Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  14

  ALL THE NEXT DAY I hoped that Alice would come. I stared at the fridge where I’d lined up the Tecates. I felt like a teenage girl with a crush.

  When the bell jingled, I almost dropped a cup I was washing. But it wasn’t her. It was River with Kurt the dog at his side. Meeting Alice had muted my desire for him.

  —Whoa, he said. You work here?

  —It appears so.

  —What happened to Natalia?

  —She went into politics.

  He smiled and looked at me like I was crazy. Jack had been better at understanding sarcasm. But River was better-looking.

  —Is it okay that Kurt’s in here?

  —Of course. How’s he doing?

  —Terrific. Aren’t you, boy?

  The dog sat and lowered his scruffy chin. He was at once regal and a little silly but, above all, loyal and smart. I felt that if I had been the one to rescue that animal, he’d be peeing in the cracks of my uneven planks and whining by the door.

  —What can I get you boys?

  —An iced genmaicha for me. Maybe a bowl of water for Kurt?

  —Sure.

  I filled one of the expensive soup bowls with water. My mother thought it was disgusting to use human bowls for dogs. After taking showers, my parents dried the stall with the towels they had used on themselves. The steel drain was always sparkling.

  —I’m taking Kurt for his first dunk in the ocean.

  —How do you know it’s his first?

  —Oh. I don’t.

  I felt bad so I walked around the counter and knelt to the dog’s eye level. I wore a frilly light green apron. I gazed in the dog’s eyes and then stood up quickly before the animal rejected me by looking away.

  —It will be his first time, I said.

  River laughed. One time I wrote to Jack, Last night was the best it’s ever been (for me, with you). Of course, I bookended it with several jokes. I addressed him as Fisheye. He wrote back, Hey handsome! He replied to my jokes with jokes, he told me about an interview he’d had with some start-up firm and asked for my advice. He included some song lyrics and ignored what I wrote about our sex.

  I made River’s tea and handed it over to him. I took his money, a few crinkled dollar bills, and gave him change. He didn’t put any of the change into the tip jar. Each time Dean came in, he slipped all of his singles into it. Both actions—the tipping and the not tipping—made me feel like I had lesions.

  —Thanks, River said. He brought the bowl of water back. The dog had splashed a good amount on the floor and I would have to wipe it up with one of the dirty bar mops.

  It was just about closing time and I had given up on Alice coming in. Out of frustration I denigrated a woman on Letgo about the price of a basket. She wanted to give me five dollars less than what I was asking but was willing to drive nearly forty minutes to meet me. Stop haggling, I wrote to her. You’re embarrassing yourself.

  Then I wrote to Vic’s wife, Mary:

  Hey… tried you back a number of times. Calls not going thru?

  She wrote back immediately:

  I didn’t get any calls! Call me now!

  I waited a few minutes and wrote:

  Okay, as soon as I get off of work.

  When?? she asked.

  I thought of all the nights when Mary must have sat at home, feeling something wasn’t right, that her husband was not where he said he was. I never noticed him step away from me to call or write to her. Once, just once, he didn’t take me up on an offer for dinner. I’d emailed him from across the office. I wrote the name of the restaurant where I wanted to go to in the subject line and a question mark in the body. I could see into his office from my desk. He had a large one with big windows. I saw his face fall. I watched him type a response. His pain was like a graveyard I could stroll about and mark up as I saw fit.

  Can’t do dinner, kid. Can’t tell you how sorry I am. Could do a quick drink before? Any drink, any bar in the city.

  I let him take me to Bemelmans in the Carlyle with the drawings of Madeline and little girls in hats with ribbons in Paris and balloons, ice-skating elephants, picnicking rabbits, and little boys and their gray dogs. Nobody had ever read Madeline to me as a child. My mother used to tell me the story of Cinderella. In her version there was a cop in lieu of the prince. Cinderella and the Cop. She told it in both English and Italian. I have her on tape. I haven’t yet been able to listen because I worry that her accent will sound stronger, all these years later, than it did in my head. That she would sound like someone I never knew.

