Calypso(37)

The second problem with throwing food into the pasture is one of perception. It would allow Carol to feel, if not like a huntress, then at least like a successful scavenger—Look what I found, she’d think. This as opposed to, Look what David gave me.

I insist that Carol eat in my presence for the same reason I wait for the coffee shop employee to turn back in my direction before putting a tip in his basket. I want to be acknowledged as a generous provider. This is about me, not them.

I don’t need Hugh to point out how ridiculous this is. Wild animals do not give a damn about our little feelings. They’re incapable of it. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” we say.

What they hear is senseless noise. It’s like us trying to discern emotion in the hum of a hair dryer or the chortle of an engine as it fails to turn over. That’s the drawback but also the glory of creatures that were never domesticated. Nothing feels better than being singled out by something that at best should fear you and at worst would like to eat you. I think of the people I’ve known over the years who’ve found a baby raccoon or possum and brought it home to raise it. When young, the animals were sweet. Then one day they became moody and violent, like human teenagers but with claws and sharp, pointy teeth. It was their wildness reclaiming them. After the change it was back into their cages, their heartsick owners—jailers now—watching as they tore at the bars, never tiring of it, thinking only of escape.

But wait, we tell ourselves, always wanting to project, to anthropomorphize, to turn the story in our favor. But what about this: One night in late September, as I was walking home in the dark from the neighboring village, I felt a presence next to me. A dog? I wondered. But the footsteps I heard were daintier, and I wasn’t near any houses. I keep a flashlight in my backpack, so I turned it on, and there was Carol. “Is this where you are when I call for you at two in the morning?” I asked.

There was a canopy of leaves over my head. Once I moved beyond it, the moon lit my path, so I turned off the flashlight. I’d expected Carol to be gone by that point, but for the next half mile, all the way home, she walked with me, sometimes by my side and sometimes a few steps ahead, leading the way. No cars approached or passed. The road was ours, and we marched right down the center of it, all the way to the front of the house and through the garden gate to the kitchen door.

I didn’t know it then, but this would be the last time I would see Carol. Foxes are like gang members. They can’t go wherever they like. That next patch of land is someone else’s territory, so chances are she was killed somehow. If she’d been hit by a car I’d have seen her body by the side of the road, but maybe she dragged herself off into the woods and died there. She could have been poisoned, which happens. Hunters pay good money to bag the pheasant that are released here every fall. These are birds that, honestly, you have to work not to kill. The landowners want to protect their investments, which means keeping down the predators. “That’s likely what happened to Carol,” Hugh says. I know this makes sense, but I refuse to hear it.

She’s just taking a little break, I think. Trying to establish her independence, which is normal for someone her age. I still call for her when I step into the yard at night. Still look into the shadows for some hint of movement, waiting to change my tone from the voice you use when summoning someone, to the less plaintive and much more preferable one you use to welcome them back home.





The One(s) Who Got Away



It was a Friday night in mid-July, around nine o’clock, and Hugh and I were at the dinner table, eating this spaghetti he makes with sausage in it. We’d been together for almost three decades, and for some reason I’d waited until this moment to ask how many people he’d slept with before we became a couple.

Hugh looked at the ceiling, which is crisscrossed with beams and, to my great consternation, spiderwebs. I’m vigilant, really I am, but out in the country there’s no keeping up with them.

“So?” I said.

“I’m thinking,” he told me.

I used to know how many people I’d slept with. After meeting Hugh, though, I took myself off the market, and the figure faded from memory. If I were to slog through all my old diaries I could certainly retrieve it. Twenty-eight? Thirty? Do I include those early gropings? They felt significant at the time, but do they qualify as sex if you never took your clothes off or actually touched anything with your bare hands? I wanted to ask Hugh, but he was too busy counting. “Thirty-two, thirty-three…”

I put down my fork. “You’re not finished yet?”

“Shhh,” he said. “You’re making me lose track.”

It shouldn’t have surprised me. When you look like Hugh, all you have to do is leave the house and people will approach you, especially gay men, the dogs. His handsomeness was never my personal opinion—rather, like the roundness of the earth, it is something society generally agrees upon. Without my face to use as bait, I had to work a lot harder than he did. There are times, I’ll admit, when I had to beg. That said, some of Hugh’s earlier choices seemed poorly thought-out to me, especially once AIDS came along.

“Thirty-five…thirty-six.”

Every man ticked off on his fingers was someone I’d been compared to at one point or another, not overtly—he’s anything but cruel—but surely it happened. Someone kissed better than I did. Someone had more stamina, a more seductive voice. Bigger muscles. I’m confident enough to compete against a dozen of his exes, but he was moving on to the population of a small town.