The Animal Girl (18 page)

Nancy pointed to the symbols on the compartment walls. “This is a nonsmoking compartment, sir.”

“I will be done in a moment,” he said.

The nun turned to him and spoke a rapid sentence of Italian, to which he did not respond. “Americans,” he said, “are so sensitive about a little smoke, no?”

Martin now closed the book he had been reading. Nancy's face was red. She was furious. Nancy responded extremely in cases of small injustice, especially cases of rudeness. Martin had always admired her passion, but she could be uncontainable, too. Once, when she had accompanied him to a conference in New York City, she had charged up to the open window of a cab and shouted at the driver—who'd been honking for no apparent reason—to lay off the horn. “There are other people in this city, too!” she yelled in the man's face. Martin warned her later that she could get them hurt like that someday. She'd just shook her head and said, “I have to vent, Martin. I don't know how you stay so quiet all the time. But I can't do that.” He wished she weren't venting now. He did, it was true, like to stay quiet. Martin crossed his legs. Then he recrossed them the other way, which felt more solid. Something needed to be said. Nancy, of course, was in the right. It was a nonsmoking compartment. Martin held on to his knee with both hands. “Sir,” Martin said, “smoking is not allowed in this compartment.”

“It is raining now,” the man said, gesturing toward the rain-speckled window. Outside, a mist rose from the black mud of farms where cows looked indifferently on at the speeding train. “But later the sun will come out. Then we will have that smell of rain in the air. I love our weather in Italy in the springtime.”

“We're not talking about the weather,” Nancy said. She turned to
Martin and said, “This guy is a genuine idiot.”

“Nancy,” Martin said, in a scolding tone.

“Nancy what?” Nancy said. “Don't you Nancy me.”

“Excuse me,” the man said. He was not smiling now. “Did your wife call me an idiot?”

Martin felt his body temperature rise sharply. He noticed for the first time the thickness of the man's midsection, his girth, his solidity. He noticed a turquoise-colored vein that pulsed now in the man's forehead. He noticed the man's dark pork-chop sideburns, his large mouth, his nicotine-yellow teeth, and again the one gold canine. The boys had abandoned their Latin lesson to look first at the larger man and then at Martin. The pupils seemed to sense, looking back at Martin a second time, what would happen to him in this exchange. “This is a small matter,” Martin said, uncomfortably aware of his sudden retreat. The man smiled again, as if appeased.

“Put your cigarette out,” Nancy said, almost yelling. “This is a nonsmoking compartment.”

“Maybe it is not so small,” the man said. He was done with his cigarette now and snubbed it out with what seemed to Martin like repressed rage.

“I,” Martin said, hesitating. “I don't know. But I think it is small.”

“I don't think so,” the man said. “I think it is big. I think I would like it if your wife apologized for calling me what she called me. I think also that I will have another cigarette.” He lit the cigarette.

“For Christ's sake,” Nancy said.

“Nancy,” Martin scolded.

“You're letting him bully you.”

Martin looked at the man and then at his wife. They were both waiting for him to speak now. The nun had forced the boys to resume their lesson; they were nervously conjugating a word unknown to Martin. “Please,” Martin said as forcefully as possible. “Please put out your cigarette. This is a nonsmoking compartment.”

The man laughed a little. “And if I don't put it out?” he asked. He tipped his head back and blew a great deal of smoke from both his mouth and his nostrils. One of the boys stopped in mid-conjugation and began to cough loudly. “Are we going to … How do you say it?”
The man looked up and seemed to see the words now in the silky gauze of smoke. “Come to blows?”

Martin stood up and took their luggage from the overhead rack. “Excuse me,” he said. “I am going to find us another compartment.” He nodded at Nancy, who had remained seated.

“I'm staying here,” Nancy said.

“I'm sorry you have to go,” the man said. He was smiling again. “It was nice talking.”

“Nancy,” Martin said. “Please come.” Nancy didn't respond. She batted at the smoke with a hand and looked out the window.

“Your wife seems to like it here,” the Italian said.

