Everyone’s vegan brother is out on a run. Since giving up animal products, the boys aren’t interested in our touch anymore. They changed their diets in a statement on the abhorrence of violence, but besides that, they long to slough off their weighted, temporal layers and get back to the etheric realm. Carnal things bind them here, me included. Thusly, I have resorted to sleeping with the old man, whose servants bring to our bed trays of sheeny offal—liver patés with fennel, bracelets of sardines, and a lamb’s heart in a China bowl like a volcano emerging from the sea.
The old man lives in a three-story townhome where from the Southern veranda, off the master, we have a view of the marshlands and meadow, a place Jane Austen might take her consternated afternoon stroll, muddying her hem, and from the Northern veranda, we can see the city square and park where I often spy a team of vegans circled up neatly. They do squats to get warm. Their legs whistle as they churn in electric yellow shorts. They are adorable, but it’s hard for any of us to connect with them. According to natural law, I should want one for myself, yet I am afraid I won’t get the prize promised me at birth. Meanwhile, I’m awash with bounty. Here, as I prepare to describe my emotions, it can’t come from a place of fear, or I may not be able to get back up again.
The old man’s house is decorated in the Parisian-style, though his pantry and cupboards scream Yorkshire. In his day, he was a war general. He retired to become a scholar and poker visionaire. I don’t know what he studies—I don’t care. He studies me and I could want for nothing. I adore the smell of his armpits as fuel. He let me pick out the new bedspread so I selected an impossible color which none of us can quite name exactly. It’s somewhere between caramel and clay and mauve and pearl and brains and it’s brassy too. You can’t picture it; don’t even try.
“This is your love color,” the old man calls it. He is really special to me. He is from a time when men were allowed to be mighty. Yearlong, he is tan and full of cartilage. He is rotund, with eyeballs like leeks soaking in a basin of water. A white sinew of hair comes onto his jowls, wrapping his face in light. Sometimes, he watches me for hours before pleasuring himself. This morning, he massaged my nipples until I came, his pinch like a God inventing the rose in the course of an hour.
Whenever someone brings us beef liver on a tray, we go slow and lick the plates. He’s in no rush to seize his future. Organ meat, he says, is vital to a woman’s fertility. A raw heart is the perfect primer for a developing brain. He encourages my daily constitutionals, so as to keep an open hips and sacrum. So many women, he says, sit too still and their babies meet an unprecedented resistance at the threshold to life. I don’t know if he wants me to have his baby, per se—he just cares about me. He sends mixed messages in the form of his many offerings. Liver was so coveted by the ancients of China, hands were not allowed to touch it directly, only special sticks. We do the same in his house, the international working together.
The old man and I fall asleep on top of each other, as pugs in a grumble. Our small, milky breaths spoil in each other’s crevices. He spares no expense on beeswax, and candles ooze down along his mantels till sunrise, a very birdy sunrise, when the rooster brays and the emerald returns to the satin wallpaper and to the meadow. That’s when my lover gets going. He rolls around with his eyes closed and kneads me for more. Someday, he will open his eyes to blackout. That won’t stop him now. I am learning a lot from our pleasure. Unfortunately, I’m in love with his son, the artist.
“Ernesto will be by later,” the old man tells me, bringing latté foam to his lip. His son’s appearances have been less frequent since I moved in. On the nightstand, a maid shucks breakfast oysters and I am wanting. “He says he needs to discuss something important.” I shall try not to care about Ernesto’s visit. I help the old man untangle the chain around his readers so he can diagnose whatever magazine he’s holding. Unbothered by the news of the country, he just fiddles around with it for a while like a crossword.
Ernesto is a painter—just my type, wiry and grim with a single eyebrow, cut arms, and cages for hands. We went to grammar school together and partnered on a Claymation video that achieved eight seconds in length. Just before junior high, he built a class bridge from toothpicks, and while his suspension design bore the most weight in the final analysis, he had permitted me to tack on a purely decorative beam which got all the compliments. We never slow danced because he was always interested in the girls with older brothers. I could spend an entire wedding night with every one of that boy’s fingers before starting on his mouth, then on to his trunk and eventually his prophetic, twisted outlooks.
