Wild Child and Other Stories Read online

  I went up the sidewalk, my legs churning against the grade with the fierce regularity of my rage, my quadriceps muscles flexing and releasing, the anterior cruciate ligaments aligning and realigning themselves in my knees, the chambers of my Jesus-less heart pumping like the slick-working intricate parts of the intricate machine they were, and the whole debate reduced to a naked clipboard and a torn shirt. I was two blocks from the Granite. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t think. I crossed one street, then the next, and the hill sank ahead of me until the familiar yellow awning of the bar came into view, cars parked out front, lights glowing against the twilight and all the trees down the block masked in shadow.

  That was when my vision suddenly came clear and I spotted Lynnese. She was sitting behind a card table in front of the bookstore, Mary-Louise perched on a folding chair beside her with her back arched so perfectly she might have been auditioning for junior cotillion. They were fifty feet from me. I saw a mug imprinted with the hopeful yellow slash of a smiley face, front and center, right in the middle of the table, saw Mary-Louise’s pink backpack at her feet and the sprawl of her books and homework. And I saw the clipboard. Cheap dun plastic, the shining metallic clip. Saw it all at the very moment Lynnese lifted her eyes and flashed me a smile with wings on it.

  My reaction? Truthfully? I made as if I didn’t see her. Suddenly I had to cross the street—this was very compelling, an absolute necessity, because even though crossing the street would take me away from the Granite and I’d have to walk a block in the opposite direction and then double back, I had an urgent errand over there on the other side of the street, in that antique shop I’d passed a hundred times and never yet set foot in.

  Mutation, and How It Operates in Nature

  And then it was a Sunday toward the end of the month, warmer than it should have been at this time of year, and I was out in the woods on the trail behind Breakneck Ridge, enjoying the weight of my daypack and the way the trees caught the wind and shook out their colors. I had two hot dog buns with me, two all-beef wieners, yellow mustard in a disposable packet and a bottle of red wine I’d decanted into my bota bag, and I was planning on a good six- or seven-mile loop and lunch beside a creek I liked to visit, especially in the fall when the bugs were down. The World Series was on, but it featured two teams that didn’t excite me all that much and I figured the Granite could do without me, at least for the afternoon—I’d been in and out all week anyway, mostly when Dave wasn’t there. Nothing against Dave—I just needed a little time to myself. Nights were getting cold. The season was almost gone.

  I felt the climb as a burn in my lungs and I realized I wasn’t in the kind of shape I should have been—the walk up from the train was one thing, but the ridge was another thing altogether. I was thinking about the philosophy of religion professor and a trick he’d played on the class one Friday afternoon when all we wanted, collectively, was to get out the door and head downtown for beer, loud music and whatever association we could make with the opposite sex. He put a drawing up on the blackboard, nothing very elaborate, just lines and shadings, that appeared to be a scene out of nature, a crag, a pine tree, a scattering of boulders. He didn’t identify it as a trompe l’oeil, but that was what it was, a trick of the eye, a deception, sweet and simple. There’s a hidden figure here,he told us, and when you see it—and please don’t reveal it to anyone else—you’re welcome to leave. Just concentrate. That’s all it takes. One by one, my classmates gave out with expressions of surprise, wondered a moment over the subtlety of the lesson, packed up their books and left. I was the last one. I stared at that crag, that pine tree, till they were imprinted on my brain, increasingly frustrated—there was nothing there, I was sure of it, and the others were faking it in order to curry favor and not least to get out of the classroom and into the sunlit arena of that Friday afternoon. When finally I did see it—a representation of Jesus leaping clear of the background, his halo a pine bough, a boulder for his cheek—all I felt was disappointment. It was a cheap trick, that was all. What did it prove? That anybody can be fooled? That we can’t trust the evidence of our five senses when five senses are all we’ve got?

