Dead Languages Read Online Free PDF Page B

Jeremy.”
    “I’ll miss you so much.”
    “I really, truly love you with all my soul,” she said.
    “My Dad’s waiting. I better go.”
    She took her arms off me and stepped back, straightened her smock. Then she said, “I’ve already told you I love you, Jeremy. Can’t you say, ‘I love you, Faith’?”
    “I love you,” I said.
    “‘I love you,
Faith,
’” she insisted.
    This little scene in the garage occurred only a few months after my futile attempt to say
Philadelphia
in the living room. Stutterers have a tendency to generalize their fear of one word that begins with a particular sound to a fear of all words that begin with the same sound. In the space of the summer I’d effectively eliminated every
F
from my vocabulary, with the exception of the preposition, “for,” which for the time being was too small to incite terror. A few weeks later, my fear of
F
ended when another letter—I think it was
L
—suddenly loomed large. But at that moment, early October 1962 , in Faith’s garage, I was terrified of
F
s. I simply wasn’t saying them. I hadn’t called Faith by her first name for nearly a month and had, instead, taken to calling her Carlisle, as if her patronymic had become a term of jocular endearment.
    “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t say that.”
    And by way of explanation I took the rubber band off my painting and unfurled a Crayola crayon effort of a cowboy on a horse that looked more like a dog. This was figure. Ground was short green grass, pool-blue sky, burgundy mountains. Between the cowboy on his dog-horse and the short green grass, pool-blue sky, and burgundy mountains was a barbed wire fence because between me and life that can be touched there has always been a fence.
    Talented as she was, Faith wasn’t exactly Walter Pater when it came to other people’s paintings. She didn’t understand. She took my inability to say her name as an admission of insincerity. Maybe she thought I had some hot new watercolorist stashed away in Encino. She didn’t even give me time to explain. She lifted the sheet over the easel, revealing a beautiful if unfinished self-portrait—it promised to be her best work yet—that she crumpled into a ball and shoved into my hands before running into the house with tears streaming down her face. I meant to run after her and explain everything, but I saw her mother lock the back door. Then I heard Father start honking the car. Like a dead man down a plank, I walked the driveway to our car, vowing to write Faith a full confession once we left Los Angeles.
    The letter, of course, never got written. An hour out of L.A. I fell asleep and started dreaming about the girls up north. Frustrated artists, young lovers are like that: they have traitorous imaginations. We took the coastal route, the slower, prettier way, since Beth and I wanted to watch the waves and neither Mother nor Father was in any particular hurry to arrive in Northern California. They weren’t sure they were doing the right thing, leaving behind good friends to take interesting jobs, and their uncertainty took the form of a sustained elegy to Los Angeles. Suddenly the Hollywood Bowl was “a lovely place to listen to piano,” the
Los Angeles Times
was a “daily addiction,” and Frank Tang’s, where Father had once launched an entire dish of sweet and sour spare ribs into Mother’s lap, was “the only Chinese restaurant anywhere that left you feeling full.”
    Their combined nostalgia grew so great, in fact, that halfway up the coast Father pulled the Rambler—a 1958 Rambler, one of the worst cars ever made—into a motel, where Beth and I swam in the heated pool and my parents tried to talk themselves out of heading back. Many years later Father, edging into another depression, wrote the Ellenboegens: “While I can’t rewind the clock and there’s little to be gained except anguish and soul-twisting remorse, I wish to Christ we’d never come up here in October of ’ 62 . Saddest