Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  He handed her the list of vets, the places she had to go. “Think your scrambled brains can handle this?”

  She didn’t answer that; she knew why he had to insult her. “Can I come down and see them tonight?” she said instead.

  Stan smirked. “Call around six. If I’m there, I’m there. No promises.”

  “I’ll try you then,” said Saga.

  No better at good-byes than he was at hellos, Stan strode off across the park, back to the subway, to his job at the phone company.

  Saga stayed on the bench for a moment to feel the sun on her head and shoulders. Sometimes she liked to imagine that if she could just sit still long enough, the sun could heal her brain the way it made leaves and flowers sprout, multiply, glow. She let herself reach up, just briefly, to feel the long furrow that remained along the top of her head, entirely hidden by her hair, which had quite indifferently grown out (speaking of growth) to cover this anatomical crisis.

  She pulled her hand down and made herself look at the picture Stan had taken for the flyer. It was true; he had done a nice job. The puppies were cozied up together on the big plaid cushion in Stan’s kitchen, all of them facing the camera. They looked playful and bright and would find their new homes quickly.

  The flyer gave Stan’s number over and over on little rip-off tabs at the bottom. When people wanted to adopt an animal, Stan took it to them, so he could see where it would live. He never let them come to his place. Saga supposed he knew how his way of living would appear to the outside world, so sometimes she still wondered, a little shamefully, about the way he’d so easily let her come over that very first time, about how naïve she had been.

  Stan lived in a skinny, sinister-looking house out in Brooklyn. Though it had clearly come first, it looked as if it had been squeezed into a crevice between the two large brick buildings on either side. Because of this, it was almost constantly in shadow. But hey, as Stan had pointed out when Saga remarked on the darkness, it was a house. A house in New York Fucking City. He’d bought it at a foreclosure sale. Deal of the fucking century.

  When she had first phoned him, last year, after getting his number from that shelter worker in Connecticut, he had given her directions to get to his place. Without worrying about her safety, or about who this man really was, she had eagerly followed those directions, carrying a small stray, a Norwich terrier, in her plumber’s bag on the subway. She had already put up a notice in the post office and the grocery store and on telephone poles around Uncle Marsden’s town and other towns nearby—IS THIS YOUR DOG? HE MISSES YOU!—but no one had called. When Stan agreed to take the dog, she’d told Uncle Marsden she was going to a museum in the city.

  Stan worked, so she’d had to wait until the evening to see him. To kill time, she had taken the dog to Central Park, walking him past the back of the Metropolitan Museum, so that what she had told Uncle Marsden became almost the truth.

  Setting foot inside Stan’s house had been a shock. Saga was almost obtusely brave (that was how Uncle Marsden put it once when he lost his temper), but for a moment even she had second thoughts about her safety. At a glance, the place was a nest of bedlam and grime, cats and dogs everywhere, in frayed, chewed-up baskets, on tattered armchairs, in open metal dog crates lined up against a wall where you’d expect to find a sofa. And this guy Stan, in his buttoned-to-the-neck white shirt (gray at the cuffs) and shiny black pants, had a kind of leering undertaker quality. He had this long, thin, pale face (somewhat like the façade of his house), spiky brown hair, and huge, intense blue eyes that looked a little creepy when he smiled, because his smile was faintly mean. Or maybe, to be fair, this effect was just because of his jumbled, slightly pointy teeth. When he closed the door behind Saga, the look he gave her was the look you might imagine on the face of the old woman in the forest who takes in Hansel and Gretel: Now here’s a tasty meal!

  Stan was obnoxious, you couldn’t get around that, yet Saga decided that maybe he was just one of those people cursed with a face that put you off no matter what he was thinking. The first thing he said that night was “Where is he? Let’s see him.” Rude, but this was business.

  He’d taken the dog from Saga’s bag and simply held him close for a few minutes, until the dog stopped shivering. Then he’d examined him, all over but gently—looking for fleas and rashes, Saga figured. Stroking the dog’s belly, Stan muttered, “Wormy as hell, poor guy.”

