Still Life with Elephant (2 page)

“S
O–HE
didn't come home last night?” Alana asked me. She is my dearest, closest friend, and I had called her early the following morning.

I was holding my breath to stop the hiccupping that was the result of too much crying, which was how I had spent the whole night.

“Nooo,” I answered, releasing a cascade of pent-up hiccups. “He never came home.”

“What a bastard!” she proclaimed. “You'd think he would have done the right thing and called you himself.”

“The right thing would have been not to screw her.”

“What a snake,” she said. “And a coward,” she added. “You'll never be able to dust his chicken.”

“Dust his chicken?”

“Trust him again,” she said.

“The thing is”—I hiccupped—“I trusted her, too. She came into my home. She ate my food.” Hiccup. “I even trusted her with my mother's secret recipe for fruit stollen.” Hiccup, hiccup.

“I would think you'd be more upset that you trusted her with Matt,” Alana said dryly.

“Well, I trusted Matt first, of course,” I said. “I trusted him to uphold his end of our marriage. If I trusted him, I shouldn't have to worry about trusting anyone who's with him.” I then excused myself to grab my third box of tissues in twenty-four hours.

“So now what?” Alana asked when I got back to the phone.

I didn't know.

I kept thinking about when I finally did get pregnant. Last year. It was after four in-vitros. And it wound up being ectopic. I went
through an emergency operation and lost an ovary and a fallopian tube, after which the surgeon came in, and said very matter-of-factly, “Sorry, but we lost your ovary and a tube,” like, Oops, where did I put those damn things, anyway?

I thought how very ectopic this all was getting now. So ectopic that now Matt's baby was in someone else's uterus.

“You want me to come over and spend a few days?” Alana asked.

“No,” I said, “you have your own family to worry about. And I need to be by myself.”

“You should have someone around you,” she said. “You should be able to walk a shoe in some gum.”

I didn't ask her what she meant. I reheard it later in my head: she had said, Talk it through with someone.

I spent the next three days alone with my stack of CDs, playing mostly stuff by
Black Sabbath.
I was angry. Sad. Angry. Sad. Furious. I didn't do my usual morning jelly-donut-and-coffee run, which I even managed to do two years ago after I had broken my right leg. At the time, I just used my left leg for both pedals, on a manual-shift truck, because I have to have my jelly donuts.

 

Matt didn't call. And I wasn't about to call him. What would I say? “How exciting that you're finally able to start a family! Need help picking out names?”

Matt didn't e-mail, write, telegraph, send up a smoke signal, or in any way let me know that he was sorry or repentant or still alive. It was as though he had disappeared into a black hole. Or maybe I had. Because it felt like I had just stepped off the curb and fallen into a deep abyss of disbelief and misery. Was he still going to work? With
her
? Like it just was any regular, ordinary day, except that he was just coming home to a different person at night?

I hoped she was puking ten times a day and gaining weight like a brood mare.

 

It was Thursday, three days after Holly's phone call, when I finally heard from Matt. “I didn't know she was going to do that,” he said, by way of apology.

“Do what?” I asked. “Get pregnant or call me?”

“Actually, both,” he said. “I was horrified when she told me. I just couldn't face you.”

“And if she hadn't called, this would have—what?—just continued until the kid went off to college? I mean, she's already three months pregnant. I trusted—” My throat closed around my vocal cords, and all I could do was produce a strangled sound, like a seal.

“Neelie, I'm so sorry,” he said. “I'm not even staying with her. I'm staying in a motel. Until we can talk. You and me. We need to talk.”

“What's there to talk about?” I asked.

“I was—I don't know.” He took a deep breath. “The practice was getting so busy, and I was under a lot of pressure. So stressed out, and she and I were together every night until late, and you—”

I knew that he had been getting home late. Later every week. I was leaving nice dinners for him on the kitchen counter. Love notes in his underwear while he showered in the morning, even though he had been too exhausted to have sex with me for weeks. There were phone calls during lunch, made from my cell phone while I was atop a rearing horse, for God's sake, to keep things good between us. To keep the connection.

“You were having an affair with her when I lost the baby!” I gasped, my outrage slamming my heart into my lungs.

