Birds of America (7 page)

“The house
is
amazing to look at,” I say. “It’s beat-up in such an intricate way. Like a Rauschenberg. Like one of those beautiful wind-tattered billboards one sees in the California desert.” I’m determined to be agreeable; the house, truth be told, is a shock. Maple seedlings have sprouted up through the dining room floorboards, from where a tree outside has pushed into the foundation. Squirrels the size of collies scrabble in the walls. Paint is chipping everywhere, in scales and blisters and flaps; in the cracked plaster beneath are written the names of women who, in 1972, 1973, and 1974, spent the night during Spring Rush weekend. The kitchen ceiling reads “Sigma power!” and “Wank me with a spoon.”

But I haven’t seen Cal in twelve years, not since he left for Belgium on a Fulbright, so I must be nice. He seems different to me: shorter, older, cleaner, despite the house. In a burst of candor, he has already confessed that those long years ago, out of friendship for me, he’d been exaggerating his interest in
dance. “I didn’t get it,” he admitted. “I kept trying to figure out the
story
. I’d look at the purple guy who hadn’t moved in awhile, and I’d think, So what’s the issue with
him
?”

Now Chappers tugs at his leash. “Yeah, the house.” Cal sighs. “We did once have a painter give us an estimate, but we were put off by the names of the paints: Myth, Vesper, Snickerdoodle. I didn’t want anything called Snickerdoodle in my house.”

“What
is
a Snickerdoodle?”

“I think they’re hunted in Madagascar.”

I leap to join him, to play. “Or eaten in Vienna,” I say.

“Or worshiped in L.A.” I laugh again for him, and then we watch as Chappers sniffs at the roots of an oak.

“But a myth or a vesper—they’re always good,” I add.

“Crucial,” he says. “But we didn’t need paint for that.”

Cal’s son, Eugene, is seven and has cystic fibrosis. Eugene’s whole life is a race with medical research. “It’s not that I’m not for the arts,” says Cal. “
You’re
here; money for the arts brought you here. That’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to see you after all these years. It’s wonderful to fund the arts.
It’s
wonderful; you’re wonderful. The arts are so nice and wonderful. But really: I say, let’s give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science.”

Something chokes up in him. There can be optimism in the increments, the bits, the chapters; but I haven’t seen him in twelve years and he has had to tell me the whole story, straight from the beginning, and it’s the whole story that’s just so sad.

“We both carried the gene but never knew,” he says. “That’s the way it works. The odds are one in twenty, times one in twenty, and then after that, still only one in four. One in sixteen hundred, total. Bingo! We should move to Vegas.”

When I first knew Cal, we were in New York, just out of graduate school; he was single, and anxious, and struck me as someone who would never actually marry and have a family, or if he did, would marry someone decorative, someone slight.
But now, twelve years later, his silver-haired wife, Simone, is nothing like that: she is big and fierce and original, joined with him in grief and courage. She storms out of PTA meetings. She glues little sequins to her shoes. English is her third language; she was once a French diplomat to Belgium and to Japan. “I miss the caviar” is all she’ll say of it. “I miss the caviar so much.” Now, in Pennsylvania Dutchland, she paints satirical oils of long-armed handless people. “The locals,” she explains in her French accent, giggling. “But I can’t paint hands.” She and Eugene have made a studio from one of the wrecked rooms upstairs.

“How is Simone through all this?” I ask.

“She’s better than I am,” he says. “She had a sister who died young. She expects unhappiness.”

“But isn’t there hope?” I ask, stuck for words.

Already, Cal says, Eugene has degenerated, grown worse, too much liquid in his lungs. “Stickiness,” he calls it. “If he were three, instead of seven, there’d be
more
hope. The researchers are making some strides; they really are.”

“He’s a great kid,” I say. Across the street, there are old Colonial houses with candles lit in each window; it is a Pennsylvania Dutch custom, or left over from Desert Storm, depending on whom you ask.

Cal stops and turns toward me, and the dog comes up and nuzzles him. “It’s not just that Eugene’s great,” he says. “It’s not just the precocity or that he’s the only child I’ll ever have. It’s also that he’s such a good person. He accepts things. He’s very good at understanding everything.”

