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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

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  went around to his house for some money. The woman sat waiting for him in the pedicab. The sky had just cleared and the water on the street had not yet receded; great clumps of parasol trees shone in the yellow river. Across the street, there was a bluish haze on the green trees around the little red houses; damp yellow smoke came out of the chimneys and flew off at a low angle. Zhenbao returned with the money, smacked his umbrella down, and splashed water all over the girl. She cried out sharply. Zhenbao climbed into the pedicab laughing, full of wet, muddy happiness. He looked at the upstairs window. It must have been Yanli standing there, but what he saw was a tea-tray lace doily, yellowing with age, stuck on the bathroom wall—or maybe it was a little white saucer with a tea-stain splotch in the center. Zhenbao smacked his umbrella into the water again. Break it to bits! Break it to bits!

  He couldn’t smash up the home he ’d made, or his wife, or his daughter, but he could smash himself up, the umbrella whacking the water and the cold, rank mud flying into his face. Again he was filled with tender sorrow for himself, a lover’s sorrow, but at the same time a strong-willed self stood opposite the lover, pulling and pushing and fighting with her.

  He had to be smashed to bits! Smash him to bits!

  The pedicab drove through the rippling water, and the water

  splashed the woman’s clothes and her leather shoes and leather handbag.

  She complained, wanting him to pay for the damage. Zhenbao laughed, threw one arm around her, and kept on splashing the water.

  After this, even Yanli ran out of excuses. Zhenbao didn’t bring back money for the family, his daughter’s tuition went unpaid, and the daily groceries were a problem too. At that point, Yanli became a brave little wife. Suddenly, at the age of nearly thirty, she had grown up. She spoke fluently and compellingly, in tearful, eloquent complaints: “How ever can we go on like this? It ’s enough to kill me—the whole family depends on him! At this rate he ’ll lose his job at the factory . . . It ’s as if he ’s gone mad, he doesn’t come home, and when he does he hits people and smashes things up. He wasn’t like this before! Oh, Mr. Liu, can you imagine? Can you tell me what I should do? How am I supposed to cope with this?”

  All at once Yanli gained self-confidence. She had social status. She

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  had sympathy. She had friends. One night Zhenbao came back home

  to find her sitting in the living room talking with Dubao. Of course they were discussing him, and when he appeared, she fell silent. She was dressed all in black, and though the wrinkles on her worried face were visible in the lamplight, she still had an aura of hidden beauty. Zhenbao didn’t rush around smashing tables and lamps. He walked in, nodded to Dubao, and said a few words about the weather. He lit a cigarette and sat down casually to discuss current events and the stock market. Finally he said he was tired and would go to bed early. He took his leave of them and headed up the stairs. Yanli simply couldn’t understand what was happening—it looked as if she ’d been lying. It was all very hard to explain.

  After Dubao left, Zhenbao heard Yanli entering the bedroom. Right when she came in the door, he swept the lamp and the hot-water thermos off the little cabinet; they fell to the floor and cracked wide open, smashed to bits. He bent down and picked up the metal base of the lamp, hurling it at her, electrical cord and all. Turning, she fled from the room.

  Zhenbao felt that she had been completely defeated. He was extremely pleased with himself. He stood there laughing silently, the quiet laughter flowing out of his eyes and spilling over his face like tears.

  The old maidservant stood in the doorway gaping, broom and dust-

  pan in hand. Zhenbao turned the light off. She didn’t dare enter the room. Zhenbao fell asleep on the bed, slept through to the middle of the night, when mosquito bites woke him. He rose and turned on the light.

  A pair of Yanli’s embroidered slippers were lying in the middle of the floor at cross angles, one a bit ahead, the other a bit behind, like a ghost that was afraid to materialize, walking fearfully, pleadingly toward him.

  Zhenbao sat on the edge of the bed and stared for a long time. When he lay down again, he sighed. He could feel his old benevolent mood stealing over him bit by bit, wrapping itself around him. Countless worries and duties and mosquitoes buzzed around him, stinging him and sucking at him.

