Fleur
EVEN THOUGH IT barely took ten minutes, the drive home from Caltech after Bob dropped me off felt interminable. I still couldn’t believe I’d slept with Bob Ballantine! But my mortification paled in comparison with my continued state of shock that Assefa had discarded me like some used plastic bag.
Thanks to Bob, I now knew where those bags ended up—in toxic swirls like the 270,000 square miles worth of horror called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located midway between Hawaii and California. And in the stomachs of marine birds and animals. The image was so voidishly nauseating that when I arrived back at the Fiskes’, for one brief second I thought that the smell assaulting my nostrils was my imagination.
“Hello? Is anybody home?” No Stanley. No Gwennie. No Jillily—bad girl, she was undoubtedly hiding. The previous year, on my way to giving a talk on the Higgs Boson at Paris Descartes University, I’d passed an ancient urinal on Boulevard Arago whose stench was unbelievable. This was worse. Who knew that female cats could spray at all? It had happened the first time back in November, when we babysat Sammie’s Midge here at the house for a week while Sammie and Aadita flew to Delhi for Aadita’s mother’s funeral.
The name Midget was the ultimate misnomer. These past years, the butter-colored creature had put on even more weight, and as soon as we brought him home with us, he put paid to our delusion that he and Jillily would get along by actually lumbering over to sit on top of her. Jillily had barely managed to ooze out from under Midge’s rump like a slow-moving black turd.
Since then, I’d been trying to explain to Jillily that lifting her tail to let loose a great arc of foul-smelling liquid was no longer necessary to persuade us to evict the uncouth intruder from the house. But alas, spraying turned out to be an attraction that, once discovered, had an atavistic life of its own.
The thing was: the stench was so pervasive that we had no idea where it was actually coming from. Closing the front door, I flung my backpack onto Stanley’s favorite leather chair and—not for the first time—dropped to my knees, sniffing my way from the book-cluttered living room to the book-cluttered den to each of the three book-cluttered bedrooms. The good news was that Jillily didn’t seem to have sprayed the books. The bad news was that I (a) banged my head as I came up from a knot of old Christmas ribbon and a ratty catnip ball under my bedside table, (b) managed to snag my favorite jeans on a nail protruding from the hardwood floor in Stanley’s bedroom, (c) and still could not find the source of the smell.
It was only after I’d showered, changed into a fresh pair of pants, and opened the freezer to get some ice for my head that Jillily deigned to make an appearance, winding her way in and out of my legs and making enough eye contact to guilt me into a little snack of Ritz Crackers and cheese. And if you think that’s an odd treat for a cat, consider Midge’s favorite snack in his vegan home—curried cauliflower and broccoli—not to mention the Fiskes’ long-departed Moggy’s preference for Gwennie’s spinach omelets.
It was when Jillily was cleaning off every lick of cheddar with gourmandish gusto that I heard the key in the lock.
Gwennie called out, “Halloooo?”
I found her in the living room, reaching a plump arm toward the bent shoulders of an odd incarnation of Stanley, one with a frantically winking eye and what looked like a giant white shower cap clamped against his jaw.
When he saw me, Stanley tried to smile, his face looking more froggish than ever. “Hawawa ma soro,” he garbled.
Gwennie laughed, and then inclined her head toward him in apology. “Poor dear,” she explained. “Emergency root canal went south. The tooth turned out to be rotten through and through. They had to pull it right away.” Gwennie’s face was a mask of worry. “I think it took the stuffing out of him.” She led him to his favorite chair and helped him into it. Stanley stunned the both of us, I think, by commencing to cry.
“Ish the damned painkillers,” Stanley managed to get out between sobs. “They futz with the brainsh executive function.”
Fighting hard against the impulse to flap, I forced out a panicky, “What can I do?” I knew what I could do: spare them seeing me fall into a full-out fit of pinching and banging. I adored Stanley H. Fiske and could not bear seeing him in such pain.
“There’s a love,” Gwennie said, laying her battered black purse and a sheaf of papers onto the sofa. “Fetch us some fresh ice, will you? I’ll get Stanley into bed and we can prop the ice pack against his face and see if he can sleep. It’ll be the best thing. The endodontist said that, by tomorrow, he’ll be right as rain.”
I didn’t know what rain had to do with it, but I rushed off to the kitchen, happy to fend off the void by doing something useful. It was only then that it occurred to me that I hadn’t managed to ice my own aching head, but given how Stanley looked, I’d merely been a tourist in the ice-needing department.
Stanley conked out as soon as Gwennie tucked him in, his face propped against the ice pack and his body curved into a long cocoon. As luck would have it, the phone rang as soon as Gwennie and I were settled into our favorite perches in the den, feet overlapping from opposite ends of the sofa and Jillily stretched luxuriously across my belly and chest.
