Waxwings

by Unknown

  They took the Audi. When Beth switched on the ignition, Terry Allen was in the middle of “Gone to Texas.” She killed the music and said to Tom: “It’s on Lakeside Avenue, just north of Dearborn.”

  Tom read her the directions out of the street atlas. The Juergensen place was on the Seattle side of Lake Washington, its graveled drive lit by carriage lamps planted among rhododendrons and old firs. The long-established greenery led Tom to expect some Tudorish mansion, circa 1925, and it was a surprise to see, at the end of the drive, a low-slung, cantilevered building of stone and glass, its weird geometric angles making it look like a partially-solved woodblock puzzle. When they found a place to park among the assembled Range Rovers and Jaguars, he saw that the long sloping lawn, with a chink of lake just in view around the side of the house, had been laid so recently that it was still a checkerboard of sods, its grid-pattern unkindly exposed by the blaze of house-lights.

  While they were waiting for someone to come to the door, Tom said: “Gardencourt! Remember, in The Portrait of a Lady? I was—”

  “Oh, do come in! You’re just in time—the musicians are tuning up.”

  Various plinks and whines could be heard in the far distance as Tom and Beth shucked off their coats and handed them to the pinafored domestic. Then Mrs. Juergensen led them through a glass-roofed atrium, with two full-grown coconut palms in vast wooden tubs, to a door that opened into what appeared to be a corporate convention hall.

  With twenty or so guests, plus the musical consort, the room still looked empty. People were scattered in armchairs and on sofas, each a long way off from their nearest neighbor, like passengers in a sparsely occupied departure lounge.

  “Can I bring you drinks before they get started? White wine or Evian water?”

  “Wine,” Beth said, with a peculiar intensity of emphasis, and Tom concurred.

  The Juergensens had obviously tried to tame the wide-open spaces of their gigantic room. An enormous blueish, pinkish, mauveish blown-glass Chihuly piece was suspended from the ceiling, representing either a tropical marine life-form or the biggest vulva in the world. Beneath it, a free-standing table, around which at least eight people might have been seated for dinner, held a collection of framed portrait photographs, all enlarged to folio-size and beyond. Two great earth-colored abstracts hung on either side of an open hearth in which a whole ox might easily have been roasted. Yet these gestures, rather than shrinking the room to manageable proportions, served only to underline its gross enormity.

  Passing the back of a massive white armchair, Beth was intercepted by a bony outstretched hand and a blue wristwatch. When the occupant rose to his feet, she seemed shocked to see him.

  “Steve?” she said. “Oh—this is my husband, Tom. Tom, this is Steve Litvinof.”

  “So glad you could come.”

  This man didn’t fit Beth’s description of her boss at all. Thin, tan, and bald, he wore a pigskin jacket over an apple-green shirt unbuttoned halfway to his midriff. Seeing Steve made Tom realize that he was the only man in the room who was wearing a tie.

  Litvinof leaned towards him and whispered, mysteriously, “Liz is a treasure!”

  They found two chairs, and Tom pushed his closer to Beth’s. The wine arrived, he touched her hand. “Liz?”

  “It’s what he calls me,” she said, her voice suddenly wan.

  The recital began with a counter-tenor, accompanied by a lutenist, singing Morley’s “O Mistress Mine.” The pure, thin, choirboy voice seemed doubly amazing, given that it issued from a florid red-bearded man who looked as if his vocal cords were lubricated with six-packs.

  . . . O stay and hear, your true love’s coming

  That can sing both high and low.

  Trip no further, pretty sweeting.

  Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,

  Every wise man’s son doth know.

  Between pieces, a musician stepped forward to give a potted lecture on his or her instrument. “The lute is a descendant of an ancient Arab instrument called the oud. Ouds were first brought to Europe by the Moors, when they conquered Spain early in the eighth century A.D.. . . .” The lutenist spoke in an upsy-downsy voice, as if he were addressing a class of rather dim kindergarteners, then the consort played Byrd’s “My Lord of Oxenford’s Masque.” It was, Tom thought, more Western than American, this irritating habit of talking-down. In a fluid, ever-shifting society of people who were mostly strangers to one another, nothing was tacit, nothing could be assumed in the way of prior knowledge or experience. Everything had to be stated plainly and underlined. Irony was out. So one was landed with—

  “The viola da gamba means literally ‘leg viol’ in Italian. It received its name because it is played between the legs.” This speaker’s own bare legs were—not to put too fine a point on it—sturdy, and could have supported a concert grand. Tom reached for Beth’s hand and held it through a brisk performance of “Nutmeg and Ginger.”

  The music was beautiful. The talks—on the dulcimer, the theorbo, and the sackbut—though none lasted for more than a minute, were a pain, but Tom clapped along with the others because he didn’t want to let Beth down.

