The Wallcreeper (4 page)

“You can bet your buttons Togo has secret sorrows,” Stephen said. “If anybody knew what they were, the world would be filled with raw, bowel-torn howling. That’s Stanislaw Lem. I was going to say, I didn’t love you when I married you. It was like, ‘Let’s Not And Say We Did.’ But now I feel like Apu in
The World of Apu
, except instead of being faithful to me and dying in childbirth like you’re supposed to, you’re fucking this Arab guy. So tell me, Tiff,
what is going on
?”

“He’s Montenegrin!”

“Montenegrin my ass! He’s Syrian if he’s a day! ‘Elvis’! It’s like a Filipino telemarketer calling himself Aragorn!”

I pouted.

“Ever try to make a list of everything you know about Elvis?”

“What would be the point? I was just trying to have some exciting sex.”

“Could you not try?”

I was silent.

“Could you love me a little?”

“Actually I do love you. Elvis told me. It’s breaking his heart.”

On Monday morning I bought the
International Herald Tribune
and some milk and said, “Elvis, I need to talk to you.” For the first time I noticed that he was reading
Hürriyet.
Over coffee at my place, he explained that his family had left Montenegro some generations before. But their women preserved the legendary beauty and kindness of the people of Montenegro, once immortalized so memorably by Cervantes in his lady of Ulcinj (D’ulcinea), and their men weren’t bad either. He showed me his Turkish passport. His name really was Elvis.

“Tiffany, my love,” he said. “What does it matter where I am from? You are an American! You know better than any shit European that we are all equal children of God!”

The next Saturday we went birding to an ugly artificial lake and Stephen asked me to talk about myself. “Let’s see,” I said, “being little sucked, but it had its advantages. Sledding is a lot more exciting before you turn ten. Of course I couldn’t really swim until I was eleven.”

“And then?”

“Well, my parents weren’t real particular about their choice of a boarding school, so I went to basically a home for wayward girls. I didn’t learn a whole lot. Like, our chemistry teacher was the choir director’s wife. I used to play around in the lab on weekends. I used to dump all the mercury on the counter and play with it.”

“Yeah?”

“I was supposed to go to Bryn Mawr after my junior year, but it was too much money, so I took a scholarship to Agnes Scott.”

He shuddered appreciatively.

“Then I moved to Philly and got a job, and then I met you.”

“Short life.”

“Well, life is short.”

“My child bride.”

“Hey, it’s not that bad! I had a thing with the riding coach at school, and in Philly I OD’d on heroin and they called me crusty mattress-back!”

“What?”

“I’m kidding. That was somebody else. This girl name of, um, Cindy—”

“You just made her up.”

“Okay, her name was Candy. I’m serious. Candy Hart. It sounds like a transvestite from Andy Warhol’s factory, so probably she made it up. She said she was from Blue Bell, so probably she was from Lancaster, and she said she was fourteen, so probably she was seventeen. I’ve never met anybody I can be entirely sure I’ve actually met.”

We saw bearded reedlings and a ruff. We would have seen more, but there were dog walkers there scaring everything off.

We went on a birding vacation to the lagoons of Bardawil. All the men I saw there reminded me of Elvis.

When I got back I demanded answers. He cradled his coffee in his hands and said, “Now I am telling you the truth. I am a Syrian Jew. My grandfather converted to Catholicism in 1948, but he took a Druze name by mistake and was not trusted by the Forces Libanaises, so then—”

“Just shut up,” I said. “I think you’re cute. That’s your nationality. Cute.”

On the phone my sister said, “Tiff, you have got to get a life. You think I have time to have sex? Guess again! I spend so much money on outfits for work I had to get another job!”

I said to Stephen at dinner that maybe we should try again to have a child. Our marriage had begun in the most daunting way imaginable. We had barely known each other, and then we had those accidents and that jarring disconnect between causes (empty-headed young people liking each other, wallcreepers) and effects (pain, death).

He objected. He said, “I’m sure there are couples that are fated to be together, like they meet each other in kindergarten and date on and off for twenty years, and finally they give up because they realize they’ve gotten so far down their common road that there’s nobody else in the entire universe they can talk to, because they have a private language and everything like that. Do you really think that applies to us? What do we have in common? We don’t even have Rudi anymore.”

