“I am a dying person,” says the parrot.
I notice a white ribbon on the floor in the corner of the room and realize the parrot has found Sara’s braids, destroyed them, and tangled himself in her hair. Henrietta bends over him, touches the threads, and says, “What is this?”
I don’t answer, keep looking at the white ribbon.
“Jeremy? What do you think he’s covered with?”
I pick up the white ribbon, and I find the box, and I carefully start pulling the hairs off the parrot and putting them in the box.
Henrietta covers her eyes with one hand when she understands, then she comes down on the bird, hitting him hard. She slaps his body and the side of his wing. I’m afraid she will hurt him seriously, so I pull her away.
“He’s an asshole!” she shouts at me.
The parrot lies on the floor, motionless. He is trembling, his beak is open, and his black tongue moves in and out slightly, as though he’s panting. Some of Sara’s hair got in his mouth. His feathers are erect. I touch him lightly. He shivers. He doesn’t seem hurt, just shocked.
“You shouldn’t vent your anger on him as though he’s responsible for her death,” I tell Henrietta. “When he saw Sara’s braids, he probably thought he had found her.”
Later that day, Henrietta tells me, “Someone is responsible for her death. I can’t live with the idea that the woman who killed my daughter is living out there in the same world I’m living in and that I’m just going to keep on living in the same world as hers without knowing her or what kind of person she is. I will feel more complete and satisfied if I know her. I want to meet her.”
“Don’t get into this,” I tell her. “One thing might lead to another.”
“I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong, I think.”
“You might start hating her and wanting to harm her.”
“I knew that’s what you were thinking. And you mean harm her as in even kill her.”
“It could happen.”
“I don’t feel it will.”
“She might not want to meet with you.”
“If the parents of the girl you ran over say they want to meet you in a public place, could you refuse?”
I think for a moment. “Most people would refuse, because it wouldn’t be surprising if the parents’ only remaining desire in life is to kill the person who ran over their daughter.”
Henrietta decides to call Julie Carson anyway, the woman of the yellow car. She sets up her recording equipment. She tells me I can listen on the other phone. A woman answers on the fourth ring. I am startled to recognize her voice so clearly.
“Is this Julie Carson?” says Henrietta.
“Yes.”
“I’m the mother of the girl you killed.”
(Be direct, why don’t you.)
“Oh,” says the woman.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about you, and it would be very helpful to my mourning if I could meet with you. Just to chat and to know you a little bit.”
(Helpful to my mourning?)
Long silence. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Please say yes. It would help my grieving.” (It would help my grieving.)
“I don’t think I can meet with you,” says the woman. “I wish I could help you in every way possible, but I cannot meet with you in person. I’m sure you understand.”
“Why? You mean for safety reasons?”
“Yes.”
“You think I’d kill you?”
(Be blunt, why not.)
“I don’t know.”
“Your address is in the phone book. If I want to, I can just wait for you outside your budding. So what difference does it make?”
(That’s it, bring out all the charm.)
“Is that what you’d do?”
Henrietta waits a moment before answering. “No. I’m just showing you that it makes no sense for you not to meet me in person.”
(Such vulnerability is sure to work.)
“I really would rather not. Also, I’ve been sick since the accident. I can’t go out. Please try to understand.”
“Perhaps I could come and visit you at home, so you don’t have to go out?”
(She couldn’t refuse that.)
“No.”
“You don’t care very much about remedying the wrong you’ve done.”
“It was an accident.”
“I know that very well. But you don’t seem the slightest bit interested in making me feel better. Logically, you should be afraid of making me angry, because then you could be in danger.”
“Is that the case?”
“I am feeling sad and angry, but you’re not in danger.”
“Please understand.”
“I don’t want to,” says Henrietta.
“But you do, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t want to.”
The woman remains silent.
“Did you end up taking your pet to the vet to kill it?” asks Henrietta. I had told her about that.
“To put him to sleep, yes.”
“I’m surprised. I would have thought you might have changed your mind.”
“He was suffering.”
“Did you do it that day?”
“No, of course not.”
“When?”
“The next day. Someone did it for me.”
“Who?”
“A friend.”
“A man?”
“Yes.”
“Your lover?”
The woman hesitates and finally replies, “No, just a friend.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-eight.”
Older than I am. I’m thirty. What I really want to know is whether you have children, but I won’t ask you that, because if you do have children, you’ll say you don’t. Do you have children?”
“No.”
“I might need to talk to you again sometime. Also, I might come and see you outside your budding. But I won’t hurt you. I would be very surprised if I hurt you. Goodbye.”
Henrietta waits for the woman to say goodbye, but it doesn’t happen. The woman hangs up silently. “Jeremy?” says Henrietta on the phone.
“What?” I answer in my receiver.
“So what do you think?”
“I think you should paint.”
Henrietta goes back to bed, and I watch TV.
“How does it feel to be clapped at, everywhere you go?” a famous interviewer asks her on TV.
“It’s funny. It’s cheerful,” she replies. “I hke it. I wonder when people will get tired of it.”
