The Animal Hour (5 page)

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Authors: Andrew Klavan

BOOK: The Animal Hour
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But the truth was, it made him feel black and lonesome. Standing there naked on the mossy bathroom tile, his poem gone. It made him feel a huge, yearning, vasty lonesomeness. As if he were standing at the bottom of a canyon, searching amid the rocks for another soul on earth.

He took his dick in his hand and waggled a drop off it. From behind, he released some of the hangover gas twisting in his gut.

There had been no good poems for two years now, he thought. Two full years this month. There had been nothing worth publishing since the river house. Since Julia and the October evenings.

He reached down to flush the toilet. The water gushed away, though the weird brown stuff remained. He sighed. There were still some days when he thought it was kind of romantic to be a dissolute Village poet. Then there were days like this one: when he thought he was going to vomit until his ears bled. He twitched the string to turn off the bathroom bulb. Then, tugging one more bit of dribble off his pud, he stalked back into the other room.

Avis Best was there. She was just climbing in through the window, her baby under her arm. Perkins waved to her wearily, his eyes half closed. He made his way to the mattress on the floor. He flopped down on it with a groan.

By that time, Avis was standing by the window. She was staring around the room, her mouth open. Behind her, a line of blue sky showed through the bars of the fire escape. She held her baby on her hip. The baby played with her face as she stood there gaping.

“Jesus Christ, Perkins,” she said.

Perkins rolled onto his back on the bare mattress. He flung his arm over his eyes. He felt black and lonely and dry, his whole body stuffed with gritty sand. “Oh, Avis,” he said pitifully. His head hurt too and he was beginning to feel nauseous.

“Oh, really,” Avis said. “Do you mind telling me what you're trying to do to yourself?”

He shook his head slightly. “I don't remember. But it must be something really awful.”

“Sure looks like it.”

“I just hope I don't deserve it.”

“Pah! Pah! Pah!” the baby cried out. He had noticed the naked figure on the bed. He was twisting in his mother's arms, straining toward the man, reaching out.

“All right.” Avis let out a breath. She started picking her way to the mattress through the mess. “Look at this place.” Even in the dim western light from the window, she could see it was a disaster.

It was just a studio, just the one large room. A subway map taped to the wall. A framed drawing of Whitman. A poster from the Keats House one of his girlfriends had brought him from Rome. There was a writing desk with a Spartan wooden chair. A dresser. A few canvas chairs, a couple of standing lamps. There was the mattress, bare on the floor.

But mostly, there were books. There were books everywhere, gray and dusty. Piles of them lined the walls, two deep, three deep, four. Stacks of them rose up at random in the center of the room like stalagmites. Books covered the desk and all the chairs. Even the bookshelf—Avis thought she remembered a small bookshelf here somewhere once—was buried now under the books.

And then there was the rest of it. His bedcovers splayed everywhere. His jeans over a chair back, his sweater over a tumbled mound of Dostoevskys. His underpants tied around a lamp.

Gimme a break
, Avis thought sourly.

And bottles of Sam Adams beer lying in the gaps all around. Empty bottles made of brown glass: Wherever she looked, her eye fell on one. She bumped one with her toe as she reached the mattress, sent it rolling with a clink into an illustrated
Quixote.

She lowered herself to the mattress, sat down next to Perkins. Perkins dropped his arm and gazed up at her pitiably. She tried to keep from glancing down at his nakedness, but she couldn't help it. He was a sturdily built man with a hairy barrel chest and muscular arms. He wore his black hair long and had an angular face, pouched and lined at thirty-one. She found his eyes—his brown eyes—seductively miserable.

She placed the baby on his chest. He held the chunky little kid steady. The baby gave a big smile and pawed him. Perkins suddenly blew up his cheeks and the baby looked up at his mother in surprise and laughed.

Avis smiled. She touched Perkins's forehead, brushed his hair with her fingers. “How bad is it?” she said softly.

“Oh …” He wrinkled his nose at the baby. “‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.' How's by you?”

“Okay, I guess. So-so.”

