by Sharon Heath
Taking a sip of my sangría, I let my eyes close halfway and wasn’t sure if it was a trick of my vision or something more objectively real, but the upraised arms and undulating torsos of the dancers made fractal-like patterns on the walls. Had Busby Berkeley had some similar experience to prompt his dazzling choreography? Sammie and I used to love to watch his films on the small telly in her bedroom, cuddled side by side under the covers with our matching hot chocolate mustaches. I felt a voidish pang rip through me as I realized we’d undoubtedly never do that again. As if to emphasize that conclusion, Sammie and Amira rose up simultaneously to dance. I followed them with my eyes and then stopped. For there were Cesar and Fidel doing pretty much what they’d been doing—and wearing pretty much what they’d been wearing, with a few flamenco accompaniments, including a floral fan for Fidel and gypsy bells on Cesar’s ankles—the day Mother climbed Fidel’s fence and suffered her concussion.
I hadn’t realized until then how much I’d blamed Cesar for Mother’s untimely death, convinced that she’d lost her balance—and her judgment—thanks to that awful blow to her head. As Cesar did a grind with his hips and executed a 360-degree turn with swift precision, I felt the gorge rise in my throat. On top of everything else, how would Gladys feel if she knew she’d come all the way to this country to have her supposed sweetheart dressing up on the sly like a cheesy porn star?
Nearly knocking over my chair, I pushed past dancing couples of every description and sexual persuasion to feel my way to the ubiquitous line in front of the ladies’ room, breathing as deeply as I could to forestall the retching I knew was to come. I had progressed to third place when a diminutive and very prettily handsome man emerged from the restroom, making me look up to the ladies’ room sign to make sure I was in the right line. The young man wore slicked back blond hair with sexily twirled sideburns, striking spots of coral rouge on his pale cheeks, a beautifully embroidered bolero jacket, and flared black trousers that revealed ridiculously high stiletto heels. He was like a very handsome, but tiny, conquistador. As he was about to pass me, his slightly slanted eyes slid over and locked onto mine. Before I knew it, he’d grabbed me and was giving me such a close embrace that I could smell the sweet orange on his breath. “Fleur! How wonderful to see you! Did you see Cesar and Fidel? They’re somewhere over this way. Come and have a drink with us!”
The next thing I knew, the Conquistador Who Was Gladys had grabbed her two companions from the dance floor and seated the three of us with her around a small table so cramped that my right knee, its skin exposed by my ruched up ruffles, touched hers. I was sure I’d get a rash, as her pants were surely made of wool. Rubbing against my still-covered left knee was Cesar’s bare one. Fidel was slightly sloshed and smiled at me fondly, as if recalling our intimate conversation at his kitchen table. I don’t know what we talked about as we four sat there, but I must have managed to keep up my end of the conversation, as Sammie told me on the way back home that I’d seemed very engrossed. But frankly, our departure couldn’t come soon enough for me.
Our driver this time turned out to be one of Sammie’s old art school friends. She and Sam were chattering away with reminiscences in the front seat of a Prius. Seated with Amira in the rear, I felt Sammie’s lover scrutinizing me as I described who Cesar, Gladys, and Fidel were. I took care to omit mention of Fidel as the murderer of Chin Hwa and of Cesar turning on me the day Mother had taken her tumble over Fidel’s gate. Nor did I speak of Fidel’s confidences regarding his father pulling his pene when he was little and his uncle viciously rubbing in the memory of it.
Speaking of self-censorship, I dared not say a word to either Sammie or her girlfriend about the upheaval the evening had stirred inside me. The sexual revolution had begotten a fluidity that allowed a seemingly simple girl like Gladys to play with her persona and a man like Cesar to find his heart’s desires with her. I desperately wanted to be in tune with the progress of the times, but this all felt so strange to me.
But then I reminded myself of all my years as the odd duck in whatever community I inhabited. The fact was, I was the one who was trying to literally abracadabra people in and out of material reality. You couldn’t get much more fluid than that.
