Birds of America

by Lorrie Moore

  Truth be told, Bill is a little afraid of suicide. Taking one’s life, he thinks, has too many glitzy things to offer: a real edge on the narrative (albeit retrospectively), a disproportionate philosophical advantage (though again, retrospectively), the last word, the final cut, the parting shot. Most importantly, it gets you the hell out of there, wherever it is you are, and he can see how such a thing might happen in a weak but brilliant moment, one you might just regret later while looking down from the depthless sky or up through two sandy anthills and some weeds.

  Still, Lina is the one he finds himself thinking about, and carefully dressing for in the morning—removing all dry-cleaning tags and matching his socks.

  Albert leads them all into the dining room and everyone drifts around the large teak table, studying the busily constructed salads at each place setting—salads, which, with their knobs of cheese, jutting chives, and little folios of frisée, resemble small Easter hats.

  “Do we wear these or eat them?” asks Jack. In his mouth is a piece of gray chewing gum like a rat’s brain.

  “I admire gay people,” Bill’s voice booms. “To have the courage to love whom you want to love in the face of all bigotry.”

  “Relax,” Debbie murmurs, nudging him. “It’s only salad.”

  Albert indicates in a general way where they should sit, alternating male, female, like the names of hurricanes, though such seating leaves all the couples split and far apart, on New Year’s Eve no less, as Bill suspects Albert wants it.

  “Don’t sit next to him—he bites,” says Bill to Lina as she takes a place next to Albert.

  “Six degrees of separation,” says Debbie. “Do you believe that thing about how everyone is separated by only six people?”

  “Oh, we’re separated by at least six, aren’t we, darling?” says Lina to her husband.

  “At least.”

  “No, I mean by only six,” says Debbie. “I mean strangers.” But no one is listening to her.

  “This is a political New Year’s Eve,” says Albert. “We’re here to protest the new year, protest the old; generally get a petition going to Father Time. But also eat: in China it’s the Year of the Pig.”

  “Ah, one of those years of the Pig,” says Stanley. “I love those.”

  Bill puts salt on his salad, then looks up apologetically. “I salt everything,” he says, “so it can’t get away.”

  Albert brings out salmon steaks and distributes them with Brigitte’s help. Ever since Albert was denied promotion to full-professor rank, his articles on Flannery O’Connor (“A Good Man Really Is Hard to Find,” “Everything That Rises Must Indeed Converge,” and “The Totemic South: The Violent Actually Do Bear It Away!”) failing to meet with collegial acclaim, he has become determined to serve others, passing out the notices and memoranda, arranging the punch and cookies at various receptions. He has not yet become very good at it, however, but the effort touches and endears. Now everyone sits with their hands in their laps, leaning back when plates are set before them. When Albert sits down, they begin to eat.

  “You know, in Yugoslavia,” says Jack, chewing, “a person goes to school for four years to become a waiter. Four years of waiter school.”

  “Typical Yugoslavians,” adds Lina. “They have to go to school for four years to learn how to serve someone.”

  “I’ll bet they do it well,” Bill says stupidly. Everyone ignores him, for which he is grateful. His fish smells fishier than the others—he is sure of it. Perhaps he has been poisoned.

  “Did you hear about that poor Japanese foreign student who stopped to ask directions and was shot because he was thought to be an intruder?” This is Debbie, dear Debbie. How did she land on this?

  “Oh, God, I know. Wasn’t that terrible?” says Brigitte.

  “A shooting like that really makes a lot of sense, too,” says Bill, “when you think about how the Japanese are particularly known for their street crime.” Lina chortles and Bill pokes at his fish a little.

  “I guess the man thought the student was going to come in and reprogram his computer,” says Jack, and everyone laughs.

  “Now is that racist?” asks Bill.

  “Is it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Not in any real way.”

  “It’s just us.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Would anyone like more food?”

  “So Stanley,” says Lina. “How is the research going?”