“Oh, shit,” hissed Gwennie. “And he just got to sleep.”
I leapt from the couch, displacing an indignant Jillily, who was forced to vault with me. Snatching up the phone, I heard Mother’s voice, a little breathless. “You’ll be happy to know he’s on his way back.” I froze. Mother began to giggle, sounding a little unsteady. “The thing is, I had to get off the phone with Abeba before she could tell me when he’ll arrive.”
I quickly tiptoed down the hall to the kitchen and pulled the door closed. “Why in the world did you get off the phone?” My heart was thudding a mile a minute.
“Well, the thing is ....” Why was Mother dawdling? “How could I have known? I hate call waiting. It was one of those annoying political calls. I suppose I could have called Abeba back, but I thought that letting you know was the first priority? It’s wonderful, isn’t it—you two lovebirds reunited.”
I was speechless. Looking down, I saw that Jillily had spied the ball of Christmas ribbon. Her ears lay flat against her head, and her mouth had that puffy expression that signified she was in touch with her inner murderer. She pounced on the ribbon and, with a low growl, held it in her front paws while her back legs scrabbled fiercely against it.
I lay the phone down on the kitchen table next to a nearly dead vaseful of the unnaturally early-blooming Austins and left the room, barely aware that Mother was still speaking.
As I stumbled up the hall, Stanley poked a head out of his bedroom. His remaining hair stood straight up from his scalp like Bob’s had after sex.
There was nothing for it. I backed up against the wall, slid down, and began banging my head until Gwennie rushed over and shouted at me to stop. She pulled me up and hugged me as Mack-truckishly as Nana would in the old days, and, just as it had then, it did the trick.
Stanley insisted on joining Gwen and me at the kitchen table. Over a cup of chamomile tea, I ended up spilling the beans about everything—Assefa, Bob, Mother’s call. I had to hand it to Stanley. He took the news about me sleeping with his newest assistant without batting an eye. Of course, the fact that he was grimacing in horrible pain and had an ice pack covering half his face might have masked his true feelings. Then again, he’d been the one who’d handled the job of taking me back to New York to inform my anti-abortionist father that I was pregnant at thirteen. Forget Bob Ballantine; Hector Hernandez had managed to seduce me with two words, “Beautiful dove.”
I wasn’t feeling so doveish right now. More like clumsy and crowy. But thirteen again, for sure.
It didn’t help that Gwennie was managing to be a bit clumsy herself. “Sweetheart,” she said, sliding a hand across the table to take mine, “You know, not everything is solved by ... getting physical.”
Stanley flung his ice pack onto the table and jumped out of his chair, stretching his froggish figure to full height. “Gwennie Fiske. You sound like a god damned old maid. Give the girl a break. She needed to know she’s still desirable.”
I stared at him and only shut my mouth when I realized my jaw was hanging open. Stanley was right. That was exactly what had happened. I felt both mortified and relieved and more than a little guilty that I’d used Bob Ballantine to salve my silly vanity. But then I remembered how triumphant Bob had looked after we’d slept together and wondered who’d used whom.
Of course, by now Gwennie was filled with remorse and had to make more amends than a roomful of Bill W’s.
Feeling a post-banging headache coming on, I fled to my room, averting my eyes from the wall mirror while stripping naked, and slid gratefully under the covers. Well, actually, what I slid under was Nana’s old cave-scented robe that I’d rescued when Sister Flatulencia was cleaning out her belongings after the accident. Jillily rewarded my efforts not to pinch by spooning tightly next to me, motoring like a house afire. As if I were channeling Nana, I gave her a thousand little chicken peck kisses all over her sleek black head. To which Jillily responded with enough rough-tongued face washings to rival the best facialist in L.A.
At last I could have my nice, long cry. But the tears refused to come. So Assefa was coming back. For what? To what—a lover who’d layered sex over the shock of rejection like a cat sweeping litter on its poop? What finally loosened the floodgates wasn’t the shame of having had intercourse with someone I didn’t love, nor the confusing loss of the one I did, let alone his imminent return. When the void sucks you in, every bit of the world’s misery dives in with you. Old hurts and current dreads swirl amidst stories of child abuse, oil spills, women across the globe being treated as chattel. Ultimately, my tears released themselves over the lonely end of the pelican on the beach—the grotesquery of its plastic-entwined entrails being treated with the averted eyes of all but a few Bob Ballantines of this world and a flurrying business of flies.
I fell asleep praying there was a parallel universe, one where humans were kind and rational and uncomplicated and life was actually fair.
