Birds of America

  Adrienne removed all her clothes, her earrings, her watch, her rings. She had already grown used to the ring Martin had given her, and so it saddened and exhilarated her to take it off, a quick glimpse into the landscape of adultery. Her other ring was a smoky quartz, which a palm reader in Milwaukee—a man dressed like a gym teacher and set up at a card table in a German restaurant—had told her to buy and wear on her right index finger for power.

  “What kind of power?” she had asked.

  “The kind that’s real,” he said. “What you’ve got here,” he said, waving around her left hand, pointing at the thin silver and turquoise she was wearing, “is squat.”

  “I like a palm reader who dresses you,” she said later to Martin in the car on their way home. This was before the incident at the Spearson picnic, and things seemed not impossible then; she had wanted Martin to fall in love with her. “A guy who looks like Mike Ditka, but who picks out jewelry for you.”

  “A guy who tells you you’re sensitive and that you will soon receive cash from someone wearing glasses. Where does he come up with this stuff?”

  “You don’t think I’m sensitive.”

  “I mean the money and glasses thing,” he said. “And that gloomy bit about how they’ll think you’re a goner, but you’re going to come through and live to see the world go through a radical physical change.”

  “That was gloomy,” she agreed. There was a lot of silence as they looked out at the night-lit highway lines, the fireflies hitting the windshield and smearing, all phosphorescent gold, as if the car were flying through stars. “It must be hard,” she said, “for someone like you to go out on a date with someone like me.”

  “Why do you say that?” he’d asked.

  She climbed up on the table, stripped of ornament and the power of ornament, and slipped between the flannel sheets. For a second, she felt numb and scared, naked in a strange room, more naked even than in a doctor’s office, where you kept your jewelry on, like an odalisque. But it felt new to do this, to lead the body to this, the body with its dog’s obedience, its dog’s desire to please. She lay there waiting, watching the mobile moons turn slowly, half revolutions, while from the speakers beneath the table came a new sound, an electronic, synthesized version of Brahms’s lullaby. An infant. She was to become an infant again. Perhaps she would become the Spearson boy. He had been a beautiful baby.

  Ilke came in quietly, and appeared so suddenly behind Adrienne’s head, it gave her a start.

  “Move back toward me,” whispered Ilke. Move back toward me, and Adrienne shifted until she could feel the crown of her head grazing Ilke’s belly. The cockatiel whooshed in and perched on a nearby chair.

  “Are you a little tense?” she said. She pressed both her thumbs at the center of Adrienne’s forehead. Ilke’s hands were strong, small, bony. Leathered claws. The harder she pressed, the better it felt to Adrienne, all of her difficult thoughts unknotting and traveling out, up into Ilke’s thumbs.

  “Breathe deeply,” said Ilke. “You cannot breathe deeply without it relaxing you.”

  Adrienne pushed her stomach in and out.

  “You are from the Villa Hirschborn, aren’t you?” Ilke’s voice was a knowing smile.

  “Ehuh.”

  “I thought so,” said Ilke. “People are very tense up there. Rigid as boards.” Ilke’s hands moved down off Adrienne’s forehead, along her eyebrows to her cheeks, which she squeezed repeatedly, in little circles, as if to break the weaker capillaries. She took hold of Adrienne’s head and pulled. There was a dull cracking sound. Then she pressed her knuckles along Adrienne’s neck. “Do you know why?”

  Adrienne grunted.

  “It is because they are overeducated and can no longer converse with their own mothers. It makes them a little crazy. They have literally lost their mother tongue. So they come to me. I am their mother, and they don’t have to speak at all.”

  “Of course they pay you.”

  “Of course.”

  Adrienne suddenly fell into a long falling—of pleasure, of surrender, of glazed-eyed dying, a piece of heat set free in a room. Ilke rubbed Adrienne’s earlobes, knuckled her scalp like a hairdresser, pulled at her neck and fingers and arms, as if they were jammed things. Adrienne would become a baby, join all the babies, in heaven, where they lived.

