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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Sharon filled a teakettle with water and lit one of the stove burners.

  The kettle was dented, but oddly bright, as if she ’d just scrubbed it. “I’m thinking of buying a sculpture,” she said. “Nothing big. Sit down, Otto, if you’d like. With some pleasant vertical bits.”

  “Good plan,” Otto said. “Where did you find it?”

  “Find it?” she said. “Oh. It ’s a theoretical sculpture. Abstract in that sense, at least. Because I realized you were right.”

  About what? Well, it was certainly plausible that he had once idly said something about a sculpture, possibly when he ’d helped her find the place and move in, decades earlier. She remembered encyclopedi-cally her years of education, pages of print, apparently arbitrary details of their histories. And some trivial incident or phrase from their childhood might at any time fetch up from her mind and flop down in front of her, alive and thrashing.

  No, but it couldn’t be called “remembering” at all, really, could it?

  That simply wasn’t what people meant by “remembering.” No act of

  mind or the psyche was needed for Sharon to reclaim anything, because nothing in her brain ever sifted down out of precedence. The passage of time failed to distance, blur, or diminish her experiences. The nacre-

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  ous layers that formed around the events in one ’s history to smoothe, distinguish, and beautify them never materialized around Sharon’s; her history skittered here and there in its original sharp grains on a depthless plane that resembled neither calendar nor clock.

  “I just had the most intense episode of déjà vu,” William said, as if Otto’s thoughts had sideswiped him. “We were all sitting here—”

  “We are all sitting here,” Otto said.

  “But that’s what I mean,” William said. “It ’s supposed to be some kind of synaptic glitch, isn’t it? So you feel as if you’ve already had the experience just as you’re having it?”

  “In the view of many neurologists,” Sharon said. “But our under-

  standing of time is dim. It ’s patchy. We really don’t know to what degree time is linear, and under what circumstances. Is it actually, in fact, mani-fold? Or pleated? Is it frilly? And what is our relationship to it? Our relationship to it is extremely problematical.”

  “I think it ’s a fine idea for you to have a sculpture,” Otto said. “But I don’t consider it a necessity.”

  Her face was as transparent as a child ’s. Or at least as hers had been as a child, reflecting every passing cloud, rippling at the tiniest disturbance.

  And her smile! The sheer wattage—no one over eleven smiled like that.

  “We ’re using the teabag-in-the-cup method,” she said. “Greater scope for the exercise of free will, streamlined technology . . .”

  “Oh, goody,” William said. “Darjeeling.”

  Otto stared morosely at his immersed bag and the dark halo spreading from it. How long would Sharon need them to stay? When would

  she want them to go? It was tricky, weaving a course between what might cause her to feel rejected and what might cause her to feel embattled . . .

  Actually, though, how did these things work? Did bits of water escort bits of tea from the bag, or what? “How is flavor disseminated?” he said.

  “It has to do with oils,” Sharon said.

  Strange, you really couldn’t tell, half the time, whether someone was knowledgeable or insane. At school Sharon had shown an astounding talent for the sciences—for everything. For mathematics, especially.

  Her mind was so rarefied, so crystalline, so adventurous, that none of

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  the rest of them could begin to follow. She soared into graduate school, practically still a child; she was one of the few blessed people, it seemed, whose destiny was clear.

  Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the

  finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her asser-tions.

  A tremendous capacity for metaphor, Otto assumed it was; a tre-

  mendous sensitivity to the deep structures of the universe. Uncanny. It seemed no more likely that there would be human beings thus equipped than human beings born with satellite dishes growing out of their heads.

  He himself was so literal minded he couldn’t understand the simplest scientific or mathematical formulation. Plain old electricity, for example, with its amps and volts and charges and conductivity! Metaphors, pre-sumably—metaphors to describe some ectoplasmic tiger in the walls just spoiling to shoot through the wires the instant the cage door was opened and out into the bulb. And molecules! What on earth were people talking about? If the table was actually just a bunch of swarming motes, bound to one another by nothing more than some amicable commonality of

  form, then why didn’t your teacup go crashing through it?

  But from the time she was tiny, Sharon seemed to be in kindly, lighthearted communion with the occult substances that lay far within and far beyond the human body. It was all as easy for her as reading was for him. She was a creature of the universe. As were they all, come to think of it, though so few were privileged to feel it. And how hospitable and correct she ’d made the universe seem when she spoke of even its most rococo and farfetched attributes!

  The only truly pleasurable moments at the family dinner table

  were those rare occasions when Sharon would talk. He remembered

  one evening—she would have been in grade school. She was wearing

  a red sweater; pink barrettes held back her hair. She was speaking of

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  holes in space—holes in nothing! No, not in nothing, Sharon explained patiently—in space. And the others, older and larger, laid down their speared meat and listened, uncomprehending and entranced, as though to distant, wordless singing.

