The Animal Girl (3 page)

When she nodded, he seemed immensely relieved, his step lighter now as they walked hand in hand, swinging their linked arms, up a dirt path until they came to a clearing in the trees. Startled, a deer sprinted through the high grass, dove into the trees, and was gone. In the orange evening light, Charles looked larger, less meek, and Kate couldn't help wondering what this gentle man would be like with a gun. “What's it like to kill something?” she asked.

“You might not like me as much if I told you the truth.”

Kate laughed and squeezed his hand. “I promise I'll still like you.”

“OK,” Charles said. “It's thrilling. It's why you go out there. It's the fun part.”

“It's fun to kill?” If she didn't like him less, it still wasn't the most pleasant answer, nor one she understood.

“Perhaps ‘fun' isn't exactly the right word.”

On their walk back, the temperature dropped sharply, and Kate was shivering so violently that she had to wonder if her vulnerability to the cold had to do with her illness. Was she weaker than she'd suspected? When they parked in front of Kate's house, she kissed him once, but pulled away when he wanted to continue. “I should tell you something,” she said, still shivering. The dark inside the car, the fact that she could see only the outline of his face, made it easier to lie to him. “I'm recovering from cancer. Breast,” she said, stopping so that odd word stood alone. “Recovered, I mean. I wouldn't mention it, but I need to tell you that I have a scar.”

“A scar?” he said.

“I had a mastectomy. My left breast.” She hated the feeling of shame that accompanied what she had just said. It was merely a fact, and she should have had the presence of mind to treat it as such.

There was a pause before he said, “I'm sorry.”

Kate couldn't see the expression on his face, but she sensed that something was different between them. An ease, an excitement was gone. “Does that change things?” she asked.

Again, he took time in answering. “I don't think so.”

“You don't think so?” The anger in her voice half surprised her. She didn't know him well enough to be angry with him.

“It's just that …” He stopped himself and reformulated his thought. “This was supposed to be a light thing. No commitment. Nothing serious.”

“What does this have to do with commitment?”

“I don't know,” he said. Then he bumbled out, “It seems serious. It seems …”

“All right,” she said. She got out of his car, and before she'd closed the front door behind her, she heard him say, “I'll call you.”

Inside, she found Melissa and Mark on the couch watching a movie in the dark. It was a school night, and they were openly defying the rule she'd set down. She turned the lights on, and they looked at her, squinting in the brightness. “Mark has to leave now.” Her anger was too pronounced, too obviously out of proportion. Their response to it was to remain frozen in each other's arms. Kate wanted to throw something at them—a shoe, a book, even her purse would
have worked. “I said now,” Kate said. Mark finally sat up and rushed to put his shoes on.

“Did something happen on your date?” Melissa asked.

“I didn't have a date.”

She expected a fight from Melissa. But instead her daughter sat up slowly and kept her eyes cautiously on Kate.

Charles called all week and left pleas on the answering machine that Kate tried her best to ignore. He was blunt. He stuttered and repeated himself. He admitted that he'd been thinking of her. He regretted the words he'd spoken that night. “I'm calling from the back of the store,” he said in one message. “From the warehouse phone. You were right. It is lonely back here.” In another, he became almost desperate. “I guess I just miss you. I hope I'm not saying too much. I realize this is just an answering machine. I realize that I'm begging.” He sounded as hurt and alone as she had felt in the car that night. Nonetheless, she was done with him, until he made what was obviously his final call, the sad bass-tone of resignation in his voice. “I'm sorry things didn't work out,” he said. When she picked up the phone, he began once again to express his regrets, and because she couldn't listen to one more simultaneously rambling and halting apology, she said, “OK, Charles. Apology accepted.”

