APPETITES

by Kathryn Chetkovich

      I had been sleeping on a friend's floor for a week. I was working nights, proofreading at a law firm, so I had the quiet, dusty apartment to myself most of the day. Next door were three children who all seemed to be at the loudest possible age, their voices alive with the sound of killing each other. After I got up, I would wander the empty rooms, looking in the refrigerator, the medicine chest, the mirror. I would put on a CD and not hear a single song. I would turn on the television and walk in the other room.
      I sat down on the couch with the free weekly paper and started working my way through the short list of studios. When I satisfied myself there was nothing there I could afford, I moved to the next column over, the depressingly enthusiastic ads for shares.
            2 wmn seek third for 3-bdrm apt.
            Clean, sunny, safe. Hdwd flrs.
      I circled this one.
      I got the machine when I called, but halfway into the message a woman broke in with a voice that sounded like an actress playing a normal person on TV. The room had been rented, she told me, but the person who was all lined up to take it had changed her mind and moved in with her boyfriend at the last minute.
      I went by that afternoon. I was buzzed in, and when I got to the third floor a door opened to reveal the most attractive woman I had ever seen. She had a look that made you want to take up painting: red hair, green eyes, and incredible pale, freckled skin. She looked like someone whose job, once you're dead, is to introduce you to God.
      I would not have thought a woman who looked like that would ever have to advertise for anything, especially not for a roommate.
      "Amanda? I'm Faith." She held out her hand. As I took it, I felt myself being pulled out of the leaky lifeboat I had been paddling around in for the last few weeks. I knew that life near this woman, if I could arrange it, would be different and better. I was prepared to give up whatever was asked of me to make that happen.
      "Come in, come in," Faith said, with the becoming touch of an eagerness to please. "Let me show you the place."
      Carla, the other roommate, appeared from somewhere, and the three of us walked through a series of clean, airy rooms. I hardly looked at them. When we got to the room that would be mine, I tried to show some discriminating interest by taking note of the placement of the outlets.
      "Do you have a lot of things to plug in?" Carla asked.
      "No, not at all," I said. "But it's nice to have, you know, options."
      "Of course it is," Faith said. "Hey, can I get you something to drink? Water? Or I think we may have a beer."
      "Water would be great," I said, avoiding the selfish, alcoholic temptation to take the last, possibly nonexistent, beer.
      Carla led me back to the living room and motioned me toward one of those big foam couches that you can pick up and carry under one arm. Across from it were a couple of candy-colored director's chairs that sprang like Easter flowers out of the thick green rug. The only piece of furniture in the whole place that could not be moved by a couple of women with a hatchback was a baby grand piano, gleaming like a casket.
      Carla saw me looking around. "Do you have a lot of furniture?"
      I waved my hand in what I hoped was a pleasantly incomprehensible way. "Oh," I said, "not really. Hardly any, actually. I'm sort of between furniture at the moment."
      Faith came in with three tall glasses of water, a slice of lemon floating in each. The ice tinkled cheerfully as she handed the glasses around.
      Carla asked if I had a boyfriend or anyone who might be visiting regularly. I had been looking at a print on the wall across from me--three well-dressed men and a naked woman at a picnic--so I said, "Actually, my boyfriend is going to Europe for a while."
      "By himself?" Faith said. Her nostrils flexed briefly. She ran a hand up and down her arm.
      "He's wanted to go for a long time and I could never afford it, so we kind of compromised," I said. "He's going and I'm moving."
      "I've made compromises like that," Carla said, and I took my first real look at her face. We didn't really look alike, but you'd describe us with the same words on a driver's license: brown, brown, corrective lenses.
      There was a little more talk about eating habits and schedules and problems we'd had with roommates in the past--the traditional trick question I thought I handled well by saying I'd always had good luck just talking things out. My eyes kept drifting over to the piano, which seemed to move closer when I looked away.
      "That's mine," Carla said finally. "Do you play?"
      I thought this might be the bond with her I needed. "Oh, sure," I said. "Well, you know, a little Fur Elise, a little boogie-woogie. What about you?"
      "I was supposed to be a concert pianist," she said. "From the time I was five."
      "Parental expectations. Tell me about it." Carla and Faith waited for me to betray some secret to them. "I could never figure out what mine wanted." The inadequacy of this remark hung there while I tried to think of something else. "Boy," I said finally, holding my glass up and rattling the ice cubes, "this water really hits the spot."
      Fortunately, Carla seemed willing to let it go at that. She stared at the piano's feet, as though she couldn't bring herself to look it in the keys.
      "When something's that big a part of your life, it's hard to know who you are without it," she said.
