Bobcat and Other Stories (3 page)

“Is everything all right?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “It is. I’m just a wreck, though. I should feel so grateful but ever since I had the baby, I’ve been falling apart. I can’t seem to pull myself together.”

“I can imagine how a new mother would feel that way,” I said.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “I’m sure it will be different for you.”

“Oh no, no, don’t worry.”

“Every day just seems so empty.”

“Is there anything that helps?”

“I guess, yes. Maybe Ray helps a little. But I’ve been so awful to him. I’m angry all the time, or sad. I just don’t know what to do with myself. I’m so sorry,” she said, and then stared out at the city.

The city never disappoints,
John frequently said when we set out on an excursion, even a tiny one to the drugstore or for a walk around the park. It was true. Kitty and I both looked out at it now—the lights, its long winding roads, the million interiors. It doesn’t know what you want so it tries to give you everything. It was October, the most beautiful month of the year, and even in the city tonight, and under a light rain, you could smell the burning—leaves, grass, the earth, everything golden burning up, surrendering before winter arrives. I looked back in at the candlelit table; people were in high spirits, and nobody seemed to mind that two of the women were out weeping on the balcony. Except then I did catch Ray’s eye, and he seemed to shrink away a little. Good.

“LET’S JUST GO OUT
there right now and tell her, in front of him,” Lizbet said. She and I were in the kitchen, preparing the trifle, and Kitty was back at the table, tucked up against Ray.

“Don’t tell her
now,
” I said. “Don’t tell her in the middle of the dinner.”

“This party is like a torture chamber for her.”

I agreed with Lizbet that Kitty needed to know, but I couldn’t bear for her to be told right now. “Some women don’t want to know,” I said. “Who knows what sort of arrangement they have?”

“I’m pretty sure they have a normal arrangement along the lines of not sleeping with other people.”

“I suppose. But the dream of a happy family can be so overpowering that people will often put up with a lot to approximate it. Sometimes a little blindness keeps the family together.”

“Well, then tear the family to pieces if it requires that.”

“I guess, but you know—children and all.”

“People need to have fewer children if what they do is just keep us all in lockstep.”

“I know,” I said. “I used to think about what was happening in, like, Kosovo, but now I’m researching baby gates deep into the night.”

“Oh my god. Are you going to get one of those plastic playgrounds in your backyard?”

“Except that I don’t have a backyard.”

“It’s kind of a drag for the rest of us when people have children.”

“It’s just that you don’t want to use your child as a scythe to break through the forest of received opinion.”

“That sounds like an okay use of a child,” Lizbet said.

None of this was surprising from Lizbet. You could trust her to hold out against any received opinions, as it was sort of the way Lizbet herself was raised. Her mother, Hanna, had gotten pregnant at twenty-seven, by accident. In fact, there was a still an IUD in Hanna’s uterus when she discovered she was pregnant, and it was too dangerous to remove it, so Lizbet grew in the womb alongside the little piece of barbed wire, an almost impossibility, and a fact that we were all strangely proud of.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m going to go crazy if I have to listen to Susan anymore.”

“She’s smart,” Lizbet said.

“I don’t even believe there was a bobcat.”

“What?”

“Seriously. A bobcat isn’t really even big enough to tear off a woman’s arm. Bobcats are quite cute and little.”

“You think she made it up, are you crazy?”

“Made what up?” John said, entering the kitchen.

“The bobcat,” I said.

“What?” he said.

“We gotta somehow look up her sleeve,” Lizbet said, “and see the type of scar it is.”

“You two are crazy. You need to not spend time alone together.”

I handed him the huge, chilled trifle and he carried it like a big baby into the dining room, where it was greeted with shouts of happiness.

EVERY DINNER PARTY BY
the end is a bit of a defeat. After the halfway mark, when everybody is still in high-spirits, some even intoxicated, and the dessert still hasn’t arrived, there is a moment when it seems like we are the most interesting dinner party in Manhattan tonight, we love each other, and we should do this all the time, why don’t we do this all the time? Everybody is calculating when they can invite everybody to their house for the next dinner party.

But then there is the subtle shift downward. Somebody is a little too drunk. The bird, which was a bronze talismanic centerpiece, golden and thriving, is revealed as a collection of crazy bones. A single line from the archeologist Ernest Becker often tore through my mind at the end of long meals, that every man stands over a pile of mangled bones and declares life good.

I had learned from my mother, who was an exquisite hostess, that it was important to provide small, gradual treats—little chocolates and liqueurs, after the meal, so that as the night decelerates there is no despair.

