American Appetites (2 page)

“Sigrid, please—”

“You and your wife, people like you!”

“—are you in danger? Is somebody there?” Ian asked, suddenly rather frightened. “Where are you?”

She began sobbing, panting harshly into the receiver, a warm moist desperate breath Ian could virtually feel. The last time he'd spoken with this young woman she had confided in him, half in worry, yet half, he'd thought, in pride, that she was involved in a love affair she couldn't seem to “control”: formally engaged to a man, Egyptian-born, now living and working in the States, who was both “devoted” to her and “vindictive”; a man she loved very much, yet sometimes feared. Ian had had, only once, a brief encounter with this man, this rather exotic fiancé of Sigrid Hunt's, in the McCulloughs' house, in fact, at one of Glynnis's large crowded parties. Ian retained only the vaguest image of a handsome, quite dark, unsmiling face that looked as if it had been carved out of stone. He could not recall having shaken the man's hand.

Now Sigrid was saying, sobbing, “You want me to beg, don't you—you, all of you—” and Ian said, “Please don't say such a thing; tell me where you are, what I can do for—” and Sigrid said, “Come or don't come, what does it matter?”—her voice lifting in childlike despair even as it seemed to fall away from the receiver—“What does it matter?”

Ian said, “Wait, Sigrid, let me check the address I have for you—”

But the line was dead, a rebuke to his caution.

EVEN AS HE
made his decision, Ian McCullough thought, But why me? Why is this young woman calling me? And he had no answer, could think of absolutely no answer. But he was flattered, in his maleness. That was, he'd recall afterward, the primary, the shameful, the exhilarating thing.

So he called Denis, to cancel out of their squash game and the editorial luncheon to follow, and he called his other colleagues, associate editors of the
Journal
, postponing the luncheon until later in the week: an emergency had come up, he said; he was terribly sorry to inconvenience them.

One of the men asked if it was a family emergency, if there was anything he might do to help, and Ian replied, hurried, vague, wanting to get off the line, “Thanks so much, Art, but I don't think so—not this time.”

THERE ARE FINALLY
only two categories of humanity in our social lives, as in Roman times there were Roman citizens and non-Roman: those whose names, addresses, and telephone numbers are carefully written into our address books, and those whose names, addresses, and telephone numbers are scribbled on tiny pieces of paper and inserted, with the expediency of the merely temporary, into our address books.

Sigrid Hunt's address was merely scribbled on a slip of paper and inserted into the tidy little book of permanent names and addresses Ian McCullough carried with him in his inside coat pocket. But how fortunate it was there at all! Ian studied it with singular intensity:
Hunt, Sigrid. 119 Tice. Poughkeepsie, N.Y
. No more than a half hour's drive.

Gutted like a fish. What, Ian wondered, had she meant by that?

He left the Institute by a rear door, half ran to his car, set off. Glynnis was in New York that day and would not be home until early evening, but that had no bearing of course upon Ian's errand.

South along the Thruway, the familiar route made unnervingly strange by a sudden snowstorm that seemed to erupt out of the sun, the sky beyond a hard ceramic blue: painterly, pictorial. Ian recalled an improbable turquoise sky in an oil by—had it been Parmigianino, or one of the others, of that odd stylized era?—contemplated, indeed, stared at, that summer in Italy, he and Glynnis hand in hand, at times gripping each other in sheer ecstatic joy at what they saw, as, at night, in love, they gripped in the ecstasy of passion. Ian thought, I must get there, I must get there before it's too late. Traffic on the Thruway was unexpectedly heavy.

Ian had taken down Sigrid Hunt's address back in November, a mild November day as he recalled, when the two of them had met, by chance, in Hazelton; Ian had dropped by the local crafts gallery, housed in a restored eighteenth-century mill, one of the several “historic” sites in the village, on an errand for Glynnis, and, returning to his car, dreamy, distracted, he'd happened to see Sigrid Hunt, or a young woman who closely resembled her, standing on a bank of the mill pond a short distance away. Ah, there, Ian thought, stopping dead in his tracks. There.

A family of tourists were rather too exuberantly tossing bread and seed out onto the pond for the ornamental waterfowl, but this young woman stood alone, unmoving, staring at the flat mirrored surface of the water: like Milton's Eve, contemplating her own mysterious reflection. She had not seen Ian but he had the uncanny feeling that she was waiting for him: knew he was there, knew he would see her, would come to her.