  It had rained the night before and the path was slick beneath my feet. I came within an ace of losing my balance on a switchback with a considerable drop to it and that drove the professor and his drawing right out of my head. There was the sound of running water everywhere, a thousand little streams sprung up overnight to churn away at the side of the mountain, and the wind picked up so that the branches of the trees rattled overhead and the leaves came down like confetti. I was almost to the creek where I was planning to gather up some damp twigs and get a fire going so I could roast my wieners and take in the glory of the day from a new perspective, when I came around a bend in the trail and saw a figure up ahead. A girl. Dressed in khaki shorts and a denim jacket. Her back was to me and she was bent at the waist in a patch of sun just off the trail, as if she were looking for something.

  I stopped where I was. It was always awkward meeting people on the trail—they’d come for solitude and so had I, and a woman alone would always view a man with suspicion, and rightfully so. There’d been attacks, even out here. It took me a moment, poised there with my feet still in their tracks, before I recognized her, Mary-Louise, bent over in a column of sunlight with her blond hair clipped short and the back of her neck so white it was like an ache. For a moment, I didn’t know what to do—I was about to turn away and tiptoe back down the trail, but she turned her face to me as if she’d known all along that I was there and I scuffed my hiking boots on the dirt just to make some noise, and said, “Hi. Hi, Mary-Louise.” And then a joke, lame, admittedly, but the best I could manage under the circumstances: “I see you’ve stepped up in the world.”

  She’d turned back to whatever it was that had caught her attention and when she looked at me again she put a single finger to her lips and then gestured for me to come closer. I moved up the path as stealthily as I could, one slow step at a time. When I reached her, when I was standing over her and seeing what she was seeing—a snake, a blacksnake stretched out across a fallen log in the full glare of the sun, its scales trapping the light like a fresh coat of paint—she gave me such a look of pride you’d think she’d created it herself. “It’s a blacksnake,” I said. “A big one too. They can get to be ten feet long, you know.”

  “Eight feet,” she said. “Maximum. The record’s a hundred and one inches.”

  “And you didn’t have to shush me—I mean, it’s not as if they can hear.”

  “They feel the vibrations. And they can see.”

  We both looked down at it. Its eyes were open, its tongue flicking. There was no hurry in it because the sun was a thing it needed and the season was going fast and soon it would be underground. Or dead. “You know,” I said, “it’s really a black racer—”

  “Coluber constrictor,” she said without turning her head. “That’s the scientific name.”

  The wind beat at the trees and a shadow chased violently across the ground, but the snake never moved. “Yeah,” I said, out of my league now. “It’s amazing how fast they can move if they want to. I saw one once, when I was a kid, and it was in this swamp. A couple of inches of water, anyway, and it went after a frog like you couldn’t believe.”

  “They move by contracting the muscles of their ribs. All snakes have at least a hundred vertebrae and some as many as four hundred, did you know that?”

  “But no legs. Their lizard cousins have legs, though, and how do you think they got them? And out west—I saw one once in the Sierras—they have a legless lizard, just like a snake, but it’s not.” I should have left it, but I couldn’t. “Why do you suppose that is? I think—no, I know—it’s because of evolution, and that legless lizard is a link between the snakes, who don’t need legs to crawl into tight spaces, and the lizards that can get up and run. Like us.” She didn’t say anything. The trees dipped and rose again. The snake lay still.

  “Once,” she
said, turning all the way round to stare at me as if I were the wonder of nature and the snake no more than incidental, “in the spring? I was with my mother and we were standing outside my friend Sarah’s house, a farmhouse, but it’s not a farm really, just an old stone place with a barn. Right there, while we were saying goodbye and getting ready to walk to our car, these snakes began to come out of a hole in the ground right where we were standing. Garter snakes.”

  I wanted to tell her that they balled up like a skein of yarn to survive the winter, hundreds of them sometimes, that they gave birth to live young and that the babies were on their own after that, but I didn’t. “Red and yellow stripes,” I said. “And black.”

  She nodded. Her eyes went distant at the memory. “They were like ribbons,” she said. “Ribbons of God.”

