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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Squinting, we walked toward the lighted windows of the Gold Coast, while the shadows of gapers attracted by the whirling emergency lights hurried past us toward the shore.

  “What happened? What ’s going on?” they asked without waiting

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  for an answer, and we didn’t offer one, just continued walking silently in the dark.

  It was only later that we talked about it, and once we began talking about the drowned woman it seemed we couldn’t stop.

  “She was pregnant,” you said. “I mean, I don’t want to sound morbid, but I can’t help thinking how the whole time we were, we almost—you know—there was this poor, dead woman and her unborn child washing in and out behind us.”

  “It ’s not like we could have done anything for her even if we had known she was there.”

  “But what if we had found her? What if after we had—you know,”

  you said, your eyes glancing away from mine and your voice tailing into a whisper, “what if after we did it, we went for a night swim and found her in the water?”

  “But, Gin, we didn’t,” I tried to reason, though it was no more a matter of reason than anything else between us had ever been.

  It began to seem as if each time we went somewhere to make out—

  on the back porch of your half-deaf, whiskery Italian grandmother, who sat in the front of the apartment cackling at I Love Lucy reruns; or in your girlfriend Tina’s basement rec room when her parents were away on bowling league nights and Tina was upstairs with her current crush, Brad; or way off in the burbs, at the Giant Twin Drive-In during the weekend they called Elvis Fest—the drowned woman was

  with us.

  We would kiss, your mouth would open, and when your tongue flicked repeatedly after mine, I would unbutton the first button of your blouse, revealing the beauty spot at the base of your throat, which matched a smaller spot I loved above a corner of your lips, and then the second button, which opened on a delicate gold cross—which I had always tried to regard as merely a fashion statement—dangling above the cleft of your breasts. The third button exposed the lacy swell of your bra, and I would slide my hand over the patterned mesh, feeling for the firmness of your nipple rising to my fingertip, but you would pull slightly away, and behind your rapid breath your kiss would grow distant, and I would

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  kiss harder, trying to lure you back from wherever you had gone, and finally, holding you as if only consoling a friend, I’d ask, “What are you thinking?” although of course I knew.

  “I don’t want to think about her but I can’t help it. I mean, it seems like some kind of weird omen or something, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know,” I said. “It was just a coincidence.”

  “Maybe if she ’d been farther away down the beach, but she was so close to us. A good wave could have washed her up right beside us.”

  “Great, then we could have had a ménage à trois.”

  “Gross! I don’t believe you just said that! Just because you said it in French doesn’t make it less disgusting.”

  “You’re driving me to it. Come on, Gin, I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just making a dumb joke to get a little different perspective on things.”

  “What ’s so goddamn funny about a woman who drowned herself

  and her baby?”

  “We don’t even know for sure she did.”

  “Yeah, right, it was just an accident. Like she just happened to be going for a walk pregnant and naked, and she fell in.”

  “She could have been on a sailboat or something. Accidents happen; so do murders.”

  “Oh, like murder makes it less horrible? Don’t think that hasn’t

  occurred to me. Maybe the bastard who knocked her up killed her,

  huh?”

  “How should I know? You’re the one who says you don’t want to

  talk about it and then gets obsessed with all kinds of theories and scenarios. Why are we arguing about a woman we don’t even know, who

  doesn’t have the slightest thing to do with us?”

  “I do know about her,” you said. “I dream about her.”

  “You dream about her?” I repeated, surprised. “Dreams you remem-

  ber?”

  “Sometimes they wake me up. In one I’m at my nonna’s cottage in Michigan, swimming for a raft that keeps drifting farther away, until I’m too tired to turn back. Then I notice there ’s a naked person sunning on the raft and start yelling. ‘Help!’ and she looks up and offers me a

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  hand, but I’m too afraid to take it even though I’m drowning because it ’s her.”

  “God! Gin, that ’s creepy.”

  “I dreamed you and I are at the beach and you bring us a couple hot dogs but forget the mustard, so you have to go all the way back to the stand for it.”

  “Hot dogs, no mustard—a little too Freudian, isn’t it?”

  “Honest to God, I dreamed it. You go back for mustard and I’m

  wondering why you’re gone so long, then a woman screams that a kid has drowned and everyone stampedes for the water. I’m swept in by the mob and forced under, and I think, This is it, I’m going to drown, but I’m able to hold my breath longer than could ever be possible. It feels like a flying dream—flying under water—and then I see this baby down there flying, too, and realize it ’s the kid everyone thinks has drowned, but he ’s no more drowned than I am. He looks like Cupid or one of those baby angels that cluster around the face of God.”

  “Pretty weird. What do you think all the symbols mean?—hot dogs,

  water, drowning . . .”