  Is this absent querying or pointed interrogation? Bill can’t tell. The last: time they were all together, they got into a terrible discussion about World War II. World War II is not necessarily a good topic of conversation generally, and among the eight of them, it became a total hash. Stanley yelled, Lina threatened to leave, and Brigitte broke down over dessert: “I was a little girl; I was there,” Brigitte said of Berlin.

  Lina, whose three uncles, she’d once told Bill, had been bayoneted by Nazis, sighed and looked off at the wallpaper—wide pale stripes like pajamas. It was impossible to eat.

  Brigitte looked accusingly at everyone, her face swelling like a baked apple. Tears leaked out of her eyes. “They did not have to bomb like that. Not like that. They did not have to bomb so much,” and then she began to sob, then choke back sobs, and then just choke.

  It had been a shock to Bill. For years, Brigitte had been the subject of his skeptical, private jokes with Albert. They would make up fake titles for her books on European history: That Kooky Führer and Hitler: What a Nutroll! But that evening, Brigitte’s tears were so bitter and full, after so many years, that it haunted and startled him. What did it mean to cry like that—at dinner? He had never known a war in that way or ever, really. He had never even known a dinner in that way.

  “Fine,” says Stanley to Lina. “Great, really. I’m going back next month. The small-head-size data is the most interesting and conclusive thus far.” He chews his fish. “If I got paid by the word, I’d be a rich man.” He has the supple, overconfident voice of a panelist from the Texaco Opera Quiz.

  “Jack here gets paid by the word,” says Bill, “and that word is Next?” Perhaps Bill could adroitly switch the subject away from nuclear devastation and steer it toward national health plans. Would that be an improvement? He remembers once asking Lina what kind of medicine Jack practiced. “Oh, he’s a gynecological surgeon,” she said dismissively. “Something to do with things dropping into the vagina.” She gave a shudder. “I don’t like to think about it.”

  Things dropping into the vagina. The word things had for some reason made Bill think of tables and chairs, or, even more glamorously, pianos and chandeliers, and he has now come to see Jack as a kind of professional mover: the Allied Van Lines of the OB-GYN set.

  “After all this time, Bill is still skeptical about doctors,” Jack now says.

  “I can see that,” says Stanley.

  “I once had the wrong tonsil removed,” says Bill.

  “Are you finding a difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” persists Lina.

  Stanley turns and looks at her. “That’s interesting that you should ask that. You know, Hiroshima was a uranium bomb and Nagasaki a plutonium. And the fact is, we’re finding more damaging results from the uranium.”

  Lina gasps and puts down her fork. She turns and looks in an alarmed way at Stanley, studying, it seems, the condition of his face, the green-brown shrapnel of his dried acne cysts, like lentils buried in the skin.

  “They used two different kinds of bombs?” she says.

  “That’s right,” says Stanley.

  “You mean, all along, right from the start, this was just an experiment? They designed it explicitly right from the beginning, as something to study?” Blood has rushed to her face.

  Stanley grows a little defensive. He is, after all, one of the studiers. He shifts in his chair. “There are some very good books written on the subject. If you don’t understand what happened regardin
g Japan during World War Two, you would be well advised to read a couple of them.”

  “Oh, I see. Then we could have a better conversation,” says Lina. She turns away from Stanley and looks at Albert.

  “Children, children,” murmurs Albert.

  “World War Two,” says Debbie. “Wasn’t that the war to end all wars?”

  “No, that was World War One,” says Bill. “By World War Two, they weren’t making any promises.”

  Stanley will not relent. He turns to Lina again. “I have to say, I’m surprised to see a Serbian, in a matter of foreign policy, attempting to take the moral high ground,” he says.

  “Stanley, I used to like you,” says Lina. “Remember when you were a nice guy? I do.”

  “I do, too,” says Bill. “There was that whole smiling, handing-out-money thing he used to do.”

