The Man Who Loved Birds (33 page)

And in that moment all of history, all the past and future, all of memory and responsibility and his vows to his brothers and to God came rushing back and Flavian opened his mouth to say
I’m sorry, I am so sorry
when Johnny Faye took his head in his hands and looked him in the eyes and did not let him turn his head to one side or look down and his eyes were deep brown and full of love. “Aint it glorious,” he said, a three-dollar word he would have learned in church, and Flavian held his tongue and looked up through the dense canopy of leaves, the sycamore leaf so broad and shapely, all of a piece, whole unto itself, and for the first time the thought occurred to him that he too might become all of a piece, whole unto himself.

“Aint it glorious,” Johnny Faye said a second time. “Now that is what I call a conversation with God. Or Beauty, if you got to be so high falutin about it and you do, I know that, it’s part of what I like about you. You know why I got brown eyes?”

“No.”

Johnny Faye held a hand flat at his forehead. “Because I’m full of shit up to here. And you, you with your barely blue eyes, you’re a quart short. Which is why you take everything so serious and why you ever been, are now, and ever will be a monk.”

And after he said this, for the space of a few seconds Flavian forgot everything he had promised, all the vows he had made, his place in the world, everything but right here, right now and the thought
I will follow this man wherever he goes. Only say the word and I shall be healed
.

Johnny Faye worked his way around Flavian and slid down the sycamore trunk to JC, who had been biding his doggy time. He picked up Flavian’s shirt from where it had fallen from the tree.
“I am a liberal-minded man but I have to say that, when it comes right down to it, I’m better at hard and sharp than I am at soft and round.”

Something in Johnny Faye’s voice and in what he said lodged a little dagger in Flavian’s side, somewhere just below his heart—maybe it lodged
in
his heart. He didn’t want to put a name to the feeling—he’d never felt it before and he would have been hard-pressed to name it. But it was there, all right—not a sharp, quick pain like a pinprick but more like a splinter, hardly noticeable, the kind of injury that he was innocent enough to think would go away on its own instead of suppurating into poison.

Johnny Faye held up Flavian’s shirt and jeans. Flavian jumped down from the tree and grabbed at them but Johnny Faye stepped out of reach. “Maybe I’ll just disappear with these. Explain
that
to the abbot.” But then he held up Flavian’s shirt with the arms out while Flavian slipped it on.

Flavian pulled on his pants in silence. With every moment the weight of what he had done grew until he was nearly choking with remorse.

“See you next week, same time, same place.”

“I won’t—I can’t promise that.”

“I aint asking for promises. I aint much on promises, you know that. Just letting you know where I’m planning on being. Now let’s get out of here before they send out that dumbass cop and a search party.”

And then they were out of the creek bed and through the parted cedars and into the fields and onto ’Sweet, whom Johnny Faye sent cantering through the early September evening light, no sun by now, the sun had set but the world was still filled with light fading every moment but everywhere at once.

The doctor pondered the evidence: Spots of blood in her underwear, three days running. Her period had never been dependable—sometimes she missed it altogether, other times it came as a painful flood. Medical school had taught her to understand this irregularity as one of many pieces of evidence of her infertility. These spots, however—a trail of scarlet tears—were something new.

And something else was afoot—something unmeasureable, unanswerable. Hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, a sea change. The world had a sharper edge. She found herself inexplicably cheerful one morning, downcast the next. The blandest American foods turned her stomach, even as she longed for the mustards and cumins of her youth.

One night she dreamed of these knobby hills, these people, her patients. Speaking the tongues of her childhood, they gather to bury her living self but they cover her with only a few centimeters of earth so she can breathe. She is very calm, she feels no fear. As she is lying in the darkness with her eyes closed, flowers sprout from the earth, covering her body. She rises up whole and complete in herself and in that predawn moment she spoke out loud: “How the body remembers.”

