Large Animals in Everyday Life (2 page)

For one winter after my formal training in the arts was complete I had tried to make a go of it in San Diego with an art librarian who spoke in a controlled whisper even outside the library, who never got angry but was secretly always angry, breezing
around in seersucker suits and straw boaters and refusing to raise his voice. He himself was not an artist but had devoted his life to the preserving and cataloguing of art and claimed to be real happy about that, very satisfied; he also shopped for me at Victoria's Secret and said I was the second most intelligent woman he ever met (the first was Hannah Arendt) and claimed to be able to feel it in his own nipple when he touched mine. He was much older than me, however, and over me in bed his eye bags hung down and I was beside myself trying not to notice them or acknowledge that they mattered. The real problem, finally, wasn't his eye bags or even him, that much, but the city, which seemed to me unnatural for no good reason I could pinpoint except that the buildings, like any buildings but for some reason these really bothered me, lacked the integrity of natural creation. Buildings were false, I was just realizing at twenty-two (duh). Yes, we needed them, but we didn't need so
many
of them, or such big ones. “I don't like it here,” I said often, and the librarian would drape himself over me, saying, “Oh,
ba
by,” trying to be some kind of spiritual blanket but at the same time getting, as he called it,
aroused
because he thought I looked like an aerobics teacher, which to him was a perversion: lowly physicality combined with bouncing commercialism, the dirty opposite of art.

So I drank, which made me feel that someone, I didn't know who, who could make me feel better about something, I didn't know what, was in the room with me or at least reachable by phone. Or, to get out of the house, I visited the Pai Gow Indian Reservation casino. There people didn't talk to each other much, but everyone was in a wonderful mood, solid men and women of all ages dressed unapologetically in synthetic blends focusing hard on the cards and wheels and dice in front of them while grinning green-aproned Caucasians ran around administering exchanges and delivering soft drinks. Alcohol was not present in these big bright rooms, but high faith was everywhere, shining stubbornly from everyone's eyes. I never learned black-jack
or how to place an off-track bet, but stuck with five-card draw, the only thing I knew, and at the end of each evening when people dimmed down and turned philosophical I commiserated with Jim, a widowed Maine lobsterman visiting his married girlfriend during the off-season. When I told him about the librarian he said, “Sounds like his bullshit's getting in the way of his slow-moving dream,” and when I told him I was trying to make a decision about whether to stay, he cut me off with scorn, saying, “Nope, nope, I don't buy it, you don't
try to make
a decision, I mean, you don't
try to make
a decision. You know what you want to do. You do what you want to do.”

Jim was small and shifty-eyed and his whole face and neck were gray as if they'd gone that way naturally along with his hair, but I could not ignore him, even though he often discounted himself, saying, “Hey, I'm not the first guy to talk about God while he's gambling and I won't be the last.” So I listened and moved to Florida, where Jim had grown up happily, he said, stealing canoes and blowing up cypress knees with homemade gasoline bombs, and where I'd always imagined myself in cutoffs someday. I was in Florida no more than a week before I went to the Round Bar, where Jim claimed to have seen a girl bare her tattooed breasts one night before the pink light of the jukebox; it was either George Jones or Waylon Jennings playing, he recalled, and she was dancing and crying, and then she just pulled up her T-shirt, and on her left tit it said
BORN TO RIDE, RIDE TO DIE
and on her right tit it said
TIT
.

“Of course that was twelve, fifteen years ago,” Jim said. “Place may not even be open anymore.” But when I got there it was and nothing had changed: elephant ears hid the door, cats slept on the windowsills, antique beer signs blinked on the walls over the splitting leather booths, and the big bar rotated endlessly, imperceptibly, in the center of the room, just as he'd described, as though nothing in the world had changed, as though time and distance meant nothing. “Drop me a line if you ever make it
there,” Jim had said, but the singer was playing the first night I went, and after that I just never got around to it.

