Gargantuan (5 page)

I ached for her even though she was standing right there.

“You shouldn’t have to be bothered with mortal tasks such as those,” I said, reaching for her hand and kissing the sweet spot on the inside of her wrist. She laughed.

“Protein shake?” she said.

“That’s fine, yes,” I said.

She pulled out the container of protein powder and put powder, juice, and bananas into an ancient-looking blender.

“You know what I think,” Ruby said as she poured us each a mug of protein drink.

“About what?” I asked, sipping at the beverage and trying not to make a face. Her culinary ineptitude was such that even the protein drink tasted funny.

“About what happened on the beach.”

“I don’t want to go into it right now.”

“Don’t shut me out,” she said, her face pinching slightly so that her mouth seemed smaller.

“I’m not, Ruby, it’s just that I have some things to work out and until I’ve done that, I can’t discuss any of this with you.”

“That bad?” She drew her eyebrows together.

“No, not that bad.” I lied. Things
were
that bad. But I wanted to keep her away from the kind of fear I was living with.

I steered the subject elsewhere, asking her when she was going
to take me to hear some of her beloved classical music. I knew she occasionally went to concerts at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. She’d even taken her friend Big Sal to hear some Bach in a church. So far though, she hadn’t offered to take me to any cultural events.

“I didn’t know you were that interested,” she said, looking surprised.

I wasn’t really but I was trying to share her passions.

Ruby started foraging through some mail on the kitchen table, producing a schedule for Lincoln Center. She read off details of several different concerts, explaining the merits of each.

“You decide,” I said softly.

“Okay,” she shrugged. She finished off her protein drink.

“I’ve got to get back to practicing now. Do you mind?”

“I couldn’t mind less,” I told her.

Her expression changed and she grew somehow remote. She had moved back to the world of music. She went to her bench, loosened her shoulders, and started playing.

I choked down the rest of my protein drink then returned to the malevolent couch. Ruby was already conjuring beauty from the piano and I felt a stab of envy. She was right there with her piano and I was miles from a horse. In spite of the obvious danger of even leaving the house, I needed to ride. I didn’t know if they’d have cleared the track enough by tomorrow for actual workouts but I thought at least I’d put in an appearance on the backstretch, go see some of the trainers I ride for, offer to hand walk a few horses. It would calm me. All of which meant that, if I was to keep my bargain with Ruby and her friend, I had to call Sal and ask him to come with me to the track at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

Just as I started thinking about retrieving my cell phone and making the call, the phone beat me to the punch and rang, the sound of it a terrible shriek against the music-filled room. I jumped up and raced over to get it out of my jacket. I looked at the incoming number, got a slightly sick feeling at what I saw, and turned the phone off. I glanced at Ruby. She just kept playing her music, not seeming to miss a note, lost in her own world.

I went back to the couch, but now I was rattled. Not only was someone trying to drown the life out of me, but my insane wife, Ava, was calling. This the third call in the last twelve hours or so. Not that I’d answered any of them. Or even listened to the voice mails she’d left. But I’d seen her number in the call log. I didn’t know exactly what her calling me meant other than she’d sniffed out the fact that I’d met a woman I liked. Ava would have smelled that from five thousand miles away.

I’d told Ruby about Ava. She hadn’t seemed too shaken about my technically still being married, but she did question me.

“You love her?” she’d asked.

“Of course, love, sure, but not
in
love. She’s insane.”

Ruby squinted at this.

“A lot of guys I know, the pull of an insane woman is something they never get away from.”

She was wise. And partially correct. I couldn’t imagine ever completely cutting off from Ava, particularly given that we have a ten-year-old daughter. But I didn’t want to be married to Ava anymore. I’d tried very hard for close to fifteen years. That had to be enough.

