Large Animals in Everyday Life Read online

  “I think Ron is a good-looking guy,” I say.

  “You hear that?” Jeff shouts.

  “Aw, she’s in love,” Ron says. “She ain’t taken her eyes off him for one second. Not one second.”

  And that’s true. The singer strums hard, letting loose the strong sad first chords of “Seminole Wind,” sending them flying like wild heavy birds into the room. “What he’s got is a gift,” Jeff says, his eyes on the singer, and his oil-dirty face appears both older and younger than it was a moment ago. “God gave that boy a gift.”

  “Gift, right,” his brother says. “Listen. Picasso? Van Gogh? They was just assholes who presented theirselves as important.”

  Still, I cannot get close enough to the singer. When we embrace, my arms go over his shoulders, around his head, and his big stomach presses into the area that starts at my belly and goes down to the middle of my thighs. His stomach is hard and creates a certain space between us; his small legs in their Wranglers seem far, far away. And even in bed he always leaves his socks on because his feet were ruined standing in the swamp in Cambodia; other Marines had cush duty, he says, but he was in the swamp, always in the swamp, in fact he was a sharpshooter, in fact he can say with almost complete certainty that it was his bullet that killed Baby Doc Duvalier’s right-hand man. The few times he’s taken them off, I’ve forgotten to look. And though he chain-smokes Dorals, he is odorless. His dick is small and in the morning when he’s gone nothing’s sore and nothing smells. Lying down he is a big man who yells, who growls in bed, but he leaves before it gets light and nothing is left behind, as though all the hair, the sweat, all the man of him has gone into his music-playing, soaked up by the Round Bar’s fat old cypress walls.

  “I want …” I sometimes say to him in bed, but I don’t know how to finish the sentence. He thinks I’m talking about being unemployed and starts taking dollars out of his wallet for me. I lie there full of desperate, dead-end feelings, a big useless naked girl, an idiot savant. “My dear,” he says, looking me up and down, “being with you is like Saturday night at the movies for a guy like me.” I want something impossible. I want to dance with him to the music he plays. I want to look over his shoulder, feel him solid in my arms, his baby-smelling beard against my throat, but see him set up in the corner at the same moment singing Love is like a dying ember, only memories remain; through the ages I’ll remember … I want to go to Nashville.

  A tall man who looks like Jesus or Willie Nelson makes his way over to me, extends his long arm. “Sorry, sir, she cain’t dance,” Ron says. “She’s waiting on her boyfriend over there.”

  “Fair enough,” the Jesus man says. “You’re pretty,” he says to me. Then he goes over to the tiny, salt-sprinkled dance floor and hops up and down there beside the jukebox’s pink light, keeping his back straight and kicking and stomping his feet, four fat women dancing around him, all of them doing the same steps and keeping perfect time, all of them smiling. “I fell for you like a child,” the singer sings. “I fell into a burning ring of fire.” Watching him, I know what I must do; for once I am spared the shame of decision-making. I dig through my purse for my keys, already picturing which panties to pack, which earrings and shoes, already hearing myself on the phone to my father, asking to borrow just a couple hundred, telling him, Yes, I have several different projects lined up, various possibilities right now, yes, many paths are still open to me.

  • • •

  In the deep end of the Nashville Sheraton’s pool, a young girl will not stop watching me. She is the only child in the pool, and I stare back at her, wondering if I know her from somewhere. But no, I think, I don’t know any children. Despite the drought, the pool’s water level is too high, and I’m hanging on the side with the other adults, all of us sipping drinks from plastic cups and holding our heads at unnatural angles, trying to appear relaxed. The girl floats near me on her stomach on a neon-patterned raft, chewing the ends of her long brown hair and watching me, staring as though she wants to know something. “Why are you looking at me?” she asks finally.

  “I’m not,” I say. I stare at her body laid out flat in a maroon one-piece, the small but unequivocal curves of her long legs and short torso.

  “Where’s your husband?” she asks.

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Oh,” she says. She thinks. “I thought I saw this man looking at me before,” she says.

