Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  “Maybe you are built for relationships,” he said, “just not this one.” He was right.

  In Oregon, living apart, Abby and I had such passion, such chemistry. Now I sought consolation in what Abby was—intelligent, energetic, gentle, well-read—and what we had been.

  In the chilly winter air, I tugged on my coat collar. “So what’s wrong?” Dad asked.

  “Everything.”

  “Everything, huh?”

  I detailed my grievances. Distance had already replaced emotional intimacy. We were becoming what Abby called “just roommates,” and poor ones at that. Dad asked for specifics, and in listing our maladies, it became clear that Abby wasn’t the only one doing the critiquing. Constantly I told her, “You have to clean some of this stuff up. There’s no room on our tables to put my work or breakfast.”

  “I know,” she’d say, “I’m sorry. I’ll get to it today.” We’d have this conversation six or seven times before she’d actually clean it up.

  The messes had gotten so bad that I took photos—just to prove to myself that I wasn’t exaggerating. I wondered, how long is the world’s longest learning curve? Dad had taught me that love starts a relationship, but making a marriage last requires a degree of work. What if Abby and I worked hard only to discover there was still no middle for us to meet in?

  Sitting on the curb in the dark, only a few stars were noticeable overhead. I told Dad, “I love Abby, but I think I need to be alone.” A column of exhaled breath snaked past my face. “You know? But here, it’s the wrong kind of alone, it’s more loneliness. This here is not enough.”

  “Well,” Dad said, “what would be enough?” Before I could answer, he said, “Let me put it to you another way. If you need all this, why are you in a relationship?”

  I saw my breath, a single plume. All the normal reasons came to mind: I loved Abby. She loved me. Coupling is human nature. You can’t be a bachelor forever. I saw my breath, then the plume was gone. I said, “I don’t know.”

  Abby spent Thanksgiving with her aunt in North Carolina. We needed to save money, so I suggested she go alone. “You have fun with your family,” I said. “Wig and I will hold down the fort.” I gave her the $100 gift check my parents sent that week, bought her snacks and magazines for the plane ride. When she asked how I would spend the holiday, I told her what I’d been telling friends back in Oregon: “Eat a cold turkey sandwich with the other loners at some down home West Side diner.” Instead, I did better. I reserved a table at Jezebel’s soul food restaurant on 45th and 9th on Thanksgiving Day, and walked there from Grand Central through Times Square.

  “Just you?” the maitre d’ asked.

  “Just me,” I said, trying to act as if I didn’t feel awkward dining alone.

  He delivered me to a small wooden table pressed against a far wall in the rear of the dining room. Large enough for two, he removed the second chair. I squeezed through the gap between tables and set my bag behind the man to my right. He was sharing a meal with a family of six.

  “Peter is nothing like that,” one woman at his table said, “and you know it.”

  “Know it?” the man said. “I know nothing!” and sent the others into a fit of laughter. They swirled glasses of red wine and later made a toast.

  Rather than face the adjacent wall, I faced the whole restaurant and the crowd at the entrance. The view of 9th was better from this angle; plus, the wall behind me was mirrored. I couldn’t hide. Everywhere I looked, there I was. I read magazines, ate my turkey, kept my head down. When I looked up, my eyes frequently caught the gaze of impatient patrons in trench coats and scarves. They squeezed into the vestibule like rush hour commuters, awaiting their turn at the greens and mashed potatoes. I looked away, covertly studying other diners.

  A quiet, elderly couple sat to my left. He in a navy blazer, she in an emerald green dress, they whispered occasional conversation that, even from a foot and a half away, was too low to hear. Once, he touched her hand and she smiled. They spent the bulk of each course in silence, staring through the restaurant, their eyes tracing pedestrians passing on 9th.

  After dessert, I ordered coffee to postpone my return home. I pictured my parents sharing a meal with my grandmother in their Phoenix living room, pictured Abby enjoying homemade biscuits and sweet tea in Raleigh. I missed her. I missed my family, my friends back in Oregon. Maybe I’d mistaken relationships for smothering and associated compromise with the end of individuality because I hadn’t yet met the right person. Or had I mistaken bachelorhood for my natural state? I craved intimacy too much to really be a loner. I’d mixed it up. I think. It was confusing to crave love and autonomy at the same time. Confused or not, I knew one thing: my disdain for Giuliani was a blatant case of emotional transference.

