Personal Matter Read online

  You can’t let yourself feel consoled by this phony restitution, not even for as long as a flickering in your brain—Bird admonished himself in the manner of a moralist. Yet his relief after the vomiting and the relative silence of the demons in his belly, albeit that could not last long, made for the first tolerable minutes Bird had spent since opening his eyes. He had a class to teach today, and there would be forms to complete at the hospital for the baby who was probably dead by now. Bird would contact his mother-in-law about the baby’s death and he would have to discuss with her when to inform his wife. It was a hell of a schedule. And here I am in my girlfriend’s bathroom, slumped against the toilet in a daze with my strength all puked away. It was preposterous! And yet Bird was not afraid; in fact, the present half-hour of helplessness and utter irresponsibility tasted sweetly of self-salvation. Crumpled on the floor as he was, aware only of the smarting in his nose and throat, Bird was a kind of brother to the baby on the verge of death. My only saving grace is that I don’t bawl the way a baby does. Not that my behavior isn’t ten times as disgraceful. …

  Had it been possible, Bird would have elected to hurl himself into the toilet as he pulled the chain and thus be flushed with a roar of water down into a sewery hell. Instead he spat once, moved away from the toilet reluctantly, and opened the glass door. At that moment he had forgotten about Himiko somehow, but as soon as he placed one bare foot in the bedroom he knew that she was wide awake and had pictured to herself the little drama in the toilet and the peculiar silence that had followed. The girl lay on the floor as before, but Bird could see in the fine powder of light sifting through a crack where the curtains met that her eyes, while darkly shadowed from corner to corner, were open wide. He had no choice but to scurry around her feet like a mouse, heading for his shirt and pants at the foot of the bed. Meanwhile, Himiko would probably stare with eyes opaque as open camera lenses at his flaccid belly and sinewy thighs.

  “Did you hear me vomiting like a dog in there?” Bird asked in a timid voice.

  “Like a dog? You don’t often hear a dog with such terrific volume,” Himiko said in a voice still fogged with sleep, gazing at Bird as if to inspect him, her quiet eyes wide.

  “This was a St. Bernard as big as a cow,” Bird said in disappointment.

  “It sounded bad—are you through?”

  “Yes, for now.” Bird wobbled toward the bed, trampling Himiko’s legs so badly on the way that she cried out in protest, and finally managed to reach his pants. “But I’m sure I’ll be sick again sometime this morning; it always happens that way. I haven’t been drinking for a while, and hangovers have stayed away from me, so this may be the worst one of my life. Now that I think about it, it was trying to polish off a hangover with a little hair of the dog that started me circling in endless alcoholic orbit.” Bird tried for a droll effect by exaggerating the mournfulness in his voice, but he ended on a bitter, introspective note.

  “Why not try the same again?”

  “I can’t afford to be drunk today.”

  “Lemon juice will perk you up; there are some lemons in the kitchen.”

  Bird peered into the kitchen obediently. In the sink, stabbed by a ray of light right out of the Flemish school that cut into the kitchen through a pane of frosted glass, a dozen pell-mell lemons glistened with such rawness that the nerves of Bird’s weakened stomach quaked at the sight of them.

  “Do you always buy so many lemons?” Having struggled frantically into his pants and buttoned his shirt up to the neck, Bird was in possession of himself again.

  “It depends, Bird,” Himiko replied with terrific indifference, as if she were trying to impress on Bird the boredom of his question. Bird, rattled again, “When did you get back, anyway? Did you drive around in that MG until dawn?” Instead of answering, Himiko merely stared at him mockingly, so Bird hurried to add, as if the report were crucial: “Two friends of yours came around in the middle of the night. One seemed to be just a boy and the other was a middle-aged gentleman with a head like an egg; I got a look at him from behind the curtain. But I didn’t say hello.”

