Birds of America

WILLING

In her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn’t her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing.

“You have the body,” studio heads told her over lunch at Chasen’s.

She looked away. “Habeas corpus,” she said, not smiling.

“Pardon me?” A hip that knew Latin. Christ.

“Nothing,” she said. They smiled at her and dropped names. Scorsese, Brando. Work was all playtime to them, playtime with gel in their hair. At times, she felt bad that it wasn’t her hip. It should have been her hip. A mediocre picture, a picture queasy with pornography: these, she knew, eroticized the unavailable. The doctored and false. The stand-in. Unwittingly, she had participated. Let a hip come between. A false, unavailable, anonymous hip. She herself was true as a goddamn dairy product; available as lunch whenever.

But she was pushing forty.

She began to linger in juice bars. Sit for entire afternoons in places called I Love Juicy or Orange-U-Sweet. She drank juice and, outside, smoked a cigarette now and then. She’d been taken seriously — once — she knew that. Projects were discussed: Nina. Portia. Mother Courage with makeup. Now her hands trembled too much, even drinking juice, especially drinking juice, a Vantage wobbling between her fingers like a compass dial. She was sent scripts in which she was supposed to say lines she would never say, not wear clothes she would never not wear. She began to get obscene phone calls, and postcards signed, “Oh yeah, baby.” Her boyfriend, a director with a growing reputation for expensive flops, a man who twice a week glowered at her Fancy Sunburst guppy and told it to get a job, became a Catholic and went back to his wife.

“Just when we were working out the bumps and chops and rocks,” she said. Then she wept.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

And so she left Hollywood. Phoned her agent and apologized. Went home to Chicago, rented a room by the week at the Days Inn, drank sherry, and grew a little plump. She let her life get dull — dull, but with Hostess cakes. There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went “What?” Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, “Wha—?” It had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn’t been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She’d been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, “There you go.” She’d stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.

Still, she was a minor movie star, once nominated for a major award. Mail came to her indirectly. A notice. A bill. A Thanksgiving card. But there was never a party, a dinner, an opening, an iced tea. One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time. Their sadnesses occurred in isolation, lurched and spazzed, sent them spinning fizzily back into empty, padded corners, disconnected and alone.

She watched cable and ordered in a lot from a pizza place. A life of obscurity and radical calm. She rented a piano and practiced scales. She invested in the stock market. She wrote down her dreams in the morning to locate clues as to what to trade. Disney, her dreams said once. St. Jude’s Medical. She made a little extra money. She got obsessed. The words cash cow nestled in the side of her mouth like a cud. She tried to be original — not a good thing with stocks — and she began to lose. When a stock went down, she bought more of it, to catch it on the way back up. She got confused. She took to staring out the window at Lake Michigan, the rippled slate of it like a blackboard gone bad.

“Sidra, what are you doing there?” shrieked her friend Tommy long distance over the phone. “Where are you? You’re living in some state that borders on North Dakota!” He was a screenwriter in Santa Monica and once, a long time ago and depressed on Ecstasy, they had slept together. He was gay, but they had liked each other very much.

“Maybe I’ll get married,” she said. She didn’t mind Chicago. She thought of it as a cross between London and Queens, with a dash of Cleveland.

“Oh, please,” he shrieked again. “What are you really doing?”

“Listening to seashore and self-esteem tapes,” she said. She blew air into the mouth of the phone.

“Sounds like dust on the needle,” he said. “Maybe you should get the squawking crickets tape. Have you heard the squawking crickets tape?”

“I got a bad perm today,” she said. “When I was only halfway through with the rod part, the building the salon’s in had a blackout. There were men drilling out front who’d struck a cable.”

“How awful for you,” he said. She could hear him tap his fingers. He had made himself the make-believe author of a make-believe book of essays called One Man’s Opinion, and when he was bored or inspired, he quoted from it. “I was once in a rock band called Bad Perm,” he said instead.

“Get out.” She laughed.

His voice went hushed and worried. “What are you doing there?” he asked again.

