“How’s the Cranston?” she asked him. “I really liked that old building. And just sitting there at my desk, watching all the people go by.”
“Turning them into animals,” he said.
“Exactly. And you got the feeling lots of the people who worked there over the years were dead now. Brought a kind of gravity to the place.”
She took a bite of her salad. He had never thought of that.
“So, how are your instructions going?”
She leaned in, turning an ear toward him. “Sorry, how’s my what going?”
“The instruction-writing business.”
“The instruction-writing business? Oh…” She smiled, recalibrating, momentarily knocked off balance, footing regained. “Yes, that. Well, I’ve gotten a couple of jobs. Little ones. Let’s see. Did something for a stapler company. Getting staples into a stapler—lots of people find that challenging because the directions are so unclear. Re-inking a stamp pad. And batteries—batteries are my bread and butter. Positive-negative, negative-positive. It can be confusing.”
“That’s so interesting,” said Bronfman, who had never learned exactly how to insert staples into a stapler and felt that Sheila was doing something important in the world by clarifying how this happens.
“You remembered that,” she said. She seemed pleased that he did. “About directions.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Sweet. I just sort of—I mean, we only talked about it for a second.”
“I’m a giraffe,” he said. “Giraffes never forget.”
With her fork she aimlessly rearranged the leaves of her salad, impaling a tiny carrot wheel on the tines. She brought it to her mouth and chewed it as thoughtfully as a small piece of carrot can be chewed.
“I want to take back what I said,” she said. “About you being an ungulate. It’s not right. It doesn’t quite fit.”
“Okay,” he said. He loved this game. “Then what? What am I?”
She thought about it, seriously, studying him, examining him, investigating the animal before her as he watched her investigate him, and she came up empty-handed. “I don’t know what you are, Bronfman,” she said. “I’d have to spend more time with you to find out exactly.”
“More time,” he said. “Of course. That makes sense.” He looked at his watch. “Can you do it in ten minutes? Because I have to get back for a meeting.”
“No,” she said. “It would take more than ten minutes.”
“Oh,” he said. “Darn.”
But Bronfman had been here before. Not here with Sheila at Goldstein’s but within this opportunity for possibility. A single word from him to her, the smallest possible gesture—that was all it called for, all he needed to reinvent his world.
He had to breathe. He had to get some air.
“Then maybe,” he said, drawing from the well of experience he had discovered just last night: if he could show two strangers his penis, what couldn’t he do? “Maybe we should create an opportunity to spend additional time together.”
She took a moment to compute his syntax. “Oh. Well. Sure. Yes. I agree,” she said, and almost laughed but caught herself. “Let’s create that opportunity. When’s good?”
Anytime, he thought. Tonight, tomorrow night, the next. But that wasn’t how it was done. He had seen enough TV to know that.
“How about next Tuesday?”
“Sure,” she said. “This coming Tuesday? Fine. Great. I think—sure. Let’s do that. Next Tuesday.”
She wrote her address and her phone number on a napkin and slid it across the table the way a mob boss in a crime drama slides an offer to a mark. He took it, and held it. Bronfman had yet to finish his Bronfman, but he got up to leave before she changed her mind.
“Tuesday, then,” he said.
“Tuesday. And I’m sorry. About the tea.”
Thirty-five days in, and Edsel Bronfman had a date.
On the way out he told Caleb, who said that he was happy for him—truly, truly, so very happy. “Mazel tov,” he said.
