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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  It was a mistake to have shown Tod’s picture to Steven. At the time, I thought I was doing it to leave nothing unshared. But actually it must ’ve been to put him on notice: that once I had been desired by a beautiful blond boy. Tod ’s beauty was a means of convincing Steven that I was beautiful. (How fucked up is that?) I’m sure Steven thought it was more evidence of my bad taste, to have been attracted to the merely beautiful.

  As if it had never happened to him. Now, there ’s another thing we were never going to do: marry a man who wasn’t on speaking terms with his own desires.

  I woke up again at seven and came down and fixed myself a tray with coffee and a bowl of Count Chocula. Steven loves the Grand Union in Oneonta—when we lived in the city he refused to shop in supermar-

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  kets—and every week he selects another brand of sugared-out kiddie cereal. “I was raised on fucking puffed rice,” he said the first time he placed a box of Cap’n Crunch in the cart. “This is a quiet man’s rebellion.” I don’t generally eat this stuff, but I had to get something in my stomach immediately. I brought the tray up to my workroom and turned on the computer. Out the window, I saw a white cloud issuing from the tailpipe of Carl Porter’s empty truck, so I picked up the phone. “You didn’t need to ask, Mrs. Sturdivant,” he said. “I meant to do you first thing.” Lovely man.

  Listening to his truck humming and rumbling as he plowed the driveway, I ate the cereal and looked over the pages I’d laid out yesterday, telling myself that one bowl of Count Chocula wasn’t so irresponsible; they probably spray the stuff with vitamins. And only then did it hit me what I’d done last night: got stinking drunk while four months pregnant.

  Four months: what did that mean in terms of how major a birth defect might be? Wouldn’t it be more major the earlier you did the bad thing?

  I pictured a bullet, fired at conception: deflect that bullet almost at the target and it would miss by only a little, but deflect it early on and it would veer off wide. Four months. That was less than halfway there.

  I slid from my chair to my knees and prayed, Dear God, since I did it without thinking, please don’t let it count. Just the kind of prayer God likes to hear. Oh, right, If it be Thy will. I listened down into my body to try to discern any damage, any change from yesterday. Nothing. Oh, God.

  Well, we just wouldn’t think about this. But what if Steven looked at the bottle? I remembered him saying, I want to make a baby with you. I know you must think I’ve said everything before to somebody else, but this is a first.

  A first. He actually said that.

  The thing to do was to hop in the car and go buy a pint of Rémy to get the level back up—put anything else in there and Steven would instantly taste something wrong—then hide the empty. But it was twenty miles to Oneonta, the nearest liquor store classy enough to stock the stuff. And it was seven-thirty in the morning.

  At nine-thirty I started down to make more coffee. Still another thing I wasn’t to do, drink more than a half cup a day, but I absolutely had to

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  finish the last six pages this afternoon without fail, and I had nodded out staring at the screen. I was looking at this one page, trying to care whether or not the vertical picture should be moved to the right and the pullquote brought down to compensate, and then I seemed to be at a performance of Hamlet, I think it was—and I suppose it’s a rule with dreams that if you think it was, it was—and my dress was too tight on me and I wanted to go to the ladies’ room and let out the waist. All pretty obvious. But before going down the stairs I stopped and eased open the bedroom door with my fingertips. Steven, in pajamas, was clutching my pillow, his mouth gaping. His hair looked damp; he must ’ve taken a shower before coming to bed. It made me sad that I’d never known him when his hair was all black. I tried to think what his life must be like—a first?—but I really couldn’t see that anything was so terrible.

  I’d never been able to take seriously enough the Central Tragedy, which was that he ’d never become, I don’t know, Jackson Pollock or whoever he ’d wanted to be when he was eighteen.

  Back in my workroom, I drank the fresh coffee and stared at that

  page. This was a simple decision. Which I still couldn’t make. I got up again and went down the hall to Steven’s workroom. So cold when I opened the door: the window wide open. He ’d finished another illustration. How could I have thought one of my little moods would slow the march of his work? Last night ’s production was a peasant family standing by a cottage. The cover from The Forest Is Crying was sandwiched in my cookbook stand, and he ’d spattered paint on the Plexiglas.

