At the same time I was uneasy. Plenty like this was usually visited with punishment. In the Book it is not considered plenty when insects eat well. It's called plague. But how could we be punished when we are the punishment?
I toasted the resolution of my first moral crisis with a juicy globule of fat, lukewarm and with the first hint of a skin, the way I have liked it best since.
"There'll be plenty more. She'll be back. They have a scene every week or two," said an adult named Bismarck.
THOUGH THE GOULASH hurling was an exceptional event, the Gypsy was truly hot-blooded, aggressive, and insistent—a natural ally for us. Her sexual ruthlessness gave us many hours of safe time to scout and harvest. She had no regard for Ira's household rules and regimens; she exercised power over him by defying them. In the kitchen she was munificent. If a recipe called for two tablespoons, at least one more would find the countertop. A cup of wine? She'd pour us one, too. Ingredients spilled and flowed over every surface, into cracks, behind cabinets. She never picked up her droppings—after all, she had already made the floor filthy, so what was the use of retrieving something too dirty to eat?
When I was born, the colony was based in the back of the kitchen cabinets, as it had been for seventy-five years. We never had to forage. We traveled only for treats the Gypsy left, and only in the safest circumstances.
One day I descended to the counter to a pool of potato leek soup.
Bismarck was already eating. "I wish she'd go easy with the paprika." Crusting soup made him look like an albino. He looked at me and belched. "Our human population is generous. But when it changes I'll yearn for the days when I had food like this to complain about."
Still new to this life, and quickly growing accustomed to its riches, I was alarmed by the suggestion that it could end.
Bismarck preened his mouthparts. "The others don't want to hear it either. But don't worry. We'll get by. We always do."
That evening, I joined him on reconnaissance and began my lifelong study of the contemporary human. It wasn't a pretty picture. I knew biblical hygiene: pick your nose and your ass often enough to keep them open, and change your rags when they start to fester. The gray funk on your skin protects it against insects and infections, but fall into the water once a season anyway, just to impress the ladies. However, Ira, the modern man, scoured himself and changed his designer rags daily. His orifices were dredged like inlets, left ripe for infection. Though he brushed his teeth relentlessly, they were loaded with fillings.
His treatment of the apartment was just as obsessive and irrational. By ritual dousings of toxic solvents, he not only regularly thwarted the Gypsy's efforts (on those surfaces he could see), but went so far as to eliminate dirt insufficient to support the tiniest, hardiest life. I didn't understand why.
Bismarck said, "Class Mammalia has this thing about show. They bang antlers, beat chests, work out on Nautilus machines. Ira scrubs."
Today's lunch was burgers. Bismarck wiped red from his antennae and jumped.
"Just ketchup," I said.
"Thanks. . . She messes; that's her show. That's why they're doomed. By cleaning after her instead of beating her, Ira is being civilized. But she hates him for it."
Reud was eating with us today. Another native of the bookshelves, his first home had been Civilization and Its Discontents, an environment so horrifying that he ran out before he could consume the F from the author's name. Now he said, "A very free interpretation."
Bismarck said, "I don't care about the theory. I'm telling you, she's going to leave, and when she does Ira is going to turn on us like you've never seen. Have you heard about the Great Depression?"
I wasn't sure I wanted to.
"There was a fumigation twelve years ago. The colony had to flee over exposed hallways and treacherous streets and sidewalks. Most who ended up in public projects wished they had stayed to die in the gas. You baby boomers don't know how bad things can get."
"Where should we go?" I said.
"There is no place to go," said Bismarck.
"Then shouldn't we start storing food somewhere?"
"Ants do that. They're so obsessed with protecting themselves against a bad day that they never have a good one." Bismarck spat. "That's not living."
"Then what do we do?"
Bismarck did not answer.
Reud smiled at me avuncularly. "Eat, bubbala, fortify yourself."
A fine idea. And so resolved, I dipped my head back to the puddle of hamburger grease, only to find that they had finished it.
