My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (2 page)

At dinner just the other night, asked to list and describe the love stories I planned to include here, I did so at length—and was met by furrowed brows. This wasn’t what my dinner companions had expected when I’d said the word “love.” They were expecting happier, fluffier stories. They were expecting 
love
. And so here I should make an important distinction.

3: WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED A LOVE STORY?

Please keep in mind: my subject here isn’t love. My subject is the love story. A compendium of philosophical notions of love might begin with Plato’s hypothesis that human beings were originally hermaphroditic. Severed into two sexes, men and women spend their lives seeking their other halves. Saint Thomas Aquinas reasoned that before the Fall erections were volitional. Adam, sinless, couldn’t have randy thoughts. In the Garden, confronted with Eve’s nakedness (nakedness he didn’t recognize as such), Adam issued disinterested, elevator-operator commands. “Up,” was one. And afterward: “Down.” Evolutionary biology does away with love completely, finding in the novelist’s most dependable material—adultery and divorce—nothing more than a hardwired imperative to pass genes along to the next generation. Sexologists see only a chemical state of infatuation that lasts a couple of years, transforming thereafter, among even the most well-matched couples, into the bath-towelly togetherness known as pair-bonding.

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims—these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

We value love not because it’s stronger than death but because it’s weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn’t hit us the way it does.

And we certainly wouldn’t write about it. The stories in this collection bear this out in each and every instance. From William Trevor’s “Lovers of Their Time,” which tells the story of a married travel agent and pharmacy clerk who have nowhere to meet but an out-of-the way bathroom in an old hotel, to Gilbert Sorrentino’s postmodern “The Moon in Its Flight,” where the teenage lovers are thwarted not only by fate but by the literary conventions of romance, to Harold Brodkey’s scandalous story “Innocence,” which consists of the extended account of a Harvard senior’s unflagging attempt to bring his girlfriend to her first orgasm by means of a virtuosic and intensely cerebral act of cunnilingus, the characters in these stories seek a paradise that recedes endlessly before them. Escape from one set of circumstances brings confinement in another. The fated love turns out to be a human fantasy. Desire is a homeostatic system. Push it down in one place and it rises in another.

4: ROMAN BIRD SONG

The stories in this volume fall within the continuum laid out by Catullus’s first two Lesbia poems: 
from voyeuristic longing to disenchanted entanglement
. The narrator of “Spring in Fialta” recounts the many missed romantic opportunities he’s had with a woman named Nina, whom he’d first met, and kissed, on a pitch-black Russian winter night years and years before. Nina recurs in the narrator’s life like a theme in a piece of music, and every time the strings announce her arrival, the cymbals clash and she disappears. I’d been under the impression lately that I was cooling ever so slightly on Nabokov, that sober middle age had made me less susceptible to his lush lyricism. But rereading “Spring in Fialta” reminded me how much better Nabokov is than everybody else. Not only does the story impart to the reader a profound wistfulness, in which the evanescence of love expands to suggest the fragility of life and time and memory itself, but Nabokov manages, at the same time, to weave into the story secondary and tertiary levels of meaning. There’s what’s happening with the weather, for instance, the “cloudy and dull” spring of Fialta that, in the background of the narrated events, is slowly transforming, thawing, dripping, and brightening, in order to flash out at the end with the story’s tragic revelation. Along with this, Nabokov has studded the story with recurring details—of the circus coming to town, of speeding automobiles—all of which will figure in the denouement. The literary craft in all this mirrors the literary imagination (the seeing of patterns, the orchestrating of fate) that the narrator brings to his random meetings with Nina throughout the years, a literary imagination that every lover possesses and is a veritable Shakespeare of. “Spring in Fialta” isn’t only about a love fated never to be. It reenacts the story-making we inevitably engage in whenever we fall in love.

The sparrow in “Spring in Fialta” is Nina’s husband Ferdinand, who’s always in the way. In the case of “The Lady with the Little Dog,” however, the sparrow is dead. Gurov, the unfaithful husband in the story, seduces Anna Sergeevna, an unhappy young married woman, while they are both visiting Yalta. Gurov, who has done this sort of thing before, assumes he’ll forget Anna as he’s forgotten other women. But he doesn’t. Her memory haunts him and, finally, he pursues her to her hometown, where they resume their affair. In the story’s final scene, the two lovers clandestinely meet in a dingy hotel room in Moscow. And then comes one of the most enigmatic endings in literature. “And it seemed that, just a little more—and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.” One of Chekhov’s admirers, Serafima Remizova, was highly disappointed with this ending. “I read your story,” she wrote to Chekhov in a letter, “and I should like to ask you to write the continuation of it. You have abandoned your heroes … at the most critical moment in their lives, when they are about to make a decision. But which one? … It is important for someone like you, Anton Pavlovich, who can see into the human heart, to show … how happiness can be found in such a situation.”

But the inconclusiveness of Chekhov’s ending, his failure to show how happiness can be found in such a predicament (along with the suggestion that perhaps it can’t be found), is exactly what makes this story one of the greatest love stories of all time. It ends where the preliminaries of love end, after the stirrings of attraction, after the trysts and renunciations and the renunciations of those renunciations, when desire has attained its object and the real, the heavy problems begin.

