Plus One (13 page)

Alex's ankle, it turned out, was sprained and maybe worse. He got up and hobbled off the field.

After two tumblers of Pabst and a muscle relaxant fetched from Figgy's glove compartment, Alex was convinced to head to the ER. She insisted on taking him, loading him into her Honda and heading across town to Cedars, because, “I don't care if it's not in your HMO, there's no way in
hell
I'm taking you to County and letting some comatose resident saw off your foot or bleed you with leeches or whatever it is they do there.”

As they made the long drive west, he distracted himself from the pain by quizzing her on her background. She'd grown up in Sherman Oaks, studied theater at NYU, and was now working retail while writing plays and spec TV pilots. She'd had a show produced at a black box in Echo Park,
Mork & Masha
, which she described as “a theatrical collage of Chekhov, hip hop, and
Mork & Mindy
.”

She'd landed a TV agent but had flamed out while on the staff of a WB sitcom about a hipster bowling league. She'd been the lone “girl hire” who her boss, a cocky schlub called Josh, could point to as proof his staff could sympathetically portray female characters. Not that any of the guys on staff had any real interest in sympathetically portraying female characters—the writers' room was too busy inventing detailed bondage scenarios involving the evangelical former beauty queen who starred in the show. Figgy was fired after four episodes and hadn't had a staff job since.

Alex learned all this before being called back into an exam room, where he was told his foot was fractured in two places and he was fitted with a protective orthopedic boot. And so it was that he was hobbled from the start of what turned out to be a fast and furious courtship; they moved in together six weeks after the trip to the ER.

Not all their friends and family understood them as a couple—his mom, for one, excused herself from the table of their introductory brunch when she deciphered the tiny alphabet beads on Figgy's barrette, which spelled out the word CUNT. Meanwhile, Joan had complained loudly about Figgy's cohabitation with “that weak-chinned
goy”
whose biggest professional achievement since graduating Hampshire had been a regional print campaign for a fried chicken and waffle franchise.

But he and Figgy made sense to Alex. She was solid where he was flexible, prickly where he was soft, certain where he was open to considering all viewpoints. And most significantly, he thought, the two of them shared an uncanny sense of timing. They were synced. Eating, sleeping, browsing a store, leaving a party—they were always, it seemed, miraculously ready at the same time, as if they had the same internal clock. It was clear neither one of them had quite figured out just who they were, but as a couple, they fit.

Besides, Alex was naturally attracted to funny, tough, intense women. That was kind of his thing. The women other men went for—the glam ones, the beauty queens, the nurturing earth mothers—they glanced right past him, registering their disinterest even before bothering to properly snub him. But the weird girls, the pudgy poetesses and tiny spitfires and socially awkward shut-ins—he was all over them.

And with her collection of Shriner fezzes and her obscene barrettes and her apartment packed with bric-a-brac, Figgy was the team captain of the weird girls. She lit him up from the word go.

Figgy's attraction to Alex, meanwhile, was at first not much more than a pleasant surprise. Her previous boyfriends had been nothing at all like him—she'd spent two years with a tattooed Mexican playwright before dating a Sephardic engineer with anger-management issues. So Alex was positively exotic in his tall, agreeable goyishness. She joked that he was her white-boy prize, her trophy boyfriend. But despite the surface differences, there was something primal, even animal about the way she loved him. She'd bury her face in his chest and inhale, murmuring about marzipan and cinnamon and the tiniest hint of jalapeño. He made her feel safe, she told him—secure, tethered. With Alex in her corner, Figgy was free to flail and wander and indulge. He was always there when she wore out, steady and supportive and with that same irresistible smell.

Nine years into their marriage, they'd settled into their respective roles. He was the steady one, the realist, the rudder that kept the ship upright. And she was the bright light, the instigator who provided spark and magic and the occasional upheaval to keep things interesting.

