The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  She was also the reason Evelyn took her old mountain bike down from the garage wall, wiped the cobwebs from the handlebars, oiled the chain, and pumped air into the tires. They needed to get away from that stupid garage and do something, anything, together. And so she put the seat up high and presented the bike to him just after he’d applied the third and ultimate coat of paint to the new clapboards, finally completing the project. “How about a spin?” she said. Her biking shorts gripped her hips and butt; she looked good in them, she knew, and was pleased to see that he’d noticed, looking away from the garage and at her for a change. “Not bad for a woman of forty-three, am I?”

  He smiled. “I’m afraid I don’t bike.”

  “Of course you bike.”

  He shook his head, bent and hammered the lid back on the paint can and began gathering up the drop cloth. “No,” he said. “I didn’t even bike much as a kid, and I don’t bike now. I walk. I’ll walk anywhere. But I won’t bike.”

  “You mean, you’re afraid to bike,” Evelyn said.

  He kept clearing up, placing a can of paint on the shelf and tossing a stirring stick in the garbage. “I need to get back to Tessa,” he said.

  “Not just yet,” Evelyn said. “We’re going to walk these bikes to West Park. There’s grass there and I’ve got a helmet for you. If you fall, it won’t hurt. There’s nothing to worry about. And once you get going, we’ll head down Main Street and onto Huron River Way. It’s beautiful there. You’ll love it. It’s a wonderful feeling speeding along next to the river.”

  He kept shaking his head, but when she wheeled the bike over to him, he reached out slowly and took the handlebars. “I don’t know,” he said, squeezing the handbrake.

  At West Park, a few kids threw a baseball and practiced batting in a distant corner. The air shimmered with late-afternoon sun, and a light breeze blew through the huge maples that bordered the park and made the empty rubber saddles of the swing set in the sandpit behind them rock gently on their chains. Evelyn had chosen a sheltered spot of grass far from the road where no one could see her holding Russell up and coaching him. “I won’t let go until you get some momentum. Once you get going, pedal.”

  His lanky body fit awkwardly over her small bike. Nonetheless, he was afraid; his shoulders and arms shook. “This is embarrassing,” he said.

  “It’s easy,” she said. “It’s as easy as riding a bike.”

  “I wish I weren’t like this. You must think I’m …”

  “I think you’re charming and honest and good.”

  He shook his head, as if trying to ward off a thought. “I worry,” he said. “I worry far too much that something will happen and nothing will be the same afterwards.”

  “The worst that can happen here is that you fall and skin a knee.”

  He tightened his grip on the handlebars now and took in a deep breath. They heard the crack of a bat and saw in the distance one of the boys sprint to a fly ball and catch it effortlessly in his mitt. “I’m ready,” Russell said. And though Evelyn felt a wave of anxiety that something terrible might happen, she counted to three, dug into the soft grass, and heaved this heavy man forward. “Lift your feet,” she said.

  “Oh, God,” he said.

  “You’re dragging your feet. You need to lift them.”

  “OK, OK,” he said. But he kept dragging his feet over the ground while Evelyn pushed.

  “Up,” she said. He lifted his feet now and shot forward, out of her reach, his shoulders wobbling as he struggled to hold the wheel straight. He put a foot down, then pulled it up again, holding it away from the bike, like a broken wing. “Pedal!” Evelyn shouted. “Put your feet on the pedals and crank.” He swerved right, then left, seeming about to fall over just when he found the pedals and launched himself over the grass. Evelyn applauded as he completed one and then another unsteady lap around the park, his arms flexed and tense and his face red with terror. “Wonderful,” Evelyn said. But he didn’t reply. He stayed focused and quiet, his eyes fixed ahead of him.

