hey Dan what’s happening? he writes. Haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks. I sent you an email but maybe you didn’t get it? Let’s get together soon. Hey, been to any good restaurants lately, not too pricey?
A few minutes later the phone rings and it’s Dan.
“You working hard or what?” Henry asks.
“I’m up to fifty miles a week, but Laz thought that was too far too fast, so I’m back down to forty. For now, anyway.”
“So do you know of a nice restaurant, quiet, good food, that I could afford?” Henry imagines Deirdre holding a glass of wine while telling him about her job, her family, the book she’s been reading, the subject vaguely outdoorsy —
“What’s wrong with where we usually go?” Dan asks.
So he has to come clean about his date, about pushing Deirdre out the night of the storm, when Dan was sick.
“Sweet,” Dan says, but he isn’t really listening. “About getting together. The soonest it can be now is next week because — well — lemme think, it kinda depends on …”
Henry has to repeat his question about a good restaurant, and Dan rattles off a few suggestions, only one of which, a funky place called The Hollows, sounds right to Henry.
“Hey Dan, about getting together whenever? Why don’t you ask Rae to come?” he asks before Dan can hang up. “It’s been a while since —”
“Nah, she’s burnt out or something, she says.” Dan sounds skeptical.
“That’s not like her.” Henry can just see the disgusted look on Rae’s face as she picks up the newspapers and empties Lazenby has left lying all over the living room.
“I know. She comes home from work, lies around for a while and then goes to bed early. She doesn’t get the running. I mean — fuck — she wants me to go slower.”
“Crazy,” Henry says dryly.
“Yeah, and she wants me to meet with this personal trainer one of the lawyers in her office uses.”
“Maybe a little advice —”
“Laz says I’m right on schedule.”
“Schedule?”
“Listen, I have to go,” Dan says.
“How about Sunday?”
“It depends. I’ll call you.”
And then Henry is left with dead air.
THAT EVENING, Henry parks the car a few houses down from the address Deirdre has given him, then stands looking up at a three-storey clapboard, its beige exterior peeling and dirty-looking, as he waits for it to be seven o’clock.
A light glows behind a white blind on the second floor. He imagines Deirdre looking in the mirror, applying makeup, winding a scarf around her neck, slipping into a bright red blouse that shimmers as she moves.
Once, just after Dan moved in with Rae about three or four years ago, Dan had one of his rare fits of fatherly behaviour, sat Henry down in Rae’s living room, and launched into a lecture on dating. He ran through — embarrassingly — a list of possible contraceptives. Then stated, rather prissily, Henry thought, that you should never have sex on the first date. He said that women would hold it against you if you tried to get them into bed before you’d asked them any basic questions, like where they work and if they like their jobs, or where they grew up or even if they thought it was going to rain later.
When Henry raised his eyebrows skeptically, Dan then said that he often did have sex on a first date — that he tried to whenever possible. Dan was standing with his hands on his hips, like a dad in a TV sitcom. “But it’s not a good idea, in principle, especially not,” and here Dan poked a finger into Henry’s collarbone, “for guys like you.”
“Not much of a principle really, is it — if you don’t follow it?”
“Well, I only have one rule.”
“Yeah?”
“Rules are for other people.” Then he sat down beside Henry, winked at him, and switched on the TV, his hands laced together behind his head, his elbows sticking out like empty wings.
Henry does have a condom in his pocket, but first chance that he gets, he plans to tell Deirdre about the skulls in his kitchen and the birds in his spare room. If she looks like she’s going to throw up, well, that’s a good indicator, isn’t it? If a woman gags when you talk about the stuff you do in your spare time, it makes sense to cut and run. That’s his only rule.
AT 7:02, he presses the buzzer two or three times before Deirdre opens the door. Giving him a distracted smile, she turns and trots back up the narrow stairs, leaving Henry no choice but to follow her black tights, the billowing tail of her powder blue blouse.
