Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  The weather had turned cold again. Skye wore her old, tailored wool coat, abandoning my groovier clothes in favor of a more familiar, preppy look. It was a surprising relief to see her in garments that actually fit.

  We carried our snacks to a low stone wall. “I want to get serious when I start college,” Skye said. “No more drugs. It’s been fun. Especially the Cape. But soon I want to get serious. I want to accomplish things.”

  She brushed graham cracker crumbs off her lap and sipped some milk. Wiped the mustache away with the back of her palm. I thought how similarly I’d felt starting Esther Percy, and wondered if while walking by the Thames or the Charles, Skye would encounter someone like herself, brimming with temptations. But I knew as soon as the idea formed, should such a person appear, Skye would resist easily.

  “All this time, I’ve wanted to get back at my father,” she said. “But maybe the best revenge—the most productive revenge—would be to make him proud. Who knows? Maybe I’ll grow up to be the person he couldn’t be.”

  I imagined Skye under the waterfall of confetti. Possessing all the unvarnished idealism her father pretended to. Forests saved. Disarmament treaties signed.

  “I got rid of Mr. November,” Skye said. “Next I’m giving up the drugs and alcohol. I’m going back to my original self. Only better. Wiser.” She peered into my face, the admonishing look of a disappointed analyst, and I wondered if this were her way of breaking off our friendship.

  “You should think about it, too,” she said. “Cleaning up.”

  I stared back at her, amazed at her oblivion to thwarting my plans to do exactly that. I thought about saying something, but before I had a chance she said, “I think you should give me the rest of the cocaine. For safekeeping.”

  “I wouldn’t do it alone,” I said. “Besides. Why not just flush it? If you want to keep us from doing it again.”

  “Well, just in case. We don’t want to be purists, Catherine.”

  She plucked a cracker from my untouched stack and bit into it, scattering cinnamon and crumbs.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON I found Ms. Latham on her hands and knees in the White Cottage common room, searching under the furniture.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “My American Express card,” she said. “I can’t find it anywhere, and I’m always leaving my coat in here. I think it might have fallen out of my pocket.”

  “When did you lose it?” I asked.

  “Who knows? I never use the damn thing.”

  I knew instantly how Skye had been paying for expensive lunches and new clothes. I felt a rush of guilt. My mother had probably spent more on my Vogel boots than Ms. Latham had on her entire wardrobe. I wondered if Skye planned to give up Ms. Latham’s credit card along with drugs and Mr. November.

  “You should cancel it.” I peeked under the sofa cushion in a lame imitation of assistance. She stood and wiped dust from the knees of her jeans.

  “I guess I’m not going to find it here,” Ms. Latham said.

  “I guess not.”

  “It’ll turn up,” she said, shrugging.

  “My mother lost her card once,” I said quickly, as she started to turn away. “They charged nearly five thousand dollars.”

  “But I haven’t had it anywhere besides school,” she said. “I can’t imagine anyone here would steal it.”

  Her trust made the veins in my neck ache.

  “How’s your arm?” Ms. Latham asked.

  It had just been reset. The cast now came up to below my elbow, so I didn’t have to wear a sling. The mud-stained cast with Senator Butterfield’s signature had been sawed apart and thrown away. I wished I’d thought to save it for Ms. Latham.

  “It itches,” I said, and she smiled.

  “You and Skye are friends again,” she said. “I’m glad.”

  She was the first and only person to express this sentiment, at least on my behalf. I smiled back at her, sad that Skye would never know how to appreciate her good wishes.

  She reached out as if to ruffle my hair, then changed her mind. She patted my shoulder instead, and I felt disappointed by the less affectionate gesture. I noticed that the Mondale/Ferraro button was finally gone, a delayed but final acceptance of defeat. And I knew that I should hate her—on behalf of Skye and Mrs. November—but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I admired her small kindnesses, not the least of which was her determination to overlook Skye’s dislike of her. I resolved to find her credit card in Skye’s belongings and cut it to shreds. But that plan became just one more thing that I didn’t do.

