Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  “I never really wanted a pet,” Isadora told him. “Never had one. I used to like insects a lot, you know, catch them in bottles, watch the grasshoppers roaming the grasses, but I never liked the neighborhood dogs much. They rambled and slobbered and nipped my hands and I’d get terrified. I’d walk around with my fingers curled up so they couldn’t get me. And then there were the bats, too.”

  “The what?” said Daniel.

  “Bats. Madison is full of them. Once I saw a pack of dogs attacking this dying bat. I saw the wings, I heard them. At first I thought it was just a starling or something, maybe one of the big crows that dips into our neighborhood, so I yelled at the dogs, I stampeded them, and this one dog—I remember, a yellow short-haired big dog—” Here Isadora paused. “He twisted around and his muzzle was dull with blood.” Isadora dug her hands into her pockets. “I saw the bat, mangled in the street, and then I threw up. Right there. After that, I wanted a night light in my room because I was sure bats roosted in the ceiling lamp.”

  He patted her shoulder. She liked the way his hand felt, and he told her that she just hadn’t met the right animals. “You wait,” he said. “Come and meet mine. You’ll fall in love.”

  She was silent for a moment, she noticed how dry her mouth had become, and then she said that the parrot didn’t look friendly.

  “Really? He usually loves women. Actually, this little goodie hates everyone but Allison, my ex-wife. God but Allison worshiped this thing. She’d uncage him all day. She could hold out her baby finger and he’d fly right to her, give her gentle little peck kisses against her lips. I’d just take a step toward this bird and he’d bite me. Allison used to tell me that the bird didn’t like me because I didn’t play with him enough. Jesus, I tried. I mean I took him out once and put him on the couch behind me. It was all right, I thought. He was walking back and forth, being a bird, languid, silent, but then suddenly he thrust forward and bit me on the back of my neck. I was so startled I couldn’t think. I just grabbed him with both my hands and threw him on the floor and then Allison stormed into the room, shouting at me, accusing me of abusing the bird. She said I was jealous because the bird liked her and not me.”

  Isadora cast a doubtful look at the parrot.

  “Oh he’s fine now,” Daniel said. “Although he has his days.”

  “How come you have him if he was Allison’s?”

  “I’ll tell you if you have lunch with me tomorrow. I promise to leave the parrot home.”

  “In that case—” said Isadora, her smile hidden by the night.

  They ate on the Diag, the grassy patch of land in the center of campus. He had packages of dried apricots and cashews and smoked Gouda cheese that you had to tug apart with your fingers. She brought a gallon jug of cheap wine because she was nervous. She didn’t have to be. The spaces in their conversation were almost immediately filled up by him. He ran on words.

  He told her that he was thirty-four, that he had married Allison when he was twenty-three and a biochemistry major and she was a history major, that they never had kids, just animals. “Those pets were our children,” he said. “I did kind of want kids, but whenever I brought the subject up, she had all kinds of wild stories for me, things about dogs mauling infants, about cats taking babies’ breath away. I told her we could always get rid of the animals, but you know, I probably wouldn’t have been able to. It was probably just talk on my part about having kids. I liked the idea of it, that was all.” He sighed. “She just liked the idea of it too, only she couldn’t admit that that was the truth.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know,” he said.

  He told her the pet store had started as a summer job, something to keep him in Ann Arbor, but he fell in love with the place, and he couldn’t wait for the owner to retire so he could buy it. He read about animals, he was happy, and the next year, he dropped everything to become a pet dealer full time. He said he loved it the moment he got up and could think about going into the shop, knowing it was his. Sometimes Allison would wander by and the two of them would watch the shop and talk to the customers and care for the animals. “God. What a good time,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “I divorced her because she hired a detective. Can you imagine? When you marry someone—when you love them, for God’s sake—you’re supposed to know who they are, you’re supposed to let them tell you, but Allison—she never trusted anything. She never even thought to ask me what she wanted to know. I didn’t even notice the detective at first. I was used to people trailing after me because of the animals. I almost always had one with me, a dog in from the breeder that I was walking until the owner could pick it up, a bird; once I had this tiny tree frog I kept on my palm.