  On her bike now, Evelyn followed as he completed another circuit of the park, then pulled in front and led him out on the sidewalk, up East Ann Street, and into the quiet neighborhoods. On Main Street, the pavement ended, and they rode over the narrow gravel shoulder, cars and semis ripping past them. Looking back occasionally to check on Russell, who dwarfed her bike, his knees sticking out with each pump, Evelyn imagined the worst: Russell, in a moment of fear, swerving wide and falling beneath the flow of traffic. But they both reached Huron River Way, where only a few cars cautiously passed them. Beside them, the river, wide and slow, glimmered in evening sun as they sped through the shadows cast by hemlocks and aspen on either side. Evelyn was surprised when Russell, cranking hard, pulled up beside her, his gray beard thrust forward by the helmet buckle at his chin, and shouted out, “Hi.”

  “Look at you,” Evelyn said.

  He was still afraid, his eyes fixed on the road as he laughed and said, “I don’t do this. I don’t ride bikes.”

  “You do now,” Evelyn said.

  Two days later, after their second ride, Russell surprised Evelyn with a blunt question. “Do you think we could have sex now? I mean,” he said, “I’m ready if you’re ready.” They were sitting on Evelyn’s porch, and he was tearing a paper napkin into tiny scraps.

  “My God,” Evelyn said, laughing. “That’s not very romantic.”

  “I don’t think I can be romantic. Not at first.”

  “Why not?” When he lifted his glass of water, she saw his hand trembling. How long, she wondered, would she have to attend to this man’s fear?

  “Maybe we could just make it something we do. Something that doesn’t have to be great or wonderful. Just a thing.”

  Evelyn shook her head. “I’d like it to be at least a nice thing. It doesn’t have to be great. But it does have to be warm. It has to be tender.”

  He nodded, seeming to agree. All the same, Evelyn had to seize the initiative, had to broach the subject of birth control (the IUD she used was 98 percent effective), had to take his hand, lead him upstairs to her room, pull the blinds (because dimness felt more comfortable), sit him down on her bed, and undress him methodically, as she might a child, removing first his shoes and socks, then his T-shirt, which he seemed reluctant to let her pull over his head, and finally his shorts, until he was naked, save for his gray boxers. “I have a little belly,” he admitted.

  In fact, he did—pale, distinct, and, as he had said, little. “I like it,” Evelyn said.

  He crossed his arms over his naked chest. “All your clothes are on.”

  Indeed they were, and she didn’t discover her own fear, a warm, unsettling rush of nerves in her stomach and chest, until she’d also undressed, folding her tank top and cycling shorts and placing them neatly over the floor. Despite the warmth of the room, Evelyn shivered now as she sat on the edge of the bed and kissed Russell. He kissed her back. Their lips met again, this time too quickly, so that their teeth clattered together. In the next moment, when Evelyn took hold of his hard penis, he jolted upright, elbowing her in the chin. “I’m sorry,” he said, panicky.

  Evelyn leaned back against the headboard. “Why don’t we take a break?” Outside, a child was yelling the name of a friend or a lost pet. Yelling and yelling that name. And then, all at once, stopped.

  “We can always try this again another time,” Russell said.

  “Of course,” Evelyn said.

  But moments later, Russell took her in what felt more like a wrestling hold than an embrace, kissing her frantically and pinning her shoulders over the bed with his weight. “Slow,” Evelyn said. “Slow.” He thrust his knee between her legs and parted her thighs. In the dimness, Evelyn recognized on Russell’s face the same expression of concentration and concern he got when cycling, as if, even now, as he entered her too quickly, he were urging himself to keep his eyes on the road and to remain cautious. “Ouch,” she let out.

  He froze above her. “Are you
all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Really? Should I stop?”

  She laughed. How could she not laugh? “No,” she said, “don’t stop.” He began moving again, and in the next moment it was over and he’d already rolled off her and retreated to the other side of the bed. “I go too fast,” he whispered. “It’s a problem I’ve always had.”

  “It was just fine,” Evelyn said.

  “It was?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He drew close now and curled into her, his slack, damp penis against her thigh. “It will get better,” he said.

  And, as Russell had promised, it did get better. They made love in the late afternoons after cycling along the river or, on some days, instead of cycling. They drew the curtains against the increasingly bright late-April sun, in which the dogwood and magnolia trees had bloomed purple and white along Washington Street, stripped down, and made more patient and skillful love. Because Russell, as he had admitted, lacked endurance, he indulged her beforehand, taking his time, caressing her, kissing her, performing an act that she enjoyed more than she liked to admit and that most men she’d been with performed only cursorily and out of a sense of fairness. She closed her eyes, giggling at times because his beard could tickle, while he made her come. Then he mounted her, and she made him come.