Her room was a corner room where a piano was allowed. It was L-shaped, like a life veering off suddenly to become something else. It had a couch and two maple dressers and was never as neat as she might have wanted. She always had the DO NOT DISTURB sign on when the maids came by, and so things got a little out of hand. Wispy motes of dust and hair the size of small heads bumped around in the corners. Smudge began to darken the moldings and cloud the mirrors. The bathroom faucet dripped, and, too tired to phone anyone, she tied a string around the end of it, guiding the drip quietly into the drain, so it wouldn’t bother her anymore. Her only plant, facing east in the window, hung over the popcorn popper and dried to a brown crunch. On the ledge, a jack-o’-lantern she had carved for Halloween had rotted, melted, froze, and now looked like a collapsed basketball — one she might have been saving for sentimental reasons, one from the big game! The man who brought her room service each morning — two poached eggs and a pot of coffee — reported her to the assistant manager, and she received a written warning slid under the door.

On Fridays, she visited her parents in Elmhurst. It was still hard for her father to look her in the eyes. He was seventy now. Ten years ago, he had gone to the first movie she had ever been in, saw her remove her clothes and dive into a pool. The movie was rated PG, but he never went to another one. Her mother went to all of them and searched later for encouraging things to say. Even something small. She refused to lie. “I liked the way you said the line about leaving home, your eyes wide and your hands fussing with your dress buttons,” she wrote. “That red dress was so becoming. You should wear bright colors!”

“My father takes naps a lot when I visit,” she said to Tommy.

“Naps?”

“I embarrass him. He thinks I’m a whore hippie. A hippie whore.”

“That’s ridiculous. As I said in One Man’s Opinion, you’re the most sexually conservative person I know.”

“Yeah, well.”

Her mother always greeted her warmly, puddle-eyed. These days, she was reading thin paperback books by a man named Robert Valleys, a man who said that after observing all the suffering in the world — war, starvation, greed — he had discovered the cure: hugs.

Hugs, hugs, hugs, hugs, hugs.

Her mother believed him. She squeezed so long and hard that Sidra, like an infant or a lover, became lost in the feel and smell of her — her sweet, dry skin, the gray peach fuzz on her neck. “I’m so glad you left that den of iniquity,” her mother said softly.

But Sidra still got calls from the den. At night, sometimes, the director phoned from a phone booth, desiring to be forgiven as well as to direct. “I think of all the things you might be thinking, and I say, ‘Oh, Christ.’ I mean, do you think the things I sometimes think you do?”

“Of course,” said Sidra. “Of course I think those things.”

“Of course! Of course is a term that has no place in this conversation!”

When Tommy phoned, she often felt a pleasure so sudden and flooding, it startled her.

“God, I’m so glad it’s you!”

“You have no right to abandon American filmmaking this way!” he would say affectionately, and she would laugh loudly, for minutes without stopping. She was starting to have two speeds: Coma and Hysteria. Two meals: breakfast and popcorn. Two friends: Charlotte Peveril and Tommy. She could hear the clink of his bourbon glass. “You are too gifted a person to be living in a state that borders on North Dakota.”

“Iowa.”

“Holy bejesus, it’s worse than I thought. I’ll bet they say that there. I’ll bet they say ‘Bejesus.’ ”

“I live downtown. They don’t say that here.”

“Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana?”

“No.”

“I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, ‘Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Champagne! Urbana!’ ” He sighed. “It was just this thing in the middle of a field. I went to a Chinese restaurant there and ordered my entire dinner with extra MSG.”

“I’m in Chicago. It’s not so bad.”

“Not so bad. There are no movie people there. Sidra, what about your acting talent?”

“I have no acting talent.”

“Hello?”

“You heard me.”

“I’m not sure. For a minute there, I thought maybe you had that dizziness thing again, that inner-ear imbalance.”

“Talent. I don’t have talent. I have willingness. What talent?” As a kid, she had always told the raunchiest jokes. As an adult, she could rip open a bone and speak out of it. Simple, clear. There was never anything to stop her. Why was there never anything to stop her? “I can stretch out the neck of a sweater to point at a freckle on my shoulder. Anyone who didn’t get enough attention in nursery school can do that. Talent is something else.”

“Excuse me, okay? I’m only a screenwriter. But someone’s got you thinking you went from serious actress to aging bimbo. That’s ridiculous. You just have to weather things a little out here. Besides. I think willing yourself to do a thing is brave, and the very essence of talent.”

