When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,58
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