Nude Men (26 page)

But the more I think about it, the more I feel I should use the elephant on her: It seems I would be selfish and evil not to. So I take the elephant out of its gray felt pouch and make a wish that Sara will live. When I replace the elephant in its pouch, my conscience is cleared. I did my duty.

P
erhaps Sara doesn’t wash anymore. Her face is dark, or dusty, or something. It looks as though she has a five o’clock shadow.

Amazing how much that’s what it looks like. A five o’clock shadow. I ask her to come closer to me. She acts delighted, probably thinking I am going to kiss her. I scrutinize her face, and I see that it’s hair on her face, like the beginnings of a beard. It’s very fine hair, like peach fuzz, but slightly too much to be called peach fuzz.

A very cold
thing
runs through me, as though the devil is talking to me, making me aware that he is responsible for this. I am reminded again of
The Exorcist.
I feel that something cruel is going on. I cannot stay in the same room with her anymore. I must leave. And then the five o’clock shadow will end. If I don’t see it, it won’t exist, I hope. I won’t mention it to Lady Henrietta or Sara. If they don’t notice, well, then, it doesn’t exist.

* * *

T
he next time I see Sara, she looks fine. There’s no five o’clock shadow. I am delighted. I had imagined it.

But when I get closer, I see that it’s worse than a five o’clock shadow. It is shaved.

So, Henrietta and Sara did, finally, notice the shadow and decided to shave it off, and they think I never noticed it, and they are not about to tell me about it. I didn’t think they would hide something like this from me.

I confront Henrietta when Sara is not there:

“I’m not blind. And I
am
a man. I can see that she’s shaving. Were you just not going to tell me?”

“She didn’t want you to know.”

“What’s going on?”

“The doctor said it’s an unexpected symptom, that her tumor is now touching a part of her brain that causes it to produce male hormones. But the hormones are only being activated in certain ways: in the ways that grow beards, not the ways that make voices deeper and muscles bigger. Only facial hair.”

I
have dinner with Laura at Défense d’y Voir. As we are eating, people at the neighboring tables suddenly start to clap at her. She looks at me, amused. She seems used to it.

I lean forward and whisper to her over our desserts. “Why are they clapping?”

“Because I just put sugar in my coffee.”

“Why would they clap at that?”

“Because the sugar
disappeared
into the coffee.”

“You
must
be joking.”

“Not in the least.”

* * *

S
ara asks me to let my beard grow.

S
ara asks me to go buy pet fishes with her. We go. She buys nine tropical fishes. She also buys a fish tank, which I find out later is for the sole purpose of not arousing my suspicion, which she should not have bothered with, because I don’t care if she wants to kill her fishes.

She looks like a grieving man, a man in mourning, who hasn’t shaved in a few days. She has long stubble, which is darker than the blond, fairy princess hair on her head. In the pet store she wears a scarf over her mouth, like a gangster, like someone with the flu, to hide the sight. As we leave the store, she turns around, faces the customers, and lowers her scarf, smiling, her small red Ups peeking through the dark hairs. I look at the people, panic-stricken. Many of them are staring at Sara, some squinting to see better, others looking plainly devastated.

She does the killing by size, starting with the smallest fish. The neon tetra goes in boiling water, the guppy goes in the freezer (“because he’s so pretty that I want to preserve him”), the painted glass fish is vacuumed off the carpet. (Before moving on to the next execution, she shouts to me over the noise of the vacuum cleaner, “I think people who are dying have a right to do very crazy things, and that does not mean they’re crazy. It means they’re dying, and upset. In fact, it means they’re sane.”) The ram is placed on her mattress and watched while it flaps to death; the dwarf gourami is cut open lengthwise and its skeleton admired; the angelfish is held by its top and bottom fins and pulled in opposite directions (I’ve always wanted to do that, I think to myself, even though it’s not true); the white long-finned tetra is soaked in concentrated blue bath herb essence for three minutes while we talk about whether the color will stick when we take it out, which it does a little, but it was not fatal so she lets the fish flap to death on her bed like the other one. (I tell her, to lighten the atmosphere, that she should have thought of something she hadn’t done before, so she offers to eat it, which I prevent her from doing for fear that the blue bath herb essence will make her sicker than she already is, though to her face I just say “sick,” not “sicker than you already are.”) The baby discus, with its beautiful facial expression, she throws out the window, making me particularly sad; and the last fish, the fat goldfish, she can’t think of anything to do with because the last one has to be the best and this high standard is giving her killer’s block so
I’m
supposed to think of something which is too much to ask of me because I’m not dying and don’t have this need to see what death is like but it finally doesn’t matter because she comes up with her own idea. She tries to feed the goldfish to the parrot. He won’t eat it. He doesn’t like goldfish. Jeremy? No, thank you; I don’t eat that kind of fish either. “Okay, then I’ll eat it,” she says. I cringe. I can’t tell her not to, because it has not been soaked in concentrated blue bath herb essence. She licks a fin and stops. She doesn’t want to eat it anymore so thinks of something even better. She throws it against the wall. The idea is to throw it until it does not move. She does it again. It is fun and slippery. Sometimes she just throws it in the air and catches it, just to enjoy the fun challengingly slippery feel of it. Finally, it does not move. She goes to the kitchen, comes back with the big kitchen knife, and heads for her parrot. She grabs it around the shoulders and points the tip of the knife at its throat.

I catch my breath. I am shocked. The fishes were one thing, but the ten-thousand-dollar parrot? And it’s not at all the price I’m talking about. It’s the animal. It’s a big animal, which talks. And as though to prove my thought, “Death and dying,” says the parrot, the blade pointed at its sky-blue neck. But after all, a dying little girl is allowed to kill a parrot. She’s allowed to kill practically anything.

