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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  He walked through the restaurant—smoky, noisy, and crowded—

  and asked for the reception desk. They sent him to the back of the lobby near the staircase, where behind a glass panel a superannuated blonde was sitting beneath a board full of keys. With difficulty, he obtained the key to the only room left.

  The girl, when she found herself alone, also threw off her role. She didn’t feel ill-humored, though, at finding herself in an unexpected town. She was so devoted to the young man that she never had doubts about anything he did, and confidently entrusted every moment of

  her life to him. On the other hand the idea once again popped into her mind that perhaps—just as she was now doing—other women had

  waited for her man in his car, those women he met on business trips.

  But surprisingly enough this idea didn’t upset her at all now; in fact, she smiled at the thought of how nice it was that today she was this other woman, this irresponsible, indecent other woman, one of those

  The Hitchhiking Game

  179

  women of whom she was so jealous; it seemed to her that she was

  cutting them all out, that she had learned how to use their weapons; how to give the young man what until now she had not known how to give him: lightheartedness, shamelessness, and dissoluteness; a curious feeling of satisfaction filled her, because she alone had the ability to be all women and in this way (she alone) could completely captivate her lover and hold his interest.

  The young man opened the car door and led the girl into the restaurant. Amid the din, the dirt, and the smoke he found a single unoccupied table in a corner.

  V I I

  “So how are you going to take care of me now?” asked the girl provocatively.

  “What would you like for an aperitif ?”

  The girl wasn’t too fond of alcohol, still she drank a little wine and liked vermouth fairly well. Now, however, she purposely said:

  “Vodka.”

  “Fine,” said the young man. “I hope you won’t get drunk on me.”

  “And if I do?” said the girl.

  The young man did not reply but called over a waiter and ordered

  two vodkas and two steak dinners. In a moment the waiter brought a tray with two small glasses and placed it in front of them.

  The man raised his glass, “To you!”

  “Can’t you think of a wittier toast?”

  Something was beginning to irritate him about the girl’s game; now sitting face-to-face with her, he realized that it wasn’t just the words that were turning her into a stranger, but that she had completely changed, the movements of her body and her facial expression, and that she unpalat-ably and faithfully resembled a type of woman he knew all too well and inspired some aversion in him.

  And so (holding his glass in his raised hand), he corrected his toast:

  “Okay, then I won’t drink to you, but to your kind, in which are com-

  180

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  bined so successfully the better qualities of the animal and the worse aspects of the human being.”

  “By ‘kind ’ do you mean all women?” asked the girl.

  “No, I mean only those who are like you.”

  “Anyway, it doesn’t seem very witty to me to compare a woman to

  an animal.”

  “Okay,” the young man was still holding his glass aloft, “then I won’t drink to your kind, but to your soul. Agreed? To your soul, which lights up when it descends from your head into your belly, and which goes out when it rises back up to your head.”

  The girl raised her glass. “Okay, to my soul, which descends into my belly.”

  “I’ll correct myself once more,” said the young man. “To your belly, into which your soul descends.”

  “To my belly,” said the girl, and her belly (now that they had named it specifically) seemed to respond to the call; she could feel every bit of its skin.

  Then the waiter brought their steaks, and the young man ordered

  them another vodka and some soda water (this time they drank to the girl’s breasts), and the conversation continued in this peculiar, frivolous tone. It irritated the young man more and more to see how well his girlfriend knew how to behave like a loose woman; if she was able to do it so well, he thought, it meant that she really was like that; after all, no alien soul had entered into her from somewhere in space; what she was acting now was she herself; perhaps it was that part of her being that had formerly been locked up and that the pretext of the game had let out of its cage. Perhaps the girl supposed that by means of the game she was disowning herself, but wasn’t it the other way around? Wasn’t she becoming herself only through the game? Wasn’t she freeing herself through the game? No, sitting opposite him was not a strange woman in his girl’s body; it was his girl, herself, no one else. He looked at her and felt growing aversion toward her.

  However, it was not only aversion. The more the girl withdrew from him psychically, the more he longed for her physically; the alienation of her soul drew attention to her body; yes it turned her body into a body;

  The Hitchhiking Game

  181

  as if until now it had been hidden from the young man within clouds of compassion, tenderness, concern, love, and emotion, as if it had been lost in these clouds (yes, as if this body had been lost!). It seemed to the young man that today he was seeing his girl’s body for the first time.

  After her third vodka and soda the girl got up and said flirtatiously:

  “Excuse me.”

  The young man said, “May I ask you where you are going, miss?”

  “To piss, if you’ll permit me,” said the girl, and she walked off between the tables back toward the plush curtain.

