The Sheila Variations

Jackson on ice

The house was built into the side of a mountain. One of the walls was rough-hewn rock, with water trickling over it, a natural spring. There were no doors in the house. The kitchen flowed into the dining room that flowed up the stairway into the spacious loft above. The ceiling was mostly glass. There was a room like a pit at the front of the house, a deep drop which you could descend into only by ladder. A tree grew up out of the pit. The walls around the pit were completely glass, so at dawn, waking up in that house, you could not tell if you were inside or outside.

Richard owned the house. He had built it himself. He was a hairdresser who was an architect on the side. He was gay, and would have liaisons with much younger men, late teens, early 20s, all buff straight-seeming guys, good with a hammer, good with the Wok. Matt was the current love when we were there, a clean-cut guy like an Abercrombie & Fitch model, with a sculpted washboard stomach. He wore glasses. It was never clear what arrangement the two had. Richard was in his 50s, Matt was 20 if he was a day. Richard would say to Matt, as we sat at the dinner table, "Matt, there's a bottle of wine in the pantry, on the top shelf. I would love it if you would open it and bring it to the table." Matt would obey. "Matt, it would be great if you could clear the table and bring out that sorbet I have in the freezer." Was Matt being paid? It's none of my business. It was a sort of kindly house-boy situation. Matt spent his winters skiing and snowboarding, and lived with Richard, helping him with the continuous construction of the house built into the mountain. I was fascinated by their dynamic. When we stayed there, we did not have to lift a finger. Gourmet meals were brought to the table, cooked by Matt, planned by Richard. Salmon so soft and buttery it melted in your mouth. Goat cheese melted on thin strips of bread, a Mediterranean-style salad, bowls of olives ... we ate so much we could barely move. We all lay on the floor after dinner, staring up at the tree inside the house, the moon and stars shining down on us through the glass ceiling. All around us were mountains. Matt washed the dishes.

Richard and my boyfriend had been friends many years before. They hadn't seen each other in a long time, but when we drove through Boulder and stopped by, Richard asked us to stay. We did. I liked to sit back by the wall of mountain inside the house. I liked the sound of trickling water, and wondered where it went, why the floors weren't flooded. I liked to reach my hand out and touch the rock, marvelling at the feel of it, how un-tamed it was. Richard hadn't carved it into something more civilized, it wasn't like a faux Flintstone rock wall. It was the actual mountain, jutting into the house, as though it were alive, pressing in from the other side. All Richard needed to do was allow it to happen, allow the mountain to grow where it wanted to, and accommodate accordingly. The mountain worked with the house.

I was not in a good mental state when I was there. I was no longer speaking to my boyfriend. Or, put it another way: slowly, we had forgotten how to speak to one another. A vast wordlessness had descended upon us, which was brought into acute relief when we sat around the table with Richard and Matt, the conversation warm and mellow, welcoming. We were in small isolated pools. As long as the other two kept talking, we wouldn't have to mention to one another ... "Uhm ... are we not speaking anymore?" Something had frozen to a small still spot inside of me. I could not access it. My warmth, humor, sense of irony, self-deprecation ... all of that had been fossilized, made historical. An ice age had descended. I was still functioning, but essential pieces of my personality were buried. A museum-piece of who I used to be. It made me prickly, way too sensitive because I knew I was not being myself, and completely paranoid. Who was I before that ice age? Where had she gone? My boyfriend noticed the difference, too, but because of the silence in between us, the growing abyss, it didn't seem part of the rules to mention it.

I tried to help in the kitchen, even though it made me so anxious I would stand there, mind a blank, fingers useless and frozen. Even if I were to help, where would I start? I felt entirely uneasy. Matt would not hear of me helping. He was there to serve me. To serve us. Who WAS Matt? Big buff wind-blown ski-boy, cooking omelettes for the hairdresser, and working on the house. It was perfectly fine with Richard and Matt if I sat at the back of the house, staring at the mountain wall, and touching it, not speaking. Nothing was required of me. A glass of wine was brought over. My boyfriend sat with Richard, and they smoked pot and talked about the old days. The old days pre-dated me, and all kinds of ghosts had been stirred up during this trip. I looked at my boyfriend in a new way, I felt I had never known him. And never had I felt so un-knowable myself. I would meet new people and cringe with interior embarrassment, because I had no idea what they would see when they looked at me. I had lost my social self completely, and felt mortified. These people I met all had known my boyfriend at another time, when he was carefree and reckless, skateboarding through Boulder, flush with money, irresponsible. Women had loved him. Everyone remembered him. I felt that these people shook hands with me, hesitatingly, wondering what on earth could have happened to their gorgeous friend that he would pick THIS person as a girlfriend. I am not saying this is rational. I was beyond being rational. But hiding out in the house on the side of the mountain ... it was okay to be silent. The tree plunged upwards from the pit, huge, leafy, reaching up to the glimmering night sky, and it was such an odd sight, so unexpected, that I fit right in. There was no "normal" to be had here. Whatever my illness was, whatever my mental instability, it was okay in that open flowing space.

