Women and Men

the unknown sound

That sound, she said — and he felt her attention touch him — doesn’t it bother you?

She lay in a corner of the long leather couch. She looked beautifully composed, relaxed. Her toes were lighted by the TV screen, the light crossed a knee, a shoulder, her nose. She was new to him and in a way he was thinking about her. He was on his knees across the room, and when he sat back on his cold heels his knees cracked like a painful joke. She didn’t seem to notice.

That sound, she said — she smiled and shook her head quickly — it’s so strong.

Well, let’s have it without sound, he said, and started crawling toward the TV. I often have the sound off.

You can’t, she said, unless you turn off the TV.

What do you mean I can’t? he said, and stopped where he was.

It’s always on when the set’s on, she said.

What is?

That sound.

I hear the guy talking, and I hear the crowd, right?

That’s not the sound I mean.

She smiled and he felt the warmth of the smile through the low light, but the smile had a clarity he did not grasp. He didn’t know her yet. He crawled back to where he’d been.

Hear it? she said.

What did she mean? Sound was something he knew about.

Look, I’m not deaf, he said. He wanted to go over to her. He looked at her eyes, one at a time, both at once. Above the nipple of one breast was a brief, tender shade he knew to be bluish. On the screen the young pitcher in a gray cap with black letters with orange hair bulging out beneath was staring in at the camera, close-up. She didn’t follow baseball, she’d said, didn’t really know baseball; but she’d played — softball, that is. The pitcher was at the top of the screen now and smaller, and three figures were grouped at the bottom of the screen watching him. These were the batter, facing sideways, waving the end of his bat above his shoulder in a brighter, a white, uniform; a player squatting behind him in a gray uniform, his cap on backwards; and behind him an older, burly man in normal clothes leaning over the shoulder of the squatting one, who now tipped onto one knee.

The thought of what she might be seeing made the picture suddenly so familiar he didn’t see quite as he was used to seeing. But what could she hear that he didn’t? It was one of the older color TVs. He concentrated and he felt the four figures — umpire, catcher, batter, pitcher — blur back into the extreme and ticklish rear of his eyes to be surfaces or components. He heard the announcer, and then the thuck of a pitch hitting the catcher’s mitt, and the shout of the umpire, who did not raise his arm.

Wait, she said. She pulled her feet up under her, she leaned forward and crawled off the couch so smoothly that the couch’s level and the floor’s were not separate.

On her hands and knees she reached the TV, her bare back arched, her head childlike up close to the screen, finding a new thing. When she turned the right-hand knob her hair, as if in the sudden absence of sound, was surrounded by light.

Now hear it?

What’s it like — is it a hum, a whistle?

It’s hard to describe.

You’re right on top of it, you sure you’re not hearing the announcer very faintly?

No, she said, it’s what’s left.

On her hands and knees she swung her head around, and she observed him, her chin against her shoulder.

You’re being mysterious, he said. He wanted to touch the blond down on the small of her back.

She fell over and, opening her legs, sat with her legs crossed. Her force was clear, but it confused their ages a bit. Turn around, she said, and don’t look.

Her pale stomach was straight up. He followed the line of each leg out along the calf to the angle of the knee then in along the thigh. He turned his back to her.

He sat the way she was sitting. He straightened his back and then realized what he was expecting. Her touch. So far he recalled each time with her; and he wondered how long it would go on — it.

Try again, she said.

He heard the set turned off as the light in the room slid away toward the one other source, the white globe on the window sill.

Ready, he said.

Maybe you should close your eyes, she said. But he didn’t; he remembered the Lord’s Prayer in church when he was a child.

Tock goes the switch again, and the sound brought up the armchair and rug and, in the window, an image of glowing bookshelves.

Do you hear a very high sound?

He didn’t. He said maybe he was inured, maybe he was flooded. He wondered how often she watched television.

Maybe once a month, if that — she didn’t have a TV.

They tried again.

The light from the screen dropped away. Then it came up again so that he saw the top of the armchair reflected in the window where the lamp was.

It’s so strong, she said, and he felt she was smiling.

Too strong for me, he said.

Come on, she said, don’t say that. It’s high, like a whistle. Very high.

A dull crank of gears echoed down in the street. He wanted to see her.

He turned himself around and she didn’t object. She was unusual in that she didn’t try to get him to talk about his work, except once she’d asked if he had to do much actual swimming. She pushed the knob, the screen became a gray mirror. She kept her hand on the knob and looked at him with something in store for him. He kept an eye on her hand.

She pulled the knob and there was a between-innings commercial.

He felt a vibration, he thought. Or a pressure.

You really can’t hear it?

A whistle, he thought, a whistle without the whistle. It’s like speed, he said.

Speed? she said.

No, I mean like the speed of light — but without the light.

