Hall of Small Mammals (11 page)

I
n his aisle seat near the front of the plane, Felix concentrates unsuccessfully on a crossword in the airline magazine, half finished by a previous flier. All the easy clues have already been answered and now he needs a six-letter word for a muzzle-loading tool. The third letter is
m
. He stares at that
m
, a bit dazed, doing his best not to think about what happens when they land in Atlanta. Rattling the ice in her cup, Laura leans over his magazine and peers down at the puzzle. “Ergo,” she says, and points at 27 Down. “Ramrod,” she says, and points at his
m
, and then, pointing somewhere else, “Pandora.”

He looks at that particular clue.
First woman.
“You think it's Pandora? I was thinking it might be Evelynn. Eve was just a nickname, right?”

“Adam and Evelynn, a lovely couple, we really need to have them over for dinner some night soon. I hear Adam's a terrific gardener. I hear Evelynn likes apple pie.”

Felix closes the inflight magazine and tucks it into the seat
pocket. He looks around for a new distraction. On the television show Felix works for,
Pets!
, Gonuts the CGI Hamster has this thing he is always saying before climbing onto his metal wheel and running mindlessly. “Don't get so stressed. You got to wheel it out.” Felix provides the voice for Gonuts. He doesn't love recording different iterations of the same phrase week after week, but he has to admit the little furball is onto something in this case: life is not easy and without distractions you can make yourself crazy.

He munches on some dried apricots and asks Laura to close the blinds since the sun is so bright and hot across their laps. Her jean shorts are wedged high and her pale knees glow like two beautiful snowy peaks, the crease of her legs a tight valley. If he wanted, with the aid and cover of a blanket, he could walk his hand right up that valley. Would she resist? Probably. Not that she always insists on decency. There was the time in the changing room at Nordstrom's. There was the night in the chair on the roof of their apartment building. But he won't slide his hand between her legs. A Neanderthalic impulse, his mother would have called it. The fasten-your-seat-belt light blinks. The overhead bins rattle.

“I'm not going to finish this drink,” he announces, his whiskey and soda hovering near his lips. He has Laura's attention. That's all he wanted anyway. She watches him, amused, as he tips back the cup, the ice crashing into his teeth, the liquid draining out. “I'm
not
going to push this,” he says, and pushes the overhead button for the stewardess. “I'm not going to order another drink and fall down drunk on the tarmac like an idiot.”

“Tell me more about these red tights,” she says, and crosses her arms. “Does Hank wear them to bed too? I don't get it. When does Bet wash them?”

Felix shrugs. “I don't think he lets her wash them. That's part of the problem. They're stinky, I'm sure.” Hank, Felix's four-year-old son, is obsessed with a pair of red tights from last year's Halloween costume when he dressed up as a strawberry. In a few weeks he will start kindergarten, and Bet, his mother, is concerned about what the other kids might say. “Did you ever do weird stuff like this when you were a kid?” Bet has asked Felix on the phone. “I'll bet you did. Hank is funny—just like you. The other day I found gravel in his juice cup. I asked him why and he said he likes his juice on the rocks. Can you believe that? Where do you think he got that from? When you get here, be sure to ask him about the sprinkler and the frog. It's his best bit. You won't regret it.” Bet is always doing this, insisting that Hank is funny, as if otherwise Felix would stop believing the boy was his.

Felix is a comedian, though he hasn't told a joke onstage in almost a year, not since he started lending his voice to Gonuts on
Pets!
A huge hit with kids, the hamster has his own lunchboxes and T-shirts. It is despicably commercial, but the paychecks sure are nice. Felix is not especially proud of the show. The jokes are too easy; the laugh track irks him. When people ask him what he's up to, he often doesn't mention the show and says only that he's developing some new material, something he hasn't done since his
Keep Your Hands to Myself
tour that took him to Atlanta, where he met Bet. She was at a table near the front of the show. She was a barista in a coffee shop near the university, a student there, in fact, though Felix only learned that later when she called to tell him about Hank—or about the bundle of cells that would eventually become Hank.

