It was gray. It was gray. Oh, God, it was gray. Another miserable, malicious gray day. Oh, God, not another one, she thought. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t take any more of these gray days. Thought she would die. Wanted to die. It was unfair. God, it was so . . . oh . . .
Sheet.
It was the sheet pulled over her eyes.
With a vague swipe, Cheryl Nunley armed the sheet away and fell back to sleep.
Jesus was not in her wineglass. Of course he wasn’t. It was the late afternoon, or the early evening, and for a minute there in the winery’s big tasting room—for one bedazzling, unbelievable, oh my Holy Lord moment—Cheryl had been convinced that Jesus was staring at her from her glass of Cabernet-Franc. Of all the people, dead or alive, who could have been staring at Cheryl from her wineglass, Jesus was the one she would have wanted most. Jay Leno would have been nice too, because his smile was gentle and comforting. But Jesus, on the whole, was better. Cheryl blinked at the image in the glass. Her eyes were somewhat numb and she had to work to focus. “Hello, Jesus!” she shouted. “Say something, Jesus!” Cheryl clamped onto the stem of her glass with her two trembling hands and stared down into the wine, into his blood, the blood of Christ. “Talk to me, Jesus!” she shouted. “I’m listening!”
But it wasn’t Jesus at all. Cheryl stared at his face, watching him saying nothing, which wasn’t like Jesus, and she saw that it wasn’t his face. It wasn’t any face. It was just the reflection of some stupid . . . there . . . the stupid light fixture over her head. That’s all it was, a light fixture. Not Jesus.
And nothing to cry about either, so just . . .
Cheryl smeared her cheeks dry and pushed her hooded gaze around the room at all the empty tables. She thought, it was a good thing Mr. Binderman wasn’t there.
Oh, great. Cheryl raked through her purse in the parking area. She dumped the contents out onto the pavement in the dark and got down on her hands and knees and picked through the lipsticks and cigarettes and lighters and . . . corks and . . . button and . . . receipts for some stupid thing and . . . and what was that? That wasn’t hers, that stupid metal hook thing, whatever it was. Throw that away. She had to find the ring of keys and . . . there was the ring of keys but there was. no. car. key. on. it. She swayed and stared at the keys and then she remembered, oh, they took that key away from her. That was her key and they took it. Okay, so now she couldn’t go into town. And that meant she couldn’t get more birdseed. And that meant Buzzy was going to die. Buzzy her cockatiel. From starvation. Buzzy, Buzzy, Buzzy. Buzzy who whistled and warbled like a telephone and other whistly things. She laid her head down, mourning Buzzy, who wasn’t dead yet but surely would be soon because there was no food and he would be silent forever and that was sad. Buzzy, Buzzy, Buzzy, oh Buzzy. Nothing she could do. Her eyes were closed. It was okay to sleep here, on the pavement, Cheryl thought.
“Mrs. Yoon?”
Mrs. Yoon was not her name. That was someone who no longer lived here. That was someone she used to be, but that person was not her anymore.
“Mrs. Yoon?”
Someone was still saying “Mrs. Yoon.” How could a person keep calling another person by the wrong name? What was that? Misidentification. Probably a crime of some nature. Determined to make that stop. Tried to open her eyes but the sun poured in like lemon juice, so she kept them shut.
“I’m not Mrs. Yoon.”
“Mrs. Yoon, you have to get up.”
“What’s my name?”
“Mrs. Yoon.”
“No it’s not.”
“Mrs. Yoon, you are on the pavement. Please get up.”
“Why don’t you listen? I am not, not, not Mrs. Yoon.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Yoon. I can’t really understand you. I don’t know what you are saying. But you have to get up now.”
Mr. Binderman took hold of her arm and pulled her into a sitting position. She knew it was Mr. Binderman because no one else was here now, and also because he smelled like the vineyard, sweet and green, and because she recognized his voice, his old-mannish, Austrian voice—not German—which was kind and imperious and afraid all together. It was Mr. Binderman pulling her into a sitting position, from which she wanted to throw up. So she did throw up.