THREE
On the way home that evening after work, Bronfman stopped by the Harris Teeter, intending to buy some milk, half a dozen eggs, breakfast tea, frozen pizza, an apple, two bananas, instant oatmeal, a roll of paper towels, rotini, half a loaf of wheat bread (he bought halves of everything whenever he could), a pound of free-range skinless, boneless chicken breasts, a bag of frozen peas, a six-pack of Diet Pepsi, baking soda, and a few other items. He walked up and down every aisle, forgetting almost everything, his cart empty save for a lonely bag of frozen peas that lay perspiring at the bottom. It was as though he were wandering through a museum, admiring the careful design, the bright colors, the clever illustrations. Or as if he weren’t doing anything at all, just mindlessly pushing his cart down alleyways created specifically for his passage. He might very well have traveled the same aisle twice, possibly three times, without noticing. He was here but not here. Somehow wandering around the Harris Teeter like a zombie, he had no trouble holding on to it, the peculiar grandness of it all, these odd bits of magic floating through his mind like dust in a sunbeam. He had a date, he had a date, he had a date!
He felt new, burnished and bright. The last time he had felt anything like this was when he left home for college. He had applied to only one school—Springmore, a small liberal-arts university an hour and a half outside Birmingham, close enough for visits but far enough to start over, to give himself a second chance to become someone other than the person he clearly was. For starters, he wouldn’t have to be Bronfman anymore; he could be Ed. He had always wanted to be an Ed. Ed was a friendly, common name; there were lots of Eds, and Bronfman had no misgivings about becoming one of them. To Bronfman, it felt as if there was only one Bronfman in the world, and it was him. It was not a good feeling. Like being an endangered species, the last of its lonely kind.
His roommate was from New Jersey, a man-child named Pete Ornstein. He was twice Bronfman’s size in every direction. He had one of those scary New York accents, the sort of accent a cop from the Bronx on a television show might have, and his hair was black and kinky and he left the top two buttons of his shirt open, revealing a carpet of curly turf. He wore a gold chain with the letter O attached—that’s what everyone called him, he said, O, sometimes Big O—and he had driven a silver Electra 225 all the way from Trenton, even though freshmen weren’t supposed to have cars on campus. But Big O didn’t care about rules.
The day they met it went like this:
“Pete Ornstein,” Pete Ornstein said, crushing Bronfman’s hand in his monstrous grip. “But people call me Big O.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Big O,” Bronfman said. “My name—my name is Ed, Ed Bronfman.”
Big O sized him up, studied him like a specimen.
“Ed?” he said. “Ed Bronfman?”
“That’s right,” Ed said. “Ed.”
“You know what, Ed?”
“What?”
“I’m going to call you Bronfman. I like that name. Ed’s boring. Bronfman’s funny, and it looks like you. You look like a Bronfman.”
“Call me Ed,” Bronfman said. And then, in a desperate attempt to stave off his first thematic defeat, “Please.”
“Bronfman,” Big O said and laughed, turning away, unpacking. “Ha! I love it.”
So Bronfman gave up being Ed. There was no reason to try to sustain that dream. It was pointless. Big O had friends, and Big O introduced him as Bronfman to everyone who came into the room, and it caught on with everybody across the tiny campus. His very first foray into the hostile and forbidding world of metamorphosis had been thwarted; based on this (albeit small) sample set, his second would be, too, as would his third, and so on. Bronfman knew that he was too easily dissuaded, but he took no for an answer because he had learned that noes traveled in packs, one following another, like street thugs. He saw negative trends where there were none; he created them; he forecast his own story before it was written. If one person
didn’t call him Ed, that meant no one would call him Ed. What a fragile spirit! His hopes were like a piñata at a birthday party, smashed with a single blow. He went to class, spent time at the library, returned to his room, ate three meals a day at the cafeteria, where he sat at the same table midway toward the back. He sometimes ate with others who were as quiet as he was, but mostly not. The cafeteria was twice as big as it needed to be. Though some students were scattered across it in small bunches of three or four, others, like Bronfman, were alone, had a whole table to themselves, surrounded by a force field of self-protection and freshman fear. You could almost see it. The alone people stayed alone, and grew only more so as the days ground by.
But his room was nice enough. He liked it. He liked how his tiny bed fit snugly in a corner by the window, cocoon-esque. And he and O, while no more like each other than an ostrich is like a telephone, actually got along. They weren’t buddies (the entire year they were roommates not a single social event did they attend together), but they coexisted in a chilly peace, just a bit short of actually being friendly.
