Louisa Meets Bear

by Lisa Gornick

  Now I sleep in Lily’s old room with her troll collection and the butterflies Corrine painted on the walls. I have thought about moving, out of the fog, to the sunny side of town, out of Lily’s bed, to a clean white room with a bed meant to hold a man and a woman. Just not now. Not yet.

  1978

  Lion Eats Cheetah Eats Weasel Eats Mouse

  At first, we named everything: the apartment, Andrew’s leather jacket, my car. Andrew’s leather jacket, we named Raoul. “Raoul and I will be home around ten,” Andrew would say, and I would imagine Andrew and some unbearably good-looking Latin male, narrow-shouldered, long-torsoed, with a shade of stubble and a lot of bruised lip, both of them wearing leather jackets with collars of chocolate fur. My car—the Datsun I’d brought from Ocean City to New York, which had developed a crack in the dashboard (the crack we referred to as the San Andreas Fault) and rust seeping up into the trunk—we called the Quake. “Gotta get the Quake some new shoes,” I’d say. Or, “Time to give Quake a bath.”

  In the winter, the kitchen became infested with mice and I became consumed with Percy Green, a black kid whose story was spattered across the papers. Deathly afraid of mice, I would not go into the kitchen in the mornings until Andrew had gone before to remove any carcasses and hide the traps. As for Percy, in the beginning the story read scholarship kid from Washington Heights, shipped off to Hotchkiss on an alumni fund grant, gunned down on the street by a brutish white cop. Standing on a footstool to do the dishes, afraid a mouse might scamper out from under the cabinets, I would study the countertop TV, flipping channel to channel for more local news, and then turning the faucet off and wiping my hands on the sides of my jeans when the pictures of Percy Green floated onto the screen.

  “They’re more scared of you than you are of them,” Andrew swore about the mice. It was morning and I was crying. “I feel so stupid,” I said. “I can’t stand to even think about them, the way they slip through cracks and have those soft flexible bones.” Mostly, though, what I was crying about was me: that since moving in with Andrew I had become a person who had to do the dishes standing on a footstool and who huddled in a ball on top of the bed.

  Andrew fingered the fur on Raoul’s collar, and then swung the jacket over his shoulders. Leaning into the bookshelf, he blew dust off a tiny pre-Columbian figure—an animal man with a distended belly and no eyes—he’d brought back from his summer travels and that now stood guard by his turntable. Already his mind was on the next thing. “When will you be home?” I asked, hating my whiny tone.

  “Late.” Andrew lifted his book bag. Taxiing for takeoff, he moved into the hall.

  “How late?”

  “Late. Don’t pressure me, Louisa.” He enunciated the three syllables of my name as though it were something distasteful he was picking up with a crumpled paper towel. “It’s ten days to exams.”

  I’d known Andrew was in his last year of law school when I moved in with him but I’d not known there were mice in the apartment. Afraid I might break into a messy gurgly sob, I chewed the braided silver chain dangling over my nightgown, comforting myself with the memory of the night Andrew had given me the necklace. He’d lit candles, long shadows blanketing the room as he laid the silver over my breastbone, explaining how the necklace had been made by a man who lived in the same village as the shaman Don Juan in the Carlos Castaneda book. When he’d lifted my hair to fasten the clasp, I had felt linked to the mystery at the center of the universe.

  “You’re acting like a baby.” Copper wind chimes clanged wildly as cold air rushed into the apartment. “A colossal baby,” he added, before shutting the door.

  *

  At the private girls’ school where I worked as an assistant librarian, two of the girls looked at me blankly when I asked what they thought about the Percy Green story, and a third, her eyes outlined in purple, said, “That guy who shot a cop?”

  “No, I mean, yes.” I tried to explain. “But he didn’t shoot the cop. He was shot by the cop near Riverside Park.” Then, later in the week, the story began to shift. Reports came that Percy was apprehended in the midst of an assault, the victim a Pakistani man visiting his engineering-student brother. Percy had a knife; the Pakistani man had a camera and a subway map.

