Silent Bird Read online

  I was like Grandma! I had been so sure that man meant to catch me…

  Finally, finally, the bustling Place de la Comédie opened up like a glittering flower. Heart still hammering, I collapsed at the nearest table at the nearest café and ordered a coffee and drank it black.

  I’m not afraid of things. It was an old mantra I hadn’t recited in years. Too bad I didn’t believe it now any more than I had back then.

  I am afraid of things.

  VI

  As we walked back home, Jeannot cheerfully described his flyer adventures: Arab barmen interested in his music because it wasn’t French; this one Moroccan restaurant that served American-sized plates of couscous; merchants saying they would love to hear original piano music along with the fabulous food of La Peña.

  I didn’t mention the man I’d felt so sure was following me in the alley. No point in confessing a moment of paranoia, right? Because then you have a reason to be paranoid when people think you’re not quite right in the head and constantly watch you to figure out what’s wrong…

  “Merci for all your help,” Jeannot said at home, after we had put away the empty cart and dropped on the sofa to cuddle.

  “My pleasure.”

  He touched my face with the curve of his hand, and we kissed, long and sweet. And I closed my eyes and tried to focus. But the wrong sensation swooped at me anyway: racing through the alley, footsteps coming closer; dread racing up my neck.

  His hands…so disorienting! With an expert flick, Jeannot unleashed my swollen, premenstrual breasts. He unbuttoned my jeans and pulled them down, and knelt on the floor to hug my body against his face.

  I felt my back go rigid. A vicious stab of pain in my heart.

  Time screeched to a halt.

  I tried to inhale and couldn’t—I’d been gut-punched by something invisible, a weight on my chest.

  Jeannot looked up. “What? What is it?”

  I wheezed; a terrible dragging sound. Then, a gasp: “My chest. Hurts!”

  “My God, Chérie, are you all right?”

  I shook my head and mouthed no, and he released me and ran for the phone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I

  Breathing is underrated.

  I mean it is the ultimate need and yet taken so much for granted. We don’t think about breathing until it stops; but when we can’t breathe, we can’t think about anything else. The hunger for air consumes us. It becomes a pinpoint of intensity, a black hole of concentration: a particularity in the universe of body and soul.

  I discovered this irony when I was six years old—not long after my father stole me, whisked me away, and then carted me back to my mother like a gift you return because you can’t find the instructions.

  By that time she and I had moved from the beach house in the Hamptons to a smaller house in Central Islip, and everybody was in a really bad mood. The breathing problem happened after I threw a temper tantrum. I sat there glaring at Mom’s calendar with my father's visitation days carefully circled and crossed out, and I held my nose and clamped my mouth shut until the spots came.

  The room went dark.

  I guess I let go of my nose then to gulp as much air as I could. But it wouldn’t work—not fast enough. I wheezed and gasped until my mother pounded my back, sobbing she was sorry for all our troubles and that I shouldn’t worry so much, everything would be fine. I cried, “Ma-ma!” like a baby in diapers, and the incident was over, thank God.

  Except I still worried. Like: when Grandma said I was “broken-hearted” over my bum of a father, did she mean my heart would stop too? I didn’t much care if Daddy was a bum. Grandma called lots of people bums. But I did mind having broken parts and dying before I got to grow up.

  Was there something really wrong with me so I would get lost again or stop breathing or go crazy and die?

  Was I really cursed with the Evil Eye?

  II

  “Can she hold the cup?” asked the French nurse, her words flying across the desk like kamikaze cartoons.

  My hands shook; water splashed a little. Using Jeannot’s arm to steady myself, I drank.

  In this weird hospital light, his face looked pale and thin and oddly hangdog.

  “Maybe she still has pain,” he said. “It was her heart. She screamed and clutched her chest.”

  The nurse asked something about my medical history, and Jeannot said he didn’t know. I kept working at the water, at swallowing, at breathing. At least the stabbing in my chest had dulled to a kinder ache.

  “Her blood pressure has gone down,” the nurse announced. “Looks like the pain is receding.”