We’d met when we were young. Still both living in North Carolina. She was blond, taller than me and, a few months after I started seeing her, substantially heavier than me. The girl was bulimic. She went from one-fifteen to one-forty-five in the blink of an eye. I didn’t mind that much. There was something sensual about having a large woman covering me with her body. She had a lot of male in her too. Would lie against my back and sort of hump me. As a kid, I’d experimented with my same sex maybe a little more than was common. I’d even sort of “seen” a man a few months before I’d met Ava. But this was Grinderville, North Carolina. Not a completely asshole-of-the-universe bigoted kind of place but close. The man’s name was Jed and we’d had to be very discreet. He was forty-three and married. When I met Ava, I quickly lost interest in Jed and in the half-dozen or so women in Grinderville who chronically put themselves in my path.

When I met Ava, the whole infernal world stood still.

She was working at a geriatric home where I would go to visit my grandma. I was in Grandma Stevens’s room one day, huddled with her over the tip sheets for the nearest bush track, because well into her nineties she was still playing the horses, which I didn’t understand since at that point I’d never set foot on a track.

Grandma sent me out to look for a nurse. She couldn’t find her glasses and was convinced her roommate, Nellie Nelson, had stolen them. Nellie Nelson was, according to Grandma, a notorious kleptomaniac who had been the town nymphomaniac a few decades earlier but now, in her dotage, had switched over to kleptomania.

As I headed for the nurses’ station, I bumped into a girl carrying a box of paints that went spilling all over the floor, making a very colorful mess. I apologized profusely and the girl laughed, seemingly pleased that I’d made her spill bright blue paint all over the linoleum floor.

“I’m so sorry, how can I help you?” I’d asked, and she’d looked at me curiously, tilted her head, and then very earnestly said, “Probably in all kinds of ways.”

Had I known precisely how many ways she had in mind, I might have simply helped her muck that blue paint off the linoleum and called it a day. Instead, I got her phone number. Right there at the geriatric home where she worked as a nurse’s aide.

On the night of our first date, I went to pick Ava up at her basement apartment on Hilda Street. She opened the door, grabbed my arm, and pulled me inside. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. This wasn’t commonplace comportment for first dates in Grinderville, where there hadn’t been a town nympho since Nellie’s notoriety had gone up in a haze of age and kleptomania. Ava stood, absorbing her effect on me for a while before turning to her stereo system and putting on an album of strange folk music. She started dancing around, with her narrow but lovely ass moving beautifully. She had a small patch of light brown pubic hair and her breasts were good, not too big but very clearly there. She started touching herself.

“You stand there and watch,” she ordered as she shimmied.

I did as I was told. For a little while. Then I moved close to her, put my hand on her cheek, and stared at her. This seemed to disorient her. I kissed her. Head to toe. She started trembling. Her whole body gasping and coiling. I made certain she was very worked up and then I walked out.

That got her nose open.

Eight months later I married her.

There was a little chapel on Crookshank Road.

My mother was dead and my father was a drunk, but Ava’s parents came. They were stiff people who didn’t seem to take to me. But that didn’t matter.

That night, for our honeymoon, we drove to the ocean and stayed in a rundown seaside motel. Ava was on top of me and underneath me and sometimes behind me. Her body was thin. When we stopped making love long enough to go outside, we walked to the water. One of her now-familiar crazy looks overtook her face and she said, “I always wanted to be a welder.”

“A what?” I said.

“A welder. Especially underwater. In the sea. A deep-sea welder.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said, gripping my hand and pulling me into the ocean.

A few months after this blessed event, Ava had grown fat. It wasn’t what I had expected, but I didn’t mind. She kept me interested with her physical and mental transformations. When she was pregnant with Grace she became even more eccentric than usual. She read constantly. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would get up and go outside wearing her long white nightgown. She would pace in the backyard as she chain-smoked. Occasionally, her absence in the bed would wake me and I’d look out the window to see a pregnant, smoking apparition.

A few months after Grace was born, Ava got depressed and
stopped eating. For the most part, I was left to take care of our daughter. Ava didn’t want Grace sucking on her breasts after the first weeks. I got Grace formula and fed her and changed her.

