Dead Languages (24 page)

“Like what kind of talk?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Like maybe real dirty talk?” she said, squinting.

“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

And then, immediately, she began. She spoke with all the pent-up passion of the lady you get on tape when you call time and hear a perfect replication of human speech only without the pauses between numbers for breath. Which, of course, was the excitement of the exchange: her disinterested control. She scratched the glass with her long nails and, moaning into the mike, repeated degradations through her China-doll smile like she was suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. I’m not sure the thesis committee needs to dwell overly long on the details: all kinds of analogies between me and most barnyard animals, my identification with my own waste products, my desire to curl up in a ball at her feet. As I dribbled into my denims she faced me directly, though the idea was that she still couldn’t see my eyes in black light.

She was supposed to have stayed in her booth until I was visiting valet parking, but she peeked out her door—for one last bonus, I guess. So far I’d spent twenty dollars for the opportunity of hugging myself. I gave her five more dollars and she seemed to take pity on me because I was so easy. She scraped her weird purple lips against mine in a lunge.

“Come back soon, sugar,” she said. “You’re unusual.”

The cabby had some trouble finding what he called my “hotsy-totsy address.” After a few wrong turns onto one-way streets, he arrived at the destination and kept the meter running while I went inside to get more money for his tip. I had to hope Mother and Father hadn’t returned yet from the Melville party in Palo Alto. They hadn’t. I tipped the cabby one hundred percent, as if to palliate what I assumed was his acute sense of my eccentricity. For reasons I can’t say I understand, I thought he thought I was homosexual. I watched him drive down the hill, then I just stood in the street for a while, shivering on the sidewalk, watching the blinking lights of the city burn.

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED
at the
Typee
party in Palo Alto: Michael, the Berkeley military historian Beth met on the march, came to the protest party with his star student, Charles Ellenboegen, my friend from childhood. Beth attended the event partly to support her least favorite professor but more to see Mother and Father for the first time in a month and even more to see Michael, whom everyone let finish introducing Charles to Beth and Mother and Father before the coincidence inaugurated laughter. The entire party wound up on President Lyman’s lawn around midnight, carrying candles and placards of instructive passages from
Typee.
President Lyman said he was sympathetic but, at quarter of one, kind of tired. Sunday morning, of course, I was subtly insulted by Mother and Father for not having driven an hour and a half south through date-night traffic, and I was raked over the coals even more thoroughly by a letter apparently written in candlelight by Charles, hand delivered by Father. Charles was two years older than I was, an eighteen-year-old sophomore, and he had a lot to share.

“I have come to grips with the fact that violence will have to be used at one time against the powers that control this country,” went the salutation. “This is materialism—looking at the objective conditions of a situation and drawing a conclusion. I plan to be very disciplined in my studies with few distractions. I’m learning to look at people not in such a linear fashion but in process. I’ve realized that most of my criticism of others was a result of this oversight and my own egotism. Things are neither good nor bad. They just are. This is the materialistic conception of the world: no matter if we would like a pie in the sky or whatever, we gotta deal with what is there. I am also a student of dialectics, which is the science of transformation where change takes place in a material sense. The act of liberating oneself is a fine and splendid idea, Jeremy, but how is it to happen?” I don’t know, Charles. “Many make a practice of standing above society and expressing themselves in some form or another, doing things they were not taught to do, and by doing so they feel they are in fact liberating themselves. However, liberation is a political act.”

At the
Typee
party Mother and Father found Michael grim to the point of being gruff, stiff to the point of being stuffed, etc.

INHERENTLY UNFULFILLABLE
fantasies were one thing and first love, I wanted to believe, was another. Only in California could she have entered my life wearing a tennis dress in January: Barbie Levine, a mid-year transfer student from a public school down the Peninsula, a junior so Jewish as to be Father’s long lost sister who died at sixteen, standing in the doorway of the
Journal
office. It was late Thursday afternoon, the paper was being printed on Friday, and I was furiously correcting galley sheets when I heard the words: “Is this the office of the
London Journal
?”