  In the lulls after lovemaking, they talked for hours, Evelyn counting fourteen past lovers and recalling in painful detail how her possessiveness had aggravated and been aggravated by her ex-husband’s grumpy independence and inwardness. “Ed”: she couldn’t say her ex-husband’s name without recalling the exhaustion and frustration she’d lived with during their six years together. Silent, removed, cryptic Ed, who’d sat there nodding, agreeing or very quietly disagreeing, never granting her the satisfaction of a good, honest, full-throttle fight, who’d said one thing and done another, who’d punished her for years by showing up late—ten, fifteen, twenty minutes—for every dinner or coffee date they ever made. “I always go for quiet, unhappy guys. Aggressively passive-aggressive guys. And I’m possessive—pushy and possessive. What do you think about that?”

  Russell laughed. “You’re a force,” he said.

  Evelyn liked being called a force. What she liked less was the revelation that, aside from Jenny, she, Evelyn, was Russell’s only other lover.

  “You’re forty-four,” Evelyn said, “and you’ve only ever been with your wife and me?”

  He nodded.

  Evelyn didn’t know that men who’d had sex with one woman still existed—or had ever existed, for that matter. And while it was sweet and astounding, she would have preferred a few other women in his past, if only to rob his sleeping wife of some influence.

  For the most part, Evelyn avoided the subject of Jenny, though at times she had to know more, as on the afternoon in early May when, back from a long ride, sweaty and hot, they rushed upstairs and made frantic love, first against the wall, then on the bed, and finally on the floor. He lasted longer than usual, and, miraculously, they came together. As they cuddled in the dark, she asked, “Were you able to do that with her?”

  “Sometimes,” he said, giving her the exact answer she had feared. He continued to answer Evelyn’s questions, telling how he had met his wife in high school in Plymouth, Michigan, where Russell had been a shy trombonist in the marching band and Jenny had been the school’s first female drum major. “She liked giving orders,” he said. “She was bossy and sweet and pretty all at the same time. She was, I guess, a little like you. I’d say that would be my type.”

  Evelyn felt herself uncomfortably suspended in the dim light of her bedroom, lying naked beside this naked man who, in a half-whisper, his hand holding Evelyn’s, had just compared her to a woman who was alive and dead at the same time, a woman who, like Evelyn, had been bossy and pretty, a woman who had commanded a timid, lanky young trombone player. How easily Evelyn pictured him as a boy dressed in an ill-fitting faux-silk costume and toting around a large instrument case, and how easily she became jealous of this woman who had ordered him about, controlled him, told him where and when to march, and later dealt with his incapacity as a lover and schooled him in how to compensate for it. And because Evelyn felt his wife’s eerie presence more strongly now than ever, she asked, “Do you still visit her?” He removed his hand from hers. “Please hold my hand,” she said. She was bossy. She couldn’t help being bossy. At least it worked. He gave her his hand back, and she held on to it.

  “Sometimes.”

  “How often is sometimes?”

  “Once a week. Once every two weeks. Sometimes less. Sometimes more.”

  “But she can’t talk,” Evelyn said. “She isn’t at all conscious or aware, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And she won’t come back? She won’t wake up?”

  “The chances of her coming back are, more or less, a million to one.”

  Evelyn closed her eyes. She was surrounded by darkness now, just as Russell’s wife was. She felt herself breathing, the air rushing in, expanding through her chest and ribcage, then out again. She tried to imagine it—sleeping through one’s life, sleeping when everyone else hurried on with things, went to work and school, ate and biked and drove, loved and was loved, married and divorced, lived and died. Evelyn heard the gentle rush of a car passing outside. She felt the chill of the air on her nipples, her stomach, her thighs. She could feel and hear and think, unlike Russell’s wife, of whom, ridiculously, stupidly, she was jealous. Or perhaps haunted. She was haunted by her, aware of her presence only because she was so conspicuously, strangely absent.

