Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (4 page)

Work is its usual comforting green-corridored self. There are three blinks on the answering machine, the first from an author who speaks very slowly, like a kindergarten teacher, asking about reprints. “What am I, the village idiot?” I ask the room, taking down his number in large backward characters. The second and third blinks are from my husband, the across-town apartment dweller.

The first makes my heart lurch in a hopeful way. “I have to talk to you right
now,
” he says grimly. “Where
are
you? I can never find you.”

“Try calling your own house,” I say to the machine. In the second message he has composed himself.

“I’m
fine
now,” he says firmly. “Disregard previous message and don’t call me back, please; I have meetings.” Click, dial tone, rewind.

I feel crestfallen, the leaping heart settles back into its hole in my chest. I say damn it out loud, just as Chris strides into the office.

“What?” he asks defensively. He tries to think if he’s done anything wrong recently. He checks the table for work; none there. He’s on top of it. We have a genial relationship these days, reading the paper together in the mornings, congratulating ourselves on each issue of the journal. It’s a space physics quarterly and he’s the editor and I’m the managing editor. I know nothing about the science part; my job is to shepherd the manuscripts through the review process and create a journal out of the acceptable ones.

Christoph Goertz. He’s hip in a professorial kind of way, tall and lanky and white-haired, forty-seven years old, with an elegant trace of accent from his native Germany. He has a great dog, a giant black outlaw named Mica who runs through the streets of Iowa City at night, inspecting garbage. She’s big and friendly but a bad judge of character and frequently runs right into the arms of the dog catcher. Chris is always bailing her out.

“They don’t understand dogs,” he says.

I spend more time with Chris than I ever did with my husband. The morning I told him I was being dumped he was genuinely perplexed.

“He’s leaving
you
?” he asked.

Chris was drinking coffee, sitting at his table in front of the chalkboard. Behind his head was a chalk drawing of a hip, professorial man holding a coffee cup. It was a collaborative effort; I drew the man and Chris framed him, using brown chalk and a straightedge. The two-dimensional man and the three-dimensional man stared at me intently.

“He’s leaving
you
?” And for an instant I saw myself from their vantage point across the room — Jo Ann and a small bubble of self-esteem percolated up from the depths. Chris shrugged. “You’ll do fine,” he said.

During my current turmoils, I’ve come to think of work as my own kind of Zen practice, the constant barrage of paper hypnotic and soothing. Chris lets me work an erratic, eccentric schedule, which gives me time to pursue my nonexistent writing career. In return I update his publications list for him and listen to stories about outer space.

Besides being an editor and a teacher, he’s the head of a theoretical plasma physics team made up of graduate students and research scientists. During the summers he travels all over the world telling people about the magnetospheres of various planets, and when he comes back he brings me presents — a small bronze box from Africa with an alligator embossed on the top, a big piece of amber from Poland with the wings of flies preserved inside it, and, once, a set of delicate, horrifying bracelets made from the hide of an elephant.

Currently he is obsessed with the dust in the plasma of Saturn’s rings. Plasma is the fourth state of matter. You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause. I like to avoid the math when I can and put a layperson’s spin on these things.

“Plasma is blood,” I told him.

“Exactly,” he agreed, removing the comics page and handing it to me.

Mostly we have those kinds of conversations around the office, but today he’s caught me at a weak moment, tucking my heart back inside my chest. I decide to be cavalier.

“I wish my
dog
was out tearing up the town and my
husband
was home peeing on a blanket,” I say.

Chris thinks the dog thing has gone far enough. “Why are you letting this go on?” he asks solemnly.

“I’m not
letting
it, that’s why,” I tell him. There are stacks of manuscripts everywhere and he has all the pens over on his side of the room. “It just
is
, is all. Throw me a pen.” He does, I miss it, stoop to pick it up, and when I straighten up again I might be crying.

You have control over this, he explains in his professor voice. You can decide how long she suffers.

This makes my heart pound. Absolutely not, I cannot do it. And then I weaken and say what I really want. For her to go to sleep and not wake up, just slip out of her skin and into the other world.

“Exactly,” he says.

I have an ex–beauty queen coming over to get rid of the squirrels for me. She has long red hair and a smile that can stop trucks. I’ve seen her wrestle goats, scare off a giant snake, and express a dog’s anal glands, all in one afternoon. I told her on the phone that a family of squirrels is living in the upstairs of my house and there’s nothing I can do about it.

“They’re making a monkey out of me,” I said.

So Caroline climbs in her car and drives across half the state, pulls up in front of my house, and gets out carrying zucchinis, cigarettes, and a pair of big leather gloves. I’m sitting outside with my sweet old dog, who lurches to her feet, staggers three steps, sits down, and falls over. Caroline starts crying.

“Don’t try to give me zucchini,” I tell her.

We sit companionably on the front stoop for a while, staring at the dog and smoking cigarettes. One time I went to Caroline’s house and she was nursing a dead cat that was still breathing. At some point that afternoon I saw her spoon baby food into its mouth and as soon as she turned away the whole pureed mess plopped back out. A day later she took it to the vet and had it euthanized. I remind her of this.

“You’ll do it when you do it,” she says firmly.

I pick the collie up like a fifty-pound bag of sticks and feathers, stagger inside, place her on the damp blankets, and put the other two nutcases in the backyard. From upstairs comes a crash and a shriek. Caroline stares up at the ceiling.

“It’s like having the Wallendas stay at your house,” I say cheerfully. All of a sudden I feel fond of the squirrels and fond of Caroline and fond of myself for heroically calling her to help me. The phone rings four times. It’s the husband, and his voice over the answering machine sounds frantic. He pleads with whoever Jo Ann is to pick up the phone.

