The Bestiary (28 page)

“I used to pay the girls from escort services to go down on me. It would take them forever. All channels of energy to that part of my body were blocked. You could have brought in a girl with a Ph.D. in the
Kama Sutra
and it still would have taken forever.”

“What’s her name, Bruno?” I said gently.

“Marisa. She’s from the Ukraine.”

“Pretty name. Am I going to meet her?”

“Of course. She’s in Boston. She gets back tomorrow.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“She’s a sonogram technician in the medical school. I had to go in for some tests. She smeared Vaseline on my abdomen and ran that gizmo around on it.” He was fumbling through his wallet. “I have her picture here.”

She was a brunette with a pageboy haircut. From her narrowed eyes and angular face, it was clear she had Mongol blood. She was smirking, a glint in her eye. I couldn’t tell if the beauty mark high on her cheek was real or artfully applied. “She’s pretty,” I said.

“You know what she did that no one else knew to do?”

“Bruno, you don’t need to tell me.”

“But I want to. You’re my oldest friend. I’m not being crude: it’s an important development for me. And if I can’t tell you, who can I tell?” He leaned closer. “She has a great body. A no-nonsense attitude. She came into my bedroom, and without a word took off her clothes and laid me out on the bed and climbed on top of me. Nobody had ever done that. Hand jobs, blow jobs—nobody had ever just started fucking me. It changed everything.”

“So you’re in love,” I said, trying to deflect him from further detail.

“I don’t know about that,” he said brusquely. “We’re having good sex—at least, I am, for the first time. Falling in love—you’re such a romantic, Xeno.”

I was taken aback. I didn’t know if it was the pain or the painkillers that had eaten away so much of him, leaving such a bitter residue.

After the plates were cleared, Bruno stood up slowly, bracing himself on the arm of his chair. “Let’s go outside. There’s a nice breeze.”

We sat on his lawn on a white bench between two pin oaks. Bruno had grown quiet. I felt I could hear his mind at work. When he spoke again, it was to an entirely different subject, his voice subdued.

“You were lucky not to have had an extended family. I’ve had to watch my family dissolve. My father, my uncle, my aunt splitting with my cousins. Then my mother coming apart at the seams. And Lena, too.”

“I did have an extended family, Bruno. All the people you just mentioned.”

“I’m sorry.” He gripped my arm. “Forgive me. But sometimes I feel like they were ghosts all along. That they never really existed. That none of us did, back in that world. That house. The get-togethers, the comings and goings. Ghosts.”

“What are you talking about?”

He removed his sunglasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Maybe I’m saying that I’m afraid of my memories.”

I had known that when he was ready he would fill me in on what had become of his family since my last visit to New York. Except for a few letters, I had been woefully out of touch, absorbed in my own affairs. I realized he had been waiting until the very end of my visit to open up.

First, he told me about his mother.

After a slew of dead-end jobs, living alone after Lena left, Mrs. Moretti had married an appliance salesman named Sal. He took her to Atlantic City for their honeymoon and the first night dropped two thousand dollars at the blackjack tables. His money. Then another three thousand the second night. Her money.

“He pissed away her savings in four months,” Bruno said. “I warned her before she got married, after I met this guy. ‘I will not be a widow forever,’ she shouted at me. Salvatore was going to be her savior. Instead, he took off when the money was gone. She spent three weeks in the psycho ward. When she got out, I rented her an apartment on Staten Island, near her cousin Maureen. I begged her to come down here, but she refused. And Lena couldn’t take care of her anymore. Maureen is also a widow. She owns a florist’s shop. Mom tried working there—for three days. She began to isolate. She was wasting away. Then, just before Christmas, she had a stroke.” He let out his breath. “It was a blow, Xeno. That woman suffered more than I want to know.”

It was a blow, and I felt it myself at that moment. I had held on to my own memories of Mrs. Moretti, her many kindnesses, the crinkly lines beside her blue eyes, the scent of her perfume. Listening to Bruno, I was reminded of my grandmother’s most important gift to me: her belief that we must pursue the beasts of this life, rather than allowing them to pursue us. If they consumed us in the end, as they had Mrs. Moretti, at least we could confront them first on our own terms. This knowledge enabled me to survive my childhood without embracing the corrosive elements—cruelty, dishonesty, envy—that ate away at so many people I knew. Eventually it translated into my quest for the bestiary, which I had come to realize was all about seeking the beasts outside myself in order to understand those within.

“Then there’s Lena,” Bruno said. “After my mother died, she really snapped. Not that things were going so great before that,” he snorted. “Sure, I’m pissed, too, about some of the same issues she is. Maybe even more pissed. I’ve dedicated my life to animal rights. But I can’t condone violence.”

“What happened?”

“Lena dropped out of veterinary school two years ago. We had a huge falling-out, and she hasn’t spoken to me since. I doubt you’ve heard from her…”

“I haven’t.” This was not a big change; over time, our correspondence had dwindled. After she graduated from college, we drifted apart. I knew she had been living with a guy in Philadelphia, a fellow graduate student, while I was enmeshed in my own affairs in Europe. But I didn’t know there had been a rift with Bruno. And I couldn’t imagine her quitting school after all her struggles to get in.

