Suicide's Girlfriend (21 page)

When Carson and Candace had first moved to Tucson, Candace immediately set about stripping the ranch-style's walls. The home had
been owned by only one family for the forty years that it had existed, and the built-up layers of paint and paper recorded changes in taste that Candace found fascinating. Originally, the owners had favored bold industrial colors—steel gray, crayon red, lime green. In what Candace supposed were the sixties or seventies, the family's palette had switched to yellow and orange, and a wild daisy print had gone up in the dining room and kitchen. Toward the end, as if nostalgic for an earlier, more eastern America, the family had hung “colonial” wallpapers in dusty blues and greens, and light fixtures with British pretensions. One of the latter, a “carriage lamp” affair, remained tipsily affixed to a post in the front yard, and after Candace had set the mirror and bird food and a bowl of water on the carport roof, and wandered the neighborhood crying up into the trees, and called the newspaper's Lost and Found and the Humane Society and the animal shelter, she hauled one of the backyard's director's chairs out front, and she spent what remained of the evening seated in the carriage lamp's little pool of yellow light.

In deference to the observatories perched on the outlying mountaintops, the city's rules on lighting left its nights much darker than the nights of most cities its size. There were no street lights at all on Candace and Carson's street, and though only rarely did cars travel the road, Candace could not help feeling conspicuous, on display, particularly when—just in case, every few minutes—she called up into the sky, “Phoul! Phoul!”

When not calling up into the trees, Candace read
Frankenstein
, which she found alternatingly boring and fascinating. She was dog-earing the page on which the monster says to Frankenstein, “You are my creator, but I am your Master,” when old Wendell Yelland called a
halloo
from out of the dark, then slowly materialized: first, the white shirt; then the bald head and pale suede shoes.

“Took advantage of its opportunity to escape, huh?” Mr. Yelland said when Candace told him of the loss of the bird.

She did her best to smile. She went on to tell Mr. Yelland about Carson's trip to the Midwest. She knew Mr. Yelland would be interested,
as he originally had come from Illinois. Mr. Yelland liked to explain that he had moved to Arizona for his allergies and asthma many years ago: “Back before everybody brought all the crap down here that gave them allergies up there!” Mr. Yelland always made it clear to Candace that he had been a “gay blade” as a young man in Illinois. “Though not what they mean by ‘gay' now; those people ruined a perfectly good word, if you ask me.”

Tonight, as Mr. Yelland talked, Candace glanced across the street now and then. The Yelland living room's curtains were drawn, and a soft yellow light came through them. Mr. Yelland's wife, Marie, would be over there, doing her treadmill, perhaps, while she watched television. Something was wrong with the Yelland marriage, Candace felt certain. Until the day that a middle-aged woman had stepped across the street to introduce herself to Candace as the visiting
daughter
of Wendell and Marie, Candace had mistaken that pair for sour brother and sister, forced to share a home for reasons of economy.

“Whenever me and my buddy got the chance, we rode the train into the city.” The blooms of the acacia bothered Mr. Yelland during this part of the year, and he coughed and excused himself as he laughed into his handkerchief. “My buddy, Milt, was a little guy, but quite a dancer, and, believe it or not, I was a pretty good-looking fella back then, so we never lacked for fun. You could get into Chicago any hour and still find something to do. This night I'm thinking of, it was about eleven, and we'd taken our bags up to our hotel room, to clean up, you understand. We were staying at the Hilton. That was a pretty swank spot in those days, and when we got on the elevator to go out on the town, by god, there's Ava Gardner on the elevator with us! I poked Milt because I knew right off who she was, and she saw me see her, and she smiles and she says, ‘Say, you boys wouldn't know where a person could get a steak at this hour, would you?' and, by god, if we didn't end up taking Ava Gardner out for a steak dinner!”

