My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  The Dead

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  She paused for a moment and sighed.

  —Poor fellow, she said, he was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. We used to go out together walking, you know, Gabriel, like the way they do in the country. He was going to study singing only for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey.

  —Well, and then? asked Gabriel.

  —And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and

  come up to the convent he was much worse and I wouldn’t be let see him so I wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer and hoping he would be better then.

  She paused for a moment to get her voice under control and then

  went on:

  —Then the night before I left I was in my grandmother’s house in

  Nun’s Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn’t see so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden shivering.

  —And did you not tell him to go back? asked Gabriel.

  —I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get

  his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree.

  —And did he go home? asked Gabriel.

  —Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he

  died and he was buried in Oughterard where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead! . . .

  She stopped, choking with sobs and, overcome by emotion, flung

  herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.

  She was fast asleep.

  Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresent-

  fully at her tangled hair and half open mouth, listening to her deep drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband,

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  had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.

  Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunts’ supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merrymak-ing when saying goodnight in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor aunt Julia! She too would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon perhaps he would be sitting in that same drawingroom, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

  The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

  Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love.

  The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region

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  where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

  A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

  d i r t y w e d d i n g

  d e n i s j o h n s o n

  Iliked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a— wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head—tunnel) actually lived.

  I was twenty-five, twenty-six, something like that. My fingertips were all yellow from smoking. My girlfriend was with child.

  It cost fifty cents, ninety cents, a dollar to ride the train. I really don’t remember.

  Out in front of the abortion building picketers shook drops of holy water at us and twisted their rosaries around their fingers. A man in dark glasses shadowed Michelle right up the big steps to the door, chant-ing softly in her ear. I guess he was praying. What were the words of his prayer? I wouldn’t mind asking her that question. But it ’s winter, the mountains around me are tall and deep with snow, and I could never find her now.

  Michelle handed her appointment card to the nurse on the third floor.

  She and the nurse went through a curtain together.

  I wandered over across the hall where they were showing a short

  movie about vasectomies. Much later I told her that I’d actually gotten

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  a vasectomy a long time ago, and somebody else must have made her pregnant. I also told her once that I had inoperable cancer and would soon be passed away and gone, eternally. But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.

  Anyway they showed the movie to two or three or four of us who

  were waiting for women across the hall. The scene was cloudy in my sight because I was frightened of whatever they were doing to Michelle and to the other women and of course to the little foetuses. After the film I talked to a man about vasectomies. A man with a mustache. I
didn’t like him.

  “You have to be sure,” he said.

  “I’m never getting anybody pregnant again. I know that much.”

  “Would you like to make an appointment?”

  “Would you like to give me the money?”

  “It won’t take long to save the money.”

  “It would take me forever to save the money,” I corrected him.

  Then I sat down in the waiting area across the hall. In forty-five minutes the nurse came out and said to me, “Michelle is comfortable now.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I kind of wish she was.”

  She looked frightened. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I went in through the curtain to see Michelle. She smelled bad.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel fine.”

  “What did they stick up you?”

  “What?” she said. “What? ”

  The nurse said, “Hey. Out of here. Out of here.”

  She went through the curtain and came back with a big black guy

  wearing a starched white shirt and one of those phony gold badges. “I don’t think this man needs to be in the building,” she said to him, and then she said to me, “Would you like to wait outside, sir?”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” I said, and all the way down the big stairs and out the front I said, “Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.”

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  It was raining outdoors and most of the Catholics were squashed up under an awning next door with their signs held overhead against the weather. They splashed holy water on my cheek and on the back of my neck, and I didn’t feel a thing. Not for many years.

  I didn’t know what to do now except ride around on the elevated

  train.

  I stepped into one of the cars just as the doors closed; as though the train had waited just for me.

  What if there was just snow? Snow everywhere, cold and white, filling every distance? And I just follow my sense of things through this winter until I reach a grove of white trees. And she takes me in.

  The wheels screamed, and all I saw suddenly was everybody’s big

  ugly shoes. The sound stopped. We passed solitary, wrenching scenes.

  Through the neighborhoods and past the platforms, I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me. Yes, a ghost. A vestige. Something remaining.

  At one of the stops down the line there was a problem with the doors.

  We were delayed, those of us who had destinations, anyway. The train waited and waited in a troubling sleep. Then it hummed softly. You can tell it ’s going to move before it moves.

  A guy stepped in just as the doors closed. The train had waited for him all this time, not a second longer than his arrival, not even half a second, and then it broke the mysterious crystal of its inertia. We ’d picked him up and now we were moving. He sat down near the front of the car, completely unaware of his importance. With what kind of miserable or happy fate did he have an appointment across the river?

  I decided to follow him.

  Several stops later he left the train and went down into a section of squat, repetitive brownstone buildings.

  He walked with a bounce, his shoulders looped and his chin scoop-

  ing forward rhythmically. He didn’t look right or left. I supposed he ’d walked this route twelve thousand times. He didn’t sense or feel me following half a block behind him.

