Mimi (26 page)

I searched the beach for a message in a bottle, something, anything! And did find a few geological wonders: tough blades of grass growing through sand and, in a secluded spot sheltered from millionaires, a Zen garden of evenly spaced round stones, all the same size and each sitting snugly in its own wind-worn cleft, with a miniature peak of sand behind: my melancholy meadow.

I puzzled over the
colors
of the Sound. They kept changing for no perceptible reason, from turquoise to gray to Venetian green. It didn’t seem to relate directly to the color of the sky; unpredictable factors were at play. But why should some schmuck, some schlemiel from the city be able to “predict” anything out here?

I didn’t know the names of most of the birds I saw, I couldn’t tell what the clouds were up to, or remember which kind they were. It was all a
big mystery
to me. I wasn’t even completely sure if there was quicksand on Long Island or not. But what’s a walk without a little danger?

Home to Bubbles and Glenn Gould. I once told Bee I thought Gould was playing one passage of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
too fast.

“Aw, leave him alone. The guy’s a genius! He can do what he wants,” she’d answered.

“Even the humming?”

“Even the humming.”

And she was right. I made him play
The Well-Tempered Clavier
to me again and again, until all I could hear were the harmonics.

I get up in the morning and think of women. Not about
sex
(that was very far from my mind) but about the many breakfasts women have made me, starting with my mom and moving through just about every female acquaintance I ever had. They all want to feed you! Bee used to make me the best scrambled eggs when we were kids, and she didn’t even like eggs.

I go downstairs and think of women, the many women I’ve drunk coffee with—and the many mornings I’ve drunk coffee alone,
thinking about
women.

I make toast for myself and think of women, in particular the problematic properties of my mother’s toastings. She never distributed the butter evenly, so you’d get this big glop of half-melted butter in the first bite, then none the next! She also cut my toast into squares, when all the cool moms were doing triangles. But then there was her jam, which none of the other moms could offer. Peach, plum, strawberry, rhubarb, strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry, blackberry, boysenberry, pear and cinnamon, apricot and almond, plum and cardamom, sweet cherry, sour cherry, dense dark marmalade, even tomato jam, green
and
red. (Mom and her ’maters!) And dilly beans. Nevermore, nevermore.

I do some laundry and think of women, my mom again, who did the laundry for fifty years until it finally
killed
her—falling down the stairs on her way to transfer stuff to the dryer. But how vigorous she was, plowing on all those years with my father panting and ranting at her heels, working his way through a million temper tantrums he always considered legitimate.

What was he so angry
about?
And where does all the
female
anger go? “Underground,” said Mimi once, “into all the slicing and sluicing and sieving and mashing.” (And of course the stitching.) There are also a lot of opportunities for destructiveness offered by gardening: digging, pruning, weeding, burning stuff, poisoning stuff, trimming stuff, tugging at stuff, hacking away for
years
at tree stumps. My mother’s anger went into the shaking-out of dishtowels. Seemingly peaceful mornings echoed with the slap and crackle of them, and then you knew not to go near Mom for a while.

I lounge on the porch and think of women, my woman: sitting canoe-style in my arms on the couch in my apartment, just before everything blew up in our faces. . .

Bubbles startled me out of my reverie by jumping vertically into a pine tree, six feet in the air! She was putting on a show for me, acting crazy, and I liked it—I even laughed, though my laughter sounded odd to me and out of place. I went to stand below her, in case she needed help getting down, and then I remembered my rowboat in the shed. I’d bought it when I got the house, to make up for that old canoe Dad preserved in amber in the garage at home.

So I dragged my boat down to the marshy pond behind the house and, with Bubbles in the bow, rowed towards the middle of the lake, where there’s an impenetrable little island. Then I just lay back and let the boat drift, with Bubbles walking back and forth on top of me, checking both sides for ducks. I closed my eyes and instantly remembered one of Bee’s Coziness Sculptures, called
Creaky Boat in Maine
. This consisted of the bare skeleton of an old wooden boat, lit by watery flashes of light, with a soundtrack of boat creaking, water lapping, breezes blowing, frogs croaking, birds chirping. . . Now
I
was free to listen to the gentle sounds of real breezes and real waves lapping against my fiberglass boat, and Bee wasn’t.

Not so gentle if you were a
duck
though. I gradually became aware of a big hullabaloo going on on the other side of the island. We rowed over to see what was happening, and it was duck rape on a grand scale! The drakes were chasing the females on land, on water, and in the air (a Churchillian assault). They fought with growing strength on the banks of the island. Whatever the cost may be, they would
never
surrender. . . When a male caught a female, he’d grab her by the neck with his beak and pin her down, practically drowning her during the actual coupling. It didn’t look very consensual to me. The females, if they were lucky, just had time to get their feathers back in order before another aggressor crash-landed and started chasing them. Sometimes the males worked as a part of a gang,
tag-teaming
. They raped them on the beaches, they raped them on the landing grounds, they raped them in the dunes and in the reeds, they raped them on the hillocks. . .

“Boys, boys! I came here to relax!” I said.

Who knew? Ducks must be an exception to Mimi’s rule—their main courtship tactic is brute force! But I really couldn’t see the evolutionary advantage in the males’ willingness to frighten, exhaust, and possibly
injure
the Egg-Layer. Such sharp dressers too, with that debonair white collar, the metallic blue or green or purple head, and the curlicues on the tail (all a bit undermined though by the joke-shop quack).

One female, who’d just endured a three-duck gang bang, seemed to have a broken wing. It looked awry: she kept flexing it, trying to stretch it out to get it working again, but it wasn’t helping. There was a big gap in that pretty bit of striping the females have on their wings, their one major embellishment. She must have been hurt during all this antagonistic mating, and now her disability made her the classic “sitting duck”! She couldn’t fly away from her pursuers, and didn’t seem able or willing to swim either. She was just stuck, barefoot and pregnant, on her little island.

