Love Begins in Winter (3 page)

S
IX MONTHS LATER, THE
black-haired woman told her sister about the birdman over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“The birdman finally spoke and told us his name was Jonathan,” she said, laughing.

A woman sipping tea at the next table dropped her cup. It split neatly in two parts on the saucer. Tea escaped into the linens. A knot of waiters rushed out from behind a door. The stains would be hard to remove.

The woman at the next table stood up and quickly stepped toward the restrooms. She was wearing an old-fashioned sequin skirt and forest-green shoes. She had grown up in Wales. Her brother's name was also Jonathan.

It was almost five o'clock. Outside, the afternoon—heavy with heat—listed like an old ship and people rolled from one side of the city to the other.

The Beverly Hills Hotel is opulent. It prides itself on many things. There is a salon and several places to eat. For anyone who likes pink, it's paradise. In the bathroom, the woman who lost her teacup sat in the stall and sobbed. She could picture the waiters cleaning up; there would soon be fresh linens and shining silverware. Within a few minutes, all traces of her outburst would be erased.

The woman felt acorns in her pocket. She squeezed each one of them. Her Jonathan collected nuts. He kept them in small bowls around his bedroom. He wanted to feed the birds. He was obsessed with birds. And they built nests outside his bedroom in small dark places in the roof. He said he could see their eyes peering into his bedroom at night. Perhaps they knew all along what would happen to him. That was long ago in Wales, in a one-eyed village of sheep, mud, and stars.

Grief is a country where it rains and rains but nothing grows. The dead live somewhere else—wearing the clothes we remember them in.

W
HEN BABY
J
ONATHAN CAME
home from the hospital wrapped in white, I couldn't stop looking at him. I would sit by him at night. His breaths were fast and small. When his arms were strong enough, he reached for me, his sister.

Our house was a cottage warmed by hot coals that burned slowly and deeply in the kitchen stove. In summer the fireplaces in the main rooms were dark and full of winter's ashes. My mother would make salad sandwiches with lettuce from the garden. When Jonathan could walk, I took him into the fields behind our cottage and sat him down on a towel somewhere shady. I would build tiny huts from mud and straw as he held in his chubby fingers the brown plastic mice we both knew were our friends.

On Saturdays we would all go into the village. Outside the butcher's shop whole animals hung from hooks of brushed steel. Jonathan would point but had yet to find words.

When it was hot, I would take off his clothes and bounce him on the bed. I like to think this was his first memory.

My dolls sat in the toy box until Jonathan was two and he found them. Then began the great age of dressing them up. The two dolls became our younger siblings. Once we wrapped them in aluminum foil and pretended they were robots. Our quiet father would send the dolls postcards from wherever he traveled on business. I would read them to the dolls, and Jonathan would nod and then put them to bed, saying, “Wasn't that nice? A postcard from somewhere you'll never go.”

When he began wearing underpants, he got in the habit of tying his unused diapers on the dolls. His underpants were small. When I came home from school, if I found them on the living room floor, soiled, I knew he would be crying on the bed waiting for me. I would take off my underwear and run it under the faucet and then show it to him. He would stop crying. All siblings have a secret life from their parents. Parents love their children, but children need each other to negotiate the strange forest they find themselves in.

It wasn't long before I was caught in the act. Jonathan stood naked at the bathroom door as I doused my underwear with cold water. He approached and wrapped his little body around my legs. The bathroom window held the final square of daylight. It was very bright and also very still. Downstairs, we could hear the sounds of cartoons pouring from the television. Jonathan never cried again when he had an accident. I firmly believe that while lies and deception destroy love, they can also build and defend it. Love requires imagination more than experience.

Nobody knows when Jonathan died. My father saw something in the snow from the bathroom window one morning. I wasn't allowed to go outside, so I sat in the bathroom and ripped out my hair. When my mother saw clumps of it on my bare legs, she decided to let me see Jonathan's body. I screamed and screamed and never stopped screaming until I met a man named Bruno Bonnet.

A
RRIVING IN THE DARK
for my concert the next day, I find Los Angeles pulsating with traffic; pairs of red lights thread the valleys with their flat houses and clear pools. The oldest houses have round edges and crumble a little more whenever the ground shakes. In the suburbs, imagine all-night Laundromats heavy with the freshness of clean clothes; young mothers with plastic flowers in their hair. Babies peer up through black eyes from hot towels. Gangs of men turn their heads to eat tacos at a roadside cantina. Trash blows from one side of the highway to the other, then back again.

Farther north, approaching Hollywood—hot-dog stands with neon arrows and faded paint; tattooed women with chopped black hair buying lip gloss at Hollywood pharmacies; a homeless man pushes a shopping cart full of shoes but he is barefoot. He keeps looking behind. His stomach hangs out. Sometime in the 1960s he was delivered into the trembling hands of his mother. If only it could happen again. Los Angeles is a place where dreams balance forever on the edge of coming true. A city on a cliff held fast by its own weight.

