Memento Mori

For the past fifteen years or so, I’ve made it a habit to carry a small notebook in my front pocket. The model I currently favor is called the Europa, and I pull it out an average of ten times a day, jotting down grocery lists, observations, and little thoughts on how to make money, or torment people. The last page is always reserved for phone numbers, and the second to last I use for gift ideas. These are not things I might give to other people, but things that they might give to me: a shoehorn, for instance — always wanted one. The same goes for a pencil case, which, on the low end, probably costs no more than a doughnut.

I’ve also got ideas in the five-hundred-to-two-thousand-dollar range, though those tend to be more specific. This nineteenth-century portrait of a dog, for example. I’m not what you’d call a dog person, far from it, but this particular one — a whippet, I think — had alarmingly big nipples, huge, like bolts screwed halfway into her belly. More interesting was that she seemed aware of it. You could see it in her eyes as she turned to face the painter. “Oh, not now,” she appeared to be saying. “Have you no decency?”

I saw the portrait at the Portobello Road market in London, and though I petitioned hard for months, nobody bought it for me. I even tried initiating a pool and offered to throw in a few hundred dollars of my own money, but still no one bit. In the end I gave the money to Hugh and had him buy it. Then I had him wrap it up and offer it to me.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

And, following the script, he said, “Do I need a reason to give you a present?”

Then I said, “Awwwww.”

It never works the other way around, though. Ask Hugh what he wants for Christmas or his birthday, and he’ll answer, “You tell me.”

“Well, isn’t there something you’ve had your eye on?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Hugh thinks that lists are the easy way out and says that if I really knew him I wouldn’t have to ask what he wanted. It’s not enough to search the shops; I have to search his soul as well. He turns gift-giving into a test, which I don’t think is fair at all. Were I the type to run out at the last minute, he might have a valid complaint, but I start my shopping months in advance. Plus I pay attention. If, say, in the middle of the summer, Hugh should mention that he’d like an electric fan, I’ll buy it that very day and hide it in my gift cupboard. Come Christmas morning, he’ll open his present and frown at it for a while, before I say, “Don’t you remember? You said you were burning up and would give anything for a little relief.”

That’s just a practical gift, though, a stocking stuffer. His main present is what I’m really after, and, knowing this, he offers no help whatsoever. Or, rather, he used to offer no help. It wasn’t until this year that he finally dropped a hint, and even then it was fairly cryptic. “Go out the front door and turn right,” he said. “Then take a left and keep walking.”

He did not say “Stop before you reach the boulevard” or “When you come to the Czech border you’ll know you’ve gone too far,” but he didn’t need to. I knew what he was talking about the moment I saw it. It was a human skeleton, the genuine article, hanging in the window of a medical bookstore. Hugh’s old drawing teacher used to have one, and though it had been ten years since he’d taken the woman’s class, I could suddenly recall him talking about it. “If I had a skeleton like Minerva’s . . . ,” he used to say. I don’t remember the rest of the sentence, as I’d always been sidetracked by the teacher’s name, Minerva. Sounds like a witch.

There are things that one enjoys buying and things that one doesn’t. Electronic equipment, for example. I hate shopping for stuff like that, no matter how happy it will make the recipient. I feel the same about gift certificates, and books about golf or investment strategies or how to lose twelve pounds by being yourself. I thought I would enjoy buying a human skeleton, but looking through the shop window I felt a familiar tug of disappointment. This had nothing to do with any moral considerations. I was fine with buying someone who’d been dead for a while; I just didn’t want to wrap him. Finding a box would be a pain, and then there’d be the paper, which would have to be attached in strips because no one sells rolls that wide. Between one thing and another, I was almost relieved when told that the skeleton was not for sale. “He’s our mascot,” the store manager said. “We couldn’t possibly get rid of him.”

In America this translates to “Make me an offer,” but in France they really mean it. There are shops in Paris where nothing is for sale, no matter how hard you beg. I think people get lonely. Their apartments become full, and, rather than rent a storage space, they take over a boutique. Then they sit there in the middle of it, gloating over their fine taste.

Being told that I couldn’t buy a skeleton was just what I needed to make me really want one. Maybe that was the problem all along. It was too easy: “Take a right, take a left, and keep walking.” It took the hunt out of it.

“Do you know anyone who will sell me a skeleton?” I asked, and the manager thought for a while. “Well,” she said, “I guess you could try looking on bulletin boards.”

I don’t know what circles this woman runs in, but I have never in my life seen a skeleton advertised on a bulletin board. Used bicycles, yes, but no human bones, or even cartilage for that matter.

“Thank you for your help,” I said.

Because I have nothing better to do with my time than shop, I tend to get excited when someone wants something obscure: an out-of-print novel, a replacement for a shattered teacup. I thought that finding another skeleton would prove difficult, but I came across two more that very afternoon — one a full-grown male and the other a newborn baby. Both were at the flea market, offered by a man who specializes in what he calls “the sorts of things that are not for everyone.”

The baby was tempting because of its size — I could have wrapped it in a shoe box — but ultimately I went for the adult, which is three hundred years old and held together by a network of fine wires. There’s a latch in the center of the forehead, and removing the linchpin allows you to open the skull and either root around or hide things — drugs, say, or small pieces of jewelry. It’s not what one hopes for when thinking about an afterlife (“I’d like for my head to be used as a stash box”), but I didn’t let that bother me. I bought the skeleton the same way I buy most everything. It was just an arrangement of parts to me, no different from a lamp or a chest of drawers.

I didn’t think of it as a former person until Christmas Day, when Hugh opened the cardboard coffin. “If you don’t like the color, we can bleach it,” I said. “Either that or exchange it for the baby.”

I always like to offer a few alternatives, though in this case they were completely unnecessary. Hugh was beside himself, couldn’t have been happier. I assumed he’d be using the skeleton as a model and was a little put off when, instead of taking it to his studio, he carried it into the bedroom and hung it from the ceiling.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked.

The following morning, I reached under the bed for a discarded sock and found what I thought was a three-tiered earring. It looked like something you’d get at a craft fair, not pretty, but definitely handmade, fashioned from what looked like petrified wood. I was just holding it to the side of my head when I thought, Hang on, this is an index finger. It must have fallen off while Hugh was carrying in the skeleton. Then he or I or possibly his mother, who was in town for the holidays, accidentally kicked it under the bed.

I don’t think of myself as overly prissy, but it bothered me to find a finger on my bedroom floor. “If this thing is going to start shedding parts, you really should put it in your studio,” I said to Hugh, who told me that it was his present and he’d keep it wherever the hell he wanted to. Then he got out some wire and reattached the missing finger.

It’s the things you don’t buy that stay with you the longest. This portrait of an unknown woman, for instance. I saw it a few years ago in Rotterdam, and rather than following my instincts I told the dealer that I’d think about it. The next day, I returned, and it was gone, sold, which is maybe for the best. Had I bought it myself, the painting would have gone on my office wall. I’d have admired it for a week or two, and then, little by little, it would have become invisible, just like the portrait of the dog. I wanted it, I wanted it, I wanted it, but the moment it was mine, it ceased to interest me. I no longer see the shame-filled eyes or the oversized nipples, but I do see the unknown woman, her ruddy, pious face, and the lace collar that hugged her neck like an air filter.

As the days pass, I keep hoping that the skeleton will become invisible, but he hasn’t. Dangling between the dresser and the bedroom door, he is the last thing I see before falling asleep, and the first thing I see when opening my eyes in the morning.

It’s funny how certain objects convey a message — my washer and dryer, for example. They can’t speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I’m doing fairly well. “No more laundromat for you,” they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can’t cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, “Well, he must be doing something. My numbers are off the charts.” The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary and says only one thing: “You are going to die.”

I’d always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call “understanding” is basically just fantasizing. I think about death all the time, but only in a romantic, self-serving way, beginning, most often, with my tragic illness and ending with my funeral. I see my brother squatting beside my grave, so racked by guilt that he’s unable to stand. “If only I’d paid him back that twenty-five thousand dollars I borrowed,” he says. I see Hugh, drying his eyes on the sleeve of his suit jacket, then crying even harder when he remembers I bought it for him. What I didn’t see were all the people who might celebrate my death, but that’s all changed with the skeleton, who assumes features at will.

One moment he’s an elderly Frenchwoman, the one I didn’t give my seat to on the bus. In my book, if you want to be treated like an old person, you have to look like one. That means no face-lift, no blond hair, and definitely no fishnet stockings. I think it’s a perfectly valid rule, but it wouldn’t have killed me to take her crutches into consideration.

“I’m sorry,” I say, but before the words are out of my mouth the skeleton has morphed into a guy named Stew, who I once slighted in a drug deal.

Stew and the Frenchwoman will be happy to see me go, and there are hundreds more in line behind them, some I can name, and others I’d managed to hurt and insult without a formal introduction. I hadn’t thought of these people in years, but that’s the skeleton’s cleverness. He gets into my head when I’m asleep and picks through the muck at the bottom of my skull. “Why me?” I ask. “Hugh is lying in the very same bed. How come you don’t go after him?”

And the skeleton says, “You are going to die.”

“But I’m the one who found your finger.”

“You are going to die.”

I say to Hugh, “Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier with the baby?”

For the first few weeks, I heard the voice only when I was in the bedroom. Then it spread and took over the entire apartment. I’d be sitting in my office, gossiping on the telephone, and the skeleton would cut in, sounding like an international operator. “You are going to die.”

I stretched out in the bathtub, soaking in fragrant oils, while outside my window beggars were gathered like kittens upon the heating grates.

“You are going to die.”

In the kitchen I threw away a perfectly good egg. In the closet I put on a sweater some half-blind child was paid ten sesame seeds to make. In the living room I took out my notebook and added a bust of Satan to the list of gifts I’d like to receive.

“You are going to die. You are going to die. You are going to die.”

“Do you think you could alter that just a little?” I asked.

But he wouldn’t.

Having been dead for three hundred years, there’s a lot the skeleton doesn’t understand: TV, for instance. “See,” I told him, “you just push this button, and entertainment comes into your home.” He seemed impressed, and so I took it a step further. “I invented it myself, to bring comfort to the old and sick.”

“You are going to die.”

He had the same reaction to the vacuum cleaner, even after I used the nozzle attachment to dust his skull. “You are going to die.”

And that’s when I broke down. “I’ll do anything you like,” I said. “I’ll make amends to the people I’ve hurt, I’ll bathe in rainwater, you name it, just please say something, anything, else.”

The skeleton hesitated a moment. “You are going to be dead . . . some day,” he told me.

And I put away the vacuum cleaner, thinking, Well, that’s a start.

All the Beauty You Will Ever Need

In Paris they warn you before cutting off the water, but out in Normandy you’re just supposed to know. You’re also supposed to be prepared, and it’s this last part that gets me every time. Still, though, I manage to get by. A saucepan of chicken broth will do for shaving, and in a pinch I can always find something to pour into the toilet tank: orange juice, milk, a lesser champagne. If I really get hard up, I suppose I could hike through the woods and bathe in the river, though it’s never quite come to that.

