Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  The first day Siena invited them up for chamomile tea, Malik held one of the fragile, downy white hatchlings in his hand. Jenny never wanted to hold them. Siena and Malik would gaze at the finches with wonder as they hopped on and off the millet spray, their red and orange beaks pecking eagerly, but the finches were something foreign to Jenny.

  Siena stands in the apartment doorway now, showing off her belly again, interrupting. Jenny had been writing her latest erotic encounter—a man and woman painting each other in gold and jade green, sinking into the dark abyss of each other. Stretched out on ivory silk sheets with the trade winds blowing. She hasn’t written the ending yet, and barricades the entrance with her body, but Siena scoots past, oblivious. “Sure you guys don’t want some finches? When Malik stopped by yesterday, he was playing with the nestlings again.” Siena pats her swollen belly and glances at the pumpkin velvet couch before sitting down, legs crossed, on the hardwood floor.

  “All that warbling might drive us crazy,” Jenny says, and resigns herself to Malik’s plush russet armchair.

  “Shane didn’t like them much at first either. Thought they were too neurotic, but now we let the adults fly all over the apartment. If you change your mind, they’re constantly mating. Eight eggs in this last batch and more of them all the time.”

  “Can I get you coffee or something?”

  “No, no, no. I just had my carrot juice upstairs. The other reason I came down is to see if you and Malik wanted to go camping with us in a couple weeks.”

  Siena is a transplant from the other coast. Jenny suspects Siena only pretends to like raw carrot juice and transcendental meditation and psychics. Probably she secretly binges on Oreos like everyone else. “Thanks, but we’re city mice.”

  “Oh, there’s no such thing! Camping’s for everyone. It’ll do us all good to get out of this pollution.” Siena slides her alexandrite pendant back and forth along the slim silver chain around her neck so that it blinks in the afternoon light, first mossy green, then raspberry. She fashions crystal jewelry for a living, wrapping gemstones in silver wire, sometimes adding beads, and she wants to move her miniature business and Shane to the Siskiyous.

  After the Fourth of July fireworks in San Francisco, two months ago, they had strolled back to the train station. Siena, stroking her bulging belly, looked around at the littered streets, the greasy bits of fried calamari, half-eaten hot dogs and fluttering bubble-gum wrappers, abandoned light sticks, and confetti. “Who will clean this?” she asked Jenny, who was unsure of whether Siena intended the question as a kind of polemical opening to an argument or whether she wanted the kind of technical response that involved knowledge of the city sanitation. Nobody answered.

  “You see, this is why we need to move back to nature,” said Siena, clarifying the intent behind her question. She poked Shane.

  He laughed. “I’m an architect, not a forest ranger, Siena.”

  Siena smiled, and wrapped an arm around her boyfriend’s waist, nestling against his chest. Jenny was sure it was an act. Shane said, “How about a compromise? I’ll take my vacation time next summer. We can travel around America together like outlaws, hopping freights, hitchhiking, walking.”

  As they’d boarded the train, Malik whispered to Jenny, “See, they’re not so bad.” All Jenny could think was that it was astonishing they chose to couple. Surely Shane would crush Siena. A skyscraper sinking down. In Pittsburgh, where Jenny’s parents live, some people have insurance for their houses, just in case a mine beneath the house opens its hungry steel mouth to swallow the lumber, the bricks, the furniture.

  Siena continues to talk about camping in an insistent, high-pitched voice. She explains how difficult it was to convince Shane to go camping when they first got together, but now he loves it. She asks Jenny what she thinks about natural childbirth in the forest. “I know I don’t want to go to a hospital, but Shane doesn’t think that he can handle delivering the baby by himself. Do you think midwives will go into the woods for a delivery?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea. It doesn’t sound safe.” She tries to imagine wanting to do Siena—those thin Puritan lips opening, snake-tongue darting out, lids shutting over sapphire eyes—and decides that a facsimile of Siena will be featured in the next erotic encounter she submits to her editor.

