Divining

The New Yorker, February 12, 2001 – Up until the time Mingala West, a Burmese restaurant at 325 Amsterdam Avenue, near seventy-fifth Street, closed, a year and a half ago, a pigeon would walk up to the place almost every evening, right before sunset. It came to the door, sometimes gently tapping its beak on the glass, sometimes waiting patiently on the sidewalk. In most respects, the pigeon was unremarkable. But, because it so often lingered outside, the staff at the restaurant, most of them exiles from Burma, began letting it in. Without hesitation the pigeon would head for the stairwell at the back and descend, one stair at a time, until it reached a landing, where it would rest its head against the wall and close its eyes. Its expression was so pained that patrons on the way to the rest rooms often thought that it was dying. Sometimes they would say something. “No, it’s okay,” the waiters would reply; they were used to it. In the morning, the pigeon waited by the door, ready to go back outside.

When Pendle found mucus hanging out of his nose and running onto his pillow, he realized that he was no longer a pigeon. He woke in a sweat…soaking. He threw his pillow on the floor and sat up in bed to look in the mirror on the wall next to his bunk bed.

“What a fucking slob you are,” he said aloud, trying to get the dream out of his head.

His nose was sort of beaky and he often felt like a bird brain, but he was his own scrawny self. The dream had been so real…detailed. He could see every character in the restaurant, even though he didn’t think he had ever been to the place. He even remembered how the dream had started in a laundromat when he had gone to get quarters from the machine in the corner with the big word “CHANGE” written diagonally across the face. It was an actual face where he was to put the dollar in its mouth. But when he inserted the dollar, the machine laughed and changed him into a bird…a pigeon.

“You are coo coo,” he said, in self-abasement and just to make sure that he was awake. He never had depressing dreams like this when he was with someone; living alone always brought out his negative side…usually about four in the morning.

He supposed that his apartment did resemble a bird’s nest, not because it was cozy, but because it was a mess. His mother certainly wouldn’t visit him here, but his kids didn’t mind. After all, they were guys, too, and teenagers…no, oh, my god, almost twenty. But his guilt was strong enough that he would pick up and vacuum the place before they came to visit. The apartment was so small that he had to install bunk beds to allow his boys to sleep over. When they did, he slept on the couch ten feet away. But it made for lots of intimacy and laughter.

Even though he wasn’t missing mowing the grass, he still missed his old house from way back, eleven or twelve years now, on which he felt he had put his fingers, on every surface…from the roofing, the walls, the doors, to the flooring. After that he would never live surrounded by his handiwork. This little apartment was his fourth move since leaving that house, but that house was where his children lived and grew up and had been the only place in which he ever put any common labor. And his ex-wife Martha hated it just because it reminded her of him. He hurt, just a little, picturing how she would sell it once the boys were gone, to rid herself of the memories. He, on the other hand, had no plans of staying in this sterile little place, but it was all he could find for the moment. He knew logically he should not feel sorry for himself; it had all been his doing.

He wondered what his new place smelled like. Every place he had ever visited smelled like something…gas, body odor, cigarettes, plastic, dust…always something. Probably dirt, he figured. But he could never smell his own place. He chose the place because of the concrete walls, his biggest fear being the lack of seclusion caused by the sounds of others arguing, children screaming, the thudding bass of somebody’s music, or dogs barking. Like the horrible place he had moved after leaving Martha. Or maybe he had hated that place because he was so miserable with himself. But this place had cement walls and he couldn’t hear a thing, except maybe a water pipe somewhere. So Pendle could fart, sneeze, play music, talk to himself and swear as loud as he wanted, and that made him a little happy…about as happy has he could be, he supposed…alone.

Right now, right at this moment, the picture of his old house, the picture of Bette’s apartment, and the picture of his old house with Meesha all intruded on his mind because of the decisions he had once made…choices which caused a lot of pain, starting with his first move, now suppressed.

#

Pendle had been thirty-four years old and in the prime of his sales career with 3M, and bored, when he had literally walked out of the marriage to Martha, who was a good mother to his two boys. He was bored and scared…scared that it was all there was. He cried and felt guilty and hated himself for walking out, but he felt he had to escape…creep out from under something. Growing up, he had dreamed of this life he had created…two children, a wife, a house in suburbia, but then at thirty-four, it all seemed boring…frighteningly so. The fogginess of what he wanted didn’t deter his fear of dying “ordinary,” as he called it. So he left.