“A baby would be something in common.”

“That’s it. Have kids and turn so weird from the stress that nobody else ever understands another word we say. A couple that’s completely wrapped up in each other can get through anything, because they don’t have a choice. Right now we have the option of floating through life without being chained to anybody, but instead we pile on a ton of bricks and go whomp down to the ground.”

“Are we ever going to both want a baby at the same time?”

“I hope not!” Stephen said. “I want to float through life. I like being with you, and I don’t want to be chained to anybody. I mean, when you got pregnant, I could deal, but if you’re not pregnant, I can also deal.”

“That’s a relief. I was afraid if I didn’t have kids soon, you’d make me get a job.”

He paused and looked at me fixedly for a good ten seconds. “I’m starting to catch on to you,” he said. “You were born wasted. You live in a naturally occurring K-hole.”

“I do my best.”

“Here’s the deal. I need your baby for my life list. It’s one of the ten thousand things I need to do before I die, along with climbing Mt. Everest and seeing the pink and white terraces of Rotomahana. The baby is the ultimate mega-tick.”

“Like a moa,” I suggested.

“Exactly. There will never be another one like it, and there was never one like it ever, so actually it’s a moa that arose from spontaneous generation. A quantum moa.”

“Babies are totally quantum,” I said. “That’s why it feels so weird when they die. You feel like it had its whole entire life taken away and all the lights went out at once, like it got raptured out of its first tooth and high school graduation in the same moment.”

We munched on food for a bit.

I said, “Stephen, may I ask you something? When we had anal sex that one time, was that for your life list?”

“Yeah.”

“It wasn’t on my list.”

“I’m sorry. I figured human beings are curious. I try not to avert my eyes when life throws new experiences my way. But I guess nobody ever asked me to stick the pelagics up my ass.”

At nine o’clock on a November morning I looked out the kitchen window and saw three birders on the sidewalk digiscoping me. When I opened the curtain, they moved their hands frantically from side to side at waist level, as if to say, Stop! When I opened the window, they shouted, “Halt!
Nicht bewegen
!” I stuck my head out and looked around. Rudolf was waiting under the eaves. When he saw me, he let go, dropped two stories, and then fluttered up and in.

Stephen was overjoyed for a day and a night. Then I was on all the birding forums as wallcreeper girl. People were writing embarrassing things. They wrote, “
Bernerin ist gut zu Vögeln
,” the oldest joke in the book. Bernese woman is nice to birds/Bernese woman is a good fuck. You could call it homonyms or a pun, but actually the only difference is that the birds are capitalized.

Birders are sort of a male version of the women in that bar Elvis took us to. They attract birds by kissing their thumbs until it squeaks. They can’t exactly attract women that way, but why would they want to? Women are ubiquitous, invasive—the same subspecies from the Palearctic to Oceania. Trash birds. However, it should be noted, birders are primates and thus, like birds, respond to visual cues. I had leaned out the window in a loose bathrobe, first drawing my hair to one side around the back of my neck so it wouldn’t get in the way. Everybody likes a woman barefoot in breeding plumage in the kitchen. Stephen said if ornitho.ch had a habit of publishing the locations of wallcreeper sightings we would be in deep shit, and also that I should get a modeling contract for optics like Pamela Anderson for Labatt’s.

Whenever I looked at the video online, I saw Elvis standing faintly illuminated in the deep shadow of the kitchen. But Stephen only had eyes for Rudolf and his floppy rag-doll trajectory up his spiral staircase of air into my arms. Stephen really did love birds. Plus psychedelic drugs, discretion, and sarcasm. The beard kept Elvis from having a face-shaped face. His dark body hair broke up the outline of his naked torso like camouflage on a warship.

As I screwed Rudolf’s bacon into his pegboards with my thumb I felt glad we were too poor to live downtown. Rudolf would never have found us. Would he?

Rudolf sang, “Toodle-oodle-oo!”

Stephen and I loved nature more than ever after we’d decided to ignore its effects in our own lives. We chose to love it instead of bending under its weight. If you’re out in a swamp every weekend morning, you’re not breeding and feeding. You’re in control. You need to stay out of nature’s way while you’re still young enough for it to ruin your life.

