An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (17 page)

INSIDE GORBACHEV'S HEAD

E
LLIOT IS WAITING
on Angell Street for the woman he loves. She is Georgia, his mother's friend. At 8:20 he finally sees her. She's driving a BMW 2002, Amazon green and rickety, and stalls right in front of his dorm, where he's been standing and waiting for fifteen cold, gray, early morning minutes. Instead of getting the car started again, she leans across the seats and opens the passenger door from the inside.

“Get in, Elliot,” Georgia says. “I can't be late for my shrink.”

Everybody his mother knows, his mother included, has a shrink; Elliot believes there is an entire population of women over forty getting analyzed, Prozaced, and twelve stepped to death.

He can't get the door shut and Georgia can't get the car started, so they both sit there with their private struggles until finally the car turns over and Georgia says, “Hold the door shut if you have to.” There's no seat belt. The door rattles. It's
a precarious situation. Still, Elliot manages to notice what Georgia's wearing—black leggings, brown Doc Martens boots, a thick woolen sweater, probably Guatemalan, with abstract people dancing across the lumpy wool and too many loose threads.

Georgia lights up a cigarette and offers him one.

Even though he wants to take it, he shakes his head, afraid of balancing the cig and a match without falling out of the car, which is now darting through Providence like an amusement park ride.

“I thought smoking was back,” Georgia says. “I can't keep up anymore.” She wraps her full lips around her cigarette and inhales, deeply. Her lipstick makes him think of seaweed, wet and dark, and that makes him think of sex, so he tries to push other images into his mind—Miró's Nocturnals, the ‘86 World Series—but it's too late. He's sitting in Georgia's car and he can see her calf muscles push against her leggings when she brakes. Every time Elliot is around Georgia he thinks like this. He tries the direct approach and looks right at her, blatantly. Even lustfully, he thinks. Her hair is dyed an unnatural black and falls in tight springs around her face and down her shoulders. He imagines her pubic hair, where it begins and how it must be wild and untamed. Her voice makes him think of a smoky bar.

“What?” she says when she catches him staring, but he just shrugs and tries to stop imagining her naked.

She pops in a tape, Counting Crows, and keeps smoking. Her eyes are hidden behind crooked Wayfarers, but Elliot knows they are dark brown, deep set, lined in black. He has known Georgia since he was seven and she lived in Manhattan, on Bank Street, in a fifth-floor walk-up that
looked the way he has come to think apartments in Paris must look. Whenever he thinks of that apartment it seems there were constants—sheer curtains always moved in the breeze, fresh flowers sat in bowls, the espresso machine gurgled. There was always sunlight, somewhere.

They used to visit her, Elliot and his mother, every Saturday, from their oversized Colonial in Chappaqua, forty minutes by train. Georgia had three cats, Abyssinians, and cat hair all over her clothes and couch. She always had a disaster—a broken heart, unrequited love, or the wrong man pursuing her. Once, a former boyfriend even stalked her and she lived, or so she told them, in fear for months. His mother would listen; she would nurse Georgia's frequent hangovers; they would all three go for a walk; Georgia would nod and smoke and not take any of his mother's advice. Back home in Chappaqua his mother made him take a hot bath right away. While she did the laundry she mumbled, about germs and cats and Georgia.

“Providence is such a hole,” Elliot blurts above the BMW's noisy muffler. Having thought of Georgia on Bank Street, it almost hurts to think of her anywhere else. “How can you stand it?”

Georgia shrugs. “It's not so bad,” she says.

But it is. Everyone keeps reminding Elliot how lucky he is to be here, at Brown, but he misses the lawns and trees of home, the order that prevails there. Georgia is here because she teaches at RISD, but mostly she is an artist; she paints in thick, dark oils. Her paintings are always described as masculine, but Elliot doesn't agree. They are big, intimidating, earthy, like Georgia herself. Once, in her bathroom on Bank Street, he took her pantyhose that were hanging over the shower to dry and sniffed them, the feet and crotch and long
leg part in between. Under the smell of Dove soap, he caught a vague whiff of Georgia. Remembering it, he leans toward her to try to find it again. But all he smells is stale smoke and old leather.

They are already at the cutoff for the airport.

“This state is so small you can't even get lost,” Elliot mumbles.

