He shifts to check on Matt, now mesmerized by the bright red pot and the tiny puffs of vapor drifting up from it. Caruso spots a rose-colored feather beneath the edge of the worktable. Serendipitous, he thinks, waddling over to retrieve it with his beak. This is the mishap he’s been waiting for. A feather in the sauce. Her meal ruined. Her perfect evening vanquished by the squatter. Proof she needs to send the Galah packing.
He glances back at the two of them through the screen door, sees her dangling parsley, like mistletoe, over Joe’s head. The die is cast, he tells himself. It’s now or never.
Flapping his wings, he sails directly above the pot and parts his beak. The pink feather floats downward, vacillating on a breath of steam, before landing in the sauce. Right then, the sauce burps, sucking the feather under. Panicked, Caruso sails into the sunroom, hunting for another. He finds it, snared in the wire-meshed bottom of his cage, two times larger than the first. His heart bursting with adrenaline, he tweezes it out with his claws, clamps it in his beak, and flies back into the kitchen, just as Matt, with a downward thrust of his wings, rises upward and flutters unsteadily toward the stove. He hovers above the pot of sauce, the steam wafting around him, then plummets like a stone.
Caruso screeches, the feather falling from his beak. There is the faint sound of a frightened chick calling out, followed by a moment of terrifying silence.
“Claaa-risss-a!” Caruso cries, swooping over the worktable, vehemently slamming against the screen door. “Claaa-risss-a!” he cries again and keeps crying until she’s running over the parched lawn toward him.
She takes the deck steps quickly and rushes inside, her eyes darting frenziedly to Caruso on the floor beside the door, to the worktable, to the lid on the counter, to the splattered, red-flecked stove.
“Please, dear God, no,” she murmurs.
Twenty-two
With his head down and his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans—the same hands that took Matt out of the pot because Clarissa couldn’t—Joe drags his feet through the sandy driveway, rounds the corner, and disappears from view. From the deck comes his concerned voice asking her if she’s feeling better. She bluntly tells him, “No.” He insists that it wasn’t her fault, that accidents do happen. “Whose fault was it then?” she says in a voice so choked and strained that Caruso wouldn’t have recognized it had he not known she was outside. Joe argues that they were gone for just a few minutes. “Long enough for a cockatoo to get into trouble,” she says back. He responds that if she has to blame someone, she should blame him for distracting her. She releases a startling, nervous laugh.
Abruptly their voices cease, and there is silence.
And yet the silence that Matt left behind still whispers from the Wedgwood plate on the painted chest, from the red pot inside the kitchen cabinet, from the dog biscuit at the bottom of his cage. Benumbed, Caruso moves through Matt’s stillness.
Beyond the long row of windows, he hears footsteps again and turns just as Clarissa comes to a halt in the driveway, frowning and blinking. Joe runs his finger down her cheek. Immediately, she holds her hands over her face. To hide her grief, Caruso thinks, his eyes on her, her shoulders heaving while she cries. Joe hugs her, and they walk, their fingers woven together, to the end of the driveway and out of sight.
Before long, the screen door opens and closes. “My carelessness, Caruso, has caused us enough sorrow. I’m not taking any chances with you,” she says, shuffling across the sunroom floor, double-checking the thick wire, looped once more around his cage and cage door. He notices the sheen of sweat above her lip and on her forehead and the ashen pallor of her skin. Her hands shaking, she slides out the poop tray and removes the soiled newspaper, spilling seed husks and filth upon the white linoleum. She rolls the newspaper up and unmindfully lays it on the table. “Me and my big reckless hands,” she says, lifting them up and staring reproachfully at them. “I hope you can forgive me, Caruso.”
As a girl, her large hands had been her shame, and she had kept them hidden from the eyes of others—tucked under her folded arms or else clasped behind her back. Yet she had learned to appreciate them when she began to cook, for they were flexible, coordinated, and strong enough to do a chef’s work. Sadly, the self-rebuke in her voice now tells him that she’s ashamed of them again.
More culpable than she is, he lowers his head.
“Why can’t you look at me?” she asks him.
Sheepishly, he glances upward, afraid that his eyes will betray him. If she looks deeply into them, she might see through the many masks he has been wearing and know who he really is.
