Sparrow Nights (13 page)

I took a sudden, involuntary deep breath, as if my body had commanded it. How like the days of my childhood today had been. How
symphonic
. There was no other word for it. And my goodness, what a long day. Well, hardly a day, for time seemed attenuated, like soft toffee pulled slowly over two or three days, the variegated incidents stuck like stones, some precious, some vulgar, here and there. The day, it seemed now, had started almost a year before. The day of the clinking hangers.

I laughed softly and stirred in my chair. The pregnant woman looked over, then went on talking. “I told him to wait for the phone call, but he said he’s coming on the eighteenth anyway. I said, Daddy, the baby might not
be
here yet …” My, she talked a lot. How difficult for her husband, all that chatter, and now the two of them trapped in the kitchen for two years, watching an infant wave and gurgle and poop and … I suppose, though, that even if Emma came back now, it’d be impossible. A teller in a bank. Who could have imagined that would be the last of things? Hmm. The last of things. There was a whole list of things that you did for the last time with someone. The last time I slept with her, yes, I remembered that; thrashing away at her poor young body because I couldn’t come. Those pills. Prozac … no, not Prozac, its cousin. Anyway, doesn’t matter. Too bad, though, to end that way. Sort of anticlimactic. There was a last dinner, a last good night, a last hug in the middle of the night, the last time she brushed her teeth over my sink, that last time she dried her hair in the bathroom. No one knew it. As one doesn’t. As one won’t when at the end of one’s life there will be a last time to make love, a last time to close a novel and lay it on the floor beside the bed, a last time to pull the curtains, a last movie. A last time to see one’s mother. A last morning. And yet one can’t complain. You’re only entitled to so much life. No, if you were to say to me, tomorrow is your last, I think I might think, I can’t complain, not really. I’ve had a bit of love, a bit of fame, a bit of sex. A bit of this and that and then goodbye. But what happens to one’s things? The books, for example. There’s a last time for each of those books too; no farewell, just a final glance at their pages. A last time for Rimbaud, for Balzac, for Zola, for Lautréamont even. The Monkees of the Symbolist movement. How little that matters now. How little it ever mattered. But you have always known that; have always known that somehow none of
that
mattered. Love mattered. Or was it love? No, probably not. For when Emma left I wanted her dead. How loving was that? (Here I smiled.) No, not murdered, not that. But a sad accident perhaps, where afterwards I might doff my hat, my eyes watering, and say, yes, how dreadful, such a fine young woman. Me at her funeral beside her father, shrunk with grief, her mother fussing about the reception, the food. “I want everyone gone by six,” she’d say. “After that they can bloody well mix their own drinks.”

The
Aranjuez
more insistent now. I looked around the room. The pace of things had picked up; the talk was louder; the silverware clanked more aggressively; the waiters moved faster. Like the concerto, the evening felt as if it were moving toward something. But what? I wondered. What?

Things began to rankle, the pregnant woman still talking. God, will she never shut up? I thought pregnant women were holy women, not such screeching chatterboxes. How
does
her husband put up with it?

“Darius?”

Is it you, my little princess? Come to save me from the fires of hell? I fear you’ve come too late
.

“Darius Halloway?”

An older woman, elegantly dressed, thick in the waist, stood before my table. Her hair grey now, once frizzy, was pulled tightly into a bun at the back of her neck. High cheekbones supported a weary, smiling face.

“It’s Raissa,” she said.

“Raissa?”

“Raissa Shestatsky.”

From a swirl of clothes and tired features my beautiful young philosophy student stepped suddenly forward, like a child who has been hiding under the covers jumps up to surprise her parents.

“My God,” I whispered.

“Of all the days I had to run into you, it would have to be today when I’m looking like hell warmed over.”

Yes, I recognized her voice now. But who was the white-haired man behind her?

“You look lovely,” I said. I opened my mouth, but nothing more came out. I tried again. “I haven’t seen you in thirty years.”

“If a day. Yes, I was sitting over there. I didn’t want to disturb you. You’re the only man I’ve ever known who can do nothing and still appear busy.”

