“Well, thanks for wasting my time,” Sam said.
Egg laughed the Egg Laugh: Ha! just once. “Here’s where it gets interesting,” but Sam never heard that part. Andrea walked in wearing the dress from the place Sam couldn’t go anymore because she yelled at them over something that, at the time, was completely worth it. Completely. Egg shut up and looked at her like a bird hitting the window.
“Where’s the poo-poo?” she said to Sam, gesturing to her hair in her hand.
“He arrived just now,” Sam said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Andrea said. “Steven isn’t the poo-poo. I mean that sticky hair stuff.”
“You don’t need hair stuff,” Egg said and took her face in his hands. They kissed grotesquely. It was a small apartment, so it was hard for Sam to look elsewhere. Somewhere in the stack of records on the new speaker was a song called “The Dream of Evan and Chan,” a whirring, buzzing song about going to hear a band play. It’s a love song, sort of, with the singer insisting that he won’t let go, he won’t let go, even if you say so, oh no. But it’s also a song about a dream, and at the end of it the telephone, ringing ringing ringing ringing on, wakes the whole band up from the dream, and the dream is over. Sam knew the song was in there someplace, and she also knew—like it came to her in a dream—that if Egg listened to it he’d think it was just some faggot singing with a bunch of drum machines. And also, Sam just knew, he’d say this. Sam could hear him say this even over the clutch of her hand on the remote for the television, tighter and tighter until the little plastic buttons begged for dear dear life. Sam had no mercy for the little plastic buttons, not with Andrea and Egg kissing like that. They could beg all night, but she wouldn’t let them go, even if they say so, oh no.
At last they stopped.
“I’m taking your purse,” Andrea said. “Mine still has that rip.”
Egg was looking at the stack of records on the new speaker. “What’s this?” he asked. “It looks like the eighties.” It was an album by the Clash entitled Sandinista!
“The money,” Sam said. “Take the purse but leave me my money.”
“I did, except you don’t have any,” Andrea said, and she still didn’t have any on the day of the Retro Pop Gala at Stirrup Park, so Egg lent her the money for a ticket and Andrea paid for the sushi they ate afterwards. They were ganging up on her. The place was almost empty and everyone was trying to be nice.
“I’m really into this restaurant,” Egg said.
“I taught it to Sam,” Andrea said, feeding him something.
Sam ate her Volcano Roll in fury. If Andrea and Egg weren’t in love, it was safe to say they were planning on doing that later. Maybe she wasn’t feeding him something this instant, but it was Sam’s story, she was realizing, and no longer about the two of them. “Tell me something,” she said to Egg.
“You don’t have to,” Andrea said quickly.
Egg picked up a piece of ginger and put it on his finger like it was wearing a little hat. “I’ll tell you something,” he said agreeably. “Do you mean a joke? Do you want to hear the story, or joke, about the people who found money in the street? Oh, wait. I blew it already.”
“It’s okay,” Andrea said. “We know that one.”
Andrea and Sam had never heard that one. Sam in particular was so broke that she would definitely remember something about finding money in the street. She gripped her little cup, which was likely imported. Millions of people live in Japan, a good portion of whom must be unhappy and devoid of money, and yet the bottles of sake are always so small. “Change the subject,” Sam said.
“I think I’ll change the subject,” Andrea said. “What should we do for Sam’s birthday?”
“Out of the neighborhood,” Sam said, “that’s for sure.”
“If we go out of the neighborhood, Mike probably won’t come,” Andrea said.
“I don’t care.” Sam turned her empty cup over but kept her hand on top of it like it might leave. “Those bird signs keep getting stapled up no matter what we do. Petey the parakeet. ‘Answers to Petey.’ It depresses me. They’re never going to find that bird.”
“It’s flown,” Andrea agreed.
“No, no,” Egg said. “Birds like that, when they get lost, there’s a flock waiting for them in the park. They flutter around together. It was in a magazine, pictures of it.”
Magazines. Listen to him. “Bullshit,” Sam said. “I’m in the park all the time and never seen that. It’s a story. People walk around and solve problems, is what the park’s for, and there’s horses for girls to look at.”
