The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  “What were you doing, Martin?” Nancy asked.

  “I thought it was trying to hurt you,” he said. He was out of breath and trembling. He knew now that he might have overreacted.

  “It was just tickling me or something! I was fine!”

  Nancy was yelling at him, and a small crowd had gathered. A little boy, who was maybe five and had a choke hold on a plastic replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and purple lips from eating too much of some candy, asked his father in a British accent, “Why’d that man try to hurt the monkey?”

  “I thought you needed to be protected,” Martin said as Nancy and he hurried away from the scene.

  “It was a harmless animal,” she whispered fiercely. When he started to reply, she interrupted him. “You’re trying too hard, Martin.”

  He reached out, wanting to put his hand on her back as they walked through the streets, but she kept herself just far enough ahead of him, just out of reach.

  Over lunch the next day, their last in Florence, Nancy apologized. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Martin, who had seen her work through anger and disappointment numerous times, but it did. She looked up from her plate of linguini and clam sauce and said, “I guess I have been … bull-headed. I ruined our vacation.”

  “I thought I was the one who ruined things,” Martin said.

  “And I’m sorry I did it,” she said. She reached across the table and took his hand, and Martin was stunned by the utter lack of relief he felt. He’d been waiting all weekend for a small portion of forgiveness; now it had come, and he felt nothing. “I knew who you were when I married you. I knew you were no bar fighter. I married a sensitive and thoughtful man.”

  Martin sensed a hesitance in her voice, as if she were still convincing herself that he was not at fault. “You still wish I had fought him.” Martin looked down. “You wish I had stood up to him.”

  “I don’t,” Nancy said. “Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “You did the smart thing.” She was making an effort to be logical and reasonable now. “I should have been as smart. I’m the one who was determined to stay in that cabin, even once I saw that we were dealing with a real bastard. That was a stupid, stubborn thing to do.”

  “I should have done something,” Martin insisted.

  “Would you please let me apologize?” Nancy said, a little irritated.

  “He said things.”

  “And that’s all he did. It wasn’t your fault.”

  On the train back to Basel, Martin wanted to talk about what he thought of now as his failure, an event for which he blamed himself more and more now that Nancy did not. Her releasing him from responsibility had only made him clench up with self-recrimination. She insisted that they leave it behind. “That’s over. That’s in the past.” She knew how he could obsess over a misplaced comma or a typo that a copy editor had failed to catch in one of his articles—the smallest of mistakes could fill him with regret—and she was not going to let him obsess over this. “Let it go,” she said. “You did the right thing. Period end.” Nancy could become combative so quickly, and Martin did not want a fight, so he backed down and stayed quiet until she fell asleep.

  Out in the corridor, where he had gone to think, Martin felt his chest tighten and a ball of hot fear rise into his throat when he saw a man dressed in a dark business suit, as the Italian had been, walking away from him and into the next car. But this man was smaller than the Italian, another man altogether. Martin locked himself into the tiny train lavatory, where he sat on the toilet seat with his pants on, his knees pushed against the sink. In front of him, he read in four languages a brief sentence forbidding the disposal of sanitary napkins in the toilet. Amore, amamus, amare. He tried his old Latin out, though he was certain that he had declined the verb wrong. He punched at the air with a fist. Had he just stayed in his seat four days ago, just exercised a little courage, no doubt the Italian would have conceded, extinguished his cigarette, and Martin would not have to sit now looking back on the event with the hopeless need to alter it. Pushing his face against the tiny lavatory window behind which the green Tuscan landscape now glowed lavender with sunset, Martin tried to release himself into the spacious beauty of the view and gain a larger perspective from which he could see how silly and small his regrets about this weekend were. But he could only feel the chilliness of the glass against his chin and take in, with every breath, the harsh floral scent of the ammonia-chloride tablet in the toilet bowl beneath him.

