There is no comfort for those shorn
of love, of laughter’s sweet caress.
Like sheep in spring, we bleat when torn
from vital warmth, from precious breath.
We move in lines bewildering,
in queues too solemn to be borne.
We wet parched lips, remembering,
and, as survivors left to mourn,
We blindly herd across the green,
our eyes unfocused in our grief.
We stumble over thoughts unseen
and pray our anguish will be brief.
We sometimes envy those departed
who, like wool, fresh clipped and dyed,
Will weave a future full, fresh-hearted,
while we grieve for that denied.
I was late, and his street was full.
I found a vacated spot on a side avenue a couple of blocks away, and rocked my car into position nervously, a parallel parker caught in uncertain geometry, squeezing my old Saab in between a beemer and a bug, resenting the audacity of gleaming new paint on all perimeters, apprehensive of the yet unvoiced threat of car alarms eager to announce transgressions.
I hate driving in L.A., but not as much as I hate parking. And I don’t hate parking as much as I hate running late.
Peabody’s place nested in quiet insolence—a reflection of the man— on a Los Angeles street lined with sterile building blocks, tiny apartment room boxes stacked neatly in rows of two or three, secure enough for earthquake codes but sorely lacking in the aesthetics that defer soulquake. Against this utilitarian construction mentality, his place was part of a retro triplex from the Fifties that faced the thoroughfare with a row of white garage doors like a frightened monkey’s bared teeth, a brazen attempt to scare away access to the building’s secrets.
But once I stepped through the weathered wood gate, it was easy to forget the rigid construction of the boulevard, easy to forget the stress of traffic, easy to let go of the constant wash of being buried in the heart of the second largest city in the country.
The entrance to his two-bedroom-one-and-a-half-bath-townhouse-with-a-garden-view was secluded in the back. The path to his door was guarded by herds of elephant’s ears that slowed my pace as I wandered the curve between cascades of bougainvillea, ivy that crawled up stucco walls in unchecked conquest, and an occasional aromatic wisp of night-blooming jasmine—a sweet summer scent that overpowered car fumes and lingering smog stink as I dodged the danger of black widows whose intricate webs clung to twilight dew and glistened under diffused streetlight.
Peabody and I meet up for late dinner two or three times a week. Sometimes we go out, sometimes he comes over and I cook. For a guy I’m not sleeping with, I see way too much of him, but neither of us has been willing to let go of whatever it is that lingers, like a persistent fungus, between us. I know what drives me. His motivation is a mystery.
The door was open.
I found him upstairs, in his bedroom, on the phone. He patted the bed next to him, and continued the conversation, mostly hmmmms and yeahs, as I sat, my weight rolling us gently toward each other until our thighs almost touched. I slid back an inch, unwilling to close that gap.
A final monosyllable to the phone before he hung up, then to me, “Barb’s joining us for dinner, I hope you don’t mind. She just got the call on Joe.
“I felt his presence about an hour ago. I could taste his fear, it made the hairs on my arms stand up.” He held out an arm to show, though the dark hairs now lay smooth, unruffled. When he dropped his hand, it brushed my leg, without significance. “I made note of the time. Barb says that’s when he died. Interesting, isn’t it?”
Peabody came at the forefront of the baby boomer generation. Even with the seven years he has on me, he is, like me, a child of the Sixties. He is still very much into things spiritual. In the late Sixties, he’d almost become a Buddhist monk, but with a sudden turn in a cross-country drive he became an entrepreneur instead. Unfortunately, his approach to business holds a faux-Zen passivity, rich with enthusiasm, but lacking the full engagement that the world of enterprise demands for success. His current project is to market rock chips from Mount Sinai in little glass bottles that dangle with a holy evocativeness from a genuine ten-carat gold-filled chain. In his test spots, the vials are lost between the mountainous breasts of his model of choice. But he’s adamant that sex sells—even to the pious. He plans to sell through infomercials to restless insomniacs who flip cable channels in their futile quest for boredom sufficient to shove them back into morpheatic retreat from the day’s tribulations. Spiritual pet-rock jewelry should fit neatly between colon cleansers and time-share opportunities. If it follows his lifetime curve, he’ll succeed in raising the venture capital, he’ll launch the campaign, then the universe will conspire to drag his business down by a series of cruel devices, never any fault of his own, and a few years down the long and rocky road of bad timing, missed opportunity and vanished funding, he’ll be off in a new venture, eternally optimistic that he’s found yet another mother lode. This must be the mentality that opened the West more than a century ago. Unfortunately, most of those early miners also died obscure deaths.