  Ilke began to massage sandalwood oil into Adrienne’s arms, pressing down, polishing, ironing, looking, at a quick glimpse, like one of Degas’s laundresses. Adrienne shut her eyes again and listened to the music, which had switched from synthetic lullabies to the contrapuntal sounds of a flute and a thunderstorm. With these hands upon her, she felt a little forgiven, and began to think generally of forgiveness, how much of it was required in life: to forgive everyone, yourself, the people you loved, and then wait to be forgiven by them. Where was all this forgiveness supposed to come from? Where was this great inexhaustible supply?

  “Where are you?” whispered Ilke. “You are somewhere very far.”

  Adrienne wasn’t sure. Where was she? In her own head, like a dream; in the bellows of her lungs. What was she? Perhaps a child. Perhaps a corpse. Perhaps a fern in the forest in the storm; a singing bird. The sheets were folded back. The hands were all over her now. Perhaps she was under the table with the music, or in a musty corner of her own hip. She felt Ilke rub oil into her chest, between her breasts, out along the ribs, and circularly on the abdomen. “There is something stuck here,” Ilke said. “Something not working.” Then she pulled the covers back up. “Are you cold?” she asked, and though Adrienne didn’t answer, Ilke brought another blanket, mysteriously heated, and laid it across Adrienne. “There,” said Ilke. She lifted the blanket so that only Adrienne’s feet were exposed. She rubbed oil into her soles, the toes; something squeezed out of Adrienne, like an olive. She felt as if she would cry. She felt like the baby Jesus. The grown Jesus. The poor will always be with us. The dead Jesus. Cheese is the best. Cheese is the best.

  At her desk in the outer room, Ilke wanted money. Thirty-five thousand lire. “I can give it to you for thirty thousand, if you decide to come on a regular basis. Would you like to come on a regular basis?” asked Ilke.

  Adrienne was fumbling with her wallet. She sat down in the wicker rocker near the desk. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

  Ilke had put on reading glasses and now opened up her appointment book to survey the upcoming weeks. She flipped a page, then flipped it back. She looked out over her glasses at Adrienne. “How often would you like to come?”

  “Every day,” said Adrienne.

  “Every day?”

  Ilke’s hoot worried Adrienne. “Every other day?” Adrienne peeped hopefully. Perhaps the massage had bewitched her, ruined her. Perhaps she had fallen in love.

  Ilke looked back at her book and shrugged. “Every other day,” she repeated slowly, as a way of holding the conversation still while she checked her schedule. “How about at two o’clock?”

  “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?”

  “Perhaps we can occasionally arrange a Saturday.”

  “Okay. Fine.” Adrienne placed the money on the desk and stood up. Ilke walked her to the door and thrust her hand out formally. Her face had changed from its earlier pinks to a strange and shiny orange.

  “Thank you,” said Adrienne. She shook Ilke’s hand, but then leaned forward and kissed her cheek; she would kiss the business out of this. “Good-bye,” she said. She stepped gingerly down the stairs; she had not entirely returned to her body yet. She had to go slowly. She felt a little like she had just seen God, but also a little like she had just seen a hooker. Outside, she walked carefully back toward the villa, but first stopped at the gelato shop for a small dish of hazelnut ice cream. It was smooth, toasty, buttery, like a beautiful liqueur, and she thought how different it was from America, where so much of the ice cream now looked like babies had attacked it with their cookies.

  “Well, Martin, it’s been nice knowing you,” Adrienne said, smiling. She r
eached out to shake his hand with one of hers, and pat him on the back with the other. “You’ve been a good sport. I hope there will be no hard feelings.”

  “You’ve just come back from your massage,” he said a little numbly. “How was it?”

  “As you would say, ‘Relaxing.’ As I would say … well, I wouldn’t say.”

  Martin led her to the bed. “Kiss and tell,” he said.

  “I’ll just kiss,” she said, kissing.

  “I’ll settle,” he said. But then she stopped, and went into the bathroom to shower for dinner.

  At dinner, there was zuppa alla paesana and then salsiccia alla griglia con spinaci. For the first time since they’d arrived, she was seated near Martin, who was kitty-corner to her left. He was seated next to another economist and was speaking heatedly with him about a book on labor division and economic policy. “But Wilkander ripped that theory off from Boyer!” Martin let his spoon splash violently into his zuppa before a waiter came and removed the bowl.