He wanted to see her as soon as possible. That afternoon he and his son, Ryan, had planned to shoot skeet at the gun club. And so Kate ended up on the edge of town, shouldering a shotgun for the first time in her life and wearing wax earplugs as she blasted away at a “clay pigeon,” a little black disk, and tried to follow the instructions Charles shouted out at her to lead the pigeon by at least a foot. The gun club was in the center of an abandoned field, which looked dead, yellow, and already ravaged by winter. It was a gray day, the air like white smoke, and Kate was surprised by the pleasing and substantial weight of the weapon in her hands, the delicious, earthy odors of cordite and gunpowder after each blast, the sense—there was no mistaking it—of power and control the weapon gave her when she finally obliterated her target. She did so twice, then three times, awed as the disk disintegrated in the air. Behind her, a small boy of aboutten,
who wore a camouflage baseball cap and chewed a huge wad of pink bubble gum, pressed a button that released the pigeon every time she shouted the word “Pull!” She handed the shotgun, its barrel hot as a stovetop, to Charles and stood behind him—“Always stand behind the shooter,” he'd told her earlier in a grave voice—and watched now as he meticulously hit pigeon after pigeon. She hadn't anticipated her excitement at seeing Charles's skill, the quickness with which he trained the barrel on the target and destroyed it. His arms seemed thicker, more powerful, his shoulders broader. There was no sign of weakness, of hesitancy or doubt, and she was awed to see this unexpected competence in a man who, as she was seeing that afternoon, could barely keep his son in check.

Ryan was a tall kid with deep-set eyes that seemed on the edge of rage every time he looked at Kate. His mohawk, high and stiff and died salmon pink, and his multiply-pierced ears, lined with studs and hoops, made him seem menacing, especially when he took the shotgun in hand. On the way out to the club, when Charles had stopped for gas and left Kate and Ryan in the car alone, the boy resisted her every attempt at conversation, and then, after she had given up, he smiled at her and said, “Are you fucking my dad yet?”

“I'm not going to answer that question.”

“None of my business, right?” he said. “You've probably already seen that he's a wimp. He lets people do whatever they want to him. He just takes it.”

“I'm not that kind of person,” Kate said.

Ryan nodded. “Sure you're not.”

Whenever Ryan missed his target that afternoon, he cringed and swore, sometimes under his breath, though more often out loud. “Fuck me,” he half shouted once, to which Charles merely responded with a warning glance. Kate would have sent him to the car at the very least. Ryan had certainly been right about his father: He did seem willing to take just about anything.

Kate was relieved when they dropped Ryan at home later and went out to a pleasant dinner with wine. When late in the meal Charles sighed and said, “I'm too easy on Ryan. I let him get away with everything,” Kate lied.

“I'm not so sure that's wrong,” she said. “Every kid needs a different approach.”

He shook his head. “My motives aren't that noble. I just want him to like me again.”

They joined hands across the table now. Kate felt terrible for this worried father, this man who just wanted to be liked, and her pity quickly transformed into attraction. She knew already that she wanted to sleep with him that night. She was blushing when she stammered out an invitation. “You can say no,” she added.

But he didn't say no. Kate hardly knew how she'd imagined herself behaving then, though she hoped that passion and desire would take over, that she'd know what to do. Instead, she and Charles waited for the bill in utter silence, which persisted as they drove toward Kate's place, the black trees and the proper Victorian homes rising on either side of them in the dark. “Let's talk,” Kate said.

“OK,” Charles said. But they didn't say another word until they stood facing each other across Kate's bed. For a change, Kate was relieved that Melissa had once again defied her and was out that night. “We don't have to do this,” she said.

“I want to,” he said, though he didn't sound as if he did.

When she came out of the bathroom wearing a man's white T-shirt that fell to her thighs, she didn't feel at all attractive. Charles sat on the edge of the bed in his tank top and boxer shorts, his legs skinnier, paler, more covered in thick, dark hair than she'd imagined. His arms were crossed, as if protecting himself from her. “I don't care about your scar,” he said.

Kate knew he'd meant to say something that would sound nicer, more romantic. “I want to keep this on,” she said, pointing to her shirt.

