by Chris White
Earbuds plugged into his ears and eyes closed, Zander lies on his bed, one leg crossed over the other in the air, his foot flopping rhythmically to some song playing on his iPhone, only a tinny scribbling leaking into the room.
Wincing at his own deception, Adrian tiptoes away toward Michaela’s room, and peeking there, finds it empty. Michaela has probably gone out somewhere with her mom, to get some last-minute ingredient at Alfalfa’s or buy the khaki pants she needs for her school recorder recital Saturday afternoon.
Adrian writes a note for Stella on a piece of paper from a pad advertising digoxin, telling the truth: that there is a bird he must see and that he has to leave immediately. He packs quickly, stealthily, all the things he’ll need; then, carrying his suitcase close to his body, he edges again to Zander’s door, just to see him a second time.
Things are much the same, but now he has his sister’s Etch A Sketch in his lap, dialing something out with tiny bits of aluminum powder, and he’s begun that type of singing exclusive to those listening through headphones—the odd half phrases that dip in and out, the sense of confidence derived from the false sense of seclusion, always out of tune. Though the sweetness of this image is enough to make Adrian throw down his suitcase and run to his only son, he knows he can’t.
Yesterday, when he was driving, he passed the same carcass of a house where he’d chased the sparrow on Halloween. This time, though, from the road, he saw a face in the abandoned window, a jaundiced, outsized face moving inside the house. He pulled over onto the shoulder again, raised his binocular, and the looming image sharpened into the wagging head of a horse. Adrian got out and sprinted across the pasture, much as he’d done before, even risking his shoes again, though this time the field was dry. When he approached the house, the horse disappeared and he followed, entering the living room of the house yet again, walking back through the dark hallway to the kitchen. There it was, the mute beast, shifting unsteadily on the tiny metal balls, hips high above the countertops, ducking its head to stumble past him across the threshold, thundering along the floorboards.
That’s how Adrian feels now. Too unwieldy for the house.
• • •
“Have you got any water? I thought I . . .”
Deborah’s entire arm disappears into her backpack, resurfaces, and then thrusts back in, as Adrian attempts to settle into his seat. (He had paid an elderly couple a hundred dollars each for their places on the stand-by list.)
“No, but I’m happy to get you some,” Adrian says, cramped.
She twists open a bottle of pills she pulls from her bag, says, “Don’t worry about it,” and pops one into the back of her throat.
“Headache?” he asks, hoping she’s not sick.
“It’s Wellbutrin.”
“Oh, really?” Adrian asks, distracted by a woman crisscrossing the aisle with a cat in a bag.
“Yeah, really,” she slings back, a little loud. “Is that a problem?” She smiles, but it’s a bitter one. What did he say?
“No. I just meant, you know”—lowering his voice in hopes she’ll follow suit—“nothing. I just wasn’t aware.”
“You can’t be as naïve as you sound right now.” She turns toward him full on.
“What do you mean? There is absolutely no judgment,” he says, and he obviously means it.
“Oh, absolutely,” she parrots. “Good thing you’re an anesthesiologist, not a psychiatrist.”
She immediately takes up with the round-faced man sitting next to her on the aisle, ignoring Adrian. He wants her to look him in the eyes and say something unexpected and straightforward, so he’ll remember why he’s doing this, why he really must do this.
But he plugs in his headphones and listens to Bob Marley: “Baby, don’t worry . . .’bout a thing . . .”
She’s on medication. That’s fine. Who isn’t? They’d met a couple of times at the Trident Café, talked in his office in the evenings, said hello here and there, at the cafeteria, the parking lot: he’d never pissed her off until now. Truth is, it is a good thing he’s not a psychiatrist. He briefly careened into the discipline his third year of undergrad when he took a class called Psychoanalytic Theories. Adrian had thought, Educate yourself on the human psyche. If you want to be a doctor, and you do, don’t just take premed classes in chemistry and biology. Acknowledge the implicit importance of the mind on the body, the nurture-and-nature relationship. These seemed like honorable aims.