  “Let us just say,” said the other man calmly, “that it was a sort of homage.”

  “If that’s ‘homage,’ ” said Martin, fidgeting with his fork, “I’d like to perform a little ‘homage’ on the Chase Manhattan Bank.”

  “I think it was felt that there was sufficient looseness there to warrant further explication.”

  “Right. And one’s twin sibling is simply an explication of the text.”

  “Why not?” The other economist smiled. He was calm, probably a supply-sider.

  Poor Martin, thought Adrienne. Poor Keynesian Martin, poor Marxist Martin, perspiring and red. “Left of Lenin?” she had heard him exclaiming the other day to an agriculturalist. “Left of Lenin? Left of the Lennon Sisters, you mean!” Poor godless, raised-an-atheist-in-Ohio Martin. “On Christmas,” he’d said to her once, “we used to go down to the Science Store and worship the Bunsen burners.”

  She would have to find just the right blouse, just the right perfume, greet him on the chaise longue with a bare shoulder and a purring “Hello, Mr. Man.” Take him down by the lake near the Sfondrata chapel and get him laid. Hire somebody. She turned to the scholar next to her, who had just arrived that morning.

  “Did you have a good flight?” she asked. Her own small talk at dinner no longer shamed her.

  “Flight is the word,” he said. “I needed to flee my department, my bills, my ailing car. Come to a place that would take care of me.”

  “This is it, I guess,” she said. “Though they won’t fix your car. Won’t even discuss it, I’ve found.”

  “I’m on a Guggenheim,” he said.

  “How nice!” She thought of the museum in New York, and of a pair of earrings she had bought in the gift shop there but had never worn because they always looked broken, even though that was the way they were supposed to look.

  “But I neglected to ask the foundation for enough money. I didn’t realize what you could ask for. I didn’t ask for the same amount everyone else did, and so I received substantially less.”

  Adrienne was sympathetic. “So instead of a regular Guggenheim, you got a little Guggenheim.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “A Guggenheimy,” she said.

  He smiled in a troubled sort of way. “Right.”

  “So now you have to live in Guggenheimy town.”

  He stopped pushing at a sausage with his fork. “Yes. I heard there would be wit here.”

  She tried to make her lips curl, like his.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was just kidding.”

  “Jet lag,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Jetty-laggy.” She smiled at him. “Baby talk. We love it.” She paused. “Last week, of course, we weren’t like this. You’ve arrived a little late.”

  He was a beautiful baby. In the dark, there was thumping, like tom-toms, and a piccolo high above it. She couldn’t look, because when she looked, it shocked her, another woman’s hands all over her. She just kept her eyes closed, and concentrated on surrender, on the restful invalidity of it. Sometimes she concentrated on being where Ilke’s hands were—at her feet, at the small of her back.

  “Your parents are no longer living, are they?” Ilke said in the dark.

  “No.”

  “Did they die young?”

  “Medium. They died medium. I was a menopausal, afterthought child.”

  “Do you want to know what I feel in you?”

  “All right.”

  “I feel a great and deep gentleness. But I also feel that you have been dishonored.”

  “Dishonored?” So Japanese. Adrienne liked the sound of it.

  “Yes. You have a deeply held fear. Right here.” Ilke’s hand went just under Adrienne’s rib cage.

  Adrienne breathed deeply, in and out. “I killed a baby,” she whispered.

  “Yes, we have all killed a baby—there is a baby in all of us. That is why people come to me, to be reunited with it.”

  “No, I’ve killed a real one.”

  Ilke was very quiet and then she said, “You can do the side lying now. You can put this pillow under your head, this other one between your knees.” Adrienne rolled awkwardly onto her side. Finally, Ilke said, “This country, its Pope, its church, makes murderers of women. You must not let it do that to you. Move back toward me. That’s it.”

  That’s not it, thought Adrienne, in this temporary dissolve, seeing death and birth, seeing the beginning and then the end, how they were the same quiet black, same nothing ever after: everyone’s life appeared in the world like a movie in a room. First dark, then light, then dark again. But it was all staggered, so that somewhere there was always light.

