Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

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  For my mother and my father

  1

  I DROVE MYSELF OUT OF New York City where a man shot himself in front of me. He was a gluttonous man and when his blood came out it looked like the blood of a pig. That’s a cruel thing to think, I know. He did it in a restaurant where I was having dinner with another man, another married man. Do you see how this is going? But I wasn’t always that way.

  The restaurant was called Piadina. On the exposed brick walls hung photographs of old Italian women rolling gnocchi across their giant floured fingers. I was eating a bowl of tagliatelle Bolognese. The sauce was thick and rust-colored and there was a bright sprig of parsley at the top.

  I was facing the door when Vic came in. He was wearing a suit, which was usual. I’d seen him only once in casual clothes, a t-shirt and jeans, and it disturbed me very much. I’m sure he could tell. His arms were pale and soft and I couldn’t stop looking at them.

  He was never Victor. He was always Vic. He was my boss, and for a long time before anything happened, I looked up to him. He was very intelligent and clean and had a warm face. He ate and drank voraciously but there was a dignity to his excess. He was generous, scooping creamed spinach onto everyone else’s plate before his own. He had a great vocabulary and a neat combover and an extensive collection of fine hats. He had two children, a girl and a boy; the boy was mentally challenged, and Vic somewhat kept this from me and the other people beneath him. He had only a picture of the daughter on his desk.

  Vic took me to hundreds of restaurants. We ate porterhouse at big clubby steakhouses with red banquettes and the waiters flirted with me. They either assumed he was my father or my older husband or they figured I was a mistress. We were, somehow, all of the above. His actual wife was at home in Red Bank. He said, I know you won’t believe this because of what a slob I am, but my wife is actually very beautiful. In fact, she was not. Her hair was too short for her face and her skin was too white for the colors she liked to wear. She looked like a good mother. She liked to buy little salt dishes and Turkish towels, and in the beginning of our friendship, I would walk around the city and if a bamboo salt dish caught my eye I would snap a photo and text him, Would your wife like?

  He said I had wonderful taste, but what does that mean?

  It can feel very safe to be friends with an older man who admires you. Anywhere you are, if something goes wrong, you can make a phone call and the man will come. The man who comes should be your father, but I didn’t have one at that time and you will never.

  At a certain point I began to rely on Vic for everything. We worked at an advertising firm. He was creative director. I had virtually no experience when I started, but I had this talent, he said. He promoted me from a regular assistant to copywriter. At first I enjoyed all the praise and then I started to feel like I deserved everything I got, that he had nothing to do with it. It took a few years for that to happen. In the interim we started up a sexual relationship.

  I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not attracted. It becomes all about your own performance, your own body and how it looks on the outside, the way it moves above this man who, for you, is only a spectator.

  While it was happening I wasn’t aware of how it was affecting me. I didn’t notice until several years later, when three showers a day were not enough.

  The very first time was in Scotland. Our company had landed an account with Newcastle beer and Vic suggested I take the lead, go to all the meetings and get the ball rolling. It was a big account and the rest of the guys were jealous. I was new to the company and the work in general. They stopped flirting with me and began to act like I was an exotic dancer, jerking themselves off and judging me at the same time.

  Newcastle put me up in this luxurious hotel just outside of Edinburgh. It was cold stone and big windows, and the front entrance was a circular gravel drive. I would look out my window to see the cars that came through, old antiques and bright black G-wagons and small silver Porsches. There was a tartan quilt on the bed and the phone was a mallard duck. The room was fourteen hundred dollars a night.

  I’d been in Scotland for about a week when I began to feel blue. I was used to being alone but it’s different in another country. The sun never came out but neither did the rain. Plus I was very naive about the work and the Newcastle representatives could see that. I called Vic at the office. I didn’t mean to, but I began to cry. I said that I missed my father. Of course I missed my mother, too. But in a very different way, and you’ll come to understand why.

  Vic was in Scotland the next evening. His last-minute flight had been exorbitant, upward of twelve thousand dollars, and he paid out of his own pocket because I was terrified that our colleagues would think I’d failed. He didn’t come to any meetings. He just drew up some talking points. He got his own room down the hall. The first night we had dinner and drinks in the hotel lobby and each went to our separate rooms. But the second night he walked me back to mine.

  Smart older men will have a way of crawling up your leg. It won’t feel seedy at first and it might seem like it was your idea.

  I was wearing a cream wool dress and my legs were bare. I never wore pantyhose or leggings of any kind, even in winter. I wore black Mary Jane heels.

  Vic wore a suit. He was perennially dressed like the men in cigarette advertisements. I wasn’t attracted to him but I was comforted by his cologne. We were laughing, walking down that green and gold hallway. A couple passed us and I remember the way the woman looked at me. I’ve gone around with that feeling for a long time.

  In my room we opened two medium-size bottles of red wine from the minibar, plus three airplane bottles of Scotch that he drank all on his own.

