Still Life with Elephant (14 page)

S
OMEONE UP
there was listening, because Reese was gone by the time I got home. I led Tom into the house, where Grace sniffed his shoes for an embarrassingly long time before finally nipping him in the shoelaces. I pulled her off. “NO BITE!” I growled into her ear.

“What does she have against Bruno Maglis?” Tom asked, retying his shoelaces.

“She has issues,” I explained, then excused myself to lock her in the bathroom.

When I got back, Tom was staring at a mug on the drain rack that Matt had always used for his morning coffee. It was a big blue mug with a shaggy dog on the front, and it read “World Class Vet.” Reese had started drinking out of it. I turned it to face the other way.

“My brother was here,” I said. “I guess he was using it.”

Tom raised his hand to my face and ran his thumb across my cheek. It left a trail of sweetness.

“Would you prefer I go home?” he asked gently.

“No,” I said, reaching up and clasping his hand in mine. I didn't want him to go. I wanted to let go of Matt. I didn't want it to be his and my house anymore. I wanted to cleanse him from everything. I wanted to begin a new life.

I stood awkwardly in front of Tom, painfully aware that everything in the house had once belonged to Matt and me, and I was standing in it with another man.

“I guess I'll make coffee,” I said.

“Not now,” he said. He was being very polite, but I could see
him looking around. I loved my kitchen, but I realized how modest and small it must have seemed to him, although earlier that morning I had thought it was perfectly comfortable. We stood there for a moment, awkward and aching for more from each other, and afraid to move, until I got an inspiration.

“Would you like to see my horses?” I asked.

“I thought you would never ask,” Tom said, maybe a bit relieved, and followed me out through the back door.

Mousi was asleep in his hay nest, a big white mound; Isis was sleeping with her head under her hay rack; Conversano was vacuuming up the remains of his dinner; Delaney watched us with great suspicion from over his stall door. I introduced them all, until we got to Delaney. Tom reached out to pet him, and Delaney reared sideways before scooting away.

“I got him in for retraining,” I said. “He's got—issues.”

“Good God,” Tom said, “does everything in your life have issues?”

“I had a jelly donut this morning that didn't,” I said.

We returned to the kitchen, and I stood there wondering what to do next. Reese had left the elephant music playing loudly on the stereo for me.

“Would you mind if we turned the music down a little?” Tom asked, looking toward the stereo. “And what on earth is that playing, anyway?”

“It's my brother's music, he lent it to me.” I said. “I always keep music playing.”

“Always?” he asked. “Why?”

I just shrugged, embarrassed. I didn't know how to answer him.

“Another one of those issues?” he asked, and stepped toward me. The anticipation left me breathless. I wanted to feel his arms, wanted him to pull me to him, wanted to feel the heat and strength of his kisses again.

“Is it okay?” He tilted his head sideways, waiting for my answer.

“Yes,” I said, and he kissed me. Slowly at first, tentatively, until
I kissed him back, and then he pressed against me. I could feel his body pressing against me, and it felt strong, insistent.

“I was kind of hoping you'd let me share your sleeping bag,” he murmured into my ear. I pulled away.

“I hope you don't think I'm easy—I mean, after the tent thing,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “Believe me, I don't think you're easy at all.” He drew me back into his arms.

I pulled away again. “And I hope you're not in a relationship,” I added. “I don't want to be the other woman.”

“Single,” he said, pulling me close again. “Heterosexual, good health. Likes to walk on the beach, hold hands in the moonlight, and solvent. Anything else?”

“No,” I whispered, and let him kiss me again and again.

 

First kisses are like opening a door and stepping through, into a new country with a different landscape and a different language. His arms, his lips felt different from those of anyone before, his body moved in a different rhythm from the one I was familiar with. All different, surprising my body with its newness. There was a resonance between us that made me feel alive; the world was suddenly full of promise.

We lay together, and he stroked my hair, and slowly caressed my body. Slow, slow, like we had infinity to be together. Slow. He moved his fingers across me, then his lips, then took my hand and ran it across his own body, letting the slowness build into demands. He covered my face with a thousand little kisses, like butterflies, telling me that I was beautiful, beautiful; then he braced himself above me, resting on his hands, and looked so intently into my eyes that I thought he could see my soul.

“Are you ready for me?” he asked.

“Yes.” I moved against him. “Oh yes.”

He pressed into me with urgency, with strength and tenderness.
The universe crashed around us. Stars imploded and pulled us together, whirling, burning white, rising into a small sharp point of light and desire and release.

I spent a wonderful night with Thomas Princeton Pennington.

Was it Revenge Sex? Consolation Sex? Rebound Sex? I didn't know, but I had never felt anything like it.

