Home > Animal(5)

Animal(5)
Author: Lisa Taddeo

In the living room, while the men brought in heavy things, groaning, angry about the weight of my life, I shook my father into the frog vase and placed it on top of the pellet stove. For the time being I left my mother in the baggie beside it.

I walked around the place looking for interesting things. But the refrigerator was the kind you couldn’t put imposing bundles of romaine in. It wasn’t for kale or stocking beets. At best, bags of peeled baby carrots. There was barely room in the pantry for all of my pastina and the cartons of College Inn broth. As a child I’d had a girlfriend whose parents were nineteenth-century poor. They had a pantry full of old food in boxes brought by ladies from the church. One night when I was over, the mother opened a package of macaroni and cheese to find milk-colored maggots slipping around, tinkling the dry elbows. The mother picked over the pasta, tossing the maggots in the sink, and turned on the hot water to melt them. Later my friend looked at me across the table with bright, wet eyes. The family said grace and I tucked my chin and pretended to close my eyes but kept them instead on my plate, watching for movement. My dear friend’s hand in mine was small and warm. After that night we never played again. It was early enough in the relationship that it didn’t feel, at the time, like a wound. But now I think about her all the time. I think about her every time I open a box of pasta.

—Where you want this? asked the one with the neck tattoo. The movers were holding my burgundy Ploum loveseat, an armless velour nest that Vic gave to me. He’d had me on it more than once. That was the point of many gifts.

I wanted it on the third floor, but the movers were sweating. The beads of sweat glistened on their foreheads like those maggots.

I shook my oily hair out of a ponytail and rubbed my shoulder.

—You’re clearly very strong, but it’s probably impossible to get that up to the third floor?

—Nothin’s impossible, said the one with the gold tooth.

I smiled and thanked him. I fluttered my eyelids. It was something I actually did. Then I turned and moved sensually toward the kitchen. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using sex. I know some people think that there is, but I don’t understand why. I’d been coached by my aunt Gosia. Gosia wasn’t my aunt by blood; she was my father’s brother’s second wife. She was Austrian and garishly beautiful—blond pompadour, black Dolce & Gabbana suits, excessive filler. She trained me in the art of sexual combat. She told me that women must deploy all their strengths in order to prevail. People will call you names, she said. They are only hating themselves.

As they moved past me with the couch, I saw the lightened spot where I’d scrubbed Vic’s semen off. At first it was revolting but lately it had become a faded badge.

—Yo, you know the White Space lives under you? said the neck tattoo.

I told him that I did.

—Fuckin sick, said the one with the gold tooth. What kind place is this? Some artist commune’n shit?

—I have no idea, I said. The men had become very ugly to me. I looked out the windows, wishing again I had moved someplace where it snowed, with big yellow Bobcats that roared down blizzardy Ketchum mornings. I loved headlights in snowstorms. But I had come to Los Angeles for a reason. I’d stayed in New York for too long when I should have tried to find Alice. New York is a lie, I will tell you. Each city is its own lie, but New York is a whopper. I don’t expect you to listen about that. Everyone needs to learn it in their own time.

The men noticed I’d stopped playing. Men are never okay when you stop. I had the fear of angering a man. Of not being an amenable woman. I had the fear of being murdered. To assuage the guilt that I didn’t follow up the flirtation by fucking them, I gave the movers each a tip of fifty dollars. I wondered if they had to buy their meth or if it was something to cook in an oxidized Airstream. I pictured them eating oyster crackers from the soup counters of gloomy grocery stores in the Valley.

There had been times in my life when I didn’t think of a hundred dollars as anything. But when those fifties left my hand, my forehead grew hot. I felt the familiar fear. There was a month when I drove to a gas station every night and bought scratch-off tickets from the lottery vendor. I scratched them off under a bug lamp next to the air pressure machine. I used a dime because it had ridges. One spring evening I won fifty dollars and it made me feel like I could run for office.

I’d considered not tipping the movers, saying I had no cash on hand, that I would send something along in the mail. I thought, with some perverse relief, that if things got terrible anytime soon, if I couldn’t find work, I might perform blow jobs on the burgundy Ploum. I could sit the pizza deliveryman down, and the propane guy, separate their giant knees, and let them depress my head like a flush valve.

 

 

4


I KNEW WHERE TO FIND Alice, but you should never engage a stranger until you understand her world. Don’t let anyone have an advantage.

I drove to Froggy’s, which was built on the sharpest curve of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Kathi had told me it was where the locals went. It was a bar and a music venue and a fish market. It was decorated like a Mexican restaurant under the sea. They sold oysters on the half shell, steamers in nets, tacos with carnitas, coconut-crusted tilapia. I sat near the stage where live music played on the weekends. I ordered shrimp quesadillas to have a plate of food in front of me. I drank a Bloody Mary. It was the only thing stronger than wine that I liked. Perhaps it was the way the thickness of the tomato quieted the vodka, or perhaps it was because my father had ordered them. I used to eat the celery from his, the pimiento-stuffed olives.

There was an old couple at a nearby table with their thirtysomething son who looked like he had cerebral palsy. His hair was trimmed into a crew cut and when he stood his limbs jangled like a puppet’s. His father helped him to the bathroom. His mother, a pale and pretty woman in her fifties with glazed eyes, sat at the table when her men had gone and squeezed a lemon into a Coke. There was someone, I thought, who might understand me.

I watched a career waitress say to the bartender, You have to take my tables. I gotta go back there. I’m gonna be some time. Somethin didn’t agree with me.

The waitress ran into the kitchen, her gray ponytail thwapping behind her. Now that I was looking in that direction, I saw the next wrong thing sitting at the bar with dirty-blond hair and light eyes the color of blue hydrangea. He looked back at me and smiled and then suddenly he was smiling more and walking over.

—Hey, he said, I saw you walking out to your car before, at the house. I would have come over, but I was.

He didn’t finish his sentence. He was one of the sexiest men I’d met in person. He didn’t have to do anything except not be cruel.

—Sorry. I’m River. I live in the yurt. You must be Joan.

—Must be, I said, biting my lip inside my brain.

—Mind if I sit?

He was twenty-two, I’d been told by Kathi, who also called him eye candy. He had pink cheeks and his bottom lip was thick and I thought I’d learned my lesson. He’d brought his mug of beer with him. His demeanor was gentle but indifferent, the gutting indifference of the young.

I said, I don’t mind, even though he’d already begun to sit down. “Werewolves of London” was playing. Behind his head a great silver and blue marlin hung from the wall. He asked what had brought me to California, and I said, Acting. That was what I was telling everyone so they would leave me alone. I figured there was enough shame associated with trying to be an actress in one’s late thirties that they wouldn’t press me.

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air #
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)