There was the trifle, and then fortune cookies, and then John brought in mango.

The alcohol had left Susan nostalgic for the bobcat and her time on the mountain. “What I missed the most,” she said, “while I lay there, aware now that my arm would most likely have to be amputated, if I didn’t die right there, going in and out of consciousness, what I missed the most was this, the ritual of dinner, the sitting down to sup together.”

Oh my god. I looked over at Lizbet and knew she would repeat “sup together” for the rest of our lives.

“It is
written inside us,
” Susan said, “to have dinner with our friends. As I crouched down, and he breathed at my back, I went through all the great meals of my life, one by one. The fish at the wharf in my childhood, the beef bourguignon in Falstaff, my grandmother’s creampuffs, one by one.”

“When you say ‘bobcat,’ ” I said, “are you meaning it metaphorically or actually?”

“Both,” Susan said. “I picture it as the fright of your life.”

“But when you say ‘bobcat’ most of us are picturing a really big, ferocious animal.”

“And that’s fine,” she said.

But Frances, as the book’s editor, took offense. She sighed and said, bored, “Actually, literature needs to be read as literature, not gone thudding through like one would a law brief.”

There was a knock at the door; I leaped up. “That’s the Tran decision,” I said. I’d asked the night secretary at the firm to bring it over the minute it arrived.

“It’ll be the manuscript,” Frances said. She said it with such certainty that I half expected a breathless Salman at the door, delivering it himself.

But it was neither, though the Tran case would be settled the next day, with Duong forced to abandon his little boy, and Salman’s memoir would get published and it actually would explain our times and it
would
find joy where none previously was. It was just a plain woman at the door, in a long overcoat, asking for my husband. It was such a startling request, and standing there, she formed the perfect answer to the question that was County Clanagh. Unlike the Donner-Nilson marriage, whose dysfunction would turn out to be, deep down, part of its durability—Kitty’s solicitude interlocking nicely with Ray’s narcissism—our marriage would break apart within months. And when it did, I would understand Susan’s book a little better because nothing could describe what was happening, my little boy, just a few months old, already cut loose from the nuclear family—a little spaceman adrift, his parents also cast to the heavens.

Our guests left soon after, leaving behind this woman at the door, who would stay and stay. I gave the guests some marzipan boats, to eat on the subway, or save for another day. Susan bit into one right away and thanked me for a wonderful party. But she knew. She put her hand on my shoulder, and her eyes let me know,
Just crouch down, hold tight, there’s a little bit of pain for you, but not too much.

The Banks of the Vistula

It was dusk; the campus had turned to velvet. I walked the brick path to Humanities, which loomed there and seemed to incline toward me, as God does toward the sinner in the book of Psalms. It was late on a Friday afternoon, when the air is fertile, about to split and reveal its warm fruit—that gold nucleus of time, the weekend. Inside, up the stairs, the door to Stasselova’s office was open, and the professor lifted his head. “Oh,” he said. “Yes.” He coughed, deep in his lungs, and motioned me in. He had requested this visit earlier in the day, following class. His course was titled Speaking in Tongues: Introductory Linguistics. Stasselova was about sixty-five and a big man, his torso an almost perfect square. Behind his balding head the blond architecture of St. Gustav College rose into the cobalt sky. It looked like a rendition of thought itself, rising out of the head in intricate, heartbreaking cornices that became more abstract and complicated as they rose.

I was in my third week of college. I loved every moment of it, every footfall. The students resembled the students I’d known in high school, Scandinavian midwesterners like myself, whose fathers were all pastors or some declension thereof—but the professors thrilled me. Most had come from the East Coast and seemed fragile and miserable in the Midwest. Occasionally during class you could see hope for us rising in them, and then they would look like great birds flying over an uncertain landscape, asking mysterious questions, trying to lead us somewhere we could not yet go.

I wanted to be noticed by them, to distinguish myself from the ordinary mass of students, and to this end I had plagiarized my first paper for Stasselova’s class. This was why, I presumed, he had called me to his office.

The paper, titled “The Common Harvest,” was on the desk between us. I had found it in the Kierkegaard Library. It was a chapter in an old green-cloth book that was so small I could palm it. The book had been written in 1945 by a man named Delores Tretsky, and it hadn’t been signed out since 1956. I began to leaf through it, and then crouched down to read. I read for a full hour; I thought it beautiful. I had not once in all my life stopped for even a moment to consider grammar, to wonder how it rose out of history like a wing unfurling.

I had intended to write my own paper, to synthesize, as Stasselova had suggested, my own ideas with the author’s, but I simply had nothing to contribute. It seemed even rude to combine this work with my own pale, unemotional ideas. So I lifted a chapter, only occasionally dimming some passages that were too fine, too blinding.