With attempted humor, he repeatedly told his acquaintances, “I’m looking for Nirvana, whoever she is. Do you know where she is?” He moved into a nondescript rental unit not too far away from his house and his children, but far away from any knowledge of why.
Then on one of his European sales training trips, Pendle met Bette at a Stockholm night club. She had literally chased him down on the dance floor and seduced him. She took him home to her apartment in Ostermalm, a swank section of Stockholm, kept him awake most of that Wednesday night, and sent him to his hotel with a note with her phone number in his shirt pocket. He had never felt so flattered by such a whirlwind of intense adoration, and by a woman of such seeming class. She made him feel handsome and desirable and he wasn’t going to let it get away. He loved her lack of American false morality. Swedish women were definitely equal to men sexually. Women were no more sluts than men if a Swedish woman “laid” a man. Her experience only made him prouder that she had chosen him. The problem was he was flying home to New York City. She was definitely “Geographically Undesirable” as he called it, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her all night Thursday on the plane.

“I’m coming to see you,” he said on the phone on Friday. It was not a question; he just was going to see her. He was sure she wanted to see him. So he spent hours planning a side trip to Sweden in connection with one of his other international road trips. He had to make up a good story which had a good reason for visiting Sweden again at company expense. But he did it. He was in Stockholm within a month.

He got a hint of the future on that very first visit when, after they agreed to meet at her place at 11:00 on a Saturday morning, Bette wasn’t home. He had traveled one hell of a distance to be stood up. He stood baffled on the street, suitcase in hand. Could she have forgotten? Maybe she was out shopping or on an errand. He waited, sitting on his suitcase and then on the curb. At least the weather wasn’t soaking or freezing him. Only one car passed by in the first hour. He began to doubt himself. He began to feel the fool. When finally she did show up at 12:30, he was so glad to see her he didn’t register that she was carrying nothing…that there had been no errand. He didn’t notice her haggard appearance. He did notice that she didn’t seem too glad to see him. She barely made any conciliation for her being late…simply that she was visiting a friend. But Pendle was just happy to see her, and relieved. Years later it had sunk in that the “friend” she said she had visited was a man she met the night before.

Bette loved to travel. She arranged a honeymoon for them in Zell am See in the Austrian Alps. She had skied downhill before; he had not. He bought all the right ski clothes, and rented skis at the resort. Stepping off the lift-chair for the first time high in the Alps, Pendle was ejected as one might picture a flailing clown from a canon shooting straight through a crowd of people, hitting no one. It was their skill which saved the situation. Pendle was tall and lanky, but he had always felt himself to be agile, coordinated, and well-balanced until now. A snow bank was the only reason that he did not fly right off the edge of a mountain cliff. After digging himself out of the deep snow, it took close to fifteen minutes to find his skis, which, after safely releasing from his boots, had plowed in under the snow. In fact, it took him the whole day, mostly crashing and falling, to descend the mountain as Bette coaxed him down with some impatience, and no pride.

That night she wanted to go bar hopping in the small ski village. After a few drinks, Bette remembered that she had forgotten her credit card back in her room. She asked Pendle if he would get it for her. He acquiesced. It took him over thirty minutes to make the walk and, when finally he walked back in the bar, he found Bette dancing tightly with some man. She spoke German with the man and they laughed together while looking at Pendle. Saying nothing, Pendle handed her the card, turned, and walked out.

“Hey, Pendle, where are you going?” he heard her say behind him. He turned to see her shuffling rapidly toward him slipping on the snow-paved street. He said nothing. She spoke again, somewhat slurred. “You’re nod going back to de room, are you?”

“I believe so.”

“But the evening has barely started.”

“No, the evening is over. You may go back to dancing, if you wish. However, this was the last time you will ever make a fool of me. ”

She walked beside him for a few steps and then said, “I don’ know whachew mean.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

Without another word, she followed him back to their room, and she never made a dupe of him again. Never again did she flirt or show interest in another man in his presence. From then on, when she was good, she was very, very good. When she was good, Pendle was happier than he had been in his whole life, and she actually thanked him for “keeping her in line.”

