American Appetites Read online

  Where Glynnis had met Sigrid Hunt, Ian did not know, though perhaps he’d been told. The young woman lived twenty miles downriver, in a déclassé area, as she smilingly called it, of Poughkeepsie; she taught, or sometimes taught, or had once taught, modern dance at Vassar. (She’d murmured vaguely, with a child’s reticent hurt, of university politics, academic jealousies and feuds, “budgetary restrictions,” so Ian guessed her contract had simply been terminated.) She had begun dance lessons at the age of four, had studied for years with the Martha Graham Company, had worked with various companies in New York City, Los Angeles, London, until an injury to a tendon in her right foot forced her into more or less permanent retirement, aged twenty-one. (“A dancer’s life is nasty, brutish, and short,” she had said, with an enigmatic smile.)

  Sigrid Hunt had told Ian these things at a large cocktail party at the McCulloughs’ house, to which Glynnis had invited her. She’d shaken Ian’s hand in a surprisingly hard grip and smiled happily, showing small, white, perfect teeth. “I’ve heard so much about you, Dr. McCullough,” she’d said, and Ian winced and said, Please, call me Ian; Ian is quite enough. But she never did quite bring herself to call him by that name, at least not in Ian’s hearing.

  Sigrid Hunt spoke in a careful, quaint voice, a voice seemingly without an accent; she fixed her listeners with round, wide, childlike eyes, smooth as coins and the shade, seemingly soft and powdery, of tarnish: her gaze given a subtle but arresting magnification by the perfectly round pink-tinted lenses of her glasses in their wire-rimmed frames. Her face was narrow, the features finely cut and teasingly asymmetrical, the eyes and mouth down-drooping at the corners, the eyelids naturally shadowed as if stained, or bruised, a faint blue. She was tall, perhaps five feet eleven, with a slender, rather epicene body: her neck long, shoulders narrow, breasts small as a young girl’s. Her hair, her spectacular hair, fell nearly to her waist, red-gold, ridged and rippled like a washboard, and wonderfully glossy. She wore, that evening, a lemon-yellow Thai silk dress, a beautiful garment, though soiled at the cuffs; well-weathered Roman sandals on her long narrow white feet; necklaces, bracelets, distractingly large and ornamental earrings that pulled cruelly at her earlobes. Talking to Ian and one or two others she smiled a good deal and showed her teeth, licked her lips nervously. Ian quickly perceived her intelligence, which was as much physical as mental: the young woman was conscious not only of her beauty but of its inevitable effect upon others—the resistance it aroused in them.

  Look at me, she was saying. For here I am.

  She had come to the McCulloughs’ house alone but had not been there an hour before a man appeared beside her, to take her away; Ian, caught up with other guests, had hardly more than a glimpse of a dark-skinned, unsmiling, but strikingly handsome young man of perhaps thirty, with thick black glossy hair brushed back from his forehead, a manner both civil and restrained, and very sporty, surely very expensive clothes. He was slender and no taller than Sigrid, his upper arms and shoulders muscled in that hard, compact way Ian knew to recognize from the gym. Ian, as always rather awkwardly at sea in so large a gathering, would not have spoken to the man at all had he not happened to be saying goodbye to another couple, at the front door, when Sigrid and her companion slipped by—Sigrid clearly agitated, her boyfriend decidedly unfriendly—but there was a brief obligatory exchange of names and a hurried and perfunctory handshake, as Sigrid introduced “Dr. McCullough” to “Fermi Sabri.” And Ian closed the door after them and promptly forgot them.

  That night, undressing in their bedroom, Glynnis asked Ian casually what did he think of Sigrid Hunt; and Ian said, frowning, “Who? Which one was she?” “The one with the long red hair, in the yellow silk,” Glynnis said, adding, with a hurt twist of her mouth; “the one who didn’t so much as trouble to introduce her boyfriend to me, or even to say goodbye to me.” Ian said, yawning, “I don’t remember, actually,” and they went on to talk of other guests, of other more important guests: who had said what to whom, who had new and startling news, who had invited them to a dinner party the following Sunday if they were free. . . . There were so many people in the McCulloughs’ lives, after all, and so few that really mattered.

