Bobcat and Other Stories Read online

  ALSO BY REBECCA LEE

  The City Is a Rising Tide

  Bobcat

  & OTHER STORIES

  Rebecca Lee

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2013

  Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,

  At incredible speed, traveling day and night,

  Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through

  Narrow passes.

  But will he know where to find you,

  Recognize you when he sees you,

  Give you the thing he has for you?

  —JOHN ASHBERY

  Contents

  Bobcat

  The Banks of the Vistula

  Slatland

  Min

  World Party

  Fialta

  Settlers

  Acknowledgments

  Bobcat

  It was the terrine that got to me. I felt queasy enough that I had to sit in the living room and narrate to my husband what was the brutal list of tasks that would result in a terrine: devein, declaw, decimate the sea and other animals, eventually emulsifying them into a paste which could then be riven with whole vegetables. It was like describing to somebody how to paint a Monet, how to turn the beauty of the earth into a blurry, intoxicating swirl, like something seen through the eyes of the dying. Since we were such disorganized hosts, we were doing a recipe from Food and Wine called the quick-start terrine. A terrine rightfully should be made over the course of two or three days—heated, cooled, flagellated, changed over time in the flames of the ever-turning world, but our guests were due to arrive within the hour.

  Of the evening’s guests, I was most worried about the Donner-Nilsons, whom my husband called the Donner-Blitzens. I had invited them about a month ago, before it had begun to dawn on me that one-half of the couple—Ray Nilson—was having an affair with a paralegal at work, a paralegal so beautiful it was hard to form any other opinions of her. I suppose Ray felt in her presence something that seemed to him so original that he had to pay attention even if he had a wife and a small baby at home.

  My friend Lizbet was also coming, and I had filled her in on the situation, making her promise that she would reveal nothing at the dinner, even with her eyes. “My eyes?” she had said, innocently. Lizbet was so irrepressible that I could imagine her raising her eyebrows very slowly for Ray’s wife, darting them suddenly over to Ray. Watch out!

  Lizbet was the person who had introduced me to my husband, John. She and I had been children together, and then during the years I was getting a law degree at NYU, she and John had been writing students together in the state of Iowa. This fall, ten years after they’d graduated, both had novels being published. Lizbet’s was about the search for the lost Gnostic Gospel texts, and the book was already, prepublication, being marketed as the thinking woman’s The Da Vinci Code. My husband’s book was a novel about a war correspondent getting traumatized in some made-up Middle Eastern country that sounded a lot like Iran but was named Burmar in the book.

  Truthfully, I was not pleased with his book. I had just finished reading it for the first time, in galleys, and within the first forty pages, the protagonist had slept with three women, none of whom even remotely resembled me—one was an aging countess, another a midwestern farm-girl TV journalist, and then the narrator’s true love was a sexy Burmarian/Iranian waif named Zita.

  “Who is Zita?” I had asked him early this afternoon. I was hovering over a roast, trying to figure out how to tie it for the oven.

  “She’s nobody,” he said. He was carrying into our apartment bags of groceries and he leaned over to kiss my cheek.

  “Who is she, though?”

  “She’s a fictional character.”

  “Do you think our unborn child will one day want to read about your sexual fantasies of other women in war zones?”

  “Wait,” he said. His head was cocked to the side, as it was when he felt confused or hurt and wanted to explain something. He looked innocent, yet interested. “First,” he said, “there is no Zita. Secondly, the protagonist in the book is not me.”

  “Zita is Frances,” I said. It was absurd, I knew. Frances was Frances Sofitel, his book editor, who was also due to show up at our house in a few hours for this dinner party, a woman as unlike a waif as humanly possible. She was tall and very angular, and spoke with an authoritative baritone, and seemed always properly amused by all the underlings around her. As well, she actually managed to make quite a bit of money as an editor, partly by digging in the muck a little, a celebrity bio here, a porn star’s memoir there, just a little bit on the side to allow her to publish what she considered her heart and soul, books like my husband’s literary thriller and paean to women who weren’t his wife.

