Sparrow Nights (3 page)

I looked at her and then at it. I must have seemed puzzled. I was. It was obviously a significant gift. But what did it signify?

I sniffed it discreetly. “Ah,” I said.

“I just came from the gym.”

You see what I mean? An old-fashioned dirty girl, I guess. Or a desk with many drawers, depending on how you see the world. She liked hard-core pornography, read girlie magazines with her hand down her jeans, abused herself on a nightly basis (“I’ve got it down to a minute. Want to watch?”), lured me into bouts of phone sex, once on a cellphone when I was lunching with a group of visiting professors from Munich. (“Yes, that
does
sound lovely, and we’ll chat about it more when I get home.”) I don’t believe for a second that she was bulimic, but after a half-bottle of wine it gave her a flush of visible pleasure to tell strangers that “For four years I had my finger up my cunt or down my throat.”
Vous voyez?

One evening she borrowed a pullover from me. It was a cool night, the rain had just ceased and I was walking her home. A couple of days later I checked my answering service. After a slightly strangled pause, I heard her say, “I just committed an unnatural act with your sweater.”

But it wasn’t all good times. She could be, for example, peculiar about her body. About her thinness, which I so adored. Her heart beat at a furious rate; I could hear it sometimes when I had my ear pressed to her chest. It wore her down, I think, the strain of being Emma, and it showed in her hands. She had the hands of an old woman, delicate but colourless. Unhealthy hands. She could lose weight during an afternoon walk down Yonge Street.

One evening, a few months into it, we met at a restaurant for dinner. She was late, which always irritated me, but when she came in the dining room she looked so lovely I forgot my displeasure. I simply couldn’t keep my hands off her, nor could I stop talking, and in the course of things I said, “You must order something hearty, anything you want, it’s my treat, roast beef, mashed potatoes, something to put some meat on you …”

She opened the menu and I remember thinking, Oh, she didn’t hear me, I must be talking too much. But then, in a voice I had never heard before, she said, “I’ll thank you not to make personal remarks about my body.”

Personal remarks about her body?
Lord, that’s all I ever did. My description of her, of how it felt to unbutton her shirt or slip off her socks, had become as graphic as anything she might come out with. I was astonished. And speechless. And embarrassed. There was, in her tone of voice, the implication that she was talking to a cretin.

“Now wait a minute,” I said, in a slightly wobbly voice, but she interrupted me.

“It’s not a debate, Darius, it’s a matter of manners.”

Manners?

The evening never recovered, and when she came back to my house she sat deliberately forward on the couch, a most uninviting posture, like a hockey player waiting to be called onto the ice. I put my hand on her back.

“I’m not really comfortable with that tonight,” she said. “You’ve made me feel very self-conscious.”

“How could I?” I protested. “I adore you.” I leaned over and tried to kiss her ear, but she pulled away with considerable irritation.

“I said no, Darius. All right?”

Oh dear. What a dreadful night. And then she added, “Go into the bedroom and take care of yourself, if you have to. I’ll wait out here.”

Nice, eh? She was a little touchy, my Emma, sometimes I even thought her a little
touched
, those voices, the foul language, the overheated body, that unpredictable pricklishness. Really, like threading your way through a minefield. But I must say that before her, and I mean all my life before Emma, I had the slightly embarrassing sensation that I was saving myself for someone. I even had it during my marriage. During the actual ceremony I found myself wondering if such-and-such a bridesmaid might be at the reception afterwards. But when I was with Emma, I had the unmistakable feeling that the train had finally pulled into the station. I caught myself being happy.

But we all have a shaming memory, no matter how well we have loved, and I have one too. Emma had gone to the hospital to have her gallbladder out. The day of the operation an article of mine appeared in a prestigious academic journal. I was very excited and rushed to the hospital with it in my hand. She was still groggy from the anaesthetic and was clutching a gold pocket watch. It had belonged to my father. The metal was dull, it no longer kept correct time, but it had a solid, reassuring weight, a beauty from a different era, and I had given it to her the night before for good luck.

The surgeon had done a bad job on her and she raised her nightgown to show an ugly six-inch wound. “Why did they have to cut such a big hole?” she asked, her small blonde head shaking slightly, like an old man’s. She waited as if I might know the answer.

But I wasn’t paying attention, you see. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about my article and about a rendezvous I was about to have with a colleague, an event where I would be praised. And so I left the hospital. And when I said I was leaving, she went quite still, she appeared to be thinking about something entirely different. Or trying to sort through the anaesthetic to solve a simple mathematics problem. Why didn’t she say something? Why didn’t she say, No, stay here. I need you?

But she didn’t. She swallowed it and in so doing condemned us both.

You don’t usually lose someone because of one thing. But that wound, in her stomach and in her heart, never healed. It gave her, I think, a new way of looking at me, that I was
over there
. After that night we were not on the same side any more.

Life went on. We lived together, went on vacation to Thailand. She’d quit graduate school and now worked as a publicist for a small publishing house; I taught my classes. But eighteen months later, perhaps sooner, she walked into the living room late one morning. It was a warm day in winter; there was a high wind, it shook the bare tree branches outside the window, they bobbed up and down in a furious silence, and overhead the clouds whizzed by with unnatural quickness. The mood of the street swung back and forth from gloominess to sprints of sunlight racing down the face of the houses and across the lawns. You couldn’t tell if a storm was coming or going.

I was fiddling with a lecture on surrealism, wondering if such and such an anecdote, that business of Alfred Jarry walking a lobster on a leash down the Champs-Elysées, would strike an amusing note for an undergraduate class. “And do you know what Jarry said when asked
why
he was walking a lobster and not a dog?” I waited an anticipatory second. “‘Because lobsters don’t bark.’”