 

We did a donut run together in the morning and brought our goodies back to the house and ate them together, sitting across the table, the table that was all mine, in a kitchen that was all mine. Maybe it had been Neutralizing Sex, because I felt very much that my home was mine, that I had a piece of myself back. We drank our coffee and ate jelly donuts, which I thought were especially good that morning, and we talked while Grace slunk under his chair and punctuated our conversation with occasional growls.

“How do I get on her good side?” Tom asked, after he accidentally moved his foot and she grabbed the toe of his shoe.

“She can be bought off with Liver YumYums,” I said, crawling under the table to detach her. “Bring her a box and she is all yours.” I chucked her into the backyard.

“So—are you and Matt able to work together?” Tom asked when I returned to my coffee. “Because I don't want to put any more strain on you than you are already under.”

“It's no problem at all,” I said. My strategy was to visit the sanctuary in the morning, and let Matt come in the afternoon. “We're both very professional.”

“And have you picked out a baby name yet?” he asked.

I gasped and dropped my donut. “It's not up to me,” I exclaimed. “That's between Matt and Holly.”

He took my hand. “I meant the baby elephant.”

“Oh. Right,” I said, quickly casting through my mind. “I might have a few ideas. Maybe ‘Dorothea,' after my grandmother.”

“Very pretty,” he said.

“Or not,” I continued, now thinking of how my mother reacted. “I'm—not sure yet.”

The morning flew. I started steeling myself for his departure. I didn't want to fool myself for one minute into thinking that Thomas Pennington was going to remain interested in me. He explained that he was leaving for England in a few days, where he had a board-of-directors meeting for one of his companies. He would stay at his apartment in London and then go on to Belgium for a week of business, before visiting his twenty-three-year-old son, who was finishing law school at Tom's alma mater, the Université Catholique de Louvain. Thomas Princeton Pennington was a very busy man.

“You must spend a lot of time traveling,” I said. “It sounds like fun.”

“You should get to England someday,” he said. “They've got horses everywhere. It's a national preoccupation, like baseball here.”

Get to England. Not, I would love to take you to England with me. But that was okay. I smiled at him and bit into my jelly donut. I had horses to work and an elephant to train, and a living to earn. “Do they have jelly donuts?” I asked, giving him a sly smile.

“They have spotted dick,” he said very solemnly.

I choked on my donut. “Is that a medical condition?”

“It's a dessert,” he said. “Honestly.”

I saw him check his watch, and I took my cue. “I have to get to the sanctuary,” I said.

“I have to get back to the city,” he said.

We stood up, almost simultaneously, and he took me into his arms and kissed me again.

“I'll call you after I get to England,” he said.

“You don't have to,” I said. “I know how busy you are.”

“I
will
call you,” he said, and I wanted to believe him. I almost believed him. He gently wiped a bit of jelly from the tip of my nose with his thumb.

“We'll be in touch,” he said, as I walked him to the door.

“Safe journey,” I said.

He gave me another kiss good-bye and left. I let Grace in from
the yard, and together we watched Tom's car drive away down the road.

“I hope you like him,” I said to Grace. She licked the tips of my fingers and blinked her big round googie eyes at me a few times.

The hunter-green Bentley disappeared around the corner, and I shut the door. It had been very good between us. Tom hadn't murmured anything about love to me, and I hadn't murmured anything back. We hadn't made one promise between us. I didn't know where it was going to lead, if anywhere, and I don't think he knew, either. It was just the two of us, needing something from the night, from each other, and being able to give it.

And even if it was only one night of No-Strings-Attached Sex, that was okay. At least it was honest.

I
M NOT
really a big weeper. Really, I'm not. I don't fall apart and get all teary-eyed during the heartrending scenes in movies. I never cry reading sad books. I don't cry at funerals, or when someone tells me a heartbreaking story. I hold things very close. My brothers used to pin me down when we were kids and give me noo-gies on my head, but they never got me to cry. “Tight Ass” became their nickname for me. Of course, I had nicknames for them as well: Reese the Beast and, my older brother, Jerome the Gnome. But I never cried. I didn't even cry when Homer died. That's why the past few weeks had been very out of character for me. I was constantly surprising myself with all the crying I was doing, and now I was sniffling because Tom left.

I splashed cold water on my face so my eyes wouldn't be red, and I was ready to leave for work when the phone rang. I lunged for it, hoping, I don't know, that maybe it was Tom calling to tell me he was going to come back and take me away with him. I could even have supplied him with the white horse, although Mousi might have some objections to being asked to actually work for a change.

It was my lawyer. I really did not want to hear from my lawyer, because I always sounded snuffled up when he called and hated sounding weak and helplessly heartbroken over Matt. Again.

“Bubeleh, I have some bad news and I have some very bad news,” he said. “Which do you want first?”

“What kind of choice is that?” I asked.

“I'm sorry to have to put it that way,” he replied, “but sometimes shit happens and you have to know about it. Are you ready?”

