Birdman
Roy Lowenstein
Max Vogel poured milk on his cornflakes, and focused on Robert’s scarlet forehead. Ruth had named him Archie, but Max now called him Robert after Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, who did solitary for forty-two years. Max had read that lovebirds flew in large flocks, chattering and grooming each other all the time. He wondered if Robert had lost his mind living alone so long. Ruth said that lovebirds mate for life.
Beating his wings, Robert climbed the bars to his perch, then scuttled sideways to smack his string of beads against the shit-stained mirror. He leapt to the bars again, now clinging head down, peering at Max first with one eye, then the other. He whistled at him.
Max opened the cage door, and Robert edged down the wooden bar, tested Max’s finger with his beak, and hopped on. He angled his head this way and that, until lowered his head while Max caressed it with his fingertip. Robert angled his head this way and that, until Max had covered all of it. Then he hopped to Max’s shoulder and nibbled on his earlobe. The hairs on Max’s neck stood up and he held his head still, ashamed that he wanted the bird never to stop.
Robert screeched as he side-stepped his way down Max’s arm and rode the spoon as Max ate. Then he jumped into the bowl, splashing like a robin in a birdbath, until Max spooned him out and deposited him on the table. When he finished preening, Robert took off, on flight muscles long atrophied, for the dining room where he crashed head first.
Max scooped him up and roared, baring his teeth as he brought Robert’s head up to his mouth. The bird scolded him and nibbled his lower lip. At the end of their ritual, Max returned Robert to his cage where he resumed his sentence.
Max wandered into the living room, the room in which Ruth and he had actually lived. Sconces bathed the faux adobe walls. Sunshine from the east and south poured through linen onto a huge red, cream, and blue Isphehan sprawled over the hardwood. Ruth had hung a mirror on one wall. She told him that it made the room look bigger. He had not thought that the room needed to look bigger, and still found his reflection unsettling, stocky and bald, bags under his eyes. His smile looked obscene. He wondered what his patients had seen that they dared not tell him.
He sank into the over-stuffed suede couch. He had told Ruth a house was just a box in which to live, and that she was just trying to copy something out of Better Homes and Gardens. He winced and fell back into the slow surrender of the down cushion.
Yesterday, he gathered his wits on the Med-Surg floor of Rangeview East, having been transferred, still woozy, from the ICU. John Passaro sat in a stack chair, filling out the form to send Max to the Fourth Floor on an emergency psych hold.
“Don’t do it, John.” Max wore a gown that opened in the back.
“I don’t have a choice,” said Passaro, poring over the form he had to know by heart.
“Of course you do. You don’t have to cover your ass. Who’s going to sue you? Ruth?” Cancer had killed her a year ago. “Think about my patients, John. Think of the crap I’ll go through with the faculty.”
Max had been practicing psychoanalysis for a long time. He had in fact trained John Passaro twenty years earlier. He’d never had a son, and didn’t want one.
Passaro bristled. “I don’t give a shit about your lawsuit. But I do have a ‘hypertrophied superego’—I think those were your words.” He was lanky and tall enough to carry himself with the faintest stoop. His hurt blue eyes locked on Max and made him uneasy.
“Your conscience.” Max snorted. His feet had begun to tingle after dangling from the bed so long. He scratched one with the other and wiggled his toes. Passaro was gesticulating about something. Max studied the IV they hadn’t yet pulled from his wrist, then gazed out the window at the Front Range, and returned to the Sangre de Cristos, his lungs burning, the sweat pouring off him from an endless herringbone up a ridge on the crest of which they now stood in the afternoon sun, the snow so white it hurt. Ruth sagging forward between her poles, her tongue lolling out, clouds of breath rising when she let out a whoop. Then she unzipped her parka and flapped it open and closed, like the slow beating of wings until the steam no longer rose from her body. It was silent, save for the croak of a raven. Then she curled her fingers to make binoculars, checking quadrants as though she were a ranger manning a fire tower.
“Nobody there . . . nobody there . . . nobody there . . . nobody here.” Her lips tasted of salt . . .
“You find this amusing?”
Max noticed a tiny fasciculation in the lower lid of his left eye, not enough for Passaro to see. He spoke to Passaro as though the man had exhausted his patience.
“You know what happens if you send me upstairs. I’ll tell them what they want to hear, make an appointment to see somebody, and I’ll be out in two days.” He lifted his eyebrows at Passaro and shook his head slowly. “If I really want to do myself, you can’t stop me.” He leaned forward until he felt a breeze on his crack. “Come on, John. Think.” He used to say that long ago when Passaro presented cases to him.
“Think?” Passaro said. “You’re the one who ate the pills. Your house cleaner doesn’t show up a day early, you’re a dead man. Spread on the carpet like a stain.”
Max smiled. “You’re sending me upstairs just to give me a spanking.”
Passaro blinked.
“Why are you doing this eval, John? Just happened to be in the neighborhood?” Max smiled. “I hurt your feelings, didn’t I?”
“No, Max,” he said. “You hurt me. And Zaidy.” John’s eyes glistened. “And Hannah.”
Max leaned forward again, too far away to put his hand on John’s shoulder. “Believe me, it was an impulsive act. I am over it.”
Passaro leaned forward also. “You took out a fat life insurance policy, and waited just long enough to beat the suicide clause. Then you left an announcement on your voice mail you’ve been called away. Called away!”
Max’s face heated up. His eye twitched. He hesitated. “You want the truth?”
Passaro sighed. “Why not?” He leaned back, tilting his chair against the wall like a high school senior.
“I couldn’t stand her. Just sat on my ass and waited for her to die.” He swallowed. “Then she did.”
“No, Max. You and Ruthie were joined at the hip.”
“In bed she was all knees and elbows.”
Passaro almost clapped his hands over his ears. “Max, I do not want to hear about that.”
Max smiled. “You wanted to do this eval.” He went on. “She’d leaf through her fashion magazines, look at all those gorgeous babies. Then she’d say, ‘I disgust you, don’t I? I see it in your face.’ I’d laugh it off, tell her she was still a knock-out. She wouldn’t stop.”
Max looked at his feet. “I had a patient once—he loved horror flicks, the bigger the arterial spray the better, but he could not abide zombies. ‘They got this relentless thing going,’ he said.” Max poked his chest. “She invaded me like water freezing in the cracks. Broke me to bits.” His eyelid quivered.
“Your heart of stone.”
“—It was a relief.”
