My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (74 page)

“It’s sad,” I started to say, meaning that I was sorry we had reached the point of silence, but before I could continue you challenged the statement.

“What makes you so sure it’s sad?”

“What do you mean, what makes me so sure?” I asked, confused by your question.

You looked at me as if what was sad was that I would never understand. “For all either one of us knows,” you said, “death could have been her triumph!”

Maybe when it really ended was the night I felt we had just reached the beginning, that one time on the beach in the summer when our bodies rammed so desperately together that for a moment I thought we did it, and maybe in our hearts we did, although for me, then, doing it in one’s heart didn’t quite count. If it did, I supposed we’d all be Casanovas.

We rode home together on the El train that night, and I felt sick and defeated in a way I was embarrassed to mention. Our mute reflections emerged like negative exposures on the dark, greasy window of the train. Lightning branched over the city, and when the train entered the subway tunnel, the lights inside flickered as if the power was disrupted, though the train continued rocketing beneath the Loop.

When the train emerged again we were on the South Side of the city and it was pouring, a deluge as if the sky had opened to drown the innocent and guilty alike. We hurried from the El station to your house, holding the Navajo blanket over our heads until, soaked, it collapsed. In the dripping doorway of your apartment building, we said good night. You were shivering. Your bikini top showed through the thin blouse plastered to your skin. I swept the wet hair away from your face and kissed you lightly on the lips, then you turned and went inside. I stepped into the rain, and you came back out, calling after me.

“What?” I asked, feeling a surge of gladness to be summoned back into the doorway with you.

“Want an umbrella?”

I didn’t. The downpour was letting up. It felt better to walk back to the station feeling the rain rinse the sand out of my hair, off my legs, until the only places where I could still feel its grit were in the crotch of my cutoffs and each squish of my shoes. A block down the street, I passed a pair of jockey shorts lying in a puddle and realized they were mine, dropped from my back pocket as we ran to your house. I left them behind, wondering if you’d see them and recognize them the next day.

By the time I had climbed the stairs back to the El platform, the rain had stopped. Your scent still hadn’t washed from my fingers. The station—the entire city it seemed—dripped and steamed. The summer sound of crickets and nighthawks echoed from the drenched neighborhood. Alone, I could admit how sick I felt. For you, it was a night that would haunt your dreams. For me, it was another night when I waited, swollen and aching, for what I had secretly nicknamed the Blue Ball Express.

Literally lovesick, groaning inwardly with each lurch of the train and worried that I was damaged for good, I peered out at the passing yellow-lit stations, where lonely men stood posted before giant advertisements, pictures of glamorous models defaced by graffiti—the same old scrawled insults and pleas: fuck you, eat me. At this late hour the world seemed given over to men without women, men waiting in abject patience for something indeterminate, the way I waited for our next times. I avoided their eyes so that they wouldn’t see the pity in mine, pity for them because I’d just been with you, your scent was still on my hands, and there seemed to be so much future ahead.

For me it was another night like that, and by the time I reached my stop I knew I would be feeling better, recovered enough to walk the dark street home making up poems of longing that I never wrote down. I was the D. H. Lawrence of not doing it, the voice of all the would-be lovers who ached and squirmed. From our contortions in doorways, on stairwells, and in the bucket seats of cars we could have composed a Kama Sutra of interrupted bliss. It must have been that night when I recalled all the other times of walking home after seeing you, so that it seemed as if I was falling into step behind a parade of my former selves—myself walking home on the night we first kissed, myself on the night when I unbuttoned your blouse and kissed your breasts, myself on the night when I lifted your skirt above your thighs and dropped to my knees—each succeeding self another step closer to that irrevocable moment for which our lives seemed poised.

But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.

SOMETHING THAT NEEDS NOTHING

MIRANDA JULY

IN AN IDEAL world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents. I even had two. They would never let me go, so I didn’t say goodbye; I packed a tiny bag and left a note. On the way to Pip’s house, I cashed my graduation checks. Then I sat on her porch and pretended I was twelve or fifteen or even sixteen. At all these ages, I had dreamed of today; I had even imagined sitting here, waiting for Pip for the last time. She had the opposite problem: her mom
would
let her go. Her mom had gigantic swollen legs that were a symptom of something much worse, and she was heavily medicated with marijuana at all times.

We’re going now, Mom.

Where?

To Portland.

Can you do one thing for me first? Can you bring that magazine over here?

We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people. And it was easy to find an apartment because we had no standards; we were just amazed that it was
our
door,
our
rotting carpet,
our
cockroach infestation. We decorated with paper streamers and Chinese lanterns and we shared the ancient bed that came with the studio. This was tremendously thrilling for one of us. One of us had always been in love with the other. One of us lived in a perpetual state of longing. But we’d met when we were children and seemed destined to sleep like children, or like an old couple who had met before the sexual revolution and were too shy to learn the new way.

