Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  He began to tremble.

  —I’ve told you, he said, about Sandstone?

  —Yes, the swinger mansion.

  —Just down the road. Now it’s nothing, all boarded up, but then it was something.

  —I thought you didn’t go.

  —I did. We did.

  —You and Lenore.

  —You must understand, and few people your age can, but those days it was—Everything was changing. We didn’t know. We thought we were being swept in a wave to a new world. In a way it didn’t feel like there was a choice. The first time we went, it was after a soiree at the Getty. A couple we were talking to, the husband was an important producer and his wife was this gorgeous thing. I’ll never forget it, she wore a silver dress, just two strips of material going down either side of her chest, meeting at the waist, so there was just bare skin all down through here—Leonard elevatored his hand in the air an inch away from my breastbone—they told us they were going to an after-event at Sandstone. They invited us along. We’d heard of it, of course. I was intrigued, I’m a man, but Lenore was, too. She was curious about all life. She wasn’t afraid of anything. We took our champagne flutes along and followed their car. The first thing that happened when we pulled into the drive was we watched the other couple emerge from their car completely nude. We sat there for a minute, turned our headlights off. Lenore looked at me and rubbed my shoulder. Come on, Len, she said. We’re bound in all the right ways. Then she kissed me deeply, lifted her white sundress over her body—very much like the one you never seem to take off—and she opened the car door and walked to meet the other couple. They both put an arm around her, the man’s touched her rear. Something happened inside of me. I wanted to kill her. I wanted to kill all three of them. More accurately, I wanted to fuck the other woman until I came and then pull it out and jam it down Lenore’s throat until she gagged.

  I had to hold the vomit back with my palm. At that point I didn’t even know the half of it.

  —Joan, he said, I’m sorry. The skin may crease but the blood is the same. I was always a jealous man. Protective, I used to say. Ha! Protective of my own ego is more like it.

  —But you went inside, I said.

  —I did. Women in braids with their small, tight bodies. Men fawning over them. In the living room where the largest clump was gathered a bearded man played a guitar and around him couples kissed, all naked, in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s legs. Every part of me wanted to jump into it, to just fuck and suck and become wet with those women, and with Lenore, but the idea of something being done to Lenore by someone else, I couldn’t manage the rage. Until that night I don’t think Lenore knew that part of me. I’d hid it all along. But that night there was no more denying it. She’d thought we could enter together, as a couple, into this new land. The idea was that if you truly loved each other, if your love was deep and your heart was pure, that you would want your partner to experience the bliss of other bodies, you would respect the animal tendencies, you could fuck and let fuck and call it making love and yet after making love was over, you would go home with your wife and eat ice cream and wash yourselves and go to bed.

  —What happened?

  —Nothing much happened that night. We observed. The couple we’d followed there, they’d been leading us around. At one point, the woman tugged on Lenore’s hand, she tried to bring her into an embrace, tried to coax her back to her husband. Like Lenore was a fresh catch she was bringing her master. She winked at me, like she would be my prize if I let Lenore go. I wanted to kill her for it. I wanted to fuck her first. I had my underwear on. I was one of the only ones in that room of snakes.

  —Briefs?

  —Yes, there were no boxers.

  —Why did you keep them on?

  —I hope you’re not insinuating something. I never wanted for in that department. All the same, I felt discarded. I felt the whole room could sense my jealousy. Lenore stayed tucked in to me. She politely turned down all the looks. She squeezed my hand, we walked back to our car, put our clothes on, and drove home. We didn’t speak of it for some time. But something had been lit inside me. A profound rage. Lenore and I had been trying to have children. We’d been married by then for four years and trying almost all that time. Each month that she bled she would try to hide her sadness from me. That same week we first went to Sandstone coincided with Lenore seeing a fertility doctor who told her everything in her system looked fine. He wanted me to go in and get checked, my count. I refused. She didn’t nag me, she wasn’t one of those. She was one of the last fine women. A European sensibility.

  Leonard was tearing up. His grief was a lie. I knew when grief was a lie. It was one of my superpowers. Even though his voice had become odious to me, I was curious. Curiosity is something that has always driven me. I am depraved and curious.

  —I went back, he said, groaning.

  —Well of course you did.

  —There was a night, Lenore lit candles all over the house, the one you’re in now. She walked the rafters at the top and set red votives down. Pillar candles on the floor. The whole room was glowing like a church. We made love on the bed, it was the best lovemaking of our relationship. It felt like the best lovemaking in the history of the world. That was the night, she ordained it, that was the night she was going to conceive our child.

  I shuddered to think of the heat in the house and the candles on top of it and this poor wife of his, spreading her legs for this insolent asshole. Once again I’d trusted a man. Once again I’d felt sympathy for a man who was not good.

  —I don’t know what kind of woman you are, Joan. Some women are not built for babies. I don’t think that’s bad. Biology is enigmatic but deliberate, it selects some for procreation and others it marks for a different path. Women like you are necessary to let off the steam. To depressurize the cabin.

  —Women like me are good for men to fuck when they’re not ready for babymaking with good Midwestern girls like Lenore.

  —That’s not how I meant it.

