Goodnight Blackbird (10 page)

Jacqueline's mom, in her brassy, aggressive way, had always viewed Jacqueline's college years as the best time in a girl's life to land a husband. When Jacqueline had opted to go to John Carroll to be close to home, Jacqueline's mom had said,
They have such a good business school! It's a regular husband farm
. To a large extent, Jacqueline had bought into that philosophy. So had Allison and Kayla. Go to college, land a man (just make sure he's got a solid $45,000-a-year position lined up after graduation), have a baby. To this suburban paradigm be true. It was probably a tired cliché to say this all had a deadening effect on the soul, but Jacqueline did sense that a sort of hive mind dynamic was at work here among these women and women like them, as if they were thoughtless insects operating on the same limited biological programming. All of Jacqueline's friends and acquaintances seemed to want the same things, bought the same baby toys, had most of the same opinions. And the 'rebels,' such as they were, were the ones like Allison, whose rebellion pretty much consisted of wearing halter tops and getting a tattoo above her ass. What did they call those things? Tramp stamps? These women—these fucking women. People said girls matured faster than boys, but that was bullshit as far as Jacqueline was concerned. Once most girls hit fourteen they'd stay that way until they were fifty.

And what became of people like Jacqueline, the ones who were chewed up and spit out by this
thing
, this gigantic, strange, shape-shifting creature that could only be discerned by the spoor left in its wake, namely the crabgrass-free lawns, the polo shirts, the SUVs? What do you do with the woman with the drowned child and disintegrating marriage? She's starting to act a little strange there, she's getting some weird ideas, what do we do?

Easy answer—medication. Therapy. Get her mind right. After a while she'll get with the program. Soon she'll drop all this ghost stuff and start talking about proper things again—like whether to take a spin class, or the scary prices of Williams-Sonoma's espresso machines.

I tried playing by your rules and look where it's gotten me,
she wanted to scream at these women.
I did everything I was supposed to and it blew up in my face. Now you want me to go back?

She got angrier and angrier as the day wore on. Cassie Christopher, the high school classmate/call girl she'd friended on Facebook, called and left a message, wanting to get together for lunch, but Jacqueline didn't pick up. Her throat was so clogged with nettles of rage she didn't trust herself to have a civil conversation. She tried eating a can of soup but she could barely sit still. She paced the kitchen, her head ringing with everything they had said. Their words got louder and more insulting as the minutes of the night ticked away. It was like the sting of a slap that hits you moments after the hand is gone. She picked up the phone, slammed it down again.

A few minutes before eleven p.m., she was at Darren's house, knocking on his back door.

Darren came to the door wearing glasses. He looked surprised but bemused. "Hey."

"I'm so angry I could punch something. I didn't call because I figured your phone would be wonky again. I—" She cocked her head. "I didn't know you wore glasses."

"For reading. I'm proofing stuff from one of our VPs. He prints everything out in ten-point type. Come on in."

She stormed in and then swore, pressing her hands to the sides of her face like Munch's
The Scream
come to life. "I am so stupid. I forgot."She turned on her heel and retreated to the driveway.

Darren followed. "Ghosts don't kill people," he said. "I've never read about a single instance of a ghost capable of homicide. At best they make noise or throw things."

"What if one of the things they throw is a carving knife?"

"Don't worry about it. What's wrong?"

Jacqueline started to tell him, but the glowing window panes of the house seemed too much like unblinking eyes watching her. "Want to get a cup of coffee somewhere?"

They took Darren's car. The only decent place open at that hour was the Denny's on Wilson Mills Road.

"What's that old saying?" she asked. "People don't go to Denny's, they end up there."

"Food snob. Just for that you can't have any of my smiley-face pancakes."

Over coffee and cheesecake, she told him about the intervention, her voice at times getting loud and borderline hysterical. A pair of heavyset men in sweat-stained John Deere ballcaps at the table next to them looked over at her a couple times. For the most part, though, the men's attention was fixed to the TV bolted to the wall. CNN was showing a program in which rednecks questioned the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate.

