Wandering among the trickle of browsers through a yard sale’s unpromising array of cluttered card tables, I paused to watch two young girls leaping and tumbling on a mattress their father had just bought.
“C’mon, kids, stop,” he complained halfheartedly, proudly watching their manic twirls and twists in the air.
Turning from their welcome diversion for a moment, I picked up a small, battered tape recorder and noticed a cassette inside. This little surprise intrigued me, and I pressed the Play button. Immediately a man’s voice mumbled something too low for me to make out. I turned up the volume. He spoke slowly in a strange, foreign language, his voice strained, hesitant.
A middle-aged woman, her summer shorts tight against the bulge of her hips, hurried over and fiddled with the control buttons. “My god, I didn’t know this was in there.” She turned it off, and when she muttered, “Hoo boy, I can’t believe I tried to get rid of it this way,” I knew this was something I wanted.
“Is that a language tape?”
She laughed strangely. “Oh no, far from it.”
“Can I buy it?”
She pointed at the tape recorder. “Uh, sure. Isn’t there a price marked on it?”
“Yes,” I said softly, “but I’d like the cassette too.”
“You want the …” Her eyes searched my face in a way I’d long grown accustomed to these past few months: a questioning look that seemed to imagine I was an answer. “You know what’s on that tape?”
“I’d like to know.”
“Suicide songs. Yeah, that’s right,” she said to my startled face. “Unhappy lovers sing them before they—”
“But he’s not singing.”
“He’s trying not to.”
“Why?”
She glanced around at the idle bargain hunters in her backyard, then examined my face again. “I’m sorry … look, just how interested in this are you?”
“Very. Please, tell me whatever you’d like.”
She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and sighed. “Well, I’ll need a beer first. It’s so hot today. Joey,” she called out to a man standing by the garage, “could you take over the cash box?”
He nodded, and the woman stepped up the stairs to the back door and waved me along. “C’mon in. By the way, my name is Jill Harnick.”
I shook her hand. “Michael Kirbv. Pleased to meet you.”
We sat at the kitchen table. Jill took a sip from her bottle, preparing herself for whatever she had to say. Her finger scratched at the edge of the label and I avoided the impulse to make small talk.
“Well,” she finally began, “this goes back over ten years, back to when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. In the Philippines. I taught English in a small town, on one of the more remote islands. One of the teachers at the school was a Filipino man who spoke English beautifully. Agustin.”
Jill paused and set her bottle down almost absentmindedly, and I imagined she could hear his words again on that cassette. “Agustin had been born in the area but he was educated in Manila,” she continued. “Because Manila was like another world to the people in town, he was a bit of an outsider, and I suppose that’s why we became friends. Sometimes after school we’d sit on my veranda and talk teaching strategy and more than once he invited me over for dinner with his family. His wife was very sweet, and a little wary of me, even though my friendship with Agustin was extremely formal, polite.
“One afternoon, when I was in the second year of my tour, he came to my veranda upset. It was later than usual—most people were at home eating dinner. He told me that a young woman, someone he barely knew, had fallen in love with him. But he was married, and in the local culture of that island, adultery is simply … well, unthinkable. So this girl was wandering the streets hopelessly at night, singing traditional songs that celebrated love. But they were actually a warm-up to suicide.”
Jill pulled back from her chair and walked to the screen window. “Joey, how are you doing with change, need any more?”
“Got more than enough,” I heard him call back, but she lingered there at the window, as if she didn’t want to believe him. She returned to the table, avoiding my eyes. “I’m sorry, where was I, anyway? Yeah—when Agustin told me this, I remembered hearing a very eerie song a few nights before—a faraway voice that kept me up half the night—and I knew that was her.
“Agustin was incredibly upset, and even though I had no decent advice to give him, he was happy to be able to talk with me—he couldn’t speak about this to anyone in town, since the custom was, no one could admit being the subject of the songs.
“Well, that girl finally killed herself, and for a week afterward he visited me every afternoon, grateful that he could let out his misery. By this time I was so curious about those songs, I wanted to understand why they were so powerful. I considered myself something of a student of the local culture—I was in my second year there by then. I’m sorry, did I mention that?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding, “you did.”
“Anyway, I asked … for something I shouldn’t have. I asked Agustin to sing the songs for me, and help me translate them. He absolutely refused—he was really quite fierce about it. But the next day I managed to convince him just to speak the words of the songs into my tape recorder.”
Jill covered her face with her hands for a moment, then stared straight at me, her eyes dark little disks. “Stupid mistake. Those damned songs were so powerful that even he wasn’t immune. He recited the words and realized he had fallen in love with me, and before he was done he knew he was a dead man. Because he was married, and in his culture adultery is unthinkable.”
