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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  “Mel, for God ’s sake,” Terri said. She reached out and took hold of his wrist. “Are you getting drunk? Honey? Are you drunk?”

  “Honey, I’m just talking,” Mel said. “All right? I don’t have to be drunk to say what I think. I mean, we ’re all just talking, right?” Mel said. He fixed his eyes on her.

  “Sweetie, I’m not criticizing,” Terri said.

  She picked up her glass.

  “I’m not on call today,” Mel said. “Let me remind you of that. I am not on call,” he said.

  “Mel, we love you,” Laura said.

  Mel looked at Laura. He looked at her as if he could not place her, as if she was not the woman she was.

  “Love you too, Laura,” Mel said. “And you, Nick, love you too. You know something?” Mel said. “You guys are our pals,” Mel said.

  He picked up his glass.

  Mel said, “I was going to tell you about something. I mean, I was going to prove a point. You see, this happened a few months ago, but it ’s still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we ’re talking about when we talk about love.”

  “Come on now,” Terri said. “Don’t talk like you’re drunk if you’re not drunk.”

  “Just shut up for once in your life,” Mel said very quietly. “Will you do me a favor and do that for a minute? So as I was saying, there ’s this old couple who had this car wreck out on the interstate. A kid hit them and they were all torn to shit and nobody was giving them much chance to pull through.”

  Terri looked at us and then back at Mel. She seemed anxious, or

  maybe that ’s too strong a word.

  Mel was handing the bottle around the table.

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  “I was on call that night,” Mel said. “It was May or maybe it was June.

  Terri and I had just sat down to dinner when the hospital called. There ’d been this thing out on the interstate. Drunk kid, teenager, plowed his dad ’s pickup into this camper with this old couple in it. They were up in their mid-seventies, that couple. The kid—eighteen, nineteen, something—he was DOA. Taken the steering wheel through his sternum.

  The old couple, they were alive, you understand. I mean, just barely.

  But they had everything. Multiple fractures, internal injuries, hemor-rhaging, contusions, lacerations, the works, and they each of them had themselves concussions. They were in a bad way, believe me. And, of course, their age was two strikes against them. I’d say she was worse off than he was. Ruptured spleen along with everything else. Both kneecaps broken. But they’d been wearing their seatbelts and, God knows, that ’s what saved them for the time being.”

  “Folks, this is an advertisement for the National Safety Council,”

  Terri said. “This is your spokesman, Dr. Melvin R. McGinnis, talking.”

  Terri laughed. “Mel,” she said, “sometimes you’re just too much. But I love you, hon,” she said.

  “Honey, I love you,” Mel said.

  He leaned across the table. Terri met him halfway. They kissed.

  “Terri’s right,” Mel said as he settled himself again. “Get those seatbelts on. But seriously, they were in some shape, those oldsters. By the time I got down there, the kid was dead, as I said. He was off in a corner, laid out on a gurney. I took one look at the old couple and told the ER

  nurse to get me a neurologist and an orthopedic man and a couple of surgeons down there right away.”

  He drank from his glass. “I’ll try to keep this short,” he said. “So we took the two of them up to the OR and worked like fuck on them most of the night. They had these incredible reserves, those two. You see that once in a while. So we did everything that could be done, and toward morning we ’re giving them a fifty-fifty chance, maybe less than that for her. So here they are, still alive the next morning. So, okay, we move them into the ICU, which is where they both kept plugging away at it for two weeks, hitting it better and better on all the scopes. So we transfer them out to their own room.”

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  Mel stopped talking. “Here,” he said, “let ’s drink this cheapo gin the hell up. Then we ’re going to dinner, right? Terri and I know a new place.

  That ’s where we ’ll go, to this new place we know about. But we ’re not going until we finish up this cut-rate, lousy gin.”

  Terri said, “We haven’t actually eaten there yet. But it looks good.

  From the outside, you know.”

  “I like food,” Mel said. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d be a chef, you know? Right, Terri?” Mel said.

  He laughed. He fingered the ice in his glass.

  “Terri knows,” he said. “Terri can tell you. But let me say this. If I could come back again in a different life, a different time and all, you know what? I’d like to come back as a knight. You were pretty safe wearing all that armor. It was all right being a knight until gunpowder and muskets and pistols came along.”

  “Mel would like to ride a horse and carry a lance,” Terri said.

  “Carry a woman’s scarf with you everywhere,” Laura said.

  “Or just a woman,” Mel said.

  “Shame on you,” Laura said.

  Terri said, “Suppose you came back as a serf. The serfs didn’t have it so good in those days,” Terri said.

  “The serfs never had it good,” Mel said. “But I guess even the

  knights were vessels to someone. Isn’t that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone. Isn’t that right? Terri? But what I liked about knights, besides their ladies, was that they had that suit of armor, you know, and they couldn’t get hurt very easy. No cars in those days, you know? No drunk teenagers to tear into your ass.”

  “Vassals,” Terri said.

  “What?” Mel said.