  That’s not it. That’s not it, she thought. But thank you.

  When she left that afternoon, seeking sugar in one of the shops, she moved slowly, blinded by the angle of the afternoon light but also believing she saw Martin coming toward her in the narrow street, approaching like the lumbering logger he sometimes seemed to be. Her squinted gaze, however, failed to catch his, and he veered suddenly left into a calle. By the time she reached the corner, he had disappeared entirely. How strange, she thought. She had felt close to something, to him, and then suddenly not. She climbed the path back up toward the villa, and went and knocked on the door of his studio, but he wasn’t there.

  “You smell good,” she greeted Martin. It was some time later and she had just returned to the room, to find him there. “Did you just take a bath?”

  “A little while ago,” he said.

  She curled up to him, teasingly. “Not a shower? A bath? Did you put some scented bath salts in it?”

  “I took a very masculine bath,” said Martin.

  She sniffed him again. “What scent did you use?”

  “A manly scent,” he said. “Rock. I took a rock-scented bath.”

  “Did you take a bubble bath?” She cocked her head to one side.

  He smiled. “Yes, but I, uh, made my own bubbles.”

  “You did?” She squeezed his bicep.

  “Yeah. I hammered the water with my fist.”

  She walked over to the cassette player and put a cassette in. She looked over at Martin, who looked suddenly unhappy. “This music annoys you, doesn’t it?”

  Martin squirmed. “It’s just—why can’t he sing any one song all the way through?”

  She thought about this. “Because he’s Mr. Medleyhead?”

  “You didn’t bring anything else?”

  “No.”

  She went back and sat next to Martin, in silence, smelling the scent of him, as if it were odd.

  For dinner there was vitello alla salvia, baby peas, and a pasta made with caviar. “Nipping it in the bud.” Adrienne sighed. “An early frost.” A fat elderly man, arriving late, pulled his chair out onto her foot, then sat down on it. She shrieked.

  “Oh, dear, I’m sorry,” said the man, lifting himself up as best he could.

  “It’s okay,” said Adrienne. “I’m sure it’s okay.??
?

  But the next morning, at exercises, Adrienne studied her foot closely during the leg lifts. The big toe was swollen and blue, and the nail had been loosened and set back at an odd and unhinged angle. “You’re going to lose your toenail,” said Kate.

  “Great,” said Adrienne.

  “That happened to me once, during my first marriage. My husband dropped a dictionary on my foot. One of those subconscious things. Rage as very large book.”

  “You were married before?”

  “Oh, yes.” She sighed. “I had one of those rehearsal marriages, you know, where you’re a feminist and train a guy, and then some other feminist comes along and gets the guy.”

  “I don’t know.” Adrienne scowled. “I think there’s something wrong with the words feminist and gets the guy being in the same sentence.”

  “Yes, well—”

  “Were you upset?”

  “Of course. But then, I’d been doing everything. I’d insisted on separate finances, on being totally self-supporting. I was working. I was doing the child care. I paid for the house; I cooked; I cleaned. I found myself shouting, “This is feminism? Thank you, Gloria and Betty!”

  “But now you’re with someone else.”

  “Pretaught. Self-cleaning. Batteries included.”

  “Someone else trained him, and you stole him.”

  Kate smiled. “Of course. What, am I crazy?”

  “What happened to the toe?”

  “The nail came off. And the one that grew back was wavy and dark and used to scare the children.”

  “Oh,” said Adrienne.

  · · ·

  “Why would someone publish six books on Chaucer?” Adrienne was watching Martin dress. She was also smoking a cigarette. One of the strange things about the villa was that the smokers had all quit smoking, and the nonsmokers had taken it up. People were getting in touch with their alternative selves. Bequeathed cigarettes abounded. Cartons were appearing outside people’s doors.

  “You have to understand academic publishing,” said Martin. “No one reads these books. Everyone just agrees to publish everyone else’s. It’s one big circle jerk. It’s a giant economic agreement. When you think about it, it probably violates the Sherman Act.”