Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  Alex evidently thought the document was a joke, something to ‘amuse’ myself with, and I have to admit that I laughed aloud in places, but in a slightly guilty way, appalled that humour could be wrung from such a subject. And who was doing the wringing?

  22nd November. We went to a private view yesterday evening at the Old Wool Mill, one of many buildings in this city which have changed their function in the last decade or so. There are warehouses which have turned into nightclubs, banks into restaurants, and factories into arts centres, as the traditional manufacturing on which this city was built, mainly steel and wool products, gives way to the postmodern economy of information, recreation and style consumption. There is a feverish public appetite, relentlessly encouraged by the media, for new styles in fashion, food, home decor, electronic gadgets, everything. Artists, who have been committed to ‘making it new’ since the advent of Modernism, but at their own pace, now find themselves overtaken by the rate of change in popular culture, and struggle to find ways of making marks on paper and canvas, or assembling three-dimensional objects in space, which no one has thought of before. The exhibition at the Old Wool Mill is called ‘Mis-takes’ and is a collection of photographs, photocopies, faxes, and other images which for one reason or another suffered a malfunction in the reprographic process and thus produced new, unexpected and allegedly interesting artefacts. There were photographs which had been over-exposed by opening the camera body before the film had been rewound, photographic images either intentionally or accidentally superimposed on each other because the film spool was not advanced, unidentifiable images produced on a digital camera by randomly altering the default settings, palimpsests produced by printing out five-page fax messages on a single sheet of paper, and photocopies of pages in books which had been spoiled because the machine jammed, or the book was twisted as the platen moved across, producing wave-like swirls of distorted text, stark shadows and white spaces. One exhibit was a blank sheet of A4 taken from a copier whose operator had omitted to insert a document to be copied. It was entitled Oh, and was on sale for £150 (£100 unframed). According to the catalogue, the artist, by introducing or accepting ‘mistakes’ in the reprographic process, was interrogating the accepted opposition between ‘original’ and ‘reproduced’ works of art, and the necessity of accuracy, uniformity and repeatability in the application of technology to artistic creation, thus carrying forward to a new level the debate initiated by Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Nothing could illustrate better my thesis that much contemporary art is supported by an immense scaffolding of discourse without which it would simply collapse and be indistinguishable from rubbish. I was saying as much to Fred in the midst of a crowd of chattering, wine-sipping private viewers when she raised her finger to her lips, which I took to be an indication that someone who would not take kindly to this remark was nearby, probably the artist, which indeed proved to be the case. When you’re deaf, as well as not being able to hear what other people are saying, you don’t realise how loudly you are speaking yourself.

  Fred’s partner Jakki was at the exhibition with her partner, i.e. new boyfriend. ‘Boyfriend’ seems too youthful a designation for Lionel, a stocky, balding, middle-aged accountant, but heaven knows he looks young enough beside myself, light on his feet and spry as a ballroom-dancing champion, able to waltz through the party throng with four glasses of wine in his paws without spilling a drop. Jakki is also younger than Fred, in her late forties I would guess, a sharp-featured brunette with a trim figure and good legs, which she makes the most of by favouring short skirts. She has a wide, perpetually mobile mouth and fortunately very good teeth, which she bares in brilliant smiles that range from the ingratiating to the lascivious depending on her mood or the circumstances. She has a loud voice and a Lancashire accent which reminds me of comediennes on the radio in my childhood, though she has little sense of humour. In every personal respect Jakki seems antithetical to Fred, but they get on surprisingly well.

  It had been agreed that the four of us would have supper after the private view at a new Italian restaurant in the city centre Jakki had heard about, called the Paradiso. As soon as we passed through the door I knew that Inferno would have been a more appropriate name as far as I was concerned. The walls were clad in marble, the floors were covered with ceramic tiles, the tables were glass-topped and the chairs made of hard wood: sounds ricocheted off these surfaces like machine-gun fire. The place was full of diners and the air resounded with the roar of their conversation, the shouts of orders passed by the waiters to the open kitchen, the clash of crockery and cutlery and glassware as dishes were served and removed, and several other contributory noises which I couldn’t actually distinguish and only learned about later from my companions, like air-conditioning and, ludicrously, ‘background’ music. Even they - my companions - found the cacophony a challenge to conversation, and were reduced to bending forward over the table with their noses almost touching in order to communicate. But communicate they did, whereas after a few attempts I gave up with a helpless shrug, and occupied myself solely with the food, which was quite good, if slow to appear, and with the wine, of which I drank more than my fair share. I was tempted to remove my hearing aid since it was serving no purpose except to amplify the circumambient din, but I remembered that Evelyn Waugh used to signal his boredom with people sitting next to him at dinner parties by laying aside his ear trumpet, and publicly taking the little plastic prostheses out of one’s ears might convey the same message.

