Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  “Isn’t it all right if I think you’re good?” She puts her hand on his shoulder and steers him toward the car. Joe is standing behind it, grinning, his forearms resting on the roof.

  “Hey, lady, can I bum a ride?”

  The sight of him—his limbs slung so casually from his torso—can both lift and sadden her still. She waves. No one can say they aren’t friends. If she can’t give him love, she can at least give him friendship. She has to, for Joe is her only friend.

  “You came with a whole platoon—they couldn’t fit you back in?”

  “Nobody’s going back to the shop. My truck’s still there.”

  She turns to Ben. “What do you think?”

  Ben rubs his nose, pretending to decide. “The man’s desperate, Mom.”

  “Okay.” Faith opens the door. “Get in.”

  “I owe you one, buddy,” Joe tells Ben, and they climb in, Joe in front and Ben in back.

  “Can you drop me off at the house first, Mom?” Ben asks. “I need a shower something wicked.”

  Joe glances into the back seat, but speaks to Faith: “Remember when we had to pay him to take a bath?”

  “Just barely,” Faith says, but she remembers it all. She remembers the instant of his birth, and Chris’s. They came to her docile, ignorant, their crimped little faces expecting nothing, and she was the first one to love them. Her love couldn’t be compared with anything else, for it was the only thing they knew. Loving Joe was different—so many people had already loved him first.

  As she pulls up to the house, she spots Chris’s bare stomach and blue-jeaned legs sticking out from under the hapless Corvair. The huge, corrugated soles of his sneakers twist impatiently. His girlfriend, Tracy, sits on the edge of the lawn with Sammy. They both look bored. All around them, on the grass and street, lies an assortment of grimy tools. The Corvair’s hood and engine cover are flapped open like the wings of some extinct bird.

  “Not again,” Faith says.

  Ben is already out, on his stomach, peering at his brother, his own cleated shoes twisting in empathy.

  “I thought that thing was all fixed,” Faith says. “You said it was mint.”

  Joe looks amused. “This is a rite of passage, Faith,” he says. “A boy’s first car is supposed to break down.”

  She smiles. “Is that right.”

  “How else do you get to take off your shirt and show your girlfriend what you know about cars?” The light of sudden memory seems to lift up his face, peeling years away. She feels as if she’s caught him at something.

  “Huh,” Joe says, and flicks it all away in a blink. “I loved that car.”

  He gets out and heads over to the boys. They slide from under the belly of the car to confer with their father, then all three of them assemble at the Corvair’s back end, the exposed engine their sole focus. Watching them, Faith wonders about men and cars, one of the many relationships in life that she does not understand.

  Her own car looks suddenly ridiculous: reliable, undistinctive, stodgy. Compared to Chris’s Corvair it isn’t zany or crooked or impractical, there is nothing noteworthy about it in any way. A word comes to her, a word she types dozens of times a week at Dr. Howe’s: unremarkable. At first she thought it a blunt, indelicate way to describe a person’s hematocrit or glucose level or general physical state; she translated it to mean Don’t worry, you’re fine. But lately the word depresses her, as if in typing it she is somehow passing judgment on a stranger’s chances for happiness.

  Faith gets out of the car slowly, watching her sons and their father deliberate over an antique that is younger than she is. They are all talking at once, leaning over the engine. The tops of their heads—Chris’s blonde flanked by the dark of his father and brother—shine up at her like shells. She waits a moment, listening, basking in the sound of them, the shimmer of their hair as they move their heads, the way their shoulders bump together over the engine’s dark hold.

  Sammy trots over to escort Faith into the house. “Hello, Tracy,” she says as she passes over the lawn.

  “Hi, Mrs. Fuller.” Tracy’s brown hair is sporting some yellow strips, and she’s had it cut short. She looks older, vaguely dangerous.

  “Car trouble?” Faith says, just to make conversation.

  “What else?” Tracy grimaces in a knowing way that gives Faith pause. The look is full of a smoldering knowledge: men, life, the future. Faith herself has never, as far as she can remember, looked like this. Tracy sits patiently, waiting for Chris to finish up, all the while exuding the unmistakable impression that it is she who is in complete control.

