The Better to Hold You (14 page)

His hand lifted my chin. “It’s the end of this phase of our lives.”

“Is it the end of us?”

He didn’t answer right away. In his silence, I thought about the fact that I had old friends and work friends, but no friend close enough to cry on. No friend other than Hunter.

“I hope it’s not the end. I don’t mean for it to be, Abs. So come with me.”

I wrapped my arms around his waist. “What if I said yes?”

Hunter looked down at me. “Is that what you want?”

I couldn’t tell if he wanted me to say yes or not. I thought of my mother, histrionically holding my father responsible for the subjugation of all women. In the middle of the night, at the top of her voice. I thought of the emptiness of having nothing but my work and the city, no one to care if I was in the apartment when it was burgled. Having no one to touch me anymore. Somehow I knew that if I let Hunter go, it would be a very, very long time before anyone would be touching me again. I would become a highly qualified veterinarian and eventually go into a successful Manhattan practice, and there would be nothing much to go home to, not even a dog.

Or one of us could sacrifice something. Like me, the one with all the emotional intelligence.

“It’s what I want, yes. I want to go with you, Hunter. If you want me to.” Relief flooded me. Oh sweet surrender. No more fighting to stay afloat; just cut the anchor and let Hunter pull me along.

Hunter leaned forward, examining me closely, taking in the glow of my happiness, which was threatening to become tears. “Hmm. I’d kiss you right now, you know, but you’re likely to flake off on me.” He looked down at the pile of dead skin in the bathtub. “Yes. Quite a lot of flaking going on here.”

“I’ll wash my face.”

“I’ll dispose of the corpse.” He gathered up the disgusting waxy bits of skin in his hands and dropped them into the toilet. “You see that? With my bare hands, too. True love, darling. Nothing less.”

There were no more jokes after that. We made love slowly, carefully, like two people made of glass. I fell asleep wrapped in his embrace.

When I told the board that I was leaving, they were very polite. They seemed to feel that I was having some wild overreaction to Malachy’s departure, and warned me that they could not guarantee a place if I decided to reapply. Sam was sweetly befuddled at my decision, while Ofer, predictably, dripped scorn.

“I can’t believe you’re going out into the sticks to watch some old guy castrate bulls with his bare hands,” he said.

“I’ll miss you, too, Ofer.”

Lilliana, of course, knew just the right thing to say. “You know I’ve got your back,” she said. “And if this is what you want, then I’m happy for you. I’m just going to miss you like hell.” She came with me when I used the day spa voucher she’d given me as a birthday present, and we gossiped about Malachy.

“Actually,” she said as we sat side by side, having our feet scrubbed, “I e-mailed him.”

“You’re kidding! What did you say?” I pressed a button to stop my chair from vibrating so I could hear her better.

“I asked him if he knew what he was doing next. He said he was looking into renting facilities upstate, where it’s cheaper.” Lilliana leaned back as her pedicurist told her to put her feet back in the mini-Jacuzzi. “Mm, if I ever get rich, I think I’ll buy one of these chairs for home. Hey, maybe Mad Mal will move near you and you can go into business together.”

“Assuming I’d want to. Besides, Lilli, the man was not exactly the picture of health,” I pointed out. “For all we know, he could be on his deathbed.” But then I remembered that distorted glimpse I’d had of him just before passing out. Maybe he was fighting off his ailment. Or maybe it was mutating into something else.

“Somehow, I think Malachy’s got a lot of fight left,” Lilliana said as her pedicurist removed her right foot from the water. Mine followed suit.

“I don’t suppose you’d ever leave Manhattan, Lilli.”

Lilliana grinned. “If I did, where would you stay when you came to visit? Do you know what hotels cost in this city?”

“Hey, nice color,” said my pedicurist as she began to paint my toenails. I had brought polish from home: All things considered, I figured Wolf Whistle Red was appropriate.

After that, I was at loose ends for a few days. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have a plan, a schedule, a place to be. It felt as though the laws of nature had been suspended. On my last day of work, I walked out of the Animal Medical Institute into the uncomfortable heat of late September. “Indian summer,” the weather report had called it this morning.