But a few years ago, Ernesto renounced dairy, meat. Not long after, he vowed celibacy. It seems he is repenting for something. For what, I wouldn’t dare ask his father, though I want to, because men are jealous at even the suggestion of another man. Despite what they insist, I’ve learned, no matter how tender the moment or private the bathtub, even if they are rubbing infinity shapes on your belly and coaxing out your sexual history, a woman must never mention—not the grocer, not the coin dealer, even her own father should be spoken of in moderation lest she condemn her happy union. Confiding these details has the same contamination effect as a human’s touch on an unhatched egg. Regardless of the mother’s love, the poor thing must be abandoned. This, a doctrine of pheromones.
I’m still entitled to get dressed and appear scrumptious for Ernesto. I wear my indigo dye—a sack— and stand at the Northern perch overlooking the square. I use my fingers to comb tallow through my hair, which has doubled in volume since the daily venison sliders, (our March aphrodisiac). My red hair is an indication of Neanderthal lineage. Its knots and buckles have made for a lifetime of problems with other women, but men love it. They bundle me up like their own little problem.
Down in the park, I observe a team of vegans running miles in circles on the cobblestone, their bloodshot noses at the prow. Ernesto is not among them this time, since he is due here in forty-three odd minutes. I think I recognize one of the guys from my days at the atelier. It’s the chap with compression socks and legs like Christ. I watch them go, go, go away into a cavern of poplars. They have denounced the material reality as evil. Matter, a creation of some demi-urge. They jog to describe this predicament. Life as we know it, according to their philosophies, is a simulation, one which deters everyone from the spiritual source, wherein they prefer to dwell and someday more absolutely return.
There is bouncing when they run, but nothing jiggles. I wonder where in the body all that shock is absorbed, where it’s hiding and waiting to reemerge, and when. They wear no rings. They do not even fry up eggs anymore. Just cashew cheese and cereal, loads of tropical produce coming off an airplane. I protest. Eggs are pristine. The hen is a girl I know. We take turns being born as the woman and the hen.
It just so happens that after a few months without animal products, the guys naturally lose their libido. The maid and I remark on this all the time. But men, bless them, will have their way. I’ve read-up on the reasons. I examine their pamphlets by the fireplace before chucking them onto the heap and going about my day. They don’t like factories, or abuse, or the grander toll the system takes on our children’s world. Our children?
There do exist decent methods of course. Surely they’re aware. This wild exchange with animals is a human tradition. We are all just dancing. Men, the alchemists, have always used their hands.
“My sweet,” my lover calls me in. He has a surprise for me. I enter his room and he faces me out in front of him at the mirror to cull back my hair and bare my neck, his fingertips under my T-shirt. With his free hand, he graces the exposed fat of my belly. He prefers to keep his hands full. When he inhales at my throat, I feel his groan rifting the earth, then, a cold metal necklace around me.
I inspect the pendant. A golden egg no bigger than a thimble.
“Heavens,” I say.
“I want you to know that just because I wouldn’t ask you to carry my baby, I am in awe of– ” his eyes get teary. He can’t finish the sentence—nervous to cry. It’s the first time the subject of our potential has come up after months of entanglement. I’ve heard that men get more estrogen as they age, suddenly becoming mothers, overfeeding their lap dogs, etc. “I want you to know,” he soldiers on, “that I wouldn’t ask you to carry my child, but I am spellbound by your,” his eyes go to my womb, and as though it is unholy for him to say it, let alone impregnate it, he kisses me and we remember each other. He has so much to offer, but he wasn’t my assignment. We love each other, holding very still. Still, we know we are far apart, and the century rolls on.
We get under the covers to receive his guests. My toes are cold. The old man doesn’t mind and orders up some sweetbreads. He has volunteered to hold court this year for the hamlet and their affairs. For his supervision, he gets a monthly stipend from the clergy, which he allots toward the grove. He is good at being in charge of peoples’ sensitive matters. They trust the old man because he never doubts the stuff he knows and should he get it wrong, he fixes it.
“My lord,” says the first stopover. It is our neighbor Rand who owes us money from a bad cards experience. “Before paying up,” he says, “I challenge you to a rematch. Double or nothing.” Rand has a devilish look but he is quivering and very bad at poker. Beside me, the giant pounds his fist on our duvet.