  I swallow the last inch of my red wine, which is hot as coffee, and squint up into the bewildering light. The girl is not going away.

  “I like your hair,” she says. She grins shyly and undulates like a fish, making the raft move closer.

  Okay, I think. “I have to go upstairs and get ready,” I tell her. “Would you like to come up to my room with me and watch TV?” She nods and undulates, her small round behind rising and falling in the waves she makes.

  My phone’s message light still isn’t blinking. “Would you like a soda or something?” I ask the girl. She looks at the carafe of wine on the table. “How old are you?” I say. She blushes, pulls on the wet ends of her hair. “It’s okay,” I say, taking the paper crown off a glass and handing it to her. “What are you, eleven? You’re twelve?” I pour her a little more.

  “Can I look in your bathroom?” she says.

  “Go ahead, I’ve got some calls to make,” I say. I call the hotel switchboard and ask the operator to recheck my voice mail. Then I call the singer’s double-wide but hang up when he answers. Finally I call my own number in Florida and listen to the messages on my machine. Jeff Russell wants to know if I’ll be at the Round Bar tonight. “I’m hoping against hope,” he says. Sally from Live Oak Office Supply has my resumé and wants to set up an interview right away. The librarian is sending me a book that made him think of me, something about the “cultural wasteland of the South.” “Ciao, baby,” he says, his voice the same old sly whisper.

  “Do you have anyone you need to call?” I ask the girl when she comes out of the bathroom.

  “Yeah, my brother,” she says. “He has epilepsy. He’s eighteen but he can’t be in the room alone ’cause he might crack his skull open, like on the edge of the desk. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  I shake my head and lie down on one of the beds, exhausted from the sun. With my eyes shut I can again hear the singer on the phone, saying, “You know if I had my choice I’d be with you,” his wife’s cat crying in the background, his baby crying right into the phone, in his arms, it sounded like. “You know, you have a certain spiritual quality,” he said. “Have we worked anything out?” I asked, confused. “No, but we will,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.” Now it occurs to me that he never asked for my room extension. Does he remember my last name? I wonder.

  The girl speaks in soft monosyllables, sitting in her damp suit on a towel on the other bed, her feet on the floor and her back straight, reminding me of Jesus and his four girlfriends dancing at the Round Bar, which at the moment seems impossibly far away, a dark room somewhere on some darker, dirtier side of the planet. Her glass, on the nightstand, is already empty. “I’m sad about my dog,” she says after she hangs up.

  “Go get him,” I suggest.

  “No, she,” she says. “She’s in Conyers but I don’t think she’s going to remember me when we get back. My dad said the first night she acted like she saw a ghost in the hamper but now she’s acting fine.”

  “How long are you here for?” I ask.

  “Um, I don’t know. My aunt has a tilted uterus and we have to wait. Can we watch ‘Muppet Babies’?” I toss her the remote. “Can I come over tomorrow?” she says.

  “Sure,” I say. “Listen, is your dog big or small?”

  “Big. Like this high.”

  “Because I don’t know about small dogs, but I think if she’s a good big dog she’ll remember you when she sees you. She won’t know what happened exactly, but she’ll have this feeling that something was wrong but now it’s better. She’ll feel happier than usual, kind of desp
erately happy, you know what I mean? Like she won’t remember having ever felt so happy to see you, but she won’t know why. Behind being happy there’ll just be this loss, only she won’t quite remember what the loss was, like a dream that leaves you with a feeling but you can’t remember the dream, you know?”

  “Yeah,” the girl says.

  “Do you want to order something?” I say. “Order anything you want.”

  She leaves when it gets dark and I pull myself together, putting on rings and perfume and eyeshadow; the bathroom has a new foul smell and so I close it off and use the mirror over the dresser. At nine-thirty I try the double-wide again and hang up when his wife says hello. I lie on the bed in my jeans and fringed jacket and watch a special about ghost sightings in small Southern towns where Civil War battles are known to have taken place. “Were you here during the war?” an old lady with a tape recorder asks the air over the banks of a river in the middle of the night. Amid static and the rushing of water on the playback a faint moaning is amplified: “Mm mmm mmm mmmmm,” and a transcription runs across the bottom of the screen: “I was in the war … I was in the war.”

