The Animal Hour by Andrew Klavan Page A

to watch her backside move.
    By the time he reached the avenue, he was imagining having sex with her. Not just sex—a whole way of life together—the way of life he figured would go with a girl who looked that way. He pictured them in an A-frame cabin in the Colorado Rockies. She was on her back on a bed of bearskins. Naked, she was spread wide: a naturalist, abandoned. He had dropped a load of freshly hewn wood just inside the door and stripped off his own jeans fast. He was still wearing his sweater as he ploughed into her. There was frost on the windowpanes. Snow on the misty mountains outside.
    He was walking down Sixth now, approaching the library on his right. His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. His chin was on his chest and his straight black hair was bouncing on his brow. He raised his eyes from his sneakers as he thought about the blonde’s lusty cries. Before him, the low buildings of stone and glass faded away toward a crisp blue sky. The bright day made him squint. The hangover had made his eyes feel raw.
    He riffled his lips as he humped down the avenue. The taste of solitude was in his mouth again, the weight of it was in his belly.
    â€¦ desolate and sick of an old passion.
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head.
    Shit, he thought, with a heavy sigh. Julia had been blonde too. She had been big and athletic too with that way of flinging herself open to him. Flinging her head back, letting loose with those abandoned howls. He thought about how he had finally lost her: because he had made it with a boy in the river near their house. The kid was no more than eighteen, nineteen. Frail bodied and white skinned. With faraway, dreamy black eyes. Yea, I was a moron and shot my wad. The kid had been sitting on a rock near Perkins’s swimming hole. He had been sitting there naked and dripping. He had been reading Leaves of Grass , holding it open on the rock. When Julia came down the forest path and found them, they had been locked together in the deep water, turning and turning in the current. Perkins’s arm was wrapped around the boy’s chest, the boy’s head was thrown back on Perkins’s shoulder.
    â€œI thought you were trying to save his life!” Julia cried out to him later.
    â€œHe was sitting naked on a rock, Jule,” Perkins said. “He was reading Whitman, for Christ’s sake! What was I supposed to do?”
    Somehow this argument had carried exactly no weight with her. She had stood and glared at him, her arms crossed on her breasts. Tears streamed steadily down her sunburnt cheeks. He had never seen her cry before and it razed him inside, turned him to ashes.
    â€œIt’s just the desperate things you do to keep from loving me, Oliver,” she said finally. “I can’t stand it, all right? I really can’t stand it anymore.”
    Just now, just as he remembered this, he was passing under the Jefferson Market Library. It was a storybook castle of a place. All red brick towers and battlements rising out of the low-flung Village mini-malls. Stone spires and gray-metal roofs. Turrets and Gothic tracery around stained glass. A peaked clocktower with four faces rising over all. It was an appropriate reproach to him, and he thought: Look on thy workspace, ye dickhead, and despair.
    He was supposed to write his poems here. It was part of a grant he’d won with The Animal Hour. Along with giving him some seven thousand dollars, the state rented him a small workroom in the rear of the library. He even got a key so he could go in after hours. He did go in: every day; and at night, too, sometimes, when he wasn’t tending bar in the café He sat alone at a small metal desk hemmed in by metal bookshelves. Barely a foot of free floor space to pace in. He sat hunched over his notebooks, with his loneliness perched on his shoulder like the Raven. He wrote bad lines of poetry and threw them away. Day after day. Night after night.
    He