Something Wild

by Hanna Halperin

  Together they step inside. The room is dark and sour smelling; all the shades are pulled down. The only light emanates from a blue TV screen, stuck on a channel with no reception. Across the room a man is propped up in bed. Dan. Eddie. He nods mildly. “Oh,” he says, and Nessa clears her throat.

  “I’ll let you guys talk,” says Heather, and then she leaves.

  Nessa approaches the bed. She is unprepared and terrified. In her pocket, she presses her thumb against the cool blade of the scissors. Heather is right; he does look different. The skin on his face droops and his eyes blink lifelessly, tucked away in their sockets. The hair on his head is sparse and patchy, whether from chemotherapy or age, she isn’t sure. The only other time she saw him he’d been wearing a hat.

  Nessa sits on the edge of the bed and Eddie regards her emotionlessly. She can tell he doesn’t recognize her. She slips her hands under her thighs to keep them from shaking.

  “You don’t know who I am,” she says. “Do you?”

  Eddie furrows his brow, then shakes his head.

  “We met years ago.”

  “What’d Heather say your name was?”

  “Nessa.”

  “Nessa,” he repeats. “I don’t know any Nessas. None that I can remember. A Vanessa maybe, but no Nessas. Heather says you’re a dog walker?”

  And that time, hearing him talk: it comes flooding back. His reserve; his calm; the almost serene way he’d spoken to them that night. “How old are you girls?” he’d asked gently, the way an adult would ask a child. He’d seen them exactly the way they’d wanted to be seen. Two beautiful young girls, two variations of the same thing. Your choice, take your pick.

  “Nessa is my real name,” Nessa says. “When I met you, I told you my name was Lola.” This time it’s easier for her to talk. She pulls her hands out from under her legs and holds them tightly in her lap.

  Eddie shrugs. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “You also met my sister,” she says. “Layla?” But Eddie’s gaze remains dull and indifferent.

  “And you told us your name was Dan.”

  Something flashes in his eyes then: recognition, or maybe confusion. It’s hard to tell.

  Nessa glances across the bed. It has the sunken, lived-in stench of a bed that has become a home. Where he eats and naps and sleeps and passes the hours in between. “How old is your daughter, Eddie?” Nessa asks.

  “Why,” he says. His voice is flat, almost bored, like he doesn’t care about the answer, but his body has stiffened.

  “How old is she?”

  “Why do you want to know?” He looks directly at Nessa, and it frightens her, even though his arms are weak and motionless by his sides.

  She stands, her body humming from the inside out. “Do you remember the time you paid a fourteen-year-old girl one hundred dollars to have sex with you?”

  Eddie’s eyes widen. He stares at her, letting his eyes travel slowly from her face down her body. A muscle in his face twitches, as though trying to stifle some reaction.

  “Get out,” he says quietly, and the way he says it—she knows he knows who she is. He’s remembering it.

  Nessa takes a step forward so she’s standing over him. Up close he’s older and sicker and he smells. She searches his eyes for fear. “I want to know how old your daughter was when you raped my little sister.”

  And then he laughs, a thin, humorless laugh. “Get out of my house,” he says, and even his anger sounds hollow, an old habit he carries around with him.

  She reaches for the scissors in her pocket. “You should be ashamed of yourself.” It’s something she’s said to him thousands of times in her head, and it feels surreal to say it out loud.

  “What are you here to do?” he says. “Scold me?” And when she doesn’t say anything he smiles. “Kill me?”

  Nessa can feel herself beginning to unravel. It isn’t fair how calm he is. He’s supposed to be frightened. “How would you feel,” she says, her voice rising, “if you found out that an old man had raped your daughter when she was fourteen years old?”