The one constant with Peabody is his ability to charm, to connive, and to disguise the connivance with sincerity. And so his projects continue to find open wallets among his friends and associates. So why do I remain friends with him? I think it was P.T. Barnum who said a sucker is born every minute. I feel good when I’m with him, even though I know he’s not good for me.
But that’s Peabody. And that’s our relationship. Convoluted. Complicated. Able to invoke conflicting feelings. I write poetry, but he is metaphor.
##
We were boothed in the Daily Grill in Studio City—Peabody, his older sister Barb, and me—one of the siblings’ favorite haunts. The ambient noise level was high enough to provide privacy but not so overwhelming as to drown conversation as I listened to them discuss a man I’d never met, never would meet.
Barb, a petite, still-pretty woman near sixty who could pass for a score less in the restaurant’s dark-wood, faux candle-golden lighting, has a nervous energy that she keeps tethered by sheer will. I’ve yet to see her when she doesn’t have an edge on—a woman who probably sleeps as restlessly as she moves. But tonight was different. Tonight there was a sadness, a deep sadness that had somehow manifested itself, according to her boyfriend Andy (who was not present at this moveable, miniature wake), in a sore foot. “You know how places on a foot are supposed to match different organs in the body?” She took off her left sport shoe and set it on the bench beside her. “Andy has a book about it, and he says that this spot here,” she lifted her foot and pointed to the painful area on her sole, “correlates with my heart.” Her limberness impressed me.
“Think so?” Peabody raised his bushy brows, brows I sometimes have an urge to chew on.
“I think I probably stepped on a rock and didn’t notice,” she said. Peabody and I laughed.
##
A few days earlier, Peabody had told me about Joe Cartucci, and about Joe’s history with Barb.
In the early Sixties, Barb was in her twenties. Barb was a precursor to the end of the decade, a cardless member of that class of women who chose not to label themselves as feminists, but instead quietly and tenaciously defied those conventions they found inconvenient or unpalatable. When Barb’s daughter Alison (that’s one ell, not two) kicked and screamed her way out of the womb, her father was already the shadow of a dim memory. It wasn’t easy playing single mom in the wake of Ozzie and Harriet and the Cleavers, and Barb learned her toughness with Alison at the tit.
When she and Joe became what the census bureau would later dub significant others, Alison was two. For five years, Joe was, in most respects, a husband to Barb and father to her child. But he didn’t marry her. The sexual revolution had not yet turned the country’s morality inside out, and Barb, even with her disregard for convention, kept expecting the vow. Joe, a dedicated womanizer, didn’t answer the questions she refused to ask, and their tacit silence grew from a mouse scurrying under the stove to a slavering monster that haunted Barb day and night.
Barb’s mother was charmed by Joe—she was, after all, a woman—but Barb’s conservative father was not. Under the pounding waves of her jealousy, Barb’s defiance steadily eroded until she gave in to patriarchal pressure and kicked him out.
When Alison reached maturity and left home for the opportunity to pursue her own mistakes, Barb found a lasting relationship with a man not much older than her daughter, Andy of the reflexological foot theories, twenty years her junior. She spent another two decades raising him from the privacy of her bed.
Barb and Joe were never lovers again, but stayed best friends for almost forty years. Joe never again lived with a woman, never owned up to loneliness, and never overtly proffered his devotion to Barb. But she remained the love of his life, the paradigm to which he compared all other women then watched as they tripped and tumbled at the base of her pedestal.