“Baga baga baga, pah, pah, pah,” said the baby. He slapped Perkins's chest. Perkins gave a grunt and lifted him into the air. The baby squealed and wriggled.

Perkins lowered the baby and kissed his neck. He was comforted a little by the softness of the baby's skin and hair, and by the fact that the kid liked him. With a great effort, he propped himself up so he could set the baby on the floor beside the bed. Then he let go and the baby started crawling away.

“Stick to the classics,” Perkins said, “and don't put your fingers in a socket.”

The baby babbled his farewells and crawled off among the books.

“My advice to the generations,” said Perkins. He lay back heavily on the mattress. He took Avis's hand. He looked up at her. The small features of the valentine-shaped face, hovering over him, soothing. She brushed at his forehead again, smiling down at him. He felt his cock stir at her cool touch.

“Your Nana called,” she told him gently.

He closed his eyes. “Oh boy.”

“She says she couldn't reach you. She says your phone is off the hook.”

“Jesus. I don't even know where it is. Was it urgent?”

“Oh, I don't know. You know Nana. It's a catastrophe.”

“Oh no.”

“I told her you'd be over there in an hour.”

Perkins kept his eyes closed. He felt her cool fingertips. “Maybe I should call her,” he murmured. “Maybe I can find the phone.”

“No, her nurse was just coming. She wants you to come over.”

“Okay,” he said. It was barely audible. His mind was drifting now. He was thinking now about Avis. He was picturing her: the way she had been on the one night he had had her. He remembered her lying facedown on his mattress, sobbing into the pillow. He had stood over her, breathless and helpless. He had just finished dealing with her husband. His knuckles were pouring blood. After a long time, he had knelt down next to her. He wanted her to stop crying, and he wanted her, and he did not know what else to do. His breath caught when she lifted her hips to let him work her leggings down. She had parted her legs too when he stretched out on top of her. All the while he was rocking in and out of her, she had held his hand in front of her and sucked the blood off his fingers. He had murmured to her, and he thought he heard her whisper something. He didn't catch it though. She would never tell him what it was …

The memory was giving him an erection. He opened his eyes. He saw Avis steal another glance down him. She nearly smiled, but then she took her hands away. She stood up quickly. Grabbed his bedsheet off the floor and dropped it over him.

“You could get dressed, you know,” she said. “You could pretend that I was here.”

“I know you're here,” he said. The light was bad, but he thought he saw her cheeks color. Anyway, she hurried across the room to the baby, who was stretched across
The Idiot
now, chewing on Perkins's sweater. She got the sweater from him. Draped it over her arm.

“You do this too much, Perkins,” she said.

“I got carried away. Don't clean up.”

“You get carried away too much.” She lifted his jeans while the baby watched her. “It's like every night, every other night.”

“It's not every night. Avis … Don't clean up. I'm telling you.” He tried to get up, but the movement shifted the sand in his head. He could only sit on the edge of the mattress, his feet on the floor. He covered his face with his hands. “Oh man!”

“I'm telling
you
, Oliver,” Avis said. “It's getting to be a real habit.”

He forced himself to look up at her. She was placing his clothes on top of the dresser now. Then she was tugging the laundry bag out from underneath the dresser, stuffing in his underwear.

“Avis, would you not do this, please.”

“Well, look at this place, Ollie.”

His shoulders sagged. He shook his head dismally. He turned and squinted dismally at the window, at the strip of blue sky. “I don't know,” he said finally. “I gave a reading at the café last night.”

“Well, that's no excuse.” She had moved across the room to pry her son's fingers from the base of a standing lamp. “Everyone always … oof! … loves your readings.”

“Yeah.” He grunted at her. “All those old poems. The same ones over and over. I had to wash away the taste of them. I could feel them stuck in my throat.”

“Oh, Oliver, come on.”

“Two years, Avis. Two years this month since I wrote my last good one.”

“And getting tanked every night is going to help a lot.”

He sighed. Sat silently.

“Shit,” Avis muttered. He glanced at her. She had been restacking a toppled pile of Greek histories and had come up with something. She examined it a moment, turning it in her fingers. “I guess someone lost this,” she said. She tossed it across the room to him.

