The Shape of Desire (5 page)

I pull insistently on the key. “This one wouldn’t be,
either
!” I exclaim.

“Maybe not,” he says. “I think I’m going to buy a bungee cord, or maybe just some industrial strength elastic, and sew the leather to that. Give myself some room to expand.”

“But a buffalo—I mean, what’s the collar size of an animal like that?” I say, trying to dial back my anxiety. Or, at least, to
sound
like I’ve dialed it back.

“Pretty damn big,” he admits.

“Maybe you should think of a different plan,” I say. “Wear it around your wrist.”

“I’d lose it the first day I changed,” he says.

“Your waist?”

“Thought about that,” he says. “Maybe. But there’s bound to be a similar problem. I mean, anything small enough to stay around my waist will turn into a tourniquet on a big animal.”

“Yeah, but at least you won’t
choke to death
in the first five minutes of transformation,” I say. “If you had to, you could probably claw it off before it did any substantial damage.”

“If I was a wolf or a big cat,” he agrees. “But buffalo or bison? Not so sure.”

“What about wearing it as part of your harness?” I say. That’s how he carries the pack with him most of the time—the harness slips over his back, shoulders, and stomach, leaving his limbs free no matter what shape he assumes. The pack holds only the barest essentials: a twenty-dollar bill, a debit card, and a pair of slick running pants folded into the smallest possible shape so he has
something
to cover his nakedness when he resumes his human body. While he’s gone, one of my daily
tasks is to check his bank account to make sure he hasn’t lost his backpack and a stranger isn’t making purchases with his card.

Whenever I see new account activity—usually the purchase of running shoes and a sweatshirt—my heart always lifts.
He’s himself again; he’ll be back with me soon.
That isn’t always true, of course. Sometimes he’s hundreds of miles away and human for just a few hours, but he still needs to buy clothes if he’s anywhere he might run into other people.

He shakes his head again. “The backpack I can afford to lose. The key I can’t. I’ve got to be able to figure out a way to keep it on me all the time.”

“Dante.” I swing a leg over him and straddle his hips, then lean in very close, my hands on his cheeks, my eyes staring into his. “Dante. You can afford to lose the key. You don’t have to go straight to the locker whenever you change. You just have to get somewhere that you can call me. I’ll come to you, wherever you are. I’ll bring everything you need.”

He turns onto his side, trying to dislodge me, but I tumble over with him, landing so that we are still face-to-face. My leg is still wrapped around his waist, my palms are still on his face, though he has grabbed my wrists as if he wants to pull my hands away. But he doesn’t.

“I cannot simply rely on you,” he says, speaking the words clearly and precisely, as if to make sure that
this time
I actually understand. We have had this conversation dozens of times before. “What if you’re sick? What if you’re out of town? What if you simply don’t want to come get me?”

“I don’t think—”

He raises his voice to drown me out. “What if you’re
dead
, though God knows I hope you live to be a hundred? What if you’ve gotten tired of me and you’ve taken up with some other guy and he doesn’t think it’s such a hot idea for you to go charging out in the middle of the night on an errand you can’t explain?”

“You know that won’t—”

“I trust you, Maria, with my secret, with my life, with my
soul
, but
no
human being can be everything else to another one. If you’re the only thing I can count on, the time will come when I need you and you won’t be there.” Now he puts his hands on my cheeks, and draws me in so our foreheads touch. Our wrists make
X
shapes on either side of our faces. “Just as there have been times you’ve needed me and I haven’t been here.”

“I’ve never complained about that,” I whisper. “I’ve never asked you to give me more than you can.”

He kisses me, very gently, on the mouth. “And I won’t let you try to give me more than you should,” he says quietly. “I have to be able to do some things for myself. I’ll think about the key. I’ll work it out.”

“I love you,” I say.

He kisses me again. “I know,” he replies. “My life would be nothing if you didn’t.”

S
aturday we run errands and eat lunch out and take a short hike through Babler State Park, which is only about twenty minutes from my house. The exercise puts Dante in a good mood, and so he’s willing to entertain an idea I had while I lay beside him the night before, unable to sleep.

