A Personal Matter (16 page)

An unconfident Bird turned a guilty eye back to the bed and saw that his wife had tightly shut her eyes. He looked down at her face and wondered uneasily if a sense of everyday balance would be restored to it; the flesh of the eyelids was wasted, the wings of the nose were swollen, and the lips seemed large out of all proportion. His wife lay motionless, with her eyes closed; she seemed to be falling asleep. All of a sudden a whole river of tears spilled from beneath her closed lids. “Just as the baby was born I heard the nurse cry ‘Oh!’ So I suspected that something must have been wrong. But then I heard the Director laughing happily, or I thought I did, it got so I couldn’t tell what was real and what was a dream—when I came to, the baby had already been taken away in an ambulance.” She spoke with her eyes closed.

That hairy Director son of a bitch! Anger clogged Bird’s throat. He had made such an uproar with his giggling that a patient under anesthesia had heard him; if he has a habit of doing that when he’s astonished, I’ll lie for him in the dark with a lead pipe and make the cocksucker laugh his head off! But Bird’s rage was that of a child’s, limited to a moment. He knew he would never grip a club of any kind, never lie in wait in any darkness. He had to acknowledge that he had lost the self-esteem essential to rebuking someone else.

“I brought you some grapefruit,” Bird said in a voice that asked forgiveness.

“Grapefruit! Why?” his wife challenged. Bird realized his mistake immediately.

“Damn! I forgot you always hated the smell of grapefruit,” he said, stumbling into self-disgust. “But why would I have gone out of my way to buy grapefruit of all things?”

“Probably because you weren’t really thinking of me or the baby, either. Bird, do you ever think seriously of anyone but yourself? Didn’t we even argue about grapefruit when we were planning the menu at the wedding dinner? Really, Bird, how could you have forgotten?”

Bird shook his head in impotence. Then he fled from the hysteria that was gradually tightening his wife’s eyes and turned to stare at his
mother-in-law, still transmitting signals from the cramped niche between the bed and the wall. His eyes implored her for help.

“I was trying to buy some fruit and I had this feeling that grapefruit meant something special to us. So I bought some, without even thinking what it was that made them special. What shall I do with them?”

Bird had gone to the fruit store with Himiko, and there was no doubting that her presence had cast its shadow on the something special he had felt. From now on, Bird thought, Himiko’s shadow would be falling heavily on the details of his life.

“You must have known I can’t be in the same room with even one grapefruit; the smell irritates me terribly,” Bird’s wife gave chase. Bird wondered apprehensively if she hadn’t detected Himiko’s shadow already.

“Why don’t you take the whole bag down to the nurses’ office?” As his mother-in-law spoke, she flashed Bird a new signal. The light filtering through the lush greenery in the window at her back ringed her deeply sunken eyes and the spatulate sides of her soaring nose with a quivering, greenish halo. Bird finally understood: this radium spook of a mother-in-law was trying to tell him that she would be waiting in the corridor when he returned from the nurses’ office.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Is the office downstairs?”

“Next to the clinic waiting room,” she said with a long look at Bird.

Bird stepped into the dusky corridor with the bag of grapefruit under his arm. Even as he walked along, the fruit began discharging its bouquet; it seemed to infuse his face and chest with particles of fragrance. Bird reflected that the smell of grapefruit could actually provoke an attack in some asthmatics. Bird thought about his wife lying peevishly abed and that woman with green halos in the hollows of her eyes, flagging signals like the poses in a Kabuki dance. And what about himself, toying with the relationship between asthma and grapefruit! It was all an act, a bad play, only the baby with the lump on its head was for real: only the baby gradually wasting away on a diet of sugar-water instead of milk. But why sugar the water? It was one thing to deprive the baby of milk, but to flavor the substitute in any way, didn’t that make the whole nasty business more like a contemptible trick?

Bird presented the bag of grapefruit to some off-duty nurses and started to introduce himself; suddenly, as if the stuttering that had afflicted him as a schoolboy had returned, he found himself unable to
get out a single word. Rattled, he bowed in silence and hurried away. Behind him the nurses’ bright laughter rose. It’s all an act, phony, why did everything have to be so unreal? Scowling, his breath coming hard, Bird climbed the steps three at a time and passed the infants’ ward warily, afraid he might carelessly glance inside.

