Strong Motion (49 page)

Stites had sat down at his desk and begun to read the Bible in the light of a bare ceiling bulb. The window at his shoulder was dark now. He didn’t look up when Renée appeared in the doorway, one side of her hair matted, dissolved mascara pooling under one eye.

“I hate you,” she said. “I hate your church, I hate your religion. You’re nothing but hatred yourself. It’s just like you said. It’s all negative. You hate women, you hate sex, and you hate the world as it is.”

There were bare lightbulbs in his eyes. “I feel a love for you, Renée. You’re not a cold person. You’re full of emotion and need, and you came here, and just from an hour with you I feel a love for you. It’s a Christian love, but the Light gets filtered through the fact that I’m a man, and so I’d love to have you in my arms. I’d like to take you. All right? I’m telling you this because you seem to think it’s easy for me. I want you to know: I’m a man. I’m not made of stone. And you damn well better respect me.”

“I’d respect you if you went ahead and did it.”

He closed the Bible and leaned back in his chair. “You know, what I read about every day is what a tough life women have in today’s society. How they have to make all these hard choices, how they have to take so much responsibility for their families. They have to be mothers and they have to be working men too, if liberal society’s gonna function.”

“It’s not just women,” Renée said. “Men have to change too.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Except you don’t hear so much about men complaining and men being caught in a bind. Do you? Men still have the choice, right? They have job satisfaction, and if they
want
to, they can feel good about parenting too. It’s like life is getting
better
for men, they’re getting options in a
positive
sense, while women are getting all these extra options in a
negative
sense. Wouldn’t you call this sort of the major paradox of the age? That the better things get for women liberal-politically, the worse things get in reality?”

“The fact that I sort of agree with you only makes me angrier, because I know what you’re going to say.”

“What? That the one thing people never seem to suspect is that it’s the politics itself that’s to blame? Because of course this society doesn’t understand things like ‘joy.’ The joy a mother feels. This society only understands ‘jobs,’ and ‘statutes,’ and especially ‘money.’”

“And that women are first-class citizens. That joy isn’t worth much if it’s forced on you. And that it’s better to have painful options than no options.”

“I was just going to say I don’t deny there are women like you. Our Lord tells us that some people are born eunuchs and some people are made into eunuchs along the way.”

“Well fuck you too.”

“But the fact is, most women want to have children. But society needs them for other stuff, you know, to make more money and more profits, so it has to kinda lure them away with their vanity and pride and greed. Which women have every bit as much of as men do.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“But if a woman’s left to her own better instincts, she don’t need a big-shot job to make her feel good about herself.”

“Her rightful place is in the home.”

“That’s right. The church understands this about women. It understands the joy of motherhood.”

“Well then tell me one thing about this God of yours.” Renée took a step towards Stites. “Just one thing. If women aren’t supposed to have the same kind of life as men have, tell me why your God gave us the same kind of consciousness.”

Stites lunged forward like a trap springing closed. “He didn’t! He gave all people the commandment: Be fruitful, and multiply! And you yourself was the one who said this ‘consciousness’ doesn’t survive the birth of a woman’s first child. That she’s ‘just a woman’ then, right? See what I’m saying? The woman who’s unhappy because she’s got a man’s consciousness is the woman who has
disobeyed
the word of the Lord. The Lord promises you salvation
if
you obey His word. And this kind of consciousness problem you’re talking about vanishes in a woman who’s got a baby, just like the covenant says it will. She becomes an instinctive mother, just like you say, and just like the church knows she will. It’s a fact!”

She nodded impatiently. “But the fact remains that women are given consciousness only to have it taken away again. They get shown what they
could
have—if they were male—and then it’s denied them. And you can say, well, most women aren’t like me. But even if there was only one of me, which I can’t believe at all, I’m stuck with a nasty choice, and the only way you can justify it is to say we’re paying for Eve’s sin or some such garbage. And I’m telling you that’s a hole in your religion you can drive a truck through: the fact that life basically shits for women and always has.”

“And always will, Renée. As it ultimately shits for every person on earth. And so the real choice you have is either suffer for no reason, suffer and be bitter and bring evil to the lives around you, or else find a way to God through your suffering. And I think the Bible might agree with me that there are a lot more women in heaven than men. Just for the suffering they’ve endured and the pride they’ve swallowed. Because the last will be first and the first will be last.”

“If there is a heaven.”

“It’s at hand. It’s starin’ you in the face. That’s what you’re here for. You know your name means ‘born again’?”

“Oh my God,” Renée said, utterly disgusted.

Stites stood up and walked around his desk. “Will you at least come again? I won’t ask if I can pray for you, because you can’t stop me. But can I call you?”

She shook her head very slowly. She was staring at him, inscribing his image in her mind so that she’d always be able to find it there: the tired eyes behind the round tortoiseshell glasses, the yellow tie that now had a spot of bean juice on it, the male hips, the stubble on his cheeks.

“You’ve helped me enough already,” she said. “You’ve helped me incredibly.”

11

T
HE RACCOON WOKE UP HUNGRY
and unrefreshed. There was hardly a glimmer of light on the still water beneath the ledge he’d slept on. Rats were waddling along the walls and through the filth on the narrow, rock-strewn mud flats, migrating as they did every evening from City Hall to the dumpsters of Union Square. The raccoon rose and yawned and stretched, chin low to the ground, like a Moslem praying.

Sometimes, when he came down from his ledge, he ran confusedly back and forth along the water, spooking the rats and being spooked by them; sometimes he ran for a block or more and then stopped, whiskers twitching, and looked into the inky, dripping blackness ahead of him and then, as if the blackness were a concrete barrier, turned back.