  At the bar I drank a gimlet and so did Vic. By that point I’d been avoiding him quite a bit. The season of Jack had begun. Young-boy bars and beer and waking up next to a strong body with soft skin. I was waiting to hear from Jack all the time, so I rarely made dinner plans with Vic. But that night Jack was going to Queens to see a friend and I knew he wouldn’t be back until late. He would eat cheesesteak sushi in Astoria and possibly he’d want to fuck when he got back but most likely he would pass out on his friend’s couch or make out with some girl his own age. He would fall asleep in a pair of breasts. We were not exclusive. Or rather, I was exclusive with him.

  I was upset that Vic couldn’t have dinner and take my mind off of the boy but it helped me to see how sorry he was that he couldn’t. I was cruel that night. I said, What a real shame, we haven’t spent any time with each other in ages. I thought we could watch a movie and be cozy with popcorn.

  —Kid, he said. You don’t know how bad I wish I could.

  —Did you know, I asked, pointing to the murals around us, that the author of the Madeline books exchanged these murals for a year and a half of accommodations at the Carlyle for himself and his family?

  —No, I didn’t, he said. They must have been a happy family to live in such close quarters and not go crazy.

  He knew how to hurt me when he dared. He stayed for a second round, which I could see he would regret. He paid for our drinks and got up. There were fine beads of sweat in the creases of his forehead.

  —Tell the car to take Ninth to the tunnel, I yelled after him. You can’t be late to your wife’s birthday!

  Now I looked at her text message. The stillness of a message, even though you know the person on the other end is trembling, staring at her phone. The desperation of the poor, poor woman! I couldn’t believe it, actually, that Vic had left her with the pain of knowing her husband killed himself over another woman. Left her to care for a child with challenges. Some people had suffered so much that it seemed they could handle anything. I was not unfeeling. I had been through my own gauntlet. I knew someone like Mary would survive. Most women do.

  The lady from Letgo wrote back, Your a fuckin pyscho cunt!

  I wrote back, You spelled you’re and psycho wrong. I deleted that and wrote, WHATEVER CHEAPO.

  Then the bell rang and Alice walked in. She wore a long gray sleeveless cotton dress. Her hair was pulled back into a wet ponytail. Her eyes didn’t need makeup.

  —Is it closing time? Can we have some beer on the patio?

  —Sure.

  —You don’t have somewhere to be?

  Her grin was acerbic, vaguely judgmental. She took out a ten-dollar bill.

  —I didn’t pay for our second round yesterday, this one’s on me. I hate people who pretend to forget to pay.

  Within moments we were in the middle of our conversation from the previous afternoon. Then she said something that made me feel we were speaking on a heightened plane. They were similar to the experience of psychedelic drugs, those first conversations with Alice.

  —There’s something about your story—Big Sky—all of it, I feel like there’s a purpose. Do you know? Like we are getting somewhere. Of course I sound crazy. This is colder than yesterday. It’s fucking beautiful.

  Of course the beer was colder. I’d turned the dial down on the beer fridge for her. It was so cold it glowed. I pictured her mother’s lips with my father’s lips.

  —You�
�re going to hate the women here, she said to me.

  —Aren’t they the same as in New York?

  —I think they’re worse. They’re opossums. This one woman, Lara, I’m giving her private lessons in her Japanese garden in Santa Monica at six in the morning. She wants to have these talks with me. Her child is with the nanny staring out the window. Hands and face pressed to glass. Lara wants to talk about nothing, about how her hairstylist gives her preferential access, more so than celebrities. She wants me to be jealous of her. One time her husband came out to the garden and saw me and then she switched our time to nine a.m.

  Alice had a light accent, maybe affected, but the artifice would have made her sexier to me. She pulled a cigarette from a new soft pack. I thought to light it for her. But I didn’t want to be the man between the two of us. I took a sip of beer and the flavor was suddenly bad. I felt an inch-thick lake of saliva coat my throat. My head buzzed. I willed myself back into the moment.