  SUSANNAH’S COLLEGE ACCEPTANCES waited for her back at Waverly, locked and lulled during Easter break. About this time, she and Drew floated along the Orinoco Delta, her father only a few miles away, with no idea of her proximity.

  Before Venezuela, Susannah’s father had never taken her out of the country. But when she was a child, he had brought Charlie and her on weekend birding trips. They had visited osprey colonies on the Westport River. They had looked for brown-headed nuthatches in the woods of North Carolina. And while they’d never been unusually close—not in the way Skye and her father were—since his defection, Susannah had noticed a marked difference in her feelings toward him. As a child she had taken him for granted in the way of imperatives: bone marrow, oxygen, her father in the next room. Now she couldn’t help her own refusal to accept or respect him. His leaving had forged a chasm that no amount of late-night confession or shared coke could bridge. The more overt his attempts to reach her on her own level, the greater the sense that this new South American father had replaced the old one—the one she’d believed would be around forever.

  With Drew it was different. Later she told me about floating down the river while she pointed out everything her father had taught her about the region. It struck Susannah that since she’d found out about Skye—once her anger had dissipated—her feelings remained more or less the same. Drew never seemed like a new person. She didn’t trust him less. She didn’t love him less. The discovery had not affected her feelings toward him so much as clarified them.

  And she wished it were anybody else, sitting in the boat beside her, floating down the murky green river, swatting away the mosquitoes and flies. She found herself formulating plans that would allow me to accompany her instead of Drew, as if the trip weren’t already well under way.

  “Look,” she said to Drew, pointing to a ragged osprey nest. She heard a hoarse catch in her smoky voice as she recited what her father had told her—information she’d pretended not to hear. She told Drew that the young ospreys would spend a year in warmer climates before beginning the migration whose rhythm would dominate their entire lives. She didn’t tell him because she thought he’d care but because the knowledge her brain contained longed to escape, to be shared with the person closest to her, even if closeness referred to mere proximity.

  She told Drew the birds she knew. She told him about the trogons and the blind oilbirds. The yellow-shouldered parrots. “Look,” she said, again and again, pointing toward the amazing colors, the prehistoric silhouettes, the shocking wingspans. The curassows, quetzals, and parakeets. Susannah could recognize and identify them all.

  “You’re amazing,” Drew said, sincere and regretful.

  “No,” she said gently. “It’s not me. It’s this place.” It’s my father, she wanted to add, almost wanted, but not quite enough. Still, the thought echoed in her head: It’s my father and everything he’s taught me.

  Their boat puttered toward a white puddle duck, who suddenly disappeared in an explosion of feathers. Susannah and Drew let out simultaneous shrieks as a caiman’s eyes rose and then sunk beneath the surface. Then they laughed—sad, horrified, and exhilarated. Susannah climbed back onto the bench beside Drew, and he put his arm around her shoulders.

  Everything moved more slowly in the sticky climate. Along the riverbanks, clotheslines held faded garments, ruffling in the warm breeze. Even with his fingers pressing against he
r smooth, bare clavicle, Drew couldn’t help staring at the pretty brown-skinned girls, unpinning dry shirts and dresses. Susannah looked away, knowing for the hundredth time that she was finished with him. She saw an ocelot crouching behind a tree, its predator’s glare fixed on a small, hapless iguana.

  It was all so beautiful and scary and strange, she wrote to me, from her shabby hotel room in Caracas. And I missed everybody. I missed my mom and my brother and my dad and the family we used to be. I missed you, of course. I even missed Skye, and Drew—though he was sitting right beside me.

  At the same time she felt happy. If she’d gone back to school that very day, her schoolmates’ money still bundled in her backpack, the connection with Rico and Alan never made, she would have felt her journey had been complete.

  IT WAS RAINING in Ciudad Guayana. Susannah and Drew lunched on steak and rum in a small café. The rain danced and drummed on the tin roof. Susannah listened to its music and watched Drew with increasing dispassion. She appreciated the rare opportunity to assess a person who would soon be exiting her life. To look at him and think about the things she liked, the things she would miss. She waited for a bittersweet twinge in her chest but felt mostly the gentle buzz of the rum. The meat thick and knotted in her unaccustomed stomach.