  HANDS ON

  She liked his hands. His eyes. The way he looked at her as if he could see beneath the skin, as if he were modeling her from clay, his fingers there at her jawline, at the orbits of her eyes, feeling their way across her brow. She’d stepped in out of the hard clean light of early summer, announced herself to the receptionist and barely had time to leaf through one of the magazines on the end table before she’d been ushered into this room, with its quiet shadows and the big black-leather reclining chair in the middle of the floor—it was like a dentist’s chair, that was her impression, only without all the rest of the paraphernalia. And that was good, because she hated the dentist, but then who didn’t? Pain, necessary pain, pain in the service of improvement and health, that was what the dentist gave you, and she wondered about this—what would this give her? The recliner said nothing to her, but it intimidated her all the same, and so she’d taken a seat in a straight-backed chair just under the single shaded window. And then he was there, soft-voiced and smiling, and he pulled up a second chair and sat close, studying her face.

  “It was the Botox I was interested in,” she heard herself say, the walls soaking up her words as if she were in a confessional. “These frown marks, right here?”—she lifted a hand to run two fingers along the rift between her eyes—“and maybe my eyes too, underneath them? I thought—well, looking in the mirror I thought they looked a little tired or saggy or something. Right here? Right along here? And maybe you could—if there’s some procedure, nothing radical, just some smoothing out there? Is that possible?” She couldn’t help herself: she laughed then, a laugh of nerves, yes, because all this was strange to her and he hadn’t said a word beyond that first soft hello, just fixed those eyes of his on the lines of her face and hadn’t let go even to blink. “I guess it’s because I’m coming up on my birthday—next week, I mean. I’ll be thirty-five, if you can believe it, so I just—”

  “Yes,” he said, rising, “why don’t you have a seat here”—indicating the leather recliner—“and we’ll have a look?”

  On the way out, she stopped at the desk to make an appointment for the Botox treatment. Both secretaries—or no, one was a nurse flipping through files in the far corner—had flawless faces, not a line or wrinkle visible, and she wondered about that. Did they get a discount? Was that one of the perks of the job? There was a color brochure to take home and study, forms to sign. The Botox was nothing, he’d assured her—simplest thing in the world, and it wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes—and the procedure on her eyes was very routine too, a snip of the excess skin and removal of the fat pads, the whole thing done in-office, though she’d be under sedation. It would take a month to heal, two to three months till it was perfect. He had run his fingers under her chin, stroked the flesh below her ears and pressed his thumbs into the hollows there. “You’ve got beautiful skin,” he said. “Stay out of the sun and you won’t need anything major for fifteen, twenty years.”

  “I was just wondering,” she said to the secretary, feeling bright now, hopeful, “Dr. Mellors’ wife—did he work on her? I mean, the kind of procedure we’re talking about for me?” She pushed her credit card across the counter. “It’s no big deal, I was just wondering if he would, you know, on his own wife . . . ?”

  The secretary—Maggie, her nametag read—was in her thirties, or maybe forties, it was hard to say. She’d put her hair up in a bun and she wore a low-cut blouse over a pair of suspiciously full breasts, but then she was an advertisement, wasn’t she? Her smile—the complicitous sunny smile that had beamed out continuously to this point—faded suddenly. The eyes—too round, too tight at the corners—dodged away. “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “He got a divorce five years ago and I’ve only been here three. But I don’t see why not.”

  The procedure—the injection of the botulin toxin under the skin between her eyes and then creeping on up to her hairline, one needle prick after another—hurt more than she thought it would. He numbed the area first with a packet of ice, but the ice gave her an instant headache and still she felt the sting of the needle. On the second or third prick she must have flinched. “Are you comfortable?” he asked, inches from her, his pale gray eyes probing hers, and she said, “Yes,” and tried to nod, but that only made it worse. “I guess I don’t handle pain well.” She tried to compose herself, tried to keep it light, because she wasn’t a whiner—that wasn’t her image of herself. Not at all. “Too sensitive, I guess,” she said, and she meant it as a joke.