  The room we sat in was as long as a railroad car and very cold. Somebody across the way began to vomit into a bag. I could hear a television: something BBC-sounding but in French. I understood the television better than the nurse, who said something about moving me to the waiting room and then about a test with cables, probably an EKG, unless she was discussing a carburetor.

  “She is only twenty-six,” Jeannot said.

  “No heart disease in her family?”

  “I do not know her family.”

  “My father had two surgeries.” My voice sounded rusty, and they both looked startled, as if the chair had spoken “He had his first attack at forty-seven.”

  The nurse patted my shoulder. “Perhaps it is something else, such as stress.”

  I tried to stand up.

  “Whoa, Pilar.” Gently Jeannot guided me back down.

  “Stress gives you headaches, Jeannot. Maybe bad dreams. Not a heart attack!"

  “D'accord,” he said soothingly. “Think you can walk into the waiting room?”

  I nodded, and he led me to the room with the TV: another cold, sad place filled with green chairs and tired people. A little girl coughed into her mother's neck. An old man breathed noisily, his mouth all crumpled. A teenaged girl clutched her battered teddy bear. I took my place in the semicircle of chairs and didn’t feel one bit the outsider.

  Two hours of waiting later, I lay on a table waiting for results. Jeannot had stayed with me during the attachment of EKG cables. Now he was consulting with the doctor. They whispered together before creeping back into the room.

  “Your heart seems fine; the test shows no obvious abnormalities,” the doctor said when I waved at him.

  He was in his thirties, with a freckled nose, watery blue eyes, and a name I couldn’t begin to pronounce: something long and complicated with the French “u” that reminded me of honking sinuses. I’d liked him immediately despite his name; with this news I liked him even more.

  Jeannot looked strange, though. Grim.

  “What?” I asked him. “What's wrong with me?”

  He hesitated.

  I turned back to the man in charge. “If my heart is fine, what was the pain?”

  Doc offered me a quintessential French shrug. “Gas can be terribly painful, but I do not think that was the problem. All I can tell for sure is that you are fine physically.”

  “Physically?”

  “Yes.”

  Jeannot stared down at his shoes.

  “You had what we call a panic reaction,” the doctor continued. “It is more common than one may believe. It can feel exactly like a heart attack.”

  I reminded him of my father’s heart condition, which did in fact kill him. Had I inherited that?

  To my relief, the doctor did not appear alarmed. “You are young and strong. You may have this genetic predisposition, but if you eat well and take care of yourself, you may not develop any heart problems.”

  I nodded. “So I had…panic?”

  Jeannot studied the doctor's stethoscope.

  “If it happens again, you might want to consult a psychiatrist. There are good anxiety medications available. You say you have not had this type of reaction before?”

  “No. Well, yes. I was…at university.”

  Jeannot seemed to come out of his trance. “You never told me.”

  There are a
lot of things I never told you, I thought.

  “Unfortunately we will not solve this tonight.” The doctor seemed to be addressing Jeannot more than me. “I suggest you go home and get some rest. Remember, Mademoiselle is not from this country. That alone can cause undue stress. Panic reactions in immigrants are not unusual.”

  “I am not immigrating,” I said before I thought about it.

  Jeannot looked at me directly this time, his eyes wounded.

  III

  “Honey, are you okay?” Tommy whispers in the darkened dorm room. “What’s wrong with you? You’re scaring the hell out of me!”

  His words and rising voice do something to my insides: a jostling back to awareness. Back to this room, where I am sitting in the middle of the icy tile floor. Naked! But I don’t move, not yet.

  I ask what happened.

  “You don’t remember?” he cries, even more alarmed.

  “I couldn’t breathe—”

  “We were, you know, making love. Then you started crying. You sat on the freakin’ floor! I couldn’t understand what you were saying—”

  “It was my chest. It hurt.”

  “Holy shit, Pilar. You mean your heart?”

  “I don’t know. I felt like…I wasn’t in my body. Like I was watching myself.”

