I thought: He is lying because liars use detail. Married, I thought, and I was annoyed he would lie so I told him my real name. I even told him where I worked. I even told him I was married.
When, later that night, my husband asked, “Did you have fun with the girls? What’d you all end up doing?” I used details. I told him we went to Akron, to a new, fancy nightclub that had a bouncer at the door and a velvet rope. I told him Sarah bumped into a cocktail waitress carrying a tray of three drinks. I told him Vicky had been getting religious lately. And I told him Meghan had gone out on a date with Steve Perry, the singer from Journey. I told him she said Steve Perry was nice, but the whole time she couldn’t stop singing, “Don’t stop! Believin’!”
“Sounds good,” my husband said. “Steve Perry. That’s cool.”
In an evening filled with that many details there wouldn’t have been time for me to meet Erich, or whatever his name was, in the line for the bathroom. There wouldn’t have been time for him to follow me into the ladies’ room, where, with his hand up my shirt, he started biting my neck and chest like he was lost in some fever, like he was going to eat me with his lips that were thick and filled with blood.
*
“I’m going to call in sick to work,” I tell my husband.
“You don’t feel well, hon?”
“No. I’m fine. I just can’t go to work today.”
In the living room, I call my boss. It’s early enough that I can just leave a message. “You’ve reached Sachman’s Real Estate Agency. No one is here to take your call. Kindly leave your name, number, and a brief message and one of our agents will get back to you. Thank you.”
I tell her I have Lyme disease. I tell her I won’t be coming in. I cough into the phone and say goodbye. I get back in bed. The cough might have been overdoing it.
My husband is getting ready for work. He’s wearing socks, boxers, a T-shirt, and a flannel. He comes into the bedroom eating a bowl of cereal, looking for his pants and shoes. “You don’t feel well?” he asks again.
“I feel fine.”
“Then why are you staying home from work?”
I stare at a blank spot above our bureau. “I hate it there.”
“You do?” He’s surprised.
“I started to yesterday.”
“Oh.”
He shakes his head. I lie back in the bed. I hear him open his dresser drawer. He has arms and legs that move perfectly. He pulls ticks off me. He came from his mother and nothing is wrong with him. He went to elementary school, where probably, one day, someone wasn’t nice to him. Maybe they called him jerk. Under the covers, I hate these kids who might have said that to him because I didn’t mean to cheat on him. It was an accident like a car crash. Except I’d tell him if I had crashed the car.
I pick up the paper from off the floor where I dropped it last night. Insurgents and Rebels. Genocide and Corporate Malfeasance. American box stores in Manchuria. Manatees in Florida. I open to the center spread. It looks a bit like the periodic table of elements. The photos are tiny, crammed onto the page. The images of all the local soldiers killed last year. The dead stare out from their enlistment photos or senior high school portraits. They’re arranged alphabetically. They are young. Some soldiers share similar last names, as if entire families were wiped out, but of course they’re not family. They probably didn’t even know one another. Anderson. Brown. Clark. Davis. DeBasi. Green. Hall. Kern. All those young people and all my head can think about is what I’ve done and all my body wants is to do it again.
Erich’s lips surprised me because how could someone new, someone I’d just met in a bar, have spit that tasted familiar? They were a little salty like we’d all really come from the ocean once. Huge lips and watery eyes. That’s about all I ever dreamed. Erich told me, like a cut in my ear, “I’d fuck you to death,” and for the past five days I’ve been hearing him say that over and over again. Touching the scab. “I’d fuck you to death. I’d fuck you to death.” Each time it feels like getting punched in the stomach, only lower, deeper than the stomach, like I can’t breathe in my legs. Then for the past five nights I’ve been turning into a deer.
The phone starts to ring. It is probably my sister. I lie in bed listening to the ring.
When my sister had her second baby a couple of months ago I told her, “That’s weird.”
“What is?”
“You just made another death in the world.”
“Fuck off,” she said. I guess she thought I was referring to our brother.
“All right,” I told her. “Okay.” But she’s been a little angry at me ever since. She’s been a little mean, as if I were responsible for the fact that we all have to die sometime.
My husband and I both just let the phone ring. It’s too early, and soon enough, after five rings, it stops. I hope it wasn’t my boss calling me back.
I’ll tell him. Any minute now I’ll say it. “Imagine what it’s like to lose your opposable thumbs, to have them bone up into hard hooves. It was scary at first,” I’ll say. “How do you think deer open doors?”
“I don’t know. How?” He’ll imagine I’m telling him a joke.
“They don’t.”
If I tell him, maybe he can build a special door for me. He’s handy like that. A door that doesn’t require opposable thumbs. Still, he’ll want to know where I’m going at night. And what would I say? Out with the other deer? He wouldn’t like that. The deer around here have been forced out into the open by the new construction. They get hit by cars all the time. He won’t want me to go out with the deer. So where would I go? Back to the nightclub? The bouncer would be surprised to find a deer trying to enter a club as nice as his, but he’d let me in. “It takes all kinds,” he’d say, throwing open a velvet curtain on the room. Just knock three times and whisper low. The song says something about castanets and silhouettes. I’d scan the nightclub for Erich. Couples would sit around small cocktail tables snapping their fingers in time to the rhythm of the song. A scent would hit me and I’d turn into it just like a movie star slapped across her face. Beautiful with a fever. I’d rev my hoof across the dance floor. I’d smell thick lips. I’d smell the blood of an animal the kitchen staff’s preparing. I’d lick my lips, slowly, letting my pink tongue dangle out of my black mouth a little just like some animal waiting by the side of the road for the driver who killed it to come back one more time and kill it again.
*