Jill regarded me carefully. “I don’t suppose you need to hear any more.”
“No,” I said. “I understand.” We sat there a while in silence, and I was surprised to hear the girls still jumping and whooping on the mattress outside. Finally I asked, “Are you sure you want to sell this?”
Jill managed to wince out a smile. “Hey, today’s our special summer clearance.” She pushed the tape recorder across the table, then tossed me the cassette. “Buy one, get one free.”
*
I played that tape in my office, between phone calls and appointments. The man had a remarkable voice. He spoke so carefully, trying to avoid breaking into song, and in the course of fifteen short minutes I heard the gradual discovery of love and then the reluctant acceptance of death. I began to memorize his inflections, almost believing that I understood the language. As he spoke I examined Kate’s photo on my desk: her eyes a bit distracted above the most cautious of smiles.
Kate had been quite happy these past few months. After dinner we sat quietly together in the living room with our newly compatible secret lives, making no demands on each other, and even if these evenings seemed uncomfortably close to what my father and Dan had become, locked in their own circle of silence, I didn’t know how to break the pattern. Yet if I really loved my wife, why would I want to disturb her? As that sad man’s intense voice continued to fill my office, his foreign words lulled me into acceptance—perhaps it was possible for me to stay with Kate, even if staying with her might be for me a form of suicide. But before I could decide, I had to know if my wife heard what I heard in that voice.
That evening Kate sat across from me in the living room, paging through one of her home decorating magazines with such intensity I wondered if she longed to live in those meticulously appointed rooms where no other people could be found, where a fire in a fireplace tended itself; where a book on a coffee table lay open, read by no one; where neatly tucked-away toys never encountered a child’s disruptive energy. Or maybe she imagined me there beside her in one of those rooms, a man content with whatever small intimacies she was able to offer.
The tape recorder lay beside me on the couch, and I slowly notched up the volume, so that at first Kate would barely hear those foreign words, so she might grow accustomed to them. With each tiny turn of the dial, I waited for some subtle sign of recognition.
Finally, Kate’s eyes flickered slightly as she turned another page, and she lifted her head. “Michael, what is that?”
The man’s voice fluttered a moment when I held up the tape recorder.
Her face recoiled at the sight. “How can you possibly listen to that?”
“Don’t worry, dear,” I said, pressing the off button, “I won’t ever listen to it again.”
Kate stared at me, puzzled. She didn’t yet know that she had saved my life.
*
Curled beside Kate on that last night that we would ever lie together side by side, I listened to the even, breathy rhythm of her sleep, I watched her breasts and belly rise and fall, and I wondered why we’d never had a child. This was another subject Kate and I hadn’t talked about, though we sometimes made love without thought of contraception. All our friends who were busy with children often commented how much more we’d learn about each other once we became parents. You can’t help but be surprised, they’d say. Kate and I would nod politely, pretending those innocent remarks weren’t central to our troubles. Now, shifting uncomfortably in bed, I wondered if those words weren’t also a clue to our infertility. Maybe each of Kate’s eggs fisted itself up when my sperm approached, each little wriggling creature a question mark that shouldn’t be acknowledged. Or perhaps my sperm purposely lost themselves in her moist, inner folds, unwilling to open what waited in that distant, mysterious egg.
In the morning, after opening the blinds, I sat on Kate’s side of the bed and waited for her eyes to open to the early light. She stirred under the blanket, then her hand rose up suddenly, blocking the unexpected sight of me so close, so soon.
“Michael?”
I took her hand and held it, admiring the delicate bones, remembering the time she’d drawn an image of my own hand. Then I set it down on the blanket, terribly aware that no tender tracing could rewrite what I had to say.
“I’m so sorry, Kate.”
“Sorry?”
I nodded. “I want a divorce.”
Her voice unusually calm, she asked me to repeat what I’d just said.
“I want a—”
“But we’re so happy,” she interrupted, with a voice that held no such conviction.
I said nothing. Then Kate’s body seemed to ease under the covers, her legs languidly stretching out and releasing this happy marriage.
*
Kate felt certain that if we sold the house and each moved elsewhere, then our new towns and homes and jobs would allow us to rebuild our lives as soon as possible. Barely able to hide her pleasure at our ending, she became positively voluble as she outlined the benefits of this plan, and I finally agreed, if only to curtail any more painful discussions.
When the time came, Kate packed her half of our dividing house with a light touch, filling each box almost tenderly before taping the cardboard flap shut. I worked more slowly, noticing that she took special care not to pack any objects I’d collected—did she somehow understand that they held secrets, like the illustrations she kept inside herself?