He didn't answer. “I felt we were drifting,” he finally said. “I was getting mooned.”

Maybe it was marooned—I had stopped listening by now. Then I hung up.

And I realized that I had not only been deaf, I had also been blind.

W
E ARE
all somebody's rescues. Grace, my Boston terrier. Alley, my cat. And even Mousi. All rescues. I rescue friends from hard times, and families from crisis. I went to school to be a social worker. I was trained to rescue.

I won't bore you with all my rescues, or the details. Except that I found Grace in the middle of the road while on my way to work and Alley as a kitten, half frozen, next to the donut shop.

“Damn disposable mentality,” Matt said with some disgust when I rushed Grace to his office so he could fix her broken jaw. She was maybe five months old, and we put ads everywhere and waited for someone to claim her. No one did, and I named her Grace because she was gracious enough to forgive half of the human race and love me unconditionally. I say half the human race because, after her jaw healed, all men, except for Matt, became the brunt of her fury and the recipients of her sharp little teeth, which she usually implanted somewhere below their knees if they dared to step into the house.

I found Mousi in the hands of an abusive trainer and bought him on the spot.

I suppose that I took a little satisfaction in thinking I had rescued Matt in some way. He was lonely, and he was hungry for family. He had been an only child, and had lost his parents early in life. He wanted to come home to someone, to belong somewhere. He wanted to be able to call and tell someone that he was going to be late, and have her care about it and say, “Okay, hon, I'll be waiting.” He wanted to be able to say, “Oh, I'd better check first with my wife.”

I gave him all that and more. I gave him a home and meals and holidays where we had to be someplace by noon, and in-laws and love. God, I loved him. I gave him my extra pillow when his neck hurt. I gave him the last piece of chocolate pie. I turned off the radio that I always kept playing, because he liked the house quiet when he got home. I left the window open in the winter because he liked to sleep cold. I
gave
him cold air!

He rescued me, too, in a sense. From being alone. From the dark sweep that overtook me because I hadn't found my way back to riding professionally yet.

Maybe Holly thought she was rescuing Matt as well. Poor overworked, underappreciated Matt, trapped in a marriage with a woman who left him alone every summer for two whole weeks at a time, so she could bring her students to silly horse shows. Handsome, deliciously unavailable Matt. It must have warmed her heart to rescue him from all that.

 

He called me again on Friday. I was out riding a horse I had gotten in for retraining. I kept my cell phone clipped to the side pocket of my britches, in vibration mode, so it wouldn't startle the horse. I felt the buzz and asked the horse I was riding to halt, so I could check the phone. The horse wouldn't halt. She backed up, shifted herself sideways, leapt forward, then gave a series of tiny half-rears, but I got a glimpse of the phone number. It was Matt, calling from his cell, which he normally keeps plugged into his car. It meant he didn't want to use his office phone. I looked at the number and clipped the phone onto my pocket again to let the voice mail take it. I would delete it later without listening to it.

I was riding Isis, a big chestnut horse with brown coin dapples, and she hated to halt. That's why she was sent to me. She wouldn't stand still at the halt. Instead, she jumped around like Baryshnikov. I suppose somebody once tried to teach her to piaffe, an advanced dressage movement where they prance in place, and now she fretted about it all the time. So I sat on her, patting her neck and wait
ing. I thought about Matt and how I used to reach over and pat his hand in bed, and how he would pull it over his heart. It meant he loved me, but was too sleepy to say the words. Sometimes he pulled it down over his penis and held it there, which meant he wanted me but was too sleepy to do anything about it, and we would fall asleep like that.

Ten minutes passed and I just sat there. Twenty. I didn't ask Isis to do anything. I just let my seat slump down into the saddle. I made sure I barely touched her with my legs; I kept the reins quiet. I thought about Matt and let the tears roll down my face.

Isis never suspected how upset her rider was. She had her own problems to worry about. And I sat there, realizing that I really would have to talk to Matt again at some point. I would have to pay attention to his words.

 

This is why I train horses. They don't speak words, they just move. They lift their heads, twitch their ears, swish a tail, lean to one side or the other. They run away. Or they don't move forward at all and rear straight up. It all means something. I understand conversations like this. Horses speak volumes without saying a word. They never lie. They never say, “Sorry, hon, we had this emergency come in at the last minute. I'll be late,” and then screw around.

