Birds of America

by Lorrie Moore

  “I read deep,” he added. “I read hard.”

  “How nice for you.”

  He looked at her narrowly. “Of course, you probably think I should write a book about Cat Stevens.” She nodded neutrally. “I see,” he said.

  For dessert, Carlo was bringing in a white chocolate torte, and she decided to spend most of the coffee and dessert time talking about it. Desserts like these are born, not made, she would say. She was already practicing, rehearsing for courses. “I mean,” she said to the Swedish physicist on her left, “until today, my feeling about white chocolate was why? What was the point? You might as well have been eating goddamn wax.” She had her elbow on the table, her hand up near her face, and she looked anxiously past the physicist to smile at Martin at the other end of the long table. She waved her fingers in the air like bug legs.

  “Yes, of course,” said the physicist, frowning. “You must be … well, are you one of the spouses?”

  · · ·

  She began in the mornings to gather with some of the other spouses—they were going to have little tank tops printed up—in the music room for exercise. This way, she could avoid hearing words like Heideggerian and ideological at breakfast; it always felt too early in the morning for those words. The women pushed back the damask sofas and cleared a space on the rug where all of them could do little hip and thigh exercises, led by the wife of the Swedish physicist. Up, down, up down.

  “I guess this relaxes you,” said the white-haired woman next to her.

  “Bourbon relaxes you,” said Adrienne. “This carves you.”

  “Bourbon carves you,” said a redhead from Brazil.

  “You have to go visit this person down in the village,” whispered the white-haired woman. She wore a Spalding sporting-goods T-shirt.

  “What person?”

  “Yes, what person?” asked the blonde.

  The white-haired woman stopped and handed both of them a card from the pocket of her shorts. “She’s an American masseuse. A couple of us have started going. She takes lire or dollars, doesn’t matter. You have to phone a couple days ahead.”

  Adrienne stuck the card in her waistband. “Thanks,” she said, and resumed moving her leg up and down like a tollgate.

  For dinner, there was tacchino alla scala. “I wonder how you make this?” Adrienne said aloud.

  “My dear,” said the French historian on her left. “You must never ask. Only wonder.” He then went on to disparage sub-altered intellectualism, dormant tropes, genealogical contingencies.

  “Yes,” said Adrienne, “dishes like these do have about them a kind of omnihistorical reality. At least it seems like that to me.” She turned quickly.

  To her right sat a cultural anthropologist who had just come back from China, where she had studied the infanticide.

  “Yes,” said Adrienne. “The infanticide.”

  “They are on the edge of something horrific there. It is the whole future, our future as well, and something terrible is going to happen to them. One feels it.”

  “How awful,” said Adrienne. She could not do the mechanical work of eating, of knife and fork, up and down. She let her knife and fork rest against each other on the plate.

  “A woman has to apply for a license to have a baby. Everything is bribes and rations. We went for hikes up into the mountains, and we didn’t see a single bird, a single animal. Everything, over the years, has been eaten.”

  Adrienne felt a light weight on the inside of her arm vanish and return, vanish and return, like the history of something, like the story of all things. “Where are you from ordinarily?” asked Adrienne. She couldn’t place the accent.

  “Munich,” said the woman. “Land of Oktoberfest.” She dug into her food in an exasperated way, then turned back toward Adrienne to smile a little formally. “I grew up watching all these grown people in green felt throw up in the street.”

  Adrienne smiled back. This now was how she would learn about the world, in sentences at meals; other people’s distillations amid her own vague pain, dumb with itself. This, for her, would be knowledge—a shifting to hear, an emptying of her arms, other people’s experiences walking through the bare rooms of her brain, looking for a place to sit.

  “Me?” she too often said, “I’m just a dropout from Sue Bennet College.” And people would nod politely and ask, “Where’s that?”

  · · ·

  The next morning in her room, she sat by the phone and stared. Martin had gone to his studio; his book was going fantastically well, he said, which gave Adrienne a sick, abandoned feeling—of being unhappy and unsupportive—which made her think she was not even one of the spouses. Who was she? The opposite of a mother. The opposite of a spouse.

