Sparrow Nights (5 page)

Some nights, sweating, my calf twitching as if tiny aliens were moving about under the skin (for a while I believed it happened when Emma was making love to someone, that the nerves in my leg were like some invisible antennae that picked from the very air the vibrations of her betraying me ten blocks away), I’d find myself sinking down into sleep. But when I’d almost arrived, was almost beyond all reach, I experienced a kind of physical halting, as if I had landed on a subterranean roof or, more precisely, had come to the end of a thick elastic band that pulled me suddenly upwards, a small, almost punitive bounce, as if to say, no, you shall think about Emma some more.

I recalled somewhat bitterly that the February she left me, I had fussed about all sorts of things. Being passed over for the keynote speech at a Lisbon symposium. A crack that Serrault made, impugning, I thought, my affection for the poetry of Jacques Prévert.
Ce genre de connerie
. All nonsensical pricks and stabs. How odd that of all the catastrophes I nursed, it was that one alone that never occurred to me. Like a train, I suppose, the sound appearing to come from the
other
direction. Suddenly there it is, black and seven storeys high and upon you.

Lord, it was hot that summer, rivulets of perspiration running down my chest, morning and night, my face puffy from the heat. Tree branches flopped over like bad hair. From my porch I watched my neighbour’s yellow cat batting the lower bushes for moths. One motionless evening I caught a whiff of myself running up the stairs from the laundry room. I was starting to
smell
like Emma.

I went to a psychiatrist, a former Princeton professor, something of an addiction expert,
on disait
. But he chain-smoked, and when I commented on it, he informed me briskly that there were plenty of psychiatrists in the city who didn’t smoke. His appearance was strange enough, the long jaw, that dank hair so peculiar to English intellectuals, but his voice, my Lord, high-pitched, like air escaping from a baboon’s anus. How such a creature had been called, much less encouraged, into the business of mental health eluded me. But not everyone apparently. Serrault had recommended him. Thought he was
un type intéressant
.

“You’re a man whose exquisite pet has run away,” said the doctor in his strange whale voice.

“But I loved her!” I insisted.

“People love their pets,” he said.

An exquisite pet? Emma? My Emma.

I listened; I disputed. Terrors spewed from my mouth like pus from a lanced boil.

“Look at the state you’ve got yourself into,” he declared, and gave me a pill to put under my tongue. When I left his office, it was with a handshake and a light step that carried me to the elevator and down nine floors and out onto the street where dusk gathered in the corners of red brick buildings. It was remarkable. I could feel my appetite return. I called a friend to meet me for dinner. I picked a restaurant Emma and I had often gone to. I felt invulnerable, as if somehow, by talking so candidly, I had flushed the poison from my system. I showered. I dressed in a snappy blue shirt and dark slacks. Rooting through my cupboard for a pair of fancy shoes, something to gild the occasion, I suddenly remembered the pill I’d taken in the doctor’s office. Surely
not
. I phoned his office, but he had gone for the day. I phoned a pharmacy and asked how long such and such a drug would last, its effects. An hour at most, they said. I looked at my watch. Look—it was almost two hours. I must be free of it. Cured!

I went for dinner. I talked merrily. The city, the streets were mine again. It lasted until bedtime. Then, like a fast-growing rust, the kind you might see on speeded-up film, the nervous jangle came back. I took another pill. I put it under my tongue and lay motionless in the dark, and it was as if a black beast was slowly backing out of my bedroom, the snorts and the scratch of claws on the wooden floor growing fainter and fainter.

Three days later, having burned through an entire month’s prescription, I returned to the baby-voiced doctor for an encore. We tried something else, I forget its name, but it made me perspire like a madman at night. I woke up two, three times to find my T-shirt soaked, the sheet under me dark with sweat. For a while I wondered if I’d contracted
AIDS
. For a while, and this is shameful to say, I sort of hoped I had.

We tried Valium, then Lectopam, then a green tablet that left a bitter taste in my mouth as it came on. I used to look forward to that taste. I’d take the tablet in a café at the foot of my street. I’d nurse a beer and a cigarette and then that funny taste came on and I’d pay up and hurry home through the warm air and get into bed before it wore off. But I’d wake up an hour and a half later. My terror, my loneliness, the haunting
absoluteness
with which Emma had vanished from my life (sometimes she was so near I felt like I could open up my eyes and she’d be there, breezy and sunny, come back from the store or the library; she was so near I could almost touch her) cut clean through the drug.