“Very well,” he says. This draw could go on for years. He’d never force a friend to pay. Money can be rather pathetic.
Next, some school children come with a trifold posterboard to present their plans for the observatory, of which we are the sponsors.
“Splendid work,” he applauds their draft, but suggests they add in more stars. The children reek of industrial soap. They are very clean. They skip out into the mists of tomorrow.
Ernesto’s cashmere turtleneck comes through the door. Under the weight of a canvas frame, he is bent and hunched like someone locked in the town stocks. I haven’t actually seen any paintings from him—just dozens of wooden frames—except for the one miniature that his dad commissioned hanging in the powder room. It’s a pastoral vignette of a time when the West was new, obfuscated by a vortex of black birds.
“Hey Dad,” he greets us like I’m not here. He sets down the frame for a rest. Ernesto’s hands slide into his back pockets (hiding the fingers from me, no doubt). He will not look at me, as if we two have a history. I mash down some gullet with a fork because I simply don’t care.
Ernesto needs money.
“What happened to the last loan?” The old man calls them loans, however all of us and the maids and the servants know they are not actually loans, because they will only be paid back in the currency of Ernesto’s joy, which the money is presumably abetting, but I don’t know about that.
“I spent it on materials for the Anthropocene piece,” he says. “And production costs.” Damn, I can’t remember if the Anthropocene was a film or a sculpture or a live happening or perhaps a monologue of some kind. I used to be a better fan, but how long can I be expected to attend the shows and get nothing in return? “Remember I’ve also been having to allocate funds towards that health stuff,” he goes on. “Prevention measures since I’m going to inherit all that funky stuff from your side,” he shrugs, and off his shoulders slide my spirit children, right onto the floor. “Also, mom’s been needing me around the house more so I haven’t been as good about my weekend gigs.” His father considers it, gazing out the window to the land.
“Son,” he says, “I don’t think my open hand is really serving you. “Come back after the summer and we can talk about more funding. You’ve got to find your own mojo.” The lord’s mojo hangs over our bed, a wool talisman embroidered with naked women and a little blood stain. He found it in the war.
Ernesto takes this news pretty good. He jots something down in a notebook. His father offers him a to-go mug of bone broth but Ernesto is repulsed. He says, “I don’t think so.” Instead, he holds up a plastic gallon of soy milk like the severed head of an enemy. Now they’ve each rejected the other.
Ernesto makes for the marsh walking trail to process. From the Northern veranda, I watch him spiral down the wooden steps. His new hiking boots are unblemished yet. Out in nature, sprawled on the body of the goddess Sophia, from whom the planet was formed, he can unload his fears. Sophia’s like that. She can absorb anything you have to dump on her. It is hard for him to inherit the Art World—a process like a drawn-out amputation from practical concerns, such endless inspiration, and too small an audience, and no funds.
Conveniently, it’s also time for my afternoon walk. I will go now to change his mind.
The full moon borders my mothers’ cliffs. The grasses are wet and fine, tearing apart under my boots rather than untwining or giving way. A swarm of geese erupts from the stillwater and into the sky. Wild—I could not catch one in my arms if I tried. Even if I ran as fast as I could. I know of someone with a gun who can, but he won’t be around forever. We really need him, and he is definitely going to die. Maybe, if I try a little harder, his son can hurry up and be done repenting.
Seems my prayer is enough to change everything. There on the dock, Ernesto sits in a full lotus position. His stress-walk and my stress-walk have aligned, and he meditates with a certain mudra on each knee. Now that he’s found total privacy, he looks angrier. An amethyst the size of a prison shank dangles over his lung.
“Ernesto, honey,” I use the voice of an affectionate aunt to approach him. I am platonic as all hell so as not to spook the guy. I do feel affectionately toward him. After such a long and unrequited attraction, he has settled into a beloved literary figure with only a first name. He slides over so I can join him on the dock. I will not mention this rendezvous to my special one. I’m finagling something for myself from out of Ernesto’s rib. I unbutton my coat so he is sure to notice the golden egg. May the boy remember that thing which moves his dad to speechlessness.
“I’m sorry about your money,” I say. First, you start by acknowledging his dilemma.
