We So Seldom Look on Love

by Barbara Gowdy

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of something along those lines,” her father said. “A couple of months ago I read about a taxidermist in Yugoslavia who preserved his deceased son and claimed it was a great comfort.”

  He was stretched out beside her on her bed. Emma spent all day in bed, and her father and mother arrived at noon with lunch and Audubon field guides and photography magazines that had torn-out pages (where there were pictures of babies, Emma suspected) and editions of the American Journal of Proctology, which her father subscribed to for its dazzling full-colour photos of the colon, photos that if you didn’t know what you were looking at you’d think were of outer space.

  Her mother straightened the apartment and returned calls on the answering machine. Her father turned the pages. Emma didn’t know how he knew that looking at pictures was the only comfort, but it was. After her parents left, she slept until Gerry came home from work. In front of the television he wolfed down most of a family-sized bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. She lay on the couch and ate some of the french fries.

  One night, during a commercial, he said, “I was thinking today about when you walked off the end of the dock.”

  When she was ten or eleven years old, before she could swim, she walked off the end of a dock because she was attracted by the shimmering water. She sat at the bottom of the lake and waited to be saved. It was a story her father enjoyed telling.

  She looked at Gerry. “Oh, yeah?”

  “I was just thinking about it.”

  He told her he didn’t blame her. He didn’t blame Ed, although she did.

  5

  A woman in Argentina puts her fifteen-month-old son on the potty and leaves the room. A toilet falls through the floor of a passing airplane, crashes through the roof of the house and lands on the child, killing him. “Tot Terminated by Toilet,” the headline says.

  “Are you through with this?” Emma asks, holding up the paper.

  Marion doesn’t look. She is picking up live mice by their tails and tossing them from their cage into a box for a customer who owns a python. He’ll be in soon, the python wrapped around his shoulders. “Is that the one with the Siamese twins on the cover?” she asks.

  Emma closes the paper. “Yep.”

  “Well, I was thinking of writing to one fella in there,” Marion says. “Sounds up my alley, except that he wants long legs.”

  Ever since she stopped seeing Craig, Marion has been buying the tabloids for the personal ads. She confessed to Emma that last month she got up the nerve to write to a guy who described himself as a college-educated homebody and an animal lover. He wrote her back, on Ohio State Prison stationery, saying that he’d received forty letters and he’d need two pictures of her in the nude, a front shot and a back shot, so that he could narrow the field.

  “But go ahead,” she says to Emma. “Take it if you want. There’s an article about crib death. About how classical music prevents it.” She glances at Emma. “Hogwash, though, I’m sure.”

  “I played classical music for Nicky,” Emma says, tearing off the page with the toilet article. She folds the page and puts it in her purse. “My father made a tape.”

  “Well, there you go,” Marion says compassionately. She believes that Nicky died of infant death syndrome. When Emma and Gerry moved out here, they agreed that that would be the story.

  “Mozart, Haydn, Brahms,” Emma says. “All soft stuff.”

  Marion closes the cage and carries the box to the counter, where Emma is sitting on one of the stools. It’s a wooden box with thin gaps between the slats. A mouse must be hanging on the side. A pair of feet, four toes each foot, emerge from one of the gaps and grip the outside of the box. Emma runs her finger along the claws, which are milky and curled like miniature cat claws. “I wonder if they know,” she says.

  “Oh, Lord,” Marion says, grimacing. The two of them have had the conversation, several times, about the obscenity of the food chain. They agree on these things. They agree that dogs laugh but cats don’t. Fish feel the hook. They agree that there’s an argument to be made for lizards—the ones with break-away tails that grow back—as representing the highest order of life.

  It’s Hot Rod Reynolds, the male stripper, on the phone. “Jay Reynolds” is the name he gives, but when he says he got her number from Hal, the manager of the Bear Pit, it rings a bell and Emma says, “Not Hot Rod,” and he says that’s right.

  “You’re kidding.” She laughs. She’s remembering his acne and the woman shrieking to be wrapped in his cape.