  At the end of the recital, Steve Litvinof came over to introduce his wife, Joyce, who filled every available inch of her sky-blue jersey pantsuit and might have passed, at a distance, for Steve’s mother. Clasping Tom’s hand, she said, “Wasn’t it interesting—learning about all the different instruments in the orchestra?”

  Holding Squashy Bear, Finn snuck downstairs in his pyjamas.

  On the living-room couch, Courtney was wrestling with her friend Josh, who’d arrived immediately after Finn’s mom and dad had left.

  “You’re winning, Josh!” Finn said.

  Courtney’s T-shirt was pulled right down, so one of her boobs was hanging out. Her nipple was brown and stuck straight out.

  “Finn!” she said, pulling her shirt back up. “How long have you been standing there?”

  Finn smiled at her, wishing she’d take her boob out again. “I can’t sleep. I need a snuggle.”

  Going in to dinner, a thirtyish woman laid her hand on Tom’s sleeve. “I’ve heard you on the radio—so droll and provoking!”

  He would’ve been happy to have seen more of her, but when he found his place-card, written in an extravagant calligraphic script, he saw that she—and Beth, too—had drawn a chair far down the long table. He was on his own, feeling self-conscious about his tie.

  After the giant reception room, the dining room appeared to belong to another house altogether. Narrow and candle-lit, it had the proportions of a corridor, with an epic glass wall on its lake-facing side. Catering people were moving up and down behind the guests, serving what promised to be a lackluster sort of dinner. From his seat, Tom looked across a half-acre of lawn to a lighted dock, at which a sea-plane and two white motor cruisers were moored.

  Eyeing the plane, Tom turned to the woman on his right, “So who was it who flew here tonight—or is that the Juergensens’?”

  “Jack and Marcie,” she said, nodding across the table at a man who looked like one of Tom’s grad students.

  Jack looked up and said, “It saves you the hassle of 520, which at rush-hour is a total bitch.”

  Everyone seemed to know everybody else, and Tom was content to listen. The main drift of the conversation was about distances. When someone complimented Soraya on the pink stone (“So warm!”) used in the construction of the house, she said, “We trucked it over here from this quarry we discovered up in Maine.” Then the young man sitting next to her said: “Our stone came from India, but we had to ship it to Italy first. The Italians are still the best stonemasons in the world . . .” A woman announced that she’d run into this “very special” landscape gardener in Romania, and flown him out from Bucharest to supervise the shaping and planting of her lakeside backyard.

  Tom picked at his plate of dry Pacific salmon and limp asparagus. He had a trick for summoning whole passages from books. It was quite s
imple: you had only to picture the position of the quote on the page, recto or verso, top, middle, or bottom. He was now mentally thumbing through the pages of the Penguin edition of Our Mutual Friend. Recto, definitely. A chapter-beginning, set about a third of the way down the page . . . He had it.

  Mr. and Mrs. Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London.

  In pre-bubblewrap days, of course, everything came packed in bran.

  Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head . . .

  Wonderful! He gazed benignly down this unending table of neo-Veneerings and tried to catch Beth’s eye, but she was talking with Joyce Litvinof.

  After the strawberries, which tasted blandly of November and hydroponics, most of the men wandered out on to the bran-new lawn to smoke cigars. The man named Jack offered Tom one. “Cuban,” he said. “I fly ’em in from Vancouver.”

  “I daren’t,” Tom said. “I’m a reformed addict. I’d inhale.” But he enjoyed the cigar-flavored air.

  Jack turned to the man standing next to him. “Larry—isn’t Shiva Ray building just up from here?”

  “I don’t think so. I believe he’s over in Medina.” He pointed at a spot on the far side of the lake, where the water was rimmed silver with lights. “Pretty much dead in the middle, between Bill’s house and the Simonyi place.”

  “I thought it was Leschi.”

  “No, it’s definitely Medina.”

  “I know Shiva Ray,” Tom said.

  Both men turned on him in candid astonishment.

  “How?” said Jack rudely.

  “He’s donating money to the creative writing program at UW. I teach there.”

  “Ah,” Larry said.

  “He calls me up once or twice a week to talk about how we’re going to spend the money. But it’s funny—he only ever calls from airplanes.”

  “That sounds like Shiva Ray,” Jack said.

  Twenty minutes later, inside the Audi, Tom said, “So that was a fund-raiser.”

  “Yes.”

  “How much did we raise, then?”

  “Oh, four hundred bucks.”

  “Each?”

  “No. Two hundred a head.”

  “Well, that’s not so bad. The music was rather wonderful, I thought.” Then he briefly attempted a falsetto: “O mistress mine, where are you roaming . . .”

  “They must’ve had a lot more wine up at your end of the table.”

  “I suppose they need the money for more shawms and psalteries and things.”

  “No, they want to bring over lots of bands from Europe for their festival.”

  “I don’t think they call them bands.”

  “Whatever.”

  “What does that Juergensen guy do, exactly?”

  “He used to be a v.p. at Microsoft, then left to start his own company. He makes digital smells.”

