A Personal Matter (17 page)

“If you abandoned our baby, I think I’d probably divorce you, Bird,” his wife said, unmistakably a line she had rehearsed in bed, her legs raised in front of her, gazing at the greenery that filled the window.

“Divorce? We wouldn’t get divorced.”

“Maybe not, but we’d argue about it for a long time, Bird.” And in the end, Bird thought, when it had been determined that he was a craven type not to be relied on, he would be turned out to live the rest of his melancholy life as a man unfit to be a husband. Right now, in that overbright hospital ward, that baby is weakening and about to die. And I’m just waiting for it to happen. But my wife is staking the future of our married life on whether I take sufficient responsibility for the baby’s recovery—I’m playing a game I’ve already lost. Still, for the present, Bird could only perform his duty. “The baby’s just not going to die,” he said with many-faceted chagrin.

Just then his mother-in-law came in with the tea. Since she was trying not to telegraph their grim exchange in the corridor, and since Bird’s wife was determined to conceal from her mother the enmity between herself and Bird, their little conversation over tea was comprised, for the first time, of ordinary talk. Bird even attempted some dry humor with an account of the baby without a liver and the little man who was its father.

Just to make certain, Bird looked back at the hospital windows and verified that all of them were masked behind trees in lush leaf before he approached the scarlet sports car. Himiko was fast asleep, wedged under the steering wheel as if she were bundled into a sleeping bag, her
head on the low seat. As Bird bent forward to shake her awake, he began to feel as if he had escaped encirclement by strangers and had returned to his true family. Guiltily, he looked back at the branches rustling high at the top of the ginkgo trees. “Hi, Bird!” Himiko greeted him from the MG like an American co-ed, then wiggled out from under the steering wheel and opened the door for him. Bird got in quickly.

“Would you mind going to my apartment first? We can stop at the bank on the way to the other hospital.”

Himiko pulled out of the driveway and immediately accelerated with a roar of exhaust. Bird, thrown off balance, told Himiko the way to the house with his back still pinned against the seat.

“You sure you’re awake? Or do you think you’re flying down a highway in a dream?”

“Of course I’m awake, Bird! I dreamed I was making it with you.”

“Is that all you ever think about?” Bird asked in simple surprise.

“Yes, after a trip like last night. It doesn’t happen that way often, and even with you that same tension isn’t going to last forever. Bird, wouldn’t it be great to know just what you had to do to make the days of marvelous lays go on and on! Before we know it, even you and I won’t be able to stifle the yawns when we confront each other’s nakedness.”

But we’ve only just begun!—Bird started to say, but with Himiko’s frantic hand on the wheel, the MG was already churning the gravel in Bird’s driveway and then nosing deeply into the garden.

“I’ll be down in five minutes; and try to stay awake this time. You can’t dream much of a lay in five minutes!”

Upstairs in the bedroom, Bird threw together a few things he would need right away for a stay at Himiko’s house. He packed with his back to the baby’s bassinet: it looked like a small, white coffin. Last of all he packed a novel written in English by an African writer. Then he took down his Africa maps from the wall and, folding them carefully, thrust them into his jacket pocket.

“Are those road maps?” Himiko asked as her keen eye lighted on Bird’s pocket. They were under way again, driving to the bank.

“They certainly are; maps you can really use.”

“Then I’ll see if I can find a shortcut to the baby’s hospital while you’re at the bank.”

“That would be a good trick: these are maps of Africa,” Bird said, “the first real road maps I’ve ever owned.”

“May the day come when you’ll be able to use them,” Himiko said with a touch of mockery.

Leaving Himiko wedged beneath the steering wheel and beginning to drop off to sleep, Bird went in to arrange for the baby’s hospitalization. But the baby’s lack of a name created a problem. Bird answered endless questions for the girl at the reception window and finally had to protest: “My infant son is dying. For all I know he may be dead already. Now would you mind telling me why I am obliged to give him a name?” he said stiffly.

Miserably rattled, the girl yielded. It was then that Bird sensed, for no special reason, that the baby’s death had been accomplished. He even inquired about making arrangements for the autopsy and cremation.

