Love and Ordinary Creatures Read online

  How could she say such a thing? he thinks, his yellow crest falling.

  “Did I say something wrong?” she asks, reaching out to stroke his head.

  He senses the love coming from her fingers, seeping through his feathers, her affection growing bigger and stronger with each caress of her warm flesh against his skin. Her love is so great now his small body can no longer contain it, and it oozes from him, filling up their cozy cottage, spilling from the windows and into the sandy yard. There, it flows freely around white oleander bushes and flagged red cedars before whirling down Fig Tree Lane, pouring into Silver Lake Harbor, and drifting out to sea—away from Ocracoke Island.

  “Mama will make you feel better,” she says.

  Mama, he thinks, the insult jerking him from his reverie.

  No, he objects, with an indignant shiver. She is not his mother. She is his goddess. His dazzling Eclectus Parrot, with her sapphire-blue eyes and her velvet head of red. She was his fantasy before the world was dreamed and formed—his chimera, when there was no word for yesterday, no word for tomorrow. She was his present on a huge continent, insulated by an ocean of water, that kept the language of regret and expectation at bay. She has been his beloved—now, always, and forever.

  Two

  Perched in his cage, Caruso casts his eyes through the long, wide row of windows and sees the green-striped tote bag bobbing in the wire basket above the bicycle’s front wheel. He follows her breasts, rising and falling like buoys in deep water, as she pedals down the rutted driveway—her white, untanned legs an anomaly on Ocracoke Island during the hot blaze of July.

  After her nap, she had bathed, her skin smelling of lavender and soap, then wiggled into a short, V-shaped white skirt and an Indian-print halter top of yellow and green amoebas. “Is it tied high enough?” she asked, slipping on a pair of orange flip-flops that matched the orange polish on her toenails.

  “Beautiful Clarissa,” he said, inhaling the perfume of her. Although his sense of smell is not as acute as his other senses, he can always detect her fragrance. “I don’t trust you, Caruso. I don’t mind looking like a hippie chef from the sixties, but I don’t want to be jiggling around town.” Whipping her deep red curls upward, she clipped them on top of her head. “I’m gonna get us some treats,” she said. “Then we’ll go to the beach.” Giggling, she had dashed through the sunroom and out the kitchen door.

  “Caruso, I love you!” she called out, blowing him a good-bye kiss over her shoulder, the silver clasp in her hair catching the sun, sending it back to him like a gift.

  “Clarissa,” he says wistfully, when she is out of view. He misses her already—craves her shimmering eyes, the color of the Tasman Sea; her bronze-red curls, the shade of the coppery-hued butterfly from Cairns; her luminous skin, as milky white as the pearls of Broome. And this deep yearning that swells in him just now makes him hunger for the equanimity he had felt during his years with the old man.

  For back then, he had been a voyeur only, witnessing the vicissitudes of Theodore Pinter’s obsessive love, not suffering, as he is at this moment, from his own obsessive love for Clarissa. On the perch in his cage near the study window, he had observed the real and surreal nature of the old man’s world. “I moved back into my childhood home because from here I can see Olivia clearly,” he had revealed. “She is my whole life again, same as she was when we were young, growing up in these two houses side by side. In those days, she filled the empty spaces in my heart, which my shyness with others had created. Years later, it was Greensboro Academy, with its tidy campus and ready-made community of friends, that made my life easier. And, oh yes, I would date other women,” he said when Caruso puffed out the feathers around his face and cocked his head questioningly. “There was a private school for girls down the road from the academy, and I halfheartedly went out with a few of the teachers there. Trudy Fenton was one of them. She taught biology. A cute gal, she was, with strawberry-blonde hair and a mass of freckles. I liked her. Yes,” he said, pensively nodding his head, “I can honestly say that. She had so many admirable qualities. Smart, sensitive, passionate. And she loved birds.”

