They had a thing for English speakers. England is the mythical Eden where every rude mechanical knows what is nesting where in his garden and woodcocks eat out of your hand, and America is the land of the citizen scientist and the bag limit. American hunters shoot five ducks in the first five minutes of the season and rest on their laurels. Models of reason and restraint.
So they trusted Stephen, even though birders under fifty were reportable to the Swiss Rarities Committee. Stephen knew his birds. They gave him a piece of protected marsh to count birds in, every Sunday in winter and once a month in summer. They promised him his ducks had an excellent chance of turning up. So he sat there behind his spotting scope looking at mallards until about mid-January and then decided maybe something was wrong with Sundays. He tried Saturday and saw about two thousand birds — various rails, fudge ducks, tufted ducks, common pochards (female), red-crested pochards, and a juvenile eagle.
The next morning he asked me to come with him. He wanted to take off at five o’clock. I forced myself. We didn’t have to look long for the guy. We heard him. He was hunting from a boat on the other side of the creek.
“No way!” Stephen said. We could sort of make him out dragging the boat up into the reeds, and heard him call his dog and start his car. It was Sunday, with no birds anywhere in sight except the ultimate in trash — those sinister little chickadees everybody feeds, who hang around all winter and get dibs on the nesting sites the good birds need. Luckily ninety percent of them die anyway of hunger and cold.
“It’s a crime against nature!” Stephen said, frowning.
I pointed out that the trend in recent jurisprudence has been to broaden the scope of so-called crimes against humanity and subsume all other offenses under them. He didn’t listen.
His first idea for a solution did not bode well. He wanted to buy a.22. His next idea was to spend a lot of money on video equipment. His third idea was to talk to the Society for the Protection of Birds, who said you can’t have everything. Hunting is way below what it used to be. Actually it’s down to almost nothing in Switzerland. It’s the peaceable kingdom. Seriously. The red-crested pochards come there from Spain, north for the winter.
The beautiful Elvis bred and fed. He rang our doorbell with Kaiser rolls and a hangdog expression and said, “Oh, Tiff, it is so much terrible. My ex-wife is pregnant. I will become a father. She will not get an abortion.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I literally don’t care.” That was not true at all, but I had learned to draw back at the sight of the forces of nature. “Either you want to continue our relationship,” I continued, “or you don’t. But don’t just come in here and tell me something like that without putting it into context. By context I mean direct relevance for me personally. A purely pragmatic context, like are you never coming over here again, or will you be coming less often, or you can come for the next six months and that’s it. Give me your findings and skip the data.”
“But that’s not it,” he said. “I will take custody of this baby. I will care for it, nurse it. I will receive a minimum of social help money and I will stop working at the petrol station. But I cannot stay living in this rat-hole. I will move to a new house.”
“What ex-wife? You could start by explaining what ex-wife you’re talking about.”
“My second wife, Alexandra in Geneva.”
“Oh, Elvis,” I said. “You’re literally driving me insane.”
I covered my eyes with my hands and thought: Back when I met Elvis it took me one look to know this guy gets into scrapes. I just didn’t know what kind of scrapes, beyond sleeping with me because I was female. When I met Stephen, on the other hand, it was obvious that we were the same sub-subspecies of control freak. Even my parents saw it. Stephen has a fair level of control, and he figures at some point I’ll get control and stop spending all my time compulsively coming up with ways to excuse my lack of it. He has those seven habits of highly effective people, and he’s graciously letting me pick up one habit at a time. Elvis, though; I can’t even tell whether Elvis is asking me for money. “Are you asking me for money?” I asked.
~ ~ ~
I didn’t tell Stephen I had broken up with Elvis, because I wasn’t really sure he didn’t think it had been over a while ago. So I kept quiet and signed up for a German course. High German. A language with actual books. I was tired of chlütterle. I had to do something, because the minute I broke up with Elvis, I fell in love with him. I loved Stephen’s disinformation dumps, but they wore me out. I missed Elvis’s scattershot stupidity. It had been like a dalliance with a sixteen-year-old shepherdess, and my marriage was starting to feel like an exercise in opportunity cost.
I knew from reading The Joy Luck Club at the tearful insistence of my mother that sex is legal tender for all debts public and private, while husbands should be exploited to the max and beyond, but without Elvis coming over anymore, I couldn’t even sit in my bed and read without being overwhelmed by memories. I couldn’t even call them memories. Actually I was painfully turned on. I felt like a cat in heat with hallucinations. I thought, Wow, love is as strong as death! I never understood that before, and now I know it! And all because I — as in me, personally, of my own accord — ordered Elvis to stop coming around. I felt like generations of bluesmen whining about women they shot to death.
Then I realized that if I was looking for a sixteen-year-old shepherdess, I didn’t have to look farther than my own black, jagged heart, and I picked myself up and went to class.
Word of Rudi’s location spread like a slow fire in a coal seam. Birders called confidentially and conspiratorially to get permission to come by. After a while he was pretty much trained. I would put him on the crown molding and he would drop and fly back up while cameras whirred and lenses purred, each worth more than our car. A feature appeared in Gefiederte Welt. I had been afraid of turning into a poster child, but once they saw Rudi, no one looked at me anymore. Long before it was time for him to leave for the mountains, there were voices calling for a GPS transponder. Stephen and I liked the idea. We could go visit him in summer, assuming he wasn’t hanging around in some inaccessible chasm. Maybe meet his family! Or at least see him collect nesting material. The transponders they have now are little tiny things, no more burden than, say, a quarter in my pocket would be for me. That’s what they told us, and it sounded plausible enough. It would increase his body weight, but given how much better he ate than most wallcreepers in winter, he ought to be able to handle the strain.
Stephen had undergone a subtle but perceptible emotional shift from thinking of the wallcreeper as Tichodroma muraria to thinking of him as our unique and irreplaceable friend Rudi. You might think now would have been a good time to build him an aviary and buy bird toys. But his coal-black chin, his restlessness, that ceaseless shrieking — his tiny sex drive was reducing him to a gemlike flame. Our instincts were sufficient to find him attractive, delightful, and guilt-inducing, but not sexy. He had to go away. But not entirely away. That was our plan. The ornithologist gave him three colored bands and a chip on the small of his back.