There was never any expectation that Felix would relocate
his life to Atlanta (and he certainly didn't ask her to join him out West). But without any lawyers having to get involved, he started mailing her monthly checks, checks that sometimes Bet didn't even bother to cash. She didn't need the money. The checks were purely symbolic. Her father worked for a certain soda company—that's what her father was always calling it,
a certain soda company
—and she moved back in with her parents once Hank was born. With their help, Bet was able to finish school and get a job in a gallery. Ever since Hank's birth, Felix has been flying into town three or four times a year for long visits.

But now, after not dating anyone seriously since the birth, Bet is getting married—to someone named JT, the heir to a carpet-cleaning business, a “good man,” according to Bet. Felix is prepared not to like him. Though he usually makes these trips alone, Laura volunteered to come along for the weekend to provide moral support, to help him get through the engagement party.

Laura is emphatic that she never wants any children of her own, but the fact that Felix has a son does not faze her. “How many women did you sleep with while you were on the road?” she asked him when he first showed her a photo of Hank on his phone, as if she were calculating the probability of other babies in other cities. This was on their second date, at a Mexican restaurant, fajitas sizzling on a metal platter between them. Felix wasn't sure how to answer her question. Too many women and he was a sleaze, but too few and he was inadequate. He settled on six and flashed three fingers on each hand. Laura nodded and announced, matter-of-factly, that six was a number she could live with. Ten months later, and they are on the verge of a more encompassing merger—of door keys, of bedsheets, of utensils, of
wireless Internet accounts. Strangely, none of this scares Felix at all. He doesn't know if he has Laura or his upcoming thirty-ninth birthday to thank for this sudden blip of maturity, but he is ready to embrace the change.

When the stewardess brings him his second whiskey and soda, he takes a long sip. Two gigantic hands descend from above. They latch on to the top of Felix's headrest and pull it back like the arm of a catapult. Ready, set—when the man stands and releases the chair, Felix is rocked forward, some of the whiskey splashing over the plastic rim of his cup.

“Watch it,” Felix says to the man, who's crouching beneath the bins. The man clears his throat and says nothing. Where is Felix's apology? He glares up at the guy through the gap between the headrests. “Buddy, you made me spill my drink.”

“Your what?” The man has a face like tapioca pudding.

“My drink,” Felix says. “When you stood up, you made me spill it.”

“Oh,” the man says. “Sorry, didn't hear you. My ears are no good with the pressure. These headphones are pointless. I turn the volume up all the way, and it's just noise. All these movies to choose from and I can't hear a word of dialogue. Plus I have to stretch every twenty minutes. Ever heard of DVT? If I don't move around enough I might get an embolism.”

“By all means, then,” Felix says, “run a few laps.”

“You'll have to excuse him,” Laura says to the man. “He's been a little edgy this morning.”

“Flying will do that to you,” the man says. “They don't make it easy, do they?”

“They don't,” she says, reaching for the inflight magazine,
and then she starts back on the crossword puzzle without further comment.

Has Felix been edgy this morning? Even if he has been, this man doesn't need to hear about it. Quietly he says to Laura, “He bumps my seat and you ask him to excuse
me
? What's that all about?”

She pats his arm. “Here's something good: you don't know how to feel about the mother of your child getting married to another man, and you've brought me along because you want me to be a part of your life, and I love you for that. Here's something bad: part of you doesn't want me on this trip.” This technique of hers, the something-good-something-bad, is from a book she read years ago. She swears it is the key to strong communication, but Felix doesn't care for it. Hearing something good doesn't mitigate the bad. The bad is still just as bad.

“I do want you on this trip,” he says. “
All
parts of me want you here.”

“Okay,” she says. “I'm glad to hear it. And here I am. I'm here.”

•   •   •

A miracle: the plane lands three minutes earlier than expected. They don't have any checked bags. Unlike his usual visits, when he rents a car and stays for the entire week, they can be here only for the weekend. Both Felix and Laura have to be back on Monday for work on
Pets!
She does makeup for the show and two others on the network.

Down the long sunlit terminal, floor-to-ceiling windows above and on all sides, he drags their shared green roller suitcase
across the hard white floor. Felix can imagine the distance between heaven and earth like this, bright and spare and seemingly endless. Laura strolls a few feet behind him, giant white sunglasses on her small face, pink oxford shirt knotted over one hip. At the bottom of an escalator, they pass between two sliding doors, and Felix scans the crowd for Bet's dad, Mr. Ash, who was enlisted to pick them up and chauffeur them to the hotel, the Commodore, Felix's usual haunt on these trips.