  Caruso clucked softly at the old man. “In fact, she knew everything about them—could mimic their calls, describe their migration patterns in detail, could tell you what they ate, if they were monogamous, how they raised their young. She had an old crow named Merlin. When he was but a chick, she had rescued him—fallen from his nest, into the high grass, after an awful storm. His parents were nowhere. ‘Probably dead,’ she had said, ‘because crows are good parents. They don’t abandon their young.’ So she took him home and raised him.”

  He paused for a moment, his eyes glazed in thought. “She’s the one, Caruso,” he said, his voice suddenly jubilant, “who introduced me to the joys and difficulties of owning a bird, and although I liked her immensely, I just couldn’t love her the way she deserved to be loved. What does a man do when his heart simply isn’t in it? A woman can intuit this lack of sincerity in him. Regardless of how hard he tries, she can see the truth. Trudy knew what I was doing—comparing her to someone else, concluding that she didn’t measure up. Even in a lifetime of effort, she could never be the woman I thought Olivia was.”

  He grew quiet again for a second, rubbing the underside of his neck. “Poor Olivia,” he said, with meaning. “To be worshiped, like I worship her, is a burden. What a heavy weight for a woman to carry. One false step, she probably feared, would send her tumbling down my mountain of idolatry into the flat land of ordinary folk. No woman wants to be a queen forever. Certainly not my Olivia. But I can’t help the way I feel about her. She is royalty, my queen eternally, and I always hope she’ll choose me to be her king one day. Choose me,” he repeated in a faraway voice. “How can she not, when I so adore her? But look, Caruso,” he said excitedly, cutting his monologue short, pointing at the long, narrow pane of beveled glass.

  Caruso followed the length of the old man’s strong, tapered finger—his gaze sailing over the shady side yard, twenty feet wide, before spotting a figure passing in front of the window of the house next door.

  “Did you see her?” he asked, turning toward Caruso.

  Caruso erected his yellow crest of feathers, rocking on his perch.

  Theodore Pinter half-closed his bespectacled eyes and recited, tapping the air with his index finger every time he stressed a word:

  She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes...

  Sighing, he shifted back to the window. “She’s still beautiful, isn’t she?” he said, grimacing as he leaned forward, pressing his hand firmly against the sill, pushing through the pain in his back, the result of a car wreck several years ago.

  An old hen, Caruso thought, with a dismissive flick of his head, but seconds later, when she passed by the window again, he saw her in a different light. Her head high, her chin up, her back straight, she put him in mind of a proud cockatoo displaying, and he was enchanted by the sight.

  “Olivia Greenaway taught ballroom dancing,” Theodore Pinter continued. “You can see it in the elegant way she carries herself. Dancing was just one of the many things we had in common. Whenever I danced with her, I forgot about my shyness. I was lean, lithe, and graceful, just like Fred Astaire, but while dancing was only a hobby for me, it was Olivia’s passion. She kept taking classes—through junior high, high school, and college, long after I quit—and she was a rising star in the ballroom scene before she married him,” he said, bitterly stressing the last word.

  Gracefully, Olivia lowered herself into an overstuffed chair facing them. Then, extending her long neck, like a Goffin Cockatoo’s, she stretched sideways and retrieved a large book from off the end table to her left.

  “What could she be reading today?” Theodore Pinter mused when she flipped open the pages.

  Often, Caruso couldn’t distinguish the ol
d man’s attempts at conversation from his spoken thoughts.

  “I’ll fetch the binoculars,” he said giddily. Wheeling around, Theodore Pinter moved vibrantly across the pine floor, stepping not with overt energy but with an intensity fueled by his emotions, and Caruso knew that, despite the physical discomfort in his back, his legs remained strong and undefeated. For when he was young, he had played soccer passionately for a small neighborhood team, and his thighs and calves, even in old age, were firm and sturdy.

  From off the top of a long row of white cabinets—surmounted by a high wall of bookshelves—he grabbed a pair of black binoculars, slipped off his wire-rimmed glasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket, and retraced his steps. He removed the eyecups from the lenses and placed them on the desk behind him. Positioning the apertures against his eyes, he covered the right lens with his hand.

