Byrd Page 6

She lives in an apartment on the top floor. Her window has a yellow lace curtain, always a vase of flowers on the sill.

  “Travel doesn’t necessarily mean move,” he tells her. “It can, but it doesn’t have to.”

  He himself is recently home from India. He went traveling as a sort of purification ritual, a way of renouncing his dependence on material comforts, of escaping the numbing day-in-day-outness of life in Greensboro. He wanted a spiritual adventure. He wanted to be able to hear the voice of God if God should speak to him. It’s when you’re between places, he has always believed, on your way from somewhere to somewhere else, that you’re most likely to hear God, because that’s when you’re most alert. Take Moses. When Moses came upon God in the burning bush he was on his way out of Egypt—fleeing, in fact, after killing a man. God said to Moses, “Go home. Go back to Egypt and take care of your people.”

  In India, Warren put on orange robes and followed sadhus. He traipsed through streets where skinny men squatted over open gutters and girls skipped along kicking up dust with their bare feet, bells on their ankles tinkling insanely. He sat in an ashram listening to flies he was not allowed to swat. He braved the crowds in Benares to wash his feet in the holy filth of the Ganges. It was there, finally, in that strange, bright, teeming, burning place, that God spoke to him. And, surely not a coincidence, God told him the same thing he’d told Moses: “Go home. Go home and take care of your mother, Warren. She doesn’t know who you are, but she doesn’t have anyone else to love her.”

  So Warren returned to Greensboro. To clean, tree-lined streets and the conveniences of his mother’s house—his house now. His bathtub, his gas range, his tea kettle. He returned to his clients, some of whom didn’t even realize he’d been away, and to his day job in the insurance office. Now, every evening after work, true to the promise he made to God, he stops in the nursing home to read tarot cards for his mother.

  “What’s this one?” she’ll ask. “This one is pretty.”

  “The Two of Cups,” Warren will say. “It’s about connecting. About healing broken relationships.”

  “And what’s this one? What are these big gold things they’re holding?”

  “The Two of Cups. Those are cups, Mother.”

  You don’t have to go to India to know death in the midst of life, to hear the sound of silence behind the quickening pulse, to know the nothingness at the core of all being.

  “I don’t think you came here to talk about moving,” he says to Addie. “Where you live, where he lives, that’s just geography.”

  Addie knots her hands. “We have history,” she says. “Not a completely nice history, to be honest. But we’re connected in a way I’ve never been connected to anyone else. When I was with him this time, I felt that. I felt like I was with him. Like my showing up in his life again after so many years had filled in some missing piece.”

  Poor Addie, Warren thinks. Getting involved with a Gemini. A mental, moony Gemini—exactly the sort of man who would appeal to her.

  “What I can tell you,” he says evenly, “is that you aren’t going to be able to figure him out. That’s the whole point of the relationship for you.”

  “How can not figuring somebody out be the point of a relationship?”

  “Look.” Warren shows her Roland’s birth chart. “Your friend has no Earth in his chart. Not a trace. In fact there’s no Earth in the composite chart, despite your three planets in Virgo.” He lays her birth chart on the table alongside the composite. “Roland epitomizes everything you’re afraid of. He’s the mystery, the unknown. His sun is in the twelfth house of the relationship, the house of mystery. Which means that, to you, he will always be unknowable. Your magical mystery man. That’s his role.”

  Addie studies the charts. “One night he played in a bar,” she says, delicately lifting her teacup from its saucer. “I was at a table with his friends and they were telling me how he was the most natural, open, out-there person they’d ever met, and I wanted to say to them, Really? How do you know? Because I’m never sure what he’s thinking.”

  “His friends have a different configuration with him than you do. They experience him on a more surface level. On that level he’s very direct. But you have a deeper connection, more of a soul-mate connection. Soulful playmates.”

  “He’s been calling me. He forgets the time difference and calls in the middle of the night, when I’m asleep. We don’t always talk. Sometimes he just plays his guitar and I listen. He’s amazing, even when he’s wasted.”

