“No deal.” She shakes her head vigorously.
“Emma, do you know how much sick leave I’ve piled up?”
“Don’t threaten me. Don’t you dare.”
“Tomorrow you will receive a letter from a prominent board-certified health care provider,” I say, “attesting to the seriousness of my condition, namely chronic colorectal diverticulosis. By the time my recovery is complete and I am deemed able to resume a full work schedule, Mr. MacArthur Polk will be worm chow, darling. An intimate of maggots, to steal a phrase.”
Emma stands up, fuming and spectacular. “You’re unbelievable, Jack, getting a doctor to lie for you!”
Murkily I confide to having heavy connections in the gastrointestinal field. “But give me ten days on Jimmy Stoma,” I say, “and I’ll go see Old Man Polk at once.”
“A week. That’s all you get,” Emma relents. “And we never had this conversation, understand? I was never here.”
“Right. And you never ogled my bare alabaster calves. Hey, I’m about to pulp some oranges—stay for juice.”
“Rain check,” Emma says curtly.
At the door I hear myself thanking her, for what I can’t imagine. She pockets the reading glasses in favor of snazzy blue Ray-Bans, new driving shades. “Look,” she says. “I really am sorry about that a-hole remark.”
“Nonsense. We’re bonding, that’s all. We’re a work in progress.”
“Juan says you keep a lizard in your kitchen freezer. Can that possibly be true?”
“An extremely large lizard, yes. Would you care to see?”
“Under no circumstances, Jack,” Emma says with a guarded smile. “Though I wouldn’t mind hearing your version of the story.”
“Maybe someday,” I say, “when I’m not feeling so puny.”
11
When Anne moved out of my apartment, Carla gave me a baby Savannah monitor lizard. She said I wasn’t responsible enough to take proper care of a puppy or a kitten, or even a parrot. Lizards require no companionship, only grubs, water and sunlight. “Even you can manage that,” Carla assured me.
I named him “Colonel Tom” because he joined the household on January 21, the anniversary of the death of Colonel Tom Parker, the man who made a king of Elvis Aron Presley. Carla provided a terrarium and a starter bag of mealworms, which Colonel Tom the lizard gobbled down in three days. Quickly he advanced to crickets, palmetto bugs and beyond—hunger incarnate, a perpetual eating machine. Before long he outgrew the terrarium, so I moved him to a fifty-gallon dry tank with a bonsai tree, a water dish and a vermiculite beach.
Lizards are not strung with the high emotions of, say, a cocker spaniel. On a good day Colonel Tom’s mood ranged from oblivious to indifferent. Only at mealtimes would he respond approvingly to a human presence, blinking a cold eye while cocking his knobbed saurian head. The rest of the time he skulked inside a toy cave that Carla had found for him.
One evening, after a few beers, I took him out to show Juan, who sensibly armed himself with a mop handle. We watched a baseball game on television, and Colonel Tom lay across my lap for five innings without so much as twitching his tail. “He looks parched,” Juan observed. “Fluids, Jack, ahora!”
I poured the lukewarm dregs of a Sam Adams into an ashtray and raised it to the monitor’s scaly mandibles, and to my wonderment he gingerly extended a tongue as pink and delicate as a Caribbean snail. My lizard, it turned out, had a thing for beer. Inspired, I offered up the remnants of a Key lime pie, which Colonel Tom inhaled savagely. The frothy dollop of meringue clung to his chin like a jaunty white goatee. Juan and I were both drunk enough to be enthralled.
From then on I brought the lizard out on TV nights for beer and dessert. Sometimes Juan would drop by on his way home from work, and a few times he even brought dates to see Colonel Tom in action. The young monitor grew rapidly, soon surpassing three feet in length. The unnatural diet began to soften his prehistoric countenance and bloat his once-chiseled flanks to droopy saddlebags. In retrospect I should have recognized the transformation as plainly unhealthy, though Colonel Tom’s disposition had never been rosier. Juan swore the lizard manifested a fan’s appreciation of baseball; the fundamentals, if not the finer points. Certainly Colonel Tom was most attentive and bright-eyed when draped across my lap, but I always suspected his spirits were elevated not by the heroics of the Marlins’ bullpen so much as the promise of more pastry and distilled hops.