  She looked at her watch. “Why don’t you finish,” she said to Drew. “I should probably meet Rico alone, anyway, since I’m the one he knows.”

  Drew put down his glass and pushed the hair out of his eyes. Susannah reached out and smoothed one strand behind his ear.

  “You’re handsome, you know.” She realized as she spoke the words that she’d never told him before.

  “Is it safe?” he said. “To walk around here by yourself?” Susannah nodded, and he left his protest at that.

  Outside, the hood of her slicker pulled up over her head, her Guatemalan sundress brushing her knees, Susannah thought she was probably safer than most Americans. Black hair and sun-browned knees, so little besides her freedom at one o’clock in the afternoon to differentiate her from the local schoolgirls. She stopped to pet one of the pointy-eared dogs, crouching under the porch of the general store. The animal cowered and then closed its eyes, its bulging rib cage trembling blissfully. Stepping away, Susannah held her hands out under the rain, letting the water gather in her palms. Scrubbed them together as she walked up the stairs to the store.

  She saw Rico immediately, unloading a case of Fanta onto the sparsely stocked shelves. She reached out and touched his elbow. He turned and looked at her blankly, waiting for her to ask a tourist’s question.

  “Remember me?” Susannah said. She pulled back her hood. Shook her hair. “My name’s Susannah. My father is Señor Twining, from the Orinoco Delta.”

  Rico pushed the box of soda aside with his foot. He let his eyes travel up and down Susannah, registering her form more than leering at it. His face eased into a wide, white-toothed smile, and Susannah realized that the compliment she’d given earlier to Drew really belonged to him.

  Because afterward at the café, where Drew sat slumped beside the near-empty bottle of rum, he didn’t look handsome at all, only disheveled and young. Susannah imagined his mother in a department store, picking out his polo shirt and khaki shorts. Sewing printed name tags inside.

  “Did you get it?” Drew asked, as she walked up to the table. Susannah thought that John Paul would never have let a girl wander off alone in a foreign city, in the rain. Not even her brother, or her father, would have done that.

  “We’re going to his house for dinner tonight,” Susannah said. “We’ll get it there.”

  RICO’S WIFE, MARIA, was even smaller than Susannah—sharp elbows and knees, dark braid, childlike feet in flat leather sandals. Impossible to think of her carrying the five children who gathered quietly together in doorways, staring at Susannah and Drew.

  The house was low and sad and cozy—green stucco walls and endless stacks of laundry. Susannah emptied her and Drew’s backpacks of everything: Levi’s and American T-shirts. Mosquito repellant and Adidas. Her raincoat. The two of them could go home in the clothes they were wearing.

  Alan arrived, and they all sat down for dinner—beef and sausage and rice and rum. They laughed and toasted. One of the little girls sat in Susannah’s lap while she ate, stealing sips of her coconut milk.

  It was civilized, Susannah wrote me in her letter. It was beautiful. After dinner, Rico took Susannah onto the cement patio that constituted his backyard. More clotheslines, tiny dresses fluttering in the damp night air. When she zipped the coke into her empty backpack, he bent down and kissed her on the lips. She could hear his family’s laughter through the open windows, feel the dim red lights shining behind her. The oropendola again, from a tree nearby. She couldn’t help wondering if it were the same bird that trilled the first night they met. And she kissed him back, because he was handsome and because the air was fragrant with sauteed spice and mariposa. And because she didn’t love Drew but forgave him: understanding moments like this, arising in a split second of opportunity. Beautiful, lawless, and ephemeral. She tried to transfer this generous exoneration to her father but found the moment trading its softness for hard and jagged edges. So she dispensed with the idea immediately, that his abandonment would ever be excusable.

  “You can never tell my father I was here,” Susannah whispered to Rico.