Her apartment is on the third floor and tiny, basically one big room with the sink and stove on an inside wall beside a small counter and a row of white, badly made cupboards. Henry stands in the middle of the room, feeling overly large, the north and south walls sloping in toward him. If he were to take a few steps in either direction, he’d whack his head on the ceiling.
Deirdre is at the stove cinching an apron around her slim waist.
“I was going to make lasagna,” she’s saying, stirring vigorously with a spatula, “but I didn’t have enough of those noodles, you know, the easy-cook type. So you’re getting stew instead.”
Would it be rude to remind her that he was supposed to be taking her out? Should he use her phone to cancel the reservation? Henry pivots nervously on the spot. There are only two other rooms — the bathroom, which he can see into from where he stands, and the bedroom, which must be behind the other door.
“Sit,” she instructs him, waving him toward a puckered leather bean bag chair in the tiny alcove that passes for a living room. Obediently, he sinks down into it, and a moment later, she aims a paring knife at a bottle of red wine on the counter. “Do the honours,” she says.
His ass is caught in the chair like a ball in a catcher’s mitt, and it takes him a minute to extract himself from it.
“Where’s your corkscrew?” he asks.
She digs around in a drawer, lifts out a spidery tangle of metal, and drops it into his palm. He fumbles with the device, trying to work its thin joints.
A rich smell, like boiled fruit, rises as the wine streams into the glasses. He places the bottle on the crowded tabletop and turns to Deirdre, as if for further instruction. She’s so close that the smell of her perfume, sharp and musky, mixes with the smell of beef and oregano. And he catches a whiff of that other, more pungent scent that seems to cling to her.
She plops large servings of steaming stew onto the plates and he sits down at the table.
“Looks good,” he says, though the stew seems to consist of nothing but cubes of beef and carrots sliced into coins.
“My own mother’s recipe, except I was missing a couple of ingredients,” Deirdre says, sitting down opposite him. “Yum,” she sniffs at her glass and smiles. “Bottoms up,” she says.
Henry can’t remember the last time he had wine. At his mother’s table, maybe, last summer. He cautiously tips a little into his mouth, its flavour warm and dark, the first red wine he’s ever had that doesn’t taste to him like a cheerful sort of cleanser.
“So, Henry,” Deirdre says, “do you like working for that Ed guy?”
And this is how it goes throughout the meal: Deirdre asks and Henry answers, her eyes looking past but not at him as her mouth dips repeatedly toward her plate.
The wine has made Henry’s head feel spacious, enlarged. He can hear a faint roar, which he thinks is the movement of blood between his ears. He’s trying not to listen to it while he listens to Deirdre. “No, just the one brother,” he’s saying. She seems to have misheard his answer and so he says again, “One brother, Dan.” As she’s refilling their wine glasses, she hovers just inches from his face. He knows that he should kiss her, but what he wants is more wine. The wine rescues the stew, the wine is awesome.
“No,” she says, falling back into her chair, “I have two brothers.” A look of annoyance flits across her face.
Did he ask about her family? He isn’t sure. She’s said that she works at the brewery,
which explains that smell — hops — and the cases of beer she was hauling through the storm.
“What did you say your father does?” she asks, pushing her plate away.
“He doesn’t do anything,” he says bluntly. “He died.”
“Oh,” she says.
“Well, it was years ago,” he says. “My mother owns a greenhouse.”
“A green house?”
“No,” he laughs, “she sells geraniums. Bedding plants. Bags of dirt. You know.”
“Oh yeah,” she says. Her eyes are fixed on him. He can see her contact lenses floating over her blue irises like tiny, unmelting spheres of ice.
Then her hand leaps across the table and pounces on his hand — startled, he drops his fork. She grips his wrist hard and studies his palm.
“You going to tell my fortune?” he tries to joke.
LATER, but how much later he isn’t sure, they are on her love-seat, embracing in a way that’s more like wrestling. She seems to want to wind herself around him and he resists. Her mouth tastes odd, like pink erasers.
