Sleeping Tigers

by Robinson, Holly

  As he danced, Ed touched himself with his hands just enough to make me shiver. I tried not to think about who else had seen this particular mating ritual. But a part of me stayed on alert and wary, observing the action instead of being fully engaged in it.

  Perhaps that’s why I reacted the way I did when Ed unfastened his trousers. His pants were held together by a Velcro strip, and he ripped them open with such deliberate flair, such noise, that I gasped. As his pants puddled around his ankles, Ed’s penis reared its head like a prairie dog popping out of a tunnel.

  That’s when I laughed. Uncontrollably.

  “I’m so sorry,” I wheezed, once I’d stopped snorting. Ed’s proud manhood had shriveled to thumb size and now dangled despondently. “You just surprised me, that’s all. I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”

  Ed hurriedly hiked up his trousers and fastened them again. “It’s all right,” he said with dignity. “Some women like something different, that’s all. I just wanted to please you.”

  The phrase “some women” got to me. I didn’t want to be one more mare in the stable. On the other hand, Ed had honestly been nice, hadn’t he? Trying to please me in bed had to count for something. For a lot, after Peter. After all, wasn’t that why I was here? For the joy of sex without the ponderous weight of love? To leap my own life’s boundaries?

  “I’m really sorry,” I said again.

  “Don’t worry. It’s fine,” Ed said, waving a hand, but we both knew it wasn’t.

  Ed took a shower then, and I lay miserably against the pillows. Would it be better if I left? Or worse?

  He seemed cheerful enough, though, when he came back, toweling his hair. Ed slid into bed naked beside me, hiking the covers up over his bare chest. “I hope you still feel comfortable enough to stay what little is left of the night,” he said, turning on his side to face me.

  Ed smelled now of the night outside, as sweet as the sea. The covers had slipped to reveal one brown shoulder. I traced it with one finger, then touched his collar bone. His bulk was comforting. “I might,” I said.

  “I hope you will. You’re a wonderful surprise,” he added, lifting the covers up to look at me.

  “Why?”

  “All those wonderful curves. Much nicer than I expected. And I expected to like you a lot.” Ed’s voice was drowsy and his eyes were at half-mast. I touched his dark hair, which was thick and soft and just long enough to tug between my fingers.

  He didn’t stir. He was sound asleep.

  I slipped out of bed and dressed again, then let myself out of the apartment.

  Chapter three

  I crept barefoot into the early morning fog and walked back to Karin’s apartment. I still had traces of eye makeup ringing my eyes, I carried Karin’s tall boots because my blistered feet screamed when I tried to put them on, and I was once again wearing the squeaky leather pants. It didn’t matter, though. The only people I passed on the street looked worse than I did. And at least I wasn’t relieving myself in the gutter.

  I had left Ed a note with my phone number, after debating the etiquette of thanking a man for a night of lovemaking that had, in the end, fizzled. I hoped he wouldn’t be hurt that I’d left as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  Karin’s apartment looked like the site of an earthquake. She and Wally were still sleeping; I could hear Wally snoring like an asthmatic spaniel. Miraculously, though, she had put my suitcase on the couch, and on top of that an envelope with the key to my new apartment and instructions for finding it.

  I washed my face, changed into jeans and a t-shirt, brought the suitcase down to my car, then drove the four blocks to the corner of Dolores and 28th Street. The fog was starting to lift. I admired the pastel houses shouldering in along the sidewalks. It was quiet enough for me to hear the rumble of a trolley on Church Street.

  I paused uncertainly in front of my new home, a modest, two-story green clapboard house with a steeply-pitched roof. There were two front doors and three doorbells, not one of them with a name. I’d just have to guess which apartment. I pressed the lower bell.

  A skinny, scruffy man cracked open the door on the left and slithered outside, blinking like a mole in the bright light. The man’s nose twitched beneath his crooked glasses, which were held together with a piece of fine wire wrapped around the left eyepiece. Behind him I glimpsed computer monitors, circuit boards, and tiny metal drawers stacked on racks around the dim living room.

