“But not successfully. You want a divorce,” Dr. Hernandez reminds her.
“Yes,” Patricia replies. “I do.”
“Why are you angry?” the psychologist wonders.
“I’m not angry,” Patricia replies. She feels completely composed.
“I think you’re hostile,” the psychologist decides.
They sit in silence. The leather on her last pair of black high heels is worn and shabby. She needs to go to Pittsburgh and buy a new pair. If she lived in Florida, she wouldn’t have to bother with boots and the cedar winter closet with its stacks of gray cashmere sweaters, down jackets, scarves and gloves and all the tedious rest. She’d just wear sandals.
“I suspect you have a secret,” Dr. Hernandez says. “Tell me. You’ll feel better.”
Patricia assesses the condition of her shoes. She’ll replace this pair and buy another and then red stiletto heels.
He stands up abruptly and walks from his desk toward her. He takes long aggressive strides and positions himself above her. “What’s your other name?” he suddenly demands, his voice raised, forceful and direct.
“Other name?” Patricia repeats. She’s completely alert.
“Who else lives inside you?” he persists.
“I beg your pardon,” Patricia says.
She watches Dr. Hernandez retreat. He reaches for his gold lighter and lights another cigarette. He needs to conceal himself with smoke. He’s an amateur.
“Why does your husband laugh without sound?” Dr. Hernandez wonders.
Patricia shrugs. She finds it impossible to form a sentence.
“Don’t you find it curious?” Dr. Hernandez persists.
Patricia says no. Out the window, roadside cemeteries of corn stalks and piled husks are littered. In the Allegeny mountains we navigate by tombs, she thinks.
“Maybe somebody punched him in the mouth,” the psychologist suggests. “You might think about that. We’ll explore that next week.”
She agrees and thanks him. On the highway, she considers the legions of untraceable women, solitary in towers of light, in stucco and in brick tenements, in trailers and farmhouses. Soon autumn will turn tawdry. Then the freefall vertigo of winter dusk. Perhaps the discarded were hiding in shoulder high grasses and Russian Thistle. They’re taking the pulse of thunder and memorizing varieties of grey — antique pewter, tin, pebbles beneath a rot of fog, and the sly silver of a bread knife. The women recite the incarnations of erasure in six languages. No one knows what the men do and no one cares.
When Patricia approaches Maple Ridge Road she stops the car. Other name, she thinks. She allows herself to laugh out loud. What a fuckhead. She rips Dr. Greg Hernandez’s appointment card into pieces and throws them out the car window.
One winter, when blizzards were virulent, car crashes epidemic, and the college suspended classes, Malcolm taught himself Mandarin. On journeys to conferences in China, he engaged in constant conversations with colleagues, waitresses and taxi drivers. Malcolm asks bartenders where they were born and if their fathers farm with water buffalo. Mac’s at his best with strangers he won’t encounter again. Professor McCarty, the part-time landscaper and ethnographer.
Patricia finds herself drawn to calligraphy. She has a desire, small as a shiver, to write in an Oriental script composed of symbols telling stories of ruined fortresses and crossing bodies of water. They’re creation myths that explain how the universe began and why it continues. If she had special pens, ink sticks and an apprenticeship in brush strokes, she might know the answer. She could have scrolls made from rare woven fibers and moth wings, and the core would be comprehensible.
Patricia thinks everything in Chinese sounds brutal and enraged. It’s all harsh threats and hoarse insults. Malcolm asks a janitor to describe his childhood and if he’ll be able to find a wife. She wanders museums alone, devising her own idiosyncratic translations. They’re not literal but rather inspirations. It’s nothing she would soil a paper with or dare spoil the air with her mouth, not even if she whispered.
She runs her hands across the archetypal hieroglyphics etched into three-thousand-year-old stones. They’re the original Braille, she decides, and closes her eyes. Some knowledge can only be transmitted tactically. Patricia only memorized a few characters — woman and man, big, market, heaven, sea, fish and baby. It was enough.
She prefers hieroglyphics to calligraphy. Characters resemble fishhooks and litters for concubines. Bent trees struck by monsoon lightning recur in a rash like seasons. She recognizes elephants and canoes, and a woman in a typhoon.
Hieroglyphics are more primitive and comprehensible. Their narratives are urgent. They’re the headlines of history. They’re like fossils in amber.
“You have theaters between your fingers,” Malcolm observes. It’s the tone he employs for undergraduates. He must be preparing for his office hours. And he means he’s given her this, defined the perimeter and secured the borders. Constellations rise from the ground and vast star systems replicate themselves on the sides of rocks. Self-contained men and women recognize and appreciate this.
“Yes, of course,” Patricia replies, prepared to kneel in dirt. In truth, she thinks gardening is boring and back-breaking. Today is bolts of steel or a river of washed rags. Malcolm says she should prepare beds for Tulips and Daffodils.
She could put on her jacket now and walk through mud and patches of ice into the forest of striped trees, curiously nude and obscene. The self-contained know miniature cities float where you stand and villages lit by votive and prayers grow under your watering can. Patricia stands at her front door. Then she realizes she doesn’t want to go there.
Malcolm McCarty is in his office, examining a hundred-year-old book he chanced to find at a rummage sale. The book is leather-bound and surprisingly heavy. The pages are composed of a paper not currently in use. The cover is engraved with the names of the author’s family in gold letters. His children and siblings and their occupations and locations are also listed. In this aspect, the book of another century possessed the qualities of a family bible. There was nothing disposable about it.
Malcolm McCarty planned to bring it to his senior seminar, to pass the book around the room and encourage his students to respond. Yes, touch it, feel the ebb and flow of the hand-set typeface. Books have oceans inside them, yes.
The content is unremarkable. But he wanted to show his students that books were once designed to endure like artifacts — an ivory inlaid table, a grandfather clock or gold charm meant to be worn at the throat. In the previous century, a book was an heirloom.
Now he realizes his students would be indifferent. They prefer books bound with glue that dissolves and composite paper of inferior substances that yellow and shred. A writer can anticipate outliving his books; he had planned to note this and pause, allowing his senior seminar to consider the implications, the irony and tragedy.
His students don’t expect books to alter the orbit of worlds or be memorized. They don’t believe a book can change a single molecule of their lives or give them one second thought. The shoddy construction of modern books asserts they’re of the moment and don’t need glass cases for protection. They aren’t distillations of personality or character in the monumental chaos of unforeseen events and complex ambiguous circumstances. They won’t be reread or gifted to children. In fact, his students donate or discard them. They leave them on beaches and in airport terminals. They toss them in trash cans. His students share an aversion for trash and they’re careful not to litter.
It’s the first tentative knocking on the door of his official office hour’s morning. Professor Malcolm McCarty glances at the door. He relishes the ritual of this, the sound of a hand against wood, uncertain but determined. It’s a gesture ancient as fertility dances, bare feet on mud under a full moon, and men drumming. He knows his assigned part, walks to the door and stops. It’s the arrested moment of expectation before the grotesque tedium of student indifference and obfuscation. This pause is like a signature in pencil on a lithograph or a single voice reciting on stage. It’s an intimacy that demands obedience and complicity. As he opens the door, he senses spring in the ice under Hadley Hall, differentiating and assembling itself.