The latest
Kate
Bush CD includes a song called "Aerial";
and, one spring afternoon, Hugh sat down to listen to it. In
the city, I'm forever nagging him about the volume. "The
neighbors!" I say. But out in Normandy
I have to admit that it's me who's being disturbed. The music
I can usually live with—it's the lyrics I find irritating—especially
when I'm at my desk and looking for a reason to feel distracted.
If one line ends with, say, the word "stranger", I'll
try to second-guess the corresponding rhyme. "Danger",
I'll think; then, "No, wait...this is a Christmas album.
'Manger'. The word will be' manger'."
If I guess correctly, the songwriter will be cursed for his
predictability; and if I guess incorrectly, he's being
willfully obtuse—a word I learned from my publisher, who
applied it to the title of my last book. It's a no-win situation
that's made even worse when the lyrics are unintelligible, the
voice a shriek embedded in noise. This makes me feel both cranky
and old, the type of pill who says things like "You and
that rock!"
There are singers Hugh's not allowed to listen to while I'm
in the house, but Kate Bush isn't one of them; or, at least,
she wasn't until recently. The song I mentioned, "Aerial",
opens with the trilling of birds. This might be startling if
you lived in the city; but, in Normandy, it's all we ever hear:
a constant din of chirps and whistles that may grow fainter
at certain times of year but never goes away. It's like living
in an aviary. Added to the calls of larks and swallows are those
of the geese and chickens that live across the road. After they've
all gone to bed, the owls come out and raise hell until dawn,
when the whole thing starts over again.
The Kate Bush song had been playing for all of thirty seconds
when we heard an odd noise and turned to see a bird rapping
its beak against the windowpane. A moment later, its identical
twin appeared at the adjacent window and began to do the same
thing. Had they knocked once or twice, I'd have chalked it up
to an accident, but these two were really going at it—like
woodpeckers, almost. "What's got into them?"
I asked.
Hugh turned to the liner notes, hoping to find some sort of
explanation. "Maybe the recorded birds are saying something
about free food," he suggested; but, to me, the message
seemed much darker: a call to anarchy, or even murder. Some
might think this was crazy, but I'd been keeping my ear to the
ground and had learned that birds are not as carefree as they're
cracked up to be. Take the crows that descend, each winter,
on the surrounding fields, and pluck the eyes out of newborn
lambs. Are they so hard up for a snack that they have to blind
a universal symbol of youth and innocence, or are they simply
evil—a quality they possibly share with these two things
at the window?
"What do you want from us?" I asked, and, rather than
peck, the birds stepped back into the flower box, getting a
little traction before hurling themselves against the glass.
"They'll wear themselves out sooner or later," Hugh
said. But they didn't. Not even after the clouds moved in and
it began to rain. By late afternoon, they were still at it,
soaking wet, but no less determined. I was lying on the daybed,
working a crossword puzzle and listening to the distinct sound
of feathers against glass. Every two minutes, I'd put aside
my paper and walk across the room. "You think it's so great
in here?" I'd say. "You think we've got something
you can't live without?" At my approach, the birds would
fly away, returning the moment I'd settled back down. Then I'd
say, "All right, if you really want to come in that badly."
But the two lost interest as soon as the windows were open.
And, so, I'd close them again and return to my puzzle, at which
point the birds would reappear and continue their assault. Then,
I'd say, "All right, if you really want to come in that
badly..."
Einstein wrote that insanity is doing the same thing over and
over and expecting a different result. That said, is it crazier
to repeatedly throw yourself against a window, or to repeatedly
open that window, believing the creatures that are throwing
themselves against it might come into your house, take a look
around, and leave with no hard feelings?
I considered this as I leafed through Birds
of the World, a visual guide as thick as a dictionary.
After learning of the Philippine Eagle—a heartless predator
whose diet consists of monkeys—I identified the things
at the window as chaffinches. The size was about right, six
inches from head to tail, longish legs, pink breast, and crooked
white bands running along the wings. The book explained that
they eat seeds and insects. It stated that some chaffinches
prefer to winter in India,
or North
Africa, but it did not explain why they were trying to get
into my house.
"Could it be something they picked up in Africa?"
I wondered. And Hugh, who had lived there until his late teens,
said, "Why are you asking me?"
When the sun finally set, the birds went away, but they were
at it again the following morning. Between their running starts
and their pitiful back-assed tumbles, the flowers in the window
box were trashed—petals and bits of stem scattered everywhere.
There were scratch marks on the windowpanes, along with what
I'm guessing was saliva—the thick, bubbly kind that forms
when you're enraged.
"What do we do, now?" I asked.
