The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  Heidi giggled. “Michael has a bit of the same. You might tell Russell to practice.”

  “Practice?”

  “Masturbate,” Heidi said. “Only slowly. He should take twenty, thirty minutes or so. That will build up his endurance.”

  “I don’t think I could tell him that,” Evelyn said. “Not yet.” But she looked forward to a deeper intimacy that would allow her to give this sort of instruction. “You might try masturbating,” she imagined herself telling him.

  Evelyn enjoyed talking about Russell and went on now about his newfound love of biking, his deep concern for Tessa, his gardening and fishing, his handiness with a hammer.

  “You’re glowing,” Heidi said then. “You’re as happy as I’ve ever seen you.”

  In mid-May, after nearly five weeks of cycling and good sex with Russell, Evelyn grew tired of the pattern they’d fallen into—bike rides two or three times a week, followed by early-evening lovemaking, after which Russell would hurry home. One afternoon, groggy from sex, Evelyn lay over her bed and listened to the funny splash of Russell urinating in the hallway bathroom. That sound filled her with tenderness and an equally powerful irritation at the fact that he would soon be rushing off. When he stepped back in her room, naked save for his boxer shorts, and began riffling through the bed sheets, where his T-shirt had been lost during their lovemaking, she said, “This feels like an affair. You come over to my house every other afternoon. We close the blinds and we … we fuck.” That word made him stop and look up at her. “Then you go home to your family.”

  “You’re angry,” he said, sitting down on a chair across the room.

  “No,” she said. “I’m frustrated. Don’t you think it would be nice to make love at other times? In the morning or evening, for instance. It would maybe even be nice to spend the night together once.”

  “I have a family, Evelyn,” Russell said. “I can’t just disappear for whole nights at a time.” He stood up and grabbed his T-shirt from the foot of the bed, where he’d evidently just seen it, and pulled it on.

  “Please,” Evelyn said, “please stop getting dressed.” He sat back down. “Maybe I want to meet your family now.”

  He nodded slowly and cradled his beard in a hand, a gesture that she’d come to recognize and adore and that meant he was thinking. “Not yet,” he finally said.

  She hadn’t expected his resoluteness, his certainty on this point. She’d expected fear and hesitation. She’d expected him to be the Russell she’d come to know. “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You can’t just say that. You have to give me an answer.” And when he didn’t, when he just sat there in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, she said, “You still love your wife. She’s asleep and won’t ever wake up and you still love her.”

  Russell glared at her. “Please don’t speak about her in that tone.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He nodded, seeming to accept her apology. “I do still love her. I may always love her. But I think I’m getting better … slowly. And she’s only part of it. Tessa’s been through a lot. I’m not sure how she’d take this. And then there’s her grandmother. She knows about you. She understands that things may change. In the past years, we’ve all managed to make a family together. Maybe you’ll want to be a part of that family. But maybe you won’t. I don’t think I want to try it out just yet. I have to be more certain about us. I have to know that we’re more than just dating.”

  “Are we just dating?” Evelyn asked. “Aren’t we together? Aren’t we a couple?”

  Russell shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve only ever been with Jenny and now with you. I don’t have much experience here. Maybe it’s just a matter of more time. I think we have to wait.”

  Evelyn nodded. She wanted them to be a couple now, but in the past she had moved too fast, she’d been pushy, and her relationships of weeks and months had crumbled in days. “OK,” she conceded. “We’ll wait.”

  Nonetheless, over the next weeks, Evelyn resented the fact that Russell’s house remained off limits to her. She was neither invited as a guest nor was she free (though he’d never said as much) to walk casually down his street and past his small house, as any pedestrian might do without thinking twice.