  She was Spider Woman.

  She picked up the phone, got an outside line, dialed the number of the masseuse on the card.

  “Pronto!” said the voice on the other end.

  “Yes, hello, per favore, parla inglese?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the voice. “I’m from Minnesota.”

  “No kidding,” said Adrienne. She lay back and searched the ceiling for talk. “I once subscribed to a haunted-house newsletter published in Minnesota,” she said.

  “Yes,” said the voice a little impatiently. “Minnesota is full of haunted-house newsletters.”

  “I once lived in a haunted house,” said Adrienne. “In college. Me and five roommates.”

  The masseuse cleared her throat confidentially. “Yes. I was once called on to cast the demons from a haunted house. But how can I help you today?”

  “You were?”

  “Were? Oh, the house, yes. When I got there, all the place needed was to be cleaned. So I cleaned it. Washed the dishes and dusted.”

  “Yup,” said Adrienne. “Our house was haunted that way, too.”

  There was a strange silence, in which Adrienne, feeling something tense and moist in the room, began to fiddle with the bagged lunch on the bed, nervously pulling open the sandwiches, sensing that if she turned, just then, the phone cradled in her neck, the child would be there, behind her, a little older now, a toddler, walked toward her in a ghostly way by her own dead parents, a Nativity scene corrupted by error and dream.

  “How can I help you today?” the masseuse asked again, firmly.

  Help? Adrienne wondered abstractly, and remembered how in certain countries, instead of a tooth fairy, there were such things as tooth spiders. How the tooth spider could steal your children, mix them up, bring you a changeling child, a child that was changed.

  “I’d like to make an appointment for Thursday,” she said. “If possible. Please.”

  For dinner there was vongole in umido, the rubbery, wine-steamed meat prompting commentary about mollusk versus crustacean anatomy. Adrienne sighed and chewed. Over cocktails, there had been a long discussion of peptides and rabbit tests.

  “Now lobsters, you know, have what is called a hemipenis,” said the man next to her. He was a marine biologist, an epidemiologist, or an anthropologist. She’d forgotten.

  “Hemipenis.” Adrienne scanned the room a little frantically.

  “Yes.” He grinned. “Not a term one particularly wants to hear in an intimate moment, of course.”

  “No,” said Adrienne, smiling back. She paused. “Are you one of the spouses?”

  Someone on his right grabbed his arm, and he now turned in that direction to say why yes, he did know Professor so-and-so … and wasn’t she in Brussels last year giving a paper at the hermeneutics conference?

  There came castagne al porto and coffee. The woman to Adrienne’s left finally turned to her, placing the cup down on the saucer with a sharp clink.

  “You know, the chef has AIDS,” said the woman.

  Adrienne froze a little in her chair. “No, I didn’t know.” Who was this woman?

  “How does that make you feel?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “How does that make you feel?” She enunciated slowly, like a reading teacher.
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  “I’m not sure,” said Adrienne, scowling at her chestnuts. “Certainly worried for us if we should lose him.”

  The woman smiled. “Very interesting.” She reached underneath the table for her purse and said, “Actually, the chef doesn’t have AIDS—at least not that I’m aware of. I’m just taking a kind of survey to test people’s reactions to AIDS, homosexuality, and general notions of contagion. I’m a sociologist. It’s part of my research. I just arrived this afternoon. My name is Marie-Claire.”

  Adrienne turned back to the hemipenis man. “Do you think the people here are mean?” she asked.

  He smiled at her in a fatherly way. “Of course,” he said. There was a long silence with some chewing in it. “But the place is pretty as a postcard.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Adrienne, “I never send those kinds of postcards. No matter where I am, I always send the kind with the little cat jokes on them.”

  He placed his hand briefly on her shoulder. “We’ll find you some cat jokes.” He scanned the room in a bemused way and then looked at his watch.

  She had bonded in a state of emergency, like an infant bird. But perhaps it would be soothing, this marriage. Perhaps it would be like a nice warm bath. A nice warm bath in a tub flying off a roof.