I had walked half a block before I realized I was still wearing my white coat. Folding it and draping it over my arm, I turned around one last time toward the East River. There I saw the ghost of a half-moon still hanging low in the sky, like some Shakespearean portent of wild spirits and mad kings.

Or like a low-bud get movie warning that lunacy is waxing near.

On the day we moved, with two weeks still left to go on our lease, I already felt nostalgic for the city. This condition had been building steadily, and on D-day I woke up and actually started to cry when I heard a jackhammer start up on the sidewalk below.

When you’ve lived in Manhattan, no other place feels quite as real: It’s the solid, looming presence of all those high stone buildings, not the aristocratic skyscrapers but the solid middle-class structures of fifteen stories or so. They make all those two-story suburban houses look like flimsy stick-and-straw affairs, something a wolf could blow down. And then there’s the fame factor, which makes Manhattan seem so oddly familiar, even to Belgian factory workers and Lancastrian sheepherders. You see this one narrow island everywhere you go—in print ads, on television, on multiplex screens—the quintessential city: noisy and glamorous and dirty, a village packed tight with avant-garde toddlers, mentally unstable artists, businesslike Europeans, marginal actors, hopeful immigrants from Haiti and Ohio, drug dealers, cat collectors, the unapologetically successful and the walking wounded—one layer overlapping the other, the uncivilized center of the civilized world.

And I didn’t want to join the ranks of the deserters, claiming to still love the city’s energy and culture but frightened off by muggings or wildings or blackouts or terrorist bandits. Like there’s safety somewhere out there in a small town, like no child ever disappeared on a cricket-filled summer night, on a bike ride home from church. At least in New York, hearing the worst about human nature is never a complete surprise.

Think of your favorite urban myth. Stolen kidney? Crispy fried rat? Radioactive subway? Chances are, when you imagined it happening, you imagined it happening in Manhattan, with smoke billowing from manhole covers, and rude pedestrians yelling across broad avenues, and gray and brown pigeons teetering along as yellow taxis shot past.

In those final days, I went to museums, the Empire State Building, Bloomingdale’s. Halfway through the Planetarium space show, when my seat began to vibrate like a rocket ship and the whole Milky Way galaxy receded until it was no more than a distant spot in an alien sky, I began to choke back tears. My home, I thought. The known universe.

Of course, you don’t think about these sorts of things unless you’ve just arrived, or are on your way out. With my job already gone, leaving a gaping, empty wound in my days, I had time to sit around and notice things. I realized that in the country I would need a car to get a tube of toothpaste and began to miss being able to walk everywhere even though I hadn’t left yet. I began to feel as if Manhattan were a lover I was giving up to save my marriage.

As if to torment me, Manhattan pulled out all the stops as I prepared to depart.

A few sidewalk maples had begun to turn yellow and there was a briskness to the air that made you want to look at all the new clothes in the shop windows, lovely deep purples and oranges and deep wine shades, like a dark glass of rich burgundy after a summer of acidic whites. The grinning faces of death had already been put out on display in all the stationery and drugstores along Broadway, and as I walked down the aisles of my local supermarket I watched as child after child pressed the button on the snarling zombie display.

While a small army of Israelis moved our belongings into one of their huge Samson Movers trucks, I had a last breakfast at Barney Greengrass, sitting alone at a table for two while a pair of old men argued politics over platters of sturgeon and belly lox. I had promised my doctor that I would eat fish from time to time to keep from becoming anemic, and so I sat there with my whitefish salad, feeling a little drunk from all the salt and protein. My father, born in Barcelona, loved fish. Especially the skinny oily ones with heads and tails.

“Don’t become a vegetarian,” he’d told me the summer I stopped eating meat. “Vegetarians are boring.”

“I just don’t want to eat corpses anymore, okay?”

“This is your mother’s fault. In Europe, children grow up seeing that chickens have feathers. You pluck them, you cook them, you eat them. Here everything’s stripped and cleaned and wrapped up like a piece of candy, and by the time you kids figure out that what you’re chewing used to have teeth of its own, you’re shocked.”

“I’m not eating these shrimp, Dad.”

“Crayfish.”

“What ever. I just feel it’s hypocritical to eat something that used to be alive, unless you’re willing to kill it yourself, like aboriginal peoples do.”