Most often, our water is shut off because of some reconstruction project, either in our village or in the next one over. A hole is dug, a pipe is replaced, and within a few hours things are back to normal. The mystery is that it’s so perfectly timed to my schedule. This is to say that the tap dries up at the exact moment I roll out of bed, which is usually between 10:00 and 10:30. For me this is early, but for Hugh and most of our neighbors it’s something closer to midday. What they do at 6:00 a.m. is anyone’s guess. I only know that they’re incredibly self-righteous about it and talk about the dawn as if it’s a personal reward, bestowed on account of their great virtue.

The last time our water was cut, it was early summer. I got up at my regular hour and saw that Hugh was off somewhere, doing whatever it is he does. This left me alone to solve the coffee problem — a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight. Once, in a half sleep, I made it with Perrier, which sounds plausible but really isn’t. On another occasion, I heated up some leftover tea and poured that over the grounds. Had the tea been black rather than green, the coffee might have worked out, but, as it was, the result was vile. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d try more than once, so this time I skipped the teapot and headed straight for a vase of wildflowers sitting by the phone on one of the living room tables.

Hugh had picked them the previous day, and it broke my heart to think of him marching across a muddy field with a bouquet in his hand. He does these things that are somehow beyond faggy and seem better suited to some hardscrabble pioneer wife: making jam, say, or sewing bedroom curtains out of burlap. Once I caught him down at the riverbank, beating our dirty clothes against a rock. This was before we got a washing machine, but still, he could have laundered things in the tub. “Who are you?” I’d said, and, as he turned, I half expected to see a baby at his breast, not nestled in one of those comfortable supports but hanging, red-faced, by its gums.

When Hugh beats underpants against river rocks or decides that it might be fun to grind his own flour, I think of a couple I once met. This was years ago, in the early nineties. I was living in New York and had returned to North Carolina for Christmas, my first priority being to get high and stay that way. My brother, Paul, knew of a guy who possibly had some pot to sell, so a phone call was made, and, in the way that these things happen, we found ourselves in a trailer twenty-odd miles outside of Raleigh.

The dealer was named Little Mike, and he addressed both Paul and me as “Bromine.” He looked like a high school student, or, closer still, like one of those kids who dropped out and then spent all day hanging around the parking lot: tracksuit, rattail, a wisp of thread looped through his freshly pierced ear. After a few words regarding my brother’s car, Little Mike ushered us inside and introduced us to his wife, who was sitting on their sofa, watching a Christmas special. The girl’s stockinged feet were resting on the coffee table, and settled between her legs, just south of her lap, was a flat-faced Persian. Both she and the cat had wide-set eyes, and ginger-colored hair, though hers was partially hidden beneath a woolen cap. Common too was the way they stuck their noses in the air when my brother and I entered the room. A little hostility was to be expected from the Persian, and I guessed I couldn’t blame the wife either. Here she was trying to watch TV, and these two guys show up — people she didn’t even know.

“Don’t mind Beth,” Little Mike said, and he smacked the underside of the girl’s foot.

“Owww, asshole.”

He advanced upon the other foot, and I pretended to admire the Christmas tree, which was miniature and artificial, and stood upon a barstool beside the front door. “This is nice,” I announced, and Beth shot me a withering look. Liar, it said. You’re just saying that because my stupid husband sells reefer.

She really wanted us out of there, but Little Mike seemed to welcome our company. “Sit down,” he told me. “Have a libation.” He and Paul went to the refrigerator to get us some beers, and the girl called after them to bring her a rum and Coke. Then she turned back to the TV and glared at the screen, saying, “This show’s boring. Hand me the nigger.”

I smiled at the cat, as if this would somehow fix things, and when Beth pointed to the far end of the coffee table, I saw that she was referring to the remote control. Under other circumstances, I might have listed the various differences between black people, who had been forced to work for no money, and black, battery-operated channel changers, which had neither thoughts nor feelings and didn’t mind doing stuff for free. But the deal hadn’t started yet, and, more than anything, I wanted my drugs. Thus the remote was handed over, and I watched as the pot dealer’s wife flicked from one station to the next, looking for something that might satisfy her.

She had just settled on a situation comedy when Paul and Little Mike returned with the drinks. Beth was dissatisfied with her ice-cube count, and, after suggesting that she could just go fuck herself, our host reached into the waistband of his track pants and pulled out a bag of marijuana. It was eight ounces at least, a small cushion, and as I feasted my eyes upon it Little Mike pushed his wife’s feet off the coffee table, saying, “Bitch, go get me my scale.”

“I’m watching TV. Get it your own self.”

“Whore,” he said.

“Asshole.”

“See the kind of shit I have to live with?” Little Mike sighed and retreated to the rear of the trailer — the bedroom, I guessed — returning a minute later with a scale and some rolling papers. The pot was sticky with lots of buds, and its smell reminded me of a Christmas tree, though not the one perched atop the barstool. After weighing my ounce and counting out my money, Little Mike rolled a joint, which he lit, drew upon, and handed to my brother. It then went to me, and just as I was passing it back to our host, his wife piped up: “Hey, what about me?”

“Now look who wants to play,” her husband said. “Women. They’ll suck the fucking paper off a joint, but when old Papa Bear needs a little b.j. action they’ve always got a sore throat.”

Beth tried to speak and hold in the smoke at the same time: “Hut hup, hasshole.”

“Either of you guys married?” Little Mike asked, and Paul shook his head no. “I got pre-engaged one time, but David here hasn’t never come close, his being a faggot and all.”

Little Mike laughed, and then he looked at me. “For real?” he said. “Is Bromine telling me the truth?”

“Oh, he’s all up inside that shit,” Paul said. “Has hisself a cocksucker — I mean a boyfriend — and everything.”

I could have done my own talking, but it was sort of nice listening to my brother, who sounded almost boastful, as if I were a pet that had learned to do math.

“Well, what do you know,” Little Mike said.

His wife stirred to action then and became almost sociable. “So this boyfriend,” she said. “Let me ask. Which one of you is the woman?”

“Well, neither of us,” I told her. “That’s what makes us a homosexual couple. We’re both guys.”

“But no,” she said. “I mean, like, in prison or whatnot. One of you has to be in for murder and the other for child molesting or something like that, right? I mean, one is more like a normal man.”

I wanted to ask if that would be the murderer or the child molester, but instead I just accepted the joint, saying, “Oh, we live in New York,” as if that answered the question.

We stayed in the trailer for another half hour, and during the ride back to Raleigh I thought about what the drug dealer’s wife had said. Her examples were a little skewed, but I knew what she was getting at. People I know, people who live in houses and do not call their remote control “the nigger,” have often asked the same question, though usually in regard to lesbians, who are always either absent or safely out of earshot. “Which one’s the man?”

It’s astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex — trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can’t imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it. Who calls whom a bitch? Who cries harder when the cat dies? Which one spends the most time in the bathroom? I guess they think that it’s that cut-and-dried, though of course it’s not. Hugh might do the cooking, and actually wear an apron while he’s at it, but he also chops the firewood, repairs the hot-water heater, and could tear off my arm with no more effort than it takes to uproot a dandelion. Does that make him the murderer, or do the homemade curtains reduce him to the level of the child molester?

I considered these things as I looked at the wildflowers he’d collected the day before the water was shut off. Some were the color I associate with yield signs, and others a sort of muted lavender, their stems as thin as wire. I pictured Hugh stooping, or maybe even kneeling, as he went about picking them, and then I grabbed the entire bunch and tossed it out the window. That done, I carried the vase into the kitchen and emptied the yellow water into a pan. I then boiled it and used it to make coffee. There’d be hell to pay when my man got home, but at least by then I would be awake and able to argue, perhaps convincingly, that I am all the beauty he will ever need.

Town and Country

They looked like people who had just attended a horse show: a stately couple in their late sixties, he in a cashmere blazer and she in a gray tweed jacket, a gem-encrusted shamrock glittering against the rich felt of her lapel. They were my seatmates on the flight from Denver to New York, and as I stood in the aisle to let them in, I felt the shame of the tragically outclassed. The sport coat I had prided myself on now looked clownish, as did my shoes, and the fistful of pine straw I refer to as my hair. “Excuse me,” I said, apologizing, basically, for my very existence.

The couple took their seats and, just as I settled in beside them, the man turned to the woman, saying, “I don’t want to hear this shit.”

I assumed he was continuing an earlier argument, but it turned out he was referring to the Gershwin number the airline had adopted as its theme song. “I can’t believe the fucking crap they make you listen to on planes nowadays.”

The woman patted her silver hair and agreed, saying that whoever had programmed the music was an asshole.

“A cocksucker,” the man corrected her. “A goddamn cocksucking asshole.” They weren’t loud people and didn’t even sound all that angry, really. This was just the way they spoke, the verbal equivalent of their everyday china. Among company, the wife might remark that she felt a slight chill, but here that translated to “I am fucking freezing.”

“Me too,” her husband said. “It’s cold as shit in here.” Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit, for how had I so misjudged these people? Why, after all these years, do I still believe that expensive clothing signifies anything more than a disposable income, that tweed and cashmere actually bespeak refinement?

When our boxed bistro meals were handed out, the couple really went off. “What is this garbage?” the man asked.

“It’s shit,” his wife said. “A box of absolute fuck-ing shit.”

The man took out his reading glasses and briefly examined his plastic-wrapped cookie before tossing it back into the box. “First they make you listen to shit, and then they make you eat it!”

“Well, I’m not fucking eating it,” the woman said. “We’ll just have to grab something at the airport.”

“And pay some son of a bitch fifteen bucks for a sandwich?”

The woman sighed and threw up her hands. “What choice do we have? It’s either that or eat what we’ve got, which is shit.”

“Aww, it’s all shit,” her husband said.

It was as if they’d kidnapped the grandparents from a Ralph Lauren ad and forced them into a David Mamet play — and that, in part, is why the couple so appealed to me: there was something ridiculous and unexpected about them. They made a good team, and I wished that I could spend a week or two invisibly following behind them and seeing the world through their eyes. “Thanksgiving dinner, my ass,” I imagined them saying.

It was late afternoon by the time we arrived at LaGuardia. I caught a cab outside the baggage claim and stepped into what smelled like a bad tropical cocktail, this the result of a coconut air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror. One hates to be a baby about this kind of thing, and so I cracked the window a bit and gave the driver my sister’s address in the West Village.

“Yes, sir.”

The man was foreign, but I have no idea where he was from. One of those tragic countries, I supposed, a land be-set by cobras and typhoons. But that’s half the world, really. He had dark skin, more brown than olive, and thick black hair he had treated with oil. The teeth of his comb had left deep troughs that ran down the back of his head and disappeared beneath the frayed collar of his shirt. The cab left the curb, and as he merged into traffic the driver opened the window between the front and back seats and asked me my name. I told him, and he looked at me in the rearview mirror, saying, “You are a good man, David, is that right? Are you good?”

I said I was OK, and he continued. “David is a good name, and New York is a good town. Do you think so?”

“I guess,” I said.

The driver smiled shyly, as if I had paid him a compliment, and I wondered what his life was like. One reads things, newspaper profiles and so forth, and gets an idea of the tireless, hardworking immigrant who hits the ground running — or, more often, driving. The man couldn’t have been older than thirty-five, and after his shift I imagined that he probably went to school and studied until he couldn’t keep his eyes open. A few hours at home with his wife and children, and then it was back to the front seat, and on and on until he earned a diploma and resumed his career as a radiologist. The only thing holding him up was his accent, but that would likely disappear with time and diligence.

