Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  My aunt Gosia was the one who told me about her, or left me information about her, in any case. When Gosia and my mother became close, I was disgusted. She was an interloper, a second wife, and I was jealous. Apparently they talked on the phone often, three times a week or more, when I was at school. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know. I was intimately involved with every part of my mother’s routine, to her increasing irritation. I can’t even change my bloody pad without you in the room.

  After my parents died, I went to stay with Gosia. But living with her was not like living with a caretaker or a mother. It was like living with a casual woman friend. We shopped for clothes, she told me I had sex appeal, even at ten years old, and she showed me how to use it. She let me grow up alone. I went to school and I came back to the house and I ate her beet soup with its funny mushroom dumplings, but if I didn’t want to eat it, I didn’t have to. Most summers I spent in Italy with my mother’s cousins. There was a laxity, I didn’t have to come home if I didn’t want to. But Gosia gave me love whenever I needed it. If I wanted to be missed, she missed me. If I didn’t, she let me be. I won’t be able to give you that.

  She also gave me all my parents’ money that I wasn’t supposed to receive until I turned twenty-one. Gosia didn’t believe that I should be controlled by the government or by her and my uncle. I blew a lot of the money on clothes, on shoes, on hotels with televisions in the bathroom, on caviar and foie gras and steak tartare and oysters.

  After high school, which was a blur of bad grades, stupid bangs, and cigarettes, I moved into Manhattan. Gosia didn’t push me to go to college. My first apartment was on Rivington. The kitchen was a short strip of Formica with a butter-yellow fridge and a rusted white stove, but I was proud of it. I hung my mother’s precious Venetian dish towels from the steel rod of the oven door. Gosia came in and we would go to Barneys and have tea and poached salmon. She would give me a few hundred dollars every month, even though I was still living off of my inheritance. She bought me expensive shoes. She was the first one to do that. Manolos and Louboutins. One pair of petal-pink Chanel mules that I wear only when the weather is gorgeous.

  Gosia told me as much as she knew, but she could not have prepared me for the reality of Alice.

  Alice had a long, almost mannish nose, but it was offset by the largeness of her blue eyes and the thickness of her lips. It was a trick. Her big nose made you feel like you had to keep looking at her to determine what was so stunning. Her hair was thick and long and the color of Coca-Cola. She wore a bralette and a pair of Lycra pants. Her body was cartoonishly perfect. She had an hourglass waist and her hips were dramatically wide. I could picture someone gripping them from behind. She was twenty-seven.

  Alice began the class with sun salutations. Unlike other instructors, she didn’t rhapsodize about energy or gratitude. She barely spoke but when she did the husk of her voice was hypnotizing.

  The class made use of small arm weights and leg weights, five-pound sacks to Velcro around the ankles. The music was curated and varied—steampunk, blues, grindcore, Indian ghazel.

  I tried hard to look elegant in the poses. During crow I was cognizant of the sinkhole between my breasts. I watched the men, inserted myself inside their heads and saw the ways they might bend the young instructor. It was erotic and eviscerating.

  During corpse pose she played Cibo Matto’s “White Pepper Ice Cream.” She padded around the room to all the lying bodies, squatted by their heads, and flattened the flesh between their shoulders and chests. When she did this to me, my eyes involuntarily slipped open and we looked at each other. I saw the reflection of her blue eyes in mine. I almost passed out. I got up soon after and left the class before namaste.

  * * *

  THE ENCOUNTER LEFT ME FEELING like I was sixty. I wanted to call Vic. I wanted to call Gosia. I needed someone I already knew to stabilize me. I had nothing left but Alice.

  Afterward I drove to Rodeo Drive because my mother loved it there. She was impossible to please or excite, but there were places she worshipped as though they were cast in gold, and Los Angeles was one of them. She’d seen so many noir films as a young woman—Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard—and Los Angeles was the rich velvety heart of them.

