Chapter 6 Mute Swan #2
I put an ad on Big Site and my place was sublet within two hours, at a third more than I was paying and with the specification
that I was promising four months but could redact that promise with one week’s notice if I had to. I drew up a legal document
I printed off from a website. I put my few bins of belongings in the storage cage in the building basement, then I packed
my car and drove away.
Was all this going to be worth it?
I was still being paid the same thing I’d had two years before when I started working for Fuchsia. I didn’t know anyone who’d ever received a raise, although perhaps they were sworn to secrecy in case the idea caught on.
Writing was supposed to be one of those things you did for love, like being a priest or a ballerina, that required a lot of
training in order to make very little money.
Now, however, well before I had proven that I could do anything new, before I had written a single word, was not the time to ask Ivy for a raise.
I pulled the car over. I called Ivy.
I swear she picked up before the ring finished.
I said, “Ivy, we should be having this conversation in person, and I’m sorry that we’re not. I need to run something past
you. I wouldn’t bother you unless it was important . . .”
She exhaled noisily. “I’m waiting, Reenie.” A sigh and a peevish first-name dump. Not good. But fortune favors the brave.
“Are you aware that I’m still making the same thing I did when I started?”
“No,” Ivy said. “What do you make?”
She didn’t know. Well, I wasn’t going to tell her. “It is just that I can’t survive on it.”
“You’re asking for a raise?”
I had the impression that no one had ever before used the R-word with Ivy.
I had to swallow hard before I replied. “Just consider it. Maybe, after this story, I can give you more help. I could be more
like a writing editor. Steer new projects. Come up with fresh perspectives. Write a column. If you just think it over . . .”
“Don’t need to,” said Ivy. “Okay. What were you thinking?”
I hadn’t been thinking beyond the first sentence. I said, “I’ll send you a proposal with a figure.”
Ivy said, “Reenie, you know it’s never been the case that I didn’t think you were capable of writing bigger features. I didn’t
think you wanted to.”
“I always wanted to write bigger stories.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask?”
“I thought you would fire me. I thought that you hired me to be a lightweight, and, Ivy, I don’t mind being a lightweight,
it’s a lot of fun, but it’s not all I want to do.”
“I understand.”
“Well, thank you, Ivy.”
I pulled the car over near the first coffee shop I saw and wrote to her proposing a pay raise and a figure for the expenses
I would need in coming months, making it clear that the expense figure could get bigger. I was prepared to cry “Psych!” if
she got annoyed, but she wrote back right away asking me to keep a running record and copy every receipt that I could. She
would put some funds in my next check backdated to January 1. Further, she said, I should make notes about possible longer
stories to do when I was back in the office full-time.
Even with an expense account, I made nowhere near what minor-league reporters in New York made, but so far, so good. This
was great, great for me, great for my résumé, a giant leap for womankind.
Great, great, great—if you ignored this being perhaps the most distressing work I would ever do in my life. As I headed north
again, I thought of what Ross had said about the reputation that Felicity had for being “an ice dolly,” a beauty with a cold
heart, a transactional thinker.
I was far from being the only one who would say that the exact opposite was true, but no one was ever acquitted of felony
murder because people said they were nice in high school.
I thought of a time when I was out walking and ended up near the rectory. At the last minute, in recognition of my friend’s
legendary insistence on order and privacy, I asked her mother, did she think it would be okay for me to drop in? Uncharacteristically
downcast, Ruth said, “I wish you would.”
Felicity’s bedroom door was partly open. A bright, hooded plant light, like a tiny, blue-toned alien installation, illuminated
one corner of her desk. Under the lamp was a nest of three baby birds, all plaintively cheeping, their scrawny, naked necks
outstretched, as Felicity fed them from a syringe.
“Oh hi!” I said, as I knocked. Then I noticed that she was crying.
“It’s not like they’re puppies,” she said, hiccuping. “If they were puppies, you could maybe find a home for them, except
maybe not in this shitty state where animals are just something you eat or beat on. I called the rehab and they’re like, we
really only work with hawks and owls. Why? Why can’t they care about sparrows? They’re so beautiful and they sing their hearts
out. They are successful. They adapt. But they’re just junk birds. There are too many of them and nobody cares about them.”
His eye is on the sparrow . . .
