalia; the abstraction of the monologue, its essayistic airiness, its woodenness. The nameless narrator’s attic prison, in addition to being a bohemian bromide, is a reflection of the way I’ve always felt, what I’ve always hated about my basement bedroom. Most of his obligatory pessimism is mine, too, I suppose. But why is he so much more impoverished than I am and why is Helen Keller so much closer to death than Mother was at the time? (Suddenly I know why: to win your pity.) I had no inkling Mother was mortal, I believed her when she said she’d be fine after a few months of chemotherapy. Written words work in an unfathomable way; I can’t explain it.

Gretchen Noyes could explain it. She said, “‘Notes on Suicide’ revivifies David Hume’s terrible apprehension that his body was literally made of words. The endless convolution going nowhere except deeper down into this fastidious fop’s incapacity to
see
the old woman dying in her blindness—that’s perfect, Jeremy, it really is. These pages are his notes; he kills himself, right? It’s an incredibly moving evocation of the very details of loneliness, an ode on the impossibility of love, a textbook example of purposeful withholding of narrative info, a compressed though not reductive remaking of—”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “It’s about my mother.”

I’d returned to Los Angeles shortly after writing the story and hadn’t shown it to my family, so Gretchen was the first person to read “Notes on Suicide.” She was twenty-four, a third-year graduate student in American literature, and the editor of the UCLA literary magazine. I’d never heard anyone who wasn’t lecturing talk quite like that. It was a very nice office, the long room in which
Westwords
was put together: lots of old lamps and comfortable chairs and a beautiful round window that overlooked Pauley Pavilion. Gretchen was sitting in the most comfortable chair, scrutinizing the window and tapping her pencil on the editor’s desk while she spoke to me.

“Well, yes,” she said, “perhaps the text does have a certain, inevitable autobiographical origin—the signal of apprentice fabulation—but the teller isn’t the tale, the dancer is distinct from the dance. I mean, you don’t reject the notion of negative capability, do you? This story isn’t a private exorcism, though, granted, it might be that, too, among other things. It’s private pain gone to public catharsis, don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.” Her hair shone in the late light like gold, pure gold. She had her little brown-socked feet up on the desk. This was the editor I’d always been looking for: one who praised, praised, praised, even if I couldn’t understand exactly what she meant.

“Obviously I want to publish it. Obviously. It’ll be the lead story in the winter issue. It’s the best undergraduate writing I’ve seen here or in Palo Alto.”

“When were you in Palo Alto?”

“Two years ago. I got my B.A. there.”

“Did you know my sister, Beth?”

“Jesus, you’re kidding. Miss historian? You have such a talented family.”

I blushed, changed my position in the chair, tapped my foot on the floor.

“You’re only a junior? We have to celebrate your future. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink at Someplace Else,” she said and, standing, took my arm.

Gretchen always talked like that: very arch, very stylized. Most of the amusement of being with her was wondering whether her formality would ever fade, whether just once she’d live inside an event and not worry about expressing its essence. After a year and a half of close inspection I can confidently report that she never has.

Someplace Else is a homosexual bar in West Hollywood. Gretchen seemed so at home there it occurred to me to ask: “You aren’t gay, Gretchen, are you?”

Either she didn’t hear me or chose to change the topic of conversation. Stirring her Scotch and soda, she answered, “No, I’ll be writing my thesis
next
semester. Nathanael West. This is research: I’m soaking up atmosphere.”

She was soaking up a lot of Scotch while entertaining skinny men wearing white shirts and blue hankies, telling her barfly friends about me—from what little I heard, how earnest I was—but I tried not to pay attention and listened, instead, to tinkling glasses, flushing toilets, spinning nickels, and a one-armed man playing remarkable jazz drum.

When her audience had wandered away, Gretchen patted my hand and said, “The only good bar in Palo Alto was the gay bar and I’m beginning to think the same thing’s true even in L.A.” I was worried again about the channel of her love life. “Only in gay bars is there that elusive
ambiance,
that unnameable
milieu
”—she pronounced both words with an exaggerated French accent—“which is both sexual and asexual, intimate and wonderfully detached. Only here is there the dimmest comprehension that personality is fluid, identity is constantly being forged, the self is not some dull static thing but baroque mask upon baroque mask.”