Candace hated to have to admit to Mr. Yelland that she did not know the identity of Ava Gardner because, clearly, the news disappointed him. “You watch
The Barefoot Contessa
one of these nights,”
Mr. Yelland said. “Beautiful woman!” He reached his chubby, furrowed hands into the light from the carriage lamp and he struck an imaginary match to show Candace exactly how Ava Gardner had lit his cigarette for him fifty years ago. “And never once took her eyes off mine!” he said. “
That
was star quality.”

At ten o'clock, Candace went inside the house and drew twenty cockatiel posters: bright, jaunty, sure to catch the eye. In the morning, under an odd, oyster-colored sky, she tacked the posters about the neighborhood—hopes rising and falling, again and again as, out of the corner of her eye, she mistook for Phoulish Phlame: a narrow-tailed mourning dove that sat on a telephone wire, a distant airplane, a wood bee, and a butterfly that zoomed in close.

“Phoul! Here, Phoul!”

Few names could have sounded more desperate or dumb, but, away from the boulevard, Candace had no audience. That neighborhood of brick ranch-styles sat quiet during the day. The only sounds to be heard were the low hum of air conditioners and swamp cooler motors, passing jets, traffic on the boulevard, the calls and chatter of the various wild birds: sparrows and Gila woodpeckers, verdins and house finches and doves.

The telephone began to ring as Candace let herself into the house once more: Joyce Burton, wanting to know if Candace's bird had come back.

As patiently as possible, Candace explained. “It can't actually come
back
, you see, because it doesn't know where I live.”

“But, listen,” said Joyce Burton, “I looked to see if you had an ad in the paper yet, and there was another person who'd lost a white cockatiel, so I called her—her name's Maryvonne. I gave her your number and told her I'd have you call—you know, in case either of you found the other one's bird or something?”

Candace wanted to object:
What business did Joyce Burton have telling people that Candace would telephone them?
Still, how could you chew out a woman who had witnessed the death of her sweetheart the week before? You couldn't, and so, with a sigh, Candace took down the number of this Maryvonne.

Maryvonne was at work at a place she identified as Deep Freeze when she answered Candace's call. Immediately, Maryvonne asked—in the sort of depressed Brooklyn accent that Candace associated with “comic” ads for products promising relief from heartburn or diarrhea—“So was your bird a young bird?”
Boid
. “My bird was young. I'm worrying somebody might call you about my bird and you'd keep him, you know?”

Candace's cheeks flushed at such bluntness, and with uncharacteristic aggression, she responded, “I guess I should worry about the same thing happening with you and
my
bird!”

“But I been trying to find mine three weeks now!” Maryvonne protested. “In all sincerity, if I don't find my bird, I think I'm gonna have to kill myself.”

“Do you mean that?” Candace glanced down to the top of Carson's desk, the photo of grinning Rick Haynes. “Because when somebody says something like that, you're supposed to take it seriously.”

“Forget it,” Maryvonne said. She was just
down
, she said. Because of the bird. Her shitty job. Still, she seemed offended that Candace did not know the Deep Freeze. “It
is
the best place in town to get a smoothie.” She sighed. “Anyways, my boss is going to fire me if I go check another bird sighting. You know how many cockatiels are lost in Tucson right now? Six, last I counted.” Here, Maryvonne raised her voice to cry out to someone at Deep Freeze, “I know you're listening to me, Bruce! You laugh, but I know you're listening!”

How old was Maryvonne, Candace wondered. Nineteen? Fifty? In an effort to cheer the woman, Candace offered up her litany of optimistic cockatiel facts. To which Maryvonne responded that their white hybrids were in particular danger, even if they did find a flock; in the wild, Maryvonne explained, the flocks were made up of
gray
birds. “'Cause
they all look alike, that gives them protection, see, since the enemy has a hard time keeping track of which bird he wants to catch—”

Alarmed by such news, and the possibility of worse to come, Candace interrupted, “We should probably get off, though. In case someone's trying to call us.”

