The Animal Girl (20 page)

Russell peeked over his paper and gave a polite, drowsy, yet unmistakably warm smile that suggested a great deal of dormant benevolence in him and made Evelyn all the more determined to wake him, to make him see her, even though he had just raised his paper again and gone back to reading. She had no paper to read, after all; she had only her steeping cup of tea. “I'm Evelyn,” she told him, holding out her hand toward the mostly gruesome screen of front-page news, a photo of children squatting in dirt, the muzzles of machine guns trained on a group of dark-eyed young men, a lapdog dressed in a tuxedo. In the next moment, he folded his paper into a baton and was smiling at her again. “Russell,” he said, taking her hand.

“I'm sorry if I've invaded your privacy.” Evelyn felt momentarily helpless against her impulse—an impulse she acted on far too often—to demean herself in front of those she meant to impress. “I can be impulsive and pushy. If you'd rather read your paper, please do.”

Evelyn observed his face turning red. A man who blushed. Why should this draw her to him still more? He wore khakis and a baby-blue Oxford shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the thick middles of his forearms. “Talking would be nice,” he said.

“You don't have to.”

“Well,” he said, slowly, calmly now, “I'd like to.”

“All right, then,” Evelyn said, and she launched into what she feared might be a frantic monologue since she tended to run on even more than usual when she was nervous. She made herself pause and let him speak as they talked about the weather, life in a midwestern university town, and, finally, about themselves. Spring seemed to have
arrived, Evelyn declared, and she looked at her bare arms—they were nice arms, thin and shapely, she knew—and told him that she felt halfnaked. “It's the first time I've worn short sleeves in seven months.”

Russell smiled, reached out, and dipped his fingers into a small square of sunlight on their table. “Sun,” he said. “Light. I don't think I've had a good look around for a long time. Winter does that to me. Today on my walk up here I noticed things—houses, trees, squirrels, cars. I mean I really looked at them.” He looked at her then with a flicker of appreciation in his eyes that Evelyn hoped she wasn't imagining. And now that he smiled, glanced down, and took a sip of his coffee before meeting her gaze again, she thought she'd been right.

They talked on an hour, ranting against the current Republican administration, the man in the White House, the useless war he'd dragged the country into. Evelyn was pleased to note their common ground on these matters, though she realized she wasn't making herself attractive by announcing that even darker times loomed ahead and calling the president a tyrant and a criminal in a rabid voice, after which she held forth on the hate the rest of the world felt for their country in a long-winded speech that Russell countered with a single, tempered comment: “We've survived bullies and unfit men in the White House before, and I'm sure we'll survive this one.” He cradled the bottom of his thick beard in a hand, a gesture Evelyn found wonderfully paternal, and nodded, as if to give closure to his optimistic prediction.

“Yes,” Evelyn said. “Yes, we will.” She liked him. Better yet, she liked herself with him. “What about you?” she said. “What do you like to do? You know … just for fun?”

“Fix things,” he said. He picked up what seemed to be an invisible hammer and pretended to balance it. “Build. Make furniture. I do a little gardening, too. Flowers, not vegetables. And I like to fish. Fly fish. I like to walk in the woods. It gets me out. Otherwise, I'm an accountant. I do people's taxes. I help them give unto Caesar what is Caesar's.”

“Well, then,” Evelyn said, “you'll have to take me fishing sometime.”

Russell sat up stiffly, as if he'd just been pinched. “I'm not sure that I'm entirely available right now.”

“Of course,” Evelyn said, feeling she'd already made a mistake, been too forward, too stupidly fast. She looked down, regarding his large foot peeking from beneath the table and shod in an ancient penny loafer, the leather cracked and the heel ground flat. “I like your shoes,” she said. “They've got character. You should get them fixed, though.” Moodiness tended to make Evelyn bossy.

“Thank you,” Russell said, smiling, seeming to appreciate her compliment while ignoring her advice.

“You're with someone, I suppose.”

He shrugged and glanced at his coffee mug. “I guess the timing isn't quite right. I'm just not … ready.”