  Joe and the boys stare at the car as if they expect it to move on its own. They stand in a semicircle, their hands stalled in their back pockets.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Faith asks.

  Chris turns around, his gaze falling on Tracy. “Fuel pump. At least Dad thinks so,” he says, then wipes his grease-blackened palms across his sweaty chest. The gesture is shockingly sexual, a rite of passage in itself.

  “Me too,” Ben says. “I think it’s the fuel pump.”

  She hears a snort from Tracy. “It’s the only major organ they haven’t already replaced.”

  Faith looks at her watch. “How much longer?”

  “Twenty minutes, tops,” Joe says.

  That means an hour, an hour and a half. Faith knows at least that much about men and cars.

  “Are you staying for dinner?”

  Joe nods. “Sure.”

  It is after eleven when Faith finally drops Joe off at the shop to retrieve his truck. Her bland gray wagon crackles over the gravel. She turns the ignition off.

  “Got a minute?” she says.

  “Two, even.”

  Outside the night is still. Though the shop is only a few miles outside the city, it is on a heavily treed, rural road. She fancies she hears an owl.

  “What is it?” he asks. “Cold feet about going to New York?”

  She reaches into her pocket for the red-wrapped condom. She hands it to him—its lurid message face up—as if it weighed a hundred pounds.

  “I found this in Chris’s jeans.”

  “Huh,” he says.

  “I suppose this means he’s having sex.”

  Joe pushes his hair off his forehead. “Safe sex, at least. I suppose we should be glad the kid has a brain.”

  “A kid, Joe. Sixteen, God.”

  “Seventeen in a month. He’ll be a senior next fall.”

  “So?”

  Joe shifts in the seat, facing her squarely. “I just don’t want to turn this into a crisis.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” He doesn’t sound convinced. She waits, expecting something more.

  “Will you talk to him?” she says.

  “Faith, I’ve talked to him.” He looks surprisingly helpless.

  “You have?”

  “Of course. Ben, too.”

  She pushes some air through her lips and taps her fingers on the steering wheel, imagining the three of them together, the big talk.

  She shakes her head. “I don’t even like her,” she says. “She’s such a little know-it-all.”

  Joe is grinning slightly, the way he does when he wants her to say something, his eyes bright on her.

  “You and your normal,” she says, struggling to smile. “You and your rites of passage.” She grips the steering wheel, pleading. “Joe, I’m losing him.”

  He slides over on the seat. “We’re both losing him. Faith,” he says, picking up her hand. “I think that’s the way it’s supposed to go.”

  She relaxes, leaning back. He smells like supper, her house, her yard. “Oh, Joe,” she says. “That car. One of these days he’s going to drive off into the sunset and we’ll never see him again.”

  Joe squeezes her fingers, then lets her hand go. “He won’t get far in that thing. Trust me.”

  Now she does smile. It astonishes her sometimes how much she still feels married. It’s Jo
e who will leave someday, she realizes now; Joe who, in the absence of his sons from her house, will fade from her life.

  In the glow of the shop’s night lights, the dark looks purple. After a long silence she checks her watch, by now nothing but a gray shape on her wrist.

  “I should go,” Joe says. “It’s late.” He gets out of the car, then knocks on the window. Faith leans across the seat and rolls it down. He sticks his head in, his teeth showing through the dark. “Don’t worry, Faith,” he says. “We’ve got two good kids. We’re doing fine.”

  She watches him get into his truck and rev it. As he pulls out of the parking lot, he sends her a friendly blast of the horn, and she listens, hard, until the sound of his engine disappears into the silence of the road.

  THREE

  Connie keeps the two letters from Isadora James in a dark pocket of her purse, hidden, as if they were parts of a treasure map. She carries them back and forth across the Atlantic as she goes on with her work, waiting for summer and the trip to New York, trying not to hope too hard. She reminds herself that Faith is probably right—Isadora James is writing a book, or crazy. Still, what would it hurt to meet a person like that?

