Willful Creatures

by Aimee Bender

  I exit the bathroom after I’ve used it and the lady who interrupted is standing there and she is embarrassed and I am not and I step on her foot as I walk out and she says, “Oops, sorry,” like all women do and I am mad at that because it was my fault so why is she apologizing? and I hate that she said “Oops” in that little meek voice and now I’m in a bad mood. And I still have one flavor to go. It’s an hour later now and the guacamole is gone and the brie is all shell and these stupid people don’t know that the white part of brie is important to the taste, that it doesn’t count if you only eat the mushy inside, that the French would leave en masse if they came to this party and saw the Americans carving out their cheese like cave dwellers, but the party people only like easy cheese, and easy jeans, and they are all sipping from their fluted glasses and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it’s giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water. Adam is back with his friends and he won’t look at me and they are sheltering him like a little male righteous wall and the redhead is gone by now or passed out somewhere and I am looking for black hair, looking, looking, and you’d think it’d be easy considering something like four-fifths of the entire earth has black hair and I do find one prospect but he seems harsh and too talkative so I pass him up and I find a cute black guy but he seems to be one of the married ones and I am trying to keep this as simple as possible and I’m looking, still looking, then bingo: it’s the tallest man in the room. He has sharp black hair over his ears and glasses and a swarthiness and he is the smarty guy and he is talking to a woman who is clearly entranced by him, but remember: I am a column of mercury, and this woman is wearing a blouse and khaki pants, drinking water from a mug imprinted with water lilies. The deal is done.

  She is telling him about her job at a pet hospital. She is a vet of sorts. Every person on earth likes a vet except me, because I think there are too many animals in the first place. And when these vets keep saving the sick animals, we are just stuck with more.

  “These are from the last cat,” she is saying, holding up her arm which is covered with raised tracks.

  He nods, observes. I, however, am not interested in her fake drug habit look-alike war wounds. I bet a thousand dollars she grew up with a dog who had a name with a y or an ie at the end. I had a dog once, a big dog, a Great Dane, and I named him Off so when I called him, I said “Off!” and he came bounding over. It really fucked with people’s heads. At the dog park no one got it. They kept trying to figure out how I did that, if I was okay, what was happening. I was laughing all the time at the dog park. I wore dresses there too and I think people brought their friends to see me, like I was a sight in the city, a tourist attraction. If I was forty it’d be a problem but I’m not so they adore me. Off died early because he was a purebred but I didn’t put him to sleep, I kept him company and stroked his big forehead until I saw his eyes shut on their own. I had him cremated. I sprinkled most of his ashes into my plants, but fed a few of the remaining ones to the cat next door because she had always been tormented by Off’s size and I thought it was a little bit of sweet vindication.

  It’s nearly midnight, and I’m waiting for the man here to say something so I can form my game plan. Adam is talking to a woman now and I can tell he is appearing extra animated to get my goat. I can only see the woman’s butt from here, but it’s very flat and Adam is an ass man so I’m not worried. I don’t shrivel up into wiggly jealousy. Instead I feel like thrusting through all the women here, stepping on all those dainty toes, releasing a chorus of “Oops, sorries,” a million apologies for something I did wrong.

  The vet is still talking. “Last week,” she is saying, “the sweetest beagle came in with some kind of dementia and I had to put him to sleep …”

  “That must be tough,” he says, “to put a dog to sleep.”

  I’m underneath the yellow-and-pink floral painting. Fuck me, I’m thinking. She is taking too damn long. At the door, one of the couples is saying goodbye to the host. Her hand is on his elbow. The host looks dampened; I think somebody broke her stereo.

  And suddenly, in a wash, I am feeling low. I am feeling like there is nothing in this whole party for me and I want everyone to leave now. I’m thinking about how when I filled out the evaluation for the painting teacher, and I said she should be fired, I made sure to sign my name. I’ve given some money to the university-not enough to get a building named after me, but close. And when the next session rolled around and I looked for her name in the catalog, I couldn’t find it anywhere. My final painting for the class was that-the catalog page without her name in it.

  “Oh,” she had said, “isn’t that a delightful picture of the sea.”

  I slump a little on the wall. The red-haired man is back, asleep in his chair. Vet says, “I feel like I’m a prison guard or something with all this lethal-injection stuff.”

  And then the man says something about how he worked in a prison once and he saw a lethal injection once and it was the worst thing he’d ever seen and I perk up then, rejuvenated, because that’s all I need to know; I figure now if he worked in a prison then he has sympathy with people who are trapped or bad and just like that my plan is set.

