The Wallcreeper (6 page)

She got to her feet. “My blood is on your hands,” she said. “I can’t feel this trapped and survive. You don’t love Stephen, and I do.” Her hands were pressed against her heart and she was taking the feeling of emptiness there very, very seriously—a hole in her heart only Stephen’s dick could fill.

“Lighten up,” I said. “Marriage isn’t a sacrament. It’s just a bunch of forms to fill out. It either works or it doesn’t. Do what you want. You’re grown up, and Omar’s a big boy. Get a job and stay in Berne! You’ll have a new boyfriend in like four minutes. Look at you.”

“But I want our apartment. Tiff, I
need
your
help.
”

“Me sleeping with Omar won’t give you Stephen. I don’t think you’d have much chance with Stephen anyway,” I said. “He’s weird.”

“What do you mean? Is Stephen kinky?”

I didn’t want to explain that he had delusions in which he had been chosen alone among men to live life to the fullest, so I said, “For one thing, he’s bi.”

A look of profound consternation flashed across her beautiful face, and I knew they had slept together without condoms.

I suggested to Stephen that we move downtown. If we had moved before, Rudi couldn’t have found us again, but now Rudi was gone and we could move.

Stephen didn’t answer. He said he’d been in touch with an Italian breeder. He rummaged through his messenger bag on the floor, produced a handwritten letter, sat down on the couch, and read aloud.

“About
Tichodroma.
I have had for thirty years always one pair, changing them every six years in good health. In March the male is strongly singing. The female is strongly seeking him. They are divided but one can see the other.
Tichodroma
never die except for special infective reason. But older they make worse thermo-regulation. A false microclimate will very much compromise the reproduction.
Tichodroma
is an absolute vagrant, seeking always those sunny days with a light fresh wind. He is using different environments always. There is no place where to have
Tichodroma
all the year.” He looked up and made eye contact.

Stephen had stooped so low as to punish me with a fable involving a cute dead friend. As he intended, I felt very, very guilty. I had assumed hurting husbands was a privilege of bad wives. Suddenly I realized it’s a moral shortcoming of good ones—good in the way I felt at that moment, in the sense of making a doomed, feeble attempt to be good, which is as good as it gets in the Judeo-Christian tradition where the imagination of man is evil from his youth.

“Move downtown by yourself,” he added. “I’ll pay your rent.”

“Does this have anything to do with Omar’s wife?” I asked.

I surprised even myself. I said it the way I might castle out of spite at not knowing anything about chess, just to prove I was in over my head.

“That bitch?” he said. “I wouldn’t fuck her for practice.”

“Is that why she’s in love with you?” I demanded. “Are you trying to tell me it’s your beautiful mind? She told me you did the nasty and Omar can’t get it up! And then she asked me to suck him off live on camera so she can get a Swiss divorce! It’s true! If he’s unfaithful to her she can totally clean him out, Joy-Luck-Club style!”

Stephen said, “Come over here so I can beat the shit out of you.”

I took his hand and lay down beside him, turning over to nestle up against his chest as if he had a brood patch. We looked over in silence at the wall unit where Rudi used to flit in and out of a shoebox twenty times a minute.

With the easy air of someone who believes he is gratifying a lover’s private obsession, Stephen confided in me that he didn’t believe the Italian guy was really breeding wallcreepers. “I think he’s selling birds he paid some climber to liberate. As in steal nestlings. You know some songbirds can be a real pain in the ass to breed. A lot of them are solitary except when they’re breeding, and everything has to be totally right or they never get in the mood. If you put them together the wrong day they do like bird jujitsu. You know how Rudi was always flicking his wings? That’s because it’s so loud next to these alpine streams nobody can hear him yelling. He was using his wings to say ‘Get off my property.’ But if he says it too much, his whole camouflage is out the window. It’s a fine line. It’s hard, trying to defend your territory and advertise your presence and keep out of predators’ line of sight. So I thought about it, and I thought, I don’t think I want to take somebody’s nestlings out of his nest, right when he finally found a cave he likes and somebody he can get along with. But the truth is, if you take their chicks, they just make more. They can lay thirty eggs a season. They’re set up for it. I mean, the reason chickens keep laying eggs is because somebody takes them away.”