  “Vassals,” Terri said. “They were called vassals, not vessels.”

  “Vassals, vessels,” Mel said, “what the fuck’s the difference? You knew what I meant anyway. All right,” Mel said. “So I’m not educated.

  I learned my stuff. I’m a heart surgeon, sure, but I’m just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit,” Mel said.

  “Modesty doesn’t become you,” Terri said.

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  “He ’s just a humble sawbones,” I said. “But sometimes they suffocated in all that armor, Mel. They’d even have heart attacks if it got too hot and they were too tired and worn out. I read somewhere that they’d fall off their horses and not be able to get up because they were too tired to stand with all that armor on them. They got trampled by their own horses sometimes.”

  “That ’s terrible,” Mel said. “That ’s a terrible thing, Nicky. I guess they’d just lay there and wait until somebody came along and made a shish kebab out of them.”

  “Some other vessel,” Terri said.

  “That ’s right,” Mel said. “Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.”

  “Same things we fight over these days,” Terri said.

  Laura said, “Nothing’s changed.”

  The color was still high in Laura’s cheeks. Her eyes were bright. She brought her glass to her lips.

  Mel poured himself another drink. He looked at the label closely as if studying a long row of numbers. Then he slowly put the bottle down on the table and slowly reached for the tonic water.

  “What about the old couple?” Laura said. “You didn’t finish that story you started.”

  Laura was having a hard time lighting her cigarette. Her matches

  kept going out.

  The sunshine inside the room was different now, changing, getting thinner. But the leaves outside the window were still shimmering, and I stared at the pattern they made on the panes
and on the Formica counter.

  They weren’t the same patterns, of course.

  “What about the old couple?” I said.

  “Older but wiser,” Terri said.

  Mel stared at her.

  Terri said, “Go on with your story, hon. I was only kidding. Then what happened?”

  “Terri, sometimes,” Mel said.

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  “Please, Mel,” Terri said. “Don’t always be so serious, sweetie. Can’t you take a joke?”

  “Where ’s the joke?” Mel said.

  He held his glass and gazed steadily at his wife.

  “What happened?” Laura said.

  Mel fastened his eyes on Laura. He said, “Laura, if I didn’t have Terri and if I didn’t love her so much, and if Nick wasn’t my best friend, I’d fall in love with you. I’d carry you off, honey,” he said.

  “Tell your story,” Terri said. “Then we ’ll go to that new place, okay?”

  “Okay,” Mel said. “Where was I?” he said. He stared at the table and then he began again.

  “I dropped in to see each of them every day, sometimes twice a day if I was up doing other calls anyway. Casts and bandages, head to foot, the both of them. You know, you’ve seen it in the movies. That ’s just the way they looked, just like in the movies. Little eye-holes and nose-holes and mouth-holes. And she had to have her legs slung up on top of it.

  Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn’t everything. I’d get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he ’d say no, it wasn’t the accident exactly but it was because he couldn’t see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.”

  Mel looked around the table and shook his head at what he was going to say.

  “I mean, it was killing the old fart just because he couldn’t look at the fucking woman.”

  We all looked at Mel.

  “Do you see what I’m saying?” he said.

  Maybe we were a little drunk by then. I know it was hard keeping things in focus. The light was draining out of the room, going back through

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  the window where it had come from. Yet nobody made a move to get up from the table to turn on the overhead light.

  “Listen,” Mel said. “Let ’s finish this fucking gin. There ’s about enough left here for one shooter all around. Then let ’s go eat. Let ’s go to the new place.”

  “He ’s depressed,” Terri said. “Mel, why don’t you take a pill?”

  Mel shook his head. “I’ve taken everything there is.”

  “We all need a pill now and then,” I said.

  “Some people are born needing them,” Terri said.

  She was using her finger to rub at something on the table. Then she stopped rubbing.

  “I think I want to call my kids,” Mel said. “Is that all right with everybody? I’ll call my kids,” he said.

  Terri said, “What if Marjorie answers the phone? You guys, you’ve heard us on the subject of Marjorie? Honey, you know you don’t want to talk to Marjorie. It ’ll make you feel even worse.”

  “I don’t want to talk to Marjorie,” Mel said. “But I want to talk to my kids.”

  “There isn’t a day goes by that Mel doesn’t say he wishes she ’d get married again. Or else die,” Terri said. “For one thing,” Terri said,

  “she ’s bankrupting us. Mel says it ’s just to spite him that she won’t get married again. She has a boyfriend who lives with her and the kids, so Mel is supporting the boyfriend too.”

  “She ’s allergic to bees,” Mel said. “If I’m not praying she ’ll get married again, I’m praying she ’ll get herself stung to death by a swarm of fucking bees.”

  “Shame on you,” Laura said.

  “Bzzzzzzz,” Mel said, turning his fingers into bees and buzzing them at Terri’s throat. Then he let his hands drop all the way to his sides.