  Although Andrew would never say so publicly (at his law school, he associated with the leftists who handled the appeals for prisoners on death row and the feminists who wrote amicus briefs for keypunch operators whose hands had turned puffy and stiff), I knew that secretly he viewed Percy’s death as justice executed. Once, he had told me about a Guatemalan man who’d ratted on someone who’d sold corn to a guerrilla band. “When the villagers found him, they killed him.” I winced. “He was a worm,” Andrew said. “A gusano. That’s what happens to a worm.”

  Since finding mice droppings in the silverware drawer, I had avoided the kitchen altogether. I climbed the stairs to the apartment, a bag with a tuna on pita hanging from my arm, and unlocked the door. There, not even a yard from my shoe, was a little carcass splayed on the floor, the tail pointing stiffly at me.

  Rooted in the doorway, I covered my eyes and peeked through my fingers. It would be hours before Andrew came home. I knew my neighbors well enough to talk about the news (Mrs. Fabrizio on Percy Green: “What do you expect, the young people, these days, they are animals. It comes from the welfare and the drugs and nobody going to church no more”) but not well enough to ask them to remove a dead mouse from my floor.

  Exiled by a rodent, I headed for the street.

  *

  Two days later, I came home early to let in the exterminator and found Raoul thrown over the couch and Andrew in bed with a classmate who called herself Cat-Sue.

  Cat-Sue wriggled her fingers at me. Andrew shoved a pillow over her head as though he might still hide her. She slithered under the sheet. I ran toward the kitchen, unsure if it was to retch or to grab the butcher’s knife. From the bedroom, I could hear Andrew calling my name. I closed my eyes. Plastered to the back of my lids was the afterimage of Cat-Sue’s tiny breasts, the nipples staring out like two raisin eyes. I pressed my lids to try to erase the picture. Then, hearing a swooshing sound, my hands flung out and my eyes bolted open. A mouse darted across the linoleum, its body long and flat on the floor.

  I rushed for the front door, grabbing Raoul both for revenge and for warmth. Andrew stood naked next to the couch. I heard sounds but there was too much noise in my head to make out the words. Knowing Andrew, he was probably telling me that I had misunderstood everything—that he and Cat-Sue were studying contracts law together, that she’d just popped by to take a friendly nap.

  Looking back, those three minutes with Andrew and Cat-Sue fall into scenes: bedroom, kitchen, living room, slamming the door behind me, yelling over my shoulder, “There’s a mouse in the kitchen,” and then jutting my chin high—brave heroine—as I ran down the stairs.

  *

  Four months before my mother died, my father took us on a trip to the Soviet Union. Memory is odd, since of course I hadn’t known then that my mother would soon die, but somehow the trip, the last time I spent any length of time with her (in fact, I hardly remember anything from after we returned—some neuronal quirk, or was she actually then hardly home?), seems like both the first and the last glimpse I ever had of my mother, the images especially vivid to me, as though after her death they were quickly resuscitated, outlined in black and cold-pressed to my mind.

  During the days, my father and the other scientists (we were with a group of European and American geneticists) visited laboratories and hospitals, while my mother and I toured the museums. The guides let the two of us roam freely, assuming, I suppose, that a slight woman with glossy black hair held back from her face with a scarf folded into a headband and tied at the nape of her neck and a nine-year-old wearing Mary Janes and a tent dress were harmless. My mother must have read up on the museums before we left, because I can still recall standing with her on one of the palatial platforms of the Moscow subway
, en route to the Pushkin, her thin hand encircling mine, while she told me about the entrepreneur collectors and how they had filled their cavernous dining rooms with paintings and sculptures from modern artists at a time when hardly anyone else recognized the value of Picassos, Cézannes, and Bonnards. “Picassos, Cézannes, and Bonnards,” I repeated, knowing these were names of painters but unable to conjure even one of their paintings.

  For years after, when I thought of my parents, what I thought of was a painting by Matisse that hung in one of the back rooms of the Hermitage in Leningrad. My father had come with us on our first visit there, explaining to me that the museum had been a palace, the home of czars, and joking after we were instructed to put paper slippers over our shoes, “They have us polishing the floors.”