“Nope,” Egg said. “There’s all the pretty birds in the flock in the park. All the parrots people lost, and bright-green parakeets like Petey, canaries, toucans, all those black bird what’s-its, who steal the shiny things.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin, and then, slowly, wiped his mouth again. “What is it, Sam? What do you want for your birthday?”
Sam let go of her useless cup. “A bird,” Sam said, suddenly and dishonestly. Her birthday was two weeks away. Egg gave Andrea and Sam both smiles, and clicked his chopsticks together like novelty teeth.
“Okay,” Egg said for nothing and ate the piece of cold egg.
So then for a while it was him in the story.
The Clash’s album Sandinista! was an absolute favorite of Andrea and Sam’s, for damn good reason. It is very long. It’s on two compact discs in my house, or on three vinyl records at Andrea and Sam’s. Egg was right about it—it does look like the eighties, although it was just 1980 when it arrived. It’s a scruffy album, and the Clash was very much into Jamaican reggae at the time, so there’s lots of that, and dub, which is like reggae but instrumental and less able-bodied. Andrea and Sam had sprawled on the couch night after night, laughing and arguing over whose turn it was to get up and flip the record over, and the first time the houseguest kissed Sam, right on the right shoulder, she would never forget that “Somebody Got Murdered,” her favorite song on the whole album, was what was playing, but still Sam had to admit that the album seemed a little long. Sometimes. If she tried to listen to it all, without anything else happening in a room all lit up with insomnia, the album seemed to stretch its dubby fingernails far out late into the night like it too wanted to do something better that evening.
But it was morning when it happened, and it was the Katydids album playing again, with Sam curled on the couch like a semicolon and Andrea moving Sam’s feet so she could sit in her towel and talk about the new shower door, and then Egg walked in, which meant he must have a key because Sam never forgot to lock it anymore. He had something with him that at first looked like the ghost of a midget. Sadly, though, it was a cage he was holding with a small sheet over it. “Happy birthday to you,” he sang in a fake British accent, “Happy birthday to you.” Then he stopped before the part everybody likes best, the part that goes “Happy birthday dear,” and then says your name. But Egg just put the cage on Sam’s lap. She peeked in and saw what there was to see.
Oh God, or somebody, what is with the terrible things? If you made a world why not a better one? Why must we do the best we can if you didn’t, Mr. or Ms. Perfect? Could you not find a kiss for us when we’re up, O finder of lost pets, instead of the kicking when we’re down? With all the stories, all those lost birds heading south when it gets real cold, is this really how your work must manifest itself on Sam’s lap?
“The bird guy says his name is Lovey,” Egg said, “but you can change that. It’s a lovebird, sorry for being corny.”
“I thought those had to come in pairs,” Andrea said.
Sam put the sheet back down. “Shut up shut up shut up,” she said.
“Not this one,” Egg said. “It’s a rare bird—ha!—like you, Sam.”
“Fuck you,” Sam said.
There is a part of the first Katydids album that is somewhat inexplicably in Japanese, right toward the end. “Steven, would you excuse us for a minute?” Andrea said.
Egg stood up. Sam migh
t have been able to stand it if he’d just walked into the kitchen but he stopped and took the box marked “Hummingbird Feeder” with him, for something to do, and that clinched it. He was too dangerous to be in Sam’s story any longer.
“He’ll slay you,” Sam said very softly. “I know him, Andrea. You’ll go on some hike with his college buddy and they’ll just do it. You’ll vanish. You’ll disappear and I’ll be here alone on the couch listening to the Katydids album.”
“The album,” Andrea said ominously, “is almost over.”
Sam sighed and looked at the towel Andrea was wearing. It was impossible for her to imagine the ways terry cloth could be as beautiful as it was. “I know,” Sam said, “that I’m turning into a creep. I know it. But also, I’m right about Egg. You will vanish, Andrea, into the woods.”
Andrea leaned down and held both of Sam’s arms at the wrists with almost no pressure at all. “Listen to me,” she said. “You are barely being nice here. I barely like you the way this is going.” The barelys, Andrea and Sam both knew, were a lie, a tiff they couldn’t tape together. They looked at one another like a pair of parentheses. From the kitchen, over the Katydids, was the sound of Egg opening a box.
