She glides over to the refrigerator, from which she scoops out a handful of cilantro, jalapeño peppers, scallions, and limes, and deposits them on the worktable. Then, she moves to another brace of shelves, just off the hallway next to the inside door, where she seizes a bottle of hot red-pepper sauce. Retracing her steps, she sets the bottle down, leans over, reaches beneath the worktable, and comes back up with two ripe red tomatoes and a bulb of garlic in her large palm. A flash of sunlight, reflected off the stainless steel stove, beams through the extensive glass panels and blinds him. Just as he is about to look away, a mass of dark clouds snuffs out the light to reveal Joseph Hampton Fitzgerald, sidled up beside her.
Betrayal! Betrayal! Caruso thinks, his heart racing, pumping jealousy through his feathers.
“Envy and jealousy are the death knells of happiness,” the old man had said. “Envious and jealous, Iago convinced Othello that his beautiful, loyal wife was being unfaithful to him. Finally, Othello strangled her in a green-eyed rage. I confess that I envy Pascal and that I’m jealous of Olivia’s love for him, but I could never hurt the woman I adore,” he added thoughtfully. “Only the one who hurts her.” Still, Caruso had never seen him wound Pascal in the name of love.
Slipping her hand into her pocket, Clarissa takes out another hairnet. Tiptoeing upward, she arranges it meticulously over Joe’s blond locks. Her throat quivers with the onslaught of a giggle—that delicious giggle, once reserved for Caruso. She smiles, her teeth gleaming in the light. Placing her hand on Joe’s shoulder, she directs his attention to the Viking stove and to the rack of stainless-steel cookware hanging from the ceiling near it. Never before has she given a date a private tour of her kitchen. Not even fat-lipped Burt, who—for reasons Caruso still can’t fathom—lasted longer than the others. Not even pretty, artistic Oliver, who would have appreciated its design.
Quivering, Caruso follows the trajectory of her finger as she points out the sturdy counter, the three-basin sink, and the commercial refrigerator along the adjoining wall. “Claaa-risss-a!” he cries, strangling the perch with his toes as she leans toward Joe, gently tucking loose strands of his hair beneath the fine-meshed net.
Grinding his beak, Caruso closes his eyes to the sight of them.
He is sailing above Kakadu National Park, dipping his wings to the tiny bee-eaters, finches, flycatchers, and ducks. He admires the floodplains, streams, and billabongs and envies the nesting birds. He spots an Australian stork, with whom he would gladly trade places, then—in the distance—a wedge-tailed eagle flying toward him. Panicked, he veers in the opposite direction, heading for the Timor Sea, with its serene turquoise water. He inhales the soothing breeze and tastes the salt on his mallet-shaped tongue. He shoots over the swells toward the shoreline, where Clarissa, her red hair ablaze in the sunlight, is wading through a shallow tidal pool. His eyes scroll down her creamy body, from her handsome face to her small feet, and fixate on her toenails, flashing bright orange in the water like tiny tropical fish. Instantly, he catches sight of the stonefish lurking in the sandy bottom. Her heel sinks into its lethal spine, and, terrified, he whips his eyelids open to the two of them again.
She is holding up a metal whisk while Joe is slanting forward, flicking out his goanna-like tongue, licking the salsa off it. They speak, their lips shifting silently. She sets the whisk on the worktable and turns around. He pushes his face against her long swan neck and begins to kiss it, nuzzling upward to her papaya-seed mole. That is Caruso’s mole. He is the one who is first and foremost a seed lover, not Joe.
His eyes smarting, Caruso pivots away from them in the direction of Clara’s Bakery, where a tall, stout man is emerging from the back entrance, happily whistling a tune, shambling over the dusty lot toward a blue delivery van. Is his joy justified? Caruso wonders. Is his cozy cottage really the happy home he believes it is?
He hears footsteps behind him. Next, their voices. He freezes, afraid to face them. But then she giggles coquettishly, and instinctively he pivots around and is confronted by the spectacle of them passionately kissing—billing and cooing—with closed eyes and lips pressed hard together.
Those lips are his, Caruso thinks. That is his mouth, his neck, his mole.