But the doctor who met Bird at the intensive care ward disabused him instantly: “Where do you come off waiting so impatiently for your son to die? Hospitalization here isn’t that high, you know! And you must have health insurance. Anyway, it’s true that your son is weakening, but he’s still very much alive. So why don’t you relax a little and start behaving like a father? How about it!”

Bird wrote Himiko’s number on a page of his memo book and asked the doctor to phone him if anything decisive happened. Since he could feel everybody in the ward reacting to him as something loathsome, he went straight back to the car, without even pausing to peer into the incubator at his son. No less than Himiko, who had been asleep in the open car, Bird was drenched in sweat after his run through the sun and shadow of the hospital square. Trailing exhaust fumes and an animal odor of perspiration, they roared off to sprawl naked in the hot afternoon while they waited for the telephone call that would announce the baby’s death.

All that afternoon, their attention was on the telephone. Bird stayed behind even when it was time to shop for dinner, afraid the phone might ring while he was out. After dinner, they listened to a popular Russian pianist on the radio, but with the volume way down, nerves screaming still for the phone to ring. Bird finally fell asleep. But he kept waking up to the ringing of a phantom bell in his dream and walking over to the phone to check. More than once the boundaries of the dream extended to lifting the receiver and hearing the doctor’s voice report the baby’s death. Waking yet another time in the middle of the night, Bird felt the
suspense of a condemned murderer during a temporary stay of execution. And he discovered encouragement of unexpected depth and intensity in the fact that he was spending the night with Himiko and not alone. Not once since becoming an adult had he so needed another person. This was the first time.

N
EXT
morning, Bird drove Himiko’s car to school. Parked in the schoolyard full of students, the scarlet MG smelled vaguely of scandal, something that didn’t worry Bird until he had put the keys into his pocket. He sensed that lacunas had formed in each of the pleats of his consciousness since the trouble with the baby had begun.

Bird pushed through the crowd of students milling around the car with his face in a scowl. In the teachers’ room, he was informed by his department chairman, a little man who wore his loud jacket askew in the manner of a nisei, that the Principal wanted to see him. But the report merely burrowed into the corroded portion of his consciousness and left Bird undisturbed.

“Bird, you are really
quelque-chose, toi,”
the chairman said pleasantly, as though in jest, even while he inspected Bird with keen eyes. “I don’t know if you’re brave or just brazen, but you’re certainly plenty bold!”

Naturally, Bird couldn’t help wincing as he entered the large lecture room where his students were waiting for him. But this was a group from a different class; most of them wouldn’t know about yesterday’s dishonorable incident. Bird encouraged himself with the thought. During the lesson he did notice a few students who evidently knew, but they were from city high schools, cosmopolitan and frivolous; to them, Bird’s accident was merely ludicrous and just a bit heroic. When their eyes met his own, they even flashed teasing, affectionate smiles. Bird of course ignored them.

When Bird left the classroom, a young man was waiting for him at the top of the spiral stairs. It was his defender from the day before, the student who had protected him from the violence of that rancorous class. Not only had the student cut his own class in some other room, he
had been waiting for Bird directly in the sun. Beads of sweat glistened on the sides of his nose, and his blue denims were smirched with mud from the step he had been sitting on.

“Hi!”

“Hi!” Bird returned the greeting.

“I bet the Principal called you in. That horse’s ass really did go to him with a story, he even had a photograph of that vomit, took it with a miniature camera!” The student smirked, exposing large, well-cared-for teeth.

Bird smiled too. Could his accuser have carried a miniature camera around with him all the time, in hopes of catching Bird in a weak moment and then taking the case to court?

“He told the Principal you came to class with a hangover, but five or six of us want to testify that you had food poisoning instead. We thought it would be a good idea to get together with you first and, you know, get our stories straight,” the boy said craftily, a smug conspirator.

“I did have a hangover, so it’s you fellows who are wrong. I’m guilty as accused by that puritan.” Bird slipped past the student and started down the stairs.

