The Glass Bird

I'm Lawrence, twenty-eight, and I work at a bank, which is exactly as fun as it sounds. My husband Galen is thirty. He blows glass for a living. We've been married two years, and for most of those two years I have felt like I was a man watching his own life through a window.

This past spring, Galen's uncle Marek went to visit his sister in Brno for a long weekend. He owns an old bathhouse in Prague that he converted into a glassblowing studio, with a small apartment above it. He asked Galen to house-sit, and Galen asked me to come along.

"Three days," Galen said on the train. "No phones. No spreadsheets. Just you and me and a furnace."

I said yes. I don't know why I said yes, honestly. I think part of me wanted to be the kind of person who says yes to things.

The bathhouse was at the end of a narrow street, all cracked tile and tall windows. The main floor held the furnace, a long wooden bench worn smooth by decades of hands, and, hanging from the ceiling on a chain, a birdcage with no bird in it.

That last one bothered me. I stood under it for a while with my bag still on my shoulder, looking up at it.

"You coming up?" Galen called from the stairs. "Or are you adopting the cage?"

"It's just sitting there," I said. "Empty."

"Grandma's. Come on, I'll make coffee."

Upstairs the apartment was small and warm. Galen changed into work clothes, kissed me on the top of the head, which is the kind of kiss you give a dog, and went downstairs to work.

Through the floor I could hear him. The furnace hums all day, this low constant note, and every so often there's the clang of a pipe against the bench or the squeak of wet newspaper on steel. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop open and did nothing. I typed three emails I didn't send. I thought about a report due Tuesday. I thought about how the last time I touched my husband on purpose, really touched him, must have been six weeks ago, maybe seven.

That's an ugly thing to know about yourself. I sat with it.

Around four the noises stopped. I went down to see why.

The studio was orange with furnace light. Galen stood at the bench, rolling a glowing blob of glass, and I watched the blob stretch and slump and stretch again. There's something about watching a person work with fire that makes your own problems feel small, or maybe that's just what I wanted to feel.

"You're staring," he said, without looking up.

"You're good at that."

"I'm okay at that." He set the pipe down on the rails and stepped back, wiping his hands. "Break time. Marek keeps beer in the old cold plunge room. Want one?"

"Sure."

The cold plunge room was a tiled alcove with a rusted drain and a crate of Pilsner in a bucket of water. We sat on the edge of the tiles with our feet hanging into the empty basin, like two men on a pier.

"So," Galen said, and popped the cap off on the tile edge. "How's the bank?"

"The bank is the bank."

"That bad?"

"No. Yes. It's fine. It's just every day." I looked at my beer. "That's my whole complaint, really. Everything is fine and every day."

He laughed, but it was a short laugh, and then he was quiet. The furnace hummed from the other room.

"Can I ask you something?" he said. "When was the last time you touched me? On purpose. Not a hand on the head. Not passing the salt."

I took a drink so I wouldn't have to answer right away.

"Six weeks," I said. "Maybe seven. I counted this afternoon, sitting upstairs, which is maybe the saddest sentence I've ever produced."

"Five for me. I stopped counting after five." He turned the bottle in his hands. "I kept thinking you'd reach over some night and I didn't want to be the one who had to ask."

"Because asking feels like begging."

"Because asking feels like proof," he said. "That it's gone far enough that somebody has to ask."

We sat with that. The tiles were cold under my legs and I liked the cold. It gave me something specific to feel.

"The cage," I said finally. "Upstairs. Was there ever a bird?"

"Never. Grandma Hana kept it empty her whole life. She said a cage without a bird is just a promise you haven't kept." He shrugged. "Family nonsense. She was very superstitious about very specific things."

"Where did you two grow up again? I always mix up the towns."

"Ostrava. She moved here before I was born and took over the lease on this place. I apprenticed with Marek." He finished his beer and stood. "Come here a second. I want to show you something before I go back in."

We went up to the apartment. He dug through a box on the shelf in the closet, past old certificates and a tin of buttons, and came out with a photograph. Black and white, soft in the corners.

In the photo, a young man stood under the birdcage. It took me a second to recognize him. It was Galen, but Galen at maybe twenty-three, before the gray came into his beard, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and holding a glass bird in both hands like it was a chick that might fly off.

"That's you," I said.

"That's me." He handed it over. "First bird I ever made. I was twenty-three, I'd been apprenticing with Marek for a year, and Grandma Hana said if I was going to make birds I should know what a cage looks like from the inside."

"That's a strange thing to say to a kid."

"She said a lot of strange things to kids. But she hung my first bird in that cage for a week before she took it out and gave it back to me. Said a bird doesn't belong in a cage, not even a glass one. Not even a good one." He took the photo back gently, like it might smudge. "Marek kept the bird. It's in the office, I think."

"Can I see it?"

"After dinner. If it doesn't have a chip on the tail I'll be shocked, it's been seven years and I was twenty-three and bad at everything." He set the photo back in the box. "Lawrence."

"Yeah?"

"I didn't bring you here to house-sit. Marek asked me to watch the place, sure, but I asked you to come because I thought if I got you away from the bank and into a room where the floor hums all day, maybe something would restart." He looked at the closet shelf instead of at me. "That is the entire plan. It's not a good plan."

"It's a better plan than mine," I said. "Mine was to sit upstairs feeling bad and counting weeks."

He laughed for real this time, a short surprised bark of it, and patted my shoulder on his way to the stairs. My shoulder. Not my head. It was small and it was nothing and I thought about it for the rest of the evening.

"I'll be down till eight," he said from the stairs. "Then dinner. There's a place two streets over that Marek swears by."

"I'll be here," I said. "Doing nothing. It's my one talent."

Down the stairs, through the floor, the furnace note started up again, and I sat at the kitchen table with the empty beer bottle and thought about a man holding a glass bird like it might fly.

* * *

Dinner was at half past eight, at a place two streets over with candles in old jam jars. Marek had recommended the duck, so we both ordered the duck like obedient nephews, and it was good, and we talked about the shop and about Marek's sister and about nothing important, and it was the best evening we'd had in months, which is a low bar but we cleared it.

Back at the bathhouse, Galen went to the office and came out holding a tissue-wrapped bundle, the way you carry something that is either valuable or a bomb.

"Ready?" he said.

"Show me the bird."

He unwrapped it on the kitchen table. The bird was small, maybe six inches, made of blue-green glass with a fat little body and a tail that drooped to one side. It was lumpy. It was, honestly, kind of ugly.

"I told you," Galen said. "Twenty-three and bad at everything."

"I like it. It looks like it tried hard."

"It looks like a pigeon that lost a fight." He set it upright and it listed left, because the tail was heavier than he'd planned. "Marek keeps it to keep me humble. He's very committed to that."

We stood there looking at it for a while. Then Galen said, "There's one more thing. If you're not too tired."

"It's not even ten."

"Come downstairs, then. I want to show you how it's done. How it was done, I mean. Badly."

* * *

The furnace room at night was different than it had been that afternoon. Warmer, orange at the edges, and quieter, because Marek's other guys weren't coming back till Monday. Galen pulled two stools up to the bench and handed me a pair of safety glasses.