Silent Bird

by Reina Lisa Menasche

  “I didn’t like the healer,” I tell Mama. “But I don’t want to have a bad eye.”

  “Pilar. Poor sweetie. We have to remember to find the rose in the thorn, and the thorn in the rose. All things in balance. That’s what I’ve come to believe, not that other nonsense.”

  “Oh.”

  “Nothing is all evil, or all good. Nothing is jinxed. There is no Evil Eye. And don’t you believe it either, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  Not meaning it.

  III

  I woke up on the couch with an aching head, thinking about little girls and wondering about the one missing from Villefranche sur Lez. Had they found her yet? Was she even alive? I knew better than to bring her up again to Jeannot, or to ask how the hell I ended up on the couch. I knew I’d walked there under my own steam, in a trance like a zombie.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t go to your parents’ today,” I told him over breakfast. “Can we please stay home, just the two of us?”

  “Yes, if you wish. I will get something special to eat,” he said, not missing a beat. Then he asked me to get dressed because we were going to go out and purchase the best chicken in town, like his mother had always found and cooked for him.

  Just the thought of chicken made me queasy. So while Jeannot got dressed in the bedroom, I quietly threw up in the toilet.

  Good morning, I thought.

  IV

  An hour later we were driving back from a local farm with a live chicken in the trunk of the car. And forgive the hyperbole, but the sight and sounds of that chicken really stuck in my craw.

  Denial has its limits, you know, like the expiration date on a bottle of milk. One chicken in the trunk and suddenly I had the sense that I could not live here in France one more season. Our life together, and the life of Jeannot’s family and maybe even his whole village, seemed to be spiraling out of control. Good or bad, nothing lasts forever. All things must evolve or devolve, find their own destinies. How could my destiny be to settle here, barefoot and pregnant, amongst his relatives?

  “Do not worry, Chérie,” he said, grinning at my expression. “I promise I will not ask you to kill it. When we sit at the table to eat you will not recognize what is in front of you. Your food will look exactly like the thousands of birds you have eaten in America. But the taste…Quelle différence!" He kissed his fingers like an Italian.

  “I never gave those thousands of birds a lift in my car,” I said glumly. “That makes it personal.” I turned the radio louder to cover the thudding of panicked poultry. And my fiancé smiled patiently, not getting how horrified I was.

  Being oblivious. Again.

  Back at the apartment, I took off for the bedroom and shut the door while Jeannot labored in the kitchen twisting that poor bird’s neck. I guess I retreated into my art, drawing more “children’s stories.” And lo and behold, my newest “children’s story” featured a chicken.

  The creature was trying to cross a road but finding the pavement too hot. A great deal of chaotic flapping later, it got caught in a flock of birds immigrating south and this alien chicken found itself stuck inside a Florida swimming pool, sipping exotic-tasting chlorine for the rest of its life when what it really wanted was a bit of nice, boring homegrown grain.

  Another whimsical tale for the depressed children of the world, n’est-ce pas?

  When Jeannot opened the bedroom door to announce that my goose was cooked, I told him I didn’t feel well.

  “Again?” he said, crossing to the bed. “Chérie, we really do need to find out if…”

  “I know,” I said. “I will.”

  “No period yet, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “So…what are we waiting for? Why not buy a simple test? Or make an appointment with a doctor? I can get a referral for a woman if you prefer.”

  “I’ll go to the pharmacy.”

  “When?”

  “Jeannot, please. Not right now, all right?”

  He sighed and nodded and spied my sketchbook and flipped through the pages of the sorry chicken story. For a while the silence between us seemed very, very thick. Then he said: “You know, you really are good. You must do something with your art.”

  “You really think so? Despite the unhappy endings?”

  “Oui. Despite your unhappy ending.”

  “I want to, if I'm not too old.”

  He chuckled. “You are never too old, according to a good friend of mine.”

  Through the French doors in our bedroom, the light had turned a lovely pale gold. I said, “What would you like to do tonight?”