"What the hell is wrong with these people?" Jacqueline snapped. "He was born in Hawaii. What do they want, a videotape of the labor?"

"I'd like to see Bush's birth certificate," Darren said. "I'm not fully convinced his was a live birth. How did you leave things with your mom and your friends?"

"I pretty much left them in mid-sentence. I just got the hell out of there. What infuriated me most was how they subtly tried to smear you." She knew it was bad manners to play tattletale like this and risk hurting Darren's feelings, but it felt necessary to drive home how violated she had felt. It was as if her mom, Allison and Kayla had set out to kick dirt onto the few remaining good things in Jacqueline's life. "They tried to make it sound like you were just trying to get me into bed by feeding my delusions. I told them you were so far above all that it wasn't even funny. Stuff like that has never occurred to you. It was so goddamned insulting."

Darren said nothing. The waitress came by and refilled their coffees.

"And it was insulting to me too," Jacqueline said, getting revved up again. "They just automatically assumed that I was 'involved' with you. That as soon as I washed my hands of Kevin I hopped into bed with you. Christ, another romance is about the last thing I need right now." It made her heartsick to realize that the people who had known her the longest were so completely unable to read her emotional temperature. Like a monk, she'd spent the last few years simplifying her life, reducing it to its bare essentials—a job, a roof over her head, time to herself. When Kevin moved out, she was actually relieved. It was too crowded with him there. Why would everyone think she'd suddenly chuck this hard-won simplicity and solitude for the cheap fireworks of a fling? She wasn't some bored, fickle housewife looking to screw the pool boy.

"I have been married," Jacqueline said, more to herself than to Darren, "I have been in love, and you know what? I think I'm okay with never going through those experiences again. I've had chicken pox too, and I'm not anxious to go through that again, either."

"I think love can be a bit more satisfying than chicken pox."

"You know what I mean. I just feel—overloaded. The circuits are blown."

"You won't always feel that way."

"Want to bet?"

"You won't always feel this way. Life is pretty long. There are only so many evenings you can spend alone in front of the TV."

Jacqueline pushed aside her plate. She'd taken exactly three bites of her cheesecake.

"I know that love and all the rest of it aren't priorities for you right now," Darren said, "but it's pretty silly to make up your mind about the rest of your life over coffee at Denny's. Love isn't some mugger in the bushes we ought to avoid. It sounds like a cliché, but love can have a healing effect on your life. Sometimes it might seem to be more trouble than it's worth, but I have to say that it's worth it. And like I said, the way you're feeling right now isn't forever. People change. We get hungry." He nodded at her plate. "You may not want cheesecake now. But someday you might."

She sat back in the booth, staring inside herself. "For all practical purposes, Kevin was the perfect husband. And I loved him. If even he wasn't enough to make my life complete, what sense would it make to ever get involved with anyone else?"

Darren said nothing for a long time. He seemed to be studying the tines on his fork. "I don't know," he said at last. "I just hope that you would at least be open to the possibility. That's all."

"Every time I see you now I seem to be dousing you with bucketloads of drama you never asked for. I'm sorry."

"That's okay."

"Tell me what's going on with you."

He sipped his coffee. "Kat Shakespeare e-mailed me."

"The kook from the Archangel Society?"

"She's gonna come to the house and do an evaluation. Then she'll do what she calls a clearing."

"Do you think she's on the level? What's she like?"

Darren pursed his lips. "She uses lots of exclamation points."

"I'm sure she'll bring her crystals and her chakras and incense candles," Jacqueline said. "And she'll leave one of the candles burning, the place will go up in smoke and you get booked for arson."

"That's one way to get out of a mortgage," he said.

"Can you do me a favor?"

"What?"

"Give me a call when you get up tomorrow morning, first thing. I want to make sure you lived through the night. You laugh, but I'm serious."

"I'll be fine," Darren said. "Ghosts don't hurt people."

D
espite what he told Jacqueline, Darren did worry about what awaited him when he came home that night. He fully expected to open the back door and find the entire place trashed, windows smashed, tables overturned. He imagined the bathroom door slamming shut and locking itself while he brushed his teeth, and then the toilet and bathtub would proceed to overflow in an attempt to drown him.

