Bobcat and Other Stories (2 page)

I was interpreting each of Kitty’s movements through the lens of what a woman does who perhaps senses but doesn’t yet know her husband is having an affair. But she was a tentative woman anyway, so it was hard to say what she knew or didn’t know. I had always found her sort of moving, actually, as it was possible to see her perpetually struggling to move past her hesitation. She sat down a little awkwardly since her kimono dress came open both at the neck and at the legs, but while she was rearranging herself, she looked at me and also put her hand on her stomach. “Oh I forgot about your baby,” she said. “It’s wonderful; there’s so much in store for you.”

John came in from the kitchen with the terrine, which looked, perhaps, not great. A terrine really does need to be great to be not awful—it is meant to evince a perfect melding of disparate entities—the lion lying with the lamb, the sea greeting the land, and so forth. John placed it on the coffee table and looked at me worriedly. I saw a flicker of alarm cross Kitty’s face. Once John and I had been at a dinner party in Manhattan and the hostess had served us an opening dish of fox meat, so I knew how Kitty felt. (Later that night John had quoted the beautiful Jane Kenyon poem as we drove home along the FDR—
Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside.
)

As John began passing out little dishes for the hors d’oeuvres, I turned to Kitty and said, “We’re not prepared at all. We just found out yesterday at our Lamaze class that we’re supposed to have a theme for our nursery.”

“Theme?” Lizbet said. “What do you mean, theme? Like man vs. nature?”

“How about alienation in the technological age?” Ray said.

“Hollywood under McCarthy?” Lizbet said.

“It’s going to be Winnie the Pooh,” John said, which was true. Everybody seemed a bit dejected that John was closing down the joke so early, but he made a recovery. “Winnie the Pooh and the Reconstructed South,” he said. And then suddenly Frances out on the balcony was rapping on the glass door, making big surprised eyes at John, the sort of look that I’ve only seen wives make at their own husbands. John went to the door and conferred with her in whispers.

And then he returned to our guests, apologizing. “You’ll have to forgive my editor for skipping the appetizers; there is a Salman Rushdie proposal floating around the city today, to various editors, and she is trying to get a copy of it sent here tonight.”

“A novel?” I asked.

“Memoir,” he said. “About the fatwa.”

“No kidding,” said Lizbet. “There’s a book you’d want to read.”

Everybody’s minds filled with it—Salman as a small child running along the banks of the Ganges, rising as a student at Oxford, ascending as a literary star in England, and then the terrible fatwa raining down, followed by years in hiding. I had seen him give a reading at an ACLU conference in Atlanta soon after 9/11. The person introducing him had said, to a very hushed, still shell-shocked crowd, “We are all Salman now.”

I HAD INJECTED THE
roast with an infusion of rosemary, palm and olive oils, and a nutty oil made from macadamias. It was an experiment. The infusion had gone in via needle, before the roast took its place in the oven, hunkered in during the whole harrowing argument, safe as a little lamb from its fighting parents.

And as we now pulled it out, an oaky, forest-floor smell filled the kitchen. “The beast emerges,” John said. One thing I loved about John’s novel, beneath all my possibly irrational rage about the female characters, was his romantic, bohemian ideas about life’s pleasures—food, trees, words, gestures. His mother was from a long line of extremely cultivated East Coast women, mostly all living in Manhattan, who used their wealth and privilege as a means to appreciate life. At our wedding, John’s aunt had read a Rilke poem, which included those famous lines about marriage—that in it “two solitudes protect and greet each other.” It had seemed almost comical to me at the time, that that could possibly be what a family was, a “shelter for the soul’s independence.” I knew it as a big, semiangry group of people griping at and with each other continually, though in a way that could seem life affirming. In my experience, you would no more expect to find peace within a family than you would expect to find it in yourself.