The Gypsy returned to the apartment late one night, after several nights away. She didn't stop to take off her coat, not even to make us a snack, but went right to the bedroom and snapped on the light. "Let's have this out once and for all. Oh God, Ira, how can I even talk to you in those pajamas. What are you, a grandfather?" Several of us ran down the hall to watch. I was breathless with fear. "You wore me down. The mind of a lawyer, Ira, for God's sake. Who could stand it?"
He sat up and felt for his glasses on the night table. "Did you just get here?"
"Don't cross-examine me. That's just what I mean."
"Are you suggesting that I misled you about being an attorney?"
"Oh, Ira, you jerk, don't you see? You always play by the rules, Ira. Rules don't make my pussy wet." Ira started. She laughed nastily. "Women want excitement, passion, hard cocks. I'm a free spirit. You're suffocating me."
"Suffocating you? Suffocating you? I hardly see you..."
As he sputtered, she thrust a carpet bag into his hands. "Hold this." She picked up pieces of rumpled clothing from the floor and bureau top and threw them in. She pulled him to the bathroom and continued.
He held the bag open while he implored. "I love you. I treat you well. We make love all the time. I don't know what you're talking about. Where have you been all these nights? That's what we should be discussing."
She stopped and looked at him. She was a small, dark, exotically beautiful woman. But now I saw the strain in the lines of her face. Her eyes darted. Her mouth was shriveled with tension from a conflict that had nothing to do with the man in the blue pajamas. Bismarck was right. Ira could never handle her.
She sighed. "Maybe it's not you, Ira. Maybe I just can't make it with a nice guy. Don't think I regret it. It was a worthwhile experience." She took the bag and snapped it closed.
"An experience? I love you. That's not just an experience."
"Oh, Ira, let's leave love out of it." She walked to the living room, and he donned his bathrobe and went after her. We raced after his flip-flops, two big tongues clicking with rude sarcasm. At the front door she reached into her bag and said, "I won't need these anymore." His eyes had not adjusted to the low light, and he was no athlete anyway. The keys struck his face. His glasses crashed to the floor a second before the door slammed.
The bells on the Gypsy's boots, which had become the masters of my salivary glands, faded down the stairs. The second greatest woman I would ever know walked out of my life.
"Finis," said Bismarck. "She's never taken it this far before."
THE CHANGE in Ira showed immediately. He was desperate, scared, whiny. The next day he began to make long, morbid telephone calls to his cousin Howie. Soon Howie stopped picking up, and Ira was forced to make shorter calls to Howie's answering machine.
Ira walked the apartment mournfully. I was sure he was searching for a pair of the soiled panties or one of the dog-eared volumes of poetry that the Gypsy had used to stake her claim to the apartment; if he found one, the claim still stood. It would be a pretext to call her. But for once she had been thorough.
His clothing soon began to replace hers over the chair backs and between the sofa cushions. He grew more careless in his hygiene. A bacterial odor began to precede him.
Though Bismarck's famine failed to materialize, there were disturbing signs in Ira's behavior. Already halfway through possible reproductive life, he lost a mate. Any other organism would seek another immediately.
What would it take for a skinny, liberal, Jewish lawyer, forty years old, single, solvent, and without children? Wasn't he the archetypal catch for a generation of modern women who'd neglected to pull their diaphragms until their time had just about passed?
He was struck down by what I now recognize as Romantic Mourning Syndrome. A perversion sanctified in human song and verse, RMS plunges its victims into self-pity, debilitation, and sometimes self-destruction. It nullifies those qualities, such as dignity and self-possession, needed for the only cure: replacement of the lost love. It also renders the victim immune to the restorative knowledge that usually he is far better off without the lost love.
"How did human genes come this far?" I asked Reud.
"The mystery of love," he said. "I think."
Shelley went on and on about love's chemistry, but life's chemistry depends on the continuous purging of a body's antigens. Ira did not seem to know this. Adam hadn't, either.
But I had no complaint; Ira's RMS served us well.
"The shikse finally takes her schmutz someplace else—thank God—and what do you do, Ira? You work overtime to make up for her," said Faith Fishblatt, his mother.
"It's not healthy to be obsessive about cleaning," he said. A Gypsy line. He had truly fallen.