  And so she did. She made a habit of it, in fact, strolling by two or three times a week, overcome by an embarrassing, adolescent urge to be closer to him, to know more about him. Murray Avenue was a quiet side street with small, identical Victorians huddled close together and painted variously in cheerful bright yellows, blues, oranges, and purples. Each house presented a compact, nicely groomed square of yard to the street and a porch just large enough for a small family to lounge on. One afternoon, when Evelyn saw them, Russell and a blond little girl out in the front yard, she could have stopped and turned around. Instead, staying on the opposite side of the street, she kept walking. Surrounded by tulips and begonias, they were kneeling in a rich, dark bed of garden dirt, digging and planting seedlings. The girl wore a red sports jersey, baggy shorts, and what appeared to be black soccer cleats. Tessa did not notice Evelyn, but Russell, a trowel in one hand and a small flowering plant in the other, caught sight of her. For a moment, she stopped and registered the look of confusion on Russell’s face. He mouthed a word at her, a single syllable, “go” or “no,” followed by a harried and angry wave of his garden tool. Then he turned and sunk the little plant into the dirt as Evelyn, feeling like a stalker, stood still for a moment before hurrying down the sidewalk.

  An hour later, wearing the same Levi’s cutoffs he’d been working in, Russell was at her front door. His fingernails and bare knees stained with earth, he smelled of sweat and the rich, organic odor of the garden. “I can’t come in,” he said. He crossed his arms and then uncrossed them. “I like you, Evelyn,” he said in a voice that was both determined and hesitant.

  Evelyn despised the half-measure of that word. “You like me. I want you to more than like me.”

  “I like you a lot,” he said, though there was a fierceness in his voice.

  “It was nice to see you in your garden,” she said now, because, in fact, it had been nice and she wanted him to know it. “It was nice to see Tessa. Does she play soccer? She seemed to be wearing a uniform. She looked darling.”

  He shook his head. “I have to just say this. I like you, Evelyn, but please don’t ever do that again. If you do that again, if you come without being asked, I don’t know that I can be with you.”

  Evelyn felt a rush of hopelessness that turned, with some relief, into anger. “For Christ’s sake,” she said. “You shook that little shovel at me. You shooed me away.” And then: “I don’t know that I can be with you either.”

  He looked at her for a moment, as if trying to make a decision. “All right.” He let his arms fall to his side. He stepped off her porch.

  “I didn’t mean …,” she began to say.

  “I should go now.” He retreated a few more paces, seemed about to say something, and then turned and walked away.

  After Russell had stayed away for several days, Evelyn called Heidi and cried. “The situation was a little weird,” her friend said, trying to comfort her. “You might be better off looking for someone whose wife … you know… isn’t a vegetable.” Evelyn had to laugh at this, laugh and weep at the same time.

  She was determined to be happy on her own. She had friends, hobbies, and a career, after all. At work, she was in the midst of negotiating what would be her largest contract ever, with Detroit Edison, a deal that looked likely to come through. She would meet other men, she told herself. Yet while she might, after weeks or months, achieve partial happiness alone—she always had in the past—she would have been happier, she was sure, with Russell, with that physically awkward, frightened, emotionally damaged man who could not last ten minutes in intercourse, who would not get in a car, who had been afraid, before meeting Evelyn, of bicycles, for God’s sake, but who was good with a hammer, generous, attentive, and
tolerant, up to a point, of Evelyn’s forcefulness, her inappropriate and inelegant honesty. He’d even rebuilt her garage, the newly painted perfection of which she’d glared at a number of times since he’d stopped coming.

  To distract herself from heartbreak, Evelyn biked, took long walks, sipped wine alone on her porch, read, now and then masturbated in the dark of her bedroom, called Heidi in the evenings and talked far too much about Russell until her friend found some excuse to get off the phone. It was late May. The rain had given way to long sunny days, and at the height of afternoon, Evelyn felt the heat of the coming summer. In the parks and the front yards of neighbors, lilac blossoms drooped, wasting away in the heat and saturating the air with a sweet, overripe mustiness.