Our first night there, woozy with too much wine, too much food, Richard pointed out the silent dark tree in the pit at the front. You could barely see it silhouetted against the night sky. He said that he had about 20 African finches who lived in that tree, only now they were fast asleep. He said it to warn me, because dawn was when they all woke up, and went insane, sun-worshippers that they are. I couldn't wait to see them all. I didn't even know what an African finch was. And I was drunk and everything seemed unreal, the mountain in the house, the tree in the house ... filled with finches I could not yet see.

"Sheila, would you like to see the first finch I ever bought?" Richard asked me, in his strangely formal yet very warm way of speaking.

"Of course!" I said. I loved Richard.

I thought Richard would take me over to the tree, and point to a small sleeping creature in the upper branches. Instead, he took me over to the deluxe stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen, opened up a freezer door, pulled out a drawer with the utmost delicacy, and lying there, on a bed of ice, was a small (dead) perfectly preserved African finch. He was spectacular: peacock blues, flecks of bright red, a streak of neon yellow, what a showoff. I did not know what to say when I stared in at the frozen dead bird, the first Richard had bought. The moment was strangely gruesome. Morbid. Yet also, beautiful, because it was a moment that was totally itself. Richard was not doing anything else in that moment but showing me the preserved flashy body of a bird he had once loved. I could have read more into it, I could have felt either horrified, or judge-y, I could have projected onto Richard all of my own loneliness ("what kind of a sad life does he has that he would do something like this?") - but none of that was present for me. It was weird, sure it was weird. I mean, what do you say when someone shows you a pet that he has kept frozen in the freezer? It wouldn't be until much later that I would remember that I had read such a story before, in Truman Capote's Music For Chameleons (excerpt here) if I'm not mistaken. A story called "Light in the window". It involves frozen pets. But at the time, none of that came to mind. Richard didn't find it strange that he had frozen his pet in the same freezer where he kept the ice cream and the vodka. And so I didn't either. I admired the dead bird's colors.

"He is so beautiful," I said. "What was his name?"

"Jackson," said Richard.

Then, unsentimentally, he swooped the drawer closed, and off went Jackson into the darkness again, and we moved on with our night. I was drunk enough to wonder, "Did that really happen?" It was like a small diamond-bright glitch in the darkness. A glimpse, a flash, of something bigger, more relevant, than the mucky-muck I was struggling through at that time.

That night, I slept on a low Japanese-style bed on the edge of the loft above. I was disoriented, I could hear the water streaming down the wall of the house inside, and I knew that down there, invisible in the darkness but still there, was that tree, full of sleeping finches. And Jackson was down there too. Despite all of this, I was able to sleep. Like a diving bell at the bottom of the ocean. I plunged into the depths, welcoming that oblivion with open arms.

I woke to streaming dawn sun and all hell breaking loose in the house. Finches were everywhere. They chirped and shrieked, they flew this way, that way, they dive bombed us, climbing up into the gleaming rafters and shrieking down on us like Kamikazes. There was no stasis. Not one finch sat quietly on her branch, chilling out with the dawn sun. It was as though they had all completely forgotten that the dawn comes every morning, that all of this was rather routine. The colors were heart-stopping. Every finch was different. Some were kelly-green, some were pitch-black with violent streaks of magenta or lemon or blue ... some were small puff-balls of fire-engine red ... There were 20 of them, swooping through the kitchen, sometimes turning in mid-air to make a particularly perilous passage through a narrow area ... I sat up in my bed, hungover, but rumpled and bewildered, ready for coffee, grinning up at the mayhem, blown away by it. Richard had warned me. But it wasn't until I actually saw it, that I understood what he was talking about. The noise was deafening. Richard and Matt slept through the whole thing. My boyfriend and I sat at the edge of the loft, wrapped up in blankets, watching the bright flashes of color zip by, swoop down on our heads, disappear into the back before careening into sight again.

Matt eventually got up and went downstairs to make us breakfast. My boyfriend and I sat at the table, the sun still low and warm in the sky, devouring coffee, not speaking, and watching the flying Wallenda-finches dive bomb us from every direction. Richard joined us, just in time for the omelette that Matt slid onto a plate in front of him. The spectacle of the sunrise had lessened a bit. The finches settled down. The bedlam had been a group event, a massive finch Mardi Gras which raged as long as the group felt like raging, and then suddenly, with a whoosh, it stopped. The finches, all 20 of them, as one, flew back to the mountain wall, as if on cue, and perched there, on different levels, dipping their neon-colored beaks into the stream of water, sometimes dipping their heads underneath the stream for a quick bath, spraying the droplets this way and that, a breakfast respite.

When my boyfriend and I left, a week later, I asked for one more look at Jackson. He had been omnipresent to me ever since I got a glimpse of him, but I knew it would be inappropriate to peek in at him myself. Richard pulled out the drawer again, and there he was, plumage perfect and preserved, blazingly bright against the cool white ice.

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