  “It means the baby who drowned inside her that night was a love

  child—a boy—and his soul was released there to wander through the water.”

  “You don’t really believe that?”

  We argued about the interpretation of dreams, about whether dreams are symbolic or psychic, prophetic or just plain nonsense, until you said,

  “Look, Dr. Freud, you can believe what you want about your dreams, but keep your nose out of mine, okay?”

  We argued about the drowned woman, about whether her death was

  a suicide or a murder, about whether her appearance that night was an omen or a coincidence which, you argued, is what an omen is anyway: a coincidence that means something. By the end of summer, even if we were no longer arguing about the woman, we had acquired the habit of arguing about everything else. What was better: dogs or cats, rock or jazz, Cubs or Sox, tacos or egg rolls, right or left, night or day?—we could argue about anything.

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  It no longer required arguing or necking to summon the drowned

  woman; everywhere we went she surfaced by her own volition: at

  Rocky’s Italian Beef, at Lindo Mexico, at the House of Dong, our favorite Chinese restaurant, a place we still frequented because when we ’d first started seeing each other they had let us sit and talk until late over tiny cups of jasmine tea and broken fortune cookies. We would always kid about going there. “Are you in the mood for Dong tonight?” I’d whisper conspiratorially. It was a dopey joke, meant for you to roll your eyes at its repeated dopiness. Back then, in winter, if one of us ordered the garlic shrimp we would both be sure to eat them so that later our mouths tasted the same when we kissed.

  Even when she wasn’t mentioned, she was there with her drowned

  body—so dumpy next to yours—and her sad breasts, with their wrin-

  kled nipples and sour milk—so saggy beside yours, which were still budding—with her swollen belly and her pubic bush colorless in the glare of electric light, with her tangled, slimy hair and her pouting, placid face—so lifeless beside yours—and her skin a pallid white, lightning-flash white, flashbulb white, a whiteness that couldn’t be duplica
ted in daylight—how I’d come to hate that pallor, so cold beside the flush of your skin.

  There wasn’t a particular night when we finally broke up, just as there wasn’t a particular night when we began going together, but it was a night in fall when I guessed that it was over. We were parked in the Rambler at the dead end of the street of factories that had been our lovers’ lane, listening to a drizzle of rain and dry leaves sprinkle the hood.

  As always, rain revitalized the smells of smoked fish and kielbasa in the upholstery. The radio was on too low to hear, the windshield wipers swished at intervals as if we were driving, and the windows were steamed as if we ’d been making out. But we ’d been arguing, as usual, this time about a woman poet who had committed suicide, whose work you were reading. We were sitting, no longer talking or touching, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to argue with you anymore. I didn’t want to sit like this in hurt silence; I wanted to talk excitedly all night as we once had. I wanted to find some way that wasn’t corny sounding to tell you how much fun I’d had in your company, how much knowing you had

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  meant to me, and how I had suddenly realized that I’d been so intent on becoming lovers that I’d overlooked how close we ’d been as friends. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to like me again.

  “It ’s sad,” I started to say, meaning that I was sorry we had reached the point of silence, but before I could continue you challenged the statement.

  “What makes you so sure it ’s sad?”

  “What do you mean, what makes me so sure?” I asked, confused by

  your question.

  You looked at me as if what was sad was that I would never understand. “For all either one of us knows,” you said, “death could have been her triumph!”

  Maybe when it really ended was the night I felt we had just reached the beginning, that one time on the beach in the summer when our bodies rammed so desperately together that for a moment I thought we did it, and maybe in our hearts we did, although for me, then, doing it in one ’s heart didn’t quite count. If it did, I supposed we ’d all be Casanovas.

  We rode home together on the El train that night, and I felt sick and defeated in a way I was embarrassed to mention. Our mute reflections emerged like negative exposures on the dark, greasy window of the train. Lightning branched over the city, and when the train entered the subway tunnel, the lights inside flickered as if the power was disrupted, though the train continued rocketing beneath the Loop.

  When the train emerged again we were on the South Side of the

  city and it was pouring, a deluge as if the sky had opened to drown the innocent and guilty alike. We hurried from the El station to your house, holding the Navajo blanket over our heads until, soaked, it collapsed. In the dripping doorway of your apartment building, we said good night.

  You were shivering. Your bikini top showed through the thin blouse plastered to your skin. I swept the wet hair away from your face and kissed you lightly on the lips, then you turned and went inside. I stepped into the rain, and you came back out, calling after me.

  “What?” I asked, feeling a surge of gladness to be summoned back into the doorway with you.

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  “Want an umbrella?”

  I didn’t. The downpour was letting up. It felt better to walk back to the station feeling the rain rinse the sand out of my hair, off my legs, until the only places where I could still feel its grit were in the crotch of my cutoffs and each squish of my shoes. A block down the street, I passed a pair of jockey shorts lying in a puddle and realized they were mine, dropped from my back pocket as we ran to your house. I left them behind, wondering if you’d see them and recognize them the next day.