  “The left is clear and sharp,” he pronounced after rotating the focusing wheel for several seconds. Next, he covered the left front lens with his palm and turned the right eyepiece. “Clear,” he said, taking a quick step forward, tightly clutching the field glasses with both hands, holding aloft his pinkies. “It’s The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson again,” he said. “Same as I, she feels a strong kinship to the woman in white. We read her poems to each other when we were young. Emily, too, had a secret love, and although she led a quiet life, she lived every moment of it loudly. Now, what poem of hers is she reading?”

  He toyed with the focusing wheels some more, inched closer to the window, then stepped back. “Dammit,” he said peevishly. “If she’d just lay the book on her lap, I could make out the number, even upside down. You see, Caruso, the poems have numbers instead of titles,” he added, with a glance over his shoulder. He swiveled back to the window. “Sometimes, Olivia reads them aloud—so, sometimes, I just frame her mouth,” he whispered, tilting forward.

  Caruso heard his breaths coming in short, quick spurts, as he readjusted the focus. “She’s licking her index finger…” he murmured. “Turning the pages. Please!” A high cry, like that of a cardinal whistling a glissando, emanated from his throat. “Please!” he groaned, the pinkies beside his face drooping with disappointment, but then they rose up again, like the wings of a finch in flight. “Ah, Caruso, we’re in luck,” he said. “At last, her lovely lips are moving.”

  Caruso’s heart thumped restlessly against his breast. As he read her lips, Theodore Pinter paused between the words, savoring each of them.

  Of Being is a Bird

  The likest to the Down

  “I know it by heart,” he said, lowering the binoculars, closing his eyelids.

  An Easy Breeze do put afloat

  The General Heavens—upon—

  It soars—and shifts—and whirls—

  And measures with the Clouds

  In easy—even—dazzling pace—

  No different the Birds—

  Blinking open his eyes, he stared longingly at Olivia Greenaway through the window.

  Except a Wake of Music

  Accompany their feet—

  As did the Down emit a Tune—

  For Ecstasy—of it

  He finished, his voice circling high, like a raptor, in the passionate heat of Dickinson’s words.

  “Caruso, I’m home!” Clarissa yells as the back door slams shut.

  Lost in thought, he’d missed her pedaling by the sunroom windows. He hears the tote bag plopping on the kitchen worktable.

  “Pretty bird,” she sings, sashaying beneath the archway toward him. He squawks with joy as she unlatches the cage door. He ruffles the feathers on his neck and bows his head. She obliges by scratching him there. “Did you miss me?” she asks, presenting her arm to him. At once, he is on her shoulder. She returns to the worktable. “Grapes from Styron’s,” she says, nodding at the tote bag. She taps her fingertips against the tabletop, and he descends. “Smart bird,” she praises him. “Smart bird.”

  She doesn’t have to tell him he’s smart. He already knows it.

  Before Clarissa took him home with her, he had shown the pet store staff just how smart he was. Every cage they locked him into, he broke out of. They timed him. In under five minutes, he opened a belt hook. Could even pick a combination lock because he remembered the rolling and tumbling sound of the clicks. Desperate, they wired his cage shut, but once more he broke out. Houdini, they nicknamed him, but he would only answer to Caruso. As a last resort, they had placed a metal plate over a wire-shield lock, making it impossible for him to escape.

  “From California,” she says, thrusting her hands into the tote bag, bringing up a bunch of white grapes. She plunks them in front of his feet and shoves in her hands again. “More,” she announces, grinning flirtatiously at him. “For you—only,” she states forcefully, setting down two pomegranates. “I don’t like them. They’re way too tart for me, like those baby gherkins Granny used to put up. Everything else she canned was tasty, but not those pickles. I pretended to fancy them, but I couldn’t fool her. I’d crunch into one, my lips pulling downward, and she’d say, ‘No blue ribbons for me, if you was the judge.’ I prefer sweet, not sour,” she says, screwing up her pretty mouth, looking so funny he can’t help but screech. “Shush,” she warns him, pressing a finger against her lips. “The neighbors.”

  Immediately, he silences himself.