  At night, she and Martin seemed almost like husband and wife, spooned against each other in a forgetful sort of love—a cold, still heaven through which a word or touch might explode like a moon, then disappear, unremembered. She moved her arms to place them around him and he felt so big there, huge, filling her arms.

  The white-haired woman who had given her the masseuse card was named Kate Spalding, the wife of the monk man, and after breakfast she asked Adrienne to go jogging. They met by the lions, Kate once more sporting a Spalding T-shirt, and then they headed out over the gravel, toward the gardens. “It’s pretty as a postcard here, isn’t it?” said Kate. Out across the lake, the mountains seemed to preside over the minutiae of the terracotta villages nestled below. It was May and the Alps were losing their snowy caps, nurses letting their hair down. The air was warming. Anything could happen.

  Adrienne sighed. “But do you think people have sex here?”

  Kate smiled. “You mean casual sex? Among the guests?”

  Adrienne felt annoyed. “Casual sex? No, I don’t mean casual sex. I’m talking about difficult, randomly profound, Sears and Roebuck sex. I’m talking marital.”

  Kate laughed in a sharp, barking sort of way, which for some reason hurt Adrienne’s feelings.

  Adrienne tugged on her socks. “I don’t believe in casual sex.” She paused. “I believe in casual marriage.”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Kate. “I married my husband because I was deeply in love with him.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Adrienne, “I married my husband because I thought it would be a great way to meet guys.”

  Kate smiled now in a real way. Her white hair was grandmotherly, but her face was youthful and tan, and her teeth shone generous and wet, the creamy incisors curved as cashews.

  “I’d tried the whole single thing, but it just wasn’t working,” Adrienne added, running in place.

  Kate stepped close and massaged Adrienne’s neck. Her skin was lined and papery. “You haven’t been to see Ilke from Minnesota yet, have you?”

  Adrienne feigned perturbance. “Do I seem that tense, that lost, that …” And here she let her arms splay spastically. “I’m going tomorrow.”

  He was a beautiful child, didn’t you think? In bed, Martin held her until he rolled away, clasped her hand and fell asleep. At least there was that: a husband sleeping next to a wife, a nice husband sleeping close. It meant something to her. She could see how through the years marriage would gather power, its socially sanctioned animal comfort, its night life a dreamy dance about love. She lay awake and remembered when her father had at last grown so senile and ill that her mother could no longer sleep in the same bed with him—the mess, the smell—and had had to move him, diapered and rank, to the guest room next door. Her mother had cried, to say this farewell to a husband. To at last lose him like this, banished and set aside like a dead man, never to sleep with him again: she had wept like a baby. His actual death, she took less hard. At the funeral, she was grim and dry and invited everyone over for a quiet, elegant tea. By the time two years had passed, and she herself was diagnosed with cancer, her sense of humor had returned a little. “The silent killer,” she would say, with a wink. “The Silent Killer.” She got a kick out of repeating it, though no one knew what to say in response, and at the very end, she kept clutching the nurses’ hems to ask, “Why is no one visiting me?” No one lived that close, explained Adrienne. No one lived that close to anyone.

  Adrienne set her spoon down. “Isn’t this soup interesting?” she said to no one in particular. “Zup-pa mari-ta-ta!” Marriage soup. She decided it was perhaps a little like marriage itself: a good idea that, like all ideas, lived awkwardly on earth.

  “You’re not a poetess, I hope,” said the English geologist next to her. “We had a poetess here last month, and things got a bit dodgy here for the rest of us.”

  “Really.” After the soup, there was risotto with squid ink.

  “Yes. She kept referring to insects as ‘God’s typos’ and then she kept us all after dinner one evening so she could read from her poems, which seemed to consist primarily of the repeating line ‘the hairy kiwi of his balls.’ ”

  “Hairy kiwi,” repeated Adrienne, searching the phrase for a sincere andante. She had written a poem once herself. It had been called “Garbage Night in the Fog” and was about a long, sad walk she’d taken once on garbage night.