  I counted palm trees and did not miss New York. I couldn’t divorce what had happened in New York from the rest of New York, from the Broome Street Bar with its copper cups and sexy bartender, from Spring Lounge the night I fell for the sexiest man in the world. From midnight on Broadway, way downtown where Manhattan looked like Rome, large and stone and anodyne. All of the city, now, was slicked in his big bright blood.

  We’d visited Rodeo when I was nine and my parents bought me a dress for $425 that required a slip. It was black with tiny white flowers and a Peter Pan collar. My mother was angry about the dress but she herself had gotten a pair of ruby earrings and it was only fair, said my father. Her birthstone is not even ruby, I spat, speaking to my father but looking at my mother. It’s garnet. When I see you in my dreams you are wearing all the dresses I ever wanted.

  I took the Pacific Coast Highway to Sunset. If someone told me this was hell, I wouldn’t have been surprised; the palm trees might have risen from beneath the mantle of the earth. But if this was hell then it was nice, the feeling of having crossed over. I recalled one of the final descents with John Ford, how I felt like a canal that this small balding man was passing through. I’d turned around to see his scummy eyes fluttering like a slot machine as he came.

  Are you a prostitute? a man once asked me. I was eating alone at the bar of a fine restaurant. I had a mouth full of burger. The burger was terrible, it tasted oxidized. I was using my sweater like a blanket over my bare legs. You look like a Sylvie, he said. Is your name Sylvie?

  I’d loved only one man. Love was not the right word. He didn’t love me. To this day, I still couldn’t face that. He would have loved Alice.

  I was eating dinner with that man, the one I loved, when Vic walked in and shot himself. He shot himself in the nose. I tell you the nose because details are important. The splatter of blood on the wall was the shape of a maple leaf. What remained of his face was a suggestion. I saw a fetus once when I worked in the hospital, its image in an ultrasound, and the baby had no nose. The mother, a heavy Brazilian woman, reacted to the news as it was translated for her by a young nurse. She nodded serenely. Como Deus quer, she said.

  As God wishes.

  The sunlight was white in Beverly Hills, whereas in Topanga it was orange and gaseous. I was learning that Los Angeles is made up of distinct countries that are merely minutes apart. Not even countries but ecosystems. The homeless beg differently from town to town.

  I walked into Lanvin. I was still wearing the same white dress. It made me feel young. I wore also a canvas cross-body bag. On my feet were old dirty sandals. Women can tell another woman’s worth by her shoes and bag. You can wear a tarp across your body, but the shoes and bag have to pass. I was conscious of this when I was greeted by a heavily made-up young blonde.

  There was a time when I wanted to have a lot of money. I wanted the best of everything because I’d come to realize that expensive things were truly made better, lasted longer, and helped you live longer. Expensive cleaning products did not cause cancer. Chanel nail color lasted at least four days longer than the kind they used in regular salons.

  All of that was still true but now I thought of life differently. What I wanted most in that moment—in what I felt might be the last year of my life—was to be poor, with a child. To go through the drive-through at a fast-food restaurant and order two items from the secret menu plus a Coca-Cola to share. Sit in the Dodge, both of us in the front seats, pretending to eat delicately, like we were at a queen’s tea party instead of in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. The yellow splash of light from the sign would illuminate the crud in the cupholders. In the morning we would eat milk and biscuits, the kind you can get for free in the breakfast rooms of travel lodges.

 
In the store I tried on a beautiful pair of emerald suede sling-backs. The salesgirl had nothing better to do so she watched me. My feet were dusty. I lifted my dress to see how the shoes made my calves look.

  I paraded around in the green heels. I was trying to feel normal, or not even normal but at the very least like the girl I was before I met Vic. Of course I knew I was half dead already by the time I met Vic—a great many segments of myself I pictured to look like the baba au rhum my mother used to love, little yeasty cakes saturated in rum. My lungs, for example. When at night I couldn’t breathe I imagined my lungs were soaked in sweet liqueur.

  By the time I got to California it was even worse. I was embarrassed that I’d ever thought I could be a mother. The desire to be beautiful had been replaced by the lowly fear of looking ugly. But seeing Alice had done something I hadn’t expected. Her beauty made me remember my own.

