Chapter 6 Mute Swan #4
“I have good manners,” I said. “What about you?”
“I’m fair.”
We danced in the kitchen to Marvin Gaye while the bread baked. The bread was very good, its crispy crust achieved by spraying
the loaf with olive oil and sliding a cake tin of boiling water into the oven. He had majored in biology and knew all kinds
of weird things about face blindness and why sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia (a “brain freeze”) is really a dangerous warning.
When he asked about my top-five favorite movies, he didn’t interrupt with his own list. He asked to see a picture of my sister,
Nell, and I had to struggle to find one in which she didn’t look prettier.
We couldn’t wait to go back to bed.
A little worn-out between the legs the next morning, really closer to afternoon, I took a bath in the big claw-foot tub, beneath two vast skylights, staring up at the steep blue sky as if it was a sea I could fall into.
He washed my hair for me, like a scene from a movie based on a Hemingway novel.
I had to remind myself that even if it lasted, and it probably wouldn’t, it could not always be like this.
I wanted to be clear on one thing. There was a cartoon devil on my left shoulder jumping up and down—Ask him, ask him, dare you—while the cartoon angel on my right shoulder wagged a cautionary finger and counseled restraint.
Just don't ever ask me a question unless you really want to know my answer.
He said I could ask him anything.
The devil always wins.
I asked, “Are you attracted to Felicity?”
Sam didn’t answer, a beat of silence more revealing than any answer. Finally, he said, “Yes.”
“If I weren’t a factor. If she weren’t on trial for murder . . .”
“If she weren’t on trial for murder, I would never have met her.”
“If you had.”
“Okay. Sure. Felicity is intelligent and beautiful and unusual. She has a unique way of listening. I wouldn’t have been a
fan of her work in the slightest. But in another world, under other circumstances, I might have fallen for her. Reenie, wouldn’t
most men? Wouldn’t women be drawn to her too? In other ways? You said so yourself, in so many words.” He added, “That’s not
a factor now. Now that you are here.”
He was right, but his being right didn’t temper the need for what I wanted him to say. I wanted him to say that the moment
he saw me, all other images of all other women exploded like an ice sculpture to a mallet blow and melted away.
“Do you want to get married?” he asked.
Ah-ha, I thought, as the other shoe hit the floor. He’s crazy. Well, good, at least now I know. Experimentally, I told him, “I haven’t really given it a lot of thought.”
“Sure, you have.”
“You mean, all women do?”
“I mean, all people do. All normal people.”
“Okay, so do you mean generally or specifically?”
“Generally,” he said. So, he wasn’t asking me to marry him. Realizing this, I wished he were crazy enough to have asked. “I
want to get married. I want to be happy. Do you know any happy marriages?”
“My parents are happily married.”
“Mine too. They had some rough patches. My dad drank too much for a while.”
“Veterinarians like to party?”
“Long ago. When we were very young kids. I think money was a big issue for them back then. Not anymore, though. They have
separate bedrooms, and they say it’s the secret to true happiness. My dad snores like a Cape buffalo.”
“I only think of guys thinking about marriage in the sense of trying to avoid it.”
He shook his head. “My one younger brother says that women think men are eight-celled creatures when it comes to love, but
I always say, hey, who wrote most of those love songs? Men wrote most of those love songs.”
My heart kicked up speed, but even I wasn’t enough of a romantic to think he meant love in the context of him and me. He meant
love the word, the way people sling it around, as in true love, a love letter, a love affair, a love story, a love interest, love
is a many-splintered thing.
I don’t believe in putting off difficult things; I believe in doing them first (that is, I believed in doing them first until
I had to interview the families of murder victims . . . ). But I wanted to ask Sam for a postponement, for another day . . .
even though I knew that this had to stop, if not end, right now.
Then he asked, “So why are you named Irene?”
“After the old song. The great old blues man Lead Belly sang it. And folk singers, like The Weavers. Everybody sang it. ‘Irene, good night, Irene, Irene, good night . . .’”
“Right,” he said. “Before my time.” He asked then, “Sisters and brothers?”
“One sister, Nell. Eleanor. Named after my mother’s mom, who was named for Eleanor Roosevelt. Who are you named for?”
“My grandfather on my mother’s side. Samuel Anthony Messina. It spells ‘Sam.’”