Tonight he went straight downhill. Street light fell through the small holes and larger slots above him. Paw over paw, he climbed the iron rungs he almost always climbed. Halfway up, he reversed and descended headfirst, then reversed again and climbed to the top and peered out through the slot. Between car bumpers he could see the Post Office. He never went out through this slot. Every night he recollected having been here innumerable times, but recollection was weaker than habit, and so invariably he retraced his steps up and down the iron rungs. These and all the other motions he repeated every night were like a sorrow.

The rats were like a sorrow. There were so many of them and only one of him. In rats the gray, hostile world ramified and mobilized and swirled around him. Superior size and intelligence counted for nothing when he experienced rats; he became clumsy and vulnerable. Although they gave him wide berth in the tunnels, their numbers made them unafraid. If they surprised him, he drew his shoulders up in anger like a cat, huffing impotently as the little evils shimmered away into the darkness. They could swim terribly well.

The raccoon was bigger also than squirrels and rabbits and opossums, and was smarter and more graceful in his proportions, but again there were many of them and only one of him. A squirrel’s world might have been nothing more than trees and nuts, a neurotic hither and thither, but there was an at-homeness—a confidence and oblivion—that came of belonging to a large population doing exactly the same inconsequential things. Solitary and omnivorous, the raccoon had no better reason to climb trees than the pleasure that following an instinct gave him. The high boughs he sought bowed wildly with his weight. And when a squirrel fell it contorted itself at lightning speed and glanced off branches and hit the ground running; but when the raccoon fell he went down with a crash, grasping futilely for purchase, making noises of distress, and landed in an undignified heap. At home in many environments, he was really at home in none.

Reaching the bottom of the tunnel, he surfaced through a grateless drain on the commuter-rail right-of-way. Cars on bridges crossed over the silence that pooled in this low, rubbly part of Somerville. Dozens of food smells mingled in the sea breeze, but few had the pungency of immediate forage. The track signals were green and red in both directions.

Beneath a bridge that saw heavy foot traffic in the daytime, he ate a stale piece of jelly doughnut and the crumbs of other doughnuts in a pink-and-orange box. He ate an apple core and some marshmallows, a novelty. He ate a moth.

Up on Prospect Hill there were good grubs, good crab apple trees, and a lot of organic garbage, but there were also dogs. Sometimes at the least opportune moment a back door would fly open and out would shoot a fanged and curly-haired cannonball, and the raccoon, which like as not had been eating the remains of the dog’s dry Purina dinner, would have to scramble up the nearest vertical surface. He had spent entire nights nervously pacing the crossbar of a swing set or the roof of a recreational vehicle while below him a dog kept the neighborhood awake. Various pets had bitten his hind legs and tail. A cat had laid open one of his cheeks (but the cat had paid for it with an eye). One night a pair of schnauzers trapped him in a free-standing twelve-foot fir tree; spotlights came on, a fat man emerged from the house and children followed, the schnauzers in frenzy all the while, and the red diode of a camcorder winked and the fat man worked the zoom and one of the children lifted a schnauzer as high as she could reach, so that its furiously righteous black German eyes and rose-petal tongue and pointed teeth were within a foot of the terrified and humiliated raccoon, and this confrontation was likewise committed to videotape.

Would a thing like this ever happen to a squirrel? To a rat? To an opossum or a skunk or a rabbit?

The raccoon had had two sisters. One had been killed by cats during a melee in which his mother was also mauled. Later the other sister stopped eating and died. He and his mother saw less and less of each other. Once he passed her in a tunnel and something made him jump on her, but she rebuffed him. Rats hastened through the trickle of water between them as they crouched, panting, on opposite sides of the tunnel. Then she ran uphill and turned back angrily. He didn’t see her again until winter. The streets were white with salt and moonlight when he found her rigid by a curb, her eyes cloudy with ice crystals. It was so cold he had to bury his nose in her fur before he could smell anything.

From Union Square, in the direction of the tall buildings, the right-of-way became narrower and rockier and less rich in edible things, until eventually there came vast tunnels in which diesel winds blew and the ground shook.

To the west there was more wildlife. In his second summer the raccoon had traveled that way for several miles, drawn by the smell of females. He ran into some males and they nosed each other and climbed a roof together, but mainly they were wrapped up in their odd, private behavior, his own as odd as any. He suffered repeated traumas involving automobiles, which in West Cambridge had a way of coming and coming and coming. Meanwhile the scent of females grew fainter. By Labor Day he was back in Union Square.

Seasons changed and came around again; he never did the thing animals most like to do. His fur darkened. Something in his stomach gave him steady pain. Fleas tormented him in cycles. Only once or twice more did he see another animal like himself; and, never fighting, never mating, never interacting with his own kind in any way, he almost ceased to have a nature. He became an individual living in a world that consisted entirely of his sorrowlike compulsions and afflictions and the pleasurable exercise of his abilities. The only real face he ever saw was his own, when he looked in dark water—not when he washed food, because then although he was looking at the food and at his busy paws and at the shrubs and car parts around him, his compulsion made him sightless—but when rain had filled a ditch along the tracks and in stopping to cross it he saw a furry, masked head descend from the urban sky with intense and tender slowness to touch noses with him, like a dream of the mate he had never met, and time folded back on itself, the repeated patterns of his existence lining up the way multiple reflections of a single object come together, so that instead of a succession of days there was just one day that was his life, in fact a single moment: this one.