American Appetites (3 page)

“Oh, as to that,” Ian said, laughing again, though without much mirth, “we all mean well.”

They were walking in the direction of Sigrid's car, at least Ian assumed it was her car, a foreign model, low-slung, sporty, lipstick-red but badly flecked with rust, its front bumper battered. It had the look of a car, Ian thought, not registered in its driver's name.

“I hope we will see each other again, before long, in Hazelton or elsewhere,” Ian said; and Sigrid said lightly, “Yes, I hope so too.” He opened her car door for her, then belatedly asked her for her address and telephone number, which he scribbled on a slip of paper, though this was information surely in Glynnis's possession already. After she'd driven away he stood for a while in the parking lot staring at the mallards, snowy white geese, black swans, as they paddled on the pond in ceaseless circles, now slow and languorous, as if on display, now wild and frenzied, fighting one another for feed. If any thought came to him, he would not afterward remember what it was.

HE HAD SOME
difficulty finding 119 Tice, which was in an area of Poughkeepsie unknown to him, of run-down apartment buildings, row houses, taverns, railroad yards, rubble-strewn vacant lots—a neighborhood that, though largely black and Hispanic, reminded him of his boyhood neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. And when he found 119 Tice he discovered that Sigrid Hunt lived not in the house on the street but in an apartment above a garage at the rear.

A small yellowed card with
SIGRID HUNT
in childlike block letters had been tacked beside the door; beneath it, a wicker basket stuffed with advertising flyers. The door itself had been painted a bright robin's-egg blue, now covered in patches of grime and cobwebs. Ian peered inside its window but could see nothing except a narrow flight of stairs leading up into shadow.

He knocked loudly, but no one answered; knocked again, and called, “Sigrid? It's me, it's Ian.” He peered up at the second-floor windows, whose blinds were drawn; no one responded. His heart knocked hard in his chest; he dreaded some sort of terrible revelation: a sudden scream, a smashed window, a man's footsteps rushing toward him down the stairs.

But no one appeared. Nor was any car parked in the drive.

“Hello? Sigrid? It's—”

He had the uneasy sensation that he was being watched, very likely from the house at the front, which, like other private residences on the street, wood-frame, shingled, shabby, had the look of a place in which welfare recipients and old-age pensioners lived. He felt exposed, a fool. An incongruous figure in his camel's-hair coat, black Astrakhan hat, green scarf: items of clothing bought for him by Glynnis. “Sigrid? Are you home? Come open the door,” he called, cupping his hands to his mouth. He was quite alarmed by this time, envisioning Sigrid Hunt lying dead upstairs: partly clothed or frankly naked, strangled, stabbed, raped, murdered, her golden-red hair fanned out about her, as in one of those lurid photographs in detective magazines he'd examined surreptitiously as a junior high school boy. . . .

How sad, Ian thought, that a woman of Sigrid Hunt's beauty and pretensions should live in a place like this: above a garage of rotted shingles, peeling paint, broken and carelessly boarded-up windows, opaque with the grime of years. Trash had been strewn about the yard; broken concrete and glass were everywhere underfoot. Untrimmed trees and overgrown bushes, lightly touched with snow, were given a startling and rather inappropriate beauty, as in a Japanese watercolor of skeletal trees and snowy-white blossoms.

Ian tried the door again, could not think what to do—summon the caretaker, if there was one? Call Sigrid Hunt's number from a pay telephone? Call the police?—when, finally, a figure appeared on the stairs, descending slowly and cautiously, like a sleepwalker: leaning against the wall and gripping the railing with both hands. It was Sigrid Hunt, drunk or drugged or seriously ill, her face pale and drawn, her hair in a tangled braid behind her back. She wore an ill-fitting white robe that opened carelessly about her bare legs; her feet too were bare, despite the cold; though by now she must have recognized Ian, she did not open the door at once but rubbed the gritty window with the palm of her hand and peered out at him. Without her glasses her eyes looked raw and reddened.

Ian rattled the doorknob impatiently. “Don't you know who I am? It's Ian McCullough; you called me,” he said. “Unlock the door.”

