Bird Read online

  Here’s an example of how things went with us. One night we met up to drive down to the Lighthouse. I got into her car and I asked her if I looked okay. I was wearing a navy blue dress with a full-circle skirt, my hair pulled into a bun.

  ‘Sure,’ Anna got in the car. ‘You look sweet. You always do.’

  Sweet. I looked down at my lap, to my clutch bag nestled neatly in it. I looked further down, to my sensible black pumps. I looked in the rear vision mirror and saw my lipstick was all wrong. It was called Coral but it looked bright orange to me. I looked across at Anna, who was wearing a pink satin dress with sequins that traced her breasts, followed and exaggerated the line of her waist and then joined in a triangle below her belly. It was a dress like one she’d seen Monroe wear once and it was so tight that Anna had had to hitch it up above her bottom to slide into the front seat. Miriam always said that pink and red should never be worn together but they looked okay on Anna. Her lips were bright red—cerise she called it—and her red shoes had the highest heels I ever saw.

  When we arrived at the Lighthouse I placed myself at the other end of the bar. I didn’t want Anna to meet Col, the double bass player in the band we were here to see. I’d never even spoken to him but you know how it is—I was pretty sure I was in love with him. The Swing Cats were no great shakes, but Col played a steady beat. The bass dwarfed him, making him seem shorter than he was. He had black hair, a goatee and blue-black eyes that closed as he sank into the music he was playing. That is when he was at his most sexy; when the music overtook him.

  ‘What they do,’ Anna would say, or had done when she used to say interesting things, ‘is practise their instrument for so many years that it is like they don’t have to think about it anymore. So what they are showing us when they play is their very selves. Their spirit is turned into music.’

  I threw back a couple of beers. I was determined to approach Col when the band was on break, but as soon as they finished playing he jumped off and walked right past me.

  ‘You see that blonde?’ he was talking to the saxophonist. ‘Pretty fuckable, right man?’ He headed towards Anna. I followed.

  Anna was leaning so close to the barman she looked as if she was going to fall over the bar. ‘You can help me out, darling,’ she grabbed his arm. ‘I know you can.’

  ‘Anna, you need to get yourself together. Go sit on the beach. Get some fresh air.’ Harsh as he sounded I could see the barman—his name was Jez—was looking at her with that glazed expression all men got around her. ‘Come back later. Maybe we can ball.’

  Anna forced herself to smile. ‘Of course.’ She hesitated. ‘But darling…’

  I could see Col didn’t know whether to stay or go after this exchange. I took my chance and touched him on the arm. ‘I’m a big fan of yours,’ I gushed. ‘I’ve been here every Tuesday for the last month.’

  ‘That’s cool,’ he said, glancing at me briefly before focusing again on Anna. Anna was looking slightly desperate as Jez slipped away down to the other end of the bar, but at that moment a tall man, with a mass of brown curls and skin that was olive and satiny perfect, glided up and slipped his arm around Anna’s waist. She turned to him in surprise.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘You’re Jez’s chick, right? He sent me to look after you.’ At the thought of which the man threw his head back and started to laugh wildly. ‘You see why that’s funny, right? I’m Gabriel Pazzi-Geniali. Friends call me a crazy cunt poet. Could mean I write poems about cunts, could mean I am one, take it whatever way you like.’

  ‘I am not so interested in who you are, actually. Or your cunt poems.’

  Gabriel put his hand out as if to shake hers, and in it was a piece of folded white paper. ‘This should help. The deal is, I get half,’ he began to laugh again, ‘as my baby-sitting fee.’

  Anna half-smiled. ‘I am not Jez’s chick. And I am not a baby. If you drive me home I’ll give you half as a driver’s fee. Okay?’

  Gabriel slapped his thigh in amazement at the turn the night was taking.

  ‘Anna,’ I said. I felt like I’d been standing, like Col and I had both been standing there forever, waiting for Anna to notice us. I decided to get the inevitable out of the way by introducing him to Anna myself. She turned to me. ‘Hello, darling,’ Anna waved her cigarette at me, ‘why don’t you introduce me to your pretty friend?’

