by Daniel Price
She wasn’t kidding. Never in my life had I been to a place where everybody was talking but nobody was saying a word. All throughout the posh little establishment, patrons cut their hands through the air in quick, elegant motions. There didn’t seem to be a single verbal conversation transpiring, yet there was more than enough noise to keep the scene from becoming eerie. The shuffling of clothes. The clapping of hands. The clumps and clods of footsteps. And the normal human interjections: moans, sighs, laughs, cries. I’d never seen anything like it before in my life. I didn’t even have a film or television reference to compare it to. I was completely off-script.
Jean paid my cover charge (she insisted, although I suspected my expression alone was worth the price of admission), then pulled me to a row of small tables on the east side of the room. Fastened onto each surface were numerous laptops linked together by LAN cables.
It cost another ten dollars to score us an hour of table time. We sat across from each other. The setup was very similar to EyeTalk, with one major difference. From behind her screen, Jean threw me a small and mysterious grin. I had no idea what was fueling it. Reading her face was like reading the NASDAQ page. There were too many details. Too much going on.
Unlike her, I wasn’t a touch typist. I had to look down at my fingers.
She shrugged.
Jean rested her chin on her fist, studying me through a squint.
Jean raised a skeptical eyebrow at me.
She made a vast sweep with her hand.
Jean rolled her eyes.
I grinned.
The overhead lights flashed on and off, until everyone turned to look at the middle-aged man at the switch. He stepped onto a small wooden stage and cheerfully signed to the room for a few moments.
She lost a good chunk of her merriment.
Sarcastically, she shook her fist.
I stated.
Before I could type a word of protest, she cut me off.
I didn’t hide my frustration.
I thought about Madison’s school survey, the one she’d shared with me and Hunta. I could picture her sitting alone in the lunchroom, carefully fabricating the input of classmates who wouldn’t give her the time of day, much less participate in her straw poll. I could see the faculty isolating her, fearing her like she was the sequel to Annabelle Shane in development. I didn’t want these images. Madison certainly wouldn’t want me to have them.
I matched her droll sneer.
I stared at her, flabbergasted.
She grinned.
That didn’t hit me very well. Sensing my discomfort, she frowned at me.
It still felt like seduction, and I didn’t like it. If she had a problem with her husband, she should work it out with him instead of seeking outside affirmation. Miranda had done the same damn thing, only she happened to catch me tired and jet-lagged on my thirty-fifth birth day. My defenses were down that night. Now they were on full shield alert.
She tossed me a dashed pout.
With some trepidation, I closed in to read the fine print. I could see she was disappointed and a little annoyed that I was missing her point. And yet I couldn’t see her point. All I could do was acknowledge the possibility that maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t playing me against her own frustrations.
Giving up, she spelled it out for me.
I kept my eyes on the screen, hiding my reactions deep inside me.
I looked up at her.
I laughed. “Oh, you don’t want me bringing her into this? You’re the one who—”
It wasn’t until she glanced at me askew that I realized I was speaking out loud. I took a deep breath and channeled my thoughts back into my hands.
I slammed my iBook shut, with the same satisfaction I’d get from slamming her mouth shut. Muted, frustrated, Jean leaned back in her chair and blew cool air at the ceiling.
How strange that I would take that moment to admire her body again. I drank it in. Her wonderfully toned arms. Her sturdy shoulders. Her terrifically humble breasts. She might have given me too much credit. Despite my rage, I couldn’t stop thinking about screwing her. There was something very safe and appealing about sex with an unhappily married woman. Not just any sex but bad sex. Unfulfilling sex. I wanted to make love to her badly. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.
While taking a break from each other, we watched the strangers in the room as they all spoke in hands. I wished I knew a little of the language, at least enough to eavesdrop. Jean was right. This was wearing thin.
Soon enough, a rotund little man flipped the light switch several times, until he had our attention. He climbed the wooden stage and addressed the room with meaningful gestures. Within seconds, he had everyone laughing except me and Jean. She was, however, idly amused.
I cocked my head at her. In response, she slipped me a futile smirk. I can’t help you, buddy. You sealed my lips. I reopened the laptop.
