A Personal Matter (15 page)

Bird found himself looking at Himiko as an old and tested warrior in the campaigns of daily life, with incomparably more experience than himself. Not only was she a sexual expert, her competence extended to a myriad other aspects of life in this real world. Bird acknowledged to himself that he was coming under Himiko’s influence: it was thanks to help from her that he had just overcome one of his fears. Had he ever felt so uncomplicated talking with a woman after intercourse? He didn’t think so. After sex, even sex with his wife, Bird had always fallen captive to feelings of self-pity and disgust. He mentioned this to Himiko, without mentioning his wife.

“Self-pity? disgust? Bird, then you couldn’t have been sexually mature. And the women you slept with probably felt self-pity and disgust, too. I bet it was never completely satisfying, was it, Bird?”

Bird was envious; jealous, too. That youth and the little dandy like an egg ogre who had called Himiko from outside her window in the middle of the night must both have had, he felt certain, completely satisfying intercourse with her. As Bird lay in petulant silence, Himiko said, carelessly again, though clearly she was displeased: “There’s nothing as arrogant and shitty as having sex with somebody and then feeling sorry for yourself. Bird, even disgust is better than that!”

“You’re right. But the kind of people who feel sorry for themselves
after sex don’t ordinarily have help from an expert like you, and they’ve lost all their confidence.”

Bird felt as if he were reclining on a psychiatrist’s couch, and when he had emptied himself of unabashed and self-indulgent talk, he began drifting off to sleep, wondering how a young man married to this woman of gold could have committed suicide. Into the dulled emptiness the sleep virus had created in his head, a notion climbed: might Himiko not be making her amends to her dead husband by tolerating Bird and those other two? He had hanged himself in this very room, stepping off this bed, precisely as naked as Bird was now. Summoned that day by a phone call from Himiko, Bird had freed the dead boy’s neck from the noose thrown over the rafters and had helped lower him to the floor, like a butcher in a freezer lowering a side of slaughtered beef from a frosted hook. In the pale dream just below the surface of sleep, Bird saw himself and the dead youth as one. With the part of himself that was awake he could feel Himiko’s hands sponging him dry, while in his dream he apprehended the movement of her trembling hands on his own body as she purified the dead boy. I
am
the dead boy, Bird thought, and the summer about to get under way will be easy to endure, because a dead boy’s body is icy as a winter tree! Trembling then as he struggled toward the surface of his dream, Bird whispered
but I won’t commit suicide!
and sank into the darkness of a deeper sleep.

… Bird’s waking dream was harsh, the reverse face of the innocent dream that had ushered him into sleep, a thing armored in burrs that inspired anguish. Sleep for Bird was a funnel which he entered through the wide and easy entrance and had to leave by the narrow exit. Inflating like a blimp, his body was slowly traversing the dimness of infinite space. He has been subpoenaed by the tribunal beyond the darkness, and he is pondering a means of blinding them to his responsibility for the baby’s death. Ultimately, he knows he will not be able to dupe the jurors, but he feels at the same time that he would like to make an appeal—those people in the hospital did it! Is there nothing I can do to escape punishment? But his suffering grows only more ignoble as he continues to drift, a puny zeppelin.

Bird woke up. Not a muscle that wasn’t stiff and aching, as though he had been lying in the lair of a creature whose body was constructed differently from his own. He felt as though his body were wrapped in layers of plaster cast. Where the hell could I be—at a crucial time like
this! he whispered, thrusting only the antlers of wariness through a vague fog. At a crucial time like this, when he was fighting hand to hand with a baby like a monster! Bird recalled his conversation with the doctor in the ward, and the sensations of peril gave way to those of shame. Not that peril had vanished; it was encysted behind the sensations of shame. Where the hell am I—at a crucial time like this!

Bird raised his voice a little and could hear that it was pickled in the vinegars of fear. He shook his head as though in spasm and—groping for a clue to the nature of the trap of darkness he was caught in—shuddered.

