THE BLUE JAY

 

 

Vince’s black eyebrows are now threaded with gray. In the years she’s known him he’s experimented with a variety of facial hair, cultivating at one time or another a thin John Waters mustache, a goatee that came to a devilish point under his chin, and a disastrous Fu Man Chu beard. Pina disliked each of these pretentions, but kept her views to herself. She did tell him a few times that she preferred seeing the handsome contours of his face with nothing more than a three-day growth, and the blaze of his black eyebrows under the white of his full head of hair.

Now she walks beside him up the street, admiring his clean-shaven face and the braided, two-tone shades of his eyebrows.

It’s not clear where they are going or even where they are. They have a number of concerns—Vince needs to pee; she’s barefoot, for whatever reason, and the pavement has switched to a pebbled walk; a black cloud floats over them and thunder claps make her leap into the air.

“When in Rome . . .” Vince says.

She’s been to Rome and this really feels like another town. There are no people around. No cars. No buildings, not even ruins. She searches everywhere in vain for a sign of vegetation.

Vince stops walking and unzips his pants. She thinks he’s going to pee right here on the spot, but, no. Instead, he steps out of his pants, which seem to have three legs, and tosses them so far into the distance that she doesn’t see them land.

“What about your wallet?” she asks.
“Pina, we need to be free.”
“We’re not slaves, Vince. We’ve never been slaves.”
“Your collective consciousness is very limited, Pina.”
“Quit talking like you know what you’re talking about.”
“Alright, alright.” Vince coaxes his penis out of the slit of his boxer shorts. “It’s so nice out, I think I’ll keep it out.”

Is this the post-apocalyptic world? At least Adam and Eve had an apple tree and a healthy desire. She would rather bite on an apple than have anything to do with the man beside her and his flaccid penis.

The sky opens up and pours black rain. Something about her is changing.

Vince turns to the side and pees in a wide multi-colored arc.

The rain has blackened her skin. Her arms are now hairless and have a black sheen. She loves how the pink under her fingernails contrasts with her black fingers. She pulls up her blouse to see if her skin has changed color even without the tint of black rain. The recess of her pink belly button is a deep reservoir in her black abdomen.

Vince, who’s remained white, hasn’t noticed the difference in her.

“I think I remember being a slave,” she says.
“Mood-making. I’m tired of your mood-making, Pina.”
“I was raped by a white man.”
“Oh, no. You Too with the Me Too, Pina?”

She wakes to the thrust of a penis in her vagina. Someone has entered her, uninvited, from behind.

 

She’s pinned on her stomach. The weight of the beast atop her is excessive. She opens her eyes to a room painted French blue. She thinks she knows where she is—Charlie’s place. Her hands are no longer black. “GET AWAY, MOTHERFUCKER,” she shouts.

And he does. “I was just trying to wake you up with pleasure.”
“By raping me?” She glares at Charlie.
“I wasn’t raping you.”
“Did I give you permission to fuck me when I was asleep?”
“I’m sorry, Pina.”

She jumps out of bed and hurries, with her arms across her breasts, to the chair where her kimono lies. She’s never been modest about her body and for weeks she’s been freely naked around Charlie. He’s a stranger to her now. Her kimono on, she gathers her clothes and dashes to the bathroom.

A moment later, Charlie is at the door. “Pin, can we talk about this?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Can’t we talk, Pina?”

She dresses quickly and then sits on the lid of the toilet seat. “Is she overreacting? Was it so bad what he did? Hasn’t she enjoyed such surprise intercourse in the past? It happened several times with Vince, even with Marco. Maybe her actual complaint is that she was startled awake from an engaging dream. She washes her face with soap and, once she’s toweled herself dry, she studies her visage. The skin under her eyes is puffy with sleep, but the eyes are hardly terrorized. Was she raped? Or is she simply me-tooing, as Vince suggested in the dream, while Charlie was actually fucking her? And what if she were to recant or simply accept Charlie’s apology? Would that be selling out her feminist soul?” A line from Artaud comes into her head: “We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.” Vince often repeated that quote and used it to justify his good lies and his bad, and remained a seasoned sophist about what constituted the heart of the matter. The heart of it here is that Charlie hadn’t raped her. Last night they’d drunk cognac in bed and told each other small lies about all the places they’d travel to together—Italy, Greece, even Japan—when things became normal. Then they made passionate love before spooning their way to sleep.

Charlie apologizes again when she comes out of the bathroom. His eyes are damp; the lines across his forehead have deepened with contrition.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It surprised me.” She tells herself to say no more; she’s been true enough to the heart of the matter.

 

Sylvie invites her to tea, downstairs in her garden. Pina brings a bottle of pickled beets as a modest offering. Two small bistro tables and chairs are positioned at a safe distance from each other. It’s cool for a June afternoon in Sonoma and Sylvie is lovely in a long moss-colored tartan skirt with a matching green blouse. She brings out two platters of small sandwiches—watercress and smoked salmon—with their crusts cut away, along with plates of jam cookies, and sets a platter on each table.

“I wasn’t expecting high tea,” Pina says.
“Oh, this is only an abbreviated version. My husband, whose family came from Scotland, loved the high teas he grew up with. They always included a hot dish of some sort, a bit of baked fish with a sauce or some variety of mac and cheese. I used to think it strange to eat that much a few hours before dinner, but I humored him.”
“That’s the best way with men, isn’t it?”

Sylvie turns her head to the side and grins.

They are waiting for the tea to steep. The teapot features a bucolic view of a thatched roof cottage and bears a motto that looks to have been scratched onto the wet clay before firing: “Say little but think much.” Pina ponders this instruction. It sounds like the type of thing little girls were once taught. As it happens, she has a lot on her mind and would like to talk about it. Her teacup’s inscribed with a different motto: “Time and tide wait for no man.” She wants to turn that motto on its head: The impatience of men waits for no women.

