Birds of America (18 page)

“I did? Not seriously. Really? I did?”

“But Bill, hadn’t you heard? I mean, it’s all over campus.”

Actually, he had heard some rumors; he had even said, “Hope so” and once “May God bless their joyous union.” But he hadn’t meant or believed any of it. Such rumors seemed ham-handed, literal, unlikely. And yet wasn’t reality always cheesy and unreliable just like that; wasn’t fate literal in exactly that way? He thinks of the severed, crossed fingers found perfectly survived in the wreckage of a local plane crash last year. Such fate was contrary and dense, like a dumb secretary, failing to understand the overall gestalt and desire of the wish. He prefers a deeper, cleverer, even tardy fate, like that of a girl he knew once in law school who, years before, had been raped, shot, and left for dead but then had crawled ten hours out of the woods to the highway with a .22 bullet in her head and flagged a car. That’s when you knew that life was making something up to you, that the narrative was apologizing. That’s when you knew
God had glanced up from his knitting, perhaps even risen from his freaking wicker rocker, and staggered at last to the window to look.

Debbie studies Bill, worried and sympathetic. “You’re just not happy in this relationship, are you?” she says.

These terms! This talk! Bill is not good at this; she is better at it than he; she is probably better at everything than he: at least she has not used the word
text
.

“Just don’t use the word
text
,” he warns.

Debbie is quiet. “You’re just not happy with your life,” she says.

“I suppose I’m not.”
Don’t count on us. Don’t count on us, motherfucker
.

“A small bit of happiness is not so hard, you know. You could manage it. It’s pretty much open-book. It’s basically a take-home.”

Suddenly, sadness is devouring him. The black-eyed peas! Why aren’t they working? Debbie’s face flickers and tenses. All her eye makeup has washed away, her eyes bare and round as lightbulbs. “You were always a tough grader,” she says. “Whatever happened to grading on a curve?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Whatever happened to that?”

Her eyelids lower and she falls soundlessly across his lap, her hair in a golden pinwheel about her head. He can feel the firm watery press of her breasts against his thigh.

How can he assess his life so harshly and ungratefully, when he is here with her, when she is so deeply kind, and a whole new year is upon them like a long, cheap buffet? How could he be so strict and mean?

“I’ve changed my mind,” he says. “I’m happy. I’m bursting.”

“You are not,” she says, but she turns her face upward and smiles hopefully, like something brief and floral and in need of heat.

“I am,” he insists, but looks away, to think, to think of anything
else at all, to think of his ex-wife—
Bring me all your old lovers, so I can love you, too
—still living in St. Paul with his daughter, who in five years will be Debbie’s age. He believes that he was happy once then, for a long time, for a while. “We are this far from a divorce,” his wife had said bitterly at the end. And if she had spread her arms wide, they might have been able to find a way back, the blinking, intermittent wit of her like a lighthouse to him, but no: she had held her index finger and her thumb up close to her face in a mean pinch of salt. Still, before he left, their marriage a spluttering but modest ruin, only two affairs and a dozen sharp words between them, they’d come home from the small humiliations they would endure at work, separately and alone, and they’d turn them somehow into desire. At the very end, they’d taken walks together in the cool wintry light that sometimes claimed those last days of August—the air chill, leaves already dropping in wind and scuttling along the sidewalk, the neighborhood planted with ocher mums, even the toughest weeds in bridal flower, the hydrangea blooms gone green and drunk with their own juice. Who would not try to be happy?

And just as he had then on those walks, he remembers now how, as a boy in Duluth, he’d once imagined a monster, a demon, chasing him home from school. It was one particular winter: Christmas was past, the snow was dirty and crusted, his father was overseas, and his young sister, Lily, home from the hospital’s iron lung, lay dying of polio in her bed upstairs at home. His parents had always—discreetly, they probably felt, though also recklessly and maybe guiltily, too—enjoyed their daughter more than their serious older boy. Perhaps it was a surprise even to themselves. But Bill, in studying their looks and words, had discerned it, though in response he had never known what to do. How could he make himself more enjoyable? With his father away, he wrote long boring letters with everything spelled correctly. “Dear Dad, How are you? I am fine.” But he didn’t mail them. He saved them up, tied them in
a string, and when his father came home, he gave him the packet. His father said “Thank you,” tucked the letters in his coat, and never mentioned them again. Instead, every day for a year, his father went upstairs and wept for Lily.

