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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  “I don’t know any Jeffs,” Starling said. “It ’s just the wrong number.”

  Starling could hear whoever was on the line hit something against the phone very hard, then say, “Shit! This isn’t happening, I can’t believe this is happening.” The voice said something to someone else who was wherever he was. Possibly a policeman.

  “It ’s the wrong number,” the operator said. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Me too,” Starling said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Would you like to try another number now, Jeff ?” the operator

  asked.

  “Dad, please accept. Please, my God. Please.”

  “Excuse the ring, sir,” the operator said, and the line was disconnected.

  Starling put down the phone and stared out the window. The three

  boys who had blown up the tin can were walking past, eyeing his house.

  They were going for more fireworks. The torn can lay in the street, and the woman across the way was watching them from her picture window, pointing them out to a man in an undershirt who didn’t look like the man

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  who worked on his car at night. He wondered if the woman was married or divorced. If she had children, where were they? He wondered who it was who had called—the sergeant ’s kids were all too young. He wondered what kind of trouble Jeff was in, and where was he? He should ’ve accepted the charges, said a word of consolation, or given some advice since the kid had seemed at wit ’s end. He ’d been in trouble in his life. He was in trouble now, in fact, but he hadn’t been any help.

  He drove toward town and cruised the lot at the King’s Hat Drive-Inn, took a look in at the Super-Duper, then drove behind a truck stop. The garbage was with him in the hot front seat and already smelled bad despite the plastic. It was at the Super-Duper that the black woman had yelled at him and threatened to turn his garbage over to the police. Starling stopped back at the Super-Duper, parked at the side of the lot by the dumpster and went inside, leaving the garbage in the driver’s seat. A different black woman was inside. He bought some breakfast cereal, a bag of frozen macaroni and a bottle of hot sauce, then went back out to the car. Another car had driven in and parked beside his, and the driver, a woman, was sitting in view of the dumpster, waiting for someone who had gone inside. The woman might be another Super-Duper employee, Starling thought, or possibly the wife of someone in the back he hadn’t noticed.

  He got in his car and drove straight out to a campground beside the Sacramento River, less than a mile from the house. He had come here and picnicked once with Lois, though the campground was empty now, all the loops and tables deserted. He pulled up beside a big green campground dumpster and heaved his garbage in without getting out of the car. Beyond the dumpster, through some eucalyptus trees, he could see the big brown river sliding swiftly by, pieces of yellow foam swirling in and out of the dark eddies. It was a treacherous river, he thought, full of perils. Each year someone drowned, and there were currents running deep beneath the surface. No one in his right mind would think of swimming in it, no matter how hot it got.

  As he drove out he passed two motorcycles with Oregon plates,

  parked at the far end of the campground, and two hippies with long hair

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  sitting on a rock, smoking. The hippies watched him when he drove by and didn’t bother hiding their dope. Two young women were coming

  out of the bushes nearby, wearing bathing suits, and one of the hippies gave Starling the black power salute and grinned. Starling drove back out to the highway.

  The hippies reminded him of San Francisco. His mother, Irma, had lived there with her last husband, Rex, who’d had money. When he was in community college Starling had lived there with them for six months, before moving with his first wife across the bay to Alameda near the airport. They had been hippies of a certain kind themselves then and had smoked dope occasionally. Jan, his first wife, had had an abortion in a student apartment right on the campus. Abortions were not easy to get then, and they’d had to call Honolulu to get a name out in Castroville.

  They had been married six months, and Starling’s mother had had to lend them money she ’d gotten from Rex.

  When the abortionist came, he brought a little metal box with him, like a fishing-tackle box. They sat in the living room of the student apartment and talked about this and that, and drank beer. The man was named Dr. Carson. He told them he was being prosecuted at that very moment and was losing his license for doing this very thing—performing abortions—but that people needed help. He had three children of his own, he said, and Starling wondered if he ever performed abortions on his own wife. Dr. Carson said it would cost $400, and he could do it the next night, but needed all cash. Before he left he opened his metal box.

