Waxwings

by Unknown

  “Look, pumpkin!” Beth said. “See the pretty necklace Grandma Katalin sent me?” She held a multicolored folk-arty beadwork choker to her throat. “Isn’t that kind of Grandma?” With a sideways grimace at Tom, she returned it quickly to its box.

  “You haven’t opened mine,” Tom said.

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t get you anything. I didn’t think—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Putting on a mime-show of eager anticipation for Finn’s benefit, she undid the knotted silver cord. “It’s very heavy . . . what can be inside?” she said, then “Oh, God.” Finally, dully: “It’s beautiful.”

  “There’s a butterfly inside it,” Finn said.

  Beth held the Baccarat globe as if it were a hand-grenade from which the pin had been removed. “You shouldn’t have. I can’t—”

  “I just liked it,” Tom said, wondering if he’d secretly known all along that the paperweight would serve to chastise her. At the time, he’d attributed the purchase to simple uxorious absent-mindedness, not unconsciously calculated vengeance.

  Beth, kneeling on the floor beside Finn, leaned across him to peck Tom on the cheek. “It’s . . . exquisite,” she said, and Tom thought, The torture, is what she means.

  He was taking the chicken out of the oven, to baste it for the second time, when she came into the kitchen. “Anything I can do?”

  “No, I’ve got everything under control here, thanks.”

  “Have you seen the new Woody Allen movie, Sweet and Lowdown?”

  “Heavens, no. I hardly ever go to the movies now, and anyway I realize that I’ve developed a sort of loathing of Woody Allen over the years. He’s so—transparent.” Spooning fat from the pan over the pallid corpse of the bird, he thought how strange it was to hear himself talking to Beth like this, as if they’d just met.

  “Funny: I’d have guessed he’d be right up your street.”

  Scenting danger, Tom said, “Is it any good, the new one?”

  “Well, it’s pretty to look at and the music’s nice.”

  “Jazz?”

  “Swing, his usual. It’s got Sean Penn in it—he plays kind of an American Django Reinhardt, but there’s this British actress—”

  “Listen, Beth—” With the chicken safely back in the oven, he told her of his mother’s phone call.

  “You haven’t said anything? Jesus, Tom!”

  “It’s Christmas Day, for godsake. I can’t tell her on Christmas Day!”

  “There’ve been whole weeks of fucking days. How long do you mean to keep from telling her—the rest of her natural life? Let me get this straight. You want me to get on the phone and lie through my teeth so you can . . . I don’t believe it. I’ve never heard of anything so cowardly and dishonest. It’s insane! I mean, it’s insane insane! Oh—yes, pumpkin?”

  Finn was suddenly with them, in his top hat. “Mom? Pick a card!”

  “Oh, honey.” She picked a card. It was the wrong one.

  At Finn’s insistence, they had to pull the Christmas crackers that Grandma Katalin had included in her care-package for Tom, which also included a Star of Bethlehem card, a boxed jar of thick-cut marmalade, a Shetland sweater, a fixtures calendar for West Ham United’s 1999– 2000 season, and a check for £50. Tom and Beth put on the flimsy paper crowns that fell out of the crackers, and Finn ate lunch wearing the top hat.

  On every count, lunch was a severely qualified success. The brussels sprouts were burned, and required surgery to amputate the blackened bits. Finn spilled his glass of cola into his mashed potatoes and chicken. Beth tried to restore a little seasonal spirit into the occasion by recounting the story of a Dilbert cartoon.

  “ ‘Must control fist of death,’ ” she said, leaving Tom awaiting the punch-line. When none came, he said, “I think you had to have been there,” which precipitated another five minutes of silence between the parents, who eventually reunited in an attempt to help Finn with a trick involving three paper cups and a disappearing yellow pom-pom ball.

  “Abra—cadabra!” Finn said, flourishing his wand. He lifted the cup to disclose an obstinately undisappeared ball.

  “Look, Finbow, you need—”

  “To be a good magician, you have to—”

  “I’m not a magician.” He took off the top hat and planted it on the table. He looked glazed and weary, defeated by Christmas. When Beth put her arm around his shoulder, he shrugged it off. “I have to take Anthony for a walk.”

  Tom called his mother. When he’d thanked her for her presents, he mouthed “Please?” at Beth, then passed her the receiver and listened gratefully, She wasn’t a good liar, but when he closed his eyes and tried to imagine her auditor in the Romford flat, it sounded good enough.

  “Thank you,” he said when she hung up.

  “I hate myself.” Out of old habit, she gathered up the plates and took them to the sink. Shortly afterwards, she and Finn left—Finn in the back seat with his spoils piled beside him and Anthony in his lap. Tom watched the tail-lights disappear through a blur of rain and (he was ashamed to admit) tears.

  Shut up in the study, feeling too bereft to read or think, he spent a wastrel hour on the Internet. England, he learned from the BBC, was flooded and gale-torn. A man had been swept to his death from a promenade, six people airlifted from a ship in trouble off the Northumbrian coast, hundreds evacuated from low-lying areas of Kent and Sussex. Power-lines were down all over the country, roads blocked by fallen trees. A few flakes of snow had fallen at the London Weather Center, confounding the bookies, who’d offered odds of 50 to 1 against a white Christmas. The Queen had delivered her Christmas speech.