“You know,” Passaro said softly, “Your thoughts really aren’t powerful enough to kill someone.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” he said, “Spare me the Freud. Do you know what she said when they diagnosed her?”
“Nope.”
“‘Are you happy now?” He ground a knuckle into his eye.
Passaro blinked. “Are you?”
“Maybe,” said Max. “Either way, I paid my debt. Double jeopardy.”
Passaro pursed his lips. It was quiet in the room.
Max tilted his head to the right, and watched Passaro’s head tilt slowly to the right. Then he tilted to the left, and Passaro followed again. He can’t help it, Max thought. It’s in his DNA.
“Max, don’t hurt me again.”
“Why not? One good deed . . .”
“Hannah left me.” Passaro dropped his pen and retrieved it. “And you know why.”
Max looked like he was trying to be interested.
Passaro returned to his clipboard. “You overdosed by accident.”
Max said, “I did. I had a migraine and lost track.”
“You have a therapist lined up just in case.”
“I do,” he said. “I have an appointment with her next week.” Her?
Passaro scribbled in the chart. “You have a support system.”
“The girls are here. They’re staying with me. I’ve been talking with my best friends all morning. We’re getting together over the next few weeks.” Max trailed off.
The light faded from Passaro’s eyes. “I guess I’m no longer part of your support system.”
Max said nothing. The little muscle fasciculated once more.
Passaro sighed. “You’re oriented to the future.”
“I am,” Max said. “I can’t wait to get back to my patients.”
“What are you going to tell them about that?” Passaro pointed to the crater over Max’s cheekbone. The pressure sore, which had formed while Max lay motionless on the carpet, had now crusted over.
“The truth.”
Passaro stared at him. Then he asked, “How’s your eye?”
“Better.” Max smiled. “Things any better with Phoebe?”
~ ~ ~
Max’s older daughter, Hannah, stayed with him the first week. She held his hand. She still wept for her mother and now for him. She cooked little dinners, spooned them into plastic containers, and cached them in the basement freezer until it was completely bricked in. When they walked in the garden she talked to him about Ruth, hoping to mobilize his grief. Max wished he could cry, just to shut her up.
Toward the end of the week, she asked how John Passaro was doing.
“Fine,” he said.
She waited for him to go on, then asked, “He still with—?“
“—Phoebe.”
She forced a chuckle. “What kind of a name is that?”
“A kind of bird.”
She turned away, holding herself. When he laid his hand on her shoulder, she shook it off and walked away.
Max’s younger daughter spelled her the following week. Zaidy cleaned the house, and packed up enough of Ruth’s artifacts that the place no longer looked like a shrine. When she asked about the portrait that Passaro had painted of Ruth, Max told her to throw it away.
“But she loved it.”
“Throw it away.”
Zaidy paused. “I hope you know what it took for Hannah to show up here.”
Max shrugged.
When she opened the closet to carry out the first armful of Ruth’s clothing, the smell caught Max by surprise. Arpege, of course. And the sea. But viburnum? And what was that other . . . ? He locked the bedroom door—something he had not done since the girls were tiny and curious—to keep the cloud from dissipating before he could parse it out. Then he heard Zaidy yelling, pounding on the door. He shushed her softly and wiped her tears away with his thumbs.
After two weeks, Max returned to his practice, and explored his patients’ reactions to such a sudden absence. When they could bring themselves to ask, he told them. When they couldn’t, he explored why. He was particularly struck by those who were blind to the wound on his face, and those who, like him, had contemplated death as a lifeboat. To his surprise, they all forgave him.
At the end of each day, he wandered the empty house at a loss.
On Sunday, Max walked slowly through the mixed borders in his garden, and visited the patch that was wheaten from thirst. He had planned last year to extend the sprinkler line, and had already bought the hardware, but death got in the way.
At the home improvement store he found the line he needed, but in fifty-foot lengths only. He asked a salesclerk if they sold anything shorter.
“Sure don’t,” the man said, “but there’s a gal right over there looking to buy a smaller piece.” He smirked. “Tore her line up with a Rotor-tiller. Maybe you two could team up.”
He gestured toward a big-boned woman whose back was turned. She was clenching and unclenching her fists. The clerk walked up to her and said, “This fella wants to split your coil.”
“What?”
She had a square jaw, gray eyes, and full lips, and wore her hair in thick yellow braids, which she now pulled taut as though trying to keep her head on. He noticed the fading goggle silhouette over her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose—evidently one of those berserkers who crashed through the trees long after the resorts had closed, some valkyrie in Daisy Dukes. She glared at him, aggrieved. He noticed the beads of sweat on her lip, and his own lips parted.
She said, “It’s only nine dollars a roll anyway.”
He gave her a faint nod.
“Oh, all right,” she said.
“Good,” said the clerk, as though he had clinched some diplomatic breakthrough.
“But I don’t have anything to cut it with,” She cried. “I don’t know what possessed me to come here.”
Max pulled out his knife.
“Give me that,” like she was used to getting her way.
Max handed it over. He swallowed.
She flicked out the serrated blade and started her cut left-handed, sawing flush to her grip.
Max’s belly quivered. “Be careful.”
She didn’t look up. “I know how to cut. Believe me.”
She was making headway when someone yelled, “Hey!”
She froze.
“You can’t do that!” said the new clerk. Max was happy to see him. “You gotta ring that through up front.”
The woman began to cry and shook the knife at him. “Tell that to your pal,” she shouted. “He got me into this mess in the first place.”
The clerk did an about-face, and wandered off.
The woman returned to the hose.
Max asked if he could help.
“No!” said the woman. “It’s almost done.”
When she cut through, she bobbled the knife, and sent it clattering across the floor. Max pounced on it, as the woman compared the lengths of the two half-coils.
“It’s okay,” Max said. “I’ll take either one. I don’t need much. Really.”
Things were getting two-dimensional.
“No,” the woman said, and gave him the segment she had selected.
“Now we’re going to have to check out together.”
Max nodded as though she still held the knife, and followed her to the self-checkout area. In the midst of his disquiet, warmth grew in his solar plexus and soon extended into his chest, his limbs and his cock.
“I have the bar code,” the woman announced, “so you follow me.”
Max nodded. He was grateful that everyone’s blood had stayed put. His vision blurred with tears. He pressed his knuckles into his sockets.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” the woman said. “I only have a credit card. We can’t split this.”
“No problem!” Max’s voice had grown husky, as though it belonged to someone else. “I have cash.” He pulled out a ten and asked the clerk for change.
“Don’t have any,” she said happily. “You’ll have to go through a regular checkout line.” She eyed him as Robert might.
