Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  —Down here, Tim said to me, gesturing around the bar, at the bottles of men and the glasses of women, you know at the end of every day whether we had a good day or a bad day. You can tell the market by the mood of this bar. We work hard and we play hard and at night we’re either celebrating or we’re drowning our sorrows. It’s not healthy. It’s like a boxer after a round; good or bad, it makes you dysfunctional.

  I suppose I liked his honesty. He was somewhat guileless and somewhat a gentleman. Vic would end up being similar. All these paltry stand-ins for my father.

  When I went to pay my check that night my card was declined. This had never happened to me or, I should say, this was just the beginning of those sorts of things happening.

  —I’ve got her, Tim said to the bartender. He had a platinum card between his knuckles like a blade.

  It wasn’t inexpensive, my bill. I’d ordered the foie gras and the steak tartare, plus a few glasses of wine. Eating like that was the only way I knew to console myself.

  He took my phone number and I took his and the next day I was about to write to him to say that I would send a check to his work address. But he wrote to me first. He asked me if I knew any women, any girls, for a friend of his who liked to be kicked.

  Another message followed right away.

  I’m the friend, it said, with a little winking face.

  I looked around my room. It was an attractive and clean apartment that I had recently moved into and feared losing. It was barely furnished because I’d lost the job at the hospital downtown. I hadn’t lost it. The contract had run out. The previous week I’d canceled my cable service and returned two dresses I’d already worn to Bergdorf. They accepted anything in those days, with the tags gone, with the smell of cigarettes. It wasn’t without a price, of course. The women would gather the garment into their arms, sniff it, and look back at you like you were trash.

  I think I have a friend who might be interested, I wrote back.

  One minute later I wrote, I’m the friend.

  Kicking Tim was healthier than all those steak dinners with Vic.

  —Like just straight with the toe?

  I was standing in his hotel room at the Soho Grand. The room was very small but tasteful and dark. He was up against a wall in his nice work shirt and tasteful boxers. Black, thin socks rose up the calves of his pale legs. I wore a pin-striped skirt suit with a high slit and a pair of heels he’d just bought me in the Meatpacking District. I was upset because I’d let him pick them out. Peep-toed black patent-leather sling-backs. Stupid.

  He nodded quickly because to give instruction would have gone against the spirit of the thing.

  Primly I brought my leg back, then smashed his testicles against the minibar behind him that held the Scotch decanter and rocks glasses. The room twinkled with the sound. He groaned but did not cover himself. Nor did he smile or look like he was in sexual congress with his pain.

  That first night, with the Talking Heads in the background, I kicked him six times. Afterward he spooned me in bed. I felt him small and hard against my skirt suit. He moved in little increments, up and down instead of back and forth. He kept his palm flat against the side of my waist, the palm paralyzed like a stroke victim’s. We sat for an early dinner at the restaurant inside the hotel. I ate an octopus appetizer and he had the endive salad. The leaves were glossed demurely in oil and lemon. We both drank water, then he went back to Connecticut and I went home to my studio, one thousand dollars in hand.

  We never know how much worse it will be. That’s the greatest gift we have in life. As a child you’ll scrape your knee and the first time will sting terribly. It will shine like mica as it starts to heal. For maybe a week you’ll look at it and think, God, that hurt. But then you will lose a child out of you. Maybe you should stop listening to me. Sometimes I think you won’t endure life without what I’ve learned, and other times I believe the exact opposite. But mostly what I think is that you won’t love me.

  11

  ON MY THIRD DAY AT the health café I worked alone. Natalia was gone. She and her braids and cowboy hat had gone home to Salinas for the summer.

  The rumpled folksinger came in at noon. He ordered the green soup and waited inside with me. I hadn’t given a sign that I knew who he was. I knew eventually he would bring it up now that Natalia was gone.

  —When Doctor Johnson was a thing—do you know any of our songs, “Jessica’s Father”—

  —Yes, I do. I’m a fan.