  Tommy rubs his face with his hand. He’s trying to wake up, trying to calm down. “I don’t know, Pilar. I don’t know what the hell…Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  “You mean a shrink? No, thank you.”

  Not again.

  “But…look at you! This isn’t…normal.” He pauses. “You know all that stuff we’ve been reading in class.”

  We never should have taken psychology. Reading The Bell Jar, including Plath's description of her boyfriend's un-aroused genitals—”a turkey neck and gizzards”—really freaked Tommy out. Now he was seeing abnormal psychology everywhere. And that wasn’t right. It wasn’t me. Plath really was disturbed; she’d committed suicide. Maybe I’d overdosed once in high school, but that was just Tylenol, and I’d really had a headache. That didn’t count.

  Did it?

  A shaft of sunlight dazzles the windows as I climb back into bed, praying for sleep. But to my surprise, my “heart attack” hasn’t made Tommy any less amorous. As we cuddle, his hard-on presses against my thigh. Eventually he kisses my neck and whispers, “Pilar? You still awake?”

  I turn to him wearily, wondering why we have to begin every fresh new day with an inflamed turkey neck with gizzards…

  Me and Plath.

  IV

  Jeannot and I did not go home right away after leaving the hospital, though when a doctor tells you to get some rest you should probably do it.

  Instead we drove to the beach. And the moon followed us, looming vibrantly from first one window, then another. How does the moon do that? I thought, yawning. Get so big it doesn’t look like a moon at all? I wished it would stay the same size. Act like a moon and stop swelling up.

  The strip of dunes at Carnon glowed softly in this liquid light. Jeannot left his car at the side of a road—he never seemed to use parking lots—and we threaded our way between dunes to where the Mediterranean lapped against empty sand.

  “Ah, this is what we needed,” he said, stretching his arms. “Peaceful.”

  “I have low-speed film here,” I said, patting the lump of camera in my purse. “I’m going to take pictures.”

  To the hymn of low waves, I captured the water churning over rocks; the dunes rising like breasts; the huge moon finger painting the sea. Jeannot sat on the sand watching me work. And when I finally joined him, a little breathless—but the good kind—he wrapped both arms around me, forming a kind of cocoon. We rocked back and forth, his cheek against the back of my neck. After a moment, he reached over to tap my ring.

  “Pilar. I hope that this…getting married…is not causing you stress,” he said in a voice so sweet and kind that I couldn’t believe he could do anything to cause me stress. “Because it seems that as soon as I gave it to you, you became …different.”

  So here it was: the crux of the matter, thrown onto the sand like a white glove.

  I said, “You heard the doctor. I had a panic attack. Lots of immigrants get them.”

  He nodded; I felt his chin brush against my hair. “You are sure about it, then?”

  “It” being that I’d had a panic attack? That I was immigrating to France? Or that I loved him and wanted to marry him?

  “Yes,” I said—to all three.

  He sighed like a small, contented boy.

  He believes me, I told myself with relief. My problem has nothing to do with him.

  A few minutes later, Jeannot said: “Can I tell you a story? Of a long time ago, when I was a little boy visiting my uncle?”

  “This is the uncle with the vineyard?”

  “Yes, he was sorry to not meet you on Sunday. My mother told him all about you.”

  And did your father, too?

  Jeannot leaned back on the sand, settling into storytelling mode. “It was one of those summers to change your whole life. French kids do not go to sleep-over camp, you know, like you say Americans do. But when I was eight, my parents said I could spend the summer with my uncle. Not at the vineyard. But at the farm about 20 kilometers outside Villefranche sur Lez. I would stay with my cousins and my uncle, and watch his sheep.”

  “You herded sheep?”

  “You sound so surprised. You have sheep in New York, yes?”

  “Mostly in the supermarket. In packages without the wool.”

  “Ah. Well, my uncle’s business makes wine mostly, as you know. But for a while he tried cheese. He also sold the wool as yarn and sometimes the animals for meat. I thought it was the best thing that could happen to me, staying all summer. I felt so grown up, though I rushed home to my parents every weekend.”

