Women and Children First

by Francine Prose

  “Don’t tell me,” says Vincent. “Crème brûlée.”

  Laurel glances at him. “You don’t have to eat there,” she says, shifting slightly away in her seat. “I don’t care.”

  “No,” Vincent says. “It sounds great. Who do you go there with?”

  “My cousin and her husband, mostly. They’re into good food.” Laurel moves closer again—all this is in fractions of inches. “Gee,” she says. “Thanks, really, for the ride.”

  “It’s nothing,” says Vincent. That’s right, he thinks. It is. Nothing. And what did he think it would be? What did he think would happen between him and some twenty-five-year-old physical therapist on the road between his dying father and a two-time loser with Lou Gehrig’s disease?

  Out of nowhere, there’s a line of red brake lights ahead of him. Everyone’s rubbernecking: an old man’s car’s broken down. For a while, after his father got sick, Vincent was always amazed to see old people walking around, or driving. This one’s in trouble. Steam’s billowing from under his hood. A cop’s there, helping.

  “Ruined his whole day,” Vincent says.

  “Car trouble all around,” says Laurel. “Maybe it’s in the stars.” Laurel turns back for one last look at the steaming car, then says, “When I was a kid I thought I saw a vision in my neighbor’s backyard. First I thought it was a ghost. Then I thought it was the Virgin Mary. But when I got really close it turned out to be steam from the neighbor’s dryer.”

  Well, Vincent thinks, that explains everything. Religious. He’s aware that some part of him wants to believe that Laurel is religious, that she’d have to be. In some way, Vincent decides, it’s not her body he wants, but her spirit. He wants to believe that people like Laurel exist—simple, selfless, purely good.

  “Are you Catholic?” he says. For a moment Vincent almost wishes he were; his parents stopped going to mass before he was born.

  “Till I was seven,” Laurel said. “Then I quit.”

  “Why’d you stop?” Vincent asks.

  “I don’t know. It was winter. It was cold in the church. I missed so much I just didn’t go back.”

  Vincent thinks: If they’ve talked about God, they can certainly talk about work. “Listen,” he says. “How does somebody become a physical therapist, anyhow?”

  “SUNY,” says Laurel. “I’ve only had my license three years.”

  “But why?” Vincent says.

  “I just like to use my body, I guess,” Laurel says. “Keep in shape. And I like to help folks.”

  Vincent can’t let himself take this seriously. He doesn’t even want to consider the possibility that this girl who has obsessed him, whom he’s seen as a kind of saint with the healing touch, is in fact just a glorified aerobics nut. Besides, he’s positive there’s more to it. Certainly there are other ways to use your body and help folks besides lavishing such tenderness and encouragement on so much dying flesh.

  “I guess that’s not all,” Laurel says a moment later. “I mean, for one thing, I was never squeamish about certain stuff that might bother other people. Even when I was little. Maybe I was born that way. Like here’s something that happened.” She waits a moment, then says:

  “When I was ten we lived in a basement apartment in Troy. My window was right on the street. First it was a good neighborhood, then it wasn’t so good, and one morning I woke up to find this bum in bed with me. It was summer and he must have crawled down through the open window. His face was stubbly, and at first I thought it was my dad—he always kissed me good-bye when he went to work. But then I smelled alcohol on his breath, and my dad didn’t drink. The bum wasn’t doing anything, just sleeping, but anyway I called my parents, and when they came in my dad went crazy, beating on the guy, pushing him out through the lobby and back onto the street. My mother would burst into tears whenever she told the neighbors. My brother had bad dreams for months. But not me. It didn’t bother me, I don’t know. Even then, I figured: Hey, he’s a person, too.”

  Vincent loves Laurel’s story, loves it so much he wants to make her repeat it. Maybe if she told it again, he’d know what it reminds him of. Then he figures it out on his own. It’s “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitaler,” the story that, Vincent thinks now, was the most loving and beautiful thing Flaubert ever wrote. Julian, the hunter who has progressed from slaughtering the innocent beasts of the forest to accidentally murdering his own parents, is forgiven—and forgives himself—when he hugs a leprous beggar in his arms all night. Suddenly Vincent feels grateful for his work, for knowing that story and being able to make this connection. He feels that he has been allowed to see some pattern in things and feel comforted, feel that some things endure beyond individual lives. He remembers how when Marianne was pregnant with Beth, and he’d get scared, he’d look at strangers in the street and, for comfort, think: Everyone was born. Now he thinks: Everyone’s parents die.

