The music—The Pointer Sisters singing “I’m So Excited”—is way too loud. Some of the women are covering their ears. Hot Rod doesn’t care. He struts around mouthing the words. He has disastrous teeth, crooked and bucked, and there’s a gap on the upper left side where at least two are missing. Every time he reaches the end of the runway he flicks his tongue in and out and flutters his black cape to offer a glimpse of his long, pale penis. Emma is beginning to wonder if this is all he’s going to do when he raises his arms and starts pumping his hips. His penis flaps around like a noodle. Women scream.
Not Emma. And not Marion, who can’t seem to see past his acne. “It’s all over his bum!” she shouts in Emma’s ear when Hot Rod turns to face the wall.
“Watch out,” Emma says. Hot Rod has suddenly leapt off the stage and is dancing in their direction. But it’s the woman sitting on Emma’s other side that he targets. Two inches from the woman’s face he resumes pumping.
“The ones on his neck look like shingles,” Marion says to Emma. She leans across the table to get a better look. “I guess you get what you pay for,” she says, referring to no cover charge.
“That’s debatable,” Emma says. She is referring to what Hot Rod has just said to the woman. She tells Marion: “He said, ‘For ten bucks, I’ll stick it in your drink.’ “
Marion slaps a hand over her wine glass.
That was also the other woman’s reaction. The woman is about Emma’s age, thirty. She keeps shaking her head until, as if out of revenge, or conceit, Hot Rod wraps it in his cape. The woman’s shriek is muffled. Hot Rod opens his arms, triumphant, then commences a frenzied, complicated flourishing of his cape as he backs up the three stairs and onto the stage. Under the fixed spotlight he turns away from the audience, lifts his arms and begins pumping his hips again. Faster, faster.
The music stops. Not the way it’s supposed to but as if the needle jumped off the record. Hot Rod freezes, legs bent, groin thrust forward. A good thirty seconds go by and then the spotlight dims. Hot Rod still doesn’t move. Women begin giggling and exchanging looks of uncertain hilarity, and Marion elbows Emma, but Emma is thinking that from the back and in this light, he’s not bad … great shoulders, nice tight ass, long thighs …
The spotlight and the house lights come back on, and Hal, who owns the bar, yells, “Let’s hear it! Hot Rod Reynolds, ladies!” Hot Rod leaps back around to reveal the semi-erection he managed while frozen, just a flash of it, then he hangs the cape over one arm like a toreador and strides offstage.
“Show him you love him, ladies!”
Generous applause, a few whistles. Even the woman who had her head wrapped applauds. (People in this town are so polite! When Emma and her husband, Gerry, moved out here from the city they had to learn that a stranger waving at you as you drove by wasn’t waving you down.) What’s going on now is more than good manners, though, as Emma realizes. It’s that the women want to clap, they want to have fun tonight, “Ladies Night,” Hal has called it, substituting the Bear Pit’s usual topless waitresses for what he says are Miami Beach boys. He says it now, trying to milk the applause. “All the way from Miami Beach, Florida!”
Marion crouches over her drink and says in her thrilled way that Craig, her new boyfriend, is going to kill her. She has a lovely, kind face and a grandmotherly manner that gives the pet store she manages a homey, animal-shelter atmosphere. What initially attracted Emma to her were her breathless accounts of horrific pet deaths. A border collie puppy goes missing when the hay is being cut and baled; months later, the farmer is breaking open one of the bales and out tumbles the dog’s rotting, mangled head. A budgie is flying around the kitchen and lands on the hot wood stove, where, instantly, its feet melt like wax and its twig legs ignite and burn down to ash.
“I mean,” Marion says now, “I thought there’d be, you know, whatchamacallit, jock straps.” She extracts an embroidered handkerchief from her sleeve and blows her nose. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
“I didn’t know,” Emma says. “The only other time I’ve seen guys doing this they wore G-strings.”
That was seven years ago. On the same night Emma also saw female table dancers for the first and only time. She suspected that she was pregnant but hadn’t had the test yet and hadn’t told anyone, so she was still drinking, sharing a carafe of wine with Gerry on the patio of a downtown restaurant, right across the street from a new bar with a neon “25 Girls 25” sign. Gerry had heard about the bar from some guys in his office, and he said she wouldn’t be able to take it, but she said she was going over whether he did or not.
It was like underwater in there, a murky pond. Dark, smoky. Quiet, since it was between stage acts. All around the room, like seaweed in the current, slender, naked women stood on little round tables and slowly writhed for men who sat right underneath them and looked up. The men hardly spoke or even moved except to reach for their drinks or their cigarettes.
As if nobody could see her (and nobody seemed to), Emma twisted in her chair and stared, while Gerry tried to get the attention of a waitress wearing a tight T-shirt that said “Better A Blow Job Than No Job.” Emma asked him if he wanted to hire a dancer for their table.
“Is this some kind of test?” he said. He took a quick glance around. “You’re the only woman in here who’s not a dancer or a waitress,” he said.
“I don’t care.”
He smiled at her and shook his head. She squeezed his leg. She was getting excited, not by the women’s bodies (they aroused in her nothing but a resolve to lose weight), and not by what some of the women might be feeling. It was the men who were turning her on, what they were feeling. “Feasting their eyes,” she thought, although they didn’t seem to be getting any pleasure out of it. They were almost grim, in fact. It was as if they had finally got down to the true, blunt business of their lives. “Are there male table dancers?” she asked.
