The Wallcreeper (5 page)

“But that’s not it,” he said. “I will take custody of this baby. I will care for it, nurse it. I will receive a minimum of social help money and I will stop working at the petrol station. But I cannot stay living in this rat-hole. I will move to a new house.”

“What ex-wife? You could start by explaining what ex-wife you’re talking about.”

“My second wife, Alexandra in Geneva.”

“Oh, Elvis,” I said. “You’re literally driving me insane.”

I covered my eyes with my hands and thought: Back when I met Elvis it took me one look to know this guy gets into scrapes. I just didn’t know what kind of scrapes, beyond sleeping with me because I was female. When I met Stephen, on the other hand, it was obvious that we were the same sub-subspecies of control freak. Even my parents saw it. Stephen has a fair level of control, and he figures at some point I’ll get control and stop spending all my time compulsively coming up with ways to excuse my lack of it. He has those seven habits of highly effective people, and he’s graciously letting me pick up one habit at a time. Elvis, though; I can’t even tell whether Elvis is asking me for money. “Are you asking me for money?” I asked.

I didn’t tell Stephen I had broken up with Elvis, because I wasn’t really sure he didn’t think it had been over a while ago. So I kept quiet and signed up for a German course. High German. A language with actual books. I was tired of
chlütterle.
I had to do something, because the minute I broke up with Elvis, I fell in love with him. I loved Stephen’s disinformation dumps, but they wore me out. I missed Elvis’s scattershot stupidity. It had been like a dalliance with a sixteen-year-old shepherdess, and my marriage was starting to feel like an exercise in opportunity cost.

I knew from reading
The Joy Luck Club
at the tearful insistence of my mother that sex is legal tender for all debts public and private, while husbands should be exploited to the max and beyond, but without Elvis coming over anymore, I couldn’t even sit in my bed and read without being overwhelmed by memories. I couldn’t even call them memories. Actually I was painfully turned on. I felt like a cat in heat with hallucinations. I thought, Wow, love is as strong as death! I never understood that before, and now I know it! And all because I—as in me, personally, of my own accord—ordered Elvis to stop coming around. I felt like generations of bluesmen whining about women they shot to death.

Then I realized that if I was looking for a sixteen-year-old shepherdess, I didn’t have to look farther than my own black, jagged heart, and I picked myself up and went to class.

Word of Rudi’s location spread like a slow fire in a coal seam. Birders called confidentially and conspiratorially to get permission to come by. After a while he was pretty much trained. I would put him on the crown molding and he would drop and fly back up while cameras whirred and lenses purred, each worth more than our car. A feature appeared in
Gefiederte Welt.
I had been afraid of turning into a poster child, but once they saw Rudi, no one looked at me anymore. Long before it was time for him to leave for the mountains, there were voices calling for a GPS transponder. Stephen and I liked the idea. We could go visit him in summer, assuming he wasn’t hanging around in some inaccessible chasm. Maybe meet his family! Or at least see him collect nesting material. The transponders they have now are little tiny things, no more burden than, say, a quarter in my pocket would be for me. That’s what they told us, and it sounded plausible enough. It would increase his body weight, but given how much better he ate than most wallcreepers in winter, he ought to be able to handle the strain.

Stephen had undergone a subtle but perceptible emotional shift from thinking of the wallcreeper as
Tichodroma muraria
to thinking of him as our unique and irreplaceable friend Rudi. You might think now would have been a good time to build him an aviary and buy bird toys. But his coal-black chin, his restlessness, that ceaseless shrieking—his tiny sex drive was reducing him to a gemlike flame. Our instincts were sufficient to find him attractive, delightful, and guilt-inducing, but not sexy. He had to go away. But not entirely away. That was our plan. The ornithologist gave him three colored bands and a chip on the small of his back.

One Saturday we found him. Stephen drove almost to the edge of a chasm, set up the scope, and scanned the rock wall below us. Finally he said, “There’s Rudi. Hey, Rudi! Hey, he’s got a nest! Way to go, Rudi! Check him out. He’s hiding. Mother fuck!”