Once again she'd managed, in only a few minutes of conversation, to make a man flee, and now she was sitting across from him and struggling with the simple adolescent feelings of rejection and humiliation, which she, at forty-three, should have long ago left behind. Now
she
was blushing. Sweat beaded across her forehead. She scratched her scalp, after which she immediately regretted this crude, unattractive gesture. She was nervous. Her armpits were wet. She wanted to escape, to stand up and walk away.

And yet he did not seem at all awkward, at all in retreat. She sipped her tea and looked out the window at a young man speeding down the street on a bicycle, his long blond hair trailing in the wind as he turned the corner and disappeared. And Evelyn's nervousness seemed to go with the cyclist, to vanish with the same grace and speed, so that she was calm when she faced Russell again. “Sure,” she said, smiling. “I understand.”

“It's not you. I've been enjoying our conversation. I'd like to keep talking if you would.”

How could Evelyn have possibly believed this cliché that meant that it was her—her pushiness, her unfeminine forthrightness? But he did, in fact, seem to be enjoying their conversation, and so they kept talking, this time about Evelyn; about her childhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana—a red state if ever there was one, though her parents had been hippies, radical lefties; about how she'd come to Ann Arbor to study library science at the University of Michigan, had always intended to be a librarian, but had found her first year at a
small branch in a suburb of Detroit boring, and so had started a small web-design firm that had miraculously survived the tech bubble. She talked about her love of mountain biking and cross-country skiing, and finally her divorce four years ago and her recent resolve simply to meet men, to get out and take risks, as she admitted to doing with him that very afternoon. “I could have skulked away, after all,” she said. “I've seen you several times before, have wanted to meet you, and simply lacked the courage. This time I just did it.”

“I'm glad you did,” he said.

Evelyn couldn't help smiling, couldn't help marveling at how easily they talked, at how undaunted by her honesty this man was. They soon discovered that they were almost neighbors, and because they lived only blocks apart, they left together and walked down Washington Street.

They stopped in front of Evelyn's home, where Russell seemed suddenly nervous, looking down, then over his shoulder, anywhere but at her, a fact that thrilled Evelyn. In the distance, the melodious, pied-piper call of an ice cream truck floated through the neighborhood and mixed oddly with the harder sounds of rock music coming from a nearby house. “I should really get back to Tessa,” he said.

“Tessa?” All at once her excitement was gone.

“She's my daughter. She turned six last month.”

“Wonderful … wonderful,” she said, guessing now why he was so cautious and hesitant with her. He'd been left alone with a daughter. He'd been rejected by his wife. Or worse yet, he'd been widowed. “Could I ask you why you aren't ready?”

He looked up and let out a breath. “I'm afraid I'd rather not say right now.”

“Sure,” she said. And then she added, “I'd like to talk again sometime.”

He took a few steps backwards. “All right,” he said, smiling. He waved at her, and with what she thought was a bounce in his step, a subtle, joyful maneuver, he turned and walked down the street.

Over the next week, Evelyn looked for Russell in the café and along the streets of their neighborhood, where she walked more often
than she otherwise would have. Lilacs were blooming and the evening light lingered and the walks, Evelyn told herself, did her good, though she didn't once run into him. She hauled her mountain bike out of the garage, filled the tires, lubed the chain, and took long afternoon rides along Huron River Drive, the high, muddy river just visible through the trees along the roadside. She felt at once lighter and stronger, as she often did in spring, as if she were shedding pounds of winter flesh, though she was slight and didn't have much flesh to shed. And yet, at the same time, she felt a tightness in her chest, something coiled and prepared for disappointment. She was acting girlish, thinking of Russell too much, too often, a man she didn't even know. His beard, his soft face, his large hazel eyes, his thoughtful, even-keeled temperament, his lanky, awkward body. She was careful to remind herself as she pedaled through the Huron River valley that she knew nothing about him, that he couldn't matter to her, certainly could not hurt her, that she simply had a crush and should savor the sweet irrational longing for this stranger while it lasted, the enjoyment of which, after all, was made keener by his absence. She could enjoy that, she decided. She could enjoy not having him.

