Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  “Yes,” she said, more quietly this time. “I don’t want you to have to live like that, all cautious and worried. I want you to be able to put on your shoes without looking. You saw what she did to her father. Think what she could do to you. I want you to be with me. The person you can trust.”

  “You think Skye’s the poisonous thing in my shoe,” I said, and Susannah and I melted into hysterical laughter. We sank to our knees, hers flower-print corduroy and mine denim. Pellets of ice disintegrated through our clothes and into our skin.

  “But if she were here,” I said, when our laughter had ended, and we gathered our breath, leaning against each other. “You wouldn’t care about trusting her. She would just be the most beautiful thing you ever saw. And you would love her.”

  There was quiet all around us. Susannah tightened her fingers through mine, a squeeze of reverent thanks for telling this secret. She shivered a little, and I remembered our coats, discarded somewhere, probably soaked through.

  “That’s why I don’t want her here,” she said.

  The dark freckles across her face fluttered and shimmered. One of them grew wings and flew away. It crossed the short stretch of air between us and landed just above my right eyebrow, planting itself there, where it’s remained—I swear—until this very day.

  “NOT HERE.”

  John Paul held me by the shoulders. My hands had sunk deep into his jeans, his back pressed against the red bark of an eastern cedar.

  “It’s too cold,” he said again.

  His breath burrowed into my ear. He always seemed this way—stoic, scarcely affected by the drugs, amused by those of us who were. I let him lead me up the path to his house, to his sewing closet of a bedroom. Where we passed hour upon pulsing hour, the light outside fading and returning until it dwindled into nothing, Pretty Girl squawking jealously from the next room. Through the many gloamings of that afternoon—true and artificial—a reel played in my head. I had no doubt that John Paul saw into my brain and watched along with me, seeing himself when he’d first arrived at Waverly in the fall of my fifth-form year.

  “There’s a gorgeous newie,” Susannah had said, to me and some other girls. “But we might as well forget about him, since Catherine will get him no matter what we do.” Susannah knew better than anyone, the radar beautiful people followed to get to me. She, after all, was the original scout from their home planet.

  Someone else had agreed John Paul was not only gorgeous but cool, and then pointed him out to me, there on the green behind Umpleby Hall, his hair curling just above his collar. Kicking a Hacky Sack to the art teacher’s dog, scooping it high in the air while the dog hurtled through the grass.

  The next day in chapel John Paul had walked down the aisle and slid into the seat next to mine. He had leaned in and offered his hand in a mock-formal handshake. And of course I had taken it—firm, calloused grip—and laughed. Susannah elbowed my ribs hard enough to make me quiet, and John Paul had been mine ever since. Though as the other girls no doubt whispered, I’d never done a thing to deserve him.

  There was between us, always, the special connection of a reticent pair, each one understanding the other’s desire not to disclose, along with the inevitable distance from admitting so little. But that afternoon at his house—laboratory chemicals surfing the waves of our blood—we passed through each other with an intimacy that was almost painful, our fear and admiration of what the other contained mitigated by quivering delight in our suddenly shared skins.

  Then night arrived in his window, and the drugs waned—objects in the room still moving like shadows, but the hurricane of intensity beginning to dilute. John Paul lifted my hand from underneath the covers and interlaced our fingers as Susannah had done earlier. I felt disappointed at the lack of merging. Just ordinary skin, stopping at its own fingertips.

  “Look,” he said, the first word in hours. “It’s us. You and me.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “Will it always be this?” he said. “The two of us together?”

  “No,” I said instantly. “Of course it won’t be.”

  He let go of my hand and moved over an inch—his skin disengaging from mine like velcro. “Why not?” he said. “Why couldn’t it be?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. But of course I did know—that I would go to college, and the next year he would. There would only be more time apart from each other, changing into different people, these brief meetings insufficient to sustain everything we had become to each other.

  “We could take a year off,” he said. “Go to France together.”

