Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  “Christ,” she said and turned away from him.

  His punching heart vibrated a frantic harmonic and one of its moorings creaked. His face stung, flushed and sweating. “Leila, wait!”

  She stopped, turned, and leaned on the doorway. Her slim arms and legs wrapped her body like spiraling concertina wire. “What?”

  He held the pipet, dripping virus-laden inoculum into the dish. “I’m sorry.”

  Her black eyes narrowed, and she looked pissed. “You’re an idiot, Conroy.”

  “Okay.” He finished inoculating that well, disposed of the pipet, and sat with his hands in his lap looking, he hoped, innocuous and contrite.

  Her dark eyes were large with calm anger. She hadn’t blinked yet, literally, no flicker of humanity or normal reflex. “Don’t ever, ever grab me like you did, ever again.”

  “I won’t,” Conroy promised. There was the slightest tickle in his head, a déjà vu, that this power play was another form of her kink. His eyes felt dry for her lack of blinking.

  “If you ever grab me again, I will fucking break your neck. I don’t care if we’re in the middle of Grand Central Station. I don’t care if your wife is standing next to you.”

  “I understand.”

  This was all a corollary of her rules for casual fucking: Act as if nothing was going on, either in the commission or the omission of acts. “All right.”

  Leila sighed, looked away, and finally blinked. “What the hell is going on with you, Conroy?”

  In the hood, he selected another fragile glass pipet from the sterile paper bag and began inoculating the rest of the cells. “It’s a long story.”

  “You’ve been here late every night. You got shit-faced at my apartment yesterday. If I hadn’t dragged you home, you would have stayed out all night, which is such a dead give-away. That’s not normal.” She flipped the switches of the other tissue culture hood, and the updraft whooshed and the neon light whined.

  The chill air of the tissue culture room seeped through his damp shirt and stroked his back. “There’s a lot going on right now.”

  Leila took dishes out of the incubator and slid them onto the stage of the inverted microscope. She focused and said, “Secret experiments again?”

  “Just confirming Yuri’s results.”

  “Bullshit.” She turned on the digital camera atop the microscope. The computer was behind her, and she stretched across the narrow room, wiggled the computer mouse to wake it, and tapped the space bar. The picture on the monitor froze. Neurons splayed their splatted cell bodies and long axon spikes.

  Sick, spindly neurons.

  Leila whipped the scope over the dish—the landscape blurred on the monitor screen like a roller coaster video—and she tapped the space bar, taking digital pictures.

  She said, “Malcolm tried to pimp me for information yesterday after I told him you had the stomach flu.” (click.) “Butch from Liddy Lab had very specific questions she mouthed for her boss about your NIH trips.” (click.) “People are talking.” (click.) “You need to be more careful. A lot more careful.”

  Leila could keep a secret. Conroy was surprised that, since their affair began seven months ago (not an affair but casual fucking), there hadn’t been a tinge of scandal. One of the reasons he had allowed himself to be seduced, or whatever had happened, was that she wouldn’t talk about any of her former men. Leila kept secrets like she kept her dogs, she said: until they were very, very old, and then they drifted away and she buried them someplace beautiful.

  He leaned on the purring incubator. “My wife and I have been going to marital counseling.”

  Leila’s head whipped around and she stared at him, angry. “Does she think you’re screwing around?”

  “Yes, but she thinks it’s with someone out of town at NIH study group.”

  The angry tension in her face softened. “That’s why Dr. Liddy was warning me. Do you have someone else?”

  Leila approved! His stock rose and his dick got heavy with filling blood. Conroy looked down in mock chagrin and real dismay. “Well, yes.” Conroy batted the air, trying to knock the foolishness away. “The woman left some underwear in my suitcase and Beverly found them.”

  Leila’s jaw dropped. She sat in one of the rolling chairs and leaned forward, hands clasped in front of her, the posture of a person conducting an intervention. She said, “Conroy, that woman is out to break up your marriage.”

  “No, it was just an accident.” He waved his hand, cleaning the air as if wiping her words off a blackboard.

  Her voice dropped lower, more serious. “You believed that.”

  Conroy pressed his palms against the incubator behind him.

