Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  A few weeks earlier it would have been just fine. I’d always taken comfort in knowing that as long as I could scrape together the money for gasoline, I could drive. I could visit the Grand Canyon. I could sleep in the Argo Tunnel and rise in the morning before the tour groups came through. But I couldn’t leave Los Angeles. It was the last place and I knew it. And here I was in the queerest part of it. I had to get a place minutes from where she worked. Just as when I was a child and I wanted a tennis skirt and tennis sneakers before ever once striking a tennis ball. As an adult I was no different. I needed to feel that I owned real estate before I used a bathroom.

  There was no nucleus, no central village, of Topanga Canyon. Just clusters of shops a mile or more apart.

  The old hardware store was otherworldly. It was not California-precious but neither was it a holdover from the fifties. It smelled of chalk inside. I loved the smell of hardware stores nearly as much as I loved the smell of chlorine.

  I stopped at the thrift store scratchy with tutus and sequined dresses and polyester palazzo pants and vintage greeting cards and postcards that once upon a time were cherished.

  Dear Mom,

  The weather is beautiful, even in winter. School is going well. They sell 24-karat gold in the shops for a good price and I’m enclosing a necklace for Susan for Christmas. Please give it to Susan, Mom. Tell Dad I saw a Ferrari 312 here, just coasting the streets of downtown Padua. Cherry red, with a tan leather interior. Love to all.

  Jack

  Not too long ago everyone wrote in script. My father wrote in script. I used to think he had the most beautiful handwriting in the world. But everyone from his era did.

  I drove up and down streets where you couldn’t see around the curves. People seemed to drive blind, on instinct. Every so often there was an impressive Spanish-tiled house, grazing horses. There were art installations and peace signs made of hubcaps. There were bamboo fences and no clouds in the sky. When I got hungry, I stopped at a place called La Choza, next to a dry cleaner. I was in the same white dress. It smelled of sweat but I hadn’t come across anyone who would notice.

  A Mexican woman behind a counter waited with a wide tin spoon. There were instructions for how to order written on a piece of cardboard. PICK ONE: CHICKEN ADOBO, STEAK, CHAR VEG.

  I wanted half chicken and half charred vegetables. I didn’t want any rice.

  —You only pick one, said the woman.

  —Can I have half of each, and you can charge me for the chicken, which is the more expensive one.

  —No, you pick one. The woman wore a honeycomb hairnet that starred her dark head.

  —But I want half of each, and you—the store—will be making money off this order. Because the chicken is more expensive and I am having less of it. Do you understand?

  The woman shook her head.

  —Why? I asked. Can you explain to me why?

  The woman set the spoon down and wiped her plastic gloves on her apron, stained with yellow and brown juices. She picked up the spoon and aggressively scraped it under a section of rice.

  —I don’t want rice, I said.

  The woman walked away then, into the kitchen. I was still hungry.

  Back in my car I drove and listened to Marianne Faithfull and Joni Mitchell. I will make a list for you of all the songs that meant something to me.

  I parked at the health food café next to her studio, which happened to be world-famous. Rod Rails Power Yoga. Rod Rails was one of the phony stars of the yoga community. Shirtless and long-haired with a crooked erection like the bone of a porterhouse, I would come to hear. In one picture holding a malnourished child in Nepal, the next with his arm around the spiky shoulders of an older actress. He led two times a month but mainly traveled to high holy grounds and franchises. Most of the classes were taught by girls like Alice. Hot girls who had never smoked a cigarette.

  I walked up to the door. My legs trembled and I felt like a nobody. On top of that, I hadn’t planned what I would say.

  There was a schedule on the door. I looked for her name. The day was a Tuesday. She wasn’t teaching until Friday. I was so relieved that everything inside of me quieted immediately. I would come back on Friday, I told myself. But I didn’t have to come back at all. I could find a nice used-car dealer, let him buy us a split-level in Baldwin Park and refuse to fuck in any position but doggy-style.

  The other thing I always wanted to put off was getting a job. After running out of the money that came from selling my parents’ home, I’d held a lot of different jobs. Often I didn’t have a job at all. I would sell something a man gave me, and the profit might last several months.

  Next door, I walked through the beaded curtain of the health café. Fat flies buzzed inside. The café sold kombucha, rope baskets, chapbooks of poems by local writers, chocolate bars made with Oregon peppermint. A sign that said HELP WANTED looked like it never came down. There was a bright pink La Marzocco machine. A young girl in a cowboy hat with two long braids stood behind the counter. An unlaminated name tag pinned to her chest said NATALIA. She was young enough to have been my daughter had I gotten pregnant at seventeen.

  —May I have the frittata, I said.

  —The spinach or the kale?

  —Spinach.

  —It comes with corn fritters.

  —I don’t want them.

  —I can wrap them up and you can take them home.

  —You want to take them home? I said.

  I ordered an Americano to see the girl use the bright pink machine. She was pretty, the kind of simple, inarguable pretty that I had never been. I was sexually attractive. Sometimes other women didn’t see it.

  —May I also have a job application?

  —Sorry?

