My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (24 page)

—Berman, this is why I asked you to call. I wanted to tell you on the phone, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing I could leave on an answering machine.

Another team of landscapers passed us with a Doric column. I felt a compulsion to stick out my foot and trip them. To start a brawl, draw blood, break bones.

—She doesn’t want to see you. I’m sorry about this, Berman. It’s just the way it is.

I made way for the Doric column.

—How much do those things weigh?

—Not as much as you’d think. They’re masonry and plaster, not marble. If they were marble I’d need slaves.

—I thought she was going to Florida.

—Come on, Berman, she’s a fucking kid. How is she supposed to get to Florida? She barely speaks English. Either she’s here or she’s on the street.

—Right.

—She thinks you betrayed her. She’s very principled. Anyway, she’ll be safe here.

—That’s one way to look at it.

—I hope you’re not mad. It’s not personal.

—I still have some of your books and maybe a few grams of weed.

—That’s cool. Don’t sweat it. Consider them yours.

—What a great deal for me.

—That’s a shitty attitude, Berman. You’re smarter than that.

—I’m a fucking genius.

—Take care of yourself, Berman.

I lingered in front of Rufus’s house after he left and watched the wheelbarrows come and go. I waited for the workmen to bring in the last of the Doric columns and then walked home. In another country, under another code, it would have been my duty to return to Rufus’s with a gun. But in the suburbs, at the end of my sixteenth summer, this was not an option. Instead, I resorted to a form of civilized murder. By the time I reached my house everyone in Rufus’s yard was dead. Rufus, Natasha, my stoner friends. I would never see them again. By the time I got home I had already crafted a new identity. I would switch schools, change my wardrobe, move to another city. Later I would avenge myself with beautiful women, learn martial arts, and cultivate exotic experiences. I saw my future clearly. I had it all planned out. And yet, standing in our backyard, drawn by a strange impulse, I crouched and peered through the window into my basement. I had never seen it from this perspective. I saw what Natasha must have seen every time she came to the house. In the full light of summer, I looked into darkness. It was the end of my subterranean life.

SOME OTHER, BETTER OTTO

DEBORAH EISENBERG

I DON’T KNOW why I committed us to any of those things,” Otto said. “I’d much prefer to be working or reading, and you’ll want all the time you can get this week to practice.”

“It’s fine with me,” William said. “I always like to see Sharon. And we’ll survive the evening with your—”

Otto winced.

“Well, we will,” William said. “And don’t you want to see Naomi and Margaret and the baby as soon as they get back?”

“Everyone always says, ‘Don’t you want to see the baby, don’t you want to see the baby,’ but if I did want to see a fat, bald, confused person, obviously I’d have only to look in the mirror.”

“I was reading a remarkable article in the paper this morning about holiday depression,” William said. “Should I clip it for you? The statistics were amazing.”

“The statistics cannot have been amazing, the article cannot have been remarkable, and I am not ‘depressed.’ I just happen to be bored sick by these inane—Waving our little antennae, joining our little paws in indication of— Oh, what is the point? Why did I agree to any of this?”

“Well,” William said. “I mean, this is what we do.”

Hmm. Well, true. And the further truth was, Otto saw, that he himself wanted, in some way, to see Sharon; he himself wanted, in some way, to see Naomi and Margaret and the baby as soon as possible. And it was even he himself who had agreed to join his family for Thanksgiving. It would be straining some concept—possibly the concept of “wanted,” possibly the concept of “self ”—to say that he himself had wanted to join them, and yet there clearly must have been an implicit alternative to joining them that was even less desirable, or he would not, after all, have agreed to it.

It had taken him—how long?—years and years to establish a viable, if not pristine, degree of estrangement from his family. Which was no doubt why, he once explained to William, he had tended, over the decades, to be so irascible and easily exhausted. The sustained effort, the subliminal concentration that was required to detach the stubborn prehensile hold was enough to wear a person right out and keep him from ever getting down to anything of real substance.

Weddings had lapsed entirely, birthdays were a phone call at the most, and at Christmas, Otto and William sent lavish gifts of out-of-season fruits, in the wake of which would arrive recriminatory little thank-you notes. From mid-December to mid-January they would absent themselves, not merely from the perilous vicinity of Otto’s family, but from the entire country, to frolic in blue water under sunny skies.

When his mother died, Otto experienced an exhilarating melancholy; most of the painful encounters and obligations would now be a thing of the past. Life, with its humorous theatricality, had bestowed and revoked with one gesture, and there he abruptly was, in the position he felt he’d been born for: he was alone in the world.

Or alone in the world, anyway, with William. Marching ahead of his sisters and brother—Corinne, Martin, and Sharon—Otto was in the front ranks now, death’s cannon fodder and so on; he had become old overnight, and free.

Old and free! Old and free . . .

Still, he made himself available to provide legal advice or to arrange a summer internship for some child or nephew. He saw Sharon from time to time. From time to time there were calls: “Of course you’re too busy, but . . .”

“Of course you’re not interested, but . . .” was how they began. This was the one thing Corinne and her husband and Martin and whichever wife were always all in accord about—that Otto seemed to feel he was too good for the rest of them, despite the obvious indications to the contrary.

