The Dogs of Babel

TWELVE

The first time I asked Lexy to marry me, she said no. It was early December, about nine months since we’d first met, and we’d gone away for the weekend. We were staying at a small inn on the beach, and the day had been rainy and blustery. We’d spent most of our time inside, with the fireplace lit, playing board games and drinking wine.

Now, as we lay in bed, Lexy reached over and picked up a felt-tip pen from the bedside table and took hold of both my hands. “This is what you give to me,” she said, and she began to write. She started on the backs of my hands and then turned them over to write on the palms. She covered my hands with words. Square eggs, she wrote, and beaches in winter. Your lips on my neck and a week of appetizers, and really bad music. She wrote, Coffee milk, and Scrabble and flowers that look like the devil. By the time she had finished, there was no space left at all.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said. She gave me the pen and offered up her hands. I didn’t know what to write. Hunger, I thought, and fullness. A feeling like wings inside me. The days and the seasons and a dog with a rough velvet hide. But instead I took her hand, and writing upside down so she could read it, I wrote letter by letter and finger by finger, whole world.

It was the truest, most romantic thing I had ever said, and I didn’t even say it out loud. Caught up as I was in the wide generosity of my emotions, I turned her hands over and, almost without thinking about it, wrote across her palms, Will you marry me?

She drew back and pulled her hands away. “Are you serious?” she said. She wasn’t smiling.

“I am completely serious,” I said, surprised to find that I was.

“You’re asking me to marry you.”

“I’m asking you to marry me.”

She searched my face. “Well… no,” she said. She looked away. “I have to say no. We don’t know enough about each other yet.”

I was perfectly calm. I was prepared to give her some time to get used to the idea. “You know everything there is to know about me,” I said. “And I know enough about you to know that I love you.”

She turned away from me. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

She didn’t speak for a moment. She had made her back stiff and hard, and when I reached out to touch her, she flinched away. “I know you love me,” she said finally. Her voice was ragged. “But how do you know that you love me?”

“Well, I know it because I want to be with you all the time,” I began.

“No. That’s not what I mean. I mean, how does it occur to you? How often do you really know it?”

“Always. I always know it.”

“Yes, you always know it, but it’s… it’s like in the back of your mind, right? It’s like… it’s like the way that you know that you’re going to die.”

I reached for her shoulder and rolled her over so that she was looking at me again. “Lexy, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Well, I mean, everyone knows that they’re going to die, right, but most of the time you let it slip from your mind. I mean, it’s always there in your head, and if anyone asked, you’d know the answer. But then there are some moments when all of a sudden you just know it, you know? It suddenly hits you that you’re going to die someday, and you say, ‘Oh, my God, this is the biggest fact of my life, and I’d almost forgotten.’”

“Well, so what?” I said. “What does that have to do with anything? No, I don’t think about my own death every moment of every day, but that’s because I want to forget it. You can’t go on with your life if you don’t forget about it sometimes. But that’s not the way I feel about you.”

“But still. That’s the way you experience it, right? It’s in fits and starts.” She turned away again.

I ran my hands over my face, rubbing hard at the skin, trying to feel the sturdiness underneath. We had not fought like this before, and I felt as if I were trying to swim through molasses. “Come on, Lexy, why are you doing this? I love you all the time. It’s always with me. But what do you want me to say? You can’t maintain that level of intensity every minute of your life.”

She was very quiet. “Well, I can. I do. I can’t take one breath, not one single breath, without knowing that I love you.”

I just lay there for a moment, looking at the long line of her back. “Where is this coming from?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she turned and looked at me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I guess you just kind of freaked me out a little, proposing like that, out of the blue.”

“Do you want me to take it back?”

She held her hands up in front of her face, looking at the words I’d written. “No,” she said. “I don’t want you to take it back.” She sighed. “But I can’t say yes yet. I don’t think you know enough about me. What if you find out more and you change your mind?”

“Well, I don’t think that’s likely. But, okay, go ahead—tell me the things I don’t know.”

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was very quiet and even. “I’ll marry you if you can answer this question for me: Do I have any tattoos?”

I stared at her. I knew the whole of her skin by heart. Did she think there was anything I had missed? “No,” I said. “You don’t.”

She lowered her head and parted her hair for me. I could see black ink on her scalp. “Sorry,” she said.

I bent over her head, examining. I couldn’t make it out. “What is it?” I asked.

“It’s snake hair,” she said. “Like Medusa.”

“Wow,” I said. I tried to follow the lines on her head, to make out the scales and the angry snake faces, but her hair was too thick. “When did you get it?”

“When I was seventeen.” She pulled away from my hands, still resting in her hair, and raised her head to look at me. “I used to pull my hair out. It’s kind of a nervous disorder.”

I nodded. “I’ve heard of that,” I said. “Let me think, what’s it called?” I puzzled out the possible Latin and Greek roots. “Trichotillomania?”

Lexy stared at me and shook her head. “You know the damnedest things,” she said. “Anyway, my parents took me to a couple of different doctors, and they put me on medication for it, but nothing worked. So one day, I just decided to shave my head and be done with it.”

I thought about my Lexy as a young girl, standing bald and brazen before the world. It was a strangely moving thought. “And did it work?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. There was nothing left to pull on.”

“Right.”

“So I kept it shaved for a year or so, until I felt like things were better in my life and it’d be safe to grow it back. I got the tattoo as kind of a talisman. It’s my secret strength. It protects me from falling back into that place where I used to be.”

I reached out tentatively. She took my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For ruining your nice proposal.” She held her hands out before her and looked at the words again. “It was very sweet.”

“That’s okay.”

“I just need some time,” she said. “To trust that this is all real.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

So I waited. I waited for five more months. And one morning, I awoke to find a single word printed across my palm. Yes, it said.