Things were definitely interesting now. Maybe too interesting. Lately he'd begun to worry that the secret something he'd recognized in Figgy was no longer a secret. Everyone now knew how amazing she was. And his kind of stability didn't feel like such a virtue anymore. How hot, really, was caretaking? Maybe now, Alex felt, it was
his
turn to do some upheaving.

• • •

“Alex! Alex!”

Alex was dozing off on the couch when Figgy started yelping and scrambling backward. It took a few seconds for him to wake up and see what she was hollering about.

Right there, not more than six feet away, holding court on a
wide expanse of the living room carpet, was a rat.

It stood upright, grasping a nugget of dog food in one paw, as if balancing an hors d'oeuvre. For a moment, the room was silent. The rat stood its ground, head cocked and whiskers twitching. He thought he saw actual musculature rippling beneath its fur. It was, he knew, the kind of rat that male rats wanted to be and female rats wanted to mate.

And it was in their house. Snacking on their dog food. Staring him down.

Alex reached over and hurled a pillow. The rat regarded the passing cushion, lowered to the floor, and backed away. It took its time, slipping underneath a door that led to the cellar.

What followed were two solid hours of frantic scrambling. Alex put on dish gloves and tied a bandana around his face before going down to inspect the cellar and finding, illuminated in the glare of his flashlight, a gruesome array of telltale droppings. He got a stack of towels and jammed them into the inch-high space between the door and the floor, cutting off the rat's one obvious point of entry.

Meanwhile Figgy fired up the computer. As soon as she typed the words “rat removal” into Google, the screen lit up with gruesome images of slick-coated vermin scurrying through kitchen pantries, teeth bared and eyes beady. She lingered on a page that claimed a single rat indicated “a full blown infestation.” Rats leave toxic droppings, gnaw through wood and wire, and have been known to bite children. And they carry disease: typhus, rabies, bubonic plague.

“Bubonic plague?” Alex said out loud. “Christ.”

Figgy punched in “extermination.” Apparently, the search engine algorithm had a mistaken impression of people in their zip code, because the top results were all “environmentally friendly” and “cruelty free” pest-removal services that used “nontoxic baits” and “comfortable cages” to release animals back into their
native habitats.

“Fuck this,” Figgy said, fiercely clicking ahead to a site for a Simi Valley exterminator called, simply, Annihilate. Its home page included a flashlit gallery of “kill zones” picturing vermin crushed by the rusty arms of medieval snap traps, bloated with toxic poisons, and smeared with sickly yellow glue.

“Now we're talking,” she said, clicking on the “About Us” page, which featured a headshot of general manager Andre Wallace, a greasy adolescent with rheumy eyes, a wide, moist grin, and stringy hair pulled back in a ponytail. He was proudly holding a trap from which dangled a full-grown trophy kill.

“Can Andre come over right now?” Figgy said.

“Let's go to bed,” Alex said. “Shut it down. We'll deal in the morning.”

Figgy moaned apprehensively but followed Alex into the bedroom. There was some panic around the fetching of pajamas from the closet and the brushing of teeth, but at last, they settled into bed. Figgy sat bolt upright with the covers pulled up to her armpits and a police Maglight between her knees.

“I hear scurrying,” she said. “It's in the walls. Go check.”

“It's nothing,” he said, rolling over. “Little fucker is probably in some corner of the cellar right now, traumatized. I almost got him, you know.”

“That pillow attack was vicious.”

Alex let that go and shut his eyes. He'd call Andre first thing in the morning. He drifted into sleep, shaken but resigned to handling it all tomorrow….

“Sylvie, stop it.”

It was Figgy. It was sometime later; Alex had no idea how much time had passed.

“Sylvie honey,” she said again. “Cut it out!”

Alex opened his eyes enough to make out the digital clock next to his bed: 5:43. Sylvie had obviously gotten into bed with
them at some point; he could feel her warm little form on his left. But now he was confused. She wasn't anywhere near Figgy. “Hon, Sylvie's over here,” he said.

