Lovers Living Lovers Dead

idylls.

The Starlings

All the women he had ever known were assassinated; what havoc in the garden! At the point of the sword they blessed him. He never ordered new ones. Women reappeared.

After the hunt or the libations, he killed everyone who followed him. Everyone followed him.

He entertained himself with the torture of rare animals. He set palaces aflame. He rushed into crowds and slaughtered all who were near him. Yet throngs, gilded roofs, beautiful animals remained.

ONE

IT WAS THAT TIME OF SPRING: when, indeed, memory mixed with desire and bred lilacs out of the dead land.

But it brought the starlings, too; they were back—for the third time, and watching a great dark cloud of them cluster far above her like a plague of locusts, blackening the sun, Christine was touched with a now-familiar wonder and panic.

She’d come out into the garden in the late summer-warm afternoon wearing one of her old maternity dresses: the crushed crinkly gold she used to wear to faculty teas. Underneath, placed very low on the abdomen, as if the baby were hourly imminent, she’d tied a small round pillow on which was painted a crude, childlike face.

She’d made up her eyes the way she thought Nefertiti might have looked: almond and angular, and wore every bit of junk jewelry she owned—all this being a kind of dress rehearsal for a little comedy-drama, like so many she played, to amuse her husband, Michael, if he was so inclined, though more often than not lately, she succeeded in entertaining only herself, and sometimes the children if they happened to be near.

The moment she heard his car crunching the stones in the driveway, she’d planned to call from the highest window in the house—the round, spooky one in the attic room beneath the gabled roof where she kept her trunk: Michael, go to the summerhouse; you’ll find a pitcher of lemonade and some iced cookies.

Then, after he’d seated himself amid his sundry portfolios and blue pencils and Comparative Literature II midterm test papers—or was it French English this week?—she would appear: all spangled and goldly pregnant, to confound him with eyes that were ancient history and the shock of an instant baby. So blessed, all that fretful, pointless worry would leave his haunted eyes, and when he threw back his handsome head, laughing, she’d look quickly into his empty mouth and count every gold filling he owned, knowing their exact number, once and for all.

But the starlings were about to ruin both drama and joke, and as they swirled closer, threatening, they were of much more interest and importance than the strategy of counting Michael’s fillings, or the Egyptian baby she’d planned to have, popping it out before him from between her legs like a bubble of bubblegum.

She watched intently as they patterned themselves into a narrow black cone, then flattened out, fanshaped, and with a vast hollow roar of wings and wind and muted hacking cries, descended, as they had twice before, into the giant dead oak at the end of the garden, the one that all winter, Michael kept saying over and over simply had to come down, no matter what the expense, else it might fall and someone get hurt.

Instantly, before her astonished eyes, the oak again became a starling tree, every empty space of it, all its leaf-bare twigs and branches that were blistered with rot and flowers of fungus, so blackly crowded and stuck together it looked as if God’s sticky fingers had emptied out a boxful of raisins—until one saw how it breathed: all of it alive, trembling with glossy feathers, scaly claws, and a guerrilla army of glinting watchful eyes.

Looking at the teeming, writhing cluster—enough to have eclipsed the sun—Christine found it as intolerable as before. Loathsome. Repellent. But quite as fascinating: indeed, irresistible, and as she advanced toward the tree, step by cautious step—believing the birds dangerous, capable of violence and injury— a cacaphony of noisy, noisome croaks and chirps and chatterings became gradually still, hushed and waiting.

It was happening for the third time!—and Christine’s skin began to crawl.

He had separated himself from the rest—bigger than most, and almost inky black; not a starling at all, possibly a raven, a crow; whatever he was, he dropped to the foot of the tree in one gentle, graceful swoop, and turning his head, fastened a glassy eye on hers.

And there he stood, with so much presence and pride, such styilzed posture, she suspected he was titled—and had to strain her chest to keep from laughing out loud at the thought, hating him intensely, yet, inexplicably, loving him too—this bold official, this pompous spokesman, preposterous prince of all the others now beginning to cacker and caw behind him: the yeas and nays of a teeming treeful of motely citizens and senators.

