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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Hilda is worried about you and wants to fix you up with a cousin of hers from Brooklyn.

  Ask wearily: “What ’s his name?”

  She looks at you, frowning. “Mark. He ’s a banker. And what the hell kind of attitude is that?”

  Mark orders you a beer in a Greek coffee shop near the movie theater.

  “So, you’re a secretary.”

  Squirm and quip: “More like a sedentary,” and look at him in sur-

  prise and horror when he guffaws and snorts way too loudly.

  Say: “Actually, what I really should have been is a dancer. Everybody has always said that.”

  Mark smiles. He likes the idea of you being a dancer.

  Look at him coldly. Say: “No, nobody has ever said that. I just made it up.”

  All through the movie you forget to read the subtitles, thinking

  instead about whether you should sleep with Mark the banker. Glance at him out of the corner of your eye. In the dark, his profile seems important and mysterious. Sort of. He catches you looking at him and turns and winks at you. Good god. He seems to be investing something in all

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  of this. Bankers. Sigh. Stare straight ahead. Decide you just don’t have the energy, the interest.

  “I saw somebody else.”

  “Oh?”

  “A banker. We went to a Godard movie.”

  “Well . . . good.”

  “Good?”

  “I mean for you, Charlene. You should be doing things like that once in a while.”

  “Yeah. He ’s real rich.”

  “Did you have fun?”

  “No.”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  “No.”

  He kisses you, almost gratefully, on the ear. Fidget. Twitch. Lie. Say:

  “I mean, yes.”

  He nods. Looks away. Says nothing.

  Cut up an old calendar into week-long strips. Place them around your kitchen floor, a sort of bar graph on the linoleum, representing the number of weeks you have been a mistress: thirteen. Put X’s through all the national holidays.

  Go out for a walk in the cold. Three little girls hanging out on the stoop are laughing and calling to strange men on the street. “Hi! Hi, Mister!” Step around them. Think: They have never had orgasms.

  A blonde woman in barrettes passes you in stockinged feet, holding her shoes.

  There are things you have to tell him.

  clients to see

  1. This affair is demeaning.

  2. Violates decency. Am I just some scampish tart, some tartish

  scamp?

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  3. No emotional support here.

  4. Why do you never say “I love you” or “Stay in my arms forever my little tadpole” or “Your eyes set me on fire my sweet nubkin?”

  The next time he phones, he says: “I was having a dream about you and suddenly I woke up with a jerk and felt very uneasy.”

  Say: “Yeah, I hate to wake up with jerks.”

  He laughs, smooth, beautiful, and tenor, making you feel warm

  inside of your bones. And it hits you; maybe it all boils down to this: people will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.

  Don’t lose your resolve. Fumble for your list. Sputter things out as convincingly as possible.

  Say: “I suffer indignities at your hands. And agonies of duh feet. I don’t know why I joke. I hurt.”

  “That is why.”

  “What?”

  “That is why.”

  “But you don’t really care.” Wince. It sounds pitiful.

  “But I do.”

  For some reason this leaves you dumbfounded.

  He continues: “You know my situation . . . or maybe you don’t.”

  Pause. “What can I do, Charlene? Stand on my goddamned head?”

  Whisper: “Please. Stand on your goddamned head.”

  “It is ten o’clock,” he says. “I’m coming over. We need to talk.”

  What he has to tell you is that Patricia is not his wife. He is separated from his wife; her name is Carrie. You think of a joke you heard once: What do you call a woman who marries a man with no arms and no legs?

  Carrie. Patricia is the woman he lives with.

  “You mean, I’m just another one of the fucking gang?”

  He looks at you, puzzled. “Charlene, what I’ve always admired

  about you, right from when I first met you, is your strength, your independence.”

  Say: “That line is old as boots.”

  Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out.

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  At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp.

  Slam the door like Bette Davis.

  Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slow-ing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

  At Karma-Kola the days are peg-legged and aimless, collapsing into one another with the comic tedium of old clowns, nowhere fast.

  In April you get a raise. Celebrate by taking Hilda to lunch at the Plaza.

  Write for applications to graduate schools.

  Send Mark the banker a birthday card.

  Take long walks at night in the cold. The blonde in barrettes scuttles timelessly by you, still carrying her shoes. She has cut her hair.

  He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of the Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: “Fine.”

  y o u r s

  m a ry r o b i s o n

  Allison struggled away from her white Renault, limping with the

  weight of the last of the pumpkins. She found Clark in the twilight on the twig- and leaf-littered porch, behind the house. He wore a tan wool shawl. He was moving up and back in a cushioned glider, pushed by the ball of his slippered foot.

  Allison lowered a big pumpkin and let it rest on the porch floor.

  Clark was much older than she—seventy-eight to Allison’s thirty-

  five. They had been married for four months. They were both quite tall, with long hands, and their faces looked something alike. Allison wore a natural-hair wig. It was a thick blonde hood around her face. She was dressed in bright-dyed denims today. She wore durable clothes, usually, for she volunteered afternoons at a children’s day-care center.