  “Say hello? Naturally, you didn’t have to,” said Himiko, unmoved. Bird took his wristwatch out of his jacket pocket and checked the time—nine o’clock. His class began at ten. A cram-school instructor brave enough to stay home without notifying the office or to show up late for a class would have to be quite a man. Bird was neither so dauntless nor so dim of wit. He tied his necktie by feel.

  “I’ve been to bed with each of them a few times and they think that gives them the right to come over here in the middle of the night. The young one is a freaky type; he’s not specially interested in just the two of us sleeping together; his dream is to be around when I’m in bed with someone else so that he can help out. He always waits until somebody is with me here and then he comes around. Even though he’s fantastically jealous!”

  “Have you given him the chance he’s looking for?”

  “Certainly not!” Himiko snapped. “That boy has a thing for adults like you; if you ever got together he’d do everything he could to please you. Bird, I bet you’ve had that kind of service lots of times before. Weren’t there boys below you in college who worshiped you? And there must be students in your classes who are particularly devoted. I’ve always thought of you as a hero figure for kids in that kind of sub-culture.”

  Bird shook his head in denial and went into the kitchen. He realized as the soles of his feet touched the chilly wooden floor that he had not put on his socks, and wasn’t that going to be a chore! If he put pressure on his stomach when he bent over to look for his socks he might throw up again. Bird winced. But it felt good to tread the floor in bare feet, and grasping a lemon with wet fingers while water from the tap pummeled his hands was pleasurable too, if only mildly. Bird selected a large lemon, cut it in half, and squeezed the juice into his mouth. A sensation of recovery he remembered well dropped cold and tingly with lemon juice from his throat toward his tyrannized stomach. Bird returned to the bedroom and began looking for his socks, carefully holding himself straight up.

  “That lemon really seems to have done the job,” he said to Himiko gratefully.

  “You may vomit again but this time it’ll taste of lemon; it might be nice.”

  “Thanks a lot for the encouragement.” Bird watched the contentment the juice had brought him scatter like mist before a wind.

  “What are you looking for? You look like a bear hunting a crab.”

  “My socks,” Bird murmured; his bare feet struck him as ridiculous.

  “In your shoes, so you can put them on together when you leave.”

  Bird looked down at Himiko doubtfully as she lay on the floor in her blanket and supposed this was the custom here whenever one of her lovers bundled into bed. She probably took the precaution so that her friends could flee the house in their bare feet with their shoes in hand if a bigger and wilder lover should appear.

  “I’d better be going,” Bird said. “I have two classes this morning. Thanks a lot for last night and this morning.”

  “Will you come again? Bird, it’s possible we may need each other.”

  If suddenly a mute had screamed, Bird would not have been more astonished. Himiko was looking up at him with her thick eyelids lowered and her brow creased.

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we do need each other.”

  Like an explorer tramping marsh country, Bird made his way in trepidation over thorny stems and scratchy bits of wire through the darkness of the living room; and when finally he bent forward in the vestibule, he hurried into his socks and shoes, afraid that nausea might set in.

  “So long,” Bird called. “Sleep well!” Himiko was silent as a stone.

  Bird stepped outside. A summer morning filled with light as sharp as vinegar. As Bird passed the scarlet MG, he noticed the key in the ignition switch. One of these days a thief would make off with the car with no trouble at all. The thought saddened him. Himiko! How could such a diligent, c
areful, and astute co-ed have been transformed into this flawed personality? The girl had married only to have her young husband kill himself, and now, after the catharsis of racing her car far into the night, she saw dreams that made her moan in terror.

  Bird started to take the key out of the switch. But if he returned to the room where his friend lay in the darkness, frowning in silence with her eyes shut tight, getting back outside again promised to be difficult. Bird let go of the key, and looked around; there were no car thieves lurking in the vicinity, he consoled himself, at least not at the moment. On the ground next to one of the spoke wheels was a cigar butt. That little man with an egg for a head must have dropped it there last night. The group looking after Himiko on more intimate terms than Bird was certain to be large in number.

