Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

—Lenny, I think you’re confused.

  —Yes, and I’ve confused you. I’m a terrible man, Lenore, and I don’t deserve our life. Come close to me, my body. My woman in blue.

  I worked for a few months at a supermarket in Utah, sealing chicken breasts in plastic. My boss was a man in a cowboy hat and a bolo tie. He always had his hands in his pockets. He went crazy one day and shot his wife in the neck. Of course, these things don’t happen one day. It was likely brewing for months, but how could I have noticed, sealing chickens and not looking at the clock for chunks of time so that I might be pleasantly surprised at how much of it had passed. But when the police came and they started asking questions, I recalled how my boss had several times called me Shelley: Shelley, we need more breasts on the cooler, and transfer yesterday’s into the discount section. I never corrected him. I hadn’t seen the point at the time.

  —Lenny.

  —Love?

  —Leonard, I said. I’m not Lenore. I think you’re having an episode.

  I said this calmly. I watched his mind return to his body. As reality crept in, his color faded. His face drooped and he appeared a decade older.

  He looked around the room, realizing it was his old house and that he didn’t live there anymore.

  —Oh God.

  —It’s all right. Why don’t you sit back down, I’ll get you a glass of water.

  —Jesus. I’m embarrassed. I’m so embarrassed.

  —Don’t be.

  —Grief does strange things to you.

  —I can only imagine.

  —It’s awful. One day someone is screaming at you for how you’re driving. The next day you’re free.

  I brought him warm tap water in a dusty glass.

  —On top of the grief, he said, there are also the drugs I did in my youth.

  —What sorts?

  —LSD. Mescaline. Peyote. And on. They make me lose my mind for a stretch. Here and there.

  I thought of the groceries I’d bought on the way home, the milk warming out there in the heat. This second child’s death had twisted my intestines. Going to grocery stores was one of the best ways I knew to calm myself. The clean, cool aisles. Everything was brightly lit at any time of day.

  —Do you mind, Lenny, I have to get my groceries from the car. I’ll be right back.

  —Let me get them. Let me be a gentleman so I don’t feel like an embarrassment.

  —No. Stay.

  It was almost four and I decided to cook him dinner. I had many fresh vegetables and they wouldn’t all fit in the fridge.

  In the beginning I cooked for Vic all the time in my apartment. You shouldn’t do that. If you cook for a man, and you cook very well, as I did, they will think you belong to them. The truth was I was always practicing for a man I might actually love. Big Sky, for example. With every crisp quail I roasted for Vic I was perfecting my technique for Big Sky. There would be long oak tables set for Thanksgiving in his deluxe lodge in the mountains. There would be twigs and pinecones strewn about, no tablecloths, and fresh sparkling water with twists of lime.

  Lenny sat on one of my modern barstools, which were out of place in that rustic hovel. He watched me mince garlic. My mother minced garlic very quickly, so fast I would always check that all her fingers were still there when she was done. I took my time. Unlike her, I didn’t have a child at my knee and a husband on his way home.

  But this time I minced sloppily. I nearly sliced my finger. My mind was on that phone call. I hadn’t thought about the people Vic left behind, not enough, anyway, until I heard her voice. When you’ve suffered as much as I have, you begin to see everything in perspective. You know exactly the ways in which people will move on and you know that they will laugh again. It makes their present suffering seem prosaic.

  —What are you making?

  —I’m sautéing broccoli with garlic, red pepper flakes, and bread crumbs.

  —Sounds spicy.

  —Are you one of these old men who can’t tolerate spice?

  —You have some cruelty in you.

  Let me tell you: men love cruelty. It reminds them of every time their fathers or mothers didn’t think they were good enough. Cruelty looks better on a woman than the perfect dress.

  —How about gluten? Salt? How’s your heart?

  He knocked his chest.

  —Strong, he said. A few things I have are still strong.

  I knew he meant between his legs. I wanted him to know that there was nobody left in the world who would fuck him.

