Love and Ordinary Creatures

by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

  “And then she was pregnant. Quitting her job, she said. She wished her students well, and they wished her well back, but I refused to let her off that easy. Foolish idea it was, but it was my time to act. Damn politeness. Damn friendship. For once, I would embrace passion—totally. Not only my passion for her but also for her baby, if it meant I could have her. I was determined to make the three of us a family. I would hold on to hope—meld her hope and my hope into our hope at last. So I asked her to tango. She put on Carlos Gardel, and we glided over the floor, performing the intricate movements, sustaining the poses of lust and caution like we had so many times before.”

  The old man held out his arms, dramatically moving to and fro, as though he were dancing with Olivia. “When she tried to pull away from me, in that choreographed interplay of fire and ice, I clutched her close—pressing her breasts against my chest, tasting the honey of her breath—until our bodies were needle and thread. At that moment, I caught sight of him. His hands were cupped around his face as he glared at us through the studio window. He banged a possessive fist against the glass. Startled, she turned around, saw him, and broke away from me.

  “I watched him as he argued with her on the walkway. The muscles in his thick neck were straining. His mouth was spread thin with indignation. But then she brushed past him, her heels clicking rapidly toward the entrance, choosing me…choosing me finally. With hope and courage, I rushed toward the door, but he must have said something to her, for just as I drew it open, she pivoted quickly and went running back to him, leaving me there—alone.

  “Later on, I heard that she lost that baby, too—it was a boy—even though she carried it longer than the others. The depression that hit her afterward put her in the hospital for months. Eight years passed. Her parents retired to Roanoke Island. She and Pascal moved into her childhood home, but I stood my ground. She had really hurt me. I didn’t follow her then. Rather, I began my own healing process. I started to date again.”

  Theodore Pinter closed his eyes and bent his tall, thin frame over. “Still, though, I kept up with her through Suzanne.” Plinking open his eyes, he brought himself back up. “Oscar Wilde was right. ‘Memory is the diary we all carry about with us,’” he quoted, his tone reflective. “If not for my memories of her, I would have sunk into despair.”

  Memories or despair. Where is the choice in that? Caruso thinks, staring wild-eyed into the darkness. He wants neither. To hell with misery, he thinks. To hell with those significant sufferings that build character. To hell with the acceptance of defeat. Damn hope! He will not wear it like a life vest. For the word itself acknowledges the possibility of failure. No, he wants certainty. Only victory for him, he vows.

  Thirteen

  Baby stuff, Caruso thinks, scooping the yellow rattle between his toes, flinging it out the cage door. It rolls beneath the table, the ugly yellow out of sight. A blight on his bower, an insult to his love for her. But what does it matter, he thinks, since she spends all of her time in Joe’s lair—an ordinary room at Blackbeard’s Lodge.

  When a prism of red hues shoots through the doorway and seizes his attention, he knows what he must do. Rather than fruitlessly pining over lost love, he will do what the bowerbird does. He will transform his plain cage into a nest of beauty and win her back. Beryl once said that red was passion. Embrace passion, embrace red, Caruso thinks, flying into the kitchen. He opens his beak, takes hold of the scarlet glass marble on the windowsill above the sink, glides back to his cage, and sets it on the brim of his feeder. Sunlight strikes it, and it explodes into a rainbow of reds. Yes, this will be his path to victory.

  He pivots around, searching for another color. On the floor beneath the blue chaise longue is a deep purple plume from her feather duster. Purple is the color of royalty, he says to himself as he wobbles over to it. Red is wild passion, he thinks, while purple is suppressed desire. He considers which is worse: a hedonistic life of pleasure, or one in which all pleasure is denied. Both are equally unattractive, he decides. He plucks up the purple feather, rushes back, and plunges it into the mound of pellets in his food dish. When the purple plume brushes seductively against the red marble, he is entranced by the sight.

  He makes straightway for her bedroom. From her dressing table, he selects a plum ribbon and drapes it artfully through the bars of his cage. Minutes later, he spots a string of ruby-and-wine Mardi Gras beads beside her jewelry box on the dresser. He loops them from the cage’s high ceiling to create a canopy over his bower of love.