  “Hi!” I said brightly. “I’m Jordan, the new tenant.” I sounded like an Avon Lady. “Is this Louise’s place?”

  The man grunted and managed to look as though he were viewing me from a great distance, even though we were only inches apart. “Upstairs,” he said, pointing to the top bell.

  “Oh. Well. See you around, then.”

  My new neighbor folded his arms, considering this proposition. Then his voice rumbled forth from somewhere deep within his body. “I don’t work the usual hours,” he informed me, and retreated behind his door again.

  I rang the top bell. Karin had warned me that Louise, who worked from home translating hospital brochures into various languages, was the oddest person in San Francisco. This man could give her some competition. Still, I was grateful to Karin for having found an apartment I could sublet for the summer.

  Louise answered the buzzer, her voice a series of squeaks on the intercom. “State your business and make it snappy.”

  I spoke with my mouth close to the speaker, feeling ridiculous as a group of chattering teenagers bobbed past on the sidewalk. “It’s me, Jordan O’Malley. Your new tenant. I brought you a rent check.”

  “Oh, I know all about you,” Louise assured me. “No need to come upstairs. Just slide the check into the mail slot. You have the key, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but don’t you want to meet me?”

  “Not necessary. I’ve only ever rented that apartment to wonderful tenants. You’ll be no exception. Your door is around to the right. No kids, no pets, and no noise after midnight. Enjoy!”

  I slid the rent check through the mail slot, feeling rejected, and opened the side door of the house with my key. The studio inside wasn’t much larger than the living room of the condominium I’d shared with Peter. A counter divided the galley kitchen from the main living space, which was furnished with a bed, a bookshelf and a desk, all natural pine. The bathroom was so narrow that I could touch the opposite walls without straightening my arms.

  The walls of the apartment were painted a pale salmon with cream trim; someone had stenciled a grape vine onto the wall behind the bed, adding bunches of green grapes to the vine. The vine extended onto the ceiling, too. I liked the effect, which was that of being outside even when enclosed in this small space.

  And the garden, as Karin had promised, added another dimension. I opened the French doors and stepped into a garden lush with fleshy jade plants and herbs. Bougainvillea snaked up the walls separating my garden from the yards around it, the scarlet blossoms fluttering like hummingbirds in the sun.

  “I can live here,” I announced.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking the boxes I’d kept locked in my car since my arrival, the French doors thrown open until afternoon, when the fog rolled back into the city. In San Francisco, fog didn’t appear as wispy strands, the way it did in Massachusetts, but was tossed into my garden in thick, soggy pillows that soon made it impossible for me to see the bougainvillea. I made a bowl of instant oatmeal and tried Cam’s cell again before falling onto the bed and napping in my sweaty clothes.

  When I woke, I studied the path of light from the bathroom window, wondering again why my brother wasn’t answering any of my messages. Maybe he’d lost his cell phone, but that didn’t explain why he hadn’t even checked in with our parents. How could Cam have disappeared so completely?

  The light filtering into my apartment reminded me of being underwater, and of the time Cam saved me from drowning. It was the summer after my freshman year of high school. I had
invited my boyfriend, Dominick, to meet me at the town lake, beneath the water ski jump. I asked him on the telephone, calling after breakfast on a Saturday morning in July while my mother was safely out of earshot, since she was so bent on ridding me of Dominick that she had once shooed the boy off our back steps with a broom.

  “He’s just white trash,” my mother told me. “And you’re not.”

  Of course, one woman’s trash is another woman’s obsession. I was still a nice kid at fifteen, a polite, Catholic schoolgirl who paid attention in class and never mouthed off to the teachers. However, my adolescent aim was to ruin any possibility that I might end up like Mom, a woman who relished every opportunity to operate a Dust Buster, even whisking sandwich crumbs off the table before you’d finished lunch. I was sure that Dominick, with his black buzz cut and cigarettes and hand-carved ink tattoos, could show me the way.

