The Cry of the Sloth

by Sam Savage

  For the first few days, beguiled by her manner (the pleasant exterior I mentioned) and by the thought that of course I knew Jolie, I didn’t suspect a thing. Arriving home in the late afternoon, chirpy as a wren, she would kick off her shoes—“absolutely bushed” from “traipsing” all over Paris—and sit on my bed, if I was in bed, or on the floor in the hall, her back against the WC door, if that’s where I was, and talk to me about the places she had visited. How could I have guessed that she was pilfering the descriptions from the guidebook? True, when she kissed me good-bye on setting out each morning, it was on the forehead instead of on the lips as before; I noticed, but thought she was just avoiding my microbes. It was the smell that finally gave her away. My olfactory powers are normally quite muted—I have to stuff a rose up a nostril in order to smell it. Maybe the purging blandness of boiled potatoes and Vichy water had sharpened them, but the fact is it was a smell that betrayed her. Cheap Paris hotels in those days didn’t have bathtubs or even showers—I mean the sort of hotel a pair of economizing lovers might resort to for an afternoon—and Jolie, innocent that she was, had no idea what to do with a bidet. I was crawling under the sheet one morning looking for my socks when the truth was borne in upon me.

  To make a long story short—in fact it was not very long; it only felt as if it were lasting forever—we ended up in a ménage à trois with young Gustav Lepp, a teacher at a secondary school near our apartment. (This is not the funny part.) Jolie had met him in the breakfast bistro on our second day in Paris. He was one of those people you can spend an evening with and be utterly charmed, swept off your feet by their wit, their erudition, the fact that they seem extremely interested in you, only to wake up next morning with the feeling that you’ve been had. Their affair lasted for seven weeks. Even now I can recall in excruciating detail, as if it were yesterday, listening as if transfixed to the gasps and cries from the bedroom, five feet from where I sat at the kitchen table staring at my face in my coffee. It was part of the ideology of the time that this sort of behavior was normal, even desirable, and to keep myself from wailing in agony I would stuff my mouth full of bread. When they would leave off at last and emerge glistening with sweat to join me in the kitchen, I would turn away to the sink as if to draw a glass of water, and there I would let the bread dribble quietly from my mouth, forcing it down the drain with a spoon, while they sat down at the table and spread jam on theirs. That’s the reason I don’t eat white bread now, on account of the memories that rush in the instant I taste it and make it impossible to swallow, only whole wheat or rye. Somehow we got through the summer, though it was thoroughly spoiled for me. And this, I suspect, was Jolie’s aim all along, a way of pointing out that we ought to have gone to Rome, where none of this would have happened. When I wasn’t tagging after the two of them, as a tiresome third, I would tail them at a distance in order to obsessively observe every kiss and caress. As a consequence I saw next to nothing of Paris—not the Louvre, not even Notre Dame. I must have passed near both places many times, but I could not see anything, blinded as I was by the visions that filled my mind. Our money mercifully ran out in August. After we had returned to the States they tried to keep up a correspondence, but this too petered out after a few months.

  Years went by, and I was confident that I had left the worst of it behind me. Jolie and I were able to prepare beignets de courgettes together, enjoy French movies again, and even discuss them afterwards without shouting. Then one Sunday morning about five years ago Gustav Lepp turned up unannounced on our doorstep. I heard the thrill in Jolie’s voice when she answered the bell, and without lifting my head from the morning paper I knew who it was. He had not changed, except to grow more so. More witty, more charming, more tanned, more vain, and, if this is possible, more tall. I, meanwhile, was looking increasingly like a ticket-taker in the Metro, right down to the little paunch, the bad teeth, and the ill-fitting pants. He had written a book, On the Phenomenology of Lust, and apparently was famous now in some psychotic niche of the university world. He was just stopping by on the way to a lectureship in California. So of course we invited him to stay for lunch. And it was not an unpleasant meal—we were after all practically middle-aged people by then. We discussed lust, of course, or rather he discussed it, while I kept an eye on their feet under the table.