  So that was where he ’d gotten the woman peasant ’s colorful costume; the man peasant and the little boy he ’d put in brown shirts and trousers and clumpy boots. There was something familiar about the landscape, too. Then I spotted the Edward Hopper book on the floor. Aha: the thatched-roof cottage was that Mobil station, and the peasant family stood in place of the round-headed gas pumps. He ’d done it well, what else was new. I’d said my piece about this new phase when he showed me the first one, for which he ’d used a Currier & Ives print of a man knife-fighting a rearing grizzly. “Oh, please,” he said. “This is an hom-mage.” Learn a new word, Paula. Then, probably because he realized he was being a pompous ass, he went into one of his pompous-ass parodies.

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  “Think of this bear,” he said, “not as a bear, but as Old Man Depression.

  The gallant mountain man? Yours truly.” He inclined his head. “And behind the tree here”—he pointed to a second man, who was aiming

  a gun at the bear—“Dr. Seibert and his magic bullet.” He ’d only been taking the pills for a couple of days at this point. He gave his snorting laugh, the one that means I hate myself.

  Even with this fresh cold air, I smelled cigarette smoke. In the wastebasket, under a crumpled page of a sketch pad, I found butts, ashes and burned-out matches. I counted the butts. Sixteen. So he was back at it with a vengeance. How had I not picked up the smell off him? Ah: wet hair.

  Paula Wilson-Sturdivant, girl detective.

  It ’s one of my amusements up here. The other morning I was unpacking a box of PAPERS & MISC when I looked out the window and saw him in the backyard by the old oil drum where the people who’d lived here had burned their trash. Steven, who puts the caps from toothpaste tubes in with the number-two plastics to be recycled—I swear—was

  touching a match to a big sheet of paper and thrusting it from him as flames leaped up. “Just a particularly lousy piece of work,” he said when he came in. I said the obvious: if it had bothered him enough to burn it, it must ’ve had something he could use. He asked if I was reverting to hippiedom, saying it in a way I was supposed to think was only kidding.

  So when he left to go get the mail, I went out to the barrel. But he ’d even smashed up the ashes.

  Around one this afternoon, I heard Steven go downstairs. The upstairs bathroom is right over the kitchen, and there ’s a grate in the floor for heat to come up. I tiptoed into the bathroom and knelt to watch. I could see a corner of the stove and most of the sink, where I’d put the filter basket with soiled filter and spent coffee grounds still in it. I saw him pick it up; his shoulders rose and fell, a martyr’s sigh.

  I printed out my pages and went downstairs. He was lying on the sofa reading The Pickwick Papers. The last time he went on one of his reading binges, it lasted for over a month. This was back in the city. He got

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  through seven Dickens novels and blew off an album cover that would have paid him three thousand dollars. He told them he ’d been mugged and his arm was in a cast. “But what if you run into one of them?” I’d said. He ’d said, “I don’t plan to be going out.”

  “Good morning,” I said. I didn’t me
an it as a bitchy way of saying it was already afternoon; it just came out. “Listen, I have to run over to Oneonta to the stationery store. You need anything from the outside world?”

  “Am I not invited?” he said.

  “Of course,” I said. “Sure. You just looked so comfortable.” How could I do what I needed to do at the liquor store with him along?

  “The master of illusion,” he said.

  “How’s the book?”

  He shrugged. “Reads about the same as last time.”

  “No, I mean the wolf book.” The children’s book he ’s working on is about a lost wolf cub, which is adopted by a peasant family but finally returns to the forest to be with its own kind. The crap he ’s handed is not his fault.

  “Oh, the book,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?” This, I guessed, was meant as a lighthearted peace overture. “Good,” he said. “Rockin’

  right along.”

  I tried to think of a delicate way to find out if he was on the verge of another Dickens thing. Finally I said, “When do they want them by?”

  “What ’s today?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Thursday,” he said. “So, a week from tomorrow. Not a problem.

  Barring a sudden coffee shortage.”