  Back in the kitchen, he tears the leaves off purplish-red basil in a jelly jar of water on the worktable and lines his nook with their pungent smell and alluring color. After that, he pries open a vial of saffron threads and sprinkles a runway of them over the white linoleum in front of the stand upon which his cage sits. On top of this, he empties a box of purple bath-oil beads, which he found in the bathroom vanity.

  He thinks long and hard about the finishing touches. Inside his cage, he arranges and rearranges a scrap of violet cellophane, a magenta eraser, two cherry-red jawbreakers, and a vermilion barrette, until he has created a harmonious flow of purple and red shades.

  It is almost there, he thinks, surveying his handiwork from the T-stand perch. Still, he should add one last flourish. Scanning the sunroom, he dismisses a crimson leather bookmarker on the table because it is too vulgar, too coarse for her refined taste. What he needs now is something delicate and beautiful—his pièce de résistance that will take her breath away. It is then he remembers the Tyrian-purple orchid in the living room. She had bought it in Wilmington last year.

  She had been cheerful that day, her steps springy as they strolled down the sidewalk, bougainvillea flourishing in large clay pots along the street. Behind them, the river was coppery in the bright sunlight. Every so often, she would hoist up his carrier cage to afford him a better view of the square. “Isn’t it fun to get away, Caruso?” she would ask him, and he would answer her with a squawk. Without warning, she came to a halt in front of a flower shop window, exploding with orchids of every type and color. She stood there staring at them, her mouth agape. “I want that one,” she had said in wonder, pointing at a stem of Tyrian-purple flowers, “to remind me of the exceptional woman I hope to bloom into one day.”

  Today he will refresh her memory, he tells himself as he teeters down the hallway, rounds the corner, and casts his eyes over the orchid’s bluish-red petals shimmering—fine as gossamer—on the end table. She had blossomed because of him. She had blossomed for him, Caruso thinks, ascending without hesitation to the marble top. Gently, he snips off the stem of flowers, flies back to his cage, and places it in his water dish. Floating there, it is his Venus rising from the sea. It is the exceptional woman she wishes to be.

  Perched on the T-stand, he waits eagerly for her footfalls. Before long, he hears them on the wooden deck. How delighted she’ll be when she beholds his handiwork and realizes he’s an artist, same as she!

  “Caruso!” she says, widening her eyes when she sees him on the T-stand.

  “Clarissa,” he coos, holding his head up high.

  “How did you get out?” she asks, taking a step toward him.

  “Claaa-risss-a,” he coos again.

  She shifts toward his cage.

  Finally, she’ll see it, he thinks, his chest feathers puffed up with pride.

  “I know I locked you in.” She moves across the floor, the purple bath-oil beads popping beneath her sandals, but she doesn’t hear them. Leaning over, she peers through the open door. “What on earth have you done?” she asks him.

  “Is he in trouble again?” Joe says from the kitchen doorway.

  “I don’t understand,” she murmurs, shaking her head. “All this mess,” she says, touching the basil, the beads, the royal purple feather from her duster.

  “Claaa-risss-a,” he tries, but she ignores him.

  “Oh, no!” she suddenly moans, the distress in her voice slapping him hard in the face. “My beautiful orchid
,” she says, caressing its silky petals with her fingers. “It was…so…beautiful, and now…” Her voice trails off. She draws in a long sigh of disappointment and wheels toward him. “How could you?” she says through clenched teeth.

  “Claaa-risss-a,” he pleads.

  “What’s that sound, that smell?” Joe says, walking over.

  “Bath-oil beads,” she says, glancing down. Squatting, she presses her index finger against the floor and holds it up to her face. “And about twenty dollars of saffron,” she says, slowly rising.

  “I’ll be damned if that’s not color-coordinated!” Joe says, peering into his cage. He turns toward Caruso. “Hey, buddy,” he says with a disbelieving grin, “you are one smart bird—maybe even a smart gay bird.”

  Mocking me again, Caruso thinks, hissing.

  “Both of you, knock it off,” Clarissa warns them. “Come here, you,” she says, bristling with recrimination. She stomps over the floor toward him.

  “Go slow,” Joe says. “He seems upset.”

  “Well, then,” she says, “he can calm down in his tacky, fucked-up cage.”