In front of a service kitchen for the use of relatives and companions of the patients, a kettle in one hand, Bird’s mother-in-law was standing proudly erect. Bird, approaching, saw around the woman’s eyes instead of a halo of light sifted through green leaves an emptiness so wretched it made him shudder. Then he noticed that her erectness had nothing to do with pride: exhaustion and despair had robbed her body of its natural suppleness.

They kept the conversation simple, one eye on the door to Bird’s wife’s room fifteen feet away. When Bird’s mother-in-law confirmed that the baby was not dead, she said, reproachfully, “Can’t you arrange for things to be taken care of right away? If that child ever sees the baby, she’ll go mad!”

Bird, threatened, was silent.

“If only there was a doctor in the family,” the woman said with a lonely sigh.

We’re a pack of vermin, Bird thought, a loathsome league of self-defenders. Nonetheless he delivered his report, his voice hushed, wary of the patients who might be crouching like mute crickets behind the closed doors that lined the corridor, their ears aflame with curiosity: “The baby’s milk is being decreased and he’s getting a sugar-water substitute. The doctor in charge said we should be seeing results in a few days.”

As he finished, Bird saw the miasma that had enveloped his mother-in-law vanish utterly. Already the kettle of water seemed a weight too heavy for her arm. She nodded slowly and, in a thin, helpless voice, as if she wanted badly to go to sleep, “Oh, I see. Yes, I see. When this is all over, we’ll keep the baby’s sickness a secret between us.”

“Yes,” Bird promised, without mentioning that he had spoken to his father-in-law already.

“Otherwise, my little girl will never agree to have another child, Bird.”

Bird nodded; but his almost physical revulsion for the woman merely
heightened. His mother-in-law went into the kitchen now, and Bird returned to his wife’s room alone. But wouldn’t she see through a ruse this simple? It was all playacting, and every character in this particular play was a dissembler.

Bird knew by the face his wife turned to him as he stepped into the room that the hysteria about the grapefruit was forgotten. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re all worn down,” his wife said, extending abruptly an affectionate hand and touching Bird’s cheek.

“I am—”

“You’ve begun to look like a sewer rat that wants to scurry into a hole.” The slap caught him unawares. “Is that so?” he said with a bitterness on his tongue, “like a sewer rat?”

“Mother is afraid you’ll start drinking again, that special way you have, no limits, night and day—”

Bird recalled the sensations of protracted drunkenness, the flushed head and the parched throat, belly aching, body of lead, the fingers numb and the brain whisky-logged and slack. Weeks of life as a cave dweller enclosed in whisky walls.

“If you did start drinking again you’d end up dead drunk and no good to anybody just when our baby really needed you. You would, Bird.”

“I’ll never drink that way again,” Bird said. It was true that the tiger of a ferocious hangover had sunk its teeth in him, but he had torn himself away without recourse to more liquor. But how would it have been if Himiko hadn’t helped? Would he have begun once again to drift on that dark and agonizing sea tens of hours wide? He wasn’t sure, and not being able to mention Himiko made it difficult to convince his wife of his power to resist the whisky lure.

“I very much want you to be all right, Bird. I think sometimes that, when a really crucial moment comes, you’ll either be drunk or in the grip of some crazy dream and just float up into the sky like a real bird.”

“Married all this time and you still have doubts like that about your own husband?” Bird spoke playfully, but his wife did not fall into his saccharine trap; far from it, she rocked him on his heels with this:

“You know, you often dream about leaving for Africa and shout things in Swahili! I’ve kept quiet about it all this time, but I’ve known you have no real desire to lead a quiet, respectable life with your wife and child. Bird?”

Bird stared in silence at the soiled, wasted hand his wife was resting
on his knee. Then, like a child weakly protesting a scolding though he recognizes that he has misbehaved, “You say I shout in Swahili; what do I say?”

“I don’t remember, Bird. I’ve always been half-asleep myself; besides, I don’t know Swahili.”

“Then what makes you so sure it was Swahili?”

“Words that sound that much like the screaming of beasts couldn’t come from a civilized language.”

In silence, Bird reflected sadly on his wife’s misconception of the nature of Swahili.

“When mother told me two days ago and then again last night that you were staying at the other hospital, I suspected you’d gotten drunk or run away somewhere. I really had my doubts, Bird.”

“I was much too upset to think about anything like that.”

“But look how you’re blushing!”

“Because I’m mad,” Bird said roughly. “Why would I run away? With the baby just born and everything—”

“But, when I told you I was pregnant, didn’t the ants of paranoia swarm all over you? Did you really want a child, Bird?”

“Anyway, all that can wait until after the baby has recovered—that’s all that matters now,” Bird said, breaking for easier ground.

“It
is
all that matters, Bird. And whether or not the baby recovers depends on the hospital you chose and on your efforts. I can’t get out of bed, I haven’t even been told where the sickness is nesting in my baby’s body. I can only depend on you, Bird.”

“That’s fine; depend on me.”

“I was trying to decide whether I could rely on you to take care of the baby and I began to think I didn’t know you all that well. Bird, are you the kind of person who’ll take the responsibility for the baby even at a sacrifice to yourself?” his wife asked. “Are you the responsible, brave type?”

If he had ever been to war, Bird had thought often, he would have been able to say definitely whether he was a brave type. This had occurred to him before fights and before his entrance examinations, even before his marriage. And always he had regretted not having a definite answer. Even his longing to test himself in the wilds of Africa which opposed the ordinary was excited by his feeling that he might discover in the process his own private war. But at the moment Bird had
a feeling he knew without having to consider war or travel to Africa that he was not to be relied on: a craven type.

Irritated by his silence, Bird’s wife clenched into a fist the hand she was resting on his leg. Bird started to cover her hand with his own and hesitated: it appeared to simmer with such hostility that it would be hot to the touch.

“Bird, I wonder if you’re not the type of person who abandons someone weak when that person needs you most—the way you abandoned that friend of yours,” Bird’s wife opened her timid eyes wide as if to study Bird’s reaction, “… Kikuhiko?”

Kikuhiko! Bird thought. A friend from his days as a tough kid in a provincial city, younger than himself, Kikuhiko had tagged along wherever Bird had gone. One day, in a neighboring town, they had had a bizarre experience together. Accepting a job hunting down a madman who had escaped from a mental hospital, they had roamed the city on bicycles all night long. Whereas Kikuhiko soon grew bored with the job, began to clown, and finally lost the bicycle he had borrowed from the hospital, Bird’s fascination only increased as he listened to the townspeople discussing the madman, and he kept up his ardent search all through the night. The lunatic was convinced that the real world was Hell, and he was terrified of dogs, which he took to be devils in disguise. At dawn, the hospital’s German shepherd pack was to be loosed on the man’s trail, and everyone agreed that he would die of fright if the animals brought him to bay. Bird therefore searched until dawn without a moment’s rest. When Kikuhiko began to insist that they give up the hunt and return to their own city, Bird, in his anger, shamed the younger boy. He told Kikuhiko he knew of his affair with an American homosexual in the CIA. On his way home on the last train of the night Kikuhiko sighted Bird, still bicycling through the night in his eager search for the madman. Leaning out of the train window, he shouted, in a voice that had begun to cry, “—Bird, I was afraid!”

But Bird abandoned his poor friend and continued the search. In the end he succeeded only in discovering the madman hanging by the neck on a hill in the middle of the town, but the experience marked a transition in his life. That morning, riding next to the driver in the three-wheel truck that was carrying the madman’s body, Bird had a premonition that he was soon to say good-by to the life of a delinquent; the following spring, he entered a university in Tokyo. The Korean war
was on, and Bird had been frightened by rumors that young men on the loose in provincial cities were being conscripted into the police corps and shipped off to Korea. But what had happened to Kikuhiko after Bird had abandoned him that night? It was as if the puny ghost of an old friend had floated up from the darkness of his past and said hello to him.

“But what made you feel like attacking me with past history like Kikuhiko? I’d forgotten I’d even told you that story.”

“If we had a boy, I was thinking of naming him Kikuhiko,” his wife said.

Naming him! If that grotesque baby ever got hold of a thing like a name! Bird winced.