  What about a cigarette shortage? I thought. He ’d gone through nearly a pack last night. How could he be lying there not jumping out of his skin? Why would he want to come with me to Oneonta instead of trying to hustle me out of here so he could smoke? Then I got it. He must have run out, and at some point he would excuse himself to do an “errand.”

  With any luck, he ’d take long enough for me to get to the liquor store.

  But wait: if he hustled me out of here, he could just walk down to Webster’s. I didn’t get it.

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  “I was looking through this,” he said, “to see if there was anything in the Seymour stuff I could use. I always thought Phiz was way overrated, and I sort of wanted to give old Seymour a tip of the Hatlo hat.

  You know the story, right?”

  “What story?” I said, obediently.

  “Okay, Seymour was the first illustrator on the book—see, Dickens was just this young guy they hired to crank out text. But in the middle of the thing Seymour kills himself, and they got some bozo to fill in for a couple of weeks or whatever and then they found Phiz. Look at this, this is the last thing Seymour did.”

  It was an ugly picture of a dying man on a bed.

  “Why did he kill himself ?” I said.

  “Got me,” he said. “I know Dickens sort of ran roughshod over him, which I guess didn’t help matters. But I think it was just, you know, his life.”

  He got up and located his boots, his checkbook, the car keys, his red plaid hat. “Carl plow the driveway?” he said, peering out the kitchen window as he zipped up his red plaid jacket over his down vest. “Did a great job.” As we walked out the door, he handed me the keys.

  In Oneonta, he came into the stationery store with me; while I

  bought a ream of paper I didn’t need, he picked out a half-dozen pen tips. Then he wanted to go have rice pudding at the luncheonette, where he got quarters for the jukebox and played Randy Travis singing the forever-and-ever song. How could he bear the irony? How could he

  put me through it? I watched his hand, the one with the ring, beat time on the Formica. He never announced he had an errand; I tried to think how to manage a run to the liquor store, but it couldn’t be done. On the way back out of town we hit the Grand Union, where I bought stuff for Chicken in a Bread Loaf, and craftily omitted the dried mint.

  When we got home, he kissed me—on the lips, warm—and went

  up to work. He hadn’t had a cigarette, apparently, since sometime last night. If he was a man who could pick up a thing and then just drop it, where did that leave me? Thinking about Marilyn, I suppose. He was married to her for fifteen years, then dumped her because she got old. (He says that ’s not what happened.) She was only forty-two. I

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  took the pad from next to the phone and figured it out. Forty-two minus twenty-nine: I would be forty-two in thirteen years. In the same thirteen years, he would be—forty-seven plus thirteen—he would be sixty. Past the point where he could get another twenty-nine-year-old, unless she was supremely stupid, and probably fat as well. Not the kind of security one might desire, but nevertheless. I put the pad back, leaving the sheet with my calculations. On the off chance he might ask what they were.

  I waited half an hour (did dishes, cleaned the top of the stove, scrubbed the downstairs toilet, put the dishes away, scoured pot marks out of the kitchen sink), then went up and knocked on his door. Loud saxophone jazz. He called, “Yo.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I said to his door. “I have to go back to Grand Union. I forgot the stupid mint for the chicken.”

  He opened the door. No smell of smoke. “You forgot what?”

  “Mint,” I said. “They call for mint.”

  “Oh, for Christ ’s sake. Don’t they carry mint at Webster’s?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. I’d forgotten about goddamn Webster’s. Actually they were pretty well stocked if you didn’t mind paying their prices.

  “Well, hell,” he said, “just leave it out. You don’t want to go all the way back to Oneonta. How much do they call for?”

  “Tablespoon,” I said. It was a teaspoon.

  “Bag it,” he said. “It ’ll be fine.”

  “It really won’t,” I said. “It ’s going to taste blah.”

  He sighed. “Christ. Well, look. Why don’t you just fix something

  else? Roast the chicken like you would anyway, and we ’ll eat the bread as bread, you know?”

  “But you like the other so much,” I said, feeling vile.

