The Man Who Lost the Sea (22 page)

Oh
, she says, coming back into the world,
Oh
.… and whispers my name four times, smiling. Now what is that—communication?

“I got so there was nothing in the world for me, sleeping or waking or working or mixing a drink,” I said aloud to the man, “but
why won’t she tell me?
And right to the end, she did that to me. Wondering why she does this or that, why she wears one particular kind of look instead of another, maybe, after all, these things don’t matter. But look how she winds up, dead in that new housecoat I didn’t buy for her, eight hundred miles from home with a guy I don’t know; all in the world I have now is
why? why?
and the idea that she wound it up in the one way where I’d never find out. I mean,” I added as soberly as I could, because I was unaccountably out of breath, just from talking to a man, imagine? “I mean, not that I want to find out. Because I don’t give a damn any more.”

“Well, that’s good then,” he said, “because you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.”

“What trouble?”

“Learning to read graves.”

I got enormously tired of this conversation suddenly. “Now what
good would it do me to learn a thing like that?”

“None,” he said in that pleasant way of his. “You have just finished saying that you don’t want to know anything about her, any more.”

“It finally sinks in,” I said sarcastically, “that what you’re trying to tell me is that a person who can read graves can stand in front of one and read it like a book.”

“A biography.” He nodded.

“And get out of it everything that person ever did.”

“Or said, or thought,” he agreed.

I looked at the grave, its empty crumbling bare planes, its empty-faced headstone. I looked again, but briefly, at the events that had made it be here just where it was, when it was, containing what, and I wet my lips and said, “You’re kidding.”

He never seemed to answer what deserved no answer, that man.

I asked him, “Even things nobody ever knew before?”

“Especially those things,” he said. “What you can see of a human being is only the outside of the top part of the surface. Now if everything—is there—” he pointed—“to be read—
everything
—then it follows that you can read far more than the most penetrating analysis of anything living.” When I had no response to this, he said, “Living things aren’t finished, you see. Everything they have ever been in contact with, each thought they have had, each person they have known—these things are still at work in them; nothing’s finished.”

“And when they’re buried, they … do something to the grave? There’s a real difference between one grave and another, or … a grave would be different if one person or another was buried in it?”

“It has to be that way,” he said. Again one of those odd, waiting pauses, which I refused to take for myself. He said, “Surely you’ve had that feeling that a human being is too much, has too much, means too much just to go out like a light, or be eroded away like the soil of a dust bowl.”

I looked at the grave. So new, so raw, so … blank. In a low voice, I asked, “What do you read?”

He understood what I meant: what are the “letters,” the “words,” the “grammar”?

He said, “A lot of things. The curve of the mound, the encroachment of growth on it—grass, weeds, mosses. The kind of vegetation that grows there, and the shape of each stem and leaf, even the veining in them. The flight of insects over it, the shadows they cast, the contours of rain rivulets as they form, as they fill, as they dry.” He laughed deprecatingly. “It sounds like more than a man could learn, doesn’t it?”

I thought it did.

He said, “You are so completely familiar with the act of reading that it never occurs to you how complex an act it is, or how vast is your accomplishment. You take in stride a variety of alphabets—upper case and lower case are very nearly two separate ones, and then upper and lower case in script are quite different from printing or typing. Old English and black-letter faces might slow you down but they won’t stop you. Your eye measures light intensities between ink and paper: green letters on a yellow page wouldn’t stop you. You select, without effort, just what you read on a page and what you do not. For example, every page of a book might have the book title at the top and a page number at the bottom, and you don’t even know they’re there. In a magazine or a newspaper, blocks of type might be broken up, carried over, interrupted by pictures or advertisements, and you sail right along reading what you are interested in and nothing else. You might notice a misprint or a misspelling, or even an out-of-context line of type lost in the middle of your paragraph, but in most cases it doesn’t bother you much. In addition, you’re reading in English—one of the richest of all languages, but also one of the most difficult, with irregular structure, spelling, and some pretty far-fetched semantic shorthand and shortcuts. But all these are the rarefied complications; to get back to basics, what about the letters themselves? The letter ‘a’ doesn’t look like the sound—or several sounds—of ‘a.’ It’s only a most arbitrary symbol, chosen by custom and usage to mean what it means.”

“But … at least there’s a system. I mean, an established alphabet. Accepted spelling. And for all their exceptions, there are rules of grammar and syntax.”

Again he said nothing, just waiting for me to come up with something
or other. To think, perhaps.

I did, and said, “Oh. You mean there is some such system,” I laughed suddenly. “A crooked thorn for the letter ‘b,’ and a line of mud for past tense?”

He smiled and nodded. “Not those, but things like those. Yes, that’s the idea.”

“Not as hard as it seems at first, hm?”

“The thing you try to put over to every first grader,” he agreed. “But—it is hard. As hard as anything else you can study. Just as hopeless looking at times, too, when the overall pattern just won’t emerge and all your work seems useless. Then—it comes clear, and you go on.”

I looked at him and said, “I don’t know why I believe you.”

He waited until I said, “—but I’d like to learn that trick.”

“Why?”

I glanced at the bare new grave. “You said … 
‘everything.’
You said I could find out what she did, with whom. And—why.”

“That’s right.”

“So … let’s go. Where do we start?” I went down on one knee and made an across-the-board gesture at my wife’s grave.

“Not here.” He smiled. “You don’t use Dostoevsky as a first reader.”