“Have you been to the Indian place?” Georgia asks. “We should do Indian when you get back.”

That is not the way to talk to your friend's kid, but Georgia has no experience. She did have her own kid, but she gave it up for adoption and then moved to Mexico. Elliot knows all her secrets from the days when he used to go with his mother to visit her. That kid would be his own age, twenty. A boy. “I didn't even hold him,” Georgia told his mother on one of those long-ago Saturdays. She did not sound sad. “I handed him over and headed south.” Briefly, Elliot wonders what became of him, Georgia's son. Maybe he's like me, he thinks. Maybe he's even at Brown. Maybe he and Georgia pass each other on Waterman Street every day.

“It's bring-your-own,” Georgia is saying, still talking about the Indian restaurant.

“Whatever,” he says. Georgia and Elliot have lived seven blocks from each other all semester and this is the first time he's seen her.

Georgia leans close to him. “Give your mother a big kiss for me, okay?”

He smells it.
Her
smell. He's afraid he's actually drooling. Does he even mumble, “Thanks,” as he lurches out of the car? She sits there, stalled, trying to turn it over for as long as it takes him to check his bag and get a boarding pass.
On his way to the coffee shop, Elliot walks past the big plate-glass window, conspicuous. He wonders if he should do something to help, but he can't for the life of him think what that might be.

I
N THE THREE
months since Elliot was last home, his mother has married their next-door neighbor, Mr. Rickey, and gotten knocked up. Elliot doesn't know what to expect when the Westchester Airport Service drops him off at the house. It looks the same, at least, large and white and neatly trimmed. He glances next door. The Rickeys' house has a
FOR SALE
sign perched on the lawn, and all the lights are off. They had daughters that he went to school with, Mindy and Randi Rickey. He thinks of them and their slightly bucktoothed grins, pug noses, skinny legs. They are off at schools in New England too. He wonders, horrified, if he is suddenly related to them. At least he never dated either of them. Would that be retroactive incest? Maybe he did kiss Mindy once, at a party in someone's dark basement rec room. He did. It hits him with great clarity. She tasted like grape bubble gum and smelled like coconut hair spray. The combination nauseated him, but they definitely used their tongues.

His mother's voice sails across the front lawn. “Elliot? Is that you lurking out there?”

“I'm not lurking,” Elliot mutters.

“Yes. You are,” she calls. “You're lurking.”

He doesn't know what to expect when he walks inside. After all, someone new has moved in—and not just anyone,
but Mr. Rickey, whom Elliot has seen shirtless mowing his old lawn, his back covered with patches of reddish blond hair and freckles; whose daughter Elliot has French-kissed; whose wife used to overtip when Elliot was the neighborhood paperboy. And his mother is pregnant, almost out of her first trimester is how she put it, and he expects her to be glowing and round, Buddha-like.

But, to his surprise, everything is the same. The slate blue kitchen, the smell of Pine-Sol, the one chipped tile on the floor with its corner cut like someone stole a taste of pie. His mother has on faded jeans, an old pink button-down of his father's, bare feet. She is an L. L. Bean mother, just like the ones who fill that catalogue—long and straight hipped, blunt-cut hair that's close to blond, practical clothes, sensible face. Once, before his parents got divorced, Elliot heard his father accuse her of not being pretty enough. He was right; she was what you would call handsome, but never pretty. Still, it wasn't something men told the women they loved. Even at ten Elliot had known that.

“Well, hello,” she says. She is planting bulbs—forcing them is what she calls it—and doesn't stop to welcome him.

Elliot kisses her cheek and notices she has acne, that she's covered it with a too-pink makeup.

“Good,” she says. “I worried about Georgia getting you there on time.”

He picks up an apple from the Bennington Potters bowl that sits on the counter, and takes a noisy bite. “She was early,” he lies.

“Bravo,” his mother says. “And here you are.”

From somewhere in the cavernous house he hears Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.

“As soon as I finish forcing these bulbs,” she tells him, “we'll get on with things.”

“Things?” Elliot asks.

“You have to call your father, of course. Make plans to see him at some point. And I thought we'd all go for dinner at Duck's tonight.”

Since their divorce, his parents haven't spoken except to discuss when Elliot would get dropped off and picked up and where. He can't imagine why they would all go to dinner. His father has lived on the Upper West Side with a woman, Veronica, since he left. Veronica looks exactly like the old movie star Louise Brooks. She does that on purpose, then acts surprised when people go up to her and say, “You look exactly like Louise Brooks!”