  My phone rang and I picked it up because it was a familiar-looking number and I thought it might be my aunt even though she was dead.

  It was a woman with whom I’d never spoken but about whom I knew a lot.

  —Is this Joan, she said.

  —Who is this?

  —My name is Mary. I’m Vic’s—I was Vic’s wife.

  * * *

  THE FIRST TIME VIC AND I had sex was in Scotland, but sex has little to do with any first time. For some it might mean the hand on the knee. The clearing of sticky hair from someone’s forehead.

  The whole team was in Jekyll Island for a conference. I’d already begun to take oceanfront rooms for granted. The first morning I skipped the group breakfast and went alone to the breakfast room called Jasmine Porch, where I ordered sweet tea and grits and red-eye gravy with a side of country ham. I sat in that spacious dining room looking at all these people who hadn’t lived a lot. They were mostly older than me but I could tell this was their first time drinking from a glass with an iced orchid inside.

  I was tan and young and careless. The waiter filled my large coffee cup from a polished silver pot. I saw a woman in her early thirties enter the restaurant, using two canes to walk. Her husband and their child walked ahead of her, following a hostess to a table, and an older woman, her mother probably, was holding the younger woman’s elbow. I had this urge to send over something, French toast for the table. After all, the firm was paying for our meals. I called the waiter, but before I could ask him, Vic materialized.

  I wish I could include a picture of him. I don’t have any. He was more of a feeling sometimes. His nice but too-big suits. So much suit material, like a factory.

  —Hey, kid, he said, looming.

  —Oh, hey.

  —Rolling solo?

  —I wasn’t feeling a group situation.

  —Me neither. Mind if I intrude?

  I had with me a Departures and wanted badly to be alone. I knew the precise color I wanted my coffee and how to have an orgasm in under thirty seconds. I needed everybody in the world—including waiters—less than they needed me.

  —Sure, I said.

  —Sure you mind, or?

  He was terribly afraid of me. He was the most gorgeous listener in the whole world.

  —Of course I don’t mind.

  How had he found me? How did he always seem to find me? One time, inexplicably, he found me on the second floor of a deli with buffet islands of old but glistening orange chicken.

  He sat down and I forgot about sending over the French toast to the handicapped woman. I didn’t remember until later that night in Vic’s grand hotel room with the ocean just below us. I’d never stayed in such places with my parents.

  It was me and this other girl who worked at the copy desk and who’d brought a complaint of unwanted sexual aggression to HR, and this young man, a sort of lackey of Vic’s, but then everyone was. Vic had a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue and we were drinking it on the balcony from rocks glasses with pebbled bottoms. Vic’s room was a suite so he had a couch out there and we’d dragged two chairs from the bedroom. It started out with the two of us girls on the couch, but at some point the pairings got rearranged and Vic was on the couch with me. I’d had two glasses of Scotch on top of the three glasses of red wine at dinner. I don’t know if I laid my head down. My guess is that he, by measured increments, lowered it down: Aw, poor, tired baby. I remember only the airplane runway of his lap, the navy miles. The ocean shushing. The other two watching me lie across him. Nothing happened, but merely the position of my head on his lap, it was somewhat a rape. That he had hunted me so quietly, that I had allowed my neck to get caught in the teeth of something stupid. I closed my eyes so that it was happening only for the others and not to me and that was when I remembered about the handicapped woman. And I felt sad about not sending the French toast with vanilla bourbon cream and whatever lavender flowers came on the side. Then a moment later I thought, She doesn’t need you, idiot. She has a mother and a child. You have nothing.

  That was the first time with Vic. He caressed my hair. My earlobe, which thereafter felt whorish and diseased.

  Anyway, that’s what Vic’s wife—Mary—that’s what she asked me.

  —How did it start? she said.

  I told her to hold the line. That it might be a while.

  I walked out of Lanvin in the heels I was wearing. It’s easiest to steal when you don’t know you’re stealing. The heavily made-up blonde had been watching me the whole time but she was violently texting when I walked out. They were display shoes, so they didn’t make a peep when they walked me out of there.

