by Alan Russell
I ordered my Scotch neat, and Norman did his oenological act and asked for some unpronounceable vintage. When the waitress had gone, Norman turned his glasses on me. “You asked for your Scotch neat,” he said.
“I always ask for my Scotch neat.”
“I know.”
“Is that a crime?”
“No. An indicative pattern.”
“And what pattern is that?”
“Everything is neat or clean to you. Compulsively so.”
“You want to hear my theory?”
“You know I want to hear it.”
“I think that virtually everyone who enters the field of mental health is missing a screw or two. They know they’re not right in the head, and knowing they have their own quirks and illnesses makes them interested in others with the same.”
Norman didn’t look very impressed. “That’s not an original theory, Stuart. And it’s not the theory you promised to talk about.”
Our drinks arrived, and I gratefully turned from Norman to my glass. When I looked up, I saw four eyes staring at me: Norman’s two and his glasses. I sighed.
“A man wants an unadulterated drink, no rocks, no water. He asks for it neat. That is how it’s done, Norman.”
“You’re evading,” he said.
The Scotch made the telling a little easier. “I have observed in this world that there are three types of people. There are the cleaners, and there are those who make a mess, and then there are those who are weathervanes.”
“Weathervanes?”
“Spinning in whatever direction the wind blows. Weathervanes constitute the bulk of our race. They wait for circumstance to change them. They never change circumstance. They never even think of changing it. They’ll march for peace. They’ll also be part of a lynch mob.”
“It sounds like you have disdain for the average man.”
“No. An understanding.”
“And you—you’re a cleaner?”
“It’s just a way of thinking, Norman.”
“You’re being evasive again. I think for you it’s more than a theory. It’s almost a discipline—a religion, like cleanliness is next to godliness.”
I sipped my Scotch and pretended interest in an old San Francisco Seals photograph. Norman wanted to play a different game of hardball.
“Am I wrong in thinking this is a way of life for you?”
“If you mean, do I get up every morning and say, ‘Oh, boy, today I can go clean something,’ then yes, you’re wrong.”
“You know that’s not what I mean. If you think of yourself as a cleaner, you’ve given yourself a role. That being the case, you have chosen a way of life.”
“Psycho-babble.”
“Does being a cleaner make life easier?”
“No,” I said, and the answer was too fervent, and too quick, and too telling. I would have bitten my lip but that would have given me away even more. Norman was a good shrink, but not good enough to hide the smile on his face. He had his answer.
“I’m paying for the drinks, Norman,” I said. “Not for analysis.”
We stopped talking for a minute, which meant I drank my Scotch too quickly and ordered another. But we had been friends and sparring partners too long to stay quiet.
“How’d that case go this morning?” asked Norman. “Did you get your man?”
I nodded, but spared him the details. Mrs. August Sinclair had hired me to do an assets check on her husband Gus. She wanted a divorce, and she wanted money. Gus had claimed a desire for the former, and a lack of the latter. My investigation had proved that Mrs. Sinclair would ultimately be a very rich divorcee, but Gus disappeared before my client was granted all her wishes, vanished even before being served with divorce papers. Gus apparently wanted to delay the inevitable as long as he could. Maybe he thought that given a little extra time he could better hide his assets. More likely, he wanted to drive his wife batty. Marital bliss turned to martial arts.
It had taken me the better part of a week to find Gus. When we finally met face to face, he thought I was a potential investor in one of his enterprises. A smart server doesn’t wait. A smart server doesn’t gloat, I knew that, but I also knew I shouldn’t drink, or eat red meat, or hang around with women who regularly use their middle name. I smirked while I served him with the papers, and then he tried to serve me with his fist—it had almost served me right.
“What about Dr. Cohen’s caseload?” I asked. “Working on any cover material for Psychology Today?”
“Not exactly,” said Norman, “But there is this new patient who comes in with his dog. He talks more to him than he does to me. He says he understands all animals, and is fluent in their tongues. I’ve heard him talk to his dog. Barks and growls and snarls.”
“Is he functional?”
“He’s a urologist.”
I thought I hid my smile behind my glass but Norman saw it.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was just wondering how he’d approach me for my specimen. I can just hear him say, ‘Could you please go into that little room and lift your leg?’ ”
Norman stifled a laugh. “I shouldn’t tell you about my patients,” he said, “It’s not only the ethics, it’s how you make me look at things. I can just see how you’d handle this case. You wouldn’t ask him how he felt, you’d go and feel his nose.”
“Only if his bark was worse than his bite.”
Norman raised his hands. “Don’t say anything else, Stuart. It’s not fair.”
“And I would think it only prudent to spread newspapers all over your office carpeting.”
Norman was pinching himself, but it wasn’t working. His sides were starting to shake.
“I wouldn’t tempt his olfactory senses, either. Better keep your backside turned.”
“I’m probably going to have to refer him to someone else now,” said Norman. “You have a habit of leaving images in my mind.”
