Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  Alice slipped her dusty Prius between two G-wagons. She was an excellent parker.

  She said she needed a coffee and led me up a ramp and through an alley to a line of people waiting outside a building that looked like a greenhouse garage. It had very high ceilings and bicycles on the walls and women with asymmetrical hair, men in red plaid shirts pouring hot water into Chemexes. We ordered our coffees and waited too long for them. So many men looked at Alice as we waited in line.

  —Where is the little freak now?

  —At home—the house. I tell her I’m going to work even when I’m not and then I drop her off for excursions. Trancas Canyon, Encino, etcetera.

  —She lets you leave the house?

  I laughed.

  —Joan. Why are you doing this?

  —I feel bad for her.

  —Just as you did for her father.

  —No. This is different.

  —She’s probably in love with you.

  —Please, I said. But I was grateful she considered me someone who could be loved.

  —Let’s go, she said. This class will reset your head. It might knock some sense into you. You might go home and tell the little barnacle to fuck off.

  * * *

  THE STUDIO SMELLED OF RAW onions. The walls were lime green and the mats were threadbare rubber, even worse than the ones at the famous studio. Some yogis seem to believe that the cheaper the yoga accoutrements, the better the practice, but this was different.

  At the head of the room a rangy instructor pulled his Christly hair into a topknot. His lips were buttered with balm, his neck snaked with tendons.

  Alice and I took two places next to each other. Aside from the instructor there was only one man, skinny, in long black shorts and a white tee. He adjusted his towel at the top corner of his mat. I felt sorry for him but didn’t know why. Soon others trickled in. The instructor dimmed the lights and it felt like evening.

  —Dear friends, the instructor said, his voice quiet and meditative but resounding all the same, I invite you to come into your bodies. Please take vajrasana, kneeling pose, and ease yourself into the forty-seven corners of your frames. Melt your bones out to the recesses of your skin, but at the same time stay within the boundaries of your flesh. Good. Very good. Take a deep breath in, now a deep breath out. Ahhhhhh. Excellent. Please go ahead and thank yourselves for coming into class tonight. For giving yourself this gift. We have a very whetted understanding of time in this room, don’t we, and we appreciate that this hour is precious. This is a special class. We are a special group. And because we are unique in yoga, I thought we deserved a unique flow. Our very own, this night.

  He slipped his eyes closed and pressed his hands in prayer. The room was still. I looked at Alice, but her eyes were closed, too.

  —When I was a boy, the instructor said, we used to hold these undercover séances. We’d turn off all the lights and repeat the names of our dead grandmas. Grandma Sue? Grandma Beth?

  A small collective laugh filled the room.

  —You there, Grandma Jo? To our great relief, we never heard back from our dead grammies. The last séance we ever held, one of us was trying to reach a dead parent. Our friend Bobby, his dad was a truck driver who died when his eighteen-wheeler flipped off a mountain pass in Idaho. Holy moly, how we all hoped he wouldn’t come to us. Even Bobby. We couldn’t fathom how far his dad had fallen, and we were terrified by the notion. If he spoke to us from beyond, we’d have probably pissed our dungarees. Looking back now, I realize that the purpose of those little séances was not to talk to these dead relatives but, rather, to scare ourselves “to death.” Because wasn’t that the scariest thought in the universe? Death?

  In the darkness I saw the room nod. There were soft squeaking noises in the walls that I was sure were mice.

  —Now, my friends, we have a unique gift in the world. All of us on this earth have a life sentence, we are walking around with an expiration date under our cap, but most of the people you see out there, bouncing around without a care in the world, they don’t know when. They might live to a hundred and ten. The way they act, it’s like coffins are for vampires, am I right? Well. For those of us in the room, the sentence is a tad bit sooner than that, isn’t it? And as I’m sure many of you have come to feel, there’s a marvelous freedom in that. We are not scared of death, not in the same way, because from this point forward, we begin at death. Are you with me?

