Birds of America (17 page)

“ ‘Don’t count on us?’ ” said Bill. “I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but as a political slogan, it seems, I don’t know, a little …” Lame. It lacked even the pouty energy and determination of “Hell no, we won’t go.” Perhaps some obscenity would have helped. “Don’t fucking count on us, motherfucker.” That would have been better. Certainly a better T-shirt.

“It was all very successful,” said Lina indignantly.

“But how exactly do you measure success?” asked Bill. “I mean, it took time, but, you’ll forgive me, we
stopped
the war in Vietnam.”

“Oh, you are all so obsessed with your Vietnam,” said Lina.

The next time Bill saw her, it was on her birthday, and she’d had three and a half whiskeys. She exclaimed loudly about the beauty of the cake, and then, taking a deep breath, she dropped her head too close to the candles and set her hair spectacularly on fire.

What does time measure but itself? What can it assess but the mere deposit and registration of itself within a thing?

A large bowl of peas and onions is passed around the table.

They’ve already dispensed with the O. J. Simpson jokes—the knock-knock one and the one about the sunglasses. They’ve banned all the others, though Bill is now asked his opinion regarding search and seizure. Ever since he began living in the present tense, Bill sees the Constitution as a blessedly changing thing. He does not feel current behavior should be made necessarily to conform to old law. He feels personally, for instance, that he’d throw away a few First Amendment privileges—abortion protest, say, and all telemarketing, perhaps some pornography (though not Miss April 1965—never!)—in exchange for gutting the Second Amendment. The Founding Fathers were revolutionaries, after all. They would be with him on this, he feels. They would be for making the whole thing up as you go along, reacting to things as they happened, like a great, wild performance piece. “There’s nothing sacred about the Constitution; it’s just another figmentary contract: it’s a palimpsest you can write and write and write on. But then whatever is there when you get pulled over are the rules for then. For now.” Bill believes in free speech. He believes in expensive speech. He doesn’t believe in shouting “Fire” in a crowded movie theater, but he does believe in shouting “Fie!” and has done it twice himself—both times at
Forrest Gump
. “I’m a big believer in the Rules for Now. Also, Promises for Now, Things to Do for Now, and the ever-handy This Will Do for Now.”

Brigitte glares at him. “Such moral excellence,” she says.

“Yes,” agrees Roberta, who has been quiet all evening, probably figuring out airfare upgrades for Stanley. “How attractive.”

“I’m talking theoretical,” says Bill. “I believe in common sense. In theory. Theoretical common sense.” He feels suddenly cornered and misunderstood. He wishes he weren’t constantly asked to pronounce on real-life legal matters. He has never even tried an actual case except once, when he was just out of law school. He’d had a small practice then in the basement of an old sandstone schoolhouse in St. Paul, and the sign inside the building directory said
WILLIAM D. BELMONT, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW: ONE LEVEL DOWN
. It always broke his heart a little, that
one level down
. The only case he ever took to trial was an armed robbery and concealed weapon case, and he had panicked. He dressed in the exact same beiges and browns as the bailiffs—a subliminal strategy he felt would give him an edge, make him seem at least as much a part of the court “family” as the prosecutor. But by the close of the afternoon, his nerves were shot. He looked too desperately at the jury (who, once in the deliberation room, and in the time it took to order the pizza and wolf it down, voted unanimously to convict). He’d looked imploringly at all their little faces and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, if my client’s not innocent, I’ll eat my shorts.”

At the end of his practice, he had taken to showing up at other people’s office parties—not a good sign in life.

Now, equipped with a more advanced degree, like the other people here, Bill has a field of scholarly, hypothetical expertise, plus a small working knowledge of budgets and parking and E-mail. He doesn’t mind the E-mail, has more or less gotten used to it, its vaguely smutty Etch-A-Sketch, though once he found himself lost in the Internet and before he knew it had written his name across some bulletin board on which the only other name was “Stud Boy.” Mostly, however, his professional
life has been safe and uneventful. Although he is bothered by faculty meetings and by the word
text
—every time he hears it, he feels he should just give up, go off and wear a powdered wig somewhere—it intrigues Bill to belong to academe, with its international hodgepodge and asexual attire, a place where to think and speak
as if
one has lived is always preferable to the alternatives. Such a value cuts down on regrets. And Bill is cutting down. He is determined to cut down. Once, he was called in by the head of the law school and admonished for skipping so many faculty meetings. “It’s costing you about a thousand dollars in raises every year,” said the dean.