But “keeping her in line” did not include her bad temper. On a trip to Weisbaden, Germany, together, Bette came stomping out of the ladies’ room and said, “I hate Germans. Bitches. You know those stupid hot-air dryers for your hands? Well, I can’t wait for them, so I grabbed some toilet paper. The German bitch made a asshole comment about my hygiene for using toilet paper to dry my hands. She wasn’t smart enough to think I could understand German. I told her to stick the whole roll up her ass.” Pendle felt some amusement at the time when he thought what was just her red-hair-trigger temper was directed toward others. But he felt a foreboding.

After a Stockholm City Hall wedding, he had moved into her apartment in Ostermalm. She couldn’t think of living anywhere else, as she had inherited this desirable and seldom-found condominium. One Sunday afternoon as they walked along an Ostermalm street of grey stone buildings with boutiques and art galleries, he received his first lesson in appearances.

“Did you see the movie American Gigolo?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

“See it again and watch how Richard Gere walks.”

“Yeah?”

“That is a sexy walk.” Before he could comment, she said, “Do you see that guy over there loading groceries in the trunk?”

“Somebody you know?”

“Right in front of the underground market entrance. Look at him!” Again before he could answer, “People like that drive me crazy. How does he get through life? It takes him ten minutes just to move two bags of groceries from a grocery cart to his car. I just can’t stand people who are that slow…who dottle…who piddle.”

Pendle said, “How did you learn that vocabulary?”

But she ignored him and said, “Let’s take a look in this gallery.”

Her need for appearances appealed to his snobbery and her intensity excited him. She was alive and made him feel more alive. Against all logic, he had moved to Sweden. Against his feelings for his children. Against his fear of not knowing the language or the customs. But he moved because he loved her. He managed to get a “temporary” staff job at a Dow Chemical office, but within two weeks he was promoted to international sales when the present rep was sent to Burma. He had never known such elation.

Then Pendle began to notice another side of Bette. When she was bad, she was manic. One Saturday afternoon, a month into their marriage, Bette said she had to pick up some clothes at Galleriaet, Stockholm’s largest downtown mall. She asked him to run across the street to the liquor store to pick up some wine for dinner. Dreading that he would have to stand in the long Friday line at the Systembolaget liquor monopoly, he stood by their car for a moment to enjoy the good weather and watch the people. Pendle spotted a vagrant checking each car door along the street as he walked up the block toward Pendle. When the derelict lucked out finding a rear car door open, he reached in and took out a package from the back seat and stuck it under his arm.

“Hey, buddy, I saw you take that out of the car down there,” Pendle said, as the wino weaved passed.

“Fuck you,” said the bum in perfect English and who, close up, looked considerably more threatening than Pendle had expected. The bum crossed the street entering the liquor store. Soon he reappeared and walk back down the block teleporting menacing looks across the street at Pendle and then disappeared around the corner. By chance, a police car got stuck in the traffic immediately in front of Pendle. He ran over to the car and said, “I don’t know if you care, but I watched a guy steal something out of a car over there.”

He led the police, who finding the guy in the market circle, handcuffed him and hauled him off to jail. An hour later, just as Pendle returned to his car, the wine shop closed for the night…and the weekend…and Bette finished shopping. When he told her the story with a bit of pride, she went into a rage.

“You didn’t get the wine?” she yelled. “You had all this time…all this time, and you didn’t manage to get any wine? Now we have to go without wine the whole weekend because of your heroics. What the fuck were you doing? Sticking your nose in others people’s business? You don’t stick your nose in other people’s business in Stockholm. Maybe in Hicksville, but not here. No wonder you haven’t gotten a better position at work. No idea of prioritizing. Sticking your nose where you shouldn’t. What’s the word in English? Fucking doody-two-shoes.”

“Goody,” he said, but she ignored him…for the rest of a ruined evening. Although he would easily shame her for her comments, it was a cut into his heartstrings.