• • •

Tonight is the singer's last night. Tomorrow he'll be back in Nashville trying to sell his songs, back with his wife and his wife's cat and his new baby Liza and his four teenage sons from his first marriage. But watching him it is impossible to believe that he won't be here tomorrow, that he hasn't always been here. He's set up on his stool on a wood pallet just large enough for him and his bass pedals and the one Wellington he's taken off in order to play them, big black Peavey behind his elbow like another person, his head angling with the words like he's kissing someone, and the music, what he calls his “fat” sound, pouring out of him, high clean string notes and his fat serious voice together filling the round round room, beautiful.

“Aw, he's not
that
good,” Ron Russell says. He and his brother have joined me in my booth and are trying to convince me to take a ride in their Mr. Small Dent wrecker truck so that I'll stop paying attention to the singer and pay attention to them.

“He does got a sweet mouth on him, I will say that much,” Jeff Russell says.

“I can show her something better than that,” Ron says.

“Hey, look at yerself,” Jeff says to Ron. “
Look
at yerself. Not a very pretty picture, is it?”

“I think Ron is a good-looking guy,” I say.

“You hear that?” Jeff shouts.

“Aw, she's in love,” Ron says. “She ain't taken her eyes off him for one second. Not
one second
.”

And that's true. The singer strums hard, letting loose the strong sad first chords of “Seminole Wind,” sending them flying like wild heavy birds into the room. “What he's got is a
gift
,” Jeff says, his eyes on the singer, and his oil-dirty face appears both
older and younger than it was a moment ago. “God gave that boy a gift.”

“Gift, right,” his brother says. “Listen. Picasso? Van Gogh? They was just assholes who
presented
theirselves as important.”

Still, I cannot get close enough to the singer. When we embrace, my arms go over his shoulders, around his head, and his big stomach presses into the area that starts at my belly and goes down to the middle of my thighs. His stomach is hard and creates a certain space between us; his small legs in their Wranglers seem far, far away. And even in bed he always leaves his socks on because his feet were ruined standing in the swamp in Cambodia; other Marines had cush duty, he says, but he was in the swamp, always in the swamp, in fact he was a sharpshooter,
in fact
he can say with almost complete certainty that it was his bullet that killed Baby Doc Duvalier's right-hand man. The few times he's taken them off, I've forgotten to look. And though he chain-smokes Dorals, he is odorless. His dick is small and in the morning when he's gone nothing's sore and nothing smells. Lying down he is a big man who yells, who
growls
in bed, but he leaves before it gets light and nothing is left behind, as though all the hair, the sweat, all the
man
of him has gone into his music-playing, soaked up by the Round Bar's fat old cypress walls.

“I want …” I sometimes say to him in bed, but I don't know how to finish the sentence. He thinks I'm talking about being unemployed and starts taking dollars out of his wallet for me. I lie there full of desperate, dead-end feelings, a big useless naked girl, an idiot savant. “My dear,” he says, looking me up and down, “being with you is like Saturday night at the movies for a guy like me.” I want something impossible. I want to dance with him to the music he plays. I want to look over his shoulder, feel him solid in my arms, his baby-smelling beard against my throat, but see him set up in the corner at the same moment singing
Love is like a dying ember, only memories remain; through the ages I'll remember
… I want to go to Nashville.

A tall man who looks like Jesus or Willie Nelson makes his way over to me, extends his long arm. “Sorry, sir, she cain't dance,” Ron says. “She's waiting on her boyfriend over there.”

“Fair enough,” the Jesus man says. “You're pretty,” he says to me. Then he goes over to the tiny, salt-sprinkled dance floor and hops up and down there beside the jukebox's pink light, keeping his back straight and kicking and stomping his feet, four fat women dancing around him, all of them doing the same steps and keeping perfect time, all of them smiling. “I fell for you like a child,” the singer sings. “I fell into a burning ring of fire.” Watching him, I know what I must do; for once I am spared the shame of decision-making. I dig through my purse for my keys, already picturing which panties to pack, which earrings and shoes, already hearing myself on the phone to my father, asking to borrow just a couple hundred, telling him,
Yes, I have several different projects lined up, various possibilities right now, yes, many paths are still open to me
.