“But it’s so lovely to see you again. Can you sit down?”

“No, we’re on our way out. I see you on television sometimes. I don’t know what the hell you’re saying, but it sounds interesting. I ended up teaching too. High school.”

“Do you still read Heidegger?”

“No, I outgrew all that.”

“But Raissa, you look so lovely. Can’t you stay a moment?” She turned and said something to her friend, the white-haired man, who stepped forward.

“This is my husband, Richard.”

A pleasant-faced man with a slight accent introduced himself.

“He’s going to get the car,” she said.

“But sit down, sit down.”

“I saw one of your books in the store, oh, ages ago, and I thought to myself, the son of a gun did it.”

“Which one?”

She looked at me with some confusion.

“I mean, there are more than one.”

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know.”

I looked at her again. I wanted to weep. “Raissa.”

“Darius,” she said with some humour.

“You won’t believe this, but I was thinking about you only a few days ago. I was trying to think of the last time we saw each other,” I said.

“That’s easy,” she said briskly. “It was after you came back from France. We had coffee together.”

“I thought there was another time. After that.”

“No, we never saw each other again.”

“It’s odd in so small a city, where I run into everyone,” I said.

“I don’t live down here. I live in the suburbs.”

“But you don’t come down here?
Ever?”
I asked in a strangely imploring tone.

“No, never. Besides, it was clear you didn’t love me any more.”

“Raissa.”

“When we had coffee together, I could see you didn’t love me any more.”

“But I did, Raissa, I loved you for
years.”

“Liar,” she said affectionately. “It sort of bugged me. I’d gotten used to being adored by you.”

“But you had a good life anyway. I can see that.”

“It’s had its moments.”

“Did you have any children?”

“No, I hate kids. I must have told you that.”

“Yes, I think you did. Come to think of it, I think you did.”

The body never forgets, I suppose, and in leaning forward to talk to her I still felt, as I had at the end of things thirty years ago, that it was I who sought and she who gently rebuffed. I was in the presence of a woman who had left me, for whom I had stronger feelings still than she had for me. But I didn’t care. She could leave the table, she could think what she wanted.
Poor Darius, still mad for me after all these years
. And I
had been
. Oh, that year in France, those midnight walks through that nasty brick city, the wind howling, the fine snow rising up from the pavement and swirling about like a ghost.

“Raissa, I was so lucky to meet you. Really, so lucky. It’s like a dream to be able to say it to you.”

“Yes?” she said cautiously, as if I might be making fun of her.

“No, no, I’m serious. I’m lucky to have had someone so beautiful to love when I was young. When I was so …
unappreciative
. Is that your husband?”

“Yes, I told you.”

“Yes, so you did. He’s very good-looking.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes.”

“Slavic men age well. But you—you look just the same.”

“Well, I’m used to it now, at any rate.”

“I have a picture of you somewhere. I still have it.”

“Oh God, don’t show it to me. And how is your friend? I forget her name. Lydia?”

“God, you’ve got a good memory, Darius.”

“For those days anyway. I couldn’t tell you what happened last week if you put a gun to my head. Lydia
Zyrrba?”

“Yes, I know who you mean.”

“I always thought her name needed a couple of vowels.”

“We don’t see each other any more.”

“I hope you didn’t have a fight.”

She shrugged. “Just one of those things.”

“Raissa, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“That morning I saw you coming out of the apartment building—who was that guy? Did you end up with him?”

“For a while, yes. For six years actually.”

“Good.”

“Why good, Darius?”

“Just that that’s a good long time to end up with anybody.” I could see she was getting ready to leave. “Stay a second longer,” I said.

“I’ll see you again.”

“Will you?”

“Yes. You know how it is: you don’t see someone for a long time and then you run into them every day.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s true. That does happen sometimes.” Involuntarily my eyes filled with tears.

“What, Darius? Don’t be sad.”

“I’m not sad. It’s just that I haven’t seen you in thirty years. I think if someone had said to me, it’s going to be thirty years before you see her again, I think I’d have died or something.”

“But you didn’t, Darius, did you?”