  Bird shook his head roughly and took a few deep breaths, trying to defend himself against the crawfish of his hangover, armored in a host of threats. But he was unable to rid himself of a bludgeoned feeling, and he stepped out of the glistening alley with his head bowed.

  Nonetheless, Bird cunningly managed to hold up all the way to and through the school gate. There was the street, the platform, then the train. Worst was the train, but Bird survived the vibrations and the odor of other bodies despite his parched throat. Of all the passengers in the car, Bird alone was sweating, as if full summer had rushed in to occupy the square yard around him only. People who brushed bodies with him all turned back to stare suspiciously. Bird could only cringe and, like a pig that had glutted a crate of lemons, exhale citric breath. His eyes restlessly roamed the car, searching for a spot to which he could dash in case of an urgent need to vomit.

  When he finally arrived at the school gate without having been sick to his stomach, Bird felt like an old soldier exhausted by a long retreat from battle. But the worst was still to come. The enemy had circled and lay in wait ahead.

  Bird took a reader and a chalk box out of his locker. He glanced at the Concise Oxford Dictionary on top of the shelf, but today it looked too heavy to carry all the way to class. And there were several students in his class whose knowledge of idioms and rules of grammar far exceeded his own. If he encountered a word he had never seen, or a difficult phrase, he would only have to call on one of them. The heads of Bird’s students were so crammed with knowledge of details they were as complicated as hyper-evolved clams: the minute they tried to perceive a problem integrally, the mechanism tangled in itself and stalled. It was accordingly Bird’s job to integrate and summarize the entire meaning of a passage. Yet he was in constant doubt close to an incombustible fixation about whether his classes were of any use when it came to college entrance examinations.

  Hoping to avoid his department chairman, a personable, keen-eyed University of Michigan graduate who had risen, it was clear, from the foreign student elite, Bird stepped outside through a rear exit, avoiding the elevator in the teachers’ lounge, and started up the spiral stairs that clung like ivy to the outside wall. Not daring to look down at the prospect unfolding below him gradually, barely enduring the swaying of the stairs like the motion of a rolling ship produced by students pounding past him: pale, panting, belching with a groan every step or two of the way. So slowly did Bird climb that students overtaking him, dismayed for an instant by their own speed, stopped short and peered into his face, hesitated, then raced on again, shaking the iron stairs. Bird sighed, his head swimming, and clung to the iron railing. …

  What a relief to reach the top of the stairs! and then someone called his name and Bird’s uneasiness returned. It was a friend who was helping sponsor a Slavic languages study group that Bird had formed with some other interpreters. But since Bird had all he could do at the moment playing cat-and-mouse with his hangover, meeting someone he had not expected struck him as a terrific nuisance. He closed himself like a shellfish under attack.

  “Hey—Bird!” his friend called: the nickname was still valid in any situation, for all categories of friend. “I’ve been calling since last night but I couldn’t get you. So I thought I’d come over—”

  “Oh?” said Bird, unsociably.

  “Have you heard the news about Mr. Delchef?”

  “News?” Bird repeated, feeling vaguely apprehensive. Mr. Delchef was an attaché in the legation from a small socialist state in the Balkans and the study group’s instructor.

  “Apparently he’s moved in with a Japanese girl and won’t go back to the legation. They say it’s been a week. The legation wants to keep things in the family and bring Mr. Delchef back themselves, but they’ve only been here a little while and, well, they’re short of people. The girl lives in the slummiest part of Shinjuku, it’s like a maze in there; there just isn’t anyone at the legation who gets around well enough to search for strays in a neighborhood like that. That’s where we come in: the legation has asked the study group to help out. Of course, we’re partly responsible for the whole thing anyway—”

  “Responsible?”

  “Mr. Delchef met her at that bar we took him to after a meeting, you know, the Pullman Car.” Bird’s friend snickered. “Don’t you remember that small, peculiar, pasty-faced girl?”