“What about a
backup
plan?” I ask. “You’ll still have the key with you in some fashion. But just in case I’m not dead or sick or on an airplane or married to someone else when you come back to town, what if we buy a prepaid cell phone and bury it somewhere that you can get to easily? And then if you lose your pack and your key, you can dig up the phone and call me.”

He gives me a look filled equally with fondness and derision. “And you don’t think the battery will have worn down during the weeks I’ve been gone?”

“We’ll buy one of those special chargers,” I say triumphantly.
“You use a couple of AA batteries and a connector cord to recharge the cell phone battery. I bought one after my power went out last time.”

He looks intrigued. “That might work.” Then he has a thought. “Of course, why couldn’t I just bury a spare key to my locker instead of the cell phone?”

I stare at him blankly and then burst out laughing. “Well, you could, I guess,” I say. “But I think we should get the cell phone, too, just to reward me for coming up with such a clever idea!”

It’s a plan that pleases both of us because it offers a couple different kinds of insurance; it also makes him feel independent and allows me to feel potentially useful. We spend the rest of the day shopping for the items we need and getting a copy of his key made. Then we take our new waterproof box back to Babler, a place that’s easily accessible to Dante, whether he’s human or animal, and that I can get to with a short drive.

The question quickly becomes: Where can we bury the box so that Dante can find it again, but no one else is likely to come across it by accident? The site has to be memorable enough for him to find it again no matter what the season, so trees can’t be the only markers. And Babler is almost nothing but trees. A few two-lane roads connect the main entrance to the RV parking spaces and the picnic areas and a few other paved spots, but mostly it’s just one big forest cluttered with scrubby underbrush beneath the heavy spreading branches of the trees.

The day is warm and spectacularly beautiful, and the park is beginning to put on its autumn finery. A few maples are showing red—one or two leaves waving like bloody hands from the vibrant green throng covering most of the branches. The tops of the sycamores look as if someone has sifted cinnamon over them from a low-flying plane, while the honey locusts appear to have accidentally dipped some of their northwestern branches into a bright vat of yellow paint. They are now trying to shake off the color in random, intermittent droplets of brilliance.

We leave my car in one of the RV spaces and plunge into the woods, following a narrow path. It’s tangled with roots and vines and deep, eternal piles of rotting leaves, old gumballs, and fallen branches. Squirrels skitter around us, alert and lively. Hawks glide overhead, soundless and patient. I hear Dante take a deep breath; I think he is inhaling nature.

“These are the days I wish I could shape-shift,” I say in a quiet voice. “To be in this world—among all this beauty—at the most basic, essential level. To be
part
of it, in ways a human can never be.”

“Trust me,” he says, his voice wry, “it’s easier to appreciate it in this shape. When you’re an animal, you’re not admiring the scenery or noticing the pretty flowers. If you’re a predator, you’re trying to hear or smell your dinner. If you’re prey, you’re always looking for the next hiding place. There are only two things you think about—eating and staying alive. Maybe only one thing, since you eat to stay alive. There is no”—he pauses to figure out exactly what he wants to say—“aesthetic sensibility.”

Maybe I should be annoyed at his pragmatic response, but instead I laugh. “Way to destroy my idealistic view of nature,” I say.

He’s grinning. “It’s like everything else,” he says. “The better you know it, the less idyllic it seems.”

I take his hand and squeeze it. “Not you,” I say soulfully, exaggerating the sentiment so he’ll think I’m kidding. “The better I know you, the more wonderful I think you are.”

“And the better I know
you
, the more delusional I think you are,” he replies. “But it turns out I like that in a woman.”

I let go of his hand and punch him lightly in the arm. I’ve lost his attention. He’s pointing ahead and a little to our left, where there’s a low wooden bridge over an almost invisible stream. The bridge looks sturdy enough, but neglected; if it had ever been painted, all the color has worn away, leaving a dingy gray behind.

“How about here? Or a few paces away in one direction or another?” he asks. “This ought to be easy enough for me to find again.”