  V I I I

  She was pleased with the way she had astounded the young man with this word, which—in spite of all its innocence—he had never heard from her; nothing seemed to her truer to the character of the woman she was playing than this flirtatious emphasis placed on the word in question; yes, she was pleased, she was in the best of moods; the game captivated her. It allowed her to what she had not felt until now: a feeling of happy-go-lucky irresponsibility.

  She who was always uneasy in advance about her every next step,

  suddenly felt completely relaxed. The alien life in which she had become involved was a life without shame, without biographical specifications, without past or future, without obligations; it was a life that was extraordinarily free. The girl, as a hitchhiker, could do anything: Everything was permitted her; she could say, do, and feel whatever she liked.

  She walked through the room and was aware that people were watch-

  ing her from all the tables; it was also a new sensation, one she didn’t recognize: indecent joy caused by her body. Until now she had never been able to get rid of the fourteen-year-old girl within herself who was ashamed of her breasts and had the disagreeable feeling that she was indecent, because they stuck out from her body and were visible. Even though she was proud of being pretty and having a good figure, this feeling of pride was always immediately curtailed by shame; she rightly suspected that feminine beauty functioned above all as sexual provocation, and she

  182

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  found this distasteful; she longed for her body to relate only to the man she loved; when men stared at her breasts in the street it seemed to her that they were invading a piece of her most secret privacy that should belong only to herself and her lover. But now she was the hitchhiker, the woman without a destiny. In this role she was relieved of the tender bonds of her love and began to be intensely aware of her body; and her body became more aroused the more alien the eyes watching it.

  She was walking past the last table when an intoxicated man, wanting to show off his worldliness, addressed her in French: “Combien, mademoiselle? ”

  The girl understood. She thrust out her breasts and
fully experienced every movement of her hips, then disappeared behind the curtain.

  I X

  It was a peculiar game. This peculiarity was evidenced, for example, by the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting; he saw his girl seducing a strange man, and he had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him); he had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.

  This was all the worse because he worshiped rather than loved her; it had always seemed that the girl had reality only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds it simply didn’t exist; beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point. When he now saw her crossing this hor-rifying boundary with nonchalant elegance, he was filled with anger.

  The girl came back from the rest room and complained: “A guy over there asked me: ‘Combien, mademoiselle?’ ”

  “Don’t be surprised!” said the young man. “You look like a whore.”

  “Do you know that it doesn’t bother me in the least?”

  The Hitchhiking Game

  183

  “Then you should go with the gentleman!”

  “But I have you.”

  “You can join him later. Go and work out something with him.”

  “I don’t find him attractive.”

  “But in principle you have nothing against it, having several men in one night.”

  “Why not? If they’re good-looking.”

  “Do you prefer them one after the other or at the same time?”

  “Either way,” said the girl.

  The conversation was proceeding to still greater enormities; it shocked the girl slightly, but she couldn’t protest. Even in a game there lurks a lack of freedom; even a game is a trap for the players. If this had not been a game and they had really been two strangers, the hitchhiker could long ago have taken offense and left; but there ’s no escape from a game. A team cannot flee before the end of the match, chess pieces cannot desert the chessboard, the boundaries of the playing field are impassable. The girl knew that she had to accept whatever form the game might take, just because it was a game. She knew that the more extreme the game became, the more it would be a game and the more obediently she would have to play it. And it was futile to evoke good sense and warn her dazed soul that she must keep her distance from the game and not take it seriously. Just because it was only a game her soul was not afraid, did not oppose the game, and sank deeper into it as if drugged.

  The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: “We ’re going.”

  “Where to?” The girl feigned surprise.

  “Don’t ask, just come on,” said the young man.

  “Is that any way to talk to me?”

  “It ’s the way I talk to whores.”

  X

  They went up the badly lit staircase. On the landing below the second floor a group of intoxicated men was standing near the rest room. The

  184

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  young man caught hold of the girl from behind so that he was holding her breast with his hand. The men by the rest room saw this and began to call out. The girl wanted to break away, but the young man yelled at her:

  “Keep still!” The men greeted this with general ribaldry and addressed several dirty remarks to the girl. The young man and the girl reached the second floor. He opened the door of their room and switched on the light.

  It was a narrow room with two beds, a small table, a chair, and a washbasin. The young man locked the door and turned to the girl. She was standing facing him in a defiant pose with insolent sensuality in her eyes. He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images super-imposed one on the other with one showing through the other. These two images showing through each other were telling him that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage. Both images continued to show through each other, and the young man understood that the girl differed only on the surface from other women, but deep down was the same as they: full of all possible thoughts, feelings, and vices, which justified all his secret misgivings and fits of jealousy. The impression that certain outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion to which the other person, the one who was looking, was subject—namely himself.