  Siena cocks her head to one side. “Are you and Malik … ?”

  Jenny jumps up quickly. “Oh. Who knows? Life’s tricky.” She strides through the hall into the kitchen. Siena follows. Jenny dumps pink, brown, and white wafer cookies onto a plate and pours two cups of coffee. “Sure you don’t want some coffee?”

  “Caffeine can cause a miscarriage.”

  Malik’s keys jangle at the door, and Jenny brings the snacks to the living room coffee table. “Hey you,” she says, hugging him. She’s glad of his physical presence, for his sharp, clear outline. The faintly roast-beef-sandwich smell of his breath, his relaxed tone of voice. When he’s not there, he blurs, unreadable, in her memory of him. “How were the new kids?”

  Malik teaches fourth grade at an elementary school in Albany, and classes started today.

  He drops his beige man purse and plays with the hair at the nape of her neck. “These kids are a big handful. One of the kids from last year, Jude, I told you about him, right? He had to stay behind and has become the coolest kid in the class. The king.”

  “That won’t last after the kids decide it’s dumb to stay behind a year.”

  Siena emerges from the kitchen. “Come here and you can feel the baby kick, Malik.”

  He concentrates, placing a hand on her belly, fingers splayed over her brown peasant skirt. He draws in a breath.

  “Jen, did you check this out yet?” He and Siena smile, so she’s forced to smile, too.

  Siena asks Malik, “Does Ivory know about the crush?”

  “Oh, Evan keeps throwing tanbark at her during lunch, so I imagine she thinks he hates her. Isn’t that what little girls think of boys who beat them up?”

  “I always thought it meant they wanted me,” Jenny says, handing him a cup of coffee.

  Siena shakes her head. “Terrible! I hope you disciplined Evan. It only encourage violence against women to allow him to think that’s okay.”

  “Oh, it’s harmless,” Jenny says. “Well, not harmless, but it’s not as if he’s actually beating her up, right?”

  “I made him take a time-out today. This little girl, Ivory, is adorable. She’ll probably be gorgeous when she’s older. And she’s so smart! Today, when I was giving my overview of fractions, she volunteered for a whole bunch of them. But she doesn’t do it in a know-it-all way. All the boys like her.” Malik nibbles at a wafer.

  “Why is it that people are so impressed with math? I don’t get it.” Jenny’s coffee is still too hot to drink. There is an annoying conversational pause, as if she has said something obscene or petty.

  “All right, I should go upstairs. My finches probably miss me.” Siena forces herself up over her abdomen. Malik walks her to the door, but Jenny waves goodbye from the armchair.

  “Because math is fundamental. Duh.” Malik slumps into the couch and eats more heartily now that Siena has left.

  “No, I mean, why is it impressive that Ivory can do math? That’s what some people are naturally good at.”

  “Why are you being defensive? That was just an example, Jen. During writing time, she wrote this amazing descriptive paragraph on an old, abandoned carousel. It’s a metaphor for the end of childhood. She’s wise.” Malik pulls her on top of him as he lies back on the couch. She can’t taste him—her tongue is dull from the coffee and she is curiously annoyed at this precocious little girl who makes metaphors about childhood even before she’s left it.

  “Just wait till she hits puberty. It’ll be all over then. She’ll lie around all afternoon watching soap operas and talking on the phone about makeup and how god-awful ugly she is instead of reading books and solving math problems.” Jenny pulls her face away, unable to resist deflat
ing him. Malik scowls and pushes her upright.

  “You can’t just agree, can you? Just fucking agree for once.” He stands, grabs his man purse and goes into the bedroom. “And don’t think I didn’t notice you were faking excitement about Siena’s baby. If you’re jealous of her pregnancy—”

  “You’re the one jealous of her pregnancy! You’re the reason we’re trying to have a baby,” Jenny calls after him. Malik pads back into the living room.

  “Okay.” He brushes hair away from her face. “But think about how it felt to feel that kicking inside Siena. That kicking is going to be a baby—a person! It’s going to learn to play basketball and eat chocolate and have sex. It’s made of your insides and mine, the stuff of the entire universe. How wonderful is that?”