And then he appeared one afternoon during a storm, the sort of downpour, immediate and powerful, accompanied by lightning and an eerie purple darkening of the sky, that happened only this time of year. The streetlights flickered on in the sudden dark, and the trees bent in the wind. Phosphorescent flashes lit the sky, and thunderclaps rattled the windows of Evelyn's house. She had poured herself a glass of chardonnay and was sitting out on her screened-in porch, the air fresh with the smell of rain, to watch the streets flood and ropes of water fall from her gutters when she saw him, a tall, lumbering man running through the storm, and called out to him. “Please,” she said, holding her screen door open, “come in.” He stopped for a moment and looked through the downpour in her direction. “It's Evelyn,” she said.

Soon he was standing on her porch, dripping puddles onto her tile floor. “I got caught in this,” he said. His shirt was plastered over his bony shoulders. His beard dripped, and Evelyn could see the fragile shape of his skull, its slight dorsal rise, through his matted hair. He
wore a tool belt, a hammer and screwdrivers holstered at his sides. “I was on my way home from helping a friend.” He shook his arms, and water came running off him.

“I haven't seen you anywhere,” Evelyn said.

He smiled. “I should go.” He seemed pleased to see her, even if he was trying to escape.

“Stay right there,” Evelyn demanded. She came back with a stack of towels, an extra-large T-shirt she sometimes slept in, and a bathrobe. “You should get out of those clothes. I'll pop them in the dryer, and in a few minutes you'll be as good as new.”

“I really should …”

“I'm not going to let you go out in that.” Evelyn thrust the towel into his hand and turned around. The thunder clapped, and the lights of the house flickered off and on again.

“This is a bit funny,” he said.

“Tell me when it's safe to look.”

“Not yet,” he said. She heard the racket of the tool belt come off, then his zipper, followed by the watery flop of his pants hitting the floor. She laughed at the thought of a man undressing in her house.

“OK,” he said.

When she faced him again, he stood in her peach-colored robe, his thick shoulders pulling at the terrycloth and too much pale thigh showing. At the bottom fringe of her robe, a half-inch of damp, baby-blue boxer shorts peeked out. “Lovely,” she said. “Nice and leggy.”

As a joke, he fastened his tool belt around the robe, and they both laughed. She put her house slippers down and he stepped into them, though only half of his pale feet fit inside. He was so good-natured, so willing, that she felt she could ask him just about anything then. “You said you liked to fix things,” she said. She walked him through her kitchen and into the garage, where she showed him the damage she'd done a few weeks earlier with her Subaru. “I sort of hit the side of the garage. I popped the clutch. It was very stupid of me.”

He surveyed the damage, the smashed clapboards, the splintered two-by-fours, and the garage-door track so badly bent that the door closed only halfway. He nodded, seeming to understand what was needed. “I think we could do some of this now,” he said, looking
around the garage at the odd assortment of old tools and wood scraps left behind by the previous owner.

Soon Evelyn was watching this man, in her robe and house slippers, swing his hammer at the side of her garage with an expertise she found attractive. Wood splintered as he pried it away. The rain fell more gently now, drumming the roof above them. He measured a two-by-four that had leaned against the wall of Evelyn's garage for years, marked it with a pencil, laid it over a wooden horse—another item Evelyn had never used—and began sawing it.

In the kitchen an hour later, she watched him drink down the glass of water she'd just handed him. Outside, the rain had settled into a drizzle and the beaded windows cast mottled shadows across the floor. When he stepped toward her to return the empty glass, they stood so close that Evelyn took in the smells of rain and wood on him. She leaned in and kissed his cheek, then his lips, after which he said, “Oh,” in a breezy, startled voice. She'd been about to retreat when she felt the weight of his hand on her shoulder. In a flurry of pecks that missed her mouth and fell over her chin and cheeks, he began kissing her. He was trembling, and to calm him Evelyn held him close.

“I'm sorry.”

“Why would you apologize?” Evelyn asked.

“I'm not good at this, not good at all.”

“Of course you are,” Evelyn said, wanting above all to encourage him, though clearly he wasn't good at it. She began kissing him gently now and felt his breathing grow steadier, his wide upper body rising and falling against her, as he began to return her kisses. She wouldn't dare put her hand down and open his robe, but she wanted to. And when, in the next moment, she changed her mind only to find the thick leather of his tool belt in her way, she laughed. “I've never dealt with one of these before.”