Lily and the Octopus

by Steven Rowley

  “Not my name.”

  “Isn’t that like paying for it?”

  “No,” I say with four or five o’s, partly in defense of my reputation and partly in defense of massage guy’s. “I paid for a massage. Then we got to talking, I offered him a drink, we each had a few while we continued our conversation, he’s a writer, too, a librettist …”

  “Libidinous?”

  “No. Well, that, too. A librettist, he writes the words for … The point is, we had a surprising amount in common, so we talked for a while—and then …” I let the sentence finish itself. “It was like a date. Except, you know, I was wearing a towel.”

  Trent laughs. “I should have seen that one coming.”

  “It took me by surprise.” But maybe I should have seen it coming, too. At least an indication it might happen.

  An omen.

  My eyes are too often closed to these things. Should I have seen it coming? Should I have seen the octopus coming? An omen for that? Octo. Latin for eight. But who did I know who was Latin? Any number of people. This is Los Angeles, after all. Maybe the Latin origin is the wrong thing to focus on, maybe it’s the eight itself. The bartender pours a beer. There are eight pints in a gallon. Eight crayons in a box of Crayolas. Eight nights of Hanukkah. Eight atoms of something in octane. Carbon? Compounds of carbon form the basis of all life, could that be it? A stop sign has eight sides; is the octopus a sign for me to stop? And if so, stop what?

  But can’t omens be good as well as bad? If there was an omen of the octopus coming and I missed it, shouldn’t I be looking for an omen of recovery, an omen of the octopus leaving? Omen is also Latin. Back to that again.

  My brain hurts.

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  Trent checks his phone. “Eleven fifteen.”

  As if on cue, the door opens and a few people enter, laughing. They’re all wearing black pants and white shirts. I elbow Trent who just mouths “Weird,” studies the late arrivals, and lands on one guy with a pen stuck behind his ear.

  “What about that one?” He’s still focused on my getting some uncommitted lip.

  I flag down the bartender. “Another round?” he asks.

  “Can I ask you a really stupid question?”

  “Shoot,” he says.

  “Isn’t this a gay bar?”

  The bartender laughs. “Used to be. The owners sold it. Now it’s mostly a hangout for local restaurant servers when their shifts end. That’s why it picks up late.”

  I look at Trent, who just shrugs.

  My head hits the bar and I speak into the crook of my arm. “We’re really bad at this,” I say. “I blame you. You’ve been happy too long.”

  “I blame you. You’ve been unhappy too long.” Trent fixes his gaze on the blank space above me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for the black cloud over your head.” He punches me playfully. I punch him back, a little less playfully.

  “One more round,” Trent says to the bartender, who places two fresh cocktail napkins on the bar before retreating to make our drinks.

  Friday

  How was your week?”

  It’s Friday again, which means I’m back in Jenny’s butter office having scant recollections of Wednesday or Thursday. There was another seizure, not as bad as the first but still scary. There was a call from the vet, but they were not able to extract enough cells from the octopus to find anything conclusive; Doogie wants to put her under general anesthesia to collect a larger sample. There was supposed to be another date with the hugging guy, but I canceled, since I was feeling gross and unattractive and unworthy of being loved. Ironically, this will probably help him clarify his feelings; men are hunters and tend to like other men who don’t make it easy.

  Mostly, this week I withdrew.

  Withdrawing, however, is difficult in therapy—even therapy with Jenny. It’s especially hard today, as Jenny sits forward on her chair with renewed zeal for her occupation. As if another patient weary of her obtuse observations has reported her to some board and she’s trying to avoid additional complaints. Or maybe she’s finally cleared whatever hurdle of ambivalence was blocking her getting involved. In either case, great time to come alive, Jenny.

  I don’t want to answer her question, or maybe I don’t know how. How was my week? The visit to the vet was … irritating? Not knowing the difference between a straight bar and a gay bar was … humiliating? My mouth is empty of adjectives and qualifying words, so I relent and swallow and sigh and tell her something else. “I might as well fill you in on our visitor.”

