Secret Language (20 page)

Connie looks out at the traffic, the thin, dirty patches of snow. “I’m sorry. He was the only person I could think of.”

“Don’t be sorry yet.” Isadora’s eyes slide over.

Connie is struck by her self-possession. What on earth ever made her think Isadora needed her? When they first met Isadora had seemed almost frail—she might have been constructed from the hollow bones of a bird. It seems to Connie now that those bones must be stuffed with gunpowder.

When the light changes, Isadora charges ahead, her garish shield at her chest, her walk purposeful and titanic. Connie hurries after her, barely keeping pace, the grimy street soughing under her shoes.

In his hotel room at Le Perreault, Stewart opens another bottle and offers Connie the first glass.

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” he says. “New snow, Mom’s plum pudding …”

“What about precious David and his precious wife and his precious son?” Connie reminds him.

“Cinnamon buns, eggnog, Bing Crosby …”

“I take it you weren’t invited.”

Stewart lifts his eyelids, a sly gleam in his eyes. “Connie. Sweetheart. Haven’t you ever crashed a party?” He drains his glass. “My mother, bless her soul, said I could come for New Year’s. The homophobes will be cleared out by then.”

“So wait till New Year’s.”

“Nope. Christmas morning. Can I borrow a dress?”

She laughs, pours more wine. “I saved the best news.”

Something shines fleetingly through the dull cast over Stewart’s eyes. “Tell me.”

“Remember
Silver
Moon?”

“The toast of Broadway.”

“Garrett’s resurrecting it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“How’s he pulling that off?”

Connie pauses, milking the suspense. “By casting Isadora James as the female lead.”

It takes him a minute. “Who’s going to want to see this masterpiece?” he says. “Besides you, of course.”

“A lot of people remember Billy and Delle, Stewart. Isadora is Billy’s daughter; her mother was in the chorus. People will be curious at the very least.” She folds her legs underneath her, the carpet’s soft pile a familiar cushion against her skin. “Think of it, Stewart. Here she comes, an unknown with a huge talent, reviving the show that broke her father. People love this stuff. Plus she’s rewriting the music.”

“A blues musical?” Stewart says. “I thought it was about a farm couple in Nebraska.”

“Don’t laugh, Stewart. They’ve raised half the money already. They even have the posters designed.” She sets down her glass and squares her hands to show him. “Here’s a faded replica of the original poster with Billy and Delle and a handful of the chorus, including Isadora’s mother. Juxtaposed over that is a picture of Isadora with a guitar slung over her back and a small caption: ‘The
Moon
Is Blue.’ What do you think?”

“I think it’s got a snowball’s chance in hell.”

“You’re wrong,” Connie says. “They’re angling for a big, fat nostalgia trip.” His cynicism can’t touch her. She’s already thinking ahead to hearing about the casting, the rehearsals, the tour. She’s already beginning to see how close it will bring them.

“Doesn’t this bother you even a little?” Stewart asks.

“Why should it?”

“It smacks of opportunism to me.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Connie says. “How else do you make it in this world?”

“Can we talk about something besides Isadora for a change?”

She raises her eyebrows.

“Isadora this, Isadora that. You sound like a first-grader with a new friend.”

Stung, she shrinks from him. “Go to hell.”

He hangs his head like a bad dog. “I’m sorry. I’m just jealous.” He thumps on his chest. “Hit me, go on. I deserve it.”

“Stewart.”

“No, really. Hit me, go ahead.”

“Forget it, Stewart. I forgive you, okay?”

He lifts his glass to her, empties it into the carpet, and with the magnificence of a cymbal player smashes it between his hands.

“Jesus!” Connie leaps up, tears his hands apart, blood spattering. “Jesus Christ! Stewart, goddammit!”

He is bent in two, whimpering. Her pulse thundering against her temples, the liquor lurching through her body, she helps him into the bathroom and runs cold water over his palms to see better what he’s done. She picks slivers of glass from his skin as the water runs. “Jesus,” she says, shaking all the way out to her fingertips. “Oh, Stewart.” His blood runs in a pink swirl down the drain.

“I’m sorry,” he keeps saying. “I’m drunk.” The water begins to reveal his white palms. One hand is miraculously unscathed. The cuts on the other are lightning-shaped, shallow but cruel.

