How to Read an Unwritten Language (25 page)

“I hurried to his side and heard steps approach the door. It opened and there she was, her face a strange version of mine—older and much harder, even as she smiled at this man in the moment before she recognized him. Then she started shouting, and because my father's anger easily matched her own, I could barely make out what they said.

“She moved out onto the porch, the little girl now nowhere in sight. My mother turned to me—my identity had been thrown out at her in the rush of words—and her eyes turned suddenly deep and dark. She, too, must have been struck by the resemblance. Then her mouth turned tight and her arms stretched out—but not to hold me. She slapped me, then slapped again, and I raised my arms to protect my face. My father began hitting her, and her hands became little walls that he slowly broke down. No one heard me wail except the neighbors, and soon enough they crowded on the porch and pulled him away from Mother and her bloody face.

“He would do that to me for years later—make my face bloody. Yet whenever I closed my eyes and tried to wave him away, I always saw my mother's terrible face instead of his.”

The man reached for his drink. Downing the last of it, he set the glass lightly on the bar. “So, you like my little story?”

I nodded, my own mother's collection of faces swirling before me. All their promises of secret transformations lurked behind the faces of everyone I'd ever met.

He motioned to the bartender for another drink, and turned to me. “Well, I gather that you have many more ‘objects,' as you call them, in stock somewhere. My name is Preston McCandles, by the way, and I have a business proposition to offer you.”

In the center of Preston's gallery I turned in a slow, tight circle, taking in the convulsive brushstrokes of the Oriental canvases that lined white brick walls. I closed my eyes, imagining I was an explosion, then opened them and faced the aftermath: the seething energy of those paintings.

A gaunt young woman peered in through the gallery window, her face all stark angles above a dark turtleneck sweater. She tried the locked door and then tapped on the glass pane, arching an eyebrow at Preston, who'd just returned from his office in the back, fresh drink in hand. He shook his head
no
. This was a private showing. She gave him the finger and walked off on the dark street.

Stepping beside me, he gestured to the silk wall hangings. “So tell me, what do you think?”

“I like them,” I offered, not yet prepared to reveal their effect on me. “Are these Chinese—”

“Japanese. A collection of their newest, their best calligraphers. Notice how each painting is a single character—a single word—from a cursive Japanese script. In these artists' versions, each character becomes more than just a word, more than pictorial—it becomes a map, of a human mystery. You of all people should appreciate that. By the way, are you sure you wouldn't like a drink?”

“No thanks.”

I drew near the wall to read the printed titles, to examine the paintings more closely.
Calm
, far from serene, was a figure-eight so deformed and slashed by a swift and agitated brush that it might be the hunched outline of someone standing before an empty, oval mirror. Another, labeled
Faint
, appeared to be two hands cupped to meet each other, the dark ink applied so thickly it bled beyond the borders of the brushstrokes into a misty haze.
Forgive
could be a face hovering between weeping and laughter. The black strokes of
Yes
were a knot straining to unravel itself.

Dream
, applied in thick yet graceful brushstrokes, resembled a dancer, the wavery lines implying swinging arms, and I lingered long before this figure. It seemed to rush away and yet rush toward me as well, the skittish ink about to release itself from the canvas. I had to fight the urge to reach out and either catch that hurtling figure or prevent its escape.

Preston's footsteps approached on the polished wooden floor. “This particular work intrigues you?”

I nodded.

He stood beside me, regarding the canvas, then sighed. “I think I see how it might.”

I didn't think it wise to reply, knowing where this was leading. He wanted to display my objects, sell them to any interested customers. I'd laughed at the idea back at the airport, laughed when he'd said I owed him the professional courtesy of hearing him out at his gallery. Yet here I was.

Preston shook the ice cubes in his glass, then slipped the smooth stone from his jacket pocket. “Up till now, Michael, our exchange has been unfair. We've matched stories, but now it's time for me to offer a gift, of equal value to this stone. This painting,
Dream
? It's yours. Whether or not you choose to show your collection here.” Alarmed by a generosity I didn't trust, I said, “I really can't accept this—”

“Of course you can. As far as I'm concerned, you already have. There's no obligation,” he said, cunningly echoing my words.