  He so wants this feeling to continue that he tries to picture the Troy apartment, Laurel at ten. His daughter will be ten in three years; but dark, intense Beth is nothing like Laurel, and anyway, Vincent can never imagine his own children older. So he thinks of himself at ten, in his own room, his own house, the stucco New Rochelle Tudor they moved into when he was six. He sees his room, all those leaded glass windows, his toy trains—and instantly he realizes his mistake. The memory of that room is so sharply, so unexpectedly painful, it knocks the wind right out of him. For that was his father’s house, where Vincent lived as a child. He will never live in that house again, and his father will soon be dead. Vincent sees that this fact stretches backward and forward in time, changing everything, so that even the happiest memories are dangerous and will hurt. What difference does it make if two stories match, if a French saint and some little girl in Troy wake up in the arms of a bum? His father is dying, and that’s all there is.

  “Are both your parents alive?” he asks. The way it comes out is almost accusing, which is almost how Vincent means it.

  Laurel looks at him strangely. “Yes,” she says. Then she says, “I’m sorry about your dad.”

  Vincent doesn’t answer. He’s afraid he’ll start weeping in front of Laurel. What makes it worse is that he can’t even speed up to distract himself. He’s stuck in a no passing zone behind some old lady doing forty. He leans forward, resting his breastbone against the wheel. Laurel leans forward too. He wonders if she’s unconsciously mimicking him, then realizes she’s pointing up through the windshield.

  Looking up, Vincent sees a gigantic bird approaching them, flying slowly in from the west. At first he thinks it’s a heron, but it’s gliding. More like a hawk, except that it’s too big for a hawk. Could it possibly be an eagle? Whatever it is, it’s flying oddly, and as it gets closer, Vincent sees why. It’s got a huge fish in its claws. The fish is still struggling, and the bird’s trying not to drop it.

  “I think it’s an osprey,” says Laurel. “Look at that!”

  Still hanging on to the fish, the bird swoops down toward a telephone pole, clearly intending to land. But just as Vincent and Laurel pass, the fish drops out of its claws and falls to the ground. Vincent watches in his rearview mirror as the bird hovers, checks out the wires, the nearby road, decides it’s not worth it, and takes off. Vincent notices that the telephone pole is, as luck would have it, newer and slightly lighter than the rest.

  Vincent and Laurel drive another quarter mile, till Vincent finds a safe place to make a U-turn. Then he circles around and heads back. He spots the light-colored telephone pole and pulls off the road. He gets out and walks through the grass.

  The fish, still moving, is easy to find. Vincent picks it up. It’s slippery and hard to hold, enormous and heavy and perfectly silver, shiny as a new dime. The sun hits it straight on. Its eye is open and bright.

  He thinks about bringing it home. At first he is worried that Marianne and the kids won’t believe him, or, if they do, will take it wrong: all their fishing brings in nothing, and all he has to do is drive down the road. He’
ll also have to explain what he was doing here with Laurel. Then he thinks: Marianne and the kids aren’t like that. They’ll believe him and love his story, they’ll exclaim over the fish, his luck in finding it, his sharp eye, his reflexes, his common sense. His giving Laurel a ride will seem like what it is: a decent thing to do, regardless of why he offered.

  Laurel is talking as she gets out of the car and walks toward him. “It’s a freshwater bass,” she’s saying. “From the reservoir, probably. You can do anything with that. You could bake it in foil with plenty of fresh parsley and garlic and olive oil and green pepper and lots of sliced fresh tomatoes…”

  Vincent can’t speak. He holds the fish toward Laurel. He doesn’t know if he is offering it or just showing it. He will do anything she says.

  Everything Is About Animals

  HER LOVER IS A BIOLOGIST, a specialist in animal relocation. When the ecologically conscious want to build in a wildlife area, he is called in to move the animal populations and accustom them to their new home.