“You don't have a message machine?” Maryvonne snorted. “You wait. Since I lost my bird, I got it all. Caller ID, Call Transfer. You name it. And, hey, I got a recording of cockatiels you could try. You can borrow it this morning while I'm working—if you don't mind driving over here.”

“Oh.” Candace shivered—intrigued, alarmed. What if it turned out that Maryvonne was wonderful and the two became the best of friends? Or Maryvonne was totally insane and could not be gotten rid of ever? Or Candace liked Maryvonne but Carson did not? “Well, thanks, but I think I'll see if anyone calls first.”

“Just a
minute,
” Maryvonne snapped, then added, “not
you
, what's your name . . . Candace. Not you. I was talking to Bruce, here. Anyway, what bothers me—I'd feel better if I thought my bird
wanted
to go. That's what people think, you know, like, all along, he was just
dying
to escape from me.”

“I know,” Candace said. “I know. You sure you're okay, though? About what you said earlier? About killing yourself?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

After Candace hung up the phone, she gave a yank on the middle drawer of Carson's desk. She meant to put the Rick Haynes flyer out of sight. The drawer, however, old and rarely used by Carson because of its crotchety ways, tipped forward and its small store of odds and ends spilled on the study floor. Candace was still picking up pens and clips when the telephone rang again.

Carson?

Maryvonne. Maryvonne had just received a telephone call from the receptionist at Valley National Bank! “A white cockatiel's sitting over their entrance! Can you get over there, 'cause Bruce'll kill me if I leave?”

Candace knew Valley National. A white mosquelike bank. Not too far off. Two miles? “Wait for me, Phoul,” she murmured as she ran out to the curb and the ancient Buick Electra that had been a hand-me-down from Carson's parents. To Candace's relief, the thing started on the second try and, then, there was actually some pleasure—or stimulation, at any rate—in being a maniac on a rescue mission.

She was already parking the car in the bank lot when she realized she had failed to bring the bird's cage. A rather serious error, but one without consequences: the bird was not Phoulish Phlame. Candace knew this as soon as she stepped from the car and heard the cries. Before that moment, she would not have known that she knew the particular sound of her bird's voice. Even so, the cries of that strange bird on the thin ledge above the bank's gloomy tinted glass door stirred her, much the way the cries of any baby would have stirred her. Poor thing. Candace could see why it had chosen the spot over the door. There, it was high off the ground, and the smoked-glass windows made a mirror that convinced the bird it was not alone.

“Phoul,” Candace called, in order to assert to those customers passing in and out the bank's door that she had a relationship to the bird, had a reason to be there. Some of the customers ignored Candace. Some smiled. Some looked up at the bird and shook their heads as if annoyed. A man with a purple yarmulke bobby-pinned to his fine net of hair stopped and asked, “How'd you lose it?” and Candace felt obliged to explain that the bird was not really her own bird, though her own bird
was
lost, and then—as if irritated or maybe just bored by the conversation—the bird over the door flew off with a squawk to a stand of eucalyptus across the street. “Excuse me,” Candace said to the man in the yarmulke and hurried into the bank.

The receptionist had apparently been watching through the window and she stood right up from her desk. A friendly woman, Candace could tell. A little old-fashioned and wearing a cardigan against the bank's deep air-conditioning. “Was it your bird?” she asked Candace.

No, but did the receptionist still have the number of the woman she had spoken to earlier? The woman from the newspaper? Maryvonne?

“Oh, hell,” said Maryvonne when Candace finished her update. “I got to quit this job. And don't make that face at me, Bruce! I'm going to take my tape over by that bank and see if it's my bird!”

Hand over the telephone's mouthpiece, Candace smiled at the waiting receptionist and whispered, “She's coming,” then said into the telephone, “So, good luck, Maryvonne.”

“You're not going to wait?” Maryvonne sounded hurt and a little angry. “What if it's your bird?”

“It's not my bird. I knew, right off,” Candace said, but could tell that in her eagerness to get off the telephone, she sounded as if she lied.