“Jesus!” the woman cried again. “What is going on here?” She grabbed her braids. “This is crazy.”
“Wait a minute,” Max said. He turned to her. “Wait a minute.” He wanted to hear the sound of his voice again. “You . . .” His heart quickened. “. . . are a good soul. You helped me when you didn’t have to . . . Now you get your reward . . .Your half is free.”
“Oh no,” the woman said. “I can’t do that. No.”
Max shrugged. “What else can we do?”
The woman glanced at the restive queue behind them. She sighed and slowly stroked her cheek at the spot that mirrored Max’s wound. “Do you know what’s going on?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “You walk out with me.”
They left the refrigerated air of the store, and stood for a moment blinking in the dazzle of the morning sun. Grackles called from the trees that rustled over the parking lot.
The woman squinted at the sky and muttered, “Who said there’s no God?” Her cheeks glowed. “What’s your name?”
He told her. “What’s yours?” He was hard as a teen-age boy.
“Ava,” she said. She touched his face, ran her fingertips over the crater, and asked him what happened.
“I tried to kill myself.”
“Yeah?”
He asked for her number, never having done such a thing in his life.
“None of your business,” she said.
He apologized, half-relieved that with his disappointment came some semblance of normalcy.
“What’s yours?” she asked.
He told her.
Then she ran off, rolling her coil alongside like a hoop.
He drove home slowly. Once there, he saw, leaning against the north fence, the coil of sprinkler line he had purchased last year.
Swinging his mattock, he dug a trench from the end of his system to the location of the new sprinkler head. He glanced at the old coil of line, and decided to use the piece he had just bought. He cut it to length, spliced it to the stump of the buried hose, and connected the free end to the sprinkler head he had purchased last year. Then, using a hand sledge, he set his anchors along the hose. He trued the sprinkler head and pounded soil back into the trench. He turned on the water and imagined his larkspur and penstemon bursting into tears of joy.
Sunday, he sat on the bench that faced the koi pond fed by a gurgling cataract, and threw pellets to the fish, which slid under the lily pads, appearing, disappearing. It was his favorite time of day. He loved the horizontal light of early evening when the fierceness of the sun relented and cool breezes rustled the trees. He sipped his martini and listened to the calls of birds preparing to bed down for the night. Bats cart-wheeled and swooped above him. His eyes filled for the beauty of it all.
The phone rang.
“Hi. You probably don’t remember me.”
“Nice place,” Ava said. She sauntered from room to room, like she was a prospective buyer. “Reminds me of Better Homes and Gardens.”
“My wife decorated it,” he said. “She passed away.”
“Yeah? When?”
He told her.
“Tough, huh?”
He nodded.
Robert chattered in the next room.
She opened the French doors, and walked out to the patio. A gibbous moon had cleared the horizon, drawing out the twilight.
“Jesus,” she said at the layered banks of daylily, hosta, flowering shrubs, and the pond. “She do this too?”
Max shook his head.
She took a seat on the bench that faced the pond. “Look!” she said, pointing at the koi.
He sat next to her, so that their thighs touched. She stayed where she was. He noticed she wore no bra and her nipples were hard.
“It doesn’t feel like evening yet,” she said, moving the placket of her blouse in and out like a bellows. “Hot.” She looked at him. Her face was flushed again. “I want to go inside.”
He followed her dumbly through the French doors. She loosened her skirt and let it drop. She pulled his head to her breasts. “Go ahead,” she whispered. He sucked like a ravenous infant. “Harder,” she said. “Use your teeth . . .”
He awoke in the dark, still sweating, and reached for her. He switched on the light, and searched room by room. A wish-fulfillment fantasy, he told himself. He inhaled her scent, and ran his hand over the drying pool on his sheet. He searched again, this time for a note. Then he checked his voicemail, but found only calls from Passaro, which he deleted out of hand.
Holding the top of his head, he stared around the room. He put on his robe, and went out the French doors. The sprinklers were on, including the one he had just installed. A faint glow rose from the east.
He drove to his office, worried he might have turned deaf to his patients. Throughout the week he heard them with an acuity that made him ache. At the end of each day he left his office happily spent, yearning for nightfall and sleep.
That Friday he picked up groceries on his way home, and after stowing them, wondered why he wanted to cook. It was a bother when all he had to do was drive a couple of miles to a bistro where the waitstaff knew the gin he drank.
He wandered through the garden, so preoccupied with Ava that he almost fell into the pond. He sat on the bench, hot from recalling Sunday. His belly felt hollow, to which he attributed the deepest yearning. Then he realized that he hadn’t eaten all day.
The phone rang. Ava said, “I’m starved.” She paused. “Can I come over?”
He felt weird. When a patient felt “weird,” it often meant that something neither of them had anticipated was about to breach.
“Can I come over?” she asked again.
He asked her if she liked spaghetti.
“I like everything,” she said.
He told her to pick up a bottle of red.
Max hummed Musetta’s Waltz as he filled a pot with water. It pleased him that he had not even thought of taking Ava to a restaurant, and that he could come up with something good enough. He felt light and goofy. “For a chef, I’m a damn good shrink.” He laughed. He cut the sausage into inch-long segments, and fried it sizzling with mushrooms. He laced the tomato sauce with herbs from the garden, a pinch of cayenne, and lots of garlic, then tossed in a couple of bay leaves. After folding the sausage and mushrooms into the sauce, he announced, “Now for Max’s secret ingredient.” He stirred in a ribbon of anchovy paste, just enough to temper the brightness of all that tomato, and brought it to a simmer.
He heated up the water for pasta, and rummaged through the shopping bags for ingredients he had selected at the market. As he tossed the baby romaine with boiled egg, edamame, red onion, grape tomatoes, pine nuts, avocado and chunks of buffalo mozzarella, it occurred to him that he had never any intention of preparing this meal for one. Weird. He saved out the croutons and mixed a balsamic vinaigrette.
Then he spread a red-and-white checked cloth on the table, and set it, using matching napkins pulled through mahogany rings. He glanced at his watch. Ava was taking far longer to get here than she had last week. He wandered around the house, and began to pick up the papers, clothing and empty cola cans, which had accumulated on every horizontal surface. What was taking her so long? The dinner would be ruined. Ruth would say that.
He heard the doorbell, and tried to walk casually.
She stood on the threshold, smiling. “Hi,” she said, but remained standing outside the door, scanning the lintel. He took her hand and pulled her through the doorway. Her eyes darted along the floor as though she had found something of great interest there.