“You’re a lucky goddamned bastard, Stewart.” Even her teeth are quivering. “What
is
this, anyway? Your family? Make up a new one, for Christ’s sake. Come home with me.” She places his cut hand on the counter, palm up, and presses a washcloth into his skin.

“Connie?” His head hangs down and blood seeps up through the cloth. “Do you love me?”

“Hold still so we can see what we’ve got. I might have to take you to the hospital.” She peers under the cloth. “You’re going to have to explain all this in French.”

“Say ‘I love you, Stewart.’ ”

“Shut up.”

“Say it.”

She heaves a long-suffering sigh, pressing his palm. “I love you, Stewart.” She used to say such things in high school to any boy who might say it back, and then she discovered Rule Number One.

“Say ‘I love you enough to have your baby.’ ”

“Will you shut up? Why didn’t you tell me you were this drunk?”

His eyes rove over her, glazed in their sockets. “We’d be a real family, Connie, close as close. You and me and the baby, Aunt Isadora coming in from New York—”

“Not now, Stewart.”

He’s quiet for a moment, watching her hand on his hand. “Close as close,” he repeats. “Close as … close as those brothers and
sisters you hear about who have their own secret language. That’s how close we’ll be.”

“You’re raving.”

“No, no, I read this. They make up their own language so nobody can bother them.” The cloth is blood-soaked now and she lifts it. To her relief the cut has stopped spurting. She grabs a clean towel and presses. “I’m not kidding,” he says. “You ever hear of that?”

“No.”

“Can you imagine being that close to someone?”

“No.”

“What about you and Faith?”

“We weren’t close.”

“No secret language?”

“Not unless you count silence.”

He’s laughing now, leaning heavy against her, drunk and blood-drained. She watches the towel for signs, but it’s still white on the surface. She keeps pressing, thinking about silence, and words.

“What about you and precious Isadora?” he says.

“Stewart, just keep your hand still, would you?” She thinks of all the words that have careened back and forth between her and Isadora, over the phone, over a restaurant table, over the bulky form of the cat, Bob. All those words, and her little sister is still a dream, something she has made up, a new friend she has a crush on, a stranger who shares some of her blood and none of her memory, and Stewart is a bastard for knowing it.

The Atlanticair Boeing 747 hits a wall of sleet over the English Channel. The seat belt signs flash on, but there is no word from the cockpit except a cryptic instruction for the attendants to buckle up. The crew is all New Guard, including one skinny novice in her first month of flying. After a stomach-gouging drop in altitude she begins to cry softly. “Just strap yourself in and
sit
there,” Connie snaps, nervous herself over the wild rocking and bumping. She has a reputation for being rigid, and this is a good time to invoke it. The girl sits, humiliated and petrified, smoothing her plum-colored skirt over her knees.

After a few more minutes of bucking and heaving, during which
several collective gasps escape from the cabin, Connie leaves her seat, raps on the cockpit door, and marches in.

“You’re supposed to be sitting,” the captain says, not turning around. His face glows eerily over the control panel.

“I think the passengers could use some reassurance, Evan,” she says. The copilot, a novice himself, looks up.

“What do I look like, a fucking tour guide?” Evan mumbles. She has heard him say this before. He hasn’t much use for the crew; he refers to all of them, even the men, as “the waitresses.” Connie dated him for a while a long time ago, and then his brother, and he’s held it against her ever since. She sometimes entertains herself with thoughts of having to land the plane herself someday, the way beautiful stewardesses once did in the movies, after Evan suffers a type-A, stress-related, particularly painful heart attack at the controls.

“
I’ll
speak to them, then,” she says.

“That’s what they pay you for, honey.”

She whirls around and snaps the door shut behind her on her way back into the cabin. The jet retches again, nearly knocking her to her feet. She straps herself in and reaches for the PA. Her voice, even through the crackle, is calm. Her own anxiety settles as she hears herself; she has always been good at this, and she can see the relief—perhaps even gratitude—in the faces of her charges. Her blood still pulses against her ears, but she senses the change, the slowing, the collective relief.

After a bumpy landing at Heathrow, the connecting passengers file past, pallid and subdued, nodding at her with small smiles. Word comes then to unload everyone, there will be a delay before leaving for Boston.

