by Lydia Millet
“We’re not going to find her just because we suffer,” he said.
“Yes,” said Casey. “We are.”
“I should have worn different shoes.”
“What are those, Ferragamos? Fulton was right. Sometimes you dress really gay.”
“It’s not gay, Case. It’s expensive.”
On the way home along the bicycle path his feet hurt. A poodle with a tall bearded man in tight shorts, a Dalmatian with two lesbians, a pug with a fat man, a Chihuahua with an emaciated woman wearing too many bangles. All of them. But not her.
At the apartment door he remembered he should not let Casey in. On the floor in his dining room were the snarled, half-inside-out legs of his wetsuit; evidence was everywhere. But he was too sore to keep up his guard. He had to collapse.
“It’s a mess,” he said wearily as he opened the door for her, and strode ahead to scoop up the most obvious traces and hurl them into a closet.
“What are you doing with an article about a rare tortoise and off-roading? You getting into ORVs suddenly?”
“Impact fees. A casino project,” he mumbled, lowering himself onto the couch. He kicked off his shoes and heaved his feet up on the arm. “You need anything?”
“I’m hungry.”
“Chinese takeout in the fridge,” he said, closing his eyes. “But it’s from yesterday. No, wait. Two days ago.”
“Disgusting … really. What is this stuff?” said Casey. “What?”
“About animals? All this material. Everywhere.” “Told you! Research for a project.”
“A lot of it.”
He shrugged. “Money at stake. You know me.” She gazed at him for a moment, then let it go.
They drank a bottle of white wine with the TV playing and then they drank another; they lolled on sofa and chair, drunk and still drinking. He felt relief that she had let him off so easy. His secret remained securely hidden.
“I’m going to go out on your balcony,” she said after a while, and left him there, eyes glazed over: there seemed to be a prizefight on, men sweating. He looked around for the remote, but did not see it. He was tired.
What if his dog appeared below? Casey might fail to see her. Casey’s view was limited from the chair, her seated position. His dog had always liked the pool, tail wagging as she moved and sniffed among the long knifelike leaves of the tiger lilies … he got up and went through the sliding doors to the rail.
Below the turquoise pool water glittered, empty.
“I thought she might be there,” he murmured, and then looked over at Casey. Her face was turned from him.
“You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t have a clue. You’re not as arrogant as I thought, I guess.”
“What?” he said sharply, a clutch of fear. “Know what?” “It’s damaging to say it,” she said. “But it can’t be helped.
It’s too bad. But without honesty I don’t have anything. Once your body’s taken from you, or at least your independence in the body, the only thing you have left is this, like, idea of yourself. It’s an idea of character, or something. If I lie or hide, that’s taken from me too. So I have to tell you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he rushed. “Case, you’re scaring me here. What is it? Are you sick?”
“No. Just pathetic. I love you.”
“I love you too, Case. You know that. So tell me. What is it?”
“No, that’s it.”
She turned her face toward him finally, small and white with wide eyes.
“… that …”
He felt nauseated. She studied him sadly: this was grim. “Yes.”
He turned and looked out at the palm fronds, still. He was glad of the lights, which gave him an excuse to look elsewhere.
“I thought it would go away. For Chrissake, you wear Ferragamos. And there’s this one shirt you have with blue stripes on it that really dorks you up. No man should ever, ever wear a blue-striped shirt with a white collar.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” “It should be federal law.”
“Or maybe I should wear it more often. Then your crush will go away.”
“It’s not a crush, T. If it was I wouldn’t bother telling you.” “Whatever it is.”
“And don’t feel you have to explain how deep but completely platonic your feelings are. It’s obvious. I never expected
anything else. I know I’m like the cute paraplegic sister you never had.”
“You like to speak for me.”
“I’m good at it. Don’t you think?”
He bent down and put his arms around her; she rested her forehead stiffly against his collarbone.
Inside she put on music and they drank more and danced giddily, she by moving her wheels on the slick kitchen floor. They went to his closet and she tore shirts off hangers, threw the shoes she disliked into a laundry hamper. He thought of the hundreds of dollars they represented, indeed thousands, and as he thought this she raced away from him toward the sliding doors with the hamper balanced on her lap. On the balcony she tipped it over the edge.
Right behind her he looked down and saw the shoes floating in the pool.
“I can’t believe you did that,” he said, but he could. She was at her bag, pulling out a vial.
“Have some of these,” she said. “They’re for pain.” “I don’t have pain,” he said.
“Then take them for mine.”
He thought of all that he had always forfeited, how he always kept control. How he never lost his hold on himself for even a moment.
He swallowed the pills.
“I want to go swimming,” she said, and was already on her way out.
In the elevator she pulled off her sweater. Beneath she wore a cotton undershirt; her torso was surprisingly lovely, compact and muscular.
“I don’t have my flotation device,” she said. “You’re not serious.”
“You’re going to have to be my buddy,” she said. “Never go swimming without a buddy, T.!”
