Dr. Timberland lived in Manatee Haven, the largest mobile home park in the area. From the college, you could get there in fifteen minutes by foot as they advertised, but you’d have to sweat. He did as he stamped down his feet one after the other in his buckled shoes along the sidewalks, brief-case swinging high, its weight pulling him along an extra few inches every other step; only an occasional lizard hindered his otherwise regular footfalls and made him release a pent-up sigh; his suit betrayed his gauntness, flapping in the breeze as if it weren’t on a body but hanging on its own on a clothes-line.
Manatee Haven was flat as a board, tidy, green, with white mobile homes; each one had their storybook tree, a driveway with their number written on it, 1481, 1482, 1483, a square of grass, a fake grass doormat with a plastic daisy, a peep-hole. It looked like something you would have played with for hours when you were a child.
Dr. Timberland had a black and white cat named Chess who waited behind the kitchen window for Dr. Timberland to come home without moving, like a ceramic ornament. When Dr. Timberland called him, he forced his head and front paws out of the window, and pulled the rest of himself out with difficulty; the window was open just enough so he could manage doing so without skinning his back. Dr. Timberland picked the cat up by the hind legs and walked him around like a wheelbarrow. They did this every night, and every night when the cat got tired of it, he attacked one of Dr. Timberland’s gaunt ankles. It was just a game, after which Dr. Timberland read the newspaper and the cat cuddled up on the discarded pages and was covered with the leisure section.
Before dusk, Dr. Timberland turned on a jet sprinkler to water his square of grass, and sometimes in the manoeuvre to keep the jet perfectly within the boundaries, wet himself. In the evening, he went to check his mail in the clubhouse and dispose of his garbage. Otherwise he stayed at home and, from what I could see, did nothing in particular besides mark papers and watch television. I know all this because I’d been following him around for over a week.
Actually, there were a few things I found unusual, going through his garbage. He went through quantities of chicken broth cubes, maybe ten cubes per day. This tortured my imagination. Everyday I found a gardenia browning at the petals. And almost daily I found an empty bottle of medication for a Miss Paulina Craft, sleeping pills, diverse painkillers. Her name wasn’t on his mailbox, neither was “Mr. and Mrs. Timberland”. Could “Miss Paulina Craft” be the maiden name of his wife? Was he the one taking her pills? Or was he just throwing the bottles out one by one? Because she’d left him? Was he a widower? I didn’t understand. Besides that, he was a normal bachelor.
It was late afternoon. The sun cast a yellow light over the mobile home park. Dr. Timberland was lowering a tin awning, noisy as thunder, over a window that was never lit. I hadn’t even begun to approach him, when an insurmountable fear, the kind that slithers up behind you at the onset of dusk, attacked me in broad daylight. My heart beat fast and hard, as if I were about to die.
I’d been brewing him too long in my mind, twisting and turning him, sampling him until he’d taken on unrealistic proportions: the finest, rarest bit, the only portion that could bring me my every happiness. I didn’t know yet how self-defeating a one-track hunger could be. Craving for strawberries, one forgets raspberries and blackberries.
I sat down behind someone’s tool-shed. A lizard eyed me suspiciously from it. I waited until Dr. Timberland cut a gardenia and sunk his nose into it.
“Dr. Timberland?”
If he looked up with a pleasant enough smile, exposing his infantile teeth, his face fell unsympathetically as soon as he recognized me; maybe he had been expecting someone else, Miss Paulina Craft to come home; maybe it had to do with the dress I was wearing; it was too short. I had told myself I was overdoing it when I’d bought it from the second-hand store, but I thought he’d like it because it was made out of a synthetic stuff, the fur of an animal that didn’t really exist. I had blackened the contours of my eyes, grown my fingernails to twice their original length, covered them with three coats of red varnish, shaved the hairs off my legs for the first time, just for him. I was so nervous, I held myself as if I were cold, which was unlikely in my attire; I felt my face sweating; the pressure of my arms against my sides made my breasts swell out of the furry V-neck, but even this didn’t appetize him; he glanced down at them with distaste. I was losing all my self-confidence. I could hardly speak. I should never have trusted my voice, it had all the nervousness of premeditation trying to sound spontaneous.
“I’m in your class. Do you remember?”
I knew he knew very well, but he wasn’t saying a word, just staring at me in disbelief.
“May I have a minute with you?”
“My minutes, and hours are posted on my office door.”
“Yes, of course, why don’t I see you then?”
He picked up his garden shears and walked away.
“You don’t happen to know where the clubhouse is, do you??”
He pointed without looking back once, a nonchalant flick of his shears. Even if I did live there, he didn’t care! My face reddened, burnt. The ignominy! Curtailed hunger, unrequited appetite! I ran home, back to my own company, and cried until my make-up left a ghostly portrait of myself on my pillow. Then I ate everything sweet I could find, four cans of peaches, and a box of white sugar, cube by cube. When I was done, I was hungrier than ever.