  But when Ian and Sigrid Hunt met some weeks later, at the mill pond, and again shook hands, Ian was oddly struck by a sense of—was it certitude? rightness? an excitement so keen as to feel, or even taste, like danger? He would not subsequently remember much of what he said, or how, slightly stammering, he’d managed to say anything of substance at all.

  He would remember that they talked together with the nervous elation of old friends who have not seen each other in some time; that the corners of his eyes pinched, as if looking into Sigrid Hunt’s face, at such close range, gave pain. It was not because Sigrid was a beautiful woman—in the sharp November sunshine she seemed in fact distinctly less beautiful than she had appeared the night of the party—but that, for all her guardedness, her self-consciousness, she was so vulnerable. And, being vulnerable, she aroused emotions in Ian he could not readily have named.

  Though surely knowing that she had been dropped, or casually misplaced, in Glynnis’s life, she asked after Glynnis nonetheless, with so gentle an air of regret one might have missed it altogether. Ian made a reply of some vague general smiling kind, alluded to the fact that Glynnis and he had been uncommonly busy these past few months and had not seen nearly as many people as they’d wished to see. And Sigrid, dropping her gaze, smiling enigmatically, said, “We never have time, do we, for all that we don’t exactly want to do.” And in the heightened pace of their conversation, the very setting a distraction—a gaggle of mallards had set up a terrific squawking, greedy for more feed than was forthcoming, and not far away, on the bank, a young mother was scolding her weeping child—it was an easy matter to change the subject, as if he hadn’t heard. Yet it touched Ian deeply: that she had been hurt. That anything in his life could have enough significance to bear upon her at all.

  Sigrid was bareheaded, and her red-blond hair blew in the wind, strands of it across her face, her eyes, catching in her mouth, so that, in quick nervous gestures, she had to brush it repeatedly away. Her eyes behind the pink-tinted lenses of her schoolgirl glasses were lightly threaded with blood and damp, and Ian felt a corresponding dampness in his own, an immediate sympathy, as he’d felt his daughter Bianca’s pain when she hurt herself as a small child; and she was always hurting herself as a small child, falling and banging her knees, cutting the soft pink palms of her hands, bruising her forehead. My baby, my girl, he’d thought, how can I protect you, what on earth can I do for you, to keep you from being hurt? And it tore at his heart, to know that there was nothing.

  They talked together for perhaps twenty minutes, and Sigrid confided in him that she was having difficulties with her “fiancé”; she could not determine whether she loved him very much or whether she wanted to escape him, to make an absolute break and never see him again. Ian laughed, saying, “That seems rather extreme.” Sigrid said stiffly, “If you knew Fermi Sabri you’d understand.”

  Ian made no reply, thinking that Fermi Sabri was the last person he cared to know.

  She told him that Fermi had been born in Cairo and had emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty; he was “brilliant” but “erratic,” an engineer with an advanced degree in hydraulics from MIT. He loved her and wanted to marry her, wanted her to have his child (“a son, of course”) as proof of her love for him. “The night I went to your party, he’d said it was fine with him, he didn’t at all mind, but then, evidently, he followed me; I think he was actually watching the house from outside for a while, before he came in.” Seeing Ian’s look of distaste she added quickly, “It’s just that he feels so possessive of me. I mean protective. He means well.”

  “Oh, as to that,” Ian said, laughing again, though without much mirth, “we all mean well.”

  They were walking in the direction of Sigrid’s car, at least Ian assumed it was her car, a foreign model, l
ow-slung, sporty, lipstick-red but badly flecked with rust, its front bumper battered. It had the look of a car, Ian thought, not registered in its driver’s name.

  “I hope we will see each other again, before long, in Hazelton or elsewhere,” Ian said; and Sigrid said lightly, “Yes, I hope so too.” He opened her car door for her, then belatedly asked her for her address and telephone number, which he scribbled on a slip of paper, though this was information surely in Glynnis’s possession already. After she’d driven away he stood for a while in the parking lot staring at the mallards, snowy white geese, black swans, as they paddled on the pond in ceaseless circles, now slow and languorous, as if on display, now wild and frenzied, fighting one another for feed. If any thought came to him, he would not afterward remember what it was.

  HE HAD SOME difficulty finding 119 Tice, which was in an area of Poughkeepsie unknown to him, of run-down apartment buildings, row houses, taverns, railroad yards, rubble-strewn vacant lots—a neighborhood that, though largely black and Hispanic, reminded him of his boyhood neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. And when he found 119 Tice he discovered that Sigrid Hunt lived not in the house on the street but in an apartment above a garage at the rear.

