Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

“Well, Jack is here to tell the tale,” I said. “So I guess she wasn’t safe.”

Loyd smiled. “Nope. Old Gunner had his one chance at love. He got into some poisoned coyote bait right after that. He died before the pups were born.”

“How do you know they were his? She could have been pregnant already.”

Loyd asked Jack, as politely as you’d ask a favor from a friend, to roll over. “See that?” Over Jack’s heart was a white patch with a black crescent moon in its center. “That’s Gunner’s. There were seven pups, two black and five brown, and every one of them had that badge.”

“How did you know which one to keep?”

He hesitated. “Dad decided,” he said finally. “And Jack. Really I guess Jack’s the one that decided.”

They were nothing electrifying, these chats with Loyd in the dark, but they were a relief from my days at the high school, which were spent in a standoff just shy of open war. Occasionally Loyd took the tips of my fingers and rubbed them absentmindedly between his own, the way he would surely stroke Jack, if Jack had fingers. The night of the story of Jack, he also kissed me before he left, and I was surprised by how I responded. Kissing Loyd was delicious, like some drug I wanted more of in spite of the Surgeon General’s warning. Later on, when I slept, I had dreams of coyotes in heat.

I also saw Hallie. Her hair moved around her like something alive. “I’ve kissed a man who kills birds,” I confessed, but she looked past me as if she didn’t have a sister. Her eyes were pale as marbles. I woke up confused, too shaken to get up and turn on a light.

I’d dreamt of Carlo, too, on several occasions, for no good reason I could see. He’d written me a letter that was fairly medical and devoid of passion. He did miss me, though, and that sentiment brought comfort as I lay in my empty bed. It meant I was lonely by choice, or by difficult circumstances such as an ailing father; these things are supposed to feel better than being lonely because nobody wants you. Lately I’d started thinking about Carlo with a kind of romantic wistfulness, which I knew was bogus. The truth is, we’d essentially promised each other from the beginning that we wouldn’t stay together. “No strings,” we said, proving that we were mature medical students without spare time. The odd thing is that we did stay together, physically, and so I suppose falling out of love was our hearts’ way of keeping the bargain. The end was always curled up there between us, like a sleeping cat, present even in our love-making.

Especially there. Carlo and I had gone to bed together for the first time one early dawn during our rotation in pediatric intensive care, after we’d worked all night trying to save a Papago baby brought in too late from the reservation. We’d gone straight from the dead baby to my apartment, my bed. There was hardly any talk that I remembered, we just held on to each other, joined, for as long as our bodies could stand it. I wanted anything that would stop that pain, and Carlo was strong medicine. Not happiness, nothing joyful, only medicine.

There was one other time of desperate, feverish connection that I particularly remembered. This was much later, when Carlo and I were living abroad. Carlo had been granted the opportunity to spend a year in an unbelievably remote clinic, halfway up the tallest mountain in central Crete.

The work was rugged, but in December we took a trip away from the village, to Venice. The clinic closed for some combination of clan ritual and Greek Orthodox holiday that practically evacuated the village. We set off for Italy feeling like truant school kids, drinking wine in tin cups on the train and reeling with the heady sense of getting away with something. Before that he’d scarcely managed an afternoon off, much less a week. Then Carlo came down with a cold on the overnight ferry to Brindisi, and by the time we reached Venice we were both burning up, our skin hot to the touch, like furnaces. Our bodies’ internal combustion gave rise to an unquenchable craving for carbohydrates, and for each other, so we checked into the Penzione Meraviglioso and for a week ate plates of pasta and made a kind of sweaty, delirious love previously unknown to either of us, in a bed that was memorably soft and huge.

The Penzione looked out onto the cold, damp Grand Canal and a dim little plaza ominously named the Piazza of the Distraught Widows. (Distraught or Inconvenienced, it could translate either way.) The origin of this name was unknown to the elderly matron, who was born and raised in the building. She brought food up to us and was alternately scandalized by our appetites and worried for our well-being. She was of the opinion that in damp weather any illness at all would find its way to the lungs. She ventured to tell us we ought to see a doctor.

Carlo spoke Italian. His father had come to America on a steamer carrying cured leather and Chianti. He explained in grammatically imperfect but polite terms that we were both doctors. We could not be in better hands, he said. For my benefit, later, he’d translated the double entendre. By the end of the week, Carlo and the matron were bosom friends. In spite of his notorious shyness, whenever she brought us hot tea he would sit up in bed with a shirt on and give opinions on the infertility of her eldest daughter and the lung ailment of her son-in-law who worked in the glassblowing trade. I lay beside him, meanwhile, with the sheets pulled around my neck, feeling sinful and out of place, like a whore taken home to meet Mother. The matron didn’t ask for my opinions, probably because she didn’t believe I was actually a doctor. Which I wasn’t, technically. I did some work at the clinic-rural Crete was not overly concerned about licensure-but to be completely honest, I was Carlo’s paramour. I did the shopping. I learned the Greek words for oil and soap and bread.

I know that a woman’s ambitions aren’t supposed to fall and rise and veer off course this way, like some poor bird caught in a storm. All I can say is, at one of the many junctures in my life when I had to sink or swim, Crete was an island, a place to head for, new and far away. I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I’d discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy, that stood in my way. I learned all this while a baby was trying to be born feet first. I couldn’t think how I was going to tell Doc Homer, and I’ll admit I was attracted just then to the idea of putting an ocean between myself and that obelisk of disapproval. It also helped that Carlo really wanted me to go with him. But I had no mission beyond personal survival; it was nothing like Hallie’s going to Nicaragua. Our village had its own kind of bleakness, the bones and stones of poverty, but the landscape was breathtaking. Our classmates were treating intestinal parasites in Niger and Haiti, black lung in Appalachia, while Carlo and I set broken legs on the steep slope of Mount Ida, mythical birthplace of Zeus. Poverty in a beautiful place seemed not so much oppressive as sublime. Basically it’s the stuff of the world’s great religions, I told myself, although I knew better.

It was 100 degrees in the shade, and the burgeoning minds of Biology I and II took a field trip to the river; our putative goal was to get some samples of water to examine under the microscope. We were learning about the plant and animal kingdoms, starting right down at the bottom of the ladder with the protozoans and the blue-green algae. I could easily have collected a gallon of river water myself and brought it in, but the school had no air conditioning and I’m not completely without a heart. I’d played it tough with the kids long enough to prove my point, if there was one, and I was tired of it. We all were.