  Dominick introduced himself by grabbing my butt beneath my plaid school uniform as I walked by his desk in algebra class to sharpen a pencil. In response, I clocked him with the full force of my open hand against his skinny neck, knocking him sideways onto the floor, desk and all. But Dominick only laughed. That’s what got me: there he was, lying on the floor with his long body still trapped in his desk, and the guy guffawed like he’d just won the pot at a church Bingo game.

  We were inseparable after that. Dominick sat next to me in the cafeteria that day, waving away my only two friends in school–Karin had already defected to the public high school–and took charge of my life. When Dominick banished my friends from our usual table, the girls waited for me to signal them to sit anyway, but I didn’t. The girls moved away, whispering like my mother and her friends did during Mass, hands hiding mouths pure of lipstick, smug with the self-righteous satisfaction of women whose behavior is above reproach.

  Within a month, Dominick taught me everything my parents had warned me about, and I went wild for the first and only time in my life. I rolled my skirts high above my knees and smoked dope even at school. I drank a great deal, too, sneaking down to the town common at night to meet Dominick and his friends, where we swilled beer until the only cop in town chased us away.

  Best of all, Dominick took me snowmobiling that winter. My mother referred to snowmobilers as “Hell’s Angels on runners,” but I was enthralled by the face-numbing speed of those machines. My favorite snowmobile run was through the State conservation land, up a series of steep hills and across a frozen river. I wore a snowmobile suit that Dominick gave me to slip on over my clothes. Sometimes we stopped and switched off the engine in the middle of the woods.

  Alone at last, we’d unzip our suits and warm our hands, giggling and gasping, on whatever flesh we could grope through the layers of clothing. Sometimes Dominick lay on his back in the snow, a dark angel in his blue snowmobile suit, while I pulled the zipper down and took his penis in my mouth. It felt like a rubber hose and scared me with its angry purple snout. Gradually, though, I became fond of Dominick’s cock, thinking of it as my very own sweet, secret pet. By that summer I was ready, I thought, to go all the way, to prove my love to this boy who had expressed his claim over me with a metal ID bracelet heavy as a bike chain.

  I told Dominick to meet me at the water ski jump. I didn’t tell him that I had decided to give myself to him under water, under the ski jump, in a place where I imagined no one would see us, and in a way that would allow his sperm to be washed out of me like a school of tiny white minnows.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t have declared my love for Dominick even if he had shown up to meet me. I came up for air in the wrong place under the water ski jump and whacked my head on one of the wooden supports. Luckily, Cam saw me swim beyond the lifeguard’s rope and followed out of curiosity. When he saw me floating face-down in the water, Cam pulled me onto one of the support beams in the dark watery cavern beneath the jump, wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pressed his skinny, smooth, eleven-year-old body against mine to ease my shivering.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to swim back.”

  “No. You go without me. I’ve got to wait here. Go!” I was crying. My head hurt and my teeth were chattering.

  “Wait for what?” Cam looked confused.

  “Dominick’s meeting me.” Even then, with a lump the size of an egg on my forehead, I planned to give myself to love.

  Cam sighed. “He’s not coming, you know.”

  “What? You don’t know that!”

  “Yes, I do,” my brother answered calmly. “I saw Dominick.” He hesitated before adding, “With Cathy Prefontaine. They were making out on the town common this morning.”

  I hated Cam at that instant. “You’re lying!” I yelled, though I knew he wasn’t. “Go away and leave me alone!”

  “I can’t leave you,” Cam said calmly. “You might drown and Mom would kill me. I’ll stay here until you swim back to shore.”

  I saw that Cam meant what he said. I also saw, in the sharp rise of his collarbones and in the angle of his chin, the man lurking within his boy’s skin.

  It was the man within my brother who talked me into going back under water. Even though I cried and said I couldn’t hold my breath and swim beneath the water ski jump again, for fear of coming up wrong, I knew that with Cam I’d be all right. So I let my brother lead me, holding his hand until we surfaced where the water was suddenly filled with light that grew like thick yellow tree trunks from the floor of the lake to its dappled green surface.