  During the worst of these slow afternoons, Evelyn thought about the last months of her marriage, how Ed had told little lies to explain his increasingly long days at work. He’d had a meeting, or fallen behind on a project and had to stay a few extra hours; he’d been caught up in his workout routine at the gym, or stuck in traffic. She’d been convinced that he’d been having an affair until she ambushed him at his office one night and found him surfing the Web for nothing, not even porn. He had just been reading basketball scores, stats and news, passing time away from her, and in the exchange that followed he had finally told her the truth with a shockingly uncharacteristic directness. “I don’t like being around you. I don’t like you anymore.” The fact that her passive, quiet, sad husband, a man who had retreated from her and let her bully him for five years, had been the one to go, to pack his things up, to hire a lawyer and take a job in North Carolina, surprised and infuriated Evelyn even now. She had been incapable of stopping him, of making him like her again. Still more painful, if sadly predictable, witnessing his unlikely forcefulness, his determination to leave her, had made her want him more than ever, had made her want him the way she wanted Russell now.

  After a week without Russell, seven days that dragged on because heartbreak was not only painful but boring and laborious, all that time with one stupid, unsophisticated feeling of rejection and hurt, she ran into him at noon on Washington Street. He waved from the opposite curb, and though Evelyn was wearing heels, she trotted over the crosswalk to reach him. He had trimmed his beard and gotten a haircut, but otherwise looked unwell, too thin, pallid and generally diminished in his dark suit, and the overall impression of misery he made left Evelyn feeling overjoyed. “How are you?” he asked with enthusiasm.

  “Not well,” Evelyn said, though she was smiling and laughed now. “Wretched, in fact.”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Yes what?” Evelyn asked.

  “Me too.” And then, after this wonderful confession, he looked nervously around. “Would you like to walk with me?”

  Fortunately, Evelyn had a meeting in a few minutes and was obliged to say no, an answer she could not have otherwise given. He took it badly, nodding too rapidly and seeming to force a smile. “Maybe later this afternoon,” she said.

  “Good. Excellent.” And then an idea came to him, something exciting, she saw, by the way he stood up straight. How much taller he seemed when he felt well. “Would you like to go fly-fishing on the Huron with me this afternoon? The weather is right for it. There should be a hatch this evening, and I can almost guarantee you a fish.”

  “A hatch?” Evelyn asked.

  “Lots of bugs,” he said. “The more bugs, the better the fishing.”

  And though Evelyn had never been fishing, had never particularly wanted to go fishing, and did not like bugs, she accepted.

  He dropped by her place later that afternoon on a used, hunter’s-orange mountain bike he must have bought over the last week. He wore a shiny turquoise-colored helmet, aviator sunglasses, and a backpack stuffed with gear, and presented a bunch of red and yellow tulips to Evelyn. “From our garden,” he said. He was excited and eager to get on the river before twilight, when the mayflies, he explained, would hatch and send the otherwise lethargic bass into a feeding frenzy.

  At a small sporting goods shop at the end of Main Street, Russell bought her a fishing license and, as a joke, a baseball hat that read “Kiss My Bass” on the front. Soon they were on the water, where Russell couldn’t stop talking about fish and fishing, about how Evelyn was to cast and “present” her fly, allowing it to drift with the current. It was a cloudless, windless day, as hot as any yet that spring, though the river cooled Evelyn down when she stepped into it wearing waist-high waders. In the evening sun, the water took on an otherworldly molten glow marred only by the flotsam of twigs and dead insects. Pairs of bright blue dragonflies—strange, alien creatures—shot through the still air while clouds of tiny bugs circled just above the water in a haze of light and wings. Evelyn was surprised and a little frightened by the force of the current, its slow tug on her legs. Russell stood about five yards downriver, coaching her on her cast. “Use a little wrist and a little elbow. It’s just like painting the ceiling,” he said. “Imagine you’re holding a paintbrush above your head. Now stroke.” He threw one elegant cast after another while Evelyn’s efforts produced an awkward splash of fly and line that was all wrong, though Russell kept encouraging her—“That’s close. Now use a little more wrist”—until she finally managed to lob her fly into the current.