Which wasn’t a very intriguing question, so I continued correcting galleys without looking up.

“Well,” she said, “I hate to bother you, you look real busy, but my name is Barbie Levine and I’d like very much to join the staff of the
Journal.
”

I just kept making notes in the margins. “Uh-huh,” I said. “What experience do you have?”

“Features editor for two years at the
Aragon Aristocrat.
Teacher profiles, student hobbies, music reviews, Q and A columns. You know, that kind of thing.”

We received high school newspapers from all over the Bay Area and the
Aragon Aristocrat
was always the one I threw out first. She was the former features editor of the worst high school newspaper in northern California. She used “real” as an adverb. Her voice was polite. She didn’t seem terribly promising. I still hadn’t looked up.

“As you can see, I’m actually rather busy right now, Barbara. If you’ll sign up for Advanced Journalism, check the assignment sheet next Tuesday, then write me a two-page double-spaced story I’ll—”

“Look, you,” she said, “I don’t know who you are. You’re probably just some lowly assistant sports editor or something, but for ten days I’ve been trying to build up the courage to come into this office and you’re not making it any easier. I transferred here just to work on the
Journal.
I love your layouts, your editorials, your twenty-one-point headlines. No one at this stupid school has yet to say a kind word to me. I heard people at London were real cold, but I didn’t expect them to be this bad. Are you all like that? Don’t any of you ever stop for a second to catch your breath? The course load is criminal, the teachers are frightening, the students are insanely intelligent and they know it, the modular schedule is confusing, the courtyard is too clean, the swimming pool is too long. I was hitting a tennis ball against the backboard, the girls’ tennis team came and kicked me off, I stayed for a while to watch them, and even they were imposing. Aren’t there any normal people around here?”

I refused to define myself as normal chiefly to make her feel better, but she had expressed her admiration for the
Journal
and I thought the least I could do was look up. She was crying. Her hair was in her eyes. Her tennis dress was, as Father would have said, “oishkispieldt”—in disarray. Her socks were down around her ankles. Her left shoe was untied. She was crying. Her aluminum racquet was in one hand, her satchel of books was in the other; I took the racquet and books out of her hands, pulled up a chair for her, poured her some coffee from my thermos, presented her with a box of tissues, and brushed the bangs off her face.

“You’re real nice,” she said.

“You’re real upset,” I said.

“Do you have any more coffee?” she asked.

“So,” I said, pouring another cup, “you play tennis?”

“No.” She knew my question was a straight line and thought her answer was the quintessence of wit. “I carry this thing around to swat mosquitoes.”

I laughed loud to make her feel good and said, “We’ll have to get together sometime to play.”

That Sunday overweight husbands and white-socks-with-pink-puffballs wives were playing doubles to either side of us and arguing about proper application of the territorial imperative, while we were content with the pleasure of new balls bouncing from my racquet to hers, tight strings, the song of a good rally. We lay down on the grass and used opposite ends of a bath towel Barbie had brought and drank Cokes charged to her father’s account.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, while stirring her ice, she said, “You limp a little on balls hit to your left.”

I wanted to kiss her for uttering a line with such perfect sonic balance, but instead I told her the story of the day at the beach, the summer in traction, the brace on my thigh. Complications. She touched where the stitches had been, the scar tissue around the bone.

“Does it still hurt?” she said.

“No,” I said. “Not really. Only when it rains.”

“When it rains?”

“Yes,” I said, wiping my face with my part of the towel. “When it rains I get a twinge in my left leg. When it rains”—I exaggerated to make myself appear brave—“I can feel the pin rubbing against the femur.”

“When it rains it pours,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, smiling, though I had no idea what she meant by this, which didn’t matter, because language doesn’t represent life: it prophesies it. Within thirty seconds of Barbie’s curious remark clouds collided, precipitating precipitation.

