I catch my breath. I am shocked. The fishes were one thing, but the ten-thousand-dollar parrot? And it’s not at all the price I’m talking about. It’s the animal. It’s a big animal, which talks. And as though to prove my thought, “Death and dying,” says the parrot, the blade pointed at its sky-blue neck. But after all, a dying little girl is allowed to kill a parrot. She’s allowed to kill practically anything.
Sara suddenly drops the knife and charges at me. I look at the knife on the floor again, just to make sure I did not imagine that she dropped it. She punches me, repeatedly, as hard and as quickly as she can, and I welcome it I understand it it should have come sooner it makes me feel better than I’ve felt in a long time as though purifying me of my crime liberating me from it it is equal I guess to serving a prison sentence and feeling you paid for your wickedness afterward.
But then the parrot joins in, shrieking, and knocks on my head with his beak, like a woodpecker, while Sara continues punching me. He is perched on the side of my face, I’m not sure exactly where, probably on my ear with one foot and on my shoulder with the other. It hurts incredibly, so much that I can’t even feel Sara’s blows. It bleeds, I can feel, but I don’t dare say no, because maybe I deserve this also. And if I said no, she might think I meant her, which I don’t. I look down, sort of sadly, but I don’t cry because I don’t have the right to cry. Then she stops. But the bird does not. “Stop it,” she tells it. “Death and dying,” it answers, and stops.
I need to wipe off the blood running down my forehead before it reaches my eyes, or I will have trouble blinking. I look around for a tissuelike thing but see nothing, so I remove the parrot from my ear and shoulder and wipe my forehead on its sky-blue and white feathers, enhancing their beauty to red and purple.
“Jeremy?” says Sara.
“What?”
“There’s something I want you to do with me.”
“What’s that?”
“I want to hang glide before I die.”
I remember Henrietta telling me that Sara’s father died of a hang gliding accident. “That’s very dangerous,” I say.
“Ha. Ha.” She pauses. “I’d really love it.”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know where people do it.”
“In the country. An hour away from here.”
“You’d have to ask your mother.”
“I already did. She said okay.”
“Well, then, okay, I’ll take you there.”
“And you’ll fly with me.”
“No, I’ll just watch. You’ll go with an instructor.”
“I want to fly with you.”
“I don’t know how to fly.”
“You’ll go with an instructor too, but we’ll be flying at the same time.”
“I don’t know. It’s very dangerous.”
“I’m sure you can’t be worried about me. Even if I get crippled for life, it won’t be for very long.”
“Well, I’m also worried about myself.”
“You could do this for me, couldn’t you?”
I suddenly become ashamed that I hesitated. Since I can’t offer her a jeweled egg, I’ll risk my life for her. “Of course I could. We’ll do it.”
She prances over to me, smiling widely, and kisses me on the mouth. The kiss does not stop. It continues, and it is not a kiss of gratitude anymore. I am again starting to smell the fruit in her. Her fruit is pear. It smells good, sweet. Everyone dying has a fruit in them. The key is to die before the fruit rots. My father’s fruit of death had been grapes. I had smelled them. My own fruit, I am certain, I instinctively know, will be lemon, bitter lemon.
The kiss is there still. I am repulsed by her beard. I get little hairs in my mouth, and the mixture of the coarse hairs and the sweet fruity smell makes me feel nauseous, on the verge of throwing up if I’m not careful. It feels good to be repelled by her, because it means I’m more normal than before if I can’t be attracted to a little girl.
But no, I’m cheating, it’s not true. The only reason I have this feeling of repugnance is the beard, and nothing else, I’m sure. I am monstrous to be repelled by a poor dying little girl who happens to have a beard. I cannot allow myself to feel this way. I mean, really, her beard is one of the symptoms, for God’s sake, of her dyingness. It does not deserve disgust from anyone. Especially not from me, who found her pretty enough to make love with before. Well, I should find her pretty enough to make love with now. I must push away my disgust and try to feel desire for her, despite the beard.
What am I doing? What am I thinking? I’m getting all tangled in these absurd thoughts. I’m losing perspective. The fact that she has a beard is destiny helping me fight this challenge.
I gently push her away.
“I can kill, but I can’t have love?” she asks.
“No, not unnatural love. You shouldn’t want to have it.”
“First of all, it’s not unnatural love. Second of all, I do want it.”
“You promised me that if I remained your friend you wouldn’t start this again.”
“Things are different now. I’m going to be dead soon. I thought that meant I could do things.”
“Yes, a lot of things, but not everything.”
“Of course not everything. I can’t kill you, but I can kiss you, can’t I?”