  While he made his inspection, Saga forced herself to look around. The furniture was coated with gray fur, the windows so filthy the panes had no shine. No bookcases, no rugs, few pictures on the walls. But she also noticed that the fifteen animals she could count looked clean and healthy. Two larger dogs had come over to Stan and tried to jump up to check out the terrier; Stan lifted a knee, ordered them down, and they obeyed. He used a calm voice. She liked that.

  Finally, still carrying the dog, Stan led Saga upstairs. He did not invite her to follow him, but he didn’t tell her not to. They went into a small room, and he shut the door behind them. Newspapers covered the floor, and except for a food bowl, a water bowl, and a cushion, the room was empty. (The “room,” Saga noted, was smaller than the pantry at Uncle Marsden’s.)

  The terrier ran straight to the water.

  “He has to stay in here alone?” said Saga.

  “He has to be quarantined—obviously—till I can get him to the vet.”

  Well, of course, thought Saga. She sat on the floor by the cushion and waited for the dog to stop drinking.

  “So what kind of a name is Saga?” Stan said.

  “It’s one of those childhood names that just sticks. I’m Emily, really. But nobody calls me that.” Nobody other than her doctors.

  “Like you told big lies—or what?”

  “Something like that.” She was glad she’d found Stan, because of what he did, but she didn’t feel much like talking to him. She wondered if she should say good-bye now and leave, if despite his own rough manners he’d find her rude.

  He crossed his bony arms and, for a moment, watched Saga petting the dog. He gave her another unnerving smile. “Want a beer, Saga? Seeing as you came all this way.” He opened the door. “He’ll get along fine. I watch over everybody here. No-brainer, it ain’t about money or fame.”

  So she followed him down to the kitchen. Stan washed his hands at the sink and made sure Saga did the same. “Sit,” he said in a neutral voice as he went to the refrigerator. The counters were covered with stacks of papers and magazines. The only place to sit was at a table taken up almost entirely by a cage in which a white rabbit—fat, immaculate, sleepy-looking—chewed mechanically on a turnip, devouring it end to end. While Stan’s back was turned, Saga sneaked a finger between the bars and stroked the rabbit’s shoulder. The rabbit turned its rosy eyes toward her and pushed its nose against her finger. “Hi,” she whispered, putting her face close to the cage.

  “Kindergarten bunny,” said Stan, startling Saga. “Did his time with several rounds of the poky little monsters and then, all because one of ’em one year had an allergy, was about to be shipped off to the torture labs of Monte Fucking Fiore.” As he talked, a dog slipped through a flap in a door that must have led to a backyard. (Saga imagined a narrow patch of dirt, a space no less dreary than the space indoors.) “So, Budweiser do? That’s it around this watering hole.”

  Since the accident, Saga hardly ever drank alcohol, but she accepted the beer because she thought it might make her less nervous. She asked Stan how he’d started taking in animals.

  “When I learned, not a minute too soon, that taking in people—wives, girlfriends, moochers, assholes, whoever—is a miserable waste of time.”

  Stan must have been about fifty. Was he implying he’d had a wife, even more than one? Saga wondered who would have married the guy. She wondered if he had children; she hoped not. But then he told her about the group of people he’d organized to look out for strays, rescue abused animals, take calls in the middle of the night if someone found an animal
hit by a car. They posted leaflets all over the city to broadcast their services. “That so-called Animal Welfare Society up in Manhattan? ‘Society’? More like charnel house,” said Stan. “Penitentiary. We’re like the Guardian Angels of the animal world. And it ain’t a world of charm and style, let me tell you. Some people get us, some don’t. They don’t? Well, to put it politely, tough excrement.” He told her about cockfighting, dogfighting, satanic sacrifice. Someone in the group had a big backyard on Staten Island; he took in the roosters and goats. Snakes, lizards, and ferrets went to a vet who lived on Long Island, birds to a flutist from the Metropolitan Opera who had a soundproofed loft on Liberty Street. “Like they say, it takes all kinds.”

  Stan opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out a sheaf of lime-green papers. “Here. Take some to fancy-ass Connecticut. Can’t hurt. Maybe get us some bleeding-heart patrons from the retriever set.” Saga took the leaflets. They read:

  We are the TRUE PROTECTORS of the urban animal kingdom.

