“Except there’s a slight problem,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Rusty. I’m not taking him. Not after what happened to Mooney.”
“No,” I agreed.
“Which means ...”
“Oh God! All right, I can do it. How bad can it be? A little lettuce, cabbage, right? A few handfuls of pellets ...”
“There’s the cage to clean too.”
“The cage. Okay.”
It was hard, her going off on the bus, with the typical scene of cheery mothers and fathers crowding around waving brown lunch bags, but I forced myself through it and so did she. I would force myself through the rest of my life if I had to.
First thing every morning and before I went to bed I put a handful of pellets in Rusty’s bowl and fresh water in his bottle, and when I left for work and came home I dropped a few leaves of something green into the cage. Since I never really looked at him I was shocked, the fourth night after Martine left, when Mr. Coates, who had come up to fix the window lock in her room, said in his usual unexcited way, “Your pig’s eye’s popping out.”
The right eye was protruding half an inch out of the socket and the cylindrical part behind it was yellow with gummy pus, a disgusting sight. “Jesus F. Christ,” I said.
“He won’t be no help to you. You need a vet.”
The thought of going back to that arrogant vet who I always suspected had screwed up with Elf was more than I could take, so I searched the yellow pages till I found a woman vet in the neighborhood. When I walked in the next day carrying Rusty in a carton, I knew I had lucked out. She had curly hair like a mop, she wore jeans and a white sweatshirt, and she seemed young, maybe twenty-nine or thirty. Her name was Doctor Dunn. Very good, Doctor Dunn, so there won’t be all that other shit to cope with.
To get him on the examining table I had to lift him up by his middle and feel all the squirminess and the beat of the scared delicate heart between my palms.
“It looks like either a growth of some kind pushing it forward, or maybe an abscess. But in either case I’m afraid the eye will have to go. It’s badly infected and unless it’s removed it’ll dry up and the infection will spread and ... uh ...”
“He’ll die?”
“Right.”
Seventy-five dollars, she said, including his overnight stay, plus twenty-five for the biopsy. Terrific, I thought, just what I need. It was lower than the other vet’s rates, though.
“I want to explain something about the surgery. He’s a very small animal, two pounds or so, and any prolonged anesthesia is going to be risky. What this means is, I can’t make any guarantees. I’d say his chances are ... seventy-thirty, depending on his general condition. Of course, we’ll do everything we can.”
“And if I don’t do it he’ll die anyhow?”
“Right.”
Squirming there on the table was this orange rat whose fate I was deciding. I felt very out of sync with reality, as if I was in a science fiction movie and how did I ever arrive at this place. “Okay. I guess we’d better do it.”
The receptionist I left him with told me to call around four the next day to see how he came through the surgery. If was what she meant. That evening out of habit I almost went in to toss him some celery, then I remembered the cage was empty. There was no reason to go into Martine’s room. But I decided to take the opportunity to clean the cage and the room both. I had found that the more I moved around the more numb I felt, which was what I wanted.
On the dot of four, I called from work. Doctor Dunn answered herself.
“He’s fine! What a trouper, that Rusty! We had him hooked up to the EKG the whole time and monitored him, and he was terrific. I’m really pleased.”
“Thank you,” I managed to say. “Thank you very much.” In one day she had established a closer relationship with him than I had in a year. That was an interesting thought. I mean, it didn’t make me feel emotionally inadequate; I simply realized that’s why she went through years of veterinary school, because she really cared, the way Carl could have about topiary, I guess.
“Can you come in and pick him up before seven? Then I can tell you about the post-op care.”
Post-op care? I had never thought of that. I had never even thought of how the eye would look. Would it be a hole, or just a blank patch of fur? Would there be a bandage on it, or maybe she could fix him up with a special little eye patch?
I found Rusty in his carton on the front desk, with the receptionist petting him and calling him a good boy. “We’re all crazy about him,” she said. “He’s quite a fella, aren’t you, Rusty-baby?”