They came at me very hard, those moments; they clutched my heart till I had no breath in my body. Once I took a graduate class to the film of Émile Zola’s
Germinal
. Movies are not for the heartbroken, I had forgotten that. The eyes rest on the vivid images, but instead of being absorbed by them, they use the screen as a sort of trampoline for private, painful imaginings. The stillness in the theatre, the privacy that comes from being in the dark give rise to a focused torture. I imagined myself floating like a disembodied soul through Emma’s new apartment. It was just before dawn. I glided over her black running shoes inside the front door, her daybook on the front hall table with that small handwriting. I moved through the kitchen with its stubby fridge, pictures of her and her friends stuck to the door with magnets. No picture of me. I hesitated at the bedroom door, heard the swish of a limb rubbing against a sheet. I went in, passing between the wooden molecules until I was on the other side. Grey daylight covered her hairbrush, her watch, her rings on a chair beside the bed. Why would she remove her rings? I peered through the darkness. She lay on her back, her arm crooked over her head, her knees up, supporting the sheet like a tent. During the night the sheet had fallen to her waist. It must have been a warm night, even for summer. But why had she removed her rings? Suddenly, involuntarily, I saw her hand, those delicate fingers wrapped around something obscene, pumping it slowly up and down while she sought her boss’s eyes.
Do you want to see my cunt?

Rising from my seat as if I’d been violently pinched from below, I hurried down the row, stepping over legs,
sorry, so sorry
, and rushed up the centre aisle. Bursting into the lobby, I took the escalator downstairs, ran along the hall to a kiosk and bought a package of cigarettes. I sat down at the back of a café. I opened the pack with trembling fingers. I struck the match once, twice, three times. But my fingers were too damp. I pulled another match loose. It lit, I puffed, the tobacco caught. I inhaled a deep lungful. But then, as if I’d just heard an unexpected noise, like a deer alerted in the forest, I had the alarming certainty that I was moments, seconds from an encounter with Emma’s friends. I imagined a group of them walking quickly through the mall; they’d be on their way to a summer camp reunion, or buying a present for a friend’s wedding, and they’d notice—it’d only take one of them—they’d notice me puffing like a madman in the Café Sweet Time. Of course, they’d stop to speak to me. They were like that. Polite with the overcheerfulness of former students. They’d come over, the whole bloody bunch of them. Alison and Robin and Susan and Trish and Emily Jane. Emily Jane? What kind of fucking name is that? The missing Austen sister? They’d tell Emma they saw me smoking cigarettes. He doesn’t smoke, does he? No, I didn’t think so. Mystified, knowing glances. He must be a mess, poor man. And Emma, shaking her head with concern, no, no, that’s true, he doesn’t smoke. Mind you, I haven’t seen him for ages.

I am leaning in the direction of not being in love with you any more
.

I left the café and went around the corner to a bank of pay telephones. And there, hunched over the last phone, my back to the world, a phone line humming expectantly in my ear, I puffed and puffed and puffed.

^{C H A P T E R}        
5

S
omeone moved into the house next door. He had two dogs, terriers or something, and in the morning when he went to work, he left them in the backyard. All day long they went
yip, yip, yip
. I was in my study preparing for a graduate seminar on Symbolism and Impressionism (the course had been dropped on me at the last moment) when it began to irk me. One never knows why, at a certain moment, neither the one before nor the one after, the nervous system suddenly, like an eel peeping forth from his crevice, takes note of an intruder.

Taking a different tack this time, a concession, no doubt, to my evolving sense of community, I slipped a note in the letter box mentioning, very politely, the racket and how, after a couple of hours, it “got on the nerves.” I didn’t leave my name or a phone number, but I was, as I said,
énormément poli
. I got a peek at the dogs, too. They were small, hairy beasts tied to a long leash. None too bright either. They stood in the middle of the yard, looking at the back door and barking, as if their master might emerge at any second and let them in.

After my note I waited a couple of days. Nothing happened.

Yip, yip, yip
.

So I wrote another letter, this time on a colleague’s computer. I used an unusual typeface not found on my system. I said, in no uncertain terms, that his dogs were becoming a bother, that if he didn’t find some way to “clam them up,” I was going to call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I considered the expression “clam them up” a prudent choice. In the event of something untoward happening, no one would give me a second look. After all, why would a man of my stature use a cretin’s turn of phrase?

I dropped the note in his box, this time after dark. I didn’t want the neighbours spotting me. I live in a Portuguese neighbourhood and those women, once their husbands die, do nothing but snoop at the window.

I heard barking the next morning. I woke up instantly, as if my body had been waiting, like an animal in the dark. It wasn’t even six, I could tell by the light. There’s a lonely clarity to sunlight when it’s too early. He—I assumed it was a he—must have let the hounds out early, a kind of middle finger to whoever wrote the note. I went to the other end of my house and got into the bed in the guest room. I like the way the sheets smell in there; it’s comforting, like a hotel. Still, I didn’t get to sleep until I figured a course of action. Then I went under as if dropped overboard with an anchor around my ankles.