  She put one of the smaller pumpkins on Clark’s long lap. “Now,

  nothing surreal,” she told him. “Carve just a regular face. These are for kids.”

  In the foyer, on the Hepplewhite desk, Allison found the maid ’s

  chore list, with its cross-offs, which included Clark’s supper. Allison went quickly through the day’s mail: a garish coupon packet, a flyer advertising white wines at Jamestown Liquors, November’s pay-TV program guide, and—the worst thing, the funniest—an already

  opened, extremely unkind letter from Clark’s married daughter, up North. “You’re an old fool,” Allison read, and “You’re being cruelly deceived.” There was a gift check for twenty-five dollars, made out to Clark, enclosed—his birthday had just passed—but it was uncashable.

  It was signed “Jesus H. Christ.”

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  Late, late into this night, Allison and Clark gutted and carved the pumpkins together, at an old table set out on the back porch. They worked over newspaper after soggy newspaper, using paring knives and spoons and a Swiss Army knife Clark liked for the exact shaping of teeth and eyes and nostrils. Clark had been a doctor—an internist—but he was also a Sunday watercolor paint
er. His four pumpkins were expressive and artful. Their carved features were suited to the sizes and shapes of the pumpkins. Two looked ferocious and jagged. One registered surprise. The last was serene and beaming.

  Allison’s four faces were less deftly drawn, with slits and areas of distortion. She had cut triangles for noses and eyes. The mouths she had made were all just wedges—two turned up and two turned down.

  By one A.M., they were finished. Clark, who had bent his long torso forward to work, moved over to the glider again and looked out sleepily at nothing. All the neighbors’ lights were out across the ravine. For the season and time, the Virginia night was warm. Most of the leaves had fallen and blown away already, and the trees stood unbothered. The moon was round, above them.

  Allison cleaned up the mess.

  “Your jack-o’-lanterns are much much better than mine,” Clark said to her.

  “Like hell,” Allison said.

  “Look at me,” Clark said, and Allison did. She was holding a squishy bundle of newspapers. The papers reeked sweetly with the smell of pumpkin innards. “Yours are far better,” he said.

  “You’re wrong. You’ll see when they’re lit,” Allison said.

  She went inside, came back with yellow vigil candles. It took her a while to get each candle settled into a pool of its own melted wax inside the jack-o’-lanterns, which were lined up in a row on the porch railing. Allison went along and relit each candle and fixed the pumpkin lids over the little flames. “See?” she said. They sat together a moment and looked at the orange faces.

  “We ’re exhausted. It ’s good-night time,” Allison said. “Don’t blow out the candles. I’ll put in new ones tomorrow.”

  In her bedroom, a few weeks earlier in her life than had been pre-

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  dicted, she began to die. “Don’t look at me if my wig comes off,” she told Clark. “Please.” Her pulse cords were fluttering under his fingers.

  She raised her knees and kicked away the comforter. She said something to Clark about the garage being locked.

  At the telephone, Clark had a clear view out back and down to the porch. He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.

  Clark was speaking into the phone now. He watched the jack-o’-

  lanterns. The jack-o’-lanterns watched him.

  t h e b a d t h i n g

  dav i d gat e s

  He has never hit me, and only once or twice in our two years has he raised his voice in anger. Even in bed Steven is gentle. To a fault.

  Why, then, am I wary of him? Obvious. Well, so if you’re wary of him, what are you doing here? Also obvious. For one thing, I have his baby inside me.

  Ye gods, his baby. I think of it that way because he and Marilyn never had children, and what other chance is he going to get? But it ’s not his baby, of course, nor mine. The baby is its own baby. I think of it as a girl, because the idea of a tiny man inside me is, is, is what? Repulsive, I was going to say, though sometimes I think, A little man, yes, squeezed out into the world to do my will. But at other times I pray, Dear God, if You’ve made it a boy, go back, in Your time-scrunching omnipotence, and re-do the instant of its conception. Not forgetting to add, If it be Thy will. You know, the kind of thing God does all the time, going back and changing what His will is.

  So I’m trying to take it as it comes; even that seems wildly ambitious.

  Two days ago, after Steven had finished working and I’d come to a stopping place, we climbed the hill up behind Carl’s house until we reached the power line. Steven put on his skis, I put on the snowshoes he bought me.

  I’m not to ski anymore, until after. Another thing I’m not to do is address Carl Porter as Carl; Steven sees it as a class thing. Slipping along by my side, he praised my walking in the snowshoes. “Big deal,” I said. “You put one foot in front of the other.” “Ah, but that,” he said, raising his index finger, “is ofttimes the hardest lesson of all.” Big joke with Steven is to intone fake profundities, raising his index finger to make sure you see he ’s kidding. I thought, Right, I’m learning that. Being married to you.

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  Oh, I know, bad. You should be reaching out to him.

  Been tried, honey.