“We who?” Elliot manages to ask.

“Franklin and you and me,” his mother says.

Franklin is Mr. Rickey. Elliot knows that from delivering his newspapers. H. Franklin Rickey. He realizes that he doesn't even know if his mother is Mrs. H. Franklin Rickey now, or if she kept her old name, Pamela Stern. He realizes that although everything looks the same and smells the same, it's all different. When Mr. Rickey appears in the kitchen, smiling dopily, his thin hair combed over his bald spot, his glasses smudged, his feet bare too, Elliot wants to run out of there.

“Elliot,” he says. “Good to see you.”

“Done!” his mother announces. She steps back to study her planting. “In six weeks this entire pot will be filled with paper whites. Lovely little things. Just in time for Christmas.”

The three of them stand there and stare at the terra-cotta planter, which, although her prediction is accurate, looks like
a bunch of onions stuck in a lot of dirt. They stare at it much longer than necessary.

E
LLIOT IS MAJORING
in English, but he can do math. Mr. Rickey got his mother pregnant first, and married her second. Over fish en papillote at Duck's, he thinks back to the summer, which was too hot and too long. Elliot worked odd jobs, as a tutor, a playground crafts director, and a picture developer at a one-hour photo place. In between, he lay on the green-striped sofa in the family room or on a chaise by the unfilled pool or in the hammock. He didn't read much. He saw his friends sometimes. He spent Fourth of July with his father and Veronica on their roof, where they had a barbecue because even though his father has lived in Manhattan for eight years, he can't let go of his suburban life—he keeps a car and shops at malls and has barbecues on rooftops. During all this, Elliot's mother was somehow, somewhere, fucking Mr. Rickey. “The Rickeys are having trouble,” she told Elliot sadly. On Friday nights, she and Mr. Rickey had dinner here at Duck's. But she was always home and in her pajamas, her half-glasses perched on her nose, a book opened, when Elliot got home.

They are acting like they are in love, his mother and Mr. Rickey. They keep touching, intimately, knees and hands, and even gently bumping foreheads. Mr. Rickey is drinking too much, almost a whole bottle of wine himself.

“It's so different having a baby now,” Elliot's mother tells him. She has taken small sips from Mr. Rickey's wineglass all night. “When I had you, I still had a martini whenever
I wanted one. I got knocked out during delivery. I had never even seen my cervix.”

They bump foreheads and giggle.

“These days, they make a point of including you in everything. We're going to Lamaze classes together. Fran will cut the umbilical cord. The works.”

Embarrassed, Elliot looks down at his fish until his mother says, “You know who did all this way back when? Georgia. You know she had a child, don't you?”

He looks up and nods, suddenly interested.

His mother lowers her voice and leans across the table. “At the time I thought she was crazy, of course, but she had it with a midwife, and this woman made her squat like she was in a field or something, made her stay naked the whole time, and made her chant these Indian birthing songs while she rubbed her perineum with eucalyptus oil. Georgia says it wasn't so bad.”

“Squatting?” Mr. Rickey asks. It is clear he cannot imagine such a thing.

Elliot's mother says, “Something about gravity.”

“But she gave that baby away,” Elliot reminds her.

“She never even held him.”

“Tragic, really,” Mr. Rickey says, shaking his head.

Elliot's mother has returned to her perfect posture. Her cheeks are slightly flushed, there is potting soil under her fingernails. She opens her small oval purse and pulls out a bad Polaroid that she slides across the table to Elliot. Mr. Rickey kneads her neck. They both grin.

The picture is dark, blurry. A picture of a night sky, perhaps. Or airplane radar.

“That's Tatiana or Alexander,” she says proudly. “Of
course we'll find out the sex. Why not? They can tell you nowadays, you know.”

It sinks in slowly: this is a photograph of their baby. Tatiana or Alexander? Why the Russian names? Elliot wonders. Then he remembers that Mr. Rickey has something to do with Russia. His old house was filled with those dolls that sit inside each other and ornate, painted Easter eggs. Once a year he and the real Mrs. Rickey used to have a party with caviar and borscht and thirty different kinds of vodka. Maybe he was even a spy.