  The next day Zhenbao rose and reformed his ways. He made a fresh

  start and went back to being a good man.

  f i r e w o r k s

  r i c h a r d f o r d

  Eddie Starling sat at the kitchen table at noon reading through the newspaper. Outside in the street some neighborhood kids were

  shooting off firecrackers. The Fourth of July was a day away, and every few minutes there was a lot of noisy popping followed by a hiss, then a huge boom loud enough to bring down an airplane. It was giving him the jitters, and he wished some parent would go out and haul the kids inside.

  Starling had been out of work six months—one entire selling season and part of the next. He had sold real estate, and had never been off work any length of time in his life. Though he had begun to wonder, after a certain period of not working, if you couldn’t simply forget how to work, forget the particulars, lose the reasons for it. And once that happened, it could become possible never to hold another job as long as you lived. To become a statistic: the chronically unemployed. The thought worried him.

  Outside in the street he heard what sounded like kids’ noises again.

  They were up to something suspicious, and he stood up to look out just when the phone rang.

  “What ’s new on the home front?” Lois’s voice said. Lois had gone back to work tending bar near the airport and always tried to call up in good spirits.

  “Status quo. Hot.” Starling walked to the window, holding the

  receiver, and peered out. In the middle of the street some kids he ’d never seen before were getting ready to blow up a tin can using an enormous firecracker. “Some kids are outside blowing up something.”

  “Anything good in the paper?”

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  “Nothing promising.”

  “Well,” Lois said. “Just be patient, hon. I know it ’s hot. Listen, Eddie, do you remember those priests who were always setting fire to themselves on TV? Exactly when were they? We were trying to remember here. Was it ’68 or ’72? Nobody could remember to save their life.”

  “Sixty-eight was Kennedy,” Starling said. “They weren’t just setting themselves on fire for TV, though. They were in Asia.”

  “Okay. But when was Vietnam exactly?”

  The kids lit the firecracker under the can and went running away

  down the street, laughing. For a moment Starling stared directly at the can, but just then a young woman came out of the house across the street. As she stepped into her yard the can went boom, and the woman leaped back and put her hands into her hair.

  “Christ, what was that!” Lois said. “It sounded like a bomb.”

  “It was those kids.”

  “The scamps,” Lois said. “I guess they’re hot, too, though.”

  The woman was very thin—too thin to be healthy, Starling thought.

  She was in her twenties and had on dull yellow shorts and no shoes.

  She walked out into the street and yelled something vicious at the kids, who were far down the street now. Starling knew nothing more about her than he did about anybody else in the neighborhood. The name on the mailbox had been taped over before he and Lois had moved in. A man lived with the woman and worked on his car in the garage late at night.

  The woman walked slowly back across her little yard to her house.

  At the top step she turned and looked at Starling’s house. He stared at her, and the woman went inside and closed the door.

  “Eddie, take a guess who’s here,”
Lois said.

  “Who’s where?”

  “In the bar. One wild guess.”

  “Arthur Godfrey,” Starling said.

  “Arthur Godfrey. That ’s great,” Lois said. “No, it ’s Louie. He just waltzed in the door. Isn’t that amazing?”

  Louie Reiner was Lois’s previous husband. Starling and Reiner had

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  been business acquaintances of a sort before Lois came along, and had co-brokered some office property at the tail end of the boom.

  Reiner had been in real estate then, along with everybody else. Reiner and Lois had stayed married six weeks, then they had gone over to Reno and gotten an annulment. A year later, Lois married Starling. That had all been in ’76, and Lois didn’t talk about it or about Reiner anymore.

  Louie had disappeared somewhere—he ’d heard Europe. He didn’t feel like he had anything against Louie now, though he wasn’t particularly happy he was around.

  “Just take a guess what Louie ’s doing?” Lois said. Water had started to run where Lois was.