  We had entered the restaurant at the peak of the evening’s business, and by the time we finished our main courses the noise had diminished to a point where I could rejoin the conversation, which Lionel steered to the topic of my disability. This is not something I usually welcome, however sympathetic and well-intentioned the instigator may be. I get tired of explaining that even the highest-tech hearing aids cannot restore my brain’s ability to screen out the sounds I don’t want to hear from those I do want to hear, and that my hearing impairment is not the kind that can be rectified by implants, but an incurable condition that will gradually get worse, ‘the only uncertainty,’ as I concluded on this occasion,‘being whether I shall be totally deaf before I’m totally dead, or vice versa.’

  Lionel said: ‘Have you tried learning to lip-read?’ I had to admit that it had never occurred to me - I associate lip-reading exclusively with the profoundly deaf, especially people in public life, and think of it as an almost miraculous skill which must have been acquired over many years from childhood onwards. ‘I had a client once, a lady, who got deaf in later life like you, and she used to go to lip-reading classes,’ said Lionel. ‘She said they were a lot of help.’ ‘What a brilliant idea, darling!’ said Fred, squeezing my hand and beaming gratefully at Lionel. ‘Well, I suppose I do lip-read to some extent, unconsciously,’ I said. ‘I mean, I can always hear what Fred is saying much better when I’m looking at her face to face.’ ‘Yes, but that’s not the same, Des,’ Jakki said. (I have never invited her to call me ‘Des’, but she does anyway. She also calls Lionel ‘Lie’, but he doesn’t seem to mind.) ‘It’s not the same as learning to do it.’ Her rubbery lower lip protruded as she pronounced the participle, and it crossed my mind that watching Jakki’s lip movements might be more distracting than helpful. Fred asked where the class was held, and Lionel said he would find out. Unfortunately the old lady in question had died a couple of years ago but he was still in touch with her son. It was definitely somewhere local. ‘That sounds marvellous, I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before,’ Fred said. ‘Lie is a fund of information,’ Jakki said smugly. ‘Well, it’s certainly a thought,’ I said cautiously. ‘I’ll have to look into it.’

  ‘You might have sounded a bit more enthusiastic, darling,’ Fred said to me as she was driving us home.

  ‘Well, I need to know more about this class, what’s entailed, who’s running it,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I like the idea anyway. It’
s a bit late in the day to go back to sitting in a classroom.’

  ‘Maybe you could have private lessons,’ Fred said.

  ‘Yes, maybe,’ I said. ‘But that would be expensive.’

  ‘Expensive! My God! If it worked, it would be worth a hundred pounds a lesson. More.’

  She spoke with such feeling that she omitted to interject her customary ‘darling’. I was a little affronted and said nothing. ‘You took practically no part in the conversation this evening until Lionel dragged you into it,’ Fred continued. ‘I know it was very noisy in there, but it sometimes seems to me that you’ve almost given up wanting to hear what other people are saying - deafness is a convenient excuse to switch off and follow your own train of thought.’ ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘It’s the bane of my life.’ ‘Well, then, why don’t you see if lip-reading would help?’

  I was cornered. I did not relish the thought of being a student again, and had little confidence in my ability to learn lip-reading at my time of life, but I realised I would have to give it a try or be accused of selfish indifference to the impact of my infirmity on Fred and others. And I wonder uncomfortably whether there isn’t some truth in what she says. Could there be a Deaf Instinct, analogous to Freud’s Death Instinct? An unconscious longing for torpor, silence and solitude underlying and contradicting the normal human desire for companionship and intercourse? Am I half in love with easeful deaf?

  This afternoon Alex Loom at last emailed me a specimen chapter. A short one, but quite promising. It’s about paragraph breaks in suicide notes. She makes a distinction between ‘depressive’ and ‘reactive’ suicides, the former being triggered by subjective feelings of disappointment, failure, frustration etc., and the latter triggered by objective circumstances, like terminal illness, bankruptcy, public disgrace etc., her theory being that short paragraphs are more frequent in the former type of suicide note than the latter (this assertion itself needs more statistical evidence) because there is less of a cohesive flow to the writer’s thoughts; rather, the depressive note is composed in a series of what she calls ‘emotive spurts’, which may have no connection with each other and even be mutually contradictory, as the writer reviews the reasons for her suicidal impulse and the impact of her action on others. (The feminine pronoun is used throughout in generalising statements.) The examples she gives confirm my own impression from what I have seen that there is a high frequency of one-sentence paragraphs in suicide notes. For instance, ‘Somebody do something.’

  I emailed some cautiously positive comments, and she shot back a fulsome thank-you and a request to meet again at her flat to discuss the chapter in more detail. I can’t see any easy way to decline, nor can I think of a better venue: if we were seen conferring at the University or in some public place like the ARC gallery it might start speculation and gossip, and I obviously can’t invite her here. Her flat has the advantage of complete privacy. The question is how to tell Fred in a way which will not reveal that I have been less than candid about my previous contact with Alex.