“Really?” replied Bill, “Well, if that’s all, it’s worth every dime.”

“Eat, eat,” says Albert. He is bringing in the baked potatoes and dessert cheeses. Things are a little out of whack.
Is a dinner party a paradigm of society or a vicious pantomime of the family?
It is already 10:30. Brigitte has gotten up again to help him. They return with sour cream, chives, grappa and cognac. Debbie looks across the table at Bill and smiles warmly. Bill smiles back. At least he thinks he does.

This taboo regarding age is to make us believe that life is long and actually improves us, that we are wiser, better, more knowledgeable later on than early. It is a myth concocted to keep the young from learning what we really are and despising and murdering us. We keep them sweet-breathed, unequipped, suggesting to them that there is something more than regret and decrepitude up ahead
.

Bill is still writing an essay in his head, one of theoretical common sense, though perhaps he is just drinking too much and it is not an essay at all but the simple metabolism of sugar. But this is what he knows right now, with dinner winding up and midnight looming like a death gong: life’s embrace is quick and busy, and everywhere in it people are equally lacking and well-meaning and nuts.
Why not admit history’s powers to
divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes next, and that robs you of surprises. It exhausts and warps the mind. We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgmental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all
.

“I believe in the present tense,” Bill says now, to no one in particular. “I believe in amnesty.” He stops. People are looking but not speaking. “Or is that just fancy rhetoric?”

“It’s not that fancy,” says Jack.

“It’s fancy,” Albert says kindly, ever the host, “without being schmancy.” He brings out more grappa. Everyone drinks it from the amber, green, and blue of Albert’s Depression glass glasses.

“I mean—” Bill begins, but then he stops, says nothing. Chilean folk music is playing on the stereo, wistful and melancholy: “Bring me all your old lovers, so I can love you, too,” a woman sings in Spanish.

“What does that mean?” Bill asks, but at this point he may not actually be speaking out loud. He cannot really tell. He sits back and listens to the song, translating the sad Spanish. Every songwriter in their smallest song seems to possess some monumental grief clarified and dignified by melody, Bill thinks. His own sadnesses, on the other hand, slosh about in his life in a low-key way, formless and self-consuming.
Modest
is how he sometimes likes to see it. No one is modest anymore. Everyone exalts their disappointments. They do ceremonious battle with everything; they demand receipts and take their presents back—all the unhappy things that life awkwardly, stupidly, without thinking, without bothering even to get to know them a little or to ask around! has given them. They bring it all back for an exchange.

As has he, hasn’t he?

·  ·  ·

The young were sent to earth to amuse the old. Why not be amused?

Debbie comes over and sits next to him. “You’re looking very rumpled and miffed,” she says quietly. Bill only nods. What can he say? She adds, “Rumpled and miffed—doesn’t that sound like a law firm?”

Bill nods again. “One in a Hans Christian Andersen story,” he says. “Perhaps the one the Ugly Duckling hired to sue his parents.”

“Or the one that the Little Mermaid retained to stick it to the Prince,” says Debbie, a bit pointedly, Bill thinks—who can tell? Her girlish voice, out of sheer terror, perhaps, has lately adorned itself with dreamy and snippy mannerisms. Probably Bill has single-handedly aged her beyond her years.

Jack has stood and is heading for the foyer. Lina follows.

“Lina, you’re leaving?” asks Bill with too much feeling in his voice. He sees that Debbie, casting her eyes downward, has noted it.

“Yes, we have a little tradition at home, so we can’t stay for midnight.” Lina shrugs a bit nonchalantly, then picks up her red wool scarf and lassoes her neck with it, a loose noose. Jack holds her coat up behind her, and she slides her arms into the satin lining.

It’s sex, Bill thinks. They make love at the stroke of midnight.

“A tradition?” asks Stanley.

“Uh, yes,” Lina says dismissively. “Just a little contemplation of the upcoming year is all. I hope you all have a happy rest of the New Year Eve.”