I refrained from saying that was a doggone shame. We talked about little things for a few minutes. Dr. Norman Cohen was a friend of almost ten years, one of the few who had survived my rise and fall. We looked at our watches at about the same time.
“Back to the dog-eat-dog world,” I said.
We walked to the door and said our good-byes outside. There was a cab dropping off a couple at the Hotel Stewart, and Norman went to commandeer it. He had his office in a high-rise building on Van Ness, clustered with other well-heeled professionals. You didn’t necessarily have to be crazy to see Norman, just rich.
I walked over to Union Square and sat down on one of the usually crowded park benches. The cold spell had scared off the fair-weather crowd. The Square was quiet save for the rock doves, better known as pigeons, or flying rats. As a card-carrying Audubon sort, usually anything in feathers grabs my attention, but my devotions are drawn at pigeons. A dozen of the feathered panhandlers approached me, and then a dozen more, but they gave up when I didn’t make any offerings. They hadn’t looked very hopeful anyway, had acted out the charade like old hookers who know their propositions aren’t going to be accepted. You can’t teach an old hooker new tricks. Or get her to turn them either. Nearby, two bums shared a bottle cloaked in a bag. Pigeons haven’t yet developed that kind of thirst. Give them time.
Pro-Union demonstrations had been held in Union Square before the Civil War, and had earned the park its name. The years hadn’t quieted the speech-makers or the causes, and Union Square never lacked either. But it didn’t look like the revolution was going to start on this Monday; it was called off on account of the weather.
A woman joined me on my bench and I surveyed her in a glance: Forty, well off, probably resting before taking a little cable car, as Tony Bennett crooned, “halfway to the stars.” Her bags bespoke the offerings of Nordy’s and Needless-Markups, a red flag for more than pigeons. Two spare-change hustlers approached her and started their pitch.
“Beat it,” I said before she reached for her purse.
They loo
ked at me, and made two decisions, one wrong and the other right: that I was with her, even if I wasn’t sitting next to her, and that they should heed my advice and beat it.
The woman was also making her appraisal of me. Her eyes appeared nicely made up even when they glowered. The wind blew her scent at me, and I sniffed appreciatively.
“Why did you do that?”
“I’ve seen those two before. The one with the greasy hair and stubble is trouble. He likes to roll winos. Maybe spare change would have been enough today. Maybe you could have bought their good will with a dollar. But your full purse would have tempted them, and they might have snatched it.”
She looked at me, suspiciously pulled her purse to her chest, then stood up to leave. “Thank you,” she said uncertainly.
3
I RENTED A SEDAN with unlimited mileage, a full-size model with a big engine. My pickup needed some engine work, enough to put me in the rental market. Everyone says it doesn’t make sense to have a car in San Francisco, and just about everyone still puts his car in long-term parking that’s about as expensive as monthly payments on a Beemer. My rental had plenty of interior room, more than I was used to. I stretched out and enjoyed the ride, despite the traffic tie-up on the way to the Bay Bridge.
I like Oakland even if no one else in San Francisco does. Gertrude Stein’s putdown of Oakland is forever on the lips of San Franciscans: “There is no there there.” But Oakland does have some parking spaces. I found one directly in front of Ellen Reardon’s house.
Hers was a nice cottage surrounded by too many apartment buildings, but with a crack of a view out to Lake Merritt. A little garden lined the path, with a few annuals, a few perennials, and two jacaranda trees that showed their lavender hairdos proudly. I could hear the geese honk in the direction of the lake as I pressed the doorbell. There was no sound except the geese, so I pressed again and once more heard silence. I had raised my fist and started a tattoo when the door opened, and I’m not sure which looked more stupid, my hanging hand or my expression.
Inside the cottage a lamp blinked on and off. A pixieish young woman with long, brown hair, an upturned nose, and a smile about as big as her frame stood at the door.
“Impatient, are we?” she said.
“No, just stupid,” I answered, and she laughed at that, and laughed a little more when I used my hanging hand to knock at my head. Only I could hear the hollow. Ellen Reardon was deaf.
“Mr. Winter?”
“Yes.”
“Please come in.”
I slowly followed her inside, stopping to admire the needlework that lined the walls. There were colorful embroidery and needlepoint projects. In the living room a quilt was in its final stages, all bright colors and blending patterns. I knew that quilts like this rarely warmed bodies. They were hung in expensive homes and called art. I touched it, glad to find that Ellen had put enough batting in it to still make it functional.
“Very nicely done,” I said.
“Mr. Winter, I’ll need you to face me in order to understand what you’re saying.”
I’m not much for blushing, but I think I came close. “Sorry,” I said. The word came out much too loudly. I modulated my speech but was sure I overmouthed my words enough to make me look like someone suffering denture fallout. “I was saying I liked it.”
“Thank you.” Ellen raised her long and full hair and briefly exposed her ears and two small hearing aids. It was supposed to be informative, but I couldn’t help finding it sexy. “I am not severely deaf,” she said, “but I can’t pick up very much. Mostly I lip read. I am very good at that. I can understand about sixty percent of your words that way.”
