“Okay,” I said. “I may as well ask what you think of Sam.”
Clem laughed. “Yeah, you’ll hear it if you ask or not.”
“So.”
“Great eyes. Cute, in a retro-hippie sort of way. Talks like this is nineteen sixty-eight, everything but ‘groovy.’ It’s quaint. But please, that ponytail. Who does he think he is, Cochise? He’s cute, though, he really is. And he’s nice. You could use some nice. Though he doesn’t seem overly, uh, complicated.” She was leaning against the sink, sipping vodka. She grinned pointedly. “And I’m afraid—you asked—I think he might be too self-centered. Too sort of … larger than his smallish life. Maybe a tad too much Kenny Rogers. I can’t put a finger on it …”
“Kenny Rogers? Cochise? You’re so mean. And you are certainly spending the night here.” I reached for her glass, but she twisted away. “Actually, I don’t care what you think. I think he’s sweet. And you ought to see his paintings. They are very complicated.”
“Well, antifreeze is sweet. Dogs lick it off the road and die.” She laughed loudly. “Just kidding.”
“God you’re a bitch.”
“Hey, you’re always telling me so. Must be so.”
We both laughed, but I was faking.
Clem poured me a glass of wine. After she handed it to me, she stood staring out the window. “Poor things.”
“What things?”
“Those rabbits, those birds. Victims of haute cuisine.”
“Well then,” I said, “poor trout.”
“Not the same thing,” said Clem, pointing a finger at me. “Eating wild animals, that’s something else.”
“Look, could we please not get into some Greenpeace debate, just for tonight? Things are tense enough, no thanks to you.” About ecology, I am a dunce. I can hardly manage cocktail banter on the greenhouse effect. Clem is always telling me alarming things about the future, how immoral we all are, how it’s too late even if (and forget it) we could change our ways. Imagine Jonathan Schell and Rachel Carson as Siamese twins: that’s my sister at her worst. She’d told me, for instance, how thousands of dollars were wasted on cleaning up birds after a major oil spill off the coast of Scotland. “That relocation business? Bleeding-heart ignorance. These are birds that nest in the same place for life. They go back no matter what. They’ll wade through the same muck all over again, die anyway.” She told me this after I’d just sent money to the World Wildlife Fund. “Save the pandas? Hey, no harm in trying! And you get a free tote bag, too. How much of your money went to that? Rule number one, Lou: don’t give a cent if they promise you a tote bag.”
The trout was, as Sam declared, flawlessly awesome. I’d stuffed it with tomato, chili peppers, and cilantro from the garden. (My filet went into the freezer.) We ate on the verandah. Sam chose the music, and the first record he played was the Doobie Brothers. “We are livin’ on the fault line!” he sang softly, earnestly, as he held out my chair. Clem rolled her eyes at me.
Luke seemed less miserable, in part because he was ignoring Clem. He talked about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, aiming his narrative at Sam and me. He had tears in his eyes when he told us about everything Roebling suffered to build his masterpiece, how in the end it literally killed him.
Sam was mesmerized. “I live right there, man,” he said. “I never knew all that. It’s shameful not to know the history of where you live!” He shook his head.
Clem said very little. She ate studiously, almost eagerly, but she paid only the slimmest attention to the conversation, as if it were so dull that she preferred the diversion of nearby trees, the darkened sky, the occasional passing car.
“Come to the kitchen,” I whispered. “Help me with dessert.”
I needed mint, to garnish the granita. Clem followed me out to the garden. As I groped among the bushy plants, I heard her inhale sharply behind me, almost a sob. “I swear,” she said, but nothing else.
I stood up and turned around. “Cut this out right now. Whatever your big fat secret is, tell it to me now.”
“Now is not the time.”
I shook a handful of mint in her face. “Now is never the time, is it? Clem, no one can help you when you’re like this! Forget me. Luke hasn’t a clue what’s going on.”
“This was a mistake.” She went back to the house.
I found her in the stone room, sitting on the table. I saw, in the brief moment before she heard the door, that she was fingering the fringes of her scar, absently, as if reading braille. “So this is it,” she said quickly, shifting her weight. “The place of culinary execution.”
She looked up. I looked up. Black hooks hung on chains from the ceiling.