I laughed and wiped my eyes. “No, apparently I didn’t.”

And then it
was
time for her to go. I stood up and put out my hand. She shook her head and, lightly brushing away my hand, kissed me on the cheek and held her lips to my face as if she were saying, I’m never going to see you again, Darius, and we both know it.

I didn’t sit back down until she had disappeared from the doorway, this grey-haired woman who for a matter of months had lain in my bed and talked to me in the dark. We had known each other’s bodies when they were young. How precious that was—for we held an image of each other which no one else in the world did, and when we died, that picture would exist no more.

The waiter rushed by with a bottle of wine for the next table.

Goodbye, Raissa, goodbye, my darling.

^{C H A P T E R}        
11

W
hen I was in graduate school, my roommate killed himself with a bullet through the temple. For reasons I’ve never entirely understood, his mother gave me the gun, with its almost full clip, at a reception after the funeral. I’m familiar with the saying, the arms maketh the man, but I was never tempted to use the gun, even in a rage, until one time in Chicago. It was a few years later and I was preparing for my orals, a crucial exam on the way to one’s doctorate. I’d been up all night and had fallen asleep near dawn. In those days I was living in the university residence. Somewhere near seven in the morning I was awakened by a knocking on the door down the hall. Even though there was no response, it went on and on and on, until finally I got out of bed and looked out my door. Down the hall a long-haired young man, husky and dishevelled, was slumped backwards against the door, tapping backhand with his knuckles whenever the spirit moved him. You could see from his physical posture that he’d decided to make a siege of it. He was going to bang on the door until his friend, probably asleep or fornicating, answered, no matter how long it took.

“Excuse me,” I said, my voice roller-coastery with emotion, “you just woke me up.”

“Tough,” he said, and just in case I had missed the point, he swung himself around, this time leaning his face against the door like a safecracker, and resumed his knocking.

Shaking with rage, I went back into my room and ripped open my sock drawer and hauled out the nine-millimetre pistol. I lay it on the night table and in so doing caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The colour had quite left my face. I ached to shoot him. To walk briskly down the hall, to see his lazy, belligerent eyes come into focus when he realized I had a gun at my side, to stop my trajectory a few feet from him, to raise that same gun to eye level. What a pleasure it would have been to see what Mr. Cool Balls would have made of
that
. And if it didn’t do the trick—if it, say, provoked some unbecoming backtalk—then perhaps I could improvise a first-rate pistol-whipping.

I didn’t, of course. You can’t pull a gun on someone unless you’re prepared to use it. And although I’m not a vulgar careerist, even
I
knew that pistol-whipping a boy for waking you up in the morning is a no-no when it comes to one’s curriculum vitae. “Excellent candidate except for episode with gun.” Instead, I went down the hall in the opposite direction to the bathroom and took a hot, long shower, and when I emerged, my imagination still exploding with violence, the guy was gone.

I confess the incident has stayed with me all these years and it still bothers me. I wish I’d done something other than just
take it
, that ponderous nonchalance. “Tough!” At least I wouldn’t be still thinking about it. I wonder, too, what ever happened to that boy. Did he go through life knocking on doors until eventually someone
did
give him a thrashing? Probably. That tends to be how things work out. Pain, as they say, is life’s only real instructor. But perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

I mention this story for two reasons. First, to admit to a childish tendency to hold on to ancient provocations, to roll them around in my head for years sometimes, decades in this case, like a toxic marble. Second, because, like Chekhov, I believe that you don’t introduce a gun into a narrative unless you plan to make use of it. Of that, more later, I promise.

The truth is, even though I occasionally behave badly, I think I’m a decent soul at heart, and so that business with Passion never sat particularly well with me. I mean, good heavens, I took her to dinner, I invited her into my home—and she clipped me for everything she could stuff into her bag. A shitty business indeed. But I didn’t retaliate. I couldn’t, really. I had a hangover only a gun would cure. (That word again.) One loud noise and I would have shattered, hardly the sang-froid necessary to confront a pimp and his girlfriend. I also had the debilitating sensation that somehow I had had it coming, that I had behaved like a sordid cretin and had got my comeuppance. Mind you, that may have been a function of the hangover. They’re like that occasionally.