  She’s heard these tender appeals before. For the past five months they haven’t been using condoms. Two weeks after they first met, they talked about life over cappuccinos and Malik called marriage a “stale, artificial state.” Now, he proposes anytime Siena’s belly makes a performance. “You sound all pro-lifey. It’s going to be a person. It’s not one yet.”

  “You’re impossible. How can you like sex as much as you do, without wanting to have kids? Evolutionary psychology went wrong somewhere.” Malik picks up the plate of wafers and the coffee cups and returns to the kitchen. He turns on Thelonious Monk’s Straight No Chaser. Jenny closes her eyes. Carried away in the percussion and angst, filled with dread at the thought of trying to reconstruct their sexual role-play for her porn stories.

  She thinks of the pregnancy test that Malik brought home the night before. She waited for the results as he brushed his teeth and pretended to be disappointed and surprised when it showed she wasn’t pregnant. Malik looked at her suspiciously. Not suspicious of her, it turned out, but of her knowledge. “Sure you were ovulating?”

  “My period’s next week. And you can tell anyway from the thinness of the mucus. When it’s clear, it’s time.”

  He reaches inside her open robe and pulls her to him, his rough sweater scratching her breasts and face. She could tell him about the doctor’s appointment years ago. She’d been sitting fully dressed in the doctor’s office, yet utterly naked. The doctor in her white jacket over a beige silk blouse spoke to her, compassionately, deliberately. She explained Jenny’s sex life as a nasty joke—all those frantic early-morning trips to get the morning-after pill, banter with boyfriends about what they’d name their children, the prolonged delays in getting her period and the futile, meaningless worry those delays engendered. Speechless, Jenny looked at the doctor. She would sit the same way, starving in her living room for the whole day, watching the hours tick by. She’d dropped the news to her then-boyfriend over egg-flower soup the following night. But she can’t tell Malik so lightly. He’ll suggest all kinds of technologically advanced methods of having children, he’ll so kindly, so gently take over her body, over their life, and she doesn’t know what’s wrong with this, if she loves him.

  Shouldn’t she be able to remember him clearly, when he’s not there, to have children with him? She wants him branded into her memory, she wants to be able to touch something of him on her own mental flesh, burned and discolored, so she can believe there’s no way to truly extract him from herself. But he is, as he always will be, entirely separate.

  After dinner she paints Malik up—gold mascara, black eyeliner, lipstick, foundation, powder, the works. He bats pretty eyelashes at her. “Just for that, we have to go outside now,” she tells him slyly.

  “What?”

  “Come on, sugah. Let me take you for a little walk on the wild side.”

  “You bitch! No way.” He laughs. But he can be persuaded, after she coaxes him with a few more drinks. They stumble, drunk and happy, out of the duplex, and ramble toward the park at the Rose Garden. In the dark, the playground structures look like beasts slumbering. They climb on top of one. Above the trees, the universe zings with stars and they are two mites, two nothings. Malik points out some constellations, instructive even with Flame lips. She listens. She leans over and covers his mouth with a kiss. Long and hard, vicious even.

  ***

  Craigslist is a deep hole of disappointment. She has been to five job interviews but has been too embarrassed to admit to prospective employers that in order to move to California she spent the last few years writing Internet pornography, and that she’s not even very good at it. Before that she’d worked as a journalist for the small Pittsburgh paper she’d grown up reading, but that still leaves two years of her life missing. Perhaps she can claim she’s been researching freelance articles on zebra finches.

  She’s observed Siena’s birds, in four wood and chicken wire cages around the otherwise empty living room. The grown finches hop up and down the branches slung through the wire, tapping on cuttle bones in a blind search for calcium, and pecking voraciously at carrots and lettuce, millet spray, seed. The males compete by serenading the females with long, loud warbles and hopping, tails in a furious vibration, on the females’ backs. Jenny has seen them take quick, joyous baths, splashing water, seed, and shit on the pages of the Utne Reader that line their cages.