  ‘Col Edwards. Col, this is my friend, Mrs Anna Goldberg.’ Col stepped towards Anna without another glance at me. I stood there for a moment, flustered, before walking to the toilets and locking myself into a cubicle. I sat and stared at my boring shoes. I tried to remember what it was that had made me love Anna. How I had watched her first, shaky steps in dance class, when she was still skinny and her hair was long and tied back in a simple ponytail. I remembered the way Anna glanced at me every minute or so, trying to copy my surer steps: looking to me for guidance.

  When I finally came out of the bathroom Col was back on stage. He saw that I was looking at him and gave me a smile. I was distracted—did he really smile at me? At me?—which meant I was slow to react when Max walked into the club and saw Anna locked into a clinch with Gabriel. By the time I reached the bar Max had grabbed Anna’s arm and slapped her across the face, right there, in front of everyone. It was like a scene out of a B-grade movie. I reached out from one side and Gabriel grabbed his arm from the other but Max lashed out and his elbow hit me in the face. I reeled back then felt a second blow as I fell to the floor. I was half wondering if it was the metal edge of the bar stool that had sliced into me, when everything went black.

  The next thing I knew I was on a couch in a tiny, messy bedsit. Col was sitting beside me holding a towel with ice stuffed in it on my head.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘My place. Bunker’s Hill,’ he said and I thought of what Miriam would say if she knew I’d set foot in Bunker’s Hill.

  ‘Your friend is pretty crazy,’ Col said. ‘She was spitting and hissing like a wild cat. That Gabriel guy had to drag her out of the bar.’

  ‘She’s having a difficult time,’ I said. God knows why I felt the need to defend her.

  ‘No doubt about that,’ he said. ‘Horse has been hard to get lately.’

  I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Horse?’

  ‘Heroin.’

  My head throbbed. ‘No. I mean a hard time with her marriage.’

  Col smiled at me. He was giving me that ‘you’re sweet’ smile that men liked to give me. ‘You’re kidding me, right?’

  I thought I was going to cry. For all that I liked to think I was street smart when I was young, I didn’t know a thing about drugs. What I did know Miriam had told me: one hit and that was the end—you collapsed into an abyss of madness and addiction.

  ‘Is she really using…’ I felt ridiculous saying the word, ‘heroin? How can you tell?’

  ‘What did you think that scene at the bar was? Before her old man turned up?’ Col said. ‘You learn the signs.’ And then because he leaned towards me and kissed me I stopped thinking about what the signs were and why it was that Col knew them. In fact, I don’t think I had a coherent thought until, four weeks later, I stepped out of Santa Monica’s city hall a married woman.

  When I finally got around to talking to Anna about her habit she was sitting with a bowl of matzah ball soup in front of her and I was eating some apple pie.

  ‘I know you are taking drugs,’ I said, primly.

  ‘Darling,’ Anna burst out laughing. ‘If you think drugs are dangerous, you have no idea what else there is in this world.’ Then she composed herself, ‘I am very, you know, sorry, that you hurt yourself that night. That was terrible. My fault, certainly. But I have told you that, no? I have tried to make things up to you.’ And it’s true, she had. There had been little gifts, and big ones too. She’d given me a dress that was so glamorous and low cut I’d never be accused of looking sweet again. If I had the courage to wear it. If I wasn’t a married woman. But the
dress wasn’t enough. I wanted Anna to apologise for everything. For her erratic behaviour. For how hard I’d worked to stay friends with her, for so little reward. Worst of all, here I was, married, and Anna, my so-called best friend in the world didn’t even know.

  Anna took my hand. ‘Actually, I am thinking I will stop.’ She was using that strange, formal English she used when she was trying to be serious. ‘Thank you for your concern. Also, I have some good news. I have got some pictures. Of Max. They will be very useful in the divorce.’

  ‘Pictures?’

  ‘It is just like in the movies. I hired a detective, though he was smelly, and not nearly as attractive as Fred MacMurray. Actually, I met Fred once, oh yes, you were there…’ she trailed away. ‘Yes, well, the pictures. Max is with a girl, no more than fifteen. So, things will go smoothly I think.’

