Lily and the Octopus(28)

Jenny hands me back my phone. “Have you been to the veterinarian?”

Duh. “On Monday.”

“What did she say?” Jenny does this thing where she defaults to the feminine pronoun to make some sort of point about a male-dominated society, something she probably picked up in a women’s studies class in the late nineties and that now feels woeful and stilted.

“He”—I emphasize the he—“couldn’t say much of anything. He took a few cells to run some tests and the tests were inconclusive. Now they want to put Lily under anesthesia and take a larger sample.”

“How do you feel about that?”

When I don’t want to answer the question someone asks, I just give the answer to another, unasked question. I realize in this moment that I do this a lot. “I find myself leaving her alone for short periods. I don’t want to be apart from her, but to be with her means I also have to be with him.” I pause and Jenny nods. “Plus, the octopus came when I wasn’t there, and there’s a part of me that thinks I need to be gone for him to leave.”

“Maybe the octopus isn’t going to leave.”

My answer to that is a glare.

“Maybe the octopus isn’t going to leave, and what you’re doing is emotionally detaching from Lily.”

My stomach turns. “That’s offensive. You’re being offensive.”

“I’m not meaning to be. It’s a natural reaction to grief.”

“Grief?” I say it with three question marks, as the word catches me by surprise. “What are you talking about? I’m not grieving.”

Jenny raises an eyebrow as if to say, Aren’t you?

“Grieving what? I’m fully focused on forcing the octopus to leave.”

“Why can’t you do both?” she asks.

Look who showed up to play.

Jenny continues. “Why can’t you focus on getting the octopus to leave and prepare yourself for the possibility that he may not?”

“He will leave.”

“I’ll leave that for you and the vet to say. But Lily is older, and you’ve said yourself that she was the runt of her litter and her health has at times been tenuous. Unless something catastrophic happens to you in the near future, in all likelihood she is going to predecease you, and in the greater context of your life, relatively soon. If it’s not the octopus that takes her, something else will eventually. A rhinoceros or a giraffe.”

“A rhinoceros or a gir— How would a dog have a giraffe?” New Jenny has gone completely around the bend.

“It’s natural, as our loved ones age, to start grieving their loss. Even before we lose them.”

I run her words by my imaginary therapist, the one who I count on to take Jenny’s bungled advice and turn it into something less botched. He’s strangely silent for once; I’m afraid it means he finds nothing wrong with her diagnosis.

“What is grief, anyhow? What does it even mean?” I’m being obstinate.

“People describe it in different ways. I’d say it’s a temporary derangement. Freud put it as something like a departure from the normal attitude toward life.”

I stare Jenny square in the eyes so she can see my annoyance. “One, my questions were rhetorical. I know what grief is. Two, thank you for calling me deranged.”

Jenny smiles as if to soften her insult. “Grief is a pathological condition. It’s just that so many of us go through it in life that we never think to treat it as such. We just expect people to go through it, endure it, and come out the other side.”

The sun pours through the window and lands in a puddle just beyond Jenny’s feet. She kicks off her shoes and stretches her naked toes into the sunlight. It reminds me of Lily, who makes a catlike effort to find whatever sun she can to nap in. It’s not uncommon for me to find her with just her hind legs resting in her bed, the rest of her body stretched across the sun-warmed linoleum.

I think of the Valium and Vicodin that have sometimes been my sunshine; my desire to crawl into their warming rays. “Fine. I’m grieving. Maybe you can write me a prescription.”

Unfortunately, Jenny knows my fears about addiction (we’ve covered that topic exhaustively) and doesn’t bite. “We’ll see.”

Maybe I, too, am suffering impairment from the presence of the octopus, seizures in reason. My thoughts of late have resembled those of a small child more than the thinking of a grown man: the magical rationalization of needing to be gone so the octopus can leave; my desire to be intimidating, bigger than I am, to have the hurricane in me; the need to express everything in a tantrum.

“What do you think of when you think of mourning?” Jenny asks. The question snaps me back to attention.

I answer without really thinking. “I guess ‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that’s not very original.”

“I don’t know it.”

“It’s a poem.”

“I gathered.”

“I’m just clarifying. It’s not a blues album.”

Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence. “Does your response need to be original? Isn’t that what poetry is for? For the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?”

I shrug. Who is Jenny, even New Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I, for that matter?