Byrd (5 page)

He is intense. When he talks, a bead of white spittle forms in the corner of his mouth. He has hair in unexpected places, on his knuckles and elbows and the undersides of his forearms. He tells Addie she's the best student he's had.

She has never felt so important.

Roland, on the road with his band, wonders if he will ever feel important again. He tries to think of himself as an adventurer like Kerouac, fearless and crazy and free. It would help if he could write like Kerouac, though he doubts even Kerouac could find poetry in this cramped, stinking van. Or in guys who are always fucking each other's women, using up each other's drugs, fighting over money, which there is never enough of, and never bathing or brushing their fucking teeth.

All he ever writes is an occasional postcard home. He likes the plain black ones that say “Georgia at night,” or “Louisiana at night.” Keep his parents guessing. Sometimes he calls them. Always collect, always from a different place—a pay phone or somebody's apartment.

He doesn't think about Carswell. Louise with her allover freckles, or Addie with her long hair. Her green eyes watching him like he was somebody to be watched.

She goes home only when she has to. Once for Shelia's wedding to Danny Brewster. Shelia and Danny both stayed in Carswell; Shelia became a certified medical assistant and Danny is working as a mechanic at the Plymouth dealership until he can open his own garage. They hold their wedding reception at the brand-new clubhouse of their brand-new apartment complex. Music blares from a boom box—Danny's wedding-music mix tape. “I hope you brought your suit,” Shelia says to Addie, to everyone, as if she expects them to swim. No one does. People dance barefoot by the pool—hospital people, car people, people Addie doesn't know. Who would have thought you could find a whole new set of friends in Carswell?

Danny asks Addie to dance and she says yes even though she has a cheap-champagne headache that the song, “Brown Eyed Girl,” is only making worse. But she came to celebrate, and she is genuinely happy for her old friends, even a little envious. “Congratulations,” she yells at Danny over the music. “You and Shelia have it all figured out. I can't even decide on a major.”

Nobody tells you what the road can do—the greasy fast food, the speed-laced drugs. Every club is another piss hole painted black, every club owner a crook. The same women line up after every show.

His mother thinks he's out making a name for himself. “You're seeing it all,” she says when he calls home.

“I sure hope not,” he says. Because what he's seeing is all the same. It's not some great romantic adventure, not like Kerouac. The deal with Kerouac was, he could come in off the road any time he felt like it. And he always had somebody, his mother or his old lady or some friend's old lady, waiting to feed him chicken soup and wash his socks while he sat in some nice room writing his masterpiece.

Addie works at the Readery, a secondhand bookstore in a decrepitly elegant Victorian house on Mendenhall Street. She lives in an apartment on the top floor, with tall ceilings and faded wallpaper and heart pine floors and braided rugs and, outside the front window, a magnolia tree with big clean-smelling blossoms. Her landlord-slash-boss is a lumberjack-looking man named John Dunn, like the poet but with a different spelling. “Batter my heart!” Addie likes to call to him from the stairs.

The Readery is open only at night. It's the hub of Greensboro's intellectual nightlife, where professors convene to read, drink coffee, smoke, listen to scratchy records, and say things to provoke and impress each other. Addie's philosophy professor sometimes stops in. He doesn't sit around pontificating and arguing with the others. He's a loner, a browser, always coming up to Addie with some question. Has she noticed that both these books were dedicated to the same person? How can she be sure the author's signature is authentic? Would she mind putting on this album (always jazz) instead of whatever is playing?

He stays late. Some nights after closing she goes upstairs to her dark apartment and looks out her window and there he is on the sidewalk below, his face upturned, street light shining on his glasses.

Roland moves with the band to Texas, to an apartment with roaches the size of his feet.

The professor is the last customer in the store. Addie asks if he'd like to see her apartment. He follows her upstairs.

She puts on Joni Mitchell,
For the Roses
. They sit on the sofa and she peels a tangerine and offers him slices.

“Sweet,” he says. Tangerine juice dribbles down his chin. He is like a character in one of Joni's songs.

Flames

The professor and his wife celebrate their anniversary as usual, by going out to dinner. They sit at their regular table near the bar, their hands folded in front of them, their rings giving off a dull glow. There is a white linen cloth on the table, a small oil lamp, and a red flower in a glass vase. The professor trusts his wife to know the name of the flower, and to remember it, so that days from now, if he's looking for a way to make conversation, he can ask her, “What kind of flower was that in the restaurant, the red one?” And she'll answer him, and for that instant they can remember tonight and it will be as if they're back at this starched white table, listening to piano music.

They begin with cocktails: Campari and soda for him, vodka martini for her. They don't have to order; the waitress remembers. The professor is flattered to have his drink remembered, even though no one else drinks Campari. As usual, he will leave an extravagant tip.

His wife cocks her head while the waitress recites the dinner specials. The waitress doesn't bother with menus; they never order from the menu. It's an unspoken rule with them. Whereas when the professor takes Addie to a restaurant (never this one, where he'd be recognized) she insists on reading everything in sight. She is a glutton for words.

“I'll try the salmon,” his wife says.

“I'll have the same,” he says.

She is a small, shapely woman, his wife, with a blameless face and a small, disapproving mouth. She's wearing her navy blue out-to-dinner dress with a pearl choker.

The professor sips his drink. It tastes bright and bitter and gives him a sweet, heady feeling. Not drunk, but on the verge.

Addie strides into the restaurant in her boots, feeling powerful. She feels like making a scene. Then she sees them at their table in their dress-up clothes, their faces tired, glazed over. And she knows at once there will be no showy ending. There's nothing left to end.