The skinny novice approaches after all the passengers have deplaned. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

“It happens,” is what Connie discovers herself saying. It once happened to her, when she was twenty-two, her first emergency landing. “You’ll do better next time,” she tells the girl, and believes it.

In the flight lounge she sits around with the crew, their young voices shimmying mawkishly, as if they had just saved the inmates of a burning orphanage. She pretends to listen, but her thoughts are
elsewhere, with Stewart in Paris, his bandaged hand and six stitches and a promise to call when he reaches Boston. Only now does she begin to shake, the terrifying flight and the scene with Stewart behind her.

She looks out at the slushy runway. She murmurs a prayer for a short delay, for she wants to be home. She thinks of her hollow apartment, Isadora arriving to fill it with her rickety laughter. She imagines a Christmas visit to Faith’s house, a blue snow cloaking its eaves. Perhaps Faith will say something surprising, something about all of them being there together; perhaps she will have bought a present—not a bottle of perfume or more towels, but a prettily wrapped bauble, some small surprise that Connie does not yet know she wants. She hopes Joe will be there, she hopes the boys will run the dog through its tricks.

She imagines herself walking through the door of the house she once lived in, joining the gathering in the kitchen, and in this vision they can’t stop talking. Their words rain into the room, a downpour of voices, a lifetime’s worth of catching up. And if this part is merely a dream, Connie thinks, the people in it are not; they exist, an ocean away, and she knows exactly where they are, waiting for her to come home.

“This is the one he wants,” Chris says. He holds up an electric guitar in an eye-destroying shade of blue.

“This one?” Faith asks, hoping he’s wrong. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.” He shrugs, not looking particularly regretful. “Sorry.”

The guitar is shaped like a crescent moon, and the tuning pegs are black, with eyes—or what look to Faith like eyes—painted on each one. Joe looks it up and down as if he’s planning to run it through a lathe.

Faith examines it helplessly. “Chris, it’s hideous.”

“Hey, I’m only the messenger,” Chris says. “And I hate to clue you, but you can’t get the guitar without an amp. We’re talking major bucks here, folks.”

The store is full of last-minute Christmas shoppers, mostly teenaged boys in denim jackets, black T-shirts. The few adults, like her and Joe, look as though they’ve just gotten off a tour bus. She wonders what kind of Christmas they are readying for in their homes, what their homes look like. Near the window a man is trying “Chopsticks” on an electric piano with his daughter; they have the same red hair. She hopes they could likewise spot Chris as her son.

“Well,” Chris says. “I’m outa here.” He hands off the guitar to Joe, who holds it by the neck like a chicken. “Meet you at the truck.”

“Wait a minute, I thought you were going to help us with this,” Joe says.

Chris backs away, lifting his arms the way Joe likes to. “Hey, I did my part. All you guys have to do is pay for it.” Faith watches
him saunter out the door. She hopes he will always look this at home with himself, so like his father.

Joe turns to her. “I vote we get it.”

“Did you see the price?” She taps the tag. “That’s not even counting the amplifier.”

“Just give me what you can,” he says. “I’ll pay for the rest.”

“If we’d done this earlier we could’ve shopped around a little.”

“Faith, I’ve been busy, okay?”

“Fine.” She doesn’t look at him. “I just hope he uses it.” She runs her fingers over the strings, the knobs on the body. “Isadora taught him a few chords and now he thinks he has some kind of destiny.”

“Maybe he has.” She hears him trying to make up. “He’s got music in his genes, after all.”

They buy the guitar, and the amplifier, and a beginner’s book on blues. As they walk out to the truck, struggling with the boxes, Faith turns her lineage into notes across a staff: tuneless, indecipherable, their identifying stems snapped off.

“Any plans for Christmas Eve?” she asks.

“Nope. Not a one.”

It is snowing, light and grainy, gathering on Joe’s black hair, turning it white as his mother’s. Faith watches this soft aging and wonders if she had ever, even in the first blush of love, believed they would grow old together.

“I thought you and Brenda might be doing something,” she says.

He slides the boxes into the back of the truck and closes the door of the cap, yanking once on the handle. “Brenda’s gone, Faith.” He sounds bitter. “As if you didn’t know.”