  The purpose of the toxin, as he’d explained to her in his sacerdotal tones, was to paralyze the muscles between her eyes and the ones that lifted her brow too, so that when she squinted in the bright sun or frowned over her checkbook, the skin wouldn’t crease—it wouldn’t move at all. She could be angry, raging, as furious as she’d ever been in her life, and certainly her body language would show that—her mouth, her eyes—but her brow would remain as smooth and untroubled as if she were asleep and dreaming of a boat drifting across a placid lake. Of course, the effect would last an average of three months or so and then she’d have to undergo the procedure all over again. And he had to warn her that a small percentage of patients reported side effects—headaches, nausea, that sort of thing. A very small percentage, negligible really. This was the safest thing in the world—in the right hands, that is. These Botox parties she’d read about? Not a good idea.

  Now he took her hand to lift it to her forehead and the patch of gauze she was to hold there, just till the pinpricks closed up. “There,” he was saying, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Lying back in the chair, staring into his eyes, she felt something give way inside her, the thin tissue of susceptibility, of surrender: she was in his hands now. This was his domain, this darkened room with its examining chair, the framed degrees on the wall, the glint of polished metal. How old was he? she wondered. She couldn’t say, and she realized with a jolt that he wore the same expression as the nurse and the secretary, that his brow was immobile and his eyes rounded as if they’d been shaped out of dough. Forty, she guessed. Forty-five, maybe. But he had a spread to his shoulders—and those hands. His hands were like electric blankets on a cold night in a cabin deep in the woods. “No,” she lied. “No, not bad at all.”

  “All right, good,” he said, rising from the chair though he hadn’t shifted his gaze from her. “Any problems, you call me right away, day or night, okay?” He drifted to the table in the corner and came back with a card imprinted with his name, the number of the office and an after-hours number. “And let’s get a date set up for that blepharoplasty—we’ll plan it around your schedule.”

  She was about to get up too, but before she could move he reached forward to take the pad of gauze from her and she saw that it was flecked with minuscule spots of blood. “Here,” he said, handing her a mirror. “You see, there’s nothing there—if you want, you can cover up with a dab of makeup. And you should expect results within a day or two.”

  “Wonderful,” she said, giving him a smile. In the background—and she’d been faintly aware of it all along, even through her minor assault of nerves—a familiar piano piece was sifting through speakers hidden somewhere in the walls,
as orderly and precise as the beating of a young heart. Bach. The partitas for keyboard, and she could hear the pianist—what was his name?—humming over them. She rose and stood there a moment in the still, shadowy room with the bright light focused on the chair in the middle of the floor, absorbing the music as if she’d just awakened to it. “Do you like classical music?” she murmured.

  He gave her a smile. “Yes, sure.”

  “Bach?”

  “Is that what this is? I never know—it’s the music service. But they’re good and I think it helps the patients relax—soothing, you know? Hey, better than heavy metal, right?”

  She made a leap here, and everything to come was the result of it, as inevitable and indisputable as if she’d planned it all out beforehand: “The reason I ask is because I have two tickets for Saturday night—at the Music Academy? It’s an all-Bach program, and”—she lifted her eyebrows, she could still do that—“my girlfriend just told me this morning she can’t make it. She was—she had to go out of town unexpectedly—and I was wondering: would you like to go?”

  After the concert—he’d begged off, said he’d love to go but had to check with Maggie, the secretary, to see if he was free, and then he wasn’t—she went into Andalusia, a restaurant she liked because it had a good feel and a long bar where people gathered to have tapas and drinks while a guitarist worked his way through the flamenco catalogue in a nook by the fireplace. She knew people here—the bartender, Enrique, especially—and she didn’t feel out of place coming in alone. Or she did, but not to the extent she felt elsewhere. Enrique took care of her, made sure nobody crowded her. He was protective, maybe a little obsessive even, and if he had a thing for her, well, she could use that to her advantage. A little mutual flirtation, that was all, but she wasn’t seriously looking—or she hadn’t been, not since she’d got her divorce. She had a house, money in the bank, the freedom to eat when and where she liked, to travel, make her own schedule, and she was enjoying it, that was what she kept telling herself.