Birds of America

  “Of course,” said Sidra. “Of course I think those things.”

  “Of course! Of course is a term that has no place in this conversation!”

  When Tommy phoned, she often felt a pleasure so sudden and flooding, it startled her.

  “God, I’m so glad it’s you!”

  “You have no right to abandon American filmmaking this way!” he would say affectionately, and she would laugh loudly, for minutes without stopping. She was starting to have two speeds: Coma and Hysteria. Two meals: breakfast and popcorn. Two friends: Charlotte Peveril and Tommy. She could hear the clink of his bourbon glass. “You are too gifted a person to be living in a state that borders on North Dakota.”

  “Iowa.”

  “Holy bejesus, it’s worse than I thought. I’ll bet they say that there. I’ll bet they say ‘Bejesus.’ ”

  “I live downtown. They don’t say that here.”

  “Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana?”

  “No.”

  “I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, ‘Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Champagne! Urbana!’ ” He sighed. “It was just this thing in the middle of a field. I went to a Chinese restaurant there and ordered my entire dinner with extra MSG.”

  “I’m in Chicago. It’s not so bad.”

  “Not so bad. There are no movie people there. Sidra, what about your acting talent?”

  “I have no acting talent.”

  “Hello?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I’m not sure. For a minute there, I thought maybe you had that dizziness thing again, that inner-ear imbalance.”

  “Talent. I don’t have talent. I have willingness. What talent?” As a kid, she had always told the raunchiest jokes. As an adult, she could rip open a bone and speak out of it. Simple, clear. There was never anything to stop her. Why was there never anything to stop her? “I can stretch out the neck of a sweater to point at a freckle on my shoulder. Anyone who didn’t get enough attention in nursery school can do that. Talent is something else.”

  “Excuse me, okay? I’m only a screenwriter. But someone’s got you thinking you went from serious actress to aging bimbo. That’s ridiculous. You just have to weather things a little out here. Besides. I think willing yourself to do a thing is brave, and the very essence of talent.”

  Sidra looked at her hands, already chapped and honeycombed with bad weather, bad soap, bad life. She needed to listen to the crickets tape. “But I don’t will myself,” she said. “I’m just already willing.”

  She began to go to blues bars at night. Sometimes she called Charlotte Peveril, her one friend left from high school.

  “Siddy, how are you?” In Chicago, Sidra was thought of as a hillbilly name. But in L.A., people had thought it was beautiful and assumed she’d made it up.

  “I’m fine. Let’s go get drunk and listen to music.”

  Sometimes she just went by herself.

  “Don’t I know you from the movies?” a man might ask at one of the breaks, smiling, leering in a twinkly way.

  “Maybe,” she’d say, and he would look suddenly panicked and back away.

  One night, a handsome man in a poncho, a bad poncho—though was there such a thing as a good poncho? asked Charlotte—sat down next to her with an extra glass of beer. “You look like you should be in the movies,” he said. Sidra nodded wearily. “But I don’t go to the movies. So if you were in the movies, I would never have gotten to set my eyes on you.”

  She turned her gaze from his poncho to her sherry, then back. Perhaps he had spent some time in Mexico or Peru. “What do you do?”

  “I’m an auto mechanic.” He looked at her carefully. “My name’s Walter. Walt.” He pushed the second beer her way. “The drinks here are okay as long as you don’t ask them to mix anything. Just don’t ask them to mix anything!”

  She picked it up and took a sip. There was something about him she liked: something earthy beneath the act. In L.A., beneath the act you got nougat or Styrofoam. Or glass. Sidra’s mouth was lined with sherry. Walt’s lips shone with beer. “What’s the last movie you saw?” she asked him.

  “The last movie I saw. Let’s see.” He was thinking, but she could tell he wasn’t good at it. She watched with curiosity the folded-in mouth, the tilted head: at last, a guy who didn’t go to the movies. His eyes rolled back like the casters on a clerk’s chair, searching. “You know what I saw?”

