Large Animals in Everyday Life (15 page)

“Here, give me your key,” she said, talking as one would to a child.

I locked the door behind her and went to wait by the window, craning my neck to see if someone who wanted to kill us was pressed up against the building, but all I saw was the empty, darkening view down the street. Two old men were attempting to wheel themselves out of the nursing home at the end of the block, ignored by a group of nurses laughing and smoking cigarettes under the security light. I saw this all the time, had called to complain about it, and I wondered if Borden ever watched it; through this window he had the exact same view I did. The glass was greaseless, spotless. I imagined what our two faces must look like from the outside, one on top of the other, peering through
our windows with the blank, identical expressions of passengers on a train. The other units in the fourplex faced north, looked out over a frontage road that led to a mall, though the tenants on that side of the building changed frequently and weren't around much while they did live there: young couples getting through the winter before they got married, attractive divorcees getting back on their feet, graduate students finishing up their dissertations. I never noticed any of them looking out their windows.

I waited, watching the nursing home and listening to Borden's messages; four more financial advisors called, and then a woman who had to be Frieda came on, though her voice was more formal and youthful than I had imagined. “I never know what to say on these machines,” she said. “I hope you're having a lovely time, you deserve it, Tom. Well, I thought it would be nice for you to have a message when you get home. I'll sign off now. Have a lovely vacation.” The click and silence after her call filled me with sadness: poor Frieda had been left behind, the way we were all going to be left behind, only in her case it was worse because she probably loved Borden, in her own drab, faded way.
Goddamn Jeannie
, I thought, as though she had something to do with it.

Upstairs, the energy of real fear surprised me. My apartment's door was unlocked and I let myself in, trying to comprehend that something terrible, life-changing, could be waiting, just moments ahead of me in time. I stalled there by the door, switching my three-way lamp twice through bright, brighter, brightest, and then Jeannie padded in, blinking and nude, her skinny body, tiny breasts exactly the same as they'd been in sixth grade. For a second I thought
rape, hostage, help
, but then I saw her expression and something deflated in my chest. “Bachelor party hijinks,” she said.

“Hey!” the professor called from my bedroom in his proper, lecture-hall voice. “Is that CeCe? CeCe, come in here! CeCe, I want to say hello!”

“You were in my
bed?
” I said.

“This wasn't my idea, honest,” Jeannie said. “I didn't even know it was him until I got up here.”

“CeCe! CeCe!” Roger called. He said my name like it was hypothetical, a joke.

Jeannie stepped up and tried to hug me. “Just ignore him,” she said. “They were drinking Rumpelmints. He thought we were at your place. He tried to beep me but my battery was dead.” I tried to push her away, but she got her skinny arms over my shoulders, her chin against my ear. “It's okay,” she said, her oniony mouth warm against my cheek. “Nothing is going to change, we'll see each other all the time, nothing will be any different.”

“Jesus, you have a beeper?” I said. I couldn't get her arms unlocked from around me.

“CeCe!” Roger shouted. “Let me see those boots of yours! I wish Jeannie would get some of those!”

“Don't worry, don't worry,” Jeannie was whispering, only it was no longer Jeannie, and no longer me. I shut my eyes and put my hands on her bare back, hypothetically, feeling her ribs, her smooth sides and small breasts, her onion breath in my hair, and I thought,
This is what Roger does, this is what he gets
, and I tried to imagine what kind of luck he thought he had, getting this. It no longer had anything to do with me. Then I imagined Borden imagining this, sitting by the window wanting this, at the expense of poor, polite Frieda. And who could blame him? Everyone wanted it. I pushed Jeannie hard and she stepped back.

“
What
,” she said. “What is your problem? Is it the lottery? Any of us could have won the lottery.”

“Do whatever you want,” I said. “I'm going back down to Borden's.”
Prostitute
. She followed me out into the hall and stood there naked, blabbing away like an anchorwoman.

“CeCe, nothing substantial has changed since yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that,” she was saying. “You are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy!” “Fine, good,” I heard her say, when she thought I was finally out of her range.