  “Why? You want to go dancing?”

  “Ha.” I hated drunks in clubs. “I was thinking of something more relaxing.”

  “What do you have in mind? Dinner and a film?”

  “In fact, I was thinking of something even better. Like a massage.”

  Jeannot nodded, the old smile rushing into his eyes. “That would be super.”

  V

  I picked and nibbled at the chicken, for Jeannot’s sake. And though we dawdled at the table for way too long, the sky had barely darkened by the time we finished. The whole evening lay before us, several uninterrupted hours in which we were to be sensual—not sexual—per Jeannot’s suggestion.

  Without discussion we left the dishes and closed ourselves inside the bedroom with scented candle, gentle guitar music, and fresh air from the open balcony doors.

  We began with Jeannot. He lay on his stomach as I rubbed my hands with the cool oil and touched his back. Slowly, one finger, then one hand, then two. His skin seemed to arch toward me.

  He wanted me; I knew it. I kept rubbing and kneading.

  He groaned. “Feels fantastique.”

  “Good.” The flame flickered from our bedside table as I continued to rub oil into his every surface. His skin seemed so, so close. It was not a fleeting, moving thing, but still and extraordinary and anything but humdrum: a delicate sheath of silk over muscle.

  He had a mole on the small of his back. And something had scratched him on the shoulder. I rubbed the tiny wound, erasing the intrusion of a random branch or the nails of his hand. I caressed skin as downy as a baby's and skin roughed by sun; his hairless, sweet neck and furry blond arms. And those legs—oh, Jeannot's legs spelled a lifestyle. He walked a lot and waited tables and jiggled his legs to music. His sock-less feet were cold, his hands warm and trusting.

  His butt seemed sculpted of stone. As I moved my hands, the stone melted and became flesh. I thought of children running naked on the beach, innocent and exuberant unless someone messes with them. Jeannot was innocent still in many ways, and he was lovely.

  I began to alter the rhythm of my hands. I squeezed in some places, kneaded in others. My touch grew so light, my fingers fluttered “like the wings of an angel”—as my mother used to say, a long, long time ago, when I was innocent too.

  Slowly, bit-by-bit, I began enjoying Jeannot in the most physical way possible.

  Until he turned onto his back.

  I stopped touching. His excitement was obvious. He opened one eye and looked at me as I poured more oil and concentrated on the skin, the person; the sensations.

  Not the sex, not the sex.

  It’s just sex!

  How dare I hesitate? This is only a massage, after all.

  He was beautiful. Part of me, and my brief life here in France, had been etched into the very contours of his body. His skin against my fingertips felt warm, strong and soft: a paradox of sexuality and masculine protection.

  I kept touching. Kept on accepting his skin in a way that I had never accepted TAG’s or Tommy’s.

  VI

  “TAG.” My voice comes out a whisper. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure, go ahead.” He has his hand probing under my sweatshirt as we lay on the grass in our usual place: a somewhat private strip of lawn belonging to the Central Islip State Mental Hospital. It is nearly dinnertime; I am late for home. Yet I linger, T
AG and I stretched out behind a fan of bushes.

  My socks are on, my shoes off. My hair down, my pants unbuttoned. I refuse to take off my jeans unless it is completely dark, and I can’t risk staying out that late, so there will be no sex tonight. Not that I care. Sex means nothing to me, maybe less than nothing. It’s a little intense at times but mostly just the business of life, like evacuating my bladder or relieving my bowels. Necessary. Unworthy of too much thought.

  Tonight I keep on my sweatshirt because it is cold even though TAG says my skin feels anything but cold. I don’t want anyone to see us here, especially not the mental patients who shuffle like zombies along the sidewalks.

  “They’re just a bunch of nuts, they won’t notice anything,” TAG likes to say. And the hands squeezing under my sweatshirt make me think of Mr. Spank, the teacher I let do this to me in ninth grade. What was that old TV commercial? I’m like a phone book, letting TAG’s fingers do the walking.