What he wasn't prepared for, however, was the grand, empty nothing that awaited him. Nothing was out of order. Everything was as he had left it.

He also wasn't prepared for the wave of desolation that began to wash over him like a dark rain as he stepped out of the shower and got ready for bed.

I think I'm okay with not ever going through those experiences again.

Darren sat on the edge of his bed for a long time.

When he got depressed, he got nostalgic. Out came the high school yearbooks, the old photos of Annika and himself. One night he found an old letter from a sweet girl he liked in college who just wanted to be friends.

Almost forty, and this was all he had.

Shooting baskets with Khabir at the park one evening, he barely heard Khabir grumbling about his nonexistent love life. Darren dribbled the ball, missed a jump shot and stared off at the smear of hot red sunset in the west, feeling an eerie, dispiriting sense of finality. Would it be this way ten years from now? One-on-one with Khabir, then dinner for one at the Taco Bell drive-thru followed by a couple hours of TV?

Khabir made an easy layup. "The dating website I'm on wants to know how I'd describe my perfect match. It would probably be bad taste to put, 'Someone with a pulse who doesn't mind dating a guy who often gets pulled aside for additional screening at the airport.' How would you answer it?"

"My perfect match?"

"Yeah."

Darren missed another jump shot. "Someone who lives outside the ordinary. Someone who's been through hell and who maybe doesn't even know what she wants anymore. Someone who doesn't fit in anymore." He grabbed the rebound. "Someone who loves silence."

"What the heck kind of a chick is that? Why would you want someone like that?"

Darren put his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. He had no answer, other than what Pascal said:
The heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of
.

That Friday evening was his parents' 40th wedding anniversary party. They had invited Darren, Julia and a handful of friends to a backyard barbecue at their house in Mentor, near the lake. Darren spent much of the evening shooing away the mosquitoes and listening to the soft, high-brow conversations among the Japanese lanterns. Most of the talk was about novels and poetry—his liberal parents steered clear of politics in deference to Sam, who still had a faded Bush-Cheney bumper sticker on his car.

The portable stereo was tuned to the smooth jazz station. Lou Ciccone manned the grill, poking and prodding the sausages and hot dogs and hamburger patties. He handed Darren a burger. "Inform your mother that if someone doesn't change this abominable music soon, I'll start singing. All of you will need therapy for the rest of your lives."

Natalie Ciccone refused to let Darren turn the dial. "You inform your father that if he puts on any of his insufferable Dave Brubeck I'll file for divorce. I'm the chief breadwinner, ergo I pick the music."

Darren's mom still worked full-time as an administrator for the Shaker Heights school district; Lou Ciccone, once a professor at Cleveland State, was semi-retired, although he still taught an English comp class or two at Lakeland Community College.

"How about a little country?" Sam suggested, sipping his longneck of Sam Adams. "Some Kenny Chesney?"

Darren wandered out to the lawn where Brandon, Madison and Julia were playing a chaotic, uncoordinated game of soccer.

"Hey, buddy," Darren said to his nephew. "You doin' okay?"

Brandon glanced at him and shrugged.

"I'm sorry about what happened at my house. Do you still think about it?"

Brandon shrugged again and went after the ball. Darren tried to get a few kicks in but his hangdog expression and listless demeanor seemed to brand him as a poor playmate. The kids spent most of their time keeping the ball away from him.

Julia disengaged herself from the game and came over to him. "They're okay. They haven't had any nightmares."

"Do they talk about it?"

"Not a lot. Kids are more resilient these days, I think." She looked like she wanted to say a lot more about that day at his house, but she glanced back at their parents. "Think they liked the gift?"

Darren and Julia had chipped in and bought their parents a year's worth of DirecTV; the truck had come yesterday to install the dish on the side of the house. "What's not to like?" Darren said. "Dad'll have all the History Channel and
Curb Your Enthusiasm
he could ever want."