“Not that I know of,” Gerry said. “Just strippers.”
“I wonder if there are any of those clubs around here.”
“Why?”
“Let’s go to one.”
He laughed.
“Why not?” She pushed the palm of her hand against his crotch. “Hey,” she said, smiling. He was hard.
He smiled back but picked up her hand and returned it to her lap. “What’d you expect?” he said.
“Sweetie,” she crooned, nuzzling his shoulder. He was still lean and ambitious then, in his stockbroker pinstripe suits. He still had an expectant look in his eyes. She is nostalgic for his eyes. She told her mother recently, and her mother said, “There was something lifeless about them, though. When he used to blink, I swear I could hear his lids click.”
What Gerry would have said about his eyes was, “I was in paradise.” Any mention of his old self and he’ll claim to have been in a state of ecstasy then, before the accident. “The accident” is how he always refers to it, which strikes an odd note with Emma. The accident. She has noticed that he uses the definite article in a couple of other questionable places, for instance in reference to their marriage. “The marriage,” he says. Also, “the weight,” “when I lose the weight,” as if she and obesity were two more bolts out of the blue.
When the waitress finally came over, Emma found out from her that there was a male strip club just two blocks away. The waitress took their orders but then disappeared for so long that Gerry said, “Let’s get out of here,” although a statuesque black dancer in horn-rimmed glasses was ascending the stairs to the stage.
Emma held back. “Oh, come on,” she said. “This should be good.”
“I can’t watch with you right beside me,” Gerry said, pushing his chair back.
“Why not? It doesn’t bother me.”
“But I wouldn’t even come here by myself,” Gerry said. He sounded unhappy.
So they left, but she steered him down the street to the male strip club. “You know, watching isn’t fucking,” she told him as they were going inside. “Dancing isn’t fucking either.”
“Right,” he said. “And fantasizing isn’t fucking. Foreplay certainly isn’t fucking.” He sounded as if he couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.
The place was packed. Mostly women, but there were a few men. Emma and Gerry sat with four flashy black women at a table near the exit. The women were all using identical silvery cigarette holders, which they gripped in their teeth to free up their hands for clapping to the music—the theme song from “Quick Draw McGraw,” Emma realized after a minute. On the stage, two men wearing cowboy hats, chaps, spurred boots and leather-fringed G-strings twirled lassoes and rode phantom bucking broncos and slapped their own asses.
“Gay,” Gerry said in Emma’s ear. He looked gratified.
Emma shrugged—maybe. That wasn’t it, though. The fact that the dancers seemed gay wasn’t why there was nothing erotic going on here. She folded her arms, disappointed. She tried to lose herself in the dancers’ bodies, but their outfits distracted her. She could feel her whole self folding in, retreating from the light and noise, the idiotic music, the laughing.
The next act was a stripping admiral whose big finale was turning away from the audience, removing his G-string, then turning back around with his white glove waving on the end of his erection. Gerry laughed and applauded.
“Can we go now?” Emma said.
In the car they had an argument about whether the women in the club had been turned on. “They were sure acting like it,” Gerry said. Emma said they were having a good time, but it was parody, it was women acting the way they thought men did.
“I’m a woman, I know how women feel,” she said, and he granted her that, although she suddenly realized it wasn’t true. She had no idea how other women felt. It occurred to her that she could be missing entire traits—irony and caution.
After leaving the Bear Pit, Emma and Marion go back to Marion’s apartment above the pet store, and Marion admits that those are the only human penises she’s ever seen other than Craig’s and her ex-husband’s. She says they make her appreciate Craig’s. “So what if it’s not all that big?” she says. “Who wants a Hot Rod or a Submarine—”
“There was no Submarine,” Emma says.
“Well, what was the red-haired guy called?”
“Torpedo.”
“Oh yeah, Torpedo.” Marion pours coffee into china cups with saucers. “I mean, who wants a torpedo in their vagina, anyway?”
“Not me,” Emma lies.
Later, driving home, Emma thinks of Gerry’s perfect penis and can’t help wishing that he still had his perfect body, more for his sake than for hers, though, because the truth is she’d still be fooling around on him. Gerry suspects, but he thinks it’s Len Forsythe, and he thinks it’s over. He has no idea that it’s still Len, and six months ago it was Len’s twin brother, Hen, and last week it was a gorgeous nitwit who wore a hard hat (not in bed, but everything else came off first) because he believed that jet stream thinned your hair. Gerry wouldn’t believe so many guys if she showed him pictures, and what’s the point in him believing it? she asks herself. How would that much truth make a man like Gerry happier, or better equipped to sell debentures?
In the three-person branch office where Gerry works, he collects less than two hundred a week in commissions. Emma means to cheer him up when she says, “It’s not as if you’re knocking yourself out,” but he blames the fact that all his clients, inherited from a guy who retired, are dropping like flies. He usually finds out at breakfast, reading the “Deaths” column in the Colville Herald. “Suddenly,” he reads out loud, “in his eighty-fifth year …”
Luckily, Emma’s cat-grooming business has taken off, here where she figured she’d be doing all right if she broke even after the first year. Emma grew up in a place like this. She knows that pampering small-town cats means letting them sleep inside. What she didn’t count on were all the lonely old women, some of them wives of Gerry’s dead clients, who would gladly have spent a lot more money than she charges just to have somebody to talk to for forty-five minutes.