  Again the room nodded. A Poland Spring bottle crinkled. I heard the sound of water slipping down a throat. I used to hate the noise my father made when he smacked his thirsty lips to make moisture. He was a diabetic and sometimes his mouth ran dry.

  —So this evening, I’d like us to begin in savasana, corpse pose. May we, in yoga, as in life, begin at death and travel onward from there. Now bring yourselves to lie down, release the legs, and push out through the heels. Soften the root of the tongue, the wings of the nose, and the taut flesh of the forehead. Let the eyes fall to the back of the head, then turn them downward to gaze at the heart. Release your heavy brain to the back of the skull.

  Once the room was lying down, Alice’s hand found mine in the relative darkness, grasped it, and the instructor began to whisper.

  —You are not your disease, dear friends, HIV/AIDS does not define you. HIV/AIDS are merely letters. You are not your body. Your body is a rental, as K. Pattabhi Jois famously, exquisitely said, and soon it will be time to return your lease. You won’t be penalized for the dents and the overage of miles. Instead, you will be given a brand-new car, more beautiful than you could have ever imagined, and this one, my dear friends, will have the ability to fly.

  * * *

  AFTER THE CLASS WAS OVER, we walked outside and stood in the sun. The line where Alice’s jaw met her neck was so beautiful as to be licentious.

  —What the fuck? I said.

  —When you’re depressed or in grave trouble, she said, people think you should be near children, amusement. They invite you to dinner, they prop you up and shine their happy light in your face. It’s bullshit. The opposite is true. You should seek out the dying.

  I felt there was something evil about that, something evil in her. I asked her if she’d gone to HIV yoga before and she said of course, many times. She said she went to desperate places whenever she was feeling unfortunate. She liked to do her taxes on the quiet patio of the Beverly Hills Cancer Center, with its flushed jacaranda and its sterile herringbone bricks.

  Now I worried she was cruel and careless enough to leave me even after she knew who we were to each other. I wanted to stitch our bodies together.

  At a crowded restaurant we ordered pâté on baguette and arugula with Treviso from a girl with interstellar bangs. There was porridge on the menu and something called a risky biscuit. The font on the menu was old diner style. The slices of bread were tremendous, ash-powdered, hard on the outside, cloud-soft within. We sat out on the patio, arid with brown vines and piles of firewood.

  —How far along are you? she asked.

  —I have no idea.

  —Are you going to keep it?

  —I don’t know, I said, even though I knew I would.

  She put her hand on my arm. Moments like those, I couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t love me.

  —Why don’t you go to the police? Tell them this child is a runaway. Have them send it back to its mother.

  —I can’t go to the police.

  —Such an outlaw, Joan. Are you wanted in New York City? Are you the one who killed Vic?

  —I just don’t trust the police.

  Alice nodded and didn’t ask me to clarify, but the police officer appeared to me then. There were two who came that night; one of them dealt with the bodies and the other dealt with me. He was in his early thirties with the pale bloated face of a young boy that merely expands out at the sides as he ages. It took me a while to realize that he thought I’d done it. He wasn’t intelligent. Even an hour later, when the trajectory of events became clear, he remained cold.
He treated me as so many men in the future would.

  —So tell your landlord, she said, laughing. I’m sure it’s another coda in the lease.

  —She’s a little girl, I said as I touched my stomach.

  —You have your own child to protect. Are you a warrior, I want to know? Or are you some husk that men—and now this girl—have had their way with?

  After the words left her mouth, there was no trace of them on her face. I realized that no matter how much I’d told her, she didn’t understand my life. Of course, I hadn’t told her the end. Big Sky, in one of his pontificating moods, said it took fifty years for a death to be completely forgotten, but sometimes it took only two weeks. Some people, he said, were stronger than others.