But then he didn’t know, and she agreed, and said she didn’t want to push him into saying what he didn’t mean.

He didn’t know if she would spend the night this time or go home.

She smiled when he told her about her neck, her collarbone, her hands, the tender bluish shade he had touched with his eyelash, even with his eye. She’d liked his hands, it was one of the first things she looked at in a man. He’d let her get away with that.

Let’s listen to the sound, she said, and he thought she was saying also, Concentrate, here’s something I can bring you on your home ground.

In the same serious way she had asked if he had some light penetrating oil; the record turntable sometimes failed to stop and the arm sometimes didn’t come back. She wanted to tilt the housing up, she knew where to look. He’d said he would buy some oil.

Now she switched the TV set off and told him to shut his eyes and put his hands over his eyes.

He asked if she’d heard this sound before.

Only the few times she’d watched TV.

She and her friends listened to music. She’d lent him a piano record. It sounded like a half-magical, musing mish-mash of Debussy, Schumann, pre-War nightclub songs and barroom rag heavy on the pedal and old American songs he could not identify, only respond to, a tune from Stephen Foster maybe, or a camp meeting by a river. He’d lent her Delius and the Bach partitas he liked. She’d said little about him himself except that she had always wondered what free-lance really meant. He had volunteered the information that most of his salvage work lately was for the police. She told him a little about her friends.

Her friends thought of themselves as coming out of the sixties, but he saw they were suburban kids not old enough to have been actually in the events of the sixties. They lived together in musical apartments but they weren’t hippies. They would be fairly romantic, he supposed, though she, he felt, was not. And she didn’t preach or brag. She ate little — only live foods, she said, meaning raw. But a week ago she’d asked if he minded if she smoked a cigarette. She had enjoyed it, looking out the window, and he had smelled a sweet richness he had never tasted when he had smoked.

This sound thing was something else.

What are you trying to do to me? he said, his hands over his eyes.

Listen, she said.

I am, he said.

Her words were softer in the absence of sound, and he found that his were, too. Are you trying to make me believe this sound’s been getting into my head for years?

You’ll hear it, she said.

And then she seemed to have answered No to his next words before he’d finished saying them: You mean like tasting preservatives in a loaf of bread or a can of tuna? You want to persuade me I’m being poisoned?

He knew some chemistry, and he knew he was already made of chemicals.

The supermarket chemicals are different, though.

Yes, they were. But who had just now said so? If he uncovered his eyes, would he find out who had said the words? The supermarket chemicals are different. He could have said them himself. He knew about preservatives. But the words had come not out of him, they’d come to him; yet had he heard them said? The face of a good-sized school tuna came at him squashed to the curve of one seven-ounce can dividing his eyes. He’d lost the tock, the tock of the TV switch; and anyway now he didn’t know if the last tock he’d heard had been the On or the Off. How does the blindfolded captive wait for what comes next? He smelled her skin. It was the odor of unbitten apricot and somewhere between a peanut in the shell and nutmeg. She hadn’t known the smell of nutmeg and he’d brought her the small jar with three partly shaved nuts of the sweet spice — pits, in fact — brown outside, pale wood inside with fine branchlets of dark grain like a leftover slice of pear.

He wanted to uncover his eyes and look at her. But he kept his hands on his eyes. He felt compelled to.

He wanted to believe her, he thought. But having thought this, he saw he wanted not to believe her. Let her try something. Did spirits fly in the window to her? Yet wait — let those spirits wait in their own midair, like hummingbirds or dragonflies — yes, wait: he’d give her this much: she hadn’t said he was putting up a fight. He was sure she hadn’t said any such thing, whatever else passed between them in this atmosphere in which he now didn’t know if his TV was on or off. And this time he wasn’t out of the room as he had been last Saturday.

Last Saturday he’d been watching his first baseball game of the season; he had gone to the bedroom for the book of matches that he’d fetched her the night before — then back to the kitchen to the stove, when suddenly there had been someone at the front door; and as he went, he wondered if he’d left the game on in the living room, the sound was off and he couldn’t tell. He recognized one of the voices and he opened the door. The game had been on, as it turned out; but the point was that at that moment on Saturday the television set in the living room had been at a distance — game or no game — while tonight he was close up and with an interpreter.

The sound he now identified with his eyes closed in the palms of his hands was one he had never heard. Yes, he did hear a sound.

It was steady; that was what it was, it was steadiness itself. It reminded him he was feeling good, and so he thought it wasn’t a poison or a coefficient host carrying untoward influence or bad substance. It was there like the faintly gaseous purity of compressed air to be taken, as his breathing might draw it, in cycles of amount; but it wasn’t divisible the way drafts of air from one of the tanks on his back were; and if, hearing it now for the first time, he recalled the anesthetic wind that sometimes tasted of mentholated rubber in the first breaths of compressed air before he went down, breathing wasn’t what this was.

