Boy, Snow, Bird (5 page)

“I like Mia too.”

“She’s a sweet kid,” he said, and I thought:
What?
You didn’t have to talk to Mia for five minutes to get the message that she wasn’t any sweet kid.

“Why’d you quit teaching?”

I felt him look at me, but I gazed steadily into the pastel pink dawn.

“I’m just trying to look busy, Whitman. I’m throwing myself on your mercy here. If you don’t talk to me, I might not get paid.”

“Ha. All right, since you asked so nicely. Two reasons. First of all history got itchy. As a field of study, I mean.”

“Itchy?”

“Yeah. I’m telling you it itched. I figured it’d pass, but it didn’t. I’d sit in my office with my shirtsleeves rolled up, kind of clawing myself from wrist to elbow—my neck sometimes too. It got so bad I’d have to take my shirt off. I was terrified my wife would think they were love scratches, but . . . anyway, she didn’t think that. No, don’t look at me . . . stay just as you are, if you don’t mind. Talking to you like this reminds me of confession.”

“Well, go on, my child . . .”

“Thank you, Father. I think I got too close to the details of my era of supposed expertise. You lose certainty that anyone or anything is really instrumental; you know, maybe time just does all the deeds from great to despicable, and uses us, and we pitifully try to save face by pretending we were at the controls. From where I was sitting the whole thing looked and felt like a flea circus. Not entertaining, not illuminating, just endlessly pathetic. Why is this flea being made to carry that grain of rice across a stick of spaghetti? Sure, it’s the strongest flea there, the strongman of the crew, but it’s struggling . . . the rice is obviously too heavy. The whole thing’s kind of degrading to watch . . . I decided to quit, with no clear idea of what I wanted my new job to be. That wasn’t as important as planning how to break it to my family that I was about to throw away a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice, theirs and mine. Snow was well on her way to being born, and my wife liked things the way they were; I think her favorite thing about our . . . collaboration was her actor and musician friends rubbing shoulders with my academic colleagues, she liked the atmosphere of challenge, the way anything that came under discussion could be claimed or rejected by either side. Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.”

He rested an elbow on the top railing and stood at a slant that made me think of the crooked man who walked a crooked mile. How does the rest of that nursery rhyme go? Something to do with this crooked man journeying farther and farther along and
coming across crooked things that he takes for his own because nobody else wants them, and then he finds a crooked wife and the two of them have a crooked whale of a time ever after . . . ?

It began to look as if he was just going to stand like that without saying another word for the rest of the boat trip, so I said: “I didn’t know you had to change friends when you change jobs.”

I think he smiled. “You don’t, I guess. I don’t know . . . I sometimes go to dinner with those same people now and I feel like a poser. I get what they’re saying but I’m not as invested in their bickering. I’d rather talk metals. Anyway, back when I was still a professor, I think my wife got wise to me before I even said anything about quitting. She sat me down to tell me, quite urgently and emphatically, how proud she was of all my achievements . . .”

“I think I get the picture. But you said there were two reasons.”

“Right. Good memory. The second reason is that I met a jeweler on the train from Boston to Flax Hill one evening, and we got talking. Making baubles wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before I got talking to that man. Why feed vanity? He said: “Oh, come on now. What do you think you are, a Puritan?” He said any Puritan worth his salt knows that vanity isn’t fussy; it’ll eat almost anything. He said it’s a matter of fact that there’s no way to avoid feeding vanity, no matter what line of work you’re in. He seemed to be doing okay, much better than I was. He was happy with his work. He mentioned that he’d recently left his wife, not for another woman, just for peace of mind, but he continued to look forward to the future and saw no reason why it shouldn’t bring him good things. I picked up his briefcase by mistake as we were getting ready for our stop. We swapped back
almost immediately, of course, but—his briefcase was so light. It was one of those cases that looked heavy—it looked like mine, which was full of printed matter—but its lightness was tempting. It made me want to walk away with it, walk all the way out of my existence and into his. He was going home to eat beans out of a can and sketch fractals into his design book. There were no flea circuses in his life.”

