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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  On the highway toward home, Starling passed the hippies he had seen at the campground. They were heading in now, the women on the rear seats, the men driving fast, leaning as if the wind blew them back.

  In town, a big fireworks display staged by a shopping mall was

  beginning. Catherine wheels and star bursts and blue-and-pink sprays were going off in the twilight. Cars were stopped along the road, and people with children sat on their hoods, drinking beer and watching the sky. It was nearly dark and rain had begun to threaten.

  “Everything’s moved out to the malls now,” Lois said, “including

  the fireworks.” She had been dozing and now she leaned against her door, staring back toward the lights.

  “I wouldn’t care to work in one,” Starling said, driving.

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  Lois said nothing.

  “You know what I was just thinking about?” she said after a while.

  “Tell me,” Starling said.

  “Your mother,” Lois said. “Your mother was a sweet old lady, you

  know that? I liked her very much. I remember she and I would go to the mall and buy her a blouse. Just some blouse she could ’ve bought in Bull-ock’s in San Francisco, but she wanted to buy it here to be sweet and special.” Lois smiled about it. “Remember when we bought fireworks?”

  Starling’s mother had liked fireworks. She liked to hear them pop so she could laugh. Starling remembered having fireworks one year in the time since he ’d been married to Lois. When was that? he thought. A time lost now.

  “Remember she held the little teenies right in her fingers and let them go off ? That tickled her so much.”

  “That was her trick,” Eddie said. “Rex taught her that.”

  “I guess he did,” Lois said. “But you know, I don’t blame you, really, for being such a mamma’s boy, Eddie. Not with your mamma—unlike mine, for instance. She ’s why you’re as nice as you are.”

  “I’m selfish,” Starling said. “I always have been. I’m capable of lying, stealing, cheating.”

  Lois patted him on the shoulder. “You’re generous, though, too.”

  Rain was starting in big drops that looked like snow on the wind-

  shield. Lights from their subdivision glowed out under the lowered sky ahead.

  “This weird thing happened today,” Starling said. “I can’t quit thinking about it.”

  Lois slid over by him. She put her head on his shoulder and her hand inside his thigh. “I knew something had happened, Eddie. You can’t hide anything. The truth is just on you.”

  “There ’s no truth to this,” Starling said. “Just the phone rang when I was leaving, and it was this kid, Jeff. He was in some kind of mess. I didn’t know who he was, but he thought I was his father. He wanted me to accept charges.”

  “You didn’t, did you?”

  Starling looked toward the subdivision. “No. I should have, though.

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  It ’s on my mind now that I should ’ve helped him. I’d just finished talking to Reiner.”

  “He might ’ve been in Rangoon, for Christ ’s sake,” Lois said. “Or Helsinki. You don’t know where he was. It could ’ve cost you five hundred dollars, then you couldn’t have helped him anyway. You were

  smart, is what I think.”

  “It wouldn’t matter, though. I could ’ve given him some advice. He said somebody was in jail. It ’s just on my mind now, it ’ll go away.”

  “Get a good job and then accept charges from Istanbul,” Lois said and smiled.

  “I just wonder who he was,” Starling said. “For some reason I

  thought he was over in Reno—isn’t that odd? Just a voice.”

  “It ’d be worse if he was in Reno,” Lois said. “Are you sorry you don’t have one of your own?” Lois looked over at him strangely.

  “One what?”

  “A son. Or, you know. Didn’t you tell me you almost had one? There was something about that, with Jan.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Starling said. “We were idiots.”

  “Some people claim they make your life hold together better,

  though,” Lois said. “You know?”

  “Not if you’re broke they don’t,” Starling said. “All they do is make you sorry.”

  “Well, we ’ll just float on through life together, then, how’s that?”

  Lois put her hand high on his leg. “No blues today, hon, okay?”

  They were at the little dirt street where the ranchette was, at the far end. A fireworks hut had been built in the front yard of the first small house, a chain of bright yellow bulbs strung across the front. An elderly woman was standing in the hut, her face expressionless. She had on a sweater and was holding a little black poodle. All the fireworks but a few Roman candles had been sold off the shelves.

  “I never thought I’d live where people sold fireworks right in their front yards,” Lois said and faced front. Starling peered into the lighted hut. The rain was coming down in a slow drizzle, and water shone off the oiled street. He felt the urge to gesture to the woman, but didn’t.

  “You could just about say we lived in a place where you wouldn’t want

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  to live if you could help it. Funny, isn’t it? That just happens to you.”

  Lois laughed.

  “I guess it ’s funny,” Starling said. “It ’s true.”

  “What ’d you dream up for dinner, Eddie? I’ve built up a hunger all of a sudden.”

  “I forgot about it,” Starling said. “There ’s some macaroni.”

  “Whatever,” Lois said. “It ’s fine.”

  Starling pulled into the gravel driveway. He could see the pony

  standing out in the dark where the fenced weed lot extended to the side of the house. The pony looked like a ghost, its white eyes unmoving in the rain.