  I tapped the HELP WANTED sign with a dusty fingernail. The girl leaned across the counter, craning her head to see it. Her breasts were big and jammed together. She wore a rose quartz Buddha on a leather string around her neck.

  —Oh, huh.

  —Do they not need help?

  —Yeah. I’m actually leaving for school.

  —Great.

  —How many do you need?

  —Just the one.

  —You want the frittata to stay or to go?

  —I’ll stay.

  I walked outside with the application and the coffee to the partially covered patio with bright butterfly chairs and old sewing tables and round wood tables, each with a bottle of Cholula on top. I felt a terrible premonition; I’ve had these throughout my life and few people have believed me because I’m always relating them after the fact. I don’t trust myself enough to say something when I have the feeling. So this time, like every time, I quieted my mind the best I could. I concentrated on the paper in front of me. I hadn’t filled out this type of application since I was in my teens. It asked if I was available to work weekends, holidays, how many hours I desired to work per week. It asked what subjects I studied in school. Yes, yes, many, I wrote, and art history.

  Before Vic I had, for a time, kicked men in the testicles with high heels. One man gave me a painting I turned around and sold for twenty-five thousand dollars. Another gave me a vintage silver print of Diane Arbus’s A Widow in Her Bedroom. I treasured that photograph. Sometimes I felt it was the finest thing about me.

  Suddenly there was an extreme noise on the road. I have to tell you that terrible things always happen around me. I was marked at ten. People don’t want to know that many bad things can happen to one person or around one person. A bad thing happens and coworkers circle your cubicle, their grating palms on your shoulders. Another bad thing happens and you’re no longer someone upon whom they could try out their munificence. You’re a squashed pack of Merits on the highway.

  The girl, Natalia, came out with my frittata on a plate. A Chevy Tahoe had head-onned a yellow Beetle. The Beetle, which looked like a human being, was compacted, its face smashed. There was the braking of other cars and a single horn sounded but otherwise a snowy peace settled across the Cany
on. I looked at the girl and the girl looked back at me.

  It took the man a long time to come out of the Tahoe, and when he did, he was covered in frosty dust. He staggered toward the Beetle. It was a seventies model with the handlebar on the hood and the headlights like a ladybug’s eyes. Medium-dark gray smoke poured out.

  It felt as though the driver of the Tahoe walked for hours but he never made it to the other car before the ambulance did. It was possible the ambulance came the quickest an ambulance had ever come. The driver of the Beetle, a woman, gave the impression of burned toast. She was laid out on a stretcher. The urgency they saved for the other passenger. I turned my head when an entire infant seat was lifted out by the broad-shouldered men. I could see the baby, who was not crying. I could taste the metal and the tears of the father in the morning.

  Beside me the girl’s mouth hung open but otherwise she didn’t shield her eyes or make a noise. She’d likely never seen death. She stood there with that white plate. She’d been taught to put a wedge of tomato on the rim. I wanted to shove her nose in a slick of blood. But I couldn’t. I had to let the girl go home, sit on her mother’s couch, and tell her boyfriend she’d seen a woman and her newborn die on the road today. The boyfriend would ask about the types of cars involved.

  * * *

  BACK AT THE HOUSE I found my landlord sitting at the table outside my door. He had a pitcher and two crystal glasses.

  —Joan, he said. This table is for all of us. I moved it to be closer to your door where there’s some shade, but if you don’t want it here, I can move it back. If you don’t like company.

  It was hot and still. I hadn’t cried about the car crash and I thought that if I went into the house alone I would lose it. I would take a pill and sit on one of my boxes. I felt I could have stopped it somehow. I knew for a fact I could have saved my father and my mother. I liked to think that one of the reasons I’d lived through my own nightmare was so that one day I might prevent someone else from suffering. But the infant died. The mother died. I watched. I finished filling out the job application.

  —How’d your audition go? he said. He poured me a glass. Dreamily he said, Lenore’s lemonade.

  —My audition, I said quietly. Likely I didn’t get it.

  —You’re a certain age. Do you mind my asking?

  —About thirty years younger than you, I said, and he smiled. The older the man, the more my specialty. I knew that when I met God one day it would go well.

  The lemonade was vodka-forward. There were bits of mint floating at the surface. I thought of the radio in the car, of what the mother and the child had been listening to. I imagined it to be Peter, Paul and Mary and that the song would live in the air there forever. Sounds didn’t die.

  He told me to call him Lenny and asked me what everyone wants to know. Where did you come from, what do you do for money, why are you alone. I gave him a list of odd jobs. Babysitting, floral arrangement. The time I’d made up dead people.

  Underneath our bodies the ground rumbled and I looked up at the sky. An earthquake was one of my most vivid fantasies. But it was only Kevin waking up, turning the silver dial on some large box.

  Leonard’s knee began to tremble. He had the face of an old movie actor, a Paul Newman. It was an interesting face and I liked him better than I had earlier that morning with his cane and metal breath. He looked fresh. He wore a white sweatshirt and gray pants. Gone were the old-man sneakers. In their place a good pair of loafers. Still, his ankles looked like they had been dug up.

  —Are you through unpacking?

  There were boxes I would never unpack. Six large ones. They contained things like the square packets of hotel shower caps my mother saved. And, from the first time my mother cut my hair, a loose braid of black.