“Oh, don’t worry about it.” Ernesto’s a nice guy though I’m not sure he’s a gentleman. “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” What a disaster—he has totally gone with the flow. “My dad is aroused by his own power,” he says, as if this is a negative quality. I contemplate the fate of men and women coming together. It took my ancestors an entire summer to cross the plains and arrive in paradise. They came by buggy. I can’t even imagine all the knitting, the hours of silence, mundane bouncing of the road and the not-quite road. It’s what he and I are doing now, on our way to the finish line, though if I ask for an ETA I’ll get some explanation about time as an illusion.
“Want some?” Ernesto offers soy milk from the jug. I don’t, but I take a swill since there are consequences from my tiny no thank yous, even if I make them extra small. I’m responsible for giving him the impression that I’m receptive to his initiatives. In my throat, the soy’s polyethylene-burn and emulsified gums do their scourge. In a swoosh of creamer, my prana is lecithinned. I would gladly spit it out into the lily pads but he’s watching me like an owl. Maybe he will tell the others about my receptivity, and they can all feel good.
His stomach makes the familiar hunger noises. Luckily, I have my cooler, about the size of a camera bag and hanging from a strap at my hip. I take out a little salmon for sharing and tell him the story of the fish.
“My friends and I caught this a few weeks ago,” I say, “we were on the ocean first thing in the morning. We sang and had beer for the sea sickness, and we said a prayer over the hunt.” I want him to know there’s a method to the mess.
“What was the prayer?” he says. So… Ernesto is interested in my prayer.
“I’m not allowed to tell you, it’s a girl thing,” I say. He apologizes profusely. “When the fish flopped aboard, I had to clonk it on the head with a mallet and when that happened, it relaxed. Its spirit left its body in a little cloud.”
“What color was the cloud?” he says.
“It’s impossible to describe.”
I can tell he wants a bite. He’s broke, after all. He looks around to see who is watching though we are alone. Even the geese are out of town.
“Just a little bit,” he speaks as if open to anything now. “Everything in moderation.” He chews slowly and with a latched mouth.
“Cheese?” I offer. We’re getting somewhere. “My favorite grandmother of all time made this with her grandson. They made it together in a sunlit barn with heirloom equipment. Both of them, you see, are poets.”
“Is it pasteurized?” he says.
“Heavens no.” We’ve been doing cheese for 7,000 years.
He mulls it over, the cheese I mean, with his saliva and chompers. I feel like Hades in the pit tricking Persephone into a fruit that will change her coordinations. Even the old man, wherever he’s playing cards, wants this for us. Ernesto digests his vittles. Across the pond, a doe shoots by with the heft of the Mayflower.
“Can I ask you a question,” I say. Ernesto doesn’t respond, an implied yes. “Have you ever been in a relationship with a woman? I mean, an intimate relationship?”
“Of course I have,” he is almost offended but too polite to be. Then he really lets it fly, kicking some dust into the water. “I’ve been in so many F-ing relationships with women. I’ve had so much sex with strangers,” he shakes his head, “They just come to me and I consume them. I can’t do it that way anymore.” He glances at my arm. Something has changed in him. He’s aroused, I can see, and shifts out of his lotus position to conceal it. “The last time it happened, the girl died.”
“Died?” I say. He’s an artist and they’re liberal with this word. But he might mean it.
“It had been a few weeks of us together like that,” he says, his breath catching in his throat, his eyes on the water, “and then in the middle of the night, she crashed her car just blocks from home.”
Poor baby—he shouldn’t need to starve. I scooch my skirts closer so that I may breathe hot air onto his neck. I lick his neck like a secret, and we embrace mouth to mouth. His lower lip is fatter than it looks. He is gentler than his father and his nearly-imperceptible touch opens me dizzyingly. In him, I feel the life force uncurl. He wears no perfumes, his flavor slightly charred and briny. A hunter lives inside. Up my sleeve, he squeezes me with the classic sorrow of one who does landscapes.
I stop things at the kiss. Let him sit a while with his desire and me with mine.
Breaking away from my circumstance with the old man will be awkward, but I can work it out. In the meantime, I get a brilliant idea for Ernesto’s reward. A reward, that is, for his newfound barbarianism. I unhook the golden egg from around my neck. It means so much to me.