I glance behind us, because I’m not at all certain
I
could find the spot again. The trail is so poorly defined that I’m not even sure I could get back to the car if I was here on my own. Fortunately, Dante never gets lost. I don’t know if it’s because his animal instincts stay with him when he’s in human form, or if it’s because he’s just one of those people who is always able to orient himself.

“Looks good,” I say. “Let’s bury our box and get back to the car. I think it’ll be dark in about an hour.”

He laughs, looks around, and counts out twenty paces directly north of the bridge, or what I imagine is north. Then he drops to his knees and clears away the leaves and rubble to get to the dirt below. I’ve brought a trowel, but I let him do the digging while I hold the package. “I didn’t know you were afraid of the dark,” he says.

“Well, I’m
not
, when I actually know where I am,” I retort. “But I’d hate to try to find my way back to the park entrance after sunset.”

“Don’t worry, I know exactly where we are,” he says. “
And
how to get back. I’d think you’d be more concerned about running into a coyote or a bobcat.”

I look around even more nervously. I’ve been so focused on our mission that it hasn’t even occurred to me to wonder if we’re in any danger. But, of course, coyotes and bobcats are common in Missouri. “Aren’t we too big for them to attack?”

He lays aside the trowel and reaches for the box. “Generally speaking, yes, but if there were a pack of coyotes—or if the cat was really, really hungry—”

“Stop it. You’re scaring me,” I say.

He laughs again. The box fits neatly in the space he’s hollowed out, and he begins filling the hole with earth. He’s made it pretty deep to
discourage wild animals from going to the trouble of digging it up. “This isn’t really the season for them to attack humans,” he says in what is supposed to be a comforting tone. “Deep winter, now, you’d be a little more at risk. They’d be hungrier by then. But this is a season of easy pickings, so you don’t look as tasty.”

“I feel so reassured,” I say. “But couldn’t you defend me if a coyote showed up? Or a
wolf
? Couldn’t you turn into a wolf yourself and fight it off?”

He’s kneeling on the ground, tamping down the dirt, but now he looks up at me with a troubled expression. “That’s not the way it works,” he says. “I can’t just
summon
the will to transform. And I can’t choose what I want to be.”

The tone of my voice is halfway between defensive and placating. “I just thought. Some natural instincts might assert themselves if you were in danger. You know, like fight or flight. If you need to fight, maybe your body doesn’t just shoot you up with adrenaline, maybe it turns you into a creature that knows how to rumble.”

He wipes his dirty hands on his jeans and stands up. His features are collecting into a scowl. “Always, with you, the most romantic interpretation,” he says, his voice edged with anger or sarcasm or maybe both. “‘How lovely it would be if my boyfriend would turn into a werewolf to save me from danger! I would swoon in his arms from gratitude.’ But it doesn’t
work
that way.”

I am close to losing my temper. “Well, how would
I
know how it works? You never
tell
me anything. You don’t want to
talk
about this part of your life. Everything I’ve ever learned about your—your alternate existence I’ve had to chisel out of you by asking questions you don’t want to answer. Maybe I do romanticize it! But I want to understand it. I want to understand
you
. And all you want is to keep your secrets.”

His lips are pressed firmly together, as if he is holding back angry words. He turns his head so he’s staring at the tree line instead of me,
as if he’s afraid his hot gaze will burn through my skin. “When I’m with you, all I want is to be human,” he says tightly. “I don’t want to
think
about and
talk
about and analyze my animal nature. You think I’m being secretive, but I’m just trying to
be
.” He swings his head around to look at me, and it’s true; his glare is fiery enough to scorch. “Let it go.”

For a moment I stare back at him, fifteen years’ worth of protests clamoring on my tongue.
Let it go? I’ve done nothing
but
let it go! I’ve believed your impossible story without a shred of proof! I’ve designed every detail of my life so that it accommodates yours. I have loved you without conditions, trusted you without reservations. All I want is to know you better. All you want is to keep your distance.

“Well, then,” I say. “Let’s go back to the car before the coyotes find us and dash all our hypotheses to the ground.”