Our marriage was happy, I believed, though there were some puzzles in it, one of which occurred almost immediately. Our honeymoon had been at a place in Ireland called County Clanagh. The first day we were there we went out sightseeing, and while I placed a call back home from the car, John went out walking. When I emerged, I saw him crouched down in the middle of a field. This field grew out of not dirt, but pebbles really. It surprised me that anything could grow out of those stones, but there was a bright-green grass that seemed to be thriving, and a lot of bluebells. To the left there were great hills, and to our right a cliff that semicircled around us and fell to an enormous angry shoreline, busy with churning. I couldn’t imagine why John was kneeling there. “Are you okay?” I shouted into the wind, over the ocean, and then as I picked my way across the rocks, a line from H.D., whom I hadn’t read since college, rose up to me, “At least I have the flowers of myself.” When I reached John, I touched his shoulder, and when he turned to look at me, he was crying.

I had asked him why, and when he didn’t answer, I hadn’t ever asked again, a fact that as it turns out I was mistakenly proud of. I felt like I was respecting the mystery of another person, maybe, and that this harsh landscape was the perfect place to learn my first lesson of marriage, an austere little lesson. And yet County Clanagh had haunted our marriage a little, mostly because it was a little sad for reasons I couldn’t comprehend and felt I shouldn’t disturb.

After John and I had set the food on the table, Frances came in from the balcony and I introduced her to the Donner-Nilsons.

“Donner as in Donner Family?” Frances asked as she shook Kitty’s hand.

“Actually, yes,” Kitty said.

Frances would find the book in anybody; she would shake it out of a person. “Which of the Donners do you descend from?” Frances asked.

“George and Tamsen,” Kitty said.

“Tamsen’s my favorite!” I said. I’d seen a ballet about the Donners at the Met in 2001. Tamsen was the great matriarch of the family, losing herself finally in a little lean-to, alongside the vicious Keseberg. They’d been stranded for weeks when the cannibalism set it, yet still Tamsen was so vigorous and organized that she labeled all the flesh in jars, so that family members could avoid their own family.

“There was no cannibalism,” Kitty said. She knew what we were all thinking.

“What?” I blurted out. That was the main thing, the cannibalism.

“There’s no evidence in the fossil record.”

It was sort of disappointing, actually. Apparently the new thinking among some archeologists was that there wasn’t enough forensic evidence—knife marks on the bones, essentially—to support a conclusion of cannibalism.

“I still watch myself,” Ray said. “I watch my back.”

I DID NOT WISH
to be one of those “work wives,” women who take up with a married coworker and, while not sleeping with him, take on other very wifely duties—keeping track of him throughout the day, establishing inside jokes, noting his food and drink preferences, texting messages
en francais
back and forth all day. But Ray and I had been working on the Tran case so closely for the past four months that it had necessitated spending inordinate amounts of time together, sometimes deep into the night. I had come to rely on Ray’s intelligence and good sense of humor. He was in general such a decent guy, very sympathetic to Duong Tran, very funny, very warm, and hard working.

One night, about a month before the dinner party, Ray and I were holed up in our conference room, eating chow mein, trying to find our way through the eye of the needle, that is, making a way for Duong Tran to stay out of jail. Duong was facing a possible twenty years in prison if we went to court, whereas opposing counsel was now offering us a settlement of two years. I couldn’t bear to allow Duong to enter prison. He’d already lost his wife and had a two-year-old baby to support. He was a very earnest, very stubborn man, set in his ways, which were somewhat strange. His beliefs sounded bizarre to me, but then again so did my own, if said aloud. Essentially, the Hmong believed that the gods had to be appeased and sometimes this involved offering a living sacrifice in place of a person, to balance out the forces of life and death on earth. And who was I to say what was superstition: I didn’t know. In fact, that was my whole legal argument. It’s cruel to punish a man for doing what he considered the best on behalf of his wife. All the precedents for this, unfortunately, involve cases of legal insanity and I didn’t think it would go well in court to call four centuries of Hmong religious thinking insanity.

I did think people should just leave him alone, and I thought the law should enforce this. He was grief-stricken by the death of his wife. It’s true he hadn’t given her the beta-blockers and blood pressure medication she had required (and more problematically, had flushed all the medication down the toilet), but Duong had, as a sign of his love and devotion, hauled a squealing seven-year-old pig up the four flights of stairs to their Brooklyn apartment and butchered it right there in front of her.

