Dead Languages (19 page)

One of them, a woman with heavy hips and a red bandana across her brow, said, “This section of San Gregorio is nudist. You’ll either have to strip or, like, depart.”

I took her to be sort of the governor of the colony—maybe the bandana was like an official badge—and her warning drew a number of rude observations from the rest of the crowd.

“The old lady’s got a good bod for an old lady,” said a bald man who was at most five years younger than Mother.

“The kid isn’t bad, either,” said a woman with tiny breasts. “Good legs. Real good legs. The face, though: ’tis a pity, the pimples.”

“Kinky couple, don’t you think?” said someone I couldn’t see because he was standing in back. “What would you say? Fifteen and forty?”

This last insult made their fat bounce with laughter, and yet it wasn’t far from wrong. I was fifteen, Mother was forty-seven, and the trend of married women taking teenage lovers was accelerating at such an alarming rate in San Francisco that I couldn’t tell whether the colonists were kidding or whether they actually thought Mother and I were a close-knit couple. Mother was wearing the only swimsuit she ever owned, a one-piece black monstrosity, and I was wearing the red trunks, with blue anchor at the crotch, which I’d bought for Audrey’s birthday party. Mother had seen me naked until I was nine but, except for one purely accidental glimpse of her running from the shower to the bedroom the early evening of February
11
,
1964
, I’d never seen her. I really didn’t want to because I’d heard severe psychological maladjustments were the inevitable result and I really don’t think she wanted me to, either, because she was a good guardian and a moral woman. There seemed only two alternatives, though—returning three miles to the crowded beach or undressing at the command of our captors like victims in a vulgar film—and neither plan struck me as wholly desirable.

Mother asked them questions: why do you want us to disrobe? Do you ask everyone you meet on this side of the beach to disrobe? How long have you been living here? Do you find the term “beach bum” pejorative? Would you define yourselves as beach bums? As nudists? Does a bare body have, for you, any political significance? Do you have little huts along the coast?

At first I thought Mother was just trying to stall them by posing diversionary issues, but then I realized she was perfectly sincere and genuinely interested in their replies. She was working now as a feature reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle
and, if this wasn’t the lead story in next week’s Sunday supplement, thirty years’ experience had taught her nothing. She only regretted she hadn’t thrown a camera into the trunk of the Fiat so she could shoot carefully shaded pictures of the subjects in their birthday suits. Mother had a talent tantamount to genius for transforming whatever absurdity she saw around her into just more stuff of her own fame: taking away its terror or ennui by exploiting it.

They seemed to have heard of her when she told them who she was. When she told them why she was asking so many questions, they gathered at her feet. She sat with her back to a boulder and recorded, in shorthand on the reverse side of the rough draft on mental illness, their inane answers. No one was paying any attention to me any more, not to my real good legs, not even to my pitiful pimples, so I slipped away with a blanket and my bag of gels. I settled on a spot in the middle distance between Mother’s colonists and baggy men playing plastic golf.

Every half hour I sprinted to the shoreline and rubbed saltwater into my welts. Other than that I did nothing more strenuous than apply patented cures to my face. I spent the entire day asleep on the sand, with my hair combed back so the sun wouldn’t forget my forehead, that most flawed of all facial areas. The sun, creams, and saltwater seemed to be working together very nicely to reduce the blisters. My skin felt softer and smoother than it had in years. The bumps burned away. Even my forehead felt fine. There was a public cabana standing, in all its indignity, on the edge of the hill that dropped down to the beach, and I felt compelled to confirm—through study of the image in the mirror—my inkling that I had at last found salvation, in Mother Nature herself.

I climbed the little cliff, then pushed open the door to the outhouse, which was a typical beach bathroom in that the smell of urine was overwhelmed only by the fumes of defecation. Centipedes crawled across the cement, flies had a field day around the toilet, broken water pipes dripped, and I had an acute sense of pervasive darkness. There was a bare little bulb above the mirror to illuminate the reflection. I looked, I looked again, and was appalled.