Or maybe I just thought that way because Stephen’s father had a pacemaker and it was the bane of his existence. That’s what he told me that day down on the dock: that he would die when the goddamn battery finally ran the hell down. In the private language shared by the extended family of western civilization, it had become impossible to connect nature and death. Nature was the locus of eternal recurrence, the seasons like coiled springs, the Lion King taking his father’s throne, the inexorable force of life that floods in and covers Surtsey with giraffes and hoopoes. Where it is apparent that there is no death, human beings are planed down to fear of failing technology: the loose seat belt that ratcheted too late and walloped Tiff, Jr. upside the head, the pricey polyurethane condom that was supposed to be so great and created her in the first place. We failed technology when it needed us most. The beaches were disappearing not because the oceans were rising, but because we hadn’t built the right walls to keep them out. We needed storm cellars and snow tires and environmentally friendly air conditioning. I needed to get to thirty-five without having a baby and then blame IVF. And meanwhile, nature itself was dying, one life at a time.

After two years in Berne, Stephen was still working on two migratory ducks. Two pretty common ducks actually, so it was a mystery why he didn’t have them yet. We would go out every Sunday morning to one little body of water or another and see everything but these damn ducks. He desperately, in his opinion, needed someone reliable to tell him where to find the ducks. So at long last he joined the Swiss Society for the Protection of Birds. He started entering his backlog of observations on ornitho.ch instead of just lurking. Four weekends in a row he went out with one of them instead of me. He didn’t make any mistakes.

They had a thing for English speakers. England is the mythical Eden where every rude mechanical knows what is nesting where in his garden and woodcocks eat out of your hand, and America is the land of the citizen scientist and the bag limit. American hunters shoot five ducks in the first five minutes of the season and rest on their laurels. Models of reason and restraint.

So they trusted Stephen, even though birders under fifty were reportable to the Swiss Rarities Committee. Stephen knew his birds. They gave him a piece of protected marsh to count birds in, every Sunday in winter and once a month in summer. They promised him his ducks had an excellent chance of turning up. So he sat there behind his spotting scope looking at mallards until about mid-January and then decided maybe something was wrong with Sundays. He tried Saturday and saw about two thousand birds—various rails, fudge ducks, tufted ducks, common pochards (female), red-crested pochards, and a juvenile eagle.

The next morning he asked me to come with him. He wanted to take off at five o’clock. I forced myself. We didn’t have to look long for the guy. We heard him. He was hunting from a boat on the other side of the creek.

“No way!” Stephen said. We could sort of make him out dragging the boat up into the reeds, and heard him call his dog and start his car. It was Sunday, with no birds anywhere in sight except the ultimate in trash—those sinister little chickadees everybody feeds, who hang around all winter and get dibs on the nesting sites the good birds need. Luckily ninety percent of them die anyway of hunger and cold.

“It’s a crime against nature!” Stephen said, frowning.

I pointed out that the trend in recent jurisprudence has been to broaden the scope of so-called crimes against humanity and subsume all other offenses under them. He didn’t listen.

His first idea for a solution did not bode well. He wanted to buy a .22. His next idea was to spend a lot of money on video equipment. His third idea was to talk to the Society for the Protection of Birds, who said you can’t have everything. Hunting is way below what it used to be. Actually it’s down to almost nothing in Switzerland. It’s the peaceable kingdom. Seriously. The red-crested pochards come there from Spain, north for the winter.

The beautiful Elvis bred and fed. He rang our doorbell with Kaiser rolls and a hangdog expression and said, “Oh, Tiff, it is so much terrible. My ex-wife is pregnant. I will become a father. She will not get an abortion.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I literally don’t care.” That was not true at all, but I had learned to draw back at the sight of the forces of nature. “Either you want to continue our relationship,” I continued, “or you don’t. But don’t just come in here and tell me something like that without putting it into context. By context I mean direct relevance for me personally. A purely pragmatic context, like are you never coming over here again, or will you be coming less often, or you can come for the next six months and that’s it. Give me your findings and skip the data.”