Tabloid Dreams

by Robert Olen Butler

  I could have used the thing the last day I went out of this house as a man. I’d found the address of the new guy at my wife’s office. He’d been there a month in the shipping department and three times she’d mentioned him. She didn’t even have to work with him and three times I heard about him, just dropped into the conversation. “Oh,” she’d say when a car commercial came on the television, “that car there is like the one the new man in shipping owns. Just like it.” Hey, I’m not stupid. She said another thing about him and then another and right after the third one I locked myself in the bathroom because I couldn’t rage about this anymore. I felt like a damn fool whenever I actually said anything about this kind of feeling and she looked at me like she could start hating me real easy and so I was working on saying nothing, even if it meant locking myself up. My goal was to hold my tongue about half the time. That would be a good start.

  But this guy from shipping. I found out his name and his address and it was one of her typical Saturday afternoons of vague shopping. So I went to his house, and his car that was just like the commercial was outside. Nobody was around in the neighborhood and there was this big tree in the back of the house going up to a second floor window that was making funny little sounds. I went up. The shade was drawn but not quite all the way. I was holding on to a limb with arms and legs wrapped around it like it was her in those times when I could forget the others for a little while. But the crack in the shade was just out of view and I crawled on along till there was no limb left and I fell on my head. Thinking about that now, my wings flap and I feel myself lift up and it all seems so avoidable. Though I know I’m different now. I’m a bird.

  Except I’m not. That’s what’s confusing. It’s like those times when she would tell me she loved me and I actually believed her and maybe it was true and we clung to each other in bed and at times like that I was different. I was the man in her life. I was whole with her. Except even at that moment, holding her sweetly, there was this other creature inside me who knew a lot more about it and couldn’t quite put all the evidence together to speak.

  My cage sits in the den. My pool table is gone and the cage is sitting in that space and if I come all the way down to one end of my perch I can see through the door and down the back hallway to the master bedroom. When she keeps the bedroom door open I can see the space at the foot of the bed but not the bed itself. That I can sense to the left, just out of sight. I watch the men go in and I hear the sounds but I can’t quite see. And they drive me crazy.

  I flap my wings and I squawk and I fluff up and I slick down and I throw seed and I attack that dangly toy as if it was the guy’s balls, but it does no good. It never did any good in the other life either, the thrashing around I did by myself. In that other life I’d have given anything to be standing in this den with her doing this thing with some other guy just down the hall and all I had to do was walk down there and turn the corner and she couldn’t deny it anymore.

  But now all I can do is try to let it go. I sidestep down to the opposite end of the cage and I look out the big sliding glass doors to the backyard. It’s a pretty yard. There are great placid maple trees with good places to roost. There’s a blue sky that plucks at the feathers on my chest. There are clouds. Other birds. Fly away. I could just fly away.

  I tried once and I learned a lesson. She forgot and left the door to my cage open and I climbed beak and foot, beak and foot, along the bars and curled around to stretch sideways out the door and the vast scene of peace was there at the other end of the room. I flew.

  And a pain flared through my head and I fell straight down and the room whirled around and the only good thing was she held me. She put her hands under my wings and lifted me and clutched me to her breast and I wish there hadn’t been bees in my head at the time so I could have enjoyed that, but she put me back in the cage and wept awhile. That touched me, her tears. And I looked back to the wall of sky and trees. There was something invisible there between me and that dream of peace. I remembered, eventually, about glass, and I knew I’d been lucky, I knew that for the little fragile-boned skull I was doing all this thinking in, it meant death.

  She wept that day but by the night she had another man. A guy with a thick Georgia truck-stop accent and pale white skin and an Adam’s apple big as my seed ball. This guy has been around for a few weeks and he makes a whooping sound down the hallway, just out of my sight. At times like that I want to fly against the bars of the cage, but I don’t. I have to remember how the world has changed.