  At two or three I wake up rolling over, my boot heels knocking together, and reach for the phone, which hasn’t rung. In the dark I listen again to Jeff Russell, Sally, and the librarian, and now a new one, a distant, familiar voice like an all-night DJ: “I don’t know if you remember me, I met you back in California, back last winter in the desert with all those Indians, remember we had that lucky pink dauber at Bingo? I had the blue truck and the red motorcycle, gave you a ride a couple times, I was Jim … Well, I’m back on the maritime coast of Maine and business is booming, weather’s good, and sometimes I just start flipping through the old Rolodex and goddamn, whatever happened to everyone? I hope I have the right number here. I just wanted to touch base, you know, see what’s up, see if you ever made it out there to that goddamned rotating bar. Man, goddamn rotating bar! I remember one night I was just poached, Country Whiskey Shot Night, it was, and I was talking to a girl, talking her up, buying highballs, pretty girl, and then I go to the bathroom and when I come back she’s gone! I started talking to her but when I looked a great big muley fucking cowboy’s in her place. Turns out she’s halfway around the room already, a hundred and goddamn eighty degrees away. Goddamn rotating bar! She was there one minute and then she was gone. Boy, what I put up with from women, all in the name of perfume! Nice girl, too. I always wondered what became of her …”

  On and on he talks, and when the tape runs out, cutting him off, I punch my code and listen to it all again, hugging the phone to my head like a stuffed animal, and again, until I fall asleep, and wake up because a waiter is pounding on the door, the same pimply, red-haired waiter who brought me the wine yesterday, only now he’s checking to make sure I’m okay, since the phone was off the hook so long. “Sorry to disturb you, miss, it’s just policy,” he says, and I ask him for another carafe, but he says the bar isn’t open yet, not until noon, but he can put my order in now if I want. “Oh, no need, that’s okay,” I tell him, “I’m fine, thanks anyway.”

  My face is swollen, my hair a sad tangle, my eyes swim in iridescent hollows of Revlon Indian Summer Dusk. It seems there is someone I should be calling, but it’s Saturday, too late for Sally at Live Oak Office Supply, and I can’t imagine calling the librarian, can’t imagine that I ever spoke to him or would want to speak to him again, and Jim, Jim I would talk to but somehow in his whole message he never got around to saying his number, or maybe he said it after the tape ended and the number’s still sitting out there in the air somewhere, floating somewhere between Maine and here, unreachable. I wish there were a way to phone the Round Bar, not to speak to anyone in particular but just to pass the time of day, as though you could just call up a place like it were a person and say, “Hey there, how are you doing? You know I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately, you know you’re never far from my thoughts.”

  The girl arrives at ten in her suit but she doesn’t want to go swimming. “It’s too crowded,” she says. We step onto the balcony into the bright sun and gaze down at the pool, which I notice for the first time is the empty bean shape. The shallow end is crowded with little girls from some camp or club tossing Barbie heads to each other and singing This is the song that never ends, it goes on and on, my friend … “Last night I had the weirdest dream,” the girl says. “I was in The Muppet Movie, and I was in this relay race, only instead of a baton we were passing a towel. My friend Heather was wearing metal shorts that were really a pan, a lead pan. Do you, um, have any more wine?” she asks.

  “I’m working on it,” I tell her.

  She sits with one leg tucked under her on the unmade bed and watches herself in the mirror, assuming several uncertain postures. She has the pensive look again, the one she had in the pool. “I’m sorry if I made your bathroom smell,” she says finally.

  “I didn’t notice,” I say.

  “See, I have polyps,” she says.

  “That must hurt,” I say after a while.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I had an operation when I was six, eight, nine, and last year on Columbus Day. It hurts when I get nervous.”

  “What do you get nervous about?” I ask.

