The Better to Hold You (8 page)

No response. For a long moment I just sat in bed, trying to figure out if the monster in the closet was real or a trick of shadows and imagination. Was Hunter really changing toward me, or was he just caught up in some internal drama that had everything to do with his work and nothing to do with me?

I walked into the living room and watched him. After a while, he turned around.

“Can’t you sleep?”

“It’s my birthday,” I said. I couldn’t help it: I was asking for special favors.

“Is it? Is it? Christ, what’s the date?”

“October seventh.”

“So it is. God, I’m all messed up with dates since I got back. So what are you now, twenty-nine?”

“Thirty.”

“Well, why don’t we have an unbirthday dinner tomorrow. I’ll bring you orchids and take you someplace absolutely fantastic, where virgins massage the beef before they serve it. We’ll stay up atrociously late, go to some smoky blues bar, and tip the piano man to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ with extra vibrato.”

“Tomorrow is Monday. I have to work.”

Hunter raked his hair back with his hand. “Do you? Of course you do. Aw, baby, I’m sorry. We’ll find another night. Friday night? We’ll do Friday. It’ll be even better. Listen, I’m almost done for to night. Just give me two more minutes and I’ll be in. Give you a birthday cuddle.”

I watched him turn, begin to work, cast an anxious, almost irritated glance over his shoulder when he saw I had not yet moved.

“Hunter?”

“What is it, Abs?” He was trying to keep the impatience from his voice, with some success.

“You were with someone else, weren’t you?” As he opened his mouth to respond, I clarified, “Not to night. In Romania.”

He looked almost relieved, I thought. “In Romania,” he said, and I waited for him to continue. But he just left it there, and I thought about all the ways I could interpret those two words. They could mean, Yes, I was unfaithful in Romania, but now I am here and I am with you. Or, There is so much you don’t understand about Romania that I don’t know where to begin. On the other hand, they could also mean that, in some very real way, my husband was still in Romania, his whole imagination caught up in the adventure of it.

But, no, I was trying to analyze this away. I knew what he meant. “Who was it?” My mind raced through the possibilities. Magdalena Ionescu, the chief wolf researcher, had to be in her forties, too old for Hunter. “Was it a girl in a bar? A call girl? Who was it?” I found myself hoping that he’d been with a call girl, something that moments ago would have felt unspeakably disgusting.

“Listen, Abra—I don’t think there’s any point in rehashing all the details. It’s only going to upset you, and frankly, I don’t have the stomach for it. Besides, it’s very American, this idea of absolute, uncompromising fidelity, with any deviation punished by an exhaustive cross-examination.” Hunter rummaged on the table for a cigarette. “In any case, sex is really the smallest part of what we have, isn’t it?” He lit the cigarette and then said, “For Christ’s sake, woman, don’t just stand there all doe-eyed. Either slap me or get over it. I don’t have patience for this victim act.”

And then I understood. Not a call girl. Not a random girl in a bar. “Are you in love with her?”

Hunter took a drag on his cigarette. “I don’t know, Abra. Probably not in the way that you mean.”

At that moment, I think I could have walked straight off the balcony without blinking. Instead, I made myself walk into the bedroom, lay myself down on the bed, and removed my glasses. Turned the light off and tried to sleep, but only wound up staring into blurry space, tears trickling down my face and into my left ear.

I wanted to scream: Tell me who she was! Tell me how many times! But in a sense, the deeper betrayal was what he’d said afterward. It wasn’t his extramarital affair that he felt was meaningless, it was sex with me that felt unimportant. All our passionate games had been nothing more than a distraction for Hunter. And he hadn’t said he didn’t love her.

I hadn’t had the guts to ask if he still loved me. It was like being told I had a potentially fatal illness, and not being able to ask whether or not there was hope.

From the other room, I could hear the steady click of the keyboard as Hunter typed. Closing my eyes made me feel like crying; I kept hearing my mother’s voice, telling me all the things that would go wrong with my marriage after the newness wore off.

I put my glasses back on and found the remote control. On Channel 54 I found what I didn’t know I was looking for: my mother, her perfectly voluptuous size-eight figure encased in a skintight space suit, trying to kiss a poor man’s Steve McQueen.