I don’t answer.
She says, “It had to happen, didn’t it? At first I thought it might not. I thought I would be noble enough and not take advantage of my dying. But I’m not. Jeremy, I want to make love with you again.”
“No. It was probably our lovemaking that caused your disease to begin with.”
“You know very well that’s not the least bit true.”
She’s right. I do, most of the time, know that it’s not the least bit true, but sometimes I forget.
“Well, then,” I say, “the reason you want to do all this love-making in the first place is probably because of your disease. It’s a symptom of it.”
“Well, listen to this: ‘Do you think that her brain tumor could have caused other symptoms?’ my mom asked the doctor. ‘Probably not, but like what?’ said the doctor. ‘Many things. For example, having unusually strong sexual urges for a girl her age?’ said my mom, embarrassed. ‘Absolutely not,’ said the doctor says Sara, emphasizing “said the doctor” very much.
“How do you know this?” I ask.
“I was there.”
“Henrietta asked the doctor in front of you?”
“No, but I was in the other room and heard everything.”
“Maybe you misheard.”
“No, because my mom repeated the conversation to me afterward. She remembered every word the way I had heard it, and not only that, but I also remember every single word exactly the way I heard it both times.”
Sara might be lying, which wouldn’t make much difference at this point anyway.
“Sara,” I say, reasonably, “I am willing to go hang gliding with you. I’ll risk my life for you, but I won’t sleep with you.”
“It’s because of my beard, isn’t it?”
“No,” I say, hoping I am telling the truth.
Sara goes to her room, upset. I sit on the couch and think. I decide to wait for Henrietta, who should be home soon. When she arrives, she is rather surprised to see a fat, pretty, dead goldfish on the floor, and water stains on the wall against which it had been thrown. She is also surprised to see a tiny thing floating around in her saucepan, which I tell her is also a fish. She finds a flat ripped fish in the corner of her living room. Each new fish corpse she finds upsets her more, because it depicts a not very flattering portrait of her daughter’s mental state.
“Are you going to do it?” Lady Henrietta asks me.
“Do what?”
“Grant her dying wish.”
“I’ll go hang gliding with her.”
“Not that one. That’s not her dying wish. That’s merely the wish of a dying girl. I meant the other one.”
“She told y
ou about it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to?”
“It’s up to you.”
“I will not grant it. I don’t think it would be right.”
“Do dying wishes have to be right?”
“No, but they should not be wrong.”
“Isn’t that the whole point of a dying wish, that for once in your life you can wish for something wrong and people will comply?”
“No,” I reply. “There are some things in life that even dying wishes should not ask for.”
“Are you doing this for her own good?”
“Yes.”
“Why? You think it would harm her to sleep with someone before her death? There certainly could not be any long-term psychological damage.”
“No, but I believe she will be more at peace during the last moments of her life if her dying wish is not granted.”
“Do you mean she will be more happy?”
“Happiness, at this point, is not the point. It does not matter, it is trivial.”
“What does matter?”
“Peace and serenity.”
“Don’t you think she’ll get enough of those when she’s dead?”
I pause. “Okay, so you want me to fuck your girl?” I hope to shock her into accepting my point of view.
“It’s up to you.”
“I feel that I should not do it.”
“Or rather, you fear that you cannot.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing she’s alluding to the beard.
“It’s the beard, isn’t it?” she says.
“No, but if it were, I would thank the beard, because it’s making me act the right way.”
“You just switched into present tense, which means you just admitted that it is the beard.”
“Think what you want.”
* * *
People start to clap when we have dinner at other restaurants as well.
Sara has been flipping coins lately, asking Fate if she will live or die.
“Everything in life is a fifty percent chance,” she says, to justify her flipping of the coins.
“No, almost nothing is,” I tell her.
“Heads means I’ll live, tails means I’ll die,” she says, ignoring my answer. She flips the coin. “It’s heads.” Indeed it is heads. She flips it again. “It’s heads again!” It’s heads again. “That means Fate is telling me twice that I’ll live. Fate is reconfirming her answer.”
“What if you got two tails now, what would that mean?”
“It would mean that I’m bothering Fate too much and she wants me to leave her alone. She’s not answering me anymore, and she’s leaving the answers up to Randomness.”
We go hang gliding. Sara does not shave anymore, so everyone thinks she is a young man. My beard is almost as full as hers. She started letting hers grow before mine.
