They met at a little café and bakery near campus, and Alex couldn’t help feeling she was in a movie. She’d watched it a thousand times, how the former lovers meet for coffee — at a table by the window, so one person could watch the other leave, then sit there brokenhearted — and now here they were. Except they were back in a corner, at a table that wobbled, with someone’s kids running around screaming in soccer uniforms. Malcolm maintained an expression of deep concern and leaned a little over the table. He looked tired. He hadn’t shaved.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” Alex said.
“Which part?”
She managed to smile. “I’d say the entire past six months. Starting with the albatross.”
“Have you been seeing someone?”
She couldn’t believe he’d think that. And she was actually flattered. She said, “I would never do that to you.”
His cup was frozen halfway to his mouth. “No — I was asking if you were seeing, like, you know. A psychologist. A therapist.”
“Oh.”
“You just haven’t seemed like yourself.”
“Honestly, Malcolm, I’ve just been drunk a lot lately. I was drunk when I said I couldn’t marry you.”
He nodded and considered this. “How do you feel now?”
“Now? I’m sober.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He made a concerted effort to drink some coffee. He set the cup down and licked his lips. “What do you need from me?” God, the man was so sweet. And she wasn’t the type to appreciate a kind heart while secretly wishing for the rough Harley man. This really was what she wanted.
If she’d learned anything from Eden Su, it was that sitting there mutely doesn’t get you anywhere. Tossman was right — she was idle, a ship frozen in a sea of trouble. And that would never do.
So she said, “I need to know how you see me.”
“I think you’re great, and I love you, but I think it wouldn’t hurt you to get some help.”
“No, I’m actually — I actually need to know what you think I look like.”
He was confused, and for a second she thought she’d have to explain the whole thing, all her vain neediness, but then he reached into his pants pocket for a ballpoint pen, white with a blue cap. He turned over his napkin and began to draw.
“What are you doing?” She leaned to see, but he moved it behind his coffee cup. Finally he held it out, in both hands. It was a stick figure: round head, curly hair in every direction, smiling mouth, happy eyes. Under it, he’d written ALEX.
She laughed. “That’s me?” He put it down on the table and drew wavy lines emanating from her face and body. “What’s that?”
“That’s your amazingness.”
He tilted his head and grinned at her, exactly like someone in a movie — the one the girl was supposed to end up with. And she thought, it wasn’t a Rossetti, but it was good enough. And she thought, if he was dumb enough to take her back, she might be smart enough to marry him.
In future years, when she told that story, she left out the part about Malcolm. It became instead the story of why she left Cyril College, of how she and Malcolm ended up at State, of how sweet Tossman had been to her, that year before he killed himself. Of how even in assessing all her misprisions, she’d still missed something enormous. But where had the signs been? There had been no signs: just poor Tossman slumped on the steps of the music building at midnight, gun in his hand. And no one seemed to know why. And really, she’d barely known him. She’d only read half his books.
She would tell the story to younger colleagues, starting with the albatross, focusing on Eden Su, ending with Tossman, whom they knew about already. The point, the moral, was how easy it was to make assumptions, how deadly your mistakes could be. How in failing to recognize something, you could harm it or kill it or at least fail to save it. But she wondered, even as she told the story, if she wasn’t still missing the point. If maybe it wasn’t something, after all, about love — something she was too cold to understand.
The telling was an attempt, of course, at penance. It never did work; penance so rarely does.
A BIRD IN THE HOUSE (THIRD LEGEND)
In almost any culture, it’s an omen: of a death, or a birth, or a journey. Sometimes a bird in the house is said to be the ghost of the recently departed. We aren’t capable of seeing it rationally — especially as it falls in love with itself in our windows, as it flaps frantically past family portraits, as it kills itself against our walls.
When I was four months old, my father’s parents saw each other for the last time. My grandmother would be dead within the year, crushed under a bus on a Budapest street. My grandfather would live on in Hawaii for two sunburnt and hazy decades. The summer of 1978 was a rare convergence for them — Chicago being a fairly precise midpoint, the birth of a baby being a neutralizing force.
The scene, as it’s been relayed to me: my mother in our family room, holding me. My grandmother at the kitchen table with my sister, peeling apples. My father in the living room, playing piano. My grandfather on the stairs, a threadbare towel around his neck. (His blind left eye, doomed in infancy when his tubercular mother broke out of quarantine and kissed it, dripped so constantly that the towel became necessary late in life. He lived out his second half as a hatha yoga instructor, and at least when he stood on his head the tears fell into his white hair and not his mouth.)
And then: A sparrow flew out of the fireplace and past my screaming mother, sprinkling ash, flailing in loud circles. It found its way through the kitchen door, and my grandmother, still seated but reaching one hand straight up, grabbed its tail. The longest feathers stayed between her fingers as the bird flew on, raining small, perfect circles of blood on the kitchen tiles, on the flesh of the peeled apples, on the lid of the Cuisinart.
The Mozart stopped mid-phrase and the bird found the upstairs hallway, following some unhelpful instinct of altitude equaling safety. My grandfather tried to throw his towel over it. When this failed (depth perception not his strength), he rolled the towel and snapped it like a locker-room bully until the wall was smeared with ash and blood, and the sparrow, dazed, beat its wings into the floor and tried to claw a foothold. The old man wrapped the towel around it like a sack, and flung the whole thing out the window with such force that the bird had five full seconds to stretch its wounded wings before it needed to fly of its own accord.
My grandfather credited his luck. He always won at the track, as well. His secret was to bet on the white horse. The white horse was the only one his good eye could follow.
My grandmother, who knew more than a bit about omens, was somber the rest of the day.
When the two guests had returned to opposite ends of the world, there remained in the house only the detritus of their stay: the gifts my grandfather had brought; a brown patch scrubbed indelibly into the upstairs wall; in my sister’s room, where a writing desk had been set up for my grandmother, the typewriter purchased for the visit and the curiously tangled ink ribbons she’d abandoned.
She always shuffled cards as she wrote, but when my mother cleaned she found only five, their margins softly obliterated. Of the Hanged Man, only the bottom half remained. Lost in the fog of whatever world she’d been creating, or in the present world (announcing its intentions so brazenly), or perhaps in some past and brutal one, my grandmother had chewed and swallowed almost the entire pack.
EXPOSITION
[TAPE #2: 4 MINUTES, 13 SECONDS]