“But it’s three a.m. The sign says closed after midnight.” “Really, T.,” and she shook her head, “who gives a shit?
You’re such a prig.” “Proud of it.”
“Have you ever even been in this pool the whole time you lived here?”
“Once, in the first week.” “I’m going in the deep end.”
“Wait!” he said desperately, but she was already out the back door of the lobby and headed for the pool deck. “How does this work?” he called after her, but she ignored him.
A few moments later she was rising in her chair, lifted on her strong arms: and then she fell forward into the water and sank like a stone. He jumped in, panicking.
As he heaved her head and shoulders above the surface, sputtering and soaking in his clothes, he thought she was crying but in fact it was laughter.
“I do pool physio all the time, fool,” she said, water running down her face. “You didn’t, like, save my life or some shit.”
“Good. You don’t deserve it.”
She pushed his head under, holding the rim of the pool with the other arm. Submerged—he stayed because he wanted to: the lights on the sides of the pool were bright and hypnotic—he thought that he admired her. He looked at her ribcage, her flat, lean abdomen, his eyes smarting from the chlorine; her shirt floated above her belly. Behind her the pool lights wavered and dazzled him. Hard to keep his eyes wide; the eyeballs smarted. But he was busy seeing. He admired her bravery. She was a heroine.
In the water beneath them her legs receded, white and tapering to a distant point of feet; but here any legs would recede that way, pale and disappearing. Other legs would be moving in the water, that was all.
He saw his own legs; he could barely keep them down. They were not white because he was wearing pants and shoes. They were big and heavy. They wanted to be floating.
It did not matter how proud she was; still he had to admit to pity. No matter what, there was always pity, however her defiance might reject it �
� and yet the water was turquoise, flooded with white, and they were here within it like two parts of a whole—connected by liquid, only the membranes of their skin between them. What were legs, anyway? She could swim without them.
How specific each thing was to the need for it.
In the pool someone might see her and not know. Someone might catch sight of her floating and believe she had legs that walked; they might believe she was whole.
He could almost believe it himself.
He thought he was happy, for a second, but then how could he be?—he must be missing something.
In a haze he burst out, dripping. His shirt around his shoulders felt cold instantly in the air and he wanted to be submerged again. She was a sacrificial lamb; she was both great and small. He adored her. Dear friend.
She could hold him under; he would not protest. Instead she studied him with a serious expression,
frowning.
“I can, you know,” she said. “You can?” he asked stupidly.
He carried her upstairs, and only later went back for her chair.
It was the emotion of it that was piercing, a thing he could not have known. He would have guessed it would be difficult, the rawness of what was missing. Instead he was suffused by a sharp, rending emotion, unidentifiable to him. With Beth there had been warmth, but not this extremeness, tearing and erotic. Was it the effect of the pills? Afterward sleep together was like being in the water, where there was hardly a line between them. But then daylight was bleak. He raised himself on an elbow and gazed down. She was lovely at the top, fresh: down and down further she was sleek and firm: then she wasted into pale angles and bone. He felt sad and furtive. He should not be seeing this.
She was awake and studying his expression.
“I need to get out of here,” she said. “Right away.”
He helped her to her chair and waited while she used the bathroom; they rode down in the elevator, saying little. Her car was parked a block away and he walked beside her, glancing down at the top of her head. She never raised her face to look at him; even as he loaded the chair into the car he could not catch her eye. He watched her drive away standing where her car had been, on a grease stain.
It was barely dawn. The grass was dewy and the sky over the sea lavender. The skin on his arms pricked and chilled; he hugged himself and rubbed his upper arms with his hands.
Regret was nagging at him, even shame.
He was walking along the sidewalk back to his building, choked and empty, when he saw his dog.
She sat beside the front steps, waiting—thin and mangy, but alive. Alive!
He was floored by relief. He felt a splinter of pained love for Casey, shot through with remorse, as though his dog’s
return was her doing somehow. He knelt down on the grass and laid his cheek against the dog’s flank.
When he stood again and she rose off her haunches to walk with him he saw she was reluctant to move; she held up one of her back legs. She was lame.
The leg, it turned out, was broken and fusing incorrectly, and also badly infected.
“How did it happen?” he asked. He was still so grateful it was hard to be upset. She was alive.
“Can’t really say. Some kind of blunt-force trauma; maybe a car hit.”
“Are you sure?”
“Wait a second,” said the veterinarian. “Oh … take a look. You see this wound at the ankle, with the pus and scabbing? The hair’s gone. Looks like it was rubbed raw by a cuff or a chain. Same thing on this leg here. Let’s see. She has wounds here too, under the hair. And there’s tenderness here. We should do X-rays. She might have other injuries.”
“What happened?”
“She was chained at the ankle, maybe jabbed and hit or beaten. She worried the chain with her teeth, trying to get it off. From the angle here I can tell the injury predated the chaining. Someone kept her chained up when she was already injured.”
