He’d Eat You Up

Amy V. Eareckson

Word Count 1344

Michael undid the leather strap of his Cartier watch and flung it from the open window of his white Cadillac convertible into the Hudson River.

“Does anybody really know what time it is?” He belted out the Chicago lyrics. We swigged greedily from a bottle of Mt. Gay 151 rum and passed a joint.

We had collided on a red clay tennis court. He was married.

I felt cherished. The first night, we used my college roommate’s apartment in Manhattan. Michael drove in from work, an ice house in Brooklyn, some sort of managerial job, bearing red roses and Krug champagne.

“Miss Amy!” he cried when he came. He collapsed on my chest. I didn’t risk a breath.

The weight of him felt like shelter. His Vetiver cologne on his skin, in my nose. In the morning, he looked at me from the doorway, love dumb and sticky, tangled in the sheets. His beige suit jacket slung over his shoulder. His immaculate attire, the brown Gucci loafers, Repp tie, pressed white button down, French cuffs. Those mesmerizing blue Teutonic eyes. Blonde hair swept to the side.

He winked, then blew me a kiss.

~

“It’s just you and me,” Michael said after the wedding. He made us extraordinary, with secret smiles and smoldering looks. What he meant was, it’s just you and me and alcohol.

He carried the blue leather checkbook with the JP Morgan logo under his arm. I had to ask for a check, even though the money was mine. His father sold the ice house in Brooklyn to the Mafia. Michael’s take was ten thousand dollars in cash. He brought it home in a brown paper bag.

“I’m looking to buy a business,” he said.

What he bought, after some years and many stuttering starts, was a yellow eight-ton Caterpillar bulldozer.

In the house our parents bought on Long Island, we had two little towheaded daughters and a Golden Retriever called Merlin. There were cats and gerbils and hamsters. The girls cantered Thunder, a coal black pony, across the lawn. They sat bareback astride the donkey Eeyore. We constructed a barn of sticks and plywood. The pasture was dirt. Eeyore’s untrimmed hooves resembled sabots. Black plastic bags of garbage hung from the garage rafters like stalactites. When Michael came home from work sweaty and muscled and dirty and tousled like Stanley Kowalski, we drank.

Dunning notices arrived in the mail. An angry man in thick yellow work boot repossessed the bulldozer.

Once Michael dressed up for a meeting with my father. I watched him adjust his pink and gray tie and brush his Gucci loafers. In a day or two the words Loser and Irresponsible and Embarrassment appeared like black ghost letters on the concrete walls of the garage. My father was a mild man, a corporate lawyer, but appearances mattered. He paid the late charges at the Beach Club.

Michael crouched under a shower of cascading glass. He and a guy named Billy were building our sun porch. Billy had missed a nail with his hammer.

“Let’s move to Vermont,” he said. “Who needs this keeping up with the Joneses’ shit? What we need is a fresh start.”

~

When Michael razed all the old-growth trees on our land in Vermont to improve the view, he left the stumps listing like headstones. Neighbors slowed to a halt by our yellow farmhouse and gawked. Our barn was the wrong shade of red. I found the shiny square envelopes of cocaine in the bookcase, the cellar full of empties.

By then we had a small son. I dug a hole for my anguish and covered it with rage. My divorce lawyer was a balding guy with a mane of wooly white hair. Let’s call him Dwarfkin. He was toadlike and short, a licentious sporophore of a man. The leer on the curl of his lips was a dare. I felt licked, savored on the tip of his tongue as his eyes devoured me. He took me on as his client. Then, late one November night, he took me on his couch. At first, I felt frangible when my marriage ended, brittle and transparent, as if my organs were molten as yolk. I felt smothered in ashes. That my divorce lawyer found me delectable was shockingly titillating.

Morchella esculenta, the common morel, grows in clusters near apple, ash, or maple trees in wooded areas with moist soil. The brown, pitted, ridged honeycombed caps resembled my divorce lawyer’s wrinkled penis when it poked its way through his white cotton briefs. I enlarged the whitish stalk of his shaft by squeezing the base. Dwarfkin wrapped his hand around mine and groaned. The leather couch was dark and rich as loam. Amber light cast from a Tiffany desk lamp glowed like the moon, as he pushed my thong aside. I smelled the sweet aroma of expensive cigars and Glen Livet. In the road outside his office, the tires from passing cars plowed through slush.

~

I sat with three older women, each of us wearing identical tangerine sweaters embroidered with witches and black cats, purchased unwittingly at the same trendy boutique. We clinked our wine glasses and jeered at the antics of Dwarfkin, the divorce lawyer we had all separately engaged. I wondered what they knew as we pushed aside the croutons in our Caesar salads.

“How pathetic are his attempts at seduction!”

“He grabbed my ass once, and I told him to fuck off.”

“He’d love to get his hands on you.” The women’s eyes met across the table in an exchange of lifted eyebrows.

“He’d eat you up.”

My father and my divorce lawyer, Dwarfkin, discussed my case like two old cronies. I was to be handled. Dwarfkin was fucking us both.

The intoxication lasted six months. Dwarfkin unleashed my inner nympho. Daily, I called his office with specious questions about my case.

“I can get you more money, more of whatever you want.” His suggestive tone loosened a torrent of fantasies. I felt fingered. Fondled. Brought to the fringe of reason. What wouldn’t I do? I had to see him. I believed I had power. When he sank to his knees before me, his hands reaching under my skirt to part my folds, I roared like Rati, Hindu goddess of lust and passion.

I barged into Dwarfkin’s office without appointments.

“Is he in?”

His secretary, a white-haired, gray complexioned woman in a brown fleece pullover and sturdy black corduroys, barely lifted her eyes. I toed the carpet like a stallion. If he dared to keep me waiting, I itched to kick in his door. When we were alone, I grabbed the front of his flannel trousers. We did it on his serpentine mahogany executive desk, on his Kilim rug, in his Eames chair. I couldn’t stop. His lust was my aphrodisiac. I had no shame, which is to say I choked on it.

“Why don’t you come back tomorrow and sign those papers.”

I left my toddler alone in his crib.

“Keep your phone on,” Dwarfkin said. “If he cries, you can be home in minutes.”

“We saw your car at Dwarfkin’s office last night.” One of the Halloween-sweatered ladies had pulled her cart alongside mine in the IGA. I moved a jumbo pack of paper towels over the bottles of wine and shrugged.

“This is what he does,” someone said. “He should be stopped.”

I exploded into Dwarfkin’s suite one afternoon in May, sans panties. A vibrating double C-ring was curled in my purse. There, on a spindle back settee perched a young blonde woman, long legs loosely crossed. She wore a tight emerald sweater and skinny jeans. Dangling jade earrings. She tapped the stiletto heel of one black leather boot on the oakfloor and glared at Dwarfkin’s office door.

“Is he in?” I flipped my hand toward the office door.

“Mr. Dwarfkin is not available at the moment.” The staccato tapping of the secretary’s fingernails quickened on the keyboard.

“Your case is closed. An invoice has been mailed to your Daddy.”

*

Amy is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and is a journalist published in Good Housekeeping, Vermont Magazine, The Manchester Journal, and most recently, Grande Dame Literary Journal. She attended the Breadloaf Summer Writing Program, is a graduate of the Brattleboro retreat, studied with the poet Kate Grey and has taken many classes at the Westport Writers’ Workshop.