Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“You have to understand academic publishing,” said Martin. “No one reads these books. Everyone just agrees to publish everyone else’s. It’s one big circle jerk. It’s a giant economic agreement. When you think about it, it probably violates the Sherman Act.”

“A circle jerk?” she said uncertainly. The cigarette was making her dizzy.

“Yeah,” said Martin, reknotting his tie.

“But six books on Chaucer? Why not, say, a Cat Stevens book?”

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m in the circle.”

She sighed. “Then I shall sing to you. Mood music.” She made up a romantic Asian-sounding tune, and danced around the room with her cigarette, in a floating, wing-limbed way. “This is my Hopi dance,” she said. “So full of hope.”

Then it was time to go to dinner.

The cockatiel now seemed used to Adrienne and would whistle twice, then fly into the back room, perch quickly on the picture frame, and wait with her for Ilke. Adrienne closed her eyes and breathed deeply, the flannel sheet pulled up under her arms, tightly, like a sarong.

Ilke’s face appeared overhead in the dark, as if she were a mother just checking, peering into a crib. “How are you today?”

Adrienne opened her eyes, to see that Ilke was wearing a T-shirt that said SAY A PRAYER. PET A ROCK.

Say a prayer . “Good,” said Adrienne. “I’m good.” Pet a rock .

Ilke ran her fingers through Adrienne’s hair, humming faintly.

“What is this music today?” Adrienne asked. Like Martin, she, too, had grown weary of the Mandy Patinkin tapes, all that unshackled exuberance.

“Crickets and elk,” Ilke whispered.

“Crickets and elk.”

“Crickets and elk and a little harp.”

Ilke began to move around the table, pulling on Adrienne’s limbs and pressing deep into her tendons. “I’m doing choreographed massage today,” Ilke said. “That’s why I’m wearing this dress.”

Adrienne hadn’t noticed the dress. Instead, with the lights now low, except for the illuminated clouds on the side wall, she felt herself sinking into the pools of death deep in her bones, the dark wells of loneliness, failure, blame. “You may turn over now,” she heard Ilke say. And she struggled a little in the flannel sheets to do so, twisting in them, until Ilke helped her, as if she were a nurse and Adrienne someone old and sick — a stroke victim, that’s what she was. She had become a stroke victim. Then lowering her face into the toweled cheek plates the table brace offered up to her (“the cradle,” Ilke called it), Adrienne began quietly to cry, the deep touching of her body melting her down to some equation of animal sadness, shoe leather, and brine. She began to understand why people would want to live in these dusky nether zones, the meltdown brought on by sleep or drink or this. It seemed truer, more familiar to the soul than was the busy, complicated flash that was normal life. Ilke’s arms leaned into her, her breasts brushing softly against Adrienne’s head, which now felt connected to the rest of her only by filaments and strands. The body suddenly seemed a tumor on the brain, a mere means of conveyance, a wagon; the mind’s go-cart now taken apart, laid in pieces on this table. “You have a knot here in your trapezius,” Ilke said, kneading Adrienne’s shoulder. “I can feel the belly of the knot right here,” she added, pressing hard, bruising her shoulder a little, and then easing up. “Let go,” she said. “Let go all the way, of everything.”

“I might die,” said Adrienne. Something surged in the music and she missed what Ilke said in reply, though it sounded a little like “Changes are good.” Though perhaps it was “Chances aren’t good.” Ilke pulled Adrienne’s toes, milking even the injured one, with its loose nail and leaky under-skin, and then she left Adrienne there in the dark, in the music, though Adrienne felt it was she who was leaving, like a person dying, like a train pulling away. She felt the rage loosened from her back, floating aimlessly around in her, the rage that did not know at what or whom to rage, though it continued to rage.

She awoke to Ilke’s rocking her gently. “Adrienne, get up. I have another client soon.”

“I must have fallen asleep,” said Adrienne. “I’m sorry.”

She got up slowly, got dressed, and went out into the outer room; the cockatiel whooshed out with her, grazing her head.

“I feel like I’ve just been strafed,” she said, clutching her hair.

Ilke frowned.

“Your bird. I mean by your bird. In there ”—she pointed back toward the massage room—“ that was great.” She reached into her purse to pay. Ilke had moved the wicker chair to the other side of the room, so that there was no longer any place to sit down or linger. “You want lire or dollars?” she asked, and was a little taken aback when Ilke said rather firmly, “I’d prefer lire.”

Ilke was bored with her. That was it. Adrienne was having a religious experience, but Ilke — Ilke was just being social. Adrienne held out the money and Ilke plucked it from her hand, then opened the outside door and leaned to give Adrienne the rushed bum’s kiss — left, right — and then closed the door behind her.

Adrienne was in a fog, her legs noodly, her eyes unaccustomed to the light. Outside, in front of the farmacìa , if she wasn’t careful, she was going to get hit by a car. How could Ilke just send people out into the busy street like that, all loose and dazed? Adrienne’s body felt doughy, muddy. This was good, she supposed. Decomposition. She stepped slowly, carefully, her Martha Graham step, along the narrow walk between the street and the stores. And when she turned the corner to head back up toward the path to the Villa Hirschborn, there stood Martin, her husband, rounding a corner and heading her way.

“Hi!” she said, so pleased suddenly to meet him like this, away from what she now referred to as “the compound.” “Are you going to the farmacìa ?” she asked.

“Uh, yes,” said Martin. He leaned to kiss her cheek.

“Want some company?”

He looked a little blank, as if he needed to be alone. Perhaps he was going to buy condoms.

“Oh, never mind,” she said gaily. “I’ll see you later, up at the compound, before dinner.”

“Great,” he said, and took her hand, took two steps away, and then let her hand go, gently, midair.

She walked away, toward a small park — il Giardino Leonardo — out past the station for the vaporetti. Near a particularly exuberant rhododendron sat a short, dark woman with a bright turquoise bandanna knotted around her neck. She had set up a table with a sign: CHIROMANTE: TAROT E FACCIA. Adrienne sat down opposite her in the empty chair. “Americano,” she said.

“I do faces, palms, or cards,” the woman with the blue scarf said.

Adrienne looked at her own hands. She didn’t want to have her face read. She lived like that already. It happened all the time at the villa, people trying to read your face — freezing your brain with stony looks and remarks made malicious with obscurity, so that you couldn’t read their face, while they were busy reading yours. It all made her feel creepy, like a lonely head on a poster somewhere.

“The cards are the best,” said the woman. “Ten thousand lire.”

“Okay,” said Adrienne. She was still looking at the netting of her open hands, the dried riverbed of life just sitting there. “The cards.”

The woman swept up the cards, and dealt half of them out, every which way in a kind of swastika. Then, without glancing at them, she leaned forward boldly and said to Adrienne, “You are sexually unsatisfied. Am I right?”

“Is that what the cards say?”