As I watched, four more male ducks paddled over to her at top speed. She squawked frantically when she saw them, and ran this way and that, but there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t reach her in time but yelled and clapped my hands and banged the oars together to try to scare the drakes off. They paid me no heed—I only succeeded in startling Bubbles. The drakes carried on marauding until another male duck turned up and grabbed one of the rapists by
his
neck, which worked: it drove him away. Then he saw the rest of them off the scene. This defender seemed to be the female duck’s real mate: he was the only male who companionably stuck around anyway, and she seemed calm with him. But by now, she was
limping
as well as dragging her wing.

I went home to get some bread for her, then rowed right out again. She was still there—no place else to go—and she ate hungrily. She seemed desperate for food. So they’d not only raped her but managed to starve her by their terror campaign: because of the broken wing, she couldn’t find food. I decided to feed her, to give her at least a fighting chance. With time, her wing might heal.

As I rowed away, one of the drakes who’d just molested her headed over to my boat, hoping for some bread for
himself
, and I felt like
killing
him—or throwing a stone at him anyway, to drive him away from her section of the pond. But what was I becoming? A guy who throws stones at ducks?! Bee had cured me early on of any interest in torturing animals, when she found me once trying to swing a neighbor’s cat around by its tail. It wasn’t what she said, it was her
inability
to speak that had quelled me.

I was losing my impartiality here—we’re all supposed to let nature take its course, red in tooth and claw (and beak and wing). I was like a reporter in the field, who stops writing and starts
helping
, changing from heartless bastard to mensch. But was it good to get so personally involved, with
ducks
? Aw, who was I kidding? Interfering with nature is my business!

I worried all night about my duck, out there alone and in pain. First thing in the morning, Bubbles and I were in the boat again. The duck seemed to recognize us and came right over for her breakfast. She seemed alert, which was a good sign, and had a good appetite. She wasn’t declining. But the wing was no better, and she was still being molested by every guy in town because she couldn’t get away. Sheesh!

In an effort to thwart one of the rapists, I lunged forward at one point, waving my hat (not my sickbed hat, my Sagaponack baseball cap), and accidentally stepped on a Coke can in the bottom of the boat. That’s how I discovered how much drakes hate the sound of a Coke can crumpling—it really messes with their heads. They lost con-centration, allowing the injured female to flee into the reeds. There she was often safe, since the drakes couldn’t be bothered searching too hard for her when there were plenty of other females to plague. From then on I brought all the empty cans I could find whenever I went to feed her, which was several times a day. But, like her partner, I couldn’t be there all the time—I had to go indoors sometimes and eat
roast chicken
with Bubbles (the paradox be damned).

A few nights later, lying sleepless on my taut bed, I decided I could at least get the poor duck some real duck food. Superior nutrition might just give her the edge over the drakes. Ducks weren’t supposed to eat bread all day. But I couldn’t remember where a pet store was. And was a wild duck a “pet”? In disobedience to Bee and her abhorrence for my perusal of phonebooks, I found an old
Yellow Pages
downstairs and spent the rest of the night searching through it for duck fodder.

This is when you realize how homocentric we all are. There was hardly a mention of anything for animals in there, or anything
non-human
. It’s as if the whole world is about us. It’s all zinc, zodiacs, yachts and yoga, xylophones, windows and wills, vacuum cleaners, ventriloquists, upholsterers, underwater ballet, timber merchants, tailors, surgical supplies, surfing, silicone implants, salsa, rubber, rope, restaurants, rehab, quilting bees, pianos, personal injury lawyers, perfume, pearls and passports, orchestras and obstetricians, nurses, notary publics, noodles, nail bars, motels, morticians, mannequins, log cabins, locksmiths, liquor stores, kites, kitchens, kiss-o-grams, karaoke, jukeboxes, jack-o’-lanterns, Italian lessons, ice skates, hydraulics, hypnotists, gyms, geriatrics and gemstones, fire alarms, fertility clinics, electrolysis, drainage consultants, chapels of rest, cane furniture, Botox, antiques, advertising, and ambulances. Animals might take more of an interest if we included them more! (Not big spenders though.)

I finally located an animal feed merchant (maybe I should have started with the
A
s) in Sag Harbor, and drove straight over there. I’d only been a recluse for a few days but already felt like a wild man from the woods. Any minute now I’d get out the faded overalls and start constructing microscopic sailboats inside light bulbs. I’d forgotten that women wear earrings, for chrissake! I’d forgotten the effort they put into their skin and their hair and their nails, and
why
.

I walked down the street behind a “waif wife,” as Mimi would have called her, a frail, drained gal bobbing along in six-inch heels beside a repellent fellow who seemed to be still in his
pj’s
and talking on his cell phone, ignoring her entirely. How much had the poor duck blown on that fancy blouse, the tight skirt, and the tiny shiny red purse to go with the shiny red shoes, all to hang out with old PJ there?! The woman was dressed for a
cocktail party
, and it wasn’t even noon. Later, I saw them buying potatoes.

The feed store only had a small sample bag of duck pellets, but they promised to get some more in. I also bought a book on duck care, with surprising information on the duck’s alimentary canal: they’ve got no teeth, so they grind grain with these rock-like structures in their gullet. The book also said broken wings
don’t
heal without human intervention. I could have done a splint myself, but she wouldn’t let me catch her! Even if I invented the perfect trap, it would probably only frighten her off, or injure her more.

I reached the car just before a storm hit. The whole town turned a gloomy yellow, and the sunlit trees waving against black clouds looked
electric
, as if they were about to blast off. In that low light, the scene seemed staged for an opera.