My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (45 page)

Your clock-radio reads 1:45.

Wonder if you are getting old, desperate. Believe that you have really turned into another woman:

your maiden aunt Phyllis;

some vaporish cocktail waitress;

a glittery transvestite who has wandered, lost, up from the Village.

When seven consecutive days go by that you do not hear from him, send witty little postcards to all your friends from college. On the eighth day, when finally he calls you at the office, murmuring lascivious things in German, remain laconic. Say: “
Ja . . . nein . . . ja
.”

At lunch regard your cream of cauliflower soup with a pinched mouth and ask what on earth he and his wife
do
together. Sound irritated. He shrugs and says, “Dust, eat, bicker about the shower curtain. Why do you ask?”

Say: “Gee, I don’t know. What an outrageous question, huh?”

He gives you a look of sympathy that could bring a dead cat back to life. “You’re upset because I didn’t call you.” He reaches across the table to touch your fingers. Pull your hand away. Say: “Don’t flatter yourself.” Look slightly off to one side. Put your hand over your eyes like you have a headache. Say: “God, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he says.

And you think: Something is backward here. Reversed. Wrong. Like the something that is wrong in “What is wrong with this picture?” in kids’ magazines in dentists’ offices. Toothaches. Stomachaches. God, the soup. Excuse yourself and hurry toward the women’s room. Slam the stall door shut. Lean back against it. Stare into the throat of the toilet.

Hilda is worried about you and wants to fix you up with a cousin of hers from Brooklyn.

Ask wearily: “What’s his name?”

She looks at you, frowning. “Mark. He’s a banker. And what the hell kind of attitude is that?”

Mark orders you a beer in a Greek coffee shop near the movie theater.

“So, you’re a secretary.”

Squirm and quip: “More like a sedentary,” and look at him in surprise and horror when he guffaws and snorts way too loudly.

Say: “Actually, what I really should have been is a dancer. Everybody has always said that.”

Mark smiles. He likes the idea of you being a dancer.

Look at him coldly. Say: “No, nobody has ever said that. I just made it up.”

All through the movie you forget to read the subtitles, thinking instead about whether you should sleep with Mark the banker. Glance at him out of the corner of your eye. In the dark, his profile seems important and mysterious. Sort of. He catches you looking at him and turns and winks at you. Good god. He seems to be investing something in all of this. Bankers. Sigh. Stare straight ahead. Decide you just don’t have the energy, the interest.

“I saw somebody else.”

“Oh?”

“A banker. We went to a Godard movie.”

“Well . . . good.”

“Good?”

“I mean for you, Charlene. You should be doing things like that once in a while.”

“Yeah. He’s real rich.”

“Did you have fun?”

“No.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

“No.”

He kisses you, almost gratefully, on the ear. Fidget. Twitch. Lie. Say: “I mean, yes.”

He nods. Looks away. Says nothing.

Cut up an old calendar into week-long strips. Place them around your kitchen floor, a sort of bar graph on the linoleum, representing the number of weeks you have been a mistress: thirteen. Put X’s through all the national holidays.

Go out for a walk in the cold. Three little girls hanging out on the stoop are laughing and calling to strange men on the street. “Hi! Hi, Mister!” Step around them. Think: They have never had orgasms.

A blonde woman in barrettes passes you in stockinged feet, holding her shoes.

There are things you have to tell him.

CLIENTS TO SEE

1. This affair is demeaning.

2. Violates decency. Am I just some scampish tart, some tartish scamp?

3. No emotional support here.

4. Why do you never say “I love you” or “Stay in my arms forever my little tadpole” or “Your eyes set me on fire my sweet nubkin?”

The next time he phones, he says: “I was having a dream about you and suddenly I woke up with a jerk and felt very uneasy.”

Say: “Yeah, I hate to wake up with jerks.”

He laughs, smooth, beautiful, and tenor, making you feel warm inside of your bones. And it hits you; maybe it all boils down to this: people will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.

Don’t lose your resolve. Fumble for your list. Sputter things out as convincingly as possible.

Say: “I suffer indignities at your hands. And agonies of duh feet. I don’t know why I joke. I hurt.”

“That is why.”

“What?”

“That is why.”

“But you don’t really care.” Wince. It sounds pitiful.

“But I do.”

For some reason this leaves you dumbfounded.

He continues: “You know my situation . . . or maybe you don’t.” Pause. “What can I do, Charlene? Stand on my goddamned head?”

Whisper: “Please. Stand on your goddamned head.”

“It is ten o’clock,” he says. “I’m coming over. We need to talk.”