  And Rico answered, as if he knew everything, “Of course.”

  Inside, everyone hugged good-bye. Susannah carried Rico’s name and address in the pouch of her backpack, so that she could send dresses and T-shirts to the children when she returned to the States.

  19

  THOUSANDS OF MILES away from dinner at Rico’s, Skye woke up after midnight. Mr. November perched at the edge of her bed, staring down at her. She sat up abruptly and threatened to scream.

  “Don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t.”

  “Don’t scream?” Skye said.

  “Don’t leave me.”

  She sighed, raising her eyes toward the skylight. In jeans and a T-shirt, with his hair too long and in disarray, Mr. November looked like one of the boys who snuck cigarettes behind the dining hall at Devon. Skye felt older than him, beyond and above. How to say this nicely, to anyone—let alone a jilted English teacher.

  He pulled her hand from under the covers and placed the twin diamond rings into her palm. She stared down at them, unbelieving.

  “Not for an engagement,” Mr. November said. “I understand that would be preposterous. I just want you to have them. I know how much you like them.”

  “Don’t you see,” Skye said. “I like them because I like her. Your wife.”

  His face readjusted to anger, distance. The same qualities that had earned him his fleeting moments of appeal. “I don’t have a wife,” he said.

  “Look,” Skye handed him back the rings. “Pretty soon I’m leaving anyway. For the Cape and then college.”

  “Cambridge isn’t far,” he said.

  She felt a creeping panic, that for the next four years he would know exactly where she lived. In that moment, she decided definitely: Oxford over Harvard.

  “Mr. November,” she said, trying to sound gentle. “You need to go.”

  She pulled the blankets up to her chin and instantly regretted the movement—betraying a certain level of fear and shifting the power.

  “You don’t need to cover yourself up,” he said. “Not in front of me.”

  “You’ve got to get yourself together,” Skye said. “I’m sorry, but it’s over. It really is.”

  He paused for a moment, as if waiting for her to deny the statement, and when no denial came he dropped his face into his hands and cried. Skye patted his back with consoling thumps. She half hoped one of the girls in the room next door would hear him and investigate. It seemed a shame that this spectacle, with all its illicit pathos, should be reserved for her alone.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Like you loved your wife?”

>   “I don’t have a wife. This has nothing to do with her.”

  “I honestly don’t think you’re capable of love, Mr. November.”

  I imagine his face in the room’s slant light, the irony of her accusation registering even through his grief. And then Skye told him. About seeing him kiss Ms. Latham and writing the letter to Mrs. November. She told him about piling into the backseat of her car—sliding her guitar on top of so many suitcases. How she’d known in that instant that his wife was leaving, that Skye had driven her away.

  “Except it was really you who drove her away,” Skye said. “Being unfaithful.”

  The melting perimeters of a crying man turned sharp. On alert. Listening to Skye, Mr. November’s unremarkable eyes turned a sudden and electric blue. For the first time Skye thought that he must have loved Mrs. November: such was the palpable rage—hanging in the air, thick and jagged between them. For a moment, she felt so certain he would hit her that she closed her eyes, bracing herself for the blow.

  “I don’t understand,” Mr. November said instead, anger clipping his voice as sorrow had elongated it. “You wrote her that letter because you wanted to be with me?”

  Maybe if she’d said yes, he would have forgiven her. But Skye shook her head. “I did it to protect her,” she said.

  He placed his hands on her shoulders, fingers straddling her larynx.

  “How righteous of you,” Mr. November said. “I guess I could do the same thing. I could tell Mrs. Chilton about you and me. I could tell her about you and Catherine and the coke. Using your logic, that would be the moral course of action.”

  “There isn’t any coke,” Skye said, frowning toward her sock drawer, where I’d let her stash the last of it.

  “I feel like I could kill you,” Mr. November whispered.

  Skye thought about carrying out her initial threat and screaming. Instead, she pulled backward, out of his grasp, and lay down. Then she yanked the covers tightly over her head.

  “Please just go away,” she said, her voice muffled under the thick down quilt.