The Fall

From where I sat I could hear only the sibilants and fricatives, the blown leaves of their conversation. A bit of voice like a glimpse of leg. Mostly those rustling esses and rattling tees. The limb gets pretty hard. I worried they'd see my feet dangling there over the patio, but it was dark.

This is good, I’m sure he said. He made a stabbing motion with his knife at the steaming contents of his plate.

So glad you like it! The way she spoke she could only be smiling: her voice high in the throat, slightly fluting, bright. Her face was in shadow but I could hear she was smiling. Recently, the advertising they play over the sound system in the grocery store features intensely-smiling female voices. The voice actors sound like they have great teeth, American grins. They sound like they are exquisitely happy about fat-free yogurt or what have you.

I wished I had put on a sweater.

He said appreciative things about the food, which smelled very good. His body performed the sanctioned poses: heroic positions of the torso, shoulders, and arms; ostensibly languorous attitudes of the legs, hips, and abdominal trunk that actually require considerable flexing; constant adjustments of the angle of the head relative to the position of hers, always mindful of the most flattering angle of the light streaming across the table from the kitchen behind them. My theory is that we learn this from the media, and it is an aspect of fashion. The self-consciousness of his performance of the current manhood subverted his intended projection of virility, IMHO.

Her movements were also highly practiced, pretty and delicate, graceful and equivocally coy, and, though the wind picked up a little and hissed through the tree and I couldn’t hear much of what she said, I could hear, distinctly, that her voice was pitched high and that it rose at the end of each sentence almost like a question, but not exactly. Every sentence rolled onto its back. This is a form of deference, or perhaps submission, and therefore potentially dominant, and I have theories about this, that there is a sociobiological basis for this kind of feminine behavior. It is a way that women make themselves available to men. It is a method of flattery and, therefore, control. I am tempted to say it is a way of lying, or, perhaps, a form of honesty. This will require more thought.

The voice actor who reads the tortilla ads uses the hard r’s and soft d’s of Spanish. Her vowels are unitary and precise, very unlike the broad diphthongs of American English. She sounds very nearly overwhelmed by the pleasure of urging us to buy the tortillas. Euphoric, or giddy. I predict that these women, these voice actors, will soon figure out a way to suggest, just to the limit of decency, that they are actually enjoying a barely-contained orgasm brought on by the product they’re selling. I’ll have what she’s having, they want us to think. Oh, so that’s her secret! And it’s on sale today! Commerce depends on the cynical re-purposing of sex, of course.

After some time, he pushed his plate away. They stayed on the patio, drinking beer and leaning into each other with the unmistakable movements of what I will call new love, which is lust. Each movement profoundly gendered: her graceful arms, elbows in tight, wrists exposed, hands birdlike; his arms possessive, his chest forward and massive.

He said something sly and turned his head to watch her eyes. She laughed rather abruptly and her shoulders rose and she placed her hands on his bicep. She threw her head back to laugh, and placed one balletic hand on her upper chest, as though she couldn’t get a deep breath because what he said what so amusing. He leaned back in his chair and straightened his legs out in front of him and hooked a thumb in his pocket so that his hand framed his package. All these movements had the canned flavor of recitation. My theory is that the highest-status young people practice these gendered movements in the mirror. They must consume media with a voracious attention to gender display, desperate to learn how to present themselves for mating.

I have heard very few male voice actors reading ads in the grocery store. Men do many of the in-store announcements, but the ads the male voice actors read are mostly for meat and barbecue products. Also, men read the ads for the gas-discount rewards program. These are prescribed male roles. The male voices are enthusiastic, but, whereas the women’s voices verge on rapture, the male voices verge on command. Pert girls sell salad greens. Kindly but authoritative fathers sell charcoal and beef.

She played with her hair. She spoke and the wind rose at that moment so that I was able, again, to entertain the idea that the breeze emanated from her mouth, that she made the leaves rustle and the branches rattle. I saw her teeth backlit white against the kitchen window.

That's all. They went inside after a while, and watched TV. He put his arm on the back of the couch behind her. She retracted her hands inside the cuffs of her sweater, hunched her shoulders, tucked her feet, and made herself small. And I slipped down out of the tree and walked back here to my warm, bright little apartment suspecting that I had witnessed what I need to know, that it would require some thought and parsing, but that the leaves would eventually blow off the tree and leave the trunk bare and plain, and there’d be nowhere to hide.