The Animal Girl (19 page)

When he returned to his room, Nancy was asleep. He undressed, climbed onto the vast bed, and cuddled into her. He remembered warmer times when he had rested in his wife's arms and she had eagerly given him all sensual comforts. They often made love in the mornings with the sun falling over them through their window. “My chemist,” she would call him afterward. Martin was erect now. He hooked his arm around Nancy, slipped his fingers beneath the lace border of her bra and found her nipple. This was not usually Martin's way: to disturb her sleep, her peace, for the sake of his urges. But for the moment, he felt the blood flow through him. He was acting according to a natural right. An appetite. He held her breast firmly. A deep, muscular spasm shivered through her. In a surprising display of somnambulant force, she clamped onto his wrist, removed his arm, turned away from him more completely and continued to sleep.

The two days that followed were tainted and sour. Martin and Nancy ate in many of the restaurants Nina and Beat had recommended, but Nancy showed no signs of enjoying the food. They saw the Uffizi and the Palacio Medici. Martin, who had read a great deal on the subject, lectured Nancy about these intellectual princes, and she nodded the whole time, though he suspected that his acumen was no longer attractive to her. He felt her repulsion, her new belief that his intelligence was a sign of weakness. A hired guide explained Michelangelo's
David
, its odd proportions, the principles of perspective underlying its design. Nancy nonetheless concluded that David's oversized head looked somehow wrong and obscene. They climbed the bell tower of the Duomo and were told by an androgynous-looking stranger—he or she looked starved and gasped for air at the top of the climb—that the tower ledge was the city's most popular site for suicides. They walked over the Ponte Vecchio, the only ancient bridge in Florence to survive the Nazis' bombs. There they looked down on the brown water of the Arno that seeped with mud and chemical sludge, and Martin purchased a handsome gold necklace from one of the many jewelers on the bridge. Nancy thanked him, but did not try it on.

Later that afternoon, Nancy bought a piece of citrus from a street market. They sat on the steps of a cathedral in the sun to eat it. It was
egg-shaped and green, larger and sweeter than a grapefruit, and its unfamiliarity surprised Martin, who had assumed citrus fruit was a known quantity to him. He would like to learn its name and where it grew, he told Nancy. “That's typical Martin,” Nancy said. “Why can't you just eat it? Why can't you just enjoy it?”

“I'm a scientist, all right?” Martin said, sucking the sticky sugar from his fingers. He was surprised by his angry tone. “I like to name things, and I like to know things.” He then took out a map and began to plan their way back to the hotel. When she asked him to please take his face out of the map and enjoy the city around him, he ignored her. Martin felt pleasantly addicted to his bit of anger. He would keep it. She tugged at his map then. He ignored her again. She tugged a second time and then, more sternly, a third. When he finally moved it aside, he looked down and saw that it had not been Nancy but a monkey dressed in a sky-blue tuxedo jacket and a French beret of the same color. He jumped to his feet. “Jesus!” he shouted. His heart was racing. The animal had given him a shock. It advanced a step and held out its furry, oddly human hand.

“It's just an organ-grinder's monkey,” Nancy said. “It wants money.” Martin heard the tinkling music in the distance. A yellow smiley-face button on the creature's tuxedo jacket said in English, “Hi! I'm Mario the monkey. Please don't feed me and please don't hold me.” So naturally Nancy knelt and put her arms out to it. “Oh my,” she said, lifting it, “you're heavy, aren't you?”

“The button says not to do that,” Martin said. Nancy was sometimes too unafraid, especially when it came to any creature she found cute. The monkey looked uncertain, fearful, as if it had come to a place in Nancy's embrace where its choices had run out. It began to poke her with a hand. It reached in her breast pocket and gouged at her ribcage, then thrust its hand in her crotch pocket. With its other arm, it held on to Nancy. She let out a quick sound—something between a laugh and a scream. The animal seemed to be attacking her, and Martin grasped its midsection with both hands and began to tug until he yanked the monkey loose and found himself in a near panic, with this warm-bodied creature clinging to him and shrieking in his ear. “Jesus!” he shouted. He swung around twice and launched
the animal into the air. It landed squarely on its four limbs and ran in a circle, performing somersaults and making a series of spastic primate sounds before it faced him, beat its hairy chest, and seemed to scream with laughter in his face. The organ grinder was shouting across the square, “No touch the monkey! No touch the monkey!”

“What were you doing, Martin?” Nancy asked.

“I thought it was trying to hurt you,” he said. He was out of breath and trembling. He knew now that he might have overreacted.

“It was just tickling me or something! I was fine!”

Nancy was yelling at him, and a small crowd had gathered. A little boy, who was maybe five and had a choke hold on a plastic replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and purple lips from eating too much of some candy, asked his father in a British accent, “Why'd that man try to hurt the monkey?”

“I thought you needed to be protected,” Martin said as Nancy and he hurried away from the scene.

“It was a harmless animal,” she whispered fiercely. When he started to reply, she interrupted him. “You're trying too hard, Martin.”

He reached out, wanting to put his hand on her back as they walked through the streets, but she kept herself just far enough ahead of him, just out of reach.

Over lunch the next day, their last in Florence, Nancy apologized. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to Martin, who had seen her work through anger and disappointment numerous times, but it did. She looked up from her plate of linguini and clam sauce and said, “I guess I have been … bull-headed. I ruined our vacation.”

“I thought I was the one who ruined things,” Martin said.

“And I'm sorry I did it,” she said. She reached across the table and took his hand, and Martin was stunned by the utter lack of relief he felt. He'd been waiting all weekend for a small portion of forgiveness; now it had come, and he felt nothing. “I knew who you were when I married you. I knew you were no bar fighter. I married a sensitive and thoughtful man.”

Martin sensed a hesitance in her voice, as if she were still convincing herself that he was not at fault. “You still wish I had fought him.”
Martin looked down. “You wish I had stood up to him.”

“I don't,” Nancy said. “Not really.”

“Not really?”

“You did the smart thing.” She was making an effort to be logical and reasonable now. “I should have been as smart. I'm the one who was determined to stay in that cabin, even once I saw that we were dealing with a real bastard. That was a stupid, stubborn thing to do.”

“I should have done something,” Martin insisted.

“Would you please let me apologize?” Nancy said, a little irritated.

“He said things.”

“And that's all he did. It wasn't your fault.”

On the train back to Basel, Martin wanted to talk about what he thought of now as his failure, an event for which he blamed himself more and more now that Nancy did not. Her releasing him from responsibility had only made him clench up with self-recrimination. She insisted that they leave it behind. “That's over. That's in the past.” She knew how he could obsess over a misplaced comma or a typo that a copy editor had failed to catch in one of his articles—the smallest of mistakes could fill him with regret—and she was not going to let him obsess over this. “Let it go,” she said. “You did the right thing. Period end.” Nancy could become combative so quickly, and Martin did not want a fight, so he backed down and stayed quiet until she fell asleep.

Out in the corridor, where he had gone to think, Martin felt his chest tighten and a ball of hot fear rise into his throat when he saw a man dressed in a dark business suit, as the Italian had been, walking away from him and into the next car. But this man was smaller than the Italian, another man altogether. Martin locked himself into the tiny train lavatory, where he sat on the toilet seat with his pants on, his knees pushed against the sink. In front of him, he read in four languages a brief sentence forbidding the disposal of sanitary napkins in the toilet.
Amore, amamus, amare
. He tried his old Latin out, though he was certain that he had declined the verb wrong. He punched at the air with a fist. Had he just stayed in his seat four days ago, just exercised a little courage, no doubt the Italian would have conceded, extinguished his cigarette, and Martin would not have to sit now
looking back on the event with the hopeless need to alter it. Pushing his face against the tiny lavatory window behind which the green Tuscan landscape now glowed lavender with sunset, Martin tried to release himself into the spacious beauty of the view and gain a larger perspective from which he could see how silly and small his regrets about this weekend were. But he could only feel the chilliness of the glass against his chin and take in, with every breath, the harsh floral scent of the ammonia-chloride tablet in the toilet bowl beneath him.

That night, Nancy made love to him with rare passion. She straddled him in the dark, a sheet of moonlight throwing her gigantic shadow over the wall, and gripped his shoulders with a force that left red welts the next day. She called out his name repeatedly, and Martin tried to grasp her shoulders and arms with a tenacity and strength to equal hers, but he couldn't seem to hold on. So he lay there and let himself be taken. Afterwards, she spooned him and whispered into his ear, “My dear little chemist,” once comforting words that made him recoil now and move to his side of the bed as Nancy drifted into sleep.

He woke too early that morning, as he would the next and two or three mornings each week during that spring, from nightmares, and Nancy cuddled him back to sleep. If he had always had bad dreams, they had never occurred with the frequency, darkness, and confusion of the dreams that came to him now. As weeks passed, Martin felt he was gaining a comfortable distance from the event. Nina had her baby, and Nancy and he began talking about having their own family. Twice, however, as spring turned to summer, Martin believed he saw the Italian rounding a street corner in Basel. He cautiously eyed men who wore jewelry. Once, in a small bar, he smelled a certain perfumed tobacco and became distracted from the conversation of his colleagues. On a Saturday afternoon in late fall, the chill of coming winter in the air and the narrow brick path that passed the animal cages crinkling beneath them with leaves, Nancy and he accompanied Beat, Nina, and their baby to the zoo. When Nancy stopped in front of the monkeys, she began laughing. “Did I ever tell you about the time Martin attacked the monkey?” she said. The look Martin gave her then took the smile from her face. “Never mind,” she said, and their friends, seeming to sense his discomfort, did not press the issue.

Time would make this memory fade, of course. It was, Martin knew, a small, unsubstantial thing. Better thoughts would crowd this incident out, would drive it from his sleep. Nancy loved him, and his future children, he was certain, would love him, too, and feel safe with him. He
was
a safe man, even if he was a quiet one. And if he remained quiet about this, too, if he did not speak of it or think of it, this small matter would dwindle in memory so that in the years to come Martin would no longer have to recall what he had failed to do in a few moments on a train one afternoon, in his youth, in the early years of his marriage.

Evelyn met Russell one afternoon in a neighborhood café so full that she had no choice—or so she told herself then—but to sit down in an empty chair across from him. He was not at all bad looking, in his mid-forties perhaps, and had always sat alone when Evelyn had seen him at this café in the past. He wore a thick, grandfatherly beard that was graying, in contrast to his dark hair; and his full, soft face and hazel eyes seemed to promise, at the very least, kindness and intelligence. But she was getting ahead of herself, as was her tendency with men. In the four years since her divorce, she'd gone through several relationships—so promising in their first weeks and months of dinners out, of movies and drinks, and finally, in the case of a few men she'd decided she liked a great deal, never mind that she'd only known them a few weeks, lovemaking and the languorous conversations afterwards, during which she knew she talked too much. She talked on and on—about the weather, the quality of the light in the room, the color of the curtains she hated in her living room, the light fixture and rug that weren't quite right and for which, after months of looking, she'd failed to find adequate replacements, her Zodiac sign (she was a Cancer and, as such, a natural homemaker), her mother, her father, her siblings, none of whom she was particularly close to. On and on, she'd talk. And soon after this phase of lovemaking and naked conversation began, her relationship would crash. The man would neither call nor return her calls. She would sleep alone and fully clothed in flannel pajamas and socks. She would consider the grim facts again and again: She was forty-three, divorced, childless, if nonetheless a successful professional, a woman techie, cofounder of her own small firm, Websmith Design. And then, after some months, two, three, six, even a year, as was the case on the afternoon she met Russell, she'd try again.

“I hope you don't mind me sitting here,” she said. “I'm afraid I have nowhere else to go.” She looked over the crowded, sun-filled café, the tables around them occupied by young couples and mothers weighed down by infants—infants in high-tech slings, infants in strollers, in laps, in arms, infants toddling, falling, crying. This first sunny warm day in early April had made Ann Arbor into a noisy playground of mothers and loud, shrill children, all of whom had come out, it seemed, to mark the end of the cold weather. “My goodness, the young hordes have been set free, haven't they?” Evelyn said, realizing too late that her comment sounded snide.