Birds of America (22 page)

“Yeah. Just saw a great cow,” says Mack. “And a not-bad possum.”

When they are finally checked into the Peabody Hotel, it is already late afternoon. Their room is a little stuffy and lit in a strange, golden way. Mack flops on the bed.

Quilty, beginning to perspire, takes his jacket off and throws it on the floor. “Y’know: what is wrong with you?” he asks.

“What do you mean,
me
? What is wrong with
you
?”

“You’re so distracted and weird.”

“We’re traveling. I’m sight-seeing. I’m tired. Sorry if I seem distant.”

“ ‘Sight-seeing.’ That’s nice! How about me? Yoo-hoo!”

Mack sighs. When he goes on the attack like this, Quilty tends to head in five miserable directions at once. He has a brief nervous breakdown and shouts from every shattered corner of it, then afterward pulls himself together and apologizes. It is all a bit familiar. Mack closes his eyes, to sail away from him. He floats off and, trying not to think of Lou, briefly thinks of Annie, though the sudden blood rush that stiffens him pulls at his stitches and snaps him awake. He sits up. He kicks off his shoes and socks and looks at his pickled toes: slugs in a box.

Quilty is cross-legged on the floor, trying to do some deep-breathing exercises. He is trying to get chi to his meridians—or something like that. “You think I don’t know you’re attracted to half the people you see?” Quilty is saying. “You think I’m stupid or something? You don’t think I feel your head turn and your gaze stop everywhere we go?”

“What?”

“You’re too much,” Quilty finally says to Mack.

“
I’m
too much? You are! You’re so damn nervous and territorial,” Mack says.

“I have a highly inflamed sense of yard,” says Quilty. He has given up on the exercises. “Blind people do. I don’t want you sticking your hitchhiker’s thumb out over the property line. It’s a betrayal and an eyesore to the community!”

“What community? What are you talking about?”

“All you sighted people are alike. You think we’re Mr. Magoo! You think I’m not as aware as some guy who paints water towers and’s got cysts on his dick?”

Mack shakes his head. He sits up and starts to put his shoes back on. “You really go for the juggler, don’t you?” he says.

“Juggler?” Quilty howls. “
Juggler
? No, obviously, I go for the clowns.”

Mack is puzzled. Quilty’s head is tilted in that hyperalert way that says nothing in the room will get past him. “Juggler,” Mack says. “Isn’t that the word? What is the word?”

“A juggler,” says Quilty, slowly for the jury, “is someone who juggles.”

Mack’s chest tightens around a small emptied space. He feels his own crappy luck returning like a curse. “You don’t even like me, do you?” he says.

“Like you? Is that what you’re really asking?”

“I’m not sure,” says Mack. He looks around the hotel room. Not this, not any room with Quilty in it would ever be his home.

“Let me tell you a story,” says Quilty.

“I don’t like stories,” Mack says.

It now seems to have cost Mack so much to be here. In his mind—a memory or a premonition, which is it, his mind does not distinguish—he sees himself returning not just to Tapston but to Kentucky or to Illinois, wherever it is Annie lives now, and stealing back his own-blooded boy, whom he loves, and who is his, and running fast with him toward a car, putting him in and driving off. It would be the proper thing, in a way. Other men have done it.

Quilty’s story goes like this: “A woman came to my office
once very early on in my practice. Her case was a simple divorce that she made complicated by greed and stubbornness, and she worked up quite a bill. When she got the bill, she phoned me, shouting and saying angry things. I said, ‘Look, we’ll work out a payment plan. One hundred dollars a month. How does that sound?’ I was reasonable. My practice was new and struggling. Still, she refused to pay a cent. I had to take out a loan to pay my secretary, and I never forgot that. So, five years later, that very same woman’s doctor phones me. She’s got bone cancer, the doctor says, and I’m one of the only German Jews in town and might have the same blood type for a marrow transfusion for her. Would I consider it, at least consider having a blood test? I said, ‘Absolutely not,’ and hung up. The doctor called back. He begged me, but I hung up again. A month later, the woman died.”

“What’s your point?” says Mack. Quilty’s voice is flying apart now.

“That that is the truth about me,” he says. “Don’t you see—”

“Yes,
I
fucking see. I am the one here who does the seeing! Me and Guapo.”

He pauses for a long time. “I don’t forgive anybody anything. That is the point.”

“Y’know what? This whole thing is such a crock,” says Mack, but his voice is thin and diffident, and he finishes putting on his shoes, but without socks, and then grabs up his coat.

Downstairs, the clock says quarter to five, and a crowd is gathering to watch the ducks. A red carpet has already been rolled out from the elevator to the fountain, and this makes the ducks excited, anxious for the evening ritual, their clipped wings fluttering. Mack takes a table in the back and orders a double whiskey with ice. He drinks it fast—it freezes and burns in that great old way: it has been too long. He orders another. The pianist on the other side of the lobby is playing
“Street of Dreams”: “Love laughs at a king/Kings don’t mean a thing” the man sings, and it seems to Mack the most beautiful song in the world. Men everywhere are about to die for reasons they don’t know and wouldn’t like if they did—but here is a song to do it by, so that life, in its mad spasms, might not demolish so much this time.

