So they were sitting in the car, watching the door of the place-people coming, people going-hoping to get lucky. In the meanwhile, he'd asked her to read him what she'd been writing, because he was curious and wanted her to share it with him, and yes, he assured her, he could listen and keep his eyes on the door at the same time. And so she'd read to him and she watched his face when he told her it was good and maybe she'd flushed red, maybe she had.
“You know,” he said, “the writing's really” and she didn't catch the rest.
She leaned in close to him. “What? The writing is what?”
“Cinematic,” he said, contorting his face, his mouth, his lips, and he finger-spelled it just to be sure.
“Cinematic?” she repeated, secretly pleased. All at once, and she couldn't help herself, she saw the book as a movie, a whole parade of scenes, not the least of which featured the premiere, the red carpet, she and Bridger in tuxedos-or no, he in a tuxedo and she in a black strapless dress, or no, white, definitely white…
His face changed, his eyes sinking away from the smile. “There “was” a movie, you know. Like thirty years ago? By”-he finger-spelled it “François Truffaut. You know that, right?”
“Yes,” she said, holding his eyes, “of course. I've seen it.”
“It was called “L'Enfant Sauvage.” We saw it in film school.” He brought his hands up out of his lap, as if to use them, and then thought better of it. “And it was good, I remember. Truffaut himself played the teacher, what was his name?”
“Itard.”
“Right, Itard-but you haven't got that far yet, right? What you gave me is as far as it goes-where they find the kid wandering naked in the woods and nobody knows who he is or how he's managed to survive on his own?”
She nodded. It was easy to read him because he was her intimate, her man, and she knew his speech patterns as well as she knew her father's, her mother's-what was hard was reading strangers, especially if they talked fast or with an impediment or an accent. That was why her stomach felt light and her blood raced as if she'd just climbed a dozen flights of stairs: there was a stranger behind the counter in Mail Boxes Etc. and she was going to have to go in there and pretend to be someone she wasn't, pretend to be hearing, pretend to be entitled and maybe even cavalier. “Yes,” she signed, “that's as far as it goes.” And then, aloud: “I want to get to that part, where Itard tries to teach him to talk, to name things, to speak through an acquired language, but first I'm interested in how the child is perceived by the society around him-and how he perceives the world himself. That's the beginning. That's the groundwork.”
“He never did learn to talk, did he? I mean, after how many years of exercises like seven days a week and all that?”
“And all that.” The struggle, that was what it was about, the fight to overcome the deficit, the impairment, the loss. Itard and Victor, the Wild Child, who could barely pronounce his own name. “Five years,” she said. And then, finally, her throat constricting, she added, “No, he never did learn to speak.”
He ran a hand through his hair and it came away with a faint sheen of gel on his palm. She noticed because he raised both his hands, as if to speak in Sign-he tried for her sake, and it was more intimate, more giving, even than what they did in bed together; in that moment, she felt herself go out to him as if all her tethers had been cut. “Are you going to go to”-he paused, because he couldn't find the Sign and had to spell it out: “France? To see it. For research, I mean?”
She showed him: “Country, foreign country. Europe, European.” “Germany” “is the double eagle,” “for France you flick the wrist like this, like the flicking of a Frenchman's handkerchief out of his cuff. See? It's easy.”
His hands were in his lap. His face fell into what she liked to call his “hangdog” look, and she loved the reference, the picture it made in her mind of a dog called out on the carpet-right, on the carpet? — and the way its body collapsed under the weight of all that undisguised doggy emotion. “What?” she said. “What's wrong?”
“You didn't answer the question.”
“You mean France?”
A full minute must have gone by and neither of them had even glanced at the door across the street. His eyes were concentrated on her lips, as if he were the deaf one. “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly, back and forth, heavy as the pendulum at the bottom of the grandfather clock in her parents' front hall, the one that announced the hour to everyone but her. “I'd love to, but-”
“But you can't afford it. Because you don't have a job. Right?”
She dropped her eyes. Used her hands: “Right”.
Both of them looked up then and studied the façade of Mail Boxes Etc. They might have been architectural students-and she should have thought of that, should have brought two sketch pads and an assortment of pencils, charcoal, gum erasers, the ones that smelled like tutti-frutti. Or maybe they were building inspectors. Or town planners. She wouldn't have put that ugly cookie-cutter thing there if she was on the board, no way in the world. In fact, she'd tear it down in a heartbeat and let the oaks creep back in, put in a fountain, a couple of benches. The frame collapsed and her eyes went to the movement inside, the vague bobbing of shapes screened by the reflection of the sun off the windows, people at work, packages being weighed, mail sent out and received, copies run, an amorphous huddle around the cash register. Her stomach sank. And then she felt his touch: two fingers at her chin, gently shifting her gaze back to him. “Have you thought about what you're going to do?”
“No, not with this hanging over me,” she said, gesturing toward the store. “I mean, I get paid through the end of August, but obviously I've got to start sending my resume out.” She watched his face change-he didn't want her to see what he was feeling, but he was a lousy actor. “I don't want to leave, if that's what you mean.”
“That's what I mean,” he said.
She leaned in to kiss him, the familiar taste and scent of him, lips that spoke in a different way altogether, and then drew back again. “I'd love to go to Aveyron, to Lacaune and Saint-Sernin-are you kidding me? — but the airfare's out of my range, I'm afraid, and with the dollar weak… Plus, they'd probably arrest me the minute they ran my passport through the computer.” She put on a face. “Dana Halter, batterer and assaulter-it even rhymes.”
“But how can you write about a place you've never seen?”
This was easy. She pointed a finger to her head. “I see it here. And I've been there, to the south of France, anyway-to Toulouse, which isn't that far from Aveyron. Didn't I ever tell you that?” She'd been there as a girl, a few years after she became deaf. She must have been ten, eleven-the age of the wild child. Her parents were vacationing in Europe that year and they brought the whole family along-her and her two brothers-for the educational opportunity. Her parents were practical in that way. Her mother especially. And especially with her, full immersion in both Sign and speech right from the beginning-what the people who make their living off the deaf call “total communication”-because there was no way her daughter was going to be a cripple or even the tiniest bit dependent on anybody or anything. Her mother was pretty then, her hair trailing down her back beneath the brim of the suede cowgirl's hat she'd bought on a trip to Mexico, her legs long and naked in a yellow sundress and two boy babies and a little deaf girl compressed in her arms-Dana didn't know whether her memories of that time came from the photographs in the family album or what she'd seen and smelled and felt. When she closed her eyes she could see the fingers of palms etched against pale stucco, a river like an avenue of light, the new bridge (a regional joke: Napoleon had built it) humped over the water as if it were trying to swim.