“I think we’re ready now.” Sylvie pours the tea, which has a dark coppery hue. “Milk, sugar?”

Pina drizzles a little milk into her cup. To keep herself from launching into personal chatter, she decides to query Sylvie about her life. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but how long have you been a widow?”

Sylvie appears startled by the question. She jerks her head back as if she’s suffered a fresh blow. “Fifteen years,” she says, finally. “I had just turned fifty-seven. Malcolm was a couple of years younger.” Sylvie sips her tea. “It’s very hard to lose a husband that you loved.”

“I know.”
“That’s right, you, too. But I think it would be worse, Pina—and I might be out of my tree to say this—but don’t you think it would be worse to lose a husband that you didn’t love? Oh, you could say, I didn’t really love him anyway. That might work in the short term, but then the worm could turn, as they say, and you’d likely find yourself struggling to discover what was unsavory about your marriage and how much you contributed to its dysfunction. Guilt would drop on you like an anvil.”
“That’s some very sophisticated reasoning, Sylvie.”
“Oh, that’s me,” Sylvie says, stripping her voice of its cultivation, “very sophisticated.”

Pina laughs and then plucks a watercress sandwich from her tray. She’s reminded of the time that she and Marco had high tea at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. She’d never felt so much like a tourist in her life. Marco loved it all: the gaudy hotel—which seemed more British than anything she experienced in England—with all the fancy shops full of useless bric brac, the uniformed servers carrying platters of tiny sandwiches and cakes that looked like doll food. Pina kept herself on good behavior, not betraying her cynicism.

Sylvie makes a point of catching Pina’s attention. She must have noticed her drifting off to the Empress Hotel. “I know how you see me, Pina—as a sweet old lady.”

“Not at all.”
“Oh, you see me as a not-so-sweet old lady?”
“Well, you’re more of a rascal than I thought.”
Sylvie cackles. “Rascal. That’s what my father used to call all us kids. But back to my husband . . . to losing him, if you don’t mind me being personal.”
“Not at all.”
“I mourned Malcolm deeply for a year, but then I was done. I can tell you the rest because I’m soon going to die.”
Pina lifts her teacup. “What are you talking about, Sylvie?”
“And I can tell you for two reasons. First off, I trust you Pina, and, secondly, I am no longer ashamed of what I did.”

Sylvie is far trickier than she thought and is beginning to worry her. Pina takes a long sip of her tea and keeps a wary eye on her host.

“And what I did was meet one man after another—I was practically a senior citizen—and I fooled around with every one I could.” Sylvie holds her head high, as if to emphasis the fidelity of her stunning revelation. “This went on for some time. I don’t know . . . three or four years, and then I was done.

“I knew a man once who during a period of high aggravation in his life smoked one cigarette after another. When his issues resolved, he went cold turkey on the cigarettes. He smoked not a one. He said he sickened himself from all that smoking he’d done and never wanted anything to do with cigarettes again. That’s how I became with men. There was one last man that I don’t remember at all. Did he break my heart? If he did, I don’t remember. Nor do I remember his name. It’s more likely, I think, that he was simply the last straw, like the last, unpleasant cigarette smoked by my friend.

“I had this need, you see, I had this need to fill the void and it turned . . . I don’t know if the word is hysterical . . . that’s what Freud would have called it, but, in any case, it was something feverish . . . it certainly was . . . this quest of mine to fill a void that I imagined to be bigger than it actually was. I really don’t think it was about sex at all. Mortality maybe. Perhaps I was running away from old age just as I galloped closer to it, like the old sot who buys himself a flashy red Mustang.

“Now that I’m fully arrived in the padded seat of the elderly, I look back on the last ten years of my life—my life without men and without longing—as the most cleared-eyed of my life.” Sylvie bows her head, finished, it seems, with her recital.

Pina doesn’t know how to respond. She has a question to ask but isn’t ready to ask it.

A noisy blue jay lands on the Japanese maple in the yard. Both she and Sylvie look up. The bird squawks a bit before alighting on Sylvie’s table.

“Get away from here, Blue,” says Sylvie, but the jay holds his ground.
“I think he wants a watercress sandwich.”
“He wants everything. He knows no bounds.”
Pina smiles. “Just like certain men I’ve known.”
“Indeed.” Sylvie swats her hand toward the jay and he flies back to the maple with a yawp. “You see, he’s a creature without a notion of his mortality and he’ll go on being rude—because that’s his calling—until his time is up.”

Pina sips at her tea, which by now has turned lukewarm. “You said something earlier about going to die soon.”
“Yes, I’m going to take my life.”
“You’re what?”
“I’ve decided to take my life and I wanted you to know, Pina.” Again Sylvie holds her head high.
“You can’t do that. I won’t let you.”
“It is my right, Pina. It wasn’t an easy decision, but now that I’ve made it, I’m thoroughly at peace. I believe it was Camus who said that the first and most important philosophical question is whether life is worth living. I’m not much of a philosopher, but I posed the question and poured over my thoughts on each side of the equation, before arriving at my answer. All the rest, as some other wit said, is commentary. Besides, I’ve finished reading À la recherche du temps perdu. I’m free to go.”

Pina is startled by the bloodlessness of Sylvie’s resolve. “How about your family, Sylvie, how about your friends?”
Sylvie chuckles. “They’ll go on about their lives and either think of me fondly or not.”
“I won’t let you,” Pina says, her voice a harsh whisper, turning to tears. “I’ll call the police.”
“Don’t be foolish, Pina. If you do that I’ll tell them that you’re mad. That I don’t even know you. That you’re just the noisy drunk who lives upstairs. It’s time for you to leave, Pina. It’s time for you to leave.”