Chapter 3
I came home from doing the laundry one afternoon to find her tossing her underwear and a few choice items of jewelry into her rolling suitcase. It occurred to me later that watching her life companion try to turn himself into a happy hydrangea might not have provided enough stimulation for a woman with a mind as sharp as Leilah's. However, though the timing is certainly suggestive, I believe my implementation of the Barbara Plan was probably more in the nature of a catalyst than the actual cause of her leaving. That she took just that one suitcase shows the kind of changes that have been happening to Leilah in the last year or two. She’s always been a very careful and somewhat flamboyant dresser, lots of clothes in eye-catching patterns, bright colors, loose drapery blowing in the wind of her motion as she strides up Market Street. . . But when she pulled out, all she took was a couple of pairs of jeans, a sweatshirt or two, a few teeshirts, and her unmentionables. Her hiking boots, of course.
We lived in the same four-room apartment for 25 years, and in one sense her departure came just in time, because we were running out of space. Roughly half of the apartment was filled with our clothes (mostly hers) and our books (about equally split between us). The closets were bulging, the books were all double-shelved, and still I had to make periodic trips to our two storage lockers to relieve the overflow.
The other half of the apartment was filled with yarn. Leilah was a knitter, and anyone who has ever been a knitter or lived with one will know what that implies. Along with the clothes, the closets were stuffed with plastic bags of yarn, some in tight spools wound up on the wool winder that was one of my first presents to her, but mostly in those loose floppy wads or neatly twisted pretzels called hanks or skeins, bulging out of every cabinet and off every shelf, every cranny and nook, spilling out of the storage boxes I built, despite the heavy lids I’d put on them to hold the stuff down. And plus there was always the one string of yarn creeping out from under a closet door like a little trickle of mauve urine, to get sucked into the vacuum cleaner when I dared to do that part of the apartment. And on every floor the countless tote bags containing her ongoing projects. Real knitters are never working on one thing; they always have at least a half-dozen works in progress, many of which will never be finished, because the main thing is really shopping for the yarn, running your hands sensuously over it in the yarn store and drinking in the colors (beautiful stuff, I have to admit), plowing through the million knitting magazines to find a pattern that will show the new yarn off to the best effect, watching the one-dimensional string slowly morph into something totally different on your flying needles as the stitches build up and it turns into a plane or a cylinder and finally a sweater or a vest. But there are a lot of stitches even in a pair of socks, and even assuming you get them all done, then you have to sew whatever it is together, wash and block, all those less fascinating parts of the process. And sometimes it doesn’t look as good as you thought it was going to. Meanwhile, in the yarn store, you’ve just noticed this gorgeous peach chenille that would make such a lovely scarf for Lester. . .
So the first real sign of change I noticed was not that she stopped finishing projects but that she stopped starting them. The same crumpled bags with the ends of skeins peeping out of them stayed on the floor next to the couch week after week, gradually slumping toward the carpet under the weight of the months and the dust. This was happening even before I retired. I furtively displaced some of them into her closets, or into the storage space under the bed: there was no reaction from her. I attributed this to a natural waning of interest in what had been her hobby and really her only passion for decades, but now I see that it was a sign she was being distracted by something important. This began to happen about the time she took the bird class in the mountains.
Ayn, our neighbor across the hall, a one-time workmate of Leilah's and a member of the knitting group, had started a fling with an X-treme trail biker. Rolf is a short, stocky guy with a shaved head and only one ear, the other having been removed in the course of a high-speed car crash by his cat, flying forward in accordance with Newton’s first law from its spot under the rear window. The cat survived, but the ear was lost in the wreckage. Rolf wears headbands a lot.
Somehow the biker fling translated into a girl trip to the Sierra Nevada for Ayn and my very un-outdoorsy wife; I don’t really understand how their minds work. They drove to the mountains, to this bird class up at some pass or other. There they camped out in ratty tents, sleeping on humid old mattresses, eating camp food and shivering in outdoor showers with inquisitive spiders hanging in front of their eyes. At 6 a.m. the head bird guy, whose name was Bill Beresford, would roust the dozen or so victims out of their warm sleeping bags and truck them off in a Chevy Suburban to deep woods and marshes joyous with mosquitosong, where they would stand with their mouths open, listening for singing birds, it being a birdsong ID class.
It should have been hell for Leilah, who as I’ve mentioned was at that time a very careful dresser and fastidious about personal hygiene, not to mention allergic to mosquito bites, which produce long sinuous ridges on her forearms and cheeks. More of a museum person than a hiker, which suited my tastes perfectly, once I'd given up my own efforts to find the unpopulated Center of the World. But from the time of the bird class on, I began to see fewer printed silk tops and more baggy sweatshirts, faded jeans, and hiking boots with bumpy soles that left big clods of dried mud all over my newly vacuumed carpets, plus slouch hats that sagged over her ears. Her huge, rather sexy hair like a chestnut mandela was now tied back in a dismissive ponytail. She reeked of DEET and sunblock.
