“My diamond is gone!” she said. “I’ve lost the diamond to my wedding ring! I must have dropped it on the path!”
Everyone gathered around her. We looked at the gold setting on my mother’s finger, the pointy teeth biting a pocket of air.
“It’s gone for good,” my father said. “A needle in a haystack.”
It was true, as this story is. The path was made of nothing but tiny shiny stones, and even a cursory search was impossible. Now my parents were heartbroken too. The diamonds in my mother’s engagement ring had come from the heel of my grandmother’s shoe, a place the Nazis didn’t think of looking as she led my father and his brother into America, but that isn’t the miracle either, although it is miraculous. The miracle isn’t the path the diamonds took to get into the shoe, which I would have to invent, beginning with what’s-it-called—carbon? a prehistoric creature, tarpitted to death in Africa maybe?—and ending with a German diamond dealer who must have done so much desperate business, or a household tool, let’s say a pair of sewing scissors, that my grandmother held in one hand, traveling shoe in the other, as she grimly dug her way out of the catastrophe that surrounded her. But those things aren’t the miracle, not in this story.
The miracle is that I found the missing diamond, ten years later in a book:
A rolling green hill descended behind the house into the valley, and Taliesin spread magnificently in the background…. Mrs. Booth clutched one hand with another, and then looked at me, with an expression of terror, as if I were a phantom. She appeared panicked—she frantically examined the wedding ring on her left hand, so that I wondered, illogically, whether her horror at my uncoupled state had possessed her completely.
“My diamond is gone!” she said. “I’ve lost the diamond to my wedding ring! I must have dropped it on the lawn!”
Everyone but Sophie gathered around her. We looked at the gold setting on Mrs. Booth’s finger, the pointy teeth biting a pocket of air.
“It’s gone for good,” Mr. Booth said. “A needle in a haystack.”
We all gazed over the dark lawn spreading toward the evening sky.
“Gone forever!” Mrs. Booth said.
Henry asked for a flashlight.
[…]
“Found it!” Henry’s voice sailed over the lawn. “Come see!”
Mrs. Booth stood uncertainly as if she believed a trick were being played on her. The look on her face was one of pure wanting to believe—as if she had been told she was about to witness a miracle she should have known was a work of charlatanry.
Over the flashlight Henry’s long arm rose again in the air, and he waved the memorial party toward him. “It’s worth looking at before we pick it up.”
One by one every member of our memorial party knelt and pressed his or her head to the grass to look along Henry’s beam…. That jewel caught the light and scattered it in a blossom of fire. Green and yellow and white gleams prickled the darkness, as impressive as a rainbow or the aurora borealis. I felt as if I were looking at a spectacular natural phenomenon that had no name yet…and I hoped unreasoningly that he would not retrieve the diamond, but that everyone would agree to keep it where we could always gaze on it.
“Unreasoningly” or not, the search party did keep the diamond right where we could always gaze on it. Every time I reread this part of the book—Paula Sharp’s novel Crows over a Wheatfield—the diamond is still there. Add to this miracle that the scene in Sharp’s novel takes place in the other Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin, as far away from Arizona as the lyrics of a love song are from being in love. How did something so small travel an impossible distance? How did a diamond fall from my mother’s engagement ring onto a gravel path at Taliesin in Arizona and end up on the lawn at Taliesin in Paula Sharp’s novel?
Some say that it’s God who performs such miracles, but not in this book. (God appears only once, as the older sister in “Briefly,” drinking snitched rum in the good glasses and flirting with the boy someone else wants.) Instead I tracked down Paula Sharp to ask her about the miracle, and it is fair to say, based on an actual real live interview, that she has no idea:
PAULA SHARP: I have no idea. It’s a tiny part of the story.
DANIEL HANDLER: Not to me. I’d like to write an essay about it, if that’s okay with you.
PS: You want to write about it? You have a magpie’s eye if you think that diamond is something to write about.
It would, in fact, require a magpie’s eye to notice a diamond on the gravel on the path in Arizona, the setting of one story, and fly it all the way to the lawn on the hill in Wisconsin, the setting of another, and so I read T. R. Birkhead’s The Magpies: The Ecology and Behaviour of Black-billed and Yellow-billed Magpies:
Attractive, artful and aggressive are all terms which have been used to describe magpies, and they are all accurate. Few bird species outside the tropics can compete with the magpie for looks: its crisp, iridescent black and white plumage together with its elongated tail gives it a distinctly exotic appearance. The magpie’s artfulness may be the result of human persecution. […] Not surprisingly the magpie had to adopt a more clandestine lifestyle in order to survive, hence its reputation for furtiveness.
Accordingly, the magpies in this book are so furtive, so eager to avoid human persecution, that you might not have noticed them. But they’re there, right from the start:
the air was also full of smells and birds [emphasis mine], but it was the love, I was sure, that was tumbling down to my lungs, the heart’s neighbors and confidantes.