  “I never raped anyone.” He’s no longer smiling. “And you think that girl downstairs is my daughter? She’s not. She’s just the greedy bitch who wants my money and my house when I die—which, lucky for her, is probably soon. Unless you want to help her out and kill me now.” He raises his hairless eyebrows—it’s the chemotherapy, she realizes—and leans forward. “Your sister wanted it,” he says quietly. “She couldn’t get enough of it. Right here on this bed. Moaning and groaning, begging me to—”

  Nessa hurls the scissors across the room to make him shut up. They clatter against the wall and drop to the floor and he looks at her, dead-eyed.

  And then, in one achingly clear moment, it occurs to Nessa how disturbing it is that she’s back here, in this sick man’s house, for the second time in her life. There is nothing he will say, she realizes, that will answer any question of hers. And there is nothing she could say or do—nothing—that will make this man, Dan or Eddie, whoever he is, feel remorse for what he did.

  Nessa is wasting her time. He has started to talk again, watching her face, eager for an audience, as it’s clear he spends most of his time alone. Silently, she turns around and walks out the bedroom door, shutting it behind her. She hears his voice falter then, finally, stop altogether.

  By the time Tanya gets home her head is pounding, and when she walks inside her apartment and is assaulted by the smell of paint, it does nothing to help her mood or her head.

  She stands in the doorway of her and Eitan’s shared office, surveying the damage. Eitan has moved all their filing cabinets into the hallway and pushed the furniture—their two desks and desk chairs, as well as several bookshelves—into the middle of the room. The walls, all but one, have been painted a sickly yellow that reminds her of courtroom 1.

  “Are you serious?” she says when she hears him come up behind her. She feels his hand on her back and she swats it away and whirls around to look at him. The last remains of a smile are melting off his face. Clearly he was thinking this would be a welcome surprise.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No, not particularly, Eitan.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “Why would you think that?” Her migraine is severe, her ears pulsing hotly on either side of her head like ticking bombs. There was an obscene amount of traffic on the Triborough Bridge, and for the entire five-hour drive she was bombarded with incoming text messages from her mother and sister. Don’t be mad; are you mad? Asked in at least a dozen different ways.

  Eitan looks dejected. “I know you had a shitty weekend. I thought this would cheer you up. I asked management and they said it was fine.”

  “Shitty is a kind way to describe the weekend I had,” she says. “The paint fumes are going to make my head explode. Can you open a few windows?” She brushes past him and storms into the kitchen. “Please,” she calls over her shoulder.

  In the kitchen she pours herself a glass of water and searches through the drawer where they keep pain relievers. “Where the fuck is the ibuprofen?”

  Eitan appears. “Tan—”

  “Found it.” She opens the bottle and shakes two white pills into her palm.

  “Tanya, I’m not sure you should be taking that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re pregnant. You really should be taking Tylenol if you’re—”

  Tanya holds up her other hand. “Don’t tell me what or what not to put in my body. You’ve put enough in there as it is.”

  Eitan holds up his hands in surrender.

  “I have a migraine. And while you spent the weekend painting, I spent the weekend in a shithole motel trying to convince my mother not to go back to a man who strangled her to the point where her eye vessels burst—she had fucking bloody eyes, Eitan. And guess what! She went ba
ck. And please, Eitan, don’t look at me that way.”

  “What way?”

  “With your God eyes,” Tanya says. His God eyes are his serious eyes, his kind eyes. “I don’t want to cry. It’s past the point of being cathartic. At this point it will just make me puffy tomorrow at work.”

  Eitan nods. “Okay,” he says. “I get that.”

  “So please don’t start acting all sweet; I really can’t stand it right now.”

  “Okay. No crying.”

  Tanya doesn’t answer. She swallows the pills and fills her glass with water again and gulps that down, too.

  “How about food? You must be hungry.”

  “I’m starving,” says Tanya. “I could eat your face.”

  “I can see that.”

  “What should we get?”

  Eitan starts listing: “Mexican, Korean, Chinese, the sub place. What? Why are you making that face?”

  “I went out to dinner with my mom and Nessa,” she says. “I was a huge bitch. I left the restaurant while they were eating.”

  “You’re a good daughter, you know that, right?”

