Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  That’s the best reason I can give for why I lingered near the door until River called out to me.

  —Hey, he said. A muscular arm reached from the bed and made the shape of a hug. Come back, he said. You can’t leave without cuddling.

  We fucked again, short but intense. We were on our sides and every thrust was deep and thoughtful. Kurt was circling near the door. His scruffy ears twitched at the sounds of squirrels and birds outside. Mid-fuck, River told the dog they’d be going soon. He asked me if I wanted to accompany them on their morning hike. Did you want to come, were the words he used.

  I said no and River told me to stay for a bit, under the covers. They left without me. I walked around the yurt. On the “walls” were pictures of his father, many of them, stuck to the wood beams. There was a tray of crystals and rocks, each of them labeled. Fancy jasper, stone of relaxation. Golden sheen obsidian, stone of personal power. Titanium aura quartz, stone of high energy. There was a collection of homemade walking canes. There was a pair of panties on the floor next to the stove. Brown silk. I picked them up and smelled them.

  * * *

  I WAS IN PAIN FOR the rest of that day. My abdomen was turning in on itself. I thought that it was because I’d had sex. Even if you don’t believe in God, you can chalk it up to biology; your body will occasionally be confused if a penis pokes in and out and doesn’t ejaculate inside of you. You didn’t fulfill your biological purpose, nor did you have a sincere orgasm.

  I took the jumpsuit off—how stupid clothes are after you’ve gotten drunk and fucked in them—and lay on the cowhide couch I’d owned for many years, the one on which I’d given Big Sky that first massage. My thighs and the backs of my arms stuck to the leather. I was afraid to turn the air conditioner on because the noise might summon Lenny. I didn’t want to see anyone, especially him. I thought an orgasm might unclench my abdomen so I flipped onto my stomach. I rode one of the wide leather pillows and thought of River fucking someone even younger than he was. I thought of Jack and River double-teaming some small blonde wearing an anklet. Finally, right at the edge, I pictured Alice’s huge naked chest squashed against a Corian kitchen counter and Big Sky plowing her from behind, an expression of ecstasy on his face that he’d never had with me. I came easily, explosively, but the pain did not subside.

  16

  AT THE END OF THE dinner that day my grandmother was raped, Joe and Evelyn dropped us off at our little red A-frame. At the restaurant they’d ordered dessert, a Baked Alaska. My mother smoked and watched them eat it, two herons drawing their big lips over the creamy forkfuls. Joe Jr. and I each got a scoop of rainbow sherbet in a little silver bowl.

  —Bye, Maria, keep us posted! Evelyn called from the car. Meanwhile Joe Sr. walked us to the door. He held my mother’s elbow. She was a little unsteady in her noisy wooden heels. He insisted on coming inside to make sure the place was secure.

  —No need, Joe, my mother said. She was always appropriating English idioms with her accent. It made me hate her a little.

  Joe made a show of poking around, going upstairs into our bedrooms.

  I need to describe the house. Right as you walked in, there was the galley kitchen, a little rectangle of Formica and a four-burner white stove. My parents were very clean people and yet the Pocono house of my memory is covered in a film of grease. There were those plastic salt-and-pepper shakers—a brown top to indicate pepper and taupe for salt—and every time I touched them I felt the need to wash my hands.

  Alongside the kitchen and extending to the back of the house was the combination dining room and living area. This was covered in wall-to-wall beige carpet, thick and cheap. Our dining room table had candlesticks and a plastic tablecloth that my mother wiped down nightly with a sponge.

  My mother was always cleaning, using her long nails to scrape hard crusts off of cabinets, spraying Windex at cloudy windows and moving her arms industriously to battle the streaks. Yet the house, for me, seemed categorically contaminated. Clearly I had some sort of a premonition.

  At the rear were the stairs to the second floor; these, too, were carpeted. The stairwell was very narrow. As a toddler I’d once tumbled from the top to the landing. I can still remember the curved pain in my neck when I thudded at the bottom with my feet in the air. I was afraid I’d broken myself. But I was more afraid of my mother getting angry.