He was naked as a baby, defenseless, and, to make it worse, someone just as naked was curled against him asleep. His wife? Was he sleeping naked with his wife and hadn’t told her yet the secret of the grotesque baby she had just borne? Ah, it couldn’t be! Fearfully Bird put out his hand and touched the naked woman’s head. As he slid his other hand down her naked shoulder to her side (the body was large, opulent, with animal softness, qualities opposite to those of his wife’s body), the naked woman slowly but steadily twined her body around him. Awareness sharpened to clarity, and Bird, as he discovered his lover Himiko, discovered desire as well, desire which no longer stigmatized the attributes of womanhood. Ignoring the pain in his arms and shoulders, Bird embraced Himiko like a bear hugging an enemy. Her body, still fast asleep, was large and heavy. Bird slowly tightened his grip until the girl was pressed against his chest and belly with her head hanging limply backward above his shoulders. Bird peered into her upturned face; rising whitely out of the darkness, it seemed painfully young. Suddenly Himiko woke up, smiled at Bird, and with a slight movement of her head touched him with hot, dry lips. Without changing the position of their bodies, they drifted smoothly into intercourse.

“Bird, can you hold out while I make it?” Himiko’s voice was still asleep. She must have prepared against the danger of pregnancy, for now she had taken the first irreversible step toward her own pleasure.

“Certainly I can hold out,” Bird replied manfully, tensing, a navigator just informed that a storm was on its way. He performed warily, determined that restraint should not be swept away from the movements of his own body. He hoped to make amends now for his pitiful performance in the lumberyard.

“Bird!” Himiko raised a piteous scream that suited the childish face straining upward through the darkness. Like a soldier accompanying a comrade in arms to private battle, Bird stood by in stoic self-restraint while Himiko wrested from their coition the
genuine
something that was all her own. For a very long time after the sexual moment, Himiko’s whole body trembled. Then she grew delicate, helpless, soft in an infinitely feminine way, and finally, releasing a muffled sigh like a baby animal with a full belly, fell fast asleep just where she lay. Bird felt like a rooster watching over a chick. Smelling the healthy odor of sweat that rose from the head half-hidden beneath his chest, he lay perfectly still, supporting his weight on his elbows lest he oppress the girl beneath him. He was still terrifically aroused, but he didn’t want to interrupt Himiko’s natural sleep. Bird had banished the curse on everything feminine that had occupied his brain a few hours ago, and, though she was more womanly than ever, he was able to accept Himiko completely. His astute sexual partner sensed this: soon Bird heard her breathing grow regular and knew that she was fast asleep. But when he tried carefully to withdraw from the girl, he felt something on his penis like the grip of a warm, gentle hand. Himiko was experimenting with a slight retaining action while she slept. Bird tasted mild but wholly sexual satisfaction. He smiled happily and immediately fell asleep.

Once again sleep was like a funnel. Bird entered the sea of sleep with a smile, but on his way back to the shores of reality he was seized by a stifling, claustrophobic dream. He fled from the dream crying. When he opened his eyes, Himiko was awake, too, peering anxiously at his tears.

A
S
Bird started up the stairs toward his wife’s hospital room, his shoes in one hand and a bag of grapefruit under his arm, the young doctor with the glass eye started down. They met halfway. The one-eyed doctor halted several steps above Bird and launched his voice downward in what felt to Bird like high imperiousness. In fact, he said merely, “How is everything?”

“He’s alive,” Bird said.

“And, what about surgery?”

“They’re afraid the baby will weaken and die before they can operate,” Bird said, feeling his upturned face blush.

“Well, that’s probably for the best!”

Bird’s color deepened noticeably and a twitch appeared at the corners of his mouth. His reaction made the doctor blush, too.

“Your wife hasn’t been told about the baby’s brain,” he said, speaking into the air above Bird’s head. “She thinks there’s a defective organ. Of course, the brain
is
an organ, there’s no getting around that, so it’s not a lie. You try lying your way out of a tight spot and you only have to lie all over again when the truth gets out. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Bird said.

