Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  Alice was pitched forward in her seat. It felt good that someone understood the passion, that it was possible to feel strongly about a man after only one and a half meetings.

  —I didn’t reply to him for three hours. I showered and blew out my hair and applied an eye mask. Finally, at five, I wrote, Sure. I’ll come by. Great, he wrote right away. I’m walking down there now.

  —Good for you for waiting so long. But isn’t it terrible? This is how we applaud ourselves. I bet you wanted to hit him and fuck him at the same time. What did you wear?

  —A long-sleeved floral dress that came to the middle of my thighs and cowboy boots. I looked like a farmer’s slutty daughter.

  She smiled and shook her head.

  —Please, I said. I know.

  —Sorry. Continue.

  —He was already seated, two martinis deep, with the same blond friend. Martini Monday, someone said, and glasses clinked. He looked at me.

  —You look like you’re going to cry.

  —The bartender said, Well, hello, missy, and Big Sky smiled. His friend left after a hello and a few last sips. I’m always impressed that men know when to leave.

  —Do you think they discussed it beforehand?

  —I don’t think so, no.

  —God, this is sexy.

  —Then we were alone. We looked at each other for several seconds. I saw him look at my legs and relished the feeling of power. And then he said, I thought of you all weekend.

  —God bless him.

  —He’d been at his family’s home in the Catskills. In the basement he’d slipped a movie in the player, one he’d told me to watch, and he thought of me. He was building a fire, he said, and he thought of me. He was chopping down firewood and he thought of me. And you, he said, are such a BITCH. And he jabbed me lightly in the chest, right between my breasts, but politely. Because I didn’t email him back right away.

  —What a cocksucker!

  —And there I was, I said, thinking of the long weekend I’d spent, the tap-tap-taps into my phone. How I’d done thirty walking lunges back and forth across my apartment floor, thinking that by the thirtieth one, he’d have responded to me. He reached for a greasy jar of bar cherries and said, I should be giving you one of these at a time. Instead here I am, passing you the whole goddamn jar at once.

  —Was he drunk?

  —Yes, but not like an asshole.

  She said she understood exactly what I meant and what type of man he was. I went inside and brought out two more beers. I would have to replenish the register later. It was an hour of work I’d be paying back to the place, but I didn’t care. When I returned, she was leaning back in her chair. Her pose—shut but sun-searching eyes, long golden neck—belonged on a yacht.

  —Thank you, she said, taking the beer. Please, get back to the story. Bated breath over here.

  —We kissed, I said, right there in the bar he went to all the time. The bartender was down at the other end. I leaned in to him, put my hands on his thighs lightly. He left a hundred-dollar bill on a forty-dollar check. I hated myself for being impressed. We walked outside and he threw me up against a brick wall and I swung my legs around his waist and we kissed some more. On the way back to my place, a car honked as we crossed Broadway. We laughed at the car as it flew by, knowing whoever was in it was less excited to be alive. We were holding hands and I felt high. I thought, I’ll always remember how beautiful a moment this is. I will always be grateful for this.

  —And are you?

  I smiled and shook my head. I wanted to cry, remembering.

  —He sounds like a fucker. I love fuckers, too. Tell me the rest. I need another cigarette.

  —In my apartment we went down on each other. We were all over each other. We kissed like animals. We knocked into my stupid liquor shelf and it wobbled and in particular I noticed the Rémy Martin on the shelf. It had belonged to my parents and I never touched it or let anyone else touch it. But in the near future, I would let him drink it. We didn’t fuck, he only went down on me, and I faked an orgasm because I was in love. Afterward, we were practicing a few yoga positions together, downward dog into crow jumping back into chaturanga, when his cell phone rang. His breathing was heavy but he clipped it somehow: Hey, honey. Yeah, no, don’t sweat it. I’m gonna bring home a pizza. Yeah, coming right now. Okay, love you. He smiled as though nothing had happened. It wasn’t that he was cruel but that he was tipsy and the moment didn’t call for being strange or for acknowledgment. I followed his lead. We laughed some more about some things and he said, Well. And I said, Bye. And he said, Easy, girl. I’m going.