“Which is probably sixty percent more than you’d want,” I said. If she understood the joke, she didn’t laugh.
“Mrs. Walters said you were investigating Anita’s disappearance,” said Ellen, doing my job.
“Yes. Mrs. Walters said you probably know Anita better than anyone. I need your knowledge.”
“What, in particular?”
“Everything and anything. She told me you lived with Anita for part of the time at the Greenmont School.”
It was a boarding school for the hearing disabled.
“You would have observed her,” I said, “and heard her stories, and learned her secrets. Best friends know things.”
“Yes,” said Ellen, “best friends do.”
There was a lot of coolness in her statement.
“Weren’t you two best friends?”
“At one time.”
“And what happened to change that?”
“We fought.”
“Over what?”
“Things. We had a big fight when I was a senior and Anita was a junior. I haven’t talked to her since.”
“What did you fight about?”
Ellen sighed at a memory she apparently would have preferred not dredging up. But she talked to me and my notepad anyway.
“We fought over my boyfriend, or what was once my boyfriend. Anita decided we should share him without asking me. It wasn’t something I was happy to find out about.”
I made tsk, tsk sounds, and then realized a lip reader wouldn’t pick them up. “Bad surprise.”
“Bad, yes, but not really a surprise.”
“No?”
“You know what Anita looks like.”
“Only by picture,” I said. “You’re supposed to tell me more than a glossy.”
Ellen didn’t look thrilled by the prospect. “Am I supposed to do that with, or without, my talons?”
I made a retracting motion.
“Anita likes to be the center of attention,” she said. “She’s not happy unless she’s turning heads. Usually she doesn’t have to work at it.”
“Did she have boyfriends?”
“Our room was like a florist’s shop.”
“Any steady?”
“No. She’s always kept her distance. She likes going out, but I don’t think she likes intimacy. I tried to talk to her about sex a few times, but she changed the subject.”
I liked talking with Ellen. She didn’t mince words, and she was an attentive listener. I also found myself beguiled by her speech. It was almost as if she talked with a foreign accent. Some of her words weren’t distinct, and some were mispronounced or accented the wrong way. It was as if English wasn’t her native tongue, and in reality, it wasn’t. That she could respond almost immediately to my questions made her accomplishment all the more amazing. She told me, with not a little pride, that she had graduated at the top of her class at Greenmont, and that she had been determined to join the mainstream of the hearing world. But like someone going from one culture to another, she retained telltale habits. Her native tongue was sign language, something she unconsciously adopted many times in her speech. Her hands were expressive, a digital ballet for my eyes.
“Do you know whether she continued seeing your boyfriend?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“She’s never stayed long with any boy. Or man. Darren was a few years older than either of us.”
“Mrs. Walters described Anita as being spirited.”
“She is.”
“Is it possible she took off somewhere without telling anyone?”
Ellen thought about the question for a minute. “Maybe,” she said. “I really don’t know.”
“Tell me something else about her.”
“She’s a perfectionist, and she’s stubborn.”
“How so?”
“She won’t talk. She refuses to.”
“Why?”
“Deaf people know our speech doesn’t sound exactly like the speech of the hearing world. Everything about our talking is an acquired skill. There’s a lot to our learning how to speak, and there’s a lot of frustration. Anita told me she hated all the lessons. I think she eventually rebelled against them in her own way.”
“What kind of lessons? And what was her own way?”
&n
bsp; “You’d have to be deaf to understand,” said Ellen, dismissing my question.
“That’s like being told you have to be a certain color to understand racial problems.”
“And maybe that’s true. Have you ever participated in a hearing-disabled awareness session?”
“No.”
“You ought to. The school offers them to parents of deaf children. They get an earful, or lack of it.”
“How about giving me a primer?”
“How about giving up your ears? It’s a different world, and you’d have to be born again without any knowledge of sounds to really hear what I’m saying. Tell me what you know about deaf people.”
“They don’t hear,” I said. “And they read lips.”
Ellen shook her head. “A lot of deaf people don’t read lips,” she said. “Because they don’t hear what sound lips make, many can’t read lips as well as the hearing. We have to deal with stereotypes like that all the time.”
“Forgive my ignorance then,” I said. “Give me some lessons on being deaf.”
Against her better judgment Ellen smiled. “You accept our talking as something natural,” she said, “but I see it as an accomplishment. I’m lucky—I can hear some sounds—but the lessons were still hard for me. At Greenmont they believe in teaching students total communication. That means they try to develop language competence in all ways. Imagine being able to see words but not hear them. I sat through countless hours of fish exercises, instructors opening and closing their mouths, and me doing the same.”
She reached for my throat and rested her hand on my larynx. I swallowed involuntarily. “Talk to me,” she said.
“Your hand feels nice,” I said. “Your fingers are strong. Must be your work.”