Sidra looked at her hands, already chapped and honeycombed with bad weather, bad soap, bad life. She needed to listen to the crickets tape. “But I don’t will myself,” she said. “I’m just already willing.”

She began to go to blues bars at night. Sometimes she called Charlotte Peveril, her one friend left from high school.

“Siddy, how are you?” In Chicago, Sidra was thought of as a hillbilly name. But in L.A., people had thought it was beautiful and assumed she’d made it up.

“I’m fine. Let’s go get drunk and listen to music.”

Sometimes she just went by herself.

“Don’t I know you from the movies?” a man might ask at one of the breaks, smiling, leering in a twinkly way.

“Maybe,” she’d say, and he would look suddenly panicked and back away.

One night, a handsome man in a poncho, a bad poncho — though was there such a thing as a good poncho? asked Charlotte — sat down next to her with an extra glass of beer. “You look like you should be in the movies,” he said. Sidra nodded wearily. “But I don’t go to the movies. So if you were in the movies, I would never have gotten to set my eyes on you.”

She turned her gaze from his poncho to her sherry, then back. Perhaps he had spent some time in Mexico or Peru. “What do you do?”

“I’m an auto mechanic.” He looked at her carefully. “My name’s Walter. Walt.” He pushed the second beer her way. “The drinks here are okay as long as you don’t ask them to mix anything. Just don’t ask them to mix anything!”

She picked it up and took a sip. There was something about him she liked: something earthy beneath the act. In L.A., beneath the act you got nougat or Styrofoam. Or glass. Sidra’s mouth was lined with sherry. Walt’s lips shone with beer. “What’s the last movie you saw?” she asked him.

“The last movie I saw. Let’s see.” He was thinking, but she could tell he wasn’t good at it. She watched with curiosity the folded-in mouth, the tilted head: at last, a guy who didn’t go to the movies. His eyes rolled back like the casters on a clerk’s chair, searching. “You know what I saw?”

“No. What?” She was getting drunk.

“It was this cartoon movie.” Animation. She felt relieved. At least it wasn’t one of those bad art films starring what’s-her-name. “A man is asleep, having a dream about a beautiful little country full of little people.” Walt sat back, looked around the room, as if that were all.

“And?” She was going to have to push and pull with this guy.

“ ‘And?’ ” he repeated. He leaned forward again. “And one day the people realize that they are only creatures in this man’s dream. Dream people! And if the man wakes up, they will no longer exist!”

Now she hoped he wouldn’t go on. She had changed her mind a little.

“So they all get together at a town meeting and devise a plan,” he continued. Perhaps the band would be back soon. “They will burst into the man’s bedroom and bring him back to a padded, insulated room in the town — the town of his own dream — and there they will keep watch over him to make sure he stays asleep. And they do just that. Forever and ever, everyone guarding him carefully, but apprehensively, making sure he never wakes up.” He smiled. “I forget what the name of it was.”

“And he never wakes up.”

“Nope.” He grinned at her. She liked him. She could tell he could tell. He took a sip of his beer. He looked around the bar, then back at her. “Is this a great country or what?” he said.

She smiled at him, with longing. “Where do you live,” she asked, “and how do I get there?”

“I met a man,” she told Tommy on the phone. “His name is Walter.”

“A forced relationship. You’re in a state of stress — you’re in a syndrome, I can tell. You’re going to force this romance. What does he do?”

“Something with cars.” She sighed. “I want to sleep with someone. When I’m sleeping with someone, I’m less obsessed with the mail.”

“But perhaps you should just be alone, be by yourself for a while.”

“Like you’ve ever been alone,” said Sidra. “I mean, have you ever been alone?”

“I’ve been alone.”

“Yeah, and for how long?”

“Hours,” said Tommy. He sighed. “At least it felt like hours.”

“Right,” she said, “so don’t go lecturing me about inner resources.”

“Okay. So I sold the mineral rights to my body years ago, but, hey, at least I got good money for mine.”

“I got some money,” said Sidra. “I got some.”