  Probably out of self-preservation, I can’t remember exactly how it got started. I’m sure I had a lot to do with it, testing the reach of my sexual power. The extent of my prettiness. But what I remember starkly is the mirror on the wall opposite the windows where I’d listened for days to the sleek cars crunching the gravel. I got up to look in the mirror because he’d said the red wine was in the corner of my lips and I looked like a crackhead. Haha, I said. But that man could never have made me feel ugly.

  He came up behind me in the mirror. His head was abnormally large next to mine. My long dark hair made an elegant contrast against the cream of the dress. He placed one hand on my shoulder and the other against my hair, near the ear, tipping my head to one side. I watched the look in his eye as he touched his thin lips to my neck. It sent a shiver down my spine, partly in repulsion, but there was also an involuntary sexual response. He lifted the dress over my head. I stood in heels and a white lace bra and white underwear with little red bows at the sides. I was dressing for someone in those days and I liked to believe it was me. Once, in a little kitchen store in SoHo, I bought an apron with printed rabbits and chalets and little girls licking ice cream cones.

  Thereafter came the trips to Sayulita, to Scottsdale for the nice spa. There were blue-tiled bathrooms and wonderful sushi. Tableside guacamole, belly dancers, valet everything.

  Eventually I grew too disgusted, but for a long time I managed. There wasn’t much physicality overall. You can get away with a lot of nothing if you play it right. Especially if the man is married, you can talk about morality and what your dead father would think. You can make the m
an feel trepidation to merely hold your hand and all the while you are in these warm places with palm trees and golf carts.

  I didn’t stop dating all those years. There were a few minor obsessions but no one truly serious. I told Vic about some of them. I said they were friends and I let him balance the suspicions in his head. But mostly I lied. I would say I was going out with girlfriends and then sneak from the office and run toward a subway, looking back the whole time, terrified he’d followed me. Then I would meet some unkind boy and Vic would go home and patrol the Internet looking for signs of me on social media. He would write me around eleven, Watcha up to kid. He didn’t use a question mark so it would look less inquisitive. You begin to understand human nature at a cellular level when an older man is obsessed with you.

  The status quo was manageable. We were both getting what we needed, though I could have done without him. It turned out he could not do without me. He likened his relationship with me to Icarus. He was Icarus and I was the sun. Lines like these, which I wholly believed and still do, made me sick to my stomach. What kind of a girl wants to be a sun over a country she doesn’t even want to visit.

  Everything was fine for a number of years, until the man from Montana. I called him Big Sky and, in the beginning, so did Vic. I sent Vic to the depths of what a man can stand. I don’t recommend you do it, and you should know what it does to a human being.

  I think Vic came to shoot me that night, is what I think.

  2

  IF SOMEONE ASKED ME TO describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use. The depravation has been useful to me. Useful to what end, I couldn’t say. But I have survived the worst. Survivor is the second word I’d use. A dark death thing happened to me when I was a child. I will tell you all about it, but first I want to tell what followed the evening that changed the course of my life. I’ll do it this way so that you may withhold your sympathy. Or maybe you won’t have any sympathy at all. That’s fine with me. What’s more important is dispelling several misconceptions—about women, mostly. I don’t want you to continue the cycle of hate.

  I’ve been called a whore. I’ve been judged not only by the things I’ve done unto others but, cruelly, by the things that have happened to me.

  I envied the people who judged me. Those who lived their lives in a neat, predictable manner. The right college, the right house, the right time to move to a bigger one. The prescribed number of children, which sometimes is two and other times is three. I would bet that most of those people had not been through one percent of what I had.

  But what made me lose my mind was when those people called me a sociopath. Some even said it like it was a positive. I am someone who believes she knows which people should be dead and which should be alive. I am a lot of things. But I am not a sociopath.

  When Vic shot a hole in himself, the blood leaked out like liquor. I hadn’t seen blood like that since I was ten years old. It opened a portal. I saw the reflection of my past in that blood. I saw the past clearly, for the first time. The cops came to the restaurant looking horny. Everyone had been cleared out of the place. The man I’d been eating with asked me if I would be okay. He was putting his jacket on. He meant would I be okay alone tonight and for the rest of my life because I would never see him again. Once he’d asked me who my group was and I didn’t know what he meant and now I did. The dead man on the floor was my group. I was part of a group that Dartmouth didn’t recognize. After the cops left I walked home to my apartment. I thought I had no carbohydrates in the house, but I found a taco kit. The worst thing about eating too much is that you need more Klonopin than usual. I got just high enough to be decisive. I decided I was going to find her.

  Vic was probably cold by then. I pictured his cold tentacles. When someone suffocates you with what they believe is love, even as you feel your air supply being cut off, you at least feel embraced. When Vic died, I was completely alone. I didn’t have the energy to make someone else love me. I was inert. Vuota. A word my mother would have used. She always had the best words.

  There was one person left. A woman I’d never met. This was terrifying because women had never loved me. I was not a woman whom other women love. She lived in Los Angeles, a city I didn’t understand. Mauve stucco, criminals, and glitter.