Chapter Twenty
IT WAS STANLEY I ended up confiding in about my own version of gender confusion. “Meaning,” I said to him, “my confusion about what to think and feel about all this. I find myself wondering if it’s accidental that our species can no longer rely on either our traditions or our instincts at a time when we’re facing the very real possibility of extinction. Whether this existential threat to our biosphere is affecting the balance of our politics, our morality, our sexuality, our level of aggression. What if sex is becoming increasingly divorced from tenderness and the categories of male and female are blurring because procreation is about to become obsolete?”
“Rats crowded in a cage, eh? It’s a hell of a leap, and maybe even a possibility—”
I interrupted him in my agitation. “Not everyone I know would think so.”
“The thing is, Fleur, you’re a quantum physicist, which means you also have a philosophical bent of mind. We physicists are always looking for something to wrap up the whole show with some nice, elegant bow: how many iterations have there been of supposed theories of everything? The great TOE. You know as well as I do that the damned thing continues to elude us. Maybe because it doesn’t actually exist. And if we can’t find it in the physical world, it’s pretty damned unlikely we’ll discover it in human nature. Maybe there’s no one reason things have gotten so complicated for our species. Maybe what you’re fretting over is pretty much down to the old saw, ‘What’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison.’”
“You’re telling me that the revulsion I feel over porn or my discomfort over the cheesy cross-dressing of someone like Cesar is just my personal biases putting me on the wrong side of history? That maybe I’m just a prude?”
Stanley raised an eyebrow. “Did you hear me say that?”
I sighed. “No. But I’ve wondered about it myself.”
Stanley stopped to study my face. We were on our way to the Huntington’s rose garden and, though we hadn’t exactly been skipping—both of us having pretty much aged out of that ritual—we’d been making our way at a good pace, as per Dr. Drew’s instructions to, as Stanley put it, “keep this old ticker going until I at least get to see Dreamization put into action and the orange-haired asshole put behind bars.” I seriously doubted that his doctor had put it that way and that Stanley would actually get to see the latter—I think many of us feared it might actually trigger a civil war. But I prayed he’d celebrate the former with us and then, along with Gwen, live on as close to forever as was possible. I couldn’t bear the thought of being orphaned for yet another time.
“You have a habit of being too hard on yourself, my girl. I’d let go of the prude bit. If you don’t like pornography, you don’t like pornography. Frankly, I think most women, at least, would agree with you.” I gave Stanley a sharp look. He grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s just leave it at that.” Then he took a deep breath. “But you might consider that you have gotten a little taste of something we all end up confronting in ourselves.”
“What’s that?”
“Intolerance. Your own version of what spewed from my lips at Assefa. Except I presume you’ve been smart enough to keep your own yap shut, at least with Cesar. It sounds like he’s had a pretty rough time of it.”
I nodded, feeling rather miserable. When Stanley put it like that, I felt nothing but shame. Perhaps as a distraction, I found myself replaying in my mind my most recent encounter with Assefa, which had occurred just a week ago: me sitting in my car to hear the last of Sting’s melancholy lyrics about human fragility before sprinting across campus for a meeting on quantum entanglement at UCLA’s Department of Physics; Assefa synchronistically wheeling Ife’s stroller with one hand past Ackerman Student Union while he held out his iPhone with the other. A
s we got closer, I nearly laughed aloud at the song playing on his phone. Maybe you guessed it. “Fragile,” of course. Snap!
Einstein hadn’t been whistling Dixie when he’d reversed his earlier dismissal of non-locality as “spooky action at a distance.” My experiences with Assefa over the years continued to affirm that not only two particles, but two people and maybe even any number of people, once connected in properties—and no matter how far apart—continued to act in concert.
As always, my ex-lover seemed taken aback when he saw me and was rather reserved in his greeting: a quick peck on each cheek and then the obligatory Ethiopian third to conclude the process. He turned off the music. I explained what I was up to.
“Ah. Always the physicist.”
“Not always,” I objected defensively, bending down to plant a smooch on Ife’s sun-warmed head. “That’s like saying you’re always the doctor. I’m also a parent. Just like you.”