  I understood immediately—his wish to present me to Monsieur Filage. The image of himself beside me—a fresh-faced girl from a good family, speaking French like a native. I saw John Paul’s love for me, strong enough to boomerang toward his father and back to himself, strong enough to right the rejections of his past. But something in my brain and nerves—the pulsing drugs—misfired, and I laughed, a quick and airless trill. John Paul frowned, then brought his hand up to shade his eyes. As if my laughter had instigated tears.

  “Don’t,” I said, pulling his hand away and pressing my lips to his salty eyelashes. “It’s all going to be okay.”

  And then we were both crying, new reels in our heads, this time of each other’s future: college and the struggling years beyond. The marriages and the children and the deaths and the divorces and the growth and the gaining and the decay. I saw the countless women who would love John Paul, so many of them never glimpsing the steady kindness behind his ridiculous good looks. I saw the father he would be, digging in the sand and pushing swings. I saw him suit-coated and gray at the temples, the monogram on his briefcase faded and chipping. All of it—these thousands of minutes that constituted his life—ticking forward without me.

  We got out of bed. John Paul went into his mother’s room and released Pretty Girl from her cage; the bird fluttered behind us spastically as we hobbled down the stairs, limping and leaning into each other like we’d been crippled. Susannah sat kneeling over Drew—who lay on the floor, curled up in a fetal position.

  “Parents,” Drew muttered, his teeth clenched and eyes closed. “Parents, parents, parents.”

  Susannah looked up at us, her pupils so huge her irises had disappeared. “He’s been like this for over an hour,” she said.

  I sat down next to Susannah and touched Drew’s forehead, beaded with tiny drops of perspiration. We had all heard the stories: someone’s second cousin once removed, who had tripped on acid and never come home. I pictured a middle-aged Drew wandering the halls of a mental ward—white haired, potbellied, arms crossed. Muttering away: Parents, parents, parents.

  John Paul went to the kitchen and returned with four cans of beer. He pried Drew into a sitting position, pulling his legs and arms straight as if yanking them from rigor mortis. Then he pushed an open beer into his hand.

  “Parents,” Drew said, but he took a tentative sip. Then a deeper one. “Parents,” he said, and then fell quiet, leaning into Susannah until they became a cuddled heap on the floor.

  John Paul and I settled beside them, drinking our beer and staring out the sliding glass doors. Pretty Girl alighted on his shoulder, preening against him with one rivalrous eye on me, disgruntled white feathers on either side of that terrible bare neck. I remembered the cannibalism she’d endured and forgave her disdain for me.

  “That’s the second time you’ve done that,” John Paul said, pressing his forehead against the bird’s wing. “Laughed at me. You never would have done that before you met Skye.”

  He didn’t sound angry, just contemplative. I slipped my arm through his, squeezing hard enough to convey my plea for forgiveness. Pretty Girl squawked in protest. I pointed to Drew, expecting John Paul to realize—the way he realized everything—that my laughing had nothing to do with Skye, but only the LSD, the chemicals: playing games with my synapses.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d like to go to France with you.”

&nb
sp; This time he laughed, a hard sound, not like him at all. He brought the beer to his lips, not looking at me. I wished the bird would fly away so I could rest my head against his shoulder without being pecked. I squeezed his arm again, reminding myself not to become frantic—lest the drug run away with that emotion and I wind up curled into a ball like Drew.

  Outside, violent green reeds shot up through what remained of the snow. A horrible strip of red-brown mud—diseased and contaminated—lay between the end of the snow and the beginning of the river. There was a vast, silver stretch of water, teeming with red and orange glow, and beyond, a smoky overhang of color. The very spectrum lapping at the sky, eternal and combustive on the water’s other side.

  “What are you kids doing?”

  John Paul’s mother came through the front door with a weary voice, her shoes in her hands after a long day on her feet.

  “We’re watching the fire,” John Paul said, tonelessly.

  She padded over to the door and looked for a minute, dutifully searching the horizon.

  “I don’t know what you kids have been smoking,” she said, “but there’s no fire out there.”

