Omnivores

by Lydia Millet

  “It’s temporary,” he said, “since we’re relocating. I figured we could start early. Stock up and take all the stuff with us.”

  There was a bassinet with frilly blankets, there were hanging plastic mobiles, toy drums, boxes of Huggies, a Jolly Jumper, stuffed animals including a hippopotamus the color of moss and a yellow dog, teething rings, rattles, potties, pacifiers, fuzzy sleepers with vinyl feet attached, nipple bottles.

  “I hope you’re not looking forward to a normal baby,” she warned.

  “Hey, the doctor told me that it’s probably a retard,” admitted Pete Magnus. “I figure, treat it like a normal kid, maybe it’ll snap out of it. Right?” He pointed out his favorite mobile, which featured floating hamburgers, French fries, and milk shakes in primary colors.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked him. “What’s your plan?”

  “Plan? Jesus Esty,” he said, leading her back out to the living room. “I’m the father. Plus which, we’re good together. You take care of the kid, I’ll take care of business so you can be comfortable. Lemme tell you what we’re gonna do.”

  She sat down on the couch and he brought her the pain pills and a glass of water from the kitchen. The shrunken head winked from its refrigerated case.

  “I put in a bid on this property in Florida. Gulf Coast. Used to be a treatment plant in the sixties, cleaned it up, it’s prime waterfront, gorgeous landscape. Not huge, but big enough. Plan is, convert it into a resort. Small but select, elite clientele, golf, put in a spa, that New Age crap the rich women from Taos are into, your herbs, your crystals, full-body massages, advertise in Connoisseur, Architectural Digest, and some retired folks’ magazines, got a faggot chef from Greece lined up to do the food. You could be my partner, like my right-hand man, hostess-type shit when you have time. PR. You’re good looking, you got class, supply the image. Your earthly paradise we got there. Go swimming in the morning. Sound sweet or what?”

  “I don’t know the first thing about being a hostess. And don’t partners have to put in money?”

  “You’re a natural hostess. Plus for the money, that’s no problem. You sign a few papers, we can liquidate the capital in your trust, sign a deal where you get an income off the place when it’s up and running. A percentage. Part owner, stockholder. As your guardian I can facilitate.”

  “Capital? What capital?”

  “See Esty, what the trust is, it’s the income off a pool of money tied up in stocks. You only have access to the income, being under twenty-one, but me, as your guardian, I got the right to convert the capital with your permission, way the fund’s set up. Now it’s just sitting there in these boring blue-chip stocks, like having a savings account. Hardly any return on your investment. Low dividends. Waste of time Esty. Trust me.”

  “How much capital?”

  “Gotta look it up Esty, don’t have the figures at my fingertips, but if I had to guesstimate I’d say in the general neighborhood of seven, eight mil.”

  “Seven or eight million dollars?”

  “I know it doesn’t seem like much to start the place with, but shit, pull in another investor or two, got it lined up, we’re set to go. Small place, but luxury. That’s the plan.”

  It was not always easy to breathe. Her throat was a thin stalk clogged with thick air. Every item in the apartment had a price tag affixed: she had not noticed it before. The tags were as big as the items. Even the shrunken head had been assigned a dollar value. The price tags cluttered up the rooms. She was hemmed in by potential transactions. Reaching for her water glass, she had to brush the sofa’s tag off her knee. The glass itself was marked Tiffany, $68. When she lifted the glass from the coffee table it left a ring, and in the center of the ring, $499. She put the capsules onto her tongue. They were acrid.

  “Your interest in me is purely financial,” she said when she had swallowed. “Your stake is my money.”

  “It hurts me that you say that,” said Pete Magnus, shaking his head. As he did so several price tags were dislodged and fell like paper snow onto his shoulders. “I’m the father of your child. Take care of you, put a roof over your head. I’ve done it all for you, Esty. I’m here for you.”

  The shrunken head smirked at this and sent his vestigial body to perform a mocking dance on the mohair rug.

  “Why did he make you my guardian? He hardly even knew you. Why’d he give you control of that money?”