“Game hooks.” Clem slid off the table and pointed beneath it, to the steel drain. “For the blood, what do you think?” She opened the drawer in the table, one I’d assumed would be crammed full of mittens, twine, pruning shears. It held several large sturdy knives, well used but honed. “This guy’s a friend of yours?” She shrugged.
“Listen,” I said, slamming the drawer, “enough of your gloom! I let you come here, ruin this, this, what might have been this incredibly romantic evening, you won’t tell me what’s going on, you, you …”
I stopped because I had never seen her look like this. She watched me, almost submissive. She reminded me of the rabbits, the way they froze in the beam of the flashlight when I checked on them at night. “Sorry,” she said.
“Stop saying that. Just do something, tell me something, would you? You’re driving everyone crazy. Or me. You’re always so alone, such a goddamn martyr.”
She leaned against the table. “I’m not alone these days.”
“Yeah, well, there’s Luke to kick around now, that’s nothing new.”
“I’m not talking about Luke. I happen to be pregnant.” She stared at the coats hanging on the wall.
I stared at the coats as well, gaunt specters in the dim, windowless room. The only light came from the kitchen. I suppressed my dismay and said calmly, “I’m glad you called Luke.”
“Lou, it’s not his.” She looked as if something amusing had crossed her mind. “That’s the joke of it.”
I looked hard at her, puzzled.
“You have your fisherman,” she said, “I have mine. Though yours seems a whole lot nicer. A whole lot.”
She had to remind me about the Labrador fisherman, Spider, the man Kurt had hired to pick up her mail. After the first letter from up there, she’d never mentioned him again. “You don’t mean, all that time …” I thought of how touched I always felt by her letters—how I believed they carried the intimate weight of a journal. I’d seen myself as her confidante.
Clem finally looked at me. “Oh, I read your mind. Like: what a slut. Oh poor Luke. And I bet you thought, I bet you thought I’d try to seduce this Sam guy. It’s been going through your head all evening, what a riot.” She laughed. “Well, yeah, he’s kind of cute, like I said.” Her voice dwindled. “He really is.”
Suddenly, as if having made a decision, she lifted her short dress up to her breasts. She was facing the light, so I saw them distinctly: three bruises hugging her rib cage. She pulled the dress down. “And how about this.” She turned her head and held her hair away from one ear. The skin behind it was purple. “Hey, no black eyes!”
“Jesus, Clem. None of this is funny.”
She pulled herself up on the table again. “It turns out Spider’s very Catholic. I mean, here I go again, right? I can’t stay away from these altar boys, can I? So when I tell him, I get a stoic proposal of marriage. I make the mistake of laughing. I’m nervous, that’s all. Big mistake. But I mean, for a minute there I think about it. I really consider it. Me, him, the baby. Can’t you see me? Knitting by the sea? Vacations hunting caribou? Wow. The honeymoon at Niagara Falls.”
“You’re not actually planning to tell Luke,” I said. “That’s suicide.”
“Oh Luke. Right. The gem I’m going to lose while I hang around waiting for something finer. He
tells me he’s patient. He knows inside I really do want him, that’s what he says. He’s dead wrong. I’m just selfish. I’m just cruel.” She started stroking her leg again.
“Stop that,” I said gently. “You’re giving me goosebumps.”
She looked down. “A new and hideous habit. Sort of reassuring. Like something outside of me that’s entered and become a part of me. Like Alien. Someday it’ll burst out, have a whole life of its own.” She pulled back her hem. “Touch it. Go ahead. It’s not radioactive.”
I touched her leg, lightly. For the first time, I really looked at the scar.
It ran fearlessly down her thigh, an eroded ravine. Feeling it, I was amazed at how much flesh seemed to be missing, the place she’d lost the dead tissue. But I saw what she meant, about the comfort. It felt solid, like a steel cable running clear through her body, breaking the surface only here. “Some parts”—she poked at the scar—“I can’t feel a thing. Is it weird to like that, having places in your body with no sensation?”
“What’re you guys makin’ out here, crêpes suzette?” Sam stood in the doorway, Luke behind him. Two boys grinning. “In the dark no less.”
“I had a tour of the garden,” said Clem without missing a beat. “The moon is huge.”