  —The wife, Alice said, like it was a vital video game character we’d forgotten to include in our game of capture the banker.

  —What about her? I asked, trying to be neutral, wondering whether she was on the wives’ side or the other side.

  —She’s at home, throwing out dead coffee filters from the morning. She’s too exhausted to cook and she doesn’t think for a moment her husband is in a crow pose at some slut’s apartment.

  —You’re judging me, I said.

  —Of course I’m not. Morality is uninteresting. I’m intrigued by the idiocy of trust. I’ll never trust a man I love. In fact, if I trust him, it will mean I don’t love him enough. And a man should never trust me. Please, go on. I’m rapt. I keep interrupting because I’m rapt as fuck.

  —Ten minutes later my heart was still beating hard and my rug was still a quarter up the wall and an email came through from his name. Sweet dreams.

  —Fucker! They all should die.

  —I was so happy. Because he’d left his Mets cap on my couch and his headphones. I went to bed without a pill and left my shades open and looked out at the moon. I was so happy.

  —It’s strange to think that there is some nice boy somewhere who wants to read us Pushkin and play records and not even fuck for a month.

  She drank the rest of her beer down and threw her cigarette in the can. She rose and I counted her inches. She must have been five feet eight. Her mother was tall. Mine was not.

  —I come in here a few times a week for lunch after class, she said. Will you be here tomorrow? I’d love to hear the rest.

  I tried to seem flippant when I said that I was there every day. I watched her get into her car. It was a light green Prius. It felt so good to talk to her. I saw her arm out the window with a cigarette as she pulled onto the boulevard. The purple bougainvillea along the fences was washed blond by the sunlight. Happiness had come easily to her. She was a person who never had to make a haunting choice. Everything was laid out for her. She only fucked men with perceptibly clean dicks.

  One of the best things about childhood is the lack of choices. Your parents make choices for you that you must inhabit. Even better is your lack of awareness. You have no conception of all the wrong choices that might have maimed you. Take the road to the left and you won’t get run over by the car that will kill you if you take the road to the right.

  The last time I was ignorant to the notion of choice was in the Poconos. It was 1989 and I was nearly eleven. I remember every single day before the day my life ended. I remember all the hot dogs and every sunset. We had a red cedar A-frame on an undeveloped lot. The Saw Creek Estates. The word estate. These ugly little summer and ski homes, linoleum and wall-to-wall oatmeal carpeting.

  We never hung around the house anyway. We went to the Fernwood, the local hotel, to meet up with friends of my parents. There was a roller rink attached to the inn. My crisp, electrified memories of roller-skating make me want to kill myself. The sharp cuts on the rink floor. The smells of the pizza and the wood. I was so impressed by the teenage girls who worked there. Their rainbow socks and crimped hair. What they did after the rink closed.

  For dinner we’d go to a steakhouse called the Big A. There was a huge iron bull over the door, and THE BIG A in red neon blinked like a beacon. That was where I grew my love for American taverns. Shoestring fries. Men drinking beer from thick mugs. Waitres
ses with bumpy faces. We never waited for a table yet the place was always packed.

  Occasionally we went to a white-tablecloth place called Villa Volpe, which was cavernous like a catering hall. Waiters in bowties and more than five fish entrées on the menu. My parents took me now and then because I liked the idea of fancy things. I think about it all the time. How the fancy place of my youth could seem cheap to me now. Broke as I am.

  There was a place right off I-90 that sold pierogies. My mother and I would share an order of six. I thought that we alone in the world knew about them. I didn’t realize they were an ethnic food or that there might be variations. The little rings of scallion on top were thrilling. We ate in the sunlight by the window, sitting on stools and looking out at the passing cars. We dipped the pierogies into a plastic ramekin of sour cream. One time one of the pierogies was still frozen in the middle. I felt betrayed. We wouldn’t have asked the kitchen to heat it up. I guess we tossed it in the garbage.