And Hugh told me to ignore them. "They just want attention."
This is his explanation for everything from rowdy children to
low-flying planes. "Turn the other way and they'll leave,"
he told me.
But how could I turn away?
The solution, it seemed, was to make some kind of scarecrow,
which is not a bad project if you're in the proper mood. My
first attempt involved an upside-down broom and a paper bag,
which I placed over the bristles and drew an angry face on.
For hair, I used a knot of steel wool. This made the figure
look old and powerless, an overly tanned grandma, mad because
she had no arms. The birds thought it was funny; and, after
chuckling for a moment or two, they took a step back and charged
against the window.
Plan B was much easier, and involved nothing more than a climb
to the attic, which Hugh uses as his studio. A few years earlier,
bored, and in between projects, he started copying head shots
he'd clipped from the newspaper. The resulting portraits were
done in different styles, but the ones that best suited my purposes
looked to be Mesopotamian,
and pictured the hijackers of American
Airlines Flight 11. Mohamed
Atta fit perfectly into the windowpane, and the effect was
immediate. The birds flew up, saw a terrorist staring back at
them, and took off screaming.
I was feeling very satisfied with myself when I heard a thud
coming from behind a closed curtain next to the bookcase. Another
trip upstairs, another hijacker, and so on, until all five living-room
windows were secured. It was then that the birds focussed their
attention on the bedroom, and I had no choice but to return
to the attic.
Aside from CDs, which Hugh buys like candy, he also has a pretty
big record collection. Most are albums that he bought in his
youth and shipped to Normandy against my better wishes. Led
Zeppelin II
,
Pink
Floyd's Dark
Side of the Moon; if it played non-stop in a skanky-smelling
dorm room, he's got it. I come home from my five-o'clock walk,
and here's Toto
or Bad
Company blaring from the attic. "Turn that crap off!"
I yell; but, of course, Hugh can't hear me. So, I go up, and
there he is, positioned before his easel, one foot rigid on
the floor, and the other keeping time with some guy in a spandex
jumpsuit.
"Do you mind?" I say.
I never thought I would appreciate his music collection, but
the chaffinches changed all that. What I needed were record
jackets picturing life-sized heads, so I started with the 'A's
and worked my way through the stack of boxes. The surprise was
that some of Hugh's albums weren't so bad. "I didn't know
he had this," I said, and I raced downstairs to prop Roberta
Flack in the bedroom window. This was the cover of Chapter
Two
,
and while, to me, the singer looked inviting, the birds thought
differently and moved on to a room that once functioned as a
milking parlor. There, I filled the windows with Bob
Dylan, Bruce
Springsteen, Joan
Armatrading, and Donna
Summer, who has her minuses but can really put the fear
of God into a chaffinch.
The pair then moved upstairs to my office, where Janice Joplin
and I were waiting for them. Bonnie
Raitt and Rodney
Crowell were standing by in case there was trouble with
the skylights; but, strangely, the birds had no interest in
them. Horizontal surfaces were not their thing; and, so, they
flew on to the bathroom
By late afternoon, every window was filled. The storm clouds
that had appeared the previous day finally blew off, and I was
able to walk to the neighboring village. The route I normally
take is circular, and leads past a stucco house occupied by
a frail elderly couple. For years, they raised rabbits in their
front yard; but, last summer, they either ate them (which is
normal in this area) or turned them loose, which is unheard
of. Then, they got rid of the pen and built a clumsy wooden
shed in its place. A few months later, a cage appeared on its
doorstep. It was the type you might keep a rodent in, but instead
of a guinea pig, they use it to hold a pair of full-grown magpies.
They're good-sized birds—almost as tall as crows—and
their quarters are much too small for them. Unlike parakeets,
which will eventually settle down, the magpies are constantly
searching for a way out and move as if they were on fire—darting
from one end of the cage to the other and banging their heads
against the wire ceiling.
Their desperation is contagious, and watching them causes
my pulse to quicken. Being locked up is one thing, but to have
no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never
understand that struggle is useless—that's what Hell must
be like. The magpies leave me feeling so depressed and anxious
that I wonder how I can possibly make it the rest of the way
home. I always do, though, and it's always a welcome sight—especially
lately. At around seven, the light settles on the western wall
of our house, just catching two of the hijackers and a half-dozen
singer-songwriters who look out from the windows—some smiling,
as if they were happy to see me, and others just staring into
space, the way one might while listening to music, or waiting,
halfheartedly, for something to happen.
,
,
and 
—each
of which became immediate bestsellers. His essays appear regularly
in Esquire and The New Yorker. Sedaris and his sister, 