They’re everywhere, these birds, looking for shiny things and carrying them around in their beaks. How else could one explain the pendant Joe gets in “Obviously,” or the envelope of money Helena finds in “Not Particularly,” flown in through the rip in her purse? You can follow them throughout the book, flying across lawns, eavesdropping in diners, listening to the radio and tucked into bed, in the forest or in the hinterlands or out the window of a cab, trying to get in the last word:
Even that bird there [emphasis mine], ignoring the Chinese woman in favor of something to eat or make into a nest, could tell you that in chirp language.
But following the birds is like following the taxi instead of the passenger. You might as well emphasize that Chinese woman, whom I first spotted on the subway in New York, where this book begins. My wife and I were coming home one night and arguing like we do. I told my wife I was going to leave her for the Chinese woman at the end of the subway car, and I stalked off and stood next to this oblivious woman until my wife and I were laughing hysterically at either end of the car. We went home happy together, and the woman never appeared in our lives again until I wrote this book.
In an earlier draft, instead of this essay, all of the characters in Adverbs—even the Chinese woman—gathered together for a party and decided to play a game. The game is Adverbs, because without a game the party’s just refreshments and people talking and there’s enough of that in the book already. Someone is It and leaves the room and everyone else decides on an adverb. It returns and forces people to act out things in the manner of the word, which is another name for the game. People argue violently, or make coffee quickly, and there’s always a time when the alcohol takes over and people suggest hornily and we all must watch as It makes two people writhe on the floor, supposedly dancing or eating or driving a car, until finally It guesses the adverb everyone’s thinking of. It’s a charade, although it’s not much like Charades. You play until you get bored. Nobody keeps score, because there’s no sense in keeping track of what everyone is doing. You might as well trace birds through a book, or follow a total stranger you spot outside the window of your cab, or follow the cocktails spilling themselves from the pages of vintage cocktail encyclopedias to leave stains through this book, or follow the pop songs that stick in people’s heads or follow the people themselves, although you’re likely to confuse them, as so many people in this book have the same names. You can’t follow all the Joes, or all the Davids o
r Andreas. You can’t follow Adam or Allison or Keith, up to Seattle or down to San Francisco or across—three thousand miles, as the bird flies—to New York City, and anyway they don’t matter. If you follow the diamond in my mother’s ring from Africa to Germany to California to Arizona to Wisconsin, in the heel of a grandmother, in the beak of a magpie, in the gravel of the path, in someone else’s novel, in the center of the earth where the volcanoes are from, you would forget the miracle, the reason diamonds end up on people’s fingers in the first place. It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe, and look—actually look!—the potatoes have arrived! They had to slice through the plastic—attractively, artfully, aggressively, to name three adverbs that didn’t make it into this book—but the potatoes are being carried inside, an actual miracle! It can’t happen to everyone—as in life, some people will be killed off before they get something shiny, and some of them will screw it up and others will just end up with the wrong kind of bird—but some of them will arrive at love. Surely somebody will arrive, in a taxi perhaps, attractively, artfully, aggressively, or any other way it is done.
not particularly
Helena still never got any mail. There was still never any mail just for her, and this wasn’t, either. Her name wasn’t on it, for one thing, just the address of the apartment she lived in, and the envelope felt thick, like someone was sending her a few million dollars. She could think of no reason, but just the other day she had found a fifty-dollar bill in a movie theater, and there’d been no reason then, either. “Guess what I found!” she’d said to her husband, who was an American named David. She was a British person, originally from Britain, named Helena. Sometimes this seemed like a big deal, a channel between them, sometimes it didn’t. She’d waited until they were walking in the park to ask him. “When I went to the movies.”
“A mythical creature of some kind,” David had said. “I guess a unicorn. That’s my guess. Can we now discuss how I will get to the airport with all the stuff I need to take to the airport with me?” Now he was in Canada for his work, which was some kind of job, and now Helena had an envelope with her name not on it. She sat down in her second favorite chair and made a chart.
If the envelope contains one-dollar bills—the movies again.
If the envelope contains five-dollar bills—another magnum of good champagne, and throw up.
If the envelope contains twenty-dollar bills—the champagne, dinner, and boots in the window.
I forgot ten-dollar bills—champagne and your choice of boots or dinner.
Million-dollar bills—buy England.
The envelope contained a letter, not money. It never does. Helena didn’t have any money, what with being broke. She had a job but was fired when the money was gone, and now the money was gone and her husband too, although only to Canada. She thought you needed a passport to go to Canada. In fact she was certain of it. She smoked, a certain smoker, and opened the drawer again to look at the two passports inside. They were different citizens, she and her husband, so it could be laws about citizens, or she was wrong, maybe. Or the love was gone with the money. On the table was a newspaper interviewing a man who had blown up something big. Nobody knows why men do things.
Dear Andrea,
I lost your number but I remembered where your place was. I’m here saying that I miss our nights of wild love, baby. I know you miss it too, baby. You are totally hot like lava. Remember when I totally rubbed you down? I’m going to the Black Elephant Masked Ball. Meet me there and we’ll start up again like the song says, baby.