Clarissa takes a small step back and smiles raptly at Joe. They talk some more, so softly Caruso can’t make out their words. Again, she giggles, tilting her head charmingly to one side, before they move on, her hips brushing against his legs as she sways over the terrace. She, with a brimming basket of tortilla chips. He, with a red clay bowl.
Seized by a sudden impulse, Caruso lunges off his perch, yanks up the latch, and swoops out the open door, keeping his flight low to feign clipped feathers. His crest is like an Indian headdress, his shriek a cry of war, as he slams against his rival’s chest.
“Shit!” Joe says when the bowl flips up and over, flinging red salsa into the air and breaking into fragments against the bricks.
“Caruso!” Clarissa yells as the basket plummets from her fingers.
Caruso lands in an avalanche of tortilla chips.
“Bad bird, escaping from your cage like that,” she scolds him. She pulls a dish towel from the waistband of her pants and comes toward Caruso, crunching the chips beneath her Reeboks. Squatting, she wraps the dish towel around his torso and carries him back to his cage. With brusque, jerky movements, she secures the door and double-checks the latch. “Why, you’ve got salsa all over you,” she coos, and for a fleeting instant Caruso thinks the concern in her voice is for him. That is, until she shifts slightly and bends toward Joe. “I hope you’re sorry, Caruso,” she says sternly while she—ever so tenderly—dabs the salsa off his cheeks with her finger.
Sorry. Sorry only that the salsa isn’t the scoundrel’s blood, he thinks. Crooking up his leg, he tucks his beak into his back feathers and slips into a deep, unrepentant sleep.
“I still can’t believe it,” Sallie says, her loud pitch startling his eyelids open. She is wildly waving her hands, speaking to Devon on the walkway outside the barroom door. “There he was, right smack in the kitchen, salsa all over him, talking to the staff like they were his best friends. I mean,” she says, in a voice that could grate peel off a lemon, “what would the health department think? Thank God he’s finally gone.”
“It was an accident. What’s the big deal?” Devon says with a lopsided grin.
“The deal is, I work very hard.”
“Clarissa works harder than any of us,” Devon says. “Besides, they cleaned up their mess—every speck of the salsa and all of the chips.”
“Well, she didn’t clean up last Tuesday.” Sallie sniffs resentfully. “When I came in early the next morning, Rick had me picking up broken pieces of porcelain on the kitchen floor. Clarissa did the breaking, so she should’ve picked them up. Anyhow, that’s not the point. The point is Joe’s not supposed to be here while she’s working.”
“It’s her kitchen. He was wearing a hairnet. What’s the problem?”
“Excuses, excuses…I bet you have a crush on her, too,” Sallie harrumphs as she wheels around, her cassowary feet thumping toward the linen table near Caruso’s cage. “You see?” she says, her eyes like X-rays piercing through him.
Caruso stiffens.
“I warned you, didn’t I?” she says. Grabbing a tablecloth, she unfolds it with a flap of her arms. It parachutes, alighting on the glass top in front of her.
He ducks his head under his wing.
She clumps over to where he is. “Are you hiding from me?” she asks, dipping down to look up at him.
He peeks out. She’s clearly not sexy, he thinks.
“I told you she was fickle,” she says, still crouching. “Loves you one minute but can’t stay away from him the next ’cause he’s one of the bad boys. Believe me, I know.”
Caruso lifts his head. Not all of them have been bad boys, he thinks as Oliver fills his mind. Before he met Oliver, he had always been able to tell the difference between a male and a female Homo sapiens.
It seemed so obvious, as opposed to differentiating between a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo hen and cock. That’s because they look identical, the color of their eyes being the only trait that distinguishes them. But therein lies the problem. The eye color in each gender is so diverse that it’s impossible for humans to use it as a way of sexing them. The first time Caruso saw Oliver, he was as confused as any person trying to determine the sex of a cockatoo.
A man or a woman? Caruso had pondered while he stared at Oliver, who was sipping iced tea on the blue chaise longue in the sunroom. First, he checked out the skin, smooth as a woman’s. The yam-colored curls were girly, too. Small gold loops hung from both earlobes, and little yellow flowers were embroidered along the outside edges of the jeans. Beneath the pink knit shirt, the chest was flat, meaning nothing really, since Beryl’s was flat also.