  After lunch I went to wash up as usual, since Jolie had cooked, while they took their coffee out back on the terrace. I had advised against that, since it seemed to me the air had turned chilly—it was October, after all—but they brushed me off with a laugh, Gustav Lepp shouting back something about la chaleur d’amitié. I thought I had put it all behind me, but to my surprise, to my shock really, I experienced at that instant such a rush of inexplicable rage that I was compelled to turn away to the sink, again! I plunged both hands deep in the soapy water and gripped tightly the rim of a large serving platter at the bottom. Though the water was painfully hot, I remained like that, head bowed, until the feeling had subsided and I could go about the business of tidying up. I had almost finished by the time Jolie came in, I hoped for good, though it was only to fetch the Sunday Times and blankets so they could stay on the terrace a while longer. She pressed me to join them, but I declined on the pretext that the fish tank needed cleaning.

  The tank stood next to a window that gave on to the terrace, and as I knelt beside it and began scraping algae from the glass, I was amused to observe that I could make out their wavering shapes through the water. Side by side in deckchairs on the terrace, they appeared to be drowning among the angel fish and mollies. A heap of newspaper lay between them, from which each had taken a favorite section: Jolie the Arts and Leisure, and Gustav Lepp the Week in Review. I watched them turn the pages, bringing their arms to their chests and then flinging them out, and I thought of butterflies slowly beating their wings as they drowned. I watched, fascinated, as a large black snail crawled in the direction of Gustav Lepp’s (I now noticed) slightly balding head.

  Soon afterwards I heard the animated murmur of renewed conversation. Leaving the fish—I had nearly finished, and it was anyway supposed to be Jolie’s chore—I slipped out the front door, and going around by the driveway, still wet from an afternoon shower, tiptoed up on the terrace. I held in my hand a straight pin I had picked up from the floor the day before and placed on the mantel, where I happened to catch sight of it on my way out. As I drew near the terrace, I realized I could just as well have kept my shoes on; they were absorbed in conversation—Jolie’s plans for her life now that she had decided to become a painter—and oblivious of my approach. I had been right about the cold and, en plus, my socks were now soaking wet. Dropping to all fours (I almost wrote “like a panther”), I crawled across the flagstones until I was crouching directly behind Gustav Lepp’s chair. He was telling Jolie, “It’s important, I think, that one have a public visage, a way of defining oneself apart from one’s husband and what really after all is his work. That is just common sense.” At the conclusion of the word “sense” I reached up with my pin and gently pricked the back of his neck. I had meant it to be nothing more than a mosquito bite, so you can imagine my mirth when he reached back and slapped the spot. My second prick was rather more assertive. Jolie was talking—“Yes, I know, I’ve always felt a need for expression. During my first year at college …”—when she was interrupted by a Gallic cry of pain: “Aie!” She stopped in midsentence. “Gustav Lepp, what?” At this point I was not able to stifle my laughter, which burst through my closed lips, I regret rather laden with spittle. Gustav Lepp turned and peered over the back of his chair down at me where I crouched grinning and wiping my chin with my hand. He said, rather humorlessly, “I believe this is what you call playing the card.” I later turned this phrase into something of a joke between Jolie and me. (This is the funny part.) She would come out with something she considered amusing, and I would say in my best French accent, “I believe zees is what you call playing zee card.” In context this was often extremely droll, though it seemed t
o vex Jolie. Of course I never used it if what she had said was actually amusing, and my little intervention often saved the day, provoking smiles all around, where otherwise there would have been only embarrassment and blank looks.

  Well, Harold, I have spent a long time telling you all this—my little Olivetti is fairly smoking—and now I wonder why I bothered. True, I had been thinking about pain, and in an earlier letter I talked about the way French speakers express it. The mind, I have found, is just one thing after another, especially lately, but that hardly justifies the intimacy of what I have just told you. Does it strike you as unseemly? I think I find it easy to talk to you because I don’t remember you very well. It’s like talking to the furniture, but with the added attraction that in your case the furniture understands, or at least pretends it does. Ever since you wrote I have tried to picture you. In the beginning, the chubby rubicund fellow I used to best every Saturday at ping-pong would come to mind, but of course I knew this could not be you still, so I have tried to update the image with the bits of information you have given me in your letters, and I have ended up, vaguely I’m afraid, with someone in overalls.

  Your old friend,

  Andy

  ¶

  Dahlberg,

  You will find no one home. I am going to Italy for the winter. I have something in my chest. If after beating your fists blue on the door you decide to go around and peer through the windows on the side, please take care while crossing the flowerbeds, which I am in the process of reseeding. Also, I have asked the police to keep an eye on the property, so you should try and not look suspicious.