  Tom clicked on the Queen, and up she came—powdered, permed, bespectacled, and wearing blue. On the tiny screen inside the Real-Player window, she was a talking postage stamp. “More than ever,” said the famous cameo head, “we are aware of being a tiny part of the infinite sweep of time when we move from one century and one millennium to another.” She appeared cross, and grew crosser. “As I look to the future, I have no doubt at all that the one certainty is change, and the pace of that change will only seem to increase.” The Queen’s mouth, its musculature shaped by a long life of dutiful forced smiles, looked as if it were chewing on some tough and unfamiliar meat. “I for one am looking forward to this new millennium,” she said, in a tone of candid insincerity.

  He checked his e-mail—no messages—and drifted downstairs, where he made a half-hearted attempt to tidy up the rubble around the Christmas tree. He opened windows to clear the living room of its sad smell of bubble gum, fallen pine needles, the trace of Beth’s cologne. She hadn’t taken the paperweight, which lay on the floor partly covered by its overturned silver box. Holding it was like cupping a rainbow in one’s hand: the purple-bodied butterfly seemed to suck every last candela of light out of the afternoon, darkening the room around it. The smudgy, marbled wings glowed orange, green, red, blue, yellow, and violet, the colors rippling and swelling in the glass. Its eyes were pin-pricks of turquoise. It was ridiculously lovely.

  He was swept by a sudden wave of pure desolation. As it passed, he felt himself floundering in panic, out of his depth. Someone else seemed to place the paperweight, in slow motion, on the mantelpiece; someone else, breathing in gasps, to go down on his knees and bury his face in the couch. He wondered, with oddly dispassionate curiosity, whether this someone was having a heart attack, and whether he should dial 911 on his behalf. Then he and the someone merged back into each other, and shuffled into the kitchen in search of a glass and something high-proof to pour into it.

  Nursing the last dregs from the bottle of geneva, he sat at the table and did the three-cup trick with the yellow pom-pom balls. He was in need of magic: Houdini himself would find it hard to escape from this particular afternoon into the neutral territory of morning. There was Some Like It Hot—borrowed from Blockbuster in preparation for a solitary Christmas night—but Tom could not now bear the prospect of sitting alone in front of the TV. He sa
w all too well the long dark hours, crowded with thoughts of the family he had lost as casually as one might lose an umbrella on a bus.

  He tried the Tatchells’ number, but they were out, and he could think of no one else to call. He knew what men in his predicament were supposed to do. He ought to pack a bag and drive to the Pacific coast, or down I-5 to California, but then had to remind himself that he was afraid of driving at night in the rain. He could head downtown and find a perch on a barstool; but he disliked bars and had no wish to become a stock character in a New Yorker cartoon; besides, even bars would be closed on Christmas Day. Finally, he went down to the basement and invited Chick to supper.

  The contractor was sitting cross-legged on his sleeping bag, watching “Rugrats,” and tinkering with a partially disembowelled refrigerator. He acknowledged Tom with a distracted wave of a length of copper tubing, which he pointed at his mouth: his lips were pursed shut on half a dozen small screws. He picked them out one by one and laid them in careful order on a spread in People. “Goddamn Mexicans,” he said. “They goof off on me. ‘No work Navidad!’ ”

  “Christmas.”

  “Christmas.” Echoing Tom, he made it sound as joyless a word as any in the language.

  Tom delivered his invitation. Chick considered it. “Hah. Chicken.” He squinted up at him for a moment, then stared broodingly at the scattered components of his refrigerator. Tom feared the fridge was going to win. “Okay, sure.”

  Chick, a confident foot-in-the-door intruder, was an uneasy guest, declining to sit down, declining wine, beer, apple juice, and water. While Tom was putting the meal together, he stood close by, moving when Tom moved and speaking, when he spoke at all, in grunted monosyllables.

  “Would you like to put the salad on the table?”

  “Wah.”

  “There’s plenty of broccoli. You eat broccoli?”

  “Wah?”

  Tom crossed from the sink to the stove; Chick shadowed him. Once, Tom turned and caught him making a rapid inventory of the Christmas remains with quick, stealthy eyes. He’d better put the paperweight away in a safe place, he thought, or Chick—a true magician—would make it disappear. Yet he had brought a companionable human heat to what would otherwise have been a frigid void. Needing his warmth, Tom chattered at him, keeping up a running commentary on everything from the time it would take to steam the broccoli to the disposition of the knives and forks, but couldn’t tell if he was taking any of this in.

  Chick refused to sit down until Tom was seated at the table.

  “Salt? Pepper?”

  But Chick had eyes only for his plate. Deferential Chinese good manners, Tom decided. The whirring hum of the fridge was joined by the considerable noise of Chick masticating his food: it sounded as if a large mammal were trampling through brushwood inside his mouth. Perhaps that was Chinese good manners, too.