“But sensei!” the boy persevered, climbing down the stairs after Bird, “you’ll be fired if you confess to that. The Principal is the head of his local chapter of the Prohibition League, for God’s sake!”

“You’re joking!”

“So why not let it go as food poisoning? It’s just the season for it—you could say the pay here is so bad you finally took a bite of something—old.”

“A hangover isn’t something I feel I have to cheat about. And I don’t want you to lie for me.”

“Humm!” was what the boy was brash enough to say.

“Sensei, where will you be going when you leave here?”

Bird decided to ignore the student. He didn’t feel up to involving himself in any new plots. He discovered that he had become extraordinarily diffident; it had to do with those faults in his consciousness.

“You probably don’t need a job at a cram-school, anyway. The Principal is going to feel pretty silly when he has to fire an instructor who drives a red MG. Hah!”

Bird walked straight away from the student’s delighted laughter and
went into the teachers’ room. He was putting away the old chalk box and the reader in his locker when he discovered an envelope addressed to him. It was a note from the friend who sponsored the study group; the others must have decided at their special meeting what to do about Mr. Delchef. Bird had torn open the envelope and was about to read the note when he remembered from his student days a funny superstition about probability—when you were faced with two errands at the same time and didn’t know what either held in store, one would always be pregnant with good fortune if the other turned out calamitously—and stuffed the letter into his pocket unread. If his meeting with the Principal went very badly, he would have a valid reason for expecting the best of the letter in his pocket.

One look at the Principal’s face as he looked up from his desk told Bird that this meeting would be pregnant with disaster. He resigned himself; at least he would try to spend whatever time the interview took as pleasantly as he could.

“We have a little mess on our hands here, Bird. To tell the truth, it’s awkward for me, too.” The Principal sounded like the keen tycoon in a film about a business empire, at once pragmatic and austere. Still in his mid-thirties, this man had transformed an ordinary tutoring service into this full-blown preparatory school with its large and integrated curriculum, and now he was plotting to establish a junior college. His bulky head was shaved clean and he wore custom-made glasses—two oval lenses suspended from a thick, straight frame—which accented the irregularities of his face. In the guilty eyes behind the bluff and bluster of his glasses, however, was something that never failed to move Bird to mild affection for the man.

“I know what you’re referring to. And I was at fault.”

“The student who complained is a regular contributor to the school magazine—an unpleasant lad. It could be troublesome if he made a fuss. …”

“Yes, of course. I’d better resign right away,” Bird quickly said, taking the lead himself in order to lighten the Principal’s burden. The Principal snorted through his nose with unnecessary vigor and put on a look of mournful outrage.

“Naturally, the professor will be upset. …” he said, a request that Bird explain the situation to his father-in-law himself.

Bird nodded. He sensed that he would begin to get irritated if he didn’t leave the office right away.

“One more thing, Bird. It seems that some of the students are insisting you had food poisoning and are threatening that tattletale. He claims that you’re putting them up to it. That can’t be right, can it?”

Bird lost his smile and shook his head. “Well, then, I don’t want to take any more of your time,” he said.

“I’m sorry about all this, Bird,” the Principal said in a voice richened with sincerity. The eyes swelling behind the oval lenses darkened with feeling. “I’ve always liked you, you’ve got character! Was that really a hangover you had?”

“Yes. A hangover,” Bird said, and he left the room. Instead of returning to the teachers’ room, Bird decided to cut through the custodian’s room and across the courtyard to the car. Now he felt melancholy defiance rising darkly in himself, as if he had been unjustly humiliated.

“Sensei, are you leaving us? Be awful sorry to see you go,” the janitor volunteered. So news of the incident had spread. Bird was popular in the custodian’s room.

“I’ll be around to bother you for the rest of this term,” he said, thinking dismally that he was not worthy of the expression on the old man’s wrinkled face.

Bird’s irrepressible ally was sitting on the door of the MG, scowling like an adult in the heat and glare of the sun. Bird’s unexpected exit from the back door of the custodian’s room took him by surprise and he scrambled to his feet. Bird climbed into the car.