Why Do Birds

by Rob Hoerburger

  She slept in the brother’s old room that night. All the good video equipment was there — she still had some episodes of Dallas to catch up on, or to watch again — but part of her also knew that she needed one last rest stop in the past. A place to validate all the good things in her life. A place where the future would officially start. A place to let go of the hate.

  Thanksgiving, Christmas, seeing her old friends, showing off her new body, it had all gone mostly according to plan. Even if a lot of the new plan seemed to be the old plan, the four of them sitting around the dining-room table, talking about big things for the future. It was a much larger house, and the clothes were a little nicer, and the parents a little grayer and more wrinkled, and she was rid of those awful bangs, and they had been around the world a few times. But now, after a decade of dreams realized and revoked and redreamed, here they were again, ready for another go-round. The brother and the father talked about cars. The brother raved about the new CD technology, how he couldn’t wait for them to have their catalog digitally remastered, how he could get rid of “all the imperfections.” The mother, as usual, was no-nonsense. “Every time I look at those damn charts. . . . ” the mother said. “Makes me crazy. That should be you up there.” A dozen or so years ago, around a similar table, she was saying: “Those damn charts. That will be you up there soon.” She made eye contact with the brother, though without looking at her, the mother did sweep her arm in her general direction.

  And that was the difference. Now even the mother knew how much hinged on her. And not just her voice this time, but her health, her very being. At the therapy session in New York that summer, the mother also talked about business. “Young man,” she said to the therapist, who wasn’t that much younger than she was, “we need to be done with this business and get on with things.”

  Thanksgiving was the start of that process, of “getting on with things.” And so the plates were passed around and filled that day as if all that business had been concluded. “Turkey?” “Yes, please.” “Dressing?” “Yes, please.” “Green beans?” “Yes, please.” “Wine?” “Yes, please.” And she could feel everyone looking sideways, as if their very existences depended on every spoonful. Every time a loaded fork approached her mouth, she could practically feel them holding their breath.

  The food went in. In fact she cleaned her plate. “That was good,” she said, the way she would after a satisfying take in the studio. The applause was both implied and inferred.

  Everyone did ooh and ahh audibly at her new look. She and F. went shopping on Rodeo Drive for new clothes. And she even sang in public again, a short Christmas concert for her godchildren’s kindergarten class; she wore a red silk blouse, white jacket and red shoes and called the brother to get the keys for the school’s accompanist. It wasn’t the Saturday Night Live spot she’d imagined when the solo album was still in the chute, but it was a start.

  They signed a new contract with their longtime label. “You look wonderful,” H. said. “Let’s make some more hits.” The terms weren’t as good as the last contract’s, but that would make them hungry. And one big song would change all that anyway. That hit was going to come.

  Her 33rd birthday was only a month away. Plenty of time.

  Her divorce was about to be finalized. She couldn’t wish him ill, much as she tried.

  She’d gone to her parents’ house the day before her divorce papers would be ready to go shopping with the mother for a new washing machine; they couldn’t find a good deal, so she decided to stay overnight and continue the search the next day.

  They went out to dinner. She had a shrimp salad and then a taco on the way home. Part of it was show; after years of their watching her not eat, she figured they still didn’t believe her. Sometimes eating now felt like checking in with a parole officer (whatever that felt like). But she actually enjoyed it. The crunch of the shrimp, the melting cheese from the taco breaking over on her tongue, were like good memories that she got to relive again. The hating had stopped.

  Just one spoonful afterward to keep it under control.

  It was all a little dizzying. She’d sign those papers tomorrow and then get on the plane to New York over the weekend. I.’s baby was due any day. She was going to be a godmother again. And maybe, now that she had a working body, a mother herself someday. She called I. and P. that night. They spoke of the album, their album, how good it was, how “F-ing great” it was.

  P. said: “I was talking about you with a friend recently. He said you’re like the New York Mets. People will flock to you again if you just field the right team.”

  She laughed. She thought she was done with baseball years ago.

  She would never leave the brother, though. To her, he was still a genius. They had a legacy. She liked the records they made. She loved him.