Because for one thing (had he said so to the girl who must still be in front of him to one side of the TV screen?) the hearing of the sound arrived all over him. What the hell was he saying! Distributed was what the sound was. From head to heel like a film of buoyancy. Or was he turning into an ear? — for the sound was something heard. And steady, so steady that it could not have been brought in here by the girl. But it was not him.

Well, he’d been telling her some of this, telling her during the last few moments. He could recall her silence. But was it that of a good listener or, if the TV was off, not on, was she now at a loss because she thought he was trying to impress her by faking it? She was past that with him, he hoped. Or at least above it. He liked her. They could communicate, couldn’t they?

Got it, he said. Had it all along.

Hey look, she said, the sound I meant is no big deal.

The sound had surrounded what he was telling her, as if it could be also a carrier outward from him. But it also steadied what he told her into a new silence.

Well, now he was not speaking. He smelled her all over him very slightly. The heels of his palms felt his cheeks rise and tighten in a smile at the words, You’re turning me on.

She had not said them. Had he?

The touch of her smell was all over him. She was closer than ever. Ripples over him were less his looseness of skin than the girl herself, dissolved toward him to preserve him, preserve even that comparative looseness of skin that was, well, mainly in the mind, skin which tightened into laughter: he was arriving inside himself, he was joyously guffawing so the warm-water kisser fish and the long cold shark and the doppler-headed dolphin heard him bubble melodiously down through his system coded words — My lady preservative!

He heard her, heard her trying to say, Hey, I just wanted you to, you know, hear it.

But she was near at hand, nearer than she knew. She was a hand, and it was conducted to him by this continuous sound he’d found in himself which yet was not him, for he was something else, its conductor.

Now he was not sure as to when things were happening. Tock goes the switch. The speed he heard went on, diminished and steady. Yes, and speed not of something.

It goes on, he said. It helps. Maybe I’m used to it, but it’s not too strong. It’s gone on longer than I’ve known you.

Or yourself, came back to him.

Just what I was going to say, he thought — but hadn’t seen her mouth open.

What has gone on? she said with audible doubt, with an emphasis that had waited a little too long before voicing the doubt.

Oh — why it’s a current. Strong, very strong.

But I thought it wasn’t too strong, she said. A current?

Like when you get inoculated, the antibodies may never need to be boosted. Like I’ve been inoculated against dead bodies that I might come up with, but that’s not the same thing; you have to have that inoculation again the next time you take that kind of job. But other inoculations, you know, they last.

You go in for lots of shots? she said.

This is hard to describe, he said — it’s so beautifully strong.

And with that, he dropped his hands and opened his eyes to find the TV screen was off.

The girl unbent herself and went full length flat on her stomach and ran a finger over the hair above his knee. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or intrigued, she said. You’re not hearing the sound, you know. At least not for the past couple of minutes when you said it was on. Because the TV set’s been off, man.

Maybe so, but the other thing goes on.

It touched you. Like someone else. I saw it. It had a beautiful effect on you. I felt it touch you. You had your hands over your eyes but I saw you smile as if you saw ahead.

What did it feel like? he said.

Well, ripples. Ripples in the skin.

I thought it was you, he said.

Maybe so, she said, but it wasn’t what I meant in the beginning. I meant the ultrasonic ray from this particular tube in the TV. That’s what it is, that’s exactly what it is. My dog tilted his head when he heard it. He tilted his head and he yawned like a silent whine. Because he heard what was coming out. It’s the ultrasonic ray — you can measure it if you have the right equipment. I didn’t want to hit you with that until you’d actually heard the sound. You know, the actual sound.

He wanted her to stay.

He said, I want you to stay the night.

She said, I was going to ask.

And he heard her almost say, I didn’t have to say that — why did I?

He slipped away for a moment — she stayed where she was — he went to the wall socket behind the TV. He looked back at her. Her finger seemed suspended, waiting for at least some part of him to return; and from the darkened soles and heels of her feet up the crease between her calves and thighs that were neatly together like a diver’s to her shoulder blades he felt in his fingertips a trace leading him to a knot of tension where her neck joined her shoulder on one side.

Look, he said — and, still on her stomach, she turned her head so her profile was toward him. Even when a color set’s completely off, the plug in the socket keeps a small amount of current going in. They tell you it’s better for the set than unplugging it.

She went up on one elbow, her cheek in her hand, so her profile was tilted, and without the light of the TV screen he barely discerned the flare at the corner of her mouth.

Unplug it, she said, but he couldn’t tell if he heard humor in her voice.

He reached down, pausing to glance at his body. His thumb and forefinger found the plug. But then he didn’t unplug the set. The joke could have been clumsy. She curved around suddenly, she lay on her outstretched arm.

He was already with her. He knew she felt that.