“Dostoevsky?
Her?
”

“They’re all Dostoevskys. They can all express every shade of meaning of every event, and through what they think and feel one can see the meaning of all their world. Isn’t that what makes a great writer?”

“I guess it is … but … great writer?
Her?
”

“She lived,” he said. “Now what she was is … graven here. Living and feeling are things done by everybody. Writing on their graves is done by everybody. Dostoevsky, now, had what you might term a
previous
skill. He could do it while he was alive. Dead, they can all do it.”

This guy made my head spin. I got up slowly and followed him to the “first reader.” Like most such volumes, it was a very little one.
I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the curl of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots are plotted. In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone.

I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people, because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it.

The man met me every day; early or late, he was around. I never asked him anything about himself. Somehow that never came up. He never read anything to me. He would point out the “letters” and occasionally the “letter groups” like (analogously) “-ing” and “-ous” and “un-,” and would correct me where I read it wrong. But when I got to where I could read whole sentences, he stopped me. He told me that the one thing I must never do is to read off what I read on a grave, aloud. Not even to him. Those who could read it, would, if they cared to. Those who could not must learn as I was learning, or not know what was written there. “There are reasons enough for not wanting to die,” he told me, “without adding the fear that someone like you will go around abusing this privilege.”

I would go home at night filled with a gray hope, that at last all the mysteries of that woman would be solved for me, and every sordid, rotten thing she had done and kept secret would be illuminated for me. I didn’t sleep very well—I hadn’t, since the day she left—and I had lots of time to think over the things she had done to me, and the things she probably had done to me, and the things she was doubtless capable of doing. Maybe this long period of insufficient sleep did something to me; I don’t know, but I didn’t mind it. I did my work at the office, enough to get along, saving my strength and
my brain for the evening; and then I worked at my lessons. I worked.

We went from the “first readers” into more complicated stuff. You can have no idea how complicated a thing like a three-year-old is when you first start. The only thing that took me through this stage was his promise that however hopeless it looked, sooner or later the pattern would emerge and I’d understand and could go on. He was right. He was always right.

I began to learn about people. I began to find out how many were afraid of the same things—afraid of being shut out, of being found out, of being unloved, unwanted, or—worst of all—unneeded. I learned how flimsy were the bases of so many of their fears, and how unimportant, in the long run, were the things on which so many of them pitifully spent their lives. More than anything else, I learned how uncharacteristic of most of them were their cruelties, how excusable their stupidities; in short, how damned decent they were.

I found out the differences between “the truth” and “all the truth.” You can know some pretty terrible things about a person, and you can know they’re true. But sometimes it makes a huge difference if you know what else is true too. I read something in a book once about an old lady who was walking along the street minding her own business when a young guy came charging along, knocked her down, rolled her in a mud puddle, slapped her head and smeared handsful of wet mud all over her hair. Now what should you do with a guy like that?

But then if you find out that someone had got careless with a drum of gasoline and it ignited and the old lady was splashed with it, and the guy had presence of mind enough to do what he did as fast as he did, and severely burned his hands in the doing of it, then what should you do with him?

Yet everything reported about him is true. The only difference is the amount of truth you tell.

Reading a grave, you read it all. All of the truth makes a difference—but what a difference—in the way you feel about people.

One day the man said to me, “I would say that there are only a half-dozen graves here that are beyond you. I think you’re a pretty remarkable student.”

I said thanks, but I’d blame the quality of the teaching. “You’ve taken an awful lot of trouble over me.”

He shrugged. “It’s what I do,” he said inclusively. Then he waited.

I wondered what he was waiting for, and so searched back through what he had been saying. “Oh,” I said, and with him, looked up at the north corner of the cemetery where my wife’s grave lay. It wasn’t sharp-planed any more, or bare. Everything about it had changed … been changed … except, of course, that unsoilable headstone. So. “Oh,” I said. “I could read it.”

“Easily,” he said.

I went up there. I don’t know if he followed me. I wasn’t thinking about him any more. I came to the grave and stood looking at it for a long time. I thought about her, and about the facts I had. Truths. The truth about her. The time I pried her out of a dark corner at a party with a drunk named Wilfred. The time she snatched a letter off the mantel when I came in and threw it into the fire. The time that guy on the boat laughed when her name was mentioned and then shut up when he found I was married to her. More than anything else, the fact of her death in the sports car, the fact of that housecoat, of the missing tweed suit and stupid hat. Now I could know. Now I could know what, where, and how many times. Now I could know why.

I guess I was up there for longer than I realized.

When I came to myself it was almost dark, and growing cold. I almost fell when I started to walk. I walked slowly until my legs woke up and, seeing a light in the caretaker’s building, went in to talk to the old fellow for a minute. I didn’t see the graveyard reader around anywhere.

I was back the next morning. It was Saturday. The stonecutter was there already, crouched in front of my plot, tick-ticking away. I’d had to agree to time-and-a-half to get him, but I was willing. When at last I decided on an epitaph for that stone, I wanted it put there, and right now.

I walked up there to watch the man work. He knew his trade, that stonecutter, and he had almost finished. After a few minutes I was aware of someone standing next to me, and sure enough, it was
the graveyard reader. “Hi.”

“How are you?” he asked—not the way anyone else might ask, but meaning it: how was I? what had happened? how did I feel about it? was I all right?

“I’m all right,” I said. Also, not the way you’d say it to just anybody.

Silently we watched the man finish up. I nodded to him and said it was fine. He grinned and gathered up his tools and the tarpaulin with the chips in it, and waved and went away. The reader and I stood looking at the inscription.