  The second floor was railroad-style, a long, slender hallway with three bedrooms and one bathroom. My parents’—the master—was at the end of the hallway with the bathroom directly opposite. I slept in the bedroom closest to theirs, although most nights I slipped into bed beside my mother. The third bedroom, the one closest to the stairs, had two creepy twin beds with very tight sheets and knit blankets and light pink pillows with eyelet fringes. Sometimes I dreamed of two little girls in there, vicious ones who would pinch me in my sleep.

  The bathroom was small with white and black subway tiles and a cheap shower curtain circling a claw-foot tub. In the mirrored medicine cabinet my mother kept a backup of her Valium, blue pills with V-shaped cutouts in the middle that I used to think were hearts. I’ve saved those, along with many of her other pills. The expiration dates are about twenty-five years old, but I’ve found they still work if you triple the dose.

  Joe Sr. came downstairs. I was always having strange thoughts; I remember wondering if he’d stuffed a pair of my mother’s panties into his jacket pocket. She wore full-bottom underwear, often sheer, in dark colors like purple and mahogany. I inherited some of my mother’s allure, but it passed through a filter. She was old-fashioned sexy, pinup sexy. I have been hotel-room sexy, succubus sexy, too skinny to be remembered.

  —All clear, he said.

  —Thanks, Joe.

  —If you feel nervous, anything at all, you give me a call, any time of night.

  My mother nodded. She’d kicked off her shoes and was rubbing her ankle with the red-painted toes of the opposite foot.

  After he left, the girlish smile left my mother’s face.

  —It’s time for a bath, she said to me.

  —Can we have cocoa?

  —No cocoa. It’s bedtime. It’s been a long day.

  —Is Grandma going to be okay?

  —Yes.

  My mother moved into the small kitchen, putting dishes away. She was angry and I didn’t understand why. I thought she should be worried, nervous. I’d expected we would cuddle and comfort each other.

  —Why didn’t we go with Daddy? I asked, knowing it was the wrong question.

  —I don’t know why. Go to bed.

  —Mommy, please, I’ll have nightmares.

  She shook her head at me. She said something in Italian about nightmares being unavoidable. I don’t want you to think she was cruel. But she didn’t hold anything back. She didn’t treat me like I was ten years old. My father loved me so much more. I always thought that. But the tragedy of my life is proof that he did not.

  —I always have nightmares if you’re angry at me. Daddy would tell you to read me a story and make it better.

  —Why isn’t your father here and do it, then?

  —Because. Grandma.

  —Go to bed!

  —Don’t you love me, Mommy?

  My mother turned to face me. I wasn’t going to get the answer I wanted. I remember the feeling inside my heart. It was shocking how cold she could be. As a child in rural Italy, she’d been very sick and her parents had put her in a sanatorium, hours away from the family home, where she was quarantined in a sick ward with other children, coughing blood and not getting outside. Nurses with masks treated her brusquely, washed her in ice water to curtail the infection. They left bowls of farina with lumps for her to eat. They didn’t care if she didn’t eat. For nearly a year she was in that hospital and her mother came to visit her only once. It was a long trip and they were very poor and my mother said she didn’t blame her. She accepted it without reservation. In their bedroom in New Jersey my mother had a shrine for the woman who left her in t
he sanatorium. She told me I didn’t understand how hard life could be. That I was lucky.

  Silently she taught me that we are all monsters, we are all capable of monstrosity. Unforgettably and unforgivably, she taught me several days later that there is always a reason behind the monstrosity. So all my life I have never had to wonder, How did that thing happen? With a mother killing her toddler, with a girl texting her boyfriend into committing suicide, with a child blowing the priest. Other people wonder why. I know exactly why.

  —There are no stories or cocoa this late, my mother said instead of answering my question.

  —But Daddy lets me when I’m scared. Daddy said—

  —Your father is going to ruin you! she snapped.

  I have long puzzled over that response. Somehow, because of how much warmer my father was on the whole, I think I metabolized it to mean that men can ruin you in wonderful ways, like lurid, bright white jawbreakers with beautiful rainbow specks.

  17

  I WOKE IN THE MORNING to two text messages. The first had come in the middle of the night, from Vic’s wife, very long and all in capital letters. She must have been drunk or on pills. I thought of her dead husband and especially of her boy, how it was exponentially easier to go on if you decided to go mad.