I’d never heard Someplace Else talked about in quite these terms, but I listened because I always listen to whatever Gretchen says. I love the way she has with words.

In the failing light of some fall evening in the
Westwords
office, she leaned over and gently licked the inside of my ear. I’ve always been fascinated by this phenomenon, as if there’s a direct line between our ears and our loins. It’s final evidence that whatever we listen to constitutes life itself.

“What?” I said.

“What do you mean ‘what?’” she said.

“You s-s-said you wanted to tell me s-s-something.”

She laughed, whispered ocean sounds into my ear, and said “G-g-got it?” Then, very softly, “What do you like? Tell me what you like.”

“Well, you.”

“What?”

“You,” I said. “I like
you
very much.”

“That’s sweet.”

“I mean, I like you more than very much. I—”

“Please don’t say that, Jeremy. Really. You don’t even know me.”

I once telephoned her at home and when she answered I tried to say, “Hi, Gretchen.” I could only say, “Hi, Grr…. Hi, Grrr … Grrr … Grrr … Grrr … Grrr….” like an ineffectual bear growling about a thorn in his foot. Gretchen kept saying, “Hello? Jeremy? Is that you? Is this Jeremy? Honey, talk to me.” Although I knew she knew it was me, I returned the receiver to its cradle.

Out of eagerness, out of anxiety, out of an excessive need to please, out of a considerably less strong but nevertheless quite real desire to be pleased, out of a sheer sense of relief, I think, just to be there, I tended to find fulfillment too fast the first time each night. The second embrace of the evening was usually fine and the third, if there was one, could be positively enjoyable, but I was distressed by the inevitable prematurity of the initial intercourse. These repeated attempts to communicate what could have been communicated more elegantly the first time—I’d been in this bind before. Once, after I’d finished too quickly for Gretchen to have much fun, she said, “So what are you going to do? See a sex counselor as well as a speech therapist? Don’t throw your money away. Don’t worry about it. That’s just your Ur-pattern: the second or third time around on everything you’re t-t-terrific.”

On her birthday, December eleventh, I treated her to a good restaurant, a bad play, and a hookers’ convention hotel in Hollywood. I took her hand and tried to get her to imitate wild, youthful abandon by racing across Sunset Boulevard, but she stayed put on the curb, watched me nearly get hit by, of all things, a boy on a bicycle, then walked two blocks south to a stoplight, where “for Chrissake, Jeremy, any sane person would cross.” I wanted to walk away from the sun, toward big buildings and the promise of Paramount Studios. After returning from her expedition to the stoplight, Gretchen started stocking up on every kitschy item she could get her hands on—star maps, free tickets to daytime TV shows, Krishna roses; she stuffed an astonishing amount of this stuff into the purse which I always told her was too big and bulky but which came in handy for her on this birthday bash in the variously inclined city.

The rest of the afternoon consisted of Gretchen consulting her maps and saying, “No, no, we take a left here, a left,” while I ran around inspecting the covers of thick slick sick skin magazines. I was always half a block ahead of her, looking back, and she was always waving, rattling her maps, calling out, “Have we passed Cahuenga?” We were two well-dressed children lost in a neighborhood we both could have sworn we knew better than this. We’d taken this little vacation to “find out why we’re together,” as Gretchen said, and all we found out was that neither of us had much sense of direction. During appetizers I used my napkin, which had been sticking out of the empty water glass like beautiful white ears, to suppress a sneeze, which Gretchen thought was such a “primitive display of bad table manners” she left the restaurant with her sweater and bulky purse in one hand and her half-eaten piece of quiche Lorraine in the other. I grabbed her just as she was getting in the car to head, I supposed, home.

