G. H.
She dispenses with any preamble. “Why weren’t you answering your cell? Look, I meant what I said at breakfast. We should call the Humane Society. Or animal control, an exterminator. Whatever. I thought I’d start calling around. I’d be happy to, because this is just ridiculous. For God’s sake, we’ve got to get rid of it or you’ll die from lack of sleep.”
“Listen,” he reaches for a tone of reason—as if it were a ripe peach hanging, stretched for, stretched for—but too far, utterly out of reach—“We don’t even know whether the thing’s there or not. So what are we supposed to say, ‘Hi, there, we think we may have a problem. But maybe not. We may have a raccoon in our crawl space. Or not. So, got any ideas, guys?’”
“Approximately, yes.”’
“Approximately? Why not exactly? Look, I think it’s ridiculous to be calling people for help with a problem we’re not even sure we have. Let’s just give ourselves a couple of days to sort this out, we’ll talk about it later, okay? It’s not like losing two nights of sleep killed anybody, okay?”
She says nothing for what seems to him a very long time. “Okay.” And hangs up.
His brain translates the buzzing of the phone into the conviction that the animal is there and won’t leave easily, as it had come, of its own obscure volition. Interesting question, volition, where is his in all this and where is hers, and why are they suddenly at variance—its like the petals of a flower in a time-lapsed film, opening, spreading away from one another and then falling off: beauty budded, blossomed, dead and meaningless, all in an eyelash of time. But he knows he’s evading the issue—which is? Is it the falling petals or the animal? Hot fingers of nausea clench his stomach. For the first time he sees his marriage as a separate being, fragrant, perfect, but fragile as an infant, that he and Sarah have created. A life long-for, treasured, and now troubled because—because of what? An almost laughable homeowner’s problem, the stuff of dinner party anecdotes? Because he is tired and irritable beyond anything she’s ever seen in him before? Because the semester has just started for her? Surely these are explanation enough. But the clutch of sickness convinces him that something else is going on, that he is in the grip of something he doesn’t yet understand. He puts his head down on the desk and waits a few moments, until the nausea has passed.
He comes home an hour earlier than usual, with an armful of daisies, and standing behind her as she sits cross-legged on the worn intricacy of the living room carpet, sketching something, he scatters the flowers around her—carefully, so the white blooms will not land on the work on her lap desk. As she laughs and tips her head back for his kiss, he bends down and tucks a flower in her hair. “Mrs. M. coming for dinner?” She nods. “We better hurry, then.” He helps her to her feet and begins sliding daisies into the neck of her shirt, nudging then gently around. “This is my first try at flower arranging.” She laughs again and on their way up to the bedroom pauses to make sure the front door is bolted.
The bed is covered in daisies, and any sound that may emanate from the crawl space they cannot hear above their own.
And then, in the small space left before they will have to prepare for their guest, he asks conscientiously about her work (her drawings for a new Metamorphosis translation), “I was working on Io—the one who gets changed into a heifer?—when you decided to start gardening on me. But I’m worried about falling behind.”
“Relax, Max, by the time Poundstone’s finished the translation we’ll all be using walkers.” And in this way he most skillfully, most completely eluded and further conversation about the raccoon.
Until dinner, when Mrs. Morel interrupts her own commentary about the late Gardiner’s—and Sarah’s current—colleagues to inquire about the animal. And having ascertained what the situation is, dredges from the frightening depths of her handbag a bedraggled notebook. After finding and studying the relevant page, she set the notebook down and resumed eating while she talks. “Yes. It’s right here, someone poor dear Gardiner once knew. Well, dears, his father had lived out West somewhere, as a boy—Michigan or Illinois or Idaho, some farmy state or other—and he had a great many dogs and cats.” Indicating vastness of quantity by a flourish of her fork, she propelled a fat, opalescent bead of salad dressing onto her spectacles and a bit of red lettuce into Matthew’s wine glass. Her vision impaired by the oily dribble, Mrs. Morel paused, frowned, then gave a gallant toss of her head before continuing. Matthew and Sarah avoided looking at one another.
“He also had,” she paused again, this time for effect, “a pet raccoon. Quite a large one, and frightfully clever. The raccoon, of course, was often in the house because he could easily get all the food he wanted there, and because he could climb up the bricks of the fireplace to the mantelpiece. And from there he would take glorious leaps down onto the back of any dog who happened by. Naturally, it wasn’t long before all the dogs learned to stay out of the parlor, and that smart little animal got the family all to himself every evening. Imagine how clever.”