Mr. Ash is in his sixties, but hasn't retired yet. Maybe he never will. In his work for a certain soda company, he often jets off to New Delhi and Shanghai, defending the company brand in places where trademark laws aren't always enforced very stringently. Save for the wire-frame glasses always at the end of his nose, Mr. Ash has the look of an elderly football brute. The first time Felix met the man was right here in the baggage claim, the screens flashing arrivals, the swishing of so many suitcase wheels across the carpet. Bet was there too, of course, her belly round under a T-shirt, black hair cut shorter than Felix remembered it. Mr. Ash towered behind her like an Easter Island statue. It was the moment Felix had dreaded most ever since Bet's first phone call about the Hank-in-progress.

“So you're the comedian I have to thank for all this,” Mr. Ash had said, unsmiling, and then stuck out his dry freckled hand.

“So you're the dad who probably wishes my plane had crashed,” Felix answered. Felix has a knack for saying the exact wrong thing. He says things defensively and without thought. Partly it's what initially drew him to the stage.

“Is that him?” Laura asks now, and points toward a sharp-chinned man with fine brown hair. He is holding a piece of paper that says
FELIX PENN
in Magic Marker. It isn't Mr. Ash.

“Felix?” the man calls out. “It's got to be you. Bet told me to look for the middle-aged pirate.”

An old line of Bet's; she used to say Felix's gray-flecked beard and earring made him look like a character off Captain Hook's ship.

“I'm JT,” the man says, and crumples up the paper. “Mr. Ash got held up at work, and Bet asked if I could come get you. So, here I am.”

“Nice to meet you,” Laura says. “And congratulations.”

“Yes, congrats,” Felix says.

“Thank you. Thanks. I'm out in short-term,” he says.

JT leads the way through the double doors and into the sunlight, his red polo shirt tucked tightly into his neatly pressed khaki pants. The white van at the end of the lot is his. Across the side:
JONES & SONS
CARPET CLEANERS
. “Your chariot,” he says. “The back is full, so we'll have to all sit up front in the cab.” He opens the passenger door. On the dashboard is a coiled brown and gold snake and, in the driver's seat, a yellow one with an open mouth and vicious red fangs. “Rubber,” he says, and tosses them on the floorboard.

“Why do you have those?” Laura asks, climbing up first and sliding toward the floorboard transmission.

“Oh,” he says. “Kind of a joke. I work in some rough neighborhoods. We like to say it scares off the criminals. Are you hungry? You need a snack before tonight?”

“We ate some on the plane,” she says. “So, are you excited about the wedding?”

“I can't wait. I'd do it tomorrow if I could.” He walks around to the driver's side as Felix joins Laura in the cab. When he's behind the wheel, “Bet wants the real deal, though—flowers, big white tent, all of it. Can you imagine me in a tux?”

Felix doesn't take the bait. The van rumbles to life. JT grips the vibrating stick shift and reverses out of the space. Felix has his window down, and once they are on the highway the warm air blows pleasantly across his face.

“It feel good to be back South?” JT asks him. “You're from around here, aren't you? Originally, I mean.”

“Not from Atlanta,” Felix says. He grew up in North Carolina but hasn't lived there since college and no longer considers himself much of a southerner. He has aunts and uncles he doesn't visit and who would probably dislike him. His parents live in other cities now, Pittsburgh (his mother) and Phoenix (his father), each with different partners. They've started entirely new lives for themselves. “A second chapter,” his father called it once. “A page-turner, I'm sure,” Felix said to that. Growing up, Felix had never thought of his parents as particularly unhappy. His father had always opened doors for his mother, and she'd rubbed his neck when it was sore. Sure, his mother would look away disgusted whenever his father belched into his hand, or complain about his habit of never filling a gas tank more than three-quarters; and yes, Felix had once overheard his father call his mother “sexless” to a group of his cigar-smoking buddies, a word his father would pretend to not recognize when a nine-year-old Felix asked for its meaning.
That his parents had so rarely argued with each other would later make Felix wonder if the marriage had all been a charade for his sake, an idea that made them seem less like parents and more like actors in a bad play about parenting.