“You want to get a pet wallcreeper to prove Rudi was a dime a dozen,” I said. “That’s cold!”

“That’s not true,” he said. “No wallcreeper is a dime a dozen. They’re lovely birds.”

“Like women,” I said. “Same-same but different.”

“Every woman is unique in her own way and most of them are pieces of shit. Whereas any wallcreeper is an avatar of the one true wallcreeper.”

“Name of Rudi,” I said.

He turned and lay on his back and said, “Fuck it. I mean it. We’re all fucked. Saving one single wild thing was more than I could manage, which means the whole world is fucked. But then I remember that you know how to look out for yourself, and I feel better. Like it’s not the weight of the world, just my own little column of air.”

I was happy. He had called me a wild thing.

Our new apartment was weensy. It was on the former second floor (the street had risen over the years) of a tiny medieval house and, according to the commission on cultural monuments, too historic to renovate. Replacing everything that needed replacing would have meant tearing down the entire house by slow stages from the inside out, clod by clod and pebble by pebble. Its pristine construction elements, dangerous and pointless as they were from a fire safety standpoint, were irreplaceable: intricately woven willow lathes, soundproofing made of rye chaff. “Soundproofing my ass, more like five hundred years of dormice. If you touch a hot crack pipe to this place, it’ll go up like a Molotov cocktail, so best behavior,” Stephen told me in the presence of the real estate broker, who blinked but said nothing.

The curved, crooked spaces were outlined with huge beams and armed with hyper-efficient Bauhaus cabinetry. The windows thrust out at odd angles into the street. It was like the captain’s quarters on a galleon. When the broker advised him to keep the vinyl in the cellar, Stephen smiled condescendingly, but on the other hand he was careful to line his records up along a bearing wall that had floor beams perpendicular.

A short time after we moved downtown, I ran into Elvis on the street. I had been gallivanting about doing nothing much, trying on silk dresses I could have shoplifted in a lipstick case and realizing that even for free they would highlight every drop of sweat like an airport body scan.

We stepped into a café so he could explain his recent doings in his habitual meticulous detail. “I live in Geneva now,” he said. “My baby is there. She is so much nice.”

“I understand,” I said.

“My life is like this. Things pass, and I do with. Whatever and whatever and whatever. Always something. First I am desolated with this pregnancy. And so I see a psychotherapist. We are doing—now—so much beautiful things together. First she take me to Venice, five days. We go also to Tokyo! I am visit her now, but she has a client, and I go walking. So nice surprise to meet you!”

I frowned. “Can’t she lose her license?”

“Who will tell them?” he asked. He seemed offended. “Always you think of the state. Always you think they are watching over you. You were born into capitalism! But I was born into chaos. Ah, Tiffany, you fail me. I close my eyes and always I am fucking you. When I see you, I cannot stop thinking this. Let me fuck you now? Why not? No one sees us. Not even you and me. We close our eyes. It stays a secret.”

He slipped his hand between my knees and for a second I believed him. I felt we could have done it right there on the barstool and nobody would have known.

I leaned forward and said, “This is exactly, precisely the
mauvaise foi
scene in
L’ětre et le néant.
”

It had never occurred to me before that people actually maybe do have sex they don’t want to have. I had always assumed those people had nothing holding them back but inhibitions. But I felt no inhibitions whatsoever. Instead I perceived a powerful longing in my innermost or outermost being (there was no difference, since I generally based appraisals of my affections on the momentary condition of my genitalia) to thaw, spread, and embody the essence of fecundity like a river in springtime.

Yet I also felt strongly that the time might have come to raise myself above the worms by a display of will. I worried that my lust was inhibiting my self-respect and not the other way around. (I was thinking of worms like Omar’s wife—she had put the fear of God into me.) In a world of intentional ethics, I was already squirming in a hotel bed with Elvis without a thought in my head. The potential consequences were nil. The risk was hypothetical: If Stephen had been God, able to see around corners, he would have wished to punish my sins. But if Stephen were God, I would have been walking on the other side of the street and Elvis would have made it back to his therapist’s office and fucked her instead …

The psychotherapist clinched it. “No, thanks,” I said as Elvis continued to caress my thighs and arms with great tenderness. “Not today and probably not ever again. Forget it. It’s not happening!”