  I tried to give Anna a smile, but her world scared me. Her world of infidelities and jealous rages. The world of drugs. ‘This is the American dream, no?’ Anna laughed. ‘Money for nothing.’

  ‘How much are we talking?’

  ‘One hundred dollars a month. He is quite generous it turns out. I get the money until I marry again, or have a child. I don’t plan on either, so we will be able to have some fun. First, I am going to have a little trip to Paris. With Gabriel.’

  ‘Who’s Gabriel?’ I asked, then remembered.

  ‘I had him cornered of course,’ Anna was still talking about Max. ‘But actually, he loved me, that was the thing. So it’s sad he had to do all the carrying on. Like a bravado.’ She leaned towards me. ‘Now tell me about that man of yours.’ So then I did tell her but wished I hadn’t because she didn’t just looked surprised, she looked concerned. We looked at each other. Directly, into each other’s eyes.

  Understanding tugged at me, just like the swell of grief that, I suddenly understood, had been dragging at Anna wherever she went. I saw her for who she was: tall, magnificent, standing—for example, as she liked to do—in the shallows of the ocean in her halter neck one-piece, waving to me where I lay on the sunlit beach on a Santa Monica afternoon. All the while struggling to keep her foothold in the sand as the undertow drove channels around her feet; dug the sand out from underneath her.

  Then she gave me a look of pure compassion, smiled brilliantly and said, ‘That’s wonderful, Ellie. Just wonderful.’ And I knew her well enough to know she didn’t think it was so wonderful at all.

  *

  in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- / journey on

  the highway across America in tears / to the door of my

  cottage in the Western night

  When Anna first left for Paris I received letters from her. There was little talk of men except when they were part of a larger story. She’d learned, I think, that I was too straight to handle the various details of her love life but I did gather that she and Gabriel hadn’t worked out, which made me sad. I liked the guy, crazy as he was. It was in Paris that Anna began to brew what she called her ‘spiritual soup’ and that is what she wrote to me about. She became interested in her Jewish heritage, and moved to the Marais, until her larger than life personality made her feel out of place there.

  ‘Can you believe,’ she wrote, ‘that my mother once found a dog, a Polish person and a Jew all dead and hanging from a tree with signs around their neck. This is what happened to my people in Russia. In the thirties.’ Soon after that she moved on from Judaism and began to attend meetings at the Theosophy Club (whatever that was) and went to séances at Madame Julia Laurin’s house (whoever she was). One night, Anna told me, she tried to talk to loved ones who’d died in the war, but Madame Laurin was unable invoke them. ‘I am thinking I am a better spirit guide than that woman,’ Anna wrote. ‘As for my mother, she was approximately one million times better than that fake.’ After that she joined a coven and, for a faddish few months, practised spells and potions in her tiny apartment until the neighbours complained about the smell.

  Then—and finally, as it turned out—there was Buddhism. Gabriel had been into it to some extent, and often spoke to Anna about it. Then she started working, on and off, at a club called the Crazy Horse, on Avenue George V not far from a the Musée Guimet, and it was there she saw signs announcing the Buddhist Society meetings. The first time she visited, she told me, there was an exhibition on the Buddhist goddess Tara. In one letter she’d scrawled down a description which I’m pretty sure was a Hindu Tara, not a Buddhist one, but such subtleties were way beyond either of us back then. ‘When life begins, hunger is born,’ she wrote. ‘The name given to this pure, this absolute, hunger is “the Star”: Tara. In its peaceful aspect, the power of hunger is merely spoken of as a void but in her fearsome mood she drinks blood, the sap of the world. She shines upon a white lotus arisen from the water, pervading the world. She holds in her hands scissors, a sword, a skull and a blue lotus. Snakes form her girdle, she wears a diadem made of bleached bones. She is seated on the heart of a corpse, her face resplendent with the power of never decaying.’

  In that same letter, Anna told me she was working as a stripper—though she didn’t call herself that. ‘In my interview with the boss,’ she wrote, ‘he says to me, a woman’s body is a form of poetry: I want you to be a poem. So that is what I am Ellie, a poem.’ Aside from the fact that this was bullshit, there was too much Miriam in me to really accept it.