“Hi,” he said, still holding her hand.
They stood in silence.
She touched the divot on his cheek and frowned. “Weird,” she said.
She kissed him, and handed him a bottle of Malbec. He led her into the kitchen. “Smells great,” she said.
Robert chattered at her approach. She bent down for a closer look.
“What’s his name?”
Max told her.
“Big name for a little guy.”
“Fits him,” he said.
“Poor thing,” she said. “All alone.”
“No,” said Max, “We have a beautiful friendship.”
He took Robert out. The bird flew straight for Ava. She hunched her shoulders and tilted her head away. Robert nibbled her ear until she laughed. Then he flew to Max. He crawled down the front of his shirt, looked up at Ava and whistled.
Ava relaxed. “He talk?”
“Yes.”
The bird alighted on her head. She hunched her shoulders and laughed again. Soon Robert danced a slow pirouette, making churring noises, and clicking his beak.
“He wants to mate with you,” said Max. He reached for the bird, who scolded him and flew to the pot rack over the sauce.
Max slammed a lid over the saucepan before Robert took his dump. The bird screeched and flew into the dining room. Soon he was back in his cage.
“Poor thing,” Ava said again. “Why don’t you get another one?”
“Because he’ll die, and then I’ll have another grief-stricken creature to nurse along.”
“Besides you.”
Max tried to come up with something smart.
“You still miss her,” she said.
Max thought a moment. “Sure.” He stirred the sauce. When he turned from the stove, Ava had wandered off.
He found her in the bedroom, studying the portrait of Ruth. He grabbed his forehead.
“She is beautiful,” she said. “Who was she?”
“She was a wonderful home-maker,” he said. “And mother.”
“My.”
“Why do you care?” He said it louder than he’d wished.
“Last week in the dark,” she said, “You called me ‘Ruth.’”
The blood rushed to his face. “You don’t understand.” He tried to collect his thoughts. “Things changed.”
He took the painting from her and laid it face down. He turned to kiss her, but she backed away.
“This isn’t working.” He sat down hard on the bed.
She remained standing.
“The older she got, the more she hated herself. And the more she hated herself, the more she hated me.” He shook his head to fling it all away, and ushered Ava toward the dining room. Max followed her gaze to the front door. He felt uneasy. He brought the water back to boil, while she popped the wine. She poured a mouthful into her glass, sniffed it, swished it around, and swallowed. “Not bad.” She poured him a glass, topped hers off, and lifted it. “To Ruth.”
They ate in silence.
Max cleared the plates. They stood side by side in silence, she scraping the dishes and he racking them in the washer. Then they wandered into the living room where they sat, she in a chair and he on the couch, with nothing to say.
She glanced again down the hallway toward the door.
The doorbell rang. For a moment, Max hoped that if he ignored it, she would also.
John Passaro stood on the threshold. He wore a faded knit shirt and paint-spattered jeans. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “I thought I’d drop by. See how you’re doing. Since you’re not taking calls.”
“I don’t answer to you.”
John said gently, “You going to let me in?”
“No.”
“What’s the matter?” John asked. “Somebody holding you at gunpoint?” He craned his neck to see beyond Max.
Max closed the door to a slit.
"You got a woman in there?”
“So?” Max glanced back at Ava.
“Max!” he said, “It’s me. Let me in . . . Please.”
“No.” Max slammed the door.
Passaro pounded on it.
Max leaned his forehead against it. “Go away.”
“You can’t do that,” Ava said.
She shouldered him aside to pull the door open. John entered, staring at her with those big cow eyes, and shook her hand. He surveyed the house from where he stood. “Nothing much has changed. Painting’s gone.”
Ava looked carefully at his pants. She asked if he were an artist.
“A hobby. I’m really an analyst.” He smiled sadly. “Like him.” He gestured toward Max. “He raised me from a tadpole into the magnificent creature you see before you.”
His smile faded when he turned Ava’s hand over to reveal ancient cuts so dense they had merged into a sleeve of scar from wrist to elbow.
Max shook his head. No way he could have missed that—he had tasted every inch of her.
Ava pulled her hand away. “You don’t have scars?”
John said, “Everyone has scars.”
“My,” she said. “He teach you that?”
“He has scars,” John said. “Look at him.”
Max clapped his hand to his cheek. Then he recovered and said, “It’s Phoebe, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.” He scanned John’s face.
“She flew the coop.”
John shook it off like a shot to the head. “We need to talk,” he said.
“Please.”
Max set his jaw. “You need to talk.”
“Max.”
Max said nothing.
John’s eye twitched. He covered it with the heel of his hand. “I should have locked you up when I had the chance.” He turned to Ava and asked for her number.
“None of your business,” she said. “What’s yours?”
“No,” Max shouted.
John turned to him. “Afraid I’ll steal another one?” Then he pulled the door closed behind him. Unlatched, it swung open a crack. Max put his shoulder to it.
It was quiet again. She was staring at him, as though through a new lens.
“Give me a drink,” she said. “Anything.”
Max handed her a bourbon over ice. She slugged it down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She asked for John’s number.
Max shook his head.
She beckoned with her hand. “The number.”
“You’re mine,” he said.
She sputtered and laughed and said no more, but took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom.
In the half-darkness of morning, Max awakened and whispered her name.
He heard the front door click.
He sank into sleep and awakened to a colorless dawn. He called the number he had surrendered to her in the night, but heard only John’s familiar greeting, which harkened to better times.
As the sun rose, he sat in his robe eating cornflakes in the breakfast nook. He had forgone his usual shower, clinging to Ava’s last trace. Robert teetered on his spoon, then hopped into the bowl. Max watched his exuberant splashes decay into the spasms of a drowning moth before he fished him out. Robert sat on the table with his eyes closed, shivering, his feathers puffed out. Ptiloerection, thought Max. That’s what they call it.
He opened the French doors for the solace of his garden. To his surprise, Robert fluttered past his ear. Annoyed, he trudged across the patio to retrieve him, but instead found himself trotting, then running flat out, as the bird, just beyond his grasp, pulled away, climbed sharply and disappeared over the massive oaks at the end of his yard.
Max stumbled forward, shading his eyes as though he were an outfielder who had lost a fly ball in the sun. He tripped on a sprinkler head and sprawled face first into the drift of penstemon and larkspur. He climbed to his knees and pressed his hand hard against his cheek to stop the lancing pain. The water came on with a hiss, and as it blasted him, he roared like a beast brought at last to bay.