Where his right eye used to be, there was a row of five black stitches, and the area around it was shaved. Below the bottom stitch, a plastic tube the diameter of a straw and about an inch long stuck out. That was a drain for the wound, Doctor Dunn explained. He had a black plastic collar around his neck that looked like a ruff, the kind you see in old portraits of royalty. To keep him from poking himself, she said.
“Was he in good condition otherwise?” I thought I should sound concerned, in this world of animal-lovers.
“Oh, fine. Now ... The post-operative care is a little complicated, so I wrote it down.” She handed me a list of instructions:
1. Cold compresses tonight, 5–10 minutes.
2. Oral antibiotics, 3 X a day for at least 7 days.
3. Keep collar on at all times.
4. Feed as usual.
5. Call if any excessive redness, swelling, or discharge develops.
6. Come in 3–4 days from now to have drain pulled.
7. Call early next week for biopsy results.
8. Make appointment for suture removal, 10–14 days.
9. Starting tomorrow, apply warm compresses 5–10 minutes, 2 X a day for 10 days.
“Here’s a sample bottle of antibiotics. Maybe I’d better do the first dose to show you how.” She held him to her chest with one hand, while with the other she nudged his mouth open using the medicine dropper and squeezed the drops in, murmuring, “Come on now, that’s a good boy, there you go.” As she wiped the drips off his face and her sweatshirt with a tissue, I thought, Never. This is not happening to me. But I knew it was, and that I would have to go through with it.
When I went to get some ice water for the cold compress that night, I saw the message the graduate student mother had left on the refrigerator near Happy Birthday, which was now Happ Brhday. “Ne mezz I camn di nstr vita,” it read. I knew some letters were missing though not which ones, and those that were left were crooked, but I remembered well enough what it meant. I sat down to watch the ten o’clock news with Rusty on my lap and put the compress on his eye, or the place where his eye used to be, but he squirmed around wildly, clawing at my pants. Ice water oozed onto my legs. I told him to cut it out, he had no choice. Finally I tried patting him and talking to him like a baby, to quiet him. Don’t worry, kiddo, you’re going to be all right—stuff like that, the way Carl would have done without feeling idiotic. It worked. Only hearing those words loosened me a little out of my numbness and I had this terrible sensation of walking a tightrope in pitch darkness, though in fact I was whispering sweet nothings to a guinea pig. I even thought of telling him what I’d been through with my appendix, a fellow sufferer, and God knows what next, but I controlled myself. If I freaked out, who would take care of Martine?
I figured seven and a half minutes for the compress was fair enough—Doctor Dunn had written down 5–10. Then I changed my mind and held it there for another minute so if anything happened I would have a clear conscience when I told Martine. I held him to my chest with a towel over my shirt, feeling the heart pulsing against me, and squirted in the antibiotic. I lost a good bit, but I’d have plenty of chances to improve.
In the morning I found the collar lying in the mess of shit and cedar chips in his cage. I washed it and tried to get it back on him, but he fought back with his whole body—each time I fitted it around his n
eck he managed to squirm and jerk his way out, till beyond being repelled I was practically weeping with frustration. Two people could have done it easily. Carl, I thought, if ever I needed you ... Finally after a great struggle I got it fastened in back with masking tape so he wouldn’t undo it. But when I came home from work it was off again and we wrestled again. The next morning I rebelled. The drops, the compresses, okay, but there was no way I was going to literally collar a rodent morning and night for ten days. There are limits to everything, especially on a tightrope in the dark. I called Doctor Dunn from work.
“Is he poking himself around the eye?” she asked. “Any bleeding or discharge? Good. Then forget it. You can throw the collar away.”
I was so relieved.
“How is he otherwise? Is he eating?”