  “No. What?” She was getting drunk.

  “It was this cartoon movie.” Animation. She felt relieved. At least it wasn’t one of those bad art films starring what’s-her-name. “A man is asleep, having a dream about a beautiful little country full of little people.” Walt sat back, looked around the room, as if that were all.

  “And?” She was going to have to push and pull with this guy.

  “ ‘And?’ ” he repeated. He leaned forward again. “And one day the people realize that they are only creatures in this man’s dream. Dream people! And if the man wakes up, they will no longer exist!”

  Now she hoped he wouldn’t go on. She had changed her mind a little.

  “So they all get together at a town meeting and devise a plan,” he continued. Perhaps the band would be back soon. “They will burst into the man’s bedroom and bring him back to a padded, insulated room in the town—the town of his own dream—and there they will keep watch over him to make sure he stays asleep. And they do just that. Forever and ever, everyone guarding him carefully, but apprehensively, making sure he never wakes up.” He smiled. “I forget what the name of it was.”

  “And he never wakes up.”

  “Nope.” He grinned at her. She liked him. She could tell he could tell. He took a sip of his beer. He looked around the bar, then back at her. “Is this a great country or what?” he said.

  She smiled at him, with longing. “Where do you live,” she asked, “and how do I get there?”

  “I met a man,” she told Tommy on the phone. “His name is Walter.”

  “A forced relationship. You’re in a state of stress—you’re in a syndrome, I can tell. You’re going to force this romance. What does he do?”

  “Something with cars.” She sighed. “I want to sleep with someone. When I’m sleeping with someone, I’m less obsessed with the mail.”

  “But perhaps you should just be alone, be by yourself for a while.”

  “Like you’ve ever been alone,” said Sidra. “I mean, have you ever been alone?”

  “I’ve been alone.”

  “Yeah, and for how long?”

  “Hours,” said Tommy. He sighed. “At least it felt like hours.”

  “Right,” she said, “so don’t go lecturing me about inner resources.”

  “Okay. So I sold the mineral rights to my body years ago, but, hey, at least I got good money for mine.”

  “I got some money,” said Sidra. “I got some.”

  Walter leaned her against his parked car. His mouth was slightly lopsided, paisley-shaped, his lips anneloid and full, and he kissed her hard. There was something numb and on hold in her. There were small dark pits of annihilation she discovered in her heart, in the loosening fist of it, and she threw herself into them, falling. She went home with him, slept with him. She told him who she was. A minor movie star once nominated for a major award. She told him she lived at the Days Inn. He had been there once, to the top, for a drink. But he did not seem to know her name.

  “Never thought I’d sleep with a movie star,” he did say. “I suppose that’s every man’s dream.” He laughed—lightly, nervously.

  “Just don’t wake up,” she said. Then she pulled the covers to her chin.

  “Or change the dream,” he added seriously. “I mean, in the movie I saw, everything is fine until the sleeping guy begins to dream about something else. I don’t think he wills it or anything; it just happens.”

  “You didn’t tell me about that part.”

&nbs
p; “That’s right,” he said. “You see, the guy starts dreaming about flamingos and then all the little people turn into flamingos and fly away.”

  “Really?” said Sidra.

  “I think it was flamingos. I’m not too expert with birds.”

  “You’re not?” She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on.

  “To tell you the truth, I really don’t think I ever saw a single movie you were in.”

  “Good.” She was drifting, indifferent, no longer paying attention.

  He hitched his arm behind his head, wrist to nape. His chest heaved up and down. “I think I may of heard of you, though.”

  Django Reinhardt was on the radio. She listened, carefully. “Astonishing sounds came from that man’s hands,” Sidra murmured.

  Walter tried to kiss her, tried to get her attention back. He wasn’t that interested in music, though at times he tried to be. “ ‘Astonishing sounds’?” he said. “Like this?” He cupped his palms together, making little pops and suction noises.