"Healthy? Aunt Jemima couldn't make this place healthy if she worked time and a half." Faith piled cleaning implements—a mop and pail, broom and dustpan, even the vacuum cleaner—in the living room.
Ira sat. "Stop it, Mother. If your doctor saw you he'd have you put away."
She peeled off her bandana and primped her hair. "All right, suffer. Live like a swine. Let that Bohemian go on tormenting you. Who am I to interfere."
The utensils sat in the middle of the room for a week like a great trophy, swords of surrender to us.
Ira cooked less now, but for the first time he started to eat in front of the TV, greatly enlarging the area of food fall. Dishes piled up in the sink. Long escape lines had always made this an unpopular feeding ground, but now the magnificent booty justified the risk
Cuisine stuck a human eyelash to his clypeus with saliva, twisted it into a handlebar mustache, and greeted citizens as they arrived at the rim of the sink. "Monsieurs, mesdames, good evening, bon soir. Enchante. For this evening might I recommend albacore, from the Pacific Ocean, aged six days, with a side of smartly turning mayonnaise, and ah! monsieurs et mesdames, she is bursting with gas like a fine sparkling Burgundy. Bon appetit!”
His antennae and all six legs bound with alfalfa sprouts, Houdini instructed that he be dumped into a rank mush of horseradish and gefilte fish. Fifteen minutes later his head broke the surface all legs freed to an antenna-storm of applause.
Bismarck was now taking ridicule for his dire prediction. "What do you think, Numbers? Am I a fool?"
I shrugged as I worked on a grain of brown rice sticking to the television channel selector.
He said, "An animal cannot live forever on the brink. It either dies or recovers. I'm afraid Ira will not die." He put a leg on my carapace. "I have seen the future of this apartment . . Interested?"
I pointed to the dining room with my left antenna. "Prosperity is just around the corner?"
"Grubstein."
Maybe they were right; maybe he was a fool. I could not believe our future was large-footed, thick-ankled, big-bottomed, plump-bellied, pendulous-breasted, wide-lipped, narrow-eyed, half again as wide as the Gypsy and several inches shorter. Ruth Grubstein was a friend of Ira's cousin Howie and an occasional visitor with him to the apartment. Ira had proven to me that males of this unsightly species will endure unnatural sacrifices to attain females marginally less unsightly. Blight though he was, I could not see him at peace with this woman's appearance.
But there was something about Bismarck's confidence that continued to make me doubt. I sat in the molding above Ruth, Ira, and Howie the following week. Ira was polite but still preoccupied. Howie made gentle fun of him. Ruth had a calming influence on the affair that I didn't quite understand. But Ira showed no appreciation of it nor interest in her.
Ruth kept returning. In the succeeding weeks she gently directed conversations so Ira could relate them to legal aid for the wretched, the one topic he still spoke about with enthusiasm.
One afternoon she took from the shelf and opened a book entitled The Conquest of New Spain. "Is this a college text? I took a course on Mexican culture when I was in school. I'll never forget an illustration, an etching I think, of the Aztecs tearing the hearts out of the conquistadores while they were still alive." She snapped the book closed. Two baby Blattella Cortezes screamed.
Ira told her the little he remembered of Montezuma's tragic character. Howie told a story of Montezuma's revenge, in which Howie had been the tragic character. Ruth laughed. "I had a crush on Montezuma—the vulnerable prince. I'm amazed I remember anything after all this time. Probably because I never had to take the final. We boycotted that year— the war, racism in America, the university's expansion into the community. It seems so long ago now. What's happened to idealism?" Ira's eyes were alert. She was awakening him.
One day the following week, as she was making cappuccino, she started on the pots and dishes in the sink. She continued to reduce the pile at every opportunity, and vanquished it a month later. When in the living room, she would rise and slyly pick up one of the strewn articles of clothing and deposit it in the hamper in the bathroom. "Does she have a bladder infection?" Ira asked Howie after her fourth sortie in one afternoon. Soon her tidiness grew infectious.
"Getting the idea?" said Bismarck.
"She's still just a visitor," I said. "She has many trials ahead."