But Emma appeared not to be listening. This irritated me. She had been moody lately, it came and went without resolution, and the only time I ever heard that gorgeous laugh was when she was on the telephone to a friend.

And I couldn’t smell her any more.

“Is there anything wrong?” I asked a bit testily.

Her young eyes watered and she said, “I can’t live here any more.”

And then I made a very grand mistake, although looking back now, I wonder if it would have mattered. I decided to call her bluff, to be firm but unsympathetic, as if this were a kind of self-indulged aberration, her being so unhappy.

“Then you mustn’t,” I said.

With theatrical briskness I got up, found my coat and went out to an afternoon movie.

When I came home hours later, the coat hangers in her closet were still clinking, as if there were a wind in the house.

She never reproached me for that scene at the hospital, although something she said a few weeks later still gives me goosebumps. We were in the bedroom, her stitches had just come out, and we were looking silently out the window at a child who was skating around and around on a small ice rink in the park below. The subject of her operation came up and she said, in a voice I barely recognized, “I learned that night that I had a soul. That I had a soul and it lives in my body.”

She didn’t say anything else or turn her glance away from the skater below. It seemed as if her attention had moved on to something else, that she was trying to solve that mathematical problem again. But I could feel something in my heart contract, and for a second I thought I knew what people mean when they say they can feel someone walking over their grave.

But let me come back to the night she left, the coat hangers still stirring in her cupboard. I had been, as I said, to a movie, and crossing the park toward home (how gloomy it was, the swings rusted and damp) I noticed something in the front window of my house. The Christmas lights! She had left them on and they twinkled merrily in the window, blue, green, red and amber. She had changed her mind! Yes, she had changed her mind and decided to stay after all. I broke into a fast walk, a lump developed in my throat, my eyes watered with things I was going to say. I pulled out my keys. Perhaps I should feign surprise—What! You still here?—but no, not this time. I unlocked the door and burst into the house. Emma! Emma!

But there was no Emma. The Christmas lights flickered over the chesterfield, my desk, the carpet, the notes for my lecture the following day.

Sometime near four in the morning I awoke and the full horror was upon me. I hurried into the bathroom and flicked on the light. In the unnatural brightness I looked like a man escaped from a lunatic asylum. I opened the medicine cabinet and shook a pair of sleeping tablets into my hand, tossed them into my dry mouth. Too impatient to get a glass from the kitchen, I cupped my hands under the cold water tap and sucked noisily. It took two goes.

I phoned her at work the following morning, my voice bounding between hysteria and false bonhomie. I spoke as if somehow this was a shared experience, a ghastly little misunderstanding we were both equally dying to reverse. Comrades in a close call, so to speak.

“So how did
you
sleep last night?” I boomed.

“What do you mean?” she asked simply. Her confusion was authentic, and in it I saw myself bouncing at the end of a rope like a freshly hanged man. If there was a moment when the devil whispered in my ear, “It’s over,” it was then. It was as if she had gone to sleep and woken up speaking a foreign language, a language I had no access to.

She came over that night. She came over a few times after. I wept. She wept for my weeping. And then she went home. She called it that, home, this bed in a friend’s apartment. She left our place and she went home.

Morning after morning I woke up too early, the snow blowing sideways, the day stretching ahead of me. Stretching and stretching and stretching all the way to the horizon where, if you looked, you could make out a tiny, crooked tree. I taught my classes. I stared into the fireplace and waited for the phone to ring. Days went by, then weeks. Hollowed out by worry and a kind of relentless anxiousness that cut through everything, I lost weight. My pants hung from my hips. I stabbed a new hole in my belt buckle.

One night, unable to last another second, I snatched up the phone and called her. “Where
are
you?” I cried. She hurried over; I proposed marriage; she diplomatically declined; offered sex instead, which I gratefully embraced. But she was so
silent!
Looking at her young body in the bed, I swear the notion of losing her forever made me feel as if I might go mad. And then she went home.

For a while, as long as I could smell her on my hands, I felt better. But then it all started up again. I could feel the panic seize me around the ribs, slowly, like a snake, and I could hear that dreadful whisper in my ear, “She’s gone,” the last syllable like a poof when a candle is extinguished. She’s gone.

I listened to opera. I listened to Bach. On Wednesdays I went to a Cajun bar; the music excited me. I’d have one, two, three mugs of beer, the accordion shrieked, the band reeled, and I could feel my shoulders coming down. The room softened; the lights glowed; I could breathe. Yes, she’d come back. She’d be back. Just be patient. Ah yes, be patient with her. But when I came outside, the winter bared its teeth at me; the wind slapped my face; giant icicles loomed like tusks overhead; and by the time I arrived home I was frightened and sober. And there was never, never, never a message from her.

Spring came, and one fragrant afternoon I sat in the park watching a child whisper to a cat and waited for Emma to come. I sat on a picnic table, the same picnic table I had kissed her on four years before, and watched her pedal toward me on her bicycle.

Upstairs in my house (God, she was beautiful), I leaned forward in my chair, she on the couch, my fingers steepled beneath my chin, and began a practised speech. I said that she had been gone for some three months now, and three months for someone who is waiting is a long time. She nodded in silent agreement. I went on to say that when we did see each other, it was always at my behest, as it had been again that day. More nodding. She too was prepared, you could see that. She’d been on the phone (that mother again) and from the way she listened, the measured patience, I had the feeling she had reached a final decision, had perhaps a long time ago but had only now consented to the language to describe it accordingly. I wound up by saying that I didn’t need kid gloves or kind treatment but simply the truth. I opened my mouth to say more, but nothing came out, which was good because there wasn’t any more to say.