  A small yellowed card with SIGRID HUNT in childlike block letters had been tacked beside the door; beneath it, a wicker basket stuffed with advertising flyers. The door itself had been painted a bright robin’s-egg blue, now covered in patches of grime and cobwebs. Ian peered inside its window but could see nothing except a narrow flight of stairs leading up into shadow.

  He knocked loudly, but no one answered; knocked again, and called, “Sigrid? It’s me, it’s Ian.” He peered up at the second-floor windows, whose blinds were drawn; no one responded. His heart knocked hard in his chest; he dreaded some sort of terrible revelation: a sudden scream, a smashed window, a man’s footsteps rushing toward him down the stairs.

  But no one appeared. Nor was any car parked in the drive.

  “Hello? Sigrid? It’s—”

  He had the uneasy sensation that he was being watched, very likely from the house at the front, which, like other private residences on the street, wood-frame, shingled, shabby, had the look of a place in which welfare recipients and old-age pensioners lived. He felt exposed, a fool. An incongruous figure in his camel’s-hair coat, black Astrakhan hat, green scarf: items of clothing bought for him by Glynnis. “Sigrid? Are you home? Come open the door,” he called, cupping his hands to his mouth. He was quite alarmed by this time, envisioning Sigrid Hunt lying dead upstairs: partly clothed or frankly naked, strangled, stabbed, raped, murdered, her golden-red hair fanned out about her, as in one of those lurid photographs in detective magazines he’d examined surreptitiously as a junior high school boy. . . .

  How sad, Ian thought, that a woman of Sigrid Hunt’s beauty and pretensions should live in a place like this: above a garage of rotted shingles, peeling paint, broken and carelessly boarded-up windows, opaque with the grime of years. Trash had been strewn about the yard; broken concrete and glass were everywhere underfoot. Untrimmed trees and overgrown bushes, lightly touched with snow, were given a startling and rather inappropriate beauty, as in a Japanese watercolor of skeletal trees and snowy-white blossoms.

  Ian tried the door again, could not think what to do—summon the caretaker, if there was one? Call Sigrid Hunt’s number from a pay telephone? Call the police?—when, finally, a figure appeared on the stairs, descending slowly and cautiously, like a sleepwalker: leaning against the wall and gripping the railing with both hands. It was Sigrid Hunt, drunk or drugged or seriously ill, her face pale and drawn, her hair in a tangled braid behind her back. She wore an ill-fitting white robe that opened carelessly about her bare legs; her feet too were bare, despite the cold; though by now she must have recognized Ian, she did not open the door at once but rubbed the gritty window with the palm of her hand and peered out at him. Without her glasses her eyes looked raw and reddened.

  Ian rattled the doorknob impatiently. “Don’t you know who I am? It’s Ian McCullough; you called me,” he said. “Unlock the door.”

  Sigrid Hunt stared at him, seemed at last to know who he was, began to work the police lock, which took some time. When at last she managed to get the door open and Ian stepped inside, she flinched back from him and muttered, “Damned lock, works so damned hard,” and turned away with no further greeting or word of explanation. She began to climb back up the stairs, again gripping the railing with both hands. “Watch the stairs,” she said, “they’re rotted; it’s that kind of place. You can see, can’t you, it’s that kind of place?” Her voice rose on the last word as if on the edge of laughter.

  Ian followed her upstairs, staring at the young woman’s bare legs and chafed, reddened heels, the badly creased and soiled skirt of the robe hanging loose about her hips. She offered no explanation, no apology: simply led him upstairs to her flat. The stairway was poorly lit and unheated and smelled of dirt; it reminded him, and the memory came swift and unbidden, though not entirely unpleasantly, of the shabby boardinghouse in which he’d lived as a graduate student in Ann Arbor, a long time ago. “Here we are,” Sigrid Hunt said, out of breath from the climb. “Here it is.”

  The apartment, or flat, was quite large, stretching the full length of the building, a single room with a low blistered ceiling, windows whose shades—cracked, crooked—were drawn, bare floorboards upon which brightly colored woven carpets were scattered. Ian had an impression of mismatched furniture, including, most conspicuously, several sling chairs in a synthetic coyote hide and a six-foot swinging mirror with a heavy carved frame: a mirror that had the look, Ian thought, of a mirror that is much consulted.