  It took her some time to believe that such a job really existed. Or rather, she believed him until the first time he went away on an assignment; then she worried that he had made it all up to escape her. It seemed inconceivable that men who constructed new factories and extended the edges of cities should spend so much money on nature. She could understand why the developers of a new ski resort might worry about displaced resentful bears, but why would a lumber company feel so solicitous about elk?

  For comfort, she thought: How could anyone make all that up? Besides, the details of his life added up. He knew every animal language, every bird call, the moony lowing of bison, the high-pitched, complex rattling of hyenas. She loved hearing, but not watching, this; she was embarrassed by the comical ways he had to screw up his face to make these sounds. But often, at night, she’d ask him to do mourning doves or owls, and though it was already dark, she’d close her eyes and imagine her bedroom was a forest. Also she loves making love with him; she feels that watching animals mate has taught him something about men and women—nothing specific, really, but something she has no language for and so cannot describe.

  What finally convinced her was nothing he did or said, nor the stories he told, nor the nature photos he showed her, but the charity ball he took her to, at which one hundred beautiful rich women signed pledges to never wear fur coats again. These women all knew him and spoke to him in hushed reverential tones; he smiled and lowered his handsome head toward their mouths. Then she realized that it wasn’t the city planners or the corporate heads who were behind this, but the wives of the city planners and corporate heads. And now his stories made sense, made even more sense when he told her: these women would do things for animals, work and care for animals in ways they would never work or care for their fellow men. He is often hired to make sure animals get enough to eat in countries where people are starving.

  She has learned to rely on him to make sense of the world. When they watch TV news, he tells her which criminals are innocent, which are guilty, and though his perceptions don’t always match hers, she accepts his because she knows he reads deeper signs: lip curls, teeth baring, postures, blinks. She moves to the country, learns to live in the country—for the beauty and quiet, she says, but really to be more like the creatures he so admires. When he is with her, she thinks that this is the right way to live; at other times, she is more aware of the long commute to work.

  She too is a scientist—a lab assistant, really. Her boss is a Korean biochemist who believes in the chemical nature of mental illness and gets grants to do elaborate analyses of the blood, sweat, and urine of schizophrenics. The other technicians are friendly, talkative women, mostly from exotic lands; at Friday lunch they have spectacular international pot-lucks. Ordinarily she likes her job, but when her lover is away, she makes frequent mistakes; the experiments require precise timing, and his absence distorts her sense of time. She has to concentrate on the clock, which only reminds her of how long until he comes home. Not that she knows. There is never any telling how long a herd of caribou, say, might take to accept their new grazing lands. She can’t help being impatient and ashamed of her impatience, thinking of the animals, thinking: Hurry up and eat.

  Also, there is this: to get to her lab, she has to walk down a long corridor past the animal research stations. The smell and the noise—the howls, the perpetual barking behind closed doors—are unspeakable. Usually she can steel herself and go deaf. But when he is gone she feels unworthy of him for not rushing in and throwing open the cages and letting the dogs and cats and rabbits run wild. She fears that her not doing this will undo all the points she imagines herself earning for having put in a garden.

  Being with him has made her conscious of resources, of taking advantage. Partly for this, and partly to convince herself there were reasons to move to the country, she has planted a garden. Last year they did this together, but gardening alone is a bore. Now, just to make sure the sun and the smell of the earth don’t trick her into happiness, she takes her ghetto blaster out for company and to drown out the sound of the breeze. She plays it loud, glad she lives in a place where there’s no one around to hear. People used to talk about rock music killing plants, but her tomatoes do fine; they have grown two feet tall when the deer come in and eat everything. By August the deer are so tame you can yell at them, and they will just stand there looking.

  For two months she has been waiting for him to come back from Puerto Rico, where a new factory is displacing a colony of monkeys. The factory will make compact discs. Right from the start, this job irritated him. He said: CDs will never catch on. Leave the monkeys alone; in two years they can have the factory. She pictured monkeys perched on jungle ruins, sailing leftover CDs through the air like frisbees, like silver and rainbow UFOs catching the tropical light. But the company doesn’t see it this way, and now the charity is paying him to move the monkeys deeper into the jungle’s shrinking heart.

