Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“You’re not a poetess, I hope,” said the English geologist next to her. “We had a poetess here last month, and things got a bit dodgy here for the rest of us.”

“Really.” After the soup, there was risotto with squid ink.

“Yes. She kept referring to insects as ‘God’s typos’ and then she kept us all after dinner one evening so she could read from her poems, which seemed to consist primarily of the repeating line ‘the hairy kiwi of his balls.’ ”

“Hairy kiwi,” repeated Adrienne, searching the phrase for a sincere andante. She had written a poem once herself. It had been called “Garbage Night in the Fog” and was about a long, sad walk she’d taken once on garbage night.

The geologist smirked a little at the risotto, waiting for Adrienne to say something more, but she was now watching Martin at the other table. He was sitting next to the sociologist she’d sat next to the previous night, and as Adrienne watched, she saw Martin glance, in a sickened way, from the sociologist, back to his plate, then back to the sociologist. “The cook ?” he said loudly, then dropped his fork and pushed his chair from the table.

The sociologist was frowning. “You flunk,” she said.

“I’m going to see a masseuse tomorrow.” Martin was on his back on the bed, and Adrienne was straddling his hips, usually one of their favorite ways to converse. One of the Mandy Patinkin tapes she’d brought was playing on the cassette player.

“The masseuse. Yes, I’ve heard.”

“You have?”

“Sure, they were talking about it at dinner last night.”

“Who was?” She was already feeling possessive, alone.

“Oh, one of them,” said Martin, smiling and waving his hand dismissively.

“Them,” said Adrienne coldly. “You mean one of the spouses, don’t you? Why are all the spouses here women? Why don’t the women scholars have spouses?”

“Some of them do, I think. They’re just not here.”

“Where are they?”

“Could you move?” he said irritably. “You’re sitting on my groin.”

“Fine,” she said, and climbed off.

The next morning, she made her way down past the conical evergreens of the terraced hill — so like the grounds of a palace, the palace of a moody princess named Sophia or Giovanna — ten minutes down the winding path to the locked gate to the village. It had rained in the night, and snails, golden and mauve, decorated the stone steps, sometimes dead center, causing Adrienne an occasional quick turn of the ankle. A dance step, she thought. Modern and bent-kneed. Very Martha Graham. Don’t kill us. We’ll kill you . At the top of the final stairs to the gate, she pressed the buzzer that opened it electronically, and then dashed down to get out in time. YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS said the sign. TRENTA SECONDI USCIRE. PRESTO! One needed a key to get back in from the village, and she clutched it like a charm.

She had to follow the Via San Carlo to Corso Magenta, past a gelato shop and a bakery with wreaths of braided bread and muffins cut like birds. She pressed herself up against the buildings to let the cars pass. She looked at her card. The masseuse was above a farmacìa , she’d been told, and she saw it now, a little sign that said MASSAGGIO DELLA VITA. She pushed on the outer door and went up.

Upstairs, through an open doorway, she entered a room lined with books: books on vegetarianism, books on healing, books on juice. A cockatiel, white, with a red dot like a Hindu wife’s, was perched atop a picture frame. The picture was of Lake Como or Garda, though when you blinked, it could also be a skull, a fissure through the center like a reef.

“Adrienne,” said a smiling woman in a purple peasant dress. She had big frosted hair and a wide, happy face that contained many shades of pink. She stepped forward and shook Adrienne’s hand. “I’m Ilke.”

“Yes,” said Adrienne.

The cockatiel suddenly flew from its perch to land on Ilke’s shoulder. It pecked at her big hair, then stared at Adrienne accusingly.

Ilke’s eyes moved quickly between Adrienne’s own, a quick read, a radar scan. She then looked at her watch. “You can go into the back room now, and I’ll be with you shortly. You can take off all your clothes, also any jewelry — watches, or rings. But if you want, you can leave your underwear on. Whatever you prefer.”

“What do most people do?” Adrienne swallowed in a difficult, conspicuous way.

Ilke smiled. “Some do it one way, some the other.”

“All right,” Adrienne said, and clutched her pocketbook. She stared at the cockatiel. “I just wouldn’t want to rock the boat.”

She stepped carefully toward the back room Ilke had indicated, and pushed past the heavy curtain. Inside was a large alcove — windowless and dark, with one small bluish light coming from the corner. In the center was a table with a newly creased flannel sheet. Speakers were built into the bottom of the table, and out of them came the sound of eerie choral music, wordless oohs and aahs in minor tones, with a percussive sibilant chant beneath it that sounded to Adrienne like “Jesus is best, Jesus is best,” though perhaps it was “Cheese, I suspect.” Overhead hung a mobile of white stars, crescent moons, and doves. On the blue walls were more clouds and snowflakes. It was a child’s room, a baby’s room, everything trying hard to be harmless and sweet.

Adrienne removed all her clothes, her earrings, her watch, her rings. She had already grown used to the ring Martin had given her, and so it saddened and exhilarated her to take it off, a quick glimpse into the landscape of adultery. Her other ring was a smoky quartz, which a palm reader in Milwaukee — a man dressed like a gym teacher and set up at a card table in a German restaurant — had told her to buy and wear on her right index finger for power.

“What kind of power?” she had asked.

“The kind that’s real,” he said. “What you’ve got here,” he said, waving around her left hand, pointing at the thin silver and turquoise she was wearing, “is squat.”

“I like a palm reader who dresses you,” she said later to Martin in the car on their way home. This was before the incident at the Spearson picnic, and things seemed not impossible then; she had wanted Martin to fall in love with her. “A guy who looks like Mike Ditka, but who picks out jewelry for you.”

“A guy who tells you you’re sensitive and that you will soon receive cash from someone wearing glasses. Where does he come up with this stuff?”

“You don’t think I’m sensitive.”

“I mean the money and glasses thing,” he said. “And that gloomy bit about how they’ll think you’re a goner, but you’re going to come through and live to see the world go through a radical physical change.”

“That was gloomy,” she agreed. There was a lot of silence as they looked out at the night-lit highway lines, the fireflies hitting the windshield and smearing, all phosphorescent gold, as if the car were flying through stars. “It must be hard,” she said, “for someone like you to go out on a date with someone like me.”

“Why do you say that?” he’d asked.

She climbed up on the table, stripped of ornament and the power of ornament, and slipped between the flannel sheets. For a second, she felt numb and scared, naked in a strange room, more naked even than in a doctor’s office, where you kept your jewelry on, like an odalisque. But it felt new to do this, to lead the body to this, the body with its dog’s obedience, its dog’s desire to please. She lay there waiting, watching the mobile moons turn slowly, half revolutions, while from the speakers beneath the table came a new sound, an electronic, synthesized version of Brahms’s lullaby. An infant. She was to become an infant again. Perhaps she would become the Spearson boy. He had been a beautiful baby.