• • •

In a dream the sailor came back to me. We sat side by side on a dock overlooking some calm water, and he helped me put back together the pieces of a paper horse I had accidentally torn up. The pieces of the horse were small and he took them in his hands with great tenderness. I turned to look at him, filled with feeling, and the gold buttons on his uniform caught the sun, blinding me. Through the explosion of light I reached for him, unable to see my own fingers, and then the spaghetti smell was there, as close as my own mouth. It was Borden, his face right there, the lamp switched on behind him, and I pushed back at him frantically. “Hey, pussycat, pussycat, take it easy,” he said. He was sitting against my hip, pressing me into the back of his sofa, grinning down at me with gray teeth. Chest hair bloomed in a small bouquet from under the neckline of his T-shirt. “Don't touch me,” I managed to say.

“Hey, okay,” he said, raising his hands as though I'd pointed a gun at him. He stood and shuffled off toward the kitchen, his thighs whiffing against each other. “Jeez, I
live
here,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” I said. It was late, three or four, and Borden's living room seemed calm, even peaceful, the mollies moving slowly up and down in their tank. I pulled myself into a sitting position and looked around for my boots.

“Well, it's funny,” he said. “I had a funny feeling. I got all the way over to Epcot, got in my room, got one of them minirefrigerators with one of everything and then some other stuff you get free, fruit and that, and then I go take a look out the window and that big goddam
ball
is sitting there. It don't do nothing, you know? It don't rotate, don't open up, don't take off, nothing. Gave me a bad feeling, just knowing it was out there. And then my legs was acting up, you ever hear of restless legs syndrome? Secretaries get it, from all that sitting, you might know. It's when your legs, at night, try to do all the running you was supposed to do during the day but you didn't. Anyway, here I am. How about that, you think I'm crazy?” He stood in front of the open refrigerator, the cold, colorful food steaming behind him.

“You went to Epcot?” I said.

“Yeah. Where was I supposed to go? Hey, you don't have to leave or nothing,” he said.

“I've got to get going,” I said.

“Say, where's your girlfriend at? Ain't that her car out front?”

Our family's poodle had died like this, when I was a child: she ran out onto the two-lane highway, then froze on the center line when she saw the traffic coming. It was impossible for her to go forward and impossible to go back. She stood there in the wind of rushing cars, turning her curly, quivering head back and forth, looking one way, then the other, until a truck finally clipped her, knocking her sideways into the eastbound lane, where a Chevy got her.

“I can't go up there,” I said.

“Jeannie's up at your place? Well, tell her to come on down and join the party.”

“
Borden
,” I said.

“Hey, hey, what's the matter?” He came back over to the sofa and sat, reaching down and lifting my legs by the ankles, before I could stop him, so that my feet rested in his lap. Once they were there, I thought it would be cruel to yank them off; I didn't want to hurt his feelings. His big thighs felt synthetic, slippery and impersonal as upholstery against my bare heels, and I imagined Jeannie watching from the doorway, the little sarcastic points of her eyes and mouth and naked breasts. “I'll tell you what,” Borden said. “You're okay, CeCe. At least you got some integrity, some principles. You're the first one so far who ain't tried to get some of the prize for yourself. How about that? You thought I was too big and fat for you before and now that I got the cash, I'm still too big and fat. What do you know?”

“Hello, Tom, it's me again.” He gazed, confused, at the wall telephone instead of at the whirring machine, where the woman's voice was coming from. “I don't want to use up your tape over nothing, but you won't believe what just happened to me. I was coming out of Winn-Dixie …”

“I was just at Winn-Dixie!” Borden said.

“She can't hear you, why don't you …”

“Shh,” he said.

“… out of collins mix, but I only had
one
, I said it before I went out, I said, ‘Frieda, tonight you will behave like a
lady
.' So I told the officer I was celebrating for you, I said, ‘Officer, I am not in my normal mode,' but he didn't even believe I know you! He said, ‘Right, lady,' and then he grabs my arm real hard, and I told him, ‘Don't you put your hands on me! When I
tell
you to put your hands on me, you do so with gusto, but when I
say
,' and he says, ‘Oh, the lady's got rules!'” She paused, swallowing, and the machine cut her off.

“You can pick up the phone while she's talking,” I told Borden, but he just sighed, his thighs giving a little under my feet as though some of the air had gone out of them.

“I know I'm supposed to be celebrating,” he said, “but man, everybody
wants
something, you know?”

“Not Frieda,” I said.

