Lizards: Short Story (3 page)

“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.