He felt a wave of faintness, bitter taste in his mouth. He saw Fulton’s wine cellar.
A course of antibiotics could be tried, said the vet, but there was significant necrosis. He advised T. to let him amputate right away.
“You’d be surprised,” said the vet, “how well they do on three legs.”
The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?
Such a house could even be the whole world.
•
It was days afterward that he went to see Casey. She was not answering his phone calls and he felt increasingly nervous about this. He gave his dog a strip of rawhide before he left, pulled on his running gear and went down to the beach. He ran south. Beachgoers were out in force; some of them wore very small swimsuits, though the air was only mild. The surf was low but still kids on boogie boards paddled frantically.
When he got to her building the sun was setting. Standing in the foyer he pushed the call button once, then again; he peered into the camera lens. She had a monitor in her apartment, though she seldom looked at the screen—only listened, said nothing, and used the remote to buzz people in. But lately she had not been in bed as she used to; lately she was active.
After a few seconds of waiting he turned to leave, let down. One of her neighbors, a man with a prosthetic foot, was hobbling along the sidewalk. He lived two doors down on her floor and they sometimes nodded at each other in the elevator.
“You seen Casey around?” he asked on impulse, as the man came up the walkway.
“She was out here earlier. She was watching a couple of kids carry boxes for her.”
“Boxes?”
“Moving.”
“Moving?”
“Yeah. She gave me a plant. I don’t even like them.”
T. stared at him.
“But I just saw her a couple of days ago. She didn’t say anything about it.”
“What can I tell you.”
The man was past, fumbling at his mailbox. He would call Susan.
Running back north he wanted to know; he swerved inland off the beach and found a payphone.
Susan picked up coughing.
“She’s moving?” he asked, when the coughing trailed off. No preamble. He felt agitated, even anxious. “Where to?”
“Thanks for your concern about my health, T. And in case you’re wondering, it’s pneumonia.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I thought it was just the flu.” “Walking pneumonia.”
“Walking? What the hell does that mean?” “It means you need to get a temp.”
“Sure. Of course. Take good care of yourself.”
“Here’s the thing. I don’t know what happened between the two of you. This is my daughter here, and my job.”
“Yeah,” he said, waiting.
“But she can’t have any contact anymore,” she said. “I’m sorry, T. You know how much I hate to be in this position.”
“You’re kidding.”
Susan coughed, and the cough wore on. “No.”
“It doesn’t—she’s my best friend, Susan. I can’t believe it. Is she really serious about this?”
“I think she’s serious,” said Susan. “Yes. I’m afraid she is,
T. And I’m sorry, but I really do have to go,” and she hung up still coughing.
He let his eyelids drop closed: a faint imprint of the great seal on the dollar bill, the glowing pyramid with its all-seeing eye.
He stood in the booth like a statue, testing the steadiness of his feet on the ground. He kept his eyes shut, and the sweat that had soaked his shirt cooled him in the night air. He started to shake. It came to him that beyond himself he had deprived his mother—she would be friendless once more.
He brought them to her and they were taken away again.
/> He needed Casey, he thought, because he liked her company, because her presence made him more than he was without it, but he could not deny that at the beginning he had also believed he was doing her a favor. That was where his arrogance had been. It was a mistake to think that because someone had fallen down, someone was injured or sick or less than complete, you were giving more to them by your association than they were giving to you.
It was a bad mistake.
He leaned for some time against the wall of the booth, still holding the receiver loosely till it occurred to him that he did not need to. The ears of unwashed men had greased the black plastic. Revolting. There was a sheen on the curving surface, the whorls and smudges of fingerprints.
He walked down to the waterline holding his hands out at his sides, feeling a need to wash them. But even as his legs moved him forward he knew a certain ambivalence or resistance, as though the leavings of strange men were also somehow the last touch of Casey, which would be washed off with the rest.
Still he plunged in his arms. The water was freezing.
7
His mother forgot him on a Thursday. On Thursdays they had dinner together; he brought over takeout and she turned from her puzzles. This time, when he knocked on her door in the early evening, pizza box in one hand, she tried to close the door in his face. He put a hand out to stop it closing.
“I didn’t order one. It’s not mine.”
Vera stood behind her, shaking her head patiently. “It’s me,” he said. “T. It’s your son. It’s our dinner.”
He held out the box as though it might jog her memory.
“Yes,” said Vera, and stepped through the door to stand next to him, an arm around his shoulders. “This is Thomas, Angela. Your son! He comes almost every day with his dog. Remember? You call him T.”
“I don’t …”
“Let’s go ahead and let him in now, honey.”
“Dog. The white dog? The one with white hairs on it?”
“Yes,” said T., and nodded.
His mother turned her back and left the door standing open. She sat down on a stool close to the television and stared at it. She did not meet his eyes when he bent to kiss her.
Onscreen a man prodded another man’s chest with a finger.
“Is this the only symptom?” he asked the nurse.