“Teddy?” he said.
Her back was to him, she could not see his lips. He touched her shoulder and she rolled over to face him, and he was surprised to see that there were tears in her eyes.
“Hey,” he said, “hey, honey… what…?”
She shook her head and rolled away from him again, closing herself into her pillow, closing him out — if she could not see him, she could not hear him. Her eyes were her ears; her hands and her face were her voice. She lay sobbing into the pillow, and he put his hand on her shoulder again, gently, and she sniffed and turned toward him again.
“Want to talk?” he said.
She nodded.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head.
“Did I do something?”
She shook her head again.
“What is it?”
She sat up, took a tissue from the box on the bedside table, blew her nose, and then put the tissue under her pillow. Carella waited. At last, her hands began to speak. He watched them. He knew the language, he had learned it well over the years, he could now speak it better than hesitantly with his own hands. As she spoke to him, the tears began rolling down her face again, and her hands fluttered and then stopped completely. She sniffed again, and reached for the crumpled tissue under her pillow.
“You’re wrong,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I’m telling you you’re wrong.”
She shook her head again.
“Honey, she likes you very much.”
Her hands began again. This time they spilled out a torrent of words and phrases, speaking to him so rapidly that he had to tell her to slow down, and even then continuing at a pace almost too fast for him to comprehend. He caught both her hands in his own, and said, “Now come on, honey. If you want me to listen…” She nodded, and sniffed, and began speaking more slowly now, her fingers long and fluid, her dark eyes glistening with the tears that sat upon them as she told him again that she was certain Augusta Kling didn’t like her, Augusta had said things and done things tonight—
“What things?”
Teddy’s hands moved again. The wine, she said.
“The wine? What about the wine?”
When she toasted.
“I don’t remember any toast.”
She made a toast.
“To what?”
To you and Bert.
“To the case, you mean. To solving the case.”
No, to you and Bert.
“Honey—”
She left me out. She drank only to you and Bert.
“Now, why would she do a thing like that? She’s one of the sweetest people—”
Teddy burst into tears again.
He put his arms around her and held her close. The rain beat steadily on the windowpanes. “Honey,” he said, and she looked up into his face, and studied his mouth, and watched the words as they formed on his lips. “Honey, Augusta likes you very much.” Teddy shook her head. “Honey, she said so. Do you remember when you told the story about the kids… about April falling in the lake at that PBA picnic? And Mark jumping in to rescue her when the water was only two feet deep? Do you remember telling…?”
Teddy nodded.
“And then you went to the ladies’ room, do you remember?”
She nodded again.
“Well, the minute you were gone, Augusta told me how terrific you were.”
Teddy looked up at him.
“That’s just what she said. She said, ‘Jesus, Teddy’s terrific, I wish I could tell a story like her.’”
The tears were beginning to flow again.
“Honey, why on earth wouldn’t she like you?”
She looked him dead in the eye. Her hands began to move.
Because I’m a deaf-mute, she said.
“You’re the most wonderful woman in the world,” he said, and kissed her, and held her close again. And then he kissed the tears from her face and from her eyes, and told her again how much he loved her, told her what he had told her that day years and years ago when he’d asked her to marry him for the twelfth time and had finally convinced her that she was so much more than any other woman when until that moment she had considered herself somehow less. He told her again now, he said, “Jesus, I love you, Teddy, I love you to death,” and then l hey made love as they had when they were younger, much younger.
Calypso, 1979
She tried to remember how long ago it had been. Years and years, that was certain. And would he think her frivolous now? Would he accept what she had done (what she was about to do, actually, since she hadn’t yet done it, and could still change her mind about it) as the gift she intended it to be, or would he consider it the self-indulgent whim of a woman who was no longer the young girl he’d married years and years ago? Well, who is? Teddy thought. Even Jane Fonda is no longer the young girl she was years and years ago. But does Jane Fonda worry about such things? Probably, Teddy thought.
The section of the city through which she walked was thronged with people, but Teddy could not hear the drifting snatches of their conversations as they moved past her and around her. Their exhaled breaths pluming on the brittle air were, to her, only empty cartoon balloons floating past in a silent rush. She walked in an oddly hushed world, dangerous to her in that her ears could provide no timely warnings, curiously exquisite in that whatever she saw was unaccompanied by any sound that might have marred its beauty. The sight (and aroma) of a bluish-gray cloud of carbon monoxide, billowing onto the silvery air from an automobile exhaust pipe, assumed dreamlike proportions when it was not coupled with the harsh mechanical sound of an automobile engine. The uniformed cop on the corner, waving his arms this way and that, artfully dodging as he directed the cross-purposed stream of lumbering traffic, became an acrobat, a ballet dancer, a skilled mime the moment one did not have to hear his bellowed, “Move it, let’s keep it moving!” And yet—
She had never heard her husband’s voice.
She had never heard her children’s laughter.
She had never heard the pleasant wintry jingle of automobile skid chains on an icy street, the big-city cacophony of jackhammers and automobile horns, street vendors and hawkers, babies crying. As she passed a souvenir shop whose window brimmed with inexpensive jade, ivory (illegal to import), fans, dolls with Oriental eyes (like her husband’s), she did not hear drifting from a small window on the side wall of the shop the sound of a stringed instrument plucking a sad and delicate Chinese melody, the notes hovering on the air like ice crystals — she simply did not hear.
The tattoo parlor was vaguely anonymous, hidden as it was on a narrow Chinatown side street. The last time she’d been here, the place had been flanked by a bar and a laundromat. Today, the bar was an offtrack betting parlor and the laundromat was a fortune-telling shop run by someone named Sister Lucy. Progress. As she passed Sister Lucy’s emporium, Teddy looked over the curtain in the front window and saw a Gypsy woman sitting before a large phrenology poster hanging on the wall. Except for the poster and the woman, the shop was empty. The woman looked very lonely and a trifle cold, huddled in her shawl, looking straight ahead of her at the entrance door. For a moment, Teddy was tempted to walk into the empty store and have her fortune told. What was the joke? Her husband was very good at remembering jokes. What was it? Why couldn’t women remember jokes? Was that a sexist attitude? What the hell was the joke? Something about a Gypsy band buying a chain of empty stores?