“I predict never. Fifty years from now, people will still be clapping at you, some without even remembering why. They will simply know: She is the person one claps at. But the question I want to ask is, Will you ever get tired of it?”
“I predict not as long as I live.”
Two days later, Henrietta is still in bed. She’s lying on her side, motionless and silent. I walk around the bed to look at her eyes. They are open and unblinking. She could be dead. “Henrietta?” I say.
Her pupils move to my face.
“Are you feeling okay?” I ask.
“Yes,” she groans.
“I was wondering if you’d like to go for a walk.”
“No.”
“A drive?”
“No.”
“Would you like to paint?”
“No.” She closes her eyes.
“I think it might make you feel much better to paint.”
She doesn’t answer.
“I’ll even pose for you if you want.”
She sighs.
“I’ll even pose naked for you if you want.”
She snorts, and I’m not sure if it’s a sob or a laugh.
“I have some painting stuff you could use, from when I was a kid. I even have some oil paints. I can bring them in here.” Henrietta does not answer, which is better than a refusal, so my mother and I carry all the paints and brushes and canvases
to Henrietta’s room. We sit her at a desk, in front of a canvas. I ask my mother to leave because I don’t want to pose nude in front of her. I take off my clothes and, remembering Sara’s rule, I lie on the bed in the most comfortable position I can find.
I talk to Lady Henrietta about light subjects, like how pretty the weather is, how pleasant it is to walk outside, how nice my mother is. To amuse her, I tell her about the agent I caught in the supermarket. I see her making a few brush strokes on the canvas. Good. She answers my comments briefly, sadly. Her brush strokes look different than usual. The movements of her arm look broad and negligent. And then suddenly they stop. She does not move anymore. She just sits there staring at me. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I’m sorry Jeremy, but I can’t paint you. I’ve painted you once already. I’m just not interested in doing it again.”
I get up and look at her canvas. On it there is a stick figure of me, lying on a stick-figure bed.
“Oh yes,” I say. “I can see you’re not inspired.”
She goes back to her bed and plops down.
“I know just how to fix the problem,” I continue. “I will find you a very inspiring model.”
“Don’t bother, Jeremy.”
“I want to bother. I just need to know one thing: Do you want a beautiful man or an Optical Illusion Man?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“Please, Henrietta. I’m sure it’ll make you feel so much better to get involved in your painting, even for just one hour.”
“O.I.M.” I hear her mumble.
My mother and I go to a bookstore. In the psychology section, we see a man checking out all the books. We wait to see what he will do. He might be a good O.I.M., depending on what he’ll do, how he’ll move.
I decided to bring my mother along because if I’m going to start picking up people, her presence gives me more courage, and makes me seem safer. In addition, two people give off an air of greater authority and credibility than one does.
The man finally takes down a book entitled How to Break Your Addiction to a Person.
My mother nudges me, her eyes wide open, and her mouth in the shape of an O. O as in “Oh! Look at what he’s reading.” Not O as in “O.I.M.,” for I haven’t told her about that, about what kind of man we’re looking for.
I instantly decide that he’s a very good Optical Illusion Man. What an unlikely type of man to be addicted to a person. What type of person is she or he? Does she or he know?
He’s about forty. He looks like he works in an office. He must have stopped at the bookstore after his job, to see if he could get some help in overcoming his infatuation with that woman, or man, perhaps.
“Excuse me,” I say.
The man turns around. He seems very self-conscious about the book he’s holding, the way he’s so aggressively not looking at it, but maybe I’m just projecting onto him the way I would feel in his place.
“We were wondering if you’d be interested in posing for a painter.”
The man licks his lips in confusion. He puckers his mouth, about to say something, but seems unsure of what to say. “I’m sorry?” he finally says.
“We need a model, to pose for a painter, and we were wondering if you’d be interested. It’s just for an hour or two, today or tomorrow. And there’s a salary of fifty dollars an hour.”
He asks us questions, which we answer. Then he says, “No, sorry.”
He wanted to get as much information as possible, as many goodies of our weirdness, though knowing from the very beginning that he was going to say no. He wanted to hear all the juicy details, so that he’d have a wonderful story to tell his adored person, and maybe she or he would like him back after he told about so great an experience in such a clever, witty way, and how he looked down upon that weird man who pissed the hell out of him when he caught him reading How to Break Your Addiction to a Person.
I would never have the guts to pick up such a book in public. And anyway, I don’t have an addiction to a person, thank God. I have had in the past, but at this point in my life I’m free.
It’s not so hard to find O.I.M.s, I realize. Almost everyone is an Optical Illusion Person. Isn’t everyone almost a certain way, but not quite?
We go to hardware stores. Big men with blond mustaches tell us no. Sometimes they don’t even speak, they droop their eyelids halfway down their eyes and slowly shake their heads. Sometimes they say “Hell no!”
In bakeries, men say “Naah,” very nasally, while they are buying their pastries.