  There was nothing in it but fishing gear: a Pflueger reel, some mono-filament line, several red-and-white Jitterbug lures. They had all three laughed. You couldn’t be too cautious, Dr. Carson said. They all liked each other and acted like they could be friends in happier days.

  The next night Dr. Carson came with a metal box that looked exactly the same as the one before, green with a silver handle. He went into the bedroom with Jan and closed the door while Starling sat in the living room, watched TV and drank beer. It was Christmastime and Andy Williams was on, singing carols with a man in a bear suit. After a while a loud whirring noise, like an expensive blender, came out of the bedroom.

  It continued for a while, then stopped, then started. Starling became ner-

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  vous. Dr. Carson, he knew, was mixing up his little baby, and Jan was feeling excruciating pain but wasn’t making noise. Starling felt sick then with fear and guilt and helplessness. And with love. It was the first time he knew he knew what real love was, his love for his wife and for all the things he valued in his life but could so easily lose.

  Later, Dr. Carson came out and said everything would be fine. He

  smiled and shook Starling’s hand and called him Ted, which was the phony name Starling had given him. Starling paid him the money in hundreds, and when Dr. Carson drove off, Starling stood out on the tiny balcony and waved. The doctor blinked his headlights, and in the distance Starling could see a small private plane settling down to the airport in the dark, its red taillight blinking like a wishing star.

  Starling wondered where the hell Jan was now, or Dr. Carson, fif-

  teen years later. Jan had gotten peritonitis and almost died after that, and when she got well she wasn’t interested in being married to Eddie Starling anymore. She seemed very disappointed. Three months later she had gone to Japan, where she ’d had a pen pal since high school, someone named Haruki. For a while she wrote Starling letters, then stopped.

  Maybe, he thought, she had moved back down to L.A. with her mother.

  He wished his own mother was alive still, and he could call her up. He was thirty-nine years old, though, and he knew it wouldn’t help.

  Starling drove along the river for a few miles until the wide vegetable and cantaloupe fields opened out, and the horizon extended a long way in the heat to a hazy wind line of Lombardy poplars. High, slat-sided trucks sat stationed against the white skyline, and men were picking in the near fields and beyond in long, dense crews. Mexicans, Starling thought, transients who worked for nothing. It was a depressing thought. There was nothing they could do to help themselves, but it was still depressing, and Starling pulled across the road and turned back toward town.

  He drove out toward the airport, along the strip where it was mostly franchises and consignment lots and little shopping plazas, some of which he had once found the tenants for. All along the way, people had put up fireworks stands for the Fourth of July, red-white-and-blue banners fluttering on the hot breeze. Some of these people undoubtedly lived out where he and Lois lived now, in the sam
e subdivision. That would mean

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  something, he thought, if one day you found yourself looking out at the world going past from inside a fireworks stand. Things would ’ve gotten far out of hand when that time came, there was no arguing it.

  He thought about driving past the apartment to see if the nurses who sublet it were keeping up the little yard. The nurses, Jeri and Madeline, were two big dykes with men’s haircuts and baggy clothes. They were friendly types, and in the real estate business dykes were considered A-1s—good tenants. They paid their rent, kept quiet, maintained property in good order, and held a firm stake in the status quo. They were like a married couple, was the business reasoning. Thinking about Jeri and Madeline, he drove past the light where their turn was, then just decided to keep driving.

  There was nothing to do now, Starling thought, but drive out to the bar. The afternoon shift meant no one came in until Lois was almost ready to leave, and sometimes they could have the bar to themselves.

  Reiner would be gone by now and it would be cool inside, and he and Lois could have a quiet drink together, toast better cards on the next deal. They had had good times doing nothing but sitting talking.

  Lois was leaning over the jukebox across from the bar when Starling came in. Mel, the owner, took afternoons off, and the place was empty. A dark-green bar light shone over everything, and the room was cool.