  That night, Nancy made love to him with rare passion. She straddled him in the dark, a sheet of moonlight throwing her gigantic shadow over the wall, and gripped his shoulders with a force that left red welts the next day. She called out his name repeatedly, and Martin tried to grasp her shoulders and arms with a tenacity and strength to equal hers, but he couldn’t seem to hold on. So he lay there and let himself be taken. Afterwards, she spooned him and whispered into his ear, “My dear little chemist,” once comforting words that made him recoil now and move to his side of the bed as Nancy drifted into sleep.

  He woke too early that morning, as he would the next and two or three mornings each week during that spring, from nightmares, and Nancy cuddled him back to sleep. If he had always had bad dreams, they had never occurred with the frequency, darkness, and confusion of the dreams that came to him now. As weeks passed, Martin felt he was gaining a comfortable distance from the event. Nina had her baby, and Nancy and he began talking about having their own family. Twice, however, as spring turned to summer, Martin believed he saw the Italian rounding a street corner in Basel. He cautiously eyed men who wore jewelry. Once, in a small bar, he smelled a certain perfumed tobacco and became distracted from the conversation of his colleagues. On a Saturday afternoon in late fall, the chill of coming winter in the air and the narrow brick path that passed the animal cages crinkling beneath them with leaves, Nancy and he accompanied Beat, Nina, and their baby to the zoo. When Nancy stopped in front of the monkeys, she began laughing. “Did I ever tell you about the time Martin attacked the monkey?” she said. The look Martin gave her then took the smile from her face. “Never mind,” she said, and their friends, seeming to sense his discomfort, did not press the issue.

  Time would make this memory fade, of course. It was, Martin knew, a small, unsubstantial thing. Better thoughts would crowd this incident out, would drive it from his sleep. Nancy loved him, and his future children, he was certain, would love him, too, and feel safe with him. He was a safe man, even if he was a quiet one. And if he remained quiet about this, too, if he did not speak of it or think of it, this small matter would dwindle in memory so that in the years to come Martin would no longer have to recall what he had failed to do in a few moments on a train one afternoon, in his youth, in the early years of his marriage.

  THE SLEEPING WOMAN

  Evelyn met Russell one afternoon in a neighborhood café so full that she had no choice—or so she told herself then—but to sit down in an empty chair across from him. He was not at all bad looking, in his mid-forties perhaps, and had always sat alone when Evelyn had seen him at this café in the past. He wore a thick, grandfatherly beard that was graying, in contrast to his dark hair; and his full, soft face and hazel eyes seemed to promise, at the very least, kindness and intelligence. But she was getting ahead of herself, as was her tendency with men. In the four years since her divorce, she’d gone through several relationships—so promising in their first weeks and months of dinners out, of movies and drinks, and finally, in the case of a few men she’d decided she liked a great deal, never mind that she’d only known them a few weeks, lovemaking and the languorous conversations afterwards, during which she knew she talked too much. She talked on and on—about the weather, the quality of the light in the room, the color of the curtains she hated in her living room, the light fixture and rug that weren’t quite right and for which, after months of looking, she’d failed to find adequate replacements, her Zodiac sign (she was a Cancer and, as such,
a natural homemaker), her mother, her father, her siblings, none of whom she was particularly close to. On and on, she’d talk. And soon after this phase of lovemaking and naked conversation began, her relationship would crash. The man would neither call nor return her calls. She would sleep alone and fully clothed in flannel pajamas and socks. She would consider the grim facts again and again: She was forty-three, divorced, childless, if nonetheless a successful professional, a woman techie, cofounder of her own small firm, Websmith Design. And then, after some months, two, three, six, even a year, as was the case on the afternoon she met Russell, she’d try again.

  “I hope you don’t mind me sitting here,” she said. “I’m afraid I have nowhere else to go.” She looked over the crowded, sun-filled café, the tables around them occupied by young couples and mothers weighed down by infants—infants in high-tech slings, infants in strollers, in laps, in arms, infants toddling, falling, crying. This first sunny warm day in early April had made Ann Arbor into a noisy playground of mothers and loud, shrill children, all of whom had come out, it seemed, to mark the end of the cold weather. “My goodness, the young hordes have been set free, haven’t they?” Evelyn said, realizing too late that her comment sounded snide.

