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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Weddings had lapsed entirely, birthdays were a phone call at the most, and at Christmas, Otto and William sent lavish gifts of out-of-season fruits, in the wake of which would arrive recriminatory little thank-you notes. From mid-December to mid-January they would absent themselves, not merely from the perilous vicinity of Otto’s family, but from the entire country, to frolic in blue water under sunny skies.

  When his mother died, Otto experienced an exhilarating melancholy; most of the painful encounters and obligations would now be a thing of the past. Life, with its humorous theatricality, had bestowed and revoked with one gesture, and there he abruptly was, in the position he felt he ’d been born for: he was alone in the world.

  Or alone in the world, anyway, with William. Marching ahead of

  his sisters and brother—Corinne, Martin, and Sharon—Otto was in the front ranks now, death’s cannon fodder and so on; he had become old overnight, and free.

  Old and free! Old and free . . .

  Still, he made himself available to provide legal advice or to arrange a summer internship for some child or nephew. He saw Sharon from time to time. From time to time there were calls: “Of course you’re too busy, but . . .”

  “Of course you’re not interested, but . . .” was how they began. This was the one thing Corinne and her husband and Martin and whichever wife were always all in accord about—that Otto seemed to feel he was too good for the rest of them, despite the obvious indications to the contrary.

  Who was too good for whom? It often came down to a show of force.

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  When Corinne had called a week or so earlier about Thanksgiving, Otto, addled by alarm, said, “We ’re having people ourselves, I’m afraid.”

  Corinne ’s silence was like a mirror, flashing his tiny, harmless lie back to him in huge magnification, all covered with sticky hairs and microbes.

  “Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  “Please try,” Corinne said. The phrase had the unassailable authority of a road sign appearing suddenly around the bend: falling rock.

  “Otto, the children are growing up.”

  “Children! What children? Your children grew up years ago,

  Corinne. Your children are old now, like us.”

  “I meant, of course, Martin’s. The new ones. Martin and Laurie ’s.

  And there ’s Portia.”

  Portia? Oh, yes. The little girl. The sole, thank heavens, issue, of Martin’s marriage to that crazy Viola.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Otto said again, this time less cravenly. It was Corinne ’s own fault. A person of finer sensibilities would have written a note, or used e-mail—or would face-savingly have left a message at his office, giving him time to prepare some well-crafted deterrent rather than whatever makeshift explosive he would obviously be forced to lob back at her under direct attack.

  “Wesley and I are having it in the city this year,” Corinne was saying. “No need to come all the way out to the nasty country. A few hours and it will all be over with. Seriously, Otto, you’re an integral element.

  We ’re keeping it simple this year.”

  “ ‘This year?’ Corinne, there have been no other years. You do not observe Thanksgiving.”

  “In fact, Otto, we do. And we all used to.”

  “Who?”

  “All of us.”

  “Never. When? Can you imagine Mother being thankful for any-

  thing?”

  “We always celebrated Thanksgiving when Father was alive.”

  “I remember no such thing.”

  “I do. I remember, and so does Martin.”

  “Martin was four when Father died!”

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  “Well, you were little, too.”

  “I was twice Martin’s age.”

  “Oh, Otto—I just feel sad, sometimes, to tell you the truth, don’t you? It ’s all going so fast! I’d like to see everyone in the same room once a century or so. I want to see everybody well and happy. I mean, you and Martin and Sharon were my brothers and sister. What was that all about? Don’t you remember? Playing together all the time?”

  “I just remember Martin throwing up all the time.”

  “You’ll be nice to him, won’t you, Otto? He ’s still very sensitive. He won’t want to talk about the lawsuit.”

  “Have you spoken to Sharon?”

  “Well, that ’s something I wanted to talk to you about, actually. I’m afraid I might have offended her. I stressed the fact that it was only to be us this year. No aunts or uncles, no cousins, no friends. Just us. And husbands or wives. Husband. And wife. Or whatever. And children,

  naturally, but she became very hostile.”

  “Assuming William to be ‘whatever,’ ” Otto said, “why shouldn’t

  Sharon bring a friend if she wants to?”

  “William is family. And surely you remember when she brought that person to Christmas! The person with the feet? I wish you’d go by and talk to her in the next few days. She seems to listen to you.”

  Otto fished up a magazine from the floor—one of the popular sci-

  ence magazines William always left lying around—and idly opened it.

  “Wesley and I reach out to her,” Corinne was saying. “And so does Martin, but she doesn’t respond. I know it can be hard for her to be with people, but we ’re not people—we ’re family.”

  “I’m sure she understands that, Corinne.”

  “I hope you do, too, Otto.”

  How clearly he could see, through the phone line, this little sister of his—in her fifties now—the six-year-old ’s expression of aggrieved anxiety long etched decisively on her face.

  “In any case,” she said, “I’ve called.”

  And yet there was something to what Corinne had said; they had been one another’s environs as children. The distance between them had been

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  as great, in any important way, as it was now, but there had been no other beings close by, no other beings through whom they could probe or illumine the mystifying chasms and absences and yearnings within themselves. They had been born into the arid clutter of one another’s behavior, good and bad, their measles, skinned knees, report cards . . .

