The Language of Men

by Anthony D'Aries

  "Bye-bye," she said. "Enjoy the fruit!" I heard her clack down the hall.

  "Well," my mother said. "That was nice of her." She looked at me, then at Don.

  My father picked up the fruit basket, peeling off a sticker that read Edible Arrangements. He slid out a slice of honeydew melon. "Gimme a little volume on this, Don."

  The nurse came in to tell us visiting hours were over. We thanked her.

  "Shit," my father said. "Hey, I'll walk you guys out. My ass is getting flat." He hopped off the bed and untangled his wires. I let him go ahead of me. He held the IV stand like a pitch fork. His gown was too big for him, and as he stepped, I glimpsed the pale skin of his ass.

  In the hallway, our sneakers screeched; my father's bare, callused feet shuffled over the floor as if his soles were made of sandpaper. I put my arm on his shoulder, felt his bones move beneath the gown. When we reached the elevators, we hugged and said goodbye. My mother wanted to stay over, so she kissed us and gave us money for a pizza. As we waited for the elevator, we watched my mother and my father walk down the white hallway, the bottom of my father's gown dragging behind him, the shoulder pads of my mother's blazer shifting with each step. Several elevators arrived and a succession of chimes echoed down the hall. My mother leaned close to my father's ear and whispered. He nodded. A doctor waited for them at the end of the hall holding a clipboard against his chest. He smiled, and guided them back to my father's dimly-lit room.

  The cold wind screamed in my ear. I felt like I had just woken up from a long, unexpected nap. Yellow street lamps spotlighted the near-empty parking lot. Don and I walked to the car in silence. I lifted the handle of the locked passenger door, triggering the interior light.

  "Hang on," Don said.

  He unlocked it and we both got in. We sat there, the pressure of the quiet car swirling in our ears. I tried to coax a yawn, but nothing worked. The pressure would not go away.

  "You think he'll be okay?" Don asked.

  "Yeah I think so. The speech thing was a little noticeable but they said it should go away."

  "It was totally noticeable. I told Mom. I told her months ago Dad wasn't looking so good, that he should get checked out."

  "You were right."

  "I know I was right. Fucking lucky he's not a vegetable. How many chances does he think he's got?"

  He lit a Camel Ultra Light and rolled down the window. I lit one, too. The cold air pushed the smoke in, then quickly sucked it out.

  "What was up with that woman?" I asked.

  "What? What about her?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Seemed kinda weird."

  Don exhaled. "Whatever. Dad's a flirty dude, you know that."

  We stopped at Taco Bell and ate it when we got home, while we watched the rest of King Kong.

  *

  Months went by, the snow melted, the sun shone longer. My father came home from the hospital, took his pill, laid off the smokes. His tongue began to thaw and his warm, throaty voice returned.

  I wrote to Vanessa and told her what had happened. There was an unspoken competition between us to see who could write the longest e-mail. We saved all of them and while many of our lines were sentimental pillow talk, there were dozens and dozens of questions. Sometimes we made lists of questions that covered all kinds of topics, from favorite foods and colors to whether or not she'd still date me if I always wore pants filled with cottage cheese. We asked each other when we had lost our virginity, how many people we'd slept with, what our fantasies were—all the things we would have avoided in our first month of dating. Perhaps longer.

  She wrote about her father—his drinking, his temper, his death. She wrote about the winter night he locked her and her mother out of the house. They stood in the street, watching his shadow move from room to room. She told me she remembered things that her sister didn't, and how odd it felt to hear conflicting stories about the same man. But what bothered her most was that their last conversation was a fight, and she'd hung up the phone without telling him she loved him.

  She was glad my father was doing okay, but more importantly, that I didn't wait too long to see him.

  *

  In July, my father and I fished off the coast of Montauk on Bobby Haggemeyer's boat, one of the lucky vessels to survive Hurricane Gloria. My father told Bobby he should change the name of his boat from "Reelin' in the Years," a Steely Dan song, to Van Morrison's "Gloria."