Walter leaned her against his parked car. His mouth was slightly lopsided, paisley-shaped, his lips anneloid and full, and he kissed her hard. There was something numb and on hold in her. There were small dark pits of annihilation she discovered in her heart, in the loosening fist of it, and she threw herself into them, falling. She went home with him, slept with him. She told him who she was. A minor movie star once nominated for a major award. She told him she lived at the Days Inn. He had been there once, to the top, for a drink. But he did not seem to know her name.

“Never thought I’d sleep with a movie star,” he did say. “I suppose that’s every man’s dream.” He laughed — lightly, nervously.

“Just don’t wake up,” she said. Then she pulled the covers to her chin.

“Or change the dream,” he added seriously. “I mean, in the movie I saw, everything is fine until the sleeping guy begins to dream about something else. I don’t think he wills it or anything; it just happens.”

“You didn’t tell me about that part.”

“That’s right,” he said. “You see, the guy starts dreaming about flamingos and then all the little people turn into flamingos and fly away.”

“Really?” said Sidra.

“I think it was flamingos. I’m not too expert with birds.”

“You’re not?” She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on.

“To tell you the truth, I really don’t think I ever saw a single movie you were in.”

“Good.” She was drifting, indifferent, no longer paying attention.

He hitched his arm behind his head, wrist to nape. His chest heaved up and down. “I think I may of heard of you, though.”

Django Reinhardt was on the radio. She listened, carefully. “Astonishing sounds came from that man’s hands,” Sidra murmured.

Walter tried to kiss her, tried to get her attention back. He wasn’t that interested in music, though at times he tried to be. “ ‘Astonishing sounds’?” he said. “Like this?” He cupped his palms together, making little pops and suction noises.

“Yeah,” she murmured. But she was elsewhere, letting a dry wind sweep across the plain of her to sleep. “Like that.”

He began to realize, soon, that she did not respect him. A bug could sense it. A doorknob could figure it out. She never quite took him seriously. She would talk about films and film directors, then look at him and say, “Oh, never mind.” She was part of some other world. A world she no longer liked.

And now she was somewhere else. Another world she no longer liked.

But she was willing. Willing to give it a whirl. Once in a while, though she tried not to, she asked him about children, about having children, about turning kith to kin. How did he feel about all that? It seemed to her that if she were ever going to have a life of children and lawn mowers and grass clippings, it would be best to have it with someone who was not demeaned or trivialized by discussions of them. Did he like those big fertilized lawns? How about a nice rock garden? How did he feel deep down about those combination storm windows with the built-in screens?

“Yeah, I like them all right,” he said, and she would nod slyly and drink a little too much. She would try then not to think too strenuously about her whole life. She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic — drink, don’t drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.

“I always thought someday I would have a little girl and name her after my grandmother.” Sidra sighed, peered wistfully into her sherry.

“What was your grandmother’s name?”

Sidra looked at his paisley mouth. “Grandma. Her name was Grandma.” Walter laughed in a honking sort of way. “Oh, thank you,” murmured Sidra. “Thank you for laughing.”

Walter had a subscription to AutoWeek. He flipped through it in bed. He also liked to read repair manuals for new cars, particularly the Toyotas. He knew a lot about control panels, light-up panels, side panels.

“You’re so obviously wrong for each other,” said Charlotte over tapas at a tapas bar.

“Hey, please,” said Sidra. “I think my taste’s a little subtler than that.” The thing with tapas bars was that you just kept stuffing things into your mouth. “Obviously wrong is just the beginning. That’s where I always begin. At obviously wrong.” In theory, she liked the idea of mismatched couples, the wrangling and retangling, like a comedy by Shakespeare.

“I can’t imagine you with someone like him. He’s just not special.” Charlotte had met him only once. But she had heard of him from a girlfriend of hers. He had slept around, she’d said. “Into the pudding” is how she phrased it, and there were some boring stories. “Just don’t let him humiliate you. Don’t mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness,” she added.

“I’m supposed to wait around for someone special, while every other girl in this town gets to have a life?”

“I don’t know, Sidra.”

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed. It suggested sexual things. “I’m a very average person,” she said desperately, somehow detecting that Charlotte already knew that, knew the deep, dark, wildly obvious secret of that, and how it made Sidra slightly pathetic, unseemly—inferior, when you got right down to it. Charlotte studied Sidra’s face, headlights caught in the stare of a deer. Guns don’t kill people, thought Sidra fizzily. Deer kill people.