  —Are you?

  —No.

  He was leaning on my counter and looking up at the ceiling between us. He wore expensive casual pants and leather sandals and wasn’t offended.

  —When we were a thing, we did a show at the Theatricum Botanicum down the way. We stayed with a couple of friends on Tuna Canyon and they brought us to lunch at this café. A beautiful young woman was slinging beans and rice. There was leche in the icebox and Pepsi-Cola. That’s it. Now look.

  My phone vibrated on the counter. Vic’s Wife, said the caller ID. The warming timer dinged on Dean’s soup. Some of the soup bowls were thick and brown. Others were shallow, light pink, and very thin. We weren’t supposed to let the customers bring the latter outside themselves.

  —I can follow you to the table, I said. I was holding the hot bowl of soup and my phone vibrated again.

  —Do you want to get that?

  —No, thanks.

  —It’s Vic’s wife, he said, smiling. She seems anxious to get in touch.

  —Could be a follow-up to “Jessica’s Father,” I said, and he laughed but not enough.

  There was an old woman at a table in the shade. She wore glasses and had fuzzy ringlets of strawberry hair. I’d sold her a rooibos hours ago and she was only halfway through with it. She wasn’t sweating. She’d told me she kept flamingos in a garden of flamingos, and if I ever wanted to visit I needn’t call ahead.

  Dean Johnson sat down and jerked his thumb in the direction of the lady.

  —If you’re ever lost, the old ladies are how you know where you’ve landed. In Beverly Hills the biddies look like whippets. Here in the Canyon they’re shriveled hippies with bright red hair.

  I placed his soup bowl before him. He looked at my neck as I did. I liked it when good-looking men checked out the less obvious parts of my body.

  When I got back to the counter there was a text message from Vic’s wife.

  CALL ME CUNT

  * * *

  ALICE CAME IN WHILE I was on a phone app that took a picture of an item and automatically affixed a description and a title, and then you named your price. Somewhere, within fifteen miles, someone who wanted your Package of Two Krazy Glue messaged you that they would come and pick it up.

  I was going around the café taking pictures of the bukedo and raffia baskets. I was setting the price at ten dollars more than their list. The plan was to meet interested parties after work and pocket the profit. I’d pinned my location as Beverly Hills and used for my profile picture a shot of myself in Sayulita. Hair in braids, white bikini, sitting on the sand in lotus pose.

  When she walked in I tripped on a basket and nearly fell. I wasn’t prepared for her to be the one to come to me. I keep talking about her beauty and I don’t want you to think it matters as much as it does. It only mattered too much to me.

  I could smell her sweat. It reminded me of my father’s. I said hello and she said it back.

  Her eyebrows were bushy. Her hair looked sandy and sweaty. I was not one of those heterosexual women who said they were attracted to other women. Who were these women? I could see in their faces; they were trying to impress whoever was listening—men—with their fluidity. I understood the inclination, of course. But with Alice what I felt was very pure and shocking to me. When I looked at Alice, I didn’t want her. What I wanted was to eat her, swallow her, and become her. I wanted to reach down between my legs and feel her cunt there.

  Nervously I asked her what she would like to eat, and brightly she said, The
green soup, please! Her manner was unhurried and self-assured. I’d never lived in the same place long enough to be meaningfully conversant with the grocery clerk.

  I felt embarrassed, like she could see inside me—my roiling thoughts, my loneliness, my suffering, and most humiliatingly, my petty jealousy.

  She walked to the fridge, selected a Tecate, and brought it to the counter. She tucked the beer under one bare arm and reached around to the back pocket of her leggings. She handed me a crumpled ten-dollar bill and looked at my face with intent. She moved in so close that I could smell her apple shampoo. I had the instinct to move away but I suppressed it. Or she suppressed it for me. I don’t know how it happened, but our two heads hovered above the counter like magnets.

