Like Life (17 page)

“I already know some Yiddish words. I’m from New York. Here, eat some of this.”

“I’ll teach you
tush
and
shmuck.
” Pinky yawned, then grinned. “And
shiksa.
”

“All the things a nice Jewish boy practices on before he marries a nice Jewish girl. I know those.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

She refused to look at him. “I don’t know.”

“
I
know,” said Pinky, and he stood up on the bed, like a child about to bounce, toweringly naked, priapic. She could barely look. Oh, for a beaded bulrush. A train disappearing into a tunnel. “You’re falling in love with me!” he exclaimed, gazing merrily down. She still had her coat on, and had stopped chewing. She stared, disbelievingly, up at him. Sometimes she thought she was just trying to have fun in life, and other times she realized she must be terribly confused. She narrowed her eyes. Then she opened her mouth wide so that he could see the train wreck of chewed-up bagel and lox.

“I like that,” said Pinky. “You’re onto something there.”

HER
POEMS
, as she stated in letters to friends in New York, were not going well; she had put them on the back burner, and they had fallen behind the stove. She had met this guy. Something
had happened to the two of them in a cave, she wasn’t sure what. She had to get out of here. She was giving her final reading to the library patrons and matrons in less than three weeks, and that would pretty much be it.
I hope you are not wearing those new, puffy evening dresses I see in magazines. They make everyone look like sticky buns. It is cold. Love, Odette.

LAIRD
WAS
CURIOUS
. He kept turning his head sideways during the sit-ups. “So you and Pinky hitting it off?”

“Who knows?” said Odette.

“Well, I mean, everyone’s had their difficulties in life; his I’m only a little aware of. I thought you’d find him interesting.”

“Sure, anthropologically.”

“You think he’s a dork.”

“Laird, we’re in our forties here. You can’t use words like
dork
anymore.” The sit-ups were getting harder. “He’s not a dork. He’s a doofus. Maybe. Maybe a
doink.
”

“You’re a hard woman,” said Laird.

“Oh, I’m not,” pleaded Odette, collapsing on the rubber mat. “Really I’m not.”

AT
NIGHT
he began to hold her in a way that stirred her deeply. He slept with one hand against the small of her back, the other capped against her head, as if to protect her from bad thoughts. Or, perhaps, thoughts at all. How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks. She would open her mouth before the library fellowship people, and out would come:
There once was a woman from
 … Someone would rush to a phone booth and call the police.

But perhaps you
could
live only from the neck down. Perhaps
you
could
live with the clothes you were taking off all piled on top of your head, in front of your face, not just a sweater with a too-small neck but everything caught there—pants, shoes, and socks—a crazed tangle on your shoulders, in lieu of a head, while your body, stark naked, prepared to live the rest of its life in the sticks, the boonies, the fly-over, the rain. Perhaps you could. For when she slept against him like that, all the rest of the world collapsed into a suitcase under the bed. It was the end of desire, this having. Oh, here oh here she was. He would wrap himself around her, take her head like an infant’s into his hand and breathe things to her, her throat her chest, in his beginning to sleep.
Go to sleep, go to sleep with me.

IN
THE
MORNING
she warmed her arms over the blue zinnias of the gas jets and heated water for coffee and eggs. Over the newspaper, she pretended she and Pinky were Beatrice and Benedick, or Nick and Nora Charles, which is what she always pretended in a love affair, at least for a few days, until the evidence overwhelmed her.

“Why are you always talking with your hands?” asked Pinky. “You think you’re Jewish?”

She glared at him. “You know, that’s what I hate about this part of the country,” she replied. “Everyone’s so repressed. If you use your body in the least way while you’re talking, people think you’re trying out for a Broadway show.”

“Kiss me,” he said, and he closed his eyes.

On a weekday Pinky would be off to his office, to work on another farm bankruptcy or a case of animal abuse. “My clients,” he said wearily. “You would never want to go out to eat with them. They come into my office reeking of cowshit, they lean back in the chair, set their belly out like that, then tell you about how some Humane Society bastard gave them a summons because their goat had worms.” Across his face there breathed
a sigh of tragedy. “It’s a sad thing not to have clients you can go out to eat with.” He shook his head. “It’s a sad thing, a goat with worms.”

There was something nice about Pinky, but that something was not Nick Charles. Pinky was more like a grave and serious brother of Nick’s, named Chuck. Chuck Charles. When you had parents who would give you a name like that, there was nothing funny anymore.

“What do you write poems about?” he asked her once in the middle of the night.

“Whores,” she said.

“Whores,” he repeated, nodding in the dark.

She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the
W
’s. When she’d ask him how he liked them, he would say, “Fine. I’m on page …” and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he’d accomplished that day. “The Wadsworth is a little too literaturey for me.”

“Wordsworth,” she corrected. They were in his kitchen, drinking juice.

“Wordsworth. Isn’t there a poet named Wadsworth?”

“No. You’re probably thinking of Longfellow. That was his middle name.”

“Longfellow. Now who’s he again?”

“How about
Leaves of Grass
? What did you think of the poems in there?”

“OK. I’m on page fifty,” he said. Then he showed her his gun, which he kept in his kitchen in a leather case, like a trombone. He kept a rifle, he said, in the basement.

Odette frowned. “You hunt?”

“Sure. Jews aren’t supposed to hunt, I know. But in this part of the country it’s best to have a gun.” He smiled. “
Bavarians
, you know. Here, try it out. Let me see how you look with a gun.”