And I further began to notice that at bedtime, when even an aging bald man might have been expecting an occasional romantic interlude, Leilah would be sitting in bed with her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, thumbing through her Sibley’s guide. Sibley at least had color pictures, but they were all of birds lined up in profile like avian petty criminals. Much worse was Pyle’s Guide to Identification of North American Passerines, a black, priestly sort of volume that contained page after page of line drawings explaining how to blow the feathers back and then lick the skull of a bird to determine its age or state of sexual arousal. Leilah would make a great show of being deeply immersed in this stuff until I finally rolled over and tried to go to sleep, after which she would turn off the light and settle herself with stealthy wrigglings so as not to wake me. I'm no fool, and I got the picture, believe me; but I put it down to the clots of brown pigment aggregating on my once lily-white skin, along with my wrinkly neck and sagging boobs. As I've already mentioned, she's considerably younger than I am.
It soon became clear, though, that her obsession was not just with birds. There was also the chief birdman himself, whose main claim to fame, as far as I could determine, was that he knew the difference between an oracular thatch and a malar stripe and could pick out the sorry twerp of a ruby-crowned dingbat at a chainsaw convention. I met him once. Leilah dragged me to a party celebrating the end of the class he gave entitled “Dialects of East Bay White-crowned Sparrows: Avian Trash Talk and the Hermeneutics of Dishonest Advertising.” I’m transcribing this exactly from the catalog she left behind in the recycling bin when she took off. It was a party of birdwatchers, and I was the only civilian in the crowd. There were lots of jokes about bird anatomy and behavior that I didn't understand. One truth, however, was self-evident at this event: that no relationship could permanently endure half-bird and half-nonbird. Every fowl freak at the meeting was either single or was matched up with another birdwatcher. This should have tipped me off, of course, but it didn't. Like Wile E. Coyote, I was too busy keeping my eyes peeled for the Roadrunner of Enlightenment to notice that I had run off the edge of a cliff. But as long as I neglected to look down, everything still seemed to be more or less all right.
Bill Beresford himself was quite pleasant, a tall, gangly guy with his own dishwater blond ponytail and a deeply sunburned face, and
those white areas around the eyes that people have when they spend a lot of time outdoors and wear glasses. He was something of a giant in his field, I gathered, but wore his laurels, or plumes, modestly. He even had a sense of humor. But he had an intensity about his chosen field that, for Leilah, must have provided a strong contrast to the aimless drifter I'd become since retiring. Well, let's admit it: I've been pretty much of an aimless drifter all my life, although until retirement I'd only drifted after work hours.
I first began to realize I had a serious problem when she left me a phone message that she had to leave town suddenly. “There’s a Masked Booby in Fort Bragg, and I’ve got to see it.” That was the message. It’s a good thing Homeland Security wasn’t listening, or at least I assume they weren’t. I was apparently supposed to know what a Masked Booby was. This is something birdwatchers like to do: they send each other emails or call their friends, or post a rare “sighting” on a website, and then everyone scrambles for their thousand-dollar binoculars and a couple of granola bars and they all rush off in their 4-wheel drive trucks to find this Little Stunt or Clam-Colored Robin – whatever it happens to be this time. It might mean a trip of hundreds of miles, driving with no sleep, stopping at 3 a.m. in lonely diners with tumbleweed piled up in their parking lots – all to get a 2.3-second glimpse of a dim, feathered bundle that they could then add to their “life list”. Frankly, I think my own wobbling search for life's meaning compares favorably with this approach.
In this case the Masked Booby had failed to appear, despite the three-hour drive to Fort Bragg. “How many of you went on this wild goose chase,” I asked her, when she finally returned, with her left eye swollen shut from mosquito bites, but glowing nevertheless. “It was just Bill and me,” she replied, challenging me with a one-eyed stare. I’m suspicious of birdwatchers anyway, because they’re always talking about sexing things, and immature boobies, and buffy rumps. And in the laser glare of Leilah's eye I woke up with a shock to find that I could imagine only too well Beresford and my wife on the clanging floor of his flatbed Toyota, sexing each other amid the gasoline fumes and the stink of pine needles, with the lonely call of the elusive Masked Booby in the night.
I don't know if anything happened between them that time, but eventually something certainly did happen. Possibly my retirement inactivity and melancholy were getting to her, and plus with the removal of work pressure I may have been harassing her a little more about our sex life, which as long I was preoccupied with teaching was no more than a sort of subliminal background hum, but began to foreground itself once teaching was over. This may have become an annoyance to her, or may have simply forced her to recognize that something was missing for her in that area. As mentioned above, my manual skills leave something to be desired. And then there was the example of neighbor Ayn, with her springy little biker dude. Ayn was a bit of a compulsive talker, at least about men, and from every meeting of the knitting group Leilah would bring home tales about the ups and downs, the ins and outs, of that new relationship. There were undoubtedly also girl-graphic psycho-erotic details that Leilah never told me, and that may have started her thinking along those lines. Then came the bird class and Beresford. And even before that, other things that I only found out about later. But obviously I'm grasping at straws here. I don't really know what happened, to tell you the truth, from beginning to end. I suppose that was the problem, wasn't it?
Retirement Projects Page 3