My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

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  people gossiped, she said. My sister had only gone out with the boy ten or twelve times. They were just getting to know each other. Then my mother began to receive calls; someone had heard from a friend of Mrs.

  Bruster’s that Mrs. Bruster had said her son was very serious about my sister, who was a very charming, very pretty girl, of good family. . . .

  My mother rubbed her hands with glee. She borrowed money from her brothers, and every week my sister had new clothes.

  My sister would come home from work and run upstairs to change.

  Sonny would be due at seven, to take her out to dinner. My sister would kick her shoes off, struggle out of her dress, and dash around the upstairs in her slip.

  “Mother, I can’t find my earrings.”

  “Which earrings, dear?”

  “The little pearls—the little tiny pearl ones that I got two Easters ago, to go with my black . . .”

  My sister was delighted with herself. She loved being talked about, being envied.

  “Mother, do you know what Ceil Johnson said to me today? She said that Beryl Feringhaus—you know, the real-estate people—was heartbroken because she thought Sonny Bruster was going to get engaged to her.” My sister giggled. Her long hair was tangled, and my mother yanked a comb through it.

  “Maybe you ought to cut your hair,” my mother said, trying to hide her own excitement and to stay practical. During this period, my mother was living in the imminence of wealth. Whenever she stopped what she was doing and looked up, her face would be bright with visions.

  That spring when I was sixteen, more than anything else in the world I wanted to be a success when I grew up. I did not know there was any other way of being lovable. My best friend was a boy named Preston, who already had a heavy beard. He was shy, and unfortunate in his deal-ings with other people, and he wanted to be a physicist. He had very little imagination, and he pitied anyone who did have it. “You and the word ‘beautiful’!” he would say disdainfully, holding his nose and imitating my voice. “Tell me—what does ‘beautiful’ mean?”

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  “It ’s something you want,” I would say.

  “You’re an aesthete,” Preston would say. “I’m a scientist. That ’s the difference.”

  He and I used to call each other almost every night and have long, profound talks on the telephone.

  On a date, Preston would sit beside his girl and stolidly eye her. Occasionally, toward the end of the evening, he would begin to breathe heavily, and he would make a few labored, daring jokes. He might catch the girl’s hand and stare at her with inflamed and wistful eyes, or he might mutter incoherent compliments. Girls liked him, and escaped easily from his clumsy longing. They slipped their hands from his grasp and asked him to call them up again, but after a few dates with a girl Preston would say disgustedly, “All she does is talk. She ’s frigid or something. . . .”

  But the truth was, he was afraid of hurting them, of doing something wrong to them, and he never really courted them at all.

  At school, Preston and I had afternoon study hall together. Study hall was in the library, which was filled with the breathing of a hundred and fifty students, and with the dim, half-fainting breezes of high spring, and with books: it was the crossroads of the world. Preston and I would sign out separately, and meet in the lavatory. There we would lean up against the stalls and talk. Preston was full of thoughts; he was tormented by all his ideas. “Do you know what relativity means?” he would ask me. “Do you realize how it affects every little detail of everyday life?” Or it might be Spinoza that moved him: “Eighteenth-century, but by God there was a rational man.” I would pace up and down, half listening, half daydreaming, wishing my name would appear on Preston’s list of people who had elements of greatness.

  Or we talked about our problems. “I’m not popular,” I would say.

  “I’m too gloomy.”

  “Why is that, do you think?” Preston would ask.

  “I don’t know,” I would say. “I’m a virgin. That has a lot to do with everything.”

  “Listen,” Preston said one day, “you may not be popular but you’re likable. Your trouble is you’re a snob.” He walked up and down the white-tiled floor, mimicking me. He slouched, and cast his eyes down,

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  and jutted his chin out, and pulled a foolish, serious look over his face.

  “Is that me?” I cried, heartbroken.

  “Well, almost,” Preston said.

  Or, leaning on the window sill, sticking our heads out into the golden afternoon air and watching a girl’s gym class doing archery under the trees, we talked about sex.

  “It starts in the infant,” Preston said. “And it lasts forever.”

  “Saints escape it,” I said mournfully.

  “The hell they do,” Preston said. The girls beneath us on the hillside drew their bows. Their thin green gym suits fluttered against their bodies.

  “Aren’t they nice?” Preston asked longingly. “Aren’t they wonderful?”

  After school, Preston and I went out for track. The outdoor track was a cinder oval surrounding the football field. A steep, grassy hill led up to the entrance of the school locker room. “Run up that hill every night, boys,” the coach pleaded—Old Mackyz, with his paunch and his iron-gray wavy hair—at the end of the practice period. “Run, boys, because when you’re abso-lootly exhausted, that ’s when you got to give more. It ’s the more, boys, that makes champions.” And then he ’d stand there, humble, and touched by his own speech.

  During our warmup sessions, we used to jog-trot the length of the field and back again, keeping our knees high. The grand inutility of this movement filled me with something like exaltation; and on every side of me, in irregular lines, my fellow-males jogged, keeping their knees high.

  What happiness!