She cut more strings when she, in a tantrum mysterious to Pendle, locked him out of the hotel room during a trip to Gothenburg together. He learned then to carry his own key for every door. And when she complained about his spending time with his children, he simply said that he could get rid of her, but not his children. But each time severed a heartstring. He could only wonder how many he had. As the year progressed, he felt he still loved the “good” time with her. He loved the excitement of living in Europe. It was a time of which he felt he had always dreamed. The boredom of his previous life was gone. Besides, where would he go? He had committed to her. He had moved here from the United States. So he asked her to change…to seek help for her temper. He asked her to see a “shrink.” Her response was to rage for seventeen days, which he marked off on the kitchen calendar as days wasted in their lives.

#

It was hot in Colorado…really hot…even with the thunderstorm throwing lightning around them. Pendle wanted to huddle in the tent with his boys to air his emotion…his stupidity. He ached. How do you explain emotional pain to children? He knew his boys would be on his side no matter what, since it didn’t involve their mother. He just needed to try to reason it out…to use them as ears...just ears. They were too young to give advice. But then did he really know what they thought or would think?

“My suggestion is that you wait in the tent. I’ve heard of people getting electrocuted swimming in a thunder storm.” He felt stupid for saying it. Since when was he an expert at anything? Where had he heard that? From his mother? What the hell did she know about camping by a beautiful lake in the rain?

“Oh, Dad. That’s silly,” said Ted, his ten-year-old. “It can strike tents and burn them to a crisp. I heard about a couple of Boy Scouts that got toasted.”

John, the eight-year-old, looked wide-eyed. “Like toast?”

Ted gave a sneer and said, “No, actually like marshmallows.”

“That’s enough, Ted,” Pendle said softly. He was feeling sorry that he even mentioned it. Once again, since when had he become an expert in anything but emotions…sexual emotions. He was obviously led by his…divining rod. Pendle sighed. He loved being with his boys for these two weeks and no one else. They loved him anyway.

His boys had the time of their lives camping with Dad. For Dad, the Colorado trip was definitely an experience. After visiting his mother in New Hampshire, he had taken the boys for the two weeks to Colorado Springs. The weather had never been so hot. In one-hundred-degree weather, they had bicycled up the hills to the forest area, just to have Ted’s bicycle chain break. So Pendle had to ride back to town to find the bicycle rental shop and then repump his way up the hills. As the day was getting short, finding a camping area was paramount. They found a lake where they quickly dug a latrine and a “fridge” and then pitched the tent. It was cozy until four in the morning when they awoke in sloppy wet sleeping bags, soaked from sinking into the lake. They had pitched the tent, dug a fridge and latrine all on a thick platform of water plants, which, through the night, had slowly given way to the weight. Their latrine had no doubt “influenced” their refrigerator. None of it influence their humor. They were together. They laughed, joked, and played as they moved on to find another lake.

He made his decision as he was sitting naked on a rock, watching his boys swim across the new lake toward where some otters had been playing. The slow rain helped cool him off and he decided Ted was right about the lightning. It could strike them anywhere they were, so forget about it. The wind was quiet and the deer flies were not biting for once. Pendle smiled to himself as he decided to see if the boys could hear him fart across the lake, so he made it as loud and long as he could, pressing his body against the wet rock. Just then a couple in a canoe appeared from behind some trees about fifty feet away. He couldn’t see their faces so Pendle wasn’t sure whether they had heard it through the rain or maybe had mistaken it for thunder. He smiled and waved, a little embarrassed by his nakedness. But just then and there he decided that he would stay with Bette.

That late afternoon the rain stopped. Before the sun set, as Pendle and his sons sat around the little cook stove, Pendle said, “I want you guys to know that I have been thinking hard about leaving Bette.” So why did he bring it up? “She has a terrible temper and, sometimes she even talks against you guys as my children…jealous of the time I spend with you.” He paused, not sure what to tell them. He had not told them about his moving to another apartment, yet. They always called his cell phone anyway, if they ever called. “I have met the sweetest young woman who has no temper and who would never speak poorly of you.” He waited to see if there were any reaction from the boys. They kept whittling sticks down to nothing with their pocketknives.

Then Ted said, “Okay, Dad,” and flicked an ant off his shoe.

Pendle couldn’t read what that meant, so he continued. “However, since Bette is so good when she is good and because I know what I have with her, I have decided to stay with her.” He looked at both his boys hoping that his pronouncement would please them.