“No Julia in his life, either,” I said, wishing for a cigarette or something to do with my hands. I was learning the ways of the world; one of them being that the presence of a certain type of curly-haired man—your type—will cause you to fidget and fidget until the only way to reach some level of calm is to touch him.

“Right,” he said.

I waited seven heartbeats and then I said: “Yeah, your kind isn’t so rare. Spoiled brat. When he’s a bachelor, life’s tough because he has everything he needs except Miss Right, and when he finds a sweetheart with the full package—beauty, brains, sweet temper—she’s too much, she’s smothering him.”

He poured the rest of the glass of water into the harbor. “Guess I wasted my breath, huh?”

“Guess you did.”

—

at seven a.m.,
as the three of us walked back along the dock in Worcester, the sun shone onto us through wooden slats and Mia pulled off her wig, ran her fingers through her bouncy black hair, and laughed at my expression. She was writing a piece for the
Telegram & Gazette
. She was going to call it “The Secret World of Blondes.” I wondered aloud what she’d managed to find out.

“It’s going to be the final nail in the coffin for blonde-brunette relations,” Arturo predicted. “That or she’ll win a Pulitzer.”

“Very funny . . .” Mia blew him a kiss. She’d promised to give me a lift, so we climbed into her pink roadster and sped away. The road got brighter the farther east we went, and we passed trucks coming into the city. I think Mia wanted to swap some tales about the experience of being blonde, but I didn’t feel like doing any more talking, so I pretended to be asleep. Then I guess I got too committed, because the next thing I knew we were parked outside the boarding house and Mia was tickling me under the nose with a feather.

—

back in my room
I used the windowsill as a desk and wrote a brief and painstakingly breezy note to Charlie Vacic from home, just to tell him that I was still looking after his flag, and to give him my address in case he wanted to write to me.
I’d appreciate it if you kept this address to yourself.

I read it over through the steam from my coffee cup. Over the years there’d been long moments when Charlie and I had looked at each other without blinking, and I’d wondered what it was that was separating us and whether he or I could make it disappear. For my part I was always a little disturbed by him because I’d never heard him tell a lie. That was horrifying to me, like living in a house with every door and window wide open all day long.
When I was in a reasonable mood, I knew Charlie wasn’t for me. The note was only a few words long, but it took me the best part of an hour to get it written because I was aware of how closely he would read it.

The other girls were at work, so the bathroom was all mine. I ran a bath and walked back and forth before the mirror as I tugged at buttons, slowly removing my clothing piece by piece. The sight was unfamiliar, and I imagined I was watching a lover undressing just for me. My lover wasn’t shy. Her motions were calculated, intent. Naked, I gathered the white mass of my hair up in my hand and turned my face from side to side, trying to see what Charlie, or Arturo, or Mia, or anyone saw. Then I moistened my lips with my tongue and walked toward the mirror, not too fast, giving myself time to change my mind, to stop if it felt too peculiar. But it was just peculiar enough. I kissed the glass with my fists against it, kissed wantonly until I felt an ache in my breasts and a throbbing between my legs. There was a taste of blood where my mouth met my mouth, as if our lips were blades.

4

c
harlie Vacic’s reply to my note contained a lot of guff about his sincere hope that I didn’t consider myself under any obligation to him, not even as a pen pal. I happened to know that he’d soon be returning to the city from Albany, so I figured he was sweet on someone else. I considered all the girls we both knew and picked one at random—Jane-Ellen Nugent, she would do—and I wrote to Charlie that I didn’t see what was so great about Jane-Ellen Nugent but I wouldn’t dream of interfering with his happiness and have a nice life.

He sent a telegram:
Cut it out Boy you know where I stand when it comes to you—C.V.

I didn’t know, and said so by return.

His reply:
Can’t believe you’re making me say this am willing to fill any role required by you i.e. buddy best buddy laborer unpaid driver unpaid gardener unpaid father of your children coat etc just tell me which and how we’ll manage come home will square things with your Pa—Charlie

Alarmed, I changed my tune.
You really don’t know that man at all let’s stick to letters from now on you nut—Boy.