  The geologist smirked a little at the risotto, waiting for Adrienne to say something more, but she was now watching Martin at the other table. He was sitting next to the sociologist she’d sat next to the previous night, and as Adrienne watched, she saw Martin glance, in a sickened way, from the sociologist, back to his plate, then back to the sociologist. “The cook?” he said loudly, then dropped his fork and pushed his chair from the table.

  The sociologist was frowning. “You flunk,” she said.

  “I’m going to see a masseuse tomorrow.” Martin was on his back on the bed, and Adrienne was straddling his hips, usually one of their favorite ways to converse. One of the Mandy Patinkin tapes she’d brought was playing on the cassette player.

  “The masseuse. Yes, I’ve heard.”

  “You have?”

  “Sure, they were talking about it at dinner last night.”

  “Who was?” She was already feeling possessive, alone.

  “Oh, one of them,” said Martin, smiling and waving his hand dismissively.

  “Them,” said Adrienne coldly. “You mean one of the spouses, don’t you? Why are all the spouses here women? Why don’t the women scholars have spouses?”

  “Some of them do, I think. They’re just not here.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Could you move?” he said irritably. “You’re sitting on my groin.”

  “Fine,” she said, and climbed off.

  The next morning, she made her way down past the conical evergreens of the terraced hill—so like the grounds of a palace, the palace of a moody princess named Sophia or Giovanna—ten minutes down the winding path to the locked gate to the village. It had rained in the night, and snails, golden and mauve, decorated the stone steps, sometimes dead center, causing Adrienne an occasional quick turn of the ankle. A dance step, she thought. Modern and bent-kneed. Very Martha Graham. Don’t kill us. We’ll kill you. At the top of the final stairs to the gate, she pressed the buzzer that opened it electronically, and then dashed down to get out in time. YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS said the sign. TRENTA SECONDI USCIRE. PRESTO! One needed a key to get back in from the village, and she clutched it like a charm.

  She had to follow the Via San Carlo to Corso Magenta, past a gelato shop and a bakery with wreaths of braided bread and muffins cut like birds. She pressed herself
up against the buildings to let the cars pass. She looked at her card. The masseuse was above a farmacìa, she’d been told, and she saw it now, a little sign that said MASSAGGIO DELLA VITA. She pushed on the outer door and went up.

  Upstairs, through an open doorway, she entered a room lined with books: books on vegetarianism, books on healing, books on juice. A cockatiel, white, with a red dot like a Hindu wife’s, was perched atop a picture frame. The picture was of Lake Como or Garda, though when you blinked, it could also be a skull, a fissure through the center like a reef.

  “Adrienne,” said a smiling woman in a purple peasant dress. She had big frosted hair and a wide, happy face that contained many shades of pink. She stepped forward and shook Adrienne’s hand. “I’m Ilke.”

  “Yes,” said Adrienne.

  The cockatiel suddenly flew from its perch to land on Ilke’s shoulder. It pecked at her big hair, then stared at Adrienne accusingly.

  Ilke’s eyes moved quickly between Adrienne’s own, a quick read, a radar scan. She then looked at her watch. “You can go into the back room now, and I’ll be with you shortly. You can take off all your clothes, also any jewelry—watches, or rings. But if you want, you can leave your underwear on. Whatever you prefer.”

  “What do most people do?” Adrienne swallowed in a difficult, conspicuous way.

  Ilke smiled. “Some do it one way, some the other.”

  “All right,” Adrienne said, and clutched her pocketbook. She stared at the cockatiel. “I just wouldn’t want to rock the boat.”

  She stepped carefully toward the back room Ilke had indicated, and pushed past the heavy curtain. Inside was a large alcove—windowless and dark, with one small bluish light coming from the corner. In the center was a table with a newly creased flannel sheet. Speakers were built into the bottom of the table, and out of them came the sound of eerie choral music, wordless oohs and aahs in minor tones, with a percussive sibilant chant beneath it that sounded to Adrienne like “Jesus is best, Jesus is best,” though perhaps it was “Cheese, I suspect.” Overhead hung a mobile of white stars, crescent moons, and doves. On the blue walls were more clouds and snowflakes. It was a child’s room, a baby’s room, everything trying hard to be harmless and sweet.