  "He even spells it out for you, Hag," my father said, popping a piece of gum into his mouth.

  "Smart guy, right. That's not his, though. Who did it?"

  "Shit, a lot of people covered that tune. The Doors did. Animals?"

  "Nope," Bobby said, patting his pockets for a cigarette.

  "Wait. Hold the phone, Hag. It is Van Morrison."

  Bobby clenched the brown filter between his teeth, eyes widening.

  "Fuckin' kiddin' me, right?"

  "I'm tellin' ya. Wasn't a solo thing. It was when he was with Them. Think it was a B-side."

  Bobby sparked his lighter several times, but couldn't get a flame. They often went back and forth over who did what, what song was a cover, what was original. Bobby started to talk around his unlit cigarette, then got impatient and ripped it from his mouth.

  "Fuck it. Either way, I ain't changin' the name."

  My father grinned.

  A red sun pulsated above us. My father peeled off his tank top and let the rays bake him back to his true tone. He kicked his feet up on the edge of the boat and leaned against the cabin. The waves rocked the boat hard but he leaned further, the butt of his pole pressed against his thigh. Bobby passed him a Winston and offered him his lighter. My father took the cigarette, shaking his head, and dug deep into his pocket. He turned toward the sky, smoke swirling around his face, eyes hidden behind black sunglasses.

  A fluke jarred the rod in my hands and I hooked him, the sudden weight pulling, dragging me toward the water.

  IV.

  THE MOVING WALL

  My old man used to race pigeons. Him and his buddies. Kept a li'l coop on the side of our house. The old man would load those nasty squawkin' things into crates and take 'em out east and let 'em go. They'd bet on which pigeon would make it home first. I don't know how the hell those things knew where our house was. But wherever the old man let 'em go, they'd find their way back.

  First thing I ever worked on was a pigeon. My brother and I stole one of the old man's birds, stuffed it in a paper bag, and held it over the tail pipe of my Roadrunner. Birds are tough to mount. Gotta get 'em dead in the best shape you can. The old man didn't care cuz here and there a bird would get loose on its own and fly away. He didn't exactly keep a close count.

  The old man's timing was always off. I don't think things worked out the way he planned. After the airport closed, he was bouncin' around for a while doin' this or that. Had a bait shop for a little bit, then he got into aluminum siding. I worked with him the summer I got back from Vietnam. Puttin' up sheetrock, paintin', stuff like that. I think he had a chance to buy into some contracting business, but he never did. Then he was out of work for a long time and started drinkin'.

  He loved the farm, though. That was the best gig in the world for him and my mother. But somethin' stupid happened with the owner and the old man got pissed off and that was that. Like I say, things just didn't work out for him.

  He wasn't much older than I am now. I don't know, after my stroke, who knows. I never thought I was in it for the long haul anyway.

  25

  THREE P.M. MY TIME. The time I've been thinking about since breakfast, since yesterday, since the last time. I can smell Vanessa's shampoo, the steam from her shower lingers in the hallway, but she's gone and I'm glad. I want to be alone. I need to be alone.

  I lock our front door and attach the chain. I walk into our bedroom, shut the door. Our cat tries to scratch her way in, but if I ignore her long enough, she'll stop. I pull the blinds, draw the curtains. My finger finds the Power button in the dark.
Windows loads on screen, and the room hums in blue light. The wait gives me time to think, to consider doing something else for two hours. But that goes away. Like the cat.

  I hear voices in the apartment above me. Footsteps. Someone in the parking lot slams a door. I check the drapes, the blinds, turn the volume down a little lower. I wear my gym shorts because that's where I'm supposed to be, plus they're easier to pull on and off in case Vanessa forgot her apron. But that's why the door is chained and our bedroom door is shut. Buys me time.

  Because there is never enough. I start clicking through image after image and minutes become seconds, hours become minutes. Everything is suspended—I am not in our room or out of our room. I am not here or there; I'm somewhere else and that's exactly where I want to be. But time knows—tethers me to now, and no matter how quickly I click from image to image, video to video—no matter how short or long I stare at the women on screen—the tiny digits in the corner of my screen tick away.

