Birds of America (35 page)

She sniffed him again. “What scent did you use?”

“A manly scent,” he said. “Rock. I took a rock-scented bath.”

“Did you take a bubble bath?” She cocked her head to one side.

He smiled. “Yes, but I, uh, made my own bubbles.”

“You did?” She squeezed his bicep.

“Yeah. I hammered the water with my fist.”

She walked over to the cassette player and put a cassette in. She looked over at Martin, who looked suddenly unhappy. “This music annoys you, doesn’t it?”

Martin squirmed. “It’s just—why can’t he sing any one song all the way through?”

She thought about this. “Because he’s Mr. Medleyhead?”

“You didn’t bring anything else?”

“No.”

She went back and sat next to Martin, in silence, smelling the scent of him, as if it were odd.

For dinner there was
vitello alla salvia
, baby peas, and a pasta made with caviar. “Nipping it in the bud.” Adrienne sighed.
“An early frost.” A fat elderly man, arriving late, pulled his chair out onto her foot, then sat down on it. She shrieked.

“Oh, dear, I’m sorry,” said the man, lifting himself up as best he could.

“It’s okay,” said Adrienne. “I’m sure it’s okay.”

But the next morning, at exercises, Adrienne studied her foot closely during the leg lifts. The big toe was swollen and blue, and the nail had been loosened and set back at an odd and unhinged angle. “You’re going to lose your toenail,” said Kate.

“Great,” said Adrienne.

“That happened to me once, during my first marriage. My husband dropped a dictionary on my foot. One of those subconscious things. Rage as very large book.”

“You were married before?”

“Oh, yes.” She sighed. “I had one of those rehearsal marriages, you know, where you’re a feminist and train a guy, and then some
other
feminist comes along and
gets
the guy.”

“I don’t know.” Adrienne scowled. “I think there’s something wrong with the words
feminist
and
gets the guy
being in the same sentence.”

“Yes, well—”

“Were you upset?”

“Of course. But then, I’d been doing everything. I’d insisted on separate finances, on being totally self-supporting. I was working. I was doing the child care. I paid for the house; I cooked; I cleaned. I found myself shouting, “This is feminism? Thank you, Gloria and Betty!”

“But now you’re with someone else.”

“Pretaught. Self-cleaning. Batteries included.”

“Someone else trained him, and you stole him.”

Kate smiled. “Of course. What, am I crazy?”

“What happened to the toe?”

“The nail came off. And the one that grew back was wavy and dark and used to scare the children.”

“Oh,” said Adrienne.

·  ·  ·

“Why would someone publish six books on Chaucer?” Adrienne was watching Martin dress. She was also smoking a cigarette. One of the strange things about the villa was that the smokers had all quit smoking, and the nonsmokers had taken it up. People were getting in touch with their alternative selves. Bequeathed cigarettes abounded. Cartons were appearing outside people’s doors.

“You have to understand academic publishing,” said Martin. “No one reads these books. Everyone just agrees to publish everyone else’s. It’s one big circle jerk. It’s a giant economic agreement. When you think about it, it probably violates the Sherman Act.”

“A circle jerk?” she said uncertainly. The cigarette was making her dizzy.

“Yeah,” said Martin, reknotting his tie.

“But six books on Chaucer? Why not, say, a Cat Stevens book?”

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m in the circle.”

She sighed. “Then I shall sing to you. Mood music.” She made up a romantic Asian-sounding tune, and danced around the room with her cigarette, in a floating, wing-limbed way. “This is my Hopi dance,” she said. “So full of hope.”

Then it was time to go to dinner.

The cockatiel now seemed used to Adrienne and would whistle twice, then fly into the back room, perch quickly on the picture frame, and wait with her for Ilke. Adrienne closed her eyes and breathed deeply, the flannel sheet pulled up under her arms, tightly, like a sarong.

Ilke’s face appeared overhead in the dark, as if she were a mother just checking, peering into a crib. “How are you today?”

Adrienne opened her eyes, to see that Ilke was wearing a T-shirt that said
SAY A PRAYER. PET A ROCK
.

Say a prayer
. “Good,” said Adrienne. “I’m good.”
Pet a rock
.

Ilke ran her fingers through Adrienne’s hair, humming faintly.