  “He affects people in powerful ways,” Warren says, “though he may not realize it. His Gemini energy makes him so scattered that he’s a bit of a mystery even to himself. Capricorn in his seventh house: he needs somebody solid, responsible. He doesn’t have much of that in his own life so he has to get it from somebody else.”

  “Like me.”

  “Your moon is falling in the fourth house, the house of security and family and rootedness, so yes, you’d be providing that part of the relationship.”

  “While he’s off somewhere being mysterious.”

  Her wistfulness makes him want to lay his hand on hers. But that would be a breach of ethics.

  “You’ve got Libra on your seventh house cusp,” he continues. “Neptune’s there, too, which means you’re also a great romantic idealist. But you tend to delude yourself by projecting your ideals onto a particular person when in fact that idealism is something more magical about life itself. The more you tap the mystery in yourself, the less weightiness your relationships will have.”

  He studies her for some sign that his reading is touching on the truth. Almost always, the answers people come to him for are truths they carry inside themselves. His job is to help them uncover what they already know. When a reading rings true, it registers visibly—a change in posture, a flicker in the eyes. Some people get hungry.

  Addie is nodding. She has folded her arms across her waist and is rocking back and forth.

  “Are you okay?” Warren asks.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m feeling a little sick. I think I need your bathroom.”

  Up on the Roof

  Roland is making a picnic. He has never made a picnic for anyone. It’s not even a word he uses: picnic.

  On his counter, blueberry smoothies and crinkle-cut fries from his favorite stand on the beach, plus everything from his kitchen: a can of peaches, half a bottle of white Zinfandel, and two hard-boiled eggs, which he peels and mashes into a bowl with salt and pepper. Then there’s the barbecue Addie brought with her from North Carolina: hickory-smoked shoulder meat sliced thin, packed on dry ice in her little travel cooler. Slaw, too, and sauce, the thin red tomatoey kind they grew up on. You can’t get sauce like this in California.

  So much food. A feast, a corn-you-fucking-copia. That’s how Addie makes him feel. Rich, generous, overflowing. Like that Bible story where all of a sudden there’s plenty of fish and bread to go around. One day he’s racking his brain over how to scrape up rent, even thinking he should move Elle back in, the next he’s making a picnic.

  Loaves and fishes, baby.

  It’s a warm, gusty February afternoon and they’re going to spend it on the roof because Addie has never eaten on a roof. They’re going to sit in the sun and eat their picnic and drink their wine and look down on the ocean. When the time comes he will kiss her. She likes being kissed, gives him her mouth full and open, like a flower, one he remembers from home but can’t remember the name of. Something with soft, damp petals.

  She’s swishing around him like a nervous cat, singing that song, “Up on the Roof,” by James Taylor or Joni Mitchell or Carole King, one of the people she listens to. He should learn the song so that next time, if there is a next time, he can play it for her the way it ought to sound, jazzy and light—the way you feel when you’re on a roof.

  He packs the food in his gym bag, the peaches and eggs and smoothies and fries and wine and barbecue. He strips the orange blanket off the sofa bed. Then they
climb out the window and up the metal ladder, past the fourth floor—only one flight, but in the wind, carrying their picnic, it feels like more. An outing, his mother would call it. Addie goes first, clinging to the rail. A warm breeze is blowing. Her cotton skirt balloons above him; he can see her legs all the way up to her lace panties. Her legs are like stalks, thin and straight and pale. No one in L.A. has legs so pale.

  “Roland,” she says, her red hair whipping around her head, “if I let go, will you catch me?”

  “Sure, baby.”

  He isn’t in love with her. Nobody’s talking about love. But if she fell, yes, he would catch her, because she believes he could. She has known him forever and trusts him anyway, and for that he would give her everything. His groceries, his coke if he had any, his roof, his big warm California sky, his ocean.

  The picnic does not turn out as he’s planned.