I didn’t want to go to a hardware store in my neighbourhood, so I took the streetcar to Parkdale. I had a flat out there years ago, but my memory isn’t what it used to be and I got off at the wrong stop. Everything seemed moved around. Finally I found the place (next door to where that red-haired girl worked in the donut shop—what a foolish business that was) and waited in the paint section for the attendant to free himself. He was an effeminate black man, very good at his job and he knew it. I explained I had a rat in my basement; I wanted to dispatch him, painlessly if possible.

“Shoot him,” the man said, “only watch out for the ricochet.”

I had the impression he had said this before and I allowed myself a small riposte. “We don’t want to kill
all
the rats down there after all.”

“Right,” he said, and laughed the way people do when they don’t follow you. Or don’t think you’re funny perhaps, although in this case I’m confident it was the former. He knew precisely what I wanted and where it was in the store, as I suspect he knew the whereabouts of everything. He led me to a shelf of small, chocolate-bar-sized packages in different colours, for ascending lethalness, I assumed. I bought the yellow pack, went to a butcher’s on Roncesvalles and bought a pound of fatty hamburger—fat makes the hamburger more flavourful—and came home, picking up some tenderizer at the corner.

After putting my purchases on the kitchen counter, I locked the door and lowered the living-room blinds. I unwrapped the bar. It was a colourless wafer, very hard. I tried to snap it in half but couldn’t. My face reddened; the effort left white indentations in my fingers. Finally I sawed it in two with a serrated paring knife and grated it into a fine yellow powder. I scrubbed the grater myself afterwards in soapy hot water and rinsed it thoroughly. The notion of accidentally killing myself with a poisoned omelette made me smile. I wished I had someone to share the joke with. I thought of one of my students, Edmond, his plump legs lounged over the edge of a chair, high on God knows what, tapping his prominent Adam’s apple. Only the other day he asked me why I didn’t just quit, go off somewhere and write poetry. Really, sometimes I have a mind to throw him out of my office and tell him to come back in four years when he’s not so bloody naïve. But I think I’d rather miss him. Besides, he’s quite right:
Thérèse Raquin
is bullshit.

Anyway, while drying the grater and hanging it back on its proper hook, I felt a kind of energized purpose, and I realized it had been some time since I’d felt it.

Near five that afternoon I cooked up a pair of patties, rare,
saignant
even, but perhaps a little overspiced, and put them in a plastic bag. I pulled my car in front of my house and made a great production of “preparing to leave for the weekend.” I left the car doors open, Rachmaninov thundering on the radio while I trundled out a small suitcase and a half-dozen thick books, which I laid carefully in the back seat. A working weekend.

My neighbour from across the street drifted out onto his patio and joined me on the sidewalk. He’s a lawyer now, but until recently he was a local politician, some say a bagman for the incumbent party, but I know nothing of these matters and besides, I couldn’t care less. In his socks and sandals and blue shorts he looked like a high school teacher. We exchanged pleasantries, but he kept throwing little glances at my new neighbour’s house, and finally he asked me what I made of it. I asked, of what? “Those fucking dogs,” he replied.

This was good, but it was also important to play it right. I paused theatrically and then, as if I had just caught a faint sound, a sound as remote as electricity passing through the wires overhead, I said agreeably, “Oh yes, you’re right.”

Right about what? It was intended to flatter, but he looked mildly irritated with me. “Come on,” he said, pleasantly unpleasant. “You must have heard them.” He sounded rather peevish and for a second I thought I saw what the voters had seen when they tossed him out of office.

“I’m sure they’re just getting used to the neighbourhood,” I said.

This expression of exasperating—and idiot—goodwill struck entirely the right note. It was succinct and easy to remember. When I turned the corner at the foot of my street, I caught a glimpse of my neighbour, his arms crossed, glaring at the house next door.

I drove north. It being a Friday, the traffic was heavy until I cleared the city and then a sad, golden light spread over the farmhouses and the gorgeous fields. The air smelt clean and young, and I remembered taking Emma out to these fields once just after we’d met and snuggling in a sleeping bag under the bright sky. “I don’t give a shit about Verlaine,” she said. “I just want to pump your cock till you faint.” Quite the nature girl, my Emma. But it was so lovely out there. Particularly after the fireworks, after Satan had withdrawn and she’d become human again. You could smell the damp earth that night and the air and Emma’s saliva-wet face; you could hear the night sounds of a farmer’s field. It was so
raw
, it seemed as if a finger passed through your chest and touched you in some humming place.