Sam got off the couch and took her new bird with her as she walked out of Egg and Andrea’s irrefutable happiness. She dragged herself down to the sidewalk, where outside like a miracle, gazing down at his shoes on the ground, was Mike, a friend of hers.
“Hey Sam,” Mike said. “Are you selling comics today? Is that a bird? Wanna see some ants?” Mike was ten years old and lived in the neighborhood with a sad and cautious dad.
“It’s a lovebird,” Sam said, planning on giving it to him. But first they would talk. “Do one thing for me, though. Mike, let’s not talk about the love part of the bird. Let’s just hang out.”
“But I know lots about love,” Mike said.
“You don’t know anything about love,” Sam said. “You’re young and you’ve had no experience. Your experience is like, how many kinds of gum have you had.”
“Seven,” Mike chimed in immediately. “I know about love. I got taught it by my girlfriend.”
Sam could not hear the Katydids anymore. Either it was over or Egg and Andrea had switched records as soon as she left, or she was simply too far away. There could be a simple answer. Overhead the weather was strange like something might happen, but there was a whole flock of nothing in the sky. “You have a girlfriend?” Sam asked.
Mike blushed, but “Yes,” he said. “You’re the first person I’ve told. She’s older than me. She’s way older.”
“That’s nice,” Sam said. “Tell her happy birthday, your old girlfriend.”
Fuck him. Fuck that bastard kid. She could give the bird to anybody. She knew the whole damn city. She could get a job driving a cab, and when people leaned up to give her the money the bird could peck out their eyes, or she would drive it south for the winter when it got cold, out of the kindness of her heart. She knew the names of each and every one of the Marvelettes. She had lots of people in the neighborhood. She crossed the street and knocked on the door of the opposite place.
Love is a story, usually a love story. The main characters are what matter. The guy who works at Zodiac doesn’t matter here, and Porky doesn’t matter, or Helena or the houseguest she married or Mike or Egg—none of these people are in Sam’s story. The main characters are Sam and her friend. Sam heard the bare footsteps, and then the woman opened the door. Thank god she was wearing a robe. The ugly terry cloth sagged, though, and if Sam cared to turn her attention to it she could see one boob. On the wall was a print you could not see from the opposite apartment, but Sam had seen it before. It showed a woman in the woods who looked not unlike the woman who lived in the place. She had a big dumb smile.
“You found my bird!” said Sam’s last friend. “Petey! Petey!” and somebody help her, this is the only story Sam is in.
judgmentally
In the United States, where this love story is set, we all get to make decisions about love, even if we’re not citizens or if we don’t know what we’re doing. If you get into a taxi and you fall in love there, no laws passed by the government of the United States will prevent you from making a fool of yourself. If you have someone in mind for the prom, you do not have to submit this person to a vote. If you want to be a lover, that is your call, no matter your mother’s advice or what the song on the radio is going on about. The love’s yours, in the United States, for the time being.
If you’d rather be a criminal, however, we have a different system for that. In the United States, twelve people get to decide if someone’s a criminal or not. There’s not anything that anybody can do about this. It’s not the same twelve people—it’s different every time, like a dozen eggs. Also like eggs, it’s a process that’s been described as messy. Joe had eggs that morning, a big breakfast.
A big breakfast weighs you down in the United States, not what you want to eat if you’re going to work at stopping a disease. Nonetheless Joe had eggs. He worked at a place called Stop AIDS Now, a political and/or social organization the aim of which is to stop AIDS, a terrible disease that has killed millions of people and which is spread through two acts much associated with love: having sex and having babies, now. At the time of this writing, let’s face it, nobody knows what to do about this. There’s drugs but they don’t work, and there’s bigotry which for some reason works real well at the job of making everything worse, and people keep on performing acts of love and then dying, all over the world all over the place. Joe’s job thought that enough was enough, among other strategies. It was a worthwhile job and so paid not that well, but Joe told himself he didn’t need much money, which is a common and surprisingly not-that-difficult thing to do. Eggs are cheap. Joe tried to stop AIDS now Monday through Friday except when he was sick or really wanted to go to a movie instead of to work, or was called—summoned, they call it—for jury duty. What happens with jury duty is, for a week maybe you get to be one of the twelve people who decides if someone’s a criminal, maybe nothing happens. Neither is really that taxing. Thus eggs.