“What do you know about Frieda?” Borden said. He dug his thumb into the soft ball of my foot and I tried to jerk it away from him, but the cushions under me were soft and I couldn't get any leverage. “A Chinese girl did this to me one time,” Borden said. “Something-su, I forget what it's called. You'll like it.”

“
Please
quit that,” I said. “All I meant was, Frieda seems to respect and depend on you.”

“Naw, she don't love me. She just wants attention, you know? Her old man's in jail, over in Starke, HRS got her kids, and she ain't even allowed in half the bars in the county, because she's always looking at someone's husband and licking her straw. I seen her get a black eye for doing that. That's why she comes by here, because she don't got nowhere else to go, you know what I'm saying?”

“I don't want to know about Frieda,” I said. “Maybe she likes her life, maybe she likes not having any responsibility, not having to worry about anything …”

“Naw, she don't,” Borden said. “No one wants everything taken from them. Everyone wants some give.” Frieda had come back on, meanwhile, saying something about Weight Watchers, but Borden spoke right over her—rudely, I thought, even if she did want something from him. “You want to hear something nuts?” he said. “When I got this thing confirmed, that I really hit it big, what's the first thing popped into my head?
Breeder tank
. Number one, my breeding females been dying, I gotta get some more, and a breeder tank. Number two, this tie I saw on TV, one of them shopping shows, some kind of a silk
weave
. I mean, does a Porsche occur to me? No. Yacht? No. Paris, France? Forget it. Girl I took out in high school whose old man was a commie, he was always asking me what was my
ambition
, because he
knew
. He knew I didn't have none. He told me, he said, ‘This is how they keep you down—whatever you got, you think that's all you deserve.' You get so you only see one inch in front of your own face, he said.”

“Well, what
are
you going to do?” I said.

Borden took his damp hands off my feet and pressed them over his eyes, then combed them back through his thin hair over and over again. He stared across the room at the hovering mollies. “You know what?” he finally said. “I just want to think about it tomorrow.”

“Borden, I need to ask you a favor,” I said. “Only certain things need to be clear up front. It's not money or anything …”

“You can stay here, just go on back to sleep, don't worry about it,” he said, before I could go on. He stood up and walked with his hands in his pockets over to the window. “Don't worry about me,” he said. He cupped his hands like blinders against the glass to block out the reflection of the lamp and sighed, making a small patch of steam. “I'm a perfect gentleman,” he said.

• • •

In the morning he was gone. A note taped on the aquarium glass said:
I went back to You Know Where. I don't want to disturb your
beauty sleep. Please feed the fish, O.K.?
I found my boots in the kitchen and left, shutting the door quickly and quietly, as though someone were still in the apartment, sleeping.

I got Jeannie out of my bed and we sat at my kitchen table, smoking cigarettes over plates of eggs. The professor had left right after I'd gone back downstairs to Borden's, she said. She suggested we spend the day together, go to a street fair or maybe go see the royal stallions that walked around on their hind legs. “Or how about that Wet Water place you applied at?” she said.

“We're too old for that shit,” I said. “People have heart attacks there.”

“Well, I'm paying,” she said, “so decide.”

At the dog track, where we ended up, she bought me some popcorn and then ran off to the clubhouse to say hello to a jai-alai player she knew. I stayed in the stands, trying to understand the loud announcer, the endless blur of greyhounds whipping by behind their strange fuzzy lure, but after Jeannie had been gone a while I gave up and stared at the crowd instead. An unexpected hot wind had come up off the Gulf, and people were sitting on their wadded-up jackets and mopping their foreheads with concession napkins. So many of them resembled Borden, I thought—so many lumpy bodies and damp, hungry-looking faces. Right in front of me a man who could have been Borden had stood up and was unzipping and peeling off one sweatshirt after another like a birthday party magician pulling scarves out of a sleeve. Maybe it was an effect of the sun, or the pony sofa smell steaming off my hair, but each time he got another sweatshirt off and revealed yet another one underneath, my scalp prickled with anticipation, as though we were all there to bet on sweatshirts instead of dogs. I thought of the real Borden wistfully, as though it had been a long time since we had seen each other, and I wished he were there with me, watching; I imagined his damp, gentlemanly face happy for once, laughing, finally, at his own good fortune.