I’ve read “The Lady with the Little Dog” countless times over the years and my interpretation continually changes. When I was younger (and more sophisticated), I was sure the ending was ironic. The emotional deadness of the lovers’ marriages was sure to infect their own new relationship in time. Reading the story now, older (and more innocent), I couldn’t help finding in Chekhov’s last line a glimmer of optimism. The story seemed to me, this time through, to be about that miracle you come across every once in a long while: two unexceptional people, for no demonstrable reasons, being exceptionally in love.

Christianity, which in its beginning retained much of the earthiness of Judaism, a sense of the body and its sexual appetites as inherently good, was slowly influenced by Neoplatonism, which held for a strict duality between the body and the spirit. Asceticism, abstinence, monasticism—you can blame it all on the Greeks. Nevertheless, if the stories in this collection provide any evidence, it’s the renunciation of the body that distinguishes true love from any simulacrum. When the body is no longer desired, when beauty has faded, when possessiveness has been relinquished, real love shows its face. This seems to happen most often in old age, or as the result of a winnowing of ego. Born with desire, these stories say, we grow into love, and then only sometimes, and only if we’re lucky.

In Alice Munro’s magnificent “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the husband of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, after regret-fully relinquishing her to a nursing home, finds, on his subsequent visits, that she is slowly forgetting him and becoming involved with an elderly male patient. The husband responds to this death-in-life with an act of love that goes beyond the bounds of matrimony, approaching the selflessly divine. Deborah Eisenberg’s shatteringly beautiful and unerring “Some Other, Better Otto” suggests that, in moments of existential crisis, the only lifeline remains the quotidian, humdrum, durable presence of that imperfect thing: one’s life partner. Each of these two stories is nearly impossibly good. The complexity of the characterization alone is a marvel—Munro’s model husband was, it turns out, a serial philanderer some years back, and the irascible Otto of Eisenberg’s tale becomes, despite his scorched-earth policy relating to other human beings, a person of uncommon tenderness and philosophical insight, in the way depleted soil is enriched by burning. These two stories are the bleakest in the collection, too; they tiptoe right up to the abyss, Munro by unsentimentally describing the inevitable decay of the mind and body, Eisenberg by insisting on the absurd and pitiful insubstantiality, the puniness, of the self. And yet these are the stories in which love, to use an old-fashioned word, triumphs. To borrow from Raymond Carver, whose work is also included here: this is what we talk about when we talk about love. Not eros, maybe, when all is said and done. Closer to agape.

Had Catullus written only those two opening poems about Lesbia’s sparrow, he might not be remembered today. Although they prefigured his own fraught relationship with his married woman, and although I find in them the poles around which all love stories revolve, there is a whole world of detail, particularity, and specificity in between. Read these stories, then, not to confirm the brutal realities of love, but to experience its many variegated, compensatory pleasures. From the bracing acerbities of Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be an Other Woman” to the stark assessments of Richard Ford’s “Fireworks” to Bernard Malamud’s comic presentation of one very picky rabbi, the stories that made their way to me, by sometimes circuitous paths, never failed to be just the thing, after a long, unromantic day at my desk, that I most wanted to read.

It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.

There’s this thought, too. After Lesbia spurned him, what did Catullus do? Kill himself ? Drink to excess? No. Mostly, he wrote, and eulogized his friendships and his dead brother. He brought to his work the same devotion he’d once lavished in vain on Clodia. And he left behind his poems, which speak to the stories in this collection that burn, dazzle, delight, or sadden, depending.

Passer pipiabat
. Here’s a loose translation: “Better a sparrow, living or dead, than no birdsong at all.”

(Finally: As this book is a charitable undertaking, I ask the reader to be charitable toward its numerous and unavoidable omissions.)

FIRST LOVE AND OTHER SORROWS

HAROLD BRODKEY

TOWARD THE END of March, in St. Louis, slush fills the gutters, and dirty snow lies heaped alongside porch steps, and everything seems to be suffocating in the embrace of a season that lasts too long. Radiators hiss mournfully, no one manages to be patient, the wind draws tears from your eyes, the clouds are filled with sadness. Women with scarves around their heads and their feet encased in fur-lined boots pick their way carefully over patches of melting ice. It seems that winter will last forever, that this is the decision of nature and nothing can be done about it.

At the age when I was always being warned by my mother not to get overheated, spring began on that evening when I was first allowed to go outside after dinner and play kick-the-can. The ground would be moist, I’d manage to get muddy in spite of what seemed to me extreme precautions, my mother would call me home in the darkness, and when she saw me she would ask, “What
have
you done to yourself?” “Nothing,” I’d say hopefully. But by the time I was sixteen, the moment when the year passed into spring, like so many other things, was less clear. In March and early April, track began, but indoors; mid-term exams came and went; the buds appeared on the maples, staining all their branches red; but it was still winter, and I found myself having feelings in class that were like long petitions for spring and all its works. And then one evening I was sitting at my desk doing my trigonometry and I heard my sister coming home from her office; I heard her high heels tapping on the sidewalk, and realized that, for the first time since fall, all the windows in the house were open. My sister was coming up the front walk. I looked down through a web of budding tree branches and called out to her that it was spring, by God. She shrugged—she was very handsome and she didn’t approve of me—and then she started up the front steps and vanished under the roof of the porch.