  And then she disappeared into the kitchen, to fix herself a drink.

  14

  NEWS OF SKYE’S protest had made headlines in New England—all the papers and the local news. And, as she told me herself, in some broader venues: a small article in the New York Times, a brief mention on the national news. Except for a promise to save the oldest tree—the one she had chained herself to—there was no talk about stopping or even delaying the logging. In fact, more trees were scheduled to come down in Shutesbury. All Skye had done, aside from rescuing a single oak tree, was bring more light to her father’s broken promise. His unreliability. Shamed him in a way he couldn’t talk his way out of, or use to his advantage.

  “But he’s not mad,” Skye said. “Because he knows I’m right.”

  She had come back to school not cowed, but restless and full of plans. Her father had bought her a BMX mountain bike, and she rode it all over campus, her lanky frame hunched over it like a springboard, her bottom never touching the seat as she tore up and down the snowy hills. This afternoon she had ridden it out to the stables, and reclined languorously on a clean pile of straw while I mucked out Pippin’s stall.

  “Maybe I’ll go to Shutesbury,” Skye said. “I won’t even bother with Greenpeace. I’ll just chain myself to one of those trees. Maybe I’ll even set up camp and live in it. And I won’t let anyone talk me down. They can mow the whole place down around me, but I’m going to at least save one more tree.”

  “Your poor father,” I said, pitching a shovelful of manure into a wheelbarrow.

  “My poor father,” she said, “can handle it. He should be glad someone’s willing to fight, for the sake of what’s right.”

  I didn’t answer but rolled the wheelbarrow out of the stall. I had been in a terrible way since coming back to school. It had taken me almost a week to realize that John Paul and I had broken up. I hadn’t understood it that Sunday, when we went out to breakfast with Drew and Susannah. She had announced our trip to Venezuela, and Drew of course protested that he should accompany her instead of me. I’d sat a person’s width away from John Paul. Overdosed on intimacy from the day before, I didn’t register his palpable melancholy or his inability to eat. Susannah fenced halfheartedly with Drew, tossing her hair in unconvincing argument.

  I understood immediately that Drew would replace me as Susannah’s accomplice in Venezuela. I saw the rain forest, but not John Paul, slip away from me.

  I hadn’t realized it when he kissed me good-bye at the station—on the cheek instead of the lips—and gave me the fiercest, longest hug before I boarded, waving to me as the bus pulled away. It only began to sink in back at school, when I opened my suitcase to discover a plastic bag filled with psilocybin mushrooms. He had included a strip of paper, like a fortune cookie, and written in his slanting scrawl, I’ll always love you. Not the sentiment, but its expression, so out of character as to seem startlingly final.

  As the days went by with no word from him, and I replayed those gauzy hours in my head, I realized that our shared, trippy mourning had been the real thing. We hadn’t been grieving the future end, but the actual one.

  “John Paul,” I said, when I finally reached him by phone. “I’ve been thinking about the whole France thing and how we might be able to do it. After my freshman year, after you graduate.”

  “It’s all right, Catherine,” he said. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

  I pressed my face against the receiver, wanting to ask him to come see me, but not sure how I would navigate Skye—how I would tell her she needed to stay away for a night or two. On the other end of the phone, John Paul stayed quiet. And I could hear in that silence his inability to say aloud but his need for me to understand: the two of us were finished.

  “Good-bye, John Paul,” I said, praying I was wrong.

  I waited for him to call me or to send a letter. I composed my own letter, scratching out sentences as soon as they were formed, not able to put into words what I needed to say to him. The one draft of that letter knew a hundred incarnations, finally crumpled and jammed into a desk drawer. Sometimes, while my days unfolded as usual, I would forget. Then, in a perfectly normal and happy moment—standing in my stirrups for a two-rail jump, picking out a fresh piece of apple pie at the orchard—the loss would come back to me, a terrifying swirl through the middle of my gut.

  What had I done, what had I done?

