December 10, 2024
Rabbits on a Log by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, from the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. J. Augustus Barnard, 1979
Rabbits
The last time she'd seen him they’d been exchanging thrilled, sloppy fluids beneath a print of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa that he’d taped above his bed. He was a better kisser than most freshmen, with the kind of plump, unexpected lips you might be confused by if you weren’t already pushed up against them.
They’d first seen each other in a freshman fiction seminar where they’d sat across from one another in a circle of desks. It “helped the chi to have the desks in a circle”—“or something resembling a circle, and something resembling chi”—the professor had said on the second day of class, after watching students spiritlessly drag the desks together. But this configuration hadn’t seemed to help the class chemistry: as soon as the clock hands reached toward the 12, and sometimes before, the students began shuffling papers and filing wordlessly out of the room.
Until she bumped into Kyle, late one Thursday, Margaret had never spoken to anyone outside of class. She was lurching home from a party; he was ahead of her carrying a laundry basket up the dormitory stairs. It was a quiet night, the sidewalks discouraged with rain, the moon faint in the dark. But the tequila, mixed in a resilient cocktail of day-old Sprite and tangerine-colored energy drink, made her feel vociferous, witty, dominant.
“Hey,” she said, tilting her head, “You’re in my class.”
“Hey,” he said, “I am.”
A silent flight of stairs followed, though she was too happily drunk to notice; each pause gently blurring with the one before. The silence seemed to make him anxious, though. “I just poured detergent all over my clothes,” he blurted, “and then realized that the freaking change machine is broken and I don’t have any freaking quarters. So that’s, like, how my night is.”
“Why didn’t you just go to the student center and get change?”
“What?”
“‘What?’” She parroted and then, regretting, flashed a pretty grin.
“This time of night? It just seemed stupid.”
“It’s gonna seem more stupid when you wake up tomorrow and all your clothes are soaked in soap.”
“I’m well aware, OK? I’m dumb as a rock. I’m gonna end up living under a bridge.” This kind of thing had been her impression of him. In the icebreaker, on the first day of class, he’d said that his favorite movie was The Princess Bride, and she’d thought, cheesy, wholesome, probably poor; eager to say ‘friggin’ but never fucking. But kinda cute! A cute guy. She liked his freckles and broad, muscled hands.
“Doing laundry at 2 AM. Huh. What a time to be alive.”
“I went to take a shower and my towel was dirty. It seemed urgent, all of a sudden. One of those, you know. 2 AM laundry crises.”
Suddenly, they were in it together. She hiccupped. “I know the type. This is my floor. I’ll give you some change.”
“Nah, what? I’d feel bad.”
“I mean, if you really feel guilty, if you don’t believe in welfare, if you think life is all about avoiding feeling bad, you can pay me back. But I have, like, a million quarters under my bed.”
Three hours of button-fumbling, a pile of books shoved off the bed with one foot—an iPod with the other—and a forgotten load of laundry later, they fell into a weekend routine. They had no mutual friends and didn’t speak in class except to exchange loaded comments on each other’s short stories—though fiction was barely a shared interest, either: she found herself writing about the Holocaust as he worked on a seven-part saga about a colony of liberated drones. But hooking up with him was isolated from the rest of her life, almost dream-like in its singularity and availability, three floors below. He was not a person that she would date. He was not cool. She wasn’t exactly cool, either, but felt she was reasonably self-aware.
Kyle studied jazz. His only friends, seemingly circumstantially, were his three suitemates. He had a closet full of thickly striped American Eagle dress shirts that he wore every day tucked into a pair of jeans that were heavily bleached and torn. He kept a bottle of knock-off designer cologne on his dresser and applied it liberally every morning. But something was still wrong and he had begun to say something about that, a few times, as they lay both pale and freckled in her bed, but the words never came out in a narrative order—and the conversations always seemed to drift, instead, to hypotheticals about celebrities and summer vacations.
*
Tonight, so many years later, she sees him, or thinks so, in that instant before the lights dim and the first musician sits down to begin playing. The vision is quick, incidental, the flash of a cartoon animal across a screen. One moment a man is standing in a doorway, leaning authoritatively against its outline; next, the room is dark.