Because of her white coat and her stainless-steel grooming instruments, they take her for a medical person. They assume she will be interested in hearing the ghastly and humiliating details of their husband’s last illness or of their own illnesses, and as it turns out she is interested, and her deep interest brings most of them back a week later with home-made cookies and bottles of jam and pickles and, incidentally, the cat.
Of course, there are also people who really do come for the sake of their animals. With them, Emma ends up doing most of the talking. They hover. To distract them from delicate procedures (cutting matted fur, cleaning out ears), she asks did they know that cats prefer Italian opera to country-and-western? That according to market research the more cats you own the more likely you are to wish that Sonny and Cher would get back together? She has acquired enough cat trivia to go on for the whole forty-five minutes, if it ever came down to that. Also cat stories—the Burmese that lived twenty-six months without water, the cat that was nursed by a spaniel and barked like one, the two-headed cat, and then all those cats that roamed thousands of miles to find their owners. If the client seems up to it, she tries out a couple of Marion’s pet-death stories. “Did you hear about the tom that sprayed the high-voltage transformer?” is her best cat one … is the one Karl Jagger says made him want to unbutton her white coat and caress her breasts with the tail of his Balinese.
The initial attraction, Emma’s father always maintained, were the tendons in her mother’s neck, but he said that what swept him off his feet was the reptilian flesh between her fingers. When her mother was older he sighed over the splendour of her wiry, grey hair. He pushed together the skin on her thigh to see it pucker. “God, it’s beautiful,” he said, “like a peeled litchi nut.” Her mother, who by then had learned not only to swallow the comeback but to fall right in with his strange raptures, regarded her leg as if it were a new and noteworthy landscape.
As a teenager Emma was in a continual state of mortification over these routines, especially if they took place in front of people. When her father started in on her mother or herself, that was bad enough, but he might go for anyone. He said to Emma’s piano teacher, a cranky, vain woman devoted to her compact mirror, “Don’t ever have that gold-crested wart removed.”
“It’s not a wart,” Emma’s piano teacher retorted. “It’s a beauty mark.”
“The gold-crested wart is the glory of the spadefoot toad,” her father said.
Emma’s friends assumed he was an artist of some sort—he had a goatee and longish hair, and all over the house there were naked figurines and gigantic abstract paintings and never fewer than six cats wearing brilliantly coloured collars from which dangled huge hand-made Algerian cat bells—but in fact he sold life insurance from an office in the basement. Over his desk was a photograph of Wallace Stevens, who had also been in the insurance business.
“My job,” he told his clients, “is to convince you to part with money that you’ll never see again as long as you live.” On the chair where the client was supposed to sit there was usually a cat. Cats slept in the old-fashioned wooden file trays. If the client hated cats, Emma’s father pretended to feel the same way. “Mind your own business!” he’d yell at a cat off in a corner washing itself. “Just keep us out of it!” he’d yell. “Okay?”
People either figured he was kidding (usually when he wasn’t), or they were disarmed by the look of starry-eyed, unflappable love he planted on everybody. Or they bought wholesale whatever he said. They believed, for instance, that if every square inch of your skin was splotched with huge freckles you resembled the sun-dappled forest floor at dawn.
Emma considered herself immune to his doting rhapsodies. She might have thought she was a big deal when she was a kid, but she knew by the time she started high school that looking like a fruit bat wasn’t something you bragged about. She was short and had a sharp nose and chin. Otherwise, she wasn’t bad. She did have huge dark eyes and she remained proud of them. It wasn’t until she left home and fell in love with a creep named Paul Butt that she discovered how much flattery she had actually bought.
For her size she had unusually long fingers and toes—like a tarsier, her father raved, and since “tarsier” sounded so exotic she went through her adolescence believing that everyone envied and adored her hands and feet. Then Paul Butt told her that Elvis Presley would never have dated a girl with scrawny hands like hers. He also said that her lips were too thin and that she should have electrolysis done on her arm hair.
She was so crazy about him that she underwent one agonizing electrolysis session, but even then, even at her most insecure, she never really saw herself through his eyes. Arm hair to him was still, secretly, “down” to her. When he dropped her for the electrolysis technician, she blamed her father for making her unjustifiably vain.
Eleven years later all she can think to blame her father for is marrying someone so unlike himself, because she is convinced that a person’s character is nothing more nor less than the battlefield where the personality of the mother and the personality of the father slug it out. When she told Karl Jagger this, at the beginning of their affair when they were indulging each other’s confessions, he said that his parents were exactly alike, and he speculated that the complete absence of contention creates a personality vacuum in which the animal nature of the baby takes over.
“Wild?” she said.
“Black.”
“Dark,” she said, because he isn’t black. Once, she asked him why he had never killed anybody, and he said, “Shackled by compassion.”
Why she asked was that he makes a lot of money writing pulp fiction about ex-marines and decent police officers getting even with crack-dealing paedophiles and mutilators. In every one of the twenty-three books he’s published, there are at least ten grisly murders, over two hundred and thirty in total, and he claims that no two murders are the same and that every one is described in authentic, meticulous detail. If some guy’s brains are all over the sidewalk, he says, and it’s winter in New York, those brains better be steaming.