I still remember my father’s smile. “So kill it yourself. You need a bit of killer instinct to get along in this world.”

Fourteen years older and less sure of my reasons for not eating meat, I spread a last schmear of eyeless, toothless fish salad onto my bagel and checked my watch. It was time to go change my entire life.

Hunter, who disdained anything with scales, had said he would meet me outside. He arrived only two minutes late, looking wonderful in faded jeans and a white fisherman’s sweater. The haunted look had left his face, and he had begun to shave and shower regularly again. In fact, he seemed ebullient these days, energized by the prospect of our move.

“Ready?”

I folded up my grease-stained copy of The New York Times and hooked my arm in his. “Ready,” I said.

As we made our way toward our car, I felt the first, faint stirrings of excitement. This would be a new beginning for us. An adventure. Couples who had adventures together lasted. I would join a country practice and become a partner within a few years. I would know everyone in town by name and my children would go to kindergarten in winter along a snowy path marked by deer prints.

Hunter squeezed my hand with his bicep. “You’re quiet, Abs.”

“Thinking happy thoughts.” At Eighty-third and Amsterdam, a skinny, dark-haired woman strode past walking an aristocratically anorectic borzoi, a husky, a standard poodle, and two shih tzus. She hailed a man in a knit hat, who was walking a rottweiler, a golden retriever, a Yorkie, a wrinkly sharpei, and a lamblike Bedlington terrier.

Jut as we passed, the rottweiler and the poodle started barking, followed by the Yorkie and the shih tzus. The Bedlington terrier wrapped itself around the man’s legs, cringing, while the retriever and the husky joined in, the former yodeling low, like a hound, the latter giving a long, low wolflike howl.

“Je-suz, Candy, pull them back,” said the male dog walker, struggling with the tanklike rotty. “Your monsters want to eat my babies.”

“They’re usually so calm, even the pood—argh, down, boy! Poodle,” said Candy, hauling with all her famine-thin, gym-toned might. But the aggressiveness of the big French dog seemed to have inflamed the husky and borzoi as well. They yanked and leaned their full body weights against their leashes, struggling to break free.

“Well, that was a Manhattan moment,” Hunter said, laughing and guiding me along the sidewalk, away from the dogs.

“Maybe I should stay, in case they need help,” I said, looking over my shoulder.

“Not our fight, Abra.”

As Hunter led me gently but firmly away, I realized that the dogs had already begun to calm down. Only the husky and the little Yorkie still barked, and they didn’t seem to be warning each other off.

Perhaps it was my own guilty urban conscience working overtime, but they seemed to be directing all their canine territorial rage at Hunter’s departing back.

In most of Jane Austen’s novels, it is the flighty, shallow, venal people who long for town amusements; thoughtful, feelingful people possess the internal resources to enjoy the quiet pleasures of the countryside.

I have to admit that I’m thinking more of the films than the actual novels, as I haven’t read a Jane Austen novel since I was sixteen. But I always mean to, especially right after I see some great BBC production with a firm-chinned actress charging resolutely through muddy vales in a soggy Empire-waisted gown.

But it’s one thing to admire the rolling green English downs while somebody photogenic stomps across them and another thing altogether to be confronted with the reality of being stuck in a house in the middle of the woods.

Of course, like most things you suspect you’ll grow to regret, it didn’t seem so bad at first.

“Well, what do you think, Abra?” Hunter threw an arm around my shoulders as we looked at our new home. Nestled between yellow and red maples, its path carpeted with a fragrant windfall of pine needles, the Barrow family house appeared suddenly as you turned the corner of the path, just like something out of a fairy tale. Ivy covered one wall. The rest of the house revealed itself in sections: the flaking dragon-scale ripple of roof; the lonely, steepled tower; the twin slitted attic windows that gazed down at the grim, willow-shrouded entrance. All along the north side of the house, which never got much sun, you could see damp, spongy sections of wood and the larger holes that announced the presence of small armies of vermin.

In bright October sunlight, it appeared to be no more than a ramshackle old mansion. But as I recalled from my previous visit, when winter arrived and shadows claimed it before four o’clock, it was a house straight out of one of my mother’s films.