“What is this music today?” Adrienne asked. Like Martin, she, too, had grown weary of the Mandy Patinkin tapes, all that unshackled exuberance.

“Crickets and elk,” Ilke whispered.

“Crickets and elk.”

“Crickets and elk and a little harp.”

Ilke began to move around the table, pulling on Adrienne’s limbs and pressing deep into her tendons. “I’m doing choreographed massage today,” Ilke said. “That’s why I’m wearing this dress.”

Adrienne hadn’t noticed the dress. Instead, with the lights now low, except for the illuminated clouds on the side wall, she felt herself sinking into the pools of death deep in her bones, the dark wells of loneliness, failure, blame. “You may turn over now,” she heard Ilke say. And she struggled a little in the flannel sheets to do so, twisting in them, until Ilke helped her, as if she were a nurse and Adrienne someone old and sick—a stroke victim, that’s what she was. She had become a stroke victim. Then lowering her face into the toweled cheek plates the table brace offered up to her (“the cradle,” Ilke called it), Adrienne began quietly to cry, the deep touching of her body melting her down to some equation of animal sadness, shoe leather, and brine. She began to understand why people would want to live in these dusky nether zones, the meltdown brought on by sleep or drink or this. It seemed truer, more familiar to the soul than was the busy, complicated flash that was normal life. Ilke’s arms leaned into her, her breasts brushing softly against Adrienne’s head, which now felt connected to the rest of her only by filaments and strands. The body suddenly seemed a tumor on the brain, a mere means of conveyance, a wagon; the mind’s go-cart
now taken apart, laid in pieces on this table. “You have a knot here in your trapezius,” Ilke said, kneading Adrienne’s shoulder. “I can feel the belly of the knot right here,” she added, pressing hard, bruising her shoulder a little, and then easing up. “Let go,” she said. “Let go all the way, of everything.”

“I might die,” said Adrienne. Something surged in the music and she missed what Ilke said in reply, though it sounded a little like “Changes are good.” Though perhaps it was “Chances aren’t good.” Ilke pulled Adrienne’s toes, milking even the injured one, with its loose nail and leaky under-skin, and then she left Adrienne there in the dark, in the music, though Adrienne felt it was she who was leaving, like a person dying, like a train pulling away. She felt the rage loosened from her back, floating aimlessly around in her, the rage that did not know at what or whom to rage, though it continued to rage.

She awoke to Ilke’s rocking her gently. “Adrienne, get up. I have another client soon.”

“I must have fallen asleep,” said Adrienne. “I’m sorry.”

She got up slowly, got dressed, and went out into the outer room; the cockatiel whooshed out with her, grazing her head.

“I feel like I’ve just been strafed,” she said, clutching her hair.

Ilke frowned.

“Your bird. I mean by your bird. In
there
”—she pointed back toward the massage room—“
that
was great.” She reached into her purse to pay. Ilke had moved the wicker chair to the other side of the room, so that there was no longer any place to sit down or linger. “You want lire or dollars?” she asked, and was a little taken aback when Ilke said rather firmly, “I’d prefer lire.”

Ilke was bored with her. That was it. Adrienne was having a religious experience, but Ilke—Ilke was just being social. Adrienne held out the money and Ilke plucked it from her hand, then opened the outside door and leaned to give Adrienne the rushed bum’s kiss—left, right—and then closed the door behind her.

Adrienne was in a fog, her legs noodly, her eyes unaccustomed to the light. Outside, in front of the
farmacìa
, if she wasn’t careful, she was going to get hit by a car. How could Ilke just send people out into the busy street like that, all loose and dazed? Adrienne’s body felt doughy, muddy. This was good, she supposed. Decomposition. She stepped slowly, carefully, her Martha Graham step, along the narrow walk between the street and the stores. And when she turned the corner to head back up toward the path to the Villa Hirschborn, there stood Martin, her husband, rounding a corner and heading her way.

“Hi!” she said, so pleased suddenly to meet him like this, away from what she now referred to as “the compound.” “Are you going to the
farmacìa
?” she asked.

“Uh, yes,” said Martin. He leaned to kiss her cheek.

“Want some company?”

He looked a little blank, as if he needed to be alone. Perhaps he was going to buy condoms.

“Oh, never mind,” she said gaily. “I’ll see you later, up at the compound, before dinner.”