I laughed, waiting for the rest of his pitch. If he understood what moved me the most in this room, then perhaps he'd also located some hidden part of me that wanted to set loose my objects and release the burden of their stories.

“Are you still upset at misreading me at the airport?” Preston asked, chuckling with the satisfaction of someone who'd managed to escape detection. “Your mistake was understandable. And yet … never mistake a gallery owner for the art he or she displays. Of course I'm a businessman, though I like to think there's more to me than that. I have a secret too, like this wonderful stone, like this lovely calligraphy. Whenever I open a new show, I imagine I'm actually redecorating my mother's house, the one I wasn't allowed to enter. My gallery isn't only public space, Michael, it's private space as well.”

“Of course,” I murmured, and as I scanned the room again a strange dizziness overtook me: those surrounding canvases could just as well be my own mother's daily dramas, or Kate's hidden self, or any number of other languages I had yet to discover.

“I choose my shows carefully,” Preston continued, “always mindful of the money, of course, but once that's taken care of, I look for work that helps me reinvent someone I never knew. You see, I'm an idealist of sorts—why else would I have given you the time of day at the airport? But I'm also calculating my self-interest, and I'm telling you this because I know you like to hear secrets. See? More self-interest on my part.”

He grinned and I smiled back. I was a sucker for confession, even one that was also a hustle.

“Now, Michael, I know very little about the rest of your collection, though I'm intrigued by the possibilities. I suspect that the rest of your objects are much like this calligraphy. Displaying them would be perfect for my gallery. I hope you'll reconsider what would be an excellent financial arrangement as well—”

“I've never sold my objects. They're gifts.”

“And you're cheapening your gifts and their revelations by giving them away. Now that was a very entertaining cab ride from the airport—the indifference of money, the poetry of insurance—but I have to disagree. People value what costs. Exchanging money for something creates an invisible bond, so if you want the treasures you bestow to really be treasures, I'm sorry to say that you'll need to make a bit of profit from them.”

Preston tilted back his head and finished his drink. Then, with that familiar flick of his arm, he scattered the ice cubes onto the polished wood floor. They clattered and careened off the baseboard, splitting into jagged chips that skitted back toward us.

“An interesting pattern, don't you think? Maybe even worthy of one or two of the paintings on the wall. But the ice will melt, and then the puddles will evaporate. I can't sell this. It can't be owned. Besides the necessary pleasures, art has to give a sense of prestige and permanence, and this is felt most deeply when its purchase involves a sacrifice, a risk. It's my business to understand this.”

“But you're contradicting yourself, Preston,” I said, though with little sense of triumph. “You gave me a painting. A gift, remember? So where's my sacrifice?”

“Oh, what does a sacrifice constitute? When I decided to listen to you, I also decided to miss my plane and an important meeting that cost me a great deal of time and effort to set up. And that made the gift of this stone all the sweeter.”

He kicked at one of the melting ice cubes and it spun away in swift pirouettes across the floor. “Look, Michael, I have another secret for you: I'm willing to gamble that your accepting my gift will be a first step toward your accepting my proposition. If you do, essentially you'll be releasing your precious objects for this one silk painting. Now that's a sacrifice worthy of the name, I'd say.”

I turned back to the whirling brushstrokes of the painting that was mine if I wanted it. I could roll it up, walk out the door, and add it to my collection. Standing before the canvas, I imagined that elusive, dancing figure as my own St. Vitus' Dance, suddenly arisen within to spin me away from every object I'd ever collected, to spin me away from the bric-a-brac of my life.