  We opened a bottle of wine. Garlic skipped in the pan. When I tossed the thick stalks of the leek, Lenny said, You can tell the worth of a woman by how much food she wastes. There were moments like that when I wanted to strangle him. And then he would compliment me, tell me my hair was like onyx, or reach with an old arm to fill my glass.

  I asked about Lenore because it soothed me to hear people talk about love like it was real. I want you to know about Lenore, about the women who men make you feel are better than you. I want you to know about everything I may not be able to teach you.

  Lenny was happy to oblige. They’d known each other only a month before he asked her to marry him, and the wedding was two weeks later. He went on about their honeymoon in Anguilla. Snorkeling and creamy pineapple drinks. A friend of his got them upgraded to a suite in one of the finest hotels. Two bedrooms, two giant marble bathrooms. Lenore said she would be able to maintain her girlish mystery with the second bathroom for at least ten more days. They made love on both beds; the poor maid, he said with a grin, like it turned him on that the housekeeper had to make two dirty beds. There was a Jacuzzi on the balcony, stone and round. Just beneath their room, palm trees and white muslin umbrellas ringed a giant blue pool. There were buckets full of sparkling wine and bikinis in bright colors and more women than men, in sunglasses and straw hats, reading tall glossy magazines, and nobody as far as the eye could see in distress, nobody who had just come from a hospital or knew they might have to go back. He said he looked at all the women in their bathing suits, some in thong bottoms with their nice rears exposed, and not one of them, he said, held a candle to Lenore. And just beyond all of that luxury they were blessed with the Caribbean ocean, teal and endless, rolling gently against the bone shore.

  —Did you ever have second thoughts? I asked. Since you hadn’t known her very long?

  —Let me tell you something, he said, looking into my eyes like an asshole. If a man takes longer than two, three months to ask you to marry him, he doesn’t love you. He won’t ever love you. Do you have a man in your life?

  —Until recently I did.

  —Did he provide for you, financially speaking?

  I thought about that for a moment. Vic had indeed provided for me. He promoted me several times. He bought me plane tickets and couches and computers, fine wines and a substantial wine cooler in which to store them.

  —In a way I didn’t need.

  —So he provided for you?

  I nodded.

  —Did you leave him in New York? Did he leave you?

  —I suppose, in a way, we left each other.

  —There’s no such thing.

  Old men are so sure of everything. He was forking broccoli into his mouth. I tried to determine whether he had dentures. Or he could have had caps. He came from a wealthy family. Now he was worried about air conditioners but that is how all old people end. More surely than we fly toward death, we go to parsimony.

  —He killed himself, I said.

  8

  WHEN I WAS TEN I drank grappa in Grosseto. Down the hill from my parents and the cousins, in a field that had nothing to do with farms or horses but was full of haystacks. It was late September. The horizon was a stand of cypress, some scattered clouds, and a dry field. The remnants of an old olive grove.

  I met a boy named Massi, short for Massimiliano. Max, I would tell my friends back home. He was much older, fourteen. His red hair was too thick but everything else was consciously set there by God for a s
mall American girl to love. He was the last boy to make me feel worthy, to put me on a pedestal the way Lenny had for Lenore. Of course, that sense of worth coincided with the fact that I had not yet been to hell.

  We were at a villa party given by posh distant relatives of my mother’s. The day lasted forever. A string quartet played “Hallelujah” on the tall, crunchy grass. There were figs in that grass, heavy as hearts.

  I’d seen the boy playing soccer, noticed his strong, tan legs and skillful footwork. What does a girl love at ten? What will you love? I loved the air around this boy. It was mixed with the strong cigarettes of the men and the flowery perfume of the ladies and the lemons in the trees.