      Before I could stop it, a home movie appeared on the screen of my mind. I was pulling up at the emergency-room entrance, and the windshield wipers were slapping the rain back and forth. It was Billy's right arm that I'd broken, so I had to walk around the car, across the path of the headlights, and open the door for him. I helped him out, and then I stood there and watched him move lopsidedly toward the building. When he got close, the big doors swung open like a grocery store and invited him in. For all I knew, he was still in there, though I knew he wasn't.
      "Amen to that," I said.
      Carla looked at me and nodded.
      When I got back from work that night, there was a message from Faith. The room was mine if I wanted it.

      I knew, of course, that there were women for whom men did their little dance. But I had never actually seen it up close before Faith. Men were always giving her things--cabs, drinks, their cards. She seemed to know how to move through the world saying yes. She had a job, doing PR for a local television station, but her real vocation seemed to be reminding others what beauty God hath wrought.
      In the world I came from, landlords were not people who cared, but now that I was sharing an apartment with Faith our tub was getting recaulked, we had screens on all the windows, we were not expected to just live with that funny gas smell. In my old world, if you told your landlord that you'd seen signs of mice under the sink and heard something skittering across the floor at night, he would have asked what you thought he looked like, an exterminator? But Wayne, our landlord's son, said he wanted to come by and "have a look at the problem."
      I saw him out my bedroom window a few days later, walking toward the building. He had a paper bag with him; he folded over the top of it and clamped it between his teeth while he tucked in his shirt.
      As I walked over to the door to let him in, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and thought of something my mother used to say: You have such a pretty face, it seems a shame not to do more with it.
      "Hey," Wayne said when I opened the door.
      "Hey."
      He took a deep breath that seemed to signal a combination of relief and disappointment that Faith had not answered the door in a black-lace teddy after all.
      "I take it you ladies are having rodent problems," he said, making it sound like an embarrassing feminine condition. He was standing just inside the doorway, passing the paper bag from one hand to the other, looking around the room. He had one of those little beards under his lower lip that gave you the impression that the phone must have rung while he was shaving.
      "It's nothing we couldn't have handled on our own," I said. "But as long as you're here. Again."
      Just then Faith's bedroom door opened and several million pheromones swarmed into the room. "Wayne, hi," she said. She didn't walk over. She just leaned against the door frame, arms crossed. Even from the other side of the room I could make out the jut of her collarbone. Her loose pullover was pitched to one side like a ship in a storm. "I think we must be talking rats here," she said. "I'm not kidding, you should hear these guys."
      "Not that we know for sure they're guys," I put in, idiotically. Wayne stood there, nodding.
      Faith stepped over and pointed at the bag. "What's in here? Is that for us?" I could still see the half-moon mark of Wayne's teeth along the top of the fold.
      He opened the bag and pulled out a box of poison. "We've had a lot of success with this particular product." He cleared his throat. "In our various properties, I mean."
      "Oh, are all your various properties rat-infested?" I asked, but my question died without an answer, because as I was reaching for the box, Faith took Wayne's arm just above the elbow and thanked him for coming. I recognized the gesture when I saw it: how to touch a man who has not touched you first.

      A few days later, the three of us were in the bathroom together, arguing about the mice. Carla was taking one of what I thought of as her wartime showers--a lukewarm spray with the water pressure turned low enough to talk over.
      I was controlling the conversation with the hair dryer. "Poison is mean and slow," I said. "You know how it works, don't you? They die of thirst." I turned the dryer on, then flipped it off to say something else. "It's like death by potato chips."
      "I could think of worse ways to go," Faith said. She was wrapped in a towel, standing on one leg with the other one propped in the sink, shaving. Her long pale leg looked new, and so smooth I couldn't tell where her razor--a small, heavy men's model--had already been and where it was headed. I bent over at the waist and aimed for my roots.
      By the time I straightened up, the shower had gone silent. "Traps, then," Carla said from behind the curtain. "And since you're the one who's morally opposed to poison, Amanda, you can set them."
      Carla was becoming the big sister I was always glad I never had.
      "No way," Faith said. "No fucking way am I waking up to a dead rat."
      "We don't know they're rats," I said, though I was certainly no fan of the trap approach, either.
      "We don't know they're not."
      "O.K. Poison, then," Carla said. She pulled the curtain aside and our eyes met in the mirror. She was a runner, and she had that runner's body that even naked seems somehow dressed. Her joints were the most prominent thing about her.
      "I'm sure there's another alternative," I said. I turned and waved the dryer in her direction. "And if you weren't so gung ho about seeing them eat themselves to death, maybe we could figure out what it is."
      Someone had been taking a fork to my peanut butter--the telltale crosshatch of grooves was there whenever I unscrewed the lid--and I was pretty sure it was Carla, whose own refrigerator shelves were dominated by vegetables in plastic bags and fat-free salad dressings.