  Paris has been cold all spring, the flowers late, the sky low and solemn. Connie hardly notices. She’s turned herself into a tourist, turned Paris into more than a place to sleep at the end of a long working flight. She visits the hushed cavern of Notre Dame cathedral, walks the Champs Elysées, roams through le Louvre committing names of paintings to memory. All this she does with an imaginary presence at her side; she’s rehearsing for the day Isadora James asks to see this magnificent city. Connie has even thought of engaging a little apartment here, some high-ceilinged refuge with an ancient concierge guarding the door. She hopes Isadora will turn out to be the type to come to Paris by herself, to borrow Connie’s keys and seek harbor in her big sister’s rooms.

  After one of these sightseeing excursions, Connie returns to her hotel—Le Perreault, the same one she’s been staying in for years—with the frail hope of finding Stewart, who sometimes works the Paris run for Pan Am. Her eyes smart, and her feet hurt from too much walking. She peers into a mirror in the lobby; her hair needs another touch-up. She thinks of the crew she came over with, her crew—beautiful boys and girls with hair the color of copper, mahogany, dandelions, ink. Invariably cheerful, chatty, perfectly turned out, no matter how many sleepless nights. She calls them the New Guard. They are young. She is thirty-six and old.

  She enters the lobby, looking around halfheartedly. It’s been a month since she’s seen Stewart, longer than usual—his work schedule is less routine than hers. She hears him before she sees him—a voice sputtering out of the lobby bar, emphatic cadences that make words sound like vows. She brightens, feeling lucky. Since Faith said yes, Connie’s life has turned.

  She finds him just inside the bar’s arched doorway, talking to Frank and Debbie, two other Old Guards from Pan Am. His back is to her, but she can see he is trying to convince them of something. His shoulders move with his voice, his short hair quivers as he nods his head. Connie laughs out loud: Stewart has never been one to conserve energy, especially in the throes of an argument.

  Frank sees her first. “Hey, Connie!”

  Stewart whirls around. “Connie! Christ, I thought you were dead!” He picks her up and squeezes her, then lets her down with a thunk.

  She pats his cheeks, frowning into his face. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be on this run?”

  “If you called once in a while, you’d know these things.”

  “You’re never home,” she says. “And I’m boycotting that ridiculous message on your machine.”

  Debbie groans appreciatively. “I hate singing machines.”

  Stewart looks perplexed. “It’s pure kitsch. Old-fashioned glad tidings. You’re supposed to love it.”

  “Sorry.” Connie hooks her arm through his. “I won’t hang up next time.”

  “You could take a lesson, Connie,” he says. “Your machine sounds like a funeral home.”

  She laughs. Stewart is her best friend. They trained together and then flew together for years until he left AtlanticAir for Pan Am. Whenever she stays with him in his Boston apartment, they chat long into the night like girlfriends. He’s the only man she knows who would never leave her.

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  “It’s under discussion,” Stewart says. He grins. “I’m not getting my way.”

  Frank runs a brown hand over his tight curls. “He wants to eat at that place he likes on St. Germain.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt either one of you to take a walk on the wild side,” Stewart says. He turns to Connie. “Where’s your crew?”

  “Loose in the city. They asked me along, but the invite wasn’t exactly fervent. I felt like their den mother.”

  Stewart caresses her arm, as if to soothe her feelings. “Kids today. Where are their manners?”

  “Listen,” Frank says. “We’re going to Lucienne. You coming or not?”

  Connie glances at Stewart. “Nah,” she says, smiling. “I’ll take the walk on the wild side.”

  She watches Frank and Debbie cross the lobby. Debbie’s hair is dark at the roots. Connie lifts her hand to her own hair.

  “You look fine,” Stewart says. He always knows what she’s thinking.

  Connie twines a few strands around her fingers, then lets go. “What if we stay in, Stewart? A bottle of wine, room service, me. What could be better? Besides, I’ve got things to tell you.”

  “Two bottles and you’ve got a deal,” he says, steering her toward the elevators. The doors open. “Allons-y.”