“I’m not what you think I am,” she warned him as she wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Baby, the way I feel right now, I don’t care if you’re really a five-headed barbatrid from the swamplands of Venus.”

“Well, in that case … kiss me.”

I settled back under the covers as my mother consumed her prey.

The decision to take a sick day and go visit my mother was something I began to regret before I had even arrived. All the way to Pleasantvale, I kept rethinking the moment of sleep-deprived weakness when I had made the call to work. Surely it would have been better to go in and lose myself in rounds before receiving the obligatory birthday card and cake at lunchtime. But once I had made the call, I couldn’t unsick myself, and the idea of staying home all day to be ignored by Hunter felt too much like self-inflicted torture.

So I took a cab to 125th Street and waited for a train on the high, rickety platform, along with a loud young mother with two small children, a middle-aged man carrying a biology textbook, and a suburban matron in her early sixties—folks who couldn’t be bothered to go all the way downtown to Grand Central.

“My daughter said this station was safe,” confided the white suburban matron in her Burberry raincoat, “but I don’t know.” She patted her lemony hair with one hand. “It seems very run-down, don’t you think?” To our left, the mother screamed at her children: “You go near that edge and I’ll kill you!”

“Bill Clinton thinks it’s safe,” I said. “He has an office around here.”

“He can afford to.”

I laughed. “I’m going to see my mother in Pleasantvale. That’s scarier than anything you’re likely to meet around here.”

The woman smiled, revealing coral lipstick on one tooth. “I’m sure she’ll be very happy to see you. I’m on my way to see my younger daughter’s children.” She pulled a stack of photos out of her wallet. “Look, that’s the three-year-old in the Easter dress I bought her last year; she’s got lovely dimples just like my daughter had. And that’s the five-year-old; she takes after the father’s side—they all have that hard-to-manage Italian hair.”

The train arrived, saving me. I moved far back, away from the chatty lady in the expensive raincoat. There was no way to explain to her that my mother would not be happy to see me. My mother was not like other mothers: Cats and dogs were her dimpled favorite grandchildren, and I was the unfortunate inheritor of my father’s bad genes.

Of course, if I’d said my mother’s name, the lady would probably have gone into verbal overdrive. As Piper LeFever, my mother made six films between 1974 and 1979, the year I was born. She’d appeared in Beware the Cat! (as the youngest of three sexy witches terrorizing a small village in medieval En gland) and The Harpy (as a morsel for a big vulture), and had made quite an impression on one reviewer in Lucrezia Cyborgia (as a dangerously beautiful alien in a skintight space suit). Her first starring role had been in Blood of Egypt (as a mousy librarian who is really a powerful priestess of the ancient Sect of Anubis), which was followed by Satan’s Bride and El Castillo de los Monstros, her last movie. El Castillo de los Monstros was my father’s big break. Only twenty-five at the time, he replaced Domingo Santos as director after my mother drove the man to a nervous breakdown. My father, who is Spanish, knew how to handle temperamental women. He made my mother pregnant and finished the picture right on schedule.

I’m not exactly sure why my parents left the West Coast, or even whose idea it was to buy a splendid Spanish-style house in Pleasantvale, thirty minutes from Manhattan. I guess it must have been one of those rare decisions they came to jointly, without arguing. In any case, it was a strange sort of place to grow up in, a great fanciful villa modeled on El Greco’s house in southern Spain, smack-dab in the middle of a resolutely working-class neighborhood. The house, which was built in the 1920s, had come first, and the neighborhood had grown up around it like the forest of thorns around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

At first there was enough room for two warring spouses, a suit of armor in the formal dining hall, two wolfhounds, and a wandering tribe of cats, not to mention a Roman fountain in the central courtyard. But then Dad’s career as a director died completely with the ill-fated mid-eighties television series I Married a Werewolf and the arrangement soon became unbearable. The fact that the show was about a henpecked husband married to a temperamental lycanthrope may also have had something to do with it. Reviewers called it a misogynistic Bewitched.

Already the proud owner of six cats, two dogs, and a ferret, my mother decided to turn our house into Beast Castle, a nonprofit organization for housing unwanted animals. Like Brigitte Bardot, Piper LeFever likes to say that she gave her youth to men and her mature, wise, nurturing, unselfish prime to animals.