  Bill feels inclined to rescue Lina. This year, she has been through a lot. Just last spring, the local radio station put her on a talk show and made her answer questions about Bosnia. In attempting to explain what was going on in the former Yugoslavia, she said, “You have to think about what it might mean for Europe to have a nationalist, Islamic state,” and “Those fascist Croats,” and “It’s all very complicated.” The next day, students boycotted her classes and picketed her office with signs that read GENOCIDE IS NOT ‘COMPLICATED’ and REPENT, IMPERIALIST. Lina had phoned Bill at his office. “You’re a lawyer. They’re hounding me. Aren’t these students breaking a law? Surely, Bill, they are breaking a law.”

  “Not really,” said Bill. “And believe me, you wouldn’t want to live in a country where they were.”

  “Can’t I get a motion to strike? What is that? I like the way it sounds.”

  “That’s used in pleadings or in court. That’s not what you want.”

  “No, I guess not. From them, I just want no more motion. Plus, I want to strike them. There’s nothing you can do?”

  “They have their rights.”

  “They understand nothing,” she said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No. I banged up the fender parking my car, I was so upset. The headlight fell out, and even though I took it into the car place, they couldn’t salvage it.”

  “You’ve gotta keep those things packed in ice, I think.”

  “These cheeldren, good God, have no conception of the world. I am well known as a pacifist and resister; I was the one last year in Belgrade, buying gasoline out of Coke bottles, hiding a boy from the draft, helping to organize the protests and the radio broadcasts and the rock concerts. Not them. I was the one standing there with the crowd, clapping and chanting beneath Milosevic’s window: ‘Don’t count on us.’ ” Here Lina’s voice fell into a deep Slavic singsong. “Don’t count on us. Don’t count on us.” She paused dramatically. “We had T-shirts and posters. That was no small thing.”

  “ ‘Don’t count on us?’ ” said Bill. “I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but as a political slogan, it seems, I don’t know, a little …” Lame. It lacked even the pouty energy and determination of “Hell no, we won’t go.” Perhaps some obscenity would have helped. “Don’t fucking count on us, motherfucker.” That would have been better. Certainly a better T-shirt.

  “It was all very successful,” said Lina indignantly.

  “But how exactly do you measure success?” asked Bill. “I mean, it took time, but, you’ll forgive me, we stopped the war in Vietnam.”

  “Oh, you are all so obsessed with your Vietnam,” said Lina.

  The next time Bill saw her, it was on her birthday, and she’d had three and a half whiskeys. She exclaimed loudly about the beauty of the cake, and then, taking a deep breath, she dropped her head too close to the candles and set her hair spectacularly on fire.

  What does time measure but itself? What can it assess but the mere deposit and registration of itself within a thing?

  A large bowl of peas and onions is passed around the table.

  They’ve already dispensed with the O. J. Simpson jokes—the knock-knock one and the one about the sunglasses. They’ve banned all the others, though Bill is now asked his opinion regarding search and seizure. Ever since he began living in the present tense, Bill sees the Constitution as a blessedly changing thing. He does not feel current behavior should be made necessarily to conform to old law. He feels personally, for instance, that he’d throw away a few First Amendment privileges—abortion protest, say, and all telemarketing, perhaps some pornography (though not Miss April 1965—never!)—in exchange for gutting the Second Amendment. The Founding Fathers were revolutionaries, after all. They would be with him on this, he feels. They would be for making the whole thing up as you go along, reacting to things as they happened, like a great, wild performance piece. “There’s nothing sacred about the Constitution; it’s just another figmentary contract: it’s a palimpsest you can write and write and write on. But then whatever is there when you get pulled over are the rules for then. For now.” Bill believes in free speech. He believes in expensive speech. He doesn’t believe in shouting “Fire” in a crowded movie theater, but he does believe in shouting “Fie!” and has done it twice himself—both times at Forrest Gump. “I’m a big believer in the Rules for Now. Also, Promises for Now, Things to Do for Now, and the ever-handy This Will Do for Now.”

  Brigitte glares at him. “Such moral excellence,” she says.