  I had done some research on the ferret-law’s history and found a transcript online. On his WABC-AM radio call-in show in 1999, Giuliani told a ferret advocate from Oceanside, New York, that this “obsessive concern that you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist.” The advocate’s name was David Guthartz, and he called to criticize Health Code Section 161.01. “There’s something deranged about you,” Giuliani told him.

  Guthartz said, “No, there isn’t, sir,” and pleaded, “Don’t go insulting me again.”

  “I’m not insulting you,” said Giuliani. “I’m being honest with you. Maybe nobody in your life has ever been honest with you.”

  When Guthartz said, “I’m more sane than you,” the Mayor said, “David, this conversation is over, David. Thank you.” And hung up. In David’s absence, Giuliani concluded: “This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.”

  Back home, I released Wiggy from his prison. He started scratching at the luggage when he heard me come in, and as I removed the partition, he came galloping out. He whizzed past my foot with a playful squeak, beckoning me to chase.

  He slipped behind the bookshelf then sniffed the spines of all the books Abby had recently purchased and left stacked against the wall. When he darted behind the couch, I had to stop him from crapping on the carpet. I thwacked his nose but it felt mean. In place of punishment, I stacked puppy pads in that now-marked corner so he’d have a bathroom on each side of the house. It seemed more compassionate than banishing him to his solitary wing, but I knew it was counterproductive. He’d peed there before, and once ferrets establish their scent, they return to that spot. I was already six years too late.

  After I went to bed that night, a scratching awoke me: Wiggy was trying to scale the corner of the comforter to climb into bed. I lifted him up and let him sleep with me like old times. Rather than coil on top of the sheets, he lifted the top blankets with his nose and slid underneath, settling in the warm pocket by my feet. When I woke up the next morning, he was snoozing on Abby’s side.

  When she called the next day to ask about Thanksgiving, I felt about as human as a sewer rat. On my first day alone, I had moved all of her papers and magazines into a single pile, pushed all her folders and books onto one side of the kitchen table, and spent subsequent days exploring new sections of Manhattan alone. I investigated cramped markets in Chinatown, walked unfamiliar streets in the East Village, SoHo, the Chelsea waterfront, and stunk up the fridge with pungent dishes from Korean restaurants. At night, I read. I’d grown fond of the quiet. Something in me seemed broken, maybe asleep—that nesting instinct and urge to couple up. When couples walked by holding hands in Central Park, I wondered, Which one sleeps on the couch after a fight? Does one resent the other? Couples passed and I imagined answers, and I always concluded how much more whole they likely were than I. Either something was wrong with me, or something was wrong with Abby and I. Or more likely, both.

  Not long after Abby’s return, we resumed the familiar pattern. “You’ve been saying you’ll clean up the papers in the living room for over week,” I said.

  “I’ve been on vacation,” she said. “Give me a break.”

  Finally, we came to a single compromis
e. She agreed to leave one half of the kitchen table free of her stuff. No newspapers, no books, no plates or coffee cups, or the French press filled with that morning’s spent grounds, were to cross the center onto what became, in grade school parlance, “my side.” This way, when I brought our breakfast over, my plate actually touched table, rather than her school work or papers. “Thank you for doing this,” I’d say as I laid my plate and mug on the natural wood grain. There we would discuss the towns where we might move if she got into graduate school, but I wondered how I could last the six months until graduation. Although the table qualified as progress, I wished it mirrored the rest of our relationship.

  Snow fell and collected in dirty black piles along the shady sides of buildings. The fantasy of a ferret subway ride didn’t diminish. The crowning achievement, I decided, would be a visit to Central Park’s Great Lawn. How cool it would be for him prance on the grass between the tall buildings? I studied a map, wondering which subway to catch. The B and C stopped at 81st. From there we could cut east through the woods to the Lawn. While I acted like I wasn’t worried about the ride, I knew Abby was right: the city was riddled with the kind of crevices that ferrets could slip into. Once inside one, there’d be no retrieving him. Plus, if cops spotted us, Wiggy could legally be confiscated and destroyed. Ferrets live an average of seven to ten years. At age six, Wiggy had entered his golden years. Why risk it now?