It occurs to Emma that Karl and Marion might be made for each other, so when Marion and Craig break up just around the time that sex with Karl starts to get predictable, she tries to arrange a blind date. Karl is game, but Marion takes offence at being told she has something in common with a man who invents stories about humans slaughtering each other. She doesn’t invent her pet-death stories, she says, and it’s not as if she goes out of her way to collect them either. It’s that being in the pet-store business and also the sister of a veterinarian she hears things other people wouldn’t.
“I don’t find them entertaining,” she says.
“Well, no,” Emma agrees.
Marion picks dog fur off her sweater, one of five pet-motif sweaters she knit to wear in the store. Emma regrets that Karl will probably never see Marion in this sweater with its psychotic-looking parrots all over it.
“I guess I’m just one of those people who are haunted by the gory details,” Marion says.
“Yes, I know,” Emma says soothingly. “I am, too.” And she sees that there really is this difference between Karl and Marion, and between Karl and herself. Karl can laugh at what haunts him. She and Marion don’t laugh.
There is something Emma can’t stop thinking about.
Nicky was eleven months old. She was about to poke her finger in the new kitten’s eye when Emma grabbed her hand and slapped it, something she’d never done before, and Nicky, after looking at Emma with more astonishment than Emma would have thought a baby was capable of summoning, slapped her own hand. Afterwards, almost every time she crawled near one of the cats, she would bring her finger close to its face, then pull her hand away and slap herself.
Sometimes this memory strikes Emma as a message from Nicky, Nicky telling her that the way to cope with the biggest shock of your life is to replay it until it becomes commonplace. Which is what Emma supposes she is doing, indirectly, whenever she reads supermarket tabloids or pumps Karl and Marion for the worst possible story, for the story that will reduce her own story to the status of contender.
She was still mourning Paul Butt, still sobbing in the washroom at the investment house where she worked as a typist, still toying with the idea of going to another clinic for more electrolysis, when Gerry came over to her desk wearing red track shorts and a shirt and tie, his suit pants draped over his arm.
“Emma,” he said, reading the name plate on her desk. He’d only been at the firm a week, and this was the first time he’d spoken to her.
“Gerry,” she said.
“Listen,” he said, “I was wondering if you had a needle and thread. I’ve split a seam.”
“Sure,” she said sarcastically, opening her desk drawer, “I’ve got an ironing board, pots and pans, diapers …”
He looked as if she’d slapped him. “I’m only asking because I saw you mending something a few days ago,” he said. “Your skirt—”
His eyes, she saw for the first time, were different colours—the left one blue, the right one gold. They were as round as coins and red-rimmed, almost as if he had on red eyeliner.
“Okay,” she said. “Sorry.” She caught him doing a fast skim of her body, and it came to her, like an illicit jackpot, that it wouldn’t take much to win his life-long adoration. She found her matchbook needle-and-thread kit and held out her hand for the pants. “I’ll do it,” she said.
“No, that’s okay,” he said, shaking the hair out of his eyes. His hair was white-blond and very fine. Whenever he was on the phone he ran his fingers through it. Emma had watched him doing this. Her desk was to the left and slightly behind his, in the big room where all the brokers and typists sat, and she had watched him, not as prospective boyfriend material (she thought she was too heartbroken for that) but because he moved so enthusiastically, banging out phone numbers, racing his buys and sells to the order desk, and because he combed his fingers through his hair as though there was nothing like the feel of it.
“I’ll probably do a better job than you,” she said, coming to her feet. Then, before he could say anything else, she pulled the pants off his arm and headed for one of the empty boardrooms. “Won’t take a minute,” she called over her shoulder.
In the boardroom she lay the pants on the table. They were navy with red pinstripes. She was impressed by the creases in the legs. You could cut a tomato with that, she thought, running a finger along one of them. Her finger was not steady. What was the matter with her? she wondered. Why had she brought the pants in here? She could have sewn them at her desk. She held up her hand and tried to see if she could keep it from trembling. She couldn’t. She investigated her forearm, the bald patch from the electrolysis treatment. Was that stubble? “Jesus Christ,” she muttered, and she was afraid she was going to start crying about Paul Butt, but she didn’t.
She picked the pants up. There was the hole, a big one, alongside and under the zipper. She stuck her hand through. She brought the pants to her nose and sniffed the crotch. Urine, very faint. Urine and the smell of steamed wool. With her eyes closed she took a deep, resuscitative breath.
When she opened her eyes, Gerry was standing in the doorway.
“Oh, God,” she said.
“I wanted to ask—” He stopped and shook his head and smiled at the floor.
She dropped the pants on the table. She gave a little laugh. In the other room brokers were picking up their phones on the first ring. She imagined sniffing the pants again and saying, “I smell trouble.” She imagined sticking her entire arm through the hole and saying, “Wow!” She imagined throwing a chair out the window and it landing on a bus in which Paul Butt and the electrolysis technician were riding.
“I wanted—” Gerry began again.
“To ask me out,” she said. She had nothing to lose.
After Paul Butt, who had figured that two fingers shoved up her vagina ought to do it and who said that only closet dykes wanted to be on top, sex with Gerry was instantly addictive. During the first six months they made love at least once a night, and then they moved in together and got married and made love most mornings, too. Then things dwindled off a bit when he started leaving the apartment earlier and returning later because of the bull market. It became a joke between them that he was the one who complained about having a headache or being too tired.