• • •

In the deep end of the Nashville Sheraton's pool, a young girl will not stop watching me. She is the only child in the pool, and I stare back at her, wondering if I know her from somewhere. But no, I think, I don't know any children. Despite the drought, the pool's water level is too high, and I'm hanging on the side with the other adults, all of us sipping drinks from plastic cups and holding our heads at unnatural angles, trying to appear relaxed. The girl floats near me on her stomach on a neon-patterned raft, chewing the ends of her long brown hair and watching me, staring as though she wants to know something. “Why are you looking at me?” she asks finally.

“I'm not,” I say. I stare at her body laid out flat in a maroon one-piece, the small but unequivocal curves of her long legs and short torso.

“Where's your husband?” she asks.

“Don't have one.”

“Oh,” she says. She thinks. “I thought I saw this man looking at me before,” she says.

I swallow the last inch of my red wine, which is hot as coffee, and squint up into the bewildering light. The girl is not going away.

“I like your hair,” she says. She grins shyly and undulates like a fish, making the raft move closer.

Okay, I think. “I have to go upstairs and get ready,” I tell her. “Would you like to come up to my room with me and watch TV?” She nods and undulates, her small round behind rising and falling in the waves she makes.

My phone's message light still isn't blinking. “Would you like a soda or something?” I ask the girl. She looks at the carafe of wine on the table. “How old are you?” I say. She blushes, pulls on the wet ends of her hair. “It's okay,” I say, taking the paper crown off a glass and handing it to her. “What are you, eleven? You're twelve?” I pour her a little more.

“Can I look in your bathroom?” she says.

“Go ahead, I've got some calls to make,” I say. I call the hotel switchboard and ask the operator to recheck my voice mail. Then I call the singer's double-wide but hang up when he answers. Finally I call my own number in Florida and listen to the messages on my machine. Jeff Russell wants to know if I'll be at the Round Bar tonight. “I'm hoping against hope,” he says. Sally from Live Oak Office Supply has my resumé and wants to set up an interview right away. The librarian is sending me a book that made him think of me, something about the “cultural wasteland of the South.” “Ciao, baby,” he says, his voice the same old sly whisper.

“Do you have anyone you need to call?” I ask the girl when she comes out of the bathroom.

“Yeah, my brother,” she says. “He has epilepsy. He's eighteen but he can't be in the room alone 'cause he might crack his skull
open, like on the edge of the desk. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

I shake my head and lie down on one of the beds, exhausted from the sun. With my eyes shut I can again hear the singer on the phone, saying, “You know if I had my choice I'd be with you,” his wife's cat crying in the background, his baby crying right into the phone, in his arms, it sounded like. “You know, you have a certain spiritual quality,” he said. “Have we worked anything out?” I asked, confused. “No, but we will,” he said. “I'll be in touch.” Now it occurs to me that he never asked for my room extension. Does he remember my last name? I wonder.

The girl speaks in soft monosyllables, sitting in her damp suit on a towel on the other bed, her feet on the floor and her back straight, reminding me of Jesus and his four girlfriends dancing at the Round Bar, which at the moment seems impossibly far away, a dark room somewhere on some darker, dirtier side of the planet. Her glass, on the nightstand, is already empty. “I'm sad about my dog,” she says after she hangs up.

“Go get him,” I suggest.

“No,
she
,” she says. “She's in Conyers but I don't think she's going to remember me when we get back. My dad said the first night she acted like she saw a ghost in the hamper but now she's acting fine.”

“How long are you here for?” I ask.

“Um, I don't know. My aunt has a tilted uterus and we have to wait. Can we watch ‘Muppet Babies'?” I toss her the remote. “Can I come over tomorrow?” she says.

“Sure,” I say. “Listen, is your dog big or small?”

“Big. Like this high.”

“Because I don't know about small dogs, but I think if she's a good big dog she'll remember you when she sees you. She won't know what happened exactly, but she'll have this feeling that something was wrong but now it's better. She'll feel happier than usual, kind of desperately happy, you know what I mean?
Like she won't remember having ever felt so happy to see you, but she won't know why. Behind being happy there'll just be this
loss
, only she won't quite remember what the loss was, like a dream that leaves you with a feeling but you can't remember the dream, you know?”