  She has not heard from him since he got there. Mostly his jobs are like this—miles from a telephone, mail that takes three weeks to come. He says: Month-old mail is worse than no mail. He’d rather get no letters, would rather not write what will probably not be true by the time it arrives. She thinks this is a little harsh. She would take any mail over no mail, but defers to him in this, and doesn’t mention it to her lab technician friends with whom—when she stays in town after work for a movie or a fireworks display—she is trying to have a normal summer. When they ask after him, she smiles and shrugs, meaning, what can you say about someone who’d spend half a summer with monkeys? If she confessed that she never hears from him, they would point out that not writing at all isn’t logical, as if she should have just told him that, as if they didn’t know how rarely the logical thing is what you do. The Indians and Filipinos all have unhelpful stories of husbands who went off and started second families somewhere else. She knows he will call when he gets to San Juan, and that is, in fact, what happens.

  By now she is used to his homecomings, and can get through them if she remembers not to expect any more than this: a certain distance, forgetfulness—that is, he seems to forget who she is and treats her with the dutiful politeness he must have shown whoever sat beside him on the plane ride home. She thinks they should hire an expert to repatriate him; but really, she is that expert. She knows what to cook: simple meals, no meat for a while. She could write a cookbook for women whose lovers have lived exclusively among animals. She knows to wait a day for each week he’s been gone before thinking he doesn’t love her, but even so, even knowing this, she’ll still think he doesn’t love her, and then she will forget, forget what grace she has, drop things in the kitchen, forget where the holes in the lawn are, and trip and fall.

  She expects this, she is prepared for it, but not for the man who gets out of his car and walks up her drive after two months in Puerto Rico. Something about him is different, he has lost weight. His body makes a funny angle with the ground, forcing her to see pictures she’
d rather not imagine: him hunkering, swinging his arms, screeching monkey talk about food. This is not how she wants to think about him, not ever, and especially not now, as he holds her, a little stiffly, so that she feels silly for hugging him, sees it anthropologically, really no different from jumping and clacking her teeth. Soon he lets her go, making such an effort to look into her eyes that she cannot look back, but only at his hands, hovering disappointedly in the air near her arms.

  She offers him a beer but he doesn’t want beer. Wine? He refuses. He doesn’t want water, doesn’t want juice. He isn’t hungry. Banana? she says, holding up a bunch. That’s not funny, he says, and heads out to the garden before she can warn him that the deer have eaten everything. Soup boils on the stove, she has to turn it down, has to taste it, has to splash soup on her shirt, rub soap in the stain, put water on it, change her shirt. Already she knows to watch for holes in the lawn, so she is tiptoeing, creeping up on him, and so is witness to the most extraordinary sight. Not six feet from him, a doe is grazing what’s left of the pepper plants.

  He will not eat dinner. He says he ate on the plane, ate something at his apartment. But what could have lasted in his apartment for two months? She has made him fresh corn chowder, broiled swordfish, red potatoes, sliced cucumbers with soy sauce and sesame oil, but she can’t eat much either. She does dishes, they go for a walk up the road. By now he has been in her house six hours. Then they go to bed. He keeps turning her, he will only make love to her from behind. She knows not to turn and look, it would be awful to see how surprised he’d be to see her face. And anyway, she prefers it this way: he can’t see she is crying. Later they lie there, not talking. She thinks he is totally gone, gone crazy, or worse, is going to tell her he’s fallen in love with a monkey.

  After a while he says he is sorry. He lies on his back and tells the ceiling that he is having a very bad time. He says what he found in Puerto Rico were forty or fifty monkeys, mostly adults—strong, unpredictable, destructive. First they harassed, then actually attacked a couple of workers building the plant, a couple of monkeys were shot before he was called in. They moved the monkeys in cages on pickup trucks: it was like the aftermath of a war, like some Hollywood epic retreat scene, complete with the bloody bandages. He says everyone knows stories about animal populations that just didn’t make it, didn’t adapt. He had never seen this himself, but there was something about these monkeys that made him think of it right away.