  I stared at the boy as I sat beside my father. I felt babied by my father’s hand on my shoulder as he spoke to a circle of men, smoking and drinking, most of them paunchy. I’d eaten so much of the shrimp cocktail being passed around that one of the men appraised me in what I’m fairly sure was a sexual manner. He said to my father, The girl likes expensive things. She will have to marry a man with money. My father smiled. No, he said in his decent Italian, she will make it on her own. I’d thought of that often since then, my father’s belief in me. My mother thought I would need to marry someone with money, maybe she thought that because of her own life. Either way, the boy, Massi, was from a wealthy family. I was thinking of pleasing my mother. On top of that or because of that, I wanted to kiss him more than I’d wanted anything outside of my mother’s love.

  Massi looked at me several times. Italian boys are good at eye contact. I looked older than ten in an off-the-shoulder dress, with my long dark hair and the coral lipstick from my mother’s purse. I’d wanted to fall in love since kindergarten. I’d always had crushes, had liked boys since Jeremy Bronn with the calloused thumbs. Four years earlier, in the lingerie section of a department store, I’d picked a sapphire teddy off the rack, with trickling garters and a net bodice. I begged my mother for it, and my mother, because she was either innocent to the request or uniquely understanding of it, let me have the silky bedroom thing. In the privacy of the house I wore it, baggy and bright, over my colt legs and flat chest.

  I watched my mother get drunk. She was laughing uncharacteristically loudly with some of the musicians. Most of the time she stood beside a stone-faced beautiful woman with an ivory cigarette holder. I felt a hatred rise up in me that day, one that had always lurked. My mother locked me out of her bedroom many nights of our life and I cried and begged at the door, pushing my finger pads against the cheap pine, and where was my father? I couldn’t think, it had been so long ago, but I remembered the bitterness I felt, and it came back around now, seeing my mother laughing with new people in a somewhat wanton way. Wearing a necklace of bones around her neck. Ah. My mother’s bone necklace.

  So that was when the boy, when Massimiliano, came around with his rich red hair and his confident saunter and his attempts at speaking my language—Wud going for a walk with me?—I took off with him. My father was distracted and he would always think I was his little girl—sexlessly beautiful—so we walked out of the sightline of the guests, down into the cool shade of a cypress grove. Massi picked up some figs and placed them in my hands. He’d hidden away a half bottle of grappa from one of the tables. It seemed the worst thing in the world if he were a cousin, but I didn’t ask, I only thought it, and my cheeks glowed like the stove burners we had in the Pocono house, the glass kind without iron that got hot and red behind your back.

  You wait for me, he said, and left and came back with two juice glasses. He took the figs from my hands and put them in the cups and filled them with two inches of grappa. You say cheers? he said, and we sipped our grappa and I almost choked but first love like that inures you.

  That was the year before the year my parents died and if only I had known. But I did know. I knew for the whole sunny day; when at night we went back to the fig and it was swollen with one of the strongest liquors, I knew. When the boy kissed me—the tongue and the lips, more sensual than I’d imagined—I was drunk in a way that was more mature than any drunk I would ever be in the future and I knew that this was the first and last perfect day of my life. I wanted to tell Alice about that day. I wanted to rub her face in the cow-trampled grass. I wanted her to know everything that she had taken from me.

  9

  THE NEXT DAY I WAS hired at the health food store. Nothing had ever come so easily. A man called. His name was Jim and I would never meet him. He burped on the other end of the line. The phone call was supposed to be an interview but it seemed I was hired before we even spoke.

  —We need someone every day. Can you work the whole day those days?

  I was frying an egg on my yellow range. Every time I accepted a job I felt terrorized, like I was about to be sent to jail. For most, it’s the opposite. The money is freeing, so they see the hours of work as a way out. I’ve had a strange relationship with money, as I’ve told you. I’ve been gifted things that are worth an entire year of steaming milk at a coffee shop.

  —Yes, I said. When I flipped the egg, the yolk ran. I was so heartbroken that I stopped listening until Jim said the hourly rate. It was less than half a yoga class at the studio. In the news that week a lawmaker said that destitute Americans who complain about the price of health care should forgo buying the new phone they want and use the money on insurance instead.

  —Sound good?