One day while Bronfman was in his bed, propped up by the bright-blue husband pillow his mother had given him, reading about early American history (what happened with the Indians—tragic, awful, but inevitable, he supposed), there was a thwack of something against his window, right by his head. He thought it was a baseball at first, or a rock, or even a bullet, so sudden and sharp and loud it was, a heart-attack-inducing sound.
It was a bird. He saw it out of the corner of his eye, the feathered thing, and, just that quickly, it was gone, falling the two stories to the ground below. Bronfman caught his breath and opened the window and looked. There it was, crumpled, black-and-brown-and-white, resting in the green of a red-berry bush, dead.
Or not. Did it move just then? Did it shiver? Did it shudder? It seemed to.
Bronfman, uncharacteristically hopeful, even prescient, removed from under his bed the cardboard box his mother had sent him, formerly full of fruit and chocolate and three frosty peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches (she must have kept them in a deep freeze for months), and raced down the two flights of stairs, through the heavy steel doors, outside past the ginormous air-conditioning unit—and there it was. The little red-brown beads that were its eyes were so full of fear, its beak opening and closing, as if it were trying to say something to Bronfman. Help me, please.
Bronfman gently cupped his hand around the nearly weightless body, lifted it from its precarious bed of leaves and berries, and held it, somewhat stunned himself. This life was in his hands, literally. He could feel its whole body thrumming. The feathers were soft but folded tight around the bird, like an enclosure, and for a fleeting moment Bronfman imagined himself covered in feathers, what that would be like. He set the bird down in the box, pulled up tufts of grass from the surrounding yard, and broke little branches off the berry tree, collected some leaves, and made the little bird a bed, a primitive nest.
Then he took it back up to his room, in the hope that it might get better there. That he, Bronfman, might save its life.
Big O wasn’t there, so Bronfman set the cardboard box on his bed and watched the bird lie there. He could see its little chest shuddering. He touched it—so soft.
Bronfman poked holes in all four sides of the box with a pencil and closed the lid, then he put it underneath his bed. He ran to the library (he avoided the computer with the anxiety of a germophobe; the sprawling, seemingly infinite world of information intimidated him) and checked out a book, Birds of America. He found the match: black head, white chest, rust-colored wings.
It was called a rufous-sided towhee. Of all the things in the world, to be called that. The way Bronfman was called Bronfman. Immediately, he established an absurd kinship with the bird, based solely on its name. Hi, Rufous, my name is Bronfman. Rufous was another word for “red-brown,” and, based on the coloring, it was a boy—or a male, Bronfman supposed is what you would call it.
And then there was this: “The female makes a nest of weeds, leaves, bark, and stems on or near the ground.”
On or near the ground. It seemed curious, very curious, that a bird would make its nest on the ground; a bird, it seemed to Bronfman, would take advantage of being a bird and make its nest in a tree, where it’s safer, and where it would be, for the most part, anyway, singing, taking in the view, avoiding cats. Although on the other hand, the ground is where the food is. If the early bird gets the worm, the early bird that lives in close proximity to the worm would be even more likely to get it.
Bronfman had no worm. He went to the cafeteria and got a piece of sesame-seed bread and scraped the seeds off into the box, and Rufous ate one, then two, then three.
Bronfman watched him eat. He watched the bird as if it were his own two eyes that were bringing him back to life.
Four, five, six.
* * *
An hour later Big O burst through the door, lumbered into the room like a lost giant.
“What’s that?” Big O said, pointing at the box.
Bronfman closed the box flaps one after the other, but slowly, so as not to draw too much attention. “This? Nothing,” Bronfman said. “Just stuff my mother sent me.”
“Sticks and leaves?” O said. “I know I saw some sticks and leaves. That what your mother sends you, Bronfman?”
