Pigeon Feathers Read Free Page B

cupped hand, rigid as an electrode, on the top of Clyde’s head—“I’m going to put some drops in your eyes sowe can check the prescription of the glasses you bought in Massachusetts.”
    Clyde didn’t remember that the drops stung so; he gasped outright and wept while Pennypacker held the lids apart with his fingers and worked them gently open and shut, as if he were playing with snapdragons. Pennypacker set preposterously small, circular dark-brown glasses on Clyde’s face and in exchange took away the stylish horn-rims Clyde had kept in his pocket. It was Pennypacker’s method to fill his little rooms with waiting patients and wander from one to another like a dungeon-keeper.
    Clyde heard, far off, the secretary’s voice tinkle, and, amplified by the hollow hall, Pennypacker’s rumble in welcome and Janet’s respond. The one word “headaches,” petulantly emphasized, stood up in her answer. Then a door was shut. Silence.
    Clyde admired how matter-of-fact she had sounded. He had always admired this competence in her, her authority in the world peripheral to the world of love, in which she was so docile. He remembered how she could face up to waitresses and teachers and how she would bluff her mother when this vigilant woman unexpectedly entered the screened porch where they were supposed to be playing cribbage. Potted elephant plants sat in the corners of the porch like faithful dwarfs; robins had built a nest in the lilac outside, inches from the screen. It had been taken as an omen, a blessing, when, one evening, their being on the glider no longer distressed the robins.
    The wallpaper he saw through the open door seemed as distinct as ever. Unlike, say, the effects of Novocain, the dilation of pupils is impalpable. He held his fingernails close tohis nose and was unable to distinguish the cuticles. He touched the sides of his nose, where tears had left trails. He looked at his fingers again, and they seemed fuzzier. He couldn’t see his fingerprint whorls. The threads of his shirt had melted into an elusive liquid surface.
    A door opened and closed, and another patient was ushered into a consulting room and imprisoned by Pennypacker. Janet’s footsteps had not mingled with the others. Without ever quite sacrificing his reputation for good behavior, Clyde in high school had become fairly bold in heckling teachers he considered stupid or unjust. He got out of his chair, looked down the hall to where a white splinter of secretary showed, and quickly walked past a closed door to one ajar. His blood told him,
This one
.
    Janet was sitting in a chair as upright as the one he had left, a two-pronged comb in her mouth, her back arched, and her arms up, bundling her hair. As he slipped around the door, she plucked the comb from between her teeth and laughed at him. He saw in a little rimless mirror cocked above her head his own head, grimacing with stealth and grotesquely costumed in glasses like two chocolate coins, and appreciated her laughter, though it didn’t fit with what he had prepared to say. He said it anyway: “Janet, are you happy?”
    She rose with a practical face and walked past him and clicked the door shut. As she stood facing it, listening for a reaction from outside, he gathered her hair in his hand and lifted it from the nape of her neck, which he had expected to find in shadow but which was instead, to his distended eyes, bright as a candle. He clumsily put his lips to it.
    “Don’t you love your wife?” she asked.
    “Incredibly much,” he murmured into the fine neck-down.
    She moved off, leaving him leaning awkwardly, and in frontof the mirror smoothed her hair away from her ears. She sat down again, crossing her wrists in her lap.
    “I just got told my eyelashes are going to fall out,” Clyde said.
    “Your pretty lashes,” she said somberly.
    “Why do you hate me?”
    “Shh. I don’t hate you now.”
    “But you did once.”
    “No, I did
not
once. Clyde, what
is
this bother?