  “The turf ’s too springy,” Preston would mumble. “Bad for the muscles.” Preston was a miler. He was thickset and without natural grace; Mackyz said he had no talent, but he ran doggedly, and he became a good miler. I ran the 440. I was tall and thin, and even Mackyz said I ought to be good at it, but I wasn’t. Mackyz said I didn’t have the spirit. “All you smart boys are alike,” he said. “You haven’t got the heart for it. You always hold back. You’re all a bunch of goldbricks.” I tried to cure my maimed enthusiasm. As I ran, Mackyz would bawl desperately, “Hit the ground harder. Hit with your toes! Spring, boy! spring! Don’t coddle yourself, for Christ ’s sake. . . .” After a race, I’d throw myself down on

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  a knoll near the finish line, under a sycamore tree, where the track manager dug a new hole every day for us to puke in. Three or four others would join me, and we ’d lie there wearily, our chests burning, too weak to move.

  Among my other problems was that I was reduced nearly to a

  state of tears over my own looks whenever I looked at a boy named Joel Bush. Joel was so incredibly good-looking that none of the boys could quite bear the fact of his existence; his looks weren’t particularly masculine or clean-cut, and he wasn’t a fine figure of a boy—he was merely beautiful. He looked like a statue that had been rubbed with honey and warm wax, to get a golden tone, and he carried at all times, in the neatness of his features and the secret proportions of his face and body that made him so handsome in that particular way, the threat of seduction. Displease me, he seemed to say, and I’ll get you. I’ll make you fall in love with me and I’ll turn you into a donkey. Everyone either avoided him or gave in to him; teachers refused to catch him cheating, boys never teased him, and no one ever told him off. One day I saw him saying goodbye to a girl after school, and as he left her to join me, walking toward the locker room, he said to her, “Meet you here at five-thirty.” Track wasn’t over until six, and I could tell that he had no intention of meeti
ng her, and yet, when he asked me about some experiments we had done in physics, instead of treating him like someone who had just behaved like a heel, I told him everything I knew.

  He never joined us under the sycamore tree, and he ran effortlessly.

  He would pass the finish line, his chest heaving under his sweat-stained track shirt, and climb into the stands and sit in the sunlight. I was watching him, one afternoon, as he sat there wiping his face and turning his head from side to side. At one moment it was all silver except for the charred hollows of his eyes, and the next it was young and perfect, the head we all recognized as his.

  Mackyz saw him and called out to him to put his sweatshirt on before he caught a cold. As he slipped the sweatshirt on, Joel shouted, “Aw, go fry your head!” Mackyz laughed good-naturedly.

  Sprinkled here and there on the football field were boys lifting their

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  arms high and then sweeping them down to touch their toes, or lying on their backs and bicycling their legs in the air. I got up and walked toward them, to do a little jog-trotting and high-knee prancing. I looked at Joel.

  “I’m cooling off,” he said to me. I walked on, and just then a flock of crows wheeled up behind the oak tree on the hill and filled the sky with their vibrant motion. Everyone—even Preston—paused and looked up.

  The birds rose in a half circle and then glided, scythelike, with wings outspread, on a down current of air until they were only twenty feet or so above the ground; then they flapped their wings with a noise like sheets being shaken out, and soared aloft, dragging their shadows up the stepped concrete geometry of the stands, past Joel’s handsome, rigid figure, off into the sky.

  “Whaddya know about that?” Mackyz said. “Biggest flock of crows

  I ever saw.”

  “Why didn’t you get your gun and shoot a couple?” Joel called out.

  Everyone turned. “Then you’d have some crow handy whenever you

  had to eat some,” Joel said.

  “Take a lap,” Mackyz bawled, his leathery face turning red up to the roots of his iron-gray hair.

  “He was only kidding,” I said, appalled at Mackyz’s hurt.

  Mackyz looked at me and scowled, “You can take a lap too, and don’t talk so much.”

  I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies sprawled out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The whole secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing—not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing—could have made up for the curious pain of the effort.

  About halfway around the track, Joel caught up to me, and then

  he slowed down and ran alongside. “Mackyz isn’t watching,” he said.

  “Let ’s sneak up the hill.” I looked and saw that Mackyz was lining up the team for high-jump practice. Joel sailed up over the crest of the hill, and I followed him.

  “He ’s getting senile,” Joel said, dropping to a sitting position, sight-

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  ing over the crest of the hill at Mackyz, and then lying down. “Come on, jerk, lie down. You want Mackyz to see you?”

  I was uneasy; this sort of fooling was all right for Joel, because he

  “made the effort,” but if Mackyz caught me, he ’d kick me off the team.

  I pointed this out to Joel.

  “Aw, Mackyz takes everything too seriously. That ’s his problem,”

  Joel said. “He ’s always up in the air about something. I don’t see why he makes so much fuss. You ever notice how old men make a big fuss over everything?”

  “Mackyz’ not so old.”

  “All right, you ever notice how middle-aged men make a big fuss over everything?” A few seconds later, he said casually, his gaze resting on the underside of the leaves of the oak tree, “I got laid last night.”

  “No kidding?” I said.