  “Let me guess,” Leila said, “she wants you to spend more time with her. She does domestic things, like cooking, and she irons your shirt while you shower after sex.”

  Conroy studied his black loafers and the asbestos-inundated, faux-marble tiles.

  Leila pressed her fingers to her temples. “And she wants you to stay over.”

  Conroy sighed. So he had been seeing a sweet woman, someone unlike Leila with all her rules and her limits and her power plays. “Well, yes.”

  “Conroy!” Leila’s voice was imperative, strident. “She’s auditioning to be your wife.”

  “No, she’s not like that.”

  “She’s exactly like that. Women lie. They’re all whores.” Leila cradled her skull as if Conroy’s hangover remnants had latched onto her. “I just hope she wasn’t ovulating that week.”

  He looked up, startled. “Peggy wouldn’t do that.”

  Leila crossed her legs and studied her boots. “She tried to sabotage your marriage.”

  “It’s not like that. She’s not like that.”

  Leila looked up sharply. “Conroy, tell me you’ve broken it off with her.”

  “She said the panties were an accident.”

  “You idiot. You play with players. Are you going to leave Beverly for this Peggy chick?”

  “No.” Conroy’s heart shrank at that terrible thought.

  “Then get rid of Peggy and go back to your wife.” She crossed her arms over her thin chest and glared at him with calm, wide, black eyes. “We’re through.”

  Damn it, first Peggy, then his wife, now this. “Oh, come on. That’s not what I meant.”

  “Your life is too complicated. The Jesuits are after you, and that Jesuit saw you grab me. Damn, Conroy. That was so obvious. You don’t grab someone like that unless you’re familiar with their body or a murderer.”

  “You’re right.” He could salvage this. He had negotiated through hundreds of committee meetings. “We’ll ignore each other in public.”

  “Your wife is hurt and suspicious. There’s no way you can fool her any more. You need to stop fucking around. We’re done with this.”

  Negotiating was over, damn it. He was not going to lose the one thing in his life that made him feel like a man instead of a cooped up, chained up lapdog.

  “Don’t threaten me.” He turned and slammed his open hand into the flat, metal door of the incubator, suggesting further violence. He looked back, but Leila’s expression was still angry and cold.

  “It’s not a threat, Conroy. It’s the best thing. Go home to your wife. Get rid of that Peggy chick who’s trying to break up your marriage.” She shouldered him aside, put her cells back in the incubator, and slammed the door on her way out.

  Damn it, damn it. Everything was slipping away. Everything was apoptosing and necrosing and decaying. He punched the steel incubator. It hurt and felt good so he reared back and threw his weight behind it and punched the gray steel hard. His knuckles crackled.

  Leila was the only one who didn’t want something from him. She was the only one he could trust. He shook his bruised fist.

  Beverly and Peggy and all of them were suffocating him. He needed to escape. He needed somewhere to escape to.

  All the anxiety that fibrillated in his chest, all the adrenaline that spurred him and sa
pped his reserves, it was all from staying too late in the lab and not sleeping enough and flinching in bed every time Beverly twitched because he was afraid that she had found some other silken whip of evidence to beat him with.

  He needed a place where he could sleep.

  Just a little pied-a-terre, a hole to go to ground in, a trench for warfare, a priest-hole where that Jesuit wouldn’t find him, where Conroy could think without anyone bitching at him.

  ~~~~~

  Monday morning, Bev needed coffee. The coffee in the teacher’s lounge was stale and reduced, but she drank it.

  The door behind her opened. “Bev?” Father Dante asked.

  “Yes?”

  “You are all right?” he asked. In his Roman-collared black shirt and slacks, sometimes he looked like a Sicilian assassin instead of a priest. She imagined him producing a gun from behind his back and, with strong posture, gunning down Conroy’s slut.

  Bev pressed her fingers to her temple. Such thoughts, such thoughts. No wonder God and the Virgin Mary still shunned her.

  Be with us now and at the hour of our deaths.

  “I’m fine. Thanks, Father.”