  SKYE SHOOK HER HAIR, fishing out stray bits of straw. She followed me outside to the steaming compost heap behind the barn. Since the day I’d met her, it seemed that she had been unfurling a series of tests. What if I take cocaine. What if I disappear on the ocean. What if I go to class stoned. What if I run away. What if I chain myself to a tree. The answer to each of these what ifs consistently disappointed her with apparent nothings, instigating a more and more urgent need for some form of spectacular repercussion.

  “I could come by your room tonight,” she said, “with those bottles of wine.” Along with the BMX, Skye had returned to Esther Percy with three bottles of her father’s vintage Château Margaux, hidden in her duffel bag.

  I shrugged. The next day, Friday, I was traveling with Zarghami to a weekend horse show in Dover, New Hampshire. I told Skye I couldn’t drink, that I was in training.

  “Training,” she said. “Since when?”

  “Since this is my last year to get to the National Horse Show riding Medal Maclay.”

  Skye tilted her head quizzically, as if she didn’t understand the need to achieve. I drew in a frustrated breath. The Skye from a year ago—the girl on the podium—was nothing but a figment of my imagination. I guessed I’d be able to explain myself to that girl. This one didn’t seem to know anything beyond thrill seeking.

  “It’s exciting to me,” I said. “Being able to win. It’s important. I’ve been working toward this my whole life, and I always manage to blow it in the eleventh hour. I’d really like the opportunity to prove to myself that I can do it.”

  “Of course you can do it,” Skye said. Her voice sounded resolute and certain, not placating at all. As if she believed me truly capable of anything I wanted to do.

  “Thank you,” I said, flattered, but also annoyed at her persistent ability to draw me out of annoyance with her.

  She threw a long leg over the seat of her BMX, straddling it like a little boy would. “Okay,” she said. “You focus on your training. Maybe Eleanor will join me.”

  “Eleanor! I thought she was a teetotaler.”

  “Well. If I can change, why can’t she? Don’t underestimate how persuasive I can be.”

  She winked at me—a failed gesture, incongruously awkward. I balked for a moment till she laughed at herself, rescued from borderline dorkiness.

  “You don’t know her,” Skye said. “She seems like she’s all about books, but she’s full of desires and sec
ret longing. I think a little vino might be just the thing for her.”

  And she rode off, leaving me with my empty wheelbarrow, staring after her as jealously as she’d intended.

  “CATHERINE.” ONE OF the Amandas poked her head into the bathroom as I showered off the barn smell before dinner. “Phone call in the student lounge!”

  My hopes skyrocketed as I grabbed my bathrobe and jogged across the lawn without rinsing the shampoo out of my hair. Less than two minutes’ travel, by the time I picked up the phone my hair was frozen enough to crunch against the receiver. I could almost hear the sound of John Paul’s voice—filled with reassurance, and amazement at my presumptions.

  But it wasn’t him. “Why didn’t you tell me about John Paul?” Susannah said.

  “I didn’t know,” I moaned, too crushed with the weight of confirmed dread to notice her curt tone. “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Like you weren’t sure about Drew and Skye dry-humping at Sandy Neck?”

  I froze at the uncharacteristic vulgarity; my misery fled under the interrogative beam of her voice. Behind me, the wall clock jumped forward, then back. Its strained, mechanical click barely out-ticked the beating of my heart.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?” Susannah said. “Or are you sticking to your policy of full nondisclosure?”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, my hand curved over the receiver. “But I really wasn’t sure it was true. And I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  I could see Susannah exactly. I knew the tapestry covering her bed at Waverly, its periwinkle camels marching around the rim. A Jim Morrison poster identical to mine, in the same position at the head of her bed. The stuffed elephant—patched and worn—she’d had since before we’d met. She would be lying on her stomach, wearing her red Adidas sweat suit, her thick hair skinned back into a ponytail. The phone cradled under her chin, and her hands around the beloved elephant’s neck in a fierce but ginger grip. Her eyes would soften the slightest bit, sensing my anguish.