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you’ve got time. Parrots can live for a hundred years, you know.”
    A hundred years? I glimpsed myself grown old. With a liver-spotted hand, I reached out for the birdseed; an empty house, a funeral procession, Richard on a stranger’s arm, flapping his wings on my grave. These images cooled my fervor for the project. One afternoon when the bird let loose a familiar torrent of enthusiasm about a hot double beef patty stacked with cheese, I threw down my book and glared. It was the middle of the day. I covered his cage with the cloth.
    “There. Now you’ll let me read.”
    “Scrrraw,” he said softly and then quickly fell asleep.
    A few hours later, as I rifled through Lars’s desk in search of photos, letters, and ticket stubs from his previous girlfriends, the quiet apartment began to feel like a tomb in which I had been buried alive. The autumnal light, the sound of Richard grinding his beak. But at six o’clock, the door burst open, and there was my boyfriend with a bag of dinner in hand. How I leapt from the sofa, how I forgot the indeterminate contents of the desk, how we clung to each other like newlyweds! The sofa that had seemed a desolate raft in the sea of his absence now became a schooner in which we glided, watching television, eating fried food, and kissing each other’s ears.
     

CHAPTER 8
     
    I don’t have the training,” I said to Rena in the coffee house. “I love cake decorating, but to actually get a job, I’d have to go to pastry school and learn fondant and . . . tart doughs and . . . petit fours.”
    “Well, maybe you’d like that,” Rena said.
    “Right now I’m liking the freedom of being cut loose from the job, and the lease on my studio, and the old expectations! I can’t describe it. When Henry James read
Treasure Island
, he wrote Stevenson a fan letter and said, ‘I feel like a boy again!’ Exactly how I feel, but I never was a boy. I’m giddy, can you tell?”
    “Too much sugar, maybe.” Rena looked down at the bill and flushed. “Speaking of which, I think she forgot to charge us for a coffee. No, there it is. Oh, well.” Gloomily, she slid a twenty-dollar bill on top of the check. “How’s Richard? Did you bring pictures?”
    “Was it you who said a pet would be good for me? The responsibility? Maybe it was Adrianna’s half-brained idea. He’s a drag. Every time he fails, it’s like I’m failing. I say, ‘Steer the boat, girlfriend’ twenty times and he looks at me like I’m part of his seed tray.”
    “Birds like seeds.”
    “I’ve pretty much given up on him for decent conversation. But I don’t like the way he follows me around the apartment with his eyes. It’s creepy, how he always seems to be looking. He sits on his perch and stares—like this.” I goggled my eyes and willed my nose to appear like a sharp hard beak. “I used to read
Treasure Island
out loud, but he inhibits me.”
    Rena took the sugar dispenser out of my hand.
    “Pets have to be chosen with care. It’s not like buying a pair of shoes or something. Which reminds me, where’d you get that bag?”
    “Anniversary present from Lars.”
    A flurry of activity as I showed her the contrast stitching and the side pockets that held my index cards on
Treasure Island
.
    “Don’t think
he
chose it, Rena. He was going to get flowers. I redirected him.”
    “I’d get a bag like that if it was vegan,” Rena sighed.
     
    “Poor Rena,” I said to Lars as we sat on the couch and pulled apart our chopsticks. “Yesterday she pretended not to like my bag because it wasn’t vegan, when the truth is she can’t afford anything like this because she works as a pet-sitter. Have you ever seen her put on that act? The holier-than-thou voluntary vow of poverty to save the animals thing?”
    “She’s always been anxious about money,” Lars observed. He tipped half the carton of egg foo yong onto my plate.
    “Next time let’s not bother with the plates,” I said.
    “The boat!” said