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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  A cruel clown of a girl. Sometimes her face was absolutely impassive as if masked in dullness and she was trying to move among us incognito.

  I was aware that each of her downfalls made her more possible for me.

  I never doubted that she was privately a pedestrian shitting-peeing person. Whenever I had a chance to observe her for any length of time, in a classroom for instance, I would think, I understand her. Whenever I approached her, she responded up to a point and then even as I stood talking to her I would fade as a personage, as a sexual presence, as someone present and important to her, into greater and greater invisibility.

  That was when she was a freshman, a sophomore, and a junior. When we were seniors, by then I’d learned how to avoid being invisible even to Orra. Orra was, I realized, hardly more than a terrific college girl, much vaunted, no more than that yet. But my God, my God, in one ’s eyes, in one ’s thoughts, she strode like a Nike, she entered like a blast of light, the thought of her was as vast as a desert. Sometimes in an early winter twilight in the Yard, I would see her in her coat, unbuttoned even in cold weather as if she burned slightly always, see her move clumsily along a walk looking like a scrawny field-hockey player, a great athlete of a girl half-stumbling, uncoordinated off the playing field, yet with reserves of strength, do you know? and her face, as she walked along, might twitch like a dog’s when the dog is asleep, twitching with whatever dialogue or adventure or daydream she was having in her head. Or she might in the early darkness stride along, cold-faced, haughty, angry, all the worst

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  refusals one would ever receive bound up in one ridiculously beautiful girl. One always said, “I wonder what will become of her.” Her ignoring me marked me as a sexual nonentity. She was proof of a level of sexual adventure I had not yet with my best efforts reached: that level existed because Orra existed.

  What is it worth to be in love in this way?

  I I . O R R A W I T H M E

  I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with where it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one ’s knees in front of the event.

  In the last spring of our being undergraduates, I finally got her.

  We had agreed to meet in my room, to get a little drunk cheaply before going out to dinner. I left the door unlatched; and I lay naked on my bed under a sheet. When she knocked on the door, I said, “Come in,” and she did. She began to chatter right away, to complain that I was still in bed; she seemed to think I’d been taking a nap and had forgotten to wake up in time to get ready for her arrival. I said, “I’m naked, Orra, under this sheet. I’ve been waiting for you. I haven’t been asleep.”

  Her face went empty. She said, “Damn you—why couldn’t you

  wait?” But even while she was saying that, she was taking off her blouse.

  I was amazed that she was so docile; and then I saw that it was maybe partly that she didn’t want to risk saying no to me—she didn’t want me

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  to be hurt and difficult, she didn’t want me to explode; she had a kind of hope of making me happy so that I’d then appreciate her and be happy with her and let her know me: I’m putting it badly. But her not being able to say no protected me from having so great a fear of sexual failure that I would not have been able to be worried about her pleasure, or to be concerned about her in bed. She was very amateurish and uninformed in bed, which touched me. It was really sort of poor sex; she didn’t come or even feel much that I could see. Afterward, lying beside her, I thought of her eight or ten or fifteen lovers being afraid of her, afraid to tell her anything about sex in case they might be wrong. I had an image of them protecting their own egos, holding their arms around their egos and not letting her near them. It seemed a kindness embedded in the event that she was, in quite an obvious way, with a little critical interpretation, a virgin. And impaired, or crippled by having been beautiful, just as I’d thought. I said to myself that it was a matter of course that I might be deluding myself. But what I did for the rest of that night—we stayed up all night; we talked, we quarreled for a while, we confessed various things, we argued about sex, we fucked again (the second one was a little better)—I treated her with the justice with which I’d treat a boy my age, a young man, and with a rather exact or measured patience and toler-ance, as if she were a paraplegic and had spent her life in a wheelchair and was tired of sentiment. I showed her no sentiment at all. I figured she ’d been asphyxiated by the sentiments and sentimentality of people impressed by her looks. She was beautiful and frightened and empty and shy and alone and wounded and invulnerable (like a cripple: what more can you do to a cripple?). She was Caesar and ruler of the known world and not Caesar and no one as well.

  It was a fairly complicated, partly witty thing to do. It meant I could not respond to her beauty but had to ignore it. She was a curious sort of girl; she had a great deal of isolation in her, isolation as a woman. It meant that when she said something on the order of “You’re very defensive,” I had to be a debater, her equal, take her seriously, and say, “How do you mean that?” and then talk about it, and alternately deliver a blow (“You can’t judge defensiveness, you have the silly irresponsibility of women, the silly disconnectedness: I have to be defensive”) and defer

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  to her: “You have a point: you think very clearly. All right, I’ll adopt that as a premise.” Of course, much of what we said was incoherent and nonsensical on examination, but we worked out in conversation what we meant or thought we meant. I didn’t react to her in an emotional way. She wasn’t really a girl, not really quite human: how could she be?

