Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

Ilke came in quietly, and appeared so suddenly behind Adrienne’s head, it gave her a start.

“Move back toward me,” whispered Ilke. Move back toward me , and Adrienne shifted until she could feel the crown of her head grazing Ilke’s belly. The cockatiel whooshed in and perched on a nearby chair.

“Are you a little tense?” she said. She pressed both her thumbs at the center of Adrienne’s forehead. Ilke’s hands were strong, small, bony. Leathered claws. The harder she pressed, the better it felt to Adrienne, all of her difficult thoughts unknotting and traveling out, up into Ilke’s thumbs.

“Breathe deeply,” said Ilke. “You cannot breathe deeply without it relaxing you.”

Adrienne pushed her stomach in and out.

“You are from the Villa Hirschborn, aren’t you?” Ilke’s voice was a knowing smile.

“Ehuh.”

“I thought so,” said Ilke. “People are very tense up there. Rigid as boards.” Ilke’s hands moved down off Adrienne’s forehead, along her eyebrows to her cheeks, which she squeezed repeatedly, in little circles, as if to break the weaker capillaries. She took hold of Adrienne’s head and pulled. There was a dull cracking sound. Then she pressed her knuckles along Adrienne’s neck. “Do you know why?”

Adrienne grunted.

“It is because they are overeducated and can no longer converse with their own mothers. It makes them a little crazy. They have literally lost their mother tongue. So they come to me. I am their mother, and they don’t have to speak at all.”

“Of course they pay you.”

“Of course.”

Adrienne suddenly fell into a long falling — of pleasure, of surrender, of glazed-eyed dying, a piece of heat set free in a room. Ilke rubbed Adrienne’s earlobes, knuckled her scalp like a hairdresser, pulled at her neck and fingers and arms, as if they were jammed things. Adrienne would become a baby, join all the babies, in heaven, where they lived.

Ilke began to massage sandalwood oil into Adrienne’s arms, pressing down, polishing, ironing, looking, at a quick glimpse, like one of Degas’s laundresses. Adrienne shut her eyes again and listened to the music, which had switched from synthetic lullabies to the contrapuntal sounds of a flute and a thunderstorm. With these hands upon her, she felt a little forgiven, and began to think generally of forgiveness, how much of it was required in life: to forgive everyone, yourself, the people you loved, and then wait to be forgiven by them. Where was all this forgiveness supposed to come from? Where was this great inexhaustible supply?

“Where are you?” whispered Ilke. “You are somewhere very far.”

Adrienne wasn’t sure. Where was she? In her own head, like a dream; in the bellows of her lungs. What was she? Perhaps a child. Perhaps a corpse. Perhaps a fern in the forest in the storm; a singing bird. The sheets were folded back. The hands were all over her now. Perhaps she was under the table with the music, or in a musty corner of her own hip. She felt Ilke rub oil into her chest, between her breasts, out along the ribs, and circularly on the abdomen. “There is something stuck here,” Ilke said. “Something not working.” Then she pulled the covers back up. “Are you cold?” she asked, and though Adrienne didn’t answer, Ilke brought another blanket, mysteriously heated, and laid it across Adrienne. “There,” said Ilke. She lifted the blanket so that only Adrienne’s feet were exposed. She rubbed oil into her soles, the toes; something squeezed out of Adrienne, like an olive. She felt as if she would cry. She felt like the baby Jesus. The grown Jesus. The poor will always be with us . The dead Jesus. Cheese is the best. Cheese is the best.

At her desk in the outer room, Ilke wanted money. Thirty-five thousand lire. “I can give it to you for thirty thousand, if you decide to come on a regular basis. Would you like to come on a regular basis?” asked Ilke.

Adrienne was fumbling with her wallet. She sat down in the wicker rocker near the desk. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

Ilke had put on reading glasses and now opened up her appointment book to survey the upcoming weeks. She flipped a page, then flipped it back. She looked out over her glasses at Adrienne. “How often would you like to come?”

“Every day,” said Adrienne.

“Every day?”

Ilke’s hoot worried Adrienne. “Every other day?” Adrienne peeped hopefully. Perhaps the massage had bewitched her, ruined her. Perhaps she had fallen in love.

Ilke looked back at her book and shrugged. “Every other day,” she repeated slowly, as a way of holding the conversation still while she checked her schedule. “How about at two o’clock?”

“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?”

“Perhaps we can occasionally arrange a Saturday.”

“Okay. Fine.” Adrienne placed the money on the desk and stood up. Ilke walked her to the door and thrust her hand out formally. Her face had changed from its earlier pinks to a strange and shiny orange.

“Thank you,” said Adrienne. She shook Ilke’s hand, but then leaned forward and kissed her cheek; she would kiss the business out of this. “Good-bye,” she said. She stepped gingerly down the stairs; she had not entirely returned to her body yet. She had to go slowly. She felt a little like she had just seen God, but also a little like she had just seen a hooker. Outside, she walked carefully back toward the villa, but first stopped at the gelato shop for a small dish of hazelnut ice cream. It was smooth, toasty, buttery, like a beautiful liqueur, and she thought how different it was from America, where so much of the ice cream now looked like babies had attacked it with their cookies.

“Well, Martin, it’s been nice knowing you,” Adrienne said, smiling. She reached out to shake his hand with one of hers, and pat him on the back with the other. “You’ve been a good sport. I hope there will be no hard feelings.”

“You’ve just come back from your massage,” he said a little numbly. “How was it?”

“As you would say, ‘Relaxing.’ As I would say … well, I wouldn’t say.”

Martin led her to the bed. “Kiss and tell,” he said.

“I’ll just kiss,” she said, kissing.

“I’ll settle,” he said. But then she stopped, and went into the bathroom to shower for dinner.

At dinner, there was zuppa alla paesana and then salsiccia alla griglia con spinaci . For the first time since they’d arrived, she was seated near Martin, who was kitty-corner to her left. He was seated next to another economist and was speaking heatedly with him about a book on labor division and economic policy. “But Wilkander ripped that theory off from Boyer!” Martin let his spoon splash violently into his zuppa before a waiter came and removed the bowl.

“Let us just say,” said the other man calmly, “that it was a sort of homage.”

“If that’s ‘homage,’ ” said Martin, fidgeting with his fork, “I’d like to perform a little ‘homage’ on the Chase Manhattan Bank.”

“I think it was felt that there was sufficient looseness there to warrant further explication.”

“Right. And one’s twin sibling is simply an explication of the text.”

“Why not?” The other economist smiled. He was calm, probably a supply-sider.

Poor Martin, thought Adrienne. Poor Keynesian Martin, poor Marxist Martin, perspiring and red. “Left of Lenin?” she had heard him exclaiming the other day to an agriculturalist. “Left of Lenin ? Left of the Lennon Sisters, you mean!” Poor godless, raised-an-atheist-in-Ohio Martin. “On Christmas,” he’d said to her once, “we used to go down to the Science Store and worship the Bunsen burners.”