Roy Lowenstein
Max Vogel poured milk on his cornflakes, and focused on Robert’s scarlet forehead. Ruth had named him Archie, but Max now called him Robert after Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, who did solitary for forty-two years. Max had read that lovebirds flew in large flocks, chattering and grooming each other all the time. He wondered if Robert had lost his mind living alone so long. Ruth said that lovebirds mate for life.
Beating his wings, Robert climbed the bars to his perch, then scuttled sideways to smack his string of beads against the shit-stained mirror. He leapt to the bars again, now clinging head down, peering at Max first with one eye, then the other. He whistled at him.
Max opened the cage door, and Robert edged down the wooden bar, tested Max’s finger with his beak, and hopped on. He angled his head this way and that, until lowered his head while Max caressed it with his fingertip. Robert angled his head this way and that, until Max had covered all of it. Then he hopped to Max’s shoulder and nibbled on his earlobe. The hairs on Max’s neck stood up and he held his head still, ashamed that he wanted the bird never to stop.
Robert screeched as he side-stepped his way down Max’s arm and rode the spoon as Max ate. Then he jumped into the bowl, splashing like a robin in a birdbath, until Max spooned him out and deposited him on the table. When he finished preening, Robert took off, on flight muscles long atrophied, for the dining room where he crashed head first.
Max scooped him up and roared, baring his teeth as he brought Robert’s head up to his mouth. The bird scolded him and nibbled his lower lip. At the end of their ritual, Max returned Robert to his cage where he resumed his sentence.
Max wandered into the living room, the room in which Ruth and he had actually lived. Sconces bathed the faux adobe walls. Sunshine from the east and south poured through linen onto a huge red, cream, and blue Isphehan sprawled over the hardwood. Ruth had hung a mirror on one wall. She told him that it made the room look bigger. He had not thought that the room needed to look bigger, and still found his reflection unsettling, stocky and bald, bags under his eyes. His smile looked obscene. He wondered what his patients had seen that they dared not tell him.
He sank into the over-stuffed suede couch. He had told Ruth a house was just a box in which to live, and that she was just trying to copy something out of Better Homes and Gardens. He winced and fell back into the slow surrender of the down cushion.
Yesterday, he gathered his wits on the Med-Surg floor of Rangeview East, having been transferred, still woozy, from the ICU. John Passaro sat in a stack chair, filling out the form to send Max to the Fourth Floor on an emergency psych hold.
“Don’t do it, John.” Max wore a gown that opened in the back.
“I don’t have a choice,” said Passaro, poring over the form he had to know by heart.
“Of course you do. You don’t have to cover your ass. Who’s going to sue you? Ruth?” Cancer had killed her a year ago. “Think about my patients, John. Think of the crap I’ll go through with the faculty.”
Max had been practicing psychoanalysis for a long time. He had in fact trained John Passaro twenty years earlier. He’d never had a son, and didn’t want one.
Passaro bristled. “I don’t give a shit about your lawsuit. But I do have a ‘hypertrophied superego’—I think those were your words.” He was lanky and tall enough to carry himself with the faintest stoop. His hurt blue eyes locked on Max and made him uneasy.
“Your conscience.” Max snorted. His feet had begun to tingle after dangling from the bed so long. He scratched one with the other and wiggled his toes. Passaro was gesticulating about something. Max studied the IV they hadn’t yet pulled from his wrist, then gazed out the window at the Front Range, and returned to the Sangre de Cristos, his lungs burning, the sweat pouring off him from an endless herringbone up a ridge on the crest of which they now stood in the afternoon sun, the snow so white it hurt. Ruth sagging forward between her poles, her tongue lolling out, clouds of breath rising when she let out a whoop. Then she unzipped her parka and flapped it open and closed, like the slow beating of wings until the steam no longer rose from her body. It was silent, save for the croak of a raven. Then she curled her fingers to make binoculars, checking quadrants as though she were a ranger manning a fire tower.
“Nobody there . . . nobody there . . . nobody there . . . nobody here.” Her lips tasted of salt . . .
“You find this amusing?”
Max noticed a tiny fasciculation in the lower lid of his left eye, not enough for Passaro to see. He spoke to Passaro as though the man had exhausted his patience.
“You know what happens if you send me upstairs. I’ll tell them what they want to hear, make an appointment to see somebody, and I’ll be out in two days.” He lifted his eyebrows at Passaro and shook his head slowly. “If I really want to do myself, you can’t stop me.” He leaned forward until he felt a breeze on his crack. “Come on, John. Think.” He used to say that long ago when Passaro presented cases to him.
“Think?” Passaro said. “You’re the one who ate the pills. Your house cleaner doesn’t show up a day early, you’re a dead man. Spread on the carpet like a stain.”
Max smiled. “You’re sending me upstairs just to give me a spanking.”
Passaro blinked.
“Why are you doing this eval, John? Just happened to be in the neighborhood?” Max smiled. “I hurt your feelings, didn’t I?”
“No, Max,” he said. “You hurt me. And Zaidy.” John’s eyes glistened. “And Hannah.”
Max leaned forward again, too far away to put his hand on John’s shoulder. “Believe me, it was an impulsive act. I am over it.”
Passaro leaned forward also. “You took out a fat life insurance policy, and waited just long enough to beat the suicide clause. Then you left an announcement on your voice mail you’ve been called away. Called away!”
Max’s face heated up. His eye twitched. He hesitated. “You want the truth?”
Passaro sighed. “Why not?” He leaned back, tilting his chair against the wall like a high school senior.
“I couldn’t stand her. Just sat on my ass and waited for her to die.” He swallowed. “Then she did.”
“No, Max. You and Ruthie were joined at the hip.”
“In bed she was all knees and elbows.”
Passaro almost clapped his hands over his ears. “Max, I do not want to hear about that.”
Max smiled. “You wanted to do this eval.” He went on. “She’d leaf through her fashion magazines, look at all those gorgeous babies. Then she’d say, ‘I disgust you, don’t I? I see it in your face.’ I’d laugh it off, tell her she was still a knock-out. She wouldn’t stop.”
Max looked at his feet. “I had a patient once—he loved horror flicks, the bigger the arterial spray the better, but he could not abide zombies. ‘They got this relentless thing going,’ he said.” Max poked his chest. “She invaded me like water freezing in the cracks. Broke me to bits.” His eyelid quivered.
“Your heart of stone.”
“—It was a relief.”