The ducks drink and dive in the fountain.

Probably Mack is already drunk as a horse.

Near the Union Avenue door is a young woman mime, juggling Coke bottles. People waiting for the ducks have gathered to watch. Even in her white pancake makeup, she is attractive. Her red hair is bright as a daylily and beneath her black leotards her legs are taut as an archer’s bow.

Go for the juggler, thinks Mack. His head hurts, but his throat and lungs are hot and clear.

Out of the corner of his eye, he suddenly notices Quilty and Guapo, stepping slow and unsure, making their way around the far edge of the crowd. Their expressions are lonely and distraught, even Guapo’s. Mack looks back at the fountain. Soon Guapo will find him—but Mack is not going to move until then, needing the ceremony of Quilty’s effort. He knows Quilty will devise some conciliatory gift. He will come up and touch Mack and whisper, “Come back, don’t be angry, you know this is how the two of us get.”

But for now, Mack will just watch the ducks, watch them summoned by their caretaker, an old uniformed black man who blows a silver whistle and wields a long rod, signaling the ducks out of the water, out onto the carpet in a line. They haven’t had a thing to say about it, these ducks, thinks Mack, haven’t done a thing to deserve it, but there they are, God’s lilies, year-round in a giant hotel, someone caring for them the rest of their lives. All the other birds of the world—the mange-hollowed hawks, the lordless hens, the dumb clucks—will live punishing, unblessed lives, winging it north, south, here, there, searching for a place of rest. But not these. Not these
rich
,
lucky
ducks! graced with rug and stairs, upstairs and down, roof to pool to penthouse, always steered, guided, welcomed toward those golden elevator doors like a heaven’s mouth, and though it isn’t really a heaven’s mouth, it is maybe the lip of all there is.

Mack sighs. Why must he always take the measure of his own stupid suffering? Why must he always look around and compare his own against others’?

Because God wants people to.

Even if you’re comparing yourself to ducks?

Especially if you’re comparing yourself to ducks.

He feels his own head shrink with the hate that is love with no place to go. He will do it: he will go back and get Lou if it kills him. A million soldiers are getting ready to die for less. He will find Annie; maybe it won’t be that hard. And at first, he will ask her nicely. But then he will do what a father must: a boy is a father’s. Sons love their fathers like nothing else. Mack read that once in a magazine.

Yet the more he imagines finding Lou, the more greatly he suspects that the whole mad task will indeed kill him. He sees—as if again in a vision (of what he must prevent or of what he cannot prevent, who knew with visions?)—the death of himself and the sorrow of his boy. He sees the wound in his own back, his eyes turning from fish-gray jellies to the plus and minus signs of a comic-book corpse. He sees Lou scratched and crawling back toward a house, the starry sky Mack’s mocking sparkled shroud.

But he will do it anyway, or what is he? Pond scum envying the ducks.

All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.

As the birds walk up the red carpet, quacking and honking fussily, a pack of pleased Miss Americas, Mack watches them pause and look up, satisfied but quizzical, into the burst of lights from the tourists’ cameras, the hollywood explosion of
them along the runner. The birds weave a little, stop, then proceed again, seeming uncertain why anyone would want to take these pictures, flash a light, be there at all, why any of this should be happening, though, by God, and sometimes surely not by God, it happened every day.

Quilty, at the edge of the crowd, holds up his fingers, giving each person he passes the peace sign and saying, “Peace.” He comes close to Mack.

“Peace,” he says.

“People don’t say that anymore,” says Mack.

“Well, they should,” says Quilty. His nostrils have begun to flare, in that way that always signals a sob. He sinks to the floor and grabs Mack’s feet. Quilty’s gestures of contrition are like comets: infrequent and brilliant, but with a lot of space garbage. “No more war!” Quilty cries. “No more devastation!”

For the moment, it is only Quilty who is devastated. People are looking. “You’re upstaging the ducks,” says Mack.

Quilty pulls himself up via Mack’s trousers. “Have pity,” he says.

This is Quilty’s audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart’s own greasepaint and a relentless need for applause.

“Okay, okay,” says Mack, and as the elevator closes on the dozen birds and their bowing trainer, everybody in the hotel lounge claps.

“Thank you,” murmurs Quilty. “You are too kind, too kind.”

It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring. She felt such inexplicable desolation then, such sludge in the heart, felt the season’s mockery, all that chartreuse humidity in her throat like a gag. How else to explain such a feeling? She could almost could one burst with joylessness? What she was feeling was too strange, too contrary, too isolated for a mere emotion. It had to be a premonition—one of being finally whisked away after much boring flailing and flapping and the pained, purposeless work that constituted life. And in spring, no less: a premonition of death. A rehearsal. A secretary’s call to remind of the appointment.

Of course, it had always been in the spring that she discovered her husband’s affairs. But the last one was years ago, and what did she care about all that now? There had been a parade of flings—in the end, they’d made her laugh: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

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