Nell Zink: The Wallcreeper

“Stephen’s a stick-in-the-mud,” I said. “He’s heavy into inertia. It leaves him plenty of time to think, but it’s not something I’d be idealizing if I were you.”

“I just can’t imagine not seeing him anymore.”

“What I’m telling you is, Stephen is a creature of habit. He’s not sexy. There are a billion sexier guys in Berne. Just go to any bar.” I jumped up and put an end to the vulgarity of our conversation by moving toward the kitchen to get more coffee.

She raised her voice and said, “Omar is an amazing lover, by the way.”

That did it. I came back jittery. “God! Jesus!” I said. “What do you want from me?”

“Do you know about the Swiss law on divorce?” she said. “If Omar fools around on me, even once, I can keep the apartment. And alimony! It’s like the 1950s! I know you better than you think. Can you do this for me? I know Omar adores you. I know you’ll say he’s Stephen’s best friend, but that just makes it worse, as in even better!”

“You’re that scared of Topeka ?” I said. “It’s not the South Pole!”

“I can’t survive another day with Omar. He’s driving me crazy. I’m going insane with boredom. I’m so in love with Stephen, and you don’t care about Stephen! Come on! It would mean so much to me to be able to stay in Berne.”

“Hey, I like Berne, too,” I said. “Plus I think Stephen likes me better than he likes you. As in, I’m not sure your odds are so great.”

She scoffed.

“I’ve come to realize,” I said, “that there’s generally something special about the person you would marry. It’s not like I ever married anybody else. But I married Stephen, and he married me. I still don’t know why it seemed like the thing to do, but I don’t regret it, and neither does he.”

She got to her feet. “My blood is on your hands,” she said. “I can’t feel this trapped and survive. You don’t love Stephen, and I do.” Her hands were pressed against her heart and she was taking the feeling of emptiness there very, very seriously — a hole in her heart only Stephen’s dick could fill.

“Lighten up,” I said. “Marriage isn’t a sacrament. It’s just a bunch of forms to fill out. It either works or it doesn’t. Do what you want. You’re grown up, and Omar’s a big boy. Get a job and stay in Berne! You’ll have a new boyfriend in like four minutes. Look at you.”

“But I want our apartment. Tiff, I need your help. ”

“Me sleeping with Omar won’t give you Stephen. I don’t think you’d have much chance with Stephen anyway,” I said. “He’s weird.”

“What do you mean? Is Stephen kinky?”

I didn’t want to explain that he had delusions in which he had been chosen alone among men to live life to the fullest, so I said, “For one thing, he’s bi.”

A look of profound consternation flashed across her beautiful face, and I knew they had slept together without condoms.

I suggested to Stephen that we move downtown. If we had moved before, Rudi couldn’t have found us again, but now Rudi was gone and we could move.

Stephen didn’t answer. He said he’d been in touch with an Italian breeder. He rummaged through his messenger bag on the floor, produced a handwritten letter, sat down on the couch, and read aloud.

“About Tichodroma. I have had for thirty years always one pair, changing them every six years in good health. In March the male is strongly singing. The female is strongly seeking him. They are divided but one can see the other. Tichodroma never die except for special infective reason. But older they make worse thermo-regulation. A false microclimate will very much compromise the reproduction. Tichodroma is an absolute vagrant, seeking always those sunny days with a light fresh wind. He is using different environments always. There is no place where to have Tichodroma all the year.” He looked up and made eye contact.

Stephen had stooped so low as to punish me with a fable involving a cute dead friend. As he intended, I felt very, very guilty. I had assumed hurting husbands was a privilege of bad wives. Suddenly I realized it’s a moral shortcoming of good ones — good in the way I felt at that moment, in the sense of making a doomed, feeble attempt to be good, which is as good as it gets in the Judeo-Christian tradition where the imagination of man is evil from his youth.

“Move downtown by yourself,” he added. “I’ll pay your rent.”

“Does this have anything to do with Omar’s wife?” I asked.

I surprised even myself. I said it the way I might castle out of spite at not knowing anything about chess, just to prove I was in over my head.

“That bitch?” he said. “I wouldn’t fuck her for practice.”

“Is that why she’s in love with you?” I demanded. “Are you trying to tell me it’s your beautiful mind? She told me you did the nasty and Omar can’t get it up! And then she asked me to suck him off live on camera so she can get a Swiss divorce! It’s true! If he’s unfaithful to her she can totally clean him out, Joy-Luck-Club style!”

Stephen said, “Come over here so I can beat the shit out of you.”

I took his hand and lay down beside him, turning over to nestle up against his chest as if he had a brood patch. We looked over in silence at the wall unit where Rudi used to flit in and out of a shoebox twenty times a minute.

With the easy air of someone who believes he is gratifying a lover’s private obsession, Stephen confided in me that he didn’t believe the Italian guy was really breeding wallcreepers. “I think he’s selling birds he paid some climber to liberate. As in steal nestlings. You know some songbirds can be a real pain in the ass to breed. A lot of them are solitary except when they’re breeding, and everything has to be totally right or they never get in the mood. If you put them together the wrong day they do like bird jujitsu. You know how Rudi was always flicking his wings? That’s because it’s so loud next to these alpine streams nobody can hear him yelling. He was using his wings to say ‘Get off my property.’ But if he says it too much, his whole camouflage is out the window. It’s a fine line. It’s hard, trying to defend your territory and advertise your presence and keep out of predators’ line of sight. So I thought about it, and I thought, I don’t think I want to take somebody’s nestlings out of his nest, right when he finally found a cave he likes and somebody he can get along with. But the truth is, if you take their chicks, they just make more. They can lay thirty eggs a season. They’re set up for it. I mean, the reason chickens keep laying eggs is because somebody takes them away.”

“You want to get a pet wallcreeper to prove Rudi was a dime a dozen,” I said. “That’s cold!”

“That’s not true,” he said. “No wallcreeper is a dime a dozen. They’re lovely birds.”

“Like women,” I said. “Same-same but different.”

“Every woman is unique in her own way and most of them are pieces of shit. Whereas any wallcreeper is an avatar of the one true wallcreeper.”

“Name of Rudi,” I said.

He turned and lay on his back and said, “Fuck it. I mean it. We’re all fucked. Saving one single wild thing was more than I could manage, which means the whole world is fucked. But then I remember that you know how to look out for yourself, and I feel better. Like it’s not the weight of the world, just my own little column of air.”

I was happy. He had called me a wild thing.

Our new apartment was weensy. It was on the former second floor (the street had risen over the years) of a tiny medieval house and, according to the commission on cultural monuments, too historic to renovate. Replacing everything that needed replacing would have meant tearing down the entire house by slow stages from the inside out, clod by clod and pebble by pebble. Its pristine construction elements, dangerous and pointless as they were from a fire safety standpoint, were irreplaceable: intricately woven willow lathes, soundproofing made of rye chaff. “Soundproofing my ass, more like five hundred years of dormice. If you touch a hot crack pipe to this place, it’ll go up like a Molotov cocktail, so best behavior,” Stephen told me in the presence of the real estate broker, who blinked but said nothing.