  New babies arrive with some frequency, first peeping, later squawking for food. Siena loves observing them, loves waiting to see which ones develop gaudy cheek patches so she can determine their genders before selling them. The nestlings grow into fledglings. The newest fledglings have names that Shane chose and Siena approved: Truth, Beauty, Charm, and others. Jenny can’t remember them all.

  On the Friday when they leave to go camping, Siena stops by while Shane carries their orange tent to the car. “Camping is good for the soul. You really don’t want to come?” Siena lingers in Jenny’s doorway, clapping her tiny mittened hands together.

  “Are you in good enough condition to go camping? Particularly since, well, look at the weather.”

  Shane enters and stands behind Siena. “I’ll take care of her, don’t worry,” he says, enfolding Siena in his thick overcoat. Even from a few feet away they smell like Pittsburgh in the autumn—dead leaves, freshly baked bread, the possibility of rain. “It’s not that cold.”

  “Besides. I want the baby to feel grounded,” Siena explains.

  “Considering we’ll be living in the city for quite some time,” Shane adds. They drive off in the truck, heading north to the Siskiyous.

  Jenny returns to the bedroom with her laptop, thinking about how she met Malik at a furniture store on San Pablo, a few blocks from her old apartment. She’d been carrying a bag of groceries, contemplating loft beds, leaving after learning the store didn’t sell them. Even though Malik was lugging a large plastic bag stuffed with a king-sized down comforter, he held the glass door for her—she’d observed that since coming to Berkeley, no man had held a door for her, and said words to that effect. “Maybe they think you’ll be offended,” Malik said. They made small talk as they stepped into a drizzle, moving past the parking lot into the busy thoroughfare. His glistening black eyelashes as he asked if she wanted to be walked somewhere out of the rain, the green delirium of trees blowing in the wind, the scent of wet peaches as she took them out of the paper bag at home, the way a peach tanged differently in his mouth than in her own. The memory somehow does not translate to anything usable as pornography.

  Jenny hears finches warbling. Malik’s grandfather clock continues ticking. Words that once excited her now seem to be merely marks. Warble, warble. She can’t stand the sounds! Squeak-squeak-squeak. The finches chortle continuously.

  She stuffs gloves and keys in her pocket. She walks outside, hurrying around the duplex to the side alley where they keep recycling and garbage bins. She creeps up the cobwebbed outdoor staircase, avoiding dead roses and moths. From the landing, she climbs over the railing and onto Siena and Shane’s window ledge. She peers through the kitchen window, between the potted plants.

  She slips on her gloves, pulls the screen out carefully, and hoists herself through the window, into the kitchen sink, and
then drops noisily down to the yellow-tiled floor. She tiptoes into the living room, even though nobody is home. Fortunately, Siena has left the living room window open, probably to air out the finch-smell.

  Jenny takes the end of the millet spray slung through the black wire and waves it around. The birds twitter at her, trying to catch and tame the millet, usually getting swatted by it instead. Jenny cackles out loud, trying to imitate a noir villainess, perhaps Ava Gardner, sporting a vivid dress and skinny, lacquered nails. One red-cheeked male hops on the branch and Jenny swings him around on it. Jenny pushes the cage closer to the window, lifts the thin wooden latch slowly, although she knows she won’t change her mind. The finches don’t move toward the large open cage door, so she reaches in and they flap around the cage in a frantic flurry.

  “Look at what a great day it is!”

  Outside the window, clouds move almost imperceptibly over the neighborhoods on the hill below and she can see the San Francisco skyline, across the bay. Suddenly in a fury of feathers, one finch flies out. “Go on, pretty thing.” The others follow his hesitant lead onto the window ledge. For a moment, she panics, lest they don’t know how to fly yet. But at the sound of a car honking, all take off, flapping wildly, then gracefully as they swoop past a eucalyptus grove and toward the vast bay. Soon they’re out of sight.