##
“The hospital room was crowded,” Barb told us. “Joe’s sister, his nephews and their wives. And Horst. My ex-husband,” she added for my benefit. “Horst isn’t Alison’s father. He lived next door to us when Joe and I were together, and as soon as Joe moved out, he moved in on me. We were married two years—”
“He was violent,” Peabody said. Barb’s head jerked, an abbreviated agreement. I was surprised. She didn’t strike me as the type to tolerate abuse, but maybe Horst was another facet of her diamond-smooth resistance to things gentle.
“And for some reason I never understood,” she continued, “he and Joe stayed close.”
“Maybe because they had you in common,” Peabody suggested.
Barb ignored him. “The cancer was in Joe’s lungs, but it made his throat so sore he could only get out a croaky whisper. I watched him grab Horst’s shoulder and pull him close. I was on the other side of the room, breathing a spray of apricot-colored roses—trying to cover the hospital smell—and couldn’t hear what he said. But I heard Horst. ‘What would you say to her that you wouldn’t say in front of me?’ Joe’s knuckles were white. He whispered something else, and Horst said okay, then chased everybody out of the room and followed.
“They left us alone. Joe’s sister resented it, she resented me. But they all left. They left out of respect for Joe. He asked them to leave because he wanted to protect me.”
Protect? What would a dying man would feel compelled to protect tough Barb from?
##
The first time I’d met Barb had been in the same restaurant, a couple of months earlier. “So what’s up with you and my brother?” she’d asked suddenly, bluntly, almost rudely, mid another conversational topic.
I’d been wondering that myself, so I passed to Peabody. “We’ve known each other for years,” he told her.
She didn’t buy it. “We met through an online dating service,” he said.
“But we’re not dating,” I added. She didn’t ask for more. Thank god! I’d have hated trying to explain to her how we didn’t date several times a week or why we’d been doing so for months. But she’d never warmed up to me. Peabody says she’s like that with all his female friends, even ones he’s been seriously involved with. I don’t sweat it.
They don’t look alike. She’s tiny, with delicate features, deceptively frail-looking, as though her bones were hollow. She has a way of watching things almost peripherally. She reacts to unexpected motion with a feral start.
He’s tall and lanky, all arms and legs, surprisingly little paunch for a man of his age and appetite. His smooth, bald forehead makes me imagine his hair sinking into his scalp so it can spring back out, thick and spongy, from his eyebrows. I love those brows. When he was younger, they were dark—brooding and intimidating over intensely dark eyes. Now, heavily peppered with gray, they’re warm and cushy, welcoming over a disarming sparkle. His smile hosts a Lauren Hutton gap between the front teeth, boyish and charming. He rarely reacts to anything, as though he doesn’t quite believe in the world around him.
Their personalities are equally disparate, but the result somehow the same. He maintains emotional distance with teasing while she does so with a cold, unsettling reserve.
They both have a quality about them that makes me think of untamed birds, like a parrot I bought years ago. Tookie was a dwarf macaw, green with a yellow band that sat like a collar on its neck. Half the height of a full-sized macaw, its beak was still powerful enough to draw blood. I’d never before considered owning a bird, but the storekeeper assured me of a full refund if it “didn’t work out.” I thought of Monty Python; “That parrot’s not dead, it’s merely sleeping!” I didn’t know enough to realize that if he had to wear gloves while taking it out of the cage, a dead bird would be the least of my concerns.
Three days after I’d brought the bird home, I was on the phone to the pet store. “My hands really hurt, and things are getting worse, not better,” I told him. “This bird is beyond not hand-tamed, it’s wild.”
He gave me the name and number of a trainer. Bea, he told me, worked in the film industry as a bird wrangler, and she could, he said, work miracles. I desperately needed a miracle. I called her and set an appointment for the next day.
Watching Bea work with the bird for the first time, I asked why she worked with bare hands. “Gloves scare the bird,” she said. “This bird was probably caught in the wild somewhere in South America, shipped here under horrific conditions, shuffled from cage to cage, always handled by anonymous hands in padded gloves. Get the idea of what our hands, especially gloved ones, must look like from the bird’s point of view.”
I did. It was scary.
The bird never bit her.