“Yes,” he granted. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Never mind,” I said, erasing with my hand the stilted air between us. “How can this little girl be so adorable? Where’s Lemlem?”
“Actually,”—he seemed to grin despite himself—“speaking of parenthood, she’s waiting for her first ultrasound. It’s a great department, but Ife was getting restless in the waiting room. We decided that I should give her a little break before we rejoin her mama. They take forever at the OBGYN clinic.” He pronounced it “ob gyne.”
“Oh my,” I said, “You two didn’t waste any time.” Then, realizing that might sound a little judgmental, I amended, “What I should say is, you must be more energetic than I am. When Callay was this one’s age, I couldn’t dream of handling another sleep stealer.”
For the first time, he let down his guard. “I know exactly what you mean, but we’ve bought a new home here in Westwood, and there’s room enough for Enat to join us. Grandmothers are a strange breed. She can’t wait to stay up all night with the new baby.” Then he seemed to realize what he’d said. “Oh, I am so sorry ....”
“Please, Assefa. No worries. It’s true, and you’re right, I’d give anything to have her back, but there it is. Like the man says, life is fragile.” Assefa cocked his head curiously, and I explained about the synchronicity.
“Ah.” Assefa allowed himself to look at me then. Really look at me, rather than that sideways thing he tended to do these days. “Yes,” he said. “I see.” And then he added, “That song, it is so beautiful, and yet he sings of the pain of war.”
At that moment, perhaps because I, too, had my limits when it came to really connecting with the man who’d meant the world to me, I became aware that Ife was looking up at us expectantly. I knelt and took her hand in mine. Already, her little fingers were finely molded and slender. Like her father’s. I stifled a sigh. “I’ll bet you want to get back to your mommy.”
She howled with glee. “Enat!”
Assefa and I didn’t even say goodbye. We didn’t need to. I watched him push the stroller away, his back and buttocks looking as strong and supple as I remembered. I found myself hoping such chance encounters would continue to occur over my lifetime, not because I wanted to be with him anymore—I really didn’t—but because, if I were a starling, he would surely be one of my seven. I needed his presence in the world to keep me rooted enough in my past to proceed with my future. We’d been through a war or two of our own, but despite our awkwardness with each other, our bond felt anything but fragile.
Stanley’s croaky voice brought me back to the present. He was waving a hand in front of my eyes. “Hello. Earth to Fleur. Anybody home?”
I snorted. Professor Stanley H. Fiske calling out anyone else on their absent-mindedness was a joke. “I’m here.” And then I paused. “The thing is, Stanley, Assefa was as much a sinner in that awful moment as you were. He behaved abominably.”
Stanley groaned. “He did, but I’m used to other people behaving badly. Hell, it would be naïve to underestimate humanity’s capacity for nasty primitivity. Nations have been formed and untold millions have been killed because of it. But to find myself falling into the same damned stupidity?”
I felt for him. “As Sammie likes to say, we all have our shadows. Jung evidently thought that the brightest lights of our species cast the deepest ones.” He picked up a rose petal that had wafted over from her host’s invisible bed. I leaned over for a sniff and commented, “It might be from a Bathsheba. She’s got both the apricot hue and the slightly honeyed scent.”
Stanley stared at me uncomprehendingly for a moment, then went on, “If Sammie and her Jung are right about those shadows, then maybe we both need to forgive ourselves.”
“Maybe. At least you’ve performed an act of redemption. It’s got to be a lot easier to forgive yourself after going the extra mile for Assefa afterward. He would never have met Lemlem but for your arranging his transfer to New York.”
He shot me an appraising look. “Nor for you, my dear. The whole thing wouldn’t have played out the way it did without you.”
That one stopped me in my tracks. God, it was true! How much did we need those miserable moments of failing each other and being failed to move where we were meant to go? And how far back would we have to unwind our fates to discern the trajectory of our unfolding?” I reached a hand into the air and let it lead me into a couple of twirls, aware of the sun shining down on my body as I danced, and amazed that I still had a few pirouettes left in me.