  “When you say our …” Jenny pauses. This is the kind of thing she never would have questioned in previous sessions. She would have figured it out contextually, or just not have been invested enough to care. This is an entirely new Jenny, and I don’t like her.

  “Lily and me. And my. And mine.” The proper syntax eludes me.

  “You and Lily. Okay. Proceed.”

  Proceed. Oh, goody, may I?

  Jenny licks her upper lip, hungry for more of the story.

  “Lily and I have an octopus.” I pause for dramatic effect, but only get a confused stare. Then I launch into the whole ordeal, like I did for Trent, like I did for Doogie. It’s already becoming like the package of stories I have preselected to recount on dates; I bore myself in the telling. Jenny nods as she listens and her eye contact is unwavering. I almost don’t know who this woman is that I’m pouring my heart out to. Seriously, her scrutiny is unnerving.

  “And when you say octopus, you mean …”

  “Octopus. When I say we, I mean Lily and me, and when I say octopus, I mean octopus.” Jenny still looks uncertain, so I pull out my phone and show her the picture of Lily and me with the lei. “Look. Right here. Except now it’s bigger and more prominent and angry.”

  Jenny studies the photo and uses her fingers to zoom in on the octopus. This in itself enrages me (even though I did the same thing), like she’s saying I’m making mountains out of molehills, that I have now been living a week and a day on the edge of hysteria for nothing. Plus, I just told her it was bigger now. Meaner. When she looks up there’s something akin to pity in her eyes. Something more than a sorrowful understanding, yet shy of commiseration. But I don’t want her pity, or whatever is pity-adjacent. I don’t need it. I am going to fix this. I am going to prevail over the octopus. I don’t want this look.

  Jenny hands me back my phone. “Have you been to the veterinarian?”

  Duh. “On Monday.”

  “What did she say?” Jenny does this thing where she defaults to the feminine pronoun to make some sort of point about a male-dominated society, something she probably picked up in a women’s studies class in the late nineties and that now feels woeful and stilted.

  “He”—I emphasize the he—“couldn’t say much of anything. He took a few cells to run some tests and the tests were inconclusive. Now they want to put Lily under anesthesia and take a larger sample.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  When I don’t want to answer the question someone asks, I just give the answer to another, unasked question. I realize in this moment that I do this a lot. “I find myself leaving her alone for short periods. I don’t want to be apart from her, but to be with her means I also have to be with him.” I pause and Jenny nods. “Plus, the octopus came when I wasn’t there, and there’s a part of me that thinks I need to be gone for him to leave.”

  “Maybe the octopus isn’t going to leave.”

  My answer to that is a glare.

  “Maybe the octopus isn’t going to leave, and what you’re doing is emotionally detaching from Lily.”

  My stomach turns. “That’s offensive. You’re being offensive.”

  “I’m not meaning to be. It’s a natural reaction to grief.”

  “Grief?” I say it with three question marks, as the word catches me by surprise. “What are you talking about? I’m not grieving.”

  Jenny raises
an eyebrow as if to say, Aren’t you?

  “Grieving what? I’m fully focused on forcing the octopus to leave.”

  “Why can’t you do both?” she asks.

  Look who showed up to play.

  Jenny continues. “Why can’t you focus on getting the octopus to leave and prepare yourself for the possibility that he may not?”

  “He will leave.”

  “I’ll leave that for you and the vet to say. But Lily is older, and you’ve said yourself that she was the runt of her litter and her health has at times been tenuous. Unless something catastrophic happens to you in the near future, in all likelihood she is going to predecease you, and in the greater context of your life, relatively soon. If it’s not the octopus that takes her, something else will eventually. A rhinoceros or a giraffe.”

  “A rhinoceros or a gir— How would a dog have a giraffe?” New Jenny has gone completely around the bend.

  “It’s natural, as our loved ones age, to start grieving their loss. Even before we lose them.”