  —Can I ask you a question? she said finally. I could feel the mist of her breath on my lips. I nodded. I felt expired. She sighed deeply and smiled as though she’d won the first interaction. In fact, she had.

  Do you shave your face? she said.

  I despised the requisite stunned look on my face. I said no and she smiled.

  —I ask because your cheeks and chin are incredibly smooth. Apparently women everywhere are shaving their faces. They say the reason men look younger than women is because they shave every day. They remove the top epidermal layer so the skin is always regenerating.

  Alice touched her face.

  —I grew fur this year, she said.

  —Well, I said, we’re animals. I tried to sound dispassionate, but I felt exploded. I wanted to bolt. I’d spent a lifetime not caring what women thought of me. But that was merely the lie I told myself to tell others. The truth was that I was afraid of women.

  When I brought her soup outside, she engaged me further, nodding to the seat across from her and saying, Did you want to sit down? as though I were the one engaging her and not the other way around. She wore small pink rose earrings that I recognized from somewhere.

  The patio abutted the face of a small mountain. The rocks near our cheeks gave the feeling of enclosure, privacy, and claustrophobia. It was my lunch hour and it was all right that I’d put a sign on the door that said BE BACK SOON in seventies-style script. It was allowed, but this was the first time I’d done it in the several days I’d been working. I drank a Tecate as well. I had never enjoyed a beer so much.

  I told her I was new to the Canyon and she could tell there was a reason I’d left New York but, like all self-assured people, she didn’t ask. She was startlingly forthcoming right away, which made her an alluring and warm conversationalist. At the same time she seemed difficult to please and too young to be so smart.

  A well-built man with blond hair walked by the café.

  —Hard eight, she said.

  —What?

  —There are so few attractive men up here. There are maybe two.

  The man turned to look at us. She looked back at him. I think she could have broken up any marriage.

  —Yes, I’ve noticed, and I’ve only been here a few days.

  —We aren’t supposed to like men these days, she said to me, still looking at the man.

  —The wrong ones, anyway.

  She nodded, turning back to face me, leaving the man standing there as though she’d never seen him to begin with. But, she said, the right ones are boring.

  —The right ones don’t lie. They don’t forget to call.

  —Who wants a man you can trust?

  There was a pause. Then we smiled and laughed. There’s nothing more sensual than a woman who makes you work to make her smile.

  —Is it not better here? I asked.

  —You mean men? Better than New York? It depends on what you want.

  —I don’t know if I want anything anymore. I’m just curious.

  In those first few moments I felt a volcanic connection to Alice unlike anything in my past. It was stronger than any link I’d had with a man, with my parents, with Gosia, even.

  —What kinds of men do you like? she asked.

  —Too many.

  —We shouldn’t be talking about men. What if they see us? We should be talking about careers and emotional fulfillment.

  —Let’s talk about careers, I said, gesturing around the silly café. The shining crystals. She laughed again but it felt like luck, like I was playing a game of pinball with a broken flipper bat and the flaw was working in my favor.

  —The last man I was with was a sailor, she said.

  —A sailor.

  —No, you know, one of these guys whose father has a boat. He had a regular job, whatever than means in Los Angeles. And then on the weekends he sailed around.

  —Oh. A sailor.

  —Precisely. He said that most of the time he was imagining me getting fucked by somebody else. That he was watching.

  —I think I like that, too, I said, remembering the way I nearly came at the thought of River and a young girl having sex in a car.

  —Most women like it, Alice said. I think they like it more than men do. They just don’t want to access that part of their brain.

  She walked out to the lot and came back with a pack of American Spirits and a book of matches from an osteria in Rome. She slid the pack across the table and I shook my head. I couldn’t believe she smoked. I wondered if she was making a show of it because she was proud of the matches. A little cartoon boy in overalls with apple cheeks, eating grapes on the hood of a powder-blue Fiat. Then I realized that was something only I would have done, and I spent the next few moments so involved with hating myself that Alice thought I was bored. We told each other our names and there was no starlight. Hearing my name didn’t ding her.