“Find a center for yourself,” she told me, “a place where you can be calm and quiet, both physically and spiritually. This is where you need to be when you’re working with the bird.”
Bea didn’t train the bird; she trained me. She showed me how to make the bird feel easy enough, relaxed enough around me to let trust begin to build. She taught me to make no sudden moves, to let the bird come to me, to feed it by hand a little at a time, then a little more, until the bird would associate my hand with safety and reward. I learned to speak always in a gentle, soothing tone.
I asked her about the bird’s sex, and she said it didn’t matter, to pick one and stick with it. Tookie became a female, a feral creature still, but one I could relate to. Bea warned that the change wouldn’t happen quickly, but that if I worked with her daily, Tookie would eventually come around.
If you clip a parrot’s wings, it adapts to walking and climbing. Tookie’s cage hung from the ceiling, with a ladder that extended to the floor. Much of the time when I was home, I’d leave the cage open, giving Tookie freedom to descend the ladder, roam the house. She began to follow me from room to room, but still kept her distance.
I never thought about how long it would take the trimmed wing feathers to grow back.
A few months later, Tookie was on the top of her cage preening when someone left the patio door open. In a heartbeat, she sailed out the door, up into the sky and out of sight.
I was devastated.
I hunted the neighborhood the first day. The second day, I haunted it. I posted signs offering reward. No calls.
A neighbor told me about a flock of mismatched parrots in Pasadena, a few miles from where I lived, made up entirely of escaped pets. This bevy, in a spectrum of color, size and cacophonous voice, would circuit the city, clearing a tree of its fruit in an hour before moving on. Citizens were patient despite the damage—they were part of the city’s lore. That night I dreamed of Tookie, imagining her safe within this company.
Just before six the next morning, as the sun’s crepuscular rays crept over the horizon, I thought I was still dreaming when I heard Tookie’s call. I ran to the deck, still in my pajamas, and scanned nearby trees, trying to pinpoint the source. I couldn’t find her.
Throughout the day, I continued to hear her sporadic calls, but still couldn’t see her. This continued for two more days. On the fifth day, I finally spotted her, early in the morning, sailing from treetop to treetop. Enough of her feathers had grown back to let her coast, but not sufficient to give her the control needed to navigate down.
I followed her through the heavily-treed neighborhood, twenty feet below her aerial distress, until she landed in a tree with branches that wove low to the ground. I stood beneath and talked her down, branch by slow branch, until she was within arm’s length, then nabbed her, stuffed her under my sweatshirt, and brought her back into the house. She relaxed into me, appreciative of the warmth and comfort of containment.
Inside, I secured the door to the deck, then pulled her gently out from under my shirt and put her in the cage. As she attacked her food and water, I called Bea, who promised to come over straightaway and show me how to safely clip her wings. Cut too deeply into a feather, trim away too much freedom, and a bird can bleed to death.
Later that day, Tookie climbed willingly onto my shoulder for the first time. When she brushed her beak against my lips, I knew I’d won. We’d both won. It was the promised miracle. We had bonded.
It was a lesson in patience, a lesson in love.
# #
Barb curled on the seat across from me, feet pulled in close, like a bird settling in for sleep. I could imagine her eyes closed, chin tucked into her shoulder.
“Remember that vanity I bought Joe for his birthday years ago?” Barb asked.
“The art deco one?” Peabody asked.
“Yeah. Well, his apartment was broken into sometime back, and a lot of things were stolen. That vanity was one of them. But the thieves left behind one of the drawers. Just one. It was so stupid.” She picked up a piece of bread, put it down again without tasting. “A normal person would have tossed the drawer, but not Joe. He kept it.”
“Because you gave it to him?”
She shrugged.
How romantic, I thought.
“There’s more,” Barb said.
Our food arrived. Peabody and I sat across from Barb, him on the right and me on the left. We kept bumping into each other throughout the meal—he’s left-handed, I’m not. Like too many things in our relationship, our relative positions were ass-backwards. We’re accustomed to facing off with each other. We haven’t learned to face the world from the same side. Barb didn’t comment as we ate off each others’ plates. But she offered me some of her salad. It might have been a peace offering, but I passed; I don’t like radishes.