  Arrivederci,

  Andrew

  ¶

  Adam’s knuckles were white, for he was gripping the steering wheel of the big pickup with a fury born of the knowledge that his car might even now be hanging from the hook of a battered tow truck. Or perhaps it had already been released, hitting the ground with a thud that had injured the front shock absorbers or the delicate torsion bars. Anything, he knew, was possible. They could have left it in gear during the towing and damaged the automatic transmission, damage that might not show up for years. He thought of all the precision-milled gears, the tiny valves, the fragile gaskets, intricate clutches and torque converters that must work together in a smoothly shifting automatic transmission of European manufacture, and he shuddered. Flo, sitting close beside him, laid off tugging at the shreds of her blouse and looked up. She saw the clenched jaw and the white knuckles and the reckless skill with which he handled the big truck on the narrow blacktop, and she wondered at the source of the violence which seemed to animate his every gesture. After all, she had given herself to him willingly, as she had to most men who gave her half a chance—in cars, on the gravel in the back of filling stations, in tents, barns, toilet stalls, phone booths, even once in a Ford Torino with two police officers—and yet he had insisted on ripping her clothes off, including her underpants, which were so damaged she had had to leave them in the grass in front of the shack, and the embroidered blouse with puff sleeves, which she now held closed with one hand, while with the other she caressed Adam’s right thigh even as he held his foot firmly on the accelerator. Violence, but also a quiet bitterness. She dimly sensed that whatever dark forces were driving him had their roots in a past which was still closed to her. She was wondering if perhaps he had suffered abuse at the hands of a close relative while still a child, when they came to an intersection. “Turn left here,” she shouted. Braking for the turn, he reached for the floor shift. “Excuse me,” he muttered, as he fumbled between her thighs in search of the shift lever. Finding it, he shifted smoothly into second, and then, as the big truck regained speed, he dragged the stick back down into third, before resuming his knuckled grip on the wheel, while Flo closed her thighs once again on the vibrating knob of the shifter. She looked over at the strong thick-veined hands and the rows of white knuckles on the steering wheel, and she thought of the miniature eggs the chickens had laid after they got sick, when they laid any eggs at all, which most of them couldn’t. Of course, even when they could, they laid them higgledy-piggledy wherever they happened to be when the urge hit them and never in neat rows of four like Adam’s knuckles.

  Now she was beset by a new apprehension. She twisted in her seat to look back at the John Deere riding mower on the trailer, for it was on a trailer in fact and not in the bed of the truck as before, skittering and fish-tailing behind them, and the sight of it made her shudder also. She knew that with the exception of his thirty-seven volume Almanac collection and her mother’s hairbrush, in which a few last gray hairs were still tangled in wistful reminder, the big John Deere riding mower was her father’s dearest possession. During the first terrible year after the accident visitors to the farm would usually find the once hale old farmer slumped dejectedly in an old rocker on the rotting front porch, perhaps lifting a wizened head to halloo intermittently for his daughter, who was invariably out of earshot milking in the cow shed or else in the hay with one of the many delivery men who were wont to stop by with increasing frequency as did salesmen of various useless articles and a deputy sheriff as well. Or else, getting no answer from her, he might be struggling in vain to drive his wheelchair through the deep sand in the yard, or, if it had rained the night before, he might already be sunk up to the axle there, pounding his fists on the chair arms and shouting for his daughter to fetch the pickup and snatch him out. As a consequence of being in this manner impaired and restricted, the proud old man, who had never had to ask a helping hand of anyone before, felt sorely diminished. Sometimes he would say as much to his daughter as she knelt beside him tying a rope to his chair. “I feel sorely diminished, daughter” he would say, “and if I could find the fucker that hit me I’d blow his dick off and make him eat it, and after that I’d kill him.”