I thought of my first few months in Paris and of how frustrating it had been when people spoke quickly or used improper French, and then I answered his question again, speaking as clearly as possible. “I have no opinion on the name David,” I said. “But I agree with you regarding the city of New York. It is a very satisfactory place.”

He then said something I didn’t quite catch, and when I asked him to repeat it, he became agitated and turned in his seat, saying, “What is the problem, David? You cannot hear when a person is talking?”

I told him my ears were stopped up from the plane, though it wasn’t true. I could hear him perfectly. I just couldn’t understand him.

“I ask you what you do for a profession,” he said. “Do you make a lot of moneys? I know by your jacket that you do, David. I know that you are rich.”

Suddenly my sport coat looked a lot better. “I get by,” I said. “That is to say that I am able to support myself, which is not the same as being rich.”

He then asked if I had a girlfriend, and when I told him no he gathered his thick eyebrows and made a little tsking sound. “Oh, David, you need a woman. Not for love, but for the pussy, which is a necessary thing for a man. Like me, for example. I fuck daily.”

“Oh,” I said. “And this is . . . Tuesday, right?” I’d hoped I might steer him onto another track — the days of the week, maybe — but he was tired of English 101.

“How is it that you do not need pussy?” he asked. “Does not your dick stand up?”

“Excuse me?”

“Sex,” he said. “Has no one never told you about it?”

I took the New York Times from my carry-on bag and pretended to read, an act that apparently explained it all.

“Ohhh,” the driver said. “I understand. You do not like pussy. You like the dick. Is that it?” I brought the paper close to my face, and he stuck his arm through the little window and slapped the back of his seat. “David,” he said. “David, listen to me when I am talking to you. I asked do you like the dick?”

“I just work,” I told him. “I work, and then I go home, and then I work some more.” I was trying to set a good example, trying to be the person I’d imagined him to be, but it was a lost cause.

“I fucky-fuck every day,” he boasted. “Two women. I have a wife and another girl for the weekend. Two kind of pussy. Are you sure you no like to fucky-fuck?”

If forced to, I can live with the word “pussy,” but “fucky-fuck” was making me carsick. “That is not a real word,” I told him. “You can say that you fuck, but fucky-fuck is just nonsense. Nobody talks that way. You will never get ahead with that kind of language.”

Traffic thickened because of an accident and, as we slowed to a stop, the driver ran his tongue over his lips. “Fucky-fuck,” he repeated. “I fucky-fucky-fucky-fuck.”

Had we been in Manhattan, I might have gotten out and found myself another taxi, but we were still on the expressway, so what choice did I have but to stay put and look with envy at the approaching rescue vehicles? Eventually the traffic began moving, and I resigned myself to another twenty minutes of torture.

“So you go to West Village,” the driver said. “Very good place for you to live. Lots of boys and boys together. Girls and girls together.”

“It is not where I live,” I said. “It is the apartment of my sister.”

“Tell me how those lesbians have sex? How do they do it?”

I said I didn’t know, and he looked at me with the same sad expression he had worn earlier when told that I didn’t have a girlfriend. “David.” He sighed. “You have never seen a lesbian movie? You should, you know. You need to go home, drink whiskey, and watch one just to see how it is done. See how they get their pussy. See how they fucky-fuck.”

And then I snapped, which is unlike me, really. “You know,” I said, “I do not think that I am going to take you up on that. In fact, I know that I am not going to take you up on that.”

“Oh, but you should.”

“Why?” I said. “So I can be more like you? That’s a worthwhile goal, isn’t it? I will just get myself a coconut air freshener and drive about town impressing people with the beautiful language I have picked up from pornographic movies. ‘Hello, sir, does not your dick stand up?’ ‘Good afternoon, madam, do you like to fucky-fuck?’ It sounds enchanting, but I don’t know that I could stand to have such a rewarding existence. I am not worthy, OK, so if it is all right with you, I will not watch any lesbian movies tonight or tomorrow night or any other night, for that matter. Instead I will just work and leave people alone.”

I waited for a response, and when none came I settled back in my seat, completely ashamed of myself. The driver’s familiarity had been maddening, but what I’d said had been cruel and uncalled for. Mocking him, bringing up his air freshener: I felt as though I had just kicked a kitten — a filthy one, to be sure — but still something small and powerless. Sex is what you boast about when you have no exterior signs of wealth. It’s a way of saying, “Look, I might not own a fancy sport coat, or even a carry-on bag, but I do have two women and all the intercourse I can handle.” And would it have hurt me to acknowledge his success?

“I think it is wonderful that you are so fulfilled,” I said, but rather than responding the driver turned on the radio, which was of course tuned to NPR.

By the time I got to my sister’s, it was dark. I poured my-self a Scotch and then, like always, Amy brought out a few things she thought I might find interesting. The first was a copy of The Joy of Sex, which she’d found at a flea market and planned to leave on the coffee table the next time our father visited. “What do you think he’ll say?” she asked. It was the last thing a man would want to find in his daughter’s apartment — that was my thought anyway — but then she handed me a magazine called New Animal Orgy, which was truly the last thing a man would want to find in his daughter’s apartment. This was an old issue, dated 1974, and it smelled as if it had spent the past few decades in the dark, not just hidden but locked in a chest and buried underground.

“Isn’t that the filthiest thing you’ve ever seen in your life?” Amy asked, but I found myself too stunned to answer. The magazine was devoted to two major stories — photo essays, I guess you could call them. The first involved a female cyclist who stops to rest beside an abandoned windmill and seduces what the captions refer to as “a stray collie.”

“He’s not a stray,” Amy said. “Look at that coat. You can practically smell the shampoo.”

The second story was even sadder and concerned a couple of women named Inga and Bodil, who stimulate a white stallion using first their hands and later their tongues. It was supposedly the luckiest day of the horse’s life, but if the sex was really that good you’d think he would stop eating or at least do something different with his eyes. Instead he just went about his business, acting as if the women were not there. On the next page, he’s led into the bedroom, where he stands on the carpet and stares dumbly at the objects on the women’s dresser: a hairbrush, an aerosol can turned on its side, a framed photo of a girl holding a baby. Above the dresser was a curtainless window, and through it could be seen a field leading to a forest of tall pines.

Amy leaned closer and pointed to the bottom of the picture. “Look at the mud on that carpet,” she said, but I was way ahead of her.

“Number one reason not to blow a horse in your bedroom,” I told her, though it was actually much further down on the list. Number four maybe, the top slots being reserved for the loss of dignity, the invitation to disease, and the off chance that your parents might drop by.

Once again the women stimulate the horse to an erection, and then they begin to pleasure each other — assuming, I guess, that he will enjoy watching. This doesn’t mean they were necessarily lesbians — not any more than the collie was a stray — but it gave me pause and forced me to think of the cabdriver. “I am not like you,” I had told him. Then, half an hour later, here I was: a glass in one hand and in the other a magazine showing two naked women making out in front of a stallion. Of course, the circumstances were a bit different. I was drinking Scotch instead of whiskey. This was a periodical rather than a video. I was with my sister, and we were just two decent people having a laugh. Weren’t we?

Aerial

The latest Kate Bush CD includes a song called “Aerial,” and one spring afternoon Hugh sat down to listen to it. In the city, I’m forever nagging him about the volume. “The neighbors!” I say. But out in Normandy, I lose my excuse and have to admit that it’s me who’s being disturbed. The music I can usually live with. It’s the lyrics I find irritating, especially when I’m at my desk and am looking for a reason to feel distracted. If one line ends with, say, the word “stranger,” I’ll try to second-guess the corresponding rhyme. Danger, I’ll think. Then, No, wait, this is a Christmas album. Manger. The word will be “manger.”

If I guess correctly, the songwriter will be cursed for his predictability. If I guess incorrectly, he’s being “willfully obtuse,” a phrase I learned from my publisher, who applied it to the title of my last book. It’s a no-win situation that’s made even worse when the lyrics are unintelligible, the voice a shriek embedded in noise. This makes me feel both cranky and old, the type of pill who says things like, “You and that rock!”

There are singers Hugh’s not allowed to listen to while I’m in the house, but Kate Bush isn’t one of them, or at least she wasn’t until recently. The song I mentioned, “Aerial,” opens with the trilling of birds. This might be startling if you lived in the city, but out in Normandy it’s all we ever hear: a constant din of chirps and whistles that may grow faint at certain times of year but never goes away. It’s like living in an aviary. Added to the calls of larks and swallows are the geese and chickens that live across the road. After they’ve all gone to bed, the owls come out and raise hell until dawn, when the whole thing starts over again.

The Kate Bush song had been playing for all of thirty seconds when we heard an odd noise and turned to see a bird rapping its beak against the windowpane. A moment later, its identical twin appeared at the adjacent window and began to do the same thing. Had they knocked once or twice, I’d have chalked it up to an accident, but these two were really going at it, like woodpeckers, almost. “What’s gotten into them?” I asked.

Hugh turned to the liner notes, hoping to find some sort of an explanation. “Maybe the recorded birds are saying something about free food,” he suggested, but to me the message seemed much darker: a call to anarchy, or possibly even murder. Some might think this was crazy, but I’d been keeping my ear to the ground and had learned that birds are not as carefree as they’re cracked up to be. Take the crows that descend each winter on the surrounding fields and pluck the eyes out of newborn lambs. Are they so hard up for a snack that they have to blind an international symbol of youth and innocence, or are they simply evil, a quality they possibly share with these two things at the window?

“What do you want from us?” I asked, and the birds stepped back into the flower box, getting a little traction before hurling themselves against the glass.

“They’ll wear themselves out sooner or later,” Hugh said. But they didn’t, not even after the clouds moved in and it began to rain. By late afternoon, they were still at it, soaking wet, but no less determined. I was lying on the daybed, working a crossword puzzle and listening to the distinct sound of feathers against glass. Every two minutes, I’d put aside my paper and walk across the room. “You think it’s so great in here?” I’d ask. “You think we’ve got something you can’t live without?” At my approach, the birds would fly away, returning the moment I’d settled back down. Then I’d say, “All right, if you really want to come in that much . . .”

But the two lost interest as soon as the windows were open. And so I’d close them up again and return to my puzzle, at which point the birds would reappear and continue their assault. Then I’d say, “All right, if you really want to come in that much . . .”

Einstein wrote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. That said, is it crazier to repeatedly throw yourself against a window, or to repeatedly open that window, believing the things that are throwing themselves against it might come into your house, take a look around, and leave with no hard feelings?

I considered this as I leafed through Birds of the World, an illustrated guidebook as thick as a dictionary. After learning about the Philippine eagle — a heartless predator whose diet consists mainly of monkeys — I identified the things at the window as chaffinches. The size was about right, six inches from head to tail, with longish legs, pink breasts, and crooked white bands running along the wings. The book explained that they eat fruit, seeds, and insects. It stated that some chaffinches prefer to winter in India or North Africa, but it did not explain why they were trying to get into my house.

“Could it be something they picked up in Africa?” I wondered. And Hugh, who had lived there until his late teens, said, “Why are you asking me?”