Astonishingly, he was ringed!—she had not noticed it before: he wore a tiny gold band above one spidery claw. So apparently he had been owned at one time!—and taught his familiar ways and strange tricks. What else could she call them? Perhaps the pathetic creature had performed professionally—on a stage, or before cameras—owned by a dwarf and chained to a stick!—able to move only a foot this way and that, backward and forward, toward her and away—as he was doing now, ostensibly for her pleasure but actually for the reward he must expect: the bit of raw meat, the sliver of writhing worm popped into his mouth. Ah, it must be so: the pink toothless cavity between the sharp bones of his beak was gaping.

He puffed out the feathers of his chest until he appeared twice his size, wings fluttering, small twin clouds of dust rising as the quivered tips beat the dead gray soil between the immense rotted roots of the tree.

A few queer foot movements followed: the tiny knot of a knee bending a thread-thin splinter of a leg in a gesture that looked absurdly like the Pope’s blessing!

Every movement was bilateral: what the left leg did, the right did also. Next, four fingerlike talons took turns raking the air, quite as if to seize the hem of her golden dress; then, abruptly, desisted. With a last violent shake of head and tail, the bird became motionless, the eyes partly filmed, half-lidded, but still staring—so it seemed—directly into hers. Oh!—it was too hideous and laughable to bear!

Even on a stick, on a stage, before cameras—with a painted dwarf to prod him, and a golden chain to keep him from flying away—who would be entertained by that?!

What the bird was doing, of course, was sexual. It was the mating dance of the starling, or the crow, or the raven—whatever he was. And when Christine suddenly realized it, it was with such a startled intake and expulsion of breath that the pillow slipped and dropped from her abdomen to her feet. She stumbled backward, tripping over her skirt, and there was the Egyptian baby, born before its time, grinning up at her, while, in an effort to keep her balance and not fall, her arms flew upward and out in a violent gesture.

Whether it was simply the violence of the gesture or that her suitor considered himself rejected, she never knew—only the wrath of the others, the pandemonium that followed. A starburst of birds. They so inundated her that for a moment she thought they would surely bear her away, like an army of ants sweeping along a carcass a thousand times their size.

Two of them hit her forehead so forcibly they lay instantly dead, or unconscious, at her feet. Others nipped and fretted, pulled strands of her hair, their thin cries so multiple and magnified she covered her ears. One got caught beneath her skirt and she shrieked as she felt the piercing track of its claws move up her leg. With a fist she beat it to a wet pulp against tightened thigh muscles.

Disheveled, distraught, weeping, afraid, her lovely dress torn and stained with blood, her baby dead— aborted, lying soiled in the dust and the incredible ruins of the afternoon, Christine went straight to the house and up to the attic, opened her trunk and returned with a shotgun almost as big as herself.

Once more they had reassembled in their vast, black, churning cluster in the tree, quite as before, stupid and memoryless, not knowing what they’d done, frozen in instinct, in behavior as rigid, as unyielding as an exoskeleton: all squawking beak and glittering eye, feathers preened, ticks eaten, itches scratched, and the whole of the tree’s massive trunk spotted, half white-washed with a constant shower of their chalky ooze.

An abomination.

As a child, she had many times gone hunting with her father: to watch him kill, see the animals strung up and disemboweled, stripped of their skin; once she had seen seven perfect babies tumble out of a lioness as a Ujaki tribesman ripped open its belly with a great curved ciizk.

When she was old enough and sufficiently strong to manage its weight and not flounder behind the impact of its recoil, she’d learned how to use a rifle herself, and to use it well. Later, under her father’s fanatic tutelage she became expert in the use of most any firearm.

Now memory served, if a bit hazily, since it had been so long since she’d handled a shotgun. It was a weapon held in low esteem, useless for hunting big game, but packing the power and shock of a hand grenade, unsurpassed in an emergency, ever ready to bring down a tiger as it crouched to spring, even to stop or divert the charge of a raging rhino.