  “Paula,” he said. “It ’s truly decadent to drive forty miles round trip for a tablespoon of mint, for Christ ’s sake. You’re putting wear and tear on the car, you’re burning up fossil fuels . . .”

  I tried to think: if my motives had been pure, would I be justified in thinking he was being a prick? And: would it seem more suspicious to fight him on this or to acquiesce? More suspicious to fight, I decided.

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  “I don’t know,” I said, “I guess you’re right. Look, what I’ll do is, I’ll run down to Webster’s and if they don’t have mint I’ll figure out something else for dinner, okay? You sure you won’t be disappointed?”

  “Au contraire. I will admire your resourcefulness in the face of domestic crisis.” He reached around and patted my ass.

  I threw my sketchbook in the backseat—that would be my alibi—and

  drove to Webster’s, where I bought a jar of dried mint and a pack of Care Free peppermint gum. I’d chewed all five sticks by the time I got to the liquor store in Oneonta. They didn’t have pints of Rémy, so I had to buy the next size up, which I really couldn’t afford. Then on the way back I remembered: fossil fuels. Steven wasn’t so anal that he ’d know the odometer reading, but he might know how much gas there was. I calculated forty miles at, say, twenty-five miles per gallon. I stopped at Cumberland Farms and put in two dollars’ worth. Back at the house, just in case, I pushed the little button on the trip odometer to make all zeroes come up. Let him wonder.

  I was smart to leave the bottle in the car: Steven stood there in the kitchen, the orange juice carton (no glass) in his hand. “Where the hell have you been?” he said, putting the carton back in the refrigerator.

  “Alice Porter called and I got stuck on the phone for an hour.” An hour meant five minutes.

  “So you shouldn’t have picked it up,” I said. “Why the good Lord

  made answering machines.”

  “I was expecting it to be Martin,” he said. “Our auteur has made still more changes in her text, and he had to b
e sure they didn’t affect the pictures. This woman thinks she ’s Flaubert. I mean, this has been going on and on and on. I told Martin, this is the end of it. Fini.”

  “Are they going to make you change anything?” I said.

  “No, it’s just stuff like where she had the wolf with his tail ‘held high,’ it ’s now ‘at a jaunty angle.’ Jaunty, for Christ ’s sake. I mean, this is what my life has come down to, ‘a jaunty angle.’ I told him, I said,

  ‘Look, the picture ’s done, he ’s got his tail in the fucking air, and if the goddamn angle isn’t jaunty enough, they can shove it.’ ”

  “Good for you,” I said.

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  “So where ’ve you been?” he said. “You didn’t go all the way back there, did you?”

  “No, you were right, they had it at Webster’s. I went up to Randolph Pond and tried to do some sketching.” I held up my sketch pad as evidence.

  “Good for you,” he said. “You haven’t sketched for a long time. Let ’s see.”

  I shook my head. “They suck,” I said. I got a book of matches out of the drawer. “I’m going to use the Steven Sturdivant method. Burn it before it gets out of hand.”

  “You’re kidding, I hope. You know, you were absolutely on the

  money with what you said the other day. How does that thing go? ‘The man of genius makes no errors’?”

  “I’m not a man,” I said, “and I’m not of genius. Be back in a second.”

  “Come on, now,” he said, grabbing for the pad. “Let the old doctor have a gander.”

  “No, Steven.” I twisted away. “I’m serious.” If he ’d gotten the pad away from me, he would ’ve seen that the last sketch in the book was of a little girl at Jones Beach, with pail and shovel. But the word serious seemed to back him off. I slammed the door behind me, to lend myself still more power.

  Standing over the rusty oil drum, I ripped out two blank pages and set fire to them. Then I ripped out the little girl and burned her up, too.

  When I came back into the kitchen, I heard the toilet flush upstairs. I listened to Steven’s footsteps going back to his workroom, then went out and brought the new bottle in. I brought the level in the old bottle up to something like what I guessed it had been—apparently I’d hit it much harder last night than I remembered—took a slug of what was left for old times’ sake and poured the rest into the sink, running hot water to chase it down. I put the empty bottle back in the paper bag, stuffed it into a milk carton and tucked it away in the bottom of the garbage.