“It’s nothing.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Big O took three slow steps—all he needed to get from his side of the room to Bronfman’s side. He hulked there above Bronfman, waiting. Big O would never have hurt Bronfman—at least, it had never come to that, but had he wanted to open the box on his own Bronfman could not have stopped him. So, fast-forwarding to the inevitable end of the conflict that would never happen, he opened it up.
“See?” Bronfman said. “It’s nothing. It’s just a bird.”
“Holy. Fucking. Crap,” O said, his voice a church-pew whisper. “It is a bird!”
O stared—epically surprised, semi-stunned. Possibly awestruck. He was on pause, frozen. It pleased Bronfman immeasurably to have affected his roommate in this way. He had never thought it possible. This was what power felt like, control. What it meant to be the puppeteer and not the puppet. He felt as if he was going to implode.
“Can I … touch it?”
O checked with Bronfman, asked permission. Bronfman considered the request.
“Maybe just the tip of its tail feather,” he said. “Along the edge. It flew into the window. I don’t know if it can fly. Be careful.”
O barely touched the bird, then he drew back his hand. “Ellen has to see this,” he said.
“No, please,” Bronfman said. “I don’t think … the bird needs quiet—”
But O was already out the door.
A few minutes later he came back with Ellen, a tall girl with hair the color of butter—Bronfman’s idea of an angel. He had seen her half a dozen times but had never said hello, because sure, right, he was going to say hello to her. Ellen had a friend, Deb, who was equally angelic and who wore those blouses that could never quite contain her breasts. Both of them smiled at Bronfman, who was sitting on the bed beside the box, and took little steps toward him.
“Can we see?” Ellen said.
“Sure,” Bronfman said. “Of course.”
They looked. Ellen’s hip brushed Bronfman’s shoulder.
“Wow. How did you get him?”
“He flew into the window and was a little knocked out. I brought him up from the bush down there. He’s getting better. I think he’s going to be okay.”
“Charles would love this,” Ellen said. “Mind if I get him? He would just love it.”
“Sure.” Anything she asked he’d do. Anything. “If he’d love it. Sure.”
A few minutes later Charles came, and two girls he didn’t know and another guy, and so did Jay Bresland, who wanted to put the bird in a film he was making. O—who by virtue of being Bronfman’s roommate had taken partial possession of the bird?
??forbade it. “It’s fighting for its fucking life,” O said. “And you want to put it in one of your stupid movies?”
Within an hour, their dorm room was jammed with people wanting to see the bird and, by extension, Bronfman himself. Intoxicating, all of this. They asked him questions about the bird—they wanted to know his story, the story of Bronfman and the bird—and he told them, and they were astounded at his ingenuity and bravery, people who had never noticed Bronfman before, even though they lived down the hall from him and had for six months.
Somehow the bird and Bronfman became one thing. That’s how it felt. He was light as air. He had grown his own feathers; he could fly. Not necessarily a good thing, though, as a freshman in college, to see yourself or present yourself to others as a thing with feathers. Ellen and Charles and O and those other girls spotlighted Bronfman in their gaze. He had their attention. If there was something he wanted from them, or something he wanted to say to them, or if he’d been waiting for something like this to put a small dent in the status quo, now was clearly the time. But it turned out there wasn’t anything he wanted from the moment except for it to be over.
The bird paced back and forth across the bottom of the cardboard box. He hopped. The crowd (how many people behind him now? Eight? Ten?) circus-gasped and applauded. There was affirmation for the bird who hopped, for Rufous. His wings opened, tentatively, they almost spread. Then, just that quickly, they closed again. Stretching. He was getting the feel of it. An old fighter back in the ring. Rufous took a few more of his scrabbly steps through the sticks and grass and stopped. The little bird froze there. This life. And his head banked skittishly back and forth, settling, finally, on Bronfman. No one had the angle Bronfman had. No one could tell that the bird was looking right at him. But for what? Help? Reassurance? Another sesame seed?