I wanted to let the whole thing go, I did, but I just couldn’t. Sometimes, at odd moments in my day, I found myself thirsting for revenge, indulging in rather elaborately choreographed fantasies. Really, it was infuriating. I’d even offered to help with her customs agent’s examination. Think of it—a customs agent! Passion going through your shaving kit, selecting who should and shouldn’t be admitted into the country. What a perfect candidate.

Well, you see my point. It rankled me. But I’ve always tried to hold close to my bosom the adage that if you’re going to do something, wait until you’re sober to do it. It doesn’t matter what it is, a phone call to an old lover, settling an old score, whatever. The point is, I never thought of getting even with Passion until I’d had a martini or two; and then, in the warm light of my favourite restaurant, near the end of the evening, I’d allow my imagination free play. But I never acted on it. I thought to myself, if you still feel like burning down her house in the morning,
vas-y, fais-le
. But not tonight. Tonight, you should go home. And so I would. And invariably, I’d wake up in the morning and look back on the evening’s final raging fifteen or twenty minutes and I’d feel a heavenly relief, as if I’d just stepped from the roadway seconds before an eighteen-wheeler roared by. Because in those twilight moments an act of violent retaliation made a kind of incontrovertible sense. It had its own compelling logic and, worse, an accompanying sensation that I was going to feel physically unwell
until
I took care of it.

I remember once, when I was a child, I was staying at a resort in South Carolina with my mother and older brother, now deceased. He was twelve and I was ten, and we’d had a spat on the beach, I can’t remember what about, him teasing me about my big ears probably, but moments later my mother caught me slipping out of the kitchen with a steak knife. She stopped me, of course, I’m sure I knew someone would, but there was a moment when, knife in hand, I had tried to calm myself down but was unable to, feeling as if I would never again be able to breathe properly until I had committed this act. Until I’d terminated
with extreme prejudice
this lout who was too big to thrash by conventional means. It was as if a madman had taken temporary possession of my young body.

There were other episodes. I quit a summer job once because my boss criticized me at an end-of-day meeting in the office. Everyone was there. I can’t remember what he said, but I remember hearing a faint snigger behind me. It left me with the sensation of having eaten poisoned food, a sensation I couldn’t get rid of till I quit. Until I
acted
upon it. But I loved that job. I thrashed and tossed in my bed for nights afterwards. I was heartbroken. Finally I broke down and apologized. I got my job back. My God, the fuss! The point is, I knew
not to do it
, not to quit. I remember standing in front of the washroom mirror and saying,
Don’t do this, don’t do this
. But I couldn’t stop myself. It was as if I were on a rail and once I started up, nothing, but nothing would stop me until I reached my destiny, no matter how ruinous. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I didn’t think about Passion and her robbing me very often. But when I did, I did.

On the night in question I don’t remember exactly when it started up, this psychotic choo-choo, but it must have been sometime after Raissa Shestatsky left the restaurant. I was too emotional to eat and kept stealing looks to see if the other diners might somehow have understood the magnitude of what had just happened. But the world went on as before. I wanted to batten things down a bit and ordered a vodka martini, which I drank greedily, then called for an encore. Before too long I had drifted into sleepy-eyed staring: the flickering blue light in a Moroccan restaurant, the blue-shirted employees in the Copy Shop across the street. Cars flowed by soundlessly on the other side of the window. At the conclusion of the second martini perspiration trickled under my arms and I had the curious conviction that it was snowing.

It wasn’t. It was a balmy night and I dallied in front of the restaurant, unable to decide which way to go. I headed west, an unusual direction, pulled forward by the warm air and the blossoming vodka. It felt as if I were entering an almost holy state, the wind brushing my face and neck like a woman’s fingers. I turned up a narrow lane. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I was going
somewhere
. The noise from the main thoroughfare receded behind me, like someone shutting a car door from which music has been issuing. I was in Serrault’s neighbourhood now, and it amused me to imagine for a second turning up at his door in this condition. He would certainly invite me in; he might well offer a coffee. But how fast a taxi would appear. What excruciating apologies one would owe after that. No, Serrault was a kindly man, but he was not the kind of man you dropped in on drunk.