  Slowly they worked upstream, casting as they went. Now and then, Evelyn looked over at him, poised above the water, staring intensely at his leader as it drifted with the current, then lifting his line into the air in a backwards arch, gorgeous and seeming for a moment to hover, before he tossed his fly upstream again. He was utterly absorbed by this activity that Evelyn found, in all truth, after only half an hour, tedious. Nonetheless, it was clear to her then—she experienced the unannounced suddenness and simplicity of the feeling even as she teetered in the cumbersome rubber suit and pushed through the water—that she loved him.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” he called over to her.

  “Yes,” she lied. It was thrilling to see him now, with his floppy green hat, his sunglasses, his graceful command of the rod, and know that she loved him, never mind the fact that above the thick canopy of trees on the opposite bank she could make out in the distance a battery of high buildings that she knew to be part of the huge university hospital where, in one room among thousands, Russell’s wife had slept for three years. Was still sleeping now, at this moment.

  To avoid this thought, she kept her eyes on the river and struggled to cast her fly into the current. Just as she was settling into a fishing torpor, struggling to appear absorbed, Russell let out a loud, wild call. “This is it,” he said. Evelyn shrieked now as a snowy flurry of bugs lifted and fled from the dark glass of the water and fell over her, soft as spider web. Silky multitudes were in her hair, on her arms and bare neck, so fragile and tiny that they seemed to die as soon as they landed on her. She might have stopped, swatted at them, even cried for help had Russell not yelled at her. “Get your fly in the water! This will only last a few minutes longer.” The river boiled with fish breaking the surface, their muddy bodies flopping and roiling. Russell had already caught and released one fish and had another on the line when Evelyn looked up at the blue sky, cloudless, immaculately clear, and, absurdly, imagined herself painting a ceiling; with a simple flick of her wrist, she finally cast her fly into the middle of the frenzy. “You’re going to get a hit,” Russell said.

  And Evelyn felt exactly that—one and then another hit—and now the end of her rod bent low. “Shit! Shit!” She backed up, lost her balance, and nearly fell before she felt her rubber boots sink into the river bottom and grip. She half wanted to let go of the pole and allow whatever was fighting her to win.

  “Keep your tip up! Don’t let any slack into the line!” Russell was shouting at her now, not with anger but with rough, urgent excitement. “Great. You’re doing great.” The fish ran upstream, then down, the reel whining like a buzz saw as the line fed out. “Let it go. Let it get tired,” he told her. When she final
ly pulled it in, Russell crouched below her and netted a large, thick-bodied bass, viscous yellow, ugly, bleeding at the mouth and gills, and, as Russell announced, nearly dead. “We’ll have to keep this one,” he said, taking a good-sized rock from the bank and killing it swiftly with a blow to the head.

  “My goodness,” she said.

  “Congratulations,” Russell said. “This will be dinner.”

  That night, he called from Evelyn’s kitchen phone to tell Tessa’s grandmother he’d be staying later than expected. Evelyn opened a fine bottle of white wine, and they ate her fish fried in a batter of cornmeal, buttermilk, and eggs with a batch of what Russell called, in a clownish French accent, pommes frites, thickly sliced potatoes, pan-fried and seasoned with herbs and salt. After weeks of lovemaking, this was the first meal they’d shared together. They were hungry and ate their greasy, delicious food quickly, though Russell’s good manners, the way he had set the table, the cutlery correctly placed and the cloth napkins folded into tents over their salad plates, the way he waited for her to lift her fork before beginning to eat, the way he looked her in the eye when they toasted to more fishing trips, were not lost on Evelyn, who could be picky when it came to small matters of etiquette.

  After they made love that night, the first time they’d done so in darkness, Evelyn, resting in his arms, listening to the hushed and constant working of his heart beneath her, had to ask a question. “Did she fish with you?”

  “No,” Russell said. “Jenny didn’t much like that sort of thing.”

  Evelyn squeezed him tightly and held him like this for a moment. “I do,” she said. “I like it a lot.”

  “Good,” he said.

  Some hours later, Evelyn woke when she heard Russell getting dressed. “I love you,” she said in a dark so thick that she could see nothing.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes, what?”

  “I love you, too.” She heard him walk over to the bed. He bent down and whispered, “Would you like to meet my family next week?”