  There was a flea market with funnel cakes, hubcaps, guns, go-carts, Mormons selling soap, candles, men in sleeveless shirts selling generators, patchwork quilts, old dolls with yarn hair, counterfeit Ninja Turtles, tin owls, pelts, hot grills with burgers, and Ziploc bags of homemade potato chips for fifty cents. We would always get the funnel cake. We would look around for the perfect amount of time and I would go home with a quartz crystal or a Civil War pin.

  Occasionally on the fairgrounds there was a car show. I say occasionally, though I’m sure, like all things, it had a date and time. But my parents seemed to happen up on things. They didn’t plan. They were always on time for everything we needed to be on time for, but when it came to weekend events, especially in the Poconos, we would just get up and drive in the sun and if there was a car show then my dad would stop. He loved cars. He would talk to the owners about the transmission and he would peer inside the windows, blocking the sun from his eyes and getting close but never touching the vehicle. He understood the price of spotlessness. At home I wasn’t allowed to touch the walls. Whenever I was angry at my parents, I would make a furious face and covertly press my palms against our cream walls, leaving prints that might not be discovered for years but would surely cause pain when they were.

  But my favorite thing about the Poconos was the pool. There were two pools. One near our house, which abutted a lake with ducks and paddleboats. There was a logroll in the pool. Maybe it was only there once, but I remember vividly the feeling of not staying on for longer than a second. A terrible feeling that fades overnight so that by the next morning you feel good about your chances.

  Then there was the other pool, in the ritzier section of the Estates. This was called the Top of the World Pool. It was high up in the mountains and surrounded by trees and there was a bar and women who dropped their bathing-suit strings off their shoulders.

  Inside the facility there were tennis courts, that pretty indoor green, the soft thudding of balls and the echoed grunts of men.

  We went to the Top of the World sparingly. It was the more adult recreation center and my parents weren’t so much day drinkers. I always felt they were keeping luxury from me and even from themselves.

  The smell of the pool up there was deeper. The chlorine was richer. I know many kids love the smell of chlorine, though I wonder if they love it as much as I did. I suppose I’m laying a foundation for you. Another chlorine lover, loose in the world.

  12

  VIC’S WIFE CALLED AGAIN THAT night. I was in my kitchen. At night my damned house was tolerable. The glow from the lantern lamp over the sink was amber and comforting. I heard River throwing a ball for his dog outside. When I didn’t pick up the call, Mary wrote, Is my daughter there? Tell me, you slut.

  I looked for the daughter’s Facebook page. I started with Vic’s wife, who had not posted anything since four hours before her husband’s death.

  A friend of hers had recently tacked a Kahlil Gibran quote about death to Mary’s page. I clicked on the friend’s profile and read her most recent post.

  I get up every morning and leave my 3 children to drive over an hour to work. I work some weekends. I give up that time with family and friends because I know that my work and the work of my organization make a difference. I can’t travel to conflict zones but I can spend every day supporting lobbyists in DC to help prevent war and kids being separated from their moms (I would die if that happened) and overall make this a safer world for all. I believe with all my heart that intl peace matters to Americans and hope that Congress agrees.

  You cannot be one of these, who says or writes these things, who needs others to think something about them.

  I clicked around in Mary’s profile to find a picture of Eleanor, the daughter, who was seventeen. Strawberry hair. Vic’s wide, flat cheeks. She looked kind and smart, as Vic was. She didn’t seem to have a boyfriend. She had thick calves and played softball.

  If she were indeed coming for me, it made perfect sense. I severed her life with a snip-snip of my inconsiderate fingers. Most people don’t worry about threats like those. Little girls don’t kill people. They’re just silly little girls. But almost no one understands a little girl. We begin hard as marbles.

  I pictured this little girl in a small, clean car, crossing Texas with a ball gag and a knife. Just then, as I was lost in that thought, the door handle jiggled and I jumped.