I got my binoculars focused on Rudi in time to see the tiny hawk raise his head wet to the nostrils with Rudi’s blood and plunge it again into Rudi’s chest. Rudi’s beautiful red and black wings with their absurd white polka dots twitched, twitched again, and died. The hawk ate his heart and flew away.

Stephen sat down and hyperventilated. Rudi’s wife hopped once and flicked her wings. Then she, too, flew away. I suspected her of leaving nestlings to die because she was too damn lazy to raise them alone. “Fucking bitch,” I said.

“I hope that motherfucking bastard dies,” Stephen said. “If I had a gun I would shoot every motherfucking sparrowhawk in the whole goddamn Alps.”

When Rudi died, Stephen stopped raising his eyes above the horizontal. He stopped going out at night or to the marsh. He read every word of the newspaper, offering lengthy, cogent commentary on the financial news as if he had been asked to join the president’s council of economic advisers. He enlightened me on the relations between oil-producing and -consuming states as if he were grooming me for a position on his staff. His personal interests were sub-rogated to those of the mass media, and he began to seem like a nearly normal person. He stopped shaking. He never got excited. When he went to bed his face turned into a slack, unhappy mask and he never looked at me before he closed his eyes.

Stephen’s grief humanized him. I began to fall in love.

While Stephen was out on Saturday morning buying ingredients for a salad, Omar’s wife appeared at our door excited and trembling. She blew her nose and told me Omar had applied for a transfer to Topeka and she couldn’t imagine life without us. “Now I’m sorry I never touched your red-hot husband,” she said, flopping down on the couch.

It was clear that she meant to imply that her failure to seduce Stephen created a major obligation on my part. She could easily have taken him, who was my sole and only meal ticket as far as anybody could tell, but she hadn’t and now I owed her one.

“I didn’t realize how much you meant to me until Omar’s news came through,” she said. “My heart just tore in little pieces. I couldn’t figure out why. I felt so forlorn and disoriented. I ended up walking around until I was standing under Stephen’s window at the lab, just hoping to see him. That’s when I realized you’re the only people I care about in this town. I’m going to miss you both so much!”

Stephen’s lab was a solid car ride away and his office was on the ground floor of a modernist R&D-campus building that overlooked a compensatory wetland like an amphitheater, so what she said made no particular sense. She had probably tried to get his attention through the window because she couldn’t get past the security at the doors in her jogging outfit, and probably eight hundred guys saw her, and so much for Stephen’s plan of professional advancement via the chi of an irreproachable family life. Maybe they had been sleeping together, before Rudi died and Stephen withdrew from everything and everybody? Or did it make more sense if they had been doing it afterwards? Stephen had been very distant.

“That’s a shame,” I said. “I can’t speak for myself, but Stephen’s definitely a very special guy. It’s sweet of you to think you’ll miss us.”

“Oh, Tiff. The truth is, Stephen means the world to me.”

I shook my head.

“Don’t worry,” she added. “It’s unrequited love. I don’t think he knows I’m alive.”

I shook my head again, mostly because I couldn’t imagine an adult woman claiming to be in love without having slept with the guy first. But you never know. Maybe she was the kind who feels guilty when she commits adultery in her heart?

“Omar is a wonderful man,” she explained. “But you know how sometimes one person can, what I mean is, I think my relationship with Omar was working mostly because Stephen was giving me something Omar just can’t give me. I mean Stephen’s way of talking, that sort of wild side he has. Omar’s a very conventional guy. Sometimes I feel like he’s kind of two-dimensional.” She stumbled along, obviously unused to explaining her actions or motivations to anyone and therefore making them as transparent as frog spawn. She wasn’t up to prevaricating with every word, the skill she so admired in Stephen. It takes a lifetime of practice. She had found her master, her teacher, too late. She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it.

I more or less stopped listening and filled in for her. Stephen, I thought to myself, is like a comet in near-earth orbit whose magnificent tail, streaming in the solar wind, defies long-standing questions regarding its ultimate composition, and compared to him Omar doesn’t even seem quite human—I mean in the classical sense of being made in the image of a god or God—whereas Stephen possesses the indefinable divine spark that arises from friction between an infinitely complex universe and the unfathomable enigma of subjectivity, plus Omar is compulsive and getting seriously chubby from all the overtime he does. According to Stephen, he basically lives in the lab.

