James Hannah - Sign Languages

“I’m hoping a woman won’t answer,” she’d laughed. He saw her long, bony face. They rarely kissed, though they made love often and ferociously. She turned her ass up now and he came at her from behind, their only contact the wetness of groin and buttocks.

Charles took a long, hot bath until his toes and fingers wrinkled. He kept adding the precious steaming water until it was completely gone. He washed his legs and feet; he never got below his knees when he showered. He dozed off in the water and came back in a chill, his watch on the top of the toilet tank fogged on the inside. The cold water raised gooseflesh.

In the bedroom he turned back the covers then went and locked the bedroom door. He turned off the lights and lay still. But what did he want to happen now? Something unusual, he answered himself. Something wonderful and strange. Something from a pleasant dream or exotic movie. Or maybe not even pleasant. But mysterious. He was sure such things must happen to other people. Isn’t that what shows in some eyes? Or were those rich people, celebrities on TV, and was that just money and drugs?

He put his fingers to his forehead. He wondered if Annie had ever had such a thing happen. She seemed light on her feet. “Happy,” he said aloud in the dark room, the edges of the blinds rosy from the streetlight at the corner. But I’m fine there, too. It wasn’t happiness. That took place in tents, in canoes, at Molly’s birth, the placenta like some heavy wet scroll rolled up tightly.

Hush, he told himself. Listen. What is there to happen? And it wouldn’t just happen by itself.

Charles got up in the dark and straightened the covers. He took some blankets out of the closet and walked to the brick patio. Outside the sky was clear; he had never really learned the constellations, though once, long ago, he’d gone out at his parents’ every night with a star chart and a flashlight. But hadn’t that ended up in a tangle of opened clothes and elbows? Or maybe it’d been too hard or he’d lost interest with no one to impress.

He made a pallet behind the row of potted, blooming vincas and leaned against the rail, watching the motionless shadows. A dog barked twice. The hedge at the back of the yard needed trimming. Charles lay down and covered up. A gust of warm wind rattled the bamboo chimes; the sound the clatter of bones.

His head was full of movies and work and images of girls and women and the girls as women, their narrow hard butts now wide and embarrassing. Elvis, the family cat, came up the steps, curious at the strange sight. He put his gray face up to Charles’s, and Charles took him into the bed. He’d never slept with a cat before, or with a dog. For a long time they both fidgeted.

Saturday

The third time Charles awoke he swung his legs off the couch and sat up stiffly aching in a dozen places. He rubbed his eyes and noticed he’d left the muted TV on, which now showed some children’s cartoon with animal-people, in ugly colors, locked in dreadful combat.

Tasting his own sour breath, he saw it was almost one o’clock. He wondered when he’d pulled the den drapes closed. Rising, he turned off the TV, opened the heavy drapes, the bright summer light rebounding off the bricks of the patio, needling his tired eyes.

He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot he’d made at daylight after the neighbors’ whispering had first wakened him. Sitting rigidly over the cup in the dainty, cheerful breakfast nook where he’d always felt too large and clumsy, he winced in embarrassment.

“Shhh… come look. See him? Over there on the patio. See?”

“Good lord. You think he’s okay?”

Charles had barely opened his eyes, his face wet with dew, cat hairs on his tongue and lips.

“Maybe it’s a heart attack.”

“Maybe Annie kicked him out or something.”

They had both laughed like naughty children.

Charles had realized he was the topic of the Hallistons’ conversation, the whispered voices as faint as the early morning light. But already the temperature was in the eighties, and though he wanted to lie still until Sam and Karen left the low hedge twenty feet beyond his head, he was terribly hot and miserable. Finally, their whispers lower now, more conspiratorial, he hurried them by groaning theatrically and tossing this way and that. Then he listened carefully over the sound of early mowers and the clink-clink of sprinklers until he heard their patio door open and close. Charles tried to sit but couldn’t, his spine a complicated network of aches. He had to turn gingerly onto his stomach and work himself to his knees by using the outdoor furniture until he sat, breathing shallowly under the shade of the pastel-striped table umbrella.

“Jesus Christ.” He pulled a damp sheet over his twisted boxer shorts. He’d popped two buttons off his pajama tops. He’d kicked out in the night and overturned two pots crowded with the white stars of vincas. The black dirt had been taken up into the bedding and his legs were streaked with the grime. Charles shook his head and began cleaning up. He scooped the dirt into the pots and gathered the bedclothes. It was full daylight before he finished and realized he was soaking with sweat and still outside in his underwear. Elvis sat on the steps down to the yard and stared at Charles, who, passing by, gently pushed him off the terrace.

The second time he’d awakened, he’d been asleep on the couch. It was nine by the VCR when Annie phoned. His mind had been full of retreating dreams, the voices of the Hallistons in the hedge, mortal embarrassment.

“Good morning, sleepyhead.”

And she’d talked on in her level voice full of straightforward information. Good descriptive details of their flight, her parents’ health, the progress of the wedding. He’d talked to the girls, their own voices full of cheer, the sound of birds, of innocent animals celebrating without any heaviness at all.

Now it was afternoon and Charles went to the kitchen and poured out the bitter, hours-old coffee. What foolishness, he thought. “Silly bastard.” His concerns now including the patio business, Sam’s and Karen’s voices, the tone of his wife on the phone. Her voice like a stalactite, fifteen years of accumulation. Steady in the face of operations, death, weddings, pain, and disappointment.

Make me like her, he thought, and was surprised because he had thought he was almost exactly like her already. Aren’t I? Isn’t that why we married, live together?

The rest of the day he worked hard at all the tasks he should already have done. He hosed down the brick walk and the front porch. He touched up the faded picnic table. He waved brazenly at the Hallistons as they left for the tennis courts.

So I’m alone for a day and I come unglued, huh? He laughed at himself and shook his head at the whole vague idea of something wonderful and exotic. That’s the movies talking, not me. And, for the longest time, he considered the devilish power of movies and rock music and commercials over our lives as he trimmed a hedge, even combed out the cat’s gray, shedding hair, its desperate claws scratching at the bricks.

But it must have been darkness, twilight, the end of activity, that brought last night back again over all those objections of neighbors, Annie, the kids, misplaced currycombs, slices of cucumber from the Tupperware bowl in the bottom of the fridge. Bob Davis not carrying his weight at work. Hadn’t for almost a year now.

Instead of showering, Charles took another hot bath. Gradually unclenching his muscles, the water worked on his mind, too. Looking up and over the lavatory, he saw the sky in its last dark blue light after the first star has appeared but not the rest.

He knew he’d only been deadening his mind, keeping it away paying penance, too — all at the same time — for some vague desire.