  “Anyway, I noticed this guy—in a suit—always near me, even when it was just me, no animal or anything. It disconcerted me. I changed routes. I was always swooping and zipping in and out of stores but there he was. I got tired of it, so one day I just went right up to him and asked him why the fuck he was following me around like that, and he kind of looked at me, startled at first. He regained his composure and said I was mistaken. Then, very politely, he asked me for the time. I told him it was time for him to stop following me, and he left. Casually, unhurriedly, you know, as if nothing was wrong. I even went into Detroit once for this dog show, and there he was, right in the goddamned stands, binoculars strapped around his neck.”

  Daniel shook his head. “Look, I’m really good at spotting lies. Allison was always a terrible fibber; her face always gave her away. I gave her a chance, though. I really did. I asked her if someone was following her, too, and then I saw what went on her face when I asked. I heard the way her voice changed. She had never been jealous. Look, there just wasn’t any reason for her to feel something like that. I never saw many women in the shop, it was too far from campus, and I loved Allison. I really did. She was so funny, so bright, and if she wanted to know something, all she had to do was ask me. I’d never hide things that were really important to her.

  “I asked her if she had hired a detective. I wanted to know why she would even think of doing such a thing. I wasn’t angry, not then, but she became furious. She screamed at me that I was the one who was jealous because she was still going to school and was surrounded by guys while all I had was animals.”

  He stretched and looked at Isadora. “I don’t know. Maybe it was my fault. I destroyed some trust myself just by bringing up that detective stuff. She kept asking me where I thought she would come up with the money to hire someone. She showed me her bank stubs, and I said she was lying, that I could tell she was hiding something. “Oh, Mr. Psychic here,” she said.

  Isadora sat up. She shook her head at the chunk of white cheese he was starting to hand her.

  “I think she hired a detective. I think that was just the kind of love she had, where she wanted nothing better than to crawl right up inside of me and live there, see things through my eyes, breathe my air, be me as well as herself. Love like that isn’t love. Not to me. If she didn’t hire that guy, then who did? Someone had to; he didn’t follow me for kicks. We got divorced a few months after that. We just couldn’t trust each other.

  “It’s funny, but it’s been three years now, and I still like her. When I see that girl, I still get these flickers, that attraction; I feel everything racing inside of me. She wouldn’t see me for months after the divorce, and she wouldn’t take any of the animals, not even the parrot. She said she had to have a new place, a new life with nothing of me there to remind her of the past. I hated the parrot, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I used to leave the windows open, hoping it would fly out and someone would steal it for his own. It’s a gorgeous bird even though its disposition is horrid.

  “We became friends a year ago,” he said. “She came over one day because she said she missed the parrot. It was funny to see her after all that time. We had had no real contact. She wouldn’t take alimony, and during the school year Ann Arbor’s
so crowded I didn’t see her, and summers she took off. She was very cold to me, very polite, but as soon as she saw that bird she grinned. It went crazy, making noises, talking the few words it actually knew.

  “I made tea and we started talking, we became friends. Not at once. It was like she was all of a sudden a new person, someone I didn’t know, and it was fun to figure her out all over again, to maybe come to some different conclusions about her.

  “We see each other all the time now. She just lives a few blocks away, but I still have all the animals and she never got new ones. She said it made her feel disloyal to even think about it. We check up on each other, see who is dating whom, that sort of thing. But the only thing is that we can’t talk about the divorce, about the detective, not if we want to stay friends.” He rubbed one hand over his chin. “Maybe that’s why we can’t be lovers again.” He smiled suddenly at Isadora. “Gee, you look pretty,” he said.

  He stood up, started dusting himself off. “You could meet her if you want. She pops by the place. She kept her old key because she said she worried about the parrot. She wanted to be able to see him.”