  “I told you I don’t need a pep talk.”

  “I’m not trying to give you one. But you’ve gone through hell this weekend. And it’s because you care so much about them.”

  Tanya sinks down to the floor and leans her head against the cabinet. “Nessa says my mom isn’t ready to leave him. What’s going to make her ready? Another injury? Another man? Another three weeks to think it over? I’ve seen enough of these cases to know—scumbags like Jesse don’t change. And it doesn’t look good for her if she keeps being wishy-washy in court. What the hell would you do if you were me, Eitan? I don’t know how to get through to her that Jesse is playing her.”

  Eitan sits, too, leaning against the opposite wall, and she’s grateful that he’s not trying to touch her. “You know, this woman came into the hospital the other day with a broken wrist. Her husband threw her down the stairs. I looked in her chart and she’s been to the ER four times in the last year alone. All DV. Baldwin was on call and he was talking with her, you know, telling her that she was in an abusive relationship and that she had to get out, that if she went back to him she was only going to end up back in the ER.

  “And the woman just kept nodding, saying, Yes, Doctor, I understand, thank you, thank you. She was very agreeable and polite, you know—very gracious. So finally, Baldwin finishes his lecture and leaves. I go back into her room an hour later to discharge her. I don’t think she recognized me or even realized I’d been in the room before with Baldwin. I asked her how she was feeling, and she said fine, and then I asked her if anyone was coming to pick her up from the hospital and help her get home—she was in a cast and on painkillers—and she just smiles and says, ‘Oh, my husband is just across the hall in the restroom.’ And I could have shaken her, Tanya. I was so close to saying something, and then I realized . . . this woman is being told all day, every day, what to do. At home she’s being told what to do by her husband, and then when she comes in to get help, she’s getting told by all these other men what to do.” Eitan shrugs.

  “So what did you do?” asks Tanya.

  “I told her I was glad she was feeling better and to come back if there were any problems.”

  “And you think that’s enough?”

  “No,” Eitan says. “Not really. But nothing that I was going to say was going to change her mind about her husband.”

  “It’s different, though, Eitan. That’s your patient. This is my mom.”

  “I know. And I’m not trying to say it’s the same thing. I just think you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to fix your mother’s life. And I don’t know if that’s even possible.”

  “No,” Tanya says. “You might be right.” And she feels terribly sad then, thinking about how far away everyone is from everybody else. Instinctually, she puts her hands on her still-flat stomach, realizing it only moments afterward.

  “Yellow,” she says. “Why, of all colors, is that the one appointed gender-neutral?”

  “I should have asked you first about painting.”

  “Yeah,” says Tanya. “You should have.” She closes her eyes. “So you think I should just wait for my mom to realize it on her own? Wait for her to be ready?”

  “Do you have any other choice?”

  Tanya opens her eyes and looks at her husband. She both loves him desperately and is irritated beyond belief with him, and she realizes that she’ll probably feel this way about him countless times in the future.

  “Probably not,” she says. “Burritos?”

  He smiles at her. “Order in or go out?”

  “What do you feel like?”

  “Let’s go out,” he says. “I need a break from the fumes.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY WALK THE FOUR BLOCKS up to the burrito place and eat outside, sitting beside one another on a bench across from a fenced-in playground. Tanya orders a pulled pork burrito with guacamole. Eitan keeps kosher, not out of obligation but out of habit—after twenty-some years of not eating pork and shellfish, it doesn’t appeal to him.

  Sometimes Tanya finds herself going out of her way to order pork when she’s with Eitan as some sort of test. When is it finally going to piss him off? When is he going to want his Jewish wife?

  Tanya goes back and forth on whether or not she’s really Jewish. She was born into a family that called itself Jewish, and in some ways, that’s been hard to shake. Lorraine married Jonathan beneath a chuppah, took and kept the Bloom last name. Her mother looks at home in the wedding photos, holding Jonathan’s hand; up in the chair, laughing. The only hint of Lorraine’s Catholicism is the prominent cross around Lorraine’s mother’s neck in the background of the photos. A mezuzah hung on their doorpost at 12 Winter Street for the first ten years of Tanya’s life.