  It was a Polish neighborhood somewhere or other. The Polish neigh-

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  borhoods have that snow. They have that fruit with the light on it, they have that music you can’t find. We ended up in a laundromat, where the guy took off his shirt and put it in a washer. He bought some coffee in a paper cup out of a coin machine.

  He read the notices on the wall and watched his machine tremble,

  walking around the place with only his sharkskin sports jacket on. His chest was narrow and white and hair sprouted from around the small nipples.

  There were a couple of other men in the laundromat. He chatted

  with them a little. I could hear one of them say, “The cops wanted to talk to Benny.”

  “How come? What ’d he do?”

  “He had a hood up. They were looking for a guy with a hood up.”

  “What ’d he do?”

  “Nut ’n. Nut ’n. Some guy got murdered last night.”

  And now the man I was following walked right up to me. “You were

  on the El,” he said. He hefted his cup, tossing a sip of coffee between his lips.

  I turned away because my throat was closing up. Suddenly I had an erection. I knew men got that way about men, but I didn’t know I did.

  His chest was like Christ ’s. That ’s probably who he was.

  I could have followed anybody off that train. It would have been the same.

  I got back on to ride around some more above the streets.

  There was nothing stopping me from going back to where Michelle

  and I were staying, but these days had reduced us to the Rebel Motel.

  The maids spat out their chew in the shower stalls. There was a smell of insecticide. I wasn’t going back there to sit in the room and wait.

  Michelle and I had our drama. It got very dreary sometimes, but it felt like I had to have her. As long as there was one other person at these motels who knew my real name.

  Out back they had all these Dumpsters stuffed with God knows

  what. We can’t imagine the shape of our fate, that ’s for sure.

  Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you

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  could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the “Ten Thousand Things”? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you even know the difference?

  I sat up front. Right beside me was the little cubicle filled with the driver.

  You could feel him materializing and dematerializing in there. In the darkness under the universe it didn’t matter that the driver was a blind man. He felt the future with his face. And suddenly the train hushed as if the wind had been kicked out of it, and we came into the evening again.

  Catty-corner from me sat a dear little black child maybe sixteen, all messed up on skag. She couldn’t keep her head up. She couldn’t stay out of her dreams. She knew: shit, we might as well have been drinking a dog’s tears. Nothing mattered except that we were alive.

  “I never tasted black honey,” I said to her.

  She itched her nose and closed her eyes, her face dipping down into Paradise.

  I said, “Hey.”

  “Black. I ain’t black,” she said. “I’m yellow. Don’t call me black.”

  “I wish I had some of what you have,” I said.

  “Gone, boy. Gone, gone, gone.” She laughed like God. I didn’t

  blame her for laughing.

  “Any chance of getting some more?”

  “How much you want? You got ten?”

  “Maybe. Sure.”

  “I’ll take you down here,” she said. “I’ll take you down over to the Savoy.” And after two more stops she led me off the train and down into the streets. A few people stood around trashcans with flames leaping up out of them and that sort of thing, mumbling and singing. The streetlamps and traffic lights had wire mesh screens over them.

  I know there are people who believe that wherever you look, all you see is yourself. Episodes like this make me wonder if they aren’t right.

  The Savoy Hotel was a bad place. The reality of it gave out as it rose

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  higher above First Avenue, so that the upper floors dribbled away into space. Monsters were draggin
g themselves up the stairs. In the basement was a bar going three sides of a rectangle, as big as an Olympic pool, and a dancing stage with a thick gold curtain hanging down over it that never moved. Everyone knew what to do. People were paying with bills they’d made by tearing a corner off a twenty and pasting it onto a one. There was a man with a tall black hat, a helmet of thick blond hair, and a sharp blond beard. He seemed to want to be here. How did he know what to do? Beautiful women in the corners of my sight disappeared when I looked directly at them. Winter outside. Night by afternoon. Darkly, darkly the Happy Hour. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know what to do.

  The last time I’d been in the Savoy, it had been in Omaha. I hadn’t been anywhere near it in over a year, but I was just getting sicker. When I coughed I saw fireflies.

  Everything down there but the curtain was red. It was like a movie of something that was actually happening. Black pimps in fur coats. The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them. “I’ll just take your money and go upstairs,” somebody said to me.

  Michelle left me permanently for a man called John Smith, or shall I say that during one of the times we were parted she took up with a man and shortly after that had some bad luck and died? Anyway, she never came back to me.

  I knew him, this John Smith. Once at a party he tried to sell me a gun, and later at the same party he made everyone quiet down for a few minutes because I was singing along with the radio, and he liked my voice.

  Michelle went to Kansas City with him and one night when he was out she took a lot of pills, leaving a note beside her on his pillow where he ’d be sure to find it and rescue her. But he was so drunk when he got home that night that he just laid his cheek down on the paper she ’d written on, and went to sleep. When he woke up the next morning my beautiful Michelle was cold and dead.

  She was a woman, a traitor, and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever could have loved her.

  For many weeks after she died, John Smith confided to people that

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  Michelle was calling to him from the other side of life. She wooed him.