Raised in Monterey, California, Frances Sherwood attended Howard University on an Agnes and Eugene Myer scholarship, graduated from Brooklyn College, received her M.A. from Johns Hopkins University where she was a teaching fellow in the Graduate Writing Seminars, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the author of a short story collection, Everything You've Heard is True (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) three novels, Vindication,

© Penguin

Green,

© Farrar, Straus
and Giroux

and The Book of Splendor.

© W.W. Norton

Her fourth novel, Betrayal, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. She has had two stories included in O.Henry Award Collections (1989, 1992) and one story was published in Best American Short Stories (2000). Twenty-four of her short stories have been published in magazines, her most recent in Zoetrope, Summer, 2004.

Currently she is Professor of English at Indiana University, South Bend.

Fox Hunting
Frances Sherwood

I was futzing around getting to be forty, closed my eyes, and suddenly it was "Forty, The Birthday," Janet's little apartment, homemade bread and lasagna, red wine, an ice cream cake with a ring of pink candles, my name in green icing-Cassandra Anne.

"The big F-O, galfriends."

I could envision one of those calendars in an old movie, white sheets with big black numbers, each page falling to the ground, creepy organ music in the background. Janet didn't appear to care. She sat in her canvas butterfly chair dreaming off like Forever Young was something she learned in graduate school, but I had Mila's attention. She stubbed out her cigarette, lifted her chin.

"Nothing to do but chase it, bag it, bring it on home."

So that August, every Friday night we hit the trail, following local two-bit bands with names like Way Past Tense, Off the Wall, the Skintones, Web of Lies. The feeling of hurtling along in my '89 Dodge through Indiana towns named Mexico, Peru, and Lebanon was kin to crisscrossing continents. The asphalt underneath the tires unfurled like silk and waves of corn parted before us as if in homage. We screamed, windows rolled down, wind whipping our hair, "out on the highway, born to be wild."

However, the night we entered the parking lot of the Ratz Blues Club, a little stoned, a little drunk, Janet in a T-shirt that said HANK for Henry Miller and Mila's big rosy tits showing through her T-shirt as if they had something