“Maybe it’s that we all used to envy you so much,” Charlotte said a little bitterly. “You were so talented. You got all the lead parts in the plays. You were everyone’s dream of what they wanted.”

Sidra poked around at the appetizer in front of her, gardening it like a patch of land. She was unequal to anyone’s wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. “Envy,” said Sidra. “That’s a lot like hate, isn’t it.” But Charlotte didn’t say anything. Probably she wanted Sidra to change the subject. Sidra stuffed her mouth full of feta cheese and onions, and looked up. “Well, all I can say is, I’m glad to be back.” A piece of feta dropped from her lips.

Charlotte looked down at it and smiled. “I know what you mean,” she said. She opened her mouth wide and let all the food inside fall out onto the table.

Charlotte could be funny like that. Sidra had forgotten that about her.

Walter had found some of her old movies in the video-rental place. She had a key. She went over one night and discovered him asleep in front of Recluse with Roommate. It was about a woman named Rose who rarely went out, because when she did, she was afraid of people. They seemed like alien life-forms — soulless, joyless, speaking asyntactically. Rose quickly became loosened from reality. Walter had it freeze-framed at the funny part, where Rose phones the psych ward to have them come take her away, but they refuse. She lay down next to him and tried to sleep, too, but began to cry a little. He stirred. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing. You fell asleep. Watching me.”

“I was tired,” he said.

“I guess so.”

“Let me kiss you. Let me find your panels.” His eyes were closed. She could be anybody.

“Did you like the beginning part of the movie?” This need in her was new. Frightening. It made her hair curl. When had she ever needed so much?

“It was okay,” he said.

“So what is this guy, a race-car driver?” asked Tommy.

“No, he’s a mechanic.”

“Ugh! Quit him like a music lesson!”

“Like a music lesson? What is this, Similes from the Middle Class? One Man’s Opinion?” She was irritated.

“Sidra. This is not right! You need to go out with someone really smart for a change.”

“I’ve been out with smart. I’ve been out with someone who had two Ph.D.’s. We spent all of our time in bed with the light on, proofreading his vita.” She sighed. “Every little thing he’d ever done, every little, little, little. I mean, have you ever seen a vita?”

Tommy sighed, too. He had heard this story of Sidra’s before. “Yes,” he said. “I thought Patti LuPone was great.”

“Besides,” she said. “Who says he’s not smart?”

The Japanese cars were the most interesting. Though the Americans were getting sexier, trying to keep up with them. Those Japs!

“Let’s talk about my world,” she said.

“What world?”

“Well, something I’m interested in. Something where there’s something in it for me.”

“Okay.” He turned and dimmed the lights, romantically. “Got a stock tip for you,” he said.

She was horrified, dispirited, interested.

He told her the name of a company somebody at work invested in. AutVis.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. But some guy at work said buy this week. They’re going to make some announcement. If I had money, I’d buy.”

She bought, the very next morning. A thousand shares. By the afternoon, the stock had plummeted 10 percent; by the following morning, 50. She watched the ticker tape go by on the bottom of the TV news channel. She had become the major stockholder. The major stockholder of a dying company! Soon they were going to be calling her, wearily, to ask what she wanted done with the forklift.

“You’re a neater eater than I am,” Walter said to her over dinner at the Palmer House.

She looked at him darkly. “What the hell were you thinking of, recommending that stock?” she asked. “How could you be such an irresponsible idiot?” She saw it now, how their life would be together. She would yell; then he would yell. He would have an affair; then she would have an affair. And then they would be gone and gone, and they would live in that gone.

“I got the name wrong,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You what?”

“It wasn’t AutVis. It was AutDrive. I kept thinking it was vis for vision.”

“ ‘Vis for vision,’ ” she repeated.

“I’m not that good with names,” confessed Walter. “I do better with concepts.”

“ ‘Concepts,’ ” she repeated as well.

The concept of anger. The concept of bills. The concept of flightless, dodo love.

Outside, there was a watery gust from the direction of the lake. “Chicago,” said Walter. “The Windy City. Is this the Windy City or what?” He looked at her hopefully, which made her despise him more.