“THIS IS AN EXTRAORDINARY
paper,” he said. He was holding his coffee cup over it, and I saw that coffee had already spilled on the page to form a small, murky pond.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It seems quite sophisticated. You must not have come here straight out of high school.”

“I did,” I said.

“Oh. Well, good for you.”

“Thanks.”

“You seem fully immersed in a study of oppression. Any reason for this?”

“Well, I do live in the world.”

“Yes, that’s right. And you say here—a shocking line—that a language must sometimes be repressed, and replaced, for the larger good. You believe this?”

“Yes.”

“You think that the Eastern-bloc countries should be forced to speak, as you say here, the mother tongue?”

Some parts of the paper I had just copied down verbatim, without really understanding, and now I was stuck with them. Now they were my opinions. “Yes,” I said.

“You know I am from that region.”

“Is that right?”

“From Poland.”

“Whereabouts in Poland?” I asked conversationally.

“I was born on the edge of it, in the dark forest land along its northeastern border, before the Soviet Union took it over completely, burning our towns. As children we were forced to speak Russian, even in our homes, even when we said good night to our mothers as we fell asleep.”

This was turning into a little piece of bad luck.

“When did you write this?” he asked.

“Last week.”

“It reads like it was written fifty years ago. It reads like Soviet propaganda.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Did somebody help you?”

“Actually, yes. Certainly that’s all right?”

“Of course, if done properly. Who was it that helped you, a book or a person?”

“My roommate helped me,” I said.

“Your roommate. What is her name?”

“Solveig.”

“Solveig what?”

“Solveig Juliusson.”

“Is she a linguistics scholar?”

“No, just very bright.”

“Maybe I can talk to Solveig myself?”

“Unfortunately, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“In what way?”

“Well, she’s stopped eating. She’s very thin. Her parents were worried, so they took her home.”

“Where does she live?”

“I don’t know.”

We both sat silent. Luckily, I had experience lying in my adolescence and knew it was possible to win even though both parties were aware of the lie. The exercise was not a search for truth but rather a test of exterior reserve.

“I’m sure she’ll be returning soon,” I said. “I’ll have her call you.”

Stasselova smiled. “Tell her to eat up,” he said, his sarcasm curled inside his concern.

“Okay,” I said. I got up and hoisted my bag over my shoulder. As I stood, I could see the upper edge of the sun falling down off the hill on which St. Gustav was built. I’d never seen the sun from this angle before, from above as it fell, as it so obviously lit up another part of the world, perhaps even flaming up the sights of Stasselova’s precious, oppressed Poland, its dark contested forests and burning cities, its dreamy and violent borders.

MY ROOMMATE SOLVEIG WAS
permanently tan. She went twice a week to a tanning salon and bleached her hair frequently, so that it looked like radioactive foliage growing out of dark, moody sands. Despite all this she was very beautiful, and sensible. “Margaret,” she said, when I came in that evening. “The library telephoned to recall a book. They said it was urgent.”

I had thought he might check the library. “Okay,” I said. As I rifled through the clothes on my closet floor, I decided it would have to be burned. I would finish the book and then I would burn it. But first there was tonight, and I had that rare thing, a date.

My date was from Stasselova’s class. His name was Hans; he was a junior, and his father was a diplomat. He had almost auburn hair that fell to his neckline. He wore, always, long white shirts whose sleeves were just slightly, almost imperceptibly, puffed at the shoulders, like an elegant little joke, and very long, so they hung over his hands. I thought he was articulate, kind. I had in a moment of astonishment asked him out.

The night was soft and warm. We walked through the tiny town, wandered its thin river. We ate burgers. He spoke of Moscow, where he had lived that summer. I had spent my childhood with a vision of Russia as an anti-America, a sort of fairy-tale intellectual prison. But this was 1987, the beginning of perestroika, of glasnost, and views of Russia were changing. Television showed a country of rain and difficulty and great humility, and Gorbachev was always bowing to sign something or other, his head bearing a mysterious stain shaped like a continent one could almost but not quite identify. I said to Hans that I wanted to go there myself, though I had never thought of the idea before that moment. He said, “You can if you want.” We were in his small, iridescent apartment by now. “Or perhaps to Poland,” I said, thinking of Stasselova.

“Poland,” Hans said. “Yes. What is left of it, after men like Stasselova.”

“What do you mean, men like Stasselova?”

“Soviet puppets.”

“Yet he is clearly anti-Soviet,” I said.