  We look after, heal, and give shelter to: DOGS, CATS, PARROTS, BIRDS, PIGEONS, LIZARDS, TURTLES, IGUANAS, SNAKES, MONKEYS, RABBITS, GUINEA PIGS, GERBILS… everything except rats from the subways and mice from your stove.

  We have ADOPTION SERVICES for pets of all kinds. We know THE BEST VETS all around the city and beyond.

  WE REFER FOR LOW-COST SPAY AND NEUTER—DO IT NOW!! HELP US HELP THE ANIMALS. CALL US ANYTIME. WE NEED VOLUNTEERS. WE ARE THE ONLY TRUE PROTECTORS!

  There were no pictures, no decorative borders. It looked serious, political. Like a…Saga groped for the word. It was a red word. If she’d told Stan what she was thinking, he would probably have said, “Nobrainer, honey.”

  All at once she felt envious of Stan, never mind his grubby little house. She was sorry that she didn’t live in the city (where people could be odd without explanation), that she couldn’t be a part of his group, that she wasn’t quite independent enough to make these choices. Stan said the group met every Tuesday night at a falafel joint around the corner. (What was falafel? Had she ever known?) “Come if you like,” he said, without encouragement.

  Manifesto—that was the word, the red word she’d been searching for, she realized as she watched the bunny lick its paws.

  She had another beer. (Why hadn’t she left?) She noticed that Stan had already drunk four or five. She said she had to go, but could they check on the terrier first? Up in the quarantine room, they found the little dog fast asleep on the cushion in the corner. “Happy?” asked Stan as he closed the door.

  “Who’s that?” said Saga as they stood in the hallway. From the floor above, she heard voices. As she listened, the voices turned to music.

  “Radio. Jazz and blues tonight,” said Stan.

  Saga must have looked as if she expected more, because he laughed and shook his head. “All right, Nosy Parker. I have a cat of my own who likes the radio. She gets my bedroom to herself, because she doesn’t get along with the guests. She’s this Siamese vixen that nobody else would take because she clawed nearly everyone who met her. Well, I discovered it’s true after all, that thing about music and the savage beast. Wanna meet the little terror?”

  Saga looked at her watch. With a pang of anxiety, she noticed that it was already too late to catch the last train to Connecticut. “Can I use your phone?”

  “Sure. But come meet Sing Sing. I promise not to let her maul you.”

  The beer had softened Stan, or maybe it had softened Saga toward him. She followed him up a staircase that tilted badly toward the wall. The banister was chipped in places, exposing paint in four or five different colors. You had to hold on or you’d fall to the side.

  Stan got to the top first and turned to see her moving cautiously, slowly. “Great sobriety test, my stairs. And honey, looks like you might just flunk.”

  “I don’t have my full equilibrium,” she said defensively—though she had to admit that two beers had affected her far more than she would have guessed.

  “Hey, who does?” said Stan as he opened one of two doors at the top of the stairs. Inside was a room that Saga had imagined (or hoped) would be a crisp, clean oasis of domesticity, another likable surprise about this sandpaper man. But no. The first thing she saw was a movie poster—The Maltese Falcon—tacked to the wall. Below it, a gooseneck lamp cast a cone of light onto a hastily made bed, navy blue sheets without a blanket or quilt. At the foot of the bed cowered a Siamese cat with shredded ears and a stump for a tail.

  The cat began to whine at that eerie pitch unique to feline distress. On the radio, a lady singer with a big voice happened to be yowling as well.

  Stan turned the radio down and then swept the cat up in his arms, as if receiving a low pass in a football game. “Now now, none of that, you she-devil!” he said between clenched teeth. To Saga’s alarm, he tossed the cat up toward the ceiling, so that she flipped over in midair, then caught her with ease. He thumped her rhythmically on her backside several times and imitated her earlier moans. “Yeeeaaah-oooo, eeeaaahooooooooo!” he moaned. When he stopped, the cat was purring, kneading her paws on the sleeve of his shirt.