She shook her head. “I don’t even know why we’re together,” she said. “I mean, why are we even together?”

He looked at her hard. “I can’t answer that for you,” he yelled. He took two steps back, away from her. “You’ve got to answer that for yourself!” And he hailed his own cab, got in, and rode away.

She walked back to the Days Inn alone. She played scales soundlessly, on the tops of the piano keys, her thin-jointed fingers lifting and falling quietly like the tines of a music box or the legs of a spider. When she tired, she turned on the television, moved through the channels, and discovered an old movie she’d been in, a love story — murder mystery called Finishing Touches. It was the kind of performance she had become, briefly, known for: a patched-together intimacy with the audience, half cartoon, half revelation; a cross between shyness and derision. She had not given a damn back then, sort of like now, only then it had been a style, a way of being, not a diagnosis or demise.

Perhaps she should have a baby.

In the morning, she went to visit her parents in Elmhurst. For winter, they had plastic-wrapped their home — the windows, the doors — so that it looked like a piece of avant-garde art. “Saves on heating bills,” they said.

They had taken to discussing her in front of her. “It was a movie, Don. It was a movie about adventure. Nudity can be art.”

“That’s not how I saw it! That’s not how I saw it at all!” said her father, red-faced, leaving the room. Naptime.

“How are you doing?” asked her mother, with what seemed like concern but was really an opening for something else. She had made tea.

“I’m okay, really,” said Sidra. Everything she said about herself now sounded like a lie. If she was bad, it sounded like a lie; if she was fine — also a lie.

Her mother fiddled with a spoon. “I was envious of you.” Her mother sighed. “I was always so envious of you! My own daughter!” She was shrieking it, saying it softly at first and then shrieking. It was exactly like Sidra’s childhood: just when she thought life had become simple again, her mother gave her a new portion of the world to organize.

“I have to go,” said Sidra. She had only just gotten there, but she wanted to go. She didn’t want to visit her parents anymore. She didn’t want to look at their lives.

She went back to the Days Inn and phoned Tommy. She and Tommy understood each other. “I get you,” he used to say. His childhood had been full of sisters. He’d spent large portions of it drawing pictures of women in bathing suits — Miss Kenya from Nairobi! — and then asking one of the sisters to pick the most beautiful. If he disagreed, he asked another sister.

The connection was bad, and suddenly she felt too tired. “Darling, are you okay?” he said faintly.

“I’m okay.”

“I think I’m hard of hearing,” he said.

“I think I’m hard of talking,” she said. “I’ll phone you tomorrow.”

She phoned Walter instead. “I need to see you,” she said.

“Oh, really?” he said skeptically, and then added, with a sweetness he seemed to have plucked expertly from the air like a fly, “Is this a great country or what?”

She felt grateful to be with him again. “Let’s never be apart,” she whispered, rubbing his stomach. He had the physical inclinations of a dog: he liked stomach, ears, excited greetings.

“Fine by me,” he said.

“Tomorrow, let’s go out to dinner somewhere really expensive. My treat.”

“Uh,” said Walter, “tomorrow’s no good.”

“Oh.”

“How about Sunday?”

“What’s wrong with tomorrow?”

“I’ve got. Well, I’ve gotta work and I’ll be tired, first of all.”

“What’s second of all?”

“I’m getting together with this woman I know.”

“Oh?”

“It’s no big deal. It’s nothing. It’s not a date or anything.”

“Who is she?”

“Someone whose car I fixed. Loose mountings in the exhaust system. She wants to get together and talk about it some more. She wants to know about catalytic converters. You know, women are afraid of getting taken advantage of.”

“Really!”

“Yeah, well, so Sunday would be better.”

“Is she attractive?”

Walter scrinched up his face and made a sound of unenthusiasm. “Enh,” he said, and placed his hand laterally in the air, rotating it up and down a little.

Before he left in the morning, she said, “Just don’t sleep with her.”

“Sidra,” he said, scolding her for lack of trust or for attempted supervision — she wasn’t sure which.

That night, he didn’t come home. She phoned and phoned and then drank a six-pack and fell asleep. In the morning, she phoned again. Finally, at eleven o’clock, he answered.

She hung up.