  Words like daggers, Caruso thinks.

  She reaches out and tries to catch him, but he quickly flees to the far end of the T-stand.

  “I said, come here,” she says and is about to grab for him again when Joe comes up behind her, seizes her arms, and yanks them back.

  His crest flared in outrage, Caruso swoops off the T-stand, determined to protect her. Screeching, he scurries across the floor, aims his sharp beak at Joe’s big toe, and bites down.

  “Shit!” Joe yells, yanking his foot back, revealing a splotch of blood on the white linoleum.

  With his beak wide open, Caruso moves menacingly forward, poised to bite once more.

  “Caruso—no!” Clarissa cries.

  The anguish in her voice lassoes him, and he is brought to a standstill—the feathers on his cheeks stained a passionate red.

  Fourteen

  Caruso can still taste Joe’s blood on his black-knobbed tongue, filling his crop with nectar. Victory is sweet! he thinks, the lingering thrill of the fight making him shiver. Impulsive, his reaction was. He didn’t think about it. Didn’t waffle. The instant Joe grabbed her arms and jerked them back, Caruso attacked. Like the hand of Warramurrungundji, he had struck decisively, defending her against the bully.

  As a fledgling, he had been too terrified to fight the men who threw the net over him. Later on, at the pet store, he had almost gone to battle with an Umbrella Cockatoo over a pinecone, but, in the end, he had not wanted it enough to exchange blows. Many times, he had watched his parents risking their lives to protect him from snakes, marsupials, and once from a hawk who tried to snatch him from the air while he was learning how to fly. With beaks agape and wings extended, they had targeted the hawk like a missile and chased him off. Not until yesterday was Caruso’s cockhood tested, and he had prevailed—attacking hard and fast, unlike Theodore Pinter, whose endless analysis of every situation diluted the fuel of his fury before it could combust. How satisfied Caruso feels, having reacted spontaneously without thinking of the consequences!

  His chest pumped up with prideful feathers, he sits for hours on his perch, reliving his moment of glory. It had been a pitched battle, marked by the penetrating smell of adrenaline, the spine-tingling cries of war. What a fierce creature he was as he erected his gold crown of feathers and let forth his piercing screech! He replays the scene in his mind and distinctly remembers Joe saying, “Go slow. He seems upset,” turning Caruso into the enemy, but he had not bought into this fiction. His wings spread wide and tail fanned out, he had dived off the T-stand. Scuttling over the floor, he had zeroed in on Joe’s big toe and wielded his beak like a knight with a sword. I’m her bird-at-arms, he thinks, closing his eyes, dizzy with visions of his courage.

  Bird-at-arms, he dubs himself.

  Caruso. Houdini. Main man. Human names, given to him by humans. Did his parents have a name for him also? he muses. Did they coo it when they fed him? Did they cluck him to sleep with it at night? Who and what is he anyway? he wonders. Is he a bird, pretending to be a man who loves a woman? Or is he a man living inside a bird’s body, in love with a red-headed Eclectus hen? Does he adore Clarissa, or does he only want to possess her? Is he, not she, the pet owner, trying to turn their cozy cottage into her cage? Neither bird nor man is he, he thinks forlornly, but some bewildered creature caught between the two species, as grotesque as a griffin, unable to bark with his beak.

  Fifteen

  The day after what Clarissa would only refer to as the incident, Joe had wrapped thick wire around his cage door and looped it to the metal frame, wounding Caruso’s pride, making him feel no better than a prisoner. He could cut through the wire with his beak and escape, but he doesn’t dare. For two days now, he has been plucking out the feathers on his body beneath his wings to mitigate his grief, then hiding them among the preened ones on the cage’s wire-meshed bottom. Not that she would even notice them, he thinks, as the back door bangs and the sweethearts waltz through, nodding at him but not speaking, making a beeline for the living room, away from his prying eyes. Yet every word they say drifts down the hallway to him.

  A pang of self-doubt rakes through him as she giggles at another one of Joe’s lousy jokes. Caruso grinds his beak in pain. She giggles again before beginning her litany of grievances against him.

  “It’s about trust,” she is saying. “Ever since the incident, I’ve lost my trust in him.”