Once, when she’d still been pretty and well, Bill went through an entire day repeating everything Lily said, until she cried in torment and his mother slapped him hard against the eye.

Lily had been enjoyed. They enjoyed her. Who could blame them? Enjoyable girl! Enjoyable joy! But Bill could not attain such a thing, either side of it, for himself. He glimpsed it all from behind some atmosphere, from across some green and scalloped sea—“Dear Dad, How are you? I am fine”—as if it were a planet that sometimes sparkled into view, or a tropical island painted in hot, picture-book shades of orange.

But deep in his private January boyhood, he knew, there were colors that were true: the late-afternoon light was bluish and dark, the bruised tundra of the snowbanks scary and silver and cold. Stepping slowly at first, the hulking monster-man, the demon-man, red and giant, with a single wing growing out of its back, would begin to chase Bill. It chased him faster and faster, up and down every tiny hill to home, casting long shadows that would occasionally, briefly, fall upon them both like a net. While the church bells chimed their four o’clock hymn, the monster-man would fly in a loping, wonky way, lunging and leaping and skittering across the ice toward Bill’s heels. Bill rounded a corner. The demon leapt over a bin of road salt. Bill cut across a path. The demon followed. And the terror of it all—as Bill flung himself onto his own front porch and into the unlocked and darkened house, slamming the door, sinking back against it, sliding down onto the doormat, safe at last among the clutter of boots and shoes but still gasping the wide lucky gasps of his great and narrow escape—was thrilling to him in a world that had already, and with such indifferent skill, forsaken all its charms.

Mack has moved so much in his life that every phone number he comes across seems to him to be one he’s had before. “I swear this used to be
my
number,” he says, putting the car into park and pointing at the guidebook: 923-7368. The built-in cadence of a phone number always hits him the same personal way: like something familiar but lost, something momentous yet insignificant—like an act of love with a girl he used to date.

“Just call,” says Quilty. They are off Route 55, at the first McDonald’s outside of Chicago. They are on a vacation, a road trip, a “pile stuff in and go” kind of thing. Quilty has been singing movie themes all afternoon, has gotten fixated on “To Sir with Love,” and he and Mack now seemed destined to make each other crazy: Mack passing buses too quickly while fumbling for more gum (chewing the sugar out fast, stick by stick), and Quilty, hunched over the glove compartment, in some purple-faced strain of emotion brought on by the line “Those schoolgirl days of telling tales and biting nails are gone.” “I
would be a genius now,” Quilty has said three times already, “if only I’d memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu.”

“If only,” says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a completely different person. But what could you do? He’d read in a magazine once that geniuses were born only to women over thirty; his own mother had been twenty-nine. Damn! So fucking close!

“Let’s just get a hotel reservation someplace and take a bath-oil bath,” Quilty says now. “And don’t dicker. You’re always burning up time trying to get a bargain.”

“That’s so wrong?”

Quilty grimaces. “I don’t like what comes after ‘dicker.’ ”

“What is that?”

Quilty sighs. “
Dickest
. I mean, really: it’s not a contest!” Quilty turns to feel for Guapo, his Seeing Eye dog, a chocolate Lab too often left panting in the backseat of the car while they stop for coffee. “Good dog, good dog, yes.” A “bath-oil bath” is Quilty’s idea of how to end a good day as well as a bad. “Tomorrow, we’ll head south, along the Mississippi, then to New Orleans, and then back up to the ducks at the Peabody Hotel at the end. Does that sound okay?”

“If that’s what you want to do, fine,” says Mack.

They had met only two years ago at the Tapston, Indiana, Sobriety Society. Because he was new in town, recently up from some stupid quickie job painting high-voltage towers in the south of the state, and suddenly in need of a lawyer, Mack phoned Quilty the next day. “I was wondering if we could strike a deal,” Mack had said. “One old drunk to another.”

“Perhaps,” said Quilty. He may have been blind and a recovering drinker, but with the help of his secretary, Martha, he had worked up a decent legal practice and did not give his services away for free. Good barter, however, he liked. It made
life easier for a blind man. He was, after all, a practical person. Beneath all his eccentricities, he possessed a streak of pragmatism so sharp and deep that others mistook it for sanity.