Suddenly the covers whipped up and Figgy was out of bed, hopping up and down, clutching at her NYU T-shirt with one hand and pointing to the headboard with the other.

“Rat!” she yelled, flipping on the overhead light. “It's the rat! It's in the bed!”

Alex took a deep breath and flopped over. There was no way the rat had gotten upstairs. Figgy was having night terrors. He'd stay calm, stay in bed, model the sane and mature response.

“Hon, I jammed towels under the door, remember?” he croaked. “We're safe and sound. Come back to bed.”

“It's
in
the fucking bed!”

Alex propped up on his elbows and cracked open his eyes. And there was the rat, dropping off the duvet and onto the floor, making a lazy diagonal path over the ridges of a thrift-store throw rug and under the door to the bathroom.

“It was
on
me!” Figgy shouted, hands flailing around her head. “It crawled across my back and into my hair! My
hair
!”

Alex got out of bed. Sylvie scampered into the room, rubbing her eyes with balled-up fists. She clung on to Figgy's leg. “It's okay, Momma. Daddy will get the rat. Won't you, Daddy?”

“Sure, pudding.” He grabbed a magazine off his bedside table and headed toward the bathroom.

“Hold it,” Figgy said. “That's your weapon?
Harper's
?”

Alex banged his hand with the magazine, which he'd twisted into a tight roll. “I'm
improvising
.”

“I'll be right back,” she said, rushing into the hall to the pantry and returning with three items, which she presented as if he'd know exactly what to do with them: a broom, a can of Lysol, and a cardboard box. “Go on,” she said, pointing a chin at the closed bathroom door. “I'll cover the door.”

Alex took the stuff. As he took hold of the doorknob, he hesitated.

Figgy gave him a shove. “One of you is coming out of there.”

He flipped on the light and went in. He spotted the rat right away, munching on a pink tampon wrapper beside the toilet. He hopped up onto the rim of the clawfoot tub, balancing high above bite range. He wished he had some clothes on—he doubted his droopy boxers provided any real protection. He felt hollow, emptied out, like a shore sucked dry before a mounting wave.

“Get out where I can see you,” he pleaded, poking his broom in its direction. The broom connected with the rat's side and it scampered into the open. Alex saw his chance, and while maintaining his balance atop the tub, he tossed the box forward. His aim was right, but the rat seemed to anticipate the throw and darted sideways, onto the base of a standup makeup mirror.

Looking for an escape route, the rat climbed up the steel pole, scampered around the fixed bracket, and stopped briefly on the face of the glass. It was now level with Alex's face, a foot or two away, its small, hot eyes and wiry whiskers in crisp focus. It kept scurrying, the mirror whirring around beneath it.

Alex smacked the mirror with a broom and it fell to the floor. The rat barely flinched before darting into an open cabinet, behind a thicket of bottles.

He hopped along the bathtub rim to get a better look inside. The rat was back in there somewhere, nestled deep in the protective cover of Sammy's Salves.

“You get him?” Sylvie called through the door.

“Working on it,” Alex said, crouching down.

Heart pounding, he extended one foot and then another clear across the bathroom to the sink counter and shifted over to a perch above the cabinet. Then he retrieved the cardboard box and picked up the Lysol. A tense moment passed. He reached down and began spraying through the open cabinet door. A cloud
of chemical mist wafted up his arm.

It did the trick. A moment later, in a quick gray blur, the rat leapt out. Alex dropped the box.

“Gotcha!” he hollered. The rat tumbled around inside, colliding off the walls.

Alex let out a triumphant cry and Figgy and Sylvie rushed in. Figgy was sent off to fetch something flat to slide below the box, returning with a piece of foam board from the craft drawer. Alex carefully pushed the board under the box, lifted it up and then headed down the stairs.

“Okay buddy—out you go,” he said, stepping out onto the front stoop. The dawn was just breaking and the sky was a dull orange. His prey captured, his bare chest heaving and his daughter and wife trailing behind him, Alex felt an unfamiliar rush of pride.