  “What can I say?” shrugged Pete Magnus. “I’m like the Prudential rock. And on this rock He builds His church, and shit. But seriously, he probably didn’t think you’d need it before you were twenty-one. The guy thought we were getting married. Jesus, he was in a world of his own. You can’t figure out a lunatic. Probably thought you’d come running home to him if you had problems. How could he know his house was gonna burn to the ground the week after?”

  “You said you thought they’d sold it to developers,” she murmured. “You said it was part of their plan. A week after? How do you know when he set up the trust?”

  He stood, went to the far wall, and ransacked his antique writing desk, never used by current owner, mint condition, $3,599, for a crumpled pack of Marlboro reds. Extracting one bent cigarette, he dropped the pack and went back to scrounging. “Just trying to make you feel better,” he said. His face belied the casual assertion. It was a swollen beet against the yellow spit of flame from his lighter. It burgeoned with nervous blood, angry capillaries pulsing under the skin.

  But she was tranquil now. Her new knowledge baptised the desert of the penthouse, streamed over the items and tags, blurring the dollar signs, voiding the digits. It cleansed her of confusion. It was drowning Pete Magnus.

  “When did you know about it? I mean the trust?”

  “When I told you Esty, Christ.” he said, spitting a fleck of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “The lawyer contacted me.”

  “Then how do you know when he did it? Why did you say he didn’t know the house would burn? Before you said he burned it down himself. That’s what you said.”

  “Figure of speech Esty,” rushed Pete Magnus, taking a deep drag. A cough hurtled out.

  She waited, staring at him, then cleared her throat and spoke slowly. “I can see the forest for the trees.”

  “The hell does that mean?”

  “I was trained to observe animal behavior,” she said softly. “I know how to watch. You knew about the trust, and being the executor. You didn’t know if he would let you keep the money. Marsha said money is power. Then the house burned.”

  “Jesus, Esty, is this gratitude?”

  Silence would be her acid test. She sat without movement, the infant flailing and scratching but confined, safely enclosed, in her motionless hide with insulated walls. Squinting Magnus was watery-eyed from the smoke. He bent over, brooding, in his jungle of paper, as the curlicue of nicotine, formaldehyde, and tar dispersed above them.

  “You saying you don’t trust me?” he sputtered at long last. Her suspicions were grounded in unprovable fact, built on a foundation of subterranean steel, invisible yet unassailable.

  She kept her counsel.

  “I mean what are you asking me here?” he persevered, seating himself on the edge of the couch, tapping his ash into her empty water glass.

  “I thought he was the pyromaniac,” she whispered. “But it was you.”

  Pete Magnus inhaled too swiftly and choked, wracked by spasms, as smoke billowed from his nose and trickled out his coughing mouth.

  “That’s insane Esty,” he gasped when he could, grinding his cigarette out distractedly. “Tomorrow we’re going to counseling.” He picked up her water glass, tipped it up to his mouth, spat out the ashes, and ran to the kitchen.

  “No,” she sighed into his wake. He was a fire starter. It confirmed her worst fears. Out there, alive or dead, Bill and Betty were doing what they’d always done. They had not recanted. They had made no sacrifice and no reversal. They were what they had always been. If they were living, they were living w
ith no regret, on parallel courses, continuing as they had planned to continue. If they were dead, they were not suicides. They were dead criminals, not saints self-martyred on their knees. They had been struck down where they stood, spears raised, eyes forward, suspecting nothing. There had never been spectacular conversion.

  Pete Magnus, tail between his legs, was gargling over the kitchen sink a broken man. She saw it in his slump of apathy. When she came in he didn’t raise his eyes, just turned to spit into the sink, over spaghetti-sauced stoneware and matching utensils caked with meat, bracing himself against the counter’s edge. She owned something. She had leverage. Anyway, the crime was unproven, and Betty had been waiting a long time for the pax romana.

  “I have nowhere else to go,” she said. “I can make you a loan, interest free. It comes due when I turn twenty-one.”

  He turned to face her, wiping his mouth with a paper towel.

  “The full amount?”

  “But it’s a loan.”

  “Jesus Esty,” he said. “Shit yeah!”

  She headed for her bedroom, where she picked up the icons of the baby cult and threw them out her door into a heap in the hallway. Pete made piles of salt on the living room table and sniffed them up, and then he went out. She stayed awake, seated beside the head in the living room, gazing out the window at the pattern of lights in the dark. She saw herself in Florida, cross-legged on a checkered picnic tablecloth, a quaint wooden basket beside her, wasps and gnats circling and diving beyond her reach. The rolling green lawns of her future spread out beneath her, bright as astroturf as she sipped ice tea in the shade of a date palm, casting no shadow. A few yards away, in diapers, the cannibal baby chortled and clapped its hands, crawling and tripping until it stood upright and took its first experimental steps across the grass.

  PART THREE

  CANNIBALIS HORRIBILIS

  ONE

  LITTLE BILL, AS PETE LIKED TO CALL HIM, WEIGHED in at fifteen pounds newborn. Anesthetized for delivery, Estée never knew how they did it. Cranes, bulldozers, pulleys. There were yellow pustules on his scalp and a full set of teeth in his mouth, and he was strong and hungry enough at three days to eat a toenail off his own foot.

  Pete Magnus began by playing the dutiful father, plying his son with gifts of athletic equipment and filling the nursery with gleaming trophies of his adolescent sports prowess. Baby-blue shelves were lined with red and purple ribbons, brass-colored figurines wielding discuses and shot puts, silver cups and mounted plastic barbells. One slow summer afternoon, when Little Bill lay spent and sleeping in his crib, numb from the fervor of hyperactivity, Pete leaned over the side of the crib and whistled the tune to “Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life at Last I’ve Found You,” and was gouged in the cheek with a diaper pin. On the subject of his son’s giant stature and rampant growth spurt, however, he waxed proud. “Boy’s gonna be a linebacker, you wait and see,” he told Estée.

  An obstetrician’s lawsuit brought against them after William’s angry birth—pain, suffering, and medical costs for the functional loss of a thumb joint—constituted early warning to Estée, but Pete took the ordeal in stride. His son was a strapping lad, a powerhouse, a marvel of genetic engineering. He would build empires and feast on a breakfast of champions.

  First it was flies, cockroaches, slugs, and worms. During his first month, already crawling, William ingested four wasps and part of a poison berry bush when Estée’s tired head was turned and had to have his stomach pumped. This operation turned up, along with organic mulch, a waxy fragment of milk carton, a two-inch bolt, and a sodden box of Playtex.

  By the second month, like grandfather, like son, he had graduated to avifauna. When Estée took him outside to play, praying the cadaverous cast of his skin could benefit from ultraviolet exposure, extinction rates soared. Flycatchers and vireos made themselves scarce, leaving only the stubborn cowbirds to nest along the fringes of the golf course. Often Estée was forced to run interference for William with the elderly guests.

  “We visited the Cistern Chapel,” said a woman who had stopped beside Estée’s lawn chair to chat about a guided tour of Rome. Estée gazed past her blue hair to the base of a tall tree, where William squatted in his pen in a bright pool of sun, his Dodgers visor glinting. A windblown feather skittered over the grass and clung to one varicose nylon. “It was pretty, but not like the Hilton. At the Hilton they gave us itty-bitty cheeses. They had the taps that go on when you stand at the sink and water fountains right beside the toilet.”

  Estée walked past her to the tree. William’s chin and mouth were muddy with blood; he held a wingless sparrow in one chubby hand. Its beak opened and closed without sound. “Bad,” she told him sternly. “Dirty.” She knocked the bird out of his grasp, kicked it deftly to death, and knelt to clean his face with a Baby Wipe.

  “Ooh,” said the old lady, coming up behind them. “Here’s a widdle baybee.”

  William bared his teeth and spat out a feather.

  “Ooh! Stinky baby!”

  Pete Magnus threw a three-month birthday party for William complete with tooting paper horns, a cake in the shape of a palm tree, and pipe-cleaner monkeys for the cocktail straws. Female guests attended en masse for the sake of a few free mimosas, cooing over William’s bulk and manual dexterity while slyly pretending not to notice his ugliness. Even on good days Little Bill looked like tenderized beef and smelled like raw sewage. “Now, don’t worry dear,” remarked a melanoma-dappled Daughter of the American Revolution. “He’s just rashy. My first was homely as a child and now he’s married to Miss Teen Ohio.”

