Lorrie Moore: Birds of America

“Yes,” said the voice a little impatiently. “Minnesota is full of haunted-house newsletters.”

“I once lived in a haunted house,” said Adrienne. “In college. Me and five roommates.”

The masseuse cleared her throat confidentially. “Yes. I was once called on to cast the demons from a haunted house. But how can I help you today?”

“You were?”

“Were? Oh, the house, yes. When I got there, all the place needed was to be cleaned. So I cleaned it. Washed the dishes and dusted.”

“Yup,” said Adrienne. “Our house was haunted that way, too.”

There was a strange silence, in which Adrienne, feeling something tense and moist in the room, began to fiddle with the bagged lunch on the bed, nervously pulling open the sandwiches, sensing that if she turned, just then, the phone cradled in her neck, the child would be there, behind her, a little older now, a toddler, walked toward her in a ghostly way by her own dead parents, a Nativity scene corrupted by error and dream.

“How can I help you today?” the masseuse asked again, firmly.

Help? Adrienne wondered abstractly, and remembered how in certain countries, instead of a tooth fairy, there were such things as tooth spiders. How the tooth spider could steal your children, mix them up, bring you a changeling child, a child that was changed.

“I’d like to make an appointment for Thursday,” she said. “If possible. Please.”

For dinner there was vongole in umido , the rubbery, wine-steamed meat prompting commentary about mollusk versus crustacean anatomy. Adrienne sighed and chewed. Over cocktails, there had been a long discussion of peptides and rabbit tests.

“Now lobsters, you know, have what is called a hemipenis,” said the man next to her. He was a marine biologist, an epidemiologist, or an anthropologist. She’d forgotten.

“Hemipenis.” Adrienne scanned the room a little frantically.

“Yes.” He grinned. “Not a term one particularly wants to hear in an intimate moment, of course.”

“No,” said Adrienne, smiling back. She paused. “Are you one of the spouses?”

Someone on his right grabbed his arm, and he now turned in that direction to say why yes, he did know Professor so-and-so … and wasn’t she in Brussels last year giving a paper at the hermeneutics conference?

There came castagne al porto and coffee. The woman to Adrienne’s left finally turned to her, placing the cup down on the saucer with a sharp clink.

“You know, the chef has AIDS,” said the woman.

Adrienne froze a little in her chair. “No, I didn’t know.” Who was this woman?

“How does that make you feel?”

“Pardon me?”

“How does that make you feel?” She enunciated slowly, like a reading teacher.

“I’m not sure,” said Adrienne, scowling at her chestnuts. “Certainly worried for us if we should lose him.”

The woman smiled. “Very interesting.” She reached underneath the table for her purse and said, “Actually, the chef doesn’t have AIDS — at least not that I’m aware of. I’m just taking a kind of survey to test people’s reactions to AIDS, homosexuality, and general notions of contagion. I’m a sociologist. It’s part of my research. I just arrived this afternoon. My name is Marie-Claire.”

Adrienne turned back to the hemipenis man. “Do you think the people here are mean?” she asked.

He smiled at her in a fatherly way. “Of course,” he said. There was a long silence with some chewing in it. “But the place is pretty as a postcard.”

“Yeah, well,” said Adrienne, “I never send those kinds of postcards. No matter where I am, I always send the kind with the little cat jokes on them.”

He placed his hand briefly on her shoulder. “We’ll find you some cat jokes.” He scanned the room in a bemused way and then looked at his watch.

She had bonded in a state of emergency, like an infant bird. But perhaps it would be soothing, this marriage. Perhaps it would be like a nice warm bath. A nice warm bath in a tub flying off a roof.

At night, she and Martin seemed almost like husband and wife, spooned against each other in a forgetful sort of love — a cold, still heaven through which a word or touch might explode like a moon, then disappear, unremembered. She moved her arms to place them around him and he felt so big there, huge, filling her arms.

The white-haired woman who had given her the masseuse card was named Kate Spalding, the wife of the monk man, and after breakfast she asked Adrienne to go jogging. They met by the lions, Kate once more sporting a Spalding T-shirt, and then they headed out over the gravel, toward the gardens. “It’s pretty as a postcard here, isn’t it?” said Kate. Out across the lake, the mountains seemed to preside over the minutiae of the terracotta villages nestled below. It was May and the Alps were losing their snowy caps, nurses letting their hair down. The air was warming. Anything could happen.

Adrienne sighed. “But do you think people have sex here?”

Kate smiled. “You mean casual sex? Among the guests?”

Adrienne felt annoyed. “ Casual sex? No, I don’t mean casual sex. I’m talking about difficult, randomly profound, Sears and Roebuck sex. I’m talking marital.”

Kate laughed in a sharp, barking sort of way, which for some reason hurt Adrienne’s feelings.

Adrienne tugged on her socks. “I don’t believe in casual sex.” She paused. “I believe in casual marriage.”

“Don’t look at me,” said Kate. “I married my husband because I was deeply in love with him.”

“Yeah, well,” said Adrienne, “I married my husband because I thought it would be a great way to meet guys.”

Kate smiled now in a real way. Her white hair was grandmotherly, but her face was youthful and tan, and her teeth shone generous and wet, the creamy incisors curved as cashews.

“I’d tried the whole single thing, but it just wasn’t working,” Adrienne added, running in place.

Kate stepped close and massaged Adrienne’s neck. Her skin was lined and papery. “You haven’t been to see Ilke from Minnesota yet, have you?”

Adrienne feigned perturbance. “Do I seem that tense, that lost, that …” And here she let her arms splay spastically. “I’m going tomorrow.”

He was a beautiful child, didn’t you think? In bed, Martin held her until he rolled away, clasped her hand and fell asleep. At least there was that: a husband sleeping next to a wife, a nice husband sleeping close. It meant something to her. She could see how through the years marriage would gather power, its socially sanctioned animal comfort, its night life a dreamy dance about love. She lay awake and remembered when her father had at last grown so senile and ill that her mother could no longer sleep in the same bed with him — the mess, the smell — and had had to move him, diapered and rank, to the guest room next door. Her mother had cried, to say this farewell to a husband. To at last lose him like this, banished and set aside like a dead man, never to sleep with him again: she had wept like a baby. His actual death, she took less hard. At the funeral, she was grim and dry and invited everyone over for a quiet, elegant tea. By the time two years had passed, and she herself was diagnosed with cancer, her sense of humor had returned a little. “The silent killer,” she would say, with a wink. “The Silent Killer .” She got a kick out of repeating it, though no one knew what to say in response, and at the very end, she kept clutching the nurses’ hems to ask, “Why is no one visiting me?” No one lived that close, explained Adrienne. No one lived that close to anyone.

Adrienne set her spoon down. “Isn’t this soup interesting ?” she said to no one in particular. “Zup-pa mari-ta-ta!” Marriage soup. She decided it was perhaps a little like marriage itself: a good idea that, like all ideas, lived awkwardly on earth.