  I realized in that very instant that I would never see Big Sky again. I would never see his face again. Feel his warm and reticent touch. Of all the rapes I’d sustained, this was the worst degradation—the way a man who thinks nothing of you can loom larger than your life, and another life inside of you. That was the most awful thing. That, like my mother before me, I felt that my child was a burden.

  25

  LENNY MET ELEANOR ONE 103-DEGREE afternoon. She was curled up on the couch when he knocked. I felt I was opening the door to a shameful secret.

  I introduced her as a friend who was staying with me. She was quiet and looked homely in a pair of inexpensive pajamas.

  —For how long? he asked. I knew Lenny wanted to continue to unburden himself. I missed the jail of Lenny. How easily I could dip in and out of it. On top of that, my plan to pinch the watch was stalled.

  —I don’t know. A bit.

  —There’s a provision in the lease, no long-term guests.

  I knew that he was upset because he would not feel free to come and see me as often as he wished. Eleanor was not beautiful. If Alice had been staying with me, he would have been fine with it. He would have been more than fine. He would have been excited.

  —She’s not. She’s staying for a few days.

  I was thrilled there was now an hourglass on her stay.

  —In any case, Lenny said, trying to regain ground, I was coming to inform you that I have not received your August rent.

  —It’s August twelfth. I have a fifteen-day leniency.

  —Well, yes, but. I’m informing you.

  —Thank you.

  Belligerently he turned and walked away.

  —I can’t leave, Eleanor said when the door closed behind him.

  —At some point—

  —I want to stay, she said, until the baby is born.

  —You will be a part of its—his—life. I promise you that.

  —But.

  —Forever.

  Then I sickened myself.

  —He’s your brother, I said.

  She began to cry. She said she had nowhere else to go. She didn’t want to go home. There was no home left. She asked me, through her tears, what her father had been like with me. Had he always been happy. I told her he talked about her all the time.

  —In what way?

  —He was very proud of you. When you learned how to drive, for example. How you parallel-parked so well.

  She looked at me in that way all children do when hearing specific stories about how their parents felt about them. I’d had that look with Gosia many times.

  —But what about how he was with you? Was he always happy to be with you?

  —Yes, I suppose. But he was also sad.

  —Because you didn’t love him back.

  Eleanor was sitting on the couch with her legs bent to one side. The pajamas were tight around her thighs and chest. She’d come to Los Angeles with fourteen hundred dollars, which in that city was barely enough for several dinners. At least it was barely enough for dinner the way that I ate dinner. The way that I racked up debt to cool my fever.

  I’d taken her to a giant discount clothing store in the Valley. We shopped beside a mother with stringy blond hair and twig legs in ripped jean shorts. Her child, a toddler with glorious green eyes, walked placidly beside her as the woman ranted into a flip phone, alternately cursing and crying. Eleanor and I were both greatly affected. We looked at each other and I knew we felt the same way. We wanted to pick the child up and bundle her in our arms and whisk her away. We could not abide selfish parents.

  I bought Eleanor a pack of white briefs and several pairs of shorts and t-shirts, a yellow sundress that I’d seen her admiring. I bought her pajamas as well, but she wore mine nearly every night.

  —He took it out on us because you didn’t love him back.

  —How did he do that?

  —There were just nights he’d come home and he was depressed. He’d say something went wrong at work, or when our grandpa—his dad—died, he said he was depressed about that for a really long time. Then he just started drinking a lot. Most nights he’d come home after Robbie was put to bed. A couple of times I heard my mom ask him to go in and kiss him good night. And Dad would say he did. But I knew he didn’t.

  Vic never told me about his father’s death.

  —I really don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am.

  —Sometimes I hate you so much. Other times I think it’s not your fault. Like that stuff my dad wanted—you, whatever—he wouldn’t have done what he did if it wasn’t for how miserable he was at home. He was unhappy. I guess he always was, when I think back. He never loved my mom. I mean, he cared for her, like you care for anyone you live with or anyone who loves you. But he didn’t love love her. And after Robbie…

  I took her hand in mine. I didn’t want to but felt I needed to.