  One Easter morning, I found Wiggy coiled on the floor, retching and slinging spit all over himself and the carpet. “Holy shit,” I said. “Abby.” He pawed at his cheeks, foaming, as if trying to dislodge a blockage. “Abby,” I yelled. “We have to go the hospital!” The only vet open was in White Plains, seven miles north.

  When the cab arrived we said it was an emergency. The driver clicked his tongue and sped up the parkway. Abby held my hand. Wiggy lay motionless in a bed of fleece on my lap. I pet him, wiped his cheeks of saliva. He was breathing but slowly. His eyes locked open, vacant and glassy. “It’s going to be okay,” I whispered to him, hoping he would find the tone comforting, hoping that saying it would make it true. I whispered and we wept.

  The vet rushed him away, put him on IVs, said to call back in four hours. “We’ll take good care of him,” she said. After some convincing that it wasn’t cruel to leave, Abby and I walked a couple miles to a diner. We ate eggs and cake and mashed potatoes drowned in gravy. We tried to read and make chitchat, but all I could think was whether we’d return to find Wiggy healing or dead.

  “He’ll be okay,” Abby said.

  Frigid air leaked beneath the adjacent window pane.

  “Yeah,” I said, spooning potatoes. “Thanks, sweetie. I hope so.” I had to conceal my teary eyes.

  That’s the thing about pets. You know all this, even while they’re young, that one day they’re going to die, and it’s going to break your heart. You comfort yourself by counting the numbers on their expected lifespans—seven, eight, nine years. You think, Man, that’s so far off, think of all the fun we’ll have from now until then. You tell yourself that if something should happen, you’ll deal with it so they don’t suffer, that you’ll put them out of their misery if that’s what mercy requires. But who puts you out of yours? Then, once you pay and sign the papers, and your pet is thoroughly sniffing their new home and learning how not to put their paws in your face while sleeping in your bed, you forget they’re even mortal. Finishing my potatoes, I looked across the table and saw Abby outside of the house, apart from the mess. I saw Abby and thought, What an incredible human being. Why can’t we be a match for each other? Why aren’t we right?

  Back at the clinic, a tech in bluish-green scrubs greeted us. “You’re here for Wiggy Gilbreath?” She slipped into a back room and emerged with Wiggy, who she handed me, squirming, like a lost piece of luggage. “Aaah,” Abby said. “Look. He’s so happy to see us.” He crawled up my chest and perched like a parrot on my shoulder, pressed against my neck. When Abby scooped him up to kiss him, a little green Band-Aid slipped off his wrist, revealing a square of shaved skin.

  The vet took me aside to chat. “Wiggy’s got big problems,” she said. Pressed for specifics, she said, “If you feel his side, you’ll notice a lump.” She placed my two fingers on his side, which pumped in and out in a frenzy of nervous breathing. A small but noticeable swelling of tissue rose above his haunch. It wasn’t visible, but you could feel it. “Could be cancer,” she said. “My guess is an enlarged pancreas from an insulinoma—diabetes, basically.” Insulinoma, a condition common to aging ferrets, is a pancreatic ailment that often leads to increased insulin production and low blood sugar. When he arrived, she explained, Wiggy’s blood sugar had dropped so low he’d nearly gone into shock. They’d revived him intravenously with fluids and stabilized his blood sugars. The only course now was maintenance: medicine, fluid, constant monitoring, which would be simple since I now mostly worked from home. The vet prescribed Prednisolone—a steroid widely given to cancer patients—administered orally in a dropper or baby “syringe.” “If he won’t eat solid foods,” she said, “give him baby food, delivered the same way. And get Wiggy a regular vet.” Unlike lawyers, cosmetic surgeons, and book publishers, the world’s best ferret doctors were not found in Manhattan. The City was full of dog psychologists and cat surgeons but, thanks to the law, lacking ferret specialists. My vet back in Oregon advised finding a vet in Jersey or Westchester to hold him over until Abby moved to North Carolina for grad school and I moved to wherever I was going.