With the two bags in hand, Martin barely fit into the narrow passageway down which he struggled now, peeking into compartments crowded with weekend travelers. He found no vacancies. The occupants looked back at him with the contempt of those who had seats on a crowded train. Other passengers squeezed past him and his heavy baggage, which made Martin think again of his trumpet case and his morbid little talent. And yet he was now a moderately well-known chemist. If not as famous as Nancy liked to believe he was, he was nonetheless accomplished in his field. He was a person of importance: recognized, esteemed, respected. He stared out the window at the blur of fence posts in the gray air, the weird and rhythmic rise and fall of telephone wires, and the greens and tans and muddy blacks of the Italian landscape to which a thick mist, white as cheese mold, clung. Important or not, he had to endure the shouts of children playing in the corridor and climbing over his luggage. Beads of rainwater rushed down the glass. Martin imagined himself back in his compartment, where, with sudden skill, he lunged at his antagonist with a shiny knife and sliced open his chest, creating a sucking wound that suffocated the large Italian. These bloody urges nauseated Martin, who pushed the violent thoughts away, turned, and headed back. He had no choice.

“You have returned,” the man said. He pulled his legs in, making way for Martin. “Please come in and join us.” Nancy was knitting on a small square of baby-blue fabric and did not look up at him.

“There are no empty seats,” Martin said. “I am afraid the train is full.”

“That is too bad,” the man said. “But I am done smoking now, and I am sorry about our unpleasant exchange. I am not always a nice man.” The man chuckled at his earlier, inconsiderate behavior, then took out a large apple, the polished redness of which seemed almost to glow in the gray compartment.

“I am sorry, too,” Martin said. Martin's response was automatic. He had not meant to be polite or express real regret. But for some reason and for something he was truly sorry.

The nun and her pupils, Martin noticed, had gone. The man must have read Martin's mind just then. “They did not like me much, I guess. I scared them away. I don't understand what is so scary about me. Do you?”

Nancy ignored the man's comments. Martin could hear the clicking of her knitting needles beside him. The Italian produced a small nickel-plated penknife, the sort of knife Martin had used in his violent fantasy, and cut the apple into slices. “This is not, I trust, a non-apple-eating compartment.” He got a good laugh out of his own joke before rapidly consuming the fruit. He clapped his hands as if breaking a spell and said, “If you will excuse me now, I am going to leave you.” He gathered his things. “I am going to the bar car, where perhaps I will meet other devils like myself.”

A while after he left, the nun and her pupils returned, no doubt having also failed to find empty seats. Though Nancy remained cold and distant, Martin ventured to ask what she was knitting. “A sweater for Nina's baby,” Nancy said. But those words—
sweater
and
baby
—were full of her bad mood, so Martin sat back. The silence settled around him for an hour until the air became visually thick and slow like water.

When Martin woke, they were just outside Florence, and he could not remember having fallen asleep. He was trying to reconstruct a dream—a head injury, a slab of black liver, the laughter of a man dressed entirely in white—but these images were rapidly swallowed up in the dusky space of sleep that was behind him now. “You were screaming,” Nancy said. “You had another nightmare. I had to wake you up.”

“Oh,” Martin said. The nun looked at him with great concern and said something in Italian. She had no doubt heard his screams. Had she known him, she would have shrugged it off. He had always had disturbing dreams.

As they walked from the station through the narrow, wet streets, Nancy still refused to talk. Out of nervousness, Martin began to speak for both of them. “Florence,” he said. “The cultural capital of Tuscany, home of the Medicis. There's the Duomo.” He motioned toward the marble cathedral with his head—a heavy suitcase pinned down each hand—but Nancy did not look. Speedy motor scooters dominated the narrow streets and forced Martin and Nancy to stick close to the dripping walls of buildings; rainwater draining from rooftop gutters pelted Martin. The sun broke through the clouds then—a solid white beam—and the air filled with the fresh smell of rain, just as the man had said it would. Martin felt troubled that the stranger's weather report had come to pass.

Nancy was still not talking when they reached Le Hotel Tinto Bianco—The White Hotel—an unsettling name, Martin thought, though Nina and Beat had recommended it to them. The lobby was huge, with twenty-foot ceilings and a number of windows twice Martin's height whose old glass dripped and gathered and bent the light into an aquatic blur. The floors were polished stone, and the aroma of new shoe leather was in the air. Nancy's continued silence forced Martin to deal with the overfriendly clerk, a smallish, rotund man who pounded away at the few English words he knew—
Thank you
and
Very nice
and
Welcome, welcome, welcome
—before speaking ribbons of his own language that Martin, smiling and nodding, pretended to understand. Finally, after Martin signed something, the man handed him an old-fashioned key that felt as heavy as a small pistol.