  It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly other, hopelessly alien, hopelessly polymorphous. He hated her.

  “What are you waiting for? Strip!” he said.

  The girl flirtatiously bent her head and said: “Is it necessary?”

  The tone in which she said this seemed to him very familiar; it seemed to him that once long ago some other woman had said this to him, only he no longer knew which one. He longed to humiliate her. Not the hitch-

  The Hitchhiking Game

  185

  hiker, but his own girl. The game merged with life. The game of humiliating the hitchhiker became only a pretext for humiliating his girl. The young man had forgotten that he was playing a game. He simply hated the woman standing in front of him. He stared at her and drew a fifty-crown bill from his wallet. He offered it to the girl. “Is that enough?”

  The girl took the fifty crowns and said: “You don’t think I’m worth much.”

  The young man said: “You aren’t worth more.”

  The girl nestled up against the young man. “You can’t get around me like that. You have to be nicer. You have to make an effort!”

  She put her arms around him and moved her mouth toward his. He

  put his fingers on her mouth and gently pushed her away. He said: “I only kiss women I love.”

  “And you don’t love me?”

  “No.”

  “Who do you love?”

  “What ’s that got to do with you? Strip!”

  X I

  She had never undressed like this before. The shyness, the feeling of inner panic, the dizziness, all that she had always felt when undressing in front of the young man (and she couldn’t hide in the darkness), all this was gone. She was standing in front of him self-confident, insolent, bathed in light, and astonished at her sudden discovery of the gestures, heretofore unknown to her, of a slow, provocative striptease. She took in his glances, slipping off each piece of clothing with a caressing movement and enjoying each individual stage of this exposure.

  But then suddenly she was standing in front of him completely

  naked, and at this moment it flashed through her head that now the whole game would end, that since she had stripped off her clothes, she had also stripped away her dissimulation, and that being naked meant that she was now herself and the young man ought to come up to her

  186

  m y m i s t r e s s ’ s s pa r r o w i s d e a d

  now and make a gesture with which he would wipe out everything and after which would follow only their most intimate lovemaking. So she stood naked in front of the young man and at that moment stopped playing the game. She felt embarrassed, and on her face appeared the smile that really belonged to her: a shy and confused smile.

  But the young man didn’t come to her and didn’t end the game. He

  didn’t notice the familiar smile; he saw before him only the beautiful, alien body of his own girl, whom he hated. Hatred cleansed his se
nsuality of any sentimental coating. She wanted to come to him, but he said:

  “Stay where you are, I want to have a good look at you.” Now he longed only to treat her as a whore. But the young man had never had a whore, and the ideas he had about them came from literature and hearsay. So he turned to these ideas and the first thing he recalled was the image of a woman in black underwear (and black stockings) dancing on the shiny top of a piano. In the little hotel room there was no piano, there was only a small table, covered with a linen cloth, leaning against the wall. He ordered the girl to climb up on it. The girl made a pleading gesture, but the young man said: “You’ve been paid.”

  When she saw the look of unshakable obsession in the young man’s eyes, she tried to go on with the game, even though she no longer could and no longer knew how. With tears in her eyes she climbed onto the table. The top was scarcely a yard square and one leg was a little bit shorter than the others, so that standing on it the girl felt unsteady.

  But the young man was pleased with the naked figure now towering

  above him, and the girl’s ashamed uncertainty merely inflamed his imperiousness. He wanted to see her body in all positions and from all sides, as he imagined other men had seen it and would see it. He was vulgar and lascivious. He used words she had never heard from him before. She wanted to refuse, she wanted to be released from the game. She called him by his first name, but he immediately yelled at her that she had no right to address him so intimately. And so eventually in confusion and on the verge of tears, she obeyed, she bent forward and crouched according to the young man’s wishes, gave a military salute, and then wiggled her hips as she did the twist for him; during a slightly more violent move-

  The Hitchhiking Game

  187

  ment, when the cloth slipped beneath her feet and she nearly fell, the young man caught her and dragged her to the bed.

  He had intercourse with her. She was glad that at least now finally the unfortunate game would end and they would again be the two people they had been before and would love each other. She wanted to press her mouth against his. But the young man pushed her head away and repeated that he only kissed women he loved. She burst into loud sobs. But she wasn’t even allowed to cry, because the young man’s furious passion gradually won over her body, which then silenced the complaint of her soul. On the bed there were soon two bodies in perfect harmony, two sensual bodies alien to each other. This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love.