  Addie sits stiff as a queen on the orange blanket, nibbling at her sandwich, now and then flapping her hand in the air to shoo a swooping gull. If she’d just finish eating, the bird would leave her alone. He doesn’t know why she’s taking such tiny bites, why she chews and chews and chews, unless it’s to avoid talking. She’s too quiet, not her usual chatterbox self.

  He tries pouring wine into her cup and she stops him.

  “What are those mountains?” she asks.

  “The Santa Monicas.”

  “They look like elephants.”

  “Elephants?”

  “It’s a Hemingway story,” she says. She sounds impatient, irritated with him. “‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ Except those hills aren’t white, they’re sort of brownish-gray. Taupe.”

  “I read a book,” he says. “I saw a show on public TV about John Steinbeck and the next day I went out and got Of Mice and Men. Fucking blew me away. I loved that guy Lenny.” What he doesn’t say, what he’s afraid to say, is that he watched the show and read the book for her.

  “The one you ought to read,” she says, “is The Grapes of Wrath. The greatest road book ever written.”

  “Isn’t it like ten thousand pages long?”

  She squints at the horizon. “Those hills don’t really look like elephants.”

  He opens the peaches and they eat them out of the can. “Last one’s yours,” he offers, but she pushes the spoon away.

  “The Hemingway story,” she says, “is about a girl who gets pregnant. She and her boyfriend are trying to decide what she should do.”

  “What do they decide?” He’s being polite. Why the hell is she still talking about this story?

  “Nothing, Roland,” she says. “Nothing. I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Oh.” Fuck. Of course. A girl who gets pregnant. That explains everything—her nervousness, her moodiness. Her not-drinking. He can’t believe he didn’t figure it out himself. Even her coming back so soon. Of course she would think she had to tell him in person; that’s Addie. Dutiful, pale, pregnant Addie.

  He imagines her packing for her trip. Choosing what to wear. Picking out the story she would use.

  If only he were a reader.

  She’s starting to cry now, but not hard. He puts his arm around her. “It’s okay, baby,” he says. “Don’t worry, it’ll be okay. Addie, look at me.” He hands her one of the paper towels they’re using as napkins. “That story,” he says, “how does it come out?”

  “It’s Hemingway. It doesn’t come out.”

  He pulls her closer and presses her head into his shoulder. Her face soaks his shirt. He doesn’t care. He isn’t thinking about himself, not yet. It’s too soon; he doesn’t need to think that far ahead. “It’s okay,” he says, keeping his voice deep and even. “Just tell me what you want me to do. Tell me, and I’ll do it.” He has no idea what this means, for himself or for her, but he likes the sound of it. Solid, convincing, strong. Stronger than he has ever been.

  Tell Me and I’ll Do It

  Addie’s phone wakes her up.

  “How you feeling, baby?”

  “Tired, Roland. I’ve never been so tired.”

  The next night he forgets again and calls at midnight, her time. “How you feeling?”

  “Please, Roland, you have to stop calling so late. I’m so tired I could die.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He calls at ten. “Did you get the money I sent?”

  “You didn’t send it,” she says. “Golita did. You told her?”

  “Golita is family,” he says. “She’s like my sister.”

  “Your sister never liked me.”

  “Golita’s okay.”

  “I sent it back,” she says. A check from Golita for a hundred dollars, less than half the cost of the procedure, and a sticky note in Golita’s handwriting, “Good luck.” Roland hadn’t even addressed the envelope himself.

  He calls at seven. She’s in the middle of supper. “Please stop calling,” she says. She isn’t even sleepy this time. “Please just stop.”

  Someone has to drive her to and from the clinic. It’s a requirement. She considers calling Shelia, though they’ve talked only once or twice since Shelia’s twins were born. But this is one secret she doesn’t want Shelia to know. It isn’t the abortion; it’s Roland. She doesn’t want Shelia to know she’s been with him again. She especially doesn’t want Shelia to know that being with him was her idea.

  She calls the professor. “It’s the least you can do,” she tells him.

  He comes for her in his Toyota. He’s wearing a black cap and sunglasses, like a character in a movie. Sometimes he’s such a joke she can’t help but love him.

