Breed (7 page)

The workmen have by now gotten used to the horrible odor, and their protective masks dangle on their cloth ties. They glance at Alex as they work, perhaps thinking he has some official connection to the building. With his hand covering his nose and mouth, Alex wanders from room to room, hoping to find something that will give him an insight into what has become of the Johnsons. He goes into the small utilitarian New York kitchen; shards of broken plates and glasses crunch beneath the leather soles of his Crockett and Jones oxfords. With some trepidation, he opens the refrigerator and, like a monstrous wave from an unsettled sea, the stench crashes down upon him, sending him reeling. His instinct is to slam the door shut, but he forces himself to peer into the refrigerator and what he sees is even more disturbing and disgusting than the smell: Ziploc bags containing rodents—mice, rats, squirrels, and a few plump, butterscotch-colored hamsters—are piled one on top of the other, all of them, despite the plastic wrap and refrigeration, in various states of decay.

Alex throws the door shut and staggers back, almost losing his footing on the shifting surface of all that broken glass. Three of the workmen have begun taking the furniture out, while the fourth is on his knees and starting in on the task of tearing up the remains of the carpeting. He glances at Alex but quickly looks away when Alex returns his gaze.

Alex walks into what had once been the Johnsons’ bedroom. Stalactite-shaped stains render the bare mattress grotesque. A bedside lamp is on the floor, its long neck snapped in two. An oddly dainty and unmolested little bedside table stands next to the abandoned bed, some fake French Provincial probably picked up at Pottery Barn. Alex opens the table’s single drawer. The blade of a straight razor greets him with a sinister wink of reflected light. Alex pulls the drawer all the way out. Besides the razor it holds a tube of Caswell-Massey shaving cream, and handcuffs.

Behind the bed, curtains cover a large window. Alex parts the curtains and sees the window has been completely covered in plywood. A little yellow Post-it is pressed to the wood, but the breeze of the moved curtain dislodges it, and it floats to the floor. Alex retrieves it, reads:
Help us
.

He hears voices—the workmen are coming back for more furniture. The one who stayed behind is saying something to them—Alex can understand just a smattering of it, but he surmises that his presence in the apartment is finally being questioned. He takes a quick look around. Is there anything here that can possibly tell him anything he needs to know? The Johnsons are gone. That is the overriding, salient fact of the matter. They descended into some horrible, disgusting squalor—and they fled.

On his way out of the apartment, Alex walks through the reeking kitchen again. He opens the refrigerator, takes one of the Ziploc bags, puts it in his pocket.

In the elevator going down, he shares the car with a woman and her two small children, but they get off on the sixth floor, where the building has a play area for children. Once he is alone, he takes his prize out of his pocket and devours the plump hamster in four quick bites. It is easily and without question the most delicious thing he has ever tasted.

It’s called
shame
for a reason. Despite having many friends, as well as her sister, Cynthia, back in San Francisco, her mother, dear cousins, and colleagues, there is no one to whom Leslie dares confide the anguish she is experiencing over her increasing and inexorable furriness.

Her obstetrician, Dr. William Yost, examining her routinely, seems stubbornly unwilling to admit that anything is out of the ordinary. Yost is a fleshy, nervous man who wears a toupee that looks as if he bought it at a yard sale. His breath is bright and minty with mouthwash, though beneath that smell is the smoky trace of the cigarette he sneaked right before limping into the examination room.

“Oh, these things happen,” Yost says as Leslie, in her paper gown, points out the swaths of fur inexorably growing everywhere on her body. “The important thing is…” He pats her stomach. “And everything is A-OK. We’re all about the babies here.”

Leslie squints at Yost. He is the second doctor she has seen at Turtle Bay Obstetrics and Wellness. The first, a woman named Dr. Eva Kosloff, an unusually tiny woman with mad blue eyes, was clear from the beginning that the eight doctors who shared this practice also shared the patients and that Dr. Kosloff herself might not be present at the delivery. Glancing down at her clipboard, she’d added, “So you come to us from the great Dr. Kis.” And after saying his name, she seemed to have difficulty making eye contact with Leslie. “Did Dr. K. mention to you that some of the women he works with deliver a bit ahead of schedule?”