At night in the hotel room she fell asleep the second I touched her and then rain was general all over Los Angeles. Because it was still raining the next morning and the road was slippery, Gretchen asked me to buckle up. It was one of those shoulder straps that lock into place in your lungs. She kept asking me to strap myself in, I kept looking at the coil of black plastic, and I kept saying no until Gretchen said if I was going to be like that she was happy to stop the car and wait for me to come to my senses. She pulled off Santa Monica Boulevard onto a side street and something in me snapped. I just started shaking her against the fake-wood paneling of her parents’ sedan. Cars passed, rain fell. I just kept shaking her. She said, “I don’t know why we’re together. I really don’t, Jeremy. I have no idea why we’re together.” In times of trouble, in the face of fear, I’ve never really found language very useful. I tossed her umbrella into a tree, shrugged, turned, and waited in the falling rain for the
320
RTD back to Westwood.

That was the lowest of the low points, but there were others. I’d already been to the bathroom and was sitting in the middle seat of the middle row, holding a large Coca-Cola, a box of popcorn. Gretchen was feeding me her least favorite flavors of Jujyfruits, licorice and lime, while we were waiting for the curtains to part. Gretchen said, “What are you doing?”

I stopped stroking her shoulder and said,
“Lo siento, señorita.
I was just stroking your shoulder.”

The lights dimmed. Gretchen said, “You were stroking my shoulder, but there’s a big difference, don’t you think, between lovers making out in a dark movie theater and a little boy pawing his mother’s blouse.” No question mark.

I swigged my Coke, poured the rest into her lap, and left as the first trailer screamed on.

At a Christmas party Gretchen tried to teach me the mambo. It was a very sophisticated party. Her thesis adviser was there. The chairman of the English department. Some people from the chancellor’s office. A candidate for Santa Monica city council. The
femme fatale
of the comparative literature program. When the music began I sat down and out. Gretchen, who had an ardent admirer wrapped around her arm, came up to me and said, “O wazza maz-zer with Jeremy poo? He no like to choreograph?” I ignored her by pretending to spot a long lost friend on the far side of the dance floor but, later, dead drunk, she dragged me into the bedroom and attempted to demonstrate. She could hardly stand up and I couldn’t learn when to lean forward, when to lean back, when to snap her wet little wrist, so we wound up wrestling on the waterbed while everyone else was singing Christmas carols and motioning toward the mistletoe.

FOR OUR FINAL
meeting of the semester, Sandra pulled out all the stops. Once we got a lot of hand-holding and teary hugging out of the way, it was quite the informative session. As a kind of hortatory prologue, she asked if I knew why American Indians didn’t stutter and, before I could guess, she explained that there’s no pressure upon Indian children to speak and very little tension in the culture as a whole. I saw myself running away to join the Iroquois—shooting buffalo, raindancing, sending smoke signals, and finally asking Yellow Feather, “What’s my nickname going to be, Yellow Feather?”

“We call you,” Yellow Feather says, smiling wide, adjusting his headdress, “Chattering Teeth.”

“Oh yeah? Well, you can take your bow-and-arrow and your leather m-m-moccasins, too,” I say, sprinting down the mountain to civilization.

Sandra then launched a quick survey of the principal attempted cures. Guy DeChauliac, a French doctor, recommended embrocations to desiccate the brain—an advance for which the Academy of Science gave him an award. Sir Francis Bacon thought the tongue was too cold and dry and suggested hot, steaming wine. Thomas Dieffenbach, a German surgeon, thought a triangular wedge should be excised completely across and nearly through the tongue. A Pythian princess urged emigration south to Libya. Emile Coué, a nineteenth-century physician, invited stutterers to join him on stage, where he shouted into their ears: “You can talk! I know you can! Believe me! You can talk!”

What was the point of these pathetic anecdotes? To get hope hanging in the atmosphere like low-flying smog? To hear the sound of one word flapping? The window was open, for once, in the clinic room. Air circulated. Light did whatever it does: collect dust motes whatever. I took my notebook out of my backpack and handed my hierarchy of feared situations to Sandra, who said she assumed I’d ultimately overcome every anxiety on the list. She looked straight at me and asked, “Is that your goal, too?”

“Sure,” I said. “But it’s not a very realistic one. At least right now.”

She rubbed my hands together, like she was trying to start a fire, and said, “Why not?”

“Because it just isn’t. In at least ten of those situations, I can hardly talk.”