Yet there was something of my collection that I wanted her to have, a secret gift that would be my rueful farewell: a long brown bootlace that once belonged to a young woman whose lush blond hair, I’d been told, was her own halo. While resting one afternoon in a park, she’d caught sight of a friend she secretly loved, unexpectedly approaching along one of the cobblestone paths. Though caught off guard, she quickly unlaced of one of her boots and used it to tie back her hair. She greeted him as he walked by, and when he stopped to chat she casually reached back and loosened the knot, her hair tumbling undone for this man who now, suddenly, had nowhere else to go.
While Kate continued her meticulous, patient packing, I climbed the stairs to our nearly empty bedroom and searched in her closet for her slim leather boots, hoping she hadn’t yet packed them. There they were, in a dark corner beneath a line of dresses, one boot lying sadly on its side. I picked it up and examined the lace—it was nearly the same color and only slightly thicker than the one I held in my hand.
I exchanged them, my fingers fumbling at the buttonhooks, satisfied with this small presence I was bestowing on Kate. Each autumn through winter she’d wear these boots, tightening them in the mornings and then going about her day, but in the evenings she’d unloose those laces, and the subtle energy of the one I’d just given her might make her pause for a moment, as if she heard someone speaking from far off, not yet recognizing that stirring within as the urge to finally let herself go. And one day, as all laces do, this lace would snap, perhaps finally breaking the spell of her own inner knot.
*
While reestablishing my insurance business in a new town, I once again traveled from one yard sale to another, or I checked the local paper for an announcement of any new auction, longing for the sound of a caller’s swift and keening voice. I quickly added to my collection, and in my new home I allowed every object its own perspective and tiny pull of gravity, so that it might radiate to the other objects in invisible, kaleidoscopic associations. My objects were always willing to silently offer their tales, and I was their rapt audience as I wandered through the house. On my dining room hunt-board sat a gravy bowl that was once a young girl’s magic lamp; on the living room mantelpiece stood the candlestick holder an elderly man had thrown out his window the day before he died; in a corner of the foyer stood a plant stand, owned by a woman who never dared grow anything and kept it empty. On my desk rested a petrified wood paperweight and its many stories: one woman had carried it with her everywhere, an unlikely balm for her too-tender heart; then her twin sister, jealous of anything that couldn’t be shared, managed to steal it; and finally their brother, weary of the bickering that always seemed to exclude him, sold it to me.
In a wooden bowl on the kitchen counter lay the soiled, bent arm of a doll. It once belonged to a timid child who held it before her whenever she had to venture down the basement for a family chore: one quick wave of that tiny arm somehow warded off all imagined dangers. Sometimes I felt the need to hold it myself, snug in my jacket pocket, and take a long, aimless walk through this new town I was still learning. My soft plastic talisman always seemed to lead me somewhere I needed to be: to a parade ground where the marching band of the local college blared out fearlessly uplifting music; to a small stream in the middle of a park, its gliding waters clear down to the smooth stones; to a late-night mall and its wonderful crush of teenaged kids flirting with each other up and down the aisles.
One evening during one of those walks I found myself hungry and standing before a diner, so I settled into a booth inside and ordered a greasy burger. While waiting for my meal I noticed a woman in the booth ahead of me, who brushed one graying strand after another from her face as she stared at the small jukebox propped against the window. Occasionally she forgot her wayward hair and reached toward the buttons, her fingers poised but never willing to push.
Her quarters surely lay inside the machine, but she wasn’t ready to spend them just yet, and again and again she nearly punched in the numbers before drawing back her hand. What song was she afraid to release, and why—some lyric that might offer advice she was afraid to hear, a melody that would call up an old love or the memory of a child now grown and gone?
The quiet drama unfolding within that woman affected me as well, and I reached into my pocket and held the hand of that little hidden arm in an anxious grip. Then a surprising thought ran through me: Why not give this bit of toy away? It had helped someone once before. It had helped soothe my entry into a new life. It might, if I told this woman its story, help her too.
I shook my head, wishing my hamburger could arrive right at this moment and release me from the familiar impulse to save others. I’d make a fool of myself, wouldn’t I, with my sudden appearance before this woman and the fantastic story I’d try to tell? Squeezing the soft plastic arm again, I felt little fingers cup into a budding, reassuring grasp, the gift of just enough courage to help me slide across my seat to the aisle. My sudden movement drew the woman’s gaze, her eyes so thick and dull with unhappiness that she might be willing to try anything, even waving a tiny toy arm against whatever the world threatened. I smiled awkwardly, and stepped forward.