“He mentioned nothing of the sort,” Leslie said. “But the sooner the better. Look. I need to do something about this.” She lifted her arm, showed her. “Can you take care of this for me?”

“Not really my field,” Kosloff said, quickly turning to take her leave.

Leslie, usually so good at coming up with solutions to life’s difficulties, is simply paralyzed with self-revulsion, and even finding a dermatologist who might help her is made difficult by her doing it in secret. She trolled the Internet and found a doctor down in Greenwich Village whose office she now sits in, taking her place in the waiting room with two wealthy-looking Indian women in gorgeous saris, both of them chatting amiably while their unibrows expressively rise and fall. Also there is a glum teenager, slim and tall, who could have been a model were it not for a noticeable mustache, and a demure woman in a pantsuit who sits with her knees pressed together and her purse in her lap and who has the sideburns of an Elvis impersonator.

Her cell phone chimes in her purse and she reads the message from her assistant Robert.
Are you in the bldg? Jacket proofs are up and they look horrible!!

No, I am not in the building,
Leslie thinks.
My disgusting self is in the office of a hair-removal specialist, thank you very much.

At last, it is Leslie’s turn to see the doctor, Carole Ann Ryan, a lantern-jawed young woman with a pageboy haircut and oversize glasses with red frames that match her hair. She glances at her clipboard and asks, “So what seems to be the trouble?” though even with most of Leslie’s body covered it is obvious she is struggling with extreme hirsutism.

Leslie’s eyes blaze as she fixes the doctor with a long stare until finally she pulls the tails of her blouse out of her skirt and exposes a torso that is darker and thicker with hair than it was even the day before. Dr. Ryan, despite her extensive acquaintance with scars, boils, eczema, psoriasis, rashes, oozing acne, and cancerous growths, has never seen anything that comes this close to turning her professionally strong stomach. Leslie notes the quiver of the doctor’s throat as she swallows her shock, and her light brown eyes widen behind her thick tinted lenses. She reaches for a chair and drags it toward her and sits, heavily, releasing a sigh.

“Are you being treated for endometriosis?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, sometimes the treatment can lead to a certain amount of unwanted hair. How about weight loss? Have you lost a great deal of weight lately?”

“Are you even looking at me? I’m pregnant. I’m gaining weight.”

“Okay. I’m just ruling out the normal causes.”

“Normal? Does any of this look normal?”

“So… you’re pregnant,” Dr. Ryan says, glancing down at Leslie’s new-patient questionnaire on her clipboard. “That’s very exciting. You do know that a certain amount of hair growth often accompanies pregnancies.”

“This is not a
certain amount,
” Leslie says. She tells herself to calm down, but rage boils within her.

“The important thing is to try and enjoy your pregnancy,” the doctor says. “It’s a very special time in a woman’s life.”

“I can’t live like this. I have a job, I’m in public. This is not doable.”

“If your insurance covers laser hair removal, we can do that for you right here. And if not, we can direct you to a couple of reliable places where it can be done nonmedically.”

Something catches Dr. Ryan’s attention—the light has touched the hair above Leslie’s upper lip in such a way that it makes it seem thicker than before. Curious in some horrible, childish manner, Ryan steps closer to Leslie and then, her brow furrowed, her lips pursed, looking like a kid about to turn over a rock to see what vile squiggly things might be beneath it, she pokes at Leslie’s mustache with one finger.

And with lightning speed, like a beast in the wild and with no more premeditation than an apple falling from a tree, Leslie sinks her teeth into the doctor’s finger. The doctor screams in pain and terror, grabs her right pointer with her left hand.

Leslie is standing now, unperturbed by the doctor’s howls of pain. She feints a move toward Ryan, causing the doctor to cower in fear. She places her hands on Ryan’s shoulders and shoves the doctor so hard against the wall that the glass cabinet attached to it comes loose and crashes to the floor.