  “See?” said Stan. “I’ve just got a way with the dames.” He pointed to a phone on a table and motioned for Saga to sit on the edge of the bed. Picking up the receiver, Saga had to be careful not to topple a tower of books (science-fiction novels), three bottles holding various amounts of beer, and a glass of cloudy liquid with a dusty film on top.

  “Yuck,” she said quietly. The receiver was sticky.

  “Oh chill,” said Stan. “Everyone else you know has a maid. I don’t squander my money like that. Other ways, but not that way.”

  Uncle Marsden was out at a lecture that night, she remembered with relief when she got the answering machine. “I missed the last train, so I’m staying with a friend,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Ho ho,” said Stan. “Would I be that lucky friend?”

  “Of course not,” said Saga, though she was no longer in touch with anyone in the city and did not know yet what she would do—probably sleep on a bench in Grand Central Station. (Could you even do that anymore, since the fancy renovations? What if you couldn’t?)

  And right then, just like that, Stan pulled her to him and kissed her—not in a forceful or threatening way, but surely and calmly, as if there wasn’t a chance in the world she’d refuse his advances.

  At first she did, not shouting but pushing at his chest. She was angry and shocked, not afraid. How could someone who took care of helpless creatures be a menace? “Stop,” she managed to say, though he wasn’t letting go of her body.

  “Oh really?” He was smiling his unpleasant smile, but then he was running his lips around her ear—the ear on her good side, the sensitive one.

  “Really,” she said. “I do not know you!”

  “Oh please let’s dispense with knowing, Story Girl,” he said in a whispery voice against her neck. “Knowing is so…cumbersome.”

  Cumbersome. She saw something like a large puffy white-blue bank of clouds. And in the opportunity of silence that opened as she contemplated her picture of this word, Stan slid a hand under her shirt and beneath the elastic band of her bra, slipping it up past her breasts.

  He’d pushed her back—without resistance, really—against the pillows, which smelled musty and earthen. The ceiling that Saga could see beyond his head was textured, patterned in curlicued squares. It was light blue, just like her vision of cumbersome. Odd coincidence, she couldn’t help thinking.

  So almost by accident she paused, letting him caress one breast and kiss her mouth, and then she found herself wondering merely if she could get pregnant this time of the month. She had a sudden elusive memory of the last time she had wondered such a thing…and here was David’s unwelcome face.

  It was so very long ago, or it seemed so long ago, that she had last been held like this. (Is it all right? whispered David’s face.) Because she was curious, even eager, to remember how it felt, or perhaps becaus
e she wanted so badly to banish David, she let Stan continue. She could feel his hard penis like an exclamation point right up against her thigh. He wasn’t rushing it. Reaching for common sense, she pushed at his chest again. “No, really. Stop.”

  Now he was on top of her, and a part of her knew she should fight, but she didn’t. Stan pulled himself up from the waist to look her in the eye. He was panting slightly as he said, “You take a while to make up your mind, Story Girl. I don’t think that’s really fair in a situation like this, do you?” And he resumed kissing her.

  His mouth tasted like beer—as hers did, too, no doubt—but it wasn’t a bad taste. It was one of those tastes that called to her from her past, her not-too-distant yet light-years-away prehistory, when she had assumed so many things (for instance, that it was stupid to go to a strange man’s house without anyone even knowing where you’d gone). But how senseless and silly so many of those assumptions had become in hindsight. Why not this one, too? That he was essentially raping her, or at least taking advantage of her.

  The word rape—a very dark purple, strangely royal—sent a tangible chill through her body, like a halting of her blood. But this did not feel like what she imagined rape to feel like. She liked the warmth of his body, and she liked the softness of his mouth.

  When she put her arms around his narrow shoulders and began to kiss him back, he murmured his approval. The radio still played, though more quietly than when they’d come upstairs, and Saga was vaguely aware that the cat was still on the bed, near their feet, no longer objecting to her presence. Tain’t nobody’s business if I do, sang a woman in a sassy, girlish voice.

  “You’re a sexy lady, know that?” Stan whispered as he unzipped her pants.