  By the time I had climbed the stairs back to the El platform, the rain had stopped. Your scent still hadn’t washed from my fingers. The station—the entire city it seemed—dripped and steamed. The summer

  sound of crickets and nighthawks echoed from the drenched neighborhood. Alone, I could admit how sick I felt. For you, it was a night that would haunt your dreams. For me, it was another night when I waited, swollen and aching, for what I had secretly nicknamed the Blue Ball Express.

  Literally lovesick, groaning inwardly with each lurch of the train and worried that I was damaged for good, I peered out at the passing yellow-lit stations, where lonely men stood posted before giant advertisements, pictures of glamorous models defaced by graffiti—the same old scrawled insults and pleas: fuck you, eat me. At this late hour the world seemed given over to men without women, men waiting in abject patience for something indeterminate, the way I waited for our next times. I avoided their eyes so that they wouldn’t see the pity in mine, pity for them because I’d just been with you, your scent was still on my hands, and there seemed to be so much future ahead.

  For me it was another night like that, and by the time I reached my stop I knew I would be feeling better, recovered enough to walk the dark street home making up poems of longing that I never wrote down. I was the D. H. Lawrence of not doing it, the voice of all the would-be lovers who ached and squirmed. From our contortions in doorways, on stairwells, and in the bucket seats of cars we could have composed a Kama Sutra of interrupted bliss. It must have been that night when I recalled all the other times of walking home after seeing you, so that it seemed as if I was falling into step behind a parade of my former selves—myself

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  walking home on the night we first kissed, myself on the night when I unbuttoned your blouse and kissed your breasts, myself on the night when I lifted your skirt above your thighs and dropped to my knees—

  each succeeding self another step closer to that irrevocable moment for which our lives seemed poised.

  But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.

  s o m e t h i n g t h a t n e e d s n o t h i n g

  m i r a n da j u ly

  In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents. I even had two. They would never let me go, so I didn’t say goodbye; I packed a tiny bag and left a note. On the way to Pip’s house, I cashed my graduation checks. Then I sat on her porch and pretended I was twelve or fifteen or even sixteen. At all these ages, I had dreamed of today; I had even imagined sitting here, waiting for Pip for the last time. She had the opposite problem: her mom would let her go. Her mom had gigantic swollen legs that were a symptom of something much worse, and she was heavily medicated with marijuana at all times.

  We ’re going now, Mom.

  Where?

  To Portland.

  Can you do one thing for me first? Can you bring that magazine over here?

  We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people. And it was easy to find an apartment because we had no standards; we were just amazed that it was our door, our rotting carpet, our cockroach infestation. We decorated with paper streamers and Chinese lanterns and we shared the ancient bed that came with the studio. This was tremendously thrilling for one of us. One of us had always been in love with the other.

  One of us lived in a perpetual state of longing. But we ’d met when we were children and seemed destined to sleep like children, or like an old couple who had met before the sexual revolution and were too shy to learn the new way.

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  We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere with-

  out filling out an application. But once we were hired—as furniture sanders—we could not believe this was really what people did all day.

  Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone ’s job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.

  With this goal in mind, Pip came up with a new plan. We went

  at it with determination; three weeks in a row we wrote and rewrote and resubmitted our ad to the local paper. Finally, the Portland Weekly accepted it; it no longer sounded like blatant prostitution, and yet, to the right reader, it could have meant nothing else. We were targeting wealthy women who loved women. Did such a thing exist? We would

  also accept a woman of average means who had saved up her money.

  The ad ran for a month, and our voice mailbox overflowed with

  interest. Every day we parsed through the hundreds of men to find that one special lady who would pay our rent. She was slow to come. She perhaps did not even read this section of the free weekly. We became agitated. We knew this was the only way we could make money without compromising ourselves. Could we pay Mr. Hilderbrand, the landlord, in food stamps? We could not. Was he interested in this old camera that Pip’s grandmother had loaned her? He was not. He wanted to be paid in the traditional way. Pip grimly began to troll through the messages for a gentle man. I watched her boyish face as she listened and realized that she was terrified. I thought of her small bottom that was so like a pastry and the warm world of complications between her legs. Let him be a withered man, I prayed. A man who really just wanted to see us jump around in our underwear. Suddenly, Pip grinned and wrote down a name. Leanne.

  The bus dropped us off at the top of the gravel driveway that Leanne had described on the phone. We had told her our names were Astrid and Tallulah, and we hoped “Leanne” was a pseudonym, too. We wanted her to be wearing a smoking jacket or a boa. We hoped she was familiar with