Which of course he did. An unavoidable social gesture, he'd thought it.

Ian's wife, Glynnis, was notable for taking up and cultivating, and eventually dropping, miscellaneous people of one kind or another: often people rather vaguely “in the arts” or “promising”; frequently young women of varying degrees of attractiveness, unattached or mysterious in their attachments, appealingly vulnerable or merely vulnerable. Her “specimens,” certain of their friends called them, not without a degree of jealousy; and, indeed, it sometimes seemed to Ian that his wife collected individuals with the avidity of an old-time biologist, hauling in and examining and classifying species. Ian, whose energy was drained by his work, whose imagination floundered when confronted by the mere prospect of cultivating a new friend, envied Glynnis both her will and her ability; was not, on the face of it, jealous; yet one day he would ask, “Where is Iris?” or “Whatever became of—was her name Frances?—I haven't seen her for months,” and Glynnis would look at him blankly for a moment, before remembering. At such times Ian felt a slight chill, wondering if, at the start, he had not been one of Glynnis's specimens himself, which she had decided to keep.

Where Glynnis had met Sigrid Hunt, Ian did not know, though perhaps he'd been told. The young woman lived twenty miles downriver, in a déclassé area, as she smilingly called it, of Poughkeepsie; she taught, or sometimes taught, or had once taught, modern dance at Vassar. (She'd murmured vaguely, with a child's reticent hurt, of university politics, academic jealousies and feuds, “budgetary restrictions,” so Ian guessed her contract had simply been terminated.) She had begun dance lessons at the age of four, had studied for years with the Martha Graham Company, had worked with various companies in New York City, Los Angeles, London, until an injury to a tendon in her right foot forced her into more or less permanent retirement, aged twenty-one. (“A dancer's life is nasty, brutish, and short,” she had said, with an enigmatic smile.)

Sigrid Hunt had told Ian these things at a large cocktail party at the McCulloughs' house, to which Glynnis had invited her. She'd shaken Ian's hand in a surprisingly hard grip and smiled happily, showing small, white, perfect teeth. “I've heard so much about you, Dr. McCullough,” she'd said, and Ian winced and said, Please, call me Ian; Ian is quite enough. But she never did quite bring herself to call him by that name, at least not in Ian's hearing.

Sigrid Hunt spoke in a careful, quaint voice, a voice seemingly without an accent; she fixed her listeners with round, wide, childlike eyes, smooth as coins and the shade, seemingly soft and powdery, of tarnish: her gaze given a subtle but arresting magnification by the perfectly round pink-tinted lenses of her glasses in their wire-rimmed frames. Her face was narrow, the features finely cut and teasingly asymmetrical, the eyes and mouth down-drooping at the corners, the eyelids naturally shadowed as if stained, or bruised, a faint blue. She was tall, perhaps five feet eleven, with a slender, rather epicene body: her neck long, shoulders narrow, breasts small as a young girl's. Her hair, her spectacular hair, fell nearly to her waist, red-gold, ridged and rippled like a washboard, and wonderfully glossy. She wore, that evening, a lemon-yellow Thai silk dress, a beautiful garment, though soiled at the cuffs; well-weathered Roman sandals on her long narrow white feet; necklaces, bracelets, distractingly large and ornamental earrings that pulled cruelly at her earlobes. Talking to Ian and one or two others she smiled a good deal and showed her teeth, licked her lips nervously. Ian quickly perceived her intelligence, which was as much physical as mental: the young woman was conscious not only of her beauty but of its inevitable effect upon others—the resistance it aroused in them.

Look at me, she was saying. For here I am.

She had come to the McCulloughs' house alone but had not been there an hour before a man appeared beside her, to take her away; Ian, caught up with other guests, had hardly more than a glimpse of a dark-skinned, unsmiling, but strikingly handsome young man of perhaps thirty, with thick black glossy hair brushed back from his forehead, a manner both civil and restrained, and very sporty, surely very expensive clothes. He was slender and no taller than Sigrid, his upper arms and shoulders muscled in that hard, compact way Ian knew to recognize from the gym. Ian, as always rather awkwardly at sea in so large a gathering, would not have spoken to the man at all had he not happened to be saying goodbye to another couple, at the front door, when Sigrid and her companion slipped by—Sigrid clearly agitated, her boyfriend decidedly unfriendly—but there was a brief obligatory exchange of names and a hurried and perfunctory handshake, as Sigrid introduced “Dr. McCullough” to “Fermi Sabri.” And Ian closed the door after them and promptly forgot them.