In shoe stores, men try to be nicer. They’re more educated and more polite. They are elegant and seated. They are heads of famdies, those men, with wives and small children at home, in houses with chimneys that smoke only on rare occasions. Their socks smell like flowers, and after they tell us no, they tell the salesman, “Ouch, they’re a bit tight.”
In the pet stores, the men are more surprised than anywhere else, I wonder why. And they express their surprise verbally, no mere lifts of the eyebrows. “Well, that’s mighty unusual,” they say. “I’ve never heard of this before. It’s original. Wowee. Well, well. But I’m sorry, pal”—slap on my arm—“I’d love to, but I’m very busy. Good luck, though.”
“I don’t know if we’ll ever find an O.I.M. who’s interested,” I mutter, walking down the street.
“What’s an oim?” asks my mother. “I didn’t know we were looking for an oim.”
“Not oim. O.I.M. Optical Illusion Man. A man who is almost a certain way but not quite.” I don’t feel like getting into it deeper than that. Only one of us needs to know what we’re looking for.
We enter a coffee shop.
My mother points to a man sitting at a little table near the window. He’s alone, eating a chocolate crepe. I must admit she’s right. She is absolutely and completely right. She has an amazing talent for finding the best O.I.M. A great eye for it. It must be beginner’s luck.
O.I.M.ness emanates from every shred of his person. He is even more extreme than I am. Exquisite choice. Superb specimen. He eats slowly and quickly at the same time; it’s hard to tell which. Two chews, swallow. One chew, swallow. Slow chews, but few chews. Even though the chews are slow, there are so few of them that the crepe disappears quickly. His eyes and mouth droop, but his wrinkles smile, giving, one moment, the impression of happiness, cheerfulness, verge of laughter, sense of humor, and, the next moment, deep despair, sadness, must comfort him, want to ask him what’s wrong. He has big, dark, young eyes, a young, plump mouth, but wrinkled skin. The wrinkles are deep but somehow young. They are not dry, not thin. They are deeper folds. Fat, juicy wrinkles. Fresh folds of flesh.
We sit in front of him, and I say, “We were wondering if you’d be interested in posing for a painter.”
“Is he femooss?” he asks, in a voice that is not only heavily accented, probably from French, but also slimy, weak, and drawn out, creating an overwhelming combination.
“It’s a woman,” I tell him. “A little famous. Are you interested? You have a good mouth.”
“Sank yooo. Eats just the face, then?” Soft voice. It envelops you and touches you in private places with too much familiarity.
“No, she paints the body also.” I try to make my own voice like a whip, to counteract his. “Nude,” I add.
“Noood! Zat’s good. I’m flattered, but ma mouse is not a very good representation ov ma neckud bowdy.”
He’s rubbing his body against mine, merely with his voice, and I am relieved when he addresses my mother in the same way.
“When is eat?” he asks her softly, intimately.
“Today or tomorrow.”
“Zat’s good,” he tells me, with much breath in his voice. “Eat sounds interesting.”
“It’s not.” Whip-whip. “You go there, you pose, and you’re done,” I tell him.
My mother looks squarely at me. Her face is open and illuminated, as though she has seen a new side of me. Yes, I can be strong too, Mom.
“I don’t know eef I shood,” he says. “On top of eat, I have a girlfriend.”
“This has nothing to do with having a girlfriend. It’s professional. Nothing else.”
“Ah, oui? Mon oeil!'" he says, which is about the only thing I know in French and which means, literally, “my eye,” which means “my foot.” I am exasperated.
“All we need is a simple yes or no,” I tell him. “We don’t have all day.”
“Eats yes.”
I didn’t even mention money.
The Frenchman says he’s available immediately, so we all drive home. He undresses and lies down on Henrietta’s bed. I sit on my bed. I don’t want to be hovering over Henrietta, putting too much pressure on her. I make light conversation.
The Frenchman seems to think that all this is very perverted. He giggles nervously and leers at us incessantly. He seems to enjoy all the attention bestowed on his flabby white body. He thinks that we think it’s beautiful. Henrietta works for about ten minutes, then stops. The painting she has made of him is scarcely better than the stick figure she made of me.
“I don’t want to paint, Jeremy,” she says.
“He’s not good enough?”
The Frenchman glares at me.
“He’s fine,” she answers. “I just don’t want to paint anything. I'm sorry.
Before putting his clothes back on, the Frenchman insists on seeing what Henrietta painted. His eyes open wide in surprise, and he looks at Henrietta. She stares back at him, completely uncaring. He looks at the painting again. I can tell he is dying to say something—“You should take lessons,” or “You are a bad painter”—but ad he does is look at her again, raise his eyebrows slightly, look at me, frown, turn away, and bob his head forward once, like a hen, before disappearing into the bathroom to put on his clothes. If only he could see one of Henrietta’s old paintings, he would admire her skdls.
We pay him and drive him back to town.
You may have sensed that my mother is a bit subdued these days. I haven’t been telling any extravagant tales about her behavior. That’s because there haven’t been any such tales to tell; she stdl hasn’t returned to her old self, her Disney World self. But I must admit I don’t mind much. Her new self is quite pleasant. For now at least. Appropriate.
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