  Flo was troubled by the bitterness he was lately wont to spit forth from his mouth on many occasions, and she racked her brain for some way to make his life altogether more pleasant, and one day she hit on the idea of dragging the big mower out of the barn and gassing it up. From the moment it coughed to life in a vast display of white smoke and considerable backfiring, her father’s days were not the same. There was, spiritually speaking, a new spring in his instep and, once he had got the phlegm up, a cheery ring to his voice when he hallooed for his breakfast at daybreak. After eggs and bacon or sausage, Flo would help him up on the mower. Once up, he could ride all day long, pausing only for lunch and a toilet break or to fill up with gas from the big red tank by the barn, and not dismount until the orb of the sun had turned blood-red in the west. Even blight-stricken and sorely weakened as they were, the surviving chickens had managed to eat every last blade of grass in the yard and most of the zinnias, so there was not much to mow there anymore. After a couple of weeks of spinning around in clouds of dust, the old man was sick and tired of it, so he mowed down the hollyhocks Flo’s mother had planted next to the house and most of the shrubbery as well, though the mower finally got hung up on a big lilac bush by the porch, and Flo had to drag it off with the pickup. After they had ordered a new blade from town, and one of the salesman who had stopped by had helped them fit it, he took up mowing the grass shoulders of the county road that ran in front of the farm. This was supposed to be the county workers’ job, for which they were paid handsomely, but by setting his blade lower than theirs would go he managed always to get the best of them. When they were not able to find anything high enough to make shorter, they would just stand around scratching and talking till lunchtime and then run their big mowers back up on the yellow trucks and leave. After a few months, when they saw they could count on the proud old farmer to keep things neat and trimmed, they stopped coming altogether. But the shoulders of the road, which he now mowed all the way to the outskirts of Parkersville, were not enough for the energetic old man, and he fell into the habit of turning into neighbors’ farms and mowing everything he could find there. Sometimes the people were happy to have their grass cut for free, but so
metimes they drove him off with spray from a garden hose or a rain of dirt clods.

  Flo was remembering all this when she turned suddenly to look at the mower bounding behind them on the trailer, and she forgot that she did not have buttons anymore. The ripped shirt fell open and Adam noticed once again how closely her breasts resembled Glenda’s. They could have been from the same woman, and for a moment he had the nightmarish conviction that they were. Flo noticed his sharp intake of breath as he struggled with this thought. For a moment he lost control of the vehicle. He regained it quickly, though, shooting a rooster tail of gravel across the shoulder as he powered out of the skid. The trailer hit the pavement again with a jolt that caused the mower to leap in the air, and when it landed back on the trailer it was with one wheel hanging off the side spinning. “We’re gonna lose her,” Flo shouted, but Adam paid no heed, for he was once more barreling grimly down a straight stretch, his jaw muscles working. She wondered if he was chewing on something, perhaps a blade of grass he had picked up while they were locked in wild embrace in front of the shack or maybe afterwards when she was inside looking for a safety pin. She let her gaze slide in a slow caress from his jaw to his shoulder and noticed for the first time how thick his neck was. And now she wondered once again at the audacity of her choice, as she had wondered before with other men, and boys too, her twin nephews for example, though not to the same degree.

  Just at that moment the road made a wide turn to the left and Adam swept into it with no decrease in forward speed. Flo began to slide sideways across the seat, which was covered in slippery blue plastic, for her father was not given to useless luxury in his pickups, and had declined to shell out for leather, or some soft fabric, despite the salesman’s warning that plastic would make his ass sweat like a pig on a spit. She instinctively grabbed at the gear lever around which her knee was hooked also. “Let go the damn shifter!” Adam shouted. It was the first time he had raised his voice to her since he had ordered her down on all fours back at the shack, and in her astonishment she let go the shifter. She shot across the seat and slammed up against the passenger door, where she was jabbed a sharp one in the ribs by the window crank. She let out a cry of pain. But Adam did not turn his head, and she remained slumped against the door, glowering darkly, a strand of damp hair falling across her face, until they reached the farm, for that is where they were going. Adam’s rage, however, was soon tempered by bitter remorse, and he smiled wanly at her through his teeth. He was about to beg her forgiveness when suddenly she shouted, “Here it is, turn here.” Adam jerked the big truck hard to the right into a narrow dirt drive that ran up to the farmhouse. At which point the John Deere mower became airborne again, this time in a mostly sideways direction, and flew into the large white-painted wooden sign announcing “Happy Daze Dairyfarm,” which it proceeded to splinter. Fortunately this same turn also flung Flo back across the seat where she slammed up against Adam, and where they both again felt the surge of their first contact.