  “Yeah,” she murmured. But she was elsewhere, letting a dry wind sweep across the plain of her to sleep. “Like that.”

  He began to realize, soon, that she did not respect him. A bug could sense it. A doorknob could figure it out. She never quite took him seriously. She would talk about films and film directors, then look at him and say, “Oh, never mind.” She was part of some other world. A world she no longer liked.

  And now she was somewhere else. Another world she no longer liked.

  But she was willing. Willing to give it a whirl. Once in a while, though she tried not to, she asked him about children, about having children, about turning kith to kin. How did he feel about all that? It seemed to her that if she were ever going to have a life of children and lawn mowers and grass clippings, it would be best to have it with someone who was not demeaned or trivialized by discussions of them. Did he like those big fertilized lawns? How about a nice rock garden? How did he feel deep down about those combination storm windows with the built-in screens?

  “Yeah, I like them all right,” he said, and she would nod slyly and drink a little too much. She would try then not to think too strenuously about her whole life. She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic—drink, don’t drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.

  “I always thought someday I would have a little girl and name her after my grandmother.” Sidra sighed, peered wistfully into her sherry.

  “What was your grandmother’s name?”

  Sidra looked at his paisley mouth. “Grandma. Her name was Grandma.” Walter laughed in a honking sort of way. “Oh, thank you,” murmured Sidra. “Thank you for laughing.”

  Walter had a subscription to AutoWeek. He flipped through it in bed. He also liked to read repair manuals for new cars, particularly the Toyotas. He knew a lot about control panels, light-up panels, side panels.

  “You’re so obviously wrong for each other,” said Charlotte over tapas at a tapas bar.

  “Hey, please,” said Sidra. “I think my taste’s a little subtler than that.” The thing with tapas bars was that you just kept stuffing things into your mouth. “Obviously wrong is just the beginning. That’s where I always begin. At obviously wrong.” In theory, she liked the idea of mismatched couples, the wrangling and retangling, like a comedy by Shakespeare.

  “I can’t imagine you with someone like him. He’s just not special.” Charlotte had met him only once. But she had heard of him from a girlfriend of hers. He had slept around, she’d said. “Into the pudding” is how she phrased it, and there were some boring stories. “Just don’t let him humiliate you. Don’t mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness,” she added.

  “I’m supposed to wait around for someone special, while every other girl in this town gets to have a life?”

  “I don’t know, Sidra.”

  It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed. It suggested sexual things. “I’m a very average person,” she said desperately, somehow detecting that Charlotte already knew that, knew the deep, dark, wildly obvious secret of that, and how it made Sidra slightly pathetic, unseemly—inferior, when you got right down to it. Charlotte studied Sidra’s face, headlights caught in the stare of a deer. Guns don’t kill people, thought Sidra fizzily. Deer kill people.

  “Maybe it’s that we all used to envy you so much,” Charlotte said a little bitterly. “You were so talented. You got all the lead parts in the plays. You were everyone’s dream of what they wanted.”

  Sidra poked around at the appetizer in front of her, gardening it like a patch of land. She was unequal to anyone’s wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. “Envy,” said Sidra. “That’s a lot like hate, isn’t it.” But Charlotte didn’t say anything. Probably she wanted Sidra to change the subject. Sidra stuffed her mouth full of feta cheese and onions, and looked up. “Well, all I can say is, I’m glad to be back.” A piece of feta dropped from her lips.

  Charlotte looked down at it and smiled. “I know what you mean,” she said. She opened her mouth wide and let all the food inside fall out onto the table.

  Charlotte could be funny like that. Sidra had forgotten that about her.

  Walter had found some of her old movies in the video-rental place. She had a key. She went over one night and discovered him asleep in front of Recluse with Roommate. It was about a woman named Rose who rarely went out, because when she did, she was afraid of people. They seemed like alien life-forms—soulless, joyless, speaking asyntactically. Rose quickly became loosened from reality. Walter had it freeze-framed at the funny part, where Rose phones the psych ward to have them come take her away, but they refuse. She lay down next to him and tried to sleep, too, but began to cry a little. He stirred. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing. You fell asleep. Watching me.”