  “Come in. Inside. I must lock the door,” Sigrid said impatiently.

  Small buzzing radio voices emerged from beside the sofa bed, over which, with evident haste, a soiled crimson silk comforter had been drawn. There were smells of cooking, and of unwashed clothes, talcum powder, perspiration. An eerie undersea atmosphere pervaded: the blinds drawn against the daylight, and only a single lamp burning, with a soiled flesh-colored shade.

  Ian asked what was wrong, what could he do for her, and Sigrid, who looked both ill and nervously elated, as if on the verge of mania, began to speak in a rapid near-incoherent mutter, smiling and grimacing as if to herself. “I need to talk to someone,” she said, “who doesn’t know me and doesn’t judge me.” She pointed at a chair and said, “Sit down, please; you make me nervous standing.” Ian wondered if he would have recognized her: her face was thinner than he recalled, her eyes bruised, her skin unnervingly pale. There was a pouty blood-heavy slackness to her lower lip, and the lovely ridged-rippled hair, in a coarse braid that hung down limply between her shoulder blades, had not been washed in some time. The terry-cloth robe, a man’s robe, fell open to reveal, as if defiantly, her small shadowy breasts and prominent collarbone. “At least take off your coat,” Sigrid said breathlessly, when Ian remained standing. “Your . . .” And her voice trailed off as if she’d forgotten the word for hat.

  Ian took off his coat, his hat, and his scarf, and laid them neatly over the back of a chair. His mind was working swiftly but to no evident purpose. He said quietly, “What’s wrong, Sigrid? Have you taken some sort of drug?”

  And Sigrid said at once, in a low angry begging voice, “Don’t judge me, don’t look at me, I can’t bear it.” She was pacing about the room, too nerved up to remain in one place.

  Ian said, following after her, “What is it, Sigrid? You can tell me, Sigrid; you know who I am, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know who anybody is,” Sigrid whispered. “You’re all lying fucking hypocrite sons of bitches.”

  SHE WAS LYING, limp, across the sofa bed and looked as if she were about to fall asleep. Her face glistened with sweat, and her breathing was hoarse and arrhythmic. Ian, standing over her, uncertain what to do—call an ambulance? try to revive her himself?—saw in the corner of his eye a ghostly spectator: his own reflection, fair-ski
nned, fair-haired, attentive, rapt, alarmed, in the slanted swinging mirror. Why are you here, why you, and why here? The buzzing radio voices continued, like a demented chorus.

  Sigrid lay unmoving, breathing shallowly; Ian could feel the heat lifting from her. “I want to die,” she said softly. “I don’t want this.”

  “What do you mean?” Ian asked. “What is ‘this’?”

  “I’m paralyzed; he’s got me,” she said. “I can’t go forward or back.”

  “Who is ‘he,’ your lover?”

  “Won’t let me have an abortion, says he’ll kill me if—”

  “You’re pregnant?”

  “—if I kill it. Six weeks, only, and already it’s beginning to—”

  “Is that it? You’re pregnant? Is that why you’re so upset?”

  “—exert its own will. Sucking the life from me.”

  She began, with no warning, to beat her fists against her belly. Ian caught her wrists, forced her to lie still. With surprising strength she twisted free, clawing and kicking, and, on her feet now, ducked away behind him. Ian saw to his astonishment that the back of his hand was badly scratched; tiny blood beads appeared between his knuckles.

  He said, “You’d better calm down, you’re making yourself hysterical.”

  “Go away and leave me. What difference does it make.”

  “If you are pregnant, it’s a relatively simple—”

  “I can’t go forward or back.” She pressed her hands over her ears, bent nearly double, and would not hear. Ian went to touch her, and she shrank away. “No. No. No. No. No.” She stumbled into one of the coyote-hide chairs and, in a sudden rage, kicked it and sent it flying against a wall. Ian watched in helpless fascination, as he’d once watched his two- or three-year-old daughter in the paroxysm of a temper tantrum, as Sigrid Hunt, dazed and lethargic only a moment before, began to curse, slam, pummel, kick, throwing things about, overturning furniture, tearing at her own hair. Ian thought, I will have to get help. I can’t do this alone.