  Perhaps, Otto sometimes consoled himself, they could be forgiven

  for failing to identify the beginnings. How could the rest of them, with their ordinary intellects, have followed Sharon’s rapid and arcane speculations, her penetrating apperceptions, closely enough to identify with any certainty the odd associations and disjunctures that seemed to be showing up in her conversation? In any case, at a certain point as she wandered out among the galaxies, among the whirling particles and ineffable numbers, something leaked in her mind, smudging the text of the cosmos, and she was lost.

  Or perhaps, like a lightbulb, she was helplessly receptive to an overwhelming influx. She was so physically delicate, and yet the person to whom she was talking might take a step back. And she, in turn, could be crushed by the slightest shift in someone ’s expression or tone. It was as if the chemistry of her personality burned off the cushion of air between herself and others. Then one night she called, very late, to alert Otto to a newspaper article about the sorting of lettuces; if he were to give each letter its numerological value . . . The phone cord thrummed with her panic.

  When their taxi approached the hospital on that first occasion, Sharon was dank and electric with terror; her skin looked like wet plaster.

  Otto felt like an assassin as he led her in, and then she was ushered away somewhere. The others joined him in the waiting room, and after several hours had the opportunity to browbeat various doctors into hangdog temporizing. Many people got better, didn’t they, had only one episode, didn’t they, led fully functioning lives? Why wouldn’t Sharon be part of that statistic—she, who was so able, so lively, so sweet—so, in a word, healthy? When would she be all right?

  That depended on what they meant by “all right,” one of the doctors replied. �
�We mean by ‘all right’ what you mean by ‘all right,’ you squirrelly bastard,” Wesley had shouted, empurpling. Martin paced, sizzling and clicking through his teeth, while Otto sat with his head in his hands,

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  but the fateful, brutal, meaningless diagnosis had already been handed down.

  “I got a cake,” Sharon said. She glanced at Otto. “Oh. Was that

  appropriate?”

  “Utterly,” William said.

  Appropriate? What if the cake turned out to be decorated with invisible portents and symbols? What if it revealed itself to be invested with power? To be part of the arsenal of small objects—nail scissors, postage stamps, wrapped candies—that lay about in camouflage to fool the credulous doofus like himself just as they were winking their malevolent signals to Sharon?

  Or what if the cake was, after all, only an inert teatime treat? A cake required thought, effort, expenditure—all that on a negligible scale for most people, but in Sharon’s stripped and cautious life, nothing was negligible. A cake. Wasn’t that enough to bring one to one ’s knees? “Very appropriate,” Otto concurred.

  “Do you miss the fish?” Sharon said, lifting the cake from its box.

  Fish? Otto’s heart flipped up, pounding. Oh, the box, fish, nothing.

  “We brought them home from the dime store in little cardboard

  boxes,” she explained to William, passing the cake on its plate and a large knife over to him.

  “I had a hamster,” William said. The cake bulged resiliently around the knife.

  “Did it have to rush around on one of those things?” Sharon asked.

  “I think it liked to,” William said, surprised.

  “Let us hope so,” Otto said. “Of course it did.”

  “I loved the castles and the colored sand,” Sharon said. “But it was no life for a fish. We had to flush them down the toilet.”

  William, normally so fastidious about food, appeared to be happily eating his cake, which tasted, to Otto, like landfill. And William had brought Sharon flowers, which it never would have occurred to Otto to do.

  Why had lovely William stayed with disagreeable old him for all this time? What could possibly explain his appeal for William, Otto wondered?

  Certainly not his appearance, nor his musical sensitivity—middling at

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  best—nor, clearly, his temperament. Others might have been swayed by the money that he made so easily, but not William. William cared as little about that as did Otto himself. And yet, through all these years, William had cleaved to him. Or at least, usually. Most of the uncleavings, in fact, had been Otto’s—brief, preposterous seizures having to do with God knows what. Well, actually he himself would be the one to know what, wouldn’t he, Otto thought. Having to do with—who did know what? Oh, with fear, with flight, the usual. A bit of glitter, a mirage, a chimera . . . A lot of commotion just for a glimpse into his own life, the real one—a life more vivid, more truly his, than the one that was daily at hand.

  “Was there something you wanted to see me about?” Sharon asked.

  “Well, I just . . .” Powerful beams of misery intersected in Otto’s heart; was it true? Did he always have a reason when he called Sharon?

  Did he never drop in just to say hello? Not that anyone ought to “drop in” on Sharon. Or on anyone, actually. How barbarous.

  “Your brother’s here in an ambassadorial capacity,” William said.

  “I’m just here for the cake.”

  “Ambassadorial?” Sharon looked alarmed.

  “Oh, it ’s only Thanksgiving,” Otto said. “Corinne was hoping— I

  was hoping—”

  “Otto, I can’t. I just can’t. I don’t want to sit there being an exhibit of robust good health, or noncontaminatingness, or the triumph of the human spirit, or whatever it is that Corinne needs me to illustrate. Just tell them everything is okay.”

  He looked at his cake. William was right. This was terribly unfair.