  JOANNN. COME IN JOAN. WHERE ARE U? ARE U WITH A NEW HUSBAND? ARE YOU GOING TO TEAR ANOTHER FAMILY TO SHREDS? MY DAUGHTER HATES ME AND SHE HATES HER FATHER. SHE THINKS ITS MY FAULT THAT A WHORE WAS ABLE TO STEAL HER FATHER FROM ME. WHAT DO U THINK JOANNN? DO U AGREE? ARE U A WOMAN OF GOD? DO U PRAY TO A HIGHER POWER? WE USED TO GO TO CHURCH EVERY SUNDAY AND AFTER TO THE ROSE GARDEN AND HE PICKED ME ROSES AND WE PUT THEM IN A VASE AT HOME AND THEY LIVED UNTIL THE NEXT SUNDAY. I WAS ONE OF THE LUCKY GIRLS. HE WAS THE LOVE OF MY LIFE. I WONDER IF HE GOT U ROSES. I HAVE ALL THE BILLS HERE THE CREDIT CARD I WASNT SUPPOSD TO KNOW ABOUT. ALL THESE FANCY DINNERS! U ARE A LUCKY GIRL TO. HE NVR GOT ME CAVIAR.

  I read it a few times. I’d begun to tremble, though I didn’t realize it until I saw the phone shaking in my hand.

  The other message was from Alice.

  Your day off right? Come by for a comped class at 10? Then ill take you to the farmers market on trancas for banana blossoms.

  * * *

  FIVE MINUTES BEFORE THE CLASS, I checked my face in my rearview mirror. Why do some straight women need to be beautiful in front of other women? If men were wiped from the planet, how long would that need linger? At what point would we just focus on becoming strong?

  Inside the studio Alice was seated in lotus pose. Her hair was all the way down. She winked at me as I unrolled one of the rental mats near the window. She led us in sun salutations to Dylan’s “Mozambique.” I wondered whether any of these tight-faced women were thinking anything other than how beautiful Alice was. How stable yet dainty her wrists looked on the mat and how demure her rear was, high up in the air, in downward dog. There is so much power in the way we obsess. If we could only harness it. If we would only redirect it.

  I watched Alice’s body move and willed my bones to lengthen like hers. When I shot my legs behind my hips into chaturanga, I felt as light as I had ever felt.

  At the end Alice readjusted me in corpse pose. She smelled like pears. I was the first to get up and quietly roll up my mat. I didn’t look at her as I left the space. I waited outside on one of the benches. The front-desk girl came outside to ask me whether I had paid for the class, whether I would like to purchase a membership. I told her the class was comped. I felt like a wrinkled thief.

  When Alice came outside, she regarded me with a queer smile on her face. I worried that maybe I’d acted needy in the studio. It was impossible for me to know the right way to be around a woman.

  We drove too fast in the left lane of the Pacific Coast Highway with the windows down. We passed several empty garden centers, we passed the stone pillars of the Getty. That stretch of Malibu felt void of animals. The wind was too hot, the cars were too fast. Only crabs thrived.

  Alice played music loud and didn’t always answer a question right away. A lot of her actions felt cruel to me. Eventually I stopped asking questions. I held my arm out the window and tried to exist as a needless thing. I felt around her much the way I’d felt around Big Sky—that I should be as seductive as possible but take up the least amount of space.

  We pulled into the Trancas Country Market. It was a cluster of shops, a café, a bank, and a few boutiques. All the storefronts were made of wood planks. It felt more like Montana than it did the dry throat of Malibu. Alice parked between a bright yellow Karmann Ghia and a powder-blue BMW. There were G-wagons and Land Rovers and weathered Volvos and Porsches and Priuses. Every car in Los Angeles felt like it was the perfect car.

  The farmers’ market took up a strip of roadway behind the shops. Individual white tents shaded twin rows of long tables. Some tables were full of flowers in vases, and others had tight clusters of young broccoli florets and healthy-looking artichokes. Some had shallow tubs of ice with plastic containers of taramosalata and whipped feta. There was a fishmonger and there was a meat man and there were gray-haired ladies selling soap.