“You know,” Passaro said softly, “Your thoughts really aren’t powerful enough to kill someone.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” he said, “Spare me the Freud. Do you know what she said when they diagnosed her?”
“Nope.”
“‘Are you happy now?” He ground a knuckle into his eye.
Passaro blinked. “Are you?”
“Maybe,” said Max. “Either way, I paid my debt. Double jeopardy.”
Passaro pursed his lips. It was quiet in the room.
Max tilted his head to the right, and watched Passaro’s head tilt slowly to the right. Then he tilted to the left, and Passaro followed again. He can’t help it, Max thought. It’s in his DNA.
“Max, don’t hurt me again.”
“Why not? One good deed . . .”
“Hannah left me.” Passaro dropped his pen and retrieved it. “And you know why.”
Max looked like he was trying to be interested.
Passaro returned to his clipboard. “You overdosed by accident.”
Max said, “I did. I had a migraine and lost track.”
“You have a therapist lined up just in case.”
“I do,” he said. “I have an appointment with her next week.” Her?
Passaro scribbled in the chart. “You have a support system.”
“The girls are here. They’re staying with me. I’ve been talking with my best friends all morning. We’re getting together over the next few weeks.” Max trailed off.
The light faded from Passaro’s eyes. “I guess I’m no longer part of your support system.”
Max said nothing. The little muscle fasciculated once more.
Passaro sighed. “You’re oriented to the future.”
“I am,” Max said. “I can’t wait to get back to my patients.”
“What are you going to tell them about that?” Passaro pointed to the crater over Max’s cheekbone. The pressure sore, which had formed while Max lay motionless on the carpet, had now crusted over.
“The truth.”
Passaro stared at him. Then he asked, “How’s your eye?”
“Better.” Max smiled. “Things any better with Phoebe?”
~ ~ ~
Max’s older daughter, Hannah, stayed with him the first week. She held his hand. She still wept for her mother and now for him. She cooked little dinners, spooned them into plastic containers, and cached them in the basement freezer until it was completely bricked in. When they walked in the garden she talked to him about Ruth, hoping to mobilize his grief. Max wished he could cry, just to shut her up.
Toward the end of the week, she asked how John Passaro was doing.
“Fine,” he said.
She waited for him to go on, then asked, “He still with—?“
“—Phoebe.”
She forced a chuckle. “What kind of a name is that?”
“A kind of bird.”
She turned away, holding herself. When he laid his hand on her shoulder, she shook it off and walked away.
Max’s younger daughter spelled her the following week. Zaidy cleaned the house, and packed up enough of Ruth’s artifacts that the place no longer looked like a shrine. When she asked about the portrait that Passaro had painted of Ruth, Max told her to throw it away.
“But she loved it.”
“Throw it away.”
Zaidy paused. “I hope you know what it took for Hannah to show up here.”
Max shrugged.
When she opened the closet to carry out the first armful of Ruth’s clothing, the smell caught Max by surprise. Arpege, of course. And the sea. But viburnum? And what was that other . . . ? He locked the bedroom door—something he had not done since the girls were tiny and curious—to keep the cloud from dissipating before he could parse it out. Then he heard Zaidy yelling, pounding on the door. He shushed her softly and wiped her tears away with his thumbs.
After two weeks, Max returned to his practice, and explored his patients’ reactions to such a sudden absence. When they could bring themselves to ask, he told them. When they couldn’t, he explored why. He was particularly struck by those who were blind to the wound on his face, and those who, like him, had contemplated death as a lifeboat. To his surprise, they all forgave him.
At the end of each day, he wandered the empty house at a loss.
On Sunday, Max walked slowly through the mixed borders in his garden, and visited the patch that was wheaten from thirst. He had planned last year to extend the sprinkler line, and had already bought the hardware, but death got in the way.
At the home improvement store he found the line he needed, but in fifty-foot lengths only. He asked a salesclerk if they sold anything shorter.
“Sure don’t,” the man said, “but there’s a gal right over there looking to buy a smaller piece.” He smirked. “Tore her line up with a Rotor-tiller. Maybe you two could team up.”
He gestured toward a big-boned woman whose back was turned. She was clenching and unclenching her fists. The clerk walked up to her and said, “This fella wants to split your coil.”
“What?”
She had a square jaw, gray eyes, and full lips, and wore her hair in thick yellow braids, which she now pulled taut as though trying to keep her head on. He noticed the fading goggle silhouette over her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose—evidently one of those berserkers who crashed through the trees long after the resorts had closed, some valkyrie in Daisy Dukes. She glared at him, aggrieved. He noticed the beads of sweat on her lip, and his own lips parted.
She said, “It’s only nine dollars a roll anyway.”
He gave her a faint nod.
“Oh, all right,” she said.
“Good,” said the clerk, as though he had clinched some diplomatic breakthrough.
“But I don’t have anything to cut it with,” She cried. “I don’t know what possessed me to come here.”
Max pulled out his knife.
“Give me that,” like she was used to getting her way.
Max handed it over. He swallowed.
She flicked out the serrated blade and started her cut left-handed, sawing flush to her grip.
Max’s belly quivered. “Be careful.”
She didn’t look up. “I know how to cut. Believe me.”
She was making headway when someone yelled, “Hey!”
She froze.
“You can’t do that!” said the new clerk. Max was happy to see him. “You gotta ring that through up front.”
The woman began to cry and shook the knife at him. “Tell that to your pal,” she shouted. “He got me into this mess in the first place.”
The clerk did an about-face, and wandered off.
The woman returned to the hose.
Max asked if he could help.
“No!” said the woman. “It’s almost done.”
When she cut through, she bobbled the knife, and sent it clattering across the floor. Max pounced on it, as the woman compared the lengths of the two half-coils.
“It’s okay,” Max said. “I’ll take either one. I don’t need much. Really.”
Things were getting two-dimensional.
“No,” the woman said, and gave him the segment she had selected.
“Now we’re going to have to check out together.”
Max nodded as though she still held the knife, and followed her to the self-checkout area. In the midst of his disquiet, warmth grew in his solar plexus and soon extended into his chest, his limbs and his cock.
“I have the bar code,” the woman announced, “so you follow me.”
Max nodded. He was grateful that everyone’s blood had stayed put. His vision blurred with tears. He pressed his knuckles into his sockets.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” the woman said. “I only have a credit card. We can’t split this.”
“No problem!” Max’s voice had grown husky, as though it belonged to someone else. “I have cash.” He pulled out a ten and asked the clerk for change.
“Don’t have any,” she said happily. “You’ll have to go through a regular checkout line.” She eyed him as Robert might.