  But some things had to change now. She wanted a greater say in how they made their records. And she’d want some time to do solo projects. It was probably too late to resurrect the last one. But P. was always telling her that she was capable of so many different styles. Bob Dylan songs, country, jazz. And hey, didn’t their longtime lyricist have a song on the hot new album by the former Motown wunderkind?

  She’d try to write a few more songs of her own. She liked how the first one turned out. She wondered if that girl ever found the tape. She’d go looking for her again when she got back to New York.

  That night she dreamed of Champagne, corks popping at some star restaurant like Chasen’s. It was a party for a record release, for her record release. The early chart numbers were very good. “Who Knew?” was the headline for the review in Rolling Stone. The brother was there. The parents. P. and I. (with her new baby in tow) and F. and H. And the girl with the backpack, whose face she could finally see, cracking a smile. Her face was sharp but friendly, full and fresh, recognizable somehow. The girl raised a glass to her.

  When she woke up that morning, her heart was fluttering, buzzing, tiny fireworks going off, darting about. There was so much ahead.

  She went downstairs to put on the coffee. The parents weren’t up yet. From the kitchen, she thought she heard something, a shaker or a soft reed. It drew her back to the stairs. Every step up felt like three; the whole morning seemed to be consumed by the ascent. At the top, she could feel the imprints her feet were making in the plush carpet as she made her way to her bedroom in a slow shuffle, the same rhythm her brother imagined on that first gigantic hit of theirs. She stepped into the walk-in closet, slipped out of her dressing gown and lay down on the floor, on her left side. Six months ago she would have keeled over, but now, almost at normal weight, her body was firmly sunk into the carpet. She closed her eyes and put her ear close to the ground. There it was again, finally, loud and clear. Somebody somewhere was playing one of her records. Listening to her.

  35. Queens, N.Y., Summer 1988

  Sib felt the pang in her back, short and sharp, as she bounced up from the front of the gravestone, where she had been pulling stray weeds and buffing the area around the names. Seven months along, and she still often forgot that she was pregnant. The first question she asked the doctor when she found out was whether she could stay active, and when the doctor gave her the O.K., she continued to run, to shoot hoops, to swim a few times a week. For the first six months, even as she gained weight, nothing felt especially different, or slower, or more exhausting. But lately the baby was reminding her, with a swift kick, a sudden twinge, just the jutting second-personness, that maybe she shouldn’t throw their weight around so much or so fast.

  It was the 18th anniversary of the bicycle accident, and while Sib and her father had visited the cemetery many times, this was the first year that Sib had gone on the actual day. Her father and Mrs. Donovan — now Mrs. Kelly — and Larry had come with her, and they all stood around the grave and said a few prayers, the usual rosary trio, plus a few words from Larry that seemed a medley/ remix of the Kaddish and Bob Marley’s “Kaya,” which earned him a sidelong smirk from Sib. After Sib�
�s father laid a bouquet of roses on the grave, Sib asked to be alone for a few minutes, and as the other three were retreating, Larry threw his arms around Sib from behind, pressing his small, strong palms against either side of Sib’s bump.

  “Dude, what are you trying to do, fit her for headphones?” Sib said.

  “Never too early,” Larry said.

  Headphones. Sound. It was still something that Sib didn’t take for granted. Sib remembered that first time she and her dad came to the grave, and how sound all fell away, the way it did when they fell away. But today the place was a riot of noise, at least to Sib. Birds, the wind, the distant cars, the half-life of the songs they’d heard on the radio, even the grass pushing up through the ground and the thick, slow blasts of heat seemed to be registering raucously in her ears, and she couldn’t take it in fast enough. Sound restored again, just as it had been when she was 13, or as it had been on the radio since Thriller kicked in the doors five years ago. Prince, the Pointers, Graceland, Control. Crowded House, De La Soul. Music, glorious sound spilling everywhere again. Even the great ’60s singer Dusty Springfield had found her way back to the Top 10 after almost 20 years, hitched to the Pet Shop Boys. Sib was at Larry’s when she heard that record, “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” for the first time earlier in the year — and couldn’t remember when her ears had tingled with such excitement. Larry saw the sudden stop-time look on Sib’s face.