  I don’t remember, though, seeing the Matisse that first day with my father—my father leading us from room to room, translating from his German Baedeker, giving little lectures about various of the objects before us. In my memory of viewing the painting, I was alone with my mother, my father off with the other scientists. My mother was carrying a French guidebook, and we stopped while she pointed for the guards at one of the pictures. When she finally found the painting, she snapped shut her guidebook and planted us in front. I rested with my bottom against her kneecaps.

  “It’s called The Conversation,” my mother whispered. “The man is Matisse. He’s in his pajamas. The woman is his wife, Amélie. She’s in her bathrobe.”

  The man had a small pointed beard that stuck out and seemed to be pointing at the woman’s toes. “He looks like Daddy,” I whispered back. My mother spread her fingers over my breastbone and pulled me gently toward her. I reached my hands backward to hold on to her thighs. The woman in the painting had long black hair, shiny like my mother’s. Her mouth was firmly shut as though refusing to speak. The man looked like he was talking at her, perhaps even raising his voice. Even at nine, I could see that it wasn’t much of a conversation.

  *

  There was the beginning of a lipstick-colored polluted sunset as I left the city, driving the Quake north on the Saw Mill to look at an apartment. Donna, the headmistress’s secretary on whose couch I’d slept for two nights, had brought me a tear-off tag for the apartment from an ad she’d seen on a bulletin board at the supermarket near her mother’s house.

  “Where’s Hastings?” I asked when she handed me the scrap of paper over breakfast.

  “On the river. It’s nice—kind of funky and laid-back.”

  “Is it near Dobbs Ferry? My aunt and uncle used to live there in a big house with Adirondack chairs on the lawn.”

  “No, it’s not like that. Go see.” Donna examined me. “I can see you there in faded jeans, not too tight but still well-fitting, and an oversized turtleneck sweater.” Donna considered it her particular talent to figure out people’s underlying style. “I’m a gamine,” she’d told me about herself. “The Coco look with lots of pearls and a flippy skirt. You’re a classic with a hint of bohemian and an undertone of the sensual in the fit of the clothes.”

  The rest of breakfast had been spent listening to Donna’s description of a Lacroix imitation she’d bought for her cousin’s wedding. “It’s pink with black dots, not really dots, but little telegraph dashes with dots that droop from the lines. It’s off the shoulder, except that it has tiny sleeves, and then there’s a big crinoline skirt that comes straight out like this.” Donna whooshed her arms out and then up and around. “My accessories will all be pink, but different colors of pink. Pale pink stockings, hot pink shoes, pink pearls that I’ll wear like a dog collar.”

  I rested my head in my hands. Imagining all of that pink so early in the morning was nauseating. I thought about Andrew and how his butt turned pink from the bathroom steam and how embarrassed I’d felt the first morning I woke in his apartment when he’d insisted on showing me the pleasures of showering à deux—embarrassed to have him see me in the blaze of lights, embarrassed by his ease with its implication that he’d showered with any of a dozen other women before.

  Donna patted my elbow. “Don’t worry. The Cat-Sues will be as outré as lime green by next year. You’re like a little black dress: you can use it forever.”

  *

  It’s odd how you can detect how old someone is from their voice on the phone, from the way their vocal cords resonate in their body, and I was not surprised, when Mr. Pryzwawa opened the door, to see a slight man with a concave chest and a shock of white hair.

  Mr. Pryzwawa led me through his living room and up the back stairs to the third floor. Looking around, I could tell he was widowed, his house with the same untended look as my father’s, the dining room table covered with things—a stack of grocery store circulars, a pile of bank statements, a clump of stray socks—that women would not leave out for company to see.

  Like the beach apartment I’d rented right after college, it was an attic apartment: a large room with dormer windows that faced the river, a prefab unit with a miniature stove, a sink, and a half refrigerator on the opposite wall.

  “It used to be my daughter’s room,” Mr. Pryzwawa explained. “We made it into a studio apartment after she moved out to go to nursing school. I’ll let you look around without me underfoot. Just turn out the light when you’re done.”

  I opened the closet and peeked into the other, which had been converted into a bathroom with an undersized shower stall. In the kitchen area, the sink was clean but lined with black scratches, everything grim but functional. I crossed the room to look out the windows. The view of the river was stunning, the road hidden by the treetops, the water cold and still, shimmering like a piece of metal laid into the earth.