“Are your grandparents alive?”
“All four,” he said.
“Me too.”
“So you come from a line of hearty people.”
“Yes, my dad used to say that you could tell we Bigelow women, my sister and I, were of peasant stock by our sturdy hips,
until my mother told him that if he ever said that again, it would be the last thing he ever said.”
“I like her.”
“I like her too. Do you like your mother?”
“I am crazy about her actually. She’s very funny. She has a very bad temper. She’s also my boss, the managing partner at Damiano,
Chen, and Damiano.”
We settled down to sleep, as though we did this all the time instead of twice. I’m pretty sure he thought that I was already
asleep when he wound one finger into the back of my newly washed hair and whispered, “Irene, good night, Irene. I’ll see you
in my dreams.”
He had known all along.
Late next morning, we drank our coffee. He ate a piece of toast and I, suddenly self-conscious, didn’t.
Soon, I would have to leave. I was packing up my backpack when Sam said, “One more night.” I knew that I should go, right then, while things were sweet as new snow, but who knew if this new connection could weather months of separation, not a wall placed between us for the trial, but, worse, if possible, a window.
And if it didn’t, who knew when love would come again for me? I set the backpack down.
I agreed to leave first thing, before anyone else in the neighborhood was awake.
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s practically night already, anyhow.”
It was not even two in the afternoon, but . . . who cared? Those last few doors within broke open with a force that made them
shudder on their hinges, doors I feared I might not be able to force shut again, or if I did, I would always see this light
shining around the edges. I wasn’t exactly thinking of names for our firstborn son, but I was so far gone that I almost wished
I hadn’t tasted this thin slice of sublime couple-hood that would make the store brand seem so bland.
Everything that last day and night was lovely, at first. All the urgency of wild love too soon undertaken, too often denied, still pertained.
For dinner, I cooked my one dish: my mother’s macaroni and cheese with the secret ingredient.
Sam pronounced it delicious. We talked more.
I told him about our feature story about cat people and dog people and how that preference extended even to the way people dressed, about how my father’s grandmother, an Irish immigrant, had four sisters, all of whom were or had been nuns, about how our only pet ever had been a parrot named Rosh Shoshana that spoke only Yiddish and which had to be given away when it nearly bit off the finger of one of those great-aunts.
Sam told me about how much he hated dirty jokes, and he thought that Irish women were the most passionate and kind, how he’d once wanted to be a farmer.
When it came to sports, he loved only college basketball because, for most of them, their championship season would be the great lyric passage of their whole lives.
He didn’t think fiction was girlie. One of his brothers wanted to be a writer.
He asked me how many books I thought I would write, where I would live if I could live anywhere, if I liked to fish.
It was lovely, yet it didn’t feel like a gift, as it should have. It was just a flight delay. We’d been outward bound, and,
relieved as we were to turn back to each other, our brains continued to outpace our emotions. Things I had to write down or
pick up kept skittering across my mind. My clothes felt old and soiled on my skin. Sam was already lost to me. He had gone
deeply into his preparation, like an athlete concentrating on the race, a surgeon on the operation, an actor on the role.
“Can I ask a question?” I said to him finally.
“Sure.”
“It’s not as a reporter, it’s as a person.”
“So, off the record.”
I gave him a raised eyebrow. “Everything here is off the record, as you say. Very off the record.”
If Felicity didn’t do it, who did?
“My mother and I talked about this several times, bunch of times,” he said. “She thought maybe it was Felicity’s mother, because
she was this born-again Christian and maybe she lost her marbles and did this to free Felicity from sin.”
“Ruth? My chemistry teacher? If you ever met Ruth, you could not be more wrong,” I said. “She is such a gentle person.”
I could think of only one time that I’d ever seen Ruth lose her shit. I’d forgotten it because it was so subtle but it ended
with Ruth required to make a formal written apology to Felicity’s and my second-grade teacher.
One morning before school, Ruth was called in.
Felicity, it seemed, had changed her answer on a math test. Felicity had, indeed, changed her answer, she told her mom, because kids on either side of her had copied her paper.
Ruth explained this quietly. The teacher, Sandy Albertson, was the principal’s wife.
Gently, she told Ruth, “Sometimes a child as bright as Felicity becomes a bit of a perfectionist. She just can’t bear to have one thing be wrong. We think that’s what happened here.”