Over the recent weeks of our courtship I’ve developed a secret dread of Morgan Geld’s rabbits. Rabbits in children’s books bear not much resemblance to how they are in reality. Up close, in the flesh, when they get upset they can be really frightening looking animals, is what no one admits. In Morgan’s rabbitry the cages are propped up on barrels and stacked milk crates, and the concrete floor around each pedestal is encircled with concentric asteroid-belts of turd-pellets. The rabbits are at eye level. The pink eyes stare at me out of the quivering fat dark. Somewhere in that borderland between dutiful boyfriend and hired servant, I was sometimes asked to feed and water them, late at night when she was off at some social engagement only rich transplants were allowed entry to. I’d steal into this barn in the dark, much like I’m doing right now, and I’d open a cage’s top to change a water bottle or empty a dish, reaching into the inner space of the cage that was so still it seemed electrically charged. I wouldn’t see the rabbit until it struck like a cobra out of the darkness, all fur and teeth and psychotic chattering.
My hand was a constant, bloodied victim of the huge animal kingdom Morgan Geld has collected here at the estate. She has practically every phyla represented. And each one has taken a piece of me. One incident from that first week that deserves narrative focus took place when Moissinac and I were in the crawlspaces of the mansion’s attics. Yes, there were multiple attics. We were peeling ancient strips of moldering, blackened insulation down from the beams where generations of pigeons had nested comfortably. Linus Bell was sizing something up with his tape measure, pretending to look busy and important, when the daughter peeked her head up into the attic.
“I need one of you to help me,” she said. She looked from Linus to Moissinac to me, triangularly as her mother had that first day, but with more intensity and fear.
Moissinac tried to step forward to volunteer but I grabbed his dust mask, pulled it back like a slingshot and released. The snap made him stumble headfirst into a beam with a satisfying knock.
I looked at Linus Bell as I strode my way across the floor toward the trapdoor. “Do you mind?” I asked him.
Linus gave me the appraising look. “Nah, you look like you can handle yourself.” He tossed his tape measure to Moissinac. “We have to pick up a load of gravel anway. C’mon, Mohawk.”
As I followed Morgan down the narrow stairs I heard Moissinac whispering to me, “I’ll crush you, dude. I will wreck you.”
We came to the second floor of the mansion. She brought me down a carpeted hallway and pointed to a confused-looking orange cat in a corner, casually chewing something. She was almost crying as she explained to me that her housecat Ashcroft was eating a bee, a bee that was still alive, evidently. She was very upset. And she fretted Ashcroft might potentially be lethally allergic to bee-stings. So she implored this strange new gullible workman to reach into the pried-open cat’s jaws to extract the bee.
“And don’t kill the bee while you’re doing it, okay?” she added.
She was very nervous. She looked like she needed to pee. Linus and Moissinac were leaving in the pick-up truck. Morgan’s parents were out of the house, antique shopping (like they needed any more). It was just the two of us, alone in the house. This was way before we ever went on anything you could construe as an official “date.” So I was very eager to please, as you can imagine. Well outside my grasp at this point was the blithe fatalism, the nonchalant disregard for life that could let an animal no matter how small die in front of the whimpering young lady hopping up and down in her red harem-like clothing. She was too new, the split-second inventory of her beauty, the effect she had on my senses was too unprecedented and powerful to argue with. If I’d kept my motives pure, if I had kept up the hard-on of my hatred, instead of trading it in for a more concrete, more compromised one, I would never find myself in situations like this, rescuing cats from bees and bees from cats, or huddled in her rabbitry, waiting for her to turn her porch light back on.
I chased Ashcroft down the corridor, luckily seizing him. The scent of her private bathroom, a mixture of soaps and oils and candles, filled the hallway as I grappled with the cat. By the time I forced his mouth open and closed my fingers around the half-dead bumblebee, it had apparently reached the end of its little insectoid decision tree, weighed every option and decided the time had finally arrived to defend its life, with its life. In extremis is stung me. Not the huge twitching mouth of Ashcroft’s that had been mauling it to death for the last five minutes, but ungratefully pierced the closer of the two pink fingerpads that had gingerly closed around it with every possible honorable intention. Morgan Geld was nowhere in sight; she’d gone back to her bedroom.
So I released Ashcroft’s stout conical little skull, in pain, and by then Ashcroft had himself gotten so scared that now he was free to follow his instinct to strike, and bit down, harder than any domestic pet should, bit and scratched and lacerated in his scramble out of my grip. Now I rode the crisp waves of the two pains which seemed bent on outracing each other up my arm. I was bleeding now. My temples throbbed with the sick needless pain of it, the adrenaline, the giddiness of flushed heroism struck down by the revolt of damaged raw nerve endings. The bee was dead, and I did not care. Ashcroft glared at me from the landing, panting, outraged.
I got up from my knees, holding the swelling hand with my other, staring at it as I rose. I had to admit, it looked bad. A clump of orange cat hair was lodged in one of the deep scratches. A coach’s voice from Little League resurfaced to urge me to Come on, walk it off, and challenged me to answer whether I was ruggeder than a cat or not. Well, yes, but a cat and a bee? I replied. A cat and a bee and a woman in need of assistance? Which of these three is the most dangerous?