  I remembered being eight and seeing my father once a year. “So what happened?”

  “At first, nothing. I herded sheep in the morning and played in the afternoon. It was fantastic. I remember the hawks diving straight down like warplanes and berries you could eat off the bush.”

  “Is it difficult to control sheep?”

  “Sometimes, yes. The trouble started when I became lazy. I sneaked the herd into a neighbor's huge meadow and let them eat his grass. See, I thought I was smarter than the rules.”

  Jeannot pulled me closer. I leaned against him, closed my eyes, and traveled with him back in time.

  “The most important part of my job was to make sure the sheep did not drink immediately after eating. You see, they must keep away from the water pen until their stomachs become less full. Except one day I was not watching and the sheep entered the pen. They drank a ton of water to match the enormous quantity of grass in their stomachs, and they, ah...exploded.”

  “Exploded?” I must have heard him wrong. “Did you say the sheep exploded?”

  “Oui. Quelle horreur.”

  It wasn’t a bit funny. But a snort escaped me as I pictured a Monty Python fiasco: sheep bursting to the 1812 Overture.

  Jeannot half-smiled, half-scowled. “It was not funny, Pilar.”

  The 1812 Overture vanished. “No, of course not. I’m sorry. But why in the world would sheep…?”

  “They have no sense of when enough is enough, when it is time to stop. So there I stood, a few of them left staring in shock and this blood all over the place...legs and organs and…I believe I went a little mad. To this day, I do not remember how I got the other sheep back to Uncle’s house. The live ones, I mean.”

  “How terrible! What did you tell him?”

  “Chérie, there is not much to say when you have a bunch of dead animals in the field. I told him the truth. Then I begged him not to kill me. He almost did, you know.”

  Craning my neck, I gazed into Jeannot’s face. So he had known fear too, as a child. Fear and shame.

  “Uncle Charles beat me, for the first and last time. Then he sent me home. My parents d
id not blame him one bit. I did not blame him either. Even my little cousin knew whose fault it was. He really thought it was funny—he didn’t care about the sheep. I did. For months I dreamed about them exploding…the blood. And that was not the worst of it. I did not want to be away from my house anymore. I refused to go outside to play. For a while I believed that if I just stayed home, nothing else bad would happen.”

  “You were a little boy. That’s too much responsibility.”

  “Not if I had listened to instructions. My family forgave me after a long while. First I had to convince them I had sense—that I could respect rules and keep promises. That was my punishment: they did not trust me. I did not trust myself. Papa had to drag me to soccer games. I was afraid I would destroy whatever I touched.”

  I said again, “Poor kid. “

  “I never told anyone outside the family about those sheep. It is not the kind of thing to share with a woman. But I wanted you to know.”

  Was this, then, Jeannot’s worst secret? I didn’t know why he’d chosen to share it tonight of all nights, but I felt grateful for his generosity.

  In our cocoon on the beach, we slowly gravitated together. His muscles felt both hard and fragile under my fingers, like violin strings. Touching Jeannot’s face in the moon-glow, I marveled at his eyelashes, pale and much longer than any man had a right to have. Sometimes, like tonight, he reminded me of a child trapped in a man’s body. Or a man who had a child behind him, sheltered behind his back, so that he could shift easily and fearlessly to and from innocence to maturity to lust, then back to innocence.

  Jeannot wasn’t like me. As a little girl, I used to put my beads and marbles and shells in different shaped containers and shut the lids tight. I didn’t like to mix things up; to this day I found it hard to blend lust with love with friendship with day-to-day reality. I pretended to. Sometimes I succeeded. But it was never easy: never quite a good fit.

  And yet tonight...tonight Jeannot's skin felt so warm and welcoming. I caressed his neck, his Adam's apple, his chest. He kissed me so hard I forgot to think. Sand flew. We rolled on the ground laughing. The muggy air felt embracing; who needed clothes? On a French beach, no less.