Born on the Edge of an Adjective
“And does your passion for music rub off on those old ladies and spoiled children you tutor?”
“I hope,” I said. I taught piano, and it brought in decent money. The only downside was having to drive out of the city into the suburbs, where everyone I tutored lived.
“Do they listen to you, Marco?” he asked. “Do you speak to them like you do me?”
“I don’t speak differently to different people,” I told him.
“But you do,” he said. “You do, and you don’t have any control over it.”
“How so?”
He turned his face to me, but stared somewhere down towards the end of the bed. “It’s not you, or anyone’s fault, Marco,” he whispered. “People just do it. They change how you talk. They hear what they want to, hear it how they want it to sound, so much that if you spoke angrily to someone who didn’t want to be hurt by you, they’d hear you differently. Or likewise, if you spoke lovingly to someone who didn’t want to be loved by you, they’d turn your tone into something vile. It’s a defensive strategy. It must be hardwired. People will never truly understand each other.”
“And how do you know this?” I asked. I took his theories seriously, even though I didn’t believe half of them. It was a conscious decision, to take anything he said seriously, if not literally. I thought it a respectable thing to do, and so I asked him, “Why do you think this is true?”
“I’ve gathered data,” he said, turning his face away from me, staring back at the ceiling again. He twirled his index finger in the hair around his navel for a moment, then lifted it to rub his eye. “Firsthand experience, Marco,” he continued. “Empirical evidence abounds.”
It was the first time I began to distrust him. Had he pulled my strings at one time or another, to see how I’d react to the crazy things he said? Played a game to confirm his theories? I stood up from the bed, slid my jeans on, and walked out of the room, scratching the back of my neck. A nervous habit.
Neil followed me. When I went into the living room and sat in front of the television, he stood in my way. When I moved into the kitchen and sat at the dinner table with a book, he stood behind me, his chin on my shoulder, breathing hotly, reading along with me, a pet peeve of mine. I snapped the television off with the remote, snapped the book closed, and finally shouted, “What do you want?”
“A true answer,” he said.
“An answer about who you are?” I asked. “You still want me to answer that question?”
“Yes,” he said. Then he knelt beside me and put his finger on the space between my eye and the bridge of my nose. I have a birthmark there: small, round and impossibly brown. He touched it lightly, then ran his fingertip across it in whirls. When I was a teenager, I hated it, wanted to be rid of it in the worst way imaginable. I even tried to cover it with my mother’s pancake makeup, but I’d still been able to see it even then. Finally I grew accustomed to it, learned to ignore it. Here he was, reminding me of it again.
“I’ve always loved this birthmark,” Neil said, his fingertips lingering. He was shirtless, pantless, naked anyway you looked at him.
“I used to hate it,” I said.
“Why?” he asked, a tone of sympathy in his voice, as if I were pathetic, a poor soul to whom he would bring solace.
“Because it made me look odd. Different.”
“But that’s good,” he said. “I’d never have spoken to you at the Blue Note if I hadn’t seen this birthmark. I don’t have any, unfortunately.”
“Liar,” I said. “Everyone has birthmarks.”
“I don’t,” he said, and so I searched him. I ranged over his body, exploring, covering his every inch only to find that he was being truthful. Completely bare of any markings, his skin was white and unblemished. When I looked up, he was crying without making a sound.
“Do you know what they call the places on maps that haven’t been charted yet?” I asked.
He shook his head, blinking tears away.
“Sleeping beauties.”
Neil met Margaret Stanbottom while he was pool sharking one night at the Shamrock. He’d made a few dollars, eighty to be exact, and was ready to spend the rest of the evening at the bar, drinking and telling Youngstown stories to Sandy or any of the other Ohioans crowding the bar that evening. He’d bought his first beer and taken a sip when Margaret walked in wearing a purple leotard, carrying a satchel over her shoulder, looking lost. She peered around the dim bar for a moment, looked both left and right, waved smoke away from her face, then turned and walked back out the door.