At 11:30, her phone rang. “Hi,” he said cheerfully. He was in a good mood.

“So where were you all night?” asked Sidra. This was what she had become. She felt shorter and squatter and badly coiffed.

There was some silence. “What do you mean?” he said cautiously.

“You know what I mean.”

More silence. “Look, I didn’t call this morning to get into a heavy conversation.”

“Well, then,” said Sidra, “you certainly called the wrong number.” She slammed down the phone.

She spent the day trembling and sad. She felt like a cross between Anna Karenina and Amy Liverhaus, who used to shout from the fourth-grade cloakroom, “I just don’t feel appreciated.” She walked over to Marshall Field’s to buy new makeup. “You’re much more of a cream beige than an ivory,” said the young woman working the cosmetics counter.

But Sidra clutched at the ivory. “People are always telling me that,” she said, “and it makes me very cross.”

She phoned him later that night and he was there. “We need to talk,” she said.

“I want my key back,” he said.

“Look. Can you just come over here so that we can talk?”

He arrived bearing flowers — white roses and irises. They seemed wilted and ironic; she leaned them against the wall in a dry glass, no water.

“All right, I admit it,” he said. “I went out on a date. But I’m not saying I slept with her.”

She could feel, suddenly, the promiscuity in him. It was a heat, a creature, a tenant twin. “I already know you slept with her.”

“How can you know that?”

“Get a life! What am I, an idiot?” She glared at him and tried not to cry. She hadn’t loved him enough and he had sensed it. She hadn’t really loved him at all, not really.

But she had liked him a lot!

So it still seemed unfair. A bone in her opened up, gleaming and pale, and she held it to the light and spoke from it. “I want to know one thing.” She paused, not really for effect, but it had one. “Did you have oral sex?”

He looked stunned. “What kind of question is that? I don’t have to answer a question like that.”

“You don’t have to answer a question like that. You don’t have any rights here!” she began to yell. She was dehydrated. “You’re the one who did this. Now I want the truth. I just want to know. Yes or no!”

He threw his gloves across the room.

“Yes or no,” she said.

He flung himself onto the couch, pounded the cushion with his fist, placed an arm up over his eyes.

“Yes or no,” she repeated.

He breathed deeply into his shirtsleeve.

“Yes or no.”

“Yes,” he said.

She sat down on the piano bench. Something dark and coagulated moved through her, up from the feet. Something light and breathing fled through her head, the house of her plastic-wrapped and burned down to tar. She heard him give a moan, and some fleeing hope in her, surrounded but alive on the roof, said perhaps he would beg her forgiveness. Promise to be a new man. She might find him attractive as a new, begging man. Though at some point, he would have to stop begging. He would just have to be normal. And then she would dislike him again.

He stayed on the sofa, did not move to comfort or be comforted, and the darkness in her cleaned her out, hollowed her like acid or a wind.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said, something palsied in her voice. She felt cheated of all the simple things — the radical calm of obscurity, of routine, of blah domestic bliss. “I don’t want to go back to L.A.,” she said. She began to stroke the tops of the piano keys, pushing against one and finding it broken — thudding and pitchless, shiny and mocking like an opened bone. She hated, hated her life. Perhaps she had always hated it.

He sat up on the sofa, looked distraught and false — his face badly arranged. He should practice in a mirror, she thought. He did not know how to break up with a movie actress. It was boys’ rules: don’t break up with a movie actress. Not in Chicago. If she left him, he would be better able to explain it, to himself, in the future, to anyone who asked. His voice shifted into something meant to sound imploring. “I know” was what he said, in a tone approximating hope, faith, some charity or other. “I know you might not want to.”

“For your own good,” he was saying. “Might be willing …” he was saying. But she was already turning into something else, a bird — a flamingo, a hawk, a flamingo-hawk — and was flying up and away, toward the filmy pane of the window, then back again, circling, meanly, with a squint.

He began, suddenly, to cry — loudly at first, with lots of ohs, then tiredly, as if from a deep sleep, his face buried in the poncho he’d thrown over the couch arm, his body sinking into the plush of the cushions — a man held hostage by the anxious cast of his dream.

“What can I do?” he asked.

But his dream had now changed, and she was gone, gone out the window, gone, gone.