  So I smile at both of them as I move away from the wall in a silvery wave and he notices me then, how can he not, and he nods and khaki vet is off talking again and I interrupt and say, “I have to do something,” and the vet is surprised that I can talk and gives me a snotty look down her I-never-got-past-my-childhood-dream nose, and I say, to him only, “Hey, if I’m not back here in a couple minutes, will you check on me?”

  He nods, unsure what I mean. She slivers her eyes at me. I open mine wide back, because eye slivering is for old hags. I’m not sure about the details of my plan yet but I step past Adam who is still talking to that unfuckable woman with no ass and I go into the bedroom. I’m planning on stealing something, but I’m not sure what to steal that would make him come find me. I survey the bed. I could steal all the wallets but it seems too unoriginal and detailed so I decide to do the thing I wanted to do with the red-haired man and that is to steal all the coats. I lean over and scoop them together, wool ones and tweed ones and velvet ones and cotton ones, and pick them up in a huge stack, my arms a belt, so heavy they make me stagger, and I go inside the bedroom closet with them and shut the door until I am smothered with coats. It’s hot in here, and it smells like shoe polish. I arrange myself underneath the billion coats and then I wait for either the black-haired man to remember to hunt for me or someone else to get ready to leave the party. After just a few minutes, there are footsteps in the bedroom and it’s two people and they’re ready to bundle up for outdoors and go back to where they live and of course they cannot find their coats and it’s winter and they are certain they brought coats. So they leave the room and return to the host and I can hear her quizzical voice going up. “Coats? Bedroom.” Her tone is always so sincere. In high school her mother wouldn’t let her shop at certain stores because they were too expensive and too slutty and so I would take her shopping and buy her a blue leather miniskirt or a sheer black slip and she would try them on at my house in the ultra-mirrored bathroom and model and pose. She refused to wear them out. She just wore them for me. She has this compact body and looked sporty in everything and I told her compliment after compliment and we never touched but she still always blushed like crazy. There was this one dress of white feathers and she looked like a whole different genre of person inside it. It would’ve made my entire high school worthwhile if she’d worn that to her prom but she could hardly leave the bathroom and her face was bright red so that between her and the dress I was reminded of a peppermint. I never took those outfits back to the store; I kept them for a few of her visits and when she seemed bored of them or started to guilt-trip me and ask how much they cost, I gave them to Goodwill. Goodwill, for good reason, loved me. And my head is leaning back on a soft coat of lamb’s wool and I can he
ar the talking outside getting louder and I’m thinking that the reason I kept going out with Adam in the first place was because when I showed him my painting of the ocean in my living room, on our second date, when I was wearing peach velvet, long sleeves, super plunging low neck, he looked at it for about one second and said, “Lady, you are screwed UP.” And even though I was a little bit insulted, I was also ridiculous with gratitude and I took off my clothes right there, in one smooth movement, unzipped that peach velvet to show a different kind of peach, a different kind of velvet. Within seconds he was kissing my shoulders and my side and the inside of my knee and he told me to stay standing for a while then and I felt like the tallest person ever born. And by now the couple is back in the bedroom and the party is filtering into the bedroom because they know something is wrong and they are all wondering where all the coats are and someone is getting upset, someone with an expensive coat and I reach out my hand and grope around until I find it. Cashmere. It smells like a woman, like expensive perfume, but not as rich as me; me, I buy perfume so expensive it doesn’t smell like anything but skin. And they are panicking and someone is saying how the pocket of her coat has her keys in it and she’s asking, “Who is missing? Who took the coats?” and I am touching the pocket with the keys, it’s near my foot, and I hear Adam call my name and I am quiet but he is thinking, It’s her, she is somewhere hiding with coats, and he excuses himself from flat butt but I don’t want to see him ever again, I want the black-haired man to find me so I can kiss him and get home already. I close my eyes, hoping that when he opens the closet he will find me sleeping and I’ll wake, disoriented; I’ll tell him in a delightfully raspy voice that I was cold and needed a blanket and he will think I’m a nut or drunk but also he will be moved somehow and we’ll start kissing in the bottom of the closet and he will have intuitive knowledge about my mouth, and I am hearing footsteps approach the closet, heavy ones, male ones, nearby, someone is approaching the closet and it’s opening a crack and then it’s open but I can’t see who’s there because my eyes are closed and then it’s the black-haired man, it is, I can tell because he says “Oh,” and I recognize his deep voice. I reach up a hand because I want to drag him in here-I am stuck, I am bad, it’s jail, it’s just like you like-but instead, he calls out, “Hey! I Found The Coats!” really loud, and then I pretend to wake up and say “Oh, hi, what? I was just cold,” and the host comes by and when she sees me it’s like I’m her troublesome dog-pet and she says “I’m so sorry,” and the black-haired man points me out and says, “Here You Are, Miss,” like he’s a bellhop locating luggage and I explain how I was cold and the coat couple reach in the closet as if I’m not even in it and fuss around and retrieve their coats and then they’re off and everyone else is taking their coats really fast in case I’m somehow going to eat them and it’s a time-limit thing and coat after coat is picked up until I’m coatless and just myself in my dress and I feel truly cold now and bare and small and then Adam is standing there in the crowd, and he says, “I’ll take it from here,” and I think that’s so fatherly of him it makes me feel sort of sick also because it makes me feel sort of good and the host asks what I was doing, and for the third or fourth time I say I was cold, I just thought I’d be warmer with all these coats. I make my eyes blurry. And she buys it. She thinks I’m that plain drunk from her affordable-yet-delicious wine. And the black-haired man buys it too and nods but then turns around and goes back to the other room to talk to the vet. He leaves the drunk crazy lady behind and returns to the conservative animal lover. And it’s just Adam there now, standing with his familiar face, who knows I wasn’t cold or drunk, standing there as everyone clears out and he tells me to get up and pulls me when I don’t and sits me on the bed. We stare at the wall together. And I’m thinking how I didn’t reach my goal and that the whole strawberry/vanilla/chocolate trio isn’t nearly as good with just two flavors, and he is sitting there thinking something else, I have no idea what, and he isn’t touching me but I can hear him breathing. In the other room, people are leaving. The hidden coats scared them and they took it as some kind of cue that the party was over. Everyone is trickling out and thanking the host and whispering about me and she continues to be ultra-sincere, even when some complainer says something about a wrinkle in her coat, in a mad voice. Oops, I think. Sorry. I stare at the wall directly ahead. There’s a painting of a desert hung up. It’s in a simple wood frame and in it there’s just a row of cacti and then the sun setting in the distance and who needs weapons when they’re cacti. That’s all I’m looking at when Adam takes my hand.