  He spread his fingers over his face, no doubt to see them turn orange in the sunlight, as children do. “Yeah,” he said.

  From the football field came the sounds of high-jump practice starting. Mackyz was shouting, “Now, start with your left foot—one, two, three—take off ! take off, goddamn it! Spread your Goddamned legs, spread ’em. You won’t get ruptured. There’s sand to catch you, for Christ ’s sake.” The jumper’s footsteps made a series of thuds, there was a pause, and then the sound of the landing in the sand. Lifting my head, I could see the line of boys waiting to jump, the lead boy breaking into a run, leaping from the ground, and spreading his arms in athletic entreaty.

  “It was disappointing,” Joel said.

  “How?” I asked.

  “It ’s nothing very special.”

  I was aroused by this exposé. “You mean the books—”

  “It ’s not like that at all.” He turned sullenly and scrabbled with his fingers in the dirt. “It ’s like masturbation, kind of with bells.”

  “Maybe the girl didn’t know how to do it.”

  “She was a grown woman!”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “She was a fully grown woman! She knew what she was doing!”

  “Oh,” I said. Then, after a minute, “Look, would you mind telling

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  me what you said to her? If I ever had a chance, I wouldn’t know what to say. I . . .”

  “I don’t remember,” Joel said. “We just looked at each other, and then she got all tearful, and she told me to take my clothes off.”

  We lay there a moment, in the late afternoon sunshine, and then I said we ’d better be getting back. We walked around behind the hill, and waited until Mackyz wasn’t looking before we sprinted out onto the track.

  The jumping went on for fifteen or twenty minutes more; then

  Mackyz raised his arms in a gesture of benediction. “All right, you squirts—all out on the track for a fast lap. And that includes you, goldbrick,” he said to me, wagging his finger.

  All the boys straightened up and started toward the track. The

  sun’s light poured in long low rays over the roof of the school. Jostling and joking, we started to run. “Faster!” Mackyz yelled. “Faster! Whatsa matter—you all a bunch of girls! Faster! For Christ ’s sake, faster!”

  Since Preston, in his dogged effort to become a good miler, ran three laps to everyone else ’s one, he was usually the last in the locker room.

  He would come in, worn out and breathing heavily; sometimes he even had to hold himself up with one hand on his locker while he undressed.

  Everyone else would long since have showered and would be almost

  ready to leave. They might make one or two remarks about Preston’s running his legs down to stumps or trying to kill himself for Mackyz’

  sake. Preston would smile numbly while he tried to get his breath back, and somehow, I was always surprised by how little attention was paid to Preston, how cut off and how alone he was.

  More often than not, Joel would be showing off in the locker room—

  walking around on his hands, singing dirty songs, or engaged in some argument or other. Preston would go into the shower. I would talk to Joel, dressing slowly, because I usually waited for Preston. By the time I was all dressed, the locker room would be empty and Preston would still be towelling himself off. Then, instead of hurrying to put his clothes on, he would run his hand over his chest, to curl the few limp hairs. “Oh come on!” I would say, disgustedly.

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  “Hold your horses,” he would say, with his maddening physicist ’s serenity. “Just you hold your horses.”

  It took him half an hour to get dressed. He ’d stand in front of the mirr
or and flex his muscles endlessly and admire the line his pectorals made across his broad rib cage, and he always left his shirt until last, even until after he had combed his hair. I found his vanity confusing; he was far from handsome, with his heavy mouth and bushy eyebrows and thick, sloping shoulders, but he loved his reflection and he ’d turn and gaze at himself in the mirror from all sorts of angles while he buttoned his shirt. He hated Joel. “There ’s a guy who’ll never amount to much,”

  Preston would say. “He ’s chicken. And he ’s not very smart. I don’t see why you want him to like you—except that you’re a sucker. You let your eyes run away with your judgment.” I put up with all this because I wanted Preston to walk me part way home. It seemed shameful somehow to have to walk home alone.

  Finally, he would finish, and we would emerge from the now deserted school into the dying afternoon. As we walked, Preston harangued me about my lack of standards and judgment. The hunger I had for holding school office and for being well thought of he dismissed as a streak of lousy bourgeois cowardice. I agreed with him (I didn’t like myself anyway); but what was to be done about it? “We might run away,” Preston said, squinting up at the sky. “Hitchhike. Work in factories. Go to a whorehouse. . . .” I leaned against a tree trunk, and Preston stood with one foot on the curb and one foot in the street, and we lobbed pebbles back and forth. “We ’re doomed,” Preston said. “Doom” was one of

  his favorite words, along with “culture,” “kinetic,” and “the Absolute.”

  “We come from a dying culture,” he said.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. “It certainly looks that way.” But then I cheered up. “After all, it ’s not as if we were insane or anything.”

  “It wouldn’t show yet,” Preston said gloomily. “It ’s still in the latent stage. It ’ll come out later. You’ll see. After all, you’re still living at home, and you’ve got your half-assed charm—”

  I broke in; I’d never had a compliment from him before.

  “I didn’t say you were charming,” he said. “I said you have a half-assed charm. You behave well in public. That’s all I meant.”

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