We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired—as furniture sanders—we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone’s job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.

With this goal in mind, Pip came up with a new plan. We went at it with determination; three weeks in a row we wrote and rewrote and resubmitted our ad to the local paper. Finally, the
Portland Weekly
accepted it; it no longer sounded like blatant prostitution, and yet, to the right reader, it could have meant nothing else. We were targeting wealthy women who loved women. Did such a thing exist? We would also accept a woman of average means who had saved up her money.

The ad ran for a month, and our voice mailbox overflowed with interest. Every day we parsed through the hundreds of men to find that one special lady who would pay our rent. She was slow to come. She perhaps did not even read this section of the free weekly. We became agitated. We knew this was the only way we could make money without compromising ourselves. Could we pay Mr. Hilderbrand, the landlord, in food stamps? We could not. Was he interested in this old camera that Pip’s grandmother had loaned her? He was not. He wanted to be paid in the traditional way. Pip grimly began to troll through the messages for a gentle man. I watched her boyish face as she listened and realized that she was terrified. I thought of her small bottom that was so like a pastry and the warm world of complications between her legs. Let him be a withered man, I prayed. A man who really just wanted to see us jump around in our underwear. Suddenly, Pip grinned and wrote down a name. Leanne.

The bus dropped us off at the top of the gravel driveway that Leanne had described on the phone. We had told her our names were Astrid and Tallulah, and we hoped “Leanne” was a pseudonym, too. We wanted her to be wearing a smoking jacket or a boa. We hoped she was familiar with the work of Anaïs Nin. We hoped that she was not the way she sounded on the phone. Not poor, not old, not willing to pay for the company of anyone who would drive all the way out to Nehalem, population 210.

Pip and I walked down the gravel path toward a small brown house. There was bad food being cooked, we could smell it already. And now a woman stepped onto the porch, she was frowning. Her age was hard to determine from our vantage point, a point in our lives when we could not bring older bodies into focus. She was perhaps the age of my mother’s older sister. And, like Aunt Lynn, she wore leggings, royal-blue leggings, and an oversized button-down shirt with some kind of appliqué on it. My mind ballooned with nervous fear. I looked at Pip and for a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.

She waves and we wave. We wave until we are close enough to say hi and then we say hi. Now we are close enough to hug, but we don’t. She says, Come in, and inside, it is dark, with no children. Of course there are no children. Pip asks for the money right away, which is something we decided on beforehand. It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever. We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting. Leanne tells us we are younger than she expected and to sit down. We sit on an old vinyl couch and she leaves the room. It is a terrible room, with magazines piled everywhere and furniture that could have come from a motel. We don’t look at each other or anything that is reflective. I stare at my own knees.

For a long time we don’t know where she is, and then, slowly, I can feel that she is standing right behind us. I realize this just before she pulls her fingernails through my hair. I didn’t think she was the sexual type, but now I see that I don’t know anything. It has begun, and every second we are closer to the end. I say to myself that long nails equal wealth; the idea of wealth always calms me down. I pretend I smell perfume. What if we all used expensive shampoo. What if we were kidding all the time and cared about nothing. My head relaxes, and I do the exercise where you imagine you are turning into honey. My mind slows down to a rate that would not be considered functional for any other job. I am alive only one out of every four seconds, I register only fifteen minutes out of the hour. I see she is standing before us in a slip and it is not really clean and I die. I see that Pip is taking off her shoes and I die. I see that I am squeezing a nipple and I die.

On the long ride home, neither of us said anything. We were kites flying in opposite directions attached to strings held by one hand. The money we had just made was also in that hand. Pip stopped to get a bag of chips on the way home, and now we had $1.99 less than our rent. It seemed obvious now that we should have charged more. Pip put the money in an envelope and wrote
Mr. Hilderbrand
on it. Then we stood there, apart, bruised and smelling like Leanne. We turned away from each other and set about tightening all the tiny ropes of our misery. I ran a bath. Just before I stepped in the tub, I heard the front door close and froze midstep; she was gone. Sometimes she did this. In the moments when other couples would fight or come together, she left me. With one foot in the bath, I stood waiting for her to return. I waited an unreasonably long time, long enough to realize that she wouldn’t be back tonight. But what if I waited it out, what if I stood here naked until she returned? And then, just as she walked in the front door, I could finish the gesture, squatting in the then-cold water. I had done strange things like this before. I had hidden under cars for hours, waiting to be found; I had written the same word seven thousand times attempting to alchemize time. I studied my position in the bathtub. The foot in the water was already wrinkly. How would I feel when night fell? And when she came home, how long would it take her to look in the bathroom? Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone? And even if she did realize that I had done this impossible feat for her, what then? She was never thankful or sympathetic. I washed quickly, with exaggerated motions that warded off paralysis.