I cannot imagine anything in my life that contains such sorrow as this, such anticipation of missing someone. Cal falls silent, the dog trots before us, and I place my hand lightly in the middle of Cal’s back as we walk like that through the cold, empty streets. Up in the sky, Venus and the thinnest paring of sickle moon, like a cup and saucer, like a nose and mouth, have
made the Turkish flag in the sky. “Look at that,” I say to Cal as we traipse after the dog, the leash taut as a stick.

“Wow,” Cal says. “The Turkish flag.”

“You’re back, you’re back!” Eugene shouts from inside, dashing toward the front door as we step up onto the front porch with Chappers. Eugene is in his pajamas already, his body skinny and hunched. His glasses are thick, magnifying, and his eyes, puffed and swimming, seem not to miss a thing. He slides into the front entryway, in his stocking feet, and lands on the floor. He smiles up at me, all charm, like a kid with a crush. He has painted his face with Merthiolate and hopes we’ll find that funny.

“Eugene, you look beautiful!” I say.

“No I don’t!” he says. “I look
witty
.”

“Where’s your mother?” asks Cal, unleashing the dog.

“In the kitchen. Dad, Mom says you have to go up to the attic and bring down one of the pans for dinner.” He gets up and chases after Chappers, to tackle him and bring him back.

“We have a couple pots up there to catch leaks,” Cal explains, taking off his coat. “But then we end up needing the pots for cooking, so we fetch them back.”

“Do you need some help?” I don’t know whether I should be with Simone in the kitchen, Cal in the attic, or Eugene on the floor.

“Oh, no. You stay here with Eugene,” he says.

“Yeah. Stay here with me.” Eugene races back from the dog and grabs my leg. The dog barks excitedly.

“You can show Eugene your video,” Cal suggests as he leaves the room.

“Show me your dance video,” he says to me in a singsong. “Show me, show me.”

“Do we have time?”

“We have fifteen minutes,” he says with great authority. I go upstairs and dig it out of my bag, then come back down. We plug it into the VCR and nestle on the couch together. He huddles close, cold in the drafty house, and I extend my long sweater around him like a shawl. I try to explain a few things, in a grown-up way, how this dance came to be, how movement, repeated, breaks through all resistance into a kind of stratosphere: from recalcitrance to ecstasy; from shoe to bird. The tape is one made earlier in the week. It is a demonstration with fourth graders. They each had to invent a character, then design a mask. They came up with various creatures: Miss Ninja Peacock. Mr. Bicycle Spoke Head. Evil Snowman. Saber-toothed Mom: “Half-girl-half-man-half-cat.” Then I arranged the kids in a phalanx and led them, with their masks on, in an improvised dance to Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It.”

He watches, rapt. His brown hair hangs in strings in his face, and he chews on it. “There’s Tommy Crowell,” he says. He knows the fourth graders as if they were royalty. When it is over, he looks up at me, smiling, but businesslike. His gaze behind his glasses is brilliant and direct. “That was really a wonderful dance,” he says. He sounds like an agent.

“Do you really think so?”

“Absolutely,” he says. “It’s colorful and has lots of fun, interesting steps.”

“Will you be my agent?” I ask.

He scowls, unsure. “I don’t know. Is the agent the person who drives the car?”

“Dinner’s ready!” Simone calls from two rooms away, the “Wank me with a spoon” room.

“Coming!” shouts Eugene, and he leaps off the couch and slides into the dining room, falling sideways into his chair.
“Whoo,”
he says, out of breath. “I almost didn’t make it.”

“Here,” says Cal. He places a goblet of pills at Eugene’s place setting.

Eugene makes a face, but in the chair, he gets up on his knees, leans forward, glass of water in one hand, and begins the arduous activity of taking all the pills.

I sit in the chair opposite him and place my napkin in my lap.

Simone has made a soup with hard-boiled eggs in it (a regional recipe, she explains), as well as Peking duck, which is ropy and sweet. Cal keeps passing around the basket of bread, anxiously, talking about how modern man has only been around for 45,000 years and probably the bread hasn’t changed much since then.

“Forty-five thousand years?” says Simone. “That’s all? That can’t be. I feel like we’ve been
married
for that long.”