  ~~~~~

  Monday afternoon in the lab, Conroy dawdled and fretted and finally called Leila into his office. She had been out of the lab all morning, avoiding him. He hadn’t looked at her face when he had called to her from his doorway. Derision might lurk in her sable eyes or the set of her soft mouth.

  Joe and Yuri busied themselves at the bench as Conroy retreated to his office and waited.

  She followed him in and nudged the office door closed.

  His newspaper was folded to the furnished apartments for rent section.

  When he looked up, he knew his eyes were too wide, his posture too anticipatory, trembling, as if someone holding his belt prevented him from falling over a precipice.

  She smiled gently. “Friends, Conroy?”

  He hissed out the breath that had ballooned inside him. If they were friends, she wouldn’t rat him out to the administration. Or Beverly. Or Peggy. Or anyone else. “Yeah,” he said. “Friends.”

  Conroy circled an ad that read 2 bdrm, 1.5 ba, furn, townhouse. Short-term, perfect for visiting faculty.

  Leila tapped Conroy’s desk. “You were busy in the mouse room this weekend. The guys in the mouse facility are nervous about your mice.”

  Conroy crossed his legs the other way and glanced at the closed office door. “It’s just a mouse virus. There’s a lot riding on this grant.”

  “You mean the department chair. They meet next week, right?”

  “Not just that,” he said. “There might be more. I want it all. I want the department chair, recognition, prizes, maybe the big one, maybe the Nobel Prize.”

  Nobel, the Nobel, the big kahuna.

  Leila asked, “Conroy, are you on drugs? Seriously, drugs?”

  Conroy leaned in and conspired with Leila, whose eyes were shocked open. “I’m in my fifties,” he said. “I’ve got a pretty big lab at a pretty good institution. If I get the chairmanship, I’ll have more resources, more people, more contacts. I’m a dark horse but I’ve got a shot. I’ve made good progress at the molecular level but I need the big one, the big, elegant experiment that shows, perfectly, something on the gut level.” Gut: Grand, Unifying Theory. “I need a gut.”

  Leila’s blink was exaggerated. “I can’t believe you’re the same person who ripped all the theory and conclusions out of my paper last year.”

  “God,” Conroy clamped a hand over his heart that cartwheeled in his chest. The path to glory echoed: grant, department chair, resources, gut, Nobel. “It makes my heart flutter.”

  “Nobel,” she whispered, her tongue licking her lip.

  Yes, yes. Those three little syllables that trip off the tongue, a touch on the teeth and two plosive presses of the lips with a zinging shiver at the end: No. Bel. Prize.

  She smiled. “Are you turning into a rock star salmon?”

  He quirked one eyebrow. “Maybe.”

  She laughed at him and left his office. Conroy watched her ass, an ass he liked to grab and lift while he screwed it.

  He bet, he would wager money, he would risk his life, that he would fuck her again next week. He would get her and his freedom back.

  He picked up the phone to call the rental agent.

  ~~~~~

  Yuri walked by Dr. S.’s office and saw inside through a horizontal rip in the poster covering the arrow-slit window. Leila’s dark head nodded.

  He hoped Leila hadn’t discovered anything brilliant. Dr. S. might give her the Porsche.

  “You coming?” Joe paused, holding the door open.

  “Sure,” Yuri said. “Should we wait for Leila?”

  “She visited Danna this morning. Took her a book. Danna said she wants junk food because patient food sucks worse than staff caff. I raided vendo land for her. Chips. Cookies.”

  Yuri surveyed the assembled cellophane bags. “That stuff will kill you.”

  ~~~~~

  Bev had not overcooked the gnocchi, thank goodness. Dinah had been suspicious of the dumplings until Bev told her that they were potato. Dinah was a big fan of anything potato.

  Father Dante had brought a lovely zinfandel and, when the bottle ran dry halfway through dinner, Bev found a chardonnay in the fridge. The drier chardonnay complemented the robust gnocchi and broiled chicken even better than the light, sweet zin.

  Dinah tugged at Father Dante’s sleeve near his wrist. “I have a joke,” she said.

  Christina rolled her eyes and sighed. “She doesn’t tell it right.”

  “A little boy is bad in school,” Dinah said. “And he disses his teachers and he fails his reading and his maths.”