  —Before Robbie, he came to my softball games. Every single one. He wore a dumb PROUD DAD hat or whatever. We played catch every day after school. We made meatball sandwiches at night, after Mom went to bed. I knew he wasn’t totally happy, but he was happy with me.

  I walked to my little tin and brought out three one-milligram Xanax pills. I swallowed two dry and offered her the third. Perhaps it was irresponsible of me but I didn’t see any reason for someone in her kind of pain not to take pills.

  She took it from me. She had never done any kind of drug, had never smoked a cigarette. She told me she was a virgin, that she thought she would wait until marriage. And now she didn’t want anything. In one day, she told me, she’d gone from wanting a love story for herself to not believing in love at all.

  —What about God? I asked.

  —What about Him?

  —Do you still believe in God?

  —Of course, she said. Don’t you?

  —No. I don’t.

  —That’s weird to me. That’s kind of totally nuts.

  —Why?

  —Because how else are you going to see your parents again?

  26

  I’D BEEN WRITING TO ALICE for two weeks and she would write back sometimes an entire day later. Her replies would be friendly but distant. They were the sorts of replies I’d gotten from Big Sky toward the end.

  It made me remember the way all my female friendships had exasperated me. I realized that was how Alice now felt about me. It was hard to believe. In the past, if a woman didn’t immediately hate me, then she would eventually develop an unsavory need for me.

  There was Carly from college, whom I reconnected with during a dark spell, in between lovers. On my way back across the country, I stopped to see her and we spent a week pretending we were better friends than we’d been in school. We ate pressed sushi and read the same biography of Jackie Onassis on Butterfly Beach. She wanted me to sleep in her bed, but I took the couch every night, peppery with sand.

  She had a crush on the bartender at the sushi place. That was what made him attractive to me. He was good-looking but not tall and not clean. She introduced me to him at a party. When she went to tap the keg, I let him bring me to a filthy couch with a bedsheet over it where we kissed. I wasn’t even a little drunk. I felt someone poking my arm and looked up to see it was Carly, rage and disbelief on her face. She downed
her drink. The cranberry froth clung to the fine hairs on her upper lip. I’m going home, she said, waiting for me to follow.

  I’m not finished with you yet, the young man whispered into my ear, gravelly, like a junkie. I was disgusted and humiliated. With the last spittle of my inheritance, I got a bungalow at the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara. I drove us there in my rented car, leaving Carly to cab home. We didn’t fuck, I was too afraid he might carry disease. I halfheartedly blew him and let him finish on my chest. I remember the color was a terrible greenish hue.

  In the morning I called my friend. I didn’t apologize but asked her to come to the pool. She was over in a flash.

  It was one of those pools that impresses people. Olympic and clean with coral grounds and white umbrellas and the private beach just below. I found it depressing and wished it were half the size. We ordered mimosas and shared a club sandwich. But eventually Carly couldn’t take it. She wanted more from me and tried to pick at my insides to get it. She didn’t know anything about my history—nobody did besides Gosia and, later, Vic—but anyhow turned to me with a piece of sandwich in her mouth and said, Are you the way that you are because of your mom or your dad?

  I stood up. I was twenty-six and wearing a red bikini, my body was at its peak, the best it would ever look. Without another word I walked back to my room, my rear swinging, polo-shirted pool boys watching, packed up my car, and left town. I slurped some Belon oysters at a harbor bar on the way out because I’d already spent so much in one weekend that it didn’t seem to matter.

  I never spoke to Carly again. I often wonder how she thought of that day. How long she hung by the pool after I’d left, expecting me to return. She’d become marvelously invested in me within mere days. Had it been me, had I been the one who was left, I’d have lain on the chaise through dusk. I’d have sucked the day down to its bone.

  But now I was the jealous friend. I couldn’t even go back and look at our messages because my need was so shameful to me. The most recent one—

  I am eating cilantro and thinking of you.