  “Who knows. Washing dishes. How should I know?”

  Lois repeated what Starling said and some people laughed. He heard Louie ’s voice saying, “Well excuuuse me.”

  “Seriously, Ed. Louie ’s an extraditer.” Lois laughed. Hah.

  “What ’s that mean?” Starling said.

  “It means he travels the breadth of the country bringing people back here so they can go to jail. He just brought a man back from Montana who’d done nothing more than pass a forty-seven-dollar bad check, which doesn’t seem worth it to me. Louie isn’t in uniform, but he ’s got a gun and a little beeper.”

  “What ’s he doing there?” Starling said.

  “His girlfriend ’s coming in at the airport from Florida,” Lois said.

  “He ’s a lot fatter than he used to be, too, though he wouldn’t like me to say that, would you, Louie?” Starling heard Reiner say “Excuuuse me”

  again. “Do you want to talk to him?”

  “I’m busy right now.”

  “Busy doing what, eating lunch? You’re not busy.”

  “I’m fixing dinner,” Starling lied.

  “Talk to Louie, Eddie.”

  Starling wanted to hang up. He wished Reiner would go back to

  wherever he came from.

  “Helloooo dere,” Reiner said.

  “Who left your cage open, Reiner?”

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  “Come on down here and have a drink, Starling, and I’ll tell you all about it. I’ve seen the world since I saw you. Italy, France, the islands.

  You know what an Italian girl puts behind her ears to make herself more attractive?”

  “I don’t want to know,” Starling said.

  “That ’s not what Lois says.” Reiner laughed a horse laugh.

  “I’m busy. Some other time, maybe.”

  “Sure you are,” Reiner said. “Listen, Eddie, get off your face and come down here. I’ll tell you how we can both retire in six months. Honest to God. This is not real estate.”

  “I already retired,” Starling said. “Didn’t Lois tell you?”

  “Yeah, she told me a lot of things,” Reiner said.

  He could hear Lois say, “Please don’t be a nerd, Eddie. Who needs nerds?” Some people laughed again.

  “I shouldn’t even be talking about this on the phone. It ’s that hot.”

  Reiner’s voice fell to a whisper. He was covering the mouthpiece of the receiver, Starling thought. “These are Italian rugs, Starling. I swear to God. From the neck of the sheep, the neck only. You only get tips on things like this in law enforcement.”

  “I told you. I’m retired. I retired early,” Starling said.

  “Eddie, am I going to have to come out there and arrest you?”

  “Try it,” Starling said. “I’ll beat the shit out of you, then laugh about it.”

  He heard Reiner put the phone down and say something he couldn’t

  make out. Then he heard Reiner shout, “Stay on your face then, cluck!”

  Lois came on the line again. “Baby, why don’t you come down here?”

  A blender started in the background, and a big cheer went up. “We ’re all adults. Have a Tanqueray on Louie. He ’s on all-expenses. There might be something to this. Louie ’s always got ideas.”

  “Reiner’s just got ideas about you. Not me.” He heard Reiner say

  to Lois to tell him—Starling—to forget it. “Tell Reiner to piss up a rope.”

  “Try to be nice,” Lois said. “Louie ’s being nice. Eddie—”

  Starling hung up.

  *

  *

  *

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  When he worked, Starling had sold business properties—commercial lots and office buildings. He had studied that in college, and when he got out he was offered a good job. People would always need a place to go to work, was his thinking. He liked the professional environment, the atmosphere of money being made, and for a while he had done very well. He and Lois had rented a nice, sunny apartment in an older part of town by a park.

  They bought furniture and didn’t save money. While Starling worked, Lois kept house, took care of plants and fish and attended a night class for her degree in history. They had no children, and didn’t expect any. They liked the size of the town and the stores, knew shopkeepers’ names and where the streets led. It was a life they could like, and better than they both could ’ve guessed would come their way.