Character description: Appropriately tall. Could dress better. A body you could like if you liked that sort of thing. Using a United States metaphor, if everyone in New York City is staunch and traditionally heterosexual and up and down the West Coast, from Seattle to San Francisco, there is nothing but lesbians and gay men, put Joe in maybe Kentucky. There are men so handsome that to pretend Joe did not notice and desire them would be wrong and absurd respectively. Everybody notices. Not to mention curiosity, which is normal as omelettes and consumed at least as often. But Joe dated women and was married to one once. Very nice person. Worked hard. Had big lips. Represented to Joe qualities which were enviable and true, mountains of etiquette and integrity, lakes of charm and goodwill and resourcefulness, well-chosen outfits of tenderness and shiny cloth, all these desirable and inutterable things which no one can list in love. Buttons, the way she buttoned things. Aluminum foil looked better on things she had cooked. The way she said, when she said it, “Put your shoes on, baby.” Conversations, the interesting people she brought home or knew in childhood or who ate at her diner or she overheard in the park. Several friends who told jokes that were funny when Joe heard them. Paying for things with cash or a credit card, this woman’s hair, the wild laugh at certain lines in a movie. “What am I, an acrobat?” would make her laugh, “It’s a party!” would make her laugh. Kissing all the time which the lips are good for. Sense of envy from copassengers in elevators, from plants even, from houseplants on the very good days. In the United States this often leads to weddings unless you’re gay, although this too will change, for how could it not, and perhaps it has by the time this is published. For six years love reigned over Joe and then something else, a new phase of the button moon. The chicken of love laid another one. Her elbows suddenly were ugly. There wasn’t enough money, or maybe the night the restaurant closed around them, Chinese men in tuxes putt
ing the chairs up on the tables like big spiders in a museum, closed for the day, closed for the evening, the lights turned low and the shimmering music off and two coats and only two coats standing off to one side on a glum rack of pinging wire hangers, while they fought, husband and wife, until they were both in tears.
These are the things we must know. This is information relevant to the case and the only judgment there is is: Joe—yes—Joe is nice. He’s a nice guy! He’s our hero! Let him have the eggs! Toast, hash browns, he ate all of it and never once thought about his wife. It was okay. Nothing tasted great, not even Top Ten in eggs, but it was time to go. The summons, they called it a summons, said 8:30 A. M. and it was criminal not to show up.
Jury duty is, you sit in a room to see if you’re going to end up doing something, a room humming with nothing while people someplace else and invisible to you decide things. It’s just like work, but you’re not at work: you’re a juror, maybe. This is your brief new job. Doesn’t pay well.
Eventually you are called into a room, as we all are. Joe was, via number. His number was a hundred something and they called 104 through 110, which was him. He paid attention as he walked out of the room. What would happen now that his number was up? Nothing probably. But nevertheless the hallway was like a drum roll. He had been doing nothing for a long time, though they’d given him several breaks. He had a perfectly natural and appropriate sense of narrative suspense and desire: maybe he would be sequestered, a sexy word.
Courtroom, the usual thing, flags. The United States like all disobedient things has a father, and the father of the United States hung over the place where the judge sat, like a big full-color dollar bill wincing all over the proceedings. Joe took a seat, everybody took seats, take a seat and wait for the judge, when the judge comes stand up. That was not Joe’s favorite part, to tell the truth. Joe wasn’t crazy about the idea of a judge, spending his middle to late age deciding whose fault it was. Back in the restaurant, there was only one moment of any peace. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault,” she said to him, and he realized he’d never forget those red chopsticks with the curled yellow dragons. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault,” and as they faded from one another this was the only thing that made it easier to get back to sleep when he woke up and found that it was still two years later. It wasn’t anybody’s fault and Joe didn’t like standing up for a judge who might decide otherwise, but you had to. You had to slide on down the bench and everyone slid on down the bench. Joe was next to a guy with somebody else on the other side.
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