Meena met Maria Goretti at the end of a slow Friday shift when they would have the lab to themselves—Maria, who lived near the hospital and so at some remove from Meena’s town. Maria
chattered while she drew blood, and Meena took comfort in the ceaseless river of words from someone who’d performed this test many times, first with rabbits and frogs, now with all this high-tech equipment. She recorded pretty much the same rate of false positives no matter the method but Dr. Chatterjee had nothing to worry about, she had a perfect record—“I don’t report out a positive unless I’m sure, and I haven’t been wrong yet.”

Meena had never given thought to lab techs as repositories of information—she had never given much thought to lab techs at all, a fact for which on the drive home she reproached herself bitterly. She could not keep herself from imagining that she had made a terrible mistake in coming here to this hospital,
her
hospital, and trusting Maria Goretti Shaklett, who until this moment struck her as entirely trustworthy, to run this test. Meena had settled on Maria exactly because she was an unmarried woman with a child
born out of wedlock
, as Ginny Rae Drummond said. On Meena’s drive to the hospital this logic had made sense, but now with a Band-Aid on her arm and the road a green tunnel through the late summer heat Meena realized that the quality that led her to seek out Maria—the fact that she, the doctor, felt comfortable in asking her to keep a secret—could turn in another direction.

Meena shook her head to clear it of such thoughts. She was being too sensitive, an old problem. Besides which she needed to know and to know fast because if she
were
pregnant she would have to call her medical school colleagues and find someone, somewhere who would terminate as soon as possible, no questions asked, privacy inviolate. Most likely she was worrying about nothing.

And so the doctor set aside her fears, that hairline fracture in time, and concentrated instead on praying, yes, that was the right word for it,
praying
, for—whatever she was praying for. One moment she prayed for the test to be negative, the next she found herself praying for a child,
their
child,
her
child.

“I have come by some information that I am certain you will find of great interest.”

Harry Vetch was facing Maria Goretti across the glassy expanse of his desk. He had been tapping away at his computer keyboard—he kept his fingers on the keys. She wore a sober dark dress and held a canvas tote bag perched on her knees—she might have been the opening speaker in a high school debate. Vetch was touched. At the same time, a small reminder was in order. “Excuse me, but this is ridiculous. We have no claims on each other. I don’t know why we’re having this conversation.”

“We’re having this conversation because you know me well enough to know that we would not be having it unless what I know is important.”

“On that front I see your point.”

“And so, your Honor, may I continue?”

A flick of his hand.

“The doctor is pregnant.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do say and I have proof. I personally processed her pregnancy test. No one is in possession of this knowledge except me. Not even the doctor. I’ve put her off a day but I’ll have to tell her tomorrow.”

“And why do you bring this pearl of gossip to me, assuming it to be true, which, by the way, I do not?”

Maria Goretti rolled her eyes. “I hadn’t thought that I would have to explain politics to a county attorney, but life is full of surprises and a man’s capacity to believe his own fairy tale is never to be underestimated. Nobody in this county cares if a lab tech fucks around—especially an unmarried lab tech who has a child as constant evidence of her questionable character. Nobody cares if a
middle-aged
man fucks around, even if he’s the county attorney, so long as he keeps it on the sly. Men will be men, blah-de-blah. But when the dark-skinned unmarried lady doctor from halfway around the world fucks around, people sit up and pay attention.”

“I see your point. I’ll remind you of what you already know, which is that you are risking at least your job and maybe more in revealing this to anybody. Including me.” Maria Goretti was studying him closely. “Maria. I’d prefer you not look at me like I was a specimen under a microscope.” He returned to his computer monitor.

“Harry. Do you have any idea—no. Back to your question. Yes, I am well aware that I am risking my job, and no, I don’t really know why I’m bringing this pearl—and it
is
a pearl—to you. I laid awake last night, asking myself this very question. And the best answer is the simplest answer. Some kind of commitment to you and, let’s face it, the lack of alternatives brings me to your door.