Who was too good for whom? It often came down to a show of force. When Corinne had called a week or so earlier about Thanksgiving, Otto, addled by alarm, said, “We’re having people ourselves, I’m afraid.”

Corinne’s silence was like a mirror, flashing his tiny, harmless lie back to him in huge magnification, all covered with sticky hairs and microbes.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“Please try,” Corinne said. The phrase had the unassailable authority of a road sign appearing suddenly around the bend: FALLING ROCK. “Otto, the children are growing up.”

“Children! What children? Your children grew up years ago, Corinne. Your children are old now, like us.”

“I meant, of course, Martin’s. The new ones. Martin and Laurie’s. And there’s Portia.”

Portia? Oh, yes. The little girl. The sole, thank heavens, issue, of Martin’s marriage to that crazy Viola.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Otto said again, this time less cravenly. It was Corinne’s own fault. A person of finer sensibilities would have written a note, or used e-mail—or would face-savingly have left a message at his office, giving him time to prepare some well-crafted deterrent rather than whatever makeshift explosive he would obviously be forced to lob back at her under direct attack.

“Wesley and I are having it in the city this year,” Corinne was saying. “No need to come all the way out to the nasty country. A few hours and it will all be over with. Seriously, Otto, you’re an integral element. We’re keeping it simple this year.”

“ ‘This year?’ Corinne, there have been no other years. You do not observe Thanksgiving.”

“In fact, Otto, we do. And we all used to.”

“Who?”

“All of us.”

“Never. When? Can you imagine Mother being thankful for anything?”

“We always celebrated Thanksgiving when Father was alive.”

“I remember no such thing.”

“I do. I remember, and so does Martin.”

“Martin was four when Father died!”

“Well, you were little, too.”

“I was twice Martin’s age.”

“Oh, Otto—I just feel sad, sometimes, to tell you the truth, don’t you? It’s all going so fast! I’d like to see everyone in the same room once a century or so. I want to see everybody well and happy. I mean, you and Martin and Sharon were my brothers and sister. What was that all about? Don’t you remember? Playing together all the time?”

“I just remember Martin throwing up all the time.”

“You’ll be nice to him, won’t you, Otto? He’s still very sensitive. He won’t want to talk about the lawsuit.”

“Have you spoken to Sharon?”

“Well, that’s something I wanted to talk to you about, actually. I’m afraid I might have offended her. I stressed the fact that it was only to be us this year. No aunts or uncles, no cousins, no friends. Just us. And husbands or wives. Husband. And wife. Or whatever. And children, naturally, but she became very hostile.”

“Assuming William to be ‘whatever,’ ” Otto said, “why shouldn’t Sharon bring a friend if she wants to?”

“William is
family
. And surely you remember when she brought that person to Christmas! The person with the feet? I wish you’d go by and talk to her in the next few days. She seems to listen to you.”

Otto fished up a magazine from the floor—one of the popular science magazines William always left lying around—and idly opened it.

“Wesley and I reach out to her,” Corinne was saying. “And so does Martin, but she doesn’t respond. I know it can be hard for her to be with people, but we’re not people—we’re family.”

“I’m sure she understands that, Corinne.”

“I hope you do, too, Otto.”

How clearly he could see, through the phone line, this little sister of his—in her fifties now—the six-year-old’s expression of aggrieved anxiety long etched decisively on her face.

“In any case,” she said, “I’ve called.”

And yet there was something to what Corinne had said; they had been one another’s environs as children. The distance between them had been as great, in any important way, as it was now, but there had been no other beings close by, no other beings through whom they could probe or illumine the mystifying chasms and absences and yearnings within themselves. They had been born into the arid clutter of one another’s behavior, good and bad, their measles, skinned knees, report cards . . .

A barren landscape dotted with clutter. Perhaps the life of the last dinosaurs, as they ranged, puzzled and sorrowful, across the comet-singed planet, was similar to childhood. It hadn’t been a pleasant time, surely, and yet one did have an impulse to acknowledge one’s antecedents, now and again. Hello, that was us, it still is, good-bye.

“I don’t know,” William said. “It doesn’t seem fair to put any pressure on Sharon.”

“Heaven forfend. But I did promise Corinne I’d speak with Sharon. And, after all, I haven’t actually seen her for some time.”

“We could just go have a plain old visit, though. I don’t know. Urging her to go to Corinne’s—I’m not really comfortable with that.”

“Oof, William, phrase, please, jargon.”

“Why is that jargon?”

“Why? How should I know why? Because it is. You can say, ‘I’m uncomfortable
about
that,’ or ‘That makes me uncomfortable.’ But ‘I’m uncomfortable
with
that’ is simply jargon.” He picked up a book sitting next to him on the table and opened it.
Relativity for Dummies
. “Good heavens,” he said, snapping the book shut. “
Obviously
Martin doesn’t want to talk about the lawsuit. Why bother to mention that to me? Does she think I’m going to ask Martin whether it’s true that he’s been misrepresenting the value of his client’s stock? Am I likely to talk about it? I’m perfectly happy to read about it in the
Times
every day, like everyone else.”