  —Where did you grow up? I asked her.

  —Are you asking because of my accent? Continental? Does it sound affected? Sometimes I think I’m affecting it. I totally am. I’ll try to be more genuine because I like you.

  She explained that she’d been born in New Jersey but had spent much of her childhood in Italy. I told her I was from there, too. We “discovered” we both had Italian mothers.

  —What brought your family to Italy? I asked, trying to neutralize the acid rising in my throat.

  —We went back there when I was a toddler. Then we returned to the States for high school. Italy was not as my mother remembered it.

  —And your father?

  —Out of the picture, she said, fluttering her hand like half of a bird, squinting, and taking a drag. You have to tell me the rest of the story, she said. We are getting somewhere.

  My dress felt too tight. She was right, we were getting somewhere. As I told her each part, from the end backward, we were getting to the beginning. We were getting to the reason why I was there. Some people say they do work inside their own brain. They learn that jealousy is a childish emotion. They teach themselves such things. But I could do no work inside my own brain. The interior of my brain was a snake pit. I couldn’t survive in there alone.

  —I’m not the important one.

  —Yes, you are! Alice said. I won’t say I feel like I’ve known you forever because that’s the kind of thing that woman Lara would say. Over bee pollen shots. She has celiac disease, so the housekeeper has to be very careful.

  —Maybe one day the housekeeper won’t be careful enough.

  She reached over, laughing, and placed both of her palms on my shoulders. Her forehead went into my chest. I thought, grotesquely, of my father having a type.

  —Everybody is full of shit, she said. I called my mother Maman from the age of ten until the age of sixteen.

  —What happened at sixteen?

  —She died, Alice said, still laughing.

  —I’m sorry.

  —She was only in the hospital for two weeks, getting gray. She was an amazing woman. A perfect mother. I really think I’d think that even if she weren’t my maman.

  I asked her to tell me about Rod Rails. She said that he was one of these gurus who left his penis inside of a woman to calm her. That he would never thrust.

  —How did you get the job?

  —You mean why did I take the job? she asked, as though of course, if a man were hiring, she would get the job. I want to open my own place someday. Not in LA. Back in Italy, maybe. A small oak studio amid the olive groves and the cypresses. And this is the best. Rod, for all of his tantric nonsense, is the best at combining business and the spirit of yoga. He may not believe in it, but I believe in what he claims to believe in. And that’s all I need.

  —You’re very smart for your age.

  —You say that like you’re so much older. What are you, thirty?

  —I’m nearly thirty-seven.

  —Well, you don’t look thirty-six, but even so, thirty-six is nothing.

  —Thirty-six may be nothing, but thirty-seven is the end.

  —Are you almost done here?

  —Closing time was a half hour ago.

  —Were you waiting for me? she asked, nearly lasciviously.

  —No, I stuttered.

  —It’s okay. I was waiting to see you, too.

  Already she had the power to coax rage from me one moment and make me feel lucky and loved the next.

  —Let’s go to the beach, she said.

  We got into her Prius. A cherry air freshener dangled from the smudged rearview mirror. It smelled like the 1980s and everything that was the color red.

  On the way down we stopped at my house because I said I had a pack of cigarettes lying around. She didn’t seem surprised by the absurdity of the compound. While I went upstairs to my stupid lofted bedroom, I heard her moving around downstairs.

  —I shouldn’t smoke, she said. It aggravates my throat.

  I found the pack of American Spirits. I’d taken them from my rapist’s hotel room.

  —What’s wrong with your throat?

  —I pulled something back in my bulimic days. Took months to heal properly. I wouldn’t have stopped otherwise.

  —You were bulimic? I said.

  —Give me a break, Alice said, fanning herself with her palm and looking all around. Jesus Christ, it’s so hot in here. Jesus! You know there’s an AC unit up there?

  —I can’t use it. It’s in the lease.

  —What?

  —It’s in the lease that I can’t use it. He can hear it from his house.

  I pointed Lenny’s shed out to Alice through the kitchen window.