I listened politely to what Isis was telling me with her body, and then I told her my side of the story. What I wanted her to do for me. All without a word being exchanged. I understood Isis when she hopped around after I asked her to halt. She was telling me that when she used to halt someone had bashed her with a whip, to make her prance. Now she was afraid to stand still. So I sat there and told her, with my body, that we were just going to stand there and do nothing until she relaxed.

I checked my watch. It was twenty-five minutes before she started chewing at the bit and let out the long snort-sigh that told me she finally understood me. She dropped her head and stood still. I dismounted immediately, which was her reward. Then I reached
into my pocket and took out a sugar cube and gave her a treat. She had learned something. She had made a decision to trust me, and I was honored.

I had made a decision, too, by that time.

 

I called Alana when I got back to the house. “I need help,” I said. “I have some major cleaning to do.”

“What exactly are you planning to clean?” I could hear the suspicion in her voice.

“Just some stuff. Are you in?”

“Is this the sponging of rats?”

“Why would I sponge rats?”

“Expunging of Matt?”

“Exactly.”

 

Alana got a babysitter for her two little girls, brought over an extra-garlic pizza, and spent the rest of that day and most of the night helping me clean every bit of Matt from the house. Every piece of clothing, every sock, every picture. She even helped me haul his favorite recliner to the curb. If I could have scraped off his DNA from everything he ever touched, I would have done that, too. I kept thinking about his remark about the disposable society we live in, and the irony of it. He had disposed of me. Neat and fast, moving right on to family number two.

“Damn disposable mentality,” he had said, and, unwittingly, I became part of it. I guess everything is disposable, because now I was cutting his photos out of albums, shredding his shirts, stretching out his sweaters, tying knots in his tighty whities, and then bringing everything to the curb, where it would sit, unrescued, until the garbage truck came to whisk it away. Irony. Irony.

There was one last box, up in the attic, and it contained his stuff from vet school. Some books, an old stethoscope, a stained lab coat, a large picture of his graduating class in a plain black frame. I sat
down in the old broken Windsor chair that we had planned to refinish someday, and studied his picture. There he was, standing in the white lab coat, in the back row, because he's tall, looking very young and serious, with a mustache. I had never seen him with his mustache, and he looked so different from the current Matt. He must have shaved it off after he graduated. It made him hard to recognize, but it was him. Then I looked closer.

And found out his secret.

S
ECRETS ARE
like plants. They can stay buried deep in the earth for a long time, but eventually they'll send up shoots and give themselves away. They have to. It's their nature. Just a tiny green stem at first. Which slowly, insidiously grows taller, stronger, unfolding itself, until there it is. A big fat secret, right in front of your face; a fully bloomed flower perfumed with the scent of deception.

I had Matt's picture from vet school in front of me, and I was scrutinizing every inch of it, like a microscope specimen.

I never knew that Matt and Holly had been classmates. They were standing next to each other. She had her chin tilted up, and her long, sun-streaked hair was blowing sideways. She was all white teeth, wide smile, heart-shaped face. He was looking at her, intent and serious. I know that look, and I had to turn the picture over and put it down.

“That's probably why she called him for a job in the first place,” Alana said, taking the picture from me and studying it. “They had a history.”

“He never told me that he knew her before,” I said. I felt sick. Then I tore the picture up and dropped it into a green plastic trash bag. That's where histories go.

 

“Am I so ugly?” I asked Alana when we were finished. We were having tea in the kitchen, well after midnight. She had clients to counsel in the morning and her husband to get home to, and she had to leave soon. The radio was playing Vivaldi very softly in the
background. I like Vivaldi because he's undemanding. You don't need to think him through. When you listen to Vivaldi, you can squash your feelings down and let the music fill in the spaces with its controlled, you-always-know-where-it's-going progressions.