“Oh, Mrs. Yoon, no, that’s not good. Not good. Here, I’m sorry, you take this. Please, you take it.”
Mr. Binderman shoved a cloth into her hand. A flimsy cloth. A handkerchief. What was she supposed to do with it? Wipe her nose? Be that as it may, she had to throw up again. She did throw up again. All this was best done with eyes closed, Cheryl thought.
Buzzy was her only friend. Buzzy, the cockatiel, had been there from the beginning, arriving in Cheryl’s life eighteen months before as a grand, angelic gesture, white warbling proof of Tam Yoon’s affection. Cheryl was then just a divorced claims adjuster living in Syracuse, New York, who liked to go on winery tours and sometimes got a little silly and snuggly with well-dressed men she happened to meet. From his perch in his white wire cage, Buzzy had seen it all—Cheryl’s sudden, swooning love for fifty-seven-year-old Tam; the determined effort to defeat the lifelong temptation that could undo her; the fervid plans for a future with someone a foot shorter and many, many times richer thanks to Tam’s very astute investments in the cellphone industry; the campaign to convince Tam to use just a bit of that money to buy a little winery and retire in the very setting that had brought them together; the early, giddy excitement when Cheryl thought she had finally secured everything that mattered and could matter in a life like hers; the gradual weakening of that certainty, and the steady disintegration of everything that had been sweet and new and possible; the shouting and the crying and the horrible, angry accusations; the “you’re pathetic” and “ridiculous”; the slammed door; the nights of Cheryl on the phone, begging Tam to forgive her; the anguish and remorse; the self-hatred; the days of lost hours; the months of lost days.
The surrender.
Throughout the formless, shattered days since Tam had gone, Buzzy was Cheryl’s steady comfort. At noon, or thereabouts, he sat perched in his cage on a table in the living room, watching his circumscribed world with black-marble eyes. He never spoke but made a series of chirping and warbling and whistling noises that could sound like the kettle or the telephone or the fax machine or the alarm clock. Some of those ringing noises sounded very much like a phone call from Tam wanting to apologize and come home. But they weren’t Tam calling. There was a dent in the side of Buzzy’s cage to remind Cheryl.
By about five o’clock every afternoon, Buzzy had stopped sounding like phone calls and often seemed, to Cheryl, to have acquired the power of rudimentary speech. But he used it to utter only warbly nonsense words that Cheryl found indistinguishable from the Chinese curses Tam had sometimes hurled at her, his mouth contorted, his black hair flying.
By nine or ten, many nights, Buzzy was conversing emphatically with Cheryl about her failed marriage. Buzzy had a harsh opinion of the cellphone industry that had fueled Tam Yoon’s fortune, and of Tam himself, and of the New York wine industry, opinions which he was only too happy to share, and which resonated with Cheryl and seemed to confirm every qualm and misgiving she had had and ignored before committing herself to the life that now consumed her. Once in a while Buzzy said something so right and true that Cheryl would hug the cage. She would press her face against the wire bars so fiercely they left imprints that took hours to fade.
But by three and four in the morning, in Cheryl’s experience, Buzzy had typically risen above such petty concerns. By then, most nights, Buzzy had convinced Cheryl to free him from his confinement, and he was flying about the living room and the dining room, the foyer and the stairwell, the kitchen and the solarium, his great white wings outstretched like the reach of a divine herald, lighting now and then on a chandelier or a curtain rod or a banister, delivering God’s message in white, glistening packages.
By nine or ten in the morning, whatever heavenly force had imbued Buzzy with the power of speech and argument and transcendent grace had dissipated, and he was returned to the form of an animal, indeed, a menace. One who made unholy, piercing noises no pillow could block out. And in these bewildering, terrorized hours Cheryl often found herself shouting at Buzzy thinking he was the phone, or at the phone thinking it was Buzzy. There were times when things would get so cloudy and confused she would pick up one of these ringing, warbling things and fight it, bash its head against the wall, strangle it, while growling the bird’s name. “Buuuzzzzzzyyyyyy.”
And late the next morning when Cheryl pried open her eyes, Buzzy would still be there, perched and happy in his cage as if the world had not come undone.