  I run her words by my imaginary therapist, the one who I count on to take Jenny’s bungled advice and turn it into something less botched. He’s strangely silent for once; I’m afraid it means he finds nothing wrong with her diagnosis.

  “What is grief, anyhow? What does it even mean?” I’m being obstinate.

  “People describe it in different ways. I’d say it’s a temporary derangement. Freud put it as something like a departure from the normal attitude toward life.”

  I stare Jenny square in the eyes so she can see my annoyance. “One, my questions were rhetorical. I know what grief is. Two, thank you for calling me deranged.”

  Jenny smiles as if to soften her insult. “Grief is a pathological condition. It’s just that so many of us go through it in life that we never think to treat it as such. We just expect people to go through it, endure it, and come out the other side.”

  The sun pours through the window and lands in a puddle just beyond Jenny’s feet. She kicks off her shoes and stretches her naked toes into the sunlight. It reminds me of Lily, who makes a catlike effort to find whatever sun she can to nap in. It’s not uncommon for me to find her with just her hind legs resting in her bed, the rest of her body stretched across the sun-warmed linoleum.

  I think of the Valium and Vicodin that have sometimes been my sunshine; my desire to crawl into their warming rays. “Fine. I’m grieving. Maybe you can write me a prescription.”

  Unfortunately, Jenny knows my fears about addiction (we’ve covered that topic exhaustively) and doesn’t bite. “We’ll see.”

  Maybe I, too, am suffering impairment from the presence of the octopus, seizures in reason. My thoughts of late have resembled those of a small child more than the thinking of a grown man: the magical rationalization of needing to be gone so the octopus can leave; my desire to be intimidating, bigger than I am, to have the hurricane in me; the need to express everything in a tantrum.

  “What do you think of when you think of mourning?” Jenny asks. The question snaps me back to attention.

  I answer without really thinking. “I guess ‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that’s not very original.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “It’s a poem.”

  “I gathered.”

  “I’m just clarifying. It’s not a blues album.”

  Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence. “Does your response need to be original? Isn’t that what poetry is for? For the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?”

  I shrug. Who is Jenny, even New Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I, for that matter?

  “Why do you think of that poem in particular?”

  “ ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone; Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone; Silence the pianos and with muffled drum; Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.’ ” I learned the poem in college and it stuck.

  Jenny savors these words like she’s testing a bottle of wine before saying, “Not inappropriate.”

  And this is where Old Jenny returns. This is where her observations are all wrong; this is where she’s a nightmare as a therapist. It is inappropriate. It does not fit the situation or merit consideration in the context of our discussion, mostly for one glaring reason: Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.

  I can feel another tantrum rising inside me.

  “It’s inappropriate if it’s the dog you are mourning!”

  Sunday

  The frozen turkey lands with a thud in the sink and it startles Lily awake. “Keep it down! Jeez.” Lily hates to be interrupted from a good nap.

  I hadn’t intended to buy a frozen turkey, or a turkey at all, for that matter, but it’s hard to find a fresh turkey in June and I was desperate to prove I’m not grieving. What better way to demonstrate I’m not suffering a pathological condition than to throw a celebration, in particular a celebration for everything we have to be thankful for? And nothing accompanies the giving of thanks better than turkey. And stuffing. And gravy. And mashed potatoes. And squash. It wasn’t until checking out at the grocery store and the looks I got from the cashier that I realized that cooking a full Thanksgiving dinner in June was in fact its own form of derangement.

  “Is that Tofurky?” Lily has risen from her bed and sits at my feet by the sink.

  “Yes, it is. We’re having Tofurky.” Years ago I flirted with vegetarianism, and one year went so far as to make a Thanksgiving Tofurky. When Lily asked for turkey, I told her we didn’t have any turkey but that we had Tofurky, and when I gave it to her she gobbled it up just the same. The gravy wasn’t quite vegetarian, and her feelings pretty much fell in line with mine: smother anything in enough stuffing, potato, butter, and gravy and it’s pretty damned good. Since then she’s called all turkey Tofurky, and the way she says it is so unbearably cute I haven’t had the heart to correct her.