  Tom tried another tack. “I was thinking of watching a movie tonight . . .”

  “Movie.”

  “Yes, an old favorite of mine. A comedy. Very funny. With Marilyn Monroe, you know?”

  The name appeared to make no impression.

  “She was sort of the Madonna of her time.”

  “Cool,” Chick said, spraying the table with small fragments of food.

  “We could take our plates through there and watch it now, if you like.”

  “Okay.”

  So they decamped into the dark living room, Chick squatting cross-legged beside the Christmas tree. Tom fed Some Like It Hot into the VCR and fast-forwarded through the trailers to the beginning of the film. The car chase got under way and the police opened fire on the hearse with machine-guns, bootleg whiskey spouting from bullet holes in the coffin. Tom, already snuffling with laughter, looked across at Chick.

  “Very old movie,” he said. “No color.”

  “Nineteen fifty-nine, I think. Billy Wilder.”

  Tom could see Chick’s jaws working methodically in the busy, glimmering light cast by the screen. Otherwise, his face was perfectly expressionless. Tom’s laughter grew thinner, fainter, more self-conscious by the minute. Of course the whole idea of asking him up to dinner had been a pathetic mistake, and the desperation that had inspired it was shaming. Clammy with embarrassment, hanging his head to hide the expression on his own face, he thought, Get a fucking grip!

  “Freaky!” Chick honked, scooting up into a chair so as to get a better view of the screen.

  On the Chicago station platform, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were in full drag, hobbled by tight skirts, and late—like Marilyn Monroe—for the train that was to take them to Miami with the all-girl band. The dialogue was drowned by the noise of Chick’s demented giggles.

  For the rest of the movie, the armchair could hardly contain him as he rocked back and forth, muttering to himself, letting out guffaws that aproached the decibel-level of shrieks. Every time Jack Lemmon showed on the screen, Chick hugged his knees and grinned in horrible anticipation. It was always Lemmon, and not Curtis or Monroe, Tom noticed, who sent Chick into fits of unhinged rapture; and Lemmon, unlike Curtis, took his transformation seriously. For a tantalizing moment, Tom had the sensation of inhabiting Chick’s skin and watching the movie through his eyes; but the moment was quickly punctured by another falsetto whoop from the armchair.

  When Joe E. Brown delivered the film’s final line, Chick picked it up and ran with it. “ ‘Nobody perfec’!’ ” he caroled, as Tom reached for the remote. “ ‘Nobody perfec’!’ ”

  “I was afraid you weren’t going to like it.”

  “I like.”

  “I’d never have guessed.”

  Chick was still looking, wistfully, at the dead screen. “He make joke on America,” he said.

  “Yes. That’s it exactly, isn’t it? Well, of course he was originally German—Austrian, actually, I think,” Tom said, then realized that Chick meant the movie, not the director.

  As he was returning to his quarters in the basement, Chick stuck his head around the kitchen door, cackled “Nobody perfec’!” and was gone.

  Waxwings

  6.

  The house shook to the thunder of construction. A diagonal shaft of sunshine, radiant with dust, fell through the new glass of the window on the stairs and reached the Christmas tree, which stood in a litter of browning needles and fallen ornaments, some in jagged silver smithereens. The contractor had removed the front door from its hinges, and chilly gusts of wind from outside added wood-shavings and sycamore leaves to the swirls of drifting paper. The disembodied talking heads of Chick, Lázaro, and Jesús were visible at floor-level in the doorway like characters in a glove-puppet show, yammering at one another in an acrimonious Babel of English, Spanish, and Chinese over the unearthly ensemble of sledgehammers and saws.

  “Enano!”

  “Besa mi culo!”

  “Yo’ fuck!”

  Tom hid the butterfly paperweight behind a great black-backed poetry anthology by Louis Untermeyer—surely no temptation there— and bicycled off to Ken’s Market. He returned to the house in time to hear Chick utter a sentence that sounded like the battle cry of a wounded tomcat in a rooftop territorial dispute. Shrugging himself into his old winter overcoat, he set off in the Volkswagen in search of peace and quiet.

  He was crossing the grating of the Fremont Bridge when the conversation with Beth began. She seemed to be riding beside him in the car, a sullen storm-cloud in the unseasonable brightness of the morning. She was so unjust. He shifted from second into third with an abrupt swipe that made the gearbox shriek.

  “Sorry,” he said. Then, “Look . . .”

  He drove on, wrangling with her silently through the stop-and-go traffic. As he swung right on to the Lake City Way exit from I-5, he said aloud, “I never dreamed you would turn out to be so bloody shallow.”

  The city frayed out into the ugly suburbs, the flag-bedecked car dealerships, strip malls, lumber-yards, Taco Bells, and martial-arts studios rendered still uglier by the unforgiving sunshine. Mean
while, Beth—that spoiled ingrate—goaded him from the passenger seat.

  “You never once bothered . . .” he said. “You might have had the common decency to . . .”