  Suddenly I was in the sunshine in these bright, beautiful Lanvin sling-backs. Their strings were like thin snakes around my ankles. Tourists were ordering cupcakes from a cupcake ATM. They were Italian and laughing. The shoes took me to Spago. I was seated in the courtyard. It was windless out there, I was early for lunch, and everybody seemed to enjoy my presence, the busboys especially. I ordered the Maine lobster salad and a glass of Dr. Loosen. I unmuted the phone.

  —I’m sorry, I said. Can you repeat the question?

  —I want to know how it started.

  I didn’t say anything for a long time and held the phone to my ear and my hand to the mouthpiece as the waiter poured me a glass. He smiled at me conspiratorially, like here we were being bacchanalian and the person on the other end of that line was probably folding laundry.

  —Do you understand the question?

  —Yes, perfectly, I said. I think it’s what I’d want to know, too. It started on his lap.

  She made a noise of disgust that doubled as reproach. Like I was stupid to lay my head on a married man’s lap.

  —You know my husband is dead, of course. But do you know my young son got into an accident a month ago, and he’s dead now, too? You didn’t know that, did you? You cunt.

  I had, up until now, taken many measures not to think of the children.

  Because it was a cold dish that only needed assembling and because I was the first customer of the afternoon, my lobster salad was delivered quickly. Bright wedges of avocado. The haricots verts were glossy and dark, the bacon was crisp and auburn, and the lobster was so fresh it looked raw.

  —I didn’t. How—?

  —He drowned.

  Now Mary began to make these little noises on the other end, like a guinea pig. Vic had met her in high school. He told me he’d never cheated on his wife with anyone other than me. It might have been a lie but I didn’t think so. He’d probably slept with five or six women before her; high school girls in the sixties, I pictured no condoms and the girls just going home and angling a faucet to exhume it out of them. Maybe there was an abortion or two. I bet I was the first woman he did not come inside, and anything new, for a man, can be an erotic discovery.

  I started crying. I knew something of the world in which Mary was now living. The heart pills he’d no longer need. Things in the refrigerator are the worst because you cannot save them indefinitely. What if the dead person comes back and wants his coffee yogurt.

  But the chil
d. I couldn’t imagine. Or I could imagine. Before I even found you, I imagined losing you. It felt like someone was serving my heart to me on a plate and forcing me to carve out pulsing segments and eat them without condiments.

  —Why are you crying?

  —I’m sorry, I said. I shouldn’t be crying. I didn’t ask for him that way. I’m so sorry about your boy.

  —You’re a lying cunt!

  She would never understand. If I’d said, Go home to your wife, you pig, he would have wanted me even more and her even less. You can’t say these things to any woman, let alone a grieving one.

  —I’m sorry, I said more quietly.

  —I’m calling, she said, for another thing. My daughter, Eleanor—in case he never told you their names—I don’t know where she is. She hates you. She said she wants to kill you. And I’m thinking. If she’s coming for you. If she comes for you, will you give me the dignity of telling me?

  I nodded into the phone.

  —Do you hear me, you cunt!

  —Yes, I said. I thought of the word dignity and wanted to kill myself.

  7

  ON THE WAY HOME I took two milligrams of Klonopin. It worked enough for me to forget a little about the child. But it would come back in terrible notions—anime eyes blinking inside of a child-size coffin.

  When I walked into my place, I found my landlord sitting on my couch. I had no one to turn to, aghast.

  —Darling! he said, standing. I’m so sorry, I feel so awful. I’ve been here, pacing, wanting to off myself.

  —Leonard?

  —Yes, my darling. Is it over? Did you do it?

  —Do what?

  —You didn’t do it and that’s all right. That’s fine, darling. We will get through. We will manage. Come, sit by me, my life. Let’s eat a nice dinner and see a funny movie.

  He had a drink in one hand and a book in the other. William Carlos Williams, Spring and All. His hair was rumpled. There were green stains on his collared white shirt.