Ray thought we should settle and I could not agree to it, so we were still working on the case at two a.m., delirious from exhaustion. Adding to the anxiety of the night, Ray’s wife kept calling his cell phone, and it would whirr and vibrate on the table periodically, spinning around angrily. I pictured her at home, holding the baby in one arm, throwing down her cell with the other hand when he wouldn’t answer.

At some point, we drifted into pure silence, right after Ray said, “Well, I think your decision means he’ll go to prison then for the full twenty.” And into that silence, there was a little light rapping at the door. I thought it had to be Kitty. We both turned toward it, and then Lakshmi peered her head around the corner. She smiled and held out a little white bag. “Late-night Danish?” she asked.

What the hell was Lakshmi doing here with a little Danish in a bag? I knew what that little Danish meant to them; I had been newly in love once. It was unbelievable that somebody would go to Hammerstein’s around the corner and pick out a jelly Danish and bring it out of the night into the harsh incandescence of our offices and hand it to you. It was irresistible, of course, it represented the whole world outside our sterile, deadlocked conference room, the ongoing life of midtown even deep into the middle of the night, its letting on to the East River, which flows south to downtown, where everyone is always free. But get a clue, Ray. Your wife is at home with a baby.

As Ray conferred with Lakshmi in the hallway, I sat inside the room, waiting, growing more furious by the second. The phone rang again, and without really looking, I opened the door and thrust it out toward Ray. “It’s your wife,” I said, and with my pregnant belly I was better able to represent all the wives and mothers of the world. Lakshmi smiled kindly at me, though, as beautiful as ever, unruffled, happy, in love.

JOHN TOOK TO CUTTING
the meat, and Kitty turned to Ray. “Meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat,” she said, many more times than seemed amusing or rational. At first I had thought she was just being kind of cute, or silly. Maybe just suddenly exuberant? She spent essentially all day every day with her baby so maybe she was only breaking free a little bit amid the adults, without really remembering how, but then as the “meats” continued, her voice revealed a little bit of harshness or even madness in those short syllables. So she knew about Ray and Lakshmi? A part of her knew, and it was making the rest of her crazy, was my diagnosis. She was going to lose her mind if she said one more “meat.” Everybody smiled nervously.

Finally Kitty turned to the rest of us, her eyes brimming with light and tears, and gave us this nonexplanation. “Ray has been reading a book about women and power that says that women’s needs for iron, especially during their periods or after childbirth, is the basis of civilization as we know it. Particularly after childbirth, women generally couldn’t procure meat, so they had to trust men to do it.”

We all nodded, all of us silent and afraid.

“So women were forced to invent civilization, to surround themselves with stability during their weakest moments and the moments of their children’s most terrible vulnerability.”

“Women invented civilization then?” John said.

“Well, yes. But they invented it through men.”

“It sounds like a lot of trouble.”

“It was,” Kitty said, demurely.

So she knew? This conversation seemed constructed explicitly to torture a cheating husband. Right? She was bereft of the very thing she and her child needed, and he was not fulfilling his duties as a man. But Ray was munching away on my mother’s
mince de déjeuner
casserole, a hearty, simple dish whose secret ingredient was Lipton’s chicken noodle soup mixed with root vegetables.

“And time, too, we invented time,” Kitty said.

At which point Susan leaped into the conversation, lecturing us on time expanding and then constricting when you are losing your limb over the frozen steppes of Nepal. Apparently when blood leaks out of a body, the body loses its pulsing internal clock, and all understanding of time is released. The soul becomes loosed from the body and unhinged from time simultaneously and begins to rove freely about. There is nothing more beautiful, Susan said, than dying. The end is joy. This little lecture briefly distracted us from the Donner-Nilson marital problems, and by the time Susan was done, Kitty was escaping out to the balcony, her whole body hunched forward as if to hide and comfort herself. Somebody had to tell her.

AS THE TABLE STAYED
riveted to Susan’s recounting of the attack—the bobcat spotting her from hundreds of feet away, stalking her through the foothills, coming upon her kneeling over a small pond, and placing his paw on her shoulder as if to say, politely,
Hello?
—I followed Kitty out to the balcony, where she stood gripping the railing. “I feel fine out here,” she said to me. She was staring out over the city, the rain falling softly into it. “I wish I could just stand out here forever.”