  Bird recalled her right away, a small, peculiar, pasty-faced girl. “But she didn’t speak English or any Slavic language and Mr. Delchef’s Japanese is no good at all—how do they get along?”

  “That’s the hell of it; how do you suppose they spent a whole week, clammed up, or what?” The friend seemed embarrassed by his own innuendo.

  “What will happen if Mr. Delchef doesn’t go back to the legation? Will that make him a defector or something?”

  “You can bet it will!”

  “He’s really asking for trouble, Mr. Delchef—” Bird said glumly.

  “We’d like to call a meeting of the study group and think it over. Are you free tonight?”

  “Tonight?—” Bird was nonplused. “—I—can’t make it tonight.”

  “But you were closer than any of us to Mr. Delchef. If we decide to send an envoy from the study group, we were hoping you’d agree to go—”

  “An envoy—anyway, I couldn’t possibly make it tonight,” Bird said. Then he forced himself to add: “We had a child but there was something wrong and he’s either dead already or dying right now.”

  “God!” Bird’s friend exclamed, wincing. Above their heads the bell began to ring.

  “That’s awful, really awful. Listen, we’ll manage without you tonight. And try not to let it get the best of you—is your wife all right?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “When we decide what to do about Mr. Delchef, I’ll get in touch. God, you look run down—take care of yourself—”

  “Thank you.”

  Bird, watching his friend flounce down the spiral stairs in reckless haste, as though he were running away, was angry with himself for having kept silent about his hangover. Bird went into his classroom. And just for a second he was confronting one hundred fly-head faces. Then he lowered his gaze as though reflexively; wary of lifting his head again and looking his students in the face, and holding the reader and the chalk box in front of his chest like weapons of self-defense, he stepped up to the lectern.

  Classtime! Bird opened the reader at the bookmark to the passage at which he had stopped the week before, without any notion of what it was. He began to read aloud, and he realized right away that it was a paragraph from Hemingway. The reader was a large collection of short passages from modern American literature, chosen by the department chairman because he happened to like them and because each was mined with grammatical traps. Hemingway! Bird was encouraged. He liked Hemingway, especially The Green Hills of Africa. The passage in the reader was from The Sun Also Rises, a scene near the end when the hero goes for a swim in the ocean. The narrator swims out beyond the breakers, taking a dunking now and then, and when he reaches the offing where the water is calm, he turns over on his back and floats. All he can see is sky, and beneath him he feels the rise of the swell and the fall. …


  In the depths of his body, Bird felt the beginning of an irrepressible and certain crisis. His throat went utterly dry; his tongue swelled in his mouth like a foreign body. Bird submerged in the amniotic fluid of fear. But he continued to read aloud, glancing like a sick weasel, craftily and feebly, at the door. Could he make it in time if he charged in that direction? But how much better to ride the crisis out without having to make a run for it. Hoping to take his mind off his stomach, Bird tried to place the paragraph he was reading in context. The hero lay around on the beach and went in for another swim. When he returned to the hotel, a telegram was waiting from his mistress, who had run off with a young bullfighter. Bird tried to remember the telegram: COULD YOU COME HOTEL MONTANA MADRID AM RATHER IN TROUBLE BRETT.

  Yes, that sounded right: and he had remembered it easily. It’s a good omen, of all the telegrams I’ve ever read, this was the most appealing. I should be able to overcome the nausea—more a prayer than a thought. Bird continued to reconstruct: the hero dives into the ocean with his eyes open and sees something green oozing along the bottom. If that appears in this passage, I’ll make it through without throwing up. It’s a magic spell. Bird went on: “I” came out of the water, returned to the hotel, and picked up his telegram. It was just as Bird had remembered it: COULD YOU COME HOTEL MONTANA MADRID AM RATHER IN TROUBLE BRETT.