He has only to touch the top button of her blouse, a little pearly thing, and she’s undoing it. Her sharp little fingers tug at the waist of his jeans. For a moment he doesn’t know what she’s doing, then his hips pop up of their own accord and his jeans slide toward his knees. Deirdre stumbles back, bumping her head on the windowsill. A blooming Christmas cactus dangles just above her head like a jester’s crown.
“Ouch,” he says with a sympathetic wince. And then Deirdre is giving it to him — head — her mouth hot, her tongue weirdly dry.
She pulls away and takes a swig of wine from her glass, which is on the floor near her knees. He can feel the chill from the cold north wall on his cock. She strips down to her panties and bra, and leads him by the hand to the bedroom. One of his socks catches on the rough floorboards and he staggers. He has to crouch to avoid banging his forehead on the low lintel above the bedroom door.
The bed is a mattress on a white shag carpet and they collapse together onto it. Her blonde head darting again between his legs. His blood rushing from everywhere in his body, down toward her mouth. He twists his head away. The room has only one tiny, high window in the peak. He shuts his eyes and his whole body bucks.
He props himself up on his elbows. Deirdre is wiping her mouth with the edge of the white sheet.
“Relax,” she says, giving him a none-too-gentle pat on the chest before she crawls off the bed. “I’ll be right back.”
He searches behind him for a pillow and crams it under his head. His neck aches. He hears running water, the sound of a glass being put down hard on porcelain. A dribble of urine in the bowl.
He opens his eyes. Deirdre’s back, and sitting astride him.
“Ah,” he says, thinking about the condom in his pocket. “I’ve got a safe,” he starts, but she shakes her head, “I’ve got it covered,” which doesn’t make sense to him, but now she’s muttering, “come on, come on.” And she’s hula-hooping her hips, the warm wet of her like a prehensile cup. Her breasts from below look like cones tipped with red, two isosceles, pointy and unbeautiful, but he can, okay, put his hands on them, and thank god they feel better than they look, they’re springy, athletic, and his hands clutch them spastically, which she seems to like.
“Yeah,” she almost yelps, and her chest bashes down onto his. He puts his arms around her and they rotate awkwardly, locked together in a tangle of knees and elbows like some kind of misshapen insect on a spit, until Henry is kneeling over her.
“Go for it,” Deirdre says in a hoarse whisper. He sees Amy in the woods in her floaty yellow dress, and she’s facing away from him, and then she’s bending, the curve of her thighs spreading as the hem lifts.
The cup closes on him like a wet fist; Deirdre moans.
Amy faces him now, she is coming at him and then is past and walking away, his eyes yearning after her hips and she’s bending again — she’s lifting the yellow skirt, arching her back toward him —
Deirdre’s breath is harsh against his collarbone as his hips move faster and faster. Her moaning rises to a howl and Henry grasps at the sheets, Amy far away now, Amy disappearing.
“Whoo-hee,” Deirdre exhales loudly into his ear.
“HEY,” SHE SAYS. “You’re not asleep, are you?” She elbows him hard in the ribs.
“Ow,” he says.
She’s grinning, their faces almost touching. “Want more wine?” she breathes into his face and then swings a leg over him as if dismounting a horse. Her white buttocks like pinched moons as she walks away.
He cants his head toward the small window, the shadow of a quivering tree branch. He can hear the wind in the eaves. It’s still there, the outdoors, the not-here.
In the kitchen, there’s a clattering of plates. “Where is it?” he hears her say. He sits up and looks around for his clothes. The living room, that’s where his jeans are, his briefs, his shirt, in a heap on the splintery floor.
She comes back waving the bottle, an inch sloshing around in the bottom. She pulls the sheet up over herself and nestles up against him, then offers him the bottle but he shakes his head. His throat is parched, a headache beginning, a dull throb at the back of his skull.
“You sure? This is great stuff — a girlfriend gave it to me,” she says, tipping the bottle up. She switches on a bedside lamp. The fine down on her arms glows in the light, and he stretches a hand out to stroke it but her arm jerks away — she’s reading the label on the back of the bottle.