  “Tell me something,” Starling said. “If I ask you something, will you tell me?”

  “If there ’s something to tell,” Lois said. “Sometimes there isn’t anything, you know. But go ahead.”

  “What happened with you and Reiner?” he said. “All that Reno stuff.

  I never asked you about that. But I want to know.”

  “That ’s easy,” Lois said and smiled at him in the dark car. “I just realized I didn’t love Reiner, that ’s all. Period. I realized I loved you, and I didn’t want to be married to somebody I didn’t love. I wanted to be married to you. It isn’t all that complicated or important.” Lois put her arms around his neck and hugged him hard. “Don’t be cloudy now, sweet. You’ve just had some odd luck is all. Things’ll get better. You’ll get back. Let me make you happy. Let me show you something to be

  happy, baby doll.” Lois slid across the seat against the door and went down into her purse. Starling could hear wind chimes in the rain. “Let me just show you,” Lois said.

  Starling couldn’t see. Lois opened the door out into the drizzle, turned her back to him and struck a match. He could see it brighten.

  And then there was a sparkling and hissing, and then a brighter one, and Starling smelled the harsh burning and the smell of rain together.

  Then Lois closed the door and danced out before the car into the rain with the sparklers, waving her arms round in the air, smiling widely and making swirls and patterns and star-falls for him that were brilliant and

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  illuminated the night and the bright rain and the little dark house behind her and, for a moment, caught the world and stopped it, as though something sudden and perfect had come to earth in a furious glowing for him and for him alone—Eddie Starling—and only he could watch and listen.

  And only he would be there, waiting, when the light was finally gone.

  w e d i d n ’ t

  s t ua rt d y b e k

/>   We did it in front of the mirror

  And in the light. We did it in darkness,

  In water, and in the high grass.

  —Yehuda Amichai, “We Did It”

  We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in darkness. We didn’t in the

  fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or

  on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn’t in

  your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you’d slept in as a child, or in the backseat of my father’s rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent ’s meat market. We didn’t in your mother’s Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs.

  At the dead end of our lovers’ lane—a side street of abandoned factories—where I perfected the pinch that springs open a bra; behind the lilac bushes in Marquette Park, where you first touched me through my jeans and your nipples, swollen against transparent cotton, seemed the shade of lilacs; in the balcony of the now defunct Clark Theater, where I wiped popcorn salt from my palms and slid them up your thighs and you whispered, “I feel like Doris Day is watching us,” we didn’t.

  How adept we were at fumbling, how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy.

  Remember that night becalmed by heat, and the two of us, fused by sweat, trembling as if a wind from outer space that only we could feel

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  was gusting across Oak Street Beach? Entwined in your faded Navajo blanket, we lay soul-kissing until you wept with wanting.

  We ’d been kissing all day—all summer—kisses tasting of different shades of lip gloss and too many Cokes. The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed, perhaps setting barns on fire somewhere in Indiana. The beach that had been so crowded was deserted as if there was a curfew. Only the bodies of lovers remained, visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield, a few of them moaning, waiting for the gulls to pick them clean.

  On my fingers your slick scent mixed with the coconut musk of the suntan lotion we ’d repeatedly smeared over each other’s bodies. When your bikini top fell away, my hands caught your breasts, memorizing their delicate weight, my palms cupped as if bringing water to parched lips.

  Along the Gold Coast, high-rises began to glow, window added to

  window, against the dark. In every lighted bedroom, couples home from work were stripping off their business suits, falling to the bed, and doing it. They did it before mirrors and pressed against the glass in streaming shower stalls; they did it against walls and on the furniture in ways that required previously unimagined gymnastics, which they invented on the spot. They did it in honor of man and woman, in honor of beast, in honor of God. They did it because they’d been released, because they were home free, alive, and private, because they couldn’t wait any longer, couldn’t wait for the appointed hour, for the right time or temperature, couldn’t wait for the future, for Messiahs, for peace on earth and justice for all. They did it because of the Bomb, because of pollu-tion, because of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, because extinction might be just a blink away. They did it because it was Friday night.

  It was Friday night and somewhere delirious music was playing—

  flutter-tongued flutes, muted trumpets meowing like cats in heat, feverish plucking and twanging, tom-toms, congas, and gongs all pounding the same pulsebeat.