“
Now,
yes. Everybody is anti-Soviet now.” The sign for the one Japanese restaurant in town cast a worldly orange light into the room, carving Hans’s body into geometric shapes. He took my hand, and at that moment the whole world seemed to have entered his apartment. I found him intelligent, deliberate, large-hearted. “Now,” he said, “is the time to be anti-Soviet.”

ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, IN
class, Hans sat across from me. We were all sitting around a conference table, waiting for Stasselova. Hans smiled. I gave him the peace sign across the table. When I looked back at him, moments later, Hans’s hands were casually laid out on the table, palms down. I saw then, for the first time, that his left hand tapered into only three fingers, which were fused together at the top knuckle. The hand looked delicate, surprising. I had not noticed this on our date, and now I wondered if he had purposely kept me from seeing it, or if I had somehow just missed it. For a brief, confused moment, I even wondered if the transformation had occurred between then and now. Hans looked me squarely in the eye. I smiled back. Stasselova then entered the room. In light of my date with Hans, I had almost forgotten my visit with him the previous Friday. I’d meant to burn the book over the weekend in the darkness at the ravine, though I dreaded this. My mother was a librarian, and I knew that the vision of her daughter burning a book would have been like a sledgehammer to the heart.

Throughout the class Stasselova seemed to be speaking directly to me, still chastising me. His eyes kept resting on me disapprovingly. “The reason for the sentence is to express the verb—a change, a
desire
. But the verb cannot stand alone; it needs to be supported, to be realized by a body, and thus the noun—just as the soul in its trajectory through life needs to be comforted by the body.”

The sun’s rays slanted in on Stasselova as he veered into very interesting territory. “All things in revolution,” he said, “in this way, need protection. For instance, when my country, Poland, was annexed by the Soviet Union, we had the choice of joining what was called Berling’s Army, the Polish wing of the Russian army, or the independent Home Army. Many considered it anti-Polish to join the Russian army, but I believed, as did my comrades, that more could be done through the system, within the support of the system, than without.”

He looked at me. I nodded. I was one of those students who nod a lot. His eyes were like brown velvet under glass. “This is the power of the sentence,” he said. “It acts out this drama of control and subversion. The noun always stands for what is, the status quo, and the verb for what might be, the ideal.”

Across the table Hans’s damaged hand, spindly and nervy, drummed impatiently on the tabletop. I could tell he wanted to speak up. Stasselova turned to him. “That was the decision I made,” he said. “Years ago. Right or wrong, I thought it best at the time. I thought we could do more work for the Polish cause from within the Red Army than from outside it.”

Hans’s face was impassive. He suddenly looked years older—austere, cold, priestly. Stasselova turned then to look at me. This was obviously an issue for him, I thought, and I nodded as he continued to speak. I really did feel supportive. Whatever army he thought was best at the time, that was fine with me.

IN THE EVENING I
went to the ravine in the elm forest, which lay curled around the hill on which the campus was built. This forest seemed deeply peaceful to me, almost conscious. I didn’t know the reason for this at the time—that many elms in a forest can spring from a single tree. In this case a single elm had divided herself into a forest, an individual with a continuous DNA in whose midst one could stand and be held. The ravine cut through like an old emotional wound. I crouched on its bank and glanced at the book one last time. I flicked open my lighter. The book caught fire instantly. As the flame approached my hand, I arced the book into the murky water. It looked spectacular, a high wing of flame rising from it. Inside, in one of its luminous chapters, I had read that the ability to use language and the ability to tame fire arose from the same warm, shimmering pool of genes, since in nature they did not appear one without the other.

As I made my way out of the woods and into the long silver ditch that lined the highway, I heard about a thousand birds cry, and I craned my neck to see them lighting out from the tips of the elms. They looked like ideas would if released suddenly from the page and given bodies—shocked at how blood actually felt as it ran through the veins, as it sent them wheeling into the west, wings raking, straining against the requirements of such a physical world.

I RETURNED AND FOUND
Solveig turning in the lamplight. Her hair was piled on her head, so unnaturally blond it looked ablaze, and her face was bronze. She looked a thousand years old. “Some guy called,” she said. “Stasselova or something.”

He called again that night, at nearly midnight. I thought this unseemly.

“So,” he said. “Solveig’s back.”

“Yes,” I said, glancing at her. She was at her mirror, performing some ablution on her face. “She’s much better.”

“Perhaps the three of us can now meet.”

“Oh,” I said, “it’s too early.”

“Too early in what?”

“In her recovery.” Solveig wheeled her head around to look at me. I smiled, shrugged.