  Many of the patrons looked like us, women in yoga clothes with good hair. There was a woman a few years older than I was, with her daughter. I was always picking these women out of crowds—my age, give or take a few years, with a young girl. The child wore her blond hair in cornrows and had gangly legs. The mother pushed her own hair into a messy bun—something that beautiful women do on autopilot. My mother did things like that but not with her hair; more so with cutting onions, eating persimmon. This mother looked rested and scheduled. I watched her buy black garlic and let the hippie farmer keep the three dollars in change.

  There was a group of young men in neon Ray-Bans wearing backpacks. They were hikers coming down from one of the nearby trails for a glass of aloe vera. They looked at us. Next to Alice, in similar clothes, I wondered if I became a part of their fantasy or if they pushed me out of the picture altogether. I would have preferred the latter. To be a part of the dream of Alice would have made me feel like the scrapings from a pan. By that point in my life I knew that my obsession with beauty had everything to do with my father. When you are young and you see your father choose something, the thing that he chooses will be the thing that you want to be. I’m thrilled you will not have this problem.

  So far the two men who’d loved me were dead. Big Sky was alive and well, with his young son and his Southern belle wife, on the Upper West Side and in Montana. For some reason I always pictured them on their big decks eating peaches, sweet yellow wedges with vibrant red-orange skin.

  I’d been in the apartment overlooking the park only once. His wife and son had been at the lodge in Montana. Back then they went sporadically, but I’d recently found out they had moved most of their life there.

  He was flying to meet them at the lodge the following day. With Big Sky, my hatred of weekends intensified. Only people who live their lives very routinely, who have never known abject grief, can love Saturdays and Sundays. For me there was a rickety lonesomeness to them. It always seemed everybody had escaped somewhere I hadn’t been invited to. Blue pools and cocktails circulating on round trays. Or black lakes and tire swings. I bet that’s true for most mistresses. But it’s laughable to call myself a mistress, with either Vic or Big Sky, or with Tim, for that matter. I wish I had been something so quaint and definable as a mistress.

  That Thursday night on Big Sky’s deck I looked out at the city beneath me. I was wearing a white dress with wooden buttons down the center. It was one of the most expensive dresses I owned, though it didn’t look it. He brought out two glasses of rosé and we peered over the stone balustrade. I felt the heat of being next to him. I wanted to make myself wider, I wanted to spread my legs as far out in either direction as they could go and take everything he could possibly shoot inside me. I asked him if he was excited to get to Montana and he said, Oh, yes, I can’t wait.

  I don’t know what I expected. But I d
idn’t expect that. I was savoring every second with him and he was merely passing the time before he could be in the mountain air with his family. We fucked on one of the striped deck loungers under the silvery Manhattan starlight. He didn’t wear a condom; he always pulled out and came across my chest. That was our thing.

  Even though I wanted to stay over I knew that I couldn’t so I took a cab home just after midnight. It was my choice to be hurt in these ways.

  Talking to Alice about Big Sky made my feelings for him both more painful and more manageable. I had only told her the first part of Vic, what you might call the honeymoon period, though I cringe to think of it in those terms. She was giving me exactly what I had always wanted. She was making me feel seen and heard.

  —Are there any herbs you absolutely hate? she said to me when we were before a table of them. Tall fronds of dill and glistening bunches of cilantro and parsley and basil, arranged like tiny trees inside of mason jars.

  —In general?

  —These are things we should get over with now. Otherwise you become close and then one day you discover the other person doesn’t like dill. And you’re forced to hate them forever.

  —Dill is a deal breaker?

  —No. Cilantro. I can’t stand people who don’t like cilantro. They’re closed-minded.

  —I could do without oregano, I said.

  —Everyone can do without oregano. That’s fine.

  —There isn’t any herb I hate. I think chives and chervil are beautiful.

  She turned to me and smiled. I’d gotten the answer right.

  —Do you cook? she asked.

  I nodded. I worried that she was more skilled in classic techniques, like poaching fish. She was likely a neater chopper; I could never take the time to dice an onion into comely cubes.