  She’s single now, of course. Her husband, the man that I was, is dead to her. She does not understand all that is behind my “hello.” I know many words, for a parrot. I am a yellow-nape Amazon, a handsome bird, I think, green with a splash of yellow at the back of my neck. I talk pretty well, but none of my words are adequate. I can’t make her understand.

  And what would I say if I could? I was jealous in life. I admit it. I would admit it to her. But it was because of my connection to her. I would explain that. When we held each other, I had no past at all, no present but her body, no future but to lie there and not let her go. I was an egg hatched beneath her crouching body, I entered as a chick into her wet sky of a body, and all that I wished was to sit on her shoulder and fluff my feathers and lay my head against her cheek, my neck exposed to her hand. And so the glances that I could see in her troubled me deeply, the movement of her eyes in public to other men, the laughs sent across a room, the tracking of her mind behind her blank eyes, pursuing images of others, her distraction even in our bed, the ghosts that were there of men who’d touched her, perhaps even that very day. I was not part of all those other men who were part of her. I didn’t want to connect to all that. It was only her that I would fluff for but these others were there also and I couldn’t put them aside. I sensed them inside her and so they were inside me. If I had the words, these are the things I would say.

  But half an hour ago there was a moment that thrilled me. A word, a word we all knew in the pet shop, was just the right word after all. This guy with his cowboy belt buckle and rattlesnake boots and his pasty face and his twanging words of love trailed after my wife, through the den, past my cage, and I said, “Cracker.” He even flipped his head back a little at this in surprise. He’d been called that before to his face, I realized. I said it again, “Cracker.” But to him I was a bird and he let it pass. “Cracker,” I said. “Hello, cracker.” That was even better. They were out of sight through the hall doorway and I hustled along the perch and I caught a glimpse of them before they made the turn to the bed and I said, “Hello, cracker,” and he shot me one last glance.

  It made me hopeful. I eased away from that end of the cage, moved toward the scene of peace beyond the far wall. The sky is chalky blue today, blue like the brow of the blue-front Amazon who was on the perch next to me for about a week at the store. She was very sweet, but I watched her carefully for a day or two when she first came in. And it wasn’t long before she nuzzled up to a cockatoo named Gordo and I knew she’d break my heart. But her color now in the sky is sweet, really. I left all those feelings behind me when my wife showed up. I am a faithful man, for all my suspicions. Too faithful, maybe. I am ready to give too much and maybe that’s the problem.

  The whooping began down the hall and I focused on a tree out there. A crow flapped down, his mouth open, his throat throbbing, though I could not hear his sound. I was feeling very odd. At least I’d made my point to the guy in the other room. “Pretty bird,” I said, referring to myself. She called me “pretty bird” and I believed her and I told myself again, “Pretty bird.”

  But then something new happened, something very difficult for me. She appeared in the den naked. I have not seen her naked since I fell from the tree and had no wings to fly. She always had a certain tidiness in things. She was naked in the bedroom, clothed in the den. But now she appears from the hallway and I look at her and she is still slim and she is beautif
ul, I think—at least I clearly remember that as her husband I found her beautiful in this state. Now, though, she seems too naked. Plucked. I find that a sad thing. I am sorry for her and she goes by me and she disappears into the kitchen. I want to pluck some of my own feathers, the feathers from my chest, and give them to her. I love her more in that moment, seeing her terrible nakedness, than I ever have before.

  And since I’ve had success in the last few minutes with words, when she comes back I am moved to speak. “Hello,” I say, meaning, You are still connected to me, I still want only you. “Hello,” I say again. Please listen to this tiny heart that beats fast at all times for you.

  And she does indeed stop and she comes to me and bends to me. “Pretty bird,” I say and I am saying, You are beautiful, my wife, and your beauty cries out for protection. “Pretty.” I want to cover you with my own nakedness. “Bad bird,” I say. If there are others in your life, even in your mind, then there is nothing I can do. “Bad.” Your nakedness is touched from inside by the others. “Open,” I say. How can we be whole together if you are not empty in the place that I am to fill?