  —Fuck you.

  —I deserve that, old girl.

  —So you and Lenore, the mother of all mothers, fucked in a temple of love. And lit all the magic candles to usher the insemination along. And then?

  —And then nothing. Her cycle came. It was a terrible day. You know about the coyotes and the cycles?

  I nodded and Lenny did, too, solemnly.

  —The coyotes circled the house. They howled before she even started to bleed. They could smell the blood traveling down her tubes. I heard her upstairs, the whimper. My blessed bride. A good man would have gone and comforted her. But I only felt rage. Rage at myself, but also at her—like a real damned dog, I was angry at my bride for showing me the extent of my futility. Then further down it went, the boiling anger, down my hips and into my shaft. I wonder if you know how rage can stiffen the shaft. It’s like a war cry. I left the house, engorged. I drove up the canyon to Sandstone. I didn’t check in at the main house but sneaked to the yard at the back where the trampoline was. There was a tall American Indian girl laughing and jumping up and down, her tits like turkey wattles, shaking. Two men were watching, and two other women, a couple of pale whore blondes. All of them naked and slim as snakes. Nothing looked human to me. I was the stiffest I’d ever been. I climbed the trampoline and tackled the American Indian girl like a wolf. I stripped down and knelt her on all fours and got behind her like an animal. Look at me, I’m built like a rich man, not like a beast, but that day I was a beast, and none of them stopped me. After all, they’d built that place to act like animals and here was a man dispensing with the formality. I was full of rage because I was being denied the one right of all humans. The one reason we are on this earth. To procreate. So I fucked the American Indian girl with my rage and then the two blondes as the two men looked on. They stroked their cocks and watched me take what I was owed.

  I shook my head in revulsion. I thought I’d expended all my disgust on hearing from men about what they wer
e owed.

  —You are shocked, Joan. I’m an old man now. The evils we have done would be pointless if they didn’t get passed down so that others might not make the same mistake. Wouldn’t you say, Joan? I know you have secrets, too. Nobody comes to the canyon unless they do.

  I bit my lip. I tried to keep my hands in my lap, away from his throat.

  —My point was that Lenore was only for children. She wanted only to be a wife and a mother. But a mother first. A mother always. Joan, that isn’t you, I don’t know you too well, but I hope you’ll allow me that. I love a woman like you. A part of me always wished to have that, a woman I could do battle with. Perhaps it would have suited me better. Perhaps my story would have turned out differently.

  —I don’t care how your story would have turned out, Lenny. You wanted to gag a woman with your cock.

  —That’s not the bad part, I’m afraid. I’m still getting there. You see, I want to come clean!

  I pushed him to the door and then outside the threshold.

  —Please, Joan, I’m an old man. I don’t expect you to feel sorry, I only—

  —I only feel sorry for your wife, Lenny. This stupid woman who wanted a child that you were too empty to give her.

  I spat, and watched a bubble of my saliva land on the bridge of his nose. I don’t know where the impulse came from, but it made me feel more powerful than I had ever felt before. I slammed the door in his face.

  Then I walked up the spiral staircase and took off my white dress to go to sleep. When you’ve been raped in a dress, you might think you want to burn it but I didn’t.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING THERE WAS a knock on my door. Alice was early. I hadn’t pulled myself together as much as I’d wanted to. I checked my face in the hallway mirror. I smoothed down my hair and opened the door. I’d completely forgotten about the little girl.

  She had Vic’s face. That was the most remarkable thing—his face staring back at me, his probing eyebrows, the shining balls of his pale cheeks. The way she held herself in my doorway was all her father. An uneven confidence.

  Then I realized we’d met before. She’d come to visit her father in the first few months of my employment. I was enjoying the early days of being the boss’s pet. I remember she came around to my desk, smiling at me dreamily. She’d probably been ten or so and I’d been twenty-seven. She introduced herself and didn’t say much more, just smiled and hung around my desk until her father called her away. He must have told her I was a star or something, a real go-getter in the advertising world. He must have said something so that she’d take note of me because he wanted to show me off to everyone in his orbit, even his own child. Women always talk about how men are so compartmentalized, how they can fuck some cosmetics manager all week, then go home and play Scrabble with their kids and scratch their wife’s back. But Vic had just one compartment and it was only for me. His love for his children was real and large, no doubt, but his mania for me was tantamount.

  —Eleanor, I said.

  —You used to be hot, she said, adjusting the wire-rimmed glasses on her face.

  I blinked. She wore frayed jean shorts and a pair of white sneakers and a pullover sweatshirt that said ESPRIT in large rainbow letters across the front.

  —Thanks, I said.

  —Do you know why I’m here? she said. It sounded foreboding because of how nice and childlike her face was. But for the same reason it also sounded ridiculous.

  —I think so, I said. Her hands were trembling inside her pullover, which she was using like a muffler.

  —Do you want to invite me inside?

  —Wouldn’t that be stupid of me?

  —I’ll do it right here, I don’t care.

  I could see she thought she meant it. She was soaked through with pain and rage. I’d been there before, I understood exactly. But how could I be afraid of this little girl, of my child self, standing there on the threshold?