When the sun finally set, the birds went away, but they were at it again the following morning. Between their running starts and their pitiful back-assed tumbles, the flowers in the window box had been trashed, petals and bits of stem scattered everywhere. There were scratch marks on the windowpanes, along with what I’m guessing was saliva, the thick, bubbly kind that forms when you’re enraged.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

And Hugh told me to ignore them. “They just want attention.” This is his explanation for everything from rowdy children to low-flying planes. “Turn the other way and they’ll leave,” he told me. But how could I turn away?

The solution, it seemed, was to make some kind of a scarecrow, which is not a bad project if you’re in the proper mood. My first attempt involved an upside-down broom and a paper bag, which I placed over the bristles and drew an angry face on. For hair, I used a knot of steel wool. This made the figure look old and powerless, an overly tanned grandma mad because she had no arms. The birds thought it was funny, and after chuckling for a moment or two they took a step back and charged against the window.

Plan B was much easier, involving nothing more than a climb to the attic, which Hugh uses as his studio. A few years earlier, bored, and in the middle of several projects, he started copying head shots he’d clipped from the newspaper. The resulting portraits were done in different styles, but the ones that best suited my purposes looked Mesopotamian and pictured the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11. Mohammed Atta fit perfectly into the windowpane, and his effect was immediate. The birds flew up, saw a terrorist staring back at them, and took off screaming.

I was feeling very satisfied with myself when I heard a thud coming from behind a closed curtain next to the bookcase. Another trip upstairs, another hijacker, and so on, until all four living room windows were secured. It was then that the birds focused their attention on the bedroom, and I had no choice but to return to the attic.

Aside from CDs, which Hugh buys like candy, his record collection is also pretty big. Most are albums he bought in his youth and shipped to Normandy against my wishes: Led Zeppelin II, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. If it played nonstop in a skanky-smelling dorm room, he’s got it. I come home from my 5:00 walk, and here’s Toto or Bad Company blaring from the attic. “Turn that crap off,” I yell, but of course Hugh can’t hear me. So I go up, and there he is, positioned before his easel, one foot rigid on the floor and the other keeping time with some guy in a spandex jumpsuit.

“Do you mind?” I say.

I never thought I would appreciate his music collection, but the chaffinches changed all that. What I needed were record jackets featuring life-sized heads, so I started with the A’s and worked my way through the stack of boxes. The surprise was that some of Hugh’s albums weren’t so bad. “I didn’t know he had this,” I said to myself, and I raced downstairs to prop Roberta Flack in the bedroom window. This was the cover of Chapter Two, and while, to me, the singer looked welcoming, the birds thought differently, and moved on to a room that once functioned as a milking parlor. There I filled the windows with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Armatrading, and Donna Summer, who has her minuses but can really put the fear of God into a chaffinch.

The pair then moved upstairs to my office, where Janis Joplin and I were waiting for them. Bonnie Raitt and Rodney Crowell were standing by in case there was trouble with the skylights, but, strangely, the birds had no interest in them. Horizontal surfaces were not their thing, and so they flew on to the bathroom.

By late afternoon, every window was filled. The storm clouds that had appeared the previous day finally blew off, and I was able to walk to the neighboring village. The route I normally take is circular and leads past a stucco house occupied by a frail elderly couple. For years they raised rabbits in their front yard, but last summer they either ate them, which is normal in this area, or turned them loose, which is unheard of. Then they got rid of the pen and built in its place a clumsy wooden shed. A few months later a cage appeared on its doorstep. It was the type you might keep a rodent in, but instead of a guinea pig they use it to hold a pair of full-grown magpies. They’re good-sized birds — almost as tall as crows — and their quarters are much too small for them. Unlike parakeets, which will eventually settle down, the magpies are constantly searching for a way out, and move as if they’re on fire, darting from one end of the cage to another and banging their heads against the wire ceiling.

Their desperation is contagious, and watching them causes my pulse to quicken. Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless — that’s what hell must be like. The magpies leave me feeling so depressed and anxious that I wonder how I can possibly make it the rest of the way home. I always do, though, and it’s always a welcome sight, especially lately. At around 7:00 the light settles on the western wall of our house, just catching two of the hijackers and a half-dozen singer-songwriters, who look out from the windows, some smiling, as if they are happy to see me, and others just staring into space, the way one might when listening to music, or waiting, halfheartedly, for something to happen.

The Man in the Hut

A single road runs through our village in Normandy, and, depending on which direction you come from, either the first or the last thing you pass is a one-story house — a virtual Quonset hut — made of concrete blocks. The roof is covered with metal, and large sheets of corrugated plastic, some green and others milk-colored, have been joined together to form an awning that sags above the front door. It’s so ugly that the No Trespassing sign reads as an insult. “As if,” people say. “I mean, really.”

The hut was built by a man I’ll call Jackie, who used to live there with his wife and his wife’s adult daughter, Clothilde, who was retarded. On summer evenings after their dinner, the wife would dress her daughter in pajamas and a bathrobe and walk her either through the village or in the opposite direction, where the road steepens and winds in a series of blind curves. Depending upon the weather, Clothilde wore plaid bedroom slippers or a pair of rubber boots that came to above her knees and changed her walk to a kind of goose step. I’d heard from neighbors that she attended a special school, but I think it was more of a sheltered workshop, the type at which the students perform simple tasks — putting bolts into bags, say. Though I never heard her speak, she did make noises. It’s a contradiction in terms, but, if forced to describe what came out of her mouth, I’d call it an “upbeat moan,” not unpleasant but joyful. I can’t say that Clothilde was a friend, but it made me happy to know that she was around. The same was true of her mother and her stepfather: the whole family.

Jackie had some sort of problem with his leg and usually walked no farther than he had to. He drove a truck so small and quiet it seemed like a toy, and every so often, as I was walking into town, he’d pull over and offer me a ride. On one of these trips, he attempted to explain that he had a metal plate in his head. My French comprehension wasn’t very good at the time, and his pointing back and forth between his temple and the door of the glove compartment only confused me. “You invented glove compartments? Your glove compartment has ideas of its own? I’m sorry . . . I don’t . . . I don’t understand.”

I later learned that when he was a boy Jackie had found an unexploded grenade in one of the nearby fields. He pulled the pin and threw it, but not quite far enough; thus the metal plate and his messed-up leg. His hearing had been affected as well, and his eyes were deeply shadowed and encircled by spidery scars. Crew cut, dented brow, lower jaw jutting just slightly forward: had he been tall, his appearance might have startled you, but, as it was, he was pint-sized, five feet two, maybe five-four, tops. When the villagers spoke of Jackie, they used the words “slow” and “gentle,” and so it seemed outrageous when the police stormed the ugly cinder-block hut and took him off to jail. Someone or other spoke to the local councilor, and within an hour everyone knew that Jackie was suspected of sexually molesting his wife’s grandchildren, who were aged six and eight and occasionally visited from their home, an hour or so away. It was speculated that he also molested Clothilde, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Hugh says I just don’t want to believe it, and I tell him he’s right — I don’t. She and her mother left our village shortly after Jackie was taken away, and I never saw either of them again.

With no one to maintain it, the house that was ugly became even uglier. Our neighbors across the road would often comment on what an eyesore it was, and, while agreeing, I’d lament the sorry state of my French. Oh, my comprehension had improved — I could understand just about everything that was said to me — but when it came to speaking I tended (and still do) to freeze up. It wouldn’t hurt me to be more social, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. The phone rings and I avoid it. Neighbors knock and I duck into the bedroom or crouch behind the daybed until they’ve left. How different things might be, I think, if, like Jackie, I had no more hiding places. Though harsh in other respects, prison would be an excellent place to learn a foreign language — total immersion, and you’d have the new slang before it even hit the streets. Unlike the French school that I actually attended, this one, when it came to verbs, would likely start with the imperative: “Bend over.” “Take it.” That kind of thing. Still, though, you’d have your little conversations. In the cafeteria, in the recreation room or crafts center, if they have them in a French prison, and I imagine they do. “Tell me, Jean-Claude, do you like the glaze I’ve applied to my shapely jug?”

Of the above, I can say, “Tell me, Jean-Claude, do you like the . . . jug?”

“Glaze” is one of those words that shouldn’t be too difficult to learn, and the same goes for “shapely.” I’m pretty good when it comes to retaining nouns and adjectives, but the bit about applying the glaze to the shapely jug — that’s where I tend to stumble. In English, it’s easy enough — “I put this on that” — but in French, such things have a way of biting you in the ass. I might have to say, “Do you like the glaze the shapely jug accepted from me?” or “Do you like the shapely jug in the glaze of which I earlier applied?”

For safety’s sake, perhaps I’d be better off breaking the one sentence into three:

“Look at the shapely jug.”

“Do you like the glaze?”

“I did that.”

If I spent as much time speaking to my neighbors as I do practicing imaginary conversations in the prison crafts center, I’d be fluent by now and could quit making excuses for myself. As it is, whenever someone asks how long I’ve been in France I wonder if it’s possible to literally die of shame. “I’m away a lot,” I always say. “Two and a half months a year in America, and at least two in England, sometimes more.”

“Yes, but how long ago did you come to France?”

“What?”

“I asked, ‘How. Long. Have. You. Been. In. France?’”

Then I might say, “I love chicken,” or “Big bees can be dangerous,” anything to change the subject.

What I needed was an acquaintance, and what I wound up with was Jackie. This was after his release, obviously. He’d been gone for close to three years when I walked past the hut one day and noticed a pair of little black socks hanging on the clothesline.

“Who do you suppose those belong to?” I asked the woman across the road, and she pulled an unusually sour face, and said, “Who do you think?”

I’d imagined that, like his wife and stepdaughter, Jackie would move away and start over, but it seemed he had no place to go and no money to go there with. After hanging out his socks, he picked up his rake and hoe and started getting his lawn in shape. It was strange. Were an American sex offender to return home, there’d be a big to-do. Here, though, it was all very quiet. No meeting was held that I was aware of, but somehow or other it was agreed that no one would look at or speak to this man. He would be treated as if he were invisible, and, with luck, the isolation would drive him away.

He’d been back in his hut for a week or so when I walked by and saw him inside his front gate, worrying something with the tip of his cane. Jackie had always been kind to me, so when he looked up and said hello I employed one of the formalities I’d learned years earlier in French class. “I am content to see you again,” I said. Then I shook his hand.

“What did you do that for?” Hugh asked later, and I said, “Well, what could I do? Someone says hello and sticks his hand out, and you’re just supposed to walk away?”

“If he’s a child molester, yes,” he said. But I’d like to see what he would have done in the same situation.

A few years later, after Jackie died of cancer, and the garden he so carefully tended had turned to weeds, I gave the baccalaureate address at a certain American university. When the speech was finished, I joined a procession of deans and distinguished fellows back to the president’s house, and it was there that a well-known politician approached and extended his hand, saying, “I just want you to know how much I enjoyed that.” Now, this politician — it’s not that I simply disagree with him. I despise him. I loathe him. My friends and I, the way we throw his name around, you’d think we were talking about the Devil himself. Spittle forms in the corners of our mouth as we denounce him, his party, and the people we refer to as his henchmen and cronies.

I hadn’t known that this politician was going to be in the procession that day; rather, I turned around and there he was, the two of us dressed in flowing robes, like wizards.

“I just want you to know how much I enjoyed that.” So did I place a pox upon him? Did I spit in his face, or even turn my back?

Of course not. With everyone watching, I looked up, and said, “Oh. Thank you.” And because he had held out his hand I took it, just as I had taken Jackie’s after his release from prison.