The class was held in an ancient building that smelled permanently of formaldehyde, though science labs were no longer held there. The professor, Dr. McQuown, wore a squared-off pubey beard that made him look like he’d been dispatched from Vienna circa 1885. The first few classes were perfectly fine, though a little dull, and Adrian listened with half a mind. But at the end of the second week of the semester, the professor gave a lecture on Freud’s Oedipus complex, which Adrian had heard of, of course, but only in vague, layman’s terms.
In Freud’s model, McQuown explained, it was normal for a young boy’s early sexual feelings to be unconsciously directed toward his mother. To dream about her, to love her like a goddess, to crave spending time with her, to want to sleep in her bed, to want to protect her from his father, even to fantasize doing violence to him. All that was normal. It was as if the professor had Adrian’s very life in his hands.
“Then,” McQuown said, pressing his beard together, pacing the floor, “the next stage must occur.” A healthy boy begins to repress his “incestuous” inklings, to experiment with other children, play a little doctor, and to identify with his father, sensing that only by doing so (halting his competition with him, joining his team) would he ever have a real lover to take the place of his mother. At this juncture, the “healthy boy” (he kept saying healthy boy like that, the healthy boy) experiences a temporary renunciation of the mother while he undergoes “individuation by his father’s side.” (Dear God.) After completion of this final stage, the son “rediscovers” the initial relationship with the mother in the form of an adult female sex partner, and all is well, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if this transition is not accomplished, not “resolved,” fixation will result, McQuown said, and adult neuroses of all types can follow.
Adrian was tortured and confounded. He spent the class not raising his hand, biting on his pencil, trying to shred it into sawdust. The professor took great pains to explain that although Freud had illuminated some foundational truths (that there is an unconscious mind, for example, or that people are often unable to report or even see the deep psychological issues that reside there), his theories must be taken with a “grain of salt.” They can sometimes be used to explain behavior, but they cannot predict it.
McQuown clutched his folded glasses in his fist. “Formulated subjectively from a tiny sample, including Freud himself”—he chuckled a little, irreverently, and looked directly at Adrian—“the theories cannot be proven nor disproven. In fact, recent, more objective researchers have discovered little to support ‘the Oedipal conflict.’ ” Why then? Adrian crushed his hand between the hard cover and first pages of his textbook. Why teach it at all?
Adrian had felt like his mother’s companion. He had literally wanted to kill his father. And once they’d moved away from him to Kingston, and June had fallen in love with Suzanne, he was sometimes wounded by the attentions she heaped on her female lover, wanting his mother only to himself. But if a mother actually committed an incestuous act? (This was never mentioned or even hinted at, either in the lecture or class materials.) If such a thing happened to this hypothetical “healthy boy,” combined with a father whom the boy had never respected and refused to emulate, what then?
Sitting in that classroom, feet shoved under his desk, Adrian was surrounded by three blackboards scratched white with the facts of his own annihilation. And whatever excuses and caveats the professor was making for Sigmund Freud, whatever question marks he occasionally added to the boards, whatever hastily circled material, Adrian couldn’t help but feel
—like an allergic reaction spreading across his face—he was an Oedipal complex to the power of ten. All this while resolutely wanting to prove fucking dickhead Freud wrong about his categories and his castration anxiety and his narcissism, wrong about children and their futures. He dropped the class. He took intramural tennis on indoor courts that echoed like canyons with the thwack of the ball against his racket, and he developed a killer serve. Psychology, psychoanalysis, case studies, theory, and practice in therapeutic settings? No, thank you.
• • •
Adrian skims the airline magazine, reading about a woman in Idaho who made a quilt for recent earthquake victims; thoughtful, he thinks, but not really helpful. He looks out the window at the reflection of his own face. He glances surreptitiously at Deborah, who is reading something her new friend is showing her, which looks like an interoffice memo from the days of the dot matrix printer. Her mouth is partly open in a smile, nodding. Adrian’s pretty sure the man just spoke the words “sales index.” Jesus.