“Yes. He seems okay. Except he’s shedding.” I told her how when I lifted him up, orange hairs fluttered down into his cage like leaves from a tree. When leaves fell off Carl’s plants, which I was also trying to keep alive though that project wasn’t as dramatic, it usually meant they were on their way out. I had already lost three—I didn’t have his green thumb. It seemed my life had become one huge effort to keep things alive, with death hot on my trail. I even had nightmares about what could be happening to Martine at camp. When I wrote to her, though, I tried to sound casual, as if I was fine, and I wrote that Rusty was fine too. Maybe Carl would have given her all the gory details, but I didn’t mind lying. He was going to be fine. I was determined that pig would live even if it was over my dead body. Luckily I wasn’t so far gone as to say all this to Doctor Dunn. “Is that a bad sign?”
“Shedding doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “He doesn’t feel well, so he’s not grooming himself as usual. It’ll stop as he gets better.”
I also noticed, those first few days, he would do this weird dance when I put the food in his cage. It dawned on me that he could smell it but not see it. While he scurried around in circles, I kept trying to shove it towards his good side—kind of a Bugs Bunny routine. Then after a while he developed a funny motion, turning his head to spot it, and soon he was finding it pretty well with his one eye. I told Doctor Dunn when I brought him in to have the drain removed. She said yes, they adapt quickly. They compensate. She talked about evolution and why eyes were located where they were. Predators, she said, have close-set eyes in the front of their heads to see the prey, and the prey have eyes at the sides, to watch out for the predators. How clever, I thought, the way nature matched up the teams. You couldn’t change your destiny, but you had certain traits that kept the game going and gave you the illusion of having a fighting chance. We talked about it for a good while. She was interesting, that Doctor Dunn.
A few days later she plucked out the stitches with tweezers while I held him down.
“I have to tell you,” she said, “not many people would take such pains with a guinea pig. Some people don’t even bother with dogs and cats, you’d be amazed. They’d rather have them put away. You did a terrific job. You must really love animals.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that although it didn’t turn my stomach anymore to hold him on my lap and stroke him for the compresses, he was still just a fat rat as far as I was concerned, but a fat rat which fate had arranged I had to keep alive. So I did.
“Well, you could say I did it for love.”
She laughed. “Keep applying the warm compresses for another day or two, to be on the safe side. Then that’s it. Case closed.”
“What about the biopsy?”
“Oh yes, the lab report. It’s not in yet, but I have a feeling it wasn’t malignant. He doesn’t look sick to me. Call me on it next week.”
In eleven days Martine will be back. Beautiful Martine, with her suntan making her almost the color of Rusty. I’ll warn her about the eye before she sees him. It doesn’t look too gruesome now, with the stitches out and the hair growing back—soon it’ll be a smooth blank space. In fact, if not for the missing eye she would never have to know what he went through. The house will feel strange to her all over again without Carl, because whenever you’re away for a while you expect to come home to some pure and perfect condition. She’ll be daydreaming on the bus that maybe it was all a nightmare and the both of us are here waiting for her. But it’ll be an altogether different life, and the worst thing is—knowing us, sensible, adaptable types—that one remote day we’ll wake up and it’ll seem normal this way, and in years to come Carl will turn into the man I had in my youth instead of what he is now, my life. I even envy her—he’ll always be her one father.
So I’m applying the warm compresses for the last time, sitting here with a one-eyed guinea pig who is going to live out his four-to-six-year life span no matter what it takes, in the middle of the journey of my life, stroking him as if I really loved animals.
The Sound of Velcro
HE WOKE, AS ALWAYS, to the sound of her sneakers opening, six little rips, swift and searing like Band-Aids ripped away to expose the raw, crimson day. Shudders crossed his spine. He pictured her roughly parting the lips of each sneaker, lifting the tongue to remove her long, smooth foot. Opening his eyes, he watched her place the sneakers side by side to air on the windowsill, toes pointing outdoors. He knew her movements by heart, the way small children learn their mothers’ rituals and cling to them for safety. Off with the sweaty headband, shake out the hair with two fine tosses of her head, cross arms to peel up the shirt. Then she kissed him quickly on the lips, blocking the light as she bent over, the heels of her hands pressed into his shoulders, and he smelled the dissonant sweetnesses of sweat and toothpaste. Her yellow hair was warm and glinting. Softness fell over him like a net.