“Oliver, this is Caruso. Caruso, this is Oliver.” Clarissa introduced them as soon as she liberated him from his cage. Still flummoxed, Caruso wobbled along her arm to get a closer look. That was when he clearly saw the Adam’s apple, small as a wild plum, and the peachy fuzz on the chin and cheeks, but instead of feeling threatened, he had felt relieved. Oliver was many things, but a bad boy he most definitely wasn’t.
“I’m still rooting for you, Caruso,” Sallie says, rising to her full height. He stares hard at her, and she stares back. “You’re wondering why, aren’t you?” She stands there, speechless for several seconds, then says, “’Cause we’re the same—me and you. We both get hurt real easy. Clarissa might dump you for a bad boy, but I always get dumped for a pretty girl. I feel pain like you do. What pain has Clarissa ever gone through?”
How about all the hurt her brother heaped upon her? Caruso thinks.
“She doesn’t know what pain is because she’s never felt it,” an exultant Sallie says. “And why? Because she’s pretty, and pretty girls have it easy. If you were my bird, I’d never toy with your feelings. I would have already sent Mr. Joseph Hampton Fitzgerald packing. I would get rid…of…him…”
Rid…of…him, Caruso muses, no longer mindful of her words.
Twelve
Hours pass before Caruso hears them pecking good night on the deck, the darkness through the windows as thick as chocolate icing on a cake. She almost never takes him with her to Crab Cakes anymore and comes home every night a little bit later than the night before.
Joe’s sandals clunk down the deck steps; her Reeboks squish through the kitchen and into the sunroom. Caruso squawks at her, but she says nothing back. He tries again. “Hello, Caruso,” she answers in her miles-away voice as she switches on the overhead light.
She walks over to him, and he instinctively lowers his head. Sticking her ring finger through the bars, she caresses his neck, but her touch feels cold and mechanical. A few weeks back, she would have released him from his cell and spent some meaningful time with him before heading off to bed, but not now. It isn’t fair, he thinks; she’s punishing him for being bad, although she loves the bad boy in Joe.
“I’m tired,” she says, withdrawing her finger. She yawns loudly, opens the bottom drawer of the painted chest, and removes the baby blanket. She wishes him sweet dreams, in a tone so impersonal he could be a hamster, before draping the baby blanket over his cage. The light clicks off. Her feet pad down the hallway.
Restless with thoughts of her, he knows he’ll be wide awake all night, while she’ll continue sleepwalking in a lovesick dream. He hikes up his leg and burrows his beak beneath his back feathers. Where did they go tonight after Crab Cakes closed? he muses. Did they take a leisurely walk through the quiet streets of the village, or did she have a glass of wine with him in his room at Blackbeard’s Lodge? Is their relationship—as Beryl had asked her—serious? He shakes his head, rejecting the notion. There was no ring on her finger when she rubbed his neck. The two are only friends. And after Joe returns to law school, she will forget him, same as the others.
He listens to crickets scritching beyond the window, to waves breaking against the shore, to a wild pony neighing in the distance. A night bird cries out, and he counts the calls. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. His way of counting sheep. His way of not thinking about her. Eight. Nine. Abruptly the calls cease. He jerks his head up and opens his eyes to silent darkness. Will he ever be able to sleep again? From now on, will insomnia chase him, the way it had often chased Theodore Pinter?
“I can’t sleep, Caruso,” the old man had said, removing the coverlet from his cage with one hand and tugging the lamp chain with the other. Startled, Caruso blinked into the intrusive light. “I can’t sleep,” he repeated, rubbing his eyes, murky-looking without his glasses. “I can’t sleep because my mind won’t let me. All night, I’ve been agonizing over those missed opportunities when I let Olivia slip through my fingers. All night, torturing myself, playing the Monday-morning quarterback.” He coughed wearily. “I’ve been berating myself like this forever,” he went on, “punishing myself for those times I let her get away, but, just minutes ago, it came to me. Only two of them really mattered. After Pascal transferred to Groton, then twenty years later when Olivia taught ballroom dancing.”