  I told her to come inside. I opened the door wide and walked backward. Eleanor advanced slowly, pulling a gun from the front pocket of her pullover. It was marvelous in its smallness and blackness and made her seem like an adult.

  She kept the gun pointed at me. Gradually her hands stopped trembling. She looked up at the high ceilings of my oven of a house.

  —Not what you pictured? I asked.

  She shook her head.

  —Not like the movies, I said.

  —Fuck you, she said. Fuck you! Sit down!

  I sat down at the kitchen table and she advanced until she was four feet away. I assumed that was the distance at which she was confident about hitting her target.

  —I can see your nipples, she said softly.

  I looked down at them. All talk of nipples made me think of my mother. In her big round eyeglasses with her layered blond hair and her white seventies breasts. She was the buxom beautiful of movie stars. Her nipples were enormous. You could see them through wool sweaters.

  —Do you want to hear a story? she asked. The gun was pointed at my head. I told her that of course I did.

  —You probably already know, she began, how we go as a family to Anguilla every year.

  I nodded. Vic had spun it to me as his wife’s trip, the highlight of her cold season, their Easter jaunt to Anguilla.

  —Last year, she continued, Dad told us at the last minute he couldn’t go. He said he had to work and it couldn’t be remote. He had to be in the office. Such a fucking load, and we knew it. My mom was really upset. I think she knew about you or at least had an idea about you. She swept it under the rug, I guess. But Anguilla was really important to her. It was like the only time she had my dad in front of her every day for ten days. It was heaven for my mom. We’d get a nanny, too, this girl from the island, and she’d watch Robbie for most of the time so my mom could pretend she was this free woman with her husband, you know? Every night is date night on Anguilla, she said. She drank a lot, which she never did at home, and she was just so happy. Dad was happy, too, I mean especially in the beginning when I was a little kid, before Robbie was born, he and I would go snorkeling and shell picking and we built sandcastles and collected sand crabs. After Robbie, it was hard. My dad sort of detached from things, not from me so much but from my mom and Robbie. They were like this set of broken dolls or something. I think he thought that if he detached from them, he could live a normal life.

  She looked like she was about to start crying. I asked if she wanted to sit down. She moved slowly and sat across from me. The table was long enough that she could keep the gun resting on it and pointed at my neck without worrying about my reaching and trying to grab for it. She talked as though we were friends and she needed to unload. Like she was me and I was Alice.

  —Two days before the trip, he said he couldn’t go. Literally two days. My mom was devastated. She had all their stuff packed in one suitcase. She’d been walking four miles every day to lose her “pooch” and she’d bought all these outfits. She said they should just postpone it and he said no, no. We would lose all our money, the flights, the house we rented. He was really smart, I’m sure you know, calculated like that. He told her after it was too late to do anything about it. He said, The kids deserve it, you deserve it. You’ve got to go. I didn’t get it then. She knew what was going on and it was killing her, that he was sending her away so he could be with you, uninterrupted or whatever.

  I thought back to the previous April. Big Sky had gone on a camping trip with friends to Chile. It was probably the second darkest time of my life after what had happened in the Poconos. In my apartment I looked at the couch where we had fucked and everything else he had touched or commented upon. I felt empty and scared because even though deep down I knew it was almost over, I didn’t want to believe it and anyway nothing is sure. I didn’t feel like drinking wine.

  It was the early evening, five or so. I saw on social media the pictures his friends had posted. He was not online in any way and so I had to dig to find them. His group of friends, thirty-six to fo
rty, wealthy and sure of their next forty years. There is no more powerful group in the world than men in that age range with money, with tasteful wives and pretty children. Family homes in Bridgehampton and Nantucket. Brunches.

  I couldn’t help thinking about the women who would let their attractive and wealthy husbands take group trips to Chile and Argentina where the men would get together with a group of girls in their twenties, building fires and drinking maté and climbing mountains with all the right gear. There was a blond girl in one photograph wearing rainbow leg warmers and holding a sausage on a stick to the fire, leaning toward the fire on slender haunches, and there was Big Sky beside her, looking at her. The picture came alive in my brain. I could see them close to each other the whole trip, walking in a pair up rocky terrain. I could see him helping her across a slim river, experiencing that brand of breathtaking crush that developed over time back in middle school. I could see day seven of the trip. I imagined it was cold and warm at once; they were together at the fire, everyone else asleep, sharing a thermos of whiskey, laughing quietly. He would bring her a thick serape blanket and wrap it around her shoulders the way he had done for me in the bar that night with his jacket.

  That was the ridiculous moment when I arranged myself on the same side as his wife, like here the two of us were in homely New York City, waiting at home for him. I felt absurd.

  I texted him, How goes it, Montana?

  And a full day later, he wrote, Hella fantastic chile is tops.

  The air went out of me. It was the end. I called Vic. I told him I was feeling suicidal and would he like to take me to dinner?

  And now here this girl was because of what Vic had done to his wife, because of what Big Sky had done to me, because of what my father had done to my mother. The pattern must end with you.

  —Do you remember April? she asked me.

  —Yes, I said. The weather was beautiful.