“I’m afraid of guns.”

“Nothing to be afraid of. Just heft it and look down the top of the barrel and line up the sights.”

She sighed, lifted the gun, pressed the butt hard against her right shoulder, and aimed it at the kitchen counter. “Now, see the notch in the metal sticking up in the middle of your barrel?” Pinky was saying. “You have to get the bead in the middle of the notch.”

She closed her left eye. “I can feel the urge coming on to blow away that cutting board,” she said.

“Gun’s not loaded. Probably not till spring. Turkey season. Though I’ve got tags for deer.”

“You hunt turkeys?” She put the gun down. It was heavy.

“You eat turkey, don’t you?”

“The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They’re different. They’ve signed on the dotted line.” She paused and sighed again. “What do you do, go into a field and fire away?”

“Kind of. You try to catch them midflight. You know, I should take you deer hunting. It’s the last two days, this weekend, and I’ve got tags. Have you ever been?”

“
Pulease
,” she said.

IT
WAS
COLD
in the woods. She blew breath clouds, then rings of cigarette smoke, into the dead ferns. “It’s nice out here. You don’t suppose we could just watch nature instead of shoot it.”

“Without hunting, the deer would starve,” said Pinky.

“So maybe we could just cook for them.” They had brought along a bottle of Jim Beam, and she twisted it open and took a swig. “Have you ever been married?”

“Once,” said Pinky. “God, what, twenty years ago.” He quickly shouldered his rifle, thinking he heard something, but no.

“Oh,” she said. “I wasn’t going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I’d ask.”

“How about you?”

“Not me,” said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began,
Marriage is the death you want to die
, and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing.

She looked down at her chest. “I don’t think orange is anyone’s most flattering color,” she said. They were wearing blaze-orange hats and vests. “I think we look like things placed in the middle of the road to make the cars go around.”

“Shhhh,” said Pinky.

She took another swig of Jim Beam. She had worn the wrong kind of boots—gray, suede, over the knees, with three-inch heels—and now she studied them with interest. One of the heels was loose, and mud was drying on the toes. “Tell me again,” she whispered to Pinky, “what makes us think a deer will cross our path?”

“There’s a doe bed not far from here,” whispered Pinky. “It attracts bucks.”

“Bucks, doe—thank God everything boils down to money, I always say.”

“During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That’s how she gets her mate.”

“So
that’s
it,” murmured Odette. “I was always peeing
in
the bed.”

Pinky’s gun suddenly fired into the trees, and the noise filled the woods like a war, spilling to the ground the yellowing needles of a larch.

“Ahhhhhh!” Odette screamed. “What is going on?” Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn’t a big
boom
sound. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Damn!” shouted Pinky. “I missed!” He stood up and went crashing through the underbrush.

“Oh, my God!” cried Odette, and she stumbled after him, snapping the same twigs underfoot, ducking the same barbed wire. “Where are we going?”

“I’ve only wounded the deer,” Pinky called over his shoulder. “I’ve got to kill it.”

“Do you have to?”

“Keep your voice down,” said Pinky.

“Fuck you,” said Odette. “I’ll wait for you back where we were,” but there was a sudden darting from a bush behind her, and the bleeding deer leaped out, in a mournful gallop, its hip a crimson gash. Pinky raised his gun and fired, catching the deer in the neck. The air shimmered in the echo, and the leaves fell from a horse chestnut. The deer’s legs buckled, and when it tipped over, dead in some berry bushes, its eyes never blinked but stayed lidless and deep, black as outer space.

“I’ll leave the entrails for the hawks,” Pinky said to Odette, but she was not there.

• • •

Only a few of Odette’s poems about whores rhymed—the ones she’d written recently—but perhaps the library crowd would like those best, the anticipation of it, knowing what the next word would be
like
though not what it would
be
; stanza after stanza, it would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.

The local library association had set up a lectern near the windows of the reference room and had arranged chairs in rows
for about eighty people. The room was chilly and alarmingly full. When Odette read she tried to look out past the faces, toward the atlases and the biographical dictionaries. She tugged on the cowl of her sweater and pulled it up over her chin between poems. She tried to pretend people’s heads were all little ears of corn, something a dance instructor had once told her ballet class to do when she was seven and they had had to dance before the parents.

There was silence. A door creaked open then shut. Odette looked up and saw Pinky in the back, tiptoeing over to a chair to sit. She had not seen or spoken to him in a week. Two elderly women in the front turned around to stare.

There were other stanzas, too many, and she sped through them. She took a sip of water and read a poem called “Sleeping Wrong.”
She slept wrong on her back last night
, it began,
and so she holds her head this way, mad with loneliness, madder still with talk.
She then read another long one, titled “Girl Gets Diphtheria, Loses Looks.” She looked up and out. The audience was squinting back at her, their blood sugar levels low from early suppers, their interest redirected now and then toward her shoes,
which were pointy and beige. “I’ll close,” she said loudly into the mike, “with a poem called ‘Le Cirque in the Rain.’ ”

It told the story of a Manhattan call girl worrying a crisis of faith.
What is a halo but a handsome accident / of light and orbiting dust. What is a heart / but a …
She looked out at the two elderly women sitting polite and half attentive, unfazed, in the front row. One of them had gotten out some knitting. Odette looked back at her page.
Chimp in the chest
, she had written in an earlier draft, and that was what she said now.