  A woman speaks with her mouth full. A man's skin burns Viagra-red, so much blood forced to the surface. Some men struggle, clamp themselves at the base, force the blood to flow. The woman asks for more, begs for more. She isn't satisfied. The man pushes harder, faster, grows redder and the woman's expression flicks from pleasure to pain to confusion to some mixture of the three. She says she wants everything the man has, but when he gives it to her, she seems disappointed. I click away.

  I sink my fingers into a jar of Vanessa's body cream. The scent does not remind me of her, but of myself, of my own scent, my own routine. I'll smell it on her later that day or week and will not be drawn to her, but to myself. When she is in the kitchen, making us dinner, I am in the bedroom. I have another purpose. My grip on here, on now, slips.

  I'll click away if I hear the hallway floor creak beneath her feet. I'll pull my hand from my waist and add a sentence to my cover letter. I'll clear our computer's history. But she knows. And she knows that I know. So when I'm done, we'll sit in the living room and I'll try to think of questions to ask her, but I'm empty.

  *

  Vanessa and I were twenty-two and had been living together for six months. I was attempting to mesh my high school and college habits with our new life, and I was failing. Each time we fought, I talked about other couples, other friends who probably watched just as much porn as I did. They didn't have anyone nagging at them. They didn't have all these stupid hang-ups. Why do we?

  I cut her off. I got defensive, angry, but couldn't say why. Perhaps part of me was frustrated because I didn't have a solid reason for why I watched so much porn. I said other guys did, too, but I had no real proof. And if I thought it was normal, natural—why did I feel guilty? Why did I have to hide in a dark room, behind locked doors?

  I talked to my brother and my guy friends. I knew they'd understand, and they did. They said Vanessa just needs to chill out and lay off me. All guys do it, they said. It's not a big deal. I didn't tell them that I watched at least an hour a day, that I was pretending to look for work while Vanessa supported us by waiting tables, that I often skipped meals or canceled plans to fit in my routine. I was the one in college who remembered all the porn stars' names, even the men, and could say them on cue whenever my friends wanted. I was the one with the most extensive sexual vocabulary. And I was the one who forwarded images of women on their knees, their faces like melted candles. Sick, dude, my friends wrote back. Then they'd ask me where I found it.

  Once, Vanessa came home early from work. I pulled up my pants, screwed the top back on her body cream, and ran to the bathroom. I turned the shower on, finished myself off, and cursed her for disturbing my privacy. When I came out she was sitting on our bed, staring at the image I'd left on screen. I stood in the doorway with a towel around my waist, dripping water on the hardwood floor.

  Vanessa undid her apron. "Is this what you do all day?"

  I didn't say anything. I shook my head.

  "Say something!" she yelled. I didn't recognize her voice.

  "No. Not all day."

  "I don't know what else to do," she said. "This whole thing, all of this, is totally out of balance. We are out of balance."

  "Babe, you're acting like—"

  She stood up. "I'm not acting like anything. We haven't had sex in five months. But you've had plenty of time and energy to spend on this shit."

  I tightened the towel around my waist, walked over to the computer and turned it off. "I wish you'd just chill out. Everybody watches it! It doesn't have to be such a big deal."

  "Who's everyone?" she said. "Who? And you're right, it doesn't have to be such a big deal. But you made it a big deal."

  "You're the one freaking out about this. I don't know what the hell you want to hear. I do this. All my friends do this. So what?"

  She walked to the door, her sneakers squeaking on the wet floor.

  "You think I hate porn. You think I'm just some crazy repressed chick. But what bothers me is how you've handled this. We can't do this together. We've never done this together. And now it's tainted with all your bullshit."

  She slammed our bedroom door, then our front door. I listened to her walk down the hallway and heard her finger jab the elevator button several times before she gave up and took the stairs.