  Even here, lying on my bed in San Francisco, I could still conjure up clear memories of plotting that swim, of how it had felt to move sensuously beneath a membrane pricked with rain, and of later coming to consciousness in that dark space with its eerie shadows, coughing on the stink of boat fuel as I opened my eyes and saw Cam’s anxious frown. “Just breathe,” were his first words when I came to. “Just keep breathing. You’ll be okay.”

  I had silently repeated Cam’s words during the biopsy for breast cancer, just before they gave me a light anesthetic and took out the core of tissue to send to the lab. I had also repeated them again, over and over–“just breathe, just breathe, just breathe”–while I showered on the morning before my lumpectomy, feeling my breast whole for the last time and imagining what might be there afterward, the dent, the scar the surgeon might leave as a reminder that all is not necessarily well, no matter how orderly and calm your life might seem.

  Now, I repeated those words in my new apartment, trying to motivate myself to get out of bed, shower, dress and go to the grocery store. “Just breathe,” I whispered, but I couldn’t get up off the bed. Not yet.

  Instead, I lay there a few minutes more, remembering the last of my relationship with Dominick, the way I’d stalked him and Cathy on my bicycle for days until I discovered them holding hands in Dominick’s dusty yard, inside the husk of a derelict car. I hit Cathy across the cheek, so that welts rose on her skin as pink as a lipstick kiss. That was the end. And that was why I’d always associated falling in love with drowning, with losing all sense of perspective until you finally whack your head on something and come to your senses.

  I got up, walked across the room and parted the curtains. The sun was starting to set. In the dusky light, the flowers in my garden looked like smudged thumb prints against the fence. I should go grocery shopping, but Cam wasn’t here to hold my hand, to make me breathe, to lead me out into the sun. I didn’t have the courage to go outside alone. I decided to have another bowl of instant oatmeal and go to bed.

  It took me a week to settle into the apartment. I spent the time exploring San Francisco, usually meeting Karin for drinks after her shift at the hospital. I went to the movies, too, once alone and once with Ed. Ed held my hand and kissed me, but didn’t ask me back to his apartment, much to my relief; I found his kisses too calculated, too deliberate, but didn’t know why. It didn’t matter. I had bigger worries now: my brother still wasn’t returning my messages.

  “Why do you think Cam isn’t calling me back?” I asked Karin a
t the end of that first week, over pizza in a North Beach restaurant with low ceilings and huge bunches of shiny black plastic grapes dangling ominously low over our heads, like bats. “Why can’t Cam just call or text me like a normal person?”

  Karin laughed. “Jordan, I hate to break this to you, but lots of people go for months at a time without calling their sisters. I’m sure Cam’s fine.”

  “I don’t know.” I took another piece of pizza. “Wouldn’t you think it was weird if one of your brothers just dropped off the face of the planet?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. People get busy.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” I said. “I’m not busy enough. I don’t even feel like me anymore. It’s like I’m in another woman’s body, going through the motions, pouring cereal for breakfast while my mind careens out of control. I thought I was taking charge of my destiny by leaving Peter, but I don’t know what the point of my life is anymore.”

  “Nobody’s in control of destiny!” Karin snapped. “Cancer, brain tumor, car accident, terrorist attack: you get what you get, and it isn’t always up to you. Whether your life means anything or not in the end is entirely subjective anyway.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Karin. Other women have husbands, kids, even divorces at my age. I know you don’t think we’re old enough to be grownups. But sometimes I wish I’d stuck it out long enough with Peter to at least get a child out of the relationship.” I twisted my napkin. “On the other hand, having cancer scared me into thinking I shouldn’t have kids, in case I’m not around long enough to drive them to preschool.”

  Karin shook her head, dark curls gleaming red in the candlelight. “Will you please stop? You don’t have cancer! Not anymore, okay? Hell, I have as much of a potshot at the cancer lottery as you do. Everybody does. The one thing nursing has taught me is that there’s always a rock with your name on it, but no guarantee you’ll see it whizzing towards your forehead. And if you’d stayed with Peter and had a child, then what? Kids don’t solve a thing! In fact, for women the two biggest predictors for poverty are kids and divorce.”