Dr. Ryan is temporarily out of commission, but Leslie hears the sound of rushing footsteps, and she bolts down the gray-carpeted corridor, into the waiting room, and bursts through the doors leading to the common hallway on the fifth floor. No time to wait for the elevator; she takes the stairway. She hasn’t had any real exercise in years but she finds it surprisingly easy and even pleasant to be running. There’s a spring in her step, but what is stranger than that, and more disturbing, is there is a quietly humming joy in her heart. It’s the first moment of real happiness she has had since taking Alex’s hand on the plane back from Slovenia. Her thought back then was
I’m pregnant;
now what fills her heart with wild music is another thought:
Get out of my way!

Shortly after Leslie returns home, the police arrive to place her under arrest. On the ride to the station, she contacts Alex and calls their lawyer, Arthur Glassman, and because of Glassman’s efficiency and Leslie’s lack of prior arrests, he is able to quickly post a minimal bail and get her out of there.

They get back home about seven. Glassman is full of bluster and pride about having gotten Leslie released so quickly. Leslie pours drinks for the men and sparkling water for herself and they sit in the front parlor listening to the rattling-beads sound of rain against the window and the whoosh of traffic below.

After finishing half her drink, Leslie excuses herself and says she must take a hot shower to get the stinky putrid smell of the lockup off.

“Oh God, yes, by all means,” Arthur says, rising from his seat. He is a well-turned-out man in his early sixties, in an English suit and expensive shoes, with a full head of kinky white hair and merry blue eyes. He takes Leslie’s hand and gazes at her in his fatherly manner, though he is also inspecting her, wondering if he might discern some visible sign of madness that would cause Leslie to take a serious nip out of a doctor’s hand.

When Leslie is out of the room, Arthur sinks back into his seat. “This is not going to be easy, you know,” he says. “I mean, she actually did bite that woman.”

“Is that a question?” Alex asks.

“No, it’s not a question. The woman was bitten, and she has Leslie’s teeth marks on her. Teeth marks are more identifiable than fingerprints.”

“I’m sure they are.”

“Alex. What is going on?”

“I don’t know. Pregnancy? It changes women, everybody knows that.”

“Yes, that’s true. But Leslie is the first pregnant woman I’ve known to bite a dermatologist. Look, the pregnancy thing is a card we can play, and I’m sure I can get this settled with probation and community service. There’s no way they are going to lock up a woman of Leslie’s stature, pregnant or not. But we’re going to have to cop a plea. You understand? We’re going to have to hammer out some sort of agreement, and I promise you this doctor is already using her good hand to dial some bottom-feeding personal injury lawyer and she is going to hit us up in a civil suit.”

“You just do what needs to be done, Arthur,” Alex says.

“You still haven’t answered my question, Alex.”

“There are things that happen, Arthur. In people’s lives, their bodies, their marriages; private things. But whatever it is, I’m sure it will pass.”

“What does her doctor say? And who is your obstetrician, by the way?”

“Oh, this Dr. Blah-Blah, who the fuck knows? It’s a practice with eight doctors and we see someone different each time. It’s strictly a moneymaking outfit, but we’re fine where we are. The last thing we want is some helicopter obstetrician hovering over us. Listen, Arthur, we’ve waited a long time for this and now the only thing that’s important is to keep her safe and comfortable and for us to have this child.”

“I realize that. But this Dr. Blah-Blah or any of his colleagues, they haven’t noticed anything… untoward in Leslie? Nothing out of the usual?”

“What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything, old buddy. I’m just asking.”

“Do you see something out of the ordinary in Leslie?”

“Other than her practically eviscerating her dermatologist?”

“Not funny, Arthur.”

“Not meant to be. But something’s going on. If you don’t want to get into it, we can just drop the subject. But if there’s anything you want to let me know, this is the time to do it. Right now. You’re on the clock anyhow.”

“Actually,” Alex says, clearing his throat, “it looks as if it might be more than one. We might be looking at twins. And there’s an outside chance of triplets.”

“Oh my God.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. It just came out.”

“You don’t think we’ll be good parents?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you said ‘Oh my God,’ as if some catastrophe were on the way.”

“It popped out of my mouth, Alex. No offense intended.” He finishes his vodka, places it on the end table with some finality, and stands up to leave.

Alex thinks how amusing it might be to pounce on Arthur, to shove him on the chest and bring him to the floor—not to hurt him, just to remind him who is boss, who is on top and who is on the bottom. Who is paying the bills. Who is paying the cost to be boss. Yeah!