The white of the ointments, the red of the sun, the green of the sea had formed a melting blue of the body. My whole face seemed to be falling off. I looked like a clown—like Bozo—caught between the acts. All the boils were raised to the highest degree and glistening in a terrible blue hue. Suddenly I was seized with the perception that I had a multitude of debilitating personal problems and there was no cure for any of them: not nature, not nurture, not love. When one thing goes, the rest usually follow right behind and, in that stinking dark cabana, all alone at three o’clock in the afternoon, a mile and a half from a nudist colony, I could find no reason to continue. I decided to dive thirty feet off the cliff to the sand. I turned the switch on and off for twenty seconds until a shadow of gray filled the room: wet skin on cold glass. I closed the door. Shutting my eyes and turning off the light, I tried to imagine what broken glass would sound like in the dark.

I bolted out of the bathroom, ran barefoot over pebbles and tough grass to the edge of the cliff, and leapt. Right around the middle of good Aristotelian books, there’s supposed to be an action that reveals the protagonist’s hamartia—in this case, for instance, excessive self-absorption as a function of disfluency—and also transforms the rising action into falling action. But the cause of the falling action isn’t supposed to be quite so literally
A FALL
. It’s supposed to be a little more metaphorical than that. Still, I can’t alter the story of my life to conform to some archaic theory of dramatic structure. There’s a book to think about, but there’s also the pressure of the past.

The light went out of the sun and the sand came up to greet me. I did one entire flip, so I landed on my feet, but my left leg was bent across my body at an extremely awkward angle and, when I touched beach, the thigh bone of that leg cracked. I couldn’t get my left leg back on the left side of my body. My left foot twitched in the sand like a crab. The femur had broken skin and looked ghastly. The pain was so exquisite I started screaming the worst words I knew, as if incapacitation of the body were the death of language. The ocean kept lapping closer and sea gulls circled above to determine whether I were more coastal litter for a late lunch.

Oddly enough, the first person who responded to my cries was one of the plastic golfers, although maybe he’d wandered over my way just looking for a lost chip shot. “Upsy daisy,” he said and tried to yank me out of my misery, but I couldn’t have moved if a whale had come floating ashore on the next wave. While the golfer went and got Mother, a hundred people who otherwise would have been bored on Sunday afternoon formed an extremely tight three-ring circle around me. The colonists, barred from this end of the beach, stayed away, which was a good thing because the clothed population was fatuous enough. They talked among themselves, and most of them thought I was probably permanently paralyzed. Others thought I would never have been bit if I hadn’t been swimming so far out at high tide.

Mother burst through the throng, clutching her interview notes and saying, “You shouldn’t have wandered away in the first place.” Those were actually her first words. She was very sympathetic later on, but her first reaction was barely concealed indignation.

The men in white coats returned to the ambulance to get a scoop stretcher to dig me out of the sand since my left leg couldn’t fit on a flat stretcher. Mother climbed into the back of the ambulance with me and held my hand. I couldn’t tell whether she was so calm because she knew that was what observers were supposed to do in emergencies, or because she’d already arrived in that beautiful realm she occupied when she knew she had a first-rate story in the bag and nothing else really penetrated.

“You know, Jeremy, Mother’s Day,
1947
, my mother threw out her hip on Lido Isle. Isn’t that quite a coincidence?” she asked.

Yes, I said, I thought that was quite a coincidence. I’d never met her mother. The siren started, Klaxon twirled in the sunset, and then I lost consciousness.

THE REASON WHY
it was not just one more broken leg, why I imbue it with significance, is that I was never again able to play competitive sports. Two months in traction and nine more in a metal leg brace nullified whatever dreams I still had of becoming an athlete and forced me into finding another way of ordering my world. Phrasemaker that she was, Mother called this the silver lining of a very black cloud. I still believed in love at first sight, the ultimate triumph of political justice, and the consolation of beautiful language.