The anniversary gift had given Darren and Julia an opportunity to come to some sort of rapprochement, and they seemed to have reverted back to their usual roles—Julia being vaguely brusque and condescending toward her big brother, and Darren feeling more like a slow-witted kid brother. Julia had evidently interpreted Darren putting his house up for sale as a tacit apology for that disastrous day back in June and was willing to let bygones be bygones. Sam, however, still refused to even acknowledge Darren's existence. Which, in Darren's opinion, wasn't exactly the worst thing in the world.

When Darren and Julia rejoined the adults on the patio, Darren's house and the housing market in general were the topic of conversation.

"Lily Kirschenbaum and her husband have been trying to sell their house for more than a year," Natalie Ciccone said, "and you wouldn't believe how gorgeous it is. And not a single offer. The market is atrocious."

"Tell me about it," Steve Wittenberg said. Steve was one of Lou Ciccone's colleagues from his Cleveland State teaching days. "Four houses on our street are up for sale."

"Five," Steve's wife said.

"Oh, hush," Lou Ciccone said, pouring himself half a glass of Riesling. "Darren's place is priced right. The people out there looking now are the bargain hunters, and Darren's place is a bargain."

"Not with what's inside it," Sam said. "I won't have my kids set foot in there. The place is evil."

"Being in your house isn't exactly like being in church, either," Darren said. "Still have that Al Gore shooting range target in your den? You sure you want to talk about evil, Sam?"

Sam would not deign to look in Darren's direction. "The house is evil, and your inability to see it speaks volumes about you."

Even in the dimness, Darren could see his father roll his eyes. Darren's parents hadn't seen any of the supernatural events, but even if they had, he doubted whether either of them—atheists both—would have resorted to a word like evil. 'Evil' smacked of Ouija boards and sweaty semi-literates under a revival tent, getting a taste of that old-time religion.

"What is evil," Darren's mother said pointedly, "is intellectual laziness and people's tendency to jump to ridiculous conclusions when they see something they can't explain. I'm sure there are aboriginal tribes in the Amazon who'd look at a radio as a sinister chalice that contains the voices of a pantheon of demons. But is a radio evil, Sam?"

"I don't see your point," Sam said.

Lou Ciccone handed Sam a sausage sandwich. "Physics. People experience a haunting and they immediately start using words like evil, demon, angel, God, miracle. If there are ghosts, maybe they're the natural residual energy released from the physical body, an energy that still retains some sort of cohesive form. Maybe we just haven't outlined the physics that make it possible."

"You know, I can never understand what the hell the two of you are saying half the time," Sam said, dabbing at a spot of grease on his polo shirt.

Julia rescued her husband by changing the subject to little Maddie's new imaginary friend, a flying red-haired girl named Suzie Rainbows. In addition to flying, Suzie's résumé was chock full of such skills as riding dinosaurs, making the rain stop and dancing so fast she could burn holes in the earth that reached all the way to the other side.

"Sounds like she'll have a great career ahead of her at ExxonMobil," Lou Ciccone said, finally losing patience and turning the radio dial. He couldn't find any non-watered-down jazz so he settled for the oldies station, where Dusty Springfield wistfully mused that the only boy who could ever teach her was the son of a preacher man. The bit of hot dog bun that bounced off Lou Ciccone's scalp most likely originated from the direction of Darren's mom.

"I think it's sweet," said Trish Horvath, a colleague of Darren's mom. "I remember when my Jason was little, he had an imaginary friend named Petey the Penguin. Apparently Petey was always the one eating my bags of chocolate chips."

Everyone else had a similarly cute story to tell. There was a great deal of hearty laughter in the smoky air and firelight. Old, faded faces were lit up with smiles, and the smiles were so transformative and youthful that Darren could see his parents and their friends as they must have looked more than forty years ago, when they were prickly young intellectuals raving about Updike and railing against Nixon. Darren didn't know if it was the acrid smoke or the sight of all the men's arms thrown loosely around the shoulders and waists of their spouses, but he had to excuse himself. He went into the kitchen and splashed water on his burning face. He did not feel like crying, but the sensations of detachment and exile were so strong they were almost paralyzing. For some reason he felt that it would always be this way—he, the loner among all the couples, year after year. Arriving alone, driving home alone. He saw his ghostly reflection in the window above the sink, saw how the lines around his eyes and mouth were becoming more deeply etched, adding an unappealing sternness to an already unhandsome, ordinary face.

