She Poured Out Her Heart (30 page)

“We were waiting for you,” Jane said with a hint of grievance, but she made shooing motions to the others to get them up and in motion. Bonnie thought, not for the first time, that she liked any of these people better by themselves than in a group.

Robbie complained that he did not want to see a bunch of old birds, he wanted to see snakes, he wanted to watch them feed live rats to the snakes. Eric said, “Robbie,” in a warning tone, and Robbie said that is too what they eat, live rats. “That's enough,” Eric said, and Robbie went quiet and sulky from being told, one more time, to stop bothering everybody, and Bonnie knew she might not be the right one to save these people from themselves, but she wished somebody would.

Things got better once they were inside the bird house, part of the obedient crowd looking through the glass windows at the secret green
worlds. Grace spotted a small rust-colored bird before anybody else did, and that lifted her spirits. Robbie, bloodthirsty as ever, wanted to know if they had any hawks or other birds of prey, but he was used to being disappointed by now and shrugged it off. Jane was absorbed in the educational aspect of things with Grace, reading the placards. Eric was cruising along behind them, and Bonnie lagged a step so that she could speak to him. Sometimes they overcompensated and practically ignored each other, when before, that is, before the sex, they might have hugged and carried on. At times like these Bonnie felt herself to be a stray explosive substance roaming around loose, ready to ignite or detonate, a walking sexual charge. No matter what half-assed good intentions she might have, no matter what the social proprieties or basic decency required, she might go off at any moment, she might willfully set herself ablaze.

So she said, “Hey Eric, Happy Zoo Day.”

And granted that was a lame-o thing to say, but he didn't make much of an effort in return, just a grimacing smile. “Yeah, same to you.”

She loved his shirt, a pale apricot cotton that reminded her of sherbet. She would have liked to touch it, feel the smoothness of it. She would have liked to unbutton it and slide her hands in between the shirt and his skin. There was a giddy, unbalanced moment when she was afraid she had actually done so. Reeling herself back in, she said, “Nice to see you enjoying yourself,” which made him glower and wonder what she was up to, and then everyone was distracted by Robbie pounding on the glass to try and get the attention of a green heron.

They made their way to the Aviary itself, one of the habitat exhibits the zoo was famous for. Birds flew freely here through a landscape of glossy-leaved plants and ferns and waterfalls and well-engineered branches. The air smelled saturated and loamy, but not unpleasantly so. It was less crowded here, or at least less echoing, and if you worked hard at it, you might convince yourself you were somewhere real. Two splendid macaws with red heads, acid green wings, and blue-violet tails
were stationed at the entrance, and they were so large and noisy and self-assured, with their flat, cracked stares, that even Robbie hung back from them.

Bonnie caught up to Jane and Grace. She was tired of having to counterfeit her feelings around Eric, and she was tired of him being tiresome. Next time she saw him, that is, next time they were alone, she was going to give him grief for it, in some way she had not yet determined. Not for the first time, she was glad she wasn't married to him, at least, glad she wasn't a wife to be ignored. If he started to treat her the same way, he might find himself surprised.

Jane was pointing out a bird to Grace, a white-crested, sharp-billed bird that looked like a kingfisher or a jay but also entirely unfamiliar. Neither Jane nor Bonnie knew what it was called, but Jane said the bird is what it is, the name was only something that people gave it. No, your father doesn't know either, don't ask him, it annoys him when he doesn't have the answer to things.

Bonnie thought this last was true. Eric did get frustrated and snappish when he couldn't provide answers, even to things nobody expected him to know, like, yes, this is the rare, white-crowned whoop-de-doo. It had something to do with being a doctor and needing to know everything. If their affair were out in the open, or if she and Jane were Mormon sister-wives, they could gossip about it, prod Eric in his weak places, share a head-shaking laugh. Of course this was making a lot of assumptions about Mormon sister-wives. Maybe they were closed-mouthed, private, jealous.

“How's it going?” Bonnie asked Jane. For the moment at least she preferred Jane's company to Eric's. The old comfort of their shared years.

“Good, fine, yeah,” Jane murmured. “Grace, there is nothing to be afraid of, I promise. These are all friendly birds, that's why they let them fly around. Robbie, what did we talk about? About the zoo being the animals' home, and we respect someone else's home.” To Bonnie she
said, “I could drop them off with the gorilla moms, don't you think? They do a pretty good job.”

“You'd miss them. You'd keep coming back to see them and you'd have to pay admission.”

“Mom! Mom! They have vultures!” Robbie came running up to them, excited that there was something sinister available in the world of birds.

“That's great, honey. Go tell your dad he has to watch you and Grace for a minute, I'll be right back. Sinus headache,” she said to Bonnie. “I have to take something. Eric?” Jane flagged him down and made a series of pointing gestures. They both watched as Eric attempted, ineffectually, to give instructions and commands to both children from too far away. “He's a gorilla dad,” Jane said. “Come help me find a drinking fountain.”

The two of them went through the far door and back out into the echoing hallway. Jane dug in her purse for her headache tablets and stood in line at the fountain. Bonnie thought that Jane looked tired, even frumpish, with her hair skinned back and her damp, freckling skin and her too-long shorts and canvas shoes. Summer was not her season. Bonnie had enough evil vanity to be pleased that she might look better. But what a weariness it was, all this picking, picking, picking at the same scab, what a weariness, her own stupid unworthy base nature.

Jane took her medicine and came back to Bonnie. “I hope these do the trick. We have a lot more animal kingdoms left.”

“Take a break. Let Eric be in charge for a while. Come on, sit.”