      "Gung ho?" Faith murmured. She shaved like a blind person, following the path of the razor with her free hand, stroking her own leg.
      Carla, still naked, put her hands on her hips, daring me. "Amanda, they are not just going to go away."
      "I didn't say they would. I said we should consider all our options."
      "You don't care," Carla said. "You'll be out of here the minute Billy gets back." This had been Carla's suspicion since I had first arrived, in a cab, all my stuff in grocery bags.
      Next to me Faith switched legs, pulling the right one down from the sink and propping the left one in its place. Suddenly her towel slid apart and I caught a glimpse of her obviously manicured pubic hair. It flashed like a rune, a sign of all we didn't know and would not even guess about each other, and then it was gone.
      "You know, this Billy thing," I started to say, but saying the words out loud was a little like going all the way in the lake after you've been standing there up to your knees. You thought you were used to it, but you're not. And then, for the first time, it occurred to me that even though I had told no one, he might have.
      "Oh, Mandy," Faith said, "maybe it's time to just forget about him." She ran her hand down my arm and her touch was cool. "What about that new guy downstairs? He's cute."
      "What guy?" I said, but I knew she meant Clark, the lawyer who lived under us. We had run into each other at a local cafe a few days before and had ended up walking home together, talking about jazz and football--subjects I could fake my way through if the trip was short. "You mean the guy downstairs? I don't think so."
      "Amanda, when you were little and your dog died, didn't your parents ever take you to the pound to pick out a new one?"
      "Faith, Billy's not dead!" Carla cried out, and for a moment I thought she knew something I didn't.
      "He might as well be." Faith swished her razor around in the sink water. "It's not like you've heard from him."
      "Since when are you monitoring my mail?"
      "Well, have you?"
      "Never mind," I said.
      "Actually," Faith said, "I ran into him the other day and we started talking and I invited him up for dinner sometime."
      "You ran into Billy?" Of course, I suddenly thought, they would have met, in one of those clubs they both would have gone to. Making conversation at the bar, a fleck of lipstick on her teeth, his arm in a cast.
      "How could I run into Billy if he's in Europe somewhere?" Faith gave me a little smile that made me cinch my robe tighter around my waist. "I ran into Clark, downstairs by the mailboxes."
      "Faith, if you're interested in him, why don't you just say so?" I could hear my voice stamping its little foot.
      "Say what? God, Mandy, I told you. I was thinking of him for you."
      "Did it ever occur to you what he might be thinking? I doubt it was Here's an incredibly attractive girl in a short skirt coming on to me, I wonder what her roommate is like."
      "I was not wearing a short skirt."
      "Never mind."
      "Mandy." Faith waited for me to look at her. Her eyes were the color of moss, of sea-washed glass, of the woods in children's books. "You think being pretty is everything. Believe me, it's not."
      Carla, who I had forgotten was even in the room, cleared her throat. "Oh, right," she said.
      "What?" Faith said.
      "Nothing."
      In the mirror I watched Carla oil her arms, touching herself the way a nurse would. I recognized something in her then that I wished I hadn't.
      Faith rinsed and dried her leg, then straightened and stretched, her shoulder blades lifting like wings. "Nobody go anywhere," she said, and left the room. Carla's lotion made the intimate, sucking sound of an animal eating. For a moment it was quiet except for that, and then suddenly a burst of sweet, sad piano music jumped through the floor.
      "Listen," Faith called from her room. "Isn't that Chopin he's got on?"
      It was a mystery to me how she knew some of the things she knew.
      "I've always loved this nocturne," Carla said. She went motionless, a coin of lotion in her upturned hand. She was leaning forward, straining to hear. I sometimes walked by Carla's room at night and saw her reading sheet music in bed, her fingers quivering as her eyes moved down the page. It reminded me of how my father, after he quit smoking, used to sit at his desk holding an unlit cigar.
      Just then Faith appeared in a short black beaded dress that was like a question to which her legs were the answer. She stood in the doorway, the music drifting up around her like smoke.
      I wish I could say that the envy I felt was no stronger than what I feel around people who can speak Chinese or understand physics. I wish I could say that any man who would love me for looking like that was not a man I wanted to love.
      "How nice!" I said. "Going ice skating?"
      "Faith, that is absolutely darling," Carla said. "Can I ask? How much?"
      "Oh, I'm not buying it, I'm borrowing it." Until I met Faith it had never occurred to me that you could actually wear something and then return it. "Think of department stores as huge lending libraries," she said to me once. "Does that make it any easier?"
      "So, what the hell," Carla said. She had her towel wrapped around her waist like some old man at a sauna, and her nipples pointed inward in a kind of pigeon-toed stance. "Are we inviting him over for dinner, or what?"

