Dialect of Want

Doug came through the door of the apartment at nine at night, stomping snow off his boots in the little foyer by the radiator, and the whole floor shook the way it always shook, because the building above the language school had been thrown up cheap in the seventies and never forgiven for it. He was forty-five years old and he had just cooked for eleven hours, two services back to back, and his shoulders felt like someone had packed them with wet snow too. The county road out front was buried to the fence posts, plows had not come, and the drive home from the restaurant had taken him two hours in second gear with his heart in his throat the whole way. He set his knife bag down harder than he meant to.

Tammy was on the sofa, forty-three years old, her legs folded under her and a book open but untouched on her knee, and she watched him come in with a posture that was too straight, too waiting, like she had been sitting that way for a while composing her face. He saw it and it made him more tired, because he knew what that posture meant, it meant she had spent the day alone in this thin-walled box listening to the muffled trucks on the county road and she wanted something from him tonight and he did not have anything left to give.

"Road's a disaster," he said, pulling off his coat. "Took two hours. Two hours, Tammy, for what is normally forty minutes, and the plow guy never came, and Marcin at work told me the whole east side is shut."

"I heard it on the radio," she said. "The whole county basically closed at four."

"Great. Wonderful." He hung the coat and stood there dripping on the mat, and he heard himself being short with her and did not stop, which was the kind of man he was on double-shift days, and he hated it and did it anyway.

Tammy closed the book and pointed her chin at the coffee table. "I used the snow day," she said. "I got a lot done on the Icelandic project, actually. Come look."

He came and looked, because it was easier than fighting, and on the coffee table, next to the cold cup of tea she had clearly reheated twice, there was a small brass model of a diving bell, a thing the size of a grapefruit, dented and green at the seams, with a little round window and a stub of chain. It was ugly and he had no idea what it was.

"It's a diving bell," she said, and when he just grunted she laughed at him, a short kind laugh with no mean in it. "For the project. The school's dialect archive. There's an old recording from the sixties of a fisherman from the west fjords, and he spent his whole life working out of one of these, and the recording is him describing the sound the air makes inside the bell when you go down. That's the text I'm coaching. It's the most beautiful vowel sequence I've ever heard and I got the whole thing transcribed today while you were white-knuckling the highway." She touched the little round window with one finger. "Isn't it something. My grandmother's neighbor had one in his shed."

"It's great," Doug said, and he heard how flat it came out, and Tammy heard it too, and something closed off in her face, just a small shut, like a drawer pushed to. He was jealous of her calm, he realized, jealous of her whole quiet day of vowels and tea, and that was an ugly thing to be jealous of and he carried it to the bedroom with his teeth gritted.

* * *

The walls in that apartment were a joke, everyone knew it, the students downstairs joked about it, the landlady joked about it, you could hear a chair scrape through two floors. So at seven the next evening, when the bell downstairs rang and boots stamped snow in the school entry, Doug, stretched on the bed with a textbook he was not reading, heard the whole arrival of Roberto through the plaster as if the man had come into the room. Roberto was a lecturer from the university, twenty-nine or thirty, over from Reykjavik twice a month for coaching, and Doug had met him twice and disliked him both times in a way he could not fully defend.

Then Tammy's voice came through the wall, and it was her working voice, the clear one, the one she used with students, and she had Roberto repeating vowel glides, the way a sound slid from one place in the mouth to another, and she made him do it again and again, patient, exact, praising him when he got it. "Again. Feel it move. Again, good, that's it, hold the second one longer." Her voice drilled and soothed and drilled, and Doug lay there on his back with the textbook on his chest and swallowed resentment like a pill that would not go down. It was a coaching session, that was all it was, he knew that the way you know a thing at three in the morning, and it did not help. He was forty-five and exhausted and his wife had a beautiful working voice and a man from the university got to hear it for ninety minutes while Doug got the dregs, the short answers, the face closing like a drawer.

The session ran long. He heard laughter once, and the scrape of the diving bell's chain, she must have brought it down to show him, and more glides, and then the entry door, and boots, and silence, and the silence was worse than all of it. Doug turned off the lamp and lay in the dark and pretended, with real commitment, to be asleep.

He heard her come up the stairs. He heard the bedroom door open the careful way she opened it when she thought he was out. And then, this was the thing he could never explain to anyone without sounding like a fool, she did not come to bed quickly, the way she would have if she truly believed he was sleeping. She moved slow. He heard the closet, the hangers. He heard her clothes come off one piece at a time, at a pace no tired woman undresses at, each pause a beat too long. He kept his eyes half closed, lashes down, breathing even, and watched her through them, and she knew, she absolutely knew, that was the game and it was an old game of theirs, and she gave him the show like a dare written in silence.

She stood by the window with the snow-light on her, unhurried, arms loose, and she did not once glance at the bed, and that not-glancing was the loudest thing in the room. His heart was loud and his mouth was dry and he did not move, and she put on a nightshirt and got into her side of the bed, and neither the pretense nor the game was ever mentioned, because that was the shape of it, that was how they had always done this thing, quiet as church, and he fell asleep at some point feeling he had been handed a gift he did not know how to open.

* * *

The double shift the next day was worse, a food critic in on a night the delivery truck was late, and Doug came home at ten with his hands smelling of shallots and his brain a wet rag, and the foyer was cold, and the apartment was quiet, and Tammy was not on the sofa.

The diving bell was gone from the coffee table. Propped where it had been, folded once, was a note in her handwriting, the loopy handwriting he had been reading on grocery lists for twenty years, and it said, "Listen tonight after