“I usually buy the cheap stuff,” she says. “Blackberries,” she pronounces contemptuously, throws her head back, and drains the last mouthful.
Water, that’s what Henry wants. Water, and out.
Eight
HENRY FREES THE BOOKS from the cloth bag and delivers them into Mrs. Bogdanov’s waiting arms. Seven Russian novels from the library, a couple of the paperbacks so pristine they must be brand new, the same old tattered copy of War and Peace he’s checked out for her countless times. She stacks the books on a small stand in the foyer, then picks up each in turn, fans through its pages, squinting a little, as if approving distant impressions of her native country, and then slots the book back into the pile.
It’s Henry’s lunch hour, and he’s so weary, leaning against the front door, it feels like the molecules that make up his cells, tissue, and blood are vibrating at twice their usual rate, as if trying to escape the confines of his skin. It’s been a busy morning — lousy with cars, with dead batteries and rusted out mufflers — but he woke up this way, strung out, rattling around inside himself. He didn’t sleep much last night after ducking out of Deirdre’s apartment at four in the morning, where she had been asleep for hours, sprawled across two-thirds of the bed.
When he got home, he had a shower and then lay rigidly in his own bed and dozed fitfully, waiting for the sun to rise.
“Come in, come in,” Mrs. Bogdanov urges now.
“I’d better get back.” He puts a hand on the doorknob and half-turns to go.
“I have made honey cake,” she declares.
Honey cake. He pauses for a fraction too long, and she makes a noise of satisfaction in her throat. She knows she’s got him.
THE CAKE IS DELICIOUS, fragrant with honey and caramel, and he accepts a second slice. Meaning he’ll be staying even longer — he just hopes that today’s story is about the bear and not the antics of the neighbours.
“Before —” Mrs. Bogdanov stops herself, putting a hand on the teapot to see how warm it is. She pours more tea into his cup, then her own.
“A few short years before I was born,” she begins again, “my grandfather spent a summer working as a labourer in the count’s many gardens — it was easier work than in the fields, and he enjoyed the variety of chores, and also he had time for the animals that he must care for.” She takes a thirsty draught of tea.
“This was before he, this K, was kicked out,” she says. “Or maybe he was killed.” She sighs. “Who knows
whether they — he and his family — survived, but at this time I speak of no one could imagine the count anywhere but in that great house. Anyway,” she gestures with one hand, as if pushing the fates of the nobility away, “for generations our family was employed by his family. We were serfs, and then we weren’t, but we didn’t notice the difference. Or so my grandfather said.”
The gardens that Yuri worked in were extensive: a vegetable garden, a herb garden, a rose garden, a formal garden, and a French garden. All that was missing, K said, was a water garden, and before leaving on an extended tour of the Continent, he’d left orders that one be built on the very spot where the bear’s pen stood. Already in the spring K’s men had cut down the trees on one side of the pen, a concern for Yuri, who knew the animal was now exposed to wind and more sun than was good for it.
The time they must move the bear was fast approaching. K would be back from France in a few weeks and it had to happen before he returned or there would be big trouble for all of them. But it would be no mean feat, transferring the creature to the iron cage K’s architect had had constructed at the end of a rutted path, deeper in the woods. Even though Valentin was so much younger than Yuri, he’d been made overseer, placing him in charge of the whole undertaking. Yuri had found him more than once taunting the bear with food, and hitting the cage with his rifle butt as he passed by. If Valentin went ahead and had the animal dragged to the new enclosure — the plan he grunted out when Yuri questioned him — Yuri was afraid something terrible would happen. Valentin had grown into a hulking man, possessed of a crude strength he wasn’t afraid to use.
It took Yuri days, and an agonizing patience of will, to persuade Valentin to let him try his method and to agree to a date. For weeks beforehand Yuri prepared the bear for the ordeal, tossing him small pieces of meat while he sang the song about the birch tree, believing that, as long as he looked away from the bear, as long as he sang, very softly, the creature would stay peaceable. And when it came time for the move, Yuri would be able to ensure that no one got hurt.
The Afterlife of Birds Page 7