  She and my husband had what I thought was an overly intimate connection. I didn’t really like to see them together. They actually talked about language itself a lot. Just words and puns and little synonyms and such. This was completely dull to me, which in addition to my jealousy was a terrible combination. For instance, we would all be out to dinner, and one of them would dig out a little piece of paper so they could play an acrostic, or dream a little about sentences that were the same backwards as forwards. For my husband, words were fascinating—their origins and mutations, their ability to combine intricately. When somebody would say something in an economical way, and use grammar originally to some satisfying end, he would usually repeat it to me at the end of the day. It stayed in his mind, like a song or a painting he loved. I did feel he would be a very good father, partially for this reason, as I could already picture him crouched over the baby, listening, rapt, waiting for the words to come in.

  “Zita is not Frances, nor is she any woman,” he said. “It’s fiction.”

  “You spend all your time writing, so we’d have to say that those women take up the lion’s share of your time—they are your significant others.”

  “Well, then, we’d have to say that Duong Tran is your significant other,” John said. Duong Tran was a Hmong immigrant who had refused to give his dying wife treatment for her heart condition on account of the medication being, according to Duong, Western voodoo and not ordained by the many gods who’d traveled alongside them from Laos to New York City in July of 2001. I was his lawyer.

  The argument devolved from there. Certain themes got repeated—John’s intense solitude, my long hours, his initial resistance to commitment, my later resistance to marriage, and then at some point the reasons were left behind and we were in that state of pure, extrarational opposition.

  Our argument was both constrained and exacerbated by the fact that I was pregnant and had read that high levels of cortisol in a troubled mother can cross the placenta and not only stress out the baby in utero but for the rest of its life. As well, there was a deadline; our dinner party was set to begin. People were soon going to be out in the streets and on the subway, making their way to our apartment. They wouldn’t want to picture their hostess like this—emotional, insecure, lashing out at her husband. You want the hostess to be serene, the apartment a set of glowing rooms awaiting you, quiet music pouring out of its walls, the food making its way through various complex stages in the kitchen—the slow broiling fig sauce, the buns in the warming oven, the pudding forming its subtle skin in the chill of the refrigerator.

  Lizbet arrived early. She helped me hoist myself up from the couch and then stood in the bathroom with me while I put on my makeup. Lizbet was a very spiritual person whose gifts of the spirit—patience, warmth, wonder—were quite available to her friends. Though her novel was about the Gnostic Gospels, her personal life was governed by the slightly spooky, semi-Christian ideas in the book A Course in Miracles, which was written by two Colu
mbia psychology professors in 1976, both of whom believed that they were channeling the voice of Jesus, though a Jesus inflected with a kind of cool, Buddhist gravitas.

  Lizbet had brought a huge trifle for dessert, and it stood gleaming on the kitchen counter in an enormous glass bowl. Normally I didn’t really like trifle—its layers of bright, childish tastes; strawberry, coconut, sugar. But Lizbet’s trifle was perfect and mysterious-seeming—anise, raspberry, and port, with a gingerbread base. Lizbet basically knew how to live a happy life and this was revealed in the trifle—she put in what she loved and left out what she didn’t. Her novel was the same really—a collection of treasures, a pleasure-taking, a finding of everything praiseworthy and putting it into words, with one concession to the traditional plot at its heart, which was the death of an important Gnostic scholar at the hands of his former student—a radical feminist—whom he had sexually harassed in college. What could be better?