  A barren landscape dotted with clutter. Perhaps the life of the last dinosaurs, as they ranged, puzzled and sorrowful, across the comet-singed planet, was similar to childhood. It hadn’t been a pleasant time, surely, and yet one did have an impulse to acknowledge one ’s anteced-ents, now and again. Hello, that was us, it still is, good-bye.

  “I don’t know,” William said. “It doesn’t seem fair to put any pressure on Sharon.”

  “Heaven forfend. But I did promise Corinne I’d speak with Sharon.

  And, after all, I haven’t actually seen her for some time.”

  “We could just go have a plain old visit, though. I don’t know. Urging her to go to Corinne ’s—I’m not really comfortable with that.”

  “Oof, William, phrase, please, jargon.”

  “Why is that jargon?”

  “Why? How should I know why? Because it is. You can say, ‘I’m

  uncomfortable about that,’ or ‘That makes me uncomfortable.’ But ‘I’m uncomfortable with that ’ is simply jargon.” He picked up a book sitting next to him on the table and opened it. Relativity for Dummies. “Good heavens,” he said, snapping the book shut. “Obviously Martin doesn’t want to talk about the lawsuit. Why bother to mention that to me? Does she think I’m going to ask Martin whether it ’s true that he’s been misrepre-senting the value of his client ’s stock? Am I likely to talk about it? I’m perfectly happy to read about it in the Times every day, like everyone else.”

  “You know,” William said, “we could go away early this year. We

  could just pick up and leave on Wednesday, if you’d like.”

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nbsp; “I would not like. I would like you to play in your concert, as

  always.”

  William took the book from Otto and held Otto’s hand between his

  own. “They’re not really so bad, you know, your family,” he said.

  Sometimes William’s consolations were oddly like provocations.

  “Easy for you to say,” Otto said.

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  “Not that easy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Otto said. “I know.”

  Just like William to suggest going away early for Otto’s sake, when he looked forward so much to his concert! The little orchestra played publicly only once a year, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Otto endured the grating preparatory practicing, not exactly with equanimity, it had to be admitted, but with relative forbearance, just for the pleasure of seeing William’s radiant face on the occasion. William in his suit, William fussing over the programs, William busily arranging tickets for friends.

  Otto’s sunny, his patient, his deeply good William. Toward the end of every year, when the city lights glimmered through the fuzzy winter dark, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, William with his glowing violin, urging the good-natured, timid audience into passionate explorations of the unseen world. And every year now, from the audience, Otto felt William’s impress stamped on the planet, more legible and valuable by one year; all the more legible and valuable for the one year’s diminu-tion in William’s beauty.

  How spectacular he had been the first time Otto brought him to a

  family event, that gladiatorial Christmas thirty-odd years earlier. How had Otto ever marshaled the nerve to do it?

  Oh, one could say till one was blue in the face that Christmas was a day like any other, what difference would it make if he and William were to spend that particular day apart, and so on. And yet.

  Yes, the occasion forced the issue, didn’t it. Either he and William would both attend, or Otto would attend alone, or they would not attend together. But whatever it was that one decided to do, it would be a declaration—to the family, and to the other. And, the fact was, to oneself.

  Steeled by new love, in giddy defiance, Otto had arrived at the house with William, to all intents and purposes, on his arm.

  A tidal wave of nervous prurience had practically blown the door out from inside the instant he and William ascended the front step. And all evening aunts, uncles, cousins, mother, and siblings had stared at William beadily, as if a little bunny had loped out into a clearing in front of them.

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  William’s beauty, and the fact that he was scarcely twenty, had embarrassed Otto on other occasions, but never so searingly. “How intelligent he is!” Otto’s relatives kept whispering to one another loudly, meaning, apparently, that it was a marvel he could speak. Unlike, the further implication was, the men they’d evidently been imagining all these years.

  Otto had brought someone to a family event only once before—also

  on a Christmas, with everyone in attendance: Diandra Fetlin, a feverishly brilliant colleague, far less beautiful than William. During the tur-key, she thumped Otto on the arm whenever he made a good point in the argument he was having with Wesley, and continued to eat with solemn assiduity. Then, while the others applied themselves to dessert, a stuc-colike fantasy requiring vigilance, Diandra had delivered an explication of one of the firm’s recent cases that was worth three semesters of law school. No one commented on her intelligence. And no one had been in the least deceived by Otto’s tepid display of interest in her.

  “So,” Corinne had said in a loud and artificially genial tone as if she were speaking to an armed high-school student, “where did you and William meet, Otto?”

  The table fell silent; Otto looked out at the wolfish ring of faces.

  “On Third Avenue,” he said distinctly, and returned to his meal.

  “Sorry,” he said, as he and William climbed into the car afterward.

  “Sorry to have embarrassed you. Sorry to have shocked them. Sorry, sorry, sorry. But what was I supposed to say? All that completely fraudulent interest. The solicitude. The truth is, they’ve never sanctioned my way of life. Or, alternately, they’ve always sanctioned it.