  “Yes,” agrees Roberta, who has been quiet all evening, probably figuring out airfare upgrades for Stanley. “How attractive.”

  “I’m talking theoretical,” says Bill. “I believe in common sense. In theory. Theoretical common sense.” He feels suddenly cornered and misunderstood. He wishes he weren’t constantly asked to pronounce on real-life legal matters. He has never even tried an actual case except once, when he was just out of law school. He’d had a small practice then in the basement of an old sandstone schoolhouse in St. Paul, and the sign inside the building directory said WILLIAM D. BELMONT, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW: ONE LEVEL DOWN. It always broke his heart a little, that one level down. The only case he ever took to trial was an armed robbery and concealed weapon case, and he had panicked. He dressed in the exact same beiges and browns as the bailiffs—a subliminal strategy he felt would give him an edge, make him seem at least as much a part of the court “family” as the prosecutor. But by the close of the afternoon, his nerves were shot. He looked too desperately at the jury (who, once in the deliberation room, and in the time it took to order the pizza and wolf it down, voted unanimously to convict). He’d looked imploringly at all their little faces and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, if my client’s not innocent, I’ll eat my shorts.”

  At the end of his practice, he had taken to showing up at other people’s office parties—not a good sign in life.

  Now, equipped with a more advanced degree, like the other people here, Bill has a field of scholarly, hypothetical expertise, plus a small working knowledge of budgets and parking and E-mail. He doesn’t mind the E-mail, has more or less gotten used to it, its vaguely smutty Etch-A-Sketch, though once he found himself lost in the Internet and before he knew it had written his name across some bulletin board on which the only other name was “Stud Boy.” Mostly, however, his professional life has been safe and uneventful. Although he is bothered by faculty meetings and by the word text—every time he hears it, he feels he should just give up, go off and wear a powdered wig somewhere—it intrigues Bill to belong to academe, with its international hodgepodge and asexual attire, a place where to think and speak as if one has lived is always preferable to the alternatives. Such a value cuts down on regrets. And Bill is cutting down. He is determined to cut down. Once, he was called in by the head of the law school and admonished for skipping so many faculty meetings. “It’s costing you about a thousand dollars in raises every year,” said the dean.

  “Really?” replied Bill, “Well, if that’s all, it’s worth every dime.”

  “Eat, eat,” says Albert. He is bringing in the baked potatoes and dessert cheese
s. Things are a little out of whack. Is a dinner party a paradigm of society or a vicious pantomime of the family? It is already 10:30. Brigitte has gotten up again to help him. They return with sour cream, chives, grappa and cognac. Debbie looks across the table at Bill and smiles warmly. Bill smiles back. At least he thinks he does.

  This taboo regarding age is to make us believe that life is long and actually improves us, that we are wiser, better, more knowledgeable later on than early. It is a myth concocted to keep the young from learning what we really are and despising and murdering us. We keep them sweet-breathed, unequipped, suggesting to them that there is something more than regret and decrepitude up ahead.

  Bill is still writing an essay in his head, one of theoretical common sense, though perhaps he is just drinking too much and it is not an essay at all but the simple metabolism of sugar. But this is what he knows right now, with dinner winding up and midnight looming like a death gong: life’s embrace is quick and busy, and everywhere in it people are equally lacking and well-meaning and nuts. Why not admit history’s powers to divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes next, and that robs you of surprises. It exhausts and warps the mind. We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgmental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.

  “I believe in the present tense,” Bill says now, to no one in particular. “I believe in amnesty.” He stops. People are looking but not speaking. “Or is that just fancy rhetoric?”

  “It’s not that fancy,” says Jack.

  “It’s fancy,” Albert says kindly, ever the host, “without being schmancy.” He brings out more grappa. Everyone drinks it from the amber, green, and blue of Albert’s Depression glass glasses.

  “I mean—” Bill begins, but then he stops, says nothing. Chilean folk music is playing on the stereo, wistful and melancholy: “Bring me all your old lovers, so I can love you, too,” a woman sings in Spanish.