Their bed was huge, as Nina, smiling suggestively, had told them it would be. It came up to Martin's waist. Its four black posts were made of a dark wood that seemed to emit the smell, both fresh and damp, of a forest. Multiple layers of white sheets gave off a precious, mother-of-pearl glow in the dim room. Martin had the urge to cajole Nancy into the depths of those sheets, where they would cuddle and
perhaps make urgent, restorative love. But when he kissed her neck, she quickly moved to the other side of the hulking bed and sat in a stiff-backed medieval-looking chair. “Nancy,” Martin said.

“You left me with that man. Why did you do that?”

“I asked you to come.”

“I know. But I was too proud to do that, and I didn't know what would happen while you were gone.”

“What happened?” Martin asked.

“Nothing really. He just said things.”

“What things?”

“You know.” She was looking at the floor. “Things.”

“I want to know what he said. Exactly what he said.” Martin stood and paced, rifled his hands deep into his pockets, then sat down again. “Every word of it.”

Nancy began to laugh, but it was not a laugh Martin recognized. It was deep and uncertain and humorless. Then she stopped. “He scared me, Martin. He frightened me.”

“Why didn't you leave when he started”—Martin could barely say it—“started saying things?”

“He put his hand up to the door. He put his feet across the aisle. The nun and the boys had already left. He said something to them in Italian, and I guess they didn't want to be in there with him. I would have had to walk right through him, and he was saying things the whole time. He didn't touch me, but he wasn't just going to let me go.”

“Why didn't you tell me when I came back? Why didn't you say something then?”

“He scared me, Martin,” she said.

Martin stood up from his chair. “I don't understand that. How could you be so scared that you couldn't talk to me?”

“I guess you've never been afraid, right, Martin?”

“I would have done something.” Martin sat back down.

“Oh, really?” Nancy said. “You actually
apologized
to him. You told him you were sorry.” Nancy began to cry. Martin sat in the purplish dim of the room, saying nothing and watching the minute digit change twice on the bedside clock before walking over to Nancy and cautiously touching her back. Her skin felt surprisingly hot. “What
would you have done,” she asked, “if we'd had a baby? Would you still have left?”

“We don't have a baby.”

“But if we had?” she asked. When he did not answer, she said bitterly, “You ran away. You left me.”

“I'm a chemist,” Martin said. “I'm not a …”—but he didn't know what he wasn't. He didn't have a word for it. A courageous man, a hero, or just a man of average instincts who would have had the proper animal sense to protect his wife. If that were so, he couldn't say it. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Don't apologize,” she said. “It makes you sound weak.” Then she said, “God,” as if she were frightened again. “You couldn't even make that bastard put out a cigarette.”

“I could have.” He hated the sound of his voice just then—the small stubbornness of it, like a child demanding something it knew it couldn't have.

“When I married you, I thought I would at least be safe. I thought you were a safe man. I thought you guaranteed me at least that much.”

Martin left the room then and walked the huge halls of the old hotel, listening to the squish-squish of his thick-soled tennis shoes echo and die. A trickle of water began somewhere behind the stone walls, followed by the asthmatic respiration of pipes. It was early evening, and molten slabs of late sunlight fell through the towering windows and across the corridor. Martin would just have to wait. Nancy was headstrong, could hold a grudge, could even be vindictive. But with time, she softened and saw how unreasonable and demanding she could be. Sometimes it took her only an afternoon, other times longer, as when Martin had thrown her a surprise birthday party four days early—on the date, Nancy knew, of his first girlfriend's birthday. Martin had been sorry and extremely embarrassed. She had seen his slip as a sign of an unfaithful heart still in the grasp of an old love. He had denied it vehemently, pleaded, even written her a love note belittling himself as an absentminded fool. It had taken her two full days to speak to him kindly again, three to accept his apologies. Once she had held a grudge against her mother for three weeks before breaking down on the phone and reconciling. But she always forgave.