Ted whittled and said, “Okay, Dad.”

Pendle didn’t know what to make of this, so he sat quietly for a while. Then he said, “I love you both no matter what.”

Ted said, “We know, Dad. What’s her name?”

“Who?”

“The new one.”

“Oh.” Pendle paused, a little taken aback by the question. “Meesha.”

The boys were silent and went on whittling.

“So it wouldn’t make any difference to you what I chose to do?” asked Pendle. A silence. “Whether I stayed with Bette or not?”

Both boys showed their palms and shrugged, looking Pendle in the eye. He saw they really meant it. A previously unperceived weight on Pendle lifted and he smiled. Then he jumped on the boys for a wrestle. “No, stop! Don’t kill me,” he yelled. They all laughed.

As he flew back to Stockholm, he made up his mind even more to go back to Bette. It was completely irrational and futureless…featherbrained…to hook up with a woman twenty years younger. He had met Meesha at work, sort of. It was the company Christmas party.

She had walked up to him and had asked him for a dance, saying, “You have to dance with me to save me from a couple of goons who won’t leave me alone.”

So he did. They had danced the rest of the night. He had found himself trying to impress her. He had watched her walk through the office many times previously because she was the prettiest, sexiest woman in the place. But she was young…only twenty-one. He was almost forty. Then he asked her out (and lied to Bette). Meesha told him how she never dreamed that he would ever ask her out; she had only hoped that he would. By the third time they were together, he felt he loved her. He was almost sure he did. She was kind, even-tempered, and…submissive. He felt a peace with her. Then again, his feelings worried him. She was so young. She would want children one day, even if she said she wouldn’t. She was a different generation. It just couldn’t last.

So as he drove from the airport, he called Bette from his car. “I’m coming back.” He gave her a small pause, but she was silent. “ I thought it through while I was with my boys in Colorado.”
Bette said, “I knew you would.” There was no softness, no joy.

He had moved out of her apartment two months ago, but it seemed years. “I need to get my things from my place.” He felt funny saying, “And I will come home tonight.”

“Yeah, you should,” was all she said.

He felt relieved about his decision, but how he dreaded telling Meesha good-bye. That it was over. He was going home. He knew he had to do it face-to-face with her. She was, after all, pretty-much living with him. He called to tell her he was on his way, but got the answering machine. He immediately had a glimpt of hope that she wouldn’t be there. He could sneak in, get his stuff, leave and call her later. But when he drove up to the building, there she was, glowing like an angel in the dim light. She ran to him and rapped her arms around his neck and cried with joy that he was home.

She said, with tears in her eyes, “I missed you every minute and never want to be alone again. I don’t want to ever be without you. It was terrible that you were gone for two weeks without a word.” She paused and said, “I screamed…really screamed…with happiness when I heard your message on the machine.”

Pendle called Bette. “I am not coming home,” is all he said and hung up. It had been just a year since he had married and moved in with Bette.

#

Meesha and he had sat on a stone wall next to the harbor in Newport, Rhode Island, one January afternoon. The wind off the water made it seem even colder and bleaker. She had just returned from a visit to her family for Christmas in Stockholm.

Shortly after they had met, she had said she wanted to move to the United States; it was exciting to her. It would be an adventure. She had said she was happy to get away from her mother and father. Pendle, on his part, was happy to return to the U.S., to be closer to his children. So they did. He found a position as a sales agent for a small chip manufacturing firm in Salem, Massachusetts, and they found an antique house. Now it had been five years since they moved.

“I’m pregnant.” She looked at him with a sadness in her eyes, or was it fear?

“You know for sure?” he asked, watching her eyes, afraid of what they would tell him.

“Yes, I went to the doctor over Christmas in Stockholm. The timing is such that I think it was when we took our trip to Maine.”

They sat quietly in silence like two new statues on the foundation. Then he said without looking at her, “You know what I told you when we got married…that I didn’t want any more children.”
Again silence.

“But I do,” she said. “I told my mother and my sister that I wanted to keep this child.”

He looked into her eyes. “I don’t. I told you that.”

“What if I keep it?”