My father likes to say that he gave his youth to Piper LeFever, which was like living with an animal.

At the Pleasantvale station, I got up, smiled wanly at the chatty lady, and began walking the familiar suburban route backward through time. It takes only ten minutes to walk to my mother’s house—five to cover the town’s tiny commercial center, five to make your way past the run-down houses that border my mother’s property. I walked past the pizza place, the dry cleaners, the deli; I passed two small, fenced-in yards and the stationery shop where lotto tickets were sold. Every step felt like it took a year off my life—twenty-nine, twenty-eight, past the sensible age of twenty-five when insurance companies will let you rent their cars, past twenty-one and the right to have white wine at a restaurant, back before the legal age to vote, to have sex, to smoke a cigarette.

Nothing but a thin line of sidewalk now, the grass growing too long around the pavement. There were the same old lovely maple and pine trees and a bit of broken glass and empty beer cans to mark my way.

I was somewhere around fifteen or sixteen, anxious and rebellious, when I arrived at the curved black iron gates of Beast Castle: An Animal Refuge.

I rang the doorbell and a young woman opened the door, holding a shivering Chihuahua. She had long, blond, stringy hair and was thin and serious in an Indian batik skirt.

“Yes?”

“I’m here to see Piper LeFever.”

“She’s busy. If you have an animal you can’t take care of, you can leave it with me.” Her voice dripped scorn. She must be a real hit with the customers, I thought. Would anyone adopt an animal from this person?

“She’s my mother.” I tried another approach. “Here, do you want me to look at that dog? I’m a vet.” The shivering Chihuahua had clear fluid dripping from its nose.

The young woman stepped to one side. “Oh, you’re Abra,” she said, with an emphasis on the second word. I had a sense she’d been expecting someone more impressive. She cuddled the little dog closer to her small breasts. “I’m Grania and this little fellow is Pimpernell and he has a cold. Yes, you do, little sniffle-up-a-kiss.”

I walked in and inhaled the familiar tang of cat urine. All the chairs had been thoroughly shredded. There was a bulging bandage of rope covering one leg of the antique French mirrored table, but clearly, no cat had taken to this improvised scratching post. I took off my cotton sweater and stared up at the skylight, which was spotted with bird feces. “God, what a mess.”

Grania bristled. “Our funds barely cover the cost of feeding and maintaining our animals,” she began, but I held up my hands.

“I’m not criticizing you. This place is vast, and my mother has always been a slob,” I said. “When I was a kid, it took a team of cleaning women to keep her from trashing the house. Here, can I have a look at the little guy?” I held out my hands for Pimpernell the Chihuahua.

“It’s just a cold,” said Grania.

“In this case, I think you’re right. But sometimes, with these big foreheads, the nose becomes a pop-off valve for their brains.”

The blond girl stared at me. “What do you mean?”

“Fluid drains from the brain. Does he act neurologic—you know, inappropriate?”

Grania looked down at the shivery little animal with a frown between her eyebrows, apparently considering what the appropriate behavior for a three-pound dog might be. “I’m not sure. He runs in circles sometimes, when he’s excited.”

“That sounds normal.” I took the little creature in my arms and it fixed its pop-eyed imploring gaze on me, shivered, and licked my nose. “Hey, you are kind of cute.”

“Is he all right?” Grania seemed a little jealous as Pimpernell gave me another wet kiss.

“I should probably run a test on the fluid, but yes, I think he’s all right.” I smiled, realizing that a good four minutes had gone by without my thinking about the fact that my husband had been having sex with another woman. Except that now I had just thought about it again.

“Wow, Pimpernell likes you.”

I turned. It was my mother, coming down the long staircase with one hand on the heavy wood banister, her purple velvet caftan flowing behind her and her long blond hair three shades brighter than the girl’s. On the carved bottom of the banister was a great, rheumy-eyed Persian, one of several cats I could see sprawled around the foyer now that I was paying attention.

“Hi, Mom.” She kissed me three times, once near the left cheek, twice near the right, like some sort of Russian noblewoman.

“You look bottom-heavy in that. Why do you keep wearing khaki pants? You need something dark below.”

“These are comfortable.”