  Oh, what on earth good is it to have a word that means only itself and its opposite!”

  Driving back to the city, through the assaultively scenic and demo-graphically uniform little towns, they were silent. William had witnessed; his power over Otto had been substantially increased by the preceding several hours, and yet he was exhibiting no signs of triumph. On the contrary, his habitual chipper mood was—where? Simply eclipsed. Otto glanced at him; no glance was returned.

  Back in the apartment, they sat for a while in the dark. Tears stung

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  Otto’s eyes and nose. He would miss William terribly. “It was a mistake,” he said.

  William gestured absently. “Well, we had to do it sooner or later.”

  We? We did? It was as if snow had begun to fall in the apartment—

  a gentle, chiming, twinkling snow. And sitting there, looking at one another silently, it became apparent that what each was facing was his future.

  Marvelous to watch William out in the garden, now with the late

  chrysanthemums. It was a flower Otto had never liked until William instructed him to look again. Well, all right, so it wasn’t a merry flower.

  But flowers could comfortably embrace a range of qualities, it seemed.

  And now, how Otto loved the imperial colors, the tensely arched blossoms, the cleansing scent that seemed dipped up from the pure well of winter, nature ’s ceremony of end and beginning.

  The flat little disk of autumn sun was retreating, high up over the neighbors’ buildings. As Otto gazed out the window, William straightened, shaded his eyes, waved, and bent back to work. Late in the year, William in the garden . . .

  Otto bought the brownstone when he and William had decided to

  truly move in together. Over twenty-five years ago, that was. The place was in disrepair and cost comparatively little at the time. While Otto hacked his way through the barbed thickets of intellectual property rights issues that had begun to spring up everywhere, struggling to disentangle tiny shoots of weak, drab good from vibrant, hardy evil, William worked in the garden and on the house. And to earn, as he insisted on doing, a modest living of his own, he proofread for a small company that published books about music. Eventually they rented out the top story of the brownstone, for a purely nominal sum, to Naomi, whom they’d met around the neighborhood and liked. It

  was nice to come home late and see her light on, to run into her on the stairs.

  She ’d been just a girl when she ’d moved in, really, nodding and smiling and ducking her head when she encountered them at the door or on

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  the way up with intractable brown paper bags, bulging as if they were full of cats but tufted with peculiar groceries—vegetables sprouting globular appendages and sloshing cartons of mysterious liquids. Then, farther along in the distant past, Margaret had appeared.

  Where there had been one in the market, at the corner bar, on the stairs, now there were two. Naomi, short and lively, given to boots and charming cowgirl skirts; tall, arrestingly bony Margaret with arched eyebrows and bright red hair. Now there were lines around Naomi’s eyes; she had widened and settled downward. One rarely recalled Margaret ’s early, sylvan loveliness.

  So long ago! Though it felt that way only at moments—when

  Otto passed by a mirror unprepared, or when he bothered to register the probable ages (in comparison with his own) of people whom—so recently!—he would have taken for contemporaries, or when he caught a glimpse of a middle-aged person coming toward him on the street who turned into William. Or sometimes when he thought of
Sharon.

  And right this moment, Naomi and Margaret were on their way

  back from China with their baby. The adoption went through! Naomi’s recent, ecstatic e-mail had announced. Adoption. Had the girls upstairs failed to notice that they had slid into their late forties?

  Sharon’s apartment looked, as always, as if it had been sealed up in some innocent period against approaching catastrophes. There were several blond wood chairs, and a sofa, all slipcovered in a nubby, unexceptionable fabric that suggested nuns’ sleepwear, and a plastic hassock. The simple, undemanding shapes of the furnishings portrayed the humility of daily life—or at least, Otto thought, of Sharon’s daily life. The Formica counter was blankly unstained, and in the cupboards there was a set of heavy, functional, white dishes.

  It was just possible, if you craned, and scrunched yourself properly, to glimpse through the window a corner of Sharon’s beloved planetar-ium, where she spent many of her waking hours; the light that made its way to the window around the encircling buildings was pale and tender, an elegy from a distant sun. Sharon herself sometimes seemed to Otto like an apparition from the past. As the rest of them aged, her small

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  frame continued to look like a young girl’s; her hair remained an infan-tine flaxen. To hold it back she wore bright, plastic barrettes.

  A large computer, a gift from Otto, sat in the living room, its screen permanently alive. Charts of the constellations were pinned to one of the bedroom walls, and on the facing wall were topographical maps.

  Peeking into the room, one felt as if one were traveling with Sharon in some zone between earth and sky; yes, down there, so far away—that was our planet.

  Why did he need so many things in his life, Otto wondered; why did all these things have to be so special? Special, beautiful plates; special, beautiful furniture; special, beautiful everything. And all that special-ness, it occurred to him, intended only to ensure that no one—especially himself—could possibly underestimate his value. Yet it actually served to illustrate how corroded he was, how threadbare his native resources, how impoverished his discourse with everything that lived and was human.