Up and down the block, one power mower after another roared a welcome to the beginning of spring, to the obligations of taming a lawn. Settled on my living room couch, I listened to the wavering intensity of each mower's back-and-forth growl. Before me on the coffee table sat Preston's catalog for his showing of my objects. I hadn't paged through it since the opening—an event successful enough that almost nothing remained of my collection. Now those mowers outside sounded like an army of hungry creatures, and I found myself reaching for that glossy-paged, full-colored book, for what I already knew would be the last time. I turned the pages to Preston's Introduction.

Virtually no object included in this catalog has any particular value in and of itself, yet each was once the center of a complex attachment, thereby accruing to itself a psychic patina, a glaze of significant drama that offers significant value for the collector
.

There were pages and pages of this sort of prose, so I skipped ahead and stopped at the sight of an ordinary key chain. The color photo magnified the cheap plaster mold of a miniature bouquet and emphasized its one flaw: a dark orange petal, slightly chipped.

This object belonged to a woman who learned to drive a car so she could leave her husband
, the text began, though this wasn't precisely true—at first she hadn't known what she'd end up doing. I could still see her surrounded by cartons of yard sale bargains in her front yard, watching me examine the key chain. Kate and I had just divorced, and that woman must have sensed my hidden rawness. Now remarried, she told a tale about an object she needed to let go. “But at one time,” she'd said wistfully, “I thought if I lost this thing, I'd lose myself.”

Her brief story often left me inventing my own details, beginning with the day she sat by the window of her apartment and listened to the steady whoosh of passing cars, an engine starting up on one of the side streets, the occasional car horn, or the squeal of tires. With eyes closed she imagined herself in a driver's seat, hurtling down avenues and weaving among reckless cabdrivers. But she never envisioned a destination in any of these private travels—the driving itself was the main pleasure.

When she decided to take lessons her husband mocked her: they lived in the city, he said, they'd never need a car, they couldn't afford one anyway. This time the familiarity of his arguments—yet another series of no's—made him strangely unfamiliar, and even as she nodded in habitual agreement she knew that she'd take the lessons anyway, behind his back.

Throughout those lessons she clung to words she shouldn't forget—ignition, clutch, accelerate—and each successful parallel parking, each left turn accomplished against traffic at an intersection must have become a declaration of her independence. She always drove with that key chain of small flowers hanging from the steering column, and as she followed the instructor's terse commands, those flowers gently swayed as if in the wind.

Though the woman never told me this, I'd always felt certain it must be true: when she came home from the Motor Vehicles Bureau after finally receiving her license, an odd emptiness blossomed. With no car, what could this piece of paper offer her? It was simply physical evidence supporting her husband's arguments, and all those lessons had been nothing more than a childish act of defiance. She hurled her key chain across the room, but when a piece snapped off, her anger broke too, transforming to regret. Picking up the key chain, the woman saw the chipped petal, the plaster interior revealed, and she tentatively scraped at it with a fingernail. A faint white cloud rose up. She sniffed its dusty dryness—the inside of this bouquet was as desiccated as her marriage. After scraping another wisp of plaster and watching it mingle with motes in the air, she then—with surprisingly calm steps—approached the telephone. The receiver nestled against her chin, she flipped through the Yellow Pages for car rentals, prepared to drive off to a new life.

*

The next object in the catalog was a car antenna with scratches down nearly the entire length of its silver surface to the jagged base. Preston had taken great pleasure in arranging the catalog's order of objects, making each one the segment of a larger story. “What we're offering is a Thousand and One Tchotchkes,” he liked to joke.

The former owner of this antenna was a retired man who stood outside in rainstorms as often as possible, soaking one old business suit after another. He held this antenna high in the air; as if attuned to stations no one else could hear, hoping that lightning might strike him
.

Every thunderstorm his family searched for him, driving down side streets or along the edges of fields, and whenever they found him his two teenage grandsons had to chase him down. Despite the family's increasing precautions, he still managed to slip away sometimes in a downpour, patiently waiting for his great moment. He was never struck, though once a nearby tree split into two giant slices by a sudden bolt. This near miss must have embittered him, for soon after he developed pneumonia and passed away
.