  By the time they reach the bottom half of the second bottle of wine, the subject of Isadora James has been well worn and Connie is dressed for bed. Stewart lazes on the carpet, leaning on one elbow with his cheek pressed into his eye. He looks tipsy and bored.

  “Look, you want to go out after all?” Connie asks.

  Stewart shifts elbows, leaving a red scar on the other side of his face. “I’m not sure I can stand up.”

  Connie slips out of her chair and sits next to him. She pours the last of the wine and hands him a glass. He lifts it to her.

  “Here’s to finding it,” he says.

  “Finding what?”

  “Damned if I know. Whatever it is we’re looking for.”

  They drink. Connie sets down her glass and draws her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. She feels warm and safe, a little fuzzy.

  “So,” Stewart says. “Tell me some more about Isadora James.”

  “I told you everything. Two teensy letters, that’s it.”

  “Think of something. This is the only interesting thing that’s happened to me in weeks.” His hair, normally blown back in soft waves, is sticking up in cowlicks.

  Connie gets up and finds her purse, from which she plucks the two letters. She tosses them to Stewart. “That’s the sum total.”

  “Why didn’t you show me these two hours ago?”

  Connie shrugs. She was guarding them. From what? Stewart reads the first letter meticulously, holding it close to his face. “She writes like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.” He reads the second one, frowning. “She doesn’t sound anything like you.”

  “Why would she?” Connie says. “She doesn’t even know me. I could have grown up on Mars for all we have in common.”

  “I’m just saying she doesn’t sound like you. If she was really your sister I’d expect something to kick in, you know? Even in a letter. Haven’t you ever read those studies about twins separated at birth? They both smoke Salems, own dogs named Fluffy, and work at meatpacking plants.”

  Stewart infuriates her sometimes, assuming her life is his business. At the same time his audacity links them—as does hers, for she has never been stingy with opinions about his life, either. She wonders if this is like being married.

  “We’re not twins, Stewart.”

  “Still.” He tosses th
e letters on the carpet. They flap briefly, like moths. “I’d want something a little more convincing.”

  “Thank you, Stewart,” she says. “Thank you for that bucket of water.”

  “Sorry.” He takes a long draught of the wine. “I envy you, actually. I wish I had a sister to meet. I wouldn’t mind trading my whole family.” He stops, squinting into the air. “What if she doesn’t look anything like you? What if she’s black, or Chinese?”

  Connie knows exactly what he’s doing. Her friendship with Stewart is like a game of tetherball, one of them playing the pole, the other spinning wildly around, until it’s time to switch places. They pronounce judgments and make predictions about each other’s love affairs, providing wine and solace at the end. After the initial diversion that a new man brings to her life, Connie sometimes looks forward to the breakup, knowing Stewart will be waiting on the other side, ready to talk all night about what went wrong.

  But Isadora James is not a lover, and the possibility this time is something else altogether, having to do with flesh and blood, permanence, even healing.

  “Can we talk about something else, please?”

  Stewart sinks back on his elbows. “Fine. Let’s talk about my thrilling life.”

  “All right. How’s Craig?”

  “Old news.”

  “That was short-lived.”

  He grimaces. “Story of my life.”

  He’s trying to be his old playful self, but his spirits are low, gathered into his forehead, his held jaw. Connie understands, but she doesn’t want to be part of it tonight. She wants to be happy.

  She waits a while. “I met someone.”

  His head swivels toward her, a darting, chickenlike turn. “Is it serious?”

  “I’ve seen him a few times. He lives right here in the city. Not far from here, in fact.”

  Stewart raises his eyebrows. “Oh ho, a Parisien. How’s his English?”

  “Good enough.” She laughs. The last Parisien she dated, a commuter pilot named Luc, could barely say hello. Connie’s command of French is all business: What would you like to drink? May I see your boarding pass? She can ask directions and order food, but can’t discuss a movie or tell a man why she likes him. Stewart accused Connie, quite rightly, of having chosen Luc for his poor English. It is Stewart’s theory that Connie prefers men with some kind of built-in obsolescence. Before Luc she dated a man who was two months from moving to New Zealand.