      Clark came for dinner that Saturday night. I made spanakopita, Carla assembled a kind of Mondrian salad, everything cut into same-size cubes, and Faith picked up an extravagant cake from the bakery down the street. She had gotten it practically for free, because whoever'd ordered it hadn't picked it up. WAY TO GO, MARIE! was iced in spidery script across the top.
      Clark showed up in a tie, carrying a bottle of champagne and a small wire cage. "From what Faith said the other day, I thought you could use one of these," he said. "It's one of those traps that lets you catch the mouse without killing it."
      "That is so great!" Faith said.
      "Then what do we do with it?" I said.
      "Then you take it somewhere and release it."
      "Clark, we live in the city," I said. "Where are we going to release it?"
      Faith put her hand on my shoulder. "Amanda, mice love the city. There's plenty of places they can go."
      Clark showed Carla how to set the trap. They loaded it with a hunk of my peanut butter and stuck it in the dark pantry off the kitchen. I popped the champagne and began pouring.
      Faith led Clark on a quick tour of the apartment, and Carla and I, champagne glasses in hand, tagged along. It felt like parents' night at boarding school. In Faith's room a scarf was draped over a lamp; necklaces hung over the sides of her dresser mirror. Carla's room looked like it had been decorated by nuns.
      I still didn't even have a bedspread, but Clark was clearly raised right.
      "Nice blanket," he said when he stuck his head into my room.
      Long after dinner, we were still at the table, peeling the labels off the champagne and wine bottles and playing with the melted candle wax. Clark worked over the wire champagne top with one of the attachments on his complicated pocketknife.
      "There," he said, setting a tiny ice-cream-parlor chair on the table.
      "Show us how to do that!" Faith cried.
      "Only if you show me something."
      One of the things I admired about Faith was that she always gave a man only what he actually asked for. "Watch this," she said, and twisted her napkin a few times until a swan appeared, a little triangle of cloth folded over as the head.
      "It takes a woman to pull that off," Clark said.
      "How about this?" Carla put her fingers to her mouth and let out the clearest, loudest whistle I had ever heard. "Can you do that?"
      "Mandy," Faith said, "what can you do?"
      I looked at them, the women I lived with who hardly knew me and the stranger I wanted to impress. "I was state yo-yo champ when I was a kid," I said. I had no idea where such a lie had come from.
      "You never told us that!"
      "Oh, the things I haven't told you." And then it occurred to me that I might be able to pass the truth, like a painful kidney stone, through this stream of inconsequential lies. "I can make ink from pyracantha berries. I know the secret to a really excellent pie crust. I could tell you how to get your bearings if you're lost at night."
      I felt them looking at me, half-smiling, confused. I was almost home. "I sent a man to the hospital once."
      "Well," Faith said, "you're my choice for desert-island companion."
      "Was that by accident?" Carla said. "The man, I mean?"
      Aren't most things? I had certainly not intended to find another woman's bracelet on the rug by my side of the bed, and I had not expected to sit on that news until a night when Billy and I had both been drinking.
      Billy only made things worse that night--first by lying and then by telling the truth. I didn't mean to do what I did, but I must have known that he would not hit me back. After I punched him, he put out his arm to calm me. I felt no fear. I pushed him away and when that did not satisfy me, I reached for him. I took his arm and yanked and twisted it as hard as I could.
      "More by mistake than by accident," I said.
      Carla nodded. My answer seemed enough for her.
      Somehow the conversation moved on, and eventually we all ended up in the green playground of the living room with slices of Marie's cake. Whatever her mysterious accomplishment--job or house or husband or baby--we hoped it would revolutionize her life.
      Then, for the first time since I had lived there, without warning or announcement, Carla walked over to her piano. As she got near, she put out her hand to stroke it, like someone steadying a nervous horse. Then she sat down and lifted the lid, exposing the keys. For a while she just sat there looking at them. "This feels strange," she said. I could see that her fingers were trembling, but also that she had forgotten we were even there. She began to play, finally, a piece of music I had never heard before. It was an achingly delicate song, not so much music as air, silence outlined by a few notes.
      It struck me then that Carla had a gift that had brought her pain simply because it was not a bigger gift, and in my woozy, naked state I felt I had found a key--a key I have found again and lost, found and lost, a hundred times since.
      We sat there listening to Carla play. In the pantry I heard a trap door fall. A mouse had been caught, alive. It would be our task to find a safe, hospitable place to let it go.

Kathryn Chetkovich lives in Boulder Creek, CA. She began this story 14 years ago; the best news, she notes, "probably belongs to the mouse, who --bludgeoned to death at the end of every earlier version--finally gets out of this one alive." Email kchetko@aol.com