  “So you caught my act,” he says.

  “Are you calling from Miami?” she kids.

  “So, what d’you think?”

  “About what?”

  “My act?”

  She takes a breath. “Why are you calling?” she asks. She suddenly has the sick feeling that Hal, a man she hardly knows, knows she sleeps around and has recommended her for a good time. She zeroes in on the guy who wears the hard hat as the guy who talked.

  But Hot Rod says, “I’ve got a dog here looks half dead.” He says he’s been staying at the motel behind the Bear Pit, checking out the trout fishing, and there’s this stray mutt he’s been feeding and letting sleep in his room. He phoned the vet, but nobody was there. Hal said that she was a sort of vet.

  “What’s the matter with it?” she asks.

  “It’s foaming at the mouth. Panting like crazy. Hal thinks it’s heat stroke.”

  She agrees. She tells him to put the dog in the bathtub and to run cold water over it. Half an hour later he phones back to say that the dog seems a lot better and to ask if he owes her anything. “Forget it,” she says. But the next day he turns up at her house with a fish that he has gutted and wrapped in newspaper.

  “If you don’t want it, your animals might,” he says.

  She is struck by his awful teeth. “Thanks,” she says.

  “Emma Trevor, cat groomer,” he says, reading the calligraphic door sign that her father made for her. He looks off to one side as if for no other reason than to present her with his profile. His hair is slicked back. His nose is upturned. His skin is almost clear—from being out in the sun, she figures. He is wearing tight blue jeans and an orange tank top and holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. His teeth and unreasonable vanity she finds touching. As she expects a client any minute, she doesn’t invite him in. “Come back in an hour,” she says.

  These days she takes precautions. Condoms. A warning that if Gerry finds out he’ll blow the guy’s balls off. “With this,” she says, showing the gun. The gun was Gerry’s father’s, it isn’t loaded, and Gerry wants to get rid of it, but Emma keeps it beside the bed, to scare off intruders, Gerry believes, and he’s half right. If Emma feels guilt over other men it’s when she tells this lie about Gerry, who is so gentle he not only won’t kill the ants in their kitchen, he dots the counter with honey to feed them.

  But the warning works. She can see that the guys are scared, although never scared off. Hot Rod asks if he can hold it, and when she hands it to him he dances around the room, gripping it in both hands, arms straight, and getting hard so fast she suggests he use a gun in his act.

  He frowns, considering. “Too obvious,” he says.

  He’s a noisy lover. He groans and makes weird yelping noises and thumps the wall with his fist. Which is why they don’t hear the car pull into the drive or the front door opening. Gerry is right in the bedroom before they realize he’s home.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hot Rod says.

  Gerry bows his head. “Sorry,” he murmurs and leaves the room.

  Hot Rod lunges for the gun, rolls out of bed, throws open the window and tosses the gun into the neighbour’s yard.

  She accompanies Hot Rod to the door because she wants to retrieve the gun. TheTV is on. As they pass through the kitchen she looks into the living room and sees the back of Gerry’s head and his hand reaching toward a bowl on the end table.

  “Will he come after me?” Hot Rod a
sks when they are outside. His tank top is on inside-out. His hair is shooting off in all directions. He looks goofy and very young, and she knows that anything she says he will believe.

  “Probably not,” she says. “Not if you keep your mouth shut.”

  He bites his lip.

  “If I were you, though, I’d get out of town.” She says it to deliver her line, to sound like the sheriff. She doesn’t care if he leaves or not. Out here in the driveway, with the asphalt scalding her feet and the gun glinting in Mrs. Gaitskill’s rose bush, the possibilities of what might happen next seem endless and out of her hands.

  “I was thinking of leaving tomorrow anyway,” Hot Rod says.

  She climbs over the split-rail fence and plucks the gun from the bush. If Mrs. Gaitskill has seen her, she has no idea what she’ll say. She puts the gun on top of the fridge, out of sight, and then goes into the living room and sits on the couch. Gerry scoops a handful of potato chips from the bowl.