We fly on separate hang gliders, each of us with an instructor. The parrot follows us. He’s big, sky-blue and white. Tears are running out of my eyes, from the wind and from my thoughts. My beard is plastered against my cheeks; hers must be too. Once in a while, I hear parts of the parrot’s favorite phrase, “Death and dying.” As he circles us, I hear “and dying,” or “death and,” or even “time yet?” and “soon?”
When we land, Sara says she loves hang gliding and that she had the best time of her life. It was indeed an unforgettable experience. She suddenly asks me how Laura is doing and how it feels to be living with her. I tell her it feels nice.
“Do you spend lots of time together?” she asks.
“Yes, when she’s home. But she often has to leave for a few days to perform in other cities.”
“Is she away right now?” asks Sara.
“Yes, actually. She’s in California for two days.”
The fruit in Sara is starting to smell riper. It is more exquisite than ever, but closer to being less so.
That night, Sara visits me, wearing her dress the color of the sun and her beard. She wants me to shave her beard. She says it’s important, meaningful, intimate, sensual, and romantic.
“You won’t be able to resist me when you shave me,” she says.
We go into the bathroom and I start shaving her beard, and I immediately and uncontrollably begin to cry. Then Sara cries. Our noses run over our mustaches, and our tears run into our beards. After I’ve shaved half her face, we start to kiss and to hug each other, still crying. Then Sara goes and lies down on my bed. I take out my little white elephant, slide it onto a gold chain, and hook it around Sara’s neck. She recognizes it from the story she read in my diary. She thanks me, squeezes the elephant in her palm, and makes a silent wish. I lie next to her and hold her. If at this point she were to ask me again to make love to her, I would not refuse, even though half her beard is still there. But she does not ask. We fall asleep crying.
While we sleep, I dream a strange nightmare, in which Sara wants to handcuff me to the foot of the couch the following morning. At first I refuse, but she insists until I finally agree. She then changes her mind about the location and handcuffs me instead to the bottom drawer of one of the file cabinets Laura bought to make me feel more at home. I see that I will always be a slave to file cabinets. Sara then lowers my pants and sits on me and, still wearing her dress the color of the sun and her half beard, has sex with me. Then, still in the dream, the door to my apartment opens, and my friend Tommy comes in, at which point Sara stops moving and remains sitting on me.
“The door was open, so I came in,” he says.
Tommy has a special relationship with doors. They are never closed for him; they simply don’t treat him that way. They are always open, unless they’re locked. And I have forgotten to lock my door.
“How’re you doing, man?” I ask him, trying to sound casual.
“Fine. I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by. Are you busy?”
“No, not at all,” Sara and I both answer.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” he says to Sara, and shakes her hand. He does not comment on her half beard.
They do small talk, which I don’t listen to because I’m frantically trying to think of an explanation to give him as to why I’m handcuffed to the file cabinet with Sara sitting on me, in case he asks. But they keep talking, and I’m starting to feel vaguely like a couch: incidental.
“What are you guys doing anyway?” Tommy finally asks.
“We are acting out the famous fairy tale ‘The Princess and the Pea,’ ” I tell him. “I’m playing the mattress.”
“And the pea,” Sara adds.
“Is he any good?” Tommy asks her.
“Yes, especially as the pea.”
“And why the handcuffs?”
“Because I’m an object,” I reply, glaring at Sara. “Mattresses and peas are helpless things.”
Eventually Tommy leaves, telling us not to get up, he’ll let himself out. And that’s the end of the dream.
In the morning, I half expect Sara to ask me if she can handcuff me to one of the file cabinets, but she doesn’t. She asks me to shave the rest of her beard, which I do, and then she requests me to escort her back home by subway, because she wants to be wearing her dress the color of the sun in the subway. This we do.
When we arrive at Henrietta’s apartment, we find her in bed, the blankets up to her nose. Not even her fingers stick out. “What’s wrong?” we ask.
“Nothing. I just have a slight cold.” She looks at Sara. “You shaved your beard.”
“No. Jeremy shaved me. Don’t you think he did a good job?”
“Yes. It looks nice.”
“He’s better at it than we are. You shave me the way you shave your legs and armpits. I shave myself the way I’d shave a doll’s head. But Jeremy shaves me the way a real man shaves a real woman’s beard.”
“Yes,” replies Henrietta through the blanket. “You should go tell your parrot a bit about it.”
The moment Sara leaves the room, Henrietta whips back t
he blankets and goes to her dressing table, on which are a bottle of rubbing alcohol, Band-Aids, cotton balls, and a tube of Vaseline.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I hurt myself.”
“How?”
“I ate all my cuticles and my lips.” She turns her face to me and, with bleeding fingers, points to her bleeding lips.
“Why?” I ask.
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