  “Some s…e…e…d…s,” she says, the letters sizzling in her throat as she draws out the word. Holding up a small brown paper bag, she rattles the seeds inside it. He loves seeds of all kinds. In the wild, he was first and foremost a seed eater. She places the paper bag on the table. “And something special for you to gnaw on,” she announces victoriously, a pinecone dangling from her fingers, “’cause I know how bored you get in your cage when I leave you here alone.”

  Pinecone in hand, she heads for the doorway. He chuckles like a kookaburra while she’s out of sight, gauges her distance from him by the loudness of her flip-flops as they smack against the linoleum tile. He does what the kookaburra does. He lets loose a chuckle that asks her where she is. The click of the cage door, as she unlatches it, is her answer. I’m in here, the click says. In here, the click repeats when she closes the door again. He keeps chuckling to her and doesn’t stop until she returns to the kitchen.

  “Are you pretending to be a kookaburra?” she asks.

  He squawks softly, emitting another kookaburra call.

  “Nope…I don’t wanna hear that,” she says, planting her large hands on her hips. “I wanna hear the laugh song.”

  Two weeks ago, she’d read a new book about kookaburras to him, sending him back to the first time he heard the kingfisher’s distinctive laugh. It was dawn, and his mother had just fed him when the ear-shattering chorus began. How happy their song had made him! So, from then on, he anticipated their singing in the early hours of every morning and evening. One dusk, though, it was not music that filled his ears but an angry cackling. Looking around, he spotted two male kookaburras, teetering on a perch, fighting for dominance. With their beaks entangled, they furiously punched the air with their wings. Then, unexpectedly, another family of kookaburras, who lived in an adjoining territory, burst forth with their evening chorus. At once, both of them quit boxing. Reverently, they listened to the music as if they had—at that very moment—been given the gift of awareness, as if they finally understood that the spirit animals—the creators of the rocks, mountains, and trees—were uniting them all in peace. As soon as their neighbors’ laugh song was over, the two opponents—with their heads thrown back and their beaks still locked together—began to sing, as did the other members of their family. Nevertheless, when the round of singing was finished, they resumed their sparring and fought as vigorously as they had before.

  Displaying his yellow crest, Caruso belts out the boisterous laugh—beginning with its low chuckle of ooos, rising to the loud series of ha-ha-has, and ending with two chuckle notes.

  Clarissa claps her hands and giggles. “Very good,” she compli
ments him. “Would you like me to sing the kookaburra song for you?”

  He rocks forward and bounces on the worktable’s worn wooden top.

  “Okay,” she says, swallowing a mouthful of air before beginning. She sings:

  Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree.

  Merry, merry king of the bush is he.

  Laugh, kookaburra. Laugh, kookaburra.

  Gay your life must be.

  When finished, she mimes him a kiss. “How about a bath before you eat?” she says, seizing the grapes and raising her lovely forearm. Eagerly, he steps up. “Down,” she tells him when they come to the sink. The porcelain feels cool against his feet. She grabs a cobalt-blue bowl from the cupboard, sets it on the counter, and turns on the water. She rinses off the grapes, water tickling his toes. She nestles the fruit in the bowl, then uncoils the sprayer’s hose and presses down on the lever.

  “You’re my sweet, smart boy,” she says as the water showers over him, washing the powder dust off his feathers. “This is how my granny used to bathe me when I was a little girl,” she goes on. “She’d set me in the tub and cut on the water. There was a rubber shower hose hooked to the spigot, and when the water was just right—as warm as milk from a baby’s bottle—she’d shower me with it, then soap me down. She made her own soap and was proud of it. I remember how she’d lean over the side of the tub, pucker up her lips, and blow at the bubbles on my arm. Up, they’d fly, disperse, and disappear. Boy, did she scrub me hard! Probably why my skin is so soft now.” With an infectious laugh, she douses his neck and crown of gold.

  Playful, he fluffs out his cheek feathers and hoots back at her.

  “I love you, too,” she says as she twists off the water.

  He flutters his wings and shimmies.

  “I’m your guardian,” she says, quoting from one of the parrot books she has read to him many times over. “Your patron, your mentor—not your jailor.”