“Great,” he said, and took her hand, took two steps away, and then let her hand go, gently, midair.

She walked away, toward a small park—il Giardino Leonardo—out past the station for the vaporetti. Near a particularly exuberant rhododendron sat a short, dark woman with a bright turquoise bandanna knotted around her neck. She had set up a table with a sign:
CHIROMANTE: TAROT E FACCIA
. Adrienne sat down opposite her in the empty chair. “Americano,” she said.

“I do faces, palms, or cards,” the woman with the blue scarf said.

Adrienne looked at her own hands. She didn’t want to have her face read. She lived like that already. It happened all the time at the villa, people trying to read your face—freezing your brain with stony looks and remarks made malicious with obscurity, so that you couldn’t read
their
face, while they were
busy reading yours. It all made her feel creepy, like a lonely head on a poster somewhere.

“The cards are the best,” said the woman. “Ten thousand lire.”

“Okay,” said Adrienne. She was still looking at the netting of her open hands, the dried riverbed of life just sitting there. “The cards.”

The woman swept up the cards, and dealt half of them out, every which way in a kind of swastika. Then, without glancing at them, she leaned forward boldly and said to Adrienne, “You are sexually unsatisfied. Am I right?”

“Is that what the cards say?”

“In a general way. You have to take the whole deck and interpret.”

“What does this card say?” asked Adrienne, pointing to one with some naked corpses leaping from coffins.

“Any one card doesn’t say anything. It’s the whole feeling of them.” She quickly dealt out the remainder of the deck on top of the other cards. “You are looking for a guide, some kind of guide, because the man you are with does not make you happy. Am I right?”

“Maybe,” said Adrienne, who was already reaching for her purse to pay the ten thousand lire so that she could leave.

“I am right,” said the woman, taking the money and handing Adrienne a small smudged business card. “Stop by tomorrow. Come to my shop. I have a powder.”

Adrienne wandered back out of the park, past a group of tourists climbing out of a bus, back toward the Villa Hirschborn—through the gate, which she opened with her key, and up the long stone staircase to the top of the promontory. Instead of going back to the villa, she headed out through the woods toward her studio, toward the dead tufts of spiders she had memorialized in her grief. She decided to take a different path, not the one toward the studio, but one that led farther up the hill, a steeper grade, toward an open meadow at the top,
with a small Roman ruin at its edge—a corner of the hill’s original fortress still stood there. But in the middle of the meadow, something came over her—a balmy wind, or the heat from the uphill hike, and she took off all her clothes, lay down in the grass, and stared around at the dusky sky. To either side of her, the spokes of tree branches crisscrossed upward in a kind of cat’s cradle. More directly overhead she studied the silver speck of a jet, the metallic head of its white stream like the tip of a thermometer. There were a hundred people inside this head of a pin, thought Adrienne. Or was it, perhaps, just the head of a pin? When was something truly small, and when was it a matter of distance? The branches of the trees seemed to encroach inward and rotate a little to the left, a little to the right, like something mechanical, and as she began to drift off, she saw the beautiful Spearson baby, cooing in a clown hat; she saw Martin furiously swimming in a pool; she saw the strewn beads of her own fertility, all the eggs within her, leap away like a box of tapioca off a cliff. It seemed to her that everything she had ever needed to know in her life she had known at one time or another, but she just hadn’t known all those things at once, at the same time, at a single moment. They were scattered through and she had had to leave and forget one in order to get to another. A shadow fell across her, inside her, and she could feel herself retreat to that place in her bones where death was and you greeted it like an acquaintance in a room; you said hello and were then ready for whatever was next—which might be a guide, the guide that might be sent to you, the guide to lead you back out into your life again.

Someone was shaking her gently. She flickered slightly awake, to see the pale, ethereal face of a strange older woman peering down at her as if Adrienne were something odd in the bottom of a teacup. The woman was dressed all in white—white shorts, white cardigan, white scarf around her head. The guide.

“Are you … 
the guide
?” whispered Adrienne.

“Yes, my dear,” the woman said in a faintly English voice that sounded like the Good Witch of the North.

“You are?” Adrienne asked.

“Yes,” said the woman. “And I’ve brought the group up here to view the old fort, but I was a little worried that you might not like all of us traipsing past here while you were, well—are you all right?”