Sitting in my car, I started to cry.
On the drive to Madison, I managed to stop crying only for short intervals, but then a lump in my throat would form and dissolve
again. By the time I got to the door of Damiano, Chen, and Damiano, Attorneys at Law, I wasn’t even attempting to wipe away
the horseshoes of mascara from beneath my eyes. Clearly the receptionist had seen it all, because she didn’t even blink when
I sat down in the waiting room and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and began to sob. That was where I was sitting
when Sam Damiano came out of his office.
“I can take it from here, Catalina,” he said to the receptionist, who, clearly smitten, lowered her elaborate eyelashes and
smiled up at him. “Remember, Monday is a holiday.”
“No, Mr. Damiano,” she said. “It’s not.”
“Just Sam is fine. And, yes, you’re new, you probably didn’t hear. It’s a paid holiday for our office.”
“Really? That’s great,” she said. She gathered up her coat and purse and departed.
Sam shrugged into a long cashmere overcoat and turned to me. “Why hello, Miss Bigelow,” he said, determinedly ignoring the fact that I was crying so hard that I was gasping for breath and snot was running out of my nose. “Okay. We can go now. Would you like to have something to eat while we talk?”
I said, “Okay.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten anything.
“I could cook,” he said. “I was going to cook tonight anyway. For myself.”
I said, “Okay.”
In silence, we drove to his austere, immaculate small house near Vilas Park. He unlocked the door. He turned to me, and I
stepped into his arms. We didn’t leave that house for seventy-two hours. For most of the first forty-eight, we didn’t talk
about Felicity nearly as much as I would have imagined. The present seemed to elbow the past and the future aside. We talked
about common ground: how disgusting to eat carryout from the carton, even if you used chopsticks, that afternoon naps for
adults should have remained a sacrament even after the Edwardian era, that the best historical record was mostly good gossip,
that audiobooks were wonderful but did not constitute reading. We drank apple-cider mimosas from his grandmother’s blue cut-crystal
flutes. We talked about where we would go when this was all over, a verdant somewhere drenched in saltwater and light, maybe
Portugal.
Because of a blizzard, the fireworks traditionally held on New Year’s Eve had been postponed and then postponed again. Wrapped
in quilts the second night on the porch, we watched the fireworks break like falling stars over the capitol dome. I was startled
when I heard what sounded like lions roaring. He lived right near the zoo, Sam explained. The lions I heard had been born
in captivity, but fresh air was essential to their health, no matter what season, so the zoo had installed heated rocks that
melted the snow. The lions liked to loll there even as spiraling snow spattered their coats.
There was nothing sad about this image except insofar as all zoos were sad.
And yet I started to cry again, bringing the total of times I’d cried over the past several days equal to the number of times I’d cried during the previous two years.
Although these lions would never see the sunbaked savannah where they were meant to live, it lived in them, and they would proclaim their wildness to the night.
If I sound like a sentimental fool, I was.
I leaned against Sam’s shoulder, and he pulled me to him, with me grateful that, although not a particularly big guy, he was taller—enough that I could feel tucked in.
“Are you always this emotional?” he asked.
“Probably. But I don’t show it.”
“Why are you sad right now?”
He was relieved that it was about the lions. He knew that it wasn’t about the lions.
An owl hooted softly, experimentally, as if sending forth a tentative question; from far off, another answered, then the same
exchange again, the distant owl moving closer. Do you want me? Am I the one you want? The seeking-out of a being by another being, the longing for union and reunion, was not only primal, but it was also not
just for primates—and, as evidenced by the owls, we weren’t the only ones who talked about it or wrote songs about it. Baudelaire
wrote of dark owls “by twos and twos” meditating under overhanging yews. I told Sam this.
“You are the obscure poetry factor. How did you memorize all this stuff at your age? And anyhow, what is your age?”
“Twenty-seven, nearly twenty-eight. I have sort of a sticky memory. Mostly for useless stuff like poetry. But it’s sort of
seductive. Men like to be impressed—” I ran my thumb down the inside of his hip bone “—by more than big boobs and a . . .
lot of energy.”
“I think you have a ton of energy. I don’t know much poetry, so you can say anything you want and I’ll believe it.”
I said then, “I have to call my parents.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe except that!”