“I got myself into a predicament,” Mack explained. He told Quilty how difficult it was being a housepainter, new in town to boot, and how some of these damn finicky housewives could never be satisfied with what was true professional work, and how, well, he had a lawsuit on his hands. “I’m being sued for sloppy house painting, Mr. Stein. But the only way I can pay you is in more house painting. Do you have a house that needs painting?”

“Bad house painting as both the accusation and the retainer?” Quilty hooted. He loved a good hoot—it brought Guapo to his side. “That’s like telling me you’re wanted for counterfeiting but you can pay me in cash.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mack.

“It’s all right,” Quilty said. He took Mack’s case, got him out of it as best he could—“the greatest art in the world,” Quilty told the judge at the settlement hearing, “has been known to mumble at the edges”—then had Mack paint his house a clear, compensatory, cornflower blue. Or was it, suggested a neighbor, in certain streaky spots
delphinium
? At lunchtime, Quilty came home from his office up the street and stopped in the driveway, Guapo heeled at his feet, Mack above them on the ladder humming some mournful Appalachian love song, or a jazzed-up version of “Taps.” Why “Taps”? “It’s the town we live in,” Mack would later explain, “and it’s the sound of your cane.”

Day is done. Gone the sun
.

“How we doing there, Mack?” asked Quilty. His dark hair was long and bristly as rope, and he often pulled on it while speaking. “The neighbors tell me my bushes are all blue.”

“A little dripping couldn’t be avoided,” Mack said unhappily. He never used tarps, the way other painters did. He didn’t even own any.

“Well, doesn’t offend me,” said Quilty, tapping meaningfully at his sunglasses.

But afterward, painting the side dormer, Mack kept hearing Quilty inside, on the phone with a friend, snorting in a loud horselaugh: “Hey, what do
I
know?
I
have blue bushes!”

Or “I’m having the shrubs dyed blue: the nouveau riche—look out—will always be with you.”

When the house was almost finished, and oak leaves began to accumulate on the ground in gold-and-ruby piles the color of pears, and the evenings settled in quickly and disappeared into that long solvent that was the beginning of a winter night, Mack began to linger and stall—over coffee and tea, into dinner, then over coffee and tea again. He liked to watch Quilty move deftly about the kitchen, refusing Mack’s help, fixing simple things—pasta, peas, salads, bread and butter. Mack liked talking with him about the Sobriety Society meetings, swapping stories about those few great benders that sat in their memories like gorgeous songs and those others that had just plain wrecked their lives. He watched Quilty’s face as fatigue or fondness spilled and rippled across it. Quilty had been born blind and had never acquired the guise and camouflage of the sighted; his face remained unclenched, untrained, a clean canvas, transparent as a baby’s gas, clear to the bottom of him. In a face so unguarded and unguarding, one saw one’s own innocent self—and one sometimes recoiled.

But Mack found he could not go away—not entirely. Not really. He helped Quilty with his long hair, brushing it back for him and gathering it in a leather tie. He brought Quilty gifts lifted from secondhand stores downtown. A geography book in Braille. A sweater with a coffee stain on the arm—was that too mean? Cork coasters for Quilty’s endless cups of tea.

“I am gratefully beholden, my dear,” Quilty had said each time, speaking, as he sometimes did, like a goddamn Victorian valentine and touching Mack’s sleeve. “You are the kindest man I’ve ever had in my house.”

And perhaps because what Quilty knew best were touch and words, or perhaps because Mack had gone through a pig’s life of everything tearing at his feelings, or maybe because the earth had tilted into shadow and cold and the whole damned future seemed dipped in that bad ink, one night in the living room, after a kiss that took only Mack by surprise, and even then only slightly, Mack and Quilty became lovers.

Still, there were times it completely baffled Mack. How had he gotten here? What soft punch in the mouth had sent him reeling to this new place?

Uncertainty makes for shyness, and shyness, Quilty kept saying, is what keeps the world together. Or, rather, is what
used
to keep the world together, used to keep it from going mad with chaos. Now—now!—was a different story.