She was now working at home, grooming cats out of their second bedroom. She’d quit her job at the brokerage firm because management frowned on married couples in the same department. Her mother had wanted her to go back to university, but her father had said she should take up something serene and uncompetitive.
“Such as hawking life insurance?” her mother had asked in her customary dead-pan.
“Such as brushing her hair!” her father had declared, and eventually that led to the idea of grooming cats, starting with his.
Cat groomer. Emma liked the novel ring of it. She bought a how-to book, a white coat and some combs and brushes and scissors. She stapled advertisements to telephone poles and in laundromats, vets’ offices and pet stores. Her first client, after her father, was an incredibly tall black man with a three-year-old daughter and an old Persian named White Thing, and at first Emma thought this was some kind of joke because the mats all over White Thing’s fur looked exactly like the swarm of little pigtails all over the daughter’s head.
A year later the black man and the cat returned. By then White Thing was matted again, and the daughter was living in New Jersey with her mother. By then Emma had had a positive pregnancy test, and Gerry had said that it made him feel weird during sex, as if they were going at it in front of their own child.
While she cut out the mats, the man, whose name was Ed, lounged on her couch, telling her how he hated his job as a policeman and was thinking of doing something to get himself suspended with pay. “Folding myself into the car is the worst part,” he said. “Those seats don’t go back far enough.”
“So how tall are you?” she asked.
“Six eight.”
She glanced at him. His limbs overhung the couch in graceful array. His eyes were bloodshot and characterful. They made her nervous and yet at the same time she felt distant from him, she didn’t feel a thing. It reminded her of being X-rayed, not in the sense of him seeing through her but in the sense that a powerful and potentially dangerous procedure was being conducted on her body, and she didn’t feel a thing.
When she was about halfway through he came over to watch her work. He smelled like an extinguished fire. The top buttons of his shirt were undone. “You’re just fine, baby,” he said in a soft, low voice that rumbled through Emma like drums, and he might have been talking to White Thing, and he might have been talking to her. Either way, it would have taken a strait-jacket for her not to put down her scissors and slide her hand into his shirt.
He gave her a big smile.
She undid the rest of his buttons, moved her hand down to his stomach, over his buckle and against his crotch. He covered her hand with his and pressed and let go again, as if to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.
She unzipped his fly.
“Feast your eyes”—he didn’t come out and say it, but when his penis slapped into her hand like a relay-race baton, he was thinking it so loud she heard.
He visited her two or three times a week, but after a month, whenever they had intercourse, she imagined that his penis was thudding against her womb and denting her baby’s skull, and she decided to call it quits.
By then she was way past guilt. Love had so little to do with what went on between her and Ed that it was hard for her to think in terms of betrayal. Her regret was that she couldn’t amaze Gerry with the fact that Ed’s penis changed colour, from mahogany when he was flaccid to dark purple when he was hard. She couldn’t tell Gerry that whereas his testicles were smooth, Ed’s had the texture of brain coral.
She wondered what her father would have compared Ed to—a crane fly, a racer snake. Gerry, her father said, was a glaucous gull because of his white-blond hair and the red rings around his eyes. Her father was crazy about Gerry’s different-coloured eyes. Emma was crazy about his flawless, white skin. In the mornings sometimes, when he was half asleep, she ran her hand over his body and rubbed herself against his leg until she came. She did this with Ed, too, except that Ed was black and moving.
After she and Ed had parted company she figured that that was it for other men, at least until the baby was a few years old, but in her fourth month, two more prospects turned up. The first was the previous tenant of their apartment, whose junk mail, featuring free brochures for Craftmatic beds, had been cramming their mailbox and who knocked on their door one day asking if they had found five one-hundred-dollar bills in the medicine cabinet. They hadn’t but she said they had and had given them to the Salvation Army.
“Fair enough,” he said, moving her to tell him the truth and to invite him in for coffee.
He was a motor-home salesman, just transferred back to town. About thirty years old, jock’s body, receding hairline, small blue eyes glued to her legs, small hands, which she was too inexperienced to know didn’t necessarily indicate a small penis, the only kind she was prepared, at this point in her pregnancy, to risk. As she was expecting a client in half an hour, nothing happened, but before he left he managed to throw in that pregnant women were a turn-on, and he gave her his card in case she wanted to have a drink sometime.
Two days later, after four nights in a row of Gerry working late and then coming home and falling asleep in front of the tv, she was on the verge of phoning him when a red-haired guy arrived at her door carrying a cat he’d run over in the apartmentbuilding parking lot. Somebody had told him she was a vet.
“It’s dead,” she pointed out. Its mouth was clogged with blood, and its eyes were open and blank.
The guy, who appeared to be in his late teens—black leather pants, leather jacket, motorcycle helmet dangling from his arm—held the cat up and said, “Oh. Right. Fuck.”
“Come on in,” she said. He looked like he was going to be sick. She took the cat and put it in a plastic Shoppers Drug Mart bag, and he sat on the living-room couch with his head in his hands, saying he knew the cat, its name was Fred, it belonged to that cross-eyed teacher in 104.
“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” Emma said, but she figured it probably was, and she was suddenly so enraged that she had to leave the room. She washed her hands in the kitchen sink, then put the bag beside the front door.