They land in Harlingen, having been offered no pretzels and nuts, no shortbread cookie, and no Ketel One. (Is this how they do things in coach?) The Charlie Brown–headed man next to Deborah is now pointing something out to her through the window. Adrian can’t imagine what it could be; he can’t hear him now. See all the big planes? There’s a man with a fluorescent jacket!
When they stand up, Deborah looks at Adrian as if he’s just materialized and slaps him on the back. They deplane, barely speaking, then duck into their rented Explorer and head out into the warm Texas evening.
Deborah is hungry and wants to stop for dinner at a Red Lobster. She says she loves the stuffed flounder, and who is Adrian to argue, so they eat their popcorn shrimp appetizer as Deborah becomes her fully animated self again, giving him bawdy smiles behind the waitress’s back. Adrian takes on the role of straight man, acting blameless and surprised like a kid passing notes at school when the teacher catches someone else. At one point, he takes out a Klonopin (he’s out of Xanax), holds it up like a specimen from across the table, then swallows it. She laughs, genuinely delighted. It’s the first time he’s ever given a woman joy by taking a pill.
• • •
Adrian steps aside to allow Deborah entrance into room 378 at the Courtyard Marriott, holding back the door like a valet. It’s the classic two queen beds with floral paintings and dark wood and minibar and flat screen, but it all feels alien and strange. There’s a sudden sensation in Adrian’s gut of having eaten too many potatoes. He places his suitcase against the wall and turns on the bedside lamp, fluctuating wildly between titillation and the fear of prolonged unproductive foreplay during which the self-lubricating gears of his body are clogged with guilt.
He’s always been loyal to Stella, other than the time he kissed a woman, an artist, in Aspen’s Hotel Jerome late at night after a fundraiser for PETA. There had been a silent auction, and Adrian had won her painting of a fat nesting grouse. When he came to collect the painting, he cordially introduced himself. She was French, and she took him by the shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks. He’d been drinking with a bit of Vicodin, and to his genuine surprise, his mouth slid across her tight, plump cheek to her lips, and her mouth softened, before he quickly pulled away, grabbed up the painting, and said, “Just beautiful work. Have a great night.” He nearly ran from the place. It was a mistake. Like dropping an envelope when you’re picking up the mail.
Tonight, he knows what’s coming. He’s chosen it. The last thing he needs is to labor against thoughts of Stella standing at the kitchen sink, her knees against his thighs in bed, bows saved and put into a box, Zander with his earbuds on.
Once they unpack, Adrian takes a Cialis and orders himself two vodka martinis from room service. He tells Deborah how happy he is she’s come, and he is, too. He’s seeing to his own joy. He kisses her, long. She tells him she’s happy he’s happy, and he downs the first martini almost like a shot, drilling a tiny hole through his gut for ventilation, while Deborah takes her Dewar’s with a decaf chaser to the bath. Occasionally he hears the water as she splashes it over herself and the clink of the glass on the tub as he waits, not even picking up his phone, thinking how much he wants her to forget his awkwardness and juvenile jealousy on the plane, but by the time he’s halfway though his second drink, she’s slipped, nude and scented, under the covers.
“Let me tell you what I see,” he says, slurring a little, pulling the sheet from her nakedness.
“What do you see, Doc?” she asks, grinning, sly.
“I am not your doctor,” he says, “I am another kind of scientist,” and flings the sheet the rest of the way off. “Compact, curvaceous frame, wide rib cage, short wingspan. Stunning auburn plumage.”
“You scientists love the redheads.”
“Particularly lush plumage”—he sucks the saliva from his lips—“around the pubis, the biological norm for this particular species.”
“Too much? Should I shave a little more?” She swirls a finger in it.
“Lush and dense,” he says, rising to his knees and looking down at her, “and tightly ringed.” His teeth feel like they’ve softened, but this too shall pass.
Deborah slowly opens her knees like a grasshopper and croons, “Mmm . . .”