  “Oh,” said Isadora, standing, letting him help her up.

  Isadora began spending time with Daniel. She liked the pet store, liked the way he wouldn’t cage things unless he had to, the way he wouldn’t stock dogs or cats but drove out to a breeder’s to pick out the best animal and then bring it back for a guaranteed sale. If a person changed his mind, then Daniel kept the animal himself. He did a funny kind of testing on all the animals before he selected them. He jiggled keys to see if they were curious, he watched how they were when he put his hands on them, hands scented with other animals, other breeds.

  He was careful about the people he sold to as well, even more careful than about the animals. He wouldn’t sell to anyone who said they wanted a show dog. “All that foolishness,” he told Isadora. “Prancing and showing off, being unanimal.” He wouldn’t sell to people who babytalked animals, either, because he said it demeaned the animals, it took away their dignity. He liked people who treated animals the way they would treat their friends.

  Daniel liked to have Isadora stand with him and watch the customers come into the store. He said he could automatically pick out the ones who were good with animals. He said he knew just by a walk, just by the way someone flexed his hands.

  “My mother says she can tell about things like that too,” said Isádora.

  “She can?” He was interested.

  “She thinks she can,” said Isadora. “It’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you.”

  “No maybes. Not with us.”

  Isadora was used to dodging out of conversations about Duse. She always tried to gauge the information she would reveal according to the manner of the question thrust at her. But Daniel was silent. He didn’t ask anything, even when she stopped after her first sentence, waiting, giving him a chance to be like most people she had encountered. He didn’t raise his brows or snicker, and when she mentioned the funny marking she carried in her hand, he simply took the hand and opened her fingers so he could see for himself.

  She stopped talking while he looked, and when he felt her hand tense, he looped toward her and kissed first her face and then the marking. When he freed her hand, she continued with her story. She relaxed because he was leaning so casually along the wall. When she was finished, she asked if he believed her.

  “I told you I know about lies,” he said. He crouched and dug out a packet of fish food from under the counter and started to tap and flutter flakes into the tank.

  “Well, what do you think?” she persisted.

  He stopped the feeding. “I don’t know,” he said looking at her. “I believe your mother does those things. I believe that she thinks there’s some power involved. But the thing is, I don’t know how all that jells with me. I like to think it’s true, but I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I,” said Isadora.

  “Hell, people can be whoever the hell they want, just as long as they don’t lie about it.”

  She saw how he was watching her and she began to feel as though he were peeling a layer of skin right off her, trying to see who and what she was. She felt suddenly that the slightest touch could wound, would scar. She was glad when she noticed the time, when she had a class to dash off to. She became all motion, whisking out of the store and back into the shiny hot streets.

  Daniel lived on East Williams Street, in an old clapboard house, and the place seemed to belong more to the animals than it did to him. Walking into his house, Isadora understood why Allison hadn’t taken any of the animals with her when she left. The three cats—a money cat, a calico, and a black—sunned themselves on the front porch and stared insolently at Isadora as she picked her way clear of them. Inside the house, the parrot was walking the bare wood floors, its claws clicking and skittering. Both dogs—a sheep dog and a fox terrier—were fighting on the couch, pawing one another and growling. Daniel led her through the house on what he called the animal tour. He showed her the rabbit hutch and the turtle tank that was braced with cat food, the only food the turtle would eat. “The cats hate cat food,” Daniel said. “I have to buy them cheap hamburger and mix it with an egg. The money cat will eat dog food though, but only the dry kind.”

  All the animals had names, sounds he rattled off to her, uncommon and unanimal. He gave them the names of things—the cats were Lamp and Table and Stovepipe, the dogs were Curtain and Scale, the rabbit Frypan, and the parrot Cigarette. “The names just fit,” Daniel said. “I mean, look at the son of a bitch. Doesn’t he remind you of something stubbed down into an ashtray?” He grinned at her; he kept grinning until the smile caught, until her mouth traced his. It was not such a crazy thing, naming animals like that. She knew all about naming rituals from Duse.