“It was alive when I picked it up,” he said. “It was alive, you know? It was alive right up until it died.”
She sat in the chair facing him. His hands were small enough. On his fingers were silver rings and blood. His red curly hair was combed back and wet. He must have just had a shower. He was lean, the black leather slicked the long muscles of his thighs. “I’ll tell her if you want,” she offered.
He looked up, surprised. She expected him to say, “No, that’s okay,” but he said, “Would you? Hey, that’d be great. Thanks a lot.”
So she went down to apartment 104, just in case the woman was home early from school. The bag weighed down, extraordinarily heavy. If the woman cried, she knew that she would, too, but nobody answered the door. When she came back into the apartment, the guy was checking out his reflection in the tv screen. She left the cat in the hallway and sat down across from him again.
“You’re married,” he said. “Right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, I won’t come on to you,” he said seriously.
“Don’t let that stop you,” she said.
He lived two floors below her, on unemployment insurance. He came up whenever she phoned. They’d been sleeping together about a month when he said he loved her.
“You love yourself,” she said.
He didn’t argue with that. “I mean I really love you,” he said.
“What you love is me making love to you,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “That’s right,” he said, as if he could rest his case.
“I’ve been thinking of stopping this anyway,” she said. “I’m too pregnant. I can’t bend over to pick up all the little red hairs you shed.”
Nicky is fifteen months old. Ed, the black giant, shows up one day without White Thing. He’s in uniform. When Emma pushes his hand off her ass, he laughs and says, “I guess you’ve got a baby crawling all over you, you don’t need a man.”
“As I remember, it was me crawling all over you,” Emma says.
He offers to take her and Nicky out for lunch, a restaurant that features a roving clown blowing bubbles and dispensing prizes for clean plates. Emma has no clients until four, so she says sure, why not? “Aren’t you on duty?” she asks.
“My partner’s tied up and I’ve got some time to kill,” he says, and she suspects that what he came here to do, his partner is doing somewhere nearby. Maybe not, though. Maybe his partner is conducting a drug bust or something. Or maybe this is just Ed trying to get himself suspended with pay. She doesn’t ask. Since Nicky came along, anything dicey or unsavoury she’d rather not hear about. She is glad that she will be able to tell Gerry the whole truth—a former client dropped by and invited her and Nicky out for a bite to eat.
“We’re going in a police car,” she tells Nicky.
“Please car,” Nicky says demurely.
Emma changes into a clean white blouse and a long white peasant skirt. She and Nicky sit in the back because Nicky’s car seat is in Gerry’s car. Nicky stands on Emma’s lap and slaps the window. She is wearing a white crocheted sun bonnet, and at stoplights people notice her and look worried. “Funny if Daddy saw us,” Emma says.
Ed is talking to his police radio, but he laughs and says over his shoulder, “It would teach him not to jump to conclusions.”
At the restaurant the people ahead of them make way for Ed to pass through. “Hey,” he says, staying at the back of the line. “I don’t take bribes.” There are bubbles rising from behind a high rattan screen, and Ed lifts Nicky onto his shoulders so that she can see the clown on the other side. When it’s their turn to be shown to their seats, Nicky doesn’t want to get down. “It’s okay,” Ed says. He follows the hostess. He is so tall that Emma can’t reach Nicky’s bonnet, which is slowly slipping off her head.
“What?” Ed says, half turning at the feel of Emma’s hand on his shoulder.
“It doesn’t matter,” Emma says.
Ed suddenly yells something and stumbles.
Nicky flies from his shoulders.
Emma is splashed in the face. Half-blinded she turns. Nicky is on the floor, next to the wall.
“Get away!” she screams, punching at Ed. He falls on his knees and lifts Nicky’s head, which is drooped too far sideways. His black hands lift Nicky’s head. Now Emma sees the gash at the side of Nicky’s neck. Blood pours out. Bright red baby blood. Emma presses her hand over the gash, the blood streams through her fingers. “Stop this!” she screams. Nicky’s eyes flutter.
“We have to stanch it,” Ed says. His voice is low and sensible. Emma tears at her own skirt. Her baby’s head is falling off, but it’s a matter of stanching the blood. She gives Ed her skirt and he quickly rips it and binds Nicky’s neck. Nicky’s legs jerk. Ed says it was the ceiling fan. Emma glances up—a silver blade, still spinning.
When Nicky was born, Emma’s father stood at the window of the hospital nursery and loudly compared his caesarean-section granddaughter to the brown, trammelled-looking birth-canal babies. Nicky was a plum among prunes, he said. Nicky was a Christmas doll among hernias.
“We are all hernias, more or less,” Emma’s mother said in her sardonic way, which had a mollifying effect on the annoyed-looking relatives of the other babies.
Once Emma and Nicky were back at home, he often dropped by in the afternoons, sometimes with Emma’s mother, usually not. If Emma had a cat to groom, he minded Nicky. He made tea for Emma’s clients and sold them life insurance. One day he answered the door and it was the red-haired guy.
“Is that maniac your husband?” the guy asked Emma.
“I thought you’d moved,” she said quietly. Her father had gone back to playing with Nicky.
“I was in the neighbourhood,” he said. “So,” he said, “I guess you’re not up for any action.”
She smiled. “No.”
“Some other time,” he said.
She started shutting the door. “I don’t think so,” she said.