Through the open window, he could hear his mother recount the tale of Darren's own imaginary playmate. "He must have been barely four years old when he started drawing these wonderful pictures of this big black raven with big, friendly eyes and huge, fluffy wings. I asked him who that was and he said, 'That's Blackbird, and she's my friend! Sometimes at night she flies me through the sky to her house in the trees, and she fights off the other birds who try to eat me. She gives me tea and these magic cookies. And one day we're gonna get married, and that's when I'm gonna turn into a bird, too! And we'll live in the treehouse all the time.' And he drew this precious picture—this big friendly black bird holding the hand of a tiny little boy."

"I take responsibility," Lou Ciccone said. "Instead of reading him
Curious George
I started reading him some of the more accessible Wallace Stevens poems. Including 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.' The imagists always make a vivid impression on children."

"Actually, it might have been me," Natalie Ciccone said. "I was going through my Ella Fitzgerald phase and must have played 'Bye Bye Blackbird' a thousand times while I was writing my thesis. But it was so sweet—I'd tuck Darren in, and he would touch the picture of his avian friend and tell her sleep tight, sweet dreams."

"Sounds like there's a book to be written about the psychological underpinnings of the imaginary friend archetype," Steve Wittenberg said.

"Oh, I could write that in my sleep," Natalie Ciccone said. "The invisible playmate is the shadow self, the reservoir for all the things we wish we could be but can't. It's the perfect helper, the perfect confidant, the perfect healer for all our woes. It gives us whatever is missing."

"Like a dream spouse, minus the sexual component," Trish Horvath said.

Her husband said, "You mean there's a sexual component to marriage? News to me."

"I could've sworn Jung wrote something about childhood fantasy archetypes," Steve said.

"Do you people always have to deconstruct everything?" Julia asked.

Darren's mother came into the kitchen bearing a stack of empty plates. "So here's where you're hiding. I hope you're not offended we were talking about you behind your back. Don't worry, we won't bring out the baby pictures."

"I was an ugly baby, anyway."

"What's the matter? You don't look very happy."

"Do you think I'm a good-looking guy?"

"Of course you are," Natalie Ciccone said. "You are very handsome."

Darren's smile was as weak and watered-down as the jazz on his mother's radio station. What did he expect her to say?
Well, to be honest, you're not getting any younger, and I think Lyndon Johnson wants his nose back
.

"What's this about?" his mother asked.

"The usual. I'm friends with a woman. And she's made it pretty clear that that's all we're going to be."

"Friends. How awful. There ought to be a law."

"You laugh, but you'd be singing a different tune if you weren't married. What if someone else out there was getting the best part of Dad and you had to make do with a few conversations here and there, a few lunch dates?"

Darren's mother put the dishes in the sink and gave them a quick rinse. "I'm tempted to be funny and say there are no best parts of Lou. I'm surprised at you. You were married. And you remember how your father and I used to fight. Marriage isn't exactly paradise on earth, you know. And how do you know you're not getting the best part of this woman?"

Darren handed her a paper towel to dry her hands.

"Do you think that sex and domesticity and joint checking accounts and looking at paint swatches is where the magic lies?" she continued. "Maybe all that stuff is just window dressing."

"I doubt you'd be married if it was just some hollow exercise."

"No, it's not a hollow exercise. But neither is friendship. Whether you sleep alone at night or not is pretty much irrelevant. Maybe the real magic is just having someone who cares about you and knows your heart and is glad you're in this world."

That night, the tablet of Ambien wore off and he found himself half-awake and half-immersed in what was perhaps the first erotic dream of his life. Even during puberty Darren didn't remember ever having any sexual dreams.