  “Well, I don’t blame you,” he said. “I wouldn’t go myself, if I could get out of it.”

  “If you had a good enough excuse.”

  “I only—” But of course it was exactly what he had meant; he had meant that Sharon had a good enough excuse. “I’m—”

  “Tell Corinne I’m all right.”

  Otto started to speak again, but stopped.

  “Otto, please.” Sharon looked at her hands, folded in her lap. “It ’s all right.”

  *

  *

  *

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  “I’ve sometimes wondered if it might not be possible, in theory, to remember something that you—I mean the aspect of yourself that

  you’re aware of—haven’t experienced yet,” William said later. “I mean, we really don’t know whether time is linear, so—”

  “Would you stop that?” Otto said. “You’re not insane.”

  “I’m merely speaking theoretically.”

  “Well, don’t! And your memory has nothing to do with whether time is ‘really,’ whatever you mean by that, linear. It ’s plenty linear for us!

  Cradle to grave? Over the hill? It ’s a one-way street, my dear. My hair is not sometimes there and sometimes not there; we ’re not getting any younger.”

  At moments it occurred to Otto that what explained his appeal for William was the fact that they lived in the same apartment. That William was idiotically accepting, idiotically pliant. Perhaps William was so deficient in subtlety, so insensitive to nuance, that he simply couldn’t tell the difference between Otto and anyone else. “And, William—I wish you’d get back to your tennis.”

  “It ’s a bore. Besides, you didn’t want me playing with Jason, as I remember.”

  “Well, I was out of my mind. And at this point it ’s your arteries I worry about.”

  “You know,” William said and put his graceful hand on Otto’s arm.

  “I don’t think she ’s any more unhappy than the rest of us, really, most of the time. That smile! I mean, that smile can’t come out of nowhere.”

  There actually were no children to speak of. Corinne and Wesley’s

  “boys” put in a brief, unnerving appearance. When last seen, they had been surly, furtive, persecuted-looking, snickering, hulking, hairy adolescents, and now here they were, having undergone the miraculous transformation. How gratified Wesley must be! They had shed their egalitarian denim chrysalis and had risen up in the crisp, mean mantle of their class.

  The older one even had a wife, whom Corinne treated with a stricken, fluttery deference as if she were a suitcase full of weapons-grade plu-tonium. The younger one was restlessly on his own. When, early in the

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  evening the three stood and announced to Corinne with thuggish placid-ity that they were about to leave (“I’m afraid we ’ve got to shove off now, Ma”), Otto jumped to his feet. As he allowed his hand to be crushed, he felt the relief of a mayor watching an occupying power depart his city.

  Martin’s first squadron of children (Maureen’s) weren’t even mentioned. Who knew what army of relatives, step-relatives, half-relatives they were reinforcing by now. But there were—Otto shuddered faintly—Martin’s two newest (Laurie ’s). Yes, just as Corinne had said, they, too, were growing up. Previously indistinguishable wads of self-interest, they had developed perceptible features—maybe even characteristics; it appeared reasonable, after all, that they had been given names.

  What on earth was it that William did to get children to converse?

  Whenever Otto tried to have a civilized encounter with a child, the child just stood there with its finger in its nose. But Martin’s two boys were chattering away, showing off to William their whole heap of tiresome electronics.

  William was frowning with interest. He
poked at a keyboard, which sent up a shower of festive little beeps, and the boys flung themselves at him, cheering, while Laurie smiled meltingly. How times had changed.

  Not so many years earlier, such a tableau would have had handcuffs rattling in the wings.

  The only other representative of “the children” to whom Corinne

  had referred with such pathos, was Martin’s daughter, Portia (Viola’s).

  She ’d been hardly more than a toddler at last sight, though she now appeared to be about—what? Well, anyhow, a little girl. “What are the domestic arrangements?” Otto asked. “Is she living with Martin and Laurie these days, or is she with her mother?”

  “That crazy Viola has gone back to England, thank God; Martin has de facto custody.”

  “Speaking of Martin, where is he?”

  “I don’t ask,” Corinne said.

  Otto waited.

  “I don’t ask,” Corinne said again. “And if Laurie wants to share, she ’ll tell you herself.”

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  “Is Martin in the pokey already?” Otto asked.

  “This is not a joke, Otto. I’m sorry to tell you that Martin has been having an affair with some girl.”

  “Again?”

  Corinne stalled, elaborately adjusting her bracelet. “I’m sorry to tell you she ’s his trainer.”

  “His trainer? How can Martin have a trainer? If Martin has a trainer, what can explain Martin’s body?”

  “Otto, it ’s not funny,” Corinne said with ominous primness. “The fact is, Martin has been looking very good, lately. But of course you wouldn’t have seen him.”

  All those wives—and a trainer! How? Why would any woman put

  up with Martin? Martin, who always used to eat his dessert so slowly that the rest of them had been made to wait, squirming at the table, watching as he took his voluptuous, showy bites of chocolate cake or floating island long after they’d finished their own.