  “She ’s vicious,” Mel said. “Sometimes I think I’ll go up there dressed like a beekeeper. You know, that hat that ’s like a helmet with the plate that comes down over your face, the big gloves, and the padded coat? I’ll knock on the door and let loose a hive of bees in the house. But first I’d make sure the kids were out, of course.”

  He crossed one leg over the other. It seemed to take him a lot of time

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  to do it. Then he put both feet on the floor and leaned forward, elbows on the table, his chin cupped in his hands.

  “Maybe I won’t call the kids, after all. Maybe it isn’t such a hot idea.

  Maybe we ’ll just go eat. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds fine to me,” I said. “Eat or not eat. Or keep drinking. I could head right on out into the sunset.”

  “What does that mean, honey?” Laura said.

  “It just means what I said,” I said. “It means I could just keep going.

  That ’s all it means.”

  “I could eat something myself,” Laura said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry in my life. Is there something to nibble on?”

  “I’ll put out some cheese and crackers,” Terri said.

  But Terri just sat there. She did not get up to get anything.

  Mel turned his glass over. He spilled it out on the table.

  “Gin’s gone,” Mel said.

  Terri said, “Now what?”

  I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone ’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

  i n n o c e n c e

  h a r o l d b r o d k e y

  I . O R R A AT H A RVA R D

  Orra Perkins was a senior. Her looks were like a force that struck you. Truly, people on first meeting her often involuntarily lifted their arms as if about to fend off the brightness of the apparition. She was a somewhat scrawny, tuliplike girl of middling height. To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die. I’m not the only one who said that. It was because seeing someone in actuality who had such a high immediate worth meant you had to decide whether such personal distinction had a right to exist or if she belonged to the state and ought to be shadowed in, reduced in scale, made lesser, laughed at.

  Also, it was the case that you had to be rich and famous to set your hands on her; she could not fail to be a trophy, and the question was whether the trophy had to be awarded on economic and political grounds or whether chance could enter in.

  I was a senior, too, and ironic. I had no money. I was without lineage.

  It seemed to me Orra was proof that life was a terrifying phenomenon of surface immediacy. She made any idea I had of psychological normalcy or of justice absurd since normalcy was not as admirable or as desirable as Orra; or rather she was normalcy and everything else was a falling off, a falling below; and justice was inconceivable if she, or someone equivalent to her if there was an equivalent once you had seen her, would not sleep with you. I used to create general hilarity in my room by shouting her name at my friends and then breaking up into laughter,

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  gasping out, “God, we ’re so small-time.” It was grim that she existed and I had not had her. One could still prefer a more ordinary girl but not for simple reasons.

  A great many people avoided her, ran away from her. She was, in

  part, more knowing than the rest of us because the experiences offered her had been so extreme, and she had been so extreme in response—

  scenes in Harvard Square with an English marquess, slapping a son of a billionaire so hard he fell ov
er backwards at a party in Lowell House, her saying then and subsequently, “I never sleep with anyone who has a fat ass.” Extreme in the humiliations endured and meted out, in the crass-ness of the publicity, of her life defined as those adventures, extreme in the dangers survived or not entirely survived, the cheapness undergone so that she was on a kind of frightening eminence, an eminence of her experiences and of her being different from everyone else. She ’d dealt in intrigues, major and minor, in the dramas of political families, in pas-sions, deceptions, folly on a large, expensive scale, promises, violence, the genuine pain of defeat when defeat is to some extent the result of your qualities and not of your defects, and she knew the rottenness of victories that hadn’t been final. She was crass and impaired by beauty.

  She was like a giant bird, she was as odd as an ostrich walking around the Yard, in her absurd gorgeousness, she was so different from us in kind, so capable of a different sort of progress through the yielding medium of the air, through the strange rooms of our minutes on this earth, through the gloomy circumstances of our lives in those years.

  People said it was worth it to do this or that just in order to see her—

  seeing her offered some kind of encouragement, was some kind of testimony that life was interesting. But not many people cared as much about knowing her. Most people preferred to keep their distance. I don’t know what her having made herself into what she was had done for her. She could have been ordinary if she ’d wished.

  She had unnoticeable hair, a far from arresting forehead, and extraordinary eyes, deep-set, longing, hopeful, angrily bored behind smooth, heavy lids that fluttered when she was interested and when she was not interested at all. She had a great desire not to trouble or be troubled by supernumeraries and strangers. She has a proud, too large nose that

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  gives her a noble, stubborn dog’s look. Her mouth has a disconcertingly lovely set to it—it is more immediately expressive than her eyes and it shows her implacability: it is the implacability of her knowledge of life in her. People always stared at her. Some giggled nervously. Do you like me, Orra? Do you like me at all? They stared at the great hands of the Aztec priest opening them to feelings and to awe, exposing their hearts, the dread cautiousness of their lives. They stared at the incredible symmetries of her sometimes anguishedly passionate face, the erratic pain for her in being beautiful that showed on it, the occasional plunging gaiety she felt because she was beautiful. I like beautiful people. The symmetries of her face were often thwarted by her attempts at expressiveness—beauty was a stone she struggled free of. A ludicrous beauty.