The Cage by Audrey Schulman

Author:Audrey Schulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1994-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

On their last night in town they all stayed around after dinner talking until late. They drank and looked hungrily about at strangers passing by the table. None of the four attempted to talk to any other people. So far as Beryl knew, only she and Jean-Claude actually knew anyone in town. Jean-Claude seemed to know every person who walked by smelling of dogs and gasoline. Each one looked around at the Natural Photography group and then gave Jean-Claude a silent nod. He nodded back.

Most of the people he knew were men, but Beryl noticed one woman. Small with dark eyes. Beryl looked to see how Jean-Claude nodded back. She could tell nothing from him, his patient steady gaze, his precise nod. She realized she was getting quite curious about his life.

David began to talk about his home in southern California. He said, “I live right on the beach with a friend, near San Diego. We got the place in order to snorkel there. We used to snorkel every day. I like the silence, you know, the light and the fish. So much movement and color in such a small area.” David breathed out through his mouth. “I never filmed that world there. I never wanted to, you know?” He looked about at them.

“In the last few years, though, it’s changed. I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t anything abrupt, not any one thing, just all the developments, all the new towns, a small oil spill.” He picked up his napkin and rubbed his thumb across its edge. “Now when I walk down to the beach, the sound is the same. The sun is the same, the waves. But I wade into the surf and the water is empty.” He put the napkin down.

Beryl watched Butler as David talked. He seemed slightly confused by the story, or perhaps by other clues, by the way David mentioned his “friend.” Butler looked at David’s face and then, for some reason, at his hands. He shifted his chair away from David, but not far. He still looked confused.

David pestered Jean-Claude to do some calls of arctic animals. Jean-Claude finally agreed.

“Snow grouse,” he said, pulling his upper lip in and making the clucking and whispering calls of the white bird with the astonished eyes, the bird that slept beneath the drifts each night and in the morning stuck its head up through the snow like a periscope. Space and cold echoed in his calls as physical as a touch on Beryl’s face.

Jean-Claude didn’t move his hands to make the call. He simply fixed his eyes on open space, pursed his mouth and made the noise. Beryl assumed he didn’t use his hands because when he needed to do these calls outside, his hands would be covered by gloves.

“Arctic fox,” he said next. He barked and yipped the small voice of the scavenger, busy, hungry, constantly complaining.

“The wolf.” He craned his neck upward and Beryl watched the sound roll up from the bones of his chest.

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