“I think you should take this,” I say, having gotten this far in life by being generous. “It will buy you some time until you dig yourself out of debt.” Gold is gold.
“I can’t, it’s way too precious,” he says. Maybe he really does see what his father sees in me. The egg has always been a metaphor.
“You’re precious,” I remind him. At this, he grows shy, pops a stick into the pond. He takes the egg without eye contact and thanks me. I’m glad to see it in his hand where it can fertilize and become.
“I’ll tell you what,” he says—another initiative. “Let’s meet back here this time tomorrow and watch the sunset together.” It occurs to me he feels like the inventor of the sunset date, which is an excellent sign. “I can bring you something,” he says, “as a thank you for your help.”
I sleep like it’s my first night on earth. When I rise, I write a long goodbye letter to the old man, whose love for me deserves a laurel crown. I stash it in the armory drawer, so he can discover it at the right time, later on, when he is unable to rebut. My bond with him deserves better than some neurotic conversation to close the ceremony. He’d tell me I’m making a mistake, but I have no choice. His son and I were assigned each other, born in the same year, we walk the same narrow bridge. The old man ought to remember me as a friend and a miracle. Someone with a stylish way of being afoot.
I shave my entire body. I sit on the floor with my legs loose and stare in the mirror until something that looks like me climbs out of it and says it’s time to go.
At last, I’m at the dock for my sunset date. Only there is no one here. Ernesto’s not showing up. Perhaps I’m a few minutes early, and I simply have to wait a while, exercise a little patience which doesn’t come naturally to women with plans. I won’t check my locket watch in case it exaggerates matters. No, Ernesto does not meet me in time for sunset or any other time. The world turns dark again with me at the center. It could be he doesn’t want me because, like the ribeye, I am covered in blood.
The next day, I trudge through the thirty-degree weather to where the brethren get their açaí bowls. In the tavern, Ernesto’s sitting with the lot of them at a wooden refectory table that resembles a torture rack. He’s applying sunscreen for their workout. I never worry about saying something clever. Sincerity is much freakier. I was taught never to embarrass a man around his friends, but he’s no man.
“Where were you yesterday?” I say, calling him out in front of the others. “I came to the dock at sunset like we agreed.” He gets up from his meeting table and leads me away from the group toward the corner of the room where the staff is bussing dishes, which is not where I had hoped to be led.
“I’m really sorry,” he says. He rubs a sunscreen hand on his forehead. “Sometimes, I get really sad, and it’s embarrassing. I prefer to just lay low until it passes.” Those dimples! Like coin slots. I don’t carry grudges.
“Can I buy you a benedict?” I say.
“I’m all full,” he says, patting his emaciated belly, and we take a seat on a bench of hay. I leaf through some of his drawings. They are fabulous—many, of me.
“That’s not supposed to be you,” he says, stealing back his pad. “It’s the goddess, Sophia, who created the earth.”
“What happened yesterday?” I say. His childhood scar, he reminds me. He nudges it forward with his mile-long snout. I forgive him of course, since I’m fixing to live forever. And when he attempts his next escape, I will pardon him some more, until I am old, and past my childbearing years. Considering these hypotheticals is pointless. I’m too hungry to focus on anything imagined. Back to the main house I’ll go, where there’s rumor of prosciutto.
The old man’s in the armory. He’s discovered my letter, but he doesn’t seem to take it seriously for some reason. He knows I’m prone to fits and starts.
“Look who’s come for breakfast,” he says, welcoming me into his chest. Even though I wrote I was going to leave him, I didn’t, and that’s all the evidence he needs. He throws my letter into the stack of his son’s environmental manifestos for the hearth. We make love like immortals. My orgasm is a horse bearing more and more weight until its legs collapse. Maybe the sex is always going to be better with the old man. The maid says she wants to fix me up with her brother. But I think, let it be natural. Let it come naturally. Everyone’s vegan brother is on a run.
Sydney Bradley is a writer and birth doula from San Francisco. She studied writing at Bennington and Columbia, and her stories have appeared in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, and Harvard Advocate. She recommends Willa Cather’s O, Pioneers!