“I understand,” she consoles him, their shared sorrow and guilt reuniting them at last.
“We’re going out,” she says a few days later, nudging him off his perch. She deliberately takes the dusty lanes where the tourists seldom venture, all the while talking about her work, the way she once did after a long day at Crab Cakes. She complains about the cheese soufflés that fell last evening. She did what she always did, she says—even added an extra two egg whites for fullness, then baked them in a water bath to be on the safe side—but they fell anyway. “I’m distracted,” she confesses. “Too much sadness inside me.”
Distracted also, he listens to her halfheartedly. In front of him, a skeeter hawk rapidly whirls its transparent, net-veined wings. A pale yellow butterfly flits near a patch of daisies. They pause beneath a gnarled live oak, its leafy canopy a respite from the sun. “Hot as Hades,” she mumbles as they saunter on. “Makes me miss the coolness of the mountains.” And Caruso hopes for a summer storm to ease the August heat.
He hears a gurgling noise, and to his left, just beyond a low brick wall, he spots a stone sculpture of a heron, its upturned beak spouting water into a fountain. “An egret,” she says, stopping to point it out. She should know her birds by now, he thinks, without a hint of judgment. Suddenly, a young robin bounces down on the pathway in front of them. “Look,” she says gleefully, unaware of the tiger-striped cat crawling out from beneath a spindly bush. Instinctively, Caruso swoops off her shoulder and dive-bombs his furry back. Yowling, the cat runs off, and the fledgling flutters upward, his mother’s tuk tuk tuk calling him from a nearby tree.
Hope is the thing with feathers—Caruso thinks as he watches the young robin fly away.
Twenty-three
“Joe,” she says, “I love you.”
Their lips are making little sucking sounds that come through the upraised window beyond which the full moon flowers in the dark night.
Don’t love him, Caruso wants to protest. Blame him for Matt’s death, for my feather plucking, for turning our cozy cottage upside down.
“I adore the sunsets here in May and June,” she says dreamily, “but it is the August moon that dazzles me.”
“The moon is a street lamp compared to your face,” he teases her, and they kiss again.
“Let’s go to the lighthouse,” she says. “It’s the perfect spot for moon gazing.”
Our lighthouse, Caruso thinks despairingly.
“It’ll look magical pirouetting in this pearl-blue moonlight,” she says.
Our pearl-blue moonlight, Caruso insists.
“But you are my celestial planet,” he says.
“We’ll take a long, romantic stroll there,” she says with a giggle, “and you can sweet-talk me all the way.”
“Okay…my love…lead me.”
She is his moon goddess, leading him with Amber Hands, just like the moon leads the sea, he thinks, as snatches of Emily’s moon poem come back to him. “It’s about Olivia and me,” the old man would say after reciting it. “I follow Olivia like a docile boy, and, although she doesn’t realize it, she follows me.”
Has Clarissa ever followed him? Caruso reflects. And when had Olivia ever followed the old man? Illusions…illusions, he thinks. Loving someone you’ve lost.
Don’t wanna lose her, he tells himself as she and Joe creak down the deck steps, their conversation fading as they cro
ss the yard. Don’t wanna lose her.
He moves with deliberation toward the thick rope of wire, loosens a strand of it with his claws, and champs down hard with his beak. The filament snaps in half. Don’t wanna lose her. He unravels another strand and severs it, then another and another until he has bitten through every filament. He flies out into the sunroom and through the kitchen. The weight of his body springs the latch on the screen door, and he escapes into the night.
Don’t wanna lose her, he thinks, soaring high above the backyard. With exhilaration, he rockets upward into the moonlit sky and for a moment feels joyful, the way he once did when he was learning how to fly. He looks down, searching for her on Fig Tree Lane and the pathways nearby, but she’s nowhere.
Effortlessly, he veers right, flapping above an empty street. He wings past Crews Inn and the old church place, then banks right again onto British Cemetery Road, his shadow flittering batlike above the quaint, historic graveyard—its weathered, mossy headstones scattered among the sassafras and loblolly pines. He spots a white-footed mouse dashing from one clump of tall weeds to another and stares into the glittering eyes of a mink, but his red-headed Eclectus hen cannot be found.