  Anyway, it was 1956 and I’d just given birth to Marilyn. I fell violently (I know that is a strong word, but it is the right word) in love with my new baby. In love enough that I lost interest in Anna’s unfathomable lifestyle; enough that even the unsettled nature of my marriage to Col stopped making me sad. I was content to sit with other mothers and swap baby and cleaning tips most mornings. We talked about whether formula was better for our children than breast feeding (formula, most of us agreed, was more hygienic) and what school we wanted for them. It sounds tedious, I know, but for a time I was happy. Mothering came easily to me; I was, finally, good at something—but I guess it made me judge others harshly.

  Anna did come back a couple of times; to see André, and for work. The first time she came home we were familiar with each other. She called me from her hotel and asked me to visit André with her. ‘I am a bit nervous, you understand, to see him alone.’ I said of course, and we met at our old stomping ground, Canter’s, beforehand. When we saw each other we hugged each other hard for a long minute before ordering a celebratory martini.

  ‘This is both delicious, and necessary,’ Anna said. ‘If we are to visit my father. It is very kind of you, Ellie, to come with me.’

  When André answered the door he looked more decrepit than ever and as Anna passed over a bunch of flowers and a bottle of Stolichnaya I wondered if the vodka was such a good idea.

  ‘Hello, Bird,’ he said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it had been more than a year since he’d seen his daughter. Anna leaned in to kiss him, but reeled back from the stench.

  ‘Hello, Ellie,’ he smiled at me, politely, as if we too had seen each other only a few days ago.

  We followed André down the hall, to the living room. In the eighteen months since Anna’d been away, his house, the one they’d once shared, had been turned into a shrine. Though the day was clear and bright, the room was dark and I realised that was because the vine outside the window was overgrown. There was a table pushed up against the wall that was covered in vodka bottles and photos; of his wife, his son, his parents, himself in uniform. There were candles alight around Sofia’s image and offerings of stale biscuits and rotting flowers were scattered on the table. There were postcards of Leningrad: Palace Square, the Hermitage, Nevsky Prospect, the Bronze Horseman. Medals he had won in the war lay in amongst the mess. There was an old map of Leningrad acting as a coaster for unwashed, empty glasses. There was a new map too, one he must have bought after he arrived in Los Angeles, stuck on the wall behind the whole arrangement.

  Most overwhelming of all was the smell of burnt plastic. The drapes—cheap o
nes, made of nylon—had burned and melted.

  ‘Papa,’ Anna turned to him. ‘What happened?’

  André gestured at the cake sitting on the edge of the table, Sofia’s favourite, a Russian honey cake, which was sagging under the weight of its 53 extinguished candles. ‘It is your mother’s birthday today. You remember?’

  ‘That is why I am here,’ Anna struggled to hide her exasperation. She couldn’t bear that he still insisted on celebrating it.

  ‘I just lit them, so my darling could blow them out, and woompf,’ he gestured dramatically at the curtains. ‘It all went up and…yes…with the water…You understand.’

  ‘Let me clean this up,’ Anna moved towards the table but André grabbed her, strong for a moment. ‘No.’

  ‘Are you some kind of imbecile?’ Anna turned on him. ‘You must stop this clinging. Mama would not want it.’

  André shrugged and left the room. He returned with an old blanket which he began to nail into the window frame. ‘The light,’ he said. ‘It is bad for the photos.’

  ‘When did you last go to work?’ Anna was in a panic now.

  ‘There is no need to worry. I still work enough to eat. I am not going to,’ and here he attempted a laugh that sounded more like a snort, ‘starve to death.’

  ‘Papa,’ she said, concerned, struggling to hold back the tears. ‘You must pull yourself together. I am only here a few weeks then I return to Paris.’

  André put the lilies Anna had given him in a vase that I had collected from the kitchen (the kitchen! I’m not even going into the state of that) and, instead of answering Anna, began to arrange and rearrange them. Anna stepped up to him and took him by the shoulders. ‘Did you hear me, Papa?’