I walked into her bedroom with my hand held up to show her the wounds I’d suffered on her behalf, a perfectly normal course of action when men suffer things for women, I’m told. I didn’t knock. Things were moving too fast. I’d taken extreme care to hide any expression of the pain I was feeling from showing itself on my face. My temples rushed with pulsing blood. I was sweaty.
As soon as I crossed the threshold and saw her, I knew something was out of the ordinary from the position she was in. She was standing next to her large bed. The sheets were messy. There were a lot of clothes strewn around. The strangest thing was her position. Almost before I entered the room I could see her lithe body was well into following through on some odd exercise type stretching movement or twisting reaching dance move I couldn’t quite place until after I came to, a short while later, and considered the whole thing in retrospect. It was like a tennis serve but with no racket in sight. Very quickly, upon seeing me, her jaw dropped in mid-motion. Everything became very slow and vivid, time got syrupy. I watched the downward-gathering momentum of her body in mid-toss change direction, and she leapt straight upwards in fright: the fright and surprise of a body whose eyes see some terrible thing unfolding but whose reaction must come too late to affect the ultimate outcome. Emotion outraced the body. In the last milliseconds I saw the grimace contort her lips, her blue eyes bulge then squeeze shut. Her hands first flattening with fear than balling into fists and darting face-ward to frame the mouth that screamed “No!” or “Look out!” or most likely some formless preverbal shout of alarm that shook me more than her dart’s impact did.
I didn’t know it was stuck in me until I pivoted my head to look at what she pointed at with her right hand, as she hopped and flapped her left one as if suddenly burnt or as if scotch tape were stuck stubborn to it. Her flapping hand sort of expressed it all; I knew it was bad from that helpless infantile hand-flapping. And all stoicism departed when I saw the green plastic fletching then the cross-hatched texture of the steel barrel, my head still turning revealing the polished taper of the tip buried in the back of the ravaged hand I’d been holding up for chivalrous effect. I tried not to imagine the dart’s point, but knew it was in there somewhere. The dart was not flopping limp the way tranquilizer darts or bullfighters’ spears hang limp from an animal’s flank, but instead it was lodged with the solid, quivering perpendicularity of arrows or crossbow bolts which have penetrated deep into dense wood. I swear I heard the impact’s vibration before I ever felt it in my hand bone. I kept swiveling my suddenly faraway-feeling head to look behind me at what she’d been throwing darts at before I interposed myself, saw two or three other darts poking at angles from the huge world map that hung on her bedroom wall. There were photos tacked along the bottom of the world, in what the Mercator projection would have curved into a circle around Antarctica, and I tried to study the pouting, mainly female faces in the photos as I crashed to the floor. I hope that when I fainted in front of Morgan Geld my collapse was not too elegant or twirlingly balletic.
Then, some time later, she was standing over me, leaning in. I was propped against her claw-footed bathtub. My hand was in the tub, and from the faucet hot water was sheeting down my arm. There was a cold towel on my forehead. She was crouching down on top of me, treating my still impaled hand with rubbing alcohol, apologizing. It’s hard to convey the erotic quality of this moment. Our bodies were coital, close to each other’s, our hearts dry-heaving in tandem. There were definite breasts in my ear. My impression of her inner sanctum was vivid, swooning. Tucked between the bathroom mirror and its gilt frame was another lining of photos, similar to the ones that encircled the South Pole on her map. The photos all seemed to be from nightclubs, girls huddling together to have group pictures taken, Morgan looking to be both the center of the girls clustered there and profoundly on the outside of them. A concatenation of reflective surfaces let me view the sunburst of private intimate logic with which her perfume and hair products and brushes were laid out around her sink. Standing in the corner of the bathroom was a bronze Hindu goddess with lush measurements and either six or eight arms that dangled, in the form of severed heads, the whole spectrum of human fates. Objects spoke of her. The tilted angle of a jeweled tiara on a faceless bust. A striped deflated bikini draped over a shower curtain rod to dry. Linus was outside yelling for Moissinac to “Back it up about two more feet…keep coming…keep coming…HUP!”
Morgan begged me not to tell her parents about this, pleading with me not to sue.
“Oh no I’m not like that,” I said, my mouth very dry and full of an electric nausea. “It was an honest mistake.”
A membrane between us had been punctured. Ashcroft came into the room, licking his lips now, curious, all prior strife forgotten, folded under in the flow of a slow day’s afternoon events. She fussed over me, stroked me, was tender, caring, overpowering, humble in a way I have not really seen since. The Florence Nightengale effect. Call me a masochist. She produced a glow in the dark BandAid, pressed it firmly on my hand once we together pulled the dart out. The cartoon logo on the BandAid was either Care Bears or Smurfs, I can’t remember, something pastoral. I do remember how, in our closeness, some stray gesture of mine accidentally knocked her left breast into a loose elliptical quiver that felt wonderful. And then, later that night, after getting drunk with Linus and Moissinac, how I lay in my bed, head under the covers, intoxicated and horny, thinking about Morgan Geld and her bedroom’s privacy and her velvety clinging sweatpants with the word EUREKA printed across the ass. How I watched the ghostly green spot travel all over, under the covers. I have found it. And now the porch light has just come back on. The Green Light, so I get to my feet and begin making my way past the rabbits in their cages, out the spare barn’s door, and across the dark lawn to the guest house.
This had an erotic vibe that made me smile for some reason.