In the dark, everything became a little easier. He began to kiss her—her face, her neck, her arms—all the while carefully avoiding the place of her absent breast. His mustache tickled. She found his erection without meaning to. It was just suddenly there in her hand, and she couldn't help but think of the shotgun she'd been handling earlier that day. Guns and penises. She let out a silly, adolescent laugh. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“I haven't done this in so long.” Now that she held him, she didn't quite know what to do with him. She tried the very act she'd seen her daughter perform only weeks before, but she was indelicate and Charles let out a whelp of pain and then began to laugh.

“Is this all right?” he asked when he finally mounted her.

Her left thigh began cramping, but she nodded as the pain gathered into a dense ball. “It's all right,” she said. His caution, his concern moved her. If not passionate, it was deeply tender, just as he had promised, and she lifted herself a little to kiss his shoulders, his neck and cheeks. It took him a while—Kate could have hoped for a briefer first time—but as soon as he was finished, he rolled over and said, “You didn't, did you?”

“I will next time.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. It was …” She paused, looking for a word, and when she finally said it, the fullness and enthusiasm in her voice embarrassed her, “Lovely.” She felt a deep and heavy laziness of body. Their legs were tangled. Off in the darkness beside her, the fingers of her hand caressed Charles's neck. She had forgotten for a moment what was happening to her. She was dying, she remembered now. Again. For the second time. And for some reason, it was easy to know. She wasn't afraid, even as she was certain that the fear would return soon. For now she lay next to a man who must have been as spent and physically oblivious as she since he let out an enormous, accidental belch. “I'm sorry,” he said.

Half-asleep, Kate giggled lazily. “I'm happy,” she said.

The next morning, she was dizzy and experiencing double vision. In her bathroom mirror, she saw that her left eye had fallen toward the lower outside corner of its socket. She looked monstrous, and she wanted Charles, who lay slumbering in her bed, out of the house. When she prodded him awake, he rolled over and smiled at her, seeming to expect the kisses and friendliness of a lover. His breath was less than pleasant and his hair was lopsided. She kept a hand over her eye, and when he asked about it, she said something about an infection and eye drops that he didn't question. “I've got to get to
work,” she said, after which she stood by him while he dressed.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, standing on the porch in a warmish rainy morning. One of his shoes was still untied, and his shirt was partially untucked. He waited in the drizzle until Kate gave him a peck on the cheek. “Something's wrong,” he said. “Tell me what's wrong.”

“I'll call you,” she said, and then closed the door.

Kate stayed home from work for the next few days. With the house empty, she thought of Charles more than she wanted to: his ease with a shotgun, his pale, gangly nakedness, his postcoital belch, his laughter and patience in her bed. He left four messages on the machine, but she didn't call him until two days later. It was three in the morning, and she'd woken with a dull, throbbing pressure in her head that verged on pain. She was hot, drenched in sweat—a side effect, her doctor had explained, of rapidly growing tumors—and opened her windows, but the breeze moving in the curtain sent shadows rushing through the dark of her room—walls of blackness falling on top of her. “Kate,” he said sleepily.

“Would you consider coming over here … now?”

He was in her bed in fewer than twenty minutes. She could only cuddle that night, and he seemed more than happy to oblige her. “This isn't going to be serious, right?” she asked.

He kissed her ear. “OK.”

“It will be pleasant. It will go until one of us says enough,” she said.

He moved in closer, sealing their bodies together. “Sure. I mean, unless we decide otherwise.”

“I'm pretty sure that I won't decide otherwise.”

“That's fine,” Charles said.

On subsequent nights, they returned to their lovemaking, vigorous, athletic, more skilled and certain. They did everything they could think of with the eagerness of discovery and the fumbling skill of those who'd done it before. Charles took her from behind with an enthusiastic brutishness—his arm hooked around her neck and his pelvis pounding into her—that left her feeling pleasantly ravished. Kate remembered how to come, straddling Charles and using her
thigh muscles to focus on the pleasure. Charles became, at times, almost too fearless, letting out loud howls so that Kate put a hand over his mouth and whispered, “My daughter will hear.” In moments of physical exuberance, Charles tried to lift her shirt, but she grabbed his arm forcefully and pushed it back down.