I said to Hugh after the graduation, “But I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Sure, I said, ‘Oh’ and ‘Thank you,’ but anyone who knows me would know that I was faking it, that I didn’t really mean the ‘thank you’ part.”

“Well,” Hugh said, “I guess you showed him.”

Had the politician been my neighbor, I might have moved. That’s how disgusted I would have felt, but Jackie, because of the metal plate in his head, because you could put a magnet to his temple and it would stay there, aroused pity rather than anger, or at least he did in me. I didn’t go out of my way to pass his hut, but neither did I go out of my way to avoid passing it. If he was in the yard, he’d say hello and I would say hello back, or “Yes, it certainly is warm,” or whatever answer seemed called for. And in this way — a word here, a wave there — little by little the summer advanced, and Jackie came to see the two of us as friends. One afternoon he invited me inside his front gate to show me the tomatoes he’d planted.

“Well,” and I looked to see if any of our neighbors were watching. No one was, so I opened the latch, saying, “OK, sure.”

During the years that he had been away, Jackie’s hair had gone from brown to gray. His eyes were flat and more heavily shadowed, and what had once been a pronounced limp had grown more subtle. It seemed that while in prison he had had a hip replaced, and the way he walked now was miles better than it had been before the operation. “Hey,” he said, and he gestured behind him in the direction of his open front door. “Do you . . . want to come in and look at my X-rays?”

As I later said to Hugh, “Do you tell a person, ‘No. I don’t want to see pictures of your insides’? Of course not. How can you?”

The hut was a lot cozier than I’d imagined it. In the kitchen were the same sorts of things you’d find in the homes of any of our neighbors: a postal calendar picturing a kitten, a hanging copper saucepan turned into a clock, souvenir salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of castles and peasants and wooden shoes. The room was tight and clean and smelled of watermelon-scented dish detergent. From the kitchen, I could see the bedroom, and rows of medications neatly arranged on the dresser. Little radio. Little TV. Little easy chair. It was like a troll’s house.

Jackie’s X-rays were as large as bath mats, and he washed and dried his hands before removing them from their separate envelopes and presenting them to me. When handed a photograph of someone’s wife or children, I know how to form the appropriate compliment. “How pretty!” I can say. Or “How like you.” “What nice eyes.” “What a pleasant smile.” Hip replacement presented more of a challenge, and I alternated between “I like the pin” and, simply, “Ouch.” On or about the fifth X-ray, I looked through a clear patch of plastic, past the front yard, and into the hills on the opposite side of the road, where another of our neighbors grazes his sheep. The flock had been shorn earlier that day, and those in view seemed oddly aware of how dumpy and vulnerable they looked.

“I have to go,” I said, and in the way of good neighbors the world over, Jackie said, “Stay, why don’t you? I was just going to make some coffee.”

A few weeks after that, he invited me in to look at his government-issued ID card.

“Oh, I don’t want to put you out.”

“Not at all,” he said, and two minutes later I found myself back at his kitchen table. The ID was in a bright plastic folder, the sort of thing that a young girl might carry. On the cover was a cartoon pony having his mane braided by a troop of friendly ladybugs.

I think I said, “All right, then.” Jackie opened the folder and withdrew his identity card, a small color photograph attached by grommets to a stiff piece of paper. As when looking at the X-rays, I didn’t know quite what to say. His birth date, his height, the color of his eyes. He was obviously proud of something, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

“See,” he said. “Right here. Look.” He pointed to the corner, and I saw that the government had classified him as a “grand mutilated” person. The “grand” business was new to me, but the other part was familiar from riding the Paris buses. “These seats are reserved for the elderly and for those who have been mutilated in the war,” the signs used to read. It’s a much stronger word than “wounded” or “handicapped,” and I imagine that, if we used it in the United States, enlistment in the volunteer army would fall by at least half.

As a grand mutilated person, Jackie was entitled to a discount on all train travel. “With the metal plate, I got fifty percent off, but now, with the hip replacement, it’s gone up to seventy-five,” he told me. “Both for me and the person I’m traveling with. Seventy-five percent off!”

I handed him back his ID card. “Those are some real savings.”

“You know,” he said, “we should maybe take a trip together. Over to Brittany, down to Marseilles — wherever we wanted.”

It took a moment for his “we” to register, and another moment to come up with a fitting response. “That would be . . . something,” I finally said, thinking later that at least I didn’t lie. “Where’s David?” the neighbors might ask. And Hugh could say, “Oh, he and Jackie are off on vacation. You know how those two are, give them seventy-five percent off on their tickets, and the sky’s the limit.”

It was only after I left the house that I started feeling insulted. What made Jackie think that I’d want to travel with him? Could he possibly have believed I’d be swayed by the discount, or did he think, the way certain people might, that the two of us belonged together, the homosexual and the child molester being cousins of sorts, like ostriches and emus. I’m usually not paranoid about this kind of thing, but in a small village, you sometimes have to wonder. Why had the neighbors to our immediate left, a truck driver and his family, never said anything more than hello to us — this after years of living next door. Then there was the man two houses down, who stopped me one afternoon and asked where I slept. “I’ve been in that place of yours, and there’s only one bedroom,” he said. This is the same man who chained a goat to a tree in his backyard and let it starve to death, so in his case it was probably the craziness talking. Just as with Jackie it was the loneliness. I usually passed his hut every other day, but after the incident with his ID card I cut it back to twice a week, and then to once a week. Late that August, I traveled to Scotland, and on my return an irritated Hugh collected me at the train station. “What’s eating you?” I asked, and he gunned the engine, saying, “Ask your little friend.”

What happened was that Jackie had come looking for me. He’d knocked on our door while I was out of town and asked in his loud country voice if David could come out and play. Those weren’t his exact words, but according to Hugh they might as well have been. Not everyone saw the child molester calling my name on our front steps, but the ones who did were pretty well connected, and it took no time at all for the story to spread.

From that day on, I always wore headphones when walking past Jackie’s hut. He may have called out to me, but I neither heard him nor raised my head to look in his direction. And it went on this way for three years, until I sort of forgot about him. We didn’t speak again until after he’d gotten his diagnosis. The cancer, I’d heard, was in his esophagus, and its progress was swift and merciless. In a matter of months, he was carved down to nothing, face all gaunt, pants held up with a short length of rope. I saw him on his front stoop a week before he died, and when I waved he beckoned me inside the gate, and we shook hands one last time. I found myself wondering if the cancer had upped his train discount, bumped it from seventy-five percent to something even higher, but it’s a hard question to ask when you’re not fluent. And I wouldn’t have wanted him to take it the wrong way.

Of Mice and Men

I’ve always admired people who can enter a conversation without overtaking it. My friend Evelyn, for instance. “Hello, so nice to meet you,” and then she just accepts things as they come. If her new acquaintance wants to talk about plants, she might mention a few of her own, never boastfully, but with a pleasant tone of surprise, as if her parlor palm and the other person’s had coincidentally attended the same high school. The secret to her social success is that she’s genuinely interested — not in all subjects, maybe, but definitely in all people. I like to think that I share this quality, but when it comes to meeting strangers, I tend to get nervous and rely on a stash of pre-prepared stories. Sometimes they’re based on observation or hearsay, but just as often they’re taken from the newspaper: An article about a depressed Delaware woman who hung herself from a tree on October 29 and was mistaken for a Halloween decoration. The fact that it’s illegal to offer a monkey a cigarette in the state of New Jersey. Each is tragic in its own particular way, and leaves the listener with a bold mental picture: Here is a dead woman dangling against a backdrop of scarlet leaves. Here is a zookeeper with an open pack of Marlboros. “Go ahead,” he whispers. “Take one.”

Then there was the story mailed to me by a stranger in New England, who’d clipped it from his local paper. It concerned an eighty-one-year-old Vermont man whose home was overrun by mice. The actual house was not described, but in my mind it was two stories tall and isolated on a country road. I also decided that it was painted white — not that it mattered so much, I just thought it was a nice touch. So the retired guy’s house was overrun, and when he could no longer bear it, he fumigated. The mice fled into the yard and settled into a pile of dead leaves, which no doubt crackled beneath their weight. Thinking that he had them trapped, the man set the pile on fire, then watched as a single flaming mouse raced back into the basement and burned the house to the ground.

The newspaper clipping arrived in the spring of 2006, just as I was preparing to leave for the United States. There were clothes to be ironed and papers to sort, but before doing anything, I wrote the New Englander a thank-you note and said that the article had moved me in unexpected ways. I did not mention that I planned to get a lot of mileage out of it, but that was my hope, for how could you go wrong with such a story? It was, to my mind, perfect, and I couldn’t wait to wedge it into whatever conversation presented itself. “Talk about eighty-one-year-olds . . . ,” I imagined myself saying.

Six months earlier, my icebreaker concerned a stripper who became a quadriplegic and eventually had her vagina eaten away by bedsores, not the easiest thing to wrangle into a conversation. But if I could pull that off, I figured that a burning mouse should pose no problem.

My first chance came in New York, when I took a cab from JFK to my hotel in the West Eighties. The driver was ten to fifteen years older than I, American born, with a shaved head. There are certainly men who can pull this off, but this fellow looked like someone had taken to him with a hammer — maybe not recently, there was no blood or bruising, just a heck of a lot of lumps. The two of us got to talking, and after telling him that I lived in Paris, and listening to his subsequent remarks about what snobs and cowards the French are, I found my entrée. “Speaking of rats, or things in that general family . . .”

I thought I did a pretty good job, but when the story was finished, instead of being amazed, the cabdriver said, “So then what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did the guy get insurance money? Was he able to save some of his stuff?”

How to explain that this wasn’t really about the homeowner. He figured, of course, but the lasting image is of the flaming mouse, this determined little torch, shooting back into the house and burning it to the ground. What happened after that is unimportant. That’s why the newspaper left it out.

I covered these points as cheerfully as possible, and the cabdriver responded with a T-shirt slogan. “Only in New York.”

“But it didn’t happen in New York,” I said. “Weren’t you listening? It happened in Vermont, out in the country, where people have houses and piles of leaves in their yards.”

The man shrugged. “Well, it could have happened here.”

“But it didn’t,” I told him.

“Well, you never know.”

That’s when I thought, OK, Lumpy, you just lost yourself a tip. The French business I was willing to overlook, but “Only in New York” and “It could have happened here” just cost you five dollars, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Of course I did give him a tip, I always do. But before handing it over, I tore the bill practically in half. Passive aggression, I guess you’d call it.

I’d come to America for a lecture tour — that’s what they’re called, but really I just read out loud. My first date was in New Jersey, and because I don’t drive the theater sent a town car, which met me in front of my hotel. Behind its wheel was a black chauffeur who wore a suit and tie and introduced himself as Mr. Davis. The man was in his early seventies, and as he lowered his visor against the setting sun, I noticed his fingernails, which were long and tapered and covered with clear polish. Above each knuckle shone a ring, and on his wrist, in addition to a watch, there hung a delicate gold chain.