  She smiles at this and she opens the door to my cage. “Up,” I say, meaning, Is there no place for me in this world where I can be free of this terrible sense of others?

  She reaches in now and offers her hand and I climb onto it and I tremble and she says, “Poor baby.”

  “Poor baby,” I say. You have yearned for wholeness too and somehow I failed you. I was not enough. “Bad bird,” I say. I’m sorry.

  And then the cracker comes around the corner. He wears only his rattlesnake boots. I take one look at his miserable, featherless body and shake my head. We keep our sexual parts hidden, we parrots, and this man is a pitiful sight. “Peanut,” I say. I presume that my wife simply has not noticed. But that’s foolish, of course. This is, in fact, what she wants. Not me. And she scrapes me off her hand onto the open cage door and she turns her naked back to me and embraces this man and they laugh and stagger in their embrace around the corner.

  For a moment I still think I’ve been eloquent. What I’ve said only needs repeating for it to have its transforming effect. “Hello,” I say. “Hello. Pretty bird. Pretty. Bad bird. Bad. Open. Up. Poor baby. Bad bird.” And I am beginning to hear myself as I really sound to her. “Peanut.” I can never say what is in my heart to her. Never.

  I stand on my cage door now and my wings stir. I look at the corner to the hallway and down at the end the whooping has begun again. I can fly there and think of things to do about all this.

  But I do not. I turn instead and I look at the trees moving just beyond the other end of the room. I look at the sky the color of the brow of a blue-front Amazon. A shadow of birds spanks across the lawn. And I spread my wings. I will fly now. Even though I know there is something between me and that place where I can be free of all these feelings, I will fly. I will throw myself there again and again. Pretty bird. Bad bird. Good night.

  “Woman Struck by Car Turns

  into Nymphomaniac”

  I work in publishing myself and so I’m not going to sue that newspaper you buy in the supermarkets. I simply don’t believe in it, as a matter of principle. But I categorically deny that what has happened to me since the accident is I’ve turned into a nymphomaniac. If I’m supposed to be a nympho, then I want to know why nobody ever called JFK or Wilt Chamberlain or Warren Beatty a satyr. Or all the millions of guys we all rightly assume have the same impulses as these public figures but less appeal or opportunity. Are all these guys satyrs? Isn’t that, in fact, exactly the way all their brains work, just like the way mine is supposed to now?

  But I’m not angry at men. I want to touch them. This is a revelation to me, sure. This has been coming on me since a New York gypsy cab and I had a blind date in a crosswalk on Sixth Avenue, sure. But this is a different thing from what the people at the Real World Weekly would have you believe.

  I saw their editor-in-chief on the Inside Scoop TV show last night. They were demanding that he sort out the real from the unreal. If a doomsday meteor were really hurtling toward the earth, they asked, why should the only astrophysicist who seems to know about it be unreachable at his supposed lab in Albania? And why would an Albanian be named Desi, anyway? At this the editor-in-chief turned to the camera and said that the reach of I Love Lucy has always been greatly underestimated. And then he smiled a little half smile, this editor-in-chief, and he is a man perhaps forty years old with a sharp white part in his soft, black-cat hair and the smile punched a dimple into his left cheek and my hand rose, wanting to place the tip of my forefinger into that indent. “It’s real,” he said, speaking of the meteor.

  I don’t believe it is. Who does? But if it were true, and the world were going to end tomorrow, the only thing I’d regret was not having understood earlier what I understand now. No. “Understand” is the wrong word. That suggests a rational thing. And it suggests that I know what’s going on. It’s neither. So why should the word offer itself up at all? Am I mad? No. Mad people talk to themselves. I’ve discovered a part of me that I can’t talk to. Or even about. But that part seems to know something.