##
Three months earlier, Joe, at 72, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Barb didn’t find out until he called and told her he wanted to see her before he was gone. She’d dropped everything—her business, her personal life, even her hair appointment—and hopped on a plane back east to spend a couple of days with him. Two days stretched into four, then seven.
She’d only returned to LA the day before. Her roots were still showing.
##
Peabody, himself fifty-eight and never married, told me he used to say he didn’t want to end up like Joe. “Joe was charming, one of the most charming men I’ve ever known. He truly loved women, and they loved him back. He’d go into department stores and hang out around the cosmetic counters just to pick women up. He’d go into Gelson’s for ice cream and strawberries and come home with a woman to help him eat them. Smooth in an intense Italian way, he was always sincere, genuine. He just wasn’t constant. Until his father died, he’d never owned a piece of real estate.”
I looked at Peabody, thinking that he, like Joe, was still a renter, thinking of his innate and irresistible appeal, so similar to how he’d described Joe, thinking about the string of women I knew of and the much vaster number of intimacies that had only been alluded to. And I thought of how easy it is to become that which you dread. I wondered what I most dreaded. We are, all of us, works in progress at best.
##
“Were many of his friends there?” Peabody asked.
“No. There was me, and Horst. The family. That’s all.”
“Horst.” Peabody laughed. “What an ugly name. Why’d you marry such an ugly name?”
Barb looked at me. “All his life, Joe was fond of talking about the woulda, coulda, shoulda he missed out on. Toward the end, it got worse. Most of his friends became weary of the same old.” I appreciated her effort to paint background for me.
“Joe’s sister, Dolores, talked about the family while I was there. She talked about their father,” Barb said.
“Did Joe ever talk about his dad?” Peabody asked.
“Never. And the things Dolores said were not kind. The man was hard, especially on Joe. Never expected him to amount to much, and never missed the chance to say so. Family dynamics are fascinating.”
Looking from her to Peabody, thinking what I knew of their own upbringings, I silently agreed.
“Dolores has two sons. She’s been married to the same man forty-eight years. Both her sons are in their forties. Both are doctors. And both married women named Jill.”
“Jill?”
“It’s strange. But they’re great kids. They’ve got it rough, though. Their uncle just died. And their father was diagnosed with cancer two weeks after Joe. He’s in constant pain, and they’re waiting for him to go next.”
It was hard for me to think of men in their forties as kids. Mine are still teenagers. I guess it’s a matter of perspective.
##
Earlier, before we left for the restaurant, Peabody and I talked, him leaning on a stack of pillows, me curled cattycorner on the foot of the bed. I find his voice soothing, and sometimes call him late at night so the rhythms of his speech patterns can lull me to sleep. His voice over the phone is much safer than his voice a few inches from my ear.
That night, after he told me about Joe, he’d showed me a book with three different translations of a Vedic hymn. The book described 36,000 sparks of light, and how they all sprang from a single impulse, desire, and all became as intense as the original spark that signaled the end of the Void. We’d continued to talk about desire, about art. We’d talked about death. Peabody was mourning in his own quiet, distant, carefully uninvolved way. I didn’t know how to offer comfort, remembering how useless others’ efforts had seemed when I’d been there.
I was thinking of all of this when I asked Barb, “What’s your idea of what happens after death?”
“No,” she said, probably more harshly than she’d intended. Peabody had already chastised her once before for being rude to me. He took it much more personally than I did. “I mean, I appreciate what you’re trying to do with that question, but I really don’t want to get into it. I don’t want, I just don’t want to go there.” Her hands fluttered like wings caught in an unexpected updraft. I nodded gently. No sudden movements. I understood. A wild bird. A wounded, wild bird.
She looked intensely at Peabody. “Horst cried at the hospital,” she said. “He cried while he held Joe’s hand, and he cried again back at the hotel.” She turned her head with a slight jerk, and made tentative eye contact with me. “But I still haven’t cried. I don’t know that I will.”
There was nothing I could say.