  I didn’t think Alice—that was her name—would love me, but I hoped she would at least want to see me. I’d known her name for years. I was almost positive that she didn’t know mine. For the first time in a long time I was going somewhere for a reason. I had no idea how it would go in California. I didn’t know if I would fuck or love or hurt someone. I knew I’d wait for a call. I knew I would be rabid. I had zero dollars but didn’t rule out the prospect of a swimming pool. There were many paths my journey could take. I didn’t think any of them would lead me to murder.

  * * *

  SHE’D BEEN UNTRACEABLE FOR YEARS, no social media, no real estate transactions. Once in a while I would look for her. But I had too little information, on top of which I was scared to death.

  Then one afternoon I went to a dentist because two of my teeth had been knocked out. A man had done it but not technically with violence. It was an expensive dentist but the man responsible for the loss of the teeth was paying for it.

  I waited in reception for over an hour, flipping through one of those aspirational magazines for people who make over five million dollars a year. There she was, on the cover, with four other pretty women who were the best of fitness, Ashtanga, aikido, and so on, in Los Angeles.

  I was so drawn to her looks that I read the article and saw her name, which I’d kept on a slip of paper for over a decade. I gasped, and air whistled through the hole between my teeth.

  She was prettier than I ever could have imagined. Her breasts were absolutely perfect. An old boyfriend—not a boyfriend but one of those purveyors of multiple and uncertain mornings—once said that of an actress who’d bared her breasts for a scene. Her breasts, he said to me while eating cheap vanilla ice cream, are absolutely perfect. I am still impressed that I didn’t kill him.

  * * *

  FOR YEARS I’D DREAMED OF her. Oftentimes I dreamed of hurting her. The rest of the time it was something else, equally worrisome.

  Within days of Vic’s death, my apartment was cleaned out. I was an expert at leaving. I didn’t know where I would live. I called about a few rentals near her place of work. But I was low on money and there weren’t too many options in my budget. It got so bad that I called a place off of a rental site whose main photo was a bathroom with mold in the grout, a bottle of Selsun Blue in the stall shower, and nothing else.

  I mapped out a quixotic, impractical route and drove my Dodge Stratus to California. It was a very ugly car but large, and I was able to fit many things inside. My mother’s jewelry in a taupe tin. My best dresses, each sheathed in plastic and folded over the passenger seat. There were my Derrida and photographs and menus from restaurants where I’d spent memorable evenings. Essential oils from a holy place in Florence. A shallot of marijuana, a pipe, ninety-six pills of varying shapes and shades of cream and blue. Very expensive copper yoga pants and mustard bralettes. Boxes of smoked Maldon and twenty squat cartons of pastina, which I’d heard they did not carry at the Ralphs or the Vons. I took the things that could come with only me, that could not be trusted to travel under anyone else’s care. My favorite scarf, my panama hat. My Diane Arbus. My mother and my father.

  They were both in plastic baggies. It was the safest way I could think for them to travel. The baggies were in an old cardboard clementine box on the floor of the passenger seat. My father used to call me Clementine, or he would sing the song, in any case. Maybe he did both. He had a goatee and when he kissed my forehead I felt like an angel.

  There were eighty million cars on the Pacific Coast Highway. The sun on their hoods made it feel even hotter than it was. The beach looked dry in the distance, more shimmering surface than cool blue depth. Just before the turnoff into the canyon I noticed an o
utdoor market with furniture and decoration for sale, hollowed oaks made into tables, the heads of gods rendered in resin.

  I pulled in because I wanted new vases for the ashes. I’d thrown out the old ones. Naturally it was awful for me, the idea of carrying their remains in baggies, but I was infinitely more shattered by the remnants in the vases that hadn’t made it. I kept thinking that parts of them were gone forever. A toenail might have lingered in a vase. One third of a brow bone.

  I got out of the Dodge and walked past hurricane candleholders. I drew a slash in the bushy dust of a gazing ball. I passed topaz seahorses, Mexican sugar skulls, aquamarine sea glass in rope nets.

  I was approached by a round-faced boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt in all that heat.

  —Miss, he said, how I can help? His happy smile made him seem ignorant to everything going on in the world.

  —You can’t, I said. I said it kindly, but by that point in my life I had a very low tolerance for unhelpful conversation.

  The marketplace shared its parking lot with Malibu Feed Bin. Seed for birds, vats of grain for horses. There were lots of horses in the canyon. Women with long braids rode them over rocks. I picture you being one of these, taller than me, stately in all aspects.

  There were vases inside the shed next to some hanging petunias and dusty roses. One vase was black with yellow blooms. A glass frog with orange eyes and feet hung from the lip, peering in. It was vulgar, something you’d find in an elderly person’s house in Florida. I was attracted to it.

  The young man at the cash register noticed me and then didn’t take his eyes off of me. I was in a white nightgownish dress, thin as smoke. He was picking a pimple on his chin and staring at me. There are a hundred such small rapes a day.

  I picked up the vase and walked around with it, pretending to appraise outdoor pillows and jade foo dogs. The acned clerk got a phone call. I could hear the other boy behind me, moving seahorses from one place to another. People rarely think you will steal something larger than your own head.