“She said she was disillusioned with the program here,” Bruno went on. “Sickened by the way the university treated its lab animals. She called it criminal. Forget the fact that
I
run a lab,” he said angrily, “and have to deal with all the other university labs, including the veterinary school’s. She joined an animal rights organization, but after a couple of months quit that, too. She claimed the legal system was rigged against them, that every suit and petition was doomed before it was filed. She moved out west, to Portland, and hooked up with a radical group. They did violent interventions, sabotaging labs and rescuing mistreated animals by breaking and entering. As a partially trained vet, she was recruited to treat these animals. That was the plan. Lena never participated in the ‘fieldwork’ she just saw animals that were brought in. Then one night she crossed the line and joined a raid on a mink farm. Her comrades clubbed a security guard, released the animals into the woods, and set fire to the pens and the gas chamber. The state police rounded up her entire group the next day and charged them with arson, larceny, assault—you name it. Lena was the getaway driver, and because she had never left their van, and had no criminal record, most of the charges against her were dropped. The judge handed her the lightest sentence, four months in state prison, on a count of conspiracy, while the others got six years. But he also imposed a far more damaging long-term penalty, refusing to reduce the felony charge to a misdemeanor for purposes of sentencing. This means she cannot obtain a veterinary license anywhere in the country, even if she completes graduate school. In fact, it will be tough for her to get any kind of responsible job.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Before she broke off with me, I told her she was playing with dynamite. These people weren’t protesters, they were vandals. No matter how strong your beliefs, violence is counterproductive. You have to be detached,” he snapped. His chin dropped to his chest. “I know. People get frustrated. They blow up. Lena blew up.”

“Where is she now?”

“Quebec, last I heard. She served her sentence in Oregon, then left the country.”

“Do you have an address?”

“I do. But she’s moving around.” He hesitated. “Are you going to try to see her?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I was hoping you would. Maybe she’ll listen to you.” He shook his head, and his voice hardened again. “She says she won’t come back to the U.S. for a long time. Maybe never. Maybe that’s good. She told me she could never be happy here. And she’s probably right.”

I
FLEW TO
Q
UEBEC
from New York late the next afternoon. There was a long layover after I arrived at JFK from Philadelphia, and I took a taxi to the Bronx. I hadn’t been there in years, and I had been thinking about it ever since my father died—and since my visit to Fornace.

Everything looked smaller in the old neighborhood: the grocery store where I used to accompany Evgénia, the florist, the Rexall drugstore, and Bellmon’s Wine Liquors across from my old building. The building itself was sorely in need of repairs: the façade crumbling, window frames peeling, the front steps cracked. My grade school had cages over the windows and a security guard at the door. The griffin that had visited my fire escape was gone, as was his partner and the First National Bank itself on whose parapet they had perched; the bank and adjacent buildings had been demolished to make way for a housing project.

I visited the Church of Saint Anthony of Padua, whose name suddenly meant something to me—conjuring up elaborate fountains and marble palazzi—now that I had actually visited Padua. I asked the rector what he could tell me about my cousin Silvana; knowing little, he directed me to a parishioner who knew the Contis, a Mrs. Tascone, the wife of a wine importer. She told me that four years earlier, Silvana Conti had contracted tuberculosis and entered a sanatorium down south.

“She recovered enough to travel to Sicily after her release,” Mrs. Tascone said, “but she never returned. She held on for a while, then passed away this year. My people are from the next town, and they let me know.”

When I left Fornace, I knew that the next time I opened my grandmother’s silver music box, the white whisker would be gone. I knew it just as surely as I had known I would never see that red fox again, even in my dreams.

I
WAS IN
M
ONTREAL
, booked on a flight to Paris that night. In Quebec City the previous day, I had gone to the address Bruno gave me, a residency hotel that rented by the week. The clerk remembered Lena, and informed me that two months earlier she had gone to Paris. She had left no forwarding address. So it turned out that when I flew home, I would be following Lena’s trail.

First, though, I was seeing Evgénia, who had written me in Paris and invited me to visit the next time I crossed the Atlantic. I had been planning to do so even before Bruno told me about Lena.

Her debts paid off, Evgénia had moved to Montreal the previous year and opened an Albanian restaurant called Shqipri on the rue Richelieu, by the river. There were thick red rugs embroidered with wolves and bears, a quartz statuette of a two-headed eagle, and a painting of Scanderbeg, the folk hero who resisted the Turks. And of course her alpine photographs adorned the walls. She lived on the second floor with her dog Yuri, in a two-bedroom apartment with bright windows and a brick fireplace. Beside the zebra-striped sofa there was an aquarium even larger than the one in her house in Chicago—fifty gallons, at least—filled with fantails.

“It’s the first place I ever owned by myself,” she said after we took a long walk by the river with Yuri.

She poured us both a glass of red wine and had the cook serve up a sampling of the house specials: baked okra, pepper salad, barley cakes soaked in honey.

“I’m glad you got to see me again, here,” Evgénia said.

Through the window the pedestrians were melting in the fog. The first customers were being led to tables by the maître d’, a young Albanian woman named Reza in white jeans and a black headband. My plane to Paris was at nine. Evgénia and I had another hour to catch up.