Sigrid Hunt stared at him, seemed at last to know who he was, began to work the police lock, which took some time. When at last she managed to get the door open and Ian stepped inside, she flinched back from him and muttered, “Damned lock, works so damned hard,” and turned away with no further greeting or word of explanation. She began to climb back up the stairs, again gripping the railing with both hands. “Watch the stairs,” she said, “they're rotted; it's that kind of place. You can see, can't you, it's that kind of
place
?” Her voice rose on the last word as if on the edge of laughter.

Ian followed her upstairs, staring at the young woman's bare legs and chafed, reddened heels, the badly creased and soiled skirt of the robe hanging loose about her hips. She offered no explanation, no apology: simply led him upstairs to her flat. The stairway was poorly lit and unheated and smelled of dirt; it reminded him, and the memory came swift and unbidden, though not entirely unpleasantly, of the shabby boardinghouse in which he'd lived as a graduate student in Ann Arbor, a long time ago. “Here we are,” Sigrid Hunt said, out of breath from the climb. “Here it
is
.”

The apartment, or flat, was quite large, stretching the full length of the building, a single room with a low blistered ceiling, windows whose shades—cracked, crooked—were drawn, bare floorboards upon which brightly colored woven carpets were scattered. Ian had an impression of mismatched furniture, including, most conspicuously, several sling chairs in a synthetic coyote hide and a six-foot swinging mirror with a heavy carved frame: a mirror that had the look, Ian thought, of a mirror that is much consulted.

“Come in.
Inside
. I must lock the door,” Sigrid said impatiently.

Small buzzing radio voices emerged from beside the sofa bed, over which, with evident haste, a soiled crimson silk comforter had been drawn. There were smells of cooking, and of unwashed clothes, talcum powder, perspiration. An eerie undersea atmosphere pervaded: the blinds drawn against the daylight, and only a single lamp burning, with a soiled flesh-colored shade.

Ian asked what was wrong, what could he do for her, and Sigrid, who looked both ill and nervously elated, as if on the verge of mania, began to speak in a rapid near-incoherent mutter, smiling and grimacing as if to herself. “I need to talk to someone,” she said, “who doesn't know me and doesn't judge me.” She pointed at a chair and said, “Sit down,
please;
you make me nervous standing.” Ian wondered if he would have recognized her: her face was thinner than he recalled, her eyes bruised, her skin unnervingly pale. There was a pouty blood-heavy slackness to her lower lip, and the lovely ridged-rippled hair, in a coarse braid that hung down limply between her shoulder blades, had not been washed in some time. The terry-cloth robe, a man's robe, fell open to reveal, as if defiantly, her small shadowy breasts and prominent collarbone. “At least take off your coat,” Sigrid said breathlessly, when Ian remained standing. “Your . . .” And her voice trailed off as if she'd forgotten the word for hat.

Ian took off his coat, his hat, and his scarf, and laid them neatly over the back of a chair. His mind was working swiftly but to no evident purpose. He said quietly, “What's wrong, Sigrid? Have you taken some sort of drug?”

And Sigrid said at once, in a low angry begging voice, “Don't judge me, don't
look
at me, I can't bear it.” She was pacing about the room, too nerved up to remain in one place.

Ian said, following after her, “What is it, Sigrid? You can tell me, Sigrid; you know who I am, don't you?”

“I don't know who anybody is,” Sigrid whispered. “You're all lying fucking hypocrite sons of bitches.”

SHE WAS LYING
, limp, across the sofa bed and looked as if she were about to fall asleep. Her face glistened with sweat, and her breathing was hoarse and arrhythmic. Ian, standing over her, uncertain what to do—call an ambulance? try to revive her himself?—saw in the corner of his eye a ghostly spectator: his own reflection, fair-skinned, fair-haired, attentive, rapt, alarmed, in the slanted swinging mirror. Why are you here, why you, and why here? The buzzing radio voices continued, like a demented chorus.

Sigrid lay unmoving, breathing shallowly; Ian could feel the heat lifting from her. “I want to die,” she said softly. “I don't want this.”

“What do you mean?” Ian asked. “What is ‘this'?”

“I'm paralyzed; he's got me,” she said. “I can't go forward or back.”

“Who is ‘he,' your lover?”