“You're very pretty,” she said. “Matt's crazy to leave you.” I looked at my face in the bowl of the spoon that I was using to stir sugar into my tea. I have nice features. I have long, thick brown hair and green eyes. I am slim. I have a rider's body. My childhood trainer always complimented me like that. “You have a rider's body,” she would say. The first time she said it, I was eleven, and I thought she meant there was something wrong with me. I had the beginning of breasts and hips, which I hated, and had just started my period, which I hated, and now, of all things, I had a rider's body. But she meant I was short-waisted, with long legs to wrap around the sides of the horse. “You are all legs,” she would say. All legs. And then I thought, Great—because riding was going to be my life.

All legs, I think now. Did that preclude brains?

“I guess I look okay,” I mumbled.

“I always thought you were striking,” Alana said. “I wish I had your figure.”

Alana is short and very rotund, with curly peach-colored hair and light-blue eyes and freckles. I wish I had her serenity.

And her two daughters. I was hoping to have a daughter.

We drank our tea in silence, except for an occasional burp from one or the other of us, thanks to the extra garlic on the pizza.

“Holly is something that should be hung. That's what you do with Holly,” Alana finally said with some disgust. “Who the hell names a kid Holly?”

“Don't talk to me about naming kids right now,” I said.

We ate a few slices of pizza in silence. “I should have gotten two pizzas,” Alana finally said after we each tried to put dibs on the last slice. “This is definitely a two-pizza night.”

“You can have it,” I relented. “Because you're my friend.”

“Well, as your friend, I have more advice,” she said, sprinkling a
little salt on the last slice. “Protect your finances. The house. Accounts. Double-check any CDs you might have. Make sure they are intact.”

“What would Matt want with my music?” I asked her.

She rolled her eyes at me. “Bank accounts, honey. Certificates of deposit.”

“Oh.” I flapped my hand at her. “Matt wouldn't do anything unethical.”

“Except get another woman pregnant,” she pointed out.

“Money is different,” I said. “There is no raging hormonal drive for money.”

“That we know of,” said Alana.

 

I took Alana's advice, and the very next day I checked with my bank. The clerk was very sweet and efficient and spent a very long time looking at the screen of her computer before walking away and coming back with the manager. I knew what that meant. She didn't want to be the bearer of bad news.

“All your accounts have been closed,” the manager said, double-checking the screen. “The CDs are cashed out; 401s are cashed out. The only thing you have open is your checking account. The balance is two hundred and twenty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents.”

“How can that be?” I asked, breathless with shock. I grabbed the counter between us to keep from slumping to the floor.

“Dr. Sterling did it all chipmunks to go,” she said, impatient to hurry me along since it was Saturday and they were closing soon.

I think she said “six months ago,” but what did it matter? Everything we had worked for was gone. I turned away so she wouldn't see my tears. I barely made it to my car. If there was a word beyond “stunned,” I was it. I felt stunned and bludgeoned. Blunned, maybe. I hadn't suspected a thing. But then I did something I had sworn I wasn't going to do.

I got a lawyer.

 

If I were still counseling clients, I would have told the offended wife, if she wanted to salvage the relationship, to initiate a dialogue between herself and the errant spouse. To take some responsibility for the loss of communication. To consider several strategies, which would be proposed by me with great confidence, until she found the one that worked. Did she want to be self-righteous or did she want to be happy? Commence the healing process, I would have advised, and work on moving forward with it.

Great advice.

Buzz words.

When I had my practice, I found it getting harder and harder to force myself to concentrate on the problems that my clients were bringing to me. Harder to pay attention to them, to care about their words. Their sentences started to sound like those spam e-mails you get when the subject is a bunch of nonsense words designed to fool your spam filter. Snoxhill cannonball snow juice. Perimeter apple feet platinum. I didn't want to listen anymore.

People are all about words. Sentences, paragraphs, pauses, expectations. Demands. I needed to get away from all of it. Matt encouraged me to ride again. We were doing pretty well financially, he said, and he encouraged me to find my way back to what I really loved. I felt so lucky that he understood. I closed my practice and recommended Alana to all my clients. And I stumbled toward something I had once turned away from.

I have an affinity for solving problems. Troubled people. Troubled horses. They are not so different. I knew I would be able to turn the lives of problem horses around and spare them from getting passed from owner to owner or, worse, ending up in a slaughterhouse.

I
needed
to save horses. I needed very much to save horses.

That was my secret.