A knocking on the front door jars him. He hustles through the apartment, checking his watch. He warned Elisa yesterday that he had an appointment this morning, but she hadn’t given a response. Lately she’s been lost in thought; Giles, dispirited by his reflection, suddenly dreads that she’s been hiding something awful, some untreatable cancer. The knocking is frantic.
Before he can reach the door, Elisa enters, pulling a stocking hat off her head, which fans propellers of staticky hair. Giles relaxes some. Barging in is a robust tradition of theirs, and despite Elisa’s nocturnal calendar and the meager vittles of the underpaid, her cheeks are so red that he’s struck by wistfulness. Under equal exertion, his face would be winding-sheet white.
“Bursting with brio this morning, aren’t we?” he asks.
She’s past him, all but ricocheting off the walls, signing recklessly enough to send columns of old paintings swaying. Giles holds up a finger for patience and closes the door to keep the chill out. When he turns back, she’s still going. Her right hand wiggles—“fish,” he thinks—and she pulls inward from both shoulders—“fireplace,” he thinks; no, “skeleton”; no, “creature”—and then a similar motion, but rounded—“trap,” he thinks, or something like it, though he’s probably wrong, she’s talking far too rapidly. He holds up both hands.
“A moment of silence, I beseech you.”
Elisa sulks her shoulders, glares like a rebuked child, and opens two shaking fists: no specific sign, just the universal gesture for exasperation.
“First things first,” he says. “Are you in trouble? Are you hurt?”
She signs the word like she’s squashing a bug: “No.”
“Wonderful. Can I interest you in Corn Flakes? I only ate half a bowl. Nerves, I’m afraid.”
Elisa scowls. Frigidly, she signs “fish.”
“Darling, I told you last night, I have a meeting. I’m practically out the door. Why the sudden craving for fish? Don’t tell me you’re pregnant.”
Elisa plants her face into her hands, and Giles’s chest tightens. Has his quip made this poor girl, single since the day he met her, cry? Her back convulses—but it’s a hiccup of laughter. When she lifts her face, her eyes remain wild, but she’s shaking her head as if in disbelief of an absurdity he has yet to comprehend. She exhales to calm herself, shakes her hands as if they’re on fire, and gives Giles a steadfast look for the first time. After a second, her mouth tweaks to the right. Giles groans.
“Food in my teeth,” he guesses. “No, it’s the hair, isn’t it? I’ve got it all cockeyed. Well, you took a battering ram to my door before I could—”
Elisa reaches out and plucks beech leaves from both suede coat and sweater, residue of a recent windstorm. Next she turns his bow tie one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. Finally, she pets his temple where real hair meets toupee, though this feels more like an act of affection than a corrective. She steps back and makes the sign for “handsome.” Giles sighs. Here is a woman who can’t be counted on to deliver the unvarnished truth.
“As much as I’d like to be a reciprocal monkey and pick your fur of lice, there is the aforementioned meeting. You wish to tell me something before I go?”
Elisa fixes him with a dour look and raises both hands to signal that she’s about to begin signing. Giles straightens his spine, a student receiving an oral exam. He’s got a hunch that Elisa wouldn’t appreciate a grin right now, so he tucks it under his mustache. His pervading fear, expanding by the year, is that he, a washed-up, never-was, so-called artist and his broken battalion of debilitated cats, are to blame for inhibiting Elisa’s potential. He could improve her life by simply moving out, finding some bland stable of old folks who’d have him in their bridge group. Elisa, then, would be forced to seek out those who might expand her world rather than restrict it. If only he could handle the grief of losing her.
Her signs are slow, deliberate, absent of affect. “Fish.” “Man.” “Cage.” O-C-C-A-M.
“Remedial,” Giles proclaims. “You can go faster than that.”
What follows is as startling as a Miltonesque monologue delivered by a bashful kindergartener. Gone is Elisa’s penchant for searching for the perfect words. Her hands take up the agility typically limited to her feet, and her narrative flows with symphonic clarity, even as it yaws with improvisational zeal. Mechanically, it is breathtaking, and like any well-told story a pleasure to read, even if every plot point pushes the story into a genre darker than Giles prefers. For a time, he thinks she is spinning fiction. Then the details become too unsparing, too mordant. Elisa, at least, believes every word.
A fish-man, locked up in Occam, tortured and dying, and in need of rescue.
15
IRONING: THIS TEDIOUS, humid, cramping drudgery has become the ideal cover for a double life. Richard’s never ironed a shirt in his life. He has no concept of the scale of the task, if it takes half an hour or half a day. Lainie wakes up before dawn, speeds through as many chores as possible, hustles the kids off to school, and then watches the morning news through steam, stretching out the ironing until Richard leaves. The hours she’d bargained for with Bernie Clay run ten to three, allowing her plenty of time to get to work, and also plenty enough to return home and mask the exotic scent of fresh office paper with the pedestrian odors of perfume.
Richard drives away, the old Thunderbird clanging, and Lainie folds the ironing board she’s been pretending to use for ten, or twenty, or thirty minutes. Lying to a husband is a virus in a marriage, she knows this, but she hasn’t found the right way to tell him. She hasn’t felt such thrill and promise since when? The days of being courted by Richard, maybe, that sharp-suited soldier fresh out of the Korean War? The early days of courting, anyhow; months into dating, at which point betrothal was inevitable, she’d already begun to feel loose gravel beneath her feet.
Lainie doesn’t let herself dwell on the past. So many parts of her current days excite, interest, and satisfy her, none more than the quick change into the work ensembles she keeps ready in the back of her closet. It’s a new kind of challenge, dressing for a job. She’s taken written notes of the secretaries’ wardrobes. She’s made three separate trips to Sears. Formal, not casual. Handsome, not pretty. Flattering, not frilly. Contradictory objectives, but that’s being a woman. She keeps skirts slim and flannel, collars petaled or bowed, bodices modest and belted.
The bus ride to work is just as gratifying. Mastering the bodily etiquette of public transport, claiming a seat all her own, snugging into her arms a handbag packed with paratrooper efficiency, and best of all, the cursory but fond eye contact between her and other employed women. They sat alone, but they were in this thing together.
The men at Klein & Saunders—well, they’re men. For the first week, her rear end was pinched exactly once per day, each time by a different man acting with the smug entitlement of someone choosing the plumpest shrimp from a buffet. The first time, she’d squealed. The second, she’d clammed up. By the fifth, she’d learned the working woman’s scowl enough to get the offender to offer a guilty shrug. She glared at this final pincher long enough to watch him join a group of chuckling backslappers. Her pinched butt burned. The whole week had been some sort of sophomoric contest.
So she’d set out to win it, to prove she was more than a grabbable ass. No doubt it was the same goal of the agency’s typists and secretaries. Or the ladies on the bus. Or the women who scrubbed floors at Richard’s lab. No matter her mood, Lainie held her head high. She drilled herself on the phone system over lunch. She projected her voice with a confidence that, day by day, she began to believe. The pinching dwindled. The men were kind to her. Then, even better, they quit being kind. They relied on her; they snapped at her when she messed up; they bought her cards and flowers when she saved their skins.