He circles back onto Silver Lake Drive, rimming the harbor, and observes the diners in the courtyard of Barney’s Café, eating seafood brought in on the fishing boats this morning.
I can’t lose her, he thinks as he swerves left, gliding over the Halo Hair Studio and the Sea Maiden’s Muse on Creek Road. On a bench in front of Albert Styron’s Store, two men are smoking cigarettes, the glowing tips oscillating through the dark space like intoxicated lightning bugs.
In the near distance, the lighthouse, white and picturesque, beckons him. He heads toward it, the gusty wind off the water flattening his crown of feathers. Minutes later, he is winging over Lighthouse Road and the white picket fence that surrounds the lighthouse and the keeper’s quarters with its red metal roof. The wind slows him down as he flits erratically above the walkway leading to the tower. He is almost there when a bank of clouds snuffs out the moonlight, but the beacon’s steady beam is there for him to follow. A few seconds later, the clouds disperse, and the world below him is bright again. He notices the ocean’s swells, slick and wet as the skin of humpback whales. With banging heart, he leans into the salty wind. Same as Joe, he has never cast his eyes upon the lighthouse at night. And when he comes upon it, it is—as she described it—a magical sight.
Descending, he circles to the right, seeking her out. A moan rides toward him on the robust wind. He follows where the sound takes him, and there she is—a dark form against the white curve of the tower, her arms high above her head, his hands pinned against her palms, her legs wrapped around his waist—as he kisses her face, her neck, her breasts. Held yet horrified by the sight, Caruso is a flash of white, zigzagging uncontrollably back and forth in front of them.
I’ve lost her, he thinks, the light from the beacon a laser beam in his breast. I’ve lost her.
He soars past them, his thoughts flying inward, but this time he can find no comfort in memory. For everyone he has ever loved, he realizes in a blinding moment of clarity, becomes lost to him.
Landing on the deck of their cottage, he pries open the screen door and teeters over the lunar radiance striping the kitchen floor. He pauses, closing his eyes on the world, but then the image of their entwined bodies rises up behind his eyelids, and he feels such numbing pain that had he shrieked out he would not have heard the anguish in his voice. He whips his eyes open, mining his memory for a time when he had made her moan like Joe. Not once, he thinks, his legs growing weak beneath him.
He stares at his breast, zeroes in on a feather, and jerks it out. Then, he gouges his bare flesh with his beak. Deserved pain, he thinks, as blood tattoos his plumage. Flying to the kitchen sink, he twists on the faucet and bares his red chest to the water. The Great Barrier Reef with its shimmering coral polyps is polluted and dying, he thinks, cutting the flow off. Ayers Rock is as weightless as one of his pinfeathers. He flutters into his cage and locks himself in with the mangled strands of wire. She is his illusion. A red-headed Eclectus hen can never be human, but a lover always is, he thinks, trembling on his perch. And most tragic of all, families are born of blood or passion.
Before long, Caruso hears them kissing passionately on the deck and, after a brief moment, her footsteps as she meanders dreamily into the sunroom. “Hey, Caruso,” she says, shifting in his direction, touching her swollen lips. The moon, through the open blinds, captures her in its spotlight. She shakes off one sandal, then the other, and moves toward him, bringing with her the loud, oppressive scent of Joseph Hampton Fitzgerald.
Unbuttoning the front of her dress, she pulls it over her head and flings it on the chaise longue. She steps out of her panties and leaves them on the floor. “I need a shower,” she says, coming closer. Cringing, Caruso tucks his beak into his wing feathers to block out the smell of Joe.
“How about a shower?” she asks him. “We haven’t done that in a long time.”
He unsheathes his beak.
She smiles at him, oblivious to the maimed wire around his cage door as she untangles it. She leans over, her breasts milky white in the moonlight, her stomach round and soft. She presents her alabaster arm to him, and timorously he steps up. She holds him close as they start down the darkened hallway, the seaweed perfume of her filling his head.
She swishes the curtain aside and turns on the water. “My sweet Caruso,” she says, drawing her fingertips over his tail feathers. A strange, powerful yearning permeates his body. Fervidly, he rubs himself against her skin, releasing his pent-up passion. Stepping into the stall, she closes the curtain behind her and puts him on the plastic shelf. She removes the sprayer from its holder and wets herself down. Taking the soap in her large palm, she runs it languidly over her body and then rinses the soap off. “Now you, Caruso,” she says, shifting toward him, dousing his feathers. He squawks excitedly and does a gleeful shimmy. “Clean boy,” she says, spraying him again.