  I’d first seen the Hudson with Bear. It was a month or so after we’d met, the evening charged in the way of two people who haven’t yet slept together but know they will, just not when. We’d driven to New York in his VW and he pulled off the West Side Highway at the Seventy-ninth Street exit to show me the houseboats and the New Jersey skyline silhouetted on the horizon. Having never seen an ocean before he’d come east for college, Bear had found Manhattan with its various waterways as exotic as Venice. For his birthday, I took him on the Circle Line around the island and bought him a navigator’s map of the channels. Not until we went together to San Francisco could he understand why the New York water vistas looked to me tame, almost quaint—closer to the Old World of my grandparents than the West of my parents, where the Pacific pounded the raw cliffs and the bay loomed wide and wild as a sea.

  I sat on Mr. Pryzwawa’s daughter’s twin bed and bounced gently up and down. I looked at my watch. It had been nearly one hundred hours since I’d left Andrew with Cat-Sue. Once on the street, I’d given Raoul to a man asking for quarters and then walked for hours, aimlessly wandering through Lord and Taylor and then Saks and Bergdorf’s, letting the bird women at the cosmetic counters test sherbet shades on the back of my hand. When the department stores closed, I headed up Fifth Avenue toward the museums and checked into the Sherry-Netherland—terribly expensive, I discovered, but the only New York hotel I’d ever seen from the inside, years before with Juanita, my father’s not-yet wife. My usual frugality dissolved, as if money had lost all value in the face of this gaping hole in my chest, I ordered a bottle of wine and crawled into bed to call Corrine, the alcohol taking its effect, the tightness in my throat easing as with Corrine’s voice on the other end of the line I was able to cry.

  “Just let it all out. Everything’s going to be okay,” Corrine cooed, and it reminded me of the way she had rocked me during the weeks after my mother’s death when she’d still been my after-school babysitter, not yet my best friend. By one in the morning, I began to laugh, uncontrollable paroxysms, as I remembered Andrew standing at the front door, his penis still half erect, yelling as I headed down the stairs not to take Raoul.

  “It looked like that damn mouse tail, pointing at me.”

  “Fuck him. None of them’s worth crying over.”

  “What a je
rk. And with a woman called Cat-Sue!”

  Lying in the enormous hotel bed, sloshed from the wine but too agitated (where, it dawned on me, would I be able to afford to live?) to fall asleep, it was my mother, not Andrew, whom I couldn’t get out of my mind: my mother, whose little car, lifted by the wind, had veered into a guardrail that buckled from the force, sending her down an embankment between Route 1 and the rocky coastline below.

  One Christmas when I’d come home from college and Juanita had made us an Argentinean holiday meal and my father had drunk too much California wine and then too many snifters of his prized French brandy, he bitterly commented, “For your mother, everything was play. That summer when we went to the Soviet Union, she wandered around Moscow, you in tow, wearing dark glasses, excited that there were KGB keeping tabs on our whereabouts. She thought it was a spy game.” My hands had grown clammy, and I’d turned away, anxious that my father—who, with Juanita, I felt, had abdicated his right to discuss my mother—was going to say something more, something about how for my mother death would have seemed an adventure.

  The river glinted like the blade of a knife. I could see Andrew’s face—seasick green when I walked in on him with Cat-Sue but then, after I took Raoul, splotched red with rage. What did you expect? I asked myself. You betrayed Bear with Andrew, Andrew betrayed you with Cat-Sue, Cat-Sue will betray Andrew with God-knows-whom. Lion eats cheetah eats weasel eats mouse.

  *

  When I came downstairs, Mr. Pryzwawa was in the kitchen making tea. He unfolded the cellophane wrapper from a column of saltines he sat on a tray with a plate of jaggedly sliced cheddar cheese and a tin of sardines. “Here, let me,” I said, carrying the tray into the living room.

  I looked down at the little fish heads, six of them lined up in a row. I hadn’t seen tinned sardines since my grandfather, whose sweaters had smelled like a potpourri of the oily brine and sweet Virginia pipe tobacco, died. Because I couldn’t tolerate the fish eyes on my plate, my grandfather would cut the heads off with a fork and then with his pocket knife make me tiny fillets.