So although her knowledge of the gun was meagre and basic, what she remembered was enough: how to break it in half—over a knee at the moment because it was thoroughly rusted—and insert two of the giant red shells.

The closer she came to the starlings, the more agitated they became, as if, instinct be damned, they suspected her purpose and knew the meaning of the long, ugly, double-mouthed snout she was pointing toward the very heart of their nest. Several of them fluttered away but came instantly back, unable to resist the collective mind that demanded that all of them roost, while the din of them swelled to such dissonance and shrillness Christine feared her eardrums might burst.

She took wavering aim, one eye screwed shut, the other a slit of narrowed concentration.

The exact second her finger tightened on the trigger, she heard the crunch of stones in the driveway and knew it was Michael.

But the tree had already exploded!—an instant mandala of fire so swift, intricate and vast she felt like a saint struck dead by the sight of God’s face. Her legs buckled, her body rose from the ground like a flying aerialist, to be flung back in a smothering rain of blood, feathers and shattered entrails.

Many of the birds weren’t dead. Dozens were mutilated: a wing blown off, a leg, half a head. They careened and stumbled in the bloody ooze, croaking and twittering, crazed in their dying, leaping for the air, the sky, broken and blind.

The sight of them was intolerable to Michael, who, covered with gore, stomped to death one after another, even seizing a few, squeezing the last flickering life to a dead pulp in his hands. He choked back his cries of loathing and despair, muttering when he could, only two words, over and over: Good God! Good God!

When the last bird was dead and he and Christine had crawled beyond the lake of blood and feathers, he found the pillow.

Half-crazed himself, he stared in a stupor at the grinning child’s face.

What’s this?—his wild eyes turned to hers.

Christine opened her mouth, but it was impossible to explain. How could she tell him, now, at this moment, about their Egyptian baby?

She shrugged and smiled, looked at the pillow with the greatest curiosity, as if she didn’t know how in the world it had gotten there.

TWO

AN APPLE ORCHARD grew to the northwest. With no one to tend it over the years, it had seeded itself, the wind rolling the falling apples a bit closer to the house each year.

Finally, like Hamlet’s forest, trees eventually buttressed the very walls, broke through two of the lowest windows, and then moved in. An astonishing sight! In one large room where the floor had rotted enough, the apples fell through to the dark earth below; then, wildly tropistic, root and branch, pale tendril, leaf ate into cracks of light and fissures of darkness in the decaying walls, turning, twisting, spreading: a weird osmosis that turned room into tree and tree into room.

It proved a delight to the children who, in summer, were able to crawl mysteriously through the leafy walls, and in November, climb to pick from the ceiling the green misshapen apples, so achingly sour that the merest taste, the tiniest break of small teeth through cool crackling skin was enough to evoke howls of laughter and woefully agonized faces.

The apple room or tree room as it was eventually called, had been the only good reason Christine could think of to live in the house. Otherwise, to her, it was pathos-old, and sat upon its hill with the giant dead oak behind it like a tired old spider taunted by a stick.

A bright student of architecture might have been able to define its uninspired and multiple sources, but all Michael was able to tell her, and she didn’t care at all, was that he was sure it was part Tudor, part Colonial, and a bit of ornate, wedding-cake Victorian, built in the twenties (said the agent, whose name was Andrew Blake), abandoned in the thirties, now owned by a corporation whose principals had to dig deep into ancient files to be reminded that it existed at all.

Is it haunted? Christine asked.

Perspiring, suffering a mild attack of hay fever from the cloud of pollen that hung like a haze in the golden air, Mr. Blake had to sneeze before he answered. Or perhaps he purposely delayed in order to imply something tauntingly positive. He was not naive, and a house with an authentic ghost frequently brought a much higher rental. In the end he decided not to lie.

Well—no; no it isn’t; it really isn’t. He smiled his regret. However— since the very young and extraordinarily beautiful wife seemed so