Ava went on lithium and got fat again. Grace turned one. Then two and three and so forth.

Through all of Grace’s and Ava’s transformations, I essentially remained the same. Physically at least. Every six months I changed jobs, from carpenter to working in a factory to landscaping to working on a dairy farm. Which is where I got on the first horse I’d been on since I was a little kid. The farmer had a couple of draft horses which his teenaged daughter rode. One day, the daughter asked if I wanted to get up on one of the horses. The moment she asked, I realized that I did want to. She led the horse over to a bale of hay. I stood on this and hoisted myself up onto the big gelding’s back. At first, the girl led the horse but, after a while, seeing that I was comfortable up there, she told me how to hold the reins and she let go of the horse’s head. The big animal walked ahead slowly. I could feel every nuance of him shooting through my own body and, most remarkably, I felt like I was inside his head, like I could feel his thoughts. It was the most amazing sensation I’d ever had in my life. I stayed up there for quite a long time until finally the girl had to beg me to get down. I guess I knew right then that eventually I’d make a living with horses. I was twenty-four. I knew that it was unheard of to decide on a life of riding at such a late age, but I didn’t care. I had something. An unusual level of communication with horses. An ability to feel them.

It took me years to become an apprentice rider. I started off at the unregulated bush tracks, riding quarter horses and Arabians and anything anyone would let me ride. I got laughed at a lot. I was old. I was on the tall side. But I won races, even won them honestly in an environment where every other rider was carrying an illegal buzzer or was up to something that would never fly at a regulated track. I rode mostly on weekends and had various day jobs to pay the rent. But the only time I was truly alive was on a horse’s back. I
won a lot of shitty little races and eventually I met Henry Meyer, a New York trainer who said he’d help me get an apprentice license in New York. This was the toughest circuit to break into but they said if you cut your teeth in New York you were guaranteed a career.

Soon Ava and Grace and I moved up to Queens. At first Ava hated it. Then her medication was changed and she loved it. Sometimes she’d go off her meds and disappear for days at a time. Henry Meyer’s wife, an Englishwoman named Violet, would help me by looking after Grace. Three months ago, it got to the point where I’d really had enough. Ava was sleeping around. She was drinking and taking strange drugs. Most of all, she was breaking my heart again and again.

I still loved her. But I couldn’t abide her madness anymore.

And now, I’d met someone else. Someone I could sit with in silence. Someone I could make love to repeatedly. Someone who seemed to understand.

I didn’t know what to do with any of these thoughts so I just sat there, listening to Ruby play wondering what Ava wanted from me. Knowing it was probably just her radar picking up on the fact that I was interested in someone else.

That someone else finally stopped playing piano, turned around on her bench, and looked at me.

“Hey you,” she said, as if we were greeting each other after a long absence.

I got up and walked over to her. I pulled her to her feet, held her, and found myself hoping I wouldn’t be killed anytime soon.

W
hen my dog Dingo died, I started feeling very lowly. I’d had Dingo for ten years, since my mother’s death when I was fourteen. I loved that dog a lot and his absence made everything seem raw and worthless.

I wasn’t working much, just a few odd jobs doing carpentry but that was about it. One day, I had some work out at old Mrs. Simmons’s house on Little Egypt Road. Mrs. Simmons was a tiny brittle woman whose mind had gone soft. She often forgot to zip her slacks or button all the buttons of her blouse and her shoes seldom matched. Mrs. Simmons had dozens of chickens and apparently they were a particularly violent breed of poultry because, from what she told me, they were endlessly tearing down their coops. She’d hired me to do some patch-up work and before I was an hour into the job I had chicken shit all over me. By the end of the day, I really stank and I never wanted to see another chicken in my life. I turned down the lemonade old Mrs. Simmons offered, pocketed the forty bucks she owed me and got in my car.