  Standing in front of the mirror, it occurred to me that Lizbet and I were living out our mothers’ dreams for us—mine that I finally be pregnant and Lizbet’s mother’s that she never be pregnant. Our mothers had met in a consciousness-raising group in late 1967, in the East Village. They had become best friends, even though Lizbet’s mother was a radical feminist, even a lesbian separatist for a while, without ever working up to actually sleeping with other women, and my own mother liked feminism only as a sort of hobby, a way to chat with a big, cozy group of women eating coffee cakes. Once she told me that feminism had given her some good “tips” for dealing with husbands, such as, Don’t cry; resist. My mother had moved to Boston when she was pregnant with me and set up my beautiful childhood home, ablaze with light and happiness, the seasons passing through it effortlessly—pumpkin muffins, the deep winter solstice, the return of spring, and then the whole house flung open all summer, more and more babies arriving over the years.

  Lizbet lived with her mother in the Village, and as I grew older I traveled by train to see her as many weekends as I could. Their tiny apartment always seemed like a great bohemian experiment to me, a little jerry-rigged maybe, but ultimately exciting—with its hanging wicker chair and its profusion of plants, the total devotion in that home to interesting, liberating ideas. Lizbet’s mother was a campus radical at NYU, a clever Andrea Dworkin–style feminist, whose mind seemed a reservoir of interesting, possibly incorrect beliefs, which nevertheless were powerful enough to transform the culture. She tried out ideas. She taught Lizbet that ideas were tools to excavate the truth, not the truth itself, which lies somewhat beyond the reach of minds, so to be in their house was like being in the middle of a never-ending, fascinating conversation at all times.

  THEN CAME SUSAN. She had also published a book, also with Frances as editor, about a near-fatal tussle she’d had with a bobcat while scaling a small mountain in Nepal. The memoir had been out for a year and I was ashamed that I hadn’t read it yet, especially as she was coming to our apartment for dinner. Earlier in the day I had gone online and read some reviews, hoping I could fake my way through.

  She appeared at our door with a big armful of flowers and some bread she had baked herself. Her left arm had been torn up by the bobcat and later amputated, so that one sleeve fell empty. She had very blond hair and was a large, athletic woman with a wide, peaceful, Swedish-type face.

  Frances appeared right behind Susan, dark to Susan’s light, talking and cerebral to Susan’s calm and silence. Susan at first seemed more of a presence than a personality. It struck me as interesting that she’d battled with an animal because she seemed so much like a certain type of large animal herself—serene, economical, introverted, with none of the neurosis a normal person has buzzing off them at every second.

  We all settled into the living room. Lizbet immediately turned to Susan and told her how much she admired her memoir. And then she asked her what took her to Nepal and her fateful encounter with the bobcat.

  “Well,” Susan said. She settled deeply into our couch: it surrounded her cozily. “It was a strange time in my life. I was engaged to be married and I realized, quite suddenly, that I didn’t want any of it. I didn’t want to plan a wedding shower, I didn’t want to buy a house together, I didn’t want to join my bank account with his. I was reading Joseph Campbell, the Sufis, Margaret Mead, and I started thinking, where is my ecstasy? I mean, where is it? Where is ecstasy, where is bliss, or even just fulfillment? Where is it?” She was looking intently at each of us. But we were in the first minutes of meeting her, and I felt unprepared to be plunged into life’s deepest questions.

  “I just didn’t want any of it,” Susan said. “I mean, what is marriage? What is it?”

  Frances startled and reached into her purse to pull out her trembling cell phone. She peered into its tiny screen and then she darted up from the table and out to the balcony to answer.

  Meanwhile, Susan looked carefully into each of our faces. She was actually waiting for us to answer, to give reasons why people fall in love and get married.

  Nobody knows, I wanted to say. Nobody really knows. But that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to not do it.