“Well then, don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything I can do.” Bird and the doctor bowed decorously and passed each other on the stairs with faces averted. Well, that’s probably for the best! the doctor had said. To weaken and die before they could operate. That meant escaping the burden of a vegetable baby, and without fouling your own hands with its murder. All you had to do was wait for the baby to weaken and die hygienically in a modern hospital ward. Nor was it impossible to forget about it while you waited: that would be Bird’s job.
Well, that’s probably for the best! The sensation of deep and dark shame renewed itself in Bird and he could feel his body stiffen. Like the expectant mothers and the women who had just given birth who passed him in their many-colored rayon nightgowns, like those who carried in their bodies a large, squirming mass, and those who had not quite escaped the memory and habit of it, Bird took short, careful steps. He was pregnant himself, in the womb of his brain, with a large squirming mass that was the sensation of shame. For no real reason, the women in the corridor eyed him haughtily as they passed, and under each glance Bird meekly lowered his head. These were the women who had watched him leave the hospital in an ambulance with his grotesque baby, that same host of pregnant angels. For a minute he was certain they knew what had happened to his son since then. And perhaps, like ventriloquists, they were murmuring at the back of their throats Ah! if it’s that baby you mean, he’s been installed on an efficient conveyer system in an infant slaughterhouse and is weakening to death this very minute—well, that’s probably for the best!

A squalling of many infants beset Bird like a whirlwind. His eye wildly wheeling fell on the rows of cradles in the infant ward. Bird fled down the corridor at a near run: he had a feeling several of the infants had stared back.

In front of the door to his wife’s room, Bird carefully sniffed his hands and arms and shoulders, even his chest. There was no telling how it might complicate his predicament if his wife, waiting for him in her sickbed with her sense of smell honed to keenness, should scent out Himiko’s fragrance on his body. Bird turned around, as if to make certain of an escape route: paused all along the dim corridor, young women in their nightgowns were peering at him through the dimness. Bird considered scowling back but he merely shook his head weakly and turned his back, then gave a timid knock at the door. He was performing the role of the young husband who has been visited by sudden misfortune.

When Bird stepped into the room his mother-in-law was standing with her back to the lush greenery in the window, and his wife was staring in his direction, lifting her head like a weasel beyond the mound of blanket that covered her spread thighs. Both wore startled looks in the greenly tinged, fecund light. In moments of surprise and sadness,
Bird observed, the blood bond between these two women was manifest in all their features and even the slightest gesture.

“I didn’t mean to startle you, I knocked, but lightly—”

“Ah, Bird,” his wife sighed, fixing him with wasted eyes that now were filling rapidly with tears. With her face clean of make-up and the pigment darkly evident on the surface of her skin, she had the firm, boyish look of the tennis player she had been when Bird had met her several years ago. Exposed to her gaze as he was, Bird felt horribly vulnerable; when he had put the bag of grapefruit down on the blanket, he stooped as if to conceal himself and deposited his shoes beneath the bed. If only, he wished ruefully, he could talk from the floor, crawling around like a crab. Out of the question: Bird straightened up, forcing himself to smile.

“Hey,” he sang, working to keep his voice light, “is the pain all gone now?”

“It still hurts periodically. And every so often there’s a contraction like a spasm. Even when I’m not in pain somehow I don’t feel right, and the minute I laugh it hurts.”

“That’s miserable.”

“It is. Bird, what’s wrong with the baby?”

“What’s wrong? That doctor with the glass eye must have explained, didn’t he?” As he spoke, trying to keep the song in his voice, Bird looked quickly in his mother-in-law’s direction, like a boxer with no confidence darting a glance behind him at his trainer. Beyond his wife’s head in the narrow space between the bed and the window, his mother-in-law was transmitting secret signals frantically. Bird couldn’t catch the nuances, only that he was being commanded to say nothing to his wife, that much was clear.

“If they would just tell me what was wrong,” his wife said in a voice as lonely as it was withdrawn. Bird knew that the dark demons of doubt had driven her a hundred times to whisper these same words in this same helpless tone.

“There’s a defective organ somewhere, the doctor won’t talk about the details. They’re probably still testing. Another thing, those university hospitals are bureaucratic as hell!” Bird could smell the stench of his lie even as he told it.

“I just know it must be his heart if they have to make so many tests. But why should my baby have a bad heart?” The dismay in his wife’s
voice made Bird feel again like scuttling around on the floor. Instead, he spoke harshly, affecting the tone of voice of a peevish teen-ager: “Since there are experts on the case why don’t we leave the diagnosing to them! All the speculation in the world isn’t going to do us one damn bit of good!”