I looked at my book, furrowing my brow as if I were trying to spot an empty slot in a sea of clients. But she was halfway out the door. A moment later, a car rumbled out of my driveway. I walked outside and watched the low, sun-sucking, gray-primed Trans Am drive too fast toward Impulveda Road, dust plume behind it like a squirrel tail. A family of quails skittered across the dirt road in their wake. Someone else was behind the wheel.
I had enough time before Sam’s scheduled arrival to indulge in two guilty pleasures: a breakfast beer and NabeWatch Eldorado, the local message board where people posted:
Need a Plumber; Near Car Crash at 285 and Vista Grande; Lost Parrot; U-Haul Trucks Now for Rent at Hardware Store; Keep Your Dogs from Pooping in My Yard; Free Yoga Classes; Red Pickup Truck Speeding near School; Farmers Market Friday; Police Cars at Cleofas Court; HUGE Bull Snake in My Garden; U-Haul Trucks in Parking Lot an Eyesore; Dog Poop... AGAIN!; Fatal Crash at 285 and Vista Grande; Beware This Plumber.
“I had another platypus dream,” Sam said. He had so many platypus dreams that I’d gone to the trouble of looking up platypus animal medicine. I also had no therapy chemistry with Sam — really, I should have referred him to someone else, but I needed the money — so drew from the animal medicine suggestions when I came up blank.
“Tell me about it.”
“I was with my ex-wife. We were making love.” He stiffened. “Why did you cringe?”
Damn it.
“You thought I cringed,” I said impassively. “Let’s stay with your dream.”
“So I was making love to her, but instead of putting my penis inside her vagina” — oh dear God, neutral neutral neutral — “I consummated the act by licking her clavicle.”
Platypus females nurse their babies from mammary patches on their skin; they don’t have teats. They also pee, poop, lay eggs, and have reproductive sex with the same hole, the cloaca. As opposed to recreational platypus sex? I stifled a smirk.
“But I couldn’t make her come, and my mouth began to ache. I went to get a glass of water and when I came back, she had turned into a platypus.”
“How did you know she hadn’t been replaced with a platypus?”
“It had her distinctive birthmark,” he said, “near its... cloaca.”
If the platypus is your totem...
“Sam, in the next week, I’d like you to redirect yourself, when you find yourself ruminating, to the present moment. Come back with a few things you’ve noticed within this mindfulness practice that make you uncomfortable.”
After Sam left, I headed to the hardware store to buy a new doorbell. I noticed the gray Trans Am parked beyond the blacktop in packed dirt. My pulse quickened as I wondered if I’d bump into Delphine, and whether she’d want to say hello or pretend she didn’t know me, something I tell clients I’m fine with. It still feels kind of shitty.
The store managed to recreate the dinge and chockablock of a Norman Rockwell — level hole-in-the-wall, but not picturesquely. Sometimes it took a few minutes to get help, because of the lip-smacking pleasure the two bearded old codgers behind the counter reveled in while jawing with each other. It was as if they were recording a podcast. One memorable topic: Eldorado’s status as an enduring Black Death incubator.
“One thing people don’t realize about the guy who died from the bubonic plague here is that he and his wife kept a pack rat as a pet. The official story is that they left their bathrobes out overnight by the hot tub, and that animals infected their robes. But I know friends of theirs who said that they adopted this pack rat, slept with it, dressed it up in costumes, crazy shit like that.”
Pack rats have a habit of arranging dried dog poop logs and other detritus into pretty designs. I wondered if the pack rat decorated the inside of the victim’s house this way.
Today a new guy approached me right away. He reminded me of my brother. Shaved head, pointed beard. His sinewy arms, exposed to the shoulder, jumped with crude tattoos.
“Hi, I’m Todd,” he said, grinning. A couple of gray teeth, a couple of metal ones. After I got braces, my brother appreciated how much more it hurt when he punched me in the mouth. I ran my tongue against the crosshatched inside of my lower lip.
Toothless, the platypus uses gravel to masticate its food.
I told him I was looking for a new doorbell.
“Great! You’ve got your battery-operated, your hardwired, and these Internet gizmos. Or you could go the gong route.” He held up a metal disk suspended from string, and struck it with a little mallet, loosing a deep, undulating timbre. “That’s what she said,” he called out, threw his head back, and laughed.
Delphine took off her trench coat and tossed it beside her on the couch, sat down. Her cream-and-black spectator pumps caught my attention like a toss of dominoes, and I raised my eyes to hers, conscious not to rain glances on her body. Still, I noticed: black wool slacks, pellucid silk blouse.
“Can I vape in here?” she asked.
“It’s better if you don’t,” I said. “It can be a barrier to delving into your feelings.”
“You think?” She kept it in her hand, rolled it across her palm. “How ever will I satisfy my oral fixation?”
I took a deep, grounding breath.
“I ran into someone at the supermarket yesterday. Jacob,” she said. “We went to preschool together here. Jacob was bigger than all of us then. The one whose name all the parents said with a roll of the eyes and a sigh.”
Like my brother.
“I was the smallest kid in the school. One day I got to play with ‘the coveted’” — here she raised her fingers in scare quotes — “red shovel. Jacob grabbed it and tried to pull it away from me. I didn’t let go. He pulled me. Across the sandbox. Over the wooden edge. Over the grass and gravel.”
She exhaled.
“By the time the teachers noticed, I had bloody scrapes all over my legs. It ruined my favorite gingham romper... it had plastic ladybug buttons. Mother threw it out after that day. The teachers made Jacob help them wipe down my scrapes with peroxide and bandage me up. After that, Jacob followed me around like a puppy. He gave me half his snack, put away my blocks.” She laughed. “Imagine. I bossed him around like a tiny fairy queen.”
It must have come naturally. She was a Hathaway.
“But after two days I got bored of him, and I told him to leave me alone.”
I felt a pang for Jacob. “How do you feel about it now?” I asked.
She looked down, smoothed her pants over her knees. I could not see her eyes.
“He got his revenge,” she said. “Eventually.”
If you never went to its one bar, you’d imagine Eldorado to be the way it looks from the outside: clean-cut retirees, families with school-age children, the occasional hippie woman with a truly impressive garden and a pack of rescue dogs. If Eldorado were a body, a healthy, rugged body wearing Tom’s of Maine deodorant, the bar would be its navel. Filled with lint and sweat and dead skin cells, a pungent odor, nooks and crannies, hairy around its perimeter.
The only thing that bar had going for it was that the manager usually hired lesbians to bartend. I still miss Josie. She leavened the tavern’s funk with her swagger, the twinkle in her hazel eyes. Before she moved back to Sacramento, we could expect the occasional free beer to slide into our progression of pints along with impromptu slam-style erotic poetry snippets. It says a lot that I still think of her so fondly, given that a few weeks after Josie left, my girlfriend Rose followed that dreadlocked, freckled, gap-toothed siren to the City of Trees. I didn’t see it coming. Maybe the erotic poetry should have tipped me off.