  DING-DONG. I TOOK A deep breath. The Donner-Nilsons were here. Kitty Donner came in first, looking pretty in her pale, reserved way. I was ashamed that immediately I compared her to the paralegal, whose looks were almost insanely good. Certainly this was another problem—though secondary—with your husband having an affair like this; everybody would constantly be comparing you to this other woman. Kitty was actually a formidable and special person—she was intelligent and watchful, she had a real empathy about her that made her connect quietly but nearly instantly with people; you could trust her to take your side. At the office, sitting in our sterile conference room where we daily and nightly worked out Duong Tran’s fate, I generally thought of Ray in a somewhat holistic way, as a brilliant legal strategist and funny colleague—a crowd-pleaser, really—an essentially good-hearted man with an unfortunate personal problem on his hands, but now, tonight, walking behind his wife in her strange, boxy, black-and-red kimono dress down our tiny entrance hallway, it became clear that he was simply a cheater; it was just basic and stupid. What felt to him to be a genuine and essential stirring, a deep response to beauty, was really just life having its way with him. If one of the things people do is establish a civilization out of nature, a way out of the chaos, then Ray was failing at being a person, falling back into the glut of the physical world. He’d been fooled by life. It had triumphed over him. I wanted to call it out to him, over his wife’s head, Hey Ray, life has triumphed over you.

  I was interpreting each of Kitty’s movements through the lens of what a woman does who perhaps senses but doesn’t yet know her husband is having an affair. But she was a tentative woman anyway, so it was hard to say what she knew or didn’t know. I had always found her sort of moving, actually, as it was possible to see her perpetually struggling to move past her hesitation. She sat down a little awkwardly since her kimono dress came open both at the neck and at the legs, but while she was rearranging herself, she looked at me and also put her hand on her stomach. “Oh I forgot about your baby,” she said. “It’s wonderful; there’s so much in store for you.”

  John came in from the kitchen with the terrine, which looked, perhaps, not great. A terrine really does need to be great to be not awful—it is meant to evince a perfect melding of disparate entities—the lion lying with the lamb, the sea greeting the land, and so forth. John placed it on the coffee table and looked at me worriedly. I saw a flicker of alarm cross Kitty’s face. Once John and I had been at a dinner party in Manhattan and the hostess had served us an opening dish of fox meat, so I knew how Kitty felt. (Later that night John had quoted the beautiful Jane Kenyon poem as we drove home along the FDR—Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside.)

  As John began passing out little dishes for the hors d’oeuvres, I turned to Kitty and said, “We’re not prepared at all. We just found out y
esterday at our Lamaze class that we’re supposed to have a theme for our nursery.”

  “Theme?” Lizbet said. “What do you mean, theme? Like man vs. nature?”

  “How about alienation in the technological age?” Ray said.

  “Hollywood under McCarthy?” Lizbet said.

  “It’s going to be Winnie the Pooh,” John said, which was true. Everybody seemed a bit dejected that John was closing down the joke so early, but he made a recovery. “Winnie the Pooh and the Reconstructed South,” he said. And then suddenly Frances out on the balcony was rapping on the glass door, making big surprised eyes at John, the sort of look that I’ve only seen wives make at their own husbands. John went to the door and conferred with her in whispers.

  And then he returned to our guests, apologizing. “You’ll have to forgive my editor for skipping the appetizers; there is a Salman Rushdie proposal floating around the city today, to various editors, and she is trying to get a copy of it sent here tonight.”

  “A novel?” I asked.

  “Memoir,” he said. “About the fatwa.”

  “No kidding,” said Lizbet. “There’s a book you’d want to read.”

  Everybody’s minds filled with it—Salman as a small child running along the banks of the Ganges, rising as a student at Oxford, ascending as a literary star in England, and then the terrible fatwa raining down, followed by years in hiding. I had seen him give a reading at an ACLU conference in Atlanta soon after 9/11. The person introducing him had said, to a very hushed, still shell-shocked crowd, “We are all Salman now.”

  I HAD INJECTED THE roast with an infusion of rosemary, palm and olive oils, and a nutty oil made from macadamias. It was an experiment. The infusion had gone in via needle, before the roast took its place in the oven, hunkered in during the whole harrowing argument, safe as a little lamb from its fighting parents.