  “TAG, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, go ahead.” While he keeps touching me...

  “Please, it's important. Can’t you listen?”

  The fingers stop. “I'm all yours.”

  I take a deep breath. “If I ever got pregnant...you know…if there was an accident and it happened. What would you do?”

  “I think I’d marry you. We'd get married.”

  I try to hide my relief. “You'd do that now?”

  “Sure. Some teenage marriages work.”

  “Most don’t.”

  “Ours would.”

  “But”—I search for arguments—“how would we live? Where would you work? We haven’t finished high school!”

  “I don’t know. I want to go to college, but I guess I could finish later.”

  “I want to be an artist.”

  “You don’t need to go to school for that.”

  “Thank God.” I continue to watch him, trying to read his thoughts, his feelings—his true opinion of me. “I'd like to paint pictures on shells and sell them at the beach. Do something I love instead of settling for something practical or boring.”

  “Hey, no shit, Sherlock, who doesn’t want that?”

  “But what would you do if you had to miss college?”

  “Pilar, why are you asking? You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  I reach out to caress his leg. “No, silly. Just answer.”

  “I'd forget about college, okay? Later on, we'd probably fight about it and get divorced, but oh well, at least we can say we tried.” He gives me another disarming smile, along with an Asshole-in-Chief sort of wink. But my facial muscles have gone dead. “Hey, I was only kidding.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll have a dozen kids, you’ll be Mrs. Asshole-in-Chief, or Lady Asshole for short, and we’ll get to make whoopie all the time, in the grandest of Irish traditions. On a bed.” He lifts my sweatshirt. Then he kisses my stomach and suckles like a baby.

  He makes me feel wanted and needed, so what does it matter if I can’t feel anything else?

  Sometimes I imagine myself floating along the treetops, watching the unclasping of a bra, the sliding of a hand down a pair of jeans. In this odd, drifting state, I know that late periods don’t belong with TAG or as a member of a group of teenagers called the Piddles. Babies are real. They cry and laugh and hunger for true selfless love. These hands touching me won’t want that.

  TAG is only sixteen, and I can’t forget that I am tricking him. And so I remove my jeans tiredly, like an old woman preparing to go to bed. If he notices my sadness, he doesn’t say. He seems grateful that I’ll stay here on the lawn; pleased that I am turning from serious to sexy again, which he says is the most exciting thing about me.

  “You are such a mystery,” he whispers as I lay, finally, stark naked on the grass. “Sure you’re not cold?”

  He opens me up despite where we are, on the grounds of a state hospital where any crazy person taking in the air might peek through the bushes.

  Meanwhile, he tells me things, secret things: I am hot, I am his; I am gorgeous; I am perfect. Terrible things. I am wet, he wants to fuck me. He tastes my skin, hurts my nipples; inserts his fingers wherever he can. I really do feel like a sort of thing, an object with holes in the bottom, like the plastic drainer that Mom uses for pasta.

  “Oh, Pilar, I love you,” TAG moans as he climbs and pumps.

  What does it matter if I am naked on the nuthouse grass? I rub his back and move my head to see his expression, but he is too intent, too busy.

  The only face I see is a pale flicker of someone unknown, passing by on the walkway, passing by close enough to hear TAG's moaning.

  VII

  Finally it was my turn to receive. To open myself to this massage we were doing, this suggestion of his to strengthen our relationship, this trick of the body that required a trick of the mind.

  “I hope this will be as enjoyable for you as it is for me,” Jeannot whispered.

  I hoped so too. Oh God: did I.

  The wish to fool Heaven is madness on Earth.

  Jeannot stroked my thighs and calves and even my toes. At first I felt only pleasure…none of that awful claustrophobic feeling. Jeannot’s hands didn’t…couldn’t smother. They loved me.

  Only when his touch changed, when the pressure changed, when his hands rose to my hips, did I feel it: cloying, clinging, airless.

  Smothered.

  Trapped.