  Russell peeked over his paper and gave a polite, drowsy, yet unmistakably warm smile that suggested a great deal of dormant benevolence in him and made Evelyn all the more determined to wake him, to make him see her, even though he had just raised his paper again and gone back to reading. She had no paper to read, after all; she had only her steeping cup of tea. “I’m Evelyn,” she told him, holding out her hand toward the mostly gruesome screen of front-page news, a photo of children squatting in dirt, the muzzles of machine guns trained on a group of dark-eyed young men, a lapdog dressed in a tuxedo. In the next moment, he folded his paper into a baton and was smiling at her again. “Russell,” he said, taking her hand.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve invaded your privacy.” Evelyn felt momentarily helpless against her impulse—an impulse she acted on far too often—to demean herself in front of those she meant to impress. “I can be impulsive and pushy. If you’d rather read your paper, please do.”

  Evelyn observed his face turning red. A man who blushed. Why should this draw her to him still more? He wore khakis and a baby-blue Oxford shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the thick middles of his forearms. “Talking would be nice,” he said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Well,” he said, slowly, calmly now, “I’d like to.”

  “All right, then,” Evelyn said, and she launched into what she feared might be a frantic monologue since she tended to run on even more than usual when she was nervous. She made herself pause and let him speak as they talked about the weather, life in a midwestern university town, and, finally, about themselves. Spring seemed to have arrived, Evelyn declared, and she looked at her bare arms—they were nice arms, thin and shapely, she knew—and told him that she felt halfnaked. “It’s the first time I’ve worn short sleeves in seven months.”

  Russell smiled, reached out, and dipped his fingers into a small square of sunlight on their table. “Sun,” he said. “Light. I don’t think I’ve had a good look around for a long time. Winter does that to me. Today on my walk up here I noticed things—houses, trees, squirrels, cars. I mean I really looked at them.” He looked at her then with a flicker of appreciation in his eyes that Evelyn hoped she wasn’t imagining. And now that he smiled, glanced down, and took a sip of his coffee before meeting her gaze again, she thought she’d been right.

  They talked on an hour, ranting against the current Republican administration, the man in the White House, the useless war he’d dragged the country into. Evelyn was pleased to note their common ground on these matters, though she realized she wasn’t making herself attractive by announcing that even darker times loomed ahead and calling the president a tyrant and a criminal in a rabid voice, after which she held forth on the hate the rest of the world felt for their country in a long-winded speech that Russell countered with a single, tempered comment: “We’ve survived bullies and unfit men in the White House before, and I’m sure we’ll survive this one.” He cradled the bottom of his thick beard in a hand, a gesture Evelyn found wonderfully paternal, and nodded, as if to give closure to his optimistic prediction.

  “Yes,” Evelyn said. “Yes, we will.” She liked him. Better yet, she liked herself with him. “What about you?” she said. “What do you like to do? You know … just for fun?”

  “Fix things,” he said. He picked up what seemed to be an invisible hammer and pretended to balance it. “Build. Make furniture. I do a little gardening, too. Flowers, not vegetables. And I like to fish. Fly fish. I like to walk in the woods. It gets me out. Otherwise, I’m an accountant. I do people’s taxes. I help them give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

  “Well, then,” Evelyn said, “you’ll have to take me fishing sometime.”

  Russell sat up stiffly, as if he’d just been pinched. “I’m not sure that I’m entirely available right now.”

  “Of course,” Evelyn said, feeling she’d already made a mistake, been too forward, too stupidly fast. She looked down, regarding his large foot peeking from beneath the table and shod in an ancient penny loafer, the leather cracked and the heel ground flat. “I like your shoes,” she said. “They’ve got character. You should get them fixed, though.” Moodiness tended to make Evelyn bossy.

  “Thank you,” Russell said, smiling, seeming to appreciate her compliment while ignoring her advice.

  “You’re with someone, I suppose.”

  He shrugged and glanced at his coffee mug. “I guess the timing isn’t quite right. I’m just not … ready.”