He shrieks with pleasure, the warm water running over him, his heart soaring with love. Fluttering off the shelf, he lands on her shoulder, pressing his beak against the dark mole, his mole, on her neck.
“Caruso!” she says, startled, the sprayer plummeting from her fingers. Dangling at the end of the metal cord, it begins to swirl, shooting water against his wings, her face, the stall. She shields her eyes with her hands while he flits over her body, shyly at first and then boldly, reveling in the velvet softness of her skin, high on her conch shell odor. “Quit that, Caruso!” she says, pushing him away with her hands.
Yet, caught in the grip of Eros, Caruso cannot help himself.
He lands once more on her shoulder and entangles his beak in her wet hair.
“Please don’t,” she tells him.
“Claaa-risss-a!” he cries out.
“Enough,” she says in a level, firm voice.
He yields to her.
Quickly she cuts off the water, wraps her long fingers around his torso, and gently eases him onto the shelf. “What’s wrong with you?” she says, her blue eyes dark with worry.
My soul is sick with love, he wants to confess as she opens the curtain and steps out.
Twenty-four
The full moon is gone, erased from his sight, while Emily’s moon poem lingers in his mind. After closing the blinds, she blew him a good-night kiss, carefully arranged the baby blanket over his cage, and went to bed, leaving behind the fragrance of talcum powder. Did he lose her tonight at the lighthouse when the moon was full? Will he ever be the moon pulling her toward him? He now remembers every word, every line of the poem, and the strange, contradictory mix of emotions he had felt that day in April when, for the very first time, he had gotten a different glimpse of Theodore Pinter through a crack in the mask he wore.
“What do you think?” the old man had asked him, waiting until noon when the sunlight was dancing behind the draperies before he drew them
open. “Will April treat me kindly or cruelly this year?” Pausing, he took off his glasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket. “Kindly, I hope,” he said. “For today, Olivia will see Pascal for the man he is.”
He glanced up at the grandfather clock on the wall behind him. Then, catching Caruso’s eye, he tapped his fingertips against the desk and went on, “I have a plan, Caruso. At noon precisely, her doorbell will ring. On her way to answer it, she will walk by these windows and pass out of sight. But I know who will be waiting for her on the front porch. A man from Duncan’s Florist Shop with a box of twelve long-stemmed pink roses. Instinctively, she will lift up the lid, anticipating Pascal’s name on the card inside, ready to forgive him for years of past neglect—yet my name will be there. Happy seventieth birthday, my darling! From your ever-devoted Teddy, the card will read, with Emily’s moon poem in my bold script below it.” Ardently, he began to recite the verses:
The Moon is distant from the Sea—
And yet, with Amber Hands—
She leads Him—docile as a Boy—
Along appointed Sands—
He never misses a Degree—
Obedient to Her Eye
He comes just so far—toward the Town—
Just so far—goes away—
Oh, Signor, Thine, the Amber Hand—
And mine—the distant Sea—
Obedient to the least command
Thine eye impose on me—
Finished, he stood there, tears in his eyes, but he quickly winked them back and said, “A perfect plan, isn’t it, Caruso?”
Caruso vehemently bobbed his head while Theodore Pinter stood speechless, staring, it seemed, right through him. Caruso watched his chest rising and falling as he breathed steadily through slightly parted lips, his face tightening into a mask of resolve. He gripped the edge of the desk firmly, appearing to draw courage from the wood, took one last deep breath, and said, “Without fail, Pascal Robinson comes home for lunch at twelve-fifteen. Same as always, he’ll pull his black Mercedes into the driveway. Same as always, he will have forgotten her birthday, but this time she won’t suffer his thoughtlessness in stoic silence. No, this time she won’t let him off so easily because this time she will be holding my gift in her arms.” He grabbed the binoculars off the desk, pivoted around, and took a resolute step forward. Pressing the apertures against his eyes, he turned the wheels and brought them into focus.
Love and Ordinary Creatures Page 17