“No,” I said.

“Listen carefully anyway,” he said, “and try not to get all confused with what I'm going to tell you. I did a little detective work about your finances, and found out that Matt signed half his practice over to Dr. Scarletta, sometime in the past year. That means very little for you to negotiate over.”

The breath was knocked out of me. My legs turned into electric eels, tingling but not willing to support me. The kitchen faded in and out of my vision, and I heard oceanic waves crashing against my ears. I slid from the chair and down onto the floor, which had become my emotional haven of late. At least I still owned my floor.

“I am sitting on the floor,” I said to him. “I can't sink any lower than this, so I'm going to hang up now.”

“Wait,” he said, “I'm sorry, but there's more. He also took out an equity loan against your house. Took out quite a bit, almost completely up to market value, and now his lawyer is proposing for him to sell it so he can get out from under the debts.”

In a flash, I realized that was why Matt had generously offered to pay the expenses. The house had been mortgaged right up to its chimney. I was certain I had heard it wrong. And certain I had heard it right. The floor began revolving backward now in a dizzying spin, and I put my hand over my mouth for a moment, because it would have been tacky to retch into the phone. I counted to five and took deep breaths. There was a definite quake in the floor just before it opened up and swallowed me. Then I stopped breathing. Could I breathe? I was panicking, and gasping for air. Was that considered breathing?

“Are you okay?” my lawyer asked. I couldn't answer. He waited a polite amount of time before calling my name again.

“Can he do that?” I finally managed. “My name is on the mortgage.”

“Well, someone illegally signed your name. Probably his lady friend. That's why he said he didn't want to sell the house. It would have opened up a whole can of worms.”

Worms again. Matt and Holly-Felony had managed to worm me right out of my own home, without my even being aware of it.

“Why?” I gasped.

“What can I say?” My lawyer paused. “He did it. He obviously planned to get all the assets before he divorced you. Weekend breast barges.”

“Breast what?” I was getting lost in words again.

“I said we can press charges,” he said. “
Prosecute
. You'll have to do it through the district attorney to make him pay up, and it can get pretty messy.”

“Oh God,” I said.

“And expensive,” he added. “But we do have a case. Just say the word and I'll get things started.”

He spoke some more, but all I heard was a mash of meaningless words. I heard “gilded bracelet canary foot” somewhere in there, and “snow fort coffeemaker.” And maybe “pretzel bender.” It didn't matter what he was saying. I had been betrayed. Matt had lied about Holly just being a quick fling. They had been working very hard to steal my home from me.

I hung up the phone and lay right there on the floor, in front of the kitchen sink, in the kitchen that had belonged to me and Matt and then only to me, and now, apparently, mostly to Matt. And maybe Holly. Holly-Vulture. I couldn't bear even to look around. Everything felt tainted. Grace came over to give me a few sympathetic kisses and then settled next to me to lick the tears from my face.

After a while, my legs fell asleep, and I got up. I needed to go somewhere, but not the barn, not the barn. I wouldn't be able to walk through the barn and touch the doors, and stand in the feed room that I had designed, and look at my horses standing in their stalls, because I knew it wasn't going to be my barn for much longer. I walked to the back door and pulled it open to get some fresh air. Conversano whinnied, and I realized that he must have spotted me. Horses make very good watch dogs.

My life was going to change, I knew. I was standing on the very edge of the cliff and looking at a pile of rocks below, and the long
fall down wasn't going to be pretty. I shut the door, ignoring Conversano's calls. Then I got into my car and drove off.

 

Margo rumbled to me as soon as I walked in. Though she pushed the baby to her other side, and flapped her ears at me, this time it seemed the flaps were less, well, flappy. I blew my nose, but she didn't seem to care about red eyes and runny noses. She just turned and faced her fruit basket. She was definitely one pragmatic elephant. I had to force myself to be calm, to forget what was going on in my life, because elephants pick up on high drama and can become agitated. I took a deep breath and stuffed my tissue into my pocket. Then I grabbed a banana from the basket and held it through the bars.

“Hello,” I said, then corrected myself. “Look here,” I commanded.

She fastened one eye on me. I waved the banana. “Look
here
,” I repeated. She ignored me. Apparently, I wasn't even banana-worthy today.

“Margo,” I commanded again. “Look here.”

She hesitated, checked on her baby, then took a few steps toward my upraised hand. It was a pleasant surprise that she was responding to me at all. She was so quiet every time I was with her. Depressed, Richie said. And why wouldn't she be? She had lost everything that made up her life.

“Come on,” I said, then corrected myself again. “Look
here
.” She looked at me. “Hey, be glad you still have your baby,” I said. “At least you have your baby.”

She took a step toward me.

“Good girl,” I said. “Come on. Do it for me. I'm probably the one person in the world who really understands you.”