It began to rain, a fine spray. I liked the sensation on my face. It was cooling, cleansing, as earlier that day something else had felt cleansing. What was it? Ah, yes, the notion of white tablecloths. Yes, there had been a purpose to that too—to get me out of the house, to get me to a certain restaurant at a certain time so that I might encounter Raissa. It had been a moment of clairvoyance. I had had them before, even as a child. That time my father broke his leg. The night a neighbour killed his wife. Or when my aunt Tullie called from California to surprise me on my ninth birthday, and I’d picked up the phone and said, “Aunt Tullie, where’s my present?” By the end even my mother was a believer. She asked me once, “What’s going to happen to me?”

“Nothing,” I said. And I was right, you see. Nothing did.

When I had these moments, it wasn’t at all like in the movies, where one appears to fall into a trance, sweat on the brow, murderous headaches, Vaseline on the lens,
ce genre de connerie
. Actually, it’s quite a banal event; it’s the
sensation
that’s interesting. You see what’s going to happen and it feels, in your body, as if you’re
remembering
something. And not something very important either, more like where you left a book or an old telephone number.

It’s also true that I never count the times I’m wrong. Those I write off as … Well, let me put it this way: you can’t go looking for these things; they have to come in through the side door. When you go looking—when, as my gambling friends say, you chase the pooch—that’s when you get things wrong. Wishful thinking has its own feel; you can mistake it for the real thing. No, it’s got to just happen, which I know is uncharacteristic language for an academic, but there it is. Why, only the other day I’d had the impression of Emma’s thoughts moving through my house like a group of frumpy women. It was as if they were on some sort of outing, a museum tour perhaps, these drab figures in shapeless coats going through my kitchen, picking up things, examining spice jars, commenting on cutlery, even on my French saucers (they were intrigued by them). They were
telling
me something, I knew that, but I couldn’t decipher it. I tried too hard, I think, I was too obvious in my applications. Finally I knew that I had to glance away, just like that, I had to look away and concentrate on something else; and then, when I’d all but forgotten, when I had released my grip, I would suddenly understand, as if it had been whispered into my ear, what the grey women were saying.

Which brings me, involuntarily, back to that time when Emma moved out, the day of the clinking hangers. My goodness, not that again, I can hear you saying, and you’re right. But bear with me. One final revelation. The truth is, I’ve never told anyone this, except Emma once, but by then her trajectory out of my life had acquired such momentum I’m not sure it even registered.

In those last two or three weeks she had arrived at some kind of resolution, that resolution being, forgive the jargon, that happiness is essentially one’s
own
job, so to speak; and so the adolescent gloom which had hung over the house, rather like that of a teenager who has been denied permission for a weekend sleepover, lifted and there was again a freshness, a lightness to our life. And it was in the midst of this sunshine that she announced on that Sunday morning (why always on a Sunday?) that she was moving out. I always describe it as a shock, a surprise, which on a conscious level it was. But a few nights before—and a few nights before
that
—I had awoken at precisely four o’clock in the morning. Standing in front of the toilet, trying to pee, I had experienced a kind of horror, a premonition that something terrible was going to happen. I recall staring into the mirror and wondering, what is it?
What is it?
I thought perhaps I was going to be fired from my job or perish in a car accident. It never crossed my mind, never, not once, that it was about Emma, that she was going to leave me. One spends one’s life preparing for tragedies that never happen; the real shockers, I now understand, the real knifings, always come at close range.

But you see, I knew something, as I did with the grey ladies in my kitchen, because when she finally made the quivering announcement that Sunday morning,
I can’t live here any more
, I had a feeling, not of shock or surprise, but rather as if I were again remembering something. Suddenly I saw precisely what they had been pointing to, those night shivers at four in the morning. The roads were clear, so to speak, and the caraan got through.