It ended, she can't say when, not with a big drama but with a lot of little ones. The night the professor sat on her sofa looking miserable and she asked him what was wrong and he said, he actually
said
, “Sex with my wife isn't so good lately.” And the time he showed up late for their day-after-Christmas dinner wearing a shiny new leather jacket, peanut butter brown, with a zipper and an elastic waistband that made the belly balloon. A gift from his wife. Addie wanted to poke it, deflate him. She could have forgiven him for being late, but not for that jacket—for having the nerve to wear it, for having a wife who would pick out something so ugly.

Lately everything has felt like an ending. The sandpaper scrape of his loafers on the stairs, his light tapping on her door. The way he still pretends not to presume, even though he keeps clothes in her closet and a toothbrush and razor in her bathroom. Even though her once-airy apartment has taken on the dark, garlicky smell of him.

It feels like an ending every time she sees him standing there, smiling and false.

The professor tries to ignore Addie. She's at the bar, next to the piano player, who's on his break. She takes a cigarette out of her purse, taps it on the bar—a habit the professor has always found annoying; he can almost hear it over the din in the restaurant—and the piano player offers her a light. He uses a real lighter, not a disposable. He talks, and Addie nods and makes a show of listening.

The professor isn't fooled. He knows why she's here.

He thinks back to his first night in her apartment. “I have a policy,” she said, “against getting involved with my professors.” A policy she honored for as long as she was a student, which was years longer than most people.

From the beginning, he was clear about what he could offer and what he couldn't. He and Addie made a point of not letting whatever they did together get in the way of what they did apart. He knew she saw other people. Sometimes she was unavailable for months. But even that on-and-offness, that in-betweenness, was something. There was energy in it, possibility. It made his marriage tolerable.

He doesn't know when she first started having different expectations, when her vocabulary changed, when she first started using words to hurt him. When he stopped being brave, adventurous, risk-taking, and became a coward.

He
is
a coward. If he didn't know it before, he knows it now, tonight, on his anniversary, in his favorite restaurant, the only place in Greensboro that serves Campari, while Addie sits at the bar flirting with the piano player.

She cups her hands around her wineglass and rests her mouth on the rim, not quite drinking. The professor is the one who taught her about wine, and about jazz. He introduced her to Merlot and Coltrane, Shiraz and Thelonious Monk.

The flame in the oil lamp is sputtering. The professor polishes off his drink, sets down his glass, and right away the waitress brings their dinner—salmon topped with white caper sauce, rosemary-roasted sweet potatoes, and his favorite, grilled asparagus. He bites into a spear. Smoky, delicate, still slightly crunchy. Delectable.

Addie can see them reflected in the mirror over the bar, picking at their food, not talking to each other. She isn't jealous. Guilty, a little. Mostly she's angry—with herself for having wasted so much time, with him for being such a cliché. How did she not see that right away? A married, middle-aged college professor with hairy knuckles. Too smart to be wise, too horny to be good in bed.

She should leave the restaurant now. But the piano player is talking to her. He has long brown hair, a gray suit, a nice smile.

“Beautiful blouse,” he's saying. “It matches your eyes. The same dangerous shade of green.”

It's not the obvious flirting that intrigues her. It's that word,
dangerous
.

She holds up her wineglass and pretends to examine it. “I can't remember all the esses,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“The way you're supposed to drink wine. There are five esses. ‘See,' ‘swirl,' ‘sniff,' ‘sip,' and something else, I can't remember.”

“'Swallow'?”

“No.”

“'Spit'?”

“No.” Addie laughs.

“I've got it,” the piano player says. “‘Stay.' You sip your wine and stay through my next set and I'll buy you dinner.” Without waiting for an answer, as if he's already sure of her, he leaves her at the bar and returns to the piano.

She can see his hands on the keys—long, sleek, manicured, confident hands. You'd have to be a musician if you had hands like that. Or a surgeon. He's playing “Spain” by Chick Corea. Every note is perfect, polished. Every note gleams.

He looks down when he plays, concealing his face. The way Roland used to play guitar.

Roland's music was different—rougher, full of mistakes. But the blues is
about
mistakes. Mistakes and suffering. To play the blues, Roland once said, you have to reach down into the saddest part of yourself. “That's where the music is,” he said.

She hasn't thought about Roland in a long time. The memory of him comforts her somehow, makes her warm. She can feel heat rising, blooming in her face.

While his wife nibbles at her chocolate torte, the professor watches Addie and the piano player eat off each other's plates and carry on animated conversation, their voices rising as if they want to be overheard. Addie drops names. “Bill Evans ….” “… like Keith Jarrett.” “… with Gary Burton.” Musicians she would never have heard of except for the professor.

The fact that he has no right to be angry only makes him angrier.

As if sensing his attention, Addie gets up. She is wearing a shiny emerald green blouse over tight black jeans. She starts toward the ladies' room, then makes an elaborate detour, doubling back to his table. His wife looks up. Her cheek is flecked with chocolate. The professor has never felt sorrier for her, or loved her more, or been more ashamed of himself for wanting Addie. And he does; he wants her more than ever.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she says, and lays her hand on his arm. Her hand is warm, her face flushed. “I just wanted to say goodbye.” She leans toward him, her hair swishing forward, brushing the table.

Instinctively, he closes his eyes. He is terrified, thrilled, swallowed up in the moment.
In every present moment, the past and future converge
. When he opens his eyes, Addie is gone, so suddenly he wonders if he imagined her.

His wife sets down her dessert fork, sighing, as if the fork has become too heavy, a burden she can no longer bear.

“Full?” the professor says.