  —Are you looking to date? she asked. Because you won’t be able to do it up here. You’ll have to go to Santa Monica. Or Hollywood, if you don’t mind lice.

  I told her I wasn’t looking for anyone and she said we are always looking for someone and I hated her and I asked about her type.

  —I don’t know the types I like. I have to go through all of them before I can settle on the one I know I need to be with. I’m nearly through with the American WASP.

  —You’re done with sailors.

  —Yes. Sailors. Check.

  —I want a cowboy, I said.

  —Cowboys don’t exist. How about a logger? A stone-cold-sober logger. Charlie—the sailor—his profile was very well written. That’s what got me. When we were in bed and he was asking me to tell him how much I loved his cock, I got to wondering. I found out later a friend of his from New York wrote it. I told Charlie his profile headline should have said, Neptune, God of the Sea, Seeking Yoga Barbie to Have Conversational Sex With.

  —You learned a new art.

  —I should include it in my profile. As a skill. Alice held out her palm like a placard and said, I can also do this.

  We talked about certain bars to show each other we spoke the same language. We talked about plantains and books and elections and melatonin and shaving our faces but eventually we returned to the topic of men. Boys. We were young girls talking about boys. I’d always been afraid that thinking about men meant I wasn’t a strong woman. But Alice was strong and she liked to address the picayune strategies involved in replying to a message. She endeavored, for example, to always use at least one word less than the other person did in a previous text. She said women were considered strong these days only if they didn’t talk about things they loved that didn’t love them, if they didn’t get hurt or allow themselves to be occasionally humiliated at their own hands when, really, strength was being unashamed to want what you want.

  —Your turn, she said. What was your last relationship?

  —I don’t know which to tell you.

  —Two at once?

  I nodded.

  —Tell them both but start with the one that you actually wanted to fuck.

  I wanted to say, How did you know? But you can’t compliment a new person too much at the start of a relationship. It will affect the balance of power.

  She smiled and seductively took a dr
ag of her cigarette. I told her about Big Sky. Our first meeting. I told her how he ended the evening by asking whether he could kiss me on the mouth. That’s erotic, she said. What an erotic way to put it. I told her how that weekend I died the death of the single woman obsessed with the married man. I imagined that he and his wife were at farmers’ markets picking out misshapen eggplants and herbs for pasta sauce. I walked and walked and walked. I tried to “find” him. On Friday I emailed him. He responded wanly, shortly. I felt like I’d not only exaggerated the emotions of our evening together but wholly invented them. I ate nothing but broccoli sprouts and broccoli florets rolled up in flaxseed wraps. My stomach felt taut and I thought, But what for, now. The weekend turned out to be beautiful. Everywhere I went, mothers bought juicy oranges and great stalks of leek and fathers pushed tiny butts on swings in the sunshine. Nobody was smoking cigarettes. All that weekend every ten minutes I tapped my code into my phone and opened my email to find nothing. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting.

  —Perhaps, Alice said, you were expecting Sorry I was short on Friday, my wife was holding our baby in my face so I couldn’t write you a long note. I missed you very much.

  —Yes, I said, that must be exactly what I was expecting. Nothing came. I started waiting thirty minutes in between check-ins to increase the likelihood of a reply. I imagined even my phone was through with me. It hungered for a more self-assured owner. Monday came. The air turned cooler and I felt calmer.

  —Let me guess, Alice said.

  I nodded.

  —It’s measurable by science, she said. A man will know the very moment you have stopped obsessing. The instant.

  —An email popped up, I continued. His name. Come by Harry’s for a drink later? I felt dizzy and at first not even grateful. My throat was dried out. How could I have felt so strongly so quickly? One of my friends turned every one-night stand into the love of her life. But not me. I had never met a man like this one. I love you, I said to my phone. Holy shit, I love you.