  VIII

  Stop!

  Angry at myself, I opened my eyes to focus on his hair gleaming in candlelight. So bright and messy. Jeannot’s hands felt obvious on my skin, but I tried to accept them. To breathe. Slowly—ever so gradually—I began to elongate and float. The softly moving hands became part of that breathing...part of the ocean in my head.

  He massaged around my breasts and down my stomach.

  Forget about TAG. TAG’s ancient history.

  Don’t think about the teacher either. Or the psychologist.

  Move on.

  Breathe. Keep breathing.

  I swallowed the sensation of being smothered, and to my surprise it actually faded, like a sharp light after you've closed your eyes. Somehow I did relax, my mind drifting and bobbing. French words and sounds floated on the tip of my tongue, under the strums of guitar music.

  Everything is all right, I realized suddenly. This isn’t the lawn of a mental hospital. This isn’t the biology classroom with its creepy teacher and the smell of formaldehyde. This isn’t a bathtub, a frilly little girl's bed, a dormitory floor. This is my own adult bedroom in my own European castle, with a prince who loves me no matter what, who wants to marry me.

  It was a powerful thought, consuming the debris around it.

  IX

  I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep until my pillow moved. My pillow moved, and Jeannot wrapped his body tightly around mine, and for once in my life I wished it.

  I wished it.

  I pressed myself against him with the gladness of a thousand accomplishments. If time couldn’t change me, what could?

  Finding Jeannot's mouth, I kissed him. He held still: an animal signaled to alert.

  “Let's make love,” I whispered.

  He didn’t speak.

  “Let's make love,” I repeated more forcefully.

  Stroking my face, he nodded. “You are sure?”

  “Yes. Please. Now, this very moment, and all night if we want to.”

  “But...” His voice trailed off. “But we said—”

  “I don’t care what we said. I feel it, Jeannot! And you do too. It’s here, right now. Let’s not stop it. Please.”

  He broke into a smile that didn’t look quite sure of itself. But a second later he grabbed me and kissed me with so much conviction that I knew we were doing the right thing.

  This was love and sex, not one without the other. Together, as one.

  I kissed him back with all of my own deep, soaring, glorious, newborn need. And it must have been enough to fool the Heavens�
��at least for a while—because it sure as Hell did fool me.

  X

  The face in the darkness floats along the path outside the nuthouse, drifting past. I yelp.

  TAG scrambles to his feet. “What the hell—?”

  “Someone looked! TAG, I saw someone! They saw us...saw...oh God.” I bite my fist; begin to cry.

  He kicks at the bushes, looking around frantically. I try not to notice him all exposed in the cold. The sky is blacker than ever, except for a scuff-mark of a moon. Not nearly enough to pin romance on.

  “There's no one here,” TAG says before lowering himself again. He kisses me soundly on the lips, on the forehead, on the eyes. He wants to keep going. Of course he does. “It’s okay, Pilar, I promise. I love you. I love you like this.”

  Maybe it is a miracle—because somehow I manage to relax, soothed by the song of his kisses, his words. The bushes smell like a forest, the grass of autumn and rain. His skin feels soft as well as chilled. Maybe it is romantic. All I have to do is believe.

  He begins to move again—move and pant, move and pant. Then, suddenly, he sits up and does a wicked thing: rolls me over and kisses my rear. Alarmed, I try to shut my mind. I don’t want to hear him going on about my body, how he loves it, I am beautiful, I excite him even by walking down the hallway in school. He kisses the backs of my legs, my inner thighs, while I cry, and he never sees it. Instead he does the unspeakable thing I can’t believe anyone would want to do: press his fingers gently between the cheeks of my butt, cupping them, massaging them.

  I feel like a whore spread out on an operating table. A whore who…likes the dirty things she hates.

  “Oh God,” I moan. Wash your hands; wash your hands...why doesn’t he care about washing his hands?

  This seems to be my fate, my destiny. I am forever being helpful, lifting my bottom out of the tub.