  He was glad to see Lois. She had on tight black slacks and a frilly white top and looked jaunty. Lois was a jaunty woman to begin with, and he was happy he ’d come.

  He had met Lois in a bar called the AmVets down in Rio Vista.

  It was before she and Louie Reiner became a twosome, and when he

  saw her in a bar now it always made him think of things then. That had been a high time, and when they talked about it Lois liked to say,

  “Some people are just meant to experience the highest moments of

  their lives in bars.”

  Starling sat on a bar stool.

  “I hope you came down here to dance with your wife,” Lois said, still leaning over the jukebox. She punched a selection and turned around, smiling. “I figured you’d waltz in here pretty soon.” Lois came by and

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  patted him on the cheek. “I went ahead and punched in all your favorites.”

  “Let’s have a drink first,” Starling said. “I’ve got an edge that needs a drink.”

  “Drink first, dance second,” Lois said and went behind the bar and got down the bottle of Tanqueray.

  “Mel wouldn’t mind,” Starling said.

  “Mary-had-a-little-lamb,” Lois said while she poured a glassful. She looked up at Starling and smiled. “It’s five o’clock someplace on the planet. Here ’s to old Mel.”

  “And some better luck,” Starling said, taking a big first drink of gin and letting it trickle down his throat as slowly as he could.

  Lois had been drinking already, he was sure, with Reiner. That

  wasn’t the best he could have hoped for, but it could be worse. She and Reiner could be shacked up in a motel, or on their way to Reno or the Bahamas. Reiner was gone, and that was a blessing, and he wasn’t going to let Reiner cast a shadow on things.

  “Poor old Lou,” Lois said and came around the bar with a pink drink she ’d poured out of the blender.

  “Poor Lou what?” Starling said.

  Lois sat down beside him on a bar stool and lit a cigarette. “Oh, his stomach’s all shot and he ’s got an ulcer. He said he worries too much.”

  She blew out the match and stared at it. “You want to hear what he drinks?”

  “Who cares what a dope like Reiner drinks out of a glass,” Starling said.

  Lois looked at him, then stared at the mirror behind the bar. The smoky mirror showed two people sitting at a bar alone. A slow country tune started to play, a tune Starling liked, and he liked the way—with the gin around it—it seemed to ease him away from his own troubles. “So tell me what Reiner drinks,” he said.

  “Wodka,” Lois said matter-of-factly. “That ’s the way he says it.

  Wodka. Like Russian. Wodka with coconut milk—a Hawiian Russian.

  He say it ’s for his stomach, which he says is better though it ’s still a wreck.

  He ’s a walking pharmacy. And he ’s gotten a lot fatter, too, and his eyes

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  bulge, and he wears a full Cleveland now. I don’t know.” Lois shook her head and smoked her cigarette. “He ’s got a cute girlfriend, though, this Jackie, from Del Rio Beach. She looks like Little Bo Peep.”

  Starling tried to picture Reiner. Louie Reiner had been a large, handsome man at one time, with thick eyebrows and penetrating black eyes.

  A sharp dresser. He was sorry to hear Reiner was fat and bug-eyed and wore a leisure suit. It was bad luck if that was the way you looked to the world.

  “How was it, seeing Louie? Was it nice?” He stared at himself in the smoky mirror. He hadn’t gotten fat, thank God.

  “No,” Lois said and dragged on her cigarette. “He was nice. Grown-up and what have you. But it wasn’t nice. He didn’t look healthy, and he still talked the same baloney, which was all before Jackie arrived, naturally.”

  “All what baloney?”

  “You know that stuff, Eddie. Everybody makes themselves happy or unhappy. You don’t leave one woman for another woman, you do it for yourself. If you can’t make it with one, make it with all of them—that baloney he was always full of. Take the tour. Go big casino. That stuff.

  Reiner stuff.”