It was after dark when I heard the stones crackle under the wheels of my car as I left the highway and followed a gravel lane for a quarter of a mile, a slow, curving route, the trees rising on each side, hundreds and hundreds of little circular leaves glimmering like coins in the headlights. After gliding to a stop in a dark parking lot, I turned off the car lights and the radio and found myself thinking, quite incongruously, of a waitress who had served me years ago on an outdoor patio. She had the oddest name, Constance something. Someone had phoned, I gathered, a customer, claiming to have left behind a handbag under my table, and she had come over and while searching the floor had rested her hand very gently on my shoulder to keep her balance. There was something about her touch, a combination of absolute lightness and at the same time familiarity, as if she had touched me many times, knew me well, was very comfortable doing it. I flushed with pleasure and desire, like a cat stroked by his master. Moreover, I had the sensation that only someone who loved me could touch me like that. Constance
Guitar
, that was her name. I’m sure she never gave me another thought, not from the moment she turned her back on my table, but now, out in the parking lot, I experienced a ghostly longing for her. The hotel rose up before me, floodlit and purring with people, and I caught myself daydreaming that she was with me, that the two of us were coming here for the weekend together. How happy that would be. What fun. With her turned-around baseball cap and that curiously theatrical voice, she’d have enjoyed this place.

I checked in and took a table for dinner, which overlooked a fast-running river and, downstream, an abandoned mill, whose facade was illuminated like a movie set by a bank of lights. From where I sat, you could hear the water sluicing over the dam. I treated myself to an overpriced Pinot Noir, Oak Knoll ’92, and just the expectation of its arrival cheered me up. After a glass and a bit the fireflies came out. The candle flames wavered like caramel. The dining room seemed warmer, the people pleasant and animated.

Near eleven I repaired to my room. I was a little wobbly from the wine and a heated cognac, and for a while I sat on my bed, looking, I’m afraid, like Jack Nicholson near the end of
The Shining
. But in truth I was trying to explain to myself, to track down the reasons for that bout of sadness that had struck me so poignantly in the parking lot. And after a while I recalled an event that had happened near the beginning of my career. I had gone to Budapest to give a lecture on the fraudulent French poet Lautréamont, an authentic no-talent who, for some bewildering reason, had come into fashion in the sixties. (Of that suicidal bunch only Arthur Rimbaud was the real item.) It was a very prestigious invitation, or so I had persuaded myself at the time. (In the world of academia, when you describe your colleagues as brilliant and an occasion as prestigious, you are inevitably talking about yourself and where you belong.)
De toute façon
, an hour before I was scheduled to take the podium, I found myself wandering in the old quarter of the city. Everything was decaying, parapets, churches; the narrow lanes mouldy and wet. I saw a child pulling a wagon over the cobblestones, his face a dark, unsmiling tulip, and suddenly I was steeped in sadness. Memories from my childhood illuminated themselves like small films: a flag drooping on a schoolyard pole, a girl in a square dress running across the kindergarten playground, a fat man oiling my tricycle. Other memories crowded in.

I walked and walked and saw nothing of old Budapest. What is wrong with me, I wondered, why am I so sad? Finally, staring sightlessly into the window of a second-hand bookstore, I realized what it was: I was
scared
. Scared that my lecture might fall on unsympathetic ears, that my audience might find in it confirmation of what I already knew, that I was second-rate.

Sitting motionless in my hotel room thirty-odd years later, the river running by the old mill, I realized I had fallen into that familiar pond again. I was frightened.

Still, it was time to go.

I roused myself and went down the back stairs, out the side door, and circled the magnificent hotel, avoiding its floodlights until I found my car. I drove back to the city in silence.

I parked ten blocks from my house. No one was about. It was a humid night, the air, especially after the country, clammy and dead. I cut through a back lane of rundown garages and unlocked a wooden door that led into my backyard, crossed the damp grass quickly and sought cover in the lilac bushes near my kitchen window. I opened the plastic grocery bag. I could smell the tenderizer. I eased my hand in and removed a baseball-sized patty.

A light went on in an upstairs window. I withdrew deeper into the bushes. A woman looked out over the yard. From the desk lamp beneath her you could see she had red, almost electrified hair. I hadn’t expected a woman. She was talking to someone in the room, smiling and looking over her shoulder. Then the other person stepped into the frame. With blonde hair and a sharp nose she reminded me of Emma, the way she held herself, the slightly rounded shoulders, the head jutted a bit forward. The desk lamp went out; the backyard fell back into darkness.

I waited five minutes, maybe longer, then lobbed the patty into the yard. Then a second one. I returned quickly to the car, wiping my hands on a rag in the trunk. I should have worn gloves. All the way back I could smell the hamburger on my hands. I couldn’t help sniffing my fingers to see if it was still there.

Back in my hotel room it was three in the morning. A bird chirped nearby. I poured myself a cognac from the mini-bar, opened the windows, lay on the bedspread and stared out at the starry night, my glass on my chest. The river raced downstream. At daylight I could still smell my hands.