  Lorraine was the one who used to drop the girls off at Hebrew school and pick them up each week. After the divorce, though, Lorraine stopped driving Tanya to Hebrew school on Thursday afternoons. Nessa’s bat mitzvah, which was supposed to take place later that year, never happened. On Hanukkah they still lit the menorah and Lorraine would give them gifts, but without Jonathan there to lead them, they didn’t sing the prayers. None of them knew the Hebrew well enough. After a while they stopped with the candles, and then eventually they were too old for gifts. Sometimes Tanya and Nessa went to Lexington for Passover seder or Rosh Hashanah, but usually Simone’s family was there, too. It didn’t feel like it used to.

  Tanya has always associated Judaism with Jonathan—but she also associates Judaism with family, with togetherness, with childhood. Something to do with her mother and her sister and herself. To her, the memory of Judaism is a tender one, like waking up on a snow day as a kid—outside bright and glittering; inside, dark and warm with sleep.

  “That’s the safest I ever felt,” Tanya told Eitan once. “Snow-day mornings. My parents outside shoveling, Nessa and me in our bunk bed.” At his house in Lexington, her father has one of those electric snowblowers. Tanya doubts that Simone has ever shoveled in her life. She wonders if her father ever missed it—his life in Arlington. There were hardly any perfect moments, the four of them together. There weren’t even very many good ones. It’s not that her parents had fought so much. Mostly she remembers silence. Her mother making a joke—her father not laughing at it or feigning confusion. I don’t get it. Her mother recounting a story from her day, her father not really listening—Nessa doing the listening instead.

  But snow-day mornings, she thinks, were probably the best.

  Now, though, she associates Judaism with Eitan. She probably doesn’t even count, she thinks, with her Catholic mother, with her pork. But right now, sitting on the Upper West Side with her ex-Orthodox husband, Tanya does feel Jewish. And she has the strong sense that the child inside of her is
as well—whatever the hell that means.

  * * *

  —

  TANYA FINISHES HER BURRITO before Eitan even gets started on his second half, and she wonders why it’s possible for her to eat this way in front of Eitan but not in front of her family. Eitan’s always relished watching her eat. “I love when you want something, and then you get it,” he’s told her. He means food and sex—earthly pleasures. Things like a job, or a raise, or even a nice outfit—he wants all those things for her, too. But there’s something about seeing someone you love satisfy a craving.

  She remembers one time, early on in their relationship, watching him attempt to untie a knot. It was a drawstring on a sweatshirt of hers that had tangled in the wash. She’d grown frustrated with it and brought it to him, then watched as he delicately and patiently plucked at the fierce knot, until eventually it loosened and he managed to pull it free. She was taken aback by how aroused this made her—watching his fingers maneuver the string, the slight twitch of the veins in his hands as he did so. By the time he’d unknotted it, she so badly wanted him to touch her, to apply the same concentration and tenderness that he’d applied to that ridiculous drawstring, that she actually said to him, “Can we fuck?”—a sentence that Tanya had never uttered in her life, and has never uttered since. Afterward, when they were lying in bed naked below the waist, she told him about the string.

  He listened intently. They weren’t touching, but there was a humming in the space between their bodies. “You’re so sexy, you know that?” he said.

  Sexy and sex had always seemed like two separate things to Tanya. She felt sexy often—in the mornings, freshly showered and made up for work. When she delivered a smart argument; when she spoke her mind. At night in her glasses and underwear, reading before bed. Sex, though, brought up a whole lot of unsexy things for Tanya: There were the smells and the secretions, the hair in unfortunate places. There were unsexy sounds, ones that escaped before you were able to stop them. There were thoughts that passed through her mind during sex, that maybe in the moment were exciting, though afterward struck her as shameful, disgusting; pornographic.