There weren't a lot of places to sit inside, because people were encouraged to keep moving, but they found a shallow step and rested with their backs against a wall. “Oof,” Jane said.

“Double oof,” Bonnie agreed.

“I just want them to have fun. It shouldn't be so hard.”

“They will. It's a fun place. They're getting into it.”

Jane rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “I don't remember childhood being fun.”

“You were sick a lot. You had to participate in competitive sports.” By
now Bonnie knew all of Jane's growing-up stories. “They got mad when you fainted.”

“It's more like, they were disappointed.”

“Disappointed, then.”

“I don't want to do that to my kids. Make them feel like we ordered different children than the ones we got.”

“You don't. You won't. Go easy on yourself.”

“It's harder than it looks, this parenting thing.”

“It looks pretty hard to me.”

Jane began to gather the bits and pieces she'd dragged out of her purse: Kleenex, comb, ChapStick, and tuck them back inside. “Tell me about the actual adult world. I miss it.”

“It's no big deal,” Bonnie said, cautious now.

“The intrigue. The drama. The passion.”

“You'd be so disappointed.”

“Would I,” Jane said, and for a moment the look in her eye was as flat and cracked and crazed as those of the macaw's, and in that moment Bonnie's guilty lying self hung suspended over a chasm, and then Jane's expression resumed its familiar exasperated, wilted mockery. “Tell me about him.”

“Who?”

“You know. Studly.”

“He's about the same. His studly self,” Bonnie said.

Because Eric was not her only lover and had not ever been.

“You should have brought him along today.”

“No,” Bonnie said. “I don't think that would have worked out. You ready? How's your headache?”

L
over” being perhaps too grand a term. There were other applicable words, but you might not care to use them.

It wasn't anything Bonnie had planned on, but that was no excuse. A
long time ago Jane told her, “The good thing about you is that you own up to all kinds of awful behavior. The bad thing is, you think that owning up is enough. You never actually stop doing stuff.”

Although Patrick, that was his name, was someone she'd known and kept company with a year or more before, that is, before Eric, so you could make some kind of a lame case that she was not transgressing, only failing to make a clean break. Except that she was too aware of her own bad intentions and her own spite, arising from one too many occasions that Eric was unavailable to her, one too many occasions of having her nose rubbed in the realities of their situation. So that if she sought out Patrick, or if he called her, and they picked up where they'd left off a few times—in fact it had been half a dozen—well, you did what you did and you had your reasons.

And if Jane asked who she was seeing these days, and if it would not do to keep saying, nobody, since this was hardly ever the case, then why not make good use of Patrick, whom Jane would never meet?

She didn't think that Jane would mention any of this to Eric. It wasn't her habit to share anything they spoke of. But there was always that chance, and Bonnie told herself she wouldn't be sorry if Jane did.

At other times she thought she should just give up and have herself committed to an institution for depraved females.

It wasn't as if she and Eric had made each other any promises, it wasn't as if she had signed over her free will. There were only certain conventions, certain unsaid expectations, namely, that he would still have Jane, for whatever purposes, and Bonnie would be his faithful mistress. Well, perhaps they should have said.

At least with Patrick there weren't any tragic subtexts. Just the usual aggravations of a certain fallible type of man. He was younger than Bonnie, thirty to her thirty-eight, a bartender at a pub-style bar off of North Kedzie. He was one of those professional Irishmen who make the most of a gabby, expansive persona, this although he'd been born in suburban Oak Lawn, two generations removed from the ould sod. Of course there
was plenty of drinking and exuberance and a conscious attempt to charm, followed by more drinking and excess of feeling and the cocaine he no longer used except on celebratory occasions because it got too much of a grip on him and he'd learned his lesson. He had a mobile, handsome face, blue eyes like rolling marbles, and he kept himself from going to fat with a lot of strenuous gym work. He wasn't anybody's idea of a good idea but he was available and agreeable. In bed he was enthusiastic, if sometimes sloppy from alcohol, and largely oblivious to his partner's needs in a way that Bonnie found restful. So many men were intent on demonstrating, in the most exhausting manner, their skill set and well-studied choreography. Patrick was the sexual equivalent of a meal from McDonald's.

“You could do something else besides tend bar,” Bonnie told him. “Take some classes, maybe business classes. See what's out there for you.” Because he wasn't stupid, just indolent and sunk in his bad habits. Patrick shrugged this and all other advice away, saying didn't she know what they said about the Irish? They were as common as whale shit on the bottom of the ocean. He knew his limits. He was a working stiff barkeep and that was good enough for him. Bonnie was aware that she might be trying to turn him into one of those comic book heroes she and Jane used to pine after and make fun of back in the day, the lumberjack with the shelf of Great Books. Or maybe she'd just grown up with alcoholics, like her falling-apart brother (now on his second tour of rehab), and she found entirely too much familiar comfort in their antics, and in attempting to prop them up and talk them out of romanticizing their failures.

“Hey girl!” was Patrick's standard, cheerful greeting across the bar. To Bonnie and to everybody else. Bonnie suspected he used it so that he would not have to remember anyone's name. “Why haven't I seen your pretty face in here for so long?” The women ate it up. With Patrick, of course, there was no question of fidelity, no expectation of seriousness. And that too could be restful. From time to time, much younger women
attached themselves to him, and then there might be some public pageant of a girl sitting at one end of the bar while Patrick busied himself at the other, and intense conversations and tears and stormings off, as Patrick smiled and attempted to look embarrassed.

And then Bonnie would tease him about being a heartbreaker and Patrick would say, “Ah, but I never thought the heart came with the rest of the goods, darlin',” and Bonnie would tell him not to talk with a brogue, it was affected.