She took another step, and I waited, holding out the banana. I waited for a long time. Then, slowly, slowly, she extended her trunk, ran it up my arm, and touched my shoulder, before continuing up
ward. The two muscles at the tip of her trunk touched my face, moving to my nose, my lips, and then up to my wet eyes. Maybe they do notice things like that after all. I cautiously took the tip of her trunk and blew gently into her nostrils. She left it against my lips for a moment, and looked very thoughtful. Then she moved it back down my arm, and very carefully took the fruit from my hand.

I caught my breath. Margo had taken a piece of fruit from me! I had become more than a representative from a particularly obnoxious and predatory species. I was a source of something good. I had commanded the attention of an elephant. I picked up an apple and repeated my command. She responded again, with slow, clumsy grace. I looked up into her intelligent face and knew what I had to do.

I had to show her that I trusted her, too. I had to take things one step further. Trust for trust. I walked to the front of her cage and tugged at the heavy chain wrapped around the door. Maybe I was being stupid, but I didn't care. I had to go in to her. The gate swung open and I walked in, closing it behind me, then leaned against it with the fruit basket in my arms.

She turned to me again. We were alone. She wasn't chained or sedated. She was alert, aware of me. We were only a few feet away from each other, a wild elephant and me. I could feel my breath coming hard. She was so tall I had to press back against the bars to see her whole magnificent body, her shoulders, her sad, dignified face. She took a step forward. I could feel a low rumble carry through the air. A vibration, and I froze. I didn't dare look at her baby, or move a muscle. I just stood. She stretched her trunk toward me. She knew I had made myself very vulnerable to her. How stupid of me. I was nothing, compared with her size. She could lift me and throw me as easily as she could throw a piece of fruit across the floor. She could press me against the bars and squeeze the life out of me far more efficiently than Matt, for all his machinations, ever could. She stepped closer and reached toward me. I took a deep breath and let her trunk press over me. She touched my face and sniffed at my hair, lifting a piece of it. She
touched my sweater as if trying to figure out the texture. The rumbling was pronounced now.

“Look here,” I said, my voice squeaking from nerves, and I held out another banana. She was either going to take it or kill me. At one time I wouldn't have cared which, but now I realized it mattered. Then I thought what a stupid place I was in, to come to this kind of realization. I waited, and my hand shook as I held it out in front of me. She made a low sound, and took it from my hand.

“Good girl,” I praised her, my heart thumping with relief. “Good girl.”

I heard a sound, and knew Richie had come into the barn. I didn't dare turn around. He stopped moving behind me. I reached into the basket again, and she continued to take the fruit from me, piece by piece, until the basket was empty.

“Get out,” Richie said in a deadly still voice. “
Get out now
.”

And I slowly, slowly backed out of the enclosure and pulled the chain across the gate. Margo looked for more fruit, then trumpeted.

“You broke the rules.” Richie said, his face severe and flushed with anger. “That was a stupid, stupid crazy thing to do.”

“I know,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't ever do that again without someone here,” he said.

“But she's taking bananas from me,” I said. “I think I'm really making progress.”

“Oh, Neelie,” he said, and let out a long, long sigh and tilted his head to the side. When someone lets out a long sigh and looks at you at an angle, you're about to get bad news. I braced myself.

“I've been working with her,” he said. “That's why I knew she would take a banana from you when Tom was here that day. I didn't want you to fail in front of him and Matt. I want this elephant to stay here.”

“Oh,” I said. Then I burst into more tears. What do they say about tears? A bucket a day keeps the doctor away? “You mean I didn't really teach her to take a banana?”

“Hey,” he said, “why are you crying? I wanted to show Tom some progress before Faye came to evaluate her.”

“Faye?”

“The elephant trainer from that big elephant sanctuary in Tennessee,” Richie explained. “Tom called her to fly up here and give you a hand. She's coming tomorrow.”

“Faye?”

“He didn't want you to get hurt before your learning curve kicked in.”

I felt my color rise. I was not going to share Margo with anyone.

“I can do it by myself,” I said, feeling my voice tighten. “I already blew in her nose.”

“Don't be silly,” he said softly. “Let Faye show you how to manage her. Otherwise, Tom mentioned, he might have to send her to Tennessee. And I don't want to lose my elephant.”

“You can't let him do that,” I said hoarsely. “I won't let anyone take our elephant from us!”

“I agree. I love her, too.” Richie gave me an affectionate pinch on the cheek and headed for the barn door. “I've wanted an elephant my whole life. So be nice to Faye.”

I watched him for a minute, then took a deep, shaky breath. “Richie?” I called.

He turned around. “Yeah?”

“Thank you,” I said. “You know, for the banana trick.”

“Yep.” He saluted me with two fingers. “Just call me Chiquita.”