  “Tonight we are going to feast.”

  OH! BOY! TOFURKY! IS! MY! ABSOLUTE! FAVORITE! I! COULD! EAT! ALL! OF! THE! TOFURKYS! JUST! GOBBLE! THEM! UP!

  Lily is now fully awake. She places a paw on my foot.

  “If I can only figure out how to defrost this motherfucker.” The turkey just about fills the sink.

  Lily gives the microwave a sideways glance and I get as far as trying to shove the damned thing in before realizing there’s no way an eighteen-pound turkey is going to fit in a standard convection microwave.

  OR! WE! CAN! EAT! IT! FROZEN! LIKE! ICE CREAM!

  “Tofurky is not good frozen like ice cream.” I look down at Lily, who looks up at me. She’s anxious for me to fix this. “Warm water bath it is!” Lily starts to retreat. “For the Tofurky,” I tell her. “Not for you.”

  She immediately comes back. YES! DO! IT!

  I slide the drain cover under the turkey and fill the sink with warm water. I have a Cook’s Illustrated magazine with an article entitled “Roasting the Big One” and I find it among a stack of never-read cookbooks. I don’t know why I have saved this, but the title has been responsible for several fits of adolescent giggles.

  While the turkey defrosts, Lily and I set the table. As a kid I was always enchanted by the holiday tables my mother would set. How she had special tablecloths for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and how there was white china rimmed with gold that would magically appear in November. The budding homosexual in me would study the plates, turning them over and drinking in words like Wedgwood and bone and England. One year my mother even provided glass finger bowls on their own saucers, and Meredith and I dipped our fingers in them after the meal and before the dessert course. It all seemed so elegant to me, I wondered if we didn’t secretly descend from royalty on my mother’s side. I tried to coax her with my eyes to share with me our closet lineage (I could be trusted to keep the secret safe if we were in fact in hiding from some evil czar or queen!), but she never did. I remember thinking this is how I was going to eat every night when I was grown
up. Of course, even though I inherited my aunt’s set of china after she passed away, this is rarely how I eat.

  Our Thanksgivings usually consist of Lily sitting by my seat at the head of the table, anxiously licking her chops. Only when the humans have gorged themselves on seconds, and sometimes thirds, is she allowed her holiday meal, served in her supper dish on the kitchen floor. I always crouch beside her, holding her ears back and out of the way like a supportive college boyfriend holding back the hair of his vomiting sorority girl. It’s my favorite part of the holidays, if not the entire year. It’s almost like I can absorb the pure joy she radiates. This time, I pick her supper dish off the floor and set her a place at the table. The silverware and cloth napkin at her place setting will go untouched, but they bring symmetry to our table.

  “Do you remember our first Thanksgiving together?” I ask Lily.

  “Did we have Tofurky?” Lily asks.

  “You, in fact, had a lot of Tofurky.”

  That year after dinner, while others did the dishes and after most of the leftover meat had been carved off the carcass, I double-bagged what was left of the turkey, placed it with the other trash by the back door, and reset the table for dessert. Later that night, I found both bags chewed through and the carcass picked clean. It only took following a short trail of greasy paw prints to find Lily under the kitchen table, engorged to nearly twice her normal size. She looked up at me, still licking her oily face. PUNISH! ME! IF! YOU! MUST! BUT! IT! WAS! WORTH! IT!

  When I finish telling this story to Lily she laughs and says, “That was my favorite Thanksgiving.”

  “It was not your favorite day-after-Thanksgiving.”

  Lily thinks about this and delivers a flat, “Oh, yeah.” Ever since then I’ve boiled the carcass for soup.

  “Roasting the Big One” suggests cooking the bird breast side down for one hour at 425 degrees to crisp the skin and seal in the juices before lowering the temperature to 325 degrees and flipping the bird breast side up until the turkey registers 165 on a meat thermometer. Overall, this should make the cooking time between four and five hours.