  I want to say her words—out of balance—pierced through my fog, that her wake-up call made me bolt upright instead of sink deeper into my dream. I had a choice. Listen to the woman who slept beside me, whose books were mixed with mine on the shelf, who worked double-shifts to keep us warm, who tolerated months and months and months of me, me, me. I could listen to her or I could turn my back and face the screen. I could search for another image. I could slip off my towel, listen to a woman moan and interpret her sounds however I pleased.

  I pressed Power.

  26

  I AM PAID to listen to strangers. I temp for a company that provides speech-recognition software to health insurance companies. So if you receive an automated call from Blue Cross or Harvard Pilgrim and your reply to "Do you have any comments or suggestions on how to improve this call?" is "Piss off" or "Suck my dick," I am listening. I am rewinding. I am typing out your comments, word for word.

  For some technical reason I never question, my hours are five a.m. to noon, which means I wake up at three and leave Boston by three forty-five. I don't mind. I feel like my father, waking up before sunrise, drinking coffee. I can even smell him because I am borrowing his Explorer to drive to work. When I met with the hiring manager last week, she'd said she had a position I might be over-qualified for, that it required me to sit in an empty office before dawn, wear headphones and listen to other people speak to a recording. I said I could start immediately.

  Each day, I come in and sit down, put on my headphones, and listen to angry people, crazy people, happy people, funny people, sad people, and people who don't understand a word because they don't speak English. I hear strangers curse and yell and tell a machine to go fuck itself. I hear potato chips crunching and a television on full blast. I hear a lonely voice thank a phone for listening. I type out all of their comments, hit spell check, and send a status update to my boss in Seattle, a woman I've never met.

  Some laugh. Some cry. Some simply let the call run its course. The violent and angry calls are disturbing. After a few misrecognized answers—the chipper automated voice repeating "I'm sorry I missed that. Could you please repeat?"—a young man or old woman could become hysterical. Screams and shouts, racial and sexual slurs will erupt from their mouths and make the red equalizer levels boil on my computer until they finally slam the phone down. I stare at the screen, black as the five-a.m. sky, reflecting my headphoned image.

  I listen to a call from an old woman. Her voice is unsteady. Each time the software delivers a question, the woman asks if the nice young lady could slow down and repeat the question again. Each time she thanks the young lady for her patience. You know something, darling, you sure sound an awful lot like my daughter. Are you from Phoenix? Well, now, if
you keep asking me the same questions, how we gonna talk? Yes, I believe you are from Phoenix. I'm headed out there this afternoon for my grandson's baseball game. Pardon me? Yes, I do have high blood pressure. Thank you for asking.

  The job only lasts a few months. I am unemployed, again. Vanessa is worried and not only for financial reasons. I am scared, too. I don't trust myself. While I was a transcriber, I didn't have time for pornography. Vanessa and I had more sex. We got along better. But that in itself frightened me. If a job didn't dictate my schedule, if I was left to my own free will, would I always position myself in front of a screen and search for something else?

  I talk to my mother on the phone a few times a week. At first, I think she is pleased to hear from me, but after months and months of listening to me, she changes her tone.

  "You know, Grandpa, Dad's dad, was out of work for years."

  "Really?" I asked. "What happened?"

  "He turned into a bitter bastard. It was a very unhealthy situation."

  *

  A few months later, the temp agency gives me another position. This time I'm working in the basement of a large office building, organizing files. The filing cabinets are massive black towers on wheels controlled by switches on the wall, like a giant puzzle.

  I'm the only one there, so after I put away all the files, I mess around with the controls, seeing what shapes and designs I can make out of the towers. Once, a wheel popped off and one of the towers almost toppled over. It banged into the wall so loudly that I waited a few minutes to see if anyone would come down and check on me. No one did.

  As in many of the temp jobs, I am assigned to 8-hour days, but the work takes no more than four. I start making up stories on scraps of paper, creating characters out of the odd yet pleasant people I sometimes temp with. One co-temp also works as a blackjack dealer at Mohegan Sun. He tells me he once dealt to Bruce Willis.