  A few mornings ago, for example. I was in my office and I was reading a manuscript. A prominent woman Orientalist trying to write a popular history of strange Eastern customs in little two-page chapters with zippy, freak-show headings and lurid illustrations. At that particular moment I was reading about footbinding, the imperial Chinese society tightly binding the feet of girls to create on their adult women crippled, distorted stumps. And these bound feet, bizarrely misshapen, nearly useless for walking, were made very secret; they were always kept beautifully covered up in silks and jewels. And here the Orientalist paused to point out the control that footbinding gave the men over their women, and I leaned back in my chair and looked out my window at the silver rise of the Chrysler Building and I thought about that for a moment. True enough, I supposed. Human relations always come down to a struggle for power. As a woman in a red tailored suit shooting for a vice-presidential title and three places a year on The New York Times best-seller list, I should know that.

  But as I turned back to the manuscript, a young man flashed past my half-open office door. I found myself on my feet and at the door and peeking down the hallway after him. He was an editorial assistant named William, a junior editor’s gofer and slush-pile wader, a Harvard lit major starting at wages as low as a McDonald’s grill man so he can get into my office and do what I do. I followed him. I’d noticed him that morning at his desk. He was wearing a button-down dress shirt and a flashy silk tie with the Windsor knot pulled open, and when he finally gets into my chair and his name is on my door he’ll change to bow ties and suspenders and he’ll hire his lit majors from Smith. And even knowing all this, I didn’t feel for a second that what was happening as I followed him was about power.

  I found him poised over the photocopy machine, the automatic feed stacked with papers. What this was about was this young man, tall and solid, and his sleeves were rolled up. This was about the impulse I suddenly saw in him to break away from whoever his stiff, rich dad was. The knot on his tie was opened enough to show his throat, and his sleeves were rolled up to his biceps, and I realized I’d been wrong about him coming someday to bow ties, and all of this insight I suddenly had was there in his bare forearms and in the hollow of his throat. I forced a little cough and he looked over his shoulder and smiled at me and he shuffled his feet and ducked his head slightly in deference, but what I felt wasn’t coming from the position I was in, it wasn’t power, it was what I knew about him and what I still didn’t know. He was William, no other. And he had a secret self and part of that self was a sly little rebellion from things that he and I would agree were pretty foolish. That’s why I wanted to run my hand through the golden hair on his forearm.

  And does it have something to do with the accident? Obviously something. I was blind to all of
this before, it’s true. One day in spring I stepped into the crosswalk at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and perhaps I was distracted by the thought of the Jenny Jones show, wishing it was the Oprah show instead, but Oprah doesn’t do the real sleazy subjects, bless her pure and, for the moment, top-rated heart. So when your author is a Manhattan psychologist with a practice in masturbation therapy and a book called Touch Yourself, Cure Yourself, you take what you can get. In this case she was to be the resident expert on an upcoming “I Have More Fun with Me Than with My Partner” segment.

  I was thinking surely somebody watching that show can read and suddenly there was the cry of a horn and I saw a flash of yellow coming at me and I stopped and I started to turn away. Then there was a terrific thump on my butt and I was suddenly on my back, my legs spread, and every pore of my body was flared open with a heat that felt like it was coming from the center of me. Though it was probably coming from the engine that was beneath me. I was spread-eagled on the cab’s hood and looking at the clouds above me and my butt hurt, I guess, but other than that I was feeling pretty good. I reached up and brushed the hair away from my face, taking up a long strand and sort of twirling it around my finger.

  Then a man’s face floated between me and the clouds and his eyes were from way beyond the clouds, it felt, as dark as the darkest night sky. “Oh, lady,” he said with an accent from somewhere on the other side of what was once the Iron Curtain. “You dream something when you cross, yes? A thousand miles away?” I realized he was the driver of the cab. His voice was gentle. He should have been cursing at me for walking against the light and causing him this kind of trouble. But he was making excuses for me.

  “Remember,” I said, “one end of the Iron Curtain was in a trailer park and the other was in a nudist colony.”

  “Oh my,” he said, thinking I was delirious.