Luke watched her. How well he must know all her excuses, her foils.
“You gotta see it,” she told him. “I’ll show you.”
Sam and I ate our dessert in the living room, on the sofa. He put on Bruce Springsteen and talked about how he had just missed going to Vietnam. He talked about antinuclear art: most of it politics, he said, not art at all. Art must absolutely never become confused with politics, he said. (“Would you ever see Mantegna slapping slogans on the canvas? No way in hell.”) Just like church and state: you had to keep that line distinct. He cut the air vertically with the side of a hand. He was colorful, animated, a man unburdened by gravity. Or by ambivalence of any kind. He might have inhabited one of his paintings, everything was so extreme. “Phenomenal!” he said about the chocolate granita. “A jumpin’ guy!” he said about Mars as he went through the records. “The coolest, snottiest, jive-talkinest phony I ever met,” he said of a very famous painter who’d come to a party on his roof, a painter sanctified in one of the essays I had just turned in to Hugh.
Sam talked, I watched. He was funny-looking and elegant all at once. His ears were sunburned and peeling. His hair gleamed marigold in the light cast by a saffron lampshade. His Hawaiian shirt, much too big, was ablaze with large purple flowers. It looked silky. I longed to press my face against his chest.
“Gale force, that sister of yours,” he said after side B of Bruce Springsteen came to an end. “That’s some scar she’s got. A shark bite.”
“She wears it like a medal,” I said. I described the accident.
“She’s intense. I mean, intensely intense. Like”—he laughed—“like you can see why she works with wildlife.”
“I’ve got too much of an affinity for people,” I said, ignoring a pun I’d heard too many times about my sister. “I couldn’t live focused on animals. I think it would make me too sad. All that helplessness. Though that’s the point, says Clem. The helpless need help most of all.”
“Sort of ying and yang, you guys. Cool. I like that.” Sam got up to find a new record. He spent a good five minutes poring through the collection, issuing sounds of approval or surprise. I realized, with an unexpected relief, that Sam was oblivious to my longings, all of them. To be fair, I was oblivious to his—or rather, I wanted only to use them. I wanted to be infected with the passion he had for his work. I wanted that passion for mine, for turning the lip on a bowl, for watching a perfect glaze emerge from the kiln. Inoculation against my doubts, that’s what I wished for in Sam. At the same time, I was relieved that I liked him, relieved that he was nice. He really was. I would fight the disappointment, the notion of something unrequited.
Luke and Clem, I imagined, were kissing out there among Leah’s flowers, making up despite the odds. If he told Clem what I’d said on the phone, she would kill me—though maybe she loved him more than she cared to admit. That would be my defense.
I walked onto the verandah and, sure enough, heard my sister’s voice, just a murmur. She was somewhere near but out of sight. Already I had a plan for her: She and Luke could borrow my apartment for a few days. I knew of a clinic. I knew many things and could be fairly certain of others. Over her insistence on going it alone, that this had nothing to do with him, Luke would accompany her, sit in the waiting room holding her hand. I saw them in this clinic: the plastic ivy, the magazines, the fluorescent lights droning like bees. Absently, Clem would touch her scar while she waited, Luke beside her with nothing to say. I remembered exactly, uncomfortably, how it felt to the touch: ridged and dry, leather embossed with hieroglyphics. Conspicuously gruesome, but wasn’t it also a caution?
I could be almost certain, too, and it made me both fearful and sad, that Luke would take a chance on proposing marriage yet again. And I knew how Clem would respond. Now is not the time. Now was never the time, not for things like that, not for her. Don’t ask for anything; just stay, I begged him silently, selfishly. My stake in having him around seemed to be this: I saw him as Clem’s one dependable link with sanity, with safety, as the proof that she was even a bit like me, that we could somehow remain joined. Plus ça change, however it goes: I still want to be the benevolent tyrant. I want to outshine her, I want to be the wiser, the smarter, the better loved, but I want to keep an eye on her. She is, after all, irreplaceable.