There are people who talk with their hands. Then there are people who talk with their arms. Then there are people who talk with their arms over their head. These are the ones I like best. Simone is one of those.

“Nope, that’s it,” says Cal, chewing. “Forty-five thousand. Though for about two hundred thousand years before that, early man was going through all kinds of anatomical changes to get where we are today. It was a
very
exciting time.” He pauses, a little breathlessly. “I wish I could have been there.”

“Ha!” exclaims Simone.

“Think of the parties,” I say.

“Right,” says Simone. “ ‘Joe, how’ve you been? Your head’s so
big
now, and, well, what is this crazy thing you’re doing with your thumb?’ A lot like the parties in Soda Springs, Idaho.”

“Simone used to be married to someone in Soda Springs, Idaho,” Cal says to me.

“You’re kidding!” I say.

“Oh, it was very brief,” she says. “He was ridiculous. I got rid of him after about six months. Supposedly, he went off and killed himself.” She smiles at me impishly.

“Who killed himself?” asks Eugene. He has swallowed all the pills but one.

“Mommy’s first husband,” says Cal.

“Why did he kill himself?” Eugene is staring at the middle of the table, trying to think about this.

“Eugene, you’ve lived with your mother for seven years now, and you don’t know why someone close to her would want to kill himself?” Simone and Cal look straight across at each other and laugh brightly.

Eugene smiles in an abbreviated and vague way. He understands this is his parents’ joke, but he doesn’t like or get it. He is bothered they have turned his serious inquiry into a casual laugh. He wants information! But now, instead, he just digs into the duck, poking and looking.

Simone asks about the school visits. What am I finding? Are people nice to me? What is my life like back home? Am I married?

“I’m not married,” I say.

“But you and Patrick are still together, aren’t you?” Cal says in a concerned way.

“Uh, no. We broke up.”

“You broke up?” Cal puts his fork down.

“Yes,” I say, sighing.

“Gee, I thought you guys would never break up!” he says in a genuinely flabbergasted tone.

“Really?”
I find this reassuring somehow, that my relationship at least looked good from the outside, at least to someone.

“Well, not
really
,” admits Cal. “Actually, I thought you guys would break up long ago.”

“Oh,” I say.

“So
you
could marry her?” says the amazing Eugene to his father, and we all laugh loudly, pour more wine into glasses, and hide our faces in them.

“The thing to remember about love affairs,” says Simone, “is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney.”

“Oh, not the raccoon story,” groans Cal.

“Yes! The raccoons!” cries Eugene.

I’m sawing at my duck.

“We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney,” explains Simone.

“Hmmm,” I say, not surprised.

“And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead.” Simone swallows some wine. “Love affairs are like that,” she says. “They all are like that.”

I’m confused. I glance up at the light, an old brass octopus of a chandelier. All I can think of is how Patrick said, when he left, fed up with my “selfishness,” that if I were worried about staying on alone at the lake house, with its squirrels and call girl-style lamps, I should just rent the place out—perhaps to a nice lesbian couple like myself.

But Eugene, across from me, nods enthusiastically, looks pleased. He’s heard the raccoon story before and likes it. Once again, it’s been told right, with flames and gore.

Now there is salad, which we pick and tear at like crows. Afterward, we gaze upon the bowl of fruit at the center of the table, lazily pick a few grapes off their stems. We sip hot tea that Cal brings in from the kitchen. We sip until it’s cool, and then until it’s gone. Already the time is ten o’clock.

“Dance time, dance time!” says Eugene when we’re through. Every night, before bed, they all go out into the living room and dance until Eugene is tired and falls asleep on the sofa. Then they carry him upstairs and tuck him in.

He comes over to my chair and takes my hand, leads me out into the living room.

“What music shall we dance to?” I ask.

“You choose,” he says, and leads me to the shelf where they
keep their compact discs. Perhaps there is some Stravinsky. Perhaps
Petrouchka
, with its rousing salute to Shrovetide.

“Will you come see me tomorrow when you visit the fourth graders?” he asks as I’m looking through the selection. Too much Joan Baez. Too much Mahler. “I’m in room one oh four,” he says. “When you visit the fourth graders, you can just stop by my classroom and wave to me from the door. I sit between the bulletin board and the window.”