Mrs. Morel’s tale meandered on for a bit, but Matthew turned tail, as it were, and hid behind the first available tree—by clearing the table, making and serving the decaffeinated coffee. And so managed to be where his wife could not see him as she confessed, laughing but irritated (because what was Mrs. M. getting at, asking so archly?), to having not yet seen the animal.
While Mrs. Morel’s frequent gracing of their dinner table over the last few months had never delighted Matthew, he had never found her conversation so irksome, nor the cat scent, now rising in heady waves from the late Gardiner’s black turtleneck jumper, so obscene and inescapable. Fortunately for him, and as was her inviolable custom, exactly nine minutes after being served her coffee, Mrs. Morel pronounced the dinner delicious and thanked them and declared she really must be getting home and no, dears, she really prefers to walk home, and will let herself out, and does so.
Matthew allowed himself only enough time for a deep breath before beginning. “My God, she really reeked tonight. If it gets any worse the Board of Health’ll cordon off the entire neighborhood.”
He could see by her look that Sarah felt the lash in this, but all she replied was, “I know. I was thinking during dinner that I should stop over there tomorrow and take some of her things to the cleaners.”
“Take her to the cleaners and leave her there.”
“Matty—”
“I mean it, Sar, she’s really been getting on my nerves lately. I don’t see why she’s got to be here for dinner all the time.”
“It isn’t all the time, it’s two or three times a week, just like we agreed when we found out she didn’t have a fridge and the stove was broken and she couldn’t cook, anyway.”
“Right, but we were supposed to figure out something better than becoming her permanent soup kitchen. We can buy her the fridge and then all we’ll need is an electrician with a head cold so bad he can stand the stench in that house long enough to fix the stove and whatever else she’s broken in that kitchen.”
“For God’s sake, you know she won’t let anybody but us into her house. You know I’ve tried a hundred times to get her to let people in to help. She won’t let an electrician in, or a house cleaner, or Meals on Wheels—you tell me how to fix this. I’d be just as glad as you would to get her out of our hair, but right now I just feel stymied. Anyway, you were the one who said it really wasn’t safe for an old lady to be walking around alone, up and back from Farmington Ave. at night. You agreed to all this, you know you did. Besides, Gardiner did a lot for me, I don’t think this is doing so much to repay him.”
“Gardiner’s dead, Sarah.”
He watched her chin jerk up as if the brutality of this were physical; she stared at him and he was horrified at what she saw: his narrowed eyes and jutted jaw, which slackened as he watched her rise from the table. “You’re being a perfect shit,” she pronounced, “sleep deprivation really does not suit you at all.” And carrying her coffee cup before her with both hands, as if it were the triumphal bowl of Argument Won, makes an impeccable exit into the kitchen.
Before him lay the aftermath of battle: the drying carnage of chicken bones, the scattershot of peas, the crusting stains of orange sauce that marked Mrs. Morel’s place at the table. Her cloth napkin was missing, and with dreary certainty Matthew knew that she had stolen it. She probably wrecked that stove on purpose. She and Gardiner, boy, they both were great at getting what they wanted.
For another moment Matthew considered this, then went into the kitchen and apologized, in general terms , to Sarah: that is offered an apology with the ensuing explanation that always begins, “I don’t know, I guess I’m just—”. And perhaps because of the daisies and the raccoon and the tender shoot of justice that sprouted from his complaints, she is amenable to reconciliation, and thus a certain peace was reestablished in the house. Until, of course, the scratching noise began again.
And again the night opens into a dark and twisting corridor of doors through which any action seems unhinged from purpose or consequence. Rising from bed, feeding the animal and staring into its eyes, trying for sleep, failing, rising to walk yet another walk.
On which I follow, ever closer.
But he doesn’t notice. And doesn’ look at the houses, doesn’t play his game of redesigning them for their owners. He avoids the sight of a porch listing crazily with neglect and the heavings of too many frosts, or the cluttered whimsy of several Gothic revival rooflines.
Especially not the rooflines. And here, with the small suns of the streetlights shining, he can see no stars. So he walks head down, heedlessly, rapidly crisscrossing Fern and Prospect, North Whitney and Elizabeth streets until they swing past like so many doors in the maze he has already entered—until he has no idea where he walks. Only that the image of the raccoon, as it had faced him again this night, always goes before him, and the sound of his feet on the leafstrewn walks is the sound of the animal scratching.
Only a few more days, I think, a few more days.
previous, 25 September next, Sarah’s Journal
The Nature of Things 