  “He what?”

  “Don’t ask. Please don’t ask. It’s what he does.”

  “Perfect.” Tom peered through the window at the traveling darkness of the Arboretum.

  Beth was in a fume. Litvinof had suckered her twice: first with the invite, then with the fraught hour at Barney’s, where she’d bought the embarrassingly over-formal Calvin Klein thing. Someone really might have mentioned to her that Steve and his cronies were in the habit of undressing for dinner.

  When they reached home, Courtney appeared both subdued and somewhat disheveled. She declined Tom’s offer to walk her back to her parents’ house, and clumped noisily down the porch steps. Tidying up in the kitchen, Beth found a used condom in the garbage can under the sink. Couldn’t she have wrapped the damn thing up, at least? Then Tom came into the room, carrying a copy of Our Mutual Friend. That felt like the last straw.

  Wearing earphones, Tom was sitting alone in one of KUOW’s new studios on University Way. From behind the glass of the control cubicle, Ned the engineer gave him a thumbs-up, and the voice of Miriam Glazebrook, his producer, came down the line from the National Public Radio studios in Washington, D.C.

  “Hi, Tom. How are things in rainy Seattle?”

  Miriam always said this. She did it to annoy.

  “Very Seattleish. Beth and I went to a fund-raiser last night. Our host was a man who left Microsoft to start his own dot-com. He sells digital smells. There’s a box-thingy you plug into your computer. You probably have one . . .”

  “The things people do out there.”

  “That’s a bit rich, coming from D.C.”

  “Trish says we’ve got good level here. We’re rolling.”

  “Every morning, first thing—”

  “Sorry, there’s a glitch at our end. Okay, now we’re rolling again.”

  “Every morning, first thing, my wife reads her fortune in the paper.

  We take the skinny national edition of the New York Times, which doesn’t have a resident astrologer, unfortunately, but . . .”

  Waxwings

  4.

  “. . . unfortunately, but Beth makes do with Section C . . .”

  The rush-hour traffic was gridlocked on First. Tom’s voice, relayed by eight hidden speakers, was grotesquely larger than life. Talking for the radio, he rolled his r’s in what Beth supposed must be the Hungarian fashion. At the best of times, this struck her as an annoying affectation; now she heard it as a mocking affront. Her hands tightened on the wheel, and the anger inside her felt like pond-water curdling into ice. How dare he say these things? He’d never said a word about the piece. She’d happened on it by accident, looking for the news.

  “Thomas Janeway teaches creative writing at the University of Washington. His regular commentaries come to us by way of member-station KUOW in—”

  She hit the Power button to kill the jabbering announcer.

  He knew nothing—nothing!—about the company, couldn’t even find his way around the site. He hadn’t a clue about how the revenue stream was generated, and for him to talk—ignorantly, complacently, with his fucking rolled r’s—about “burrrn rrrates” was insufferable. Swift? Pope? That South Sea fucking bubble? As for bringing her and her options into it—it was condescending, humiliating, unbelievably pompous. He no more understood the online world than he did particle physics. All he knew or cared about were his stupid Victorian novels and his even stupider World War Two stories, yet he had the fucking shameless audacity to broadcast his worthless opinions about the “New Economy” and the company in which she was daily struggling to keep her own head above water. People listened to “All Things Considered,” for godsake! How was she supposed to face the ninth floor next morning? “My wife, Beth”! She might just as well be his fucking lab rat. Would Robert have heard it? Would Lisa? Would Steve? She felt sick at the thought.

  Instead of turning left on Galer, she continued north on Queen Anne Avenue, driving for driving’s sake, trying to recover some shred, at least, of ordinary composure. By the time she crossed the Fremont Bridge and was climbing the slope of Phinney Ridge, she’d returned, more or less, to herself.

  There was no real malice aforethought in the man. Tom was just utterly thoughtless in his bookish self-absorption, believing himself to be observant because he could observe things that happened in novels. In reality, he was so blind that someone ought to make him carry a white stick. It wasn’t even his fault that he could do something like this to her; that would be like blaming a kitten for unraveling a ball of yarn. He was, in his way, incorrigibly innocent. Once, she had thought him brilliant.

  Well, she thought, live and fucking learn.

  When
, half an hour later, she got back to the house, Tom and Finn were on their hands and knees in the living room, making animal noises at each other.

  Tom clambered to his feet to kiss her. “How was the day, sweet-heart?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  Chick studied American men, wanting to look right, to blend in with the crowd. The smartest-looking guys his age nearly all had the same style: their hair was trimmed to a dark shadow around the skull, they wore neatly groomed moustaches, and most of them had a gold ring in the lobe of one ear.

  He began to grow a moustache, and paid a barber $10 to shave his head. He begrudged the money but was pleased with the haircut. Catching sight of himself unexpectedly in a store window, he saw an American—although the moustache would take many patient weeks before it achieved the glossy luxuriance he had in mind.