  She was a position, a specific glory, a trophy, our local upper-middle-class pseudo-Cleopatra. Or not pseudo. I couldn’t revel in my luck or be unselfconsciously vain. I could not strut horizontally or loll as if on clouds, a demigod with a goddess, although it was clear we were deeply fortunate, in spite of everything: the poor sex, the differences in attitude which were all we seemed to share, the tensions and the blundering. If I enjoyed her more than she enjoyed me, if I lost consciousness of her even for a moment, she would be closed into her isolation again.

  I couldn’t love her and have her, too. I could love her and have her if I didn’t show love or the symptoms of having had her. It was like lying in a very lordly way, opening her to the possibility of feeling by making her comfortable inside the calm lies of my behavior, my inscribing the minutes with false messages. It was like meeting a requirement in Greek myth, like not looking back at Eurydice. The night crept on, swept on, late minutes, powdered with darkness, in the middle of a sleeping city, spring crawling like a plague of green snakes, bits of warmth in the air, at 4 a.m. smells of leaves when the stink of automobiles died down. Dawn came, so pink, so pastel, so silly: We were talking about the possibility of innate grammatical structures; I said it was an unlikely notion, that Jews really were God-haunted (the idea had been broached by a Jew), and the great difficulty was to invent a just God, that if God appeared at a moment of time or relied on prophets, there had to be degrees in the possibility of knowing Him so that He was by definition unjust; the only just God would be one who consisted of what had always been known by everyone; and that you could always identify a basically Messianic, a huge
ly religious, fraudulent thinker by how much he tried to anchor his doctrine to having always been true, to being innate even in savage man, whereas an honest thinker, a nonliar, was caught in the grip of the truth of process and change and the profound absence of justice except as an invention, an attempt by the will to live with someone, or with many

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  others without consuming them. At that moment Orra said, “I think we ’re falling in love.”

  I figured I had kept her from being too depressed after fucking—it ’s hard for a girl with any force in her and any brains to accept the whole thing of fucking, of being fucked without trying to turn it on its end, so that she does some fucking, or some fucking up; I mean, the mere power of arousing the man so he wants to fuck isn’t enough: she wants him to be willing to die in order to fuck. There ’s a kind of strain or intensity women are bred for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it ’s in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near. To be fucked when there ’s no drama inherent in it, when you’re not going to rise to a level of nobility and courage forever denied the male, is to be cut off from what is inherently female, bestially speaking.

  I wanted to be halfway decent company for her. I don’t know that it was natural to me. I am psychologically, profoundly, a transient. A form of trash. I am incapable of any continuing loyalty and silence; I am an informer. But I did all right with her. It was dawn, as I said. We stood naked by the window, silently watching the light change. Finally, she said, “Are you hungry? Do you want breakfast?”

  “Sure. Let ’s get dressed and go—”

  She cut me off; she said with a funny kind of firmness, “No! Let me go and get us something to eat.”

  “Orra, don’t wait on me. Why are you doing this? Don’t be like

  this.”

  But she was in a terrible hurry to be in love. After those few hours, after that short a time.

  She said, “I’m not as smart as you, Wiley. Let me wait on you. Then things will be even.”

  “Things are even, Orra.”

  “No. I’m boring and stale. You just think I’m not because you’re in love with me. Let me go.”

  I blinked. After a while, I said, “All right.”

  She dressed and went out and came back. While we ate, she was

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  silent; I said things, but she had no comment to make; she ate very little; she folded her hands and smiled mildly like some nineteenth-century portrait of a handsome young mother. Every time I looked at her, when she saw I was looking at her, she changed the expression on her face to one of absolute and undeviating welcome to me and to anything I might say.

  So, it had begun.

  I I I . O R R A

  She hadn’t come. She said she had never come with anyone at any time.

  She said it didn’t matter.

  After our first time, she complained, “You went twitch, twitch,

  twitch—just like a grasshopper.” So she had wanted to have more pleasure than she ’d had. But after the second fuck and after the dawn, she never complained again—unless I tried to make her come, and then

  she complained of that. She showed during sex no dislike for any of my sexual mannerisms or for the rhythms and postures I fell into when I fucked. But I was not pleased or satisfied; it bothered me that she didn’t come. I was not pleased or satisfied on my own account, either.