Although Father vociferously urged us not to see it because he felt both the book and the play romanticized and thus exploited mental illness, we saw a production of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
off-Geary. Brandenburg Concerto Number Four, the happiest moment in human history, played over and over while Barbie drove us there in her fast-back Mustang. Her window was down. Cold, clear air blew through the air like promises. High school seems like it happened such a long time ago. Barbie sipped diet soda. Traffic was thick. The play was just well lit, overacted insanity—maybe Father was right for once—but Billy Bibbitt, the guy who played Billy Bibbitt, I explained to Barbie, who was so sympathetic she nearly cried with compassion, the guy who played Billy Bibbitt was God.

The fluorescent lights still flickered and the typewriters still had jammed margin releases, but soon the
Journal
walls were bright with posters of Mrs. Levine’s from various shows at the De Young Museum and “funky” tapestries (Barbie’s word). We took ourselves too seriously and had an office in which to work—all those long tables and folded proof sheets, reams of faded mimeo paper, grade-school scissors. I was the editor and Barbie was the assistant editor. I scribbled the story assignments in pencil, so no one could read them and Barbie and I could write all the articles. The newspaper was, to me, the unwilling child, the final truth-teller of the school, not that the students or teachers read it. The more unpopular the
Journal,
and Barbie and I, became, the more vengeful my satires and the more allusive the paper as a whole tended. With deepening desperation and frequency, we retreated to the white walls of the little office, where we hated everything except each other and the sound of the door being closed from the inside—a sound I believe I may have mentioned before. By the end of the year it would have been difficult to argue that what we edited was anything other than a five-column, four-page biweekly private correspondence.

Barbie was chief photographer as well as assistant editor, clicking pictures wherever she went, the Instamatic camera strapped over her shoulder like a purse and the pink gloss applied like a kind of lipstick. She was such a demure and polite interviewer that most people, especially less good-looking vice principals, felt compelled to fill the silence with sensational revelations. She also had the ability, which never ceased to wow Mother, to write a headline that not only precisely fit the line’s word count but also contained some semi-obscure pun. And she cultivated a smooth writing style, although sometimes her coy confessions and subtle self-mockery dominated a story to such an extent that the casual reader was soon more interested in the dark recesses of Barbie’s soul than the pressing need to recycle aluminum cans.

The first time we drove together to the printer in South San Francisco the bay hadn’t been visible from
101
, but as we exited the off-ramp, spiraling onto a gravel road, we suddenly saw the sun backlighting the water. Suddenly we were looking at not license plates and guard rails but the benediction of white beams on a circle of blue lead. Like Charles’s whisper when we counted change or the Last Tier Quintet’s song in dark silence, the refracting shimmer made conversation sound absurd, so we drove the rest of the way to the printer and most of the way back without a word spoken between us.

MOTHER GAVE ME
all sorts of advice as to proper etiquette—napkin placement, knife position, witty repartee, that kind of thing—and Father said, “Whatever you do, be true to yourself,” four words of which rhyme but which I accepted, nevertheless, as sound counsel. Difficult to follow, however, when I was greeted on the front porch by a Venezuelan maid in white hat and apron, offering what must have been a dozen choices of cheese, while the three of them—Dr. and Mrs. Levine and Barbie—came forward in excellent attire.

Dr. Levine was wearing a suit and vest and those special brown shoes with air holes in the toes that seem less than ludicrous only when worn by members of the medical profession. With a yellow corsage pinned to her pink dress, Mrs. Levine looked like spring, though clouds swirled from the west. Barbie was wearing white buckled shoes, a white lace dress, her hair in a pony tail, and a watch on her wrist that gleamed. The only suit I owned was too short in the sleeves and it was this too-short, quite faded outfit in which I was sweating when Dr. Levine said, “Barbie tells me you’re a perfect genius at running the newspaper.”

“Barbie said that?” I said. “Well, that’s very nice, but it’s not really true. After a while, the paper practically runs itself.”

“Oh, now, I know that’s not true,” Mrs. Levine said. “At least with
creative
writing that’s never true. I mean, my Harlequin Romances never write themselves. Down to the last line of dialogue, I’m inventing and cogitating and analyzing mood and character.”