It wasn’t guilt, it wasn’t tiredness, it wasn’t worry that her father was listening. It was no interest. Since Nicky’s birth she’d had zero sex drive. Which was natural, so her baby book said. Natural and temporary. “It’ll come back,” she told Gerry.
“Sure it will,” Gerry said enthusiastically, although he didn’t seem very disappointed that it was gone. Like Emma, he was all wrapped up in Nicky. They lay her on a blanket on the floor and knelt over her and kissed and nibbled at her like two dogs feeding from the same bowl.
Nicky preferred the floor to her crib. If they put her on the floor and patted her bottom, she stopped crying. Emma’s father had discovered this. He was constantly trying things out on her to test her reactions and to nurture her perceptions. He carried her around the apartment and touched her hand to the walls and curtains and windows. He opened jars for her to smell. He warbled songs in what he claimed was Ojibwa, holding her foot to his throat so that she might pick up the vibration. One of the songs was apparently about how the toes of a baby’s feet are like pebbles. After Nicky died, Emma couldn’t stop thinking of her toes like pebbles. She raved that she wanted Nicky’s foot, she should have kept her foot and stuffed it, and then she would at least have her foot.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of something along those lines,” her father said. “A couple of months ago I read about a taxidermist in Yugoslavia who preserved his deceased son and claimed it was a great comfort.”
He was stretched out beside her on her bed. Emma spent all day in bed, and her father and mother arrived at noon with lunch and Audubon field guides and photography magazines that had torn-out pages (where there were pictures of babies, Emma suspected) and editions of the American Journal of Proctology, which her father subscribed to for its dazzling full-colour photos of the colon, photos that if you didn’t know what you were looking at you’d think were of outer space.
Her mother straightened the apartment and returned calls on the answering machine. Her father turned the pages. Emma didn’t know how he knew that looking at pictures was the only comfort, but it was. After her parents left, she slept until Gerry came home from work. In front of the television he wolfed down most of a family-sized bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. She lay on the couch and ate some of the french fries.
One night, during a commercial, he said, “I was thinking today about when you walked off the end of the dock.”
When she was ten or eleven years old, before she could swim, she walked off the end of a dock because she was attracted by the shimmering water. She sat at the bottom of the lake and waited to be saved. It was a story her father enjoyed telling.
She looked at Gerry. “Oh, yeah?”
“I was just thinking about it.”
He told her he didn’t blame her. He didn’t blame Ed, although she did.
A woman in Argentina puts her fifteen-month-old son on the potty and leaves the room. A toilet falls through the floor of a passing airplane, crashes through the roof of the house and lands on the child, killing him. “Tot Terminated by Toilet,” the headline says.
“Are you through with this?” Emma asks, holding up the paper.
Marion doesn’t look. She is picking up live mice by their tails and tossing them from their cage into a box for a customer who owns a python. He’ll be in soon, the python wrapped around his shoulders. “Is that the one with the Siamese twins on the cover?” she asks.
Emma closes the paper. “Yep.”
“Well, I was thinking of writing to one fella in there,” Marion says. “Sounds up my alley, except that he wants long legs.”
Ever since she stopped seeing Craig, Marion has been buying the tabloids for the personal ads. She confessed to Emma that last month she got up the nerve to write to a guy who described himself as a college-educated homebody and an animal lover. He wrote her back, on Ohio State Prison stationery, saying that he’d received forty letters and he’d need two pictures of her in the nude, a front shot and a back shot, so that he could narrow the field.
“But go ahead,” she says to Emma. “Take it if you want. There’s an article about crib death. About how classical music prevents it.” She glances at Emma. “Hogwash, though, I’m sure.”
“I played classical music for Nicky,” Emma says, tearing off the page with the toilet article. She folds the page and puts it in her purse. “My father made a tape.”
“Well, there you go,” Marion says compassionately. She believes that Nicky died of infant death syndrome. When Emma and Gerry moved out here, they agreed that that would be the story.
“Mozart, Haydn, Brahms,” Emma says. “All soft stuff.”
Marion closes the cage and carries the box to the counter, where Emma is sitting on one of the stools. It’s a wooden box with thin gaps between the slats. A mouse must be hanging on the side. A pair of feet, four toes each foot, emerge from one of the gaps and grip the outside of the box. Emma runs her finger along the claws, which are milky and curled like miniature cat claws. “I wonder if they know,” she says.
“Oh, Lord,” Marion says, grimacing. The two of them have had the conversation, several times, about the obscenity of the food chain. They agree on these things. They agree that dogs laugh but cats don’t. Fish feel the hook. They agree that there’s an argument to be made for lizards—the ones with break-away tails that grow back—as representing the highest order of life.
It’s Hot Rod Reynolds, the male stripper, on the phone. “Jay Reynolds” is the name he gives, but when he says he got her number from Hal, the manager of the Bear Pit, it rings a bell and Emma says, “Not Hot Rod,” and he says that’s right.
“You’re kidding.” She laughs. She’s remembering his acne and the woman shrieking to be wrapped in his cape.
“So you caught my act,” he says.
“Are you calling from Miami?” she kids.
“So, what d’you think?”
“About what?”
“My act?”
She takes a breath. “Why are you calling?” she asks. She suddenly has the sick feeling that Hal, a man she hardly knows, knows she sleeps around and has recommended her for a good time. She zeroes in on the guy who wears the hard hat as the guy who talked.