  I thought the reason for that was she attracted me more than she could satisfy me, maybe more than fucking could ever satisfy me, that the more you cared, the more undertow there was, so that the sexual thing drowned—I mean, the sharpest sensations, and yet the dullest, are when you masturbate—but when you’re vilely attached to somebody, there are noises, distractions that drown out the sensations of fucking. For a long time, her wanting to fuck, her getting undressed, and the soft horizontal bobble of her breasts as she lay there, and the soft wavering, the kind of sinewlessness of her legs and lower body, with which she more or less showed me she was ready—that was more moving, was

  more immensely important to me than any mere ejaculation later, any putt-putt-putt in her darkness, any hurling of future generations into the clenched universe, the strict mitten inside her: I clung to her and grunted and anchored myself to the most temporary imaginable relief of the

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  desire I felt for her; I would be hungry again and anxious to fuck again in another twenty minutes; it was pitiable, this sexual disarray. It seemed to me that in the vast spaces of the excitement of being welcomed by each other, we could only sightlessly and at best half organize our bodies. But so what? We would probably die in these underground caverns; a part of our lives would die; a certain innocence and hope would never survive this: we were too open, too clumsy, and we were the wrong people: so what did a fuck matter? I didn’t mind if the sex was always a little rasping, something of a failure, if it was just preparation for more sex in half an hour, if coming was just more foreplay. If this was all that was in store for us, fine. But I thought she was getting gypped in that she felt so much about me, she was dependent, and she was generous, and she didn’t come when we fucked.

  She said she had never come, not once in her life, and that she didn’t need to. And that I mustn’t think about whether she came or not. “I’m a sexual tigress,” she explained, “and I like to screw but I’m too sexual to come: I haven’t that kind of daintiness. I’m not selfish that way.”

  I could see that she had prowled around in a sense and searched out men and asked them to be lovers as she had me rather than wait for them or plot to capture their attention in some subtle way; and in bed she was sexually eager and a bit more forward and less afraid than most girls; but only in an upper-middle-class frame of reference was she a sexual tigress.

  It seemed to me—my whole self was focused on this—that her not

  coming said something about what we had, that her not coming was an undeniable fact, a measure of the limits of what we had. I did not think we should think we were great lovers when we weren’t.

  Orra said we were, that I had no idea how lousy the sex was other people had. I told her that hadn’t been my experience. We were, it seemed to me, two twenty-one-year-olds, overeducated, irrevocably shy beneath our glaze of sexual determination and of sexual appetite, and psychologically somewhat slashed up and only capable of being partly useful to each other. We weren’t the king and queen of Cockandcuntdom yet.

  Orra said coming was a minor part of sex for a woman and was a

  demeaning measure of sexuality. She said it was imposed as a measure by people who knew nothing about sex and judged women childishly.

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  It seemed to me she was turning a factual thing, coming, into a public-relations thing. But girls were under fearful public pressures in these matters.

  When she spoke about them, these matters, she had a little, superior inpuckered look, a don’t-make-me-make-mincemeat-of-you-in-argument look—I thought of it as her Orra-as-Orra look, Orra alone, Orra-without-Wiley, without me, Orra isolated and depressed, a terrific girl, an Orra who hated cowing men.

  She referred to novels, to novels by women writers, to specific scenes and remarks about sex and coming for women, but I’d read some of

  those books, out of curiosity, and none of them were literature, and the heroines in them invariably were innocent in every relation; but very strong and very knowing and with terrifically good judgment; and the men they loved were described in such a way that they appeared to be examples of the woman’s sexual reach, or of her intellectual value, rather than sexual companions or sexual objects; the women had sex generously with men who apparently bored them ph
ysically; I had thought the books and their writers and characters sexually naive.

  Very few women, it seemed to me, had much grasp of physical reality. Still, very strange things were often true, and a man’s notion of orgasm was necessarily specialized.

  When I did anything in bed to excite her, with an eye to making her come, she asked me not to, and that irritated the hell out of me. But no matter what she said, it must have been bad for her after six years of fucking around not to get to a climax. It had to be that it was a run on her neural patience. How strong could she be?

  I thought about how women coming were at such a pitch of uncon-

  trol they might prefer a dumb, careless lover, someone very unlike me: I had often played at being a strong, silent dunce. Some girls became fawning and doglike after they came, even toward dunces. Others

  jumped up and became immediately tough, proud of themselves as if the coming was all to their credit, and I ought to be flattered. God, it was a peculiar world. Brainy girls tended to control their comes, doling out one to a fuck, just like a man; and often they would try to keep that one under control, they would limit it to a single nozzle-contracted squirt

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  of excitement. Even that sometimes racked and emptied them and made them curiously weak and brittle and embarrassed and delicate and lazy.

  Or they would act bold and say, “God, I needed that.”

  I wondered how Orra would look, in what way she would do it, a

  girl like that going off, how she ’d hold herself, her eyes, how she ’d act toward me when it was over.