“I have a big crush on Stephen,” I said. “I can see where you like him. But I bet there are plenty of cool guys in Topeka. I mean, out there they don’t have any choice! People in Topeka can’t stumble around like culture zombies following all the latest trends. They have to get creative. You’re going to like the Midwest, I swear. There’s more real art going on in one square inch of Midwest than in all of New York City. We’ll come see you! Who knows, maybe Stephen will end up getting transferred there, too. What’s Omar working on?”

“The contraption. The regulatory environment is better in the U.S.” she said.

The contraption was somehow based on the stent, but I didn’t know it had anything to do with animal health, or even what it was.

She told me, if not in so many words: “The female-to-male transsexual market is much more lucrative when it’s not covered by health insurance. You know how the companies negotiate the prices down.”

“Right,” I said.

“And you can’t do experimental surgery on higher primates in Switzerland. It’s impossible. I mean, this place has a formal policy on the dignity of
plant
life!”

She wanted to be sardonic but conveyed only vain indignation. Incapacity for irony was another thing keeping her from coming across, where Stephen was concerned, as anything but horny.

“In Topeka they can probably get human volunteers,” I said. “They’re cheaper than pygmy chimps.”

“In my opinion the transsexual indication is one big smokescreen. The contraption is for everybody.” She held my gaze steadily. “Once it has regulatory approval, it’s going to be an off-label gold mine.”

I realized she was offering me an insider stock tip. I asked her how far the contraption was down the pipeline.

“It’s not even phase one, but it’s two years to launch,” she said. “It’s accelerated because the application is so exotic nobody cares whether it’s safe.”

“It reminds me of, like, a Kurt Vonnegut story,” I said. “No way it will sell to anybody in his right mind. I remember they tried to move Stephen to the contraption six months ago and he said no way.”

“I wish Omar were as smart as Stephen,” she sighed.

“Omar’s going to have a way bigger career than Stephen,” I assured her. “I mean, you already said this project has huge potential, right? And he’s got a lead position, right? So where’s he going to be coming off it? Looking pretty good! It’s definitely a step up from the beagles. You can kick back and play tennis in Topeka for a couple years, then come back here with vice president Omar and live the life of Riley! Stephen will still be futzing around doing God knows what when you get back. You’re not going to miss anything. His amazing brain isn’t going anywhere. He’ll be fat and bald with a heart condition because he never gets any exercise except driving and eating tater tots” (tater tots, known as
Rösti
, are a staple of the Swiss diet), “but trust me, he’ll be here.”

“Look at me,” she said. “I’m a woman.” Irony was truly not her forte.

“Stephen’s a stick-in-the-mud,” I said. “He’s heavy into inertia. It leaves him plenty of time to think, but it’s not something I’d be idealizing if I were you.”

“I just can’t imagine not seeing him anymore.”

“What I’m telling you is, Stephen is a creature of habit. He’s not sexy. There are a billion sexier guys in Berne. Just go to any bar.” I jumped up and put an end to the vulgarity of our conversation by moving toward the kitchen to get more coffee.

She raised her voice and said, “Omar is an amazing lover, by the way.”

That did it. I came back jittery. “God! Jesus!” I said. “What do you want from me?”

“Do you know about the Swiss law on divorce?” she said. “If Omar fools around on me, even once, I can keep the apartment. And alimony! It’s like the 1950s! I know you better than you think. Can you do this for me? I know Omar adores you. I know you’ll say he’s Stephen’s best friend, but that just makes it worse, as in even better!”

“You’re that scared of
Topeka
?” I said. “It’s not the South Pole!”

“I can’t survive another day with Omar. He’s driving me crazy. I’m going insane with boredom. I’m so in love with Stephen, and you don’t care about Stephen! Come on! It would mean so much to me to be able to stay in Berne.”

“Hey, I like Berne, too,” I said. “Plus I think Stephen likes me better than he likes you. As in, I’m not sure your odds are so great.”

She scoffed.

“I’ve come to realize,” I said, “that there’s generally something special about the person you would marry. It’s not like I ever married anybody else. But I married Stephen, and he married me. I still don’t know why it seemed like the thing to do, but I don’t regret it, and neither does he.”