There is an intermittent droning followed by bright, brassy flashes—because, as Dan has warned on the walk over, this is experimental jazz. It might be different, he’d said or implied, from what she might expect.
But the club, and the performance, are exactly what she had expected. There are little green tables and smudged posters of Miles Davis on the walls and the ladies' room is cramped with elaborate pink powder-room furniture. When she looked in the bathroom mirror, she felt an unfamiliar dread—a sort of vintage claustrophobia, as if a past she’d never lived was closing in on her.
It’s all very campy. When they had first walked in, with Caroline, Dan’s friend from law school, and Caroline’s boyfriend, they had been overcome with giddiness. “I’ll have an Appletini,” Dan said to the waitress, whose face suggested that she wasn’t in the mood. Instead, they ordered a round of Manhattans. Jazz, Kyle had told her once, in a moment of confessional post-coitus, was like a meal with many courses. You had to give it time, to fill yourself up a little at a time. You couldn’t—or, he emphasized, trailing a finger along her spine, shouldn’t—try to understand the emotional logic of the first musical arrangement until you’d heard the last. Could you judge a book on the first chapter? Maybe a little, sure. But the arc of the story? No—not the sloping narrative, not the way the bits all came together.
“I think I know the guy who runs the club,” she whispers to Dan. “Or, I think he runs the club. And that I know him.”
“Ssh. It’s starting.”
Caroline is incautious; famously, yes, a loud talker. But tonight Margaret feels grateful for this petite woman who leans over and hisses, “What?”
“The guy who runs the club. I think I know him.”
“But how?”
“We used to hook up! In college.”
“So funny!” Caroline says. “New York. You just never.”
Margaret wants to say more; to dilute an otherwise overwhelmingly private moment. But people have begun to throw irritated looks at their table and so she settles back into her coat. Kyle, if the face belongs to him, probably hadn’t seen her.
Only once had they interacted outside of class or a fifteen-by-fourteen dorm room. The fiction professor’s depressive fog had lifted, mid-semester, and she’d invited the class over to her townhouse for dinner. The baby was cooed over by the girls who confessed how much they missed babies, as if all they’d done, in recent teenage years, was spend time with infants. The boys made grave, gendered small talk about the NBA with the professor’s husband.
The townhouse was suburban and ugly, animated with chunky beige molding and carpets. It was fringed by a band of small, bare trees and one extravagant Camilla bush that emitted, right when you walked in the door, the overpowering perfume of a premature spring. It had a powerful effect on the class. The spell was unanimous, a gratitude for being inside a real house. Somebody brought a flask of tequila and they spent turns in the bird-papered bathroom taking swigs.
At some point, Margaret stood up and went to refill her water glass. She stopped short at the kitchen door when she saw Kyle at the sink—she hadn’t noticed he’d left the group. He stood with his back to her, tawny head bent low as he washed the party dishes. There was an assurance to the way he worked; here was a man with a system for dishes, for domestic chores, who would take great pains with secret things. He seemed confidently helpful. She remembered him talking about how much he’d learned, being raised by a single mother; an admission that she’d vaguely followed up on, feeling she should, but hadn’t pressed when he changed the subject. The best part of their hookups was that, though she enjoyed them, counted on them, she did not wonder about him between trysts. His eagerness when they were together, the time he took when he kissed down her stomach and then disappeared beneath the sheets, as if beneath water—the briny way he smelled, coming up for air afterward—suggested little mystery to her.
She did not know that washing dishes could be sensual—or if not sexual and if not precisely sensual, then some cousin of the word, something very sensory, something that pulled at a distinct knob of pleasure—his sleeves rolled up, arms plunged into the streaky light of the dishwater, lemony steam rising to obscure the window, his body caught in that dark source of winter. It was touching. She watched him for a while; the sounds of a rowdy game of Taboo floating in from the other room. But then a questioning ache began to curdle in her stomach and she returned to the living room without water.