  It was only Leonard. He strode through, speaking as though he’d been speaking for a long time.

  —Leonard! I shouted. Part of me wondered if it wasn’t a ruse, if he wasn’t fully cognizant.

  —Oh, he said, seeing me at last.

  —Jesus.

  —Oh, dear. How sorry I am.

  He touched the top of his forehead. It shone with perspiration. I looked at his hands. Many hands reminded me of my father’s. In particular there was a gas station attendant down the street from the house where I grew up. The day I got my license, I drove past my old house. It had been sold to a family of six. As I approached the tall oak with the haphazard patch of tulips circling its trunk, I found them all outside. The dad was playing catch with one of the girls. The mother was drinking iced tea and smiling at her herd. Afterward I went to the gas station. The attendant remembered me, or rather, he remembered my father’s car. He didn’t ask me where my father was. He was Pakistani and quiet and warm and, when I looked in the side-view mirror, his hands on the gas pump were my father’s hands. I’d have known them anywhere. I tipped the man more than he would make that week. He’d loved my father in the silent way that men love other men they see infrequently.

  —Lenny, I said more gently, it’s okay.

  —It’s Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

  —What?

  —That I’ve got. Please don’t tell the others. He pointed idly out my window, then gestured downstairs, toward Kevin’s quarters.

  —Oh. I won’t.

  —Even the doctor was stunned. He’s an old Jew, too. He said, You must have done quite a lot wrong in your time. Ha!

  —When did you find out?

  —I’ve known.

  In the distance we heard the coyotes howling. Their voices were bright and bony. At night in the canyon everything stilled. There was either a terrible wind or there was no movement at all.

  Leonard looked around my house. He looked at the envelopes on my tables as though they were bits of lingerie. Most were overdue bills.

  —You’re a mysterious woman, Joan.

  —You’re a nosy old man.

  —I may be. But I’m a rich nosy old man. Why don’t you be nice to me, and you never know who remembers who in their will.

  —You never know, I said, gripping the counter. I wanted money so badly. When I had money, I could drive away from myself.

  He checked the time on a watch I’d never noticed, then jingled it at me.

  —You see this, old girl?

  —What?

  —This timepiece is the only one of its kind. Patek Philippe 1939 Platinum. My father was a cunt. I fi
gured he was going to bury himself with this watch. But he left it for me. The only thing he ever did. I don’t think it was love, anyhow. This watch, old girl, is worth a lot of money.

  —It doesn’t look it.

  He laughed at me.

  —Don’t laugh at me, Leonard.

  —I’m sorry, dear. Precious things are not always comely.

  He turned toward the door, then back to me.

  —Joan. Would you come back to my house with me? I am overdue for my pill. Long overdue, in fact.

  I didn’t want to go, but I went. I’d done the same thing with every other man I’d known. I went with them in case it got bad and I needed to be saved. I don’t mean saved by a man. I mean saved by money, by someone doing something dirty for me. The dirty part was how I couldn’t accept someone’s help without subjugating myself in some sinister, sexual way.

  I followed Lenny outside and down the grassy path. There was a breeze for a change. The wealthy people had all the breezes, in the Hills, in the Palisades. Lenny had money, so I wondered why he lived in a garden shed at the top of this rusted canyon. Whenever I had money, I lived beautifully. I was good at living in the present, in believing that tomorrow would be taken care of. Gosia always told me that. Money will always come back, she said. It goes and it comes back more than anything.

  Lenny unlocked his door. That he kept it locked was interesting.

  —Here we are, he said. I followed his little body inside. The smell hit me. That elderly smell of bone dust on medium-pile carpets. Of coffee and orange juice dumped into the same sink together. Whenever I smelled old people, I felt cheated out of not having parents. At the same time I was grateful. While the death of my parents when I was so young had brought me a world of devastation, I would at least be spared seeing them come undignified. My mother would always be beautiful, my father would always be strong. His big hands, pumping gas in the side-view mirror of the car.