He wrote letters, but I didn’t reply. It wasn’t a genuine attachment. We didn’t even have photographs of each other. Charlie’s telegrams were meant for the Grace Kelly look-alike in his mind’s eye, and I—I had written a jealous letter directly to his freckles.

He kept up the letters for three months, then wrapped up his one-sided correspondence with a note that was so . . . like him that I had to show it to Mia.

All right, Boy. You win. I won’t be bothering you anymore. This fella you’ve met out there, whoever he is . . . I was going to write that he’s lucky, but actually I don’t think he is. Because . . . with all due respect . . . I think you’ve got something that looks an awful lot like an attitude problem, and that’s quite aside from the matter of whether or not you left the city with a roll of your Pa’s cash like he says you did. Sorry. I had to be honest. Doesn’t stop me wishing you were my bad luck, though.

So long,

C

We were having a little picnic at the park, Mia and I, wearing daring hats we’d made out of sheets of newsprint. Mia read the note slowly, placing a finger beneath each word, opening her mouth wide every now and again to indicate that I should place a pitted olive in there. That girl was suspiciously good at being
waited on. I’d expected, even wanted, her to laugh at the note, but she didn’t. She touched the letter C at the end.

“Huh,” she said. “Did you really take the money?”

“It wasn’t as much as he makes out. It was practically peanuts.” She refused the next olive, so I ate it myself. “Also I’m going to pay it back.”

“You’re going to Hell, you dirty thief,” she said, in a very mild tone of voice. “But this C—he’s not like you?”

“No. He’s just . . . Charlie.”

“Charlie,” Mia said, around a strawberry. “Charlie. Char-lie.” She pushed her sunshades farther down the bridge of her nose so that I could see her serious eyes. “I think Charlie could really love you,” she said.

“Oh, please,” I said. “What do you think you know about him?”

“All I know is I’d think twice before counting out someone who could really love me.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe you’re a sap.” I tapped a corner of her hat and it collapsed.

—

i got work
as a telephone operator—they said they’d train me up because I had the right voice and manner for it. I counted myself lucky apart from the fact that I kept seeing Arturo Whitman on the way to work. He went running every morning, and I walked to the telephone exchange to save bus fare. Our routes coincided for about half a mile, along a road that swirled around one of the hills like a helter-skelter. That road was called Ivorydown, and I was always glad when I reached the turn onto Willoughby
Street. Not just because of having to observe Arturo running up ahead or approaching from behind (there’s something about being chased by a big strong man with yellowish eyes that makes you feel like an antelope in a bad situation), but because I’ve never liked roads that take you down from steep heights too quickly. Ivorydown was like that, the tyrannical kind of road that makes you take quick little step after quick little step until you’re all the way at the bottom. Cars and buses flowed down the hill with ease, and the people in them watched you placidly through the windows. The road was lined with saplings, but they weren’t there to help, they just stood there making pretty frames for the landscape with their branches. Arturo slowed down to speak to me.

“Hey,” he said, as if he’d completely forgotten that we despised each other. “So when’s our next double date?”

He may have been told that a rakish grin works wonders. If so, he’d been getting bad advice.

I became extremely conscious of the sound of my heels tapping on the concrete. I wanted to stop walking, but the road was forcing us both down it as fast as it could, and he was already a few strides ahead, looking back at me. And so, hurrying after him with only a bunch of saplings, a couple of cars, and a truck to see us, I told him I never wanted to see his stupid face again.

He said: “Oh,” and continued his run. After that he’d pass me on the road without seeming to see me. And I went merrily on to the telephone exchange. I don’t even know what happened to that particular job. I can’t remember if I really tried at it. All those voices buzzing up and down wires, all those switches and dials, a single shift was like a long day out in dry rain. Of all the things
that got to me, I never expected it to be that operator job. I couldn’t work out why, either. It was just people saying hello to each other.