  “Pretty good track, eh?” Larry said.

  “It’s not pretty good,” Sib said. “‘There’s not a single thing wrong with it. It’s fucking perfect.”’’

  “Such language from a Catholic girl! But what do you really think?” Larry said. He often razzed Sib for her sliced-ribbons opinions, but they had made a name for her in the male-dominated rock-crit world, where most everyone else wanted to write about U2 and Springsteen and R.E.M., but where she found a niche writing about pop and soul. Her reviews were noticed by a junior exec in the publishing division of a major label, who was looking for a song doctor for some of his acts. Sib got the job when she told him to simply change a pronoun in a Britboy track from “them” to “we.” More recently she had rewritten practically the entire lyric of an arena-rock band’s power ballad and helped them land their first No. 1 single. Sib didn’t receive any label credit, but she got a bonus check that was more money than she’d ever dreamed of. Money that more than paid for the obstetrician and baby stuff and then some.

  Midsummer and the Mets were comfortably in first place.

  Sib and Larry hadn’t married. They still thought of themselves as best friends who occasionally had sex, and the sex itself was almost like foreplay for their shared music passion, for the nights they stayed up listening to records or spinning the radio dial. They would raise the baby together but would live apart, at least for now.

  They were even going to try the songwriting thing again. Sib hadn’t listened to the tape in a while, but the song, she knew, was timeless. With the right production, anything could be a hit, so why not an actual quality song? Dusty Springfield’s recent comeback only confirmed Sib’s faith.

  Alone now at the grave, the singer on the tape came to Sib’s mind. Was it really the singer Sib had detested all those years, who had died shortly after Sib found the tape? Or just a soundalike? She had never resolved the question, and sometimes thought she didn’t want to; when she heard that the singer had died, and then learned how the singer had suffered from that strange affliction, she felt guilty for all the rage she’d had toward her all those years, realized that it was a stand-in for the guilt she felt about the accident. At some point she had pulled out that greatest-hits album from Kieran’s closet again and listened all the way through, to the songs she had avoided for so long. She thought some of the arrangements were cheesy, but she had come to realize that the singer had something singular, something happening in the grooves, and in between them.

  Sib stared at her mother’s name on the gravestone. “Of course you knew,” Sib said. “You always knew.” Then she looked at Kieran’s name. “The two of you always knew,” she said. “I still don’t quite get it the way you did, and I’ll never sound as good as either of you, but here you go.”

  Sib felt a wave of queasiness go through her, like morning sickness, only she was too far along for that. The song she was thinking of still had that unsettling effect on her. But now, she knew she could keep the song down. She knelt to one knee, slowly, lest the baby protest. She took a breath, swept her head up from the gravestone into the cooling blue-and-white floes in the sky, and started to sing. “Why do birds . . . ? ”

  36. Chelsea, New York, January 1990

  Sean was panting by the time they got to the fifth floor and Andy’s door. “I see why you have such good glutes,” Sean said. Andy just shook his head at the line, and they went in. A second after Andy turned on the lights, Sean said, “Oh, my God, this place is so . . . tidy.”

  It was true. The railroad apartment was clean and airy, like every place Andy had ever lived. Open spaces, minimal furniture, dish rack emptied, counters gleaming, rugs vacuumed, masculine, woodlined, understated in its charms, a nonworking fireplace taking up half a wall and high, beamed ceilings giving the illusion of space.

  Soccer ball tucked neatly in a corner. Zero clutter.

  “Can always be tidier,” Andy said as he hung up his coat and went to his tiny kitchen to put on the teakettle. Out in the living room, he found Sean, who had shed his down vest and was wearing a blue canvas button-down with cartoon characters all over it, splayed on the couch. He’d flung a pack of cigarettes on a side table. This is going to be a challenge, Andy thought.