The memory is clear, though it has never surfaced before. Now it rises up, pawing. Perhaps it is just a matter of parallel framing: one man in a doorway of light, another man in a doorway of light, ten years later. Perhaps it has nothing to do with him at all.
“You know,” Caroline whispers across the table, “This place is legit. John Coltrane used to play here like, all the time. Nuts.”
A glaze has settled over the audience. The music seems to go on forever. She’d give anything for it to end and then, it does. As the audience lifts their hands to clap, she mouths “I have to pee” to Dan, and slips out of her chair. She walks to the bathroom, still shakily holding her glass, and then past it.
Her instinct is right. He is leaning against the wall.
“Kyle. Hi.”
“What—geez, Meg. Holy cow.” The surprise is genuine, unpracticed. (So, he hadn’t seen her.) “What the heck are you doing here?”
She tells him that she is there with her husband and then tells him more than is necessary about Dan, and then asks about the club. Yes, he runs it. Yes, it’s good to see her, after all these years—trippy, seriously. Did she like the show? Yes, she says. They talk about the music and their jobs and how crazy it is to see each other this randomly and this far from home.
This goes on. And then, “If you don’t mind—” she pauses, “If you don’t mind, there are things I’ve wondered for a bit, and I feel like it would be a good thing to talk about, maybe we could get coffee—”
“Ominous beginning,” he says. “Sure, OK, let’s hear it.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, sure, you got me.”
“Okay, so—I’m sorry to ask this—but I wanted to talk about what happened, and your leaving, and whether—I guess I’ve sometimes wondered about the circumstances and, you know, how much it had to do with our thing.”
“Couldn’t you start with something less intense? For all you know, I might have a nice husband now, too.” He says this with a small, giving smile.
“I’m sorry, I know this is invasive. I really don’t mean to be.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Well. To be honest, I thought you’d call.” “Yeah. I wasn’t sure, you know, really all of what had happened.”
“I believe, if memory serves, that Deborah sent you an email.”
Deborah is his mother. She can’t remember why he calls her by a first name; only residual annoyance that he does.
“Yes, that’s true. I guess I didn’t understand how serious it was.”
“Really?”
“It was a confusing time.”
“Oh, Meg. Come on.”
“Where’d you get those pills? It was so unlike you.”
“Professor Malloy’s medicine cabinet, that time we went to her house for dinner—remember? She had a whole bunch of shit in there and I was an asshole and took the whole bottle with the label and everything, so then they found out that that’s where I got them from, and then when she found that out she tried to kill herself, too.”
“What? Oh, my god. Did she?”
“What? No, she survived, I would never bring it up this casually if she had passed away—I mean, she took a semester off and stuff. But she was fine.”
Margaret looks at her glass, touches a piece of ice.
“We still keep in touch, actually, like a now-and-then email thing,” Kyle continues. “The kid’s like, in sixth grade and plays hockey. Such a weird sport to imagine for a little kid.”
“But you were also fine—I mean, not fine, but OK, after the accident?”
“Yeah, thankfully,” he runs a hand through his hair and then starts again. “Yeah, Macon came home early from a weekend thing and found me.”
“It was so awful. I was so shaken up and then it was summer and I guess you wouldn’t have known that but, truly, I was so shaken. And I hope you believe that. And then I still look back and think, you know, wow,how young we were.”
“We were,” he pauses, and starts again. “We were, but you were a creative writing major, right? Maybe you could have, like, improvised your way through shock. I know it’s weird to say but I really thought I was in love with you.”
“Oh, Kyle. We weren’t even dating.”
“Sure, no, and I wasn’t actually in love. But I didn’t know that then, did I?”
“Look,” she says, patiently, “It was very traumatic and I’m sorry to not have come to see you. And I hear you, I do.”
“The thing is, to your question, you were the last person I saw, okay, right? But I’ve had a lot of therapy and now I know I had shit to work through and it didn’t have all that much to do with that semester. And honestly, I am sorry if my tone seems a bit on edge—I’m pretty dialed into the universe, generally. Maybe we could have coffee, like you said, and talk.”
“Yes,” she says, softer this time. “Coffee would be good.”