“Dr. Chatterjee has been seen in the company of exactly one man who might conceivably be of interest to a woman of her education and social standing—”

Now he sat back and looked directly at her. “You’re not suggesting—”

“‘Suggesting’ is the perfect word for what I am doing. Not stating. Only suggesting. I am a medical professional. I deal in facts, not gossip. And in this case the facts are that the doctor is pregnant, and that marriage to an American citizen brings benefits that the doctor is surely aware of. The last time I checked, pregnancy requires the presence of another party, the Virgin Mary notwithstanding. So. I thought about that a long time and it came
down to this. I don’t think you’re the father. At first I thought, ‘Oh, sure, obviously, Harry.’ But having a kid under, let’s call them ‘unconventional circumstances,’ has taught me—for that matter, my kid herself has taught me, that the most obvious explanation is not always the right explanation. Something about the doctor during that visit—I don’t know, hard to put a finger to—let’s call it an intuition. If
you’d
been the father she’d have been, I don’t know. Excited. Or something. And she wasn’t. She was—I don’t know. Jumpy. Anyway, if you
are
the father, you’ll find out soon enough. You must have some idea of what this will mean for your career.”

“What do you mean, my career?”

“Jesus, Harry. I have my doubts that you’ll ever get married but that’s another subject. But why are you so indifferent to getting trapped into it? I am telling you this so that you might think about what it means for the good doctor’s future. Even more to the point, for
your
future. And if you’re
not
the father—well.”

Outside, the silence of the warm afternoon, broken by a sparrow’s chatter.

“That damned clock,” Maria Goretti muttered. “I don’t know—”

And at that moment he knew.
Birdwatching
. In that moment Harry Vetch became both present to and apart from himself. He turned his back to Maria Goretti. He saw himself reflected in the mirror that backed the pendulum clock. Disbelief, uncertainty, grief, rage, jealousy, hatred, betrayal were written on his face in a script that bore the signature of Johnny Faye.

Vetch composed his features. He circled in his seat, saved the document on his monitor, and stood. “If you don’t mind. I appreciate your bringing this information to my attention. I will be in touch sooner rather than later, I promise you that. I need some time to think through the right course of action.”

“Whatever you want. But I’m telling the doctor tomorrow.” Maria Goretti rose and walked to the door and then turned and faced him head-on, crossing her arms. “Harry. Let’s forget about
facts for a second and think about the truth. You are terrified of love. You use your good looks and your power to lure women in, and then once we’re within arm’s reach you swing and knock us down—you have to punish yourself for being so weak as to have feelings and punish us for being so stupid as to fall for you. You turn to the bottle to give you the nerve to swing, and then once you’ve swung you go back to it so you can forget what you’ve said and done. You go back to it because it will always provide you with a story that makes the other person out to be the villain or at least the sucker. You’re a storyteller all right, just as much as the rest of us. Making up stories where you’re the hero, and where the other person is too needy, or too demanding, or too something, you fill in the blank, it doesn’t matter so long as the problems are their problems and not your problems.

“This is a recipe for disaster, loving somebody who loves the bottle more than me or even himself, but the problem is it’s too late, I love you and fuck me for it. I guess it’s in my nature to take care of people, that is why I became a health professional and why I had a child.

“You’re a facts kind of guy—OK, then here are the facts. You can marry the doctor, which is surely what she will work to make happen, it’s what I would do if I was in her boat. And she has the kid seven months from now, tough to explain but I am sure you are capable of explaining it, no matter if it comes out looking like, I don’t know. Chicken Little. I will not breathe another word to anybody, you know that.

“Or you can bail on the doctor and keep doing what you’re doing until you’ve fucked every woman dumb enough to let herself get within reach or you’re too old to get it up. Which point you’re going to reach pretty soon. Do the math.

“You can do one of these things. Or you can choose
the right course of action
. You can quit drinking. You can join forces with the best partner you’re likely to find in this life who is eager to help you make something of yourself, whatever that might be. I’d give
up drinking in a heartbeat if you’d give it up. I don’t even like the stuff and I’d lose a good ten pounds. You’ve got the ambition and I’ve got the will to support it. As for everybody else in this podunk corner of the world—ask yourself this question. Do you want to be liked? Or feared? Do you want to spend your life doing what other people want? Or getting what
you
want? You’ve heard the news about Martin Stead.”