  Once again she’d managed, in only a few minutes of conversation, to make a man flee, and now she was sitting across from him and struggling with the simple adolescent feelings of rejection and humiliation, which she, at forty-three, should have long ago left behind. Now she was blushing. Sweat beaded across her forehead. She scratched her scalp, after which she immediately regretted this crude, unattractive gesture. She was nervous. Her armpits were wet. She wanted to escape, to stand up and walk away.

  And yet he did not seem at all awkward, at all in retreat. She sipped her tea and looked out the window at a young man speeding down the street on a bicycle, his long blond hair trailing in the wind as he turned the corner and disappeared. And Evelyn’s nervousness seemed to go with the cyclist, to vanish with the same grace and speed, so that she was calm when she faced Russell again. “Sure,” she said, smiling. “I understand.”

  “It’s not you. I’ve been enjoying our conversation. I’d like to keep talking if you would.”

  How could Evelyn have possibly believed this cliché that meant that it was her—her pushiness, her unfeminine forthrightness? But he did, in fact, seem to be enjoying their conversation, and so they kept talking, this time about Evelyn; about her childhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana—a red state if ever there was one, though her parents had been hippies, radical lefties; about how she’d come to Ann Arbor to study library science at the University of Michigan, had always intended to be a librarian, but had found her first year at a small branch in a suburb of Detroit boring, and so had started a small web-design firm that had miraculously survived the tech bubble. She talked about her love of mountain biking and cross-country skiing, and finally her divorce four years ago and her recent resolve simply to meet men, to get out and take risks, as she admitted to doing with him that very afternoon. “I could have skulked away, after all,” she said. “I’ve seen you several times before, have wanted to meet you, and simply lacked the courage. This time I just did it.”

  “I’m glad you did,” he said.

  Evelyn couldn’t help smiling, couldn’t help marveling at how easily they talked, at how undaunted by her honesty this man was. They soon discovered that they were almost neighbors, and because they lived only blocks apart, they left together and walked down Washington Street.

  They
stopped in front of Evelyn’s home, where Russell seemed suddenly nervous, looking down, then over his shoulder, anywhere but at her, a fact that thrilled Evelyn. In the distance, the melodious, pied-piper call of an ice cream truck floated through the neighborhood and mixed oddly with the harder sounds of rock music coming from a nearby house. “I should really get back to Tessa,” he said.

  “Tessa?” All at once her excitement was gone.

  “She’s my daughter. She turned six last month.”

  “Wonderful … wonderful,” she said, guessing now why he was so cautious and hesitant with her. He’d been left alone with a daughter. He’d been rejected by his wife. Or worse yet, he’d been widowed. “Could I ask you why you aren’t ready?”

  He looked up and let out a breath. “I’m afraid I’d rather not say right now.”

  “Sure,” she said. And then she added, “I’d like to talk again sometime.”

  He took a few steps backwards. “All right,” he said, smiling. He waved at her, and with what she thought was a bounce in his step, a subtle, joyful maneuver, he turned and walked down the street.

  Over the next week, Evelyn looked for Russell in the café and along the streets of their neighborhood, where she walked more often than she otherwise would have. Lilacs were blooming and the evening light lingered and the walks, Evelyn told herself, did her good, though she didn’t once run into him. She hauled her mountain bike out of the garage, filled the tires, lubed the chain, and took long afternoon rides along Huron River Drive, the high, muddy river just visible through the trees along the roadside. She felt at once lighter and stronger, as she often did in spring, as if she were shedding pounds of winter flesh, though she was slight and didn’t have much flesh to shed. And yet, at the same time, she felt a tightness in her chest, something coiled and prepared for disappointment. She was acting girlish, thinking of Russell too much, too often, a man she didn’t even know. His beard, his soft face, his large hazel eyes, his thoughtful, even-keeled temperament, his lanky, awkward body. She was careful to remind herself as she pedaled through the Huron River valley that she knew nothing about him, that he couldn’t matter to her, certainly could not hurt her, that she simply had a crush and should savor the sweet irrational longing for this stranger while it lasted, the enjoyment of which, after all, was made keener by his absence. She could enjoy that, she decided. She could enjoy not having him.