Barb’s voice was calm, detached. I wondered whether she was on meds. “At the hospital, after everyone else left the room, I asked Joe what he wanted. His throat hurt, it was hard for him to talk. I had to lean in close to hear him I’ll never forget the smell.
“He said there were papers in his apartment here in LA he wanted me to go through before anyone else saw them. ‘For this you chased everyone else out of the room?’ I asked him. ‘I didn’t want to embarrass you,’ he said.”
“When he told me where to look, I wasn’t sure I understood. It didn’t come clear until I was there.”
The waiter arrived with an unsolicited dessert—a rich brownie buried in creamy vanilla ice cream and dressed with caramel sauce and caramelized pecans. “My treat,” he said. Barb eats here often and the staff love her, in part because she tips well. I’ve seen her receive this attention before.
The waiter handed us each a spoon. None of us wanted to take the first bite. Peabody finally dug in, his elbow pushing against mine. I pushed back, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted the rest of the story more than I wanted dessert, more than I wanted Peabody’s teasing. More than I wanted Peabody.
“Did you know that Joe got Mom to smoke pot with him one time?” Barb said.
“Really.” He didn’t seem surprised. “Could you imagine Dad doing that?”
“No.” The flatness in her voice made me think of how she’d described Dolores’ reaction to a cruel father. Peabody’s expression remained vague.
“Joe was always private about his money, his financial affairs. Yesterday, when I got back to town, I went to his apartment.”
“The same one he’s had for the last twenty-five years?” Peabody asked.
It occurred to me that Peabody had been in his apartment almost as long.
“Just down the street. I let myself in with his key. It looked like he’d just walked out for a few hours, maybe a day trip to the beach. It didn’t look like he’d been gone six months. Unwashed dishes in the sink. Used towels on the bathroom floor. Dirty laundry in the bedroom. There, on a shelf in the corner near his bed was the drawer.”
“The drawer?” Peabody asked.
“From the stolen vanity,” I said.
“Sitting on the shelf, uncovered, full of papers,” Barb continued. “I went through everything. Bank statements—the balances surprised me—stock certificates, Horst’s going to handle all of that—he’s a stock broker,” she added for my benefit.
“His papers were in no particular order. And there were photographs. A shot of Joe and Dolores when they were little. Joe with his nephews. One of Joe and Horst and me. Joe with Alison at her fourth birthday. And me. Polaroids, yellowed and faded, and very, very nude. He didn’t want Horst to see the Polaroids. Not that I would have cared. He didn’t want Horst to know he’d taken them. Some nudes I’d taken of him, too. All of them—all of these memories, mixed in with his financials.” She rubbed her sore foot on the spot that might or might not reflect her heart. “We were there, in the drawer, underexposed, faded, hoarded with his money. In the drawer he never threw away.”
She cut a careful piece of brownie, scooped it with ice cream and nuts. As she put it in her mouth, she stared off at something Peabody and I couldn’t see, would never see.
“Make sure you leave the waiter a good tip,” she said to Peabody. “The dessert was on him.”
##
On the drive back, we were both pensive, almost melancholy. I pulled up in front of Peabody’s apartment on Coldwater Canyon, but he didn’t get out. We sat in semi-darkness, lost in our separate thoughts, both of us lost. I finally broke the silence. “Did I ever tell you I had a parrot?”
He looked at me without fully turning his face, his profile silhouetted by the street lamp. “What happened to it?”
“She died.”
“I thought parrots lived for decades.”
“Some weird bird virus, sudden, unexpected.” A wash of grief warmed my face, my shoulders. “She was in my lap. I felt her final breath.”
He put a hand lightly, briefly on mine, then pulled away.
It was almost midnight when he finally climbed out of the car. I was tired. Before he got out, his lips brushed mine. No question, no promise. No miracle. Only a slowly growing trust. Perched at the curb, he watched me drive off.
I turned up the volume on the CD player, trying to lose myself in Gershwin—The way your smile just beams, the way you sing off-key, the way you haunt my dreams…
Hours later, in bed, alone, still awake, I was still thinking about Tookie, still thinking about the drawer.
What a dreadful waste. All of it.