He caught it in his cupped hands. An earring. Turquoise on hand-hammered silver. Something bought on the street in the East Village probably. “Not one of yours, huh?”

“You know it's not.” She showed him her back, walking toward the kitchenette.

Perkins gazed down at the earring, trying to remember. He had a vague flash of the café. The black microphone in his face. The cool neck of the beer bottle in his fist. Candlelight in the white wine at the tables. Faces at the tables, young men, young women's faces; the grizzled chins of the old Village denizens; the candlelight in their eyes.

Avis flicked on the light in the kitchenette. “I hope it's a girl's, that's all,” she said darkly.

“There was someone.” He studied the earring.

“You said you weren't going to do boys anymore. It's dangerous—especially when you're too drunk to think.”

“Cindy,” he said. “Or Mindy. Maybe it was Mindy …” He looked up then and saw her in the kitchenette. He flinched. A dolmen of encrusted pots and dishes rose out of the sink. Avis was sponging some red slime off the countertop. A roach was scuttling for a crack in the caulking.

“Well, I'm sure she was a nice girl,” she was saying. “She probably just had to get back to school in time for recess.”

“Avis,” said Perkins. “Would you put down the fucking sponge.”

“You want eggs?”

“Oh, don't make me breakfast. God, Avis, don't take care of me. I mean it. This is your whole problem.”

“I'll get a psychiatrist first thing tomorrow. You want them scrambled?”

Perkins let out his breath, dejected. His chin fell to his chest. There was the baby. Crawling over a Sam Adams to get to his foot. Smiling up at him from his hairy toes, waiting for some attention.

Perkins reached down and picked the baby up. The baby put his arms around the poet's neck. “Yeah,” Perkins said quietly. “Scrambled is fine.”

He lay down with the baby on top of him. He blew out his cheeks again to make the baby laugh. But now the kid had noticed the buttons on the mattress. He was climbing down off Perkins to see if he could get some to eat.

Abandoned, Perkins lay where he was, staring up at the ceiling. He licked his lips, picking up the faint taste of dried vomit. He listened to the running water in the kitchenette. The clattering of pots as Avis cleared them. He listened to the baby gurgling. The loneliness settled down over him like a blanket.

Two years, he thought. Not since the river house. He had sat on the porch there in the evenings and watched the view. The green Catskills rising against the pale and darkening sky. The beaver pond lying in the meadow just below, a black oval in the high grasses. He could see Julia floating on her back down there. Her long body white beneath the black water, her breasts breaking the surface of it. Her white thighs lifting and falling lazily as she kicked along. Sometimes he heard an explosive whap! as a beaver slapped its tail against the water to warn the others she was coming. More often, the creatures swam right over to her. He could see their V-shaped wakes, the domes of their heads. They would bump their black noses against her side and make her smile.

And Perkins would sit on the porch, balancing a pad on his lap, twirling a pen in his hand. Soon, the evening star would shine dimly in the big sky above them. Other stars would show through the tendrils of mountain mist. Raccoons would waddle to the pond's edge and drink while Julia floated with the beavers. And deer too would sometimes step from the grass and bow their heads gracefully to lap the water. There had seemed to him a luxury of life and death, night coming like that. And just as the light was almost gone, he would begin writing.

This is the animal hour.

The slow October flies, despairing on the porch chairs,

blink into the shards of the sun they see setting.

Blue and then a deeper blue ease into the air,

and bats suddenly dive and butterfly up out of the trees …

His last good poem. The last poem in the collection.

“Christ.” He groaned, his head going back and forth on the pillow. He rubbed his eyes with both hands. He yawned. “So what did Nana want anyway?” he said.

“What?” Avis was at the sink, the water running. She glanced over her shoulder, holding a pot under the stream.

“I said, What did my grandmother want?” Perkins called. “What was the big catastrophe?”

“Oh,” Avis called back. “It's your kid brother again.”

“Zachary?” Perkins came up slowly onto his elbow. “What the hell's the matter with Zach?”

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