  “God speaks to us in silence,” the man on theTV says. He strikes her as a man who would either love you or beat you to death. Gerry seems arrested by this man. The notion that she has shocked Gerry into sudden religious fanaticism is preferable to what she is certain he’s thinking.

  “I’m sorry you walked in on that,” she says.

  Gerry switches off theTV and slowly turns his head. She sees his blue eye and then his gold eye and the redness around them that would appear to be from crying but isn’t. She imagines Hot Rod taking credit for the pain and incredulity that have been in Gerry’s eyes for five years, and now she is glad that he is leaving town.

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” Gerry says quietly. “Except—” He glances at the blankTV screen. “Except that I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You won’t,” she murmurs.

  “I know I’m a fat slob,” he says.

  “God, Gerry—”

  “It’s just that I’d prefer it if you did it somewhere else.”

  She looks down at her hands, and there is Hot Rod’s semen, dried and flaky on her palm.

  “I’m not blaming you,” he says.

  She can feel the pressure building behind her eyes.

  “Listen,” Gerry says. “Whatever it takes.”

  That’s it. That’s what she knew he was thinking. She begins to cry. “This is not consolation!” she wants to shout. She has it in her to show him the semen on her hand and shout, “This is recovery! Do you want the truth? This is who I am!”

  But she loves him. That is also the truth.

  She cries without a sound. Presently she stands up and says, “I’ll start supper.”

  “Okay,” Gerry says. He turns theTV back on.

  She sways a little. It’s a sweltering day, she is burning up. If a budgie lands on a hot stove, its feet melt. There are a million truths. She understands that she has no idea which ones matter.

  She is light-headed because she is pregnant. But she doesn’t know that yet.

  We So Seldom Look on Love

  When you die, and your earthly self begins turning into your disintegrated self, you radiate an intense current of energy. There is always energy given off when a thing turns into its opposite, when love, for instance, turns into hate. There are always sparks at those extreme points. But life turning into death is the most extreme of extreme points. So just after you die, the sparks are really stupendous. Really magical and explosive.

  I’ve seen cadavers shining like stars. I’m the only person I’ve ever heard of who has. Almost everyone senses something, though, some vitality. That’s why you get resistance to the idea of cremation or organ donation. “I want to be in one piece,” people say. Even Matt, who claimed there was no soul and no afterlife, wrote a P.S. in his suicide note that he be buried intact.

  As if it would have made any difference to his energy emission. No matter what you do—slice open the flesh, dissect everything, burn everything—you’re in the path of a power way beyond your little interferences.

  I grew up in a nice, normal, happy family outside a small town in New Jersey. My parents and my brother are still living there. My dad owned a flower store. Now my brother owns it. My brother is three years older than I am, a serious, remote man. But loyal. When I made the headlines he phoned to say that if I needed money for a lawyer, he would give it to me. I was really touched. Especially as he was standing up to Carol, his wife. She got on the extension and screamed, “You’re sick! You should be put away!”

  She’d been wanting to tell me that since we were thirteen years old.

  I had an animal cemetery back then. Our house was beside a woods and we had three outdoor cats, great hunters who tended to leave their kills in one piece. Whenever I found a body, usually a mouse or a bird, I took it into my bedroom and hid it until midnight. I didn’t know anything about the ritual significance of the midnight hour. My burials took place then because that’s when I woke up. It no longer happens, but I was such a sensitive child that I think I must have been aroused by the energy given off as day clicked over into the dead of night and, simultaneously, as the dead of night clicked over into the next day.

  In any case, I’d be wide awake. I’d get up and go to the bathroom to wrap the body in toilet paper. I felt compelled to be so careful, so respectful. I whispered a chant. At each step of the burial I chanted. “I shroud the body, shroud the body, shroud little sparrow with broken wing.” Or “I lower the body, lower the body …” And so on.