I had to admit that Stanley was right. The butterfly effect was real. We had no idea whether our best efforts would lead to catastrophe or if our lapses and flaws might catalyze something wonderful. I said as much to him, adding, “But if it takes the deaths of precious butterflies to facilitate Dreamization and, possibly, prolong the human experiment on this planet, I doubt that would console the individual butterfly that’s lost its own life.”
As I spoke, a Red Admiral miraculously landed on my still outstretched wrist as if it wanted to take a whirl with me. It preened its black velvet wings with their bright red circles, thickly salted with white spots. I’d never had a butterfly land on me before, and this one seemed to content to hang out awhile, tickling my skin just a little. Did it have any idea the impression it was making? I dared not move. Stanley and I locked eyes, barely able to breathe. I saw a tear sneak down his cheek from beneath his Coke-bottle lenses. A slight whisper of wind stirred, and the butterfly took flight as suddenly as it had landed.
“Goodbye, you beauty!” I called after it. “And thank you!”
Stanley shook his head. “Only with you, Fleur. Only with you. You’ll have me believing in God yet.”
I nearly laughed, but I stopped myself. Who was I to dismiss the mysterious inter-relation of all things as anything but what people liked to call God? Most times, I tended to forget about that miraculous web of life that the Hindus ascribed to the god Indra. And then something like this occurred, and I realized that some other part of me knew it down to my bones.
When Stanley and I returned to the house at Rose Villa, Gwen was waiting for us with fresh mint tea, homemade shortbread cookies, and one of her riper rants. Stanley had prepared me for the latter as he huffed and puffed rather alarmingly on our way back. “She’s started getting anxiety attacks. Pretty much a first for her. You know Gwen. Salty as hell, but solid as a rock. Her oncologist suggested an SSRI, but she’s not convinced her distress should get medicated away. Says if she’s not a little anxious after surviving cancer, a violent attack on a local gay rights parade, the death of a good friend, and a sociopath in the White House, there’d be something wrong with her. I can’t say I disagree with her.”
I couldn’t disagree with Stanley. Hearing his labored breathing after a walk that used to be a vigorous skip not so many years ago, I was feeling pretty anxious myself.
It didn’t exactly help when Gwen let it rip, waving the front page of Science Times in front of our faces. “No wonder I got sick. We’re a fucking cancer on the face of this p
lanet. How can we even look ourselves in the mirror? What other species shits on its own food source, commits matricide without a backward glance, knows it’s making a beautiful planet uninhabitable, and distracts itself with an ignoramus tweeting his ignorance, thinking he’s Tolstoy?”
Stanley sighed and put a hand on his sister’s shoulder. “What is it this time, Gwen? You really do need to calm down a little. You know what the doctor said. This kind of agitation tends to build on itself.”
I could see Gwen struggling to contain her rage. For a moment, she won, a torrent of tears washing her face. “It’s the puffins. They’re going down. I’ve adored them since I was a little girl.”
I knew what she meant. For most of us, it was the eponymous publisher of children’s books that had introduced us to the comical creatures with sad-looking eyes, sleek black caps, and matching bright orange webbed feet and outsized, curved bills.
“The books,” I said, and Gwennie shot me a grateful look.
Stanley helped her to one of the living room sofas, where she continued. “Exactly. Every girl I knew was a Puffin reader. Make Way for Ducklings. Madeline.”
“The Wind in the Willows,” I threw in.
And from Stanley, “Black Beauty!” Gwen and I stared at him. “What? You think only girls read those books? My other reading at the time was The Physical Review.”
Gwennie and I avoided each other’s eyes. Actually, she seemed to have settled down a little, perhaps feeling less alone. “I don’t know how I can take it, guys. How many of my friends had to have a plush puffin beside her to get to sleep at night?” She looked across the room to Stanley, who sat in his favorite chair. “Do you remember that trip the folks took us on to Yorkshire? We actually got to see a flock of them at that freezing wildlife reserve.”
“A circus,” I interjected.
Disconcerted, Gwennie said, “No, they were wild.”
Embarrassed, I responded hastily, “Don’t mind me, Gwen. It’s just that a flock of puffins are called a circus. Or an improbability. Or a puffinry.”