  “Do you know how to get there?” she asks.

  He nods.

  It’s a cold, blustery March morning. White pear blossoms whip through the air like snow, a spring blizzard. On the sidewalk outside the clinic, half a dozen men are holding signs. They aren’t walking up and down the way you’re supposed to on a picket line. They seem frozen in place. Their signs are big white posters with red magic marker letters, the exact same red on every poster, like they all got together in somebody’s basement.

  “Don’t they have jobs?” the professor says.

  Addie knows she’s supposed to hate them. But they’re nothing to her. Standing out in the weather in their wool jackets, too cold to move, they’re not even an inconvenience.

  Someone should take them coffee, she thinks.

  Kerouac’s Girlfriend

  Roland stands at his bathroom mirror shaving off his mustache. The mirror keeps fogging over. He wipes it with the side of his hand.

  The bathroom feels smaller when he’s alone. The whole apartment does. Crowded and stale. Nothing nice, just him and his stuff. Dirty clothes, dirty towels, dirty magazines.

  When he was on the road he used to daydream about places he might end up. None of them looked like this. This place could be anybody’s. He could be anybody.

  Who can blame Addie for not wanting his kid.

  She wouldn’t even take money from him, even after he talked it out of Golita. Golita insisted on writing the check herself. “I give you cash, you’ll just put it up your nose,” she said.

  Today is the day. It’s happening now, while he shaves. No, fuck, it happened hours ago—he keeps forgetting the time difference. By now it’s done.

  Kerouac’s girlfriend had an abortion. Kerouac wrote about her in Desolation Angels. Kerouac’s girlfriend’s name was Joyce, but Kerouac changed it to Alyce in the book. Back then, abortions were illegal. Nineteen fifty-six—the year Roland was born, and Addie.

  He splashes water on his face and checks his reflection. Clean face, clean start. Like nothing’s happened yet.

  He pictures Addie in a hospital gown, lying on a table, her thin white arms and legs. Is she scared?

  Maybe he’ll write her a song. Call it “Desolation Angel.”

  Love, Stay, Keep

  The clinic has certain people for certain things. One hands you pills in a paper cup. Another escorts you from room to room: the pape
rwork room, the changing room, the ultrasound room, small and dark. The lab, all bright lights and needles. The counseling room with windows and potted plants. The procedure room. Finally, the recovery room like a big beauty salon, with magazines and soothing music and reclining chairs lined up in two long rows and a smiling, pink-cheeked woman who walks around serving graham crackers and ginger ale. “More?” she asks. “More?” If kindness could be eaten and drunk, it would taste like graham crackers and ginger ale.

  The first couple of rooms—paperwork, changing—are nothing, except the blue gown Addie has to put on is an insult, a thin blue plastic thing that clings to her skin and crackles when she moves and makes her hair electric.

  The ultrasound room is where she comes face to face with what she’s doing. She’s on a table and a nurse comes in and rubs warm Vaseline on her belly and glides a camera over her. “Show me,” she says, and the nurse points to a spot on a black-and-white TV screen. The spot is gray and smaller than a baby bird. Which is how Addie tries to think of him in the beginning: as a bird, something that doesn’t belong in her, a mistake, all blind and gray and no feathers. She wonders what others see when they look at the screen, what images they conjure up to fool themselves. She wonders why the clinic, which has people for everything else, doesn’t have a person to help with this. A useful-metaphor woman in a nice blue smock and crepe-soled shoes.

  Or maybe that’s the job of the clinic counselor, the one with potted plants. She sits them down, Addie and two others, a nervous high school girl and a bored twenty-year-old, and asks a few questions to make sure they’ve come here of their own free will. Then she gives a speech that’s supposed to make them feel brave and wise and strong.

  “Is there anything else you need to talk about?” she asks them.

  The high school girl wants to know if she’ll be able to go to the basketball game Friday night. The twenty-year-old says she’s been through this before and knows the drill. Addie says nothing. What can she say? Thirty-two and still no readier to be a mother than they are.