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  I stripped your bikini bottom down the skinny rails of your legs, and you tugged my swimsuit past my tan. Swimsuits at our ankles, we kicked like swimmers to free our legs, almost expecting a tide to wash over us the way the tide rushes in on Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity—a love scene so famous that although neither of us had seen the movie, our bodies assumed the exact position of movie stars on the sand and you whispered to me softly, “I’m afraid of getting pregnant,”

  and I whispered back, “Don’t worry, I have protection,” then, still kissing you, felt for my discarded cutoffs and the wallet in which for the last several months I had carried a Trojan as if it was a talisman. Still kissing, I tore its flattened, dried-out wrapper, and it sprang through my fingers like a spring from a clock and dropped to the sand between our legs. My hands were shaking. In a panic, I groped for it, found it, tried to dust it off, tried as Burt Lancaster never had to, to slip it on without breaking the mood, felt the grains of sand inside it, a throb of lightning, and the Great Lake behind us became, for all practical purposes, the Pacific, and your skin tasted of salt and to the insistent question that my hips were asking your body answered yes, your thighs opened like wings from my waist as we surfaced panting from a kiss that left you pleading Oh, Christ yes, a yes gasped sharply as a cry of pain so that for a moment I thought that we were already doing it and that somehow I had missed the instant when I entered you, entered you in the bloodless way in which a young man discards his own virginity, entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life, into a life as I wanted it to be lived yes but Oh then I realized that we were still floundering unconnected in the slick between us and there was sand in the Trojan as we slammed together still feeling for that perfect fit, still in the Here groping for an Eternity that was only a fine adjustment away, just a millimeter to the left or a fraction of an inch farther south though with all the adjusting the sandy Trojan was slipping off and then it was gone but yes you kept repeating although your head was shaking no-not-quite-almost and our hearts were going like mad and you said, Yes.

  Yes wait . . . Stop!

  “What?” I asked, still futilely thrusting as if I hadn’t quite heard you.

  “Oh. God!” You gasped, pushing yourself up. “What ’s coming?”

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  “Gin, what ’s the matter?” I asked, confused, and then the beam of a spotlight swept over us and I glanced into its blinding eye.

  All around us lights were coming, speeding across the sand. Blinking blindness away, I rolled from your body to my knees, feeling utterly defenseless in the way that only nakedness can leave one feeling. Headlights bounded toward us, spotlights crisscrossing, blue dome lights revolving as squad cars converged. I could see other lovers, caught in the beams, fleeing bare-assed through the litter of garbage that daytime hordes had left behind and that night had deceptively concealed. You were crying, clutching the Navajo blanket to your breasts with one hand and clawing for your bikini with the other, and I was trying to calm your terror with reassuring phrases such as “Holy shit! I don’t fucking believe this!”

  Swerving and fishtailing in the sand, police calls pouring from their radios, the squad cars were on us, and then they were by us while we struggled to pull on our clothes.

  They braked at the water’s edge, and cops slammed out, brandishing huge flashlights, their beams deflecting over the dark water. Beyond the darting of those beams, the far-off throbs of lightning seemed faint by comparison.

  “Over there, goddamn it!” one of them hollered, and two cops

  sloshed out into the shallow water without even pausing to kick off their shoes, huffing aloud for breath, their leather cartridge belts creaking against their bellies.

  “Grab the sonofabitch! It ain’t gonna bite!” one of them yelled, then they came sloshing back to shore with a body slung between them.

  It was a woman—young, naked, her body limp and bluish beneath

  the play of flashlight beams. They set her on the sand just past the ring of drying, washed-up alewives. Her face was almost totally concealed by her hair. Her hair was brown and tangled in a way that even wind or sleep can’t tangle hair, tangled as if it had absorbed the ripples of water—thick strands,
slimy looking like dead seaweed.

  “She ’s been in there awhile, that ’s for sure,” a cop with a beer belly said to a younger, crew-cut cop, who had knelt beside the body and removed his hat as if he might be considering the kiss of life.

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  The crew-cut officer brushed the hair away from her face, and the flashlight beams settled there. Her eyes were closed. A bruise or a birth-mark stained the side of one eye. Her features appeared swollen, her lower lip protruding as if she was pouting.

  An ambulance siren echoed across the sand, its revolving red light rapidly approaching.

  “Might as well take their sweet-ass time,” the beer-bellied cop said.

  We had joined the circle of police surrounding the drowned woman almost without realizing that we had. You were back in your bikini, robed in the Navajo blanket, and I had slipped on my cutoffs, my underwear dangling out of a back pocket.

  Their flashlight beams explored her body, causing its whiteness to gleam. Her breasts were floppy; her nipples looked shriveled. Her belly appeared inflated by gallons of water. For a moment, a beam focused on her mound of pubic hair, which was overlapped by the swell of her belly, and then moved almost shyly away down her legs, and the cops all glanced at us—at you, especially—above their lights, and you hugged your blanket closer as if they might confiscate it as evidence or to use as a shroud.

  When the ambulance pulled up, one of the black attendants imme-

  diately put a stethoscope to the drowned woman’s swollen belly and announced, “Drowned the baby, too.”

  Without saying anything, we turned from the group, as uncon-

  sciously as we ’d joined them, and walked off across the sand, stopping only long enough at the spot where we had lain together like lovers, in order to stuff the rest of our gear into a beach bag, to gather our shoes, and for me to find my wallet and kick sand over the forlorn, deflated Trojan that you pretended not to notice. I was grateful for that.

  Behind us, the police were snapping photos, flashbulbs throbbing

  like lightning flashes, and the lightning itself, still distant but moving in closer, rumbling audibly now, driving a lake wind before it so that gusts of sand tingled against the metal sides of the ambulance.