I meant to plow right into my mouse story, but before I could begin, Mr. Davis started in on what he termed “the traffic situation vis-à-vis liquidity.” His tone was finicky, and rather than speaking normally he tended to intone, like God addressing Moses through the clouds, only gay. After telling me that people were fools to drive in Manhattan, he looked into the surrounding cars and slandered his competition. The woman beside us was a boob. The man in front, a chucklehead. Dimwits, dopes, dummies, and dunces: it was like he had a thesaurus on his lap and was delivering the entries in alphabetical order. He criticized a cabdriver for talking on a cell phone, and then he pulled out one of his own and left an angry message with his dispatcher, who should have known better than to send him out in this mess.

For blocks on end, Mr. Davis fumed and muttered, this until we came to Canal Street, where he pointed to a gap in the downtown skyline. “See that,” he said. “That is where the World Trade Center used to be.”

Out of politeness, I pretended that this information was new to me. “What do you know!”

Mr. Davis stared south and brushed a bit of lint off his shoulder. “Eleven September, two thousand and one. I was present on that fateful morning and will never forget it as long as I live.”

I leaned forward in my seat. “What was it like?”

“Loud,” Mr. Davis said.

One would expect a few more details, but none was offered, and so I moved on and asked what he had been doing there.

“Had myself a meeting with an import-export company,” he told me. “That was my profession back then, but 9/11 killed all that. You can’t ship anything now, leastwise you can’t make any money at it.”

I asked what he imported, and when he answered “You name it,” I looked into the window of the adjacent car.

“Umm. Little stuffed animals?”

“I moved some of those,” he said. “But the name of my game was mostly clothes, them and electronics.”

“So did you travel a lot?”

“Everywhere,” he told me. “Saw the world and then some.”

“Did you ever go to China?”

He said that he had been more times than he could count, and when I asked what he had seen, he rolled forward a few inches. “Lots of people eating rice, mainly from bowls.”

“Gosh,” I said. “So it’s true! And what about India? That’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit.”

“What do you think you’re going to see there?” Mr. Davis asked. “Poor people? Chaos? So much garbage you can’t hardly stand it?”

When I told him that I was interested in the monkeys, he said that the country was lousy with them. “I was with my driver one day, and we passed by this tree that homed over two hundred of them. Baboons, I think they were, and I’ll always remember how they swarmed our car, banging on the doors and begging for peanuts.” A man with a cardboard sign approached, and Mr. Davis waved him away. “Another problem with India is the heat. The last time I was there, the temperature hit one hundred and fifty degrees, saw it on the thermometer with my own eyes. Had myself an appointment with some swamis, but come time to leave the hotel, I said, ‘That’s it. No meeting for me today.’ I’m telling you, it felt like I was burning alive.”

I couldn’t have dreamt for a better in. “Speaking of burning alive, there was this retired man living in Vermont, see, and his home was overrun with mice . . .”

When I had finished, Mr. Davis met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Now, you,” he said, “are just a liar.”

“No,” I told him. “The story is true. I read it in the newspaper.”

“Newspaper or not, it’s a load of b.s., and I will tell you why: Isn’t no way that a mouse could cover all that distance without his flames going out. The wind would have snuffed them.”

“Well, what about that girl in Vietnam?” I asked. “The one in the famous picture who’s just been hit with napalm or whatever and is running down the road with no clothes on? I don’t see the wind doing her any favors, and she just had skin, not flammable fur.”

“Well, that was a dark period in our nation’s history,” Mr. Davis said.

“But isn’t this a dark period?” I asked this question just as we entered the Holland Tunnel. The din of canned traffic made it impossible to talk, and so I sat back and tried to get a handle on my growing anger. Since when do politics affect a mammal’s ability to sustain a flame? That aside, who says a burning mouse can’t run a distance of twelve feet? What made this guy an authority? His fingernails? His jewelry?

What really smarted was being called a liar, and so matter-of-factly. This from someone who’d reduced the Chinese to a bunch of people eating rice from bowls. Then there was the bit about the baboons. I’d heard of them attacking people for fruit, but doing it for peanuts seemed an idea he’d picked up from the circus. I didn’t believe for one moment that he was really at the World Trade Center on September 11, and as for the 150-degree heat, I’m pretty sure that at that temperature your head would just explode. All this, and I was the liar? Me?

Leaving the tunnel was like being freed from a clogged drain. We were moving now, around a bend and up onto an elevated highway. Below us sat storage tanks resembling dirty aspirin, and as I wondered what they were used for, Mr. Davis pulled out his cell phone and proceeded to talk until we reached our exit. “That was my wife,” he said after hanging up, and I thought, Right. The woman you’re married to. I bet he’s really something.

After New Jersey, I went to Connecticut, and then to Indiana. On and on for thirty-five days. I returned to my apartment in early May, and after closing the door behind me, I asked Hugh to go on the Internet and search for the world’s highest recorded temperature. He took a seat before his computer, and I stood at his side with my fingers crossed. Don’t be 150, don’t be 150, don’t be 150.

Later that day, among my receipts, I found Mr. Davis’s business card. Someone needed to tell him that the hottest it’s ever been is 136, and so I wrote him a short note, adding that the record was set in Libya, not India, and in the year 1922. Before you were born, the subtext read. Before you could so casually call someone a liar.

I thought I would send him the news clipping as well, and it was here that my triumph lost its luster. “Mouse gets revenge: sets home ablaze,” the headline read, and then I noticed the letters “AP,” and saw that while the story had been published in Vermont, it had actually taken place in New Mexico, which sort of ruined everything. Now, instead of a white, wood-frame house, I saw a kind of shack with cow skulls tacked to the outer walls. It then turned out that the homeowner had not fumigated, and that there was only one mouse, which he somehow caught alive, and threw onto a pile of leaves he’d started burning some time earlier. This would certainly qualify as thoughtless, but there was no moment when he looked at the coughing mice, running for their lives from the poisonous fumes. He did not hear the leaves crackling beneath their feet, or reach for his matches, thinking, Aha!

How had I so misread this story, and why? Like a dog with a table scrap, had I simply wolfed it down too quickly, or do I believe, on some subconscious level, that eastern mice are inherently more sympathetic than their western cousins? Where did the fumigation business come from, and the idea that the man’s house was overrun? I recalled myself before the tour, sitting at my desk and lighting one cigarette right after the other, the way I do when time is running out. Garlands of smoke drifted into the next room and fouled the sinuses of our out-of-town guests, who’d arrived a few days earlier and were sleeping in our bed. The house was overrun, extermination was necessary. Had I somehow imposed my own life on the newspaper story?

Despite my embroidery, the most important facts hold true: The mouse did run back indoors. His flames were not extinguished by the wind. The fire spread, the house was consumed, and these are certainly dark times, both for the burning, and those who would set them alight.

April in Paris

While watching TV one recent evening, I stumbled upon a nature program devoted to the subject of making nature programs. The cameraman’s job was to catch a bird of paradise in full display, so he dug himself a hole, covered it with branches, and sat inside it for three weeks. This was in New Guinea, where the people used to wear sexy loincloths, but now stand around in T-shirts that say “Cowboys Do It with Chaps” and “I Survived the 2002 IPC Corporate Challenge Weekend.” One villager might wear a pair of gym shorts and then add a fanny pack or a sun visor with the name of a riverboat casino stitched onto the brim. I suppose that these things came from a relief organization, either that or a cruise ship went down, and this was what washed up onshore.

I’ll wager that quite a few sun visors found their way to Southeast Asia after the tsunami. One brutal news story after another, and it went on for weeks. The phone numbers of aid organizations would skitter across the bottom of the TV screen, and I recall thinking that if they wanted serious donations, they should have shown a puppy. Just one was all it would have taken. It could have been sleeping, its belly full of the malnourished children we’d seen on the previous night’s broadcast, but none of that would have mattered. People who had never before contributed to charity emptied their pockets when a cocker spaniel was shown standing on a rooftop after Hurricane Katrina. “What choice did I have?” they asked. “That poor little thing looked into the camera and penetrated my very soul.”

The eyes of the stranded grandmother, I noted, were not half as piercing. There she was, clinging to a chimney with her bra strap showing, and all anyone did was wonder if she had a dog. “I’d hate to think there’s a Scottie in her house, maybe trapped on the first floor. What’s the number of that canine rescue agency?”

Saying that this was everyone’s reaction is, of course, an exaggeration. There were cat people too, and those whose hearts went out to the abandoned reptiles. The sight of an iguana sailing down the street on top of a refrigerator sent a herpetologist friend over the edge. “She seems to be saying, ‘Where’s my master?’” he speculated. “Here it is, time for our daily cuddle, and I’m stuck on the SS Whirlpool!!!”

I’ve often heard that anthropomorphizing an animal is the worst injustice you can do it. That said, I’m as guilty as anyone. In childhood stories, the snail grabs her purse and dashes out the door to put money in the meter. The rabbit cries when the blue jay makes fun of her buck teeth. The mouse loves his sister but not that way. And we think, They’re just like us!

Certain nature shows only add to this misconception, but that, to me, is why they’re so addictive. Take Growing Up Camel, a program my friend Ronnie and I watched one evening. It was set in a small privately owned zoo somewhere in Massachusetts. The camel in question was named Patsy, and the narrator reminded us several times over the next fifty minutes that she had been born on Super Bowl Sunday. While still an infant — the football stadium probably not even cleared yet — she was taken from her mother. Now she was practically grown, and as the commercials neared, the narrator announced a reunion. “Coming up, the camels reconcile after their long separation.”

In the next segment, the two were reintroduced, and the grumpy old mother chased her daughter around the pen. When the opportunity arose, she bit Patsy on the backside, and pretty hard, it seemed to me. This was the camels not getting along, and it wasn’t too terribly different from the way they acted when they did get along.

When the next break approached, the narrator hooked us with “Coming up, a tragedy that changes Patsy’s life forever.”

I’d have put my money on an amputated leg, but it turned out to be nothing that dramatic. What happened was that the mother got bone cancer and died. The veterinarian took it hard, but Patsy didn’t seem to care one way or the other. And why would she, really? All her mom ever did was hassle her and steal her food, so wasn’t she better off on her own?

The zookeepers worried that if left all alone, Patsy would forget how to be a camel, and so they imported some company, a male named Josh, and his girlfriend, Josie, who were shipped in from Texas. The final shot was of the three of them, standing in the sunshine and serenely ignoring one another. “So that’s what became of the little camel who was born on Super Bowl Sunday,” Ronnie said.

She turned on the light and looked me in the face. “Are you crying?” she asked, and I told her I had an ash in my eye.

Growing Up Camel had its merits, but I think I prefer the more serious type of nature show, the kind that follows its subject through the wild. This could be a forest, a puddle, or a human intestinal tract, it makes no difference. Show me a tiger or a tapeworm, and I’ll watch with equal intensity. In these sorts of programs we see the creature’s world reduced to its basic components: food, safety, and reproduction. It’s a constant chain of desperation and heartache, the gist being that life is hard, and then it ends violently. I know I should watch these things with an air of detachment, but time and again I forget myself. The show will run its course, and afterward I’ll lie on the sofa, shattered by the death of a doda or a guib, one of those four-letter antelope-type things that’s forever turning up in my crossword puzzles.

Apart from leaving me spent and depressed, such programs remind me that I am rarely, if ever, alone. If there’s not an insect killing time on the ceiling, there’s surely a mite staring out from the bath towel, or a parasite resting on the banks of my bloodstream. I’m reminded too that, however repellent, each of these creatures is fascinating, and worthy of a nature show.