At her first meeting with Ruth, Faith Fishblatt unleashed a peroration on the decay of values in her son's generation, the choice of quick cheap sex over enduring commitment, and the damned shame that people didn't know how to make each other happy anymore.
Ira rolled his eyes.
"What do you think, honey?" she said to Ruth. Her red eyebrows rose in challenge.
Ruth smiled and said, "I think you're right."
Later that afternoon Ruth took down recipes that Faith swore were worth their weight in gold.
But Ruth's primary adversary was the Gypsy. One night behind the leek soup in the cabinet, Sufur said, "The Gypsy show up, she beat Ruth big ass without touchin' it or sayin' nothin'. Chubby never show her face again."
"Hah!" said Reud. "Compared to Ruth, she's built like a boy. That's the problem with this species, core gender confusion."
"Ruth wouldn't even ask Ira. She'd recognize the mandate of the people and leave," said Rosa Luxemburg. I wasn't sure I believed her, but I certainly did like the way she smelled as she said it.
"What makes you think she feels she's facing superior pheromones?" said Bismarck.
Rosa smiled. "What do humans care for pheromones? It's exploitational material, like the cover of Vogue, that matters to them."
Reud said, "Ruth is the real female here."
Bismarck agreed. "Don't underestimate her."
"I don't," said Rosa. "It's Ira I'm forced to underestimate. Men." I nodded and moved closer to her. Something was trying to happen in my little body.
Perhaps retrospection is foolish, but I think it was our colony's greatest tragedy that the Gypsy did not immediately return in the flesh. At her leisure Ruth could vanquish her image inside Ira's febrile mind. Her tactics were ingenious; she gently picked at his scabs until he hemorrhaged the Gypsy all over her. After the first opening, it took little to initiate hours of puling about the baffling and tragic separation. Long after Ira's emetic confessions had driven Howie and the rest of us away, Ruth sat beside him on the living room sofa with sympathetic ear and soothing tongue. Ira treated her like a selfless confidante, heedless of her womanly pride. Ruth bore it well. This troubled me, until Rosa pointed out that this was a temporary exercise; Ruth had no intention of being a permanent emotional slop bucket. While I was more comfortable thinking of Ruth as
selfish and ambitious—and therefore natural—at the same time I feared a natural Ruth as a more formidable barrier to the return of my beloved Gypsy.
Soon Ruth was in complete command. Ira was reviving. I could feel the great dead weight of his dependence shift from the Gypsy to the woman who had chosen to hear about her. Still, three months later, he made none of the embarrassing gestures of human sentiment. He showed no sexual interest. I clung to my hopes for the Gypsy.
One night, as several of us chipped at a blackened plaque of tomato sauce on the stove—so quickly was our easy food dwindling—I said, "Explain this to me. Did you ever hear of two animals of late reproductive age consorting for months without copulating?"
Columbo said, "Let me see. Yes, there is a subspecies of barnacle that will hold off reproduction for weeks in the presence of high concentrations of raw sewage."
"That's it?" I said.
"The only one. And of course nuns and priests."
Bismarck said, "I know Ruth is a functioning female. After that talk yesterday about the ACLU, I got caught in the wake of her skirt. It reeked of hormones. I think Ira is gland-dead."
Rosa grimaced. "If only. I was in the bedroom the other night and he hit me with a tissue loaded with seed. Ugh. At least it was neatly folded." The image of her at impact sped my heart.
Clausewitz spat out a mouthful of carbon. "It's her looks. He'll never accept them."
Reud said, "Humans like the way humans look. They even take pictures."
"And slugs like the way slugs look," said Columbo. "But then, they don't see very well."
"Now that's natural selection," said Bismarck
He and Sufur slapped antennae.
The following weeks were harrowing. Every innocent gesture set me on edge. Then, at eleven thirty-five on a Monday night, the phone rang. At eleven o'clock Ira had made a final round of the apartment, hung up his clothes, treed his shoes, and showered. At eleven-twenty he had peeled back the covers of his crisply made bed and gotten in. This recently restored routine never varied by more than a few minutes.
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