Since it was a cold blustery day, they were alone by the shore. He was silent as countless waves brushed in a rhythmic static against the dock pilings. He rubbed the flats of his hands on his lap in the same slow tempo. Tears came welling into his eyes, but he hid them, even from himself, hoping it was just the cold wind burning his eyes.

“Then I am gone. You will have to raise it alone.” He felt a qualm dizziness. He didn’t know how he could say such a thing, and he wasn’t so sure he meant it, but he needed to act certain. He could not see himself as a sixty-year-old father to a teenager. He pictured himself bound and tied the way a parent needs to be tied to his child. He knew what it meant to have children; she did not. The guilt of being away from his two boys and the attention that he owed them bolstered his act of certainty. He looked at her as the innocent thing he had met the first evening at the company party. He thought of her as sweetness and kindness. Meesha could not know what it was like to have children, and he couldn’t let her know that he wouldn’t abandon her. Not right now. He needed her to decide to have an abortion.

And she did. She didn’t tell him when. He knew he would have been there to help support her, past the hecklers, the humiliation, and the cold table. But she didn’t tell him a thing…not when, not where, not how.

#

Ghosts were not his thing, but he had experienced one about as well as could be expected. He lived alone for a while in the old house in Salem, Massachusetts, built back when George Washington was President…after Meesha ran off with her lover. When he was upstairs, he was sure that the chills he felt in his spine were just his imagination because he felt sorry for himself. He was tired from all the crying, so he was probably just cold. But it was always the same room.

The footsteps in the stairwell sounded like his cat, but she lay sleeping beside him…hearing nothing. In addition, the Persian had started waking him exactly at four in the morning by saying “Pendle” loudly and clearly. One evening, as he was watching television, bells began ringing in the same room, then downstairs, and then in the basement pretty well convincing him that something was “happening.” The final conviction sunk in when an antique dealer, visiting to buy some of Pendle’s European furniture too big to move to a tiny apartment, let out a yell right at the top of the stairs.

“You’ve got a presence here!”

“What do you mean?” Pendle asked, trying to avoid coyness.

“You have some sort of presence here in this room. A strong one.” Pendle tried to look incredulous, but the guy went on. “I know these things. I study them. I have even written a book about it, Salem Specters. It’s in the library.”

And that was it. Pendle just accepted that he had a ghost…a friendly one or, at least, harmless. However, when he sold his house to move into this little apartment…this nest, he didn’t declare the ghost on the sales documents. The old house deserved a ghost.

He moved…had to move…to erase Meesha; to try to help rub out the memories of their new life in America. Martha had said, “I wish you were dead; it would be much easier.” He understood now. He understood what he had done to Martha, the mother of his children, many years ago. And to Bette.

Sitting on his sofa-bed on the first night in the new little apartment, he logged onto the Internet to find a dating service. He did not want to be alone. As the page slowly crept onto the screen in small pieces, each piece stabbed him with memories. It seemed that the presence from the old house followed him to the new place, making Pendle a little leary about his prospects of ridding himself of whatever it was. He felt a chill and he heard noises in the wall …a tapping behind him. He wanted very much to flap his wings, to fly away.

The phone made him jump with its unexpected ring. As soon as Pendle picked up the phone, he heard it was an old acquaintance from Stockholm.

“Hi, Peter.”

“Hi, Pendle. How’s it going, Buddy?” Peter’s voice was its usual over-enthusiastic tone, which used to make Pendle smile.

“Not so good.”

“Hey, what’s wrong, Buddy?”

Pendle paused. “Meesha left me.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“No, I’m not joking. She found somebody else.”

There was a silence, and then Peter said, “But, if anybody were happy and perfect for each other, it was you two. I’ve never seen such happy people.”

“I bored her by getting old.”

Again silence. Peter said, “Well, I was thinking about coming to visit, but….”

“You’re welcome any time, but I won’t be the best of company.” Pendle held onto his tears.

After another lengthy pause, Peter said, “I’ll call back sometime.”

“Sure.” Pendle knew Peter wouldn’t. Peter was her friend.

When he hung up, he felt tired. Maybe he could find that Burmese restaurant again. Or was it really no longer in existence? He would have to keep looking, but now he was so tired it didn’t matter what shadows there were or how cold he was, he would fall asleep right there on the stairs.