Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

She would have to find just the right blouse, just the right perfume, greet him on the chaise longue with a bare shoulder and a purring “Hello, Mr. Man.” Take him down by the lake near the Sfondrata chapel and get him laid. Hire somebody. She turned to the scholar next to her, who had just arrived that morning.

“Did you have a good flight?” she asked. Her own small talk at dinner no longer shamed her.

“ Flight is the word,” he said. “I needed to flee my department, my bills, my ailing car. Come to a place that would take care of me.”

“This is it, I guess,” she said. “Though they won’t fix your car. Won’t even discuss it, I’ve found.”

“I’m on a Guggenheim,” he said.

“How nice!” She thought of the museum in New York, and of a pair of earrings she had bought in the gift shop there but had never worn because they always looked broken, even though that was the way they were supposed to look.

“But I neglected to ask the foundation for enough money. I didn’t realize what you could ask for. I didn’t ask for the same amount everyone else did, and so I received substantially less.”

Adrienne was sympathetic. “So instead of a regular Guggenheim, you got a little Guggenheim.”

“Yes,” he said.

“A Guggenheimy,” she said.

He smiled in a troubled sort of way. “Right.”

“So now you have to live in Guggenheimy town.”

He stopped pushing at a sausage with his fork. “Yes. I heard there would be wit here.”

She tried to make her lips curl, like his.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just kidding.”

“Jet lag,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Jetty-laggy.” She smiled at him. “Baby talk. We love it.” She paused. “Last week, of course, we weren’t like this. You’ve arrived a little late.”

He was a beautiful baby . In the dark, there was thumping, like tom-toms, and a piccolo high above it. She couldn’t look, because when she looked, it shocked her, another woman’s hands all over her. She just kept her eyes closed, and concentrated on surrender, on the restful invalidity of it. Sometimes she concentrated on being where Ilke’s hands were — at her feet, at the small of her back.

“Your parents are no longer living, are they?” Ilke said in the dark.

“No.”

“Did they die young?”

“Medium. They died medium. I was a menopausal, afterthought child.”

“Do you want to know what I feel in you?”

“All right.”

“I feel a great and deep gentleness. But I also feel that you have been dishonored.”

“Dishonored?” So Japanese. Adrienne liked the sound of it.

“Yes. You have a deeply held fear. Right here.” Ilke’s hand went just under Adrienne’s rib cage.

Adrienne breathed deeply, in and out. “I killed a baby,” she whispered.

“Yes, we have all killed a baby — there is a baby in all of us. That is why people come to me, to be reunited with it.”

“No, I’ve killed a real one.”

Ilke was very quiet and then she said, “You can do the side lying now. You can put this pillow under your head, this other one between your knees.” Adrienne rolled awkwardly onto her side. Finally, Ilke said, “This country, its Pope, its church, makes murderers of women. You must not let it do that to you. Move back toward me. That’s it.”

That’s not it, thought Adrienne, in this temporary dissolve, seeing death and birth, seeing the beginning and then the end, how they were the same quiet black, same nothing ever after: everyone’s life appeared in the world like a movie in a room. First dark, then light, then dark again. But it was all staggered, so that somewhere there was always light.

That’s not it. That’s not it, she thought. But thank you.

When she left that afternoon, seeking sugar in one of the shops, she moved slowly, blinded by the angle of the afternoon light but also believing she saw Martin coming toward her in the narrow street, approaching like the lumbering logger he sometimes seemed to be. Her squinted gaze, however, failed to catch his, and he veered suddenly left into a calle . By the time she reached the corner, he had disappeared entirely. How strange, she thought. She had felt close to something, to him, and then suddenly not. She climbed the path back up toward the villa, and went and knocked on the door of his studio, but he wasn’t there.

“You smell good,” she greeted Martin. It was some time later and she had just returned to the room, to find him there. “Did you just take a bath?”

“A little while ago,” he said.

She curled up to him, teasingly. “Not a shower? A bath? Did you put some scented bath salts in it?”

“I took a very masculine bath,” said Martin.

She sniffed him again. “What scent did you use?”

“A manly scent,” he said. “Rock. I took a rock-scented bath.”

“Did you take a bubble bath?” She cocked her head to one side.

He smiled. “Yes, but I, uh, made my own bubbles.”

“You did?” She squeezed his bicep.

“Yeah. I hammered the water with my fist.”

She walked over to the cassette player and put a cassette in. She looked over at Martin, who looked suddenly unhappy. “This music annoys you, doesn’t it?”

Martin squirmed. “It’s just — why can’t he sing any one song all the way through?”

She thought about this. “Because he’s Mr. Medleyhead?”

“You didn’t bring anything else?”

“No.”

She went back and sat next to Martin, in silence, smelling the scent of him, as if it were odd.

For dinner there was vitello alla salvia , baby peas, and a pasta made with caviar. “Nipping it in the bud.” Adrienne sighed. “An early frost.” A fat elderly man, arriving late, pulled his chair out onto her foot, then sat down on it. She shrieked.

“Oh, dear, I’m sorry,” said the man, lifting himself up as best he could.

“It’s okay,” said Adrienne. “I’m sure it’s okay.”

But the next morning, at exercises, Adrienne studied her foot closely during the leg lifts. The big toe was swollen and blue, and the nail had been loosened and set back at an odd and unhinged angle. “You’re going to lose your toenail,” said Kate.

“Great,” said Adrienne.

“That happened to me once, during my first marriage. My husband dropped a dictionary on my foot. One of those subconscious things. Rage as very large book.”

“You were married before?”

“Oh, yes.” She sighed. “I had one of those rehearsal marriages, you know, where you’re a feminist and train a guy, and then some other feminist comes along and gets the guy.”

“I don’t know.” Adrienne scowled. “I think there’s something wrong with the words feminist and gets the guy being in the same sentence.”

“Yes, well—”

“Were you upset?”

“Of course. But then, I’d been doing everything. I’d insisted on separate finances, on being totally self-supporting. I was working. I was doing the child care. I paid for the house; I cooked; I cleaned. I found myself shouting, “This is feminism? Thank you, Gloria and Betty!”

“But now you’re with someone else.”

“Pretaught. Self-cleaning. Batteries included.”

“Someone else trained him, and you stole him.”

Kate smiled. “Of course. What, am I crazy?”

“What happened to the toe?”

“The nail came off. And the one that grew back was wavy and dark and used to scare the children.”

“Oh,” said Adrienne.

· · ·

“Why would someone publish six books on Chaucer?” Adrienne was watching Martin dress. She was also smoking a cigarette. One of the strange things about the villa was that the smokers had all quit smoking, and the nonsmokers had taken it up. People were getting in touch with their alternative selves. Bequeathed cigarettes abounded. Cartons were appearing outside people’s doors.