  23rd November. Lionel discovered the email address of Bethany Brooks, the lip-reading teacher, and passed it to Jakki, who passed it to Fred, who brought it home and gave it to me. So I had to carry out my promise to ‘look into’ the matter, and an exchange of emails followed. First I asked Bethany Brooks if she gave private lessons, and she said she didn’t, because she runs classes all over the region and doesn’t have time to give individual lessons, but that anyway really it was better to learn lip-reading in a group. She holds a weekly class at an adult education centre not far from us and she said I was welcome to join. ‘In fact we could do with more men in the class,’ she wrote, which I did not find reassuring. To my surprise it is entirely free, ‘apart from a small charge for tea and coffee’, being supported by a charity for the deaf and hearing-impaired. The class meets every Thursday morning from 10.30 to 12.30. I suggested, hopefully, that as a beginner perhaps I should wait until the start of a new course, rather than attempt to join an ongoing one, but she told me that there was no need, because there was no real beginning or end to the course, and most of the participants had been coming for years. ‘It’s not like learning a new language,’ she wrote. ‘It’s more a matter of developing habits of observation. Identifying what’s easy and what’s difficult. Learning how to anticipate problems and get round them. The more practice you have the better.’

  ‘That sounds sensible,’ Fred said when I reported this message. In spite of my misgivings I couldn’t disagree, or think of any good reason not to join the class next week.

  10

  24th November. I’ve just come back from a very disturbing visit to Alex Loom. She is either totally irresponsible or mentally unbalanced, or perhaps both, and I deeply regret that I ever got involved with her.

  I mentioned to Fred at breakfast, as casually as I could manage, that I was meeting Alex at the University this afternoon to give her some tips about her research, though in fact I had agreed to go to her apartment again. My plan was to tell Fred this evening that Alex had phoned later in the morning and asked me to come to her flat instead of the University because she had to be at home to receive a delivery. Fred might raise an eyebrow at my willingness to put myself out for a postgraduate’s convenience, but I could think of ways to get round that, saying for instance that I had always been curious to see the inside of one of those new canalside developments. Then I could describe the flat to Fred as if I had seen it today for the first time, and there would be no need for further subterfuge about my relationship with Alex in the future. Now I desperately wish that it had no future. If only I had heard what she was saying when we first met it would never have started. Deaf and the maiden, a dangerous combination.

  I parked my car as before, and made my way to the front of her apartment block under a raised umbrella. It was a still, grey day, with a fine drizzle falling from the low cloud cover, sinking imperceptibly into the canal and covering the pavement with a shiny slick. I held the umbrella low to conceal my face. I could not shake off the feeling that there was something transgressive about this expedition and I did not wish to be recognised, remote as the possibility was. Moisture dripped from the plastic trim on the eaves of Wharfside Court, and the backwater on which it is situated seemed even more hushed and deserted than before. There was slightly more half-submerged garbage at the dead end than on my previous visit. Checking that my hearing aid was in place I rang the bell for flat 36 to announce my arrival, and Alex’s voice responded: ‘You’re in luck. They fixed the elevator. Come on up.’

  She was standing at the open door of her apartment to greet me as the doors of the lift opened on the third floor landing, dressed in black trousers and top as before. I noted with reflex attention that her sweater had a high turtle neck, so there would be no glimpses of cleavage on this occasion, though to compensate the cotton jersey clung revealingly to the contours of her breasts. She smiled with her perfect American teeth. ‘Hi. Give me your umbrella and I’ll put it in the bath to dry off. What a day!’ While she was attending to the umbrella I hung up my raincoat on a hook in the little hall, and wondered whether to make some joke about hoping not to find any foreign objects in it when I got home, but decided that it was best to pretend, as Alex herself had requested, that ‘the panties never happened’.

  I went into the living room, taking my document case with me, and sat down in the easy chair. Alex quickly followed, and sat down on the sofa. ‘Thanks so much for coming!’ she said. ‘And for reading my stuff. I really appreciate it.’

  ‘I only have a few comments,’ I said, taking her chapter out of the document case. ‘And you do understand this is all off the record and unofficial?’

  ‘Of course. What did you think of the Writer’s Guide, by the way?’

  ‘I thought it was very clever.’ She gave a pleased smile. ‘But I couldn’t work out the intention behind it,’ I added.

  ‘Oh, I was just having a little fun,’ she said.

  It took me a mom
ent to draw the inference. ‘You mean, you wrote it?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I thought you would guess. You didn’t think I was smart enough?’

  ‘No, not at all, but . . . why?’

  She flicked back her curtain of silky pale blonde hair. ‘Oh, you know, when you spend day after day reading suicide notes you get a little impatient with the writers, their self-pity, their bad grammar, their sheer stupidity. I suppose I was letting off a little steam.’

  I asked her what effect she thought reading it would have on someone who was really thinking of committing suicide.

  ‘I think it might have a good effect,’ she said. ‘I think they would say to themselves, “Who is this asshole making fun of my tragic despair?” And then they would get so mad at me perhaps they wouldn’t kill themselves after all. You know, like in movies, when the cop says to the guy sitting on the parapet of the skyscraper, “OK, go ahead, if you’re going to jump, jump, but don’t keep me waiting, I go off duty in fifteen minutes,” and the guy is so mad he takes a swing at the cop and the cop drags him to safety.’

  ‘Supposing they’re not sophisticated readers,’ I said. ‘Suppose they take the whole thing entirely seriously?’