  They met a few weeks earlier at a gym in Chelsea called Good Bodies. Once AIDS had secured its vise grip on New York, all the bathhouses were closed, and gay men were flocking to gyms not just for anonymous sex but to build muscles as a first line of defense against the enemy. Andy had gone that day not to work out — he still preferred outdoor runs, even in the cold, fewer people, more space — or to hook up but instead to drop condoms and literature about safe sex and ACT UP in the locker room and steam room, at least what he could fit under his towel without being too conspicuous or weighed down. He’d fashioned a rubber stamp with his mantra-phrase — BE SAFE — and emblazoned it all over the fronts of the pamphlets. The steam and his constant movement, his strategy of going during the off-hours, his refusal to return or even notice any cruises, kept him focused, ahead of his mission.

  But one afternoon the steam was so thick that Andy walked right into a guy about his age, a little shorter, in a towel and glasses with gold frames. “That’s quite a package you’ve got there,” the man said, having felt the condoms and cards and pamphlets under Andy’s towel. The corniness of the line, and the man’s buzz cut, café-au-lait skin and smirky-friendly face disarmed Andy, and when the man nudged him toward a bench in the steam room, Andy found himself following. “I’ve seen you here a few times before,” the man said. “I’m Sean. I was just on my way out. What’s all this stuff?”

  “Andy. Condoms, information about H.I.V. and AIDS, safe sex, ACT UP,” he said. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got it all already, engraved in my skull in fact.

  Too many friends gone in just 10 years.” Sean seemed focused on the BE SAFE stamp. “I do want something else, though,” he said

  “What’s that?” Andy said, ready to bolt if Sean made a move. “Your number.” Andy had almost forgotten Sean by the time he called a few weeks later. They made a date. But then Sean didn’t show up at the coffee shop, and Andy was almost back at his apartment when he heard someone calling his name from down the block, clopping and zigzagging toward him in the light coating of snow on the sidewalk. It was Sean, who apologized and said he had been visiting a friend in the AIDS ward at St. Vincent’s, which was just a few blocks away from Andy’s place. “Please, can I come in, just for a few minutes, to get warm?” Sean said. “I won’t keep you long.”

  Andy’s
inner flares went off. He didn’t really know this guy, and at least in the coffee shop he might have been able to figure him out a bit, get ahead of him. Now he’d be right in Andy’s space. But if he’d had a long night at the hospital. . . .

  “O.K.,” Andy said. “Just for a little while.” He still had his gun, safely concealed under a side table. He’d still never fired it.

  Now Andy sat at the other end of the couch and tried to make small talk. In the light, with clothes on, still a little breathless, Sean came into more focus, as he wasn’t enveloped in steam or winter night air. He was a little meaty but defined, confident in his slouch, brown eyes that seemed fully open and focused on everything except what was right in front of him, like most of the men Andy had dated.

  “So tell me about your friend,” Andy said as the kettle started to whistle.

  “A buddy from the old ’hood in the Bronx, Frankie, Italian, sweetest guy ever,” Sean said. “We called him Sugarcube.”

  Sugarcube. Some guys on the force used that word for smack. “Drugs?” Andy said.

  “No, no, not Frankie, he was a good kid, wouldn’t know a packet of cheer from a packet of Cheer.” Sean saw the recognition in Andy’s eyes and went on. “We called him that because he had the biggest sweet tooth in the Bronx. He could wolf down the cannolis and never put on a pound. His mother always knew where to find him most days: near the bakeries on Arthur Avenue.

  “When I heard that he was in the hospital, I went back to one of those bakeries and got him some Italian cookies, jelly-filled mini-tarts, chocolate dips, sprinkles, rainbows, in a white box with a string, just like the old days. But he couldn’t bear to look at them, or at me. He couldn’t even really talk. He just seemed so shriveled and scared. I mean, he’s barely 30.” Sean gazed out Andy’s window, into the tall grid of lights of the old Port Authority building on Ninth Avenue. “I’m sorry, I can’t go there right now,” Sean said, his voice cracking a bit. “I’ve been eating, drinking, sleeping, breathing this plague all week, all my life it seems. . . . How long have you lived here?”