Husbandry
1986
I’m on the graveyard shift when my mother calls to tell me that ten of her prize hounds have been abducted by her kennelman and are, or so she suspects, headed clear across the country to Carmel. “Took off! Took off, the lunatic; thinks he can pull a Houdini on me! Well let me tell you, his notion of cunning is pathetic.” She rants on, sharp as she always is when provoked: she has her sources, she’s no idiot, she’ll track him down and have his hide on toast. “Years of trust, years, and what? What are the man’s true colors? A monster, just a crazed sadistic monster biding his time!”
I listen—all I’m permitted to do, which is fine by me. But here’s what I know: Titus Goodwin, who’s hung around our house for ages, fondly known to us as Tighty, hasn’t one sadistic atom in his battle-weary soul. And monstrous? No way. Crazy, though, you couldn’t rule out. He has a vindictive temper, an appetite for tragedy, and drinks like a camel refueling at an oasis. A bad mix. Otherwise, he’s your run-of-the-mill deposed aristocrat who, if scornful of the human race, has nothing but tenderness and reverence for all living creatures, down to the prickliest sea urchin. This is why I will always love Tighty, no matter what he does to the people around him.
But I have no time for his neuroses or for my mother’s fury. There’s a cat due here any minute, classic urinary blockage, and it’s my job to call in a vet. “Look, say they got off at dawn,” I say. “They can’t be any farther than, what, mid-Ohio? Indiana? Tighty’d never break fifty-five with hounds in the truck. I don’t know what you think I can do, but whatever it is, I can’t do it till they get here.” I live in Monterey, right next to Carmel. I can’t imagine how you’d hide ten restless foxhounds in a town that snug, but Tighty’s never been rational. Nor has my mother, which may help explain how they’ve gotten along all these years—parallel lines that kiss at infinity. Mom is master of the Figtree Domain Foxhunt. Tighty is her kennelman.
“Go to the police is what you can do!” she says. I look at the clock; her time, it’s two in the morning. My father will be upstairs, long asleep, head clamped under a pillow. Mom will be pacing the kitchen: talking, smoking, sipping vodka, her reflection over the sink goading her on.
“Mom, listen, I’m afraid we’ve got an emergency here.”
“Honey, we certainly do. He took Tallulah—she’s whelping in less than two weeks!” Tallulah, a sublimely marked blanket-back crossbred, symmetrical as a R
orschach blot, took Best in Show last year at Bryn Mawr and gives incomparable tongue. She’s my mother’s number one brood bitch.
Bench queen or mutt, a dog in whelp on the road is bad news, but I tell Mom I have to go. I don’t tell her I have no intention of calling the police before I talk to Tighty—that is, if he gets this far. Because where would he stay? Your average Motel 6 isn’t likely to let a pack of dogs cozy up in their massage-o-matic bed. (Nor do I tell her that Louisa will be arriving here tomorrow, having informed my machine four hours ago, in a voice jagged with tears, that she’s catching a dawn flight from New York, that she’s had it with Hugh’s inertia and thinks she might leave him.)
Headlights sweep the parking lot. A car door slams, and then I hear the unmistakable yowling of feline pain. I speed-dial the night vet and yank on clean scrubs as I hopscotch my way to the stairs, cordless in hand. I’m halfway down when he answers. “Poosepoose Simonson’s here,” I tell him. “Roto-Rooter, major league.” I hold out the phone to share the cat’s distress, echoing off the tiled floor of our waiting room. Poosepoose, a massive fur-bound coon cat, writhes in Mrs. Simonson’s arms. Mrs. Simonson begins to cry. I suggest gently that Poosepoose might prefer his carrier, and she bawls, “When this may be his last hour on earth?”
Are the planets out to spite me? Why is everyone suddenly indulging in hysterics? I put my hand on Mrs. Simonson’s shoulder and say, very softly, “It’s okay. Dr. John will be here any minute. Everything’s going to be fine, I promise.” This calms her down instantly. I don’t know why, but people trust me.
I’ve got two part-time jobs and am supposed to be finishing my thesis. Four evenings and two overnights a week, I work at the Monterey Ark. I pin down hostile Dobermans, unwrap and fill syringes, give worming instructions, clip wings, prepare anesthetics, sort true emergencies from episodes of hypochondriacal projection. Three afternoons I’m an underwater guide at the aquarium. I dive down into the kelp forest, feed the fish, and answer silly questions from the tourists who swarm beyond the glass wall.