“Mating behavior evident,” he says, his penis finally hardening to the experiment. “A showy display, perhaps somewhat less common in the female . . .”
She rocks from one butt cheek to the other, back and forth, her inner thigh muscles flexing with each movement, her face growing into a mask of only partially feigned impatience. “Just fuck me,” she says.
“Ah, she seems to want to form what we call a promiscuous pair bond with the polygynous male,” he says, as his head collapses back a little between his own shoulders.
“Okay.” She runs her foot along his calf. “Enough.”
“How about the song?”
She heaves herself back up onto an elbow, lifts her hair at the roots with her fingers and shuffles it. “What?”
“You got a song, don’t you, of some kind?” He looks around for his drink, stretches for it on the bedside table, and finishes it.
“I do not.”
“Well, maybe you could whistle a tune? Then I’ll fuck you.” He falls safely overboard into an old familiar mix of glee and self-loathing, pills and alcohol. He licks his lips then wipes the saliva away with his forearm.
There is a moment when all either of them hears is a stranger in the hallway, sliding a keycard into a lock. Then she licks her lips too, a game expression on her face, and starts to blow.
Only a few seconds into an unidentifiable melody, he rocks her over onto her knees and elbows, her forearms lost in the pillows. Balancing precariously on the soft bed, he holds himself in one hand and enters her, his cheeks hot and eyes squeezed shut, thrusting judiciously. Thrusting. Harder. She brings herself to climax with her fingers; he can feel them rhythmic against his balls. She contracts around him again, again, again, and the instant she loosens her grip on the sheets, he ejaculates.
He pauses, dizzy, as his bravado drains away, then pulls gently out like an apology.
He lowers himself back down to the bed, uncertain, offering his shoulder like he does with his wife, but Deborah sits up to cleanse herself sloppily with the errant sheet, throwing her hair back off her neck. So Adrian stands and steps back into his boxers, steadying himself on the desk chair.
“Thank you,” he says, oddly, then adds, “Sorry.”
She smiles and shakes her head, magnanimously. “It’s all good.”
Nothing else to say, suddenly; they watch a rerun of 30 Rock, and Deborah does fall asleep on his shoulder. When the transitional commercials start to blabber, Adrian moves her aside and turns off the lights—the high in a sickening, swooping decline.
He thinks ceaselessly of the past, of his brother and father arguing about primer and sandpaper and Evan stepping into the tray of blue paint, about the time Michaela got into the Thai pe
pper plant and burned her mouth, about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker he and his mother thought they saw in the Santee Swamp, how the photo she’d taken of the bird was left in the North Carolina house when they fled to Kingston, leaving no evidence for Adrian to examine, to prove or disprove, the crowning moment of his childhood.
Over the course of the next forty minutes, he juggles his pillows in their stiff cases, takes hurried sips of water, and bullfights with the too-short bedclothes, until he downs 2 mg of Lunesta and another half a Vicodin to join Deborah in the void.
• • •
The morning begins dazedly at 5:30 a.m. when Adrian slips into the bathroom to shower and shave before waking Deborah. He thinks it went pretty well with her last night, everything considered, like the fact that he’d been drinking and taking pills and acted like a complete adolescent sadistic freak—but he’s going to focus on his successes, instead of on his thin-limbed children, whom he can’t think about at all, not during the light of day, not now that he’s done what he’s done.
When Deborah gets up, she makes a short braid of her hair and doesn’t take a shower, which Adrian decides he will find sexy, that she’s going to walk around streaked with fluids the full day, the smells of his own body emanating from her powdery smooth thighs.
• • •
They arrive at Bentsen State Park to find the Ruddy Quail-Dove departed.
The wiry park ranger at the scene tells them he’s sorry and offers to give them the name of a great breakfast place. As the adrenaline of disappointment surges into Adrian’s throat, the ranger raises his index finger and takes a phone call from a local birder, a Pete somebody, who followed the dove when it flew away the night before.
“He says he’s looking at it right now,” says the ranger, “forest up near the river.”