But Hot Rod says, “I’ve got a dog here looks half dead.” He says he’s been staying at the motel behind the Bear Pit, checking out the trout fishing, and there’s this stray mutt he’s been feeding and letting sleep in his room. He phoned the vet, but nobody was there. Hal said that she was a sort of vet.
“What’s the matter with it?” she asks.
“It’s foaming at the mouth. Panting like crazy. Hal thinks it’s heat stroke.”
She agrees. She tells him to put the dog in the bathtub and to run cold water over it. Half an hour later he phones back to say that the dog seems a lot better and to ask if he owes her anything. “Forget it,” she says. But the next day he turns up at her house with a fish that he has gutted and wrapped in newspaper.
“If you don’t want it, your animals might,” he says.
She is struck by his awful teeth. “Thanks,” she says.
“Emma Trevor, cat groomer,” he says, reading the calligraphic door sign that her father made for her. He looks off to one side as if for no other reason than to present her with his profile. His hair is slicked back. His nose is upturned. His skin is almost clear—from being out in the sun, she figures. He is wearing tight blue jeans and an orange tank top and holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. His teeth and unreasonable vanity she finds touching. As she expects a client any minute, she doesn’t invite him in. “Come back in an hour,” she says.
These days she takes precautions. Condoms. A warning that if Gerry finds out he’ll blow the guy’s balls off. “With this,” she says, showing the gun. The gun was Gerry’s father’s, it isn’t loaded, and Gerry wants to get rid of it, but Emma keeps it beside the bed, to scare off intruders, Gerry believes, and he’s half right. If Emma feels guilt over other men it’s when she tells this lie about Gerry, who is so gentle he not only won’t kill the ants in their kitchen, he dots the counter with honey to feed them.
But the warning works. She can see that the guys are scared, although never scared off. Hot Rod asks if he can hold it, and when she hands it to him he dances around the room, gripping it in both hands, arms straight, and getting hard so fast she suggests he use a gun in his act.
He frowns, considering. “Too obvious,” he says.
He’s a noisy lover. He groans and makes weird yelping noises and thumps the wall with his fist. Which is why they don’t hear the car pull into the drive or the front door opening. Gerry is right in the bedroom before they realize he’s home.
“Jesus Christ,” Hot Rod says.
Gerry bows his head. “Sorry,” he murmurs and leaves the room.
Hot Rod lunges for the gun, rolls out of bed, throws open the window and tosses the gun into the neighbour’s yard.
She accompanies Hot Rod to the door because she wants to retrieve the gun. TheTV is on. As they pass through the kitchen she looks into the living room and sees the back of Gerry’s head and his hand reaching toward a bowl on the end table.
“Will he come after me?” Hot Rod asks when they are outside. His tank top is on inside-out. His hair is shooting off in all directions. He looks goofy and very young, and she knows that anything she says he will believe.
“Probably not,” she says. “Not if you keep your mouth shut.”
“If I were you, though, I’d get out of town.” She says it to deliver her line, to sound like the sheriff. She doesn’t care if he leaves or not. Out here in the driveway, with the asphalt scalding her feet and the gun glinting in Mrs. Gaitskill’s rose bush, the possibilities of what might happen next seem endless and out of her hands.
“I was thinking of leaving tomorrow anyway,” Hot Rod says.
She climbs over the split-rail fence and plucks the gun from the bush. If Mrs. Gaitskill has seen her, she has no idea what she’ll say. She puts the gun on top of the fridge, out of sight, and then goes into the living room and sits on the couch. Gerry scoops a handful of potato chips from the bowl.
“God speaks to us in silence,” the man on theTV says. He strikes her as a man who would either love you or beat you to death. Gerry seems arrested by this man. The notion that she has shocked Gerry into sudden religious fanaticism is preferable to what she is certain he’s thinking.
“I’m sorry you walked in on that,” she says.
Gerry switches off theTV and slowly turns his head. She sees his blue eye and then his gold eye and the redness around them that would appear to be from crying but isn’t. She imagines Hot Rod taking credit for the pain and incredulity that have been in Gerry’s eyes for five years, and now she is glad that he is leaving town.
“I don’t know what to say to you,” Gerry says quietly. “Except—” He glances at the blankTV screen. “Except that I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t,” she murmurs.
“I know I’m a fat slob,” he says.
“God, Gerry—”
“It’s just that I’d prefer it if you did it somewhere else.”
She looks down at her hands, and there is Hot Rod’s semen, dried and flaky on her palm.
“I’m not blaming you,” he says.
She can feel the pressure building behind her eyes.
“Listen,” Gerry says. “Whatever it takes.”
That’s it. That’s what she knew he was thinking. She begins to cry. “This is not consolation!” she wants to shout. She has it in her to show him the semen on her hand and shout, “This is recovery! Do you want the truth? This is who I am!”
But she loves him. That is also the truth.
She cries without a sound. Presently she stands up and says, “I’ll start supper.”
“Okay,” Gerry says. He turns theTV back on.
She sways a little. It’s a sweltering day, she is burning up. If a budgie lands on a hot stove, its feet melt. There are a million truths. She understands that she has no idea which ones matter.
She is light-headed because she is pregnant. But she doesn’t know that yet.
If you enjoyed “Lizards” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.
E-book: 9781443402484
Print: 9780006475231