<“What do a duck and a dog have in common?”> she typed.
I shrugged at her. She shrugged back.
<“They both fly, except for the dog.”>
Wincing, I shook my head.
I emitted a soft grin.
Saddened, she tossed up her hands.
she wrote with a wan smile.
She wasn’t buying it.
She stood up and leaned over her keyboard.
I watched her walk away. She looked good from behind, too. I couldn’t seem to escape my lower functions, but I was afraid to go back upstairs. I was afraid to look into my very own mind and see how much of it she’d already conquered.
Serves me right for letting her in. I should have kept her in my laptop, just like I kept Harmony trapped inside my big red cellular. Complicated gadgetry standing in for people. Are we embracing the future, Ira? Or are we both in need of a serious intervention?
As I sat there alone, the comedian’s silent jokes flying miles above my head, I thought about everything Jean had said. Then I realized I didn’t have to think about it. I had an electronic transcript right here in front of me. Technology at work again.
I scrolled through our conversation until I reached the part where I cut her off. I’d noticed she had typed a few more words after I slammed my laptop shut. I was curious—deeply afraid but curious—to see how she finished her thought.
Scott, I’m looking at your face. And I can see you’re lonely. That’s okay. We’re lonely, too. And we’re inviting you in.
18
“HARMONY THIS AND THAT”
There was no escaping irony. I returned home from my Deaf club excursion at half past eleven, only to remove the red phone from my pocket and discover that it had been switched off. I had six messages waiting for me, all from Alonso. Apparently there was a new crisis brewing at the Fairmont Miramar.
“Finally!” Alonso yelled. “Where were you?”
“Sorry. My phone was off. I didn’t realize.”
“Well, we’ve got an urgent matter.”
“You said that. Now can you please elaborate?”
In his message, Alonso had only stated that Harmony had...a visitor. He’d said it with such delicate discretion that for a moment I thought he was referring to her period. If only. Harmony was indeed dealing with her very own blood, but it was all in the form of a fifty-eight-year-old man whose arrival I probably should have anticipated.
At ten o’clock he approached the main entrance to the hotel, only to be stopped by doormen. From his stained army ja
cket, torn jeans and duct-taped shoes, it was obvious he wasn’t a distinguished guest of the Miramar. And yet despite his pauperlike appearance, the man insisted he was a Prince.
“You show her this photo,” he demanded. “You show her my ID. She’ll know me.”
Sadly, he wasn’t the first one to try to ride his way in on the long lost-relative ticket. He wasn’t even the first one who proclaimed to be Harmony’s father. But he was the first to offer evidence. In addition to a long-expired driver’s license, he bore a photograph from 1981, the only known picture of Harmony’s two natural parents.
I suppose I couldn’t blame her for wanting to meet her biological father, if even just to confront him. Nobody could blame me for assuming the worst in Franklin Prince. At thirty-eight, he’d knocked up his adolescent foster daughter and then abandoned his family to live with her in Modesto. Shortly after Harmony was born, he discarded both lover and child for a new teenage squeeze. He wasn’t the villain of Harmony’s life (that would be her stepfather), but he wasn’t a beacon of virtue either.
I was dying to know how she was doing. The phone rang six times before she answered. She sounded tranquilized.
“Hello.”
“Harmony. It’s me. I heard. Jesus. How are you?”
“I can’t talk now.”
“Is he still there?”
Pause. “Yeah.”
“Listen, I want you to call me the minute he leaves, okay? Don’t worry about the time. I’ll be up.”
“Okay.”
“You promise to call me?”
“Yeah,” she said after another discomforting silence. “I gotta go.”
I put the phone down, then stretched out on the couch. It was hard to think, especially with Jean still running loose in my head. I watched Saturday Night Live until my eyes fell shut. When I opened them again, it was two-thirty in the morning. My red phone was ringing.
“Harmony?”
She didn’t respond, but I could hear her soft sniffles. I sat up.
“Okay, are those good tears or bad tears?”
She sniffed again. “I don’t know.”
“Well, how did he seem?”
“Terrible. He was missing teeth. He had these sores on his hands. And he smelled awful. I felt so bad for him.”