This was a lesson I learned a few summers back in Normandy. I was at my desk one afternoon, writing a letter, when I heard a faint buzzing sound, like a tiny car switching into a higher gear. Curious, I went to the window, and there, in a web, I saw what looked like an angry raisin. It was a trapped fly, and as I bent forward to get a closer look, a spider rushed forth and carried it screaming to a little woven encampment situated between the wall and the window casing. It was like watching someone you hate getting mugged: three seconds of hard-core violence, and when it was over you just wanted it to happen again.

It’s hard to recall having no working knowledge of the Tegenaria duellica, but that’s what I was back then — a greenhorn with a third-rate field guide. All I knew was that this was a spider, a big one, the shape of an unshelled peanut. In color it ranged from russet to dark brown, the shades alternating to form a mottled pattern on the abdomen. I’d later learn that the Tegenaria can live for up to two years, and that this was an adult female. At that moment, though, standing at the window with my mouth hanging open, all I recognized was a profound sense of wonder.

How had I spent so much time in that house and never realized what was going on around me? If the Tegenaria barked or went after my food, I might have picked up on them earlier, but as it was, they were as quiet and unobtrusive as Amish farmers. Outside of mating season, they pretty much stayed put, a far cry from the Carolina wolf spiders I grew up with. Those had been hunters rather than trappers. Big shaggy things the size of a baby’s hand, they roamed the basement of my parents’ house and evoked from my sisters the prolonged, spine-tingling screams called for in movies when the mummy invades the delicate lady’s dressing room. “Kill it!” they’d yell, and then I’d hear a half-dozen shoes hitting the linoleum, followed by a world atlas or maybe a piano stool — whatever was heavy and close at hand.

I was put off by the wolf spiders as well but never thought that they were purposefully out to get me. For starters, they didn’t seem that organized. Then too, I figured they had their own lives to lead. This was an attitude I picked up from my father, who squashed nothing that was not directly related to him. “You girls are afraid of your own shadows,” he’d say, and no matter how big the thing was, he’d scoot it onto a newspaper and release it outside. Come bedtime I’d knock on my sisters’ door and predict that the spider was now crawling to the top of the house, where he’d take a short breather before heading down the chimney. “I read in the encyclopedia that this particular breed is known for its tracking ability, and that once it’s pegged its victims, almost nothing will stop it. Anyway, good night.”

They’d have been horrified by the house in Normandy, as would most people, probably. Even before I joined the American Arachnological Society, the place looked haunted, cobwebs sagging like campaign bunting from the rafters and curtain rods. If one was in my way, I’d knock it down. But that all changed after I discovered that first Tegenaria — April, I called her. After writing her name on an index card and taping it to the wall, my interest spread to her neighbors. The window they lived in was like a tenement building, one household atop another, on either side of the frame. Above April was Marty, and then Curtis and Paula. Across the way were Linda, Russell, Big Chief Tommy, and a sexless little speck of a thing I decided to call Leslie. And this was just one window.

Seeing as I’d already broken the number one rule of a good nature documentary — not to give names to your subjects — I went ahead and broke the next one, which was not to get involved in their lives. “Manipulating,” Hugh would call it, but, to my mind, that was a bit too mad-scientist. Manipulating is crossbreeding, or setting up death matches with centipedes. What I was doing was simply called feeding.

No spider, or at least none that I’ve observed, wants anything to do with a dead insect, even a freshly dead one. Its food needs to be alive and struggling, and because our house was overrun, and I had some time on my hands, I decided to help out. In my opinion, the best place to catch flies is against a windowpane. Something about the glass seems to confuse them, and they get even dopier when you come at them with an open jar. Once one was in, I’d screw on the lid and act as though I were shaking a cocktail. The little body would slam against the sides, and as Hugh went progressively Gandhi on me, I’d remind him that these were pests, disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance on our silverware. “I mean, come on,” I said. “You can’t feel sorry for everything.”

The Tegenaria build what I soon learned to call “horizontal sheet webs,” dense trampoline-like structures that are most often triangular and range in size from that of a folded handkerchief to that of a place mat. Once my prey was good and woozy, I’d unscrew the lid and tip the jar toward the waiting spider. The fly would drop, and, after lying still for a moment or two, it would begin to twitch and rouse itself, a cartoon drunk coming to after a long night. “What the fuck . . . ?” I imagined it saying. Then it would notice the wings and foreheads of earlier victims. “I’ve got to get out of here.” A whisper of footsteps off in the distance, and just as the fly tasted futility, the monster was upon him.

“. . . and cut!” I would yell.

Watching this spectacle became addictive, and so, in turn, did catching flies. There were days when I’d throw a good three dozen of them to their deaths, this at the expense of whatever else I was supposed to be doing. As the spiders moved from healthy to obese, their feet tore holes in their webs. Running became a chore, and I think their legs started chafing. By this point there was no denying my emotional attachment. There were nights that first summer when I’d get out of bed at 3:00 a.m. and wander into my office with a flashlight. Everyone would be wide awake, but it was always April that I singled out. If I thought about her a hundred times a day, it seemed only fair that she thought about me as well. My name, my face: I didn’t expect these things to register, but in the way that a body feels the warmth of the sun, I fully imagined that she sensed my presence, and missed it when I was away.

“That’s all right,” I’d tell her. “It’s only me.” Often I’d take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face.

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you’re in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can’t be thought of as cute. It slayed me that she had eight eyes, and that none of them seemed to do her any good. They were more like decoration, really, a splay of beads crowded atop her chelicerae. These were what she used to grip her prey, and if you looked at her the right way you could see them as a pair of enormous buck teeth. This made her appear goofy rather than scary, though I’d never have said so in her presence. For a Tegenaria, she was quite attractive, and I was glad to see that Principal Hodges shared my view. He was a freshly molted adult male who traveled from the other side of the room and spent six days inside her inner sanctum. Why Marty or Curtis or Big Chief Tommy didn’t mate with April is a mystery, and I put it on a list beside other nagging questions, such as “What was Jesus like as a teenager?” and “Why is it you never see a baby squirrel?”

As the summer progressed, so did the mysteries. Spiders relocated, both male and female, and I started noticing a lot of spare parts — a forsaken leg or palp lying in a web that used to belong to Paula or Philip or the Right Reverend Karen. Someone new would move in, and as soon as I tacked up a fresh name card, he or she would vacate without notice. What had once seemed like a fine neighborhood quickly became a dangerous one, the tenants all thuggish and transitory. Maybe April was more highly respected than anyone else in her window unit. Maybe her enemies knew that she was being watched, but, for whatever reason, she was one of the few Tegenaria that managed to stay put and survive. In mid-September, Hugh and I returned to the city and, at the last minute, I bought a plastic terrarium and decided to take her with me. The “April in Paris” business didn’t occur to me until we were on the train, and I held her container against the window, saying, “Look, the Eiffel Tower!”

Funny, the details that slip your notice until it’s too late. The fact, for instance, that we don’t really have flies in Paris, at least not in our apartment. Back in Normandy, catching prey had been a breeze. I could do it barefoot and in my pajamas, but now I was forced to go outside and lurk around the trash cans in the Luxembourg Gardens. Someone would toss in a disposable diaper, and I’d stand a few feet from the bin and wait for the scent to be picked up. Then there’d be the sneak attack, the clattering jar, the little spell of cursing and foot stomping. Had the flies been gathered on a windowpane, I would have enjoyed the last laugh, but out in the open, and with an audience of French people noting my every failure, my beautiful hobby became a chore.

I’d been telling myself for months that April needed me — though of course she didn’t. An adequate amount of prey stumbled into her web, and she caught it quite capably on her own — that was the case in Normandy anyway. Now, though, trapped inside a terrarium in a fourth-floor apartment, she honestly did need me, and the responsibility weighed a ton. Tegenaria can go without eating for three months, but whenever I returned home empty-handed, I could feel her little spider judgment seeping from the plastic box. The face that had once seemed goofy was now haughty and expectant. “Hmm,” I imagined her saying. “I guess I had you figured all wrong.”

In early October the weather turned cool. Then the rains came and, overnight, every fly in Paris packed up and left town. April hadn’t eaten in over a week when, just by chance, I happened upon a pet store and learned that it sold live crickets, blunt little black ones that looked like bolts with legs. I bought a chirping boxful and felt very proud of myself until the next morning, when I learned something no nature show ever told me: crickets stink. They reek. Rather than dirty diapers or spoiled meat, something definite you can put your finger on, they smell like an inclination: cruelty maybe, or hatred.

No amount of incense or air freshener could diminish the stench. Any attempt only made it worse, and it was this more than anything that led me back to Normandy. April and I took the train in late October, and I released her into her old home. I guess I thought that she would move back in, but in our absence her web had fallen to ruin. One corner had come unmoored, and its ragged, fly-speckled edge drooped like a filthy petticoat onto the window ledge. “I’m pretty sure it can be fixed,” I told her, but before I could elaborate, or even say good-bye, she took off running. And I never saw her again.

There have been other Tegenaria over the years, a new population every summer, and though I still feed them and monitor their comings and goings, it’s with a growing but not unpleasant distance, an understanding that, unlike mammals, spiders do only what they’re supposed to do. Whatever drives the likes of April is private and severe, and my attempts to humanize it only moved me further from its majesty. I still can’t resist the fly catching, but in terms of naming and relocating I’ve backed off considerably, though Hugh would say not enough.

I suppose there’s a place in everyone’s heart that’s reserved for another species. My own is covered in cobwebs rather than dog or cat hair, and, because of this, people assume it doesn’t exist. It does, though, and I felt it ache when Katrina hit. The TV was on, the grandmother signaled from her rooftop, and I found myself wondering, with something akin to panic, if there were any spiders in her house.

Crybaby

The night flight to Paris leaves JFK at 7:00 p.m. and arrives at de Gaulle the next day at about 8:45 a.m. French time. Between takeoff and landing, there’s a brief parody of an evening: dinner is served, the trays are cleared, and four hours later it’s time for breakfast. The idea is to trick the body into believing it has passed a night like any other — that your unsatisfying little nap was actually sleep and now you are rested and deserving of an omelet.

Hoping to make the lie more convincing, many passengers prepare for bed. I’ll watch them line up outside the bathroom, some holding toothbrushes, some dressed in slippers or loose-fitting pajama-type outfits. Their slow-footed padding gives the cabin the feel of a hospital ward: the dark aisles are corridors; the flight attendants are nurses. The hospital feeling grows even stronger once you leave coach. Up front, where the seats recline almost flat, like beds, the doted-on passengers lie under their blankets and moan. I’ve heard, in fact, that the airline staff often refers to the business-class section as “the ICU,” because the people there demand such constant attention. They want what their superiors are getting in first class, so they complain incessantly, hoping to get bumped up.

There are only two classes on the airline I normally take between France and the United States — coach and something called Business Elite. The first time I sat there, I was flown to America and back for a book tour. “Really,” I kept insisting, “there’s no need.” The whole “first-to-board” business, I found a little embarrassing, but then they brought me a bowl of warm nuts and I began to soften. The pampering takes some getting used to. A flight attendant addresses me as “Mr. Sedaris,” and I feel sorry that she’s forced to memorize my name rather than, say, her granddaughter’s cell phone number. On this particular airline, though, they do it in such a way that it seems perfectly natural, or at least it does after a time.

