“OK,” she says. “Sleep well, B. Talk soon.”
Vague. Indeterminate. Formal. Passive-aggressive.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” I say. Aggressive. “Tell you how it’s going.”
“OK,” she says.
But the timing of the OK is wrong. There’s a sweet spot. Too quick, it’s forced, jumping the gun, covering for something. Too slow, annoyed, exasperated, communicating a silent sigh.
“Cool,” I say.
I never say “cool.”
“Cool,” she says.
She never says “cool.”
“Get some sleep,” she adds.
“I will. Love you.”
“Love you.”
I click off my phone, furious. A stew of heartache, jealousy, resentment, loneliness, and impotent zugzwang. I know if I were a handsome, successful, young African American gentleman, everything would be so simple. If only I were her, even. I would be beautiful and everyone would love me and be sympathetic to my plight, impressed with all I’d overcome as an African American woman in this racist society. If only, I think. Think about being able to admire myself in the mirror whenever I want, how confident I would be in social interactions. How the Slammy’s woman would smile at me, give me hundreds of free paper towels because I am a sister. Maybe we’d even sleep together. I feel a tightness in my pants. A horniness has come over me at the thought of this transformation and an affair with the sullen Slammy’s woman. I catch sight of my actual self in the rearview mirror: old, bald, scrawny, long unwieldy gray beard, glasses, hook nose, Jewish-looking. The horniness evaporates, leaving me despondent and alone.
My side hurts. A stitch? Kidney disease? Appendicitis? Cancer? It’s been hurting for some time now. On and off. When it stops hurting, I forget about it, focus on some other pain. Then it comes back and I think, Why is it coming back? I should go to a doctor but I don’t want to know if something is wrong. It would only hasten my demise. I would feel hopeless, give up. I know this. I wouldn’t be able to work. I need to work. It is the thing that keeps me alive, this hope that the next thing will be the one to get me noticed. It is always the next one.
I find the apartment building. It’s in a complex outside of town. I’m not sure what the building style would be called, but basically it looks like a giant house, three stories high, maybe eight units wide. And there are many of them on a campus of some sort, and they’re all pale yellow. There’s an empty, pitted tennis court. No net. It’s cheap. I didn’t get much of an advance on this book. On TripAdvisor, the single review of this place read: Close to walk to work to and cloe (sic) to bus route since I don’t have a car and close to restaurants. The review made me sad for this man (Woman? Trans woman? Trans man?) but also worried I’d end up as his (her, thon) neighbor and driving him (her, thon) to work and restaurants. Thon is, of course, my favorite of the available gender-neutral pronouns, probably because it has a certain pedigree, a history, an impressive prescience in that it was created in the gendered wasteland that was the middle of the nineteenth century. I have adopted thon as my own personal pronoun, but other than when I refer to myself in the third person, which happens but infrequently, it gets very little use. Of course I use it in my book-flap biography: “B. Rosenberger Rosenberg writes about film. Thon received the Milton Bradley Film Criticism Certificate of Excellence in 1998, 2003, and 2011. Thon teaches a cinema studies elective at the Howie Sherman Zoo Worker Institute in Upper Manhattan. Thon loves to cook and considers thonself a pretty decent chef. Some of the world’s greatest chefs are women.” I threw in the last sentence because, sadly, it’s still necessary to point out.
IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK. I knock on the super’s door. An old man, reed thin and ramrod straight, answers. By way of greeting, he hands me a stained xeroxed sheet of paper. I read lips, it says. Please enunciate and don’t turn away from me or cover your mouth while talking. You don’t need to talk loudly or slowly. If you have a foreign accent, indicate which one in the space provided below, as the accent will affect the way your lips move while forming certain words. I am adept at Spanish accents (Cuban and Mexican only), Mandarin, Hebrew, French, Vietnamese, and Dutch. All other accents will make lipreading almost impossible for me and might require paper and pencil, which I am happy to provide for a small fee.
I write American accent on the page and hand it back to him.
He studies it for an oddly long time. I have time to count to thirty in my head and I do this, with all the Mississippis attendant. He looks up, nods. I tell him I am B. and I am here for the apartment. He nods. That’s when I come up with my experiment. I don’t know why I come up with it. Perhaps it is due to some residual hostility I’m feeling from my phone call—but I decide to see what will happen if I just mouth the words to him. I mouth, “Is the apartment ready?” He nods, walks away, returns with a key, and points me upstairs. It works just fine. I mouth, “Thank you.” He nods, smiles, then writes on his paper, Why are you just mouthing?
Taken aback, I hesitate, then mouth, “As an experiment. How can you tell?”
You are not breathing when you talk.
“Interesting!” I smile. Interesting, indeed. I am learning a great deal about the deaf community already.
Later, I’ll practice breathing while I mouth things to him. It’ll take some work, but I think I can do it. Practice makes perfect.
The apartment is as expected. Nondescript. Pale yellow bedspread and curtains. It seems clean. Lysol. There’s a single brown egg in the refrigerator. I pull the curtains. Sunlight makes the room golden.
Left thumb and pinkie!
The bathroom is clean. I unwrap the hotel-sized bar of Ivory soap, wash my hands. Relief. Finding a decent bathroom on the road is always an ordeal.
ON MY BACK on the still-made bed, I stare at the ceiling while practicing simultaneous mouthing and breathing. I discover mouth-breathing while mouthing creates a voice, a whisper-like sound: a deaf person whispering. I experiment with nose-breathing and mouthing words. It’s silent. Takes a little practice. Puts me in mind of learning, as a child, to rub my abdomen and pat my head. I was so goddamn proud of that. I was an idiot, I think. Just like all the other idiot kids. Not the exception. A good student but never the top student. Number two. Number three. I was not a chess prodigy. No one ever approached my mother in a mall and said they were a casting agent and I should be in movies. No adult ever sexually abused me. Only one girl ever sent me a mash note and she was a second-tier girl, not the prettiest or smartest, not even that quirky brooding artistic girl Melliflua Vanistroski. No, the girl who loved me was nondescript. Unloved, certainly. She seemed unsure of herself. She had no discernible personality. Her hair was brown. Her eyes were brown. Her skin was white. Her nose was not cute.
This reminds me and I try the nose-breathing mouthing once again. This time on the exhale, I notice smoke pouring from my nostrils. Odd. I look at my right hand and see a cigarette there. Odd. I did not light a cigarette. I did not have a cigarette. I gave up smoking five months ago. Odd. How did this thing get into my hand? I must admit it does taste good. But quitting was so difficult that I must have somehow unconsciously started up again. I have no recollection of buying cigarettes, lighting one up, inhaling its smoke. Addiction is a powerful beast. I will tear