Sara suddenly drops the knife and charges at me. I look at the knife on the floor again, just to make sure I did not imagine that she dropped it. She punches me, repeatedly, as hard and as quickly as she can, and I welcome it I understand it it should have come sooner it makes me feel better than I’ve felt in a long time as though purifying me of my crime liberating me from it it is equal I guess to serving a prison sentence and feeling you paid for your wickedness afterward.

But then the parrot joins in, shrieking, and knocks on my head with his beak, like a woodpecker, while Sara continues punching me. He is perched on the side of my face, I’m not sure exactly where, probably on my ear with one foot and on my shoulder with the other. It hurts incredibly, so much that I can’t even feel Sara’s blows. It bleeds, I can feel, but I don’t dare say no, because maybe I deserve this also. And if I said no, she might think I meant her, which I don’t. I look down, sort of sadly, but I don’t cry because I don’t have the right to cry. Then she stops. But the bird does not. “Stop it,” she tells it. “Death and dying,” it answers, and stops.

I need to wipe off the blood running down my forehead before it reaches my eyes, or I will have trouble blinking. I look around for a tissuelike thing but see nothing, so I remove the parrot from my ear and shoulder and wipe my forehead on its sky-blue and white feathers, enhancing their beauty to red and purple.

“Jeremy?” says Sara.

“What?”

“There’s something I want you to do with me.”

“What’s that?”

“I want to hang glide before I die.”

I remember Henrietta telling me that Sara’s father died of a hang gliding accident. “That’s very dangerous,” I say.

“Ha. Ha.” She pauses. “I’d really love it.”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know where people do it.”

“In the country. An hour away from here.”

“You’d have to ask your mother.”

“I already did. She said okay.”

“Well, then, okay, I’ll take you there.”

“And you’ll fly with me.”

“No, I’ll just watch. You’ll go with an instructor.”

“I want to fly with you.”

“I don’t know how to fly.”

“You’ll go with an instructor too, but we’ll be flying at the same time.”

“I don’t know. It’s very dangerous.”

“I’m sure you can’t be worried about me. Even if I get crippled for life, it won’t be for very long.”

“Well, I’m also worried about myself.”

“You could do this for me, couldn’t you?”

I suddenly become ashamed that I hesitated. Since I can’t offer her a jeweled egg, I’ll risk my life for her. “Of course I could. We’ll do it.”

She prances over to me, smiling widely, and kisses me on the mouth. The kiss does not stop. It continues, and it is not a kiss of gratitude anymore. I am again starting to smell the fruit in her. Her fruit is pear. It smells good, sweet. Everyone dying has a fruit in them. The key is to die before the fruit rots. My father’s fruit of death had been grapes. I had smelled them. My own fruit, I am certain, I instinctively know, will be lemon, bitter lemon.

The kiss is there still. I am repulsed by her beard. I get little hairs in my mouth, and the mixture of the coarse hairs and the sweet fruity smell makes me feel nauseous, on the verge of throwing up if I’m not careful. It feels good to be repelled by her, because it means I’m more normal than before if I can’t be attracted to a little girl.

But no, I’m cheating, it’s not true. The only reason I have this feeling of repugnance is the beard, and nothing else, I’m sure. I am monstrous to be repelled by a poor dying little girl who happens to have a beard. I cannot allow myself to feel this way. I mean, really, her beard is one of the
symptoms,
for God’s sake, of her
dyingness.
It does not deserve disgust from anyone. Especially not from me, who found her pretty enough to make love with before. Well, I should find her pretty enough to make love with now. I must push away my disgust and try to feel desire for her, despite the beard.

What am I doing? What am I thinking? I’m getting all tangled in these absurd thoughts. I’m losing perspective. The fact that she has a beard is destiny helping me fight this challenge.

I gently push her away.

“I can kill, but I can’t have love?” she asks.

“No, not unnatural love. You shouldn’t
want
to have it.”

“First of all, it’s not unnatural love. Second of all, I do want it.”

“You promised me that if I remained your friend you wouldn’t start this again.”

“Things are different now. I’m going to be dead soon. I thought that meant I could do things.”

“Yes, a lot of things, but not everything.”

“Of course not everything. I can’t kill you, but I can kiss you, can’t I?”

I don’t answer.

She says, “It had to happen, didn’t it? At first I thought it might not. I thought I would be noble enough and not take advantage of my dying. But I’m not. Jeremy, I want to make love with you again.”

“No. It was probably our lovemaking that caused your disease to begin with.”

“You know very well that’s not the least bit true.”

She’s right. I do, most of the time, know that it’s not the least bit true, but sometimes I forget.

“Well, then,” I say, “the reason you want to do all this love-making in the first place is probably
because
of your disease. It’s a symptom of it.”

“Well, listen to
this:
‘Do you think that her brain tumor could have caused other symptoms?’ my mom asked the doctor. ‘Probably not, but like what?’ said the doctor. ‘Many things. For example, having unusually strong sexual urges for a girl her age?’ said my mom, embarrassed. ‘Absolutely not,’
said the doctor
says Sara, emphasizing “said the doctor” very much.

“How do you know this?” I ask.

“I was there.”

“Henrietta asked the doctor in front of you?”

“No, but I was in the other room and heard everything.”

“Maybe you misheard.”

“No, because my mom repeated the conversation to me afterward. She remembered every word the way I had heard it, and not only that, but
I
also remember every single word exactly the way I heard it both times.”