He insinuated his hips between my legs, sighing poetically as his lips approached mine.

“Stop!” I said. I picked up my coffee cup. A mistake.

When the owner of the bar came out from behind the counter, I assumed she meant to come to my aid. But apparently she thought the two of us were bringing down the neighborhood. She asked us to leave. I tried to pay and she grimaced in disgust, waving me out the door with my wallet in my hand.

Elvis was waiting at the next corner. I wailed uncharacteristically in despair and frustration.

“You have showered coffee on me,” he said blankly, tilting his head like a shy child. “I am sorry,” he added, “but I need a clean shirt for today, please darling! It’s so much important.”

I gave him a hundred Franken and he sauntered away. I saw him duck from the bustle of the colonnade into a men’s clothing store—I couldn’t believe it myself—and I turned and ran.

I think approximately seven hundred passersby, including ninety of Stephen’s coworkers, saw the handoff of cash and were confirmed in their belief that I was turning tricks to support an ungrateful pimp. But my estimate could be off by a factor of infinity.

The apartment was very close to Mancuso’s Loft.

Rave music was never my thing. Girls dipping their knees, boys pumping their fists. Too fast to dance to. I had seen Elvis waft across the floor like an air-hockey puck, and I assumed his Latin moves were the only way out. Stephen enlightened me as we stood at the bar sipping ginger ale through straws. “That girl with the head wrap,” he said. “Dancehall mouse.”

I looked over at a pretty girl with blonde dreadlocks done up in a carpet. Her body was obscured by a loose, longish dress over pants, as if she were doing her western best to conform with the dress code of Yemen. The beat was pushing one-forty, but her hips were circling
extremely
slowly.

The contrast between her movements and the music was startling. She wasn’t dancing to it. The soundtrack was a commentary that served to heighten and illustrate her butt.

“Is she hot?” I asked Stephen.

“Nah,” he said. “She looks mangy. I’d say she’s a tourist, conserving energy because she wants to keep going until Sunday.”

“She doesn’t want to pick you up? She looks to me like she’s disdaining the hoi polloi because she wants to take home the DJ.”

“Nobody who goes to clubs ever has sex. They don’t have the time.”

“Don’t they trade sex for drugs?”

“With who? These snuggle-bunnies?” He gestured with his head at the other men at the bar.

“Maybe if the guys had the contraption?”

“Who told you about the contraption?”

“Omar’s wife.”

“Trust me, they’re better off without it. Unless you want this place turning into a lake of body fluids like a dubstep party. It’s totally fucking disgusting. I think it’s going to change. I hope so. For now I’m taking it on faith that one of these days dubstep will rise above.”

“You’re so tidy and fastidious.”

“I’m attracted to control.”

“That’s an odd reason to hang out in discos.”

“I didn’t meet you in a disco.”

“Is this a virgin-whore thing?”

“I’m not talking about your songbird sexual mores. I mean your control over your body, the way you eat and dress and get your hair to lie down. You blow me away. It’s like you could spend all day at a pig roast eating chocolate ice cream, and then go caving, and come out looking ready to hit the Norfolk Yacht and Country Club.”

“It’s because I take time to preen,” I said. Which is true. My sleekness, when I put my mind to it, resembled that of the arctic loon. But we were both shiny bright as if we had just come out of the autoclave. Immaculate and smooth—as though clinically sterile—unlike his icon of sexlessness Miss Mangy Dread, who was now doing the lambada with a guy whose ad agency was on our street. (I wouldn’t have known this, but Stephen knew everybody in the club.) Probably she was his new intern. And I suppose Stephen’s look could be better described as fluffy, like a dabchick, which was going to make it hard for him to advance in his career in the cutthroat world of pharmaceutical devices, at least until his temples started to go gray, like a dabchick’s.

Stephen put his arm around my shoulder.

“Are we in on the contraption?” I asked.

“I have options that vest in four years.”

On weekends I was always home by one o’clock. Stephen would stay out until whenever and then sleep, sleep, sleep. He took a break from birding. I didn’t mind. There’s something nice about keeping quiet so as not to wake a fluffy man dozing in a fluffy bed. I read fewer novels and more bird books, learning something new every day. Always simple stuff that afterwards I was ashamed to admit I hadn’t known.