Love you, Tony
The envelope had been thick because it was folded badly around a photograph of a naked man, taken by a naked man. The naked man was standing in front of a mirror with a camera in front of his crotch, although his penis was big enough to hang below. It was also thick. The man’s expression was a little squinty, like he was thinking of giving up on the whole thing if someone didn’t sleep with him soon, and Helena couldn’t think of what song he meant, so she got in the tub and taped the letter and the photograph to the other end where she could look at them. The wall was all puckered from other times she had done this, although she hadn’t taped something to the other end of the tub in quite some time. Nights of wild love. Totally hot like lava. It was a common enough name, Andrea. Like David, or she supposed there were other names. She got out of the tub because she had to pee, which was more and more the problem lately. The phone was also ringing.
“It’s David,” said David. “I’m in Canada.”
Helena opened the drawer. “Tell me, spouse,” she said, “is Canada a foreign country?”
“Of course it is,” David said. “It’s like England.”
“And is it like England?” Helena asked, looking at her husband in his passport photo and then at the naked man.
“Well,” David said kindly, “there’s weather. Listen, I’ll give you the number of the hotel, but there was some problem with the reservation so it might not be in my name. It’ll be under the name of the company.”
Helena could not for the life of her remember the name of the company, only that it was stupid. “How is it?” she asked. “The work?”
“Well, it’s what they’re paying me to do,” David said.
“I’m having trouble figuring that out,” Helena said. “I don’t know what people are paying me to do because I’m not making any money. We’re out of juice, David, and I don’t know if I can buy any more because there is only a handful left in my purse.” They say the poor have dignity but Helena’s voice was not dignified into the phone.
“Are you freaking out again?” David said. “Take a bath.”
“Tell me something,” Helena said. “No, tell me something else. Who used to live in this apartment?”
“You know it was Andrea before us,” David said, and gave Helena one of his long, kind sighs, which with long-distance rates cost maybe one American dollar. “Before Andrea I don’t know. Early settlers of California, for the San Francisco gold rush. Did I tell you she was driving a cab?”
“Andrea?”
“Last I heard,” David said.
“You’re jealous,” Helena said, and she was crying which was another problem. “I mean me. I can’t even drive a cab. You love Andrea.”
“You could drive a cab if someone paid you.”
“New in town,” Helena said. “New in town, wrong side of the road.”
“Honey, I have to go,” David said. “It’s work. I love you. Buy yourself some juice.”
“It costs seven hundred thousand dollars,” Helena said, and she cried very hard.
“Buy a cheaper kind of juice,” David was heard to say. “Andrea, I think this is good for me to be in Canada. We’ve been fighting and this is like a vacation.”
“It’s not like a vacation!” Helena yelled, or something. “I’m still here, and you called me Andrea, who you’re with!”
“This is what I mean,” David said. “Goodbye.”
Off the phone Helena felt a lot better, which couldn’t be a good sign, but she looked at Tony again. Helena didn’t have a lot of men in her life. Her husband, of course, and his friend Ed who married Dawn who was so boring she had an insulting nickname for the two of them and would only meet at restaurants so loud they couldn’t talk. Also, there was her neighbor. He walked his dog and Helena would run out in a false coincidence. “Hello again,” she would say to the dog. “Hello baby,” and cup its face with her hands. The neighbor would smile. “Hello baby,” she wanted to say to him, and cup his face with her hands. She could explain that it was a British custom and that she was from Britain, originally. The only other man she had met through an ad. When she was fired—or, more to the point, when Andrea fired her—she found a place on the computer to place an ad. It was free to place an ad so she kept placing them with increasing desperation as the theme.
>
Published novelist available as editor, ghostwriter, or freelancer. Rates flexible.
Published novelist, new in town, available for a variety of services. Married. All inquires welcomed. Reasonable rates. Very reasonable rates.
I am a writer and please answer this and send me money. I am flat broke and I never get any mail. Please mail me some money and I will do something for you, I guess.
By the time Helena received a reply she had no idea which ad he was answering, but she met Joe at a sticky diner and had sticky buns. “I think I misunderstood your ad,” he said, almost right away.
“Don’t be so sure,” she said, and why had she said that, and why was she wearing the boots?
“I thought you were looking for a friend or maybe something more,” Joe said. “You know what? This is a bad idea. It’s just that the love left my life so I answered this ad. I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t have a lot of money but I’m employed and even you could say I do noble work. There was even a day once, or something, when everybody loved me, but not really since my wife has my love really arrived, if you know what I mean.”
“Well,” Helena said, wondering if the place served drinks or just wine. “I have the opposite problem, or maybe even worse.”
“Listen to you, maybe even worse,” Joe said. “You have a sexy accent.”
“I know,” Helena said, and this is another good example of why behave this way? Things just poured out of her mouth lately, like vomit, and sometimes it actually was.
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