  —Yes, I said. Do you live in the potting shed?

  He smiled and nodded at me, like, I know the kind of woman you are.

  —It’s not a potting shed. It’s one of these tiny homes. I don’t need a lot of space. I used to live here, in your place.

  —Why’d you move?

  —I didn’t need all the space, he repeated.

  I could tell I’d gone too far. I wished I didn’t care.

  —Have you always wanted to be an actress?

  —No. I didn’t want to compete with all the other pretty girls when I was young. So I waited. I figured I’d be more interesting now. I was biding my time.

  —Kathi told me you came all the way out here alone.

  —I drove.

  —She drove, he said, rubbing the rim of his glass. He looked at me in the familiar way.

  I finished my drink and stood. He placed two fingers on my wrist and poured me another glass, saying, A bird cannot fly on one wing, my friend. You can flap one wing, but you can’t fly on it.

  I sat back down. Lenny had a controlling air. At some point he had been in charge of things—family money, legacy, oil futures, a wife, a mistress—and old men like him never stopped flexing their alleged power. Sometimes, when he was being gallant, he reminded me of my father, but so did anyone. For a very long time I had written the word Daddy in the steam of shower doors. This was when I lived in places with glass doors. At the apartment in Jersey City I had written it on so many different spots that, when the sun came through the cloudy window, you could see the letters in many directions, like a crossword.

  —My wife died, he said, a little under a year ago.

  —I’m sorry.

  He nodded. He seemed to believe I should feel the pain alongside him.

  —Her name was Lenore. Lenny and Lenore. Do you want to know how we met?

  —Of course, I said. And I did. Everybody always wanted to know how everybody else met. It seemed possible the key to life was contained on street corners in springtime when a man retrieved a woman’s scarf from the sidewalk.

  —It was on Love Connection. The television program.

  —Wow.

  —It was the first season they were on the air. She wore a purple skirt suit with little white kitten heels.

  —Was she beautiful?

  —Beyond beautiful. That something extra. Chuck Woolery asked her if she had any fetishes. She said yes, she had two. The first was that shirts and socks have to match. She didn’t like it if a man wore a white shirt and then black socks. She thought it was sloppy. At this point, Chuck Woolery looked down and he was wearing a white shirt with black socks. Lenore laughed. I don’t think anybody in the world will ever have a laugh as wonderful. Tough, said Chuck, if you wear argyles. She didn’t laugh that time. She knew how to suspend a man. It’s a rare talent. I was jealous of Chuck from the start. I was always worried, in the beginning, that Lenore was going to love someone better.

  —What was her second fetish?

  —The second fetish was cowboy boots. She said she didn’t like them. They disgusted her. They made her think of backwoods things, Jimmy Dean sausage.

  —It sounds, I said, like she didn’t understand the meaning of the word fetish.

  Lenny blinked.

  —She was young. She was hardly twenty-four. I was in my late thirties, probably your age right now.

  —Did you sleep together on the date? I always wondered that about Love Connection.

  —People did the same things then that they do now.

  —So you fucked right away.

  Kevin, showered and dressed all in black, came outside at the hottest point of the day. He said hello to both of us on his way to his car. I felt like a whore.

  6

  THE FRIDAY THAT ALICE WAS working, I dressed in Lycra pants and a tank top. I applied mascara and blew out my hair. I drove to the studio. I was sweating so much that warm rivulets ran down my arms.

  There was no evidence of the crash. It was wiped from the Canyon. The air was crisp because it was early and the sun was imposing like in a Hollywood western. In New York the sun was a pellet. We get over a death as though it happened only in a movie.

  Looking in the rearview mirror
, I absorbed the oil from my cheeks and nose with a powdered rose-scented blotting paper. I stared at my face, hating it, for so long that I became embarrassed for myself, as though others were watching me hate myself, and judging me for it. Then I got out and walked languidly to the door, an entirely different person from the one I’d been in the car. When I opened the door a brass bell tinkled. Like everything else in Los Angeles, it was nothing like what I expected. I expected white glossy walls and orchids the color of dawn. Instead there were dusty snake plants and mammillaria in terra-cotta pots. The green paint was peeling off the walls and the place smelled like summer camp. Waiting in line to register, I watched sweaty thin women exit with towels around their necks and rolled-up mats on cords over their shoulders. I thought of the way men talked about women who’d lost their beauty. I knew what they meant because it was happening to me. There was a fading in the eyes and an overall parch, like an old orange. But I believed it was less a physical change than a by-product of seeing their husbands become moony over a babysitter, as though the babysitter had solved the unsolvable equation or brokered world peace instead of merely braiding the child’s hair without the child crying.

  I paid for a single class, twenty-six dollars out of a wad of cash that felt like last breaths. I wrote down my age and it looked back at me. Through the glass door I saw her. At first I saw only the back of her head and I was struck at once. Sometimes you can be struck by the back of someone. You won’t have to wonder if that person is as striking from the front. When she turned, I gasped. She had the kind of look that you saw very rarely, even in a place full of beautiful girls. She was so unequivocally flawless that I wanted to hit her.