  Isadora began spending time at the house and she got used to mopping up the animal dust with the seat of her pants every time she plunked down to rest. Everything she wore seemed magnetized for animal dander, for the dirt the cats tracked silently in. She couldn’t sit down anywhere without the animals jouncing toward her. The cats wound in and out of her legs, the dogs propped their muddy paws on her knees, and even the parrot ventured sitting on her shoulder, although she never felt entirely comfortable with the big preening bird. They all seemed to like her, but it would take her a while to loosen up enough to like any of them.

  At first, when she saw an animal approach, she would just go into another room, shutting the door, ignoring their scratching pleas to be let in. When Daniel appeared, she would feign surprise at the animal sound, she would immediately open the door. She tried convincing the pets with her body that she didn’t want them in any kind of proximity to her; she nudged them back with her sneakered feet, she pushed them with her fingers.

  She would learn to tolerate the animals because of Daniel, and then, later, because of the magnanimous greeting they always gave her when she stepped into that house. It was a cacophony of sound; they made her feel as though no one was more important to them. They would jockey for position, scrambling on top of one another to get to her hands. She would learn to really love only one of them, though—Scale, the terrier.

  When she first saw Scale, he had a stiff cardboard clown collar about his neck because of a cataract operation. The collar was to prevent his scratching the stitches out. But he was a persistent dog; he didn’t care about the stitches, and it was Isadora who found him bleeding on the floor. She had to force herself to focus, to unstick her two hands from the wall and make herself go to him. He had chewed the collar free. She wasn’t sure how he had managed such a thing, but there it was, in two pieces. She and Daniel got the dog to the vet, but the eye was lost.

  Scale came home from the vet in a few days and Isadora was startled at the way that dog trailed her. He nuzzled her ankles, he kept watching her with his good eye as if he knew the part she played in his canine drama. She was sleeping at Daniel’s now, and Scale slept in the hollow of her stomach.
Sometimes he’d cock his head at her, tilting so he could always see her. He wouldn’t leave when they rolled into lovemaking, and she got used to his presence, to the way he fidgeted and moved on the bed so he wouldn’t be crushed in their heat.

  The parrot was the only animal she disliked. She told herself it was because that bird had a foul temper, but really, it was because it was Allison’s bird.

  It was a month before Isadora met Allison. Isadora was always a little tense when she walked into Daniel’s because she half expected Allison to be there. She had never seen a picture of her. Daniel had told Isadora that he had ripped up all of Allison’s pictures when they divorced, and now that they were friends, he saw no need to take any others. He said that if he wanted to look at her face, he could just call her up, that he didn’t need any celluloid. She kept asking for descriptions, but he kept changing his adjectives. Sometimes he said Allison was a little plump, other times he said she could use a few pounds. He never saw any discrepancy; he said change was the beauty of living.

  He offered several times to phone Allison and have them all share a dinner, but Isadora always slid right into an excuse. She had cramps, her hair was tacky with dirt and she didn’t have time to wash it. It was funny, though. Isadora could always tell when Allison called. She herself never answered Daniel’s phone, although he insisted it was her phone too. She listened when he spoke on the phone, she heard how he molded his voice. She’d hear Allison’s name in his mouth, she’d wonder at the way he laughed. He stayed on the phone for a very long time when he spoke with Allison, but when he hung up he never told Isadora what they had talked about, and she never asked. She always launched into a conversation about something else entirely.

  Sometimes, when Isadora walked into Daniel’s house, she thought she could tell whether Allison had been there or not. Daniel said she had all her afternoons sewn up because she was writing a thesis and the only time she could see the animals was around ten, a time that neither Isadora nor Daniel were home. Isadora would sniff at the air, trying to catch a new scent, an energy she wasn’t familiar with. She sometimes thought she sensed something different in the way the animals moved, in the sluggish prowling they did.