That night, undressing in their bedroom, Glynnis asked Ian casually what did he think of Sigrid Hunt; and Ian said, frowning, “Who? Which one was she?” “The one with the long red hair, in the yellow silk,” Glynnis said, adding, with a hurt twist of her mouth; “the one who didn't so much as trouble to introduce her boyfriend to me, or even to say goodbye to me.” Ian said, yawning, “I don't remember, actually,” and they went on to talk of other guests, of other more important guests: who had said what to whom, who had new and startling news, who had invited them to a dinner party the following Sunday if they were free. . . . There were so many people in the McCulloughs' lives, after all, and so few that really mattered.

But when Ian and Sigrid Hunt met some weeks later, at the mill pond, and again shook hands, Ian was oddly struck by a sense of—was it certitude? rightness? an excitement so keen as to feel, or even taste, like danger? He would not subsequently remember much of what he said, or how, slightly stammering, he'd managed to say anything of substance at all.

He would remember that they talked together with the nervous elation of old friends who have not seen each other in some time; that the corners of his eyes pinched, as if looking into Sigrid Hunt's face, at such close range, gave pain. It was not because Sigrid was a beautiful woman—in the sharp November sunshine she seemed in fact distinctly less beautiful than she had appeared the night of the party—but that, for all her guardedness, her self-consciousness, she was so vulnerable. And, being vulnerable, she aroused emotions in Ian he could not readily have named.

Though surely knowing that she had been dropped, or casually misplaced, in Glynnis's life, she asked after Glynnis nonetheless, with so gentle an air of regret one might have missed it altogether. Ian made a reply of some vague general smiling kind, alluded to the fact that Glynnis and he had been uncommonly busy these past few months and had not seen nearly as many people as they'd wished to see. And Sigrid, dropping her gaze, smiling enigmatically, said, “We never have time, do we, for all that we don't exactly want to do.” And in the heightened pace of their conversation, the very setting a distraction—a gaggle of mallards had set up a terrific squawking, greedy for more feed than was forthcoming, and not far away, on the bank, a young mother was scolding her weeping child—it was an easy matter to change the subject, as if he hadn't heard. Yet it touched Ian deeply: that she had been hurt. That anything in his life could have enough significance to bear upon her at all.

Sigrid was bareheaded, and her red-blond hair blew in the wind, strands of it across her face, her eyes, catching in her mouth, so that, in quick nervous gestures, she had to brush it repeatedly away. Her eyes behind the pink-tinted lenses of her schoolgirl glasses were lightly threaded with blood and damp, and Ian felt a corresponding dampness in his own, an immediate sympathy, as he'd felt his daughter Bianca's pain when she hurt herself as a small child; and she was always hurting herself as a small child, falling and banging her knees, cutting the soft pink palms of her hands, bruising her forehead. My baby, my girl, he'd thought, how can I protect you, what on earth can I do for you, to keep you from being hurt? And it tore at his heart, to know that there was nothing.

They talked together for perhaps twenty minutes, and Sigrid confided in him that she was having difficulties with her “fiancé”; she could not determine whether she loved him very much or whether she wanted to escape him, to make an absolute break and never see him again. Ian laughed, saying, “That seems rather extreme.” Sigrid said stiffly, “If you knew Fermi Sabri you'd understand.”

Ian made no reply, thinking that Fermi Sabri was the last person he cared to know.

She told him that Fermi had been born in Cairo and had emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty; he was “brilliant” but “erratic,” an engineer with an advanced degree in hydraulics from MIT. He loved her and wanted to marry her, wanted her to have his child (“a son, of course”) as proof of her love for
him
. “The night I went to your party, he'd said it was fine with him, he didn't at all mind, but then, evidently, he followed me; I think he was actually watching the house from outside for a while, before he came in.” Seeing Ian's look of distaste she added quickly, “It's just that he feels so possessive of me. I mean protective. He
means
well.”