I like performing here, especially at the Hollywood Bowl. There's something about the movement of air. My music fills the thermals, and I imagine the notes flooding the city like birds. It's hot here too; a real contrast to Quebec City two weeks ago, where my feet froze after walking the city at night and conversing with the statuary. When my shoes dried, they were very stiff. I put them in a clear plastic bag and labeled it “Le Flâneur de Quebec.” I think it's important to keep items of clothing that have emotional significance.

I've been thinking about that woman I saw behind the window in the middle of the night. Since that evening I've felt differently about a lot of things. I spoke to my brother about it. He thinks I'm finally coming around. He thinks I suffer from depression. But I'm just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves.

After a good night's sleep, it's lunchtime and I'm eating meat loaf in the Beverly Hills Hotel. It's actually late morning. Outside on the patio is a Brazilian spearmint tree that died years ago. The waiter said it's now over a hundred years old—but does a thing continue to accrue years once it's dead? If so, if so. . .I stop myself. There are stumps of baguette on the table. The baker enters my mind. He is drying his hands on an apron. I stop myself.

Later, I will sink again.

Later, I will row myself out to sea with my bow to Anna's floating body. I can see her face so clearly. She died when she was twelve. I was thirteen. She hasn't aged with me, but sometimes I imagine her as a woman.

“A girl comes every week.” The waiter was back, still thinking about the tree outside. “She plays with the plastic ferns in the branches.”

I look into the branches and smile.

“Landscapers look at it and laugh,” he said. “To them it must look stupid.”

I like waiters—but you have to win them over quickly before you become just another client, just another table 23. The meat loaf is mediocre here, but the service is fabulous. I seldom eat at home; I'm on the road so much. This hotel is like having an adoring mother who can't cook.

The most delicious bread in the world is made in my village. It's something to do with salt in the water. The baker's daughter and I used to ride our bicycles to the edge of town. Remember that Noyant is a small village. We would leave our bikes leaning against each other as we climbed the swaying gate into the soft fields of Farmer Ricard.

He was a large man with eyes that seemed ready to fall out. His lips were very large too, and he wore green army sweaters. He once carried a baby cow on his back through waist-deep snow across several kilometers of fields. The vet in the next village was drinking chamomile tea and looking out the window. A broken leg was set and healed in a barn warmed by gaslight. Everyone in the village remembers what happened. The cow was allowed to die of old age.

Farmer Ricard has a photograph of his father in the kitchen. He was in the Resistance and was tortured to death. Madame Ricard is in the habit of talking to the photograph while Farmer Ricard is away in the fields. Sometimes she can hear him hammering in the barn. He likes to drink his coffee with both hands. They haven't made love for years but sleep holding hands.

A pianist here at the hotel is playing “The Girl from Ipanema.” Lights behind the bar make the liquor glow. My napkin is pebbled at the edges. The hotel crest is faintly impressed in the center. The dining room is mostly empty. The dining room is split into many areas. Three tables over, an old man is doing magic tricks for his teenage granddaughter. It looks like she is wearing her prom dress. Her hair is pulled back. Her earrings are new. Every time the knife disappears into the napkin, she smiles.

At another table are a young Mexican and a very old man with white hair. They are reading from the same book and eating from the same bowl of ice cream.

This is the sort of place where pictures were snapped before the war. Glossy black-and-white prints now hanging in Beverly Hills above quiet beds in bedrooms that smell of mothballs. Women in black gloves. Smoking men with shiny hair. Palm trees in the background. Glasses, empty of gin, replenished by melting ice.

Once we were in Farmer Ricard's misty field, the baker's daughter and I would fill our pockets with stones. If one of us remembered to bring a plastic bag, that was even better. When laden with more stones than we could possibly carry, we dragged our heavy bodies to the edge of the field and made a pile. Then we'd split up and the search would continue.

We collected stones to save the plows.

Monsieur Ricard gave us a franc for every ten stones. If we managed to find one too big for one of us to carry alone (that was the test), that particular stone was worth a franc all by itself. When we got tired, we'd sit on the dirt and watch birds. Sometimes a farm cat would find us and its tail would go up. The cat would often turn around to look at something that wasn't there. For the past twenty-two years, I've been doing the same thing.

When I finish my lunch, I'm going downstairs to the Beverly Hills Hotel gift shop. It's opposite the hair salon. Rows of women sit with twists of silver foil in their hair. The stylists talk about celebrities, and soon the women start to feel like celebrities.

In the hotel gift shop I'm going to buy a hatbox.

Then I'm going to fill it with stones.

F
OR
J
ONATHAN'S FOURTH BIRTHDAY
, he was given a white hardcover book called
The British Book of Birds
. This was by far his favorite possession. When he was upset, he would clumsily sketch birds from the book, gripping his colored pencil in a fist.

About this time we had some lovely family vacations together.

Watching my father lift the caravan onto the hitch of our family sedan was like watching Atlas take up the world on his back. Then, on the motorway, my brother and I nesting in the back as my mother's hand appeared behind the seat with a smile of orange for each of us, my father quietly navigating our fortress to a field on a hillside at a distance from our Welsh village unfathomable to us.

By the evening, my mother, father, Jonathan, and I would be sitting in plastic chairs under a Cinzano umbrella somewhere on the Welsh coast. The smell of my father's cold lager beer, my mother's wine, cigarette smoke from another table. The sound of cars in the town, the smell of fish and chips, women in heels clopping along the narrow roads to the town nightclub. Then back at the caravan, Jonathan and I in bunk beds. We communicated by gently knocking on the thin wall against which our beds were built. The blankets were always musty, and the smell of dinner sometimes lingered until morning.

As an adult, I've realized where Jonathan found his gentleness. Our father was a shy, good-natured boy—a handsome man from South Wales, strong enough to lift a caravan by the throat but wise enough to cup a moth as it slid its body against the flickering black-and-white TV. I remember the release from our caravan through a cracked door into the dark field, as though on its powdery back balanced the weight of his children's dreams.

The day was spent exploring the village and the countryside. My favorite memory is cooking sausages beside a river. We hiked through shallow woods and didn't see anyone. My mother grew up afraid because of what people did to her. And then afraid of what they might do to us. To her family she was shy, loving, secretive, and fiercely loyal, but in the world she stood poised, cunning, and glamorous. The perfect saleswoman.

I remember holding her slender hand as we crossed a river somewhere close to the sea, our caravan back through the forest on a concrete slab with other caravans. Little Jonathan held my hand. One of his shoes was wet. He had misjudged his steps. We all thought it was funny.

I wish I'd kept his shoes—that's one thing I regret getting rid of. I loved those shoes, and I loved the socks too.

And then my father with sausages wrapped in newspaper, who had not yet reached the bank. I remember our faces changing before us as we crossed the cold, blind, rushing river. I led Jonathan, carefully picking out stones whose heads poked out from the water, as though they wished to say something.

I remember looking back for my father, slowed by the weight of his joy from knowing that we were somewhere but he could not see us. I remember my mother's trembling voice as we neared the other bank and Jonathan's laughter like a tablecloth spread over his fear. Then my father tilted across on the stones, and we cooked sausages beside the water.

Jonathan disappeared that winter. It was a few days before Christmas. I remember asking my mother where he was. She told me to look under his bed. Potatoes boiled. The kitchen was full of steam. I wiped the window with my sleeve.

“He won't be outside, dear—look at the snow.”

I will never forget that moment. Because he was outside.

My father had left a ladder propped against a conifer tree.

He was cutting branches with a chain saw before the snow came.

Jonathan had climbed the ladder. Nobody knew.

Once in the tree, he climbed and climbed. We don't know why. Perhaps he knew he had come to the end of his life and wanted to become a bird.

I hope he did become a bird.

I hear him call every morning from the tree outside my apartment.

By late afternoon we were all worried. My mother telephoned the police. My father searched the village, then young men showed up at our doorstep with flashlights and heavy walking sticks.

I fell asleep in the early hours of the morning without wanting to. I've felt guilty about that for most of my life. Perhaps if I'd stayed awake, I would have heard him call out.

The next morning several old Land Rovers with canvas backs were parked outside. The men at the kitchen table drank strong tea. Eggs spat in the frying pan. The farmers' waxed jackets dripped water on the stone floor.

They had found nothing and were half-frozen.

Dogs on the floor at their feet.

The dogs refused the bacon scraps offered them. The men said the dogs were sad because they couldn't find the boy. The scent of him lingered in their noses.

On Christmas Day, we sat and looked at the presents. My mother cried and threw her shoe through a window. I prayed by reading Jonathan's
British Book of Birds
aloud to the heavens. It responded in a scatter of soft white tongues that told us nothing.

In January, two weeks later, my father was shaving when he noticed a speck in the garden outside.

A smudge of color broke the white monotony.

Without wiping the shaving cream that smeared his cheeks, he rushed outside into the thick snow. Jonathan's body lay completely still. The branch onto which he had climbed and become trapped had broken that night in a storm. He lay in the snow faceup. His body was hard and his mouth was open. In one of his hands were three frozen acorns. In his mind, it was not yet Christmas Day.

It's still a mystery why he didn't call out. Perhaps he was afraid of being punished; children possess the most powerful fear of disappointing their parents.

After they took Jonathan's body away, my father went into the shed. He closed the door and then chopped off his right hand with an axe.

The police came and took him to hospital.

For almost three decades, I've kept acorns in my pockets. I check for them constantly.

Sometimes I roll them in my palms and hear laughter, then the sound of a breaking branch, something soft punching the snow from a great height.

Birdsong.