  —I’m turning it on, she said. She dragged one of my unpacked boxes to the wall, climbed it, and switched the unit on. An oily sweat glistened between her breasts. Why don’t you buy some window units?

  The notion of the accordion, of stuffing the gaps, it was so large-seeming a problem that it made me want to curl into a fetal position.

  —I hate window units, I said.

  —Window air conditioners make me feel cozy.

  —They make me feel poor.

  —In Maremma, Alice said, most everywhere in Italy, as I’m sure you know, air-conditioning isn’t necessary at night. The breeze is enough. There is nearly always a breeze. And it’s really only at night that you need to feel cool.

  Alice had told me earlier that the house they moved to in Italy was across the road from a dairy farm and on the same dirt road as a rifle range. She would look out the window to see the brown cows on the dusty knolls, finding swatches of grass and munching in their homely way, and then she would hear a gunshot; both she and the cows would flinch, each in her own fashion. Violently bucolic, she called it. I wondered how many times she’d said that to a man who admired her.

  —Is that why your mother went back to Italy? I asked. The night breeze?

  —You want to know the truth? It makes me sick to say it.

  I nodded. I felt the cold of the air conditioner against my face and weirdly missed the oppressive heat. In the Poconos we had a miserable old toaster that darkened one side of the bread while barely warming the other and so you would have to flip the bread and babysit the process. When, that final summer, we bought a new toaster from the Two Guys in Harrison, the settings were precisely calibrated, the toast came out perfectly every time, and it made me irrationally sad.

  —My mother left America, Alice said, following the death of her lover.

  —Lover, I said.

  —A married one. Perhaps the same sort of situation as yours. Everything reminded her of him. It was too painful. She couldn’t be in the same country where he died. She told me some of the story when I was younger, and then when she was dying, she told me the man was my father.

  —Oh. How did he die?

  —Cancer, she said. Throat.

  Right then I wanted to tell her the truth of how it actually happened, in part because I hated her for not knowing. Fo
r having had the childhood that had been ripped from me.

  * * *

  WE TOOK TUNA CANYON TO the beach. It was a one-way road through the Canyon, from the village down the mountain to the base, ending bluntly at the Pacific Coast Highway. People raced their cars from the summit to the beach, Alice told me. Jimmy Dean died on that road. In his perfect little car. She opened all four windows and the sunroof to give the impression of a convertible. Her caramel hair whipped against her face. There were no guardrails on the road and Alice took the twists fearlessly. Through the gaps in the sycamores you could see the extent of the canyon, the mop of jade like the canopy of a rainforest.

  When we arrived at the bottom, it was like everything else I’d seen in Los Angeles—you came out of something gorgeous and untamed into something lurid, the unlovely row of houses on the ocean side of the Pacific Coast Highway. The gas stations and the garden centers with overpriced terra-cotta pots.

  She pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant with nets and buoys. She said we were going to get some clams and beer and bring them to the beach. There was a red neon sign that said REEL INN. The air smelled of crabs as we got out and the sun hit me in that evocative way it does after you have a beer on an empty stomach. Inside there were colored lights strung from the ceiling, plastic red gingham tablecloths across long tables, an ordering booth for clam rolls, raw clams and oysters, thick steaks of Chilean sea bass on paper plates. There was a patio with heat lamps and pebbles on the ground and picnic tables and petunias in galvanized Corona buckets.

  I stood behind her in line and stared at her pornographic legs. Strong calves and soft thighs. I imagined cutting into parts of her with a fork and knife.

  She ordered two dozen clams without asking if I ate clams or whether I wanted something different. And a bucket of beers, she said to the boy behind the counter, who knew her. No charge, he said. She smiled and slipped a twenty into a tip jar.

  I was afraid in that way you can only be afraid in an early friendship with a woman. I was afraid of being too careful. I was afraid of being too old, of not understanding music. She carried the clams they’d packaged in a to-go container and I carried the bucket of beer. We crossed the median. Cars zoomed past and my heart thumped between my breasts. The times you are most willing to die are, ironically, the times you are having the most fun.