There is no more music. Behind them, the sound of instruments being zipped up and a low shuffling, coats, heels, tugging and shifting.
“I gotta say,” Kyle says, “The way you have your hair now is cool. The short bangs thing? Not everyone can pull it off.”
Has anything changed? She looks at him and a current of bad feelings goes through her and she cannot name them or distinguish how much the feelings are about him and how much they are about her. It wasn’t like she’d come from the cushiest home life, either—it wasn’t just him who had things hard, who’d had things to move past that first year. Back home her father drove an Ingalls truck and didn’t talk. Her mother did nails—her silent, bird-boned mother who, when returning home from work in an especially distressed mood, would hunker in the corner and draw in her sketchpad; inked pictures of terrifying rabbits that reared up and filled the page. For hours she did this—hours! Her nail art was tacky, carelessly pastel, too much purple, but Margaret believed the rabbits were a clue to how she’d settled on a mannered name like Margaret for a daughter. These rabbits, scrupulously shaded and textured, reached out from beyond the page, and for this, her husband was disgusted—not in so many words, but in the way he rattled the dishes, tossed a beer off-mark into the trash, went early to bed.
The trick, Margaret had found in school and beyond, was to come up with little systems for concealing how long she’d had the same lunchbox or what extra jobs her parents worked or how young she’d been when they began leaving her home alone. The trick was to scaffold with innuendos and half-truths (she had never, for instance, told Dan or anyone else about the rabbits).
Kyle had never seemed to find such systems necessary. In class, he’d liked to go on about his hometown; on and on about financial aid and his junkie mother. Even on the very first day of class he’d brought up the hog waste lagoons—lilac and angular, slightly beautiful—by his home, a detail the teacher seized upon, prodding him to write about, though he stuck doggedly to the liberated drones. He was proud of the off-brand cologne. She’d seen that. Even now he smelled much the same: a high, hopeful, lurching scent that unfurled like a mist dispenser at the supermarket.
He’ll bald soon, she thinks. He’ll studiously pour drinks behind the bar. He’ll keep wearing a Puka shell necklace, though he isn’t really from the beach. She can barely imagine what he is like outside of this club, what he’d look like away from the angular stroke of the stage lights. What street he lives on, what kind of furniture he might have in his apartment, who the first person he talks to every morning might be—any of these details seem too incredible to sit with.
*
“Where’d you go?” Dan asks when she returns. He sounds irritated, though he hasn’t put his coat on and is still looking at his phone. Caroline and her boyfriend, sensing domestic bad weather (it must have been the boyfriend—Caroline wouldn’t have the antenna) have gone home without waiting to say goodbye.
“A baby,” she says, sitting down and rapping the side of the table. “I want to revisit the baby talk.”
“What?”
“Don’t you remember how Colin and Emma looked with theirs, how happy they seemed? She was so cute—so chunky!”
“Oh, Christ,” he puts down his phone, “You don’t want a baby.”
“Harsh.”
“That’s not what I meant. You told me—what, last month?—that the plan is to, you know, stick a pin in the talk until the clerkship is up. I’m literally just repeating back what you said.”
“I’m not allowed to change my mind?”
“Marge. Come on. Seriously.”
“What a mess,” she says—a small voice. “What a mess, what a mess.”
“We both had long weeks,” he reaches for her hand. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow.” Tomorrow is Saturday. She’d like to be on a run by eight; later, nebulous brunch plans with the PR head of another magazine, later, the movie she and Dan have been wanting to see. (Is it sold out? She should check.) Streets plastered with yesterday’s copy of AM New York, people bright with coffee; some shivered, tender feeling of the approaching holiday—likely, even, a few zealous people hauling Christmas trees across town. The old panic will dissolve, she knows, as soon as they travel up the narrow stairs and step out into that familiar Martian-orange swell of streetlamp. No need to overthink anything.
Sarah Edwards is a writer and editor living in Durham, North Carolina. She has fiction and poetry published in Subtropics, Joyland, The Yale Review, Annulet, The Stinging Fly, and Ninth Letter, among other places.