  Out the window I saw River. He was loading heavy-looking panels into the back of his work truck. On the side it said SOLAR FORWARD. A sun was pushing a lawn mower. He wore a bandana and a white t-shirt. I watched his arms crank in the sunlight.

  —Yes, I said. When should I start?

  —Tomorrow.

  —Perfect.

  I figured I could always quit right away. Really I had just wanted to get off the phone. The previous night Leonard hadn’t left until I yawned three times, the final time very aggressively. I’d washed all the dishes. I’d banged around so many pans, but he either didn’t take the hint or didn’t want to. After he left I’d taken two pills and tried not to think of Vic’s boy.

  I went outside. I walked by River while he was in the back of his truck, and I opened my car. Nothing made sense to grab. I picked up a pack of gum from the hairy console.

  —Hey, he said. He was so awake. I smiled and shielded my eyes from the light and hated myself for waking up late almost every day of my life.

  —So weird, I had a dream about you.

  —Oh?

  —Yeah. You were this wolf lady. Ha. Not in a bad way. Because of that song, I guess. You tore through the house looking for blankets, which is nuts because of how hot it’s been.

  The kid in New York, Jack, had been just like this. Young boys make you feel wanted but also like they could take you or leave you. Jack had long balls that hung like Dalí’s clocks. He was unembarrassed about them. He would come to my apartment from the place he shared in Hoboken with two other boys. He would say my apartment was in violation of a fun code. It had not had enough fun for weeks. When I missed him, I wrote, all in lowercase, something about something I had to show him.

  Are you trying to lure me into your city fort? he replied.

  i don’t know, am i? it’s just that the city fort is buckling under the weight of its lack-of-fun-code violation. it needs to be violated…

  Vic knew about Jack. He was the one who gave him the name the kid. He used to call me that until I started seeing someone so young. Are you going to get ravaged by the kid this weekend? Vic would ask. I told Vic about Jack’s long coral balls. He would ask if I served the kid cookies and milk after we fucked. If he sensed my anger he would say, Just joshing, kid. A woman like you will always be a girl. He’s the luckiest dope in the world until you’re through with him.

  River was even more attractive than Jack had been. I laughed off his dream even though it had the power to make me feel gamy. I told him to have a good day at work and I walked back to my door in a way that would make him look at my backside.
I was wearing small gray pajama shorts. The pills hit and my head went wavy.

  Just inside the door, I pressed medium-hard with two fingers up between my thighs. I could have come like that, right then. I wanted to and then call Vic, say there was a new kid on the block. I felt sick to my stomach.

  * * *

  I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO dress for my first day of work at the health café. I’d always wished I didn’t care so much. I have my mother’s clothes to give you and a few of my favorite pieces. You can throw it all away but I found it’s nice to have fabric. It stores memory in an accessible way.

  I parked in the small lot. My Dodge looked old and sad next to two impudent convertibles. I walked by the studio but did not look inside. It was daunting to know she was in there. I imagined her sitting on the bench made of a single tree, my mother and my father flanking her. They would be talking about me as though I wouldn’t understand something. Picturing the three of them together was one of the most sordid things I had ever done.

  When I walked in, Natalia was rinsing mugs in the immense silver sink.

  —How are you? I said, looking into her big Bambi eyes.

  —Uh, good, she said, and asked if I wanted a coffee, which was nice. It seemed we were going to pretend the accident we’d witnessed together had never happened. I could tell she was nervous to be training someone nearly two decades older than she was.

  I half-listened about everything except the coffee machine and the cash register. Both things had so many parts and I was nervous to make a mistake. Natalia was not a good teacher. She spoke too quietly and too quickly and hurried over the important things. To help her relax, I asked where she was from. She was so stupid.

  —Salinas, she said. My dad works on a farm. It was the most she volunteered. She asked absolutely nothing of me.

  She came very close to me while demonstrating a knob under the La Marzocco. She smelled like drugstore vanilla perfume. When she texted on her phone, her pretty pink nails stabbed the screen adroitly. I flipped through the manual for the coffee machine. I read the ingredients on the chocolate bars.