  A securities trader presented Pete with a BB gun to hold in trust for Little Bill, but the birthday boy found it and fired it at a dowager’s eyeball. The missile’s trajectory met tinted plastic lenses and the woman went unharmed, but after the party Pete felt it was necessary to discipline his son. Estée was alerted by guttural choking noises from the nursery and ran in to find William seated on his progenitor’s windpipe, jamming a stubby arm down Pete’s throat up to the elbow. When Estée pulled William off, Pete was livid and gasping. “Get me to a mirror!” he said, and raced to the bathroom door to check himself out. When he returned he had regained partial composure. “That dangling thing?”

  “The uvula,” said Estée. “Grape, in Latin.”

  “That little shit hadda holda my uvula. Thought he was giving me a goddamn tonsilectomy.”

  “Naughty William,” reproved Estée. “Daddy needs his dangling thing.”

  “Take a look in my mouth Esty. Swolled up like a bladder!”

  Later Pete insisted he had been faking his terror. Estée noted, however, that he avoided William for a week and was religious in his application of tan-toned cover-up to the bruises on his neck. He touched up constantly with the aid of a Q-tip and told people he had cut himself shaving. “Kid doesn’t need assertiveness training,” he joked wanly to Estée in private.

  Shortly thereafter William began to crawl out of his room and make nocturnal hunting forays, leaving his bloodied kills at the foot of Pete’s bed, entrails rent asunder. They ran the gamut from mice to gulls. At first Pete was brave in the face of the evidence. “Boys will be boys,” he proclaimed staunchly the first time he awoke to find William kneeling on his chest with a rat between his teeth. “Hey Esty, did he get a rabies shot?”

  But his bravado was only for show. In increments he transferred his attentions to management, ordering Armani suits cheap from Hong Kong, circulating among the guests and kitchen staff with claps to the back and jocular remarks, driving golf carts past the pool with a cheery wave to the swimmers. When he got out of bed in the morning he carefully stepped past the remains of small prey and locked himself in the bathroom to shave, leaving Estée to clean up the mess. Little Bill persisted with his offerings until he found the straw that broke the camel’s back. Pete had left his educational reading, a paperback tome entitled Money or Your Life, on the carpet beside his bed. While he slept the deep sleep of the guiltless, Little Bill
laid a gift on top of it: a skunk with its scent glands split open.

  “Fuck him,” said Pete, putting his foot down. “I don’t care if he’s the fruit of my loom. He’s an asshole.”

  It was clear that they had a security problem. Locks and windows were no match for William, who resisted confinement. Cleaned vermin bones piled up beside his carton of toddler-size Huggies; at night he scratched holes in the wallboard, ripped the plastic covers off electrical outlets, and stuck his tongue into sockets. Estée attempted to funnel his energy into educational tasks: she bought him 3-D puzzles, xylophones, and Tonka trucks, but William swallowed the star-shaped puzzle piece, chewed on wheels, and stuck xylophone parts up a dachshund.

  The nightly expeditions did not abate, so she tried locking him in at night with a bolt outside his door. This tactic met with instant failure. William refused to eat baby food, and when she forcefed him he disgorged the pabulum onto furniture and clothes. Afraid of a hunger strike, she stopped shooting the bolt. Natural selection was the name of the game and William was top of the food chain.

  A decorator named Charise was invited to stay in a guest suite free of charge while she redesigned the poolroom. Her toy poodle, Lili, whom she festooned with pink ribbons, walked past William’s window at twilight. The cadences of Charise’s voice grew familiar. “Here Lili,” she sang. “Little pretty Lili, come to pretty Mommy.” Every evening William pricked up his ears at the sound and ran to his window to sit on the ledge in silent vigil. His rapt eyes followed Lili as she trotted past, though his head did not turn. When, beneath a balmy red sky on a Tuesday, Lili escaped her rhinestone-studded leash and disappeared onto the darkened expanse of the first fairway, Estée was drinking coffee in the clubhouse kitchen. The poodle search was launched without her knowledge and ended when Lili was discovered shivering on the second green, emitting a high-pitched whine, with only three legs remaining.