  We hugged the vet and thanked the staff and took a cab to the train station. It was too cold to walk and expose our little patient to the winter air. The IVs had pumped him full of his youthful vigor. In the cab, he scratched at the carrier with the strength once reserved for my ugly couch. He pawed at my hand when I stuck it inside, nibbling on my thumb and beckoning me into a game of cat-and-mouse that made Abby and I laugh. “Let me see that Fuzzle,” she said, taking him out. “Oh, Wiggy,” she said, “you’re back,” and showered him with kisses.

  Easter turned out to be the last day he possessed that level of strength. When the vet’s fluids metabolized, Wiggy’s energy waned. For the final two months of his life, he ate an exclusive diet of baby food—a gloppy, pungent stew of pureed poultry—and Prednisolone. I fed him by hand, every day, with a spoon. His fur lost its shine, and his spunk came in spurts as erratic as warmth in New York in April. No matter how gently I held the granules to his mouth, hard food never interested him again. He gummed and let them fall. The clutter in the house no longer mattered. Cover the whole bedroom with clothes, I figured, why squander what time we have left. But in the cab, as the fluids surged, that morning’s horrors felt behind us, and nothing bad lay ahead.

  Abby bought our tickets at the train station, and I found an empty bench to wait. Wiggy sat in his carrier on my lap, and a little girl and her mother stopped in front of us. Still holding her mother’s hand, the girl leaned over, straining to see what oddity lurked behind the carrier’s dark mesh. “Want to say hi?” I said. She nodded, and her mother told her, “Go up and see,” giving me a grin that implied, “She’s shy.”

  “He’s a ferret,” I said and scooped him from his fleece. I cradled Wiggy in my arms, showing he was friendly. Like a dozing king, he sprawled there and lifted his lazy head just enough to sniff and survey the scene. “He won’t bite,” I said. “I promise.” She released her mother’s hand and sauntered over. I ran my fingers across Wiggy’s back, and held him out so she could try. She paused a moment, then stroked his back and giggled. I asked if he looked funny, and she nodded. Smiling, she looked back at her mom, and when she finally ran back over, I lifted Wiggy’s shaven hand and made him wave. The mother mouthed back, “Thank you.”

  On the train to Bronxville, Wiggy was calm, so calm that he didn’t need the carrier. Once we got a seat, I took him out and set on my lap. “What’s out there?” I said, holding him up to the window. He stared at passing houses, passing trees, occupying a vinyl seat like any
other commuter. Forested creeks threaded the neighborhoods, the maple boughs slowly leafing out, working to grow as thick as they were the summer we arrived. Squirrels darted beside the tracks, resuming life after winter. “Who’s that?” I said. Wiggy’s wet nose left little streaks on the glass. It tapped my chin, registering damp and cold, while to my right, Abby looked at us and smiled.

  Soon she held out her hands, and when I’d deposited Wiggy in them, she cradled him in her seat, stroking him as she had this entire year, being so sweet to him, to me, to us, despite us all.

  MY MANHATTAN MINUTE

  I found out I didn’t get Meredith’s old job as a publicity assistant at Katz & Strayhorn Publicity the day of the company Christmas party. Meredith called it “keeping it in the family.” I called it insulting.

  That publicity assistant job was supposed to be my ticket in, the first paid step on the golden road to a publishing career. But I was still just another intern. And after the Christmas party, an ex-intern.

  The previous fall, at age thirty-one, I’d followed my girlfriend Abby to New York so that she could finish school and I could further my fledgling career. I’d worked six years at Powell’s Books—intelligent retail and customer service work, but retail all the same. My real aim was to write. So before her school year resumed in affluent Westchester, I boxed my deeply rooted life, stored my enormous library in Abby’s Mom’s basement in Portland along with half my clothes and all my records and CDs, and I moved to New York. I’d never been there before, but it seemed the right place for a writer to be.

  Who knows how these mythic notions colonize your head. I suppose a youth among books suggests a career in books. But leaving quiet, arty, affordable Portland and casting myself from the repetitive retail bottom of the publishing food chain to work the production end, I held what I considered informed, but what were in fact vague, notions of that future career: work at a publishing house, a magazine, or an inspired combination where I worked in editorial and also wrote freelance. Meaning, I wanted to work in some sort of creative, editorial, literary capacity.