“May I bring you a drink to go with those warm nuts, Mr. Sedaris?” the woman looking after me asked — this as the people in coach were still boarding. The looks they gave me as they passed were the looks I give when the door of a limousine opens. You always expect to see a movie star, or, at the very least, someone better dressed than you, but time and time again it’s just a sloppy nobody. Thus the look, which translates to, Fuck you, Sloppy Nobody, for making me turn my head.

On all my subsequent flights, the Business Elite section was a solid unit, but on this particular plane it was divided in two: four rows up front and two in the back. The flight attendant assured everyone in my section that although we were technically in the back, we shouldn’t think of it as the back. We had the same rights and privileges as those passengers ahead of us. Yet still they were ahead of us, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d been somehow favored.

On the way to New York, I sat beside a bearded Frenchman, who popped a pill shortly after takeoff and was out until we landed. On the leg back there was no one beside me, at least not for the first half hour. Then a flight attendant knelt in the aisle beside my seat and asked if I might do her a favor. That’s how they talk in Business Elite. “I’m wondering, Mr. Sedaris, if you might do me a favor?”

Chipmunk-like, my cheeks packed with warm nuts, I cocked my head.

“I’ve got a passenger a few rows up, and his crying is disturbing the people around him. Do you think it would be OK if he sat here?”

The woman was blond and heavily made-up. Glasses hung from a chain around her neck, and as she gestured to the empty window seat beside me, I got a pleasant whiff of what smelled like oatmeal cookies. “I believe he’s Polish,” she whispered. “That is to say, I think he’s from Poland. The country.”

“Is he a child?” I asked, and the flight attendant told me no.

“Is he drunk?”

Again she said no. “His mother just died, and he’s on his way to her funeral.”

“So people are upset because he’s crying over his dead mother?”

“That’s the situation,” she told me.

I’d once read that a first-class passenger complained — threatened to sue, if I remember correctly — because the blind person next to him was traveling with a Seeing Eye dog. He wasn’t allergic, this guy. Labrador retrievers on the street didn’t bother him, but he hadn’t paid thousands of dollars to sit next to one, or at least that was his argument. If that had seemed the last word in assholiness, this was a close second.

I said of course the man could sit beside me, and the flight attendant disappeared into the darkness, returning a few minutes later with the grieving passenger.

“Thank you,” she mouthed.

And I said, “No problem.”

The Polish man might have been in his midforties but seemed older, just as people in my parents’ generation had. Foreign blood, or an abundance of responsibility, had robbed him of the prolonged adolescence currently enjoyed by Americans of the same age, so his face, though unlined, seemed older than mine, more used. His eyes were red and swollen from crying, and his nose, which was large and many-faceted, looked as if it had been roughly carved from wood and not yet sanded smooth. In the dim light, he resembled one of those elaborate, handcrafted bottle stoppers — the kindly peasant or good-natured drunk who tips his hat when you pull the string. After settling in, the man looked out the darkened window. Then he bit his lower lip, covered his face with his remarkably large hands, and proceeded to sob, deeply. I felt that I should say something, but what? And how? Perhaps it would be better, less embarrassing for him, if I were to pretend that he wasn’t crying — to ignore him, basically. And so I did.

The Polish man didn’t want dinner, just waved it away with those king-sized mitts of his, but I could feel him watching as I cut into my herb-encrusted chicken, most likely wondering how anyone could carry on at a time like this. That’s how I felt when my mother died. The funeral took place on a Saturday afternoon in November. It was unseasonably warm that day, even for Raleigh, and returning from the church we passed people working on their lawns as if nothing had happened. One guy even had his shirt off. “Can you beat that?” I said to my sister Lisa, not thinking of all the funeral processions that had passed me over the years — me laughing, me throwing stones at signs, me trying to stand on my bicycle seat. Now here I was eating, and it wasn’t bad, either. The best thing about this particular airline is the after-dinner sundae. The vanilla ice cream is in the bowl already, but you can choose from any number of toppings. I order the caramel and chopped nuts, and the flight attendant spoons them on before my eyes. “Is that enough sauce, Mr. Sedaris?” she’ll ask, and, “Are you sure you don’t want whipped cream?” It would be years before I worked up the courage to ask for seconds, and when I finally did I felt like such a dope. “Do you think, um . . . I mean, is it possible to have another one of those?”

“Well, of course it is, Mr. Sedaris! Have a third if you like!”

That’s Business Elite for you. Spend eight thousand dollars on a ticket, and if you want an extra thirteen cents’ worth of ice cream, all you have to do is ask. It’s like buying a golf cart and having a few tees thrown in, but still it works. “Golly,” I say. “Thanks!”

In the years before I asked for seconds, my sundae would be savored — each crumb of cashew or walnut eaten separately, the way a bird might. After those were gone, I would recline a bit and start in on the caramel. By the time the ice cream itself was finished, I’d be stretched out flat, watching a movie on my private screen. The control panels for the seats are located on a shared armrest, and it would take me a good three or four flights before I got the hang of them. On this trip, for instance, I kept mashing the buttons, wondering why they failed to work: feet up, feet down, head back, head forward. I was two seconds from calling the flight attendant when I looked to my right and saw the Polish man keening and bucking against his will. It was then that I realized I had the wrong control panel. “Sorry about that,” I said. And he held up his pan-sized hand, the way you do when you mean “No hard feelings.”

When my empty bowl was taken away, I leafed through the in-flight magazine, biding my time until my neighbor’s dizziness wore off and he could fall asleep. In an effort to appear respectful, I’d already missed the first movie cycle, but I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out. Up ahead, in the cheerful part of Business Elite, someone laughed. It wasn’t the practiced chuckle you offer in response to a joke, but something more genuine, a bark almost. It’s the noise one makes when watching stupid movies on a plane, movies you’d probably never laugh at in the theater. I think it’s the thinness of the air that weakens your resistance. A pilot will offer some shopworn joke, and even the seasoned fliers will bust a gut. The only funny announcement I’ve ever heard was made by a male flight attendant, a queen, who grabbed the microphone as we were taxiing down the runway in San Francisco. “Those of you standing in the aisles should have an excellent view of the Fasten Seat Belt sign,” he said.

My memory of him and his stern, matronly voice was interrupted by my seatmate, who seemed to have suffered a setback. The man was crying again, not loudly but steadily, and I wondered, perhaps unfairly, if he wasn’t overdoing it a bit. Stealing a glance at his blocky, tearstained profile, I thought back to when I was fifteen and a girl in my junior high died of leukemia, or “Love Story disease,” as it was often referred to then. The principal made the announcement, and I, along with the rest of my friends, fell into a great show of mourning. Group hugs, bouquets laid near the flagpole. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had we actually known her. Not to brag, but I think I took it hardest of all. “Why her and not me?” I wailed.

“Funny,” my mother would say, “but I don’t remember you ever mentioning anyone named Monica.”

My friends were a lot more understanding, especially Barbara, who, a week after the funeral, announced that maybe she would kill herself as well.

None of us reminded her that Monica had died of a terminal illness, as, in a way, that didn’t matter anymore. The point was that she was gone, and our lives would never be the same: we were people who knew people who died. This is to say that we had been touched by tragedy, and had been made special by it. By all appearances, I was devastated, but in fact I had never felt so purposeful and fulfilled.

The next time someone died, it was a true friend, a young woman named Dana who was hit by a car during our first year of college. My grief was genuine, yet still, no matter how hard I fought, there was an element of showmanship to it, the hope that someone might say, “You look like you just lost your best friend.”

Then I could say, “As a matter of fact, I did,” my voice cracked and anguished.

It was as if I’d learned to grieve by watching television: here you cry, here you throw yourself upon the bed, here you stare into the mirror and notice how good you look with a tear-drenched face.

Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am. This Polish man for instance. Given the time it would take him to buy a ticket and get to JFK, his mother would have been dead for at least six hours, maybe longer. Wasn’t he over it yet? I mean, really, who were these tears for? It was as if he were saying, “I loved my mother a lot more than you loved yours.” No wonder his former seatmate had complained. The guy was so competitive, so self-righteous, so, well, over the top.

Another bark of laughter from a few rows up, and it occurred to me that perhaps my sympathy was misplaced. Perhaps these tears of his were the by-product of guilt rather than sorrow. I envisioned a pale, potato-nosed woman, a tube leaking fluids into her arm. Calls were placed, expensive ones, to her only son in the United States. “Come quick,” she said, but he was too caught up in his own life. Such a hectic time. So many things to do. His wife was getting her stripper’s license. He’d been asked to speak at his son’s parole board hearing. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll come at the end of dog racing season.” And then . . . this. She rides to her death on a lumpy gurney, and he flies to her funeral in Business Elite. The man killed his mother with neglect, and because of that I can’t watch a movie on a plane?

I pulled my private screen from its hiding place in my armrest and had just slipped on my headphones when the flight attendant came by. “Are you sure I can’t get you something to eat, Mr. . . . ?” She looked down at her clipboard and made a sound like she was gargling with stones.

The Polish man shook his head no, and she regarded me with disappointment, as if it had been my job to stoke his appetite. I thought you were different, her eyes seemed to say.

I wanted to point out that at least I hadn’t complained. I hadn’t disrespected his grief by activating my screen, either, but I did once she’d retreated back into the darkness. Of the four movies playing, I had already seen three. The other was called Down to Earth and starred Chris Rock as an aspiring stand-up comic. One day he gets hit and killed by a truck and, after a short spell in Heaven, he’s sent back among the living in the body of an elderly white man. The reviews had been tepid at best, but I swear I’ve never seen anything funnier. I tried not to laugh, I really did, but that’s a losing game if ever there was one. This I learned when I was growing up. I don’t know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children’s happiness. Group crying he could stand, but group laughter was asking for it, especially at the dinner table.

The problem was that there was so much to laugh at, particularly during the years that our Greek grandmother lived with us. Had we been older, it might have been different. “The poor thing has gas,” we might have said. For children, though, nothing beats a flatulent old lady. What made it all the crazier was that she wasn’t embarrassed by it — no more than our collie, Duchess, was. It sounded as if she were testing out a chain saw, yet her face remained inexpressive and unchanging.

“Something funny?” our father would ask us, this as if he hadn’t heard, as if his chair, too, had not vibrated in the aftershock. “You think something’s funny, do you?”

If keeping a straight face was difficult, saying no was so exacting that it caused pain.

“So you were laughing at nothing?”

“Yes,” we would say. “At nothing.”

Then would come another mighty rip, and what was once difficult would now be impossible. My father kept a heavy serving spoon next to his plate, and I can’t remember how many times he brought it down on my head.

“You still think there’s something to laugh about?”

Strange that being walloped with a heavy spoon made everything seem funnier, but there you have it. My sisters and I would be helpless, doubled over, milk spraying out of our mouths and noses, the force all the stronger for having been bottled up. There were nights when the spoon got blood on it, nights when hairs would stick to the blood, but still our grandmother farted, and still we laughed until the walls shook.

Could that really have been forty years ago? The thought of my sisters and me, so young then, and so untroubled, was sobering, and within a minute, Chris Rock or no Chris Rock, I was the one crying on the night flight to Paris. It wasn’t my intention to steal anyone’s thunder. A minute or two was all I needed. But in the meantime here we were: two grown men in roomy seats, each blubbering in his own elite puddle of light.