  Like our first night in this house. We ’d both learned—not from each other; we ’ve both been around the block—that the big moments you plan never work, so we decided against the French restaurant two towns over with the forty-dollar prix fixe dinner, and went to the diner on 28.

  We took a booth, ordered pancakes and sausage and sat waiting for the modest magic by which the everyday becomes precious. Steven flipped page after page of jukebox selections, fingering the little metal tabs at the bottom. The country songs in green. Then he flipped back through in the other direction.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Zip. Unless you want to hear fucking Randy

  Travis.”

  By this I understood that I was not to want to hear Randy Travis.

  I put a hand on his. “Something’s worrying you,” I said.

  “Don’t,” he said, pulling his hand out from under. I saw tears come up and fill his eyes.

  “What?” I said. “Talk to me.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve heard the same shit forty-eight times,”

  he said. “Maybe the pills will help.”

  Forty-eight was one of his numbers I hadn’t heard before. Usually they were round and overwhelming, like fifty thousand ( I’ve done fifty thousand of these fucking children’s books) or ten million ( Ten million fucking fax machines at fucking J&R, and I get the one that craps out). Afterward I thought about it. Forty-eight was how old he ’d be in June. When his first child would be born. Oh, but Steven was such a complex man; could it possibly be that simple? One thing that might help: to get my contempt under control. Since he doesn’t seem to be doing much about his.

  Now that would be a mood drug I could get behind.

  We moved up here for the beauty and the quiet, and so we ’d each

  have a workroom. It ’s all so postindustrial: no need anymore to be bodily on Lexington Avenue from ten to six. Up here I’d be able to take my job lightly and my work seriously—as seriously as Steven takes his.

  But needless to say.

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  Yesterday we had to go to Oneonta for groceries. It had started

  snowing in the morning; when we got back, it was still coming down and we couldn’t get up the driveway. He insisted on trying to shovel—

  after making three trips all the way up to the house with the stuff, which he wouldn’t let me help with. I told him forget it, come inside, we ’ll drink tea and get snowed in. Thinking, actually, of some Rémy in the tea—what he ’s taking is one of the new anything-goes antidepres-sants—and stretching out by the pellet stove, our feet together under the shiny maroon comforter. And so on. We ’ll get Carl to plow us out in the morning, I said. He said I treated the locals like old family retainers. Which was so uncalled-for when for once I was trying to take some care of him. He was already pale and sweating, and his chest was heaving. I went into the bathroom and cried, then washed my face. When he came in, looking even worse, he found me sipping tea (with Rémy) and reading Mirabella. Or, rather, staring at the pages and feeling put-upon because now that I’d cut myself out of the loop, I would never design anything but monthly newsletters and annual reports. Bitch, I’m sure he thought, and clomped upstairs.

  When it got dark, I opened a can of soup. Then I stopped bothering with the tea and drank myself pretty nearly to sleep. Just managed to get up the stairs. Then woke up, of course, at two in the morning, mouth
dry, head killing me. I went to the bathroom to pee and get a drink of water and some aspirin, and heard the music still going in Steven’s workroom—his damn Louis Armstrong—and saw a line of golden

  light along the bottom of his door. Inside was the Kingdom of Art, from which I’d been exiled. I crept back to bed like a dirty animal.

  Sneaking around a dark house at night: just like old times.

  When I was twenty-two, my boyfriend and I shared a big old farm-

  house in Rhode Island with his best friend and the best friend ’s girlfriend, and once a week or so I would leave Dalton in bed and make my way down the creaky stairs to find Tod waiting on the sofa. He would be drunk, having got Kathleen drunk enough to put her to sleep, and not gentle with me; I would have put Dalton to sleep by fucking him as sweetly as I knew how. More sweetly than I know how anymore. But

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  saving my orgasm for Tod. Knowing it was of no value to him, except as proof that he could make me do it when Dalton couldn’t. Though of course Dalton could. And I didn’t always save it.

  It started in the summer, one morning when Tod and I were alone in the house. He asked if I wanted coffee, then ran his index finger down my bare arm (me in that blue sundress with the yellow flowers, him in blue jeans and a T-shirt I couldn’t imagine how he kept so white) and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we put the horns on Dalton?” The horns.

  What more did I need to know? And yet. I heard two voices in my head, talking at me as I stood there in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room: my own voice saying This is bad for you and a man’s voice saying Do what I say. I narrowed my eyes, trying to hear which was right, and I could picture myself as Tod saw me, looking intense and tempted. This is a beautiful boy, said another voice, a voice that wished me ill, who knows how to touch you.

  Did I simply have bad character, or was I a strong young woman

  going after what she wanted and willing to pay the price? Though how strong were you really if you couldn’t, finally, get it? One thing I promised myself, I would never again let myself in for this kind of humiliation. When Tod finally dumped me, I did the one bit of bitchy damage I could: I said I’d always known the real romance was between him and Dalton. I hope he still hears me saying that in his head.