Caruso sidestepped toward the lamplight to see the old man better. “The day Pascal left for boarding school, I was beside myself with glee,” he said, his face suddenly lively. “It was my first big chance to take her away from him forever, and believe me, Caruso, I gave it my best shot. She’d come over to my house after school, and we’d gossip for hours, like we once did. In some ways, Olivia was as lonely as I was. We didn’t have siblings, but we had each other to be with. She shared so much with me—trivial thoughts but important ones, too. Said she wanted to be stronger than her mother. Vowed she’d never let any man dictate to her. ‘Oh, Teddy,’ she’d tell me, ‘you’re so easy to talk to.’ And it wasn’t a one-way conversation, Caruso, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Caruso vehemently shook his head. “She asked me questions also. Wanted to know if I got on well with my parents, if my mother was as passive as hers, if I liked reading poetry.
“I can see the question in your eyes, Caruso. Yes, it was Olivia who introduced me to Emily, even though we were much too young to understand her poems. Still, we discussed them as if we did. For months, everything was great between us,” he said in a pensive voice, massaging the back of his neck with his sturdy fingers. “On the weekends, she and I went to the movies, ate popcorn from one bag, sipped Coca-Cola through two straws in the same bottle. We took hay rides, bobbed for apples at Suzanne Winters’s Halloween party, celebrated Thanksgiving at my house, finished it off with sweet-potato pie at hers. I invited her to the fall dance, and we danced together all evening. That night on her front porch, I kissed her for the very first time. Just one kiss, but I still remember the sweetness of her lips. For days afterward, I was ecstatic, but a few days later I came crashing down when Pascal finally wrote her. He was coming home for Christmas.
“I endured the holidays like an alcoholic swearing off liquor. I craved the sight of her. I longed for our daily talks, but she was with him. That was when I began to watch her. Each time she crossed in front of this window, I would feel connected to her again. As soon as Pascal left for Massachusetts, I worked even harder to win her back. The months passed quickly. On April seventeenth, her birthday, I gave her a bouquet of her favorite flowers—not daisies, her birth flower, as you might expect, but a dozen long-stemmed pink roses. ‘I want to put them in water,’ she bubbled girlishly, her face glowing as she held them up to her nose and breathed in. Cradling them against her chest, she started for the kitchen. Within seconds, she was back, carrying a vase with the roses in it. After setting it on the coffee table, she smiled warmly and came toward me. I anticipated another tender kiss. She held out her hand. ‘Look, Teddy,’ she said, wiggling her ring finger. ‘Pascal sent me this. Now we’re officially going steady.’ I gazed at the ring, a diamond chip in it, the bitter taste of defeat in my mouth.”
Theodore Pinter was quiet for several minut
es. “They caught me off guard,” he said at last. “Ironical, isn’t it? He managed to stay only a year at Groton. Couldn’t adjust to the cold climate. Couldn’t handle the school’s austerity, its muscular Christianity, its strict rules. Returned wearing that silly blazer, with a hint of New England blue blood in his voice, and latched on to Olivia like a magnet. Six years later, they were married in the Duke Chapel, and I knew I’d lost her for good. Then, after twenty years, I was given another chance.
“She was teaching ballroom dancing at Arthur Murray’s. Suzanne Winters told me she had lost another baby and wanted to dance her grief away. Arthur Murray’s,” the old man repeated nostalgically. He began to pace in front of Caruso’s cage. “Immediately, I signed up for all of her classes. The American Smooth dances were her specialty, and the Argentinian tango was the one she loved best. As we tangoed across the floor, I unleashed my pent-up passion. With each push and pull, I felt some relief.
“During those months, she opened up to me bit by bit, like she had when we were young. She told me that Pascal desperately wanted a son. With each miscarriage, he grew a little more distant from her. But the last one, from which she almost died, changed everything, she said. She woke up and saw him beside her hospital bed, silently weeping, and for the first time in a long while, she knew he cared.”
Theodore Pinter looked straight at Caruso and unloosed a snuffle of laughter. “He cared,” he repeated in a tone that was both sad and acerbic. “He cared…when I absolutely adored her, when I was the one doing the tango with her, pressing my cheek against hers, jerking it away as though she’d just slapped me, but loving her enough to forgive her and hold her close again.
Love and Ordinary Creatures Page 12