  “Reiner’s big casino, all right,” Starling said. “I guess he wanted you to go off with him.”

  “Oh sure. He said he was off to Miami next week to arrest some poor soul. He said I ought to go, and we could stay at the Fontainebleau or the Eden Roc or one of those sharp places.”

  “What about me?” Starling said. “Did I come? Or did I stay here?

  What about little Jackie?”

  “Louie didn’t mention either one of you, isn’t that funny? I guess it slipped his mind.” Lois smiled and put her arm on Starling’s arm. “It ’s just baloney, Eddie. Trashy talk.”

  “I wish he was here now,” Starling said. “I’d use a beer bottle on him.”

  “I know it, hon. But you should ’ve heard what this little girlfriend said. It was a riot. She ’s a real Ripley’s.”

  “She ’d need to be,” Starling said.

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  “Really. She said if Louie ran around on her she was going to sleep with a black man. She said she already had one picked out. She really knew how to work Louie. She said Louie had a house full of these cheap Italian carpets, and nobody to sell them to. That was his big deal he needed a partner for, by the way—not a very big market over here, I guess. She said Louie was thinking of selling them in Idaho. Good luck with that, I said. She said—and this would ’ve made you laugh, Eddie, it would ’ve truly—she said it ’s a doggy-dog world out there. Doggy-dog.

  She was real cute. When she said that, Louie got down on the floor and barked like a dog. He dropped his pistol out of his whatever-you-call-it, his scabbard, and his beeper”—Lois was laughing—“he was like a big animal down on the floor of the bar.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it.”

  “Louie can be funny,” Lois said.

  “Maybe you should ’ve married him, then.”

  “I did marry him.”

  “Too bad you didn’t stay married to him instead of me. I don’t have a beeper.”

  “I like what you have got, though, sweetheart.” She squeezed his

  arm. “Nobody would love me like you do, you know I think that. Reiner was just my mistake, but I can laugh at him today because I don’t have to live with him. You’re such a big mamma’s boy, you don’t want anybody to have any
fun.”

  “I’d like to have a little fun,” Starling said. “Let ’s go where there ’s some fun.”

  Lois leaned and kissed him on the cheek. “You smell awfully nice.”

  She smiled at him. “Come on and dance with me, Ed. Justice demands that you dance with me. You have that light step. It ’s nice when you do.”

  Lois walked out onto the little dance floor and took Starling’s hand.

  He stood close to her and they danced to the slow music on the jukebox, holding together the way they had when he ’d first known her. He felt a little drunk. A buzz improved a thing, he thought, made a good moment out of nothing.

  “You’re a natural dancer, Eddie,” Lois said softly. “Remember us

  dancing at Powell’s on the beach, with everybody watching us?”

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  “You like having men think about you?” Starling said.

  “Oh, sure. I guess.” Lois’s cheek was against his cheek. “It makes me feel like I’m in a movie, sometimes, you know? Everybody does that, don’t they?”

  “I never do.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder what your ex thinks about you? Old Jan.

  That was a long time ago, I guess.”

  “Bygones are bygones to me,” Starling said. “I don’t think about it.”

  “You’re such a literal, Eddie. You get lost in the lonely crowd, I think sometimes. That ’s why I want to be nice and make you happy.” She held him close to her so that her hard, flat hips were next to his. “Isn’t this nice? It ’s nice to dance with you.”

  Starling saw now that the bar was decorated with red, white, and

  blue crêpe paper—features he ’d missed. Little curlicues and ribbons and stars hung from the dark rafters and down off the shaded green bar lights and the beer signs and the framed pictures behind the back bar. This was festive, he thought. Lois had fixed it, it showed her hand.

  Before long a crowd would be in, the lights would go up and shine out, the music would be turned up loud. It would be a good time. “That ’s nice,” Starling said.

  “I just love this,” Lois said. Her head was on his shoulder. “I just love this so much.”