  Christina nodded and frowned.

  “And so his mommy makes him two doors.”

  Christina said, “Tutors. Takes him to tutors.”

  Dinah shot her a dirty look. “But the little boy still fails his maths. She teaches him maths at home and he still doesn’t do the maths rights. So his mommy sends him to Catholic school.”

  Christine nodded.

  “And the little boy starts doing better. Especially in maths. Lots better in maths.” Dinah looked up at Christina.

  Christina prompted, “So his mom asks him why he’s doing better in math.”

  Dinah nodded. “And he says, ‘I knew they were serious about maths when I saw that they had nailed that guy to the cross.’”

  “Plus sign,” Christina said. “I knew they were serious about math when I saw that they had nailed that guy to the plus sign.”

  Bev chuckled, caught herself, and looked at Father Dante. He would think that was funny and not blasphemy, right?

  He laughed, and so she did, too.

  After supper, the girls included Father Dante in their cutthroat board game long enough for Bev to tidy up. The French white casseroles were soaking when Bev noticed it was eight-thirty and time for little girls to be in bed.

  The girls climbed the stairs. Dinah literally dragged her feet on the carpeted steps, leaving scuffs. Christine hopped, a stealthy victory dance.

  “My head,” Dante sat up on the floor near her feet and pressed his palm to his temple. “I think I drank too much wine.”

  “Me, too.” Bev smiled and laid her head on the back of the couch, enjoying the lightness. Elation spun behind her eyes. She recognized Conroy’s absence. “Conroy isn’t home.” She stood, and the floor tilted but she held her balance. “I should call him.”

  The cordless phone was across the room, but she hesitated. She didn’t know what to say to Conroy. She hadn’t said anything to him since she had bawled him out for being drunk Sunday morning and told him to get his butt to Mass and now she had to talk to him in front of Father Dante. Oh, good Lord. The floor tilted again, and she stepped to counter the shifting ash dunes.

  Father Dante stood and held her elbow.

  An elbow is a friendly place for a man to hold, not the intimate touch of p
alms, not too near the swell of the breast.

  She smiled at Father Dante and he let her go. She dialed Conroy’s office.

  ~~~~~

  Conroy found his jingling office phone between stacks of papers under the split-open book Immunobiology and lifted the receiver on its third ring. To the phone, he said, “Sloan.”

  “Conroy? Everything all right?” Beverly asked.

  “Yes, yes.” She should have figured out by now that he just wouldn’t be home for supper. Surely she wasn’t so dense that she was waiting for him. “I’m sorry, Beverly. I should have emailed. Leila and I were editing her paper.”

  “Leila Faris? Oh, all right,” Bev said.

  “Yes, it’s almost finished.” Leila’s svelte shadow sashayed by his open office door. “It’ll be a few hours. Around eleven. I’m sorry, Dearest.”

  ~~~~~

  Dante, horrified that Bev had said Leila Faris, waited until Bev laid the phone in its cradle to ask, “He said something about Leila Faris?”

  “Sure.” Bev moved the phone farther back on the table. “Do you want a cocktail?”

  His silk shirt clung to his back, which had sprouted sweat. “Sure.”

  Perhaps he could obtain enough information to interpret what it meant when Sloan grabbed Leila’s arm and yet accused her of stalking him.

  “What do you want?” She opened a cabinet and removed a couple of boxes of dried pasta to reveal a cubby stocked with liquor bottles. “Screwdriver? Sloe gin fizz? Long Island Iced Tea? Neat?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  “Long Island iced tea.” Bev tipped bottles, splashing several types of alcohol into each of the two glasses and a finishing jolt of Diet Coke, and handed one glass to Dante. The drink looked like tea. It tasted like tea to his wine-numbed tongue.

  During medical school, after a spate of exams, he and some of his classmates had toasted each other with a similar drink (“We drink to cope!”) and then there was a long white space and flashes of naked female flesh from various angles, like an ill-tuned satellite dish burping pornography, and he woke the next morning with two women twined around him and around each other, and he was ashamed to not feel mortifying disgust at his stupid, carnal self. They had cooked breakfast, omelet and fruit. Their names were a mystery.