  Climbing out the bathroom window was accompanied by: “I enter the night, enter the night …” At my cemetery I set the body down on a special flat rock and took my pyjamas off. I was behaving out of pure inclination. I dug up four or five graves and unwrapped the animals from their shrouds. The rotting smell was crucial. So was the cool air. Normally I’d be so keyed up at this point that I’d burst into a dance.

  I used to dance for dead men, too. Before I climbed on top of them, I’d dance all around the prep room. When I told Matt about this he said that I was shaking my personality out of my body so that the sensation of participating in the cadaver’s energy eruption would be intensified. “You’re trying to imitate the disintegration process,” he said.

  Maybe—on an unconscious level. But what I was aware of was the heat, the heat of my danced-out body, which I cooled by lying on top of the cadaver. As a child I’d gently wipe my skin with two of the animals I’d just unwrapped. When I was covered all over with their scent, I put them aside, unwrapped the new corpse and did the same with it. I called this the Anointment. I can’t describe how it felt. The high, high rapture. The electricity that shot through me.

  The rest, wrapping the bodies back up and burying them, was pretty much what you’d expect.

  It astonishes me now to think how naive I was. I thought I had discovered something that certain other people, if they weren’t afraid to give it a try, would find just as fantastic as I did. It was a dark and forbidden thing, yes, but so was sex. I really had no idea that I was jumping across a vast behavioural gulf. In fact, I couldn’t see that I was doing anything wrong. I still can’t, and I’m including what happened with Matt. Carol said I should have been put away, but I’m not bad-looking, so if offering my body to dead men is a crime, I’d like to know who the victim is.

  Carol has always been jealous of me. She’s fat and has a wandering eye. Her eye gives her a dreamy, distracted quality that I fell for (as I suppose my brother would eventually do) one day at a friend’s thirteenth birthday party. It was the beginning of the summer holidays, and I was yearning for a kindred spirit, someone to share my secret life with. I saw Carol standing alone, looking everywhere at once, and I chose her.

  I knew to take it easy, though. I knew not to push anything. We’d search for dead animals and birds, we’d chant and swaddle the bodies, dig graves, make popsicle-stick crosses. All by daylight. At midnight I’d go out and dig up the grave and conduct a proper burial.

  There must have been some chipmunk sickness that summer.
Carol and I found an incredible number of chipmunks, and a lot of them had no blood on them, no sign of cat. One day we found a chipmunk that evacuated a string of foetuses when I picked it up. The foetuses were still alive, but there was no saving them, so I took them into the house and flushed them down the toilet.

  A mighty force was coming from the mother chipmunk. It was as if, along with her own energy, she was discharging all the energy of her dead brood. When Carol and I began to dance for her, we both went a little crazy. We stripped down to our underwear, screamed, spun in circles, threw dirt up into the air. Carol has always denied it, but she took off her bra and began whipping trees with it. I’m sure the sight of her doing this is what inspired me to take off my undershirt and underpants and to perform the Anointment.

  Carol stopped dancing. I looked at her, and the expression on her face stopped me dancing, too. I looked down at the chipmunk in my hand. It was bloody. There were streaks of blood all over my body. I was horrified. I thought I’d squeezed the chipmunk too hard.

  But what had happened was, I’d begun my period. I figured this out a few minutes after Carol ran off. I wrapped the chipmunk in its shroud and buried it. Then I got dressed and lay down on the grass. A little while later my mother appeared over me.

  “Carol’s mother phoned,” she said. “Carol is very upset. She says you made her perform some disgusting witchcraft dance. You made her take her clothes off, and you attacked her with a bloody chipmunk.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said. “I’m menstruating.”

  After my mother had fixed me up with a sanitary napkin, she told me she didn’t think I should play with Carol any more. “There’s a screw loose in there somewhere,” she said.

  I had no intention of playing with Carol any more, but I cried at what seemed like a cruel loss. I think I knew that it was all loneliness from that moment on. Even though I was only thirteen, I was cutting any lines that still drifted out toward normal eroticism. Bosom friends, crushes, pyjamaparty intimacy, I was cutting all those lines off.