Lina always leaves the apostrophe
s
out of New Year’s Eve, Bill notes, oddly enchanted. And why
should
New Year’s Eve have an apostrophe
s
? It shouldn’t. Christmas Eve doesn’t. Logically—

“They have sex at the stroke of midnight,” says Albert after they leave.

“I knew it!” shouts Bill.

“Sex at the stroke of midnight?” asks Roberta.

“I myself usually save that for Lincoln’s Birthday,” says Bill.

“It’s a local New Year’s tradition apparently,” says Albert.

“I’ve lived here twenty years and I’ve never heard of it,” says Stanley.

“Neither have I,” says Roberta.

“Nor I,” says Brigitte.

“Me, neither,” says Bill.

“Well, we’ll all have to do something equally compelling,” says Debbie.

Bill’s head spins to look at her. The bodice of her black velvet dress is snowy with napkin lint. Her face is flushed from drink. What does she mean? She means nothing at all.

“Black-eyed peas!” cries Albert. And he dashes into the kitchen and brings out an iron pot of warm, pasty, black-dotted beans and six spoons.

“Now this is a tradition I know,” says Stanley, and he takes one of the spoons and digs in.

Albert moves around the room with his pot. “You can’t eat until the stroke of midnight. The peas have to be the first thing you consume in the New Year and then you’ll have good luck all year long.”

Brigitte takes a spoon and looks at her watch. “We’ve got five minutes.”

“What’ll we do?” asks Stanley. He is holding his spoonful of peas like a lollipop, and they are starting to slide.

“We’ll contemplate our fruitful work and great accomplishments.” Albert sighs. “Though, of course, when you think about Gandhi, or Pasteur, or someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., dead at thirty-nine, it sure makes you wonder what you’ve done with your life.”

“We’ve done some things,” says Bill.

“Yes? Like what?” asks Albert.

“We’ve …” And here Bill stops for a moment. “We’ve … had some excellent meals. We’ve … bought some nice shirts. We’ve gotten a good trade-in or two on our cars—I think I’m going to go kill myself now.”

“I’ll join you,” says Albert. “Knives are in the drawer by the sink.”

“How about the vacuum cleaner?”

“Vacuum cleaner in the back closet.”

“Vacuum cleaner?” hoots Roberta. But no one explains or goes anywhere. Everyone just sits.

“Peas poised!” Stanley suddenly shouts. They all get up and stand in a horseshoe around the hearth with its new birch logs and bright but smoky fire. They lift their mounded spoons and eye the mantel clock with its ancient minute hand jerking toward midnight.

“Happy New Year,” says Albert finally, after some silence, and lifts his spoon in salute.

“Amen,” says Stanley.

“Amen,” says Roberta.

“Amen,” say Debbie and Brigitte.

“Ditto,” says Bill, his mouth full, but indicating with his spoon.

Then they all hug quickly—“Gotcha!” says Bill with each hug—and begin looking for their coats.

“You always seem more interested in other women than in me,” Debbie says when they are back at his house after a silent ride home, Debbie driving. “Last month it was Lina. And the month before that it was … it was Lina again.” She stops for a minute. “I’m sorry to be so selfish and pathetic.” She begins to cry, and as she does, something cracks open in her and Bill sees straight through to her heart. It is a good heart. It has had nice parents and good friends, lived only during peacetime, and been kind to animals. She looks up at him. “I mean, I’m romantic
and passionate. I believe if you’re in love, that’s enough. I believe love conquers all.”

Bill nods sympathetically, from a great distance.

“But I don’t want to get into one of these feeble, one-sided, patched-together relationships—no matter how much I care for you.”

“Whatever happened to love conquers all, just four seconds ago?”

Debbie pauses. “I’m older now,” she says.

“You kids. You grow up so fast.”

Then there is a long silence between them, the second in this new New Year. Finally, Debbie says, “Don’t you know that Lina’s having an affair with Albert? Can’t you see they’re in love?”

Something in Bill drops, squares off, makes a neat little knot. “No, I didn’t see.” He feels the sickened sensation he has sometimes felt after killing a housefly and finding blood in it.

“You yourself had suggested they might be lovers.”