  Then interest rates had gone sky-high, and suddenly no one wanted commercial property. Everything was rent. Starling rented space in malls and in professional buildings and in empty shops downtown where older businesses had moved out and leather stores, health-food and copy shops moved in. It was a holding action, Starling thought, until people wanted to spend again.

  Then he had lost his job. One morning, his boss at the agency asked him back to his private office along with a fat woman named Beverley who’d been there longer than Starling had. His boss told them he was closing down and wanted to tell them first because they’d been there the longest, and he wanted them to have a chance for the other jobs.

  Starling remembered feeling dazed when he heard the bad news, but he remembered thanking the boss, wishing him good luck, then comforting Beverley, who went to pieces in the outer office. He had gone home and told Lois, and they had gone out to dinner at a Greek restaurant that night, and gotten good and drunk.

  As it turned out, though, there weren’t any other jobs to get. He visited the other agencies and talked to salesmen he knew, but all of his friends were terrified of being laid off themselves and wouldn’t say much. After a month, he heard that his boss hadn’t closed the agency down, but had simply hired two new people to take his and Beverley’s places. When he called to ask about it the boss apologized, then claimed to have an important call on another line.

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  In six weeks Starling had still not found a job, and when the money ran out and they couldn’t pay the rent, he and Lois sublet the apartment to two nurses who worked at a hospital, and got out. Lois found an ad in the Pennysaver that said, “No Rent for Responsible Couple—House Sit Opportunity.” And they moved in that day.

  The house was a ranchette in a tract of small, insignificant houses on fenced-in postage-stamp lots down on the plain of the Sacramento River, out from town. The owner was an Air Force sergeant who had been stationed in Japan, and the house was decorated with Oriental tastes: wind chimes and fat, naked women stitched over silk, a red enamel couch in the living room, rice-paper lanterns on the patio. There was an old pony in the back, from when the owner had been married with kids, and a couple of wrecked cars in the carport. All the people who lived on the street, Starling noticed, were younger than the two of them. More than a few were in the Air For
ce and fought loud, regular arguments, and came and went at all hours. There was always a door slamming after midnight, then a car starting up and racing away into the night. Starling had never thought he ’d find himself living in such a place.

  He stacked the dishes, put the grounds in the newspaper and emptied all the wastebaskets into a plastic bag. He intended to take the garbage for a ride. Everybody in the subdivision either drove their garbage to a dump several miles away or toured the convenience stores and shopping malls until they found a dumpster no one was watching. Once a black woman had run out of a convenience store and cursed at him for ditching his garbage in her dumpster, and since then he ’d waited till dark. This afternoon, though, he needed to get out of the house, as though with the heat and talking to Reiner there wasn’t enough air inside to breathe.

  He had the garbage set out the back door when the phone rang again.

  Sometimes car dealers called during lunch, wanting to talk to the Air Force sergeant, and Starling had learned not to answer until after one, when car salesmen all left for lunch. This time it might be Lois again, wanting him to come by the bar to see Reiner, and he didn’t want to answer. Only he didn’t want Lois going off somewhere, and he didn’t

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  want Reiner coming over. Reiner would think the house with the pony was a comedy act.

  Starling picked up the phone. “All right, what is it?”

  An unfamiliar voice said, “Dad? Is that you?”

  “No dads here, Reiner,” Starling said.

  “Dad,” the voice said again, “it ’s Jeff.”

  A woman’s voice came on the line. “I have a collect call to anyone from a Jeff. Will you pay for the call?”

  “Wrong number,” Starling said. He couldn’t be sure it wasn’t Reiner still.

  “Dad,” the voice said. It was a teenager’s voice, a worried voice.

  “We ’re in awful trouble here, Dad. They’ve got Margie in jail.”

  “No, I can’t help,” Starling said. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

  “This party says you’ve got the wrong number, Jeff,” the operator said.

  “I know my own father’s voice, don’t I? Dad, for God ’s sake. This is serious. We ’re in trouble.”