  “I tried to stop going once,” Russell said. “But it didn’t feel right. She’s there, after all. I mean her body is there. In that room.”

  Evelyn opened her eyes. “Where?” she asked, wanting to know even the irrelevant details.

  “She’s in a full-care facility attached to the university hospital. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk from home. It would feel wrong not to see her.”

  Evelyn took in a long, slow breath. “Is she blond?”

  “What?”

  She heard the irritation in his voice. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m jealous. I shouldn’t be. I wish I weren’t. But I am. And it feels better just to tell you that I am.”

  “Yes,” he said. “She’s blond.”

  Evelyn, a brunette, had hoped this fact might put her at ease, but it didn’t.

  She felt him shudder, his hand holding more tightly to hers. “Tessa no longer visits Jenny. It’s been easier for her that way. When I told her she had to stop visiting the hospital last year, she didn’t put up a fight, and it was pretty clear that she had wanted to stay away even before then and had just been waiting for my permission. She doesn’t talk about it. But I’d guess that she stopped seeing her mother in that bed some time ago. When I visit, I make sure things look nice. I put flowers on her bedside table. I check that the nurses are doing what needs to be done—keeping her clean, moving her from time to time.”

  “Oh,” Evelyn said, picturing Russell as he arranged a vase of flowers, of tulips or orchids, or perhaps roses, since those would last longer, with his large hands, which were better suited to a hammer and had worked on her house and had touched her body.

  “What do you do then?” Evelyn asked. “I mean, after you’ve made things nice?”

  Russell released her hand, and this time Evelyn let him go. “I just sit there. I sit there and look at her. Sometimes I say a few things. I tell her how Tessa is doing. I give her news about her mother. For five minutes. Ten minutes, maybe. Then I go.”

  Every few weeks, Heidi and her husband, Michael, invited Evelyn over for dinner, the first half-hour of which she’d spend with their boys, ages six and eight, while her hosts finished preparing the food. A loud pair, sandy-haired and soft-faced, the boys startled Evelyn with their barely containable wildness, their yells and yips, their fights and violent affections. They called her Aunt Evelyn, though arou
nd them she felt more like an unwanted grandma. Dennis, the younger one, had once complained about her perfume. “It stinks,” he said, holding his nose. Chad, the eight-year-old, liked to give her bear hugs that often left sticky food—honey or jam—on her clothes and face. Yet Evelyn, who suspected that these dinners were charity, Heidi and Michael’s attempt to help a single, middle-aged woman escape the overcontrolled confines of her neat world, enjoyed this household: the pieces of an obliterated train set, a red caboose with its roof torn off, a Union Pacific freight car loaded with Cheerios, Tonka trucks, wood blocks, and strange-looking action figures, among other toys scattered across the living-room and dining-room floors. Evelyn had always assumed she’d have kids, especially by this time in her life, and these dinners at Heidi’s often left her feeling regretful, even if she was happy to return to her quiet home at the end of the evening.

  That night the boys, already in their orange tiger-striped pajamas when she arrived, were especially loud and giggly, and it continued after Michael, who was conscientious about cleaning up around the house and sharing parenting duties, went upstairs to put Chad and Dennis to bed. “It’s the light,” Heidi complained. “It’s almost impossible to get them to settle down before eight when the sun is still shining.” In fact, it was a few minutes after eight, and burnished sheets of sun poured in through the windows. Evelyn heard Michael’s voice intone from above, “I’ll count to ten, and if you’re not in bed …” Evelyn did not particularly crave the company of Chad and Dennis, nor was she attracted to Michael, a thin man with a beaked nose and curly hair, but she nonetheless felt slightly envious of Heidi’s disorderly and lively household.

  “We’ve been having sex,” Evelyn whispered across the table to Heidi, who let out a laugh and clapped her hands.

  “Tell me all about it,” she said. “Everything.”

  Evelyn felt a sudden tenderness and yearning for him when she said, still whispering, “He doesn’t last long, but he takes his time beforehand.”