  Lost her trust in him, Caruso thinks, all at once so vulnerable he fears he will disappear. Jerking up his left wing, he parts his beak, aims, and plucks out a feather. First comes the initial sting, followed by blessed relief.

  “I’ll be limping for a month,” Joe says with a laugh.

  “Spoiled rotten,” she says.

  Caruso buries his head in his wing feathers and flattens them against his ear coverts in an effort to block out her voice, but her words worm their way in.

  “He did it out of jealousy,” she says. “For two years, he’s had me all to himself. Now he has to share me, and he can’t stand it.”

  “I didn’t realize he could be so aggressive.”

  “A spoiled-rotten little brat,” she insists emphatically.

  Such betrayal, Caruso thinks.

  “I’m a threat to him lately,” Joe says, “but hopefully he’ll change his mind about me.”

  Never, Caruso vows. The old man had never changed his mind about Pascal.

  “He’ll never change,” Theodore Pinter had said, pointing at Pascal opening the door of his black Mercedes. “See that suit he has on.”

  Caruso had tilted forward on his perch and looked at the enemy’s gray armor. “He bought it in Hong Kong last spring. Went there on a business trip for his law firm and returned with half a dozen of them—European cuts in silk and linen—but he brought nothing back for her,” he said, making a zero with his thumb and index finger, holding it up high for Caruso to see. “Zilch,” he said, his eyes flashing scornfully. “Not even one of those designer handbags you can get over there for half price, not even a silk scarf or a delicate comb for her hair. That’s because he didn’t think about her. Out of sight, out of mind. Suzanne Winters told me that Olivia was really hurt about it.”

  He had paused for several seconds, tapping his foot against the hardwood floor, and then in a sour voice he added, “The man is as thoughtless now as he ever was. He’s a narcissist, Caruso. Obsessed with his own needs, oblivious to the needs of others. Totally unaware of how much he hurts her, and I’ll never forgive him for that.”

  “I wonder if you know who remembers the incident—if he might be feeling a little guilty,” Joe says.

  “Of course he remembers,” she tells him, “but I don’t think he’s eager to apologize to us.”

  Please, enough of this you know who stuff, Caruso huffs. He remembers, but he refuses to show any sign of weakness. Be more like Clarissa, he tells himself. Never say
you’re sorry.

  “It’s scary, really, how much he remembers,” she continues. “And how he ends up using it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ruthie, the little girl next door, had a dog.”

  “Had?”

  “She became allergic to him, so her parents gave him away. But he was a cute little mutt. Had a touch of beagle and terrier in him—a Heinz 57 mix. I liked him. His name was Tick, and he was a mellow fellow. That is, until Caruso stepped in.”

  “Bit him?” Joe says, with a grin in his voice.

  “Oh, no,” Clarissa says. “It was much worse. Pure, unadulterated mental torture. That’s what it was.”

  “Torture. Really?”

  “Really. I’m talking Chinese water torture, maybe worse.”

  “More aggression from the White Avenger? Please, go on.”

  “Well…it was a Monday, steaming hot, and I had raised all the windows to let in a breeze off the harbor. I wanted to take a cold shower to cool myself off and was heading down the hallway—clean undies in hand—when I heard Mr. Marshall, Ruthie’s daddy, yelling, ‘Tick, suppertime!’ As I stepped into the bathroom, I spotted Tick through the window, wiggling out from beneath the forsythia hedge along the rear fence, next running frenziedly to the deck. He scrambled up the steps, skidded over the floorboards, and slammed into the back door. But no one was there to let him in. I swished the shower curtain aside, reached into the stall, and cut on the cold water just as Mr. Marshall began to call for Tick again. I caught sight of the little fellow halfway across the yard, pricking up his ears before bounding back to the house. Once more, no one opened the door for him. Curious now, I turned off the faucet and tiptoed down the hallway. ‘Tick!’ the voice rang out. ‘Tick! Tick! Tick!’ At the edge of the sunroom, I could see Tick plainly though the low row of windows, insanely scratching the door. I noticed Caruso on the other side of the sunroom, rocking with glee on his perch. And, right then, the culprit exposed himself, squawking loudly, ‘It’s suppertime, Tick!’”