“Won't let me have an abortion, says he'll kill me if—”

“You're pregnant?”

“—if I kill
it
. Six weeks, only, and already it's beginning to—”

“Is that it? You're pregnant? Is that why you're so upset?”

“—exert its own
will
. Sucking the life from
me
.”

She began, with no warning, to beat her fists against her belly. Ian caught her wrists, forced her to lie still. With surprising strength she twisted free, clawing and kicking, and, on her feet now, ducked away behind him. Ian saw to his astonishment that the back of his hand was badly scratched; tiny blood beads appeared between his knuckles.

He said, “You'd better calm down, you're making yourself hysterical.”

“Go away and leave me. What difference does it make.”

“If you are pregnant, it's a relatively simple—”

“
I can't go forward or back
.” She pressed her hands over her ears, bent nearly double, and would not hear. Ian went to touch her, and she shrank away. “No. No. No. No. No.” She stumbled into one of the coyote-hide chairs and, in a sudden rage, kicked it and sent it flying against a wall. Ian watched in helpless fascination, as he'd once watched his two- or three-year-old daughter in the paroxysm of a temper tantrum, as Sigrid Hunt, dazed and lethargic only a moment before, began to curse, slam, pummel, kick, throwing things about, overturning furniture, tearing at her own hair. Ian thought, I will have to get help. I can't do this alone.

He was sweating inside his clothes. An old terror of sudden and unanticipated intimacy rose in him, a memory of other such situations when, thrown together with another person, whether a man or a woman, in one or two cases children, he had been taken off guard: had simply not known what to do. Glynnis would have known: would take the girl's hands in hers and embrace her, speak soothingly to her, brush the damp strands of hair off of her forehead. It's all right dear don't be frightened dear I'll help you dear there are people who will help you please don't be upset. But Ian dared not touch her.

He said, looking for a telephone, “I'm going to call an ambulance; you're hysterical, you're going to hurt yourself.”

Sigrid cut her eyes at him and said, panting, “Leave me alone, just please leave me
alone
.”

“Don't be silly, I can't leave you alone,” Ian said. He advanced upon her and said, “I don't want to leave you alone.”

Like Glynnis, though not so easily as Glynnis, Ian took the girl's hands in his—both her hands, in his—and urged her to sit down. Suddenly obedient, she sat: began to sob, pressing her forehead, which was damp but surprisingly cool, against the backs of his hands. He thought, She is Bianca's age; she is Glynnis's young friend. So long as he could think of Sigrid Hunt in those terms, in that specific equation, he believed he would be all right. His alarm, his excitement, even his acute sexual arousal, could be contained.

As Sigrid wept Ian told her, in a low, calm, unemphatic voice, as one might speak to a sick child, or an animal, that he could help her; he wanted to help her, if she would cooperate. He was not going to leave her, in any case. Not in the condition she was in. “What kind of drug have you been taking?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. Then, “Just something to help me sleep.”

“What is it?”

“I don't know.”

“Of course you know.”

“I want to
sleep
and I can't
sleep
, my head is filled with noises like breaking
glass
—”

“Sleeping pills? Barbiturates? How many?”

“—I want to die but I can't even
die
.”

Ian went into Sigrid's windowless cubbyhole of a bathroom, looked through the medicine cabinet, found nothing (apart from bottles of vitamins, calcium, aspirin, “stress tabs with zinc”); rummaged in a little wastebasket beneath the sink, where, holding his breath against the close, ammoniac smell, as of backed-up drains and soiled towels, he found, hidden beneath a wad of filthy Kleenex, an empty plastic pill container with a prescription label for the tranquilizer Librium.

“How many of these did you take?” Ian asked Sigrid.

And Sigrid, looking away, suddenly very tired, said, so softly he barely heard, “Not enough, I guess.”

“How many?” he persisted.

“I don't
know
,” she said. She hid her face in her hands, elbows on her knees, knees apart, in an awkward, provocative posture: the insides of her thighs exposed, a patch of pubic hair. Ian stood over her, looking down at her so that he could not see.

He said, “Then I must call an ambulance.”

“No, don't, really. It isn't necessary, really.”

“But how do you feel?”

“I don't feel as if I'm going to die.”