  “I was tired,” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Let me kiss you. Let me find your panels.” His eyes were closed. She could be anybody.

  “Did you like the beginning part of the movie?” This need in her was new. Frightening. It made her hair curl. When had she ever needed so much?

  “It was okay,” he said.

  “So what is this guy, a race-car driver?” asked Tommy.

  “No, he’s a mechanic.”

  “Ugh! Quit him like a music lesson!”

  “Like a music lesson? What is this, Similes from the Middle Class? One Man’s Opinion?” She was irritated.

  “Sidra. This is not right! You need to go out with someone really smart for a change.”

  “I’ve been out with smart. I’ve been out with someone who had two Ph.D.’s. We spent all of our time in bed with the light on, proofreading his vita.” She sighed. “Every little thing he’d ever done, every little, little, little. I mean, have you ever seen a vita?”

  Tommy sighed, too. He had heard this story of Sidra’s before. “Yes,” he said. “I thought Patti LuPone was great.”

  “Besides,” she said. “Who says he’s not smart?”

  The Japanese cars were the most interesting. Though the Americans were getting sexier, trying to keep up with them. Those Japs!

  “Let’s talk about my world,” she said.

  “What world?”

  “Well, something I’m interested in. Something where there’s something in it for me.”

  “Okay.” He turned and dimmed the lights, romantically. “Got a stock tip for you,” he said.

  She was horrified, dispirited, interested.

  He told her the name of a company somebody at work invested in. AutVis.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. But some guy at work said buy this week. They’re going to make some announcement. If I had money, I’d buy.”

  She bought, the very next morning. A thousand shares.
By the afternoon, the stock had plummeted 10 percent; by the following morning, 50. She watched the ticker tape go by on the bottom of the TV news channel. She had become the major stockholder. The major stockholder of a dying company! Soon they were going to be calling her, wearily, to ask what she wanted done with the forklift.

  “You’re a neater eater than I am,” Walter said to her over dinner at the Palmer House.

  She looked at him darkly. “What the hell were you thinking of, recommending that stock?” she asked. “How could you be such an irresponsible idiot?” She saw it now, how their life would be together. She would yell; then he would yell. He would have an affair; then she would have an affair. And then they would be gone and gone, and they would live in that gone.

  “I got the name wrong,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “You what?”

  “It wasn’t AutVis. It was AutDrive. I kept thinking it was vis for vision.”

  “ ‘Vis for vision,’ ” she repeated.

  “I’m not that good with names,” confessed Walter. “I do better with concepts.”

  “ ‘Concepts,’ ” she repeated as well.

  The concept of anger. The concept of bills. The concept of flightless, dodo love.

  Outside, there was a watery gust from the direction of the lake. “Chicago,” said Walter. “The Windy City. Is this the Windy City or what?” He looked at her hopefully, which made her despise him more.

  She shook her head. “I don’t even know why we’re together,” she said. “I mean, why are we even together?”

  He looked at her hard. “I can’t answer that for you,” he yelled. He took two steps back, away from her. “You’ve got to answer that for yourself!” And he hailed his own cab, got in, and rode away.

  She walked back to the Days Inn alone. She played scales soundlessly, on the tops of the piano keys, her thin-jointed fingers lifting and falling quietly like the tines of a music box or the legs of a spider. When she tired, she turned on the television, moved through the channels, and discovered an old movie she’d been in, a love story–murder mystery called Finishing Touches. It was the kind of performance she had become, briefly, known for: a patched-together intimacy with the audience, half cartoon, half revelation; a cross between shyness and derision. She had not given a damn back then, sort of like now, only then it had been a style, a way of being, not a diagnosis or demise.