Conventional wisdom has it that poetry begins when the pain or at least the boredom gets intolerable. Conventional wisdom has it right for once, since immediately after dispensing with the last of sophomore year course work I commenced to write the first and last series of poems I’ve ever written, a satirical sonnet sequence too pathetic to look at again, even here. I took as the subjects of the Hospital Cycle the standard themes of convalescent life—the cold doctor, the cheerful nurses, the bland food, the tedious visitor—whereas what I wanted to write about was the sound of the little Korean woman’s voice when she entered the room at sunrise, selling papers, screeching
“Chron-eee-cle, Chron-eee-cle,
” as if she were consciously attempting to reproduce in her intonation the undesirability of morning and irritability of the world.

In July I began purchasing the newspaper from her because I could no longer abide the sound of her voice and wanted to dismiss her, with a ten-cent tip, as quickly as I possibly could, but also because I was becoming increasingly interested in the adventures of Thomas Eagleton. There I was, flat on my back in a body cast from chest to toes, and there he was: Poor Tom, wearing checkered sportcoats, running around getting assurances, sweating on national television, crying, hugging his wife, having that dead metaphor “skeletons in his closet” applied to him so often that I came to think of him carrying, quite literally, a little closet wherever he went, with a plastic skeleton dangling from a coat hanger. My curiosity about Poor Tom derived, I suppose, from Father, to whom he represented the Right of the Electrically Shocked to Live without Shame.

Father would come visit me on his lunch hour, shaking his head, licking his lips, complaining of a muscle he’d pulled when he tried to sprint the final
440
of a five-mile jog. Upon entering the room he’d rattle the bed frame, which was meant as a gesture of paternal jocularity. He would sit in a metal chair with his arms folded and sunglasses on, as if he were blind, criminally suspect, or excruciatingly shy: looking straight ahead, saying nothing. But then the noon news would come on, Poor Tom would appear, and we’d start exchanging information from magazine articles and reports we’d heard on the radio. In that there was nothing in the least heroic about him, Poor Tom was an unlikely hero, but via the vice-presidential candidate Father was attempting to prevent another visit to Montbel, so we waxed eloquent.

“I’m a thousand percent behind him,” Father would say.

“I’m two thousand,” I would say.

“I think he has Woodcock’s support.”

“I don’t know about Woodcock. I don’t know if he’s a thousand percent behind him.”

“Nine hundred,” Father would say, laughing.

“Eight hundred,” I’d say. “Maybe eight-fifty.”

“Well, at least they aren’t going to find any more skeletons in Tom’s closet.”

“Just little things now, like second-degree m-m-murder or sodomy.”

“Right you are who say you are,” Father would say, using one of his favorite if somewhat opaque phrases. “Nothing’s worse in the eyes of the democracy than a man sensitive enough to have been depressed once or twice in his life and sought help.”

“Exactly.”

“How’s the leg, Jeremy?”

The leg was all right until the doctor misread, on the X-rays, a knot of still broken bone as healing scar tissue. Mother and Father were called to Kaiser Hospital. I was rushed from physical therapy into surgery, and a metal pin was inserted near the bone to lend support. The pin is still there. When the weather shifts suddenly to rain, I can feel it rubbing against my bones. In airport inspections, it invariably triggers an electronic beep; I take from my wallet and pass to the police a letter from my doctor explaining that I have not a revolver in my hip pocket but a hollow rod in my left leg. After strenuous exercise of any sort—rock-climbing, full-court basketball, difficult-angled desire—I get a twinge where the pin was inserted, I drag my leg a little, limp walking uphill, and must shower soon after the exertion or my nerves will pinch and the next day I’ll have to lean on the cane I’ve kept in the closet all these years.

Six years later, such minor handicaps are the only aftereffects of the accident, but when I was sixteen it seemed like a near-mortal wound. Over the summer I’d grown several inches and lost twenty pounds, so when I walked across the parking lot and appeared in the courtyard a few minutes before the first bell of a new year no one recognized me. They all took me for some crippled kid who’d transferred. It was a nice enough feeling at first—having doors opened for me and held—but I soon wearied of it. I appreciated people’s condescension no more than my own passivity. I missed athletics so much that for a while I consented to serve as score-keeper and assistant manager for the girls’ field hockey team, but there’s no experience quite so degrading as being bossed around by a phalanx of stocky, padded girls waving sticks; I turned in my key to the towel room.