What he has to tell you is that Patricia is not his wife. He is separated from his wife; her name is Carrie. You think of a joke you heard once: What do you call a woman who marries a man with no arms and no legs? Carrie. Patricia is the woman he lives with.

“You mean, I’m just another one of the fucking gang?”

He looks at you, puzzled. “Charlene, what I’ve always admired about you, right from when I first met you, is your strength, your independence.”

Say: “That line is old as boots.”

Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out.

At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp.

Slam the door like Bette Davis.

Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

At Karma-Kola the days are peg-legged and aimless, collapsing into one another with the comic tedium of old clowns, nowhere fast.

In April you get a raise. Celebrate by taking Hilda to lunch at the Plaza.

Write for applications to graduate schools.

Send Mark the banker a birthday card.

Take long walks at night in the cold. The blonde in barrettes scuttles timelessly by you, still carrying her shoes. She has cut her hair.

He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of the Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: “Fine.”

YOURS

MARY ROBINSON

ALLISON STRUGGLED AWAY from her white Renault, limping with the weight of the last of the pumpkins. She found Clark in the twilight on the twig- and leaf-littered porch, behind the house. He wore a tan wool shawl. He was moving up and back in a cushioned glider, pushed by the ball of his slippered foot.

Allison lowered a big pumpkin and let it rest on the porch floor.

Clark was much older than she—seventy-eight to Allison’s thirty-five. They had been married for four months. They were both quite tall, with long hands, and their faces looked something alike. Allison wore a natural-hair wig. It was a thick blonde hood around her face. She was dressed in bright-dyed denims today. She wore durable clothes, usually, for she volunteered afternoons at a children’s day-care center.

She put one of the smaller pumpkins on Clark’s long lap. “Now, nothing surreal,” she told him. “Carve just a
regular
face. These are for kids.”

In the foyer, on the Hepplewhite desk, Allison found the maid’s chore list, with its cross-offs, which included Clark’s supper. Allison went quickly through the day’s mail: a garish coupon packet, a flyer advertising white wines at Jamestown Liquors, November’s pay-TV program guide, and—the worst thing, the funniest—an already opened, extremely unkind letter from Clark’s married daughter, up North. “You’re an old fool,” Allison read, and “You’re being cruelly deceived.” There was a gift check for twenty-five dollars, made out to Clark, enclosed—his birthday had just passed—but it was uncashable. It was signed “Jesus H. Christ.”

Late, late into this night, Allison and Clark gutted and carved the pumpkins together, at an old table set out on the back porch. They worked over newspaper after soggy newspaper, using paring knives and spoons and a Swiss Army knife Clark liked for the exact shaping of teeth and eyes and nostrils. Clark had been a doctor—an internist—but he was also a Sunday watercolor painter. His four pumpkins were expressive and artful. Their carved features were suited to the sizes and shapes of the pumpkins. Two looked ferocious and jagged. One registered surprise. The last was serene and beaming.

Allison’s four faces were less deftly drawn, with slits and areas of distortion. She had cut triangles for noses and eyes. The mouths she had made were all just wedges—two turned up and two turned down.

By one A.M., they were finished. Clark, who had bent his long torso forward to work, moved over to the glider again and looked out sleepily at nothing. All the neighbors’ lights were out across the ravine. For the season and time, the Virginia night was warm. Most of the leaves had fallen and blown away already, and the trees stood unbothered. The moon was round, above them.

Allison cleaned up the mess.

“Your jack-o’-lanterns are much much better than mine,” Clark said to her.

“Like hell,” Allison said.

“Look at me,” Clark said, and Allison did. She was holding a squishy bundle of newspapers. The papers reeked sweetly with the smell of pumpkin innards. “Yours are
far
better,” he said.

“You’re wrong. You’ll see when they’re lit,” Allison said.

She went inside, came back with yellow vigil candles. It took her a while to get each candle settled into a pool of its own melted wax inside the jack-o’-lanterns, which were lined up in a row on the porch railing. Allison went along and relit each candle and fixed the pumpkin lids over the little flames. “See?” she said. They sat together a moment and looked at the orange faces.

“We’re exhausted. It’s good-night time,” Allison said. “Don’t blow out the candles. I’ll put in new ones tomorrow.”

In her bedroom, a few weeks earlier in her life than had been predicted, she began to die. “Don’t look at me if my wig comes off,” she told Clark. “Please.” Her pulse cords were fluttering under his fingers. She raised her knees and kicked away the comforter. She said something to Clark about the garage being locked.

At the telephone, Clark had a clear view out back and down to the porch. He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.