“Jesus!” the woman cried again. “What is going on here?” She grabbed her braids. “This is crazy.”
“Wait a minute,” Max said. He turned to her. “Wait a minute.” He wanted to hear the sound of his voice again. “You . . .” His heart quickened. “. . . are a good soul. You helped me when you didn’t have to . . . Now you get your reward . . .Your half is free.”
“Oh no,” the woman said. “I can’t do that. No.”
Max shrugged. “What else can we do?”
The woman glanced at the restive queue behind them. She sighed and slowly stroked her cheek at the spot that mirrored Max’s wound. “Do you know what’s going on?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “You walk out with me.”
They left the refrigerated air of the store, and stood for a moment blinking in the dazzle of the morning sun. Grackles called from the trees that rustled over the parking lot.
The woman squinted at the sky and muttered, “Who said there’s no God?” Her cheeks glowed. “What’s your name?”
He told her. “What’s yours?” He was hard as a teen-age boy.
“Ava,” she said. She touched his face, ran her fingertips over the crater, and asked him what happened.
“I tried to kill myself.”
“Yeah?”
He asked for her number, never having done such a thing in his life.
“None of your business,” she said.
He apologized, half-relieved that with his disappointment came some semblance of normalcy.
“What’s yours?” she asked.
He told her.
Then she ran off, rolling her coil alongside like a hoop.
He drove home slowly. Once there, he saw, leaning against the north fence, the coil of sprinkler line he had purchased last year.
Swinging his mattock, he dug a trench from the end of his system to the location of the new sprinkler head. He glanced at the old coil of line, and decided to use the piece he had just bought. He cut it to length, spliced it to the stump of the buried hose, and connected the free end to the sprinkler head he had purchased last year. Then, using a hand sledge, he set his anchors along the hose. He trued the sprinkler head and pounded soil back into the trench. He turned on the water and imagined his larkspur and penstemon bursting into tears of joy.
Sunday, he sat on the bench that faced the koi pond fed by a gurgling cataract, and threw pellets to the fish, which slid under the lily pads, appearing, disappearing. It was his favorite time of day. He loved the horizontal light of early evening when the fierceness of the sun relented and cool breezes rustled the trees. He sipped his martini and listened to the calls of birds preparing to bed down for the night. Bats cart-wheeled and swooped above him. His eyes filled for the beauty of it all.
The phone rang.
“Hi. You probably don’t remember me.”
“Nice place,” Ava said. She sauntered from room to room, like she was a prospective buyer. “Reminds me of Better Homes and Gardens.”
“My wife decorated it,” he said. “She passed away.”
“Yeah? When?”
He told her.
“Tough, huh?”
He nodded.
Robert chattered in the next room.
She opened the French doors, and walked out to the patio. A gibbous moon had cleared the horizon, drawing out the twilight.
“Jesus,” she said at the layered banks of daylily, hosta, flowering shrubs, and the pond. “She do this too?”
Max shook his head.
She took a seat on the bench that faced the pond. “Look!” she said, pointing at the koi.
He sat next to her, so that their thighs touched. She stayed where she was. He noticed she wore no bra and her nipples were hard.
“It doesn’t feel like evening yet,” she said, moving the placket of her blouse in and out like a bellows. “Hot.” She looked at him. Her face was flushed again. “I want to go inside.”
He followed her dumbly through the French doors. She loosened her skirt and let it drop. She pulled his head to her breasts. “Go ahead,” she whispered. He sucked like a ravenous infant. “Harder,” she said. “Use your teeth . . .”
He awoke in the dark, still sweating, and reached for her. He switched on the light, and searched room by room. A wish-fulfillment fantasy, he told himself. He inhaled her scent, and ran his hand over the drying pool on his sheet. He searched again, this time for a note. Then he checked his voicemail, but found only calls from Passaro, which he deleted out of hand.
Holding the top of his head, he stared around the room. He put on his robe, and went out the French doors. The sprinklers were on, including the one he had just installed. A faint glow rose from the east.
He drove to his office, worried he might have turned deaf to his patients. Throughout the week he heard them with an acuity that made him ache. At the end of each day he left his office happily spent, yearning for nightfall and sleep.
That Friday he picked up groceries on his way home, and after stowing them, wondered why he wanted to cook. It was a bother when all he had to do was drive a couple of miles to a bistro where the waitstaff knew the gin he drank.
He wandered through the garden, so preoccupied with Ava that he almost fell into the pond. He sat on the bench, hot from recalling Sunday. His belly felt hollow, to which he attributed the deepest yearning. Then he realized that he hadn’t eaten all day.
The phone rang. Ava said, “I’m starved.” She paused. “Can I come over?”
He felt weird. When a patient felt “weird,” it often meant that something neither of them had anticipated was about to breach.
“Can I come over?” she asked again.
He asked her if she liked spaghetti.
“I like everything,” she said.
He told her to pick up a bottle of red.
Max hummed Musetta’s Waltz as he filled a pot with water. It pleased him that he had not even thought of taking Ava to a restaurant, and that he could come up with something good enough. He felt light and goofy. “For a chef, I’m a damn good shrink.” He laughed. He cut the sausage into inch-long segments, and fried it sizzling with mushrooms. He laced the tomato sauce with herbs from the garden, a pinch of cayenne, and lots of garlic, then tossed in a couple of bay leaves. After folding the sausage and mushrooms into the sauce, he announced, “Now for Max’s secret ingredient.” He stirred in a ribbon of anchovy paste, just enough to temper the brightness of all that tomato, and brought it to a simmer.
He heated up the water for pasta, and rummaged through the shopping bags for ingredients he had selected at the market. As he tossed the baby romaine with boiled egg, edamame, red onion, grape tomatoes, pine nuts, avocado and chunks of buffalo mozzarella, it occurred to him that he had never any intention of preparing this meal for one. Weird. He saved out the croutons and mixed a balsamic vinaigrette.
Then he spread a red-and-white checked cloth on the table, and set it, using matching napkins pulled through mahogany rings. He glanced at his watch. Ava was taking far longer to get here than she had last week. He wandered around the house, and began to pick up the papers, clothing and empty cola cans, which had accumulated on every horizontal surface. What was taking her so long? The dinner would be ruined. Ruth would say that.
He heard the doorbell, and tried to walk casually.
She stood on the threshold, smiling. “Hi,” she said, but remained standing outside the door, scanning the lintel. He took her hand and pulled her through the doorway. Her eyes darted along the floor as though she had found something of great interest there.