“Please? I think I might be freaking out,” he says. “Am I ruining my life here, or what? Am I making a
mistake
? Jo?” He breathes raggedly and sniffs into the receiver for a moment, then hangs up with a muffled clatter.

Caroline stares at the machine like it’s a copperhead.

“Holy fuckoly,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re
living
with this crap?”

“He wants me to reassure him that he’s strong enough to leave me,” I tell her. “Else he won’t have fun on his bike ride. And guess what; I’m too tired to.” Except that now I can see him in his dank little apartment, wringing his hands and staring out the windows. He’s wearing his Sunday hairdo with a baseball cap trying to scrunch it down. In his rickety dresser is the new package of condoms he accidentally showed me last week.

Caroline lights another cigarette. The dog pees and thumps her tail.

I need to call him back because he’s suffering.

“You call him back and I’m forced to kill you,” Caroline says. She exhales smoke and points to the phone. “That is evil shit,” she says.

I tend to agree. It’s blanket time. I roll the collie off onto the floor and put the fresh ones down, roll her back. She stares at me with the face of love. I get her a treat, which she chews with gusto and then goes back to sleep. I carry the blankets down to the basement and stuff them into the machine, trudge back up the stairs. Caroline has finished smoking her medicine and is wearing the leather gloves which go all the way to her elbows. She’s staring at the ceiling with determination.

The plan is that I’m supposed to separate one from the herd and get it in a corner. Caroline will take it from there. Unfortunately, my nerves are shot, and when I’m in the room with her and the squirrels are running around all I can do is scream. I’m not even afraid of them, but my screaming button is stuck on and the only way to turn it off is to leave the room.

“How are you doing?” I ask from the other side of the door. All I can hear is Caroline crashing around and swearing. Suddenly there is a high-pitched screech that doesn’t end. The door opens and Caroline falls out into the hall, with a gray squirrel stuck to her glove. Brief pandemonium and then she clatters down the stairs and out the front door and returns looking triumphant.

The collie appears at the foot of the stairs with her head cocked and her ears up. She looks like a puppy for an instant, and then her feet start to slide. I run down and catch her and carry her upstairs so she can watch the show. They careen around the room, tearing the ancient wallpaper off the walls. The last one is a baby, so we keep it for a few minutes, looking at its little feet and its little tail. We show it to the collie, who stands up immediately and tries to get it.

Caroline patches the hole where they got in, cutting wood with a power saw down in the basement. She comes up wearing a toolbelt and lugging a ladder. I’ve seen a scrapbook of photos of her wearing evening gowns with a banner across her chest and a crown on her head. Curled hair, lipstick. She climbs down and puts the tools away. We eat nachos.

“I only make food that’s boiled or melted these days,” I tell her.

“I know,” she replies.

We smoke cigarettes and think. The phone rings again but whoever it is hangs up.

“Is it him?” she asks.

“Nope.”

The collie sleeps on her blankets while the other two dogs sit next to Caroline on the couch. She’s looking through their ears for mites. At some point she gestures to the sleeping dog on the blanket and remarks that it seems like just two days ago she was a puppy.

“She was never a puppy,” I say. “She’s always been older than me.”

When they say goodbye, she holds the collie’s long nose in one hand and kisses her on the forehead; the collie stares back at her gravely. Caroline is crying when she leaves, a combination of squirrel adrenaline, and sadness. I cry, too, although I don’t feel particularly bad about anything. I hand her the zucchini through the window and she pulls away from the curb.

The house is starting to get dark in that terrible early-evening twilit way. I turn on lights, get a cigarette, and go upstairs to the former squirrel room. The black dog comes with me and circles the room, snorting loudly, nose to floor. There is a spot of turmoil in an open box — they made a nest in some old disco shirts from the seventies. I suspect that’s where the baby one slept. The mean landlady has evicted them.

Downstairs, I turn the lights back off and let evening have its way with me. Waves of pre-nighttime nervousness are coming from the collie’s blanket. I sit next to her in the dimness, touching her ears, and listen for feet at the top of the stairs.

They’re speaking in physics so I’m left out of the conversation. Chris apologetically erases one of the pictures I’ve drawn on the blackboard and replaces it with a curving blue arrow surrounded by radiating chalk waves of green.

“If it’s plasma, make it in red,” I suggest helpfully. We’re all smoking illegally in the journal office with the door closed and the window open. We’re having a plasma party.

“We aren’t discussing
plasma
,” Bob says condescendingly. He’s smoking a horrendously smelly pipe. The longer he stays in here the more it feels like I’m breathing small daggers in through my nose. He and I don’t get along; each of us thinks the other needs to be taken down a peg. Once we had a hissing match in the hallway which ended with him suggesting that I could be fired, which drove me to tell him he was
already
fired, and both of us stomped into our offices and slammed our doors.

“I had to fire Bob,” I tell Chris later.

“I heard,” he says noncommittally. Bob is his best friend. They spend at least half of each day standing in front of chalkboards, writing equations and arguing about outer space. Then they write theoretical papers about what they come up with. They’re actually quite a big deal in the space physics community, but around here they’re just two guys who keep erasing my pictures.

Someone knocks on the door and we put our cigarettes out. Bob hides his pipe in the palm of his hand and opens the door.

It’s Gang Lu, one of their students. Everyone lights up again. Gang Lu stands stiffly talking to Chris while Bob holds a match to his pipe and puffs fiercely; nose daggers waft up and out, right in my direction. I give him a sugary smile and he gives me one back. Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike features, will appear at the door to my office and identify herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty office. I do this Without saying anything because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face loosens and she starts to cry in long ragged sobs. An hour later I go back and the office is empty. When I erase the blackboard finally, I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred.