But then something new happened, something very difficult for me. She appeared in the den naked. I have not seen her naked since I fell from the tree and had no wings to fly. She always had a certain tidiness in things. She was naked in the bedroom, clothed in the den. But now she appears from the hallway and I look at her and she is still slim and she is beautiful, I think — at least I clearly remember that as her husband I found her beautiful in this state. Now, though, she seems too naked. Plucked. I find that a sad thing. I am sorry for her and she goes by me and she disappears into the kitchen. I want to pluck some of my own feathers, the feathers from my chest, and give them to her. I love her more in that moment, seeing her terrible nakedness, than I ever have before.
And since I’ve had success in the last few minutes with words, when she comes back I am moved to speak. “Hello,” I say, meaning, You are still connected to me, I still want only you. “Hello,” I say again. Please listen to this tiny heart that beats fast at all times for you.
And she does indeed stop and she comes to me and bends to me. “Pretty bird,” I say and I am saying, You are beautiful, my wife, and your beauty cries out for protection. “Pretty.” I want to cover you with my own nakedness. “Bad bird,” I say. If there are others in your life, even in your mind, then there is nothing I can do. “Bad.” Your nakedness is touched from inside by the others. “Open,” I say. How can we be whole together if you are not empty in the place that I am to fill?
She smiles at this and she opens the door to my cage. “Up,” I say, meaning, Is there no place for me in this world where I can be free of this terrible sense of others?
She reaches in now and offers her hand and I climb onto it and I tremble and she says, “Poor baby.”
“Poor baby,” I say. You have yearned for wholeness too and somehow I failed you. I was not enough. “Bad bird,” I say. I’m sorry.
And then the cracker comes around the corner. He wears only his rattlesnake boots. I take one look at his miserable, featherless body and shake my head. We keep our sexual parts hidden, we parrots, and this man is a pitiful sight. “Peanut,” I say. I presume that my wife simply has not noticed. But that’s foolish, of course. This is, in fact, what she wants. Not me. And she scrapes me off her hand onto the open cage door and she turns her naked back to me and embraces this man and they laugh and stagger in their embrace around the corner.
For a moment I still think I’ve been eloquent. What I’ve said only needs repeating for it to have its transforming effect. “Hello,” I say. “Hello. Pretty bird. Pretty. Bad bird. Bad. Open. Up. Poor baby. Bad bird.” And I am beginning to hear myself as I really sound to her. “Peanut.” I can never say what is in my heart to her. Never.
I stand on my cage door now and my wings stir. I look at the corner to the hallway and down at the end the whooping has begun again. I can fly there and think of things to do about all this.
But I do not. I turn instead and I look at the trees moving just beyond the other end of the room. I look at the sky the color of the brow of a blue-front Amazon. A shadow of birds spanks across the lawn. And I spread my wings. I will fly now. Even though I know there is something between me and that place where I can be free of all these feelings, I will fly. I will throw myself there again and again. Pretty bird. Bad bird. Good night.
“Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac”
I work in publishing myself and so I’m not going to sue that newspaper you buy in the supermarkets. I simply don’t believe in it, as a matter of principle. But I categorically deny that what has happened to me since the accident is I’ve turned into a nymphomaniac. If I’m supposed to be a nympho, then I want to know why nobody ever called JFK or Wilt Chamberlain or Warren Beatty a satyr. Or all the millions of guys we all rightly assume have the same impulses as these public figures but less appeal or opportunity. Are all these guys satyrs? Isn’t that, in fact, exactly the way all their brains work, just like the way mine is supposed to now?
But I’m not angry at men. I want to touch them. This is a revelation to me, sure. This has been coming on me since a New York gypsy cab and I had a blind date in a crosswalk on Sixth Avenue, sure. But this is a different thing from what the people at the Real World Weekly would have you believe.
I saw their editor-in-chief on the Inside Scoop TV show last night. They were demanding that he sort out the real from the unreal. If a doomsday meteor were really hurtling toward the earth, they asked, why should the only astrophysicist who seems to know about it be unreachable at his supposed lab in Albania? And why would an Albanian be named Desi, anyway? At this the editor-in-chief turned to the camera and said that the reach of I Love Lucy has always been greatly underestimated. And then he smiled a little half smile, this editor-in-chief, and he is a man perhaps forty years old with a sharp white part in his soft, black-cat hair and the smile punched a dimple into his left cheek and my hand rose, wanting to place the tip of my forefinger into that indent. “It’s real,” he said, speaking of the meteor.
I don’t believe it is. Who does? But if it were true, and the world were going to end tomorrow, the only thing I’d regret was not having understood earlier what I understand now. No. “Understand” is the wrong word. That suggests a rational thing. And it suggests that I know what’s going on. It’s neither. So why should the word offer itself up at all? Am I mad? No. Mad people talk to themselves. I’ve discovered a part of me that I can’t talk to. Or even about. But that part seems to know something.
A few mornings ago, for example. I was in my office and I was reading a manuscript. A prominent woman Orientalist trying to write a popular history of strange Eastern customs in little two-page chapters with zippy, freak-show headings and lurid illustrations. At that particular moment I was reading about footbinding, the imperial Chinese society tightly binding the feet of girls to create on their adult women crippled, distorted stumps. And these bound feet, bizarrely misshapen, nearly useless for walking, were made very secret; they were always kept beautifully covered up in silks and jewels. And here the Orientalist paused to point out the control that footbinding gave the men over their women, and I leaned back in my chair and looked out my window at the silver rise of the Chrysler Building and I thought about that for a moment. True enough, I supposed. Human relations always come down to a struggle for power. As a woman in a red tailored suit shooting for a vice-presidential title and three places a year on The New York Times best-seller list, I should know that.
But as I turned back to the manuscript, a young man flashed past my half-open office door. I found myself on my feet and at the door and peeking down the hallway after him. He was an editorial assistant named William, a junior editor’s gofer and slush-pile wader, a Harvard lit major starting at wages as low as a McDonald’s grill man so he can get into my office and do what I do. I followed him. I’d noticed him that morning at his desk. He was wearing a button-down dress shirt and a flashy silk tie with the Windsor knot pulled open, and when he finally gets into my chair and his name is on my door he’ll change to bow ties and suspenders and he’ll hire his lit majors from Smith. And even knowing all this, I didn’t feel for a second that what was happening as I followed him was about power.
I found him poised over the photocopy machine, the automatic feed stacked with papers. What this was about was this young man, tall and solid, and his sleeves were rolled up. This was about the impulse I suddenly saw in him to break away from whoever his stiff, rich dad was. The knot on his tie was opened enough to show his throat, and his sleeves were rolled up to his biceps, and I realized I’d been wrong about him coming someday to bow ties, and all of this insight I suddenly had was there in his bare forearms and in the hollow of his throat. I forced a little cough and he looked over his shoulder and smiled at me and he shuffled his feet and ducked his head slightly in deference, but what I felt wasn’t coming from the position I was in, it wasn’t power, it was what I knew about him and what I still didn’t know. He was William, no other. And he had a secret self and part of that self was a sly little rebellion from things that he and I would agree were pretty foolish. That’s why I wanted to run my hand through the golden hair on his forearm.