“You should try it sometime, Joe,” and she poked him gently in the stomach before striding to the shower. “You’re getting soft.” The other day, she had teased, “You’ll lose your looks.”
He granted himself five more minutes. This was the most arduous task of the day—forcing his body to get started. Lately when he stood up he felt a faint stiffness, a numbing disorientation. It must be the change in weather, summer announcing itself so abruptly. He was thirty-three years old and not heavy, but he felt ponderous and old as he prodded himself from bed part by part, like Cro-Magnon man rising to face the puzzle of civilization.
He had never known Van other than taut and muscular and civilized, except when she was pregnant. Her face was drawn then, her hair drab, but he had preferred her lapsed from perfection. Physical perfection was more than intimidating; there was something unmistakably crude about it, as if the body were aspiring to a condition beyond itself, to spirit, as absurd and slightly titillating as apes dressed up as humans. The baby died at three months, one of those unaccountable deaths, asleep. Joe tried to imagine the instant of passage from sleep to death: what was it like, did the baby know, feel a shiver or a catch of the breath? But no one could ever know what a baby knew. Simply overnight, where there had been life there was a void. He felt it defied natural law, the conservation of matter. He had tried to puzzle it out with Van, but she disliked anything with the aroma, however slight, of mysticism. She was not one to lie in the dark and speculate. He wanted to talk, too, about what the child might have been like, whether it would have had her swiftness and energy, or his dreamy temperament and drowsy eyes. At first she wouldn’t answer, then one night she put her hand over his lips softly and said, “I can’t. Don’t you see? I just can’t.” And then she curled in a ball and wept into the pillow, and Joe felt helpless beside her, afraid she would melt away and leave him alone with his sorrow. The next morning Van was running again, returning streaked and sweaty, gasping with sobs. He urged her to stop pushing herself, at least to cry in the comfort of bed, but she said why waste time and get fat besides? A while later, she had a miscarriage.
“It usually means something was wrong to begin with,” she said, crisp and dry-eyed this time. “It’s not meant to be.” She spoke more fervently than ever about her career, interior design, an
d the need for contacts and networking. She drew up a schedule of household chores, presenting it to Joe like a challenge. He accepted it calmly, more calmly than she expected, he noted with a boy’s twinge of satisfaction. Compared to the advertising agency, where he managed half a dozen accounts with the deftness of a juggler, domestic work was easy and familiar. He didn’t mind helping out—along with his brother, Hughie, he used to help his mother too, if asked.
Walking to work through the park on this pale, hot June morning, he heard a sound uncannily like Vanessa’s tearing open her sneakers, the sound of Velcro, only louder and angrier, and again the chill ran down his spine. How out of place it was, in the greenery. The sound repeated two, three more times, with a harsh caw at the end. Alive. A bird, or some monstrous cricket? It left him bemused. As he slogged his way through the day, struggling to be diplomatic with his most demanding account, a cosmetics firm, the echo remained. Who, or what, could produce a sound like the most advanced of plastics?
That evening he found a letter from Hughie. It was as if a nugget of Joe’s boyhood had waited patiently all day in the mailbox: there was the familiar vertical, plump script on the small white envelope, the words “Street” and “New York” and “Denver, Colorado” meticulously spelled out. It was months since he had called Hughie. He would call immediately, tonight, maybe even ask him to visit. ...
He tore the letter open in the elevator. It was typed, which was vaguely disappointing. He might have basked in that placid writing as in an embrace.
Dear Hooch,
It is a long time since we were in touch and I hope you and your wife Vannesa are doing okay. I am fine exept I have a little probelm Hoochie if you could help me out. The place where I am working the magazine place is laying off workers. But I was hired from the program from the Guild so they are finding me another job guess where, New York City. The shipping department in Long Island City.
Joe turned the key in the lock without looking, his eyes fixed on the letter, and dropped into a chair. His heart was pounding with a fearful eagerness.
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