  “Like, if I’m waiting for something to happen, or like, now talking about it, it hurts, but that’s all in my head, I’m supposed to use mind over matter.” I stare at her stomach, smooth and shimmery under lycra and no bigger than an appetizer plate but hiding such treachery and dissent. The only time I feel the pain, is in the sunshine and the rain, I think. “Excuse me,” the girl says, with sudden tears, and runs to the bathroom.

  I turn the TV on loud, Geraldo, and almost don’t hear the knock. The singer is a pale Martian in the light of day, a strangely solid ghost. “Hello, my dear,” he says in his soft, lying voice. I love you, I think, and say nothing. He steps inside, a short fat man in a tractor cap, and sits at the table, a stranger.

  He talks about the tape I’ve asked him so many times to make for me, says he’ll send it soon, his brother is moving to Nashville soon and when he does they’re going to build a house, and in the basement will be a recording studio, and the sound will be perfect, it will all happen soon. “You do what you want to do,” I say. Sitting across from him I don’t want him to touch me, but when he does, reaching over and laying his warm square palm on my cheek and holding it there, his bicep swelling under his rolled sleeve, I cannot pull away, it has been so long, something like my whole life, since anyone’s touched me. “This isn’t a good idea,” I say, and he says, “I’ve lost a lot of things in my life, but I regret nothing more than losing you,” and I think, Your bullshit’s getting in the way of your slow-moving dream, but still I cannot pull away.

  He moves me to the bed easily, matter-of-factly, like switching guitars between songs, and there does what he has always done, making me feel that there’s something I’m forgetting, something important, something beautiful, but I can’t quite get it, it’s leaving me, leaving me like a dream. With my eyes closed against his shoulder I hear her voice, a soft echo in my head, as though she’s hiding there and not in the bathroom. Wait, she says. “Wait,” I say, but my voice has no force and he doesn’t wait, he goes on. He won’t stay for long, I answer her silently; he has never stayed for long. And when he leaves he never says when he’s coming back. Goodbye, sweetheart. Holding him, I can feel the words in him already, before they hit the air. Please wait, I plead with her in my head. He is almost gone.

  She does not come out of the bathroom. When he’s gone I sit naked where he’s left me, feeling myself sweat, keeping my head turned away from the dresser mirror. Look at yourself. Look at yourself. Not a very pretty picture, is it?

  The bathroom is silent, the door blank and white. “Are you okay in there?” I call. There’s no sound, not even water, not even rustling. “Hello, are you all right? Hello, say something!” The doorknob is cold and I jiggle it hard, as though trying to revive it.


  “No, don’t come in!” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her, speaking through the door. I sit down on the carpet there, pulling the corner of the sheet from the bed around myself and leaning my face against the cool white wall. “You can come out whenever you’re ready, okay?” I tell her. “It’s safe now, so just come out whenever you’re ready. No one will hurt you, I promise.”

  a little something

  Helene is young, brown-haired, and intelligent, but not necessarily an attractive person. She knows that her expressions change too dramatically; she can’t seem to hold her face still like people on TV, or even most people she meets in real life. She tends to take things personally, like the time she was sunning in her square of a front yard, feeling puffy in her new bikini, and she opened her eyes to the Goodyear blimp, humming serenely overhead. She dresses well, knows how to wear a suit, but she’s also aware of how easy it is to put together a wrong ensemble. It tires her out, just thinking about it, or about how easy it is to say the wrong thing. She works hard at life, but believes herself to be lazy and obsessive; she knows she is not necessarily a pretty person.

  She works downtown in the Loop, in the planning department of a firm that publishes astrology guides and pocket cookbooks. This involves phoning freelance artists and figuring out how many recipes or astrological forecasts will fit on a page. To brighten her work space she tacks up photos of men who remind her of Joe, the man she is in love with. There’s Jack Nicholson, a local talk show host, and an unidentified magician from an ad for vodka. It’s not that she doesn’t have photos of Joe himself, but there’s something exciting, amazing even, about finding his likeness in someone else. Connection is implied, connection and fate. Her co-workers needle her about this; a divorced editor named Jan, in particular, takes issue with Helene in a smilingly sardonic way. “Do you actually believe this zodiac stuff?” she says.