“Hi,” he said, still holding her hand.
They stood in silence.
She touched the divot on his cheek and frowned. “Weird,” she said.
She kissed him, and handed him a bottle of Malbec. He led her into the kitchen. “Smells great,” she said.
Robert chattered at her approach. She bent down for a closer look.
“What’s his name?”
Max told her.
“Big name for a little guy.”
“Fits him,” he said.
“Poor thing,” she said. “All alone.”
“No,” said Max, “We have a beautiful friendship.”
He took Robert out. The bird flew straight for Ava. She hunched her shoulders and tilted her head away. Robert nibbled her ear until she laughed. Then he flew to Max. He crawled down the front of his shirt, looked up at Ava and whistled.
Ava relaxed. “He talk?”
“Yes.”
The bird alighted on her head. She hunched her shoulders and laughed again. Soon Robert danced a slow pirouette, making churring noises, and clicking his beak.
“He wants to mate with you,” said Max. He reached for the bird, who scolded him and flew to the pot rack over the sauce.
Max slammed a lid over the saucepan before Robert took his dump. The bird screeched and flew into the dining room. Soon he was back in his cage.
“Poor thing,” Ava said again. “Why don’t you get another one?”
“Because he’ll die, and then I’ll have another grief-stricken creature to nurse along.”
“Besides you.”
Max tried to come up with something smart.
“You still miss her,” she said.
Max thought a moment. “Sure.” He stirred the sauce. When he turned from the stove, Ava had wandered off.
He found her in the bedroom, studying the portrait of Ruth. He grabbed his forehead.
“She is beautiful,” she said. “Who was she?”
“She was a wonderful home-maker,” he said. “And mother.”
“My.”
“Why do you care?” He said it louder than he’d wished.
“Last week in the dark,” she said, “You called me ‘Ruth.’”
The blood rushed to his face. “You don’t understand.” He tried to collect his thoughts. “Things changed.”
He took the painting from her and laid it face down. He turned to kiss her, but she backed away.
“This isn’t working.” He sat down hard on the bed.
She remained standing.
“The older she got, the more she hated herself. And the more she hated herself, the more she hated me.” He shook his head to fling it all away, and ushered Ava toward the dining room. Max followed her gaze to the front door. He felt uneasy. He brought the water back to boil, while she popped the wine. She poured a mouthful into her glass, sniffed it, swished it around, and swallowed. “Not bad.” She poured him a glass, topped hers off, and lifted it. “To Ruth.”
They ate in silence.
Max cleared the plates. They stood side by side in silence, she scraping the dishes and he racking them in the washer. Then they wandered into the living room where they sat, she in a chair and he on the couch, with nothing to say.
She glanced again down the hallway toward the door.
The doorbell rang. For a moment, Max hoped that if he ignored it, she would also.
John Passaro stood on the threshold. He wore a faded knit shirt and paint-spattered jeans. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “I thought I’d drop by. See how you’re doing. Since you’re not taking calls.”
“I don’t answer to you.”
John said gently, “You going to let me in?”
“No.”
“What’s the matter?” John asked. “Somebody holding you at gunpoint?” He craned his neck to see beyond Max.
Max closed the door to a slit.
"You got a woman in there?”
“So?” Max glanced back at Ava.
“Max!” he said, “It’s me. Let me in . . . Please.”
“No.” Max slammed the door.
Passaro pounded on it.
Max leaned his forehead against it. “Go away.”
“You can’t do that,” Ava said.
She shouldered him aside to pull the door open. John entered, staring at her with those big cow eyes, and shook her hand. He surveyed the house from where he stood. “Nothing much has changed. Painting’s gone.”
Ava looked carefully at his pants. She asked if he were an artist.
“A hobby. I’m really an analyst.” He smiled sadly. “Like him.” He gestured toward Max. “He raised me from a tadpole into the magnificent creature you see before you.”
His smile faded when he turned Ava’s hand over to reveal ancient cuts so dense they had merged into a sleeve of scar from wrist to elbow.
Max shook his head. No way he could have missed that—he had tasted every inch of her.
Ava pulled her hand away. “You don’t have scars?”
John said, “Everyone has scars.”
“My,” she said. “He teach you that?”
“He has scars,” John said. “Look at him.”
Max clapped his hand to his cheek. Then he recovered and said, “It’s Phoebe, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.” He scanned John’s face.
“She flew the coop.”
John shook it off like a shot to the head. “We need to talk,” he said.
“Please.”
Max set his jaw. “You need to talk.”
“Max.”
Max said nothing.
John’s eye twitched. He covered it with the heel of his hand. “I should have locked you up when I had the chance.” He turned to Ava and asked for her number.
“None of your business,” she said. “What’s yours?”
“No,” Max shouted.
John turned to him. “Afraid I’ll steal another one?” Then he pulled the door closed behind him. Unlatched, it swung open a crack. Max put his shoulder to it.
It was quiet again. She was staring at him, as though through a new lens.
“Give me a drink,” she said. “Anything.”
Max handed her a bourbon over ice. She slugged it down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She asked for John’s number.
Max shook his head.
She beckoned with her hand. “The number.”
“You’re mine,” he said.
She sputtered and laughed and said no more, but took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom.
In the half-darkness of morning, Max awakened and whispered her name.
He heard the front door click.
He sank into sleep and awakened to a colorless dawn. He called the number he had surrendered to her in the night, but heard only John’s familiar greeting, which harkened to better times.
As the sun rose, he sat in his robe eating cornflakes in the breakfast nook. He had forgone his usual shower, clinging to Ava’s last trace. Robert teetered on his spoon, then hopped into the bowl. Max watched his exuberant splashes decay into the spasms of a drowning moth before he fished him out. Robert sat on the table with his eyes closed, shivering, his feathers puffed out. Ptiloerection, thought Max. That’s what they call it.
He opened the French doors for the solace of his garden. To his surprise, Robert fluttered past his ear. Annoyed, he trudged across the patio to retrieve him, but instead found himself trotting, then running flat out, as the bird, just beyond his grasp, pulled away, climbed sharply and disappeared over the massive oaks at the end of his yard.
Max stumbled forward, shading his eyes as though he were an outfielder who had lost a fly ball in the sun. He tripped on a sprinkler head and sprawled face first into the drift of penstemon and larkspur. He climbed to his knees and pressed his hand hard against his cheek to stop the lancing pain. The water came on with a hiss, and as it blasted him, he roared like a beast brought at last to bay.