  The woman he met. He met a woman. This woman was the woman he met. She was not the woman he expected to meet or planned to meet or had carved into his head in full dress with a particular nose and eyes and lips and a very particular brain. No, this was a different woman, the one he met. When he met her he could hardly stand her because she did not fit the shape in his brain of the woman he had planned so vigorously and extensively to meet. And the non-fit was uncomfortable and made his brain hurt. Go away, woman, he said, and the woman laughed, which helped for a second. He trailed the woman for a few days saying it was because he had nothing else to do, but in truth he did have plenty to do and he did not know why he was trailing her. His brain made a lot of shouts and static about his brain’s own idea of hair color and sense of humor and what animals the woman he met would like (mammals) and his brain’s own idea of how to be a member of the world, and everything that was sort of like him and yet different enough and still: this woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.

  His brain was in an utter panic at changing. His brain was very pleased with its current shape and did not want to shift, not one bit. This woman liked reptiles and fish. What sort of decent human being could possibly like reptiles and fish?

  He said, Go away, woman. You go away, she said, shooing him with her hand. You’re the one following me around all the time.

  They went on a walk-or rather she went on a walk and he asked if he could join her-together over the small bridge which ran over a dry stream and looked down at rocks which jutted up like teeth. She talked significantly more than he expected the woman he met to talk and so while she was talking he thought she is surely, and clearly, not the woman for me. Blabbermouth, he thought. She paused at an oak tree and said, Did you stop listening? and so he started listening again and said some stuff himself, about this, about that. He liked talking to her. The woman said she did not know why she liked him, as he was being something of an irritation with all this static in his head and he said he was sorry, he liked her too, but his brain kept rejecting her and he did not know what to do about that. The woman said, Please, would you shut your brain down for five seconds and let the world participate a bit? No, said the man, I control the world. The woman’s laughter bounced off the rocks below. The man laughed too but inside he still meant it.

  The woman said goodbye and went to her cottage and made some spaghetti and the next day guess who was at her door. Good afternoon. How are you, how are you. The spaghetti was fine-tuned and she was beautiful in the filtered sunlight and they made love that afternoon with the green sunlight through her green curtains. Her body was new to him and he did not like the way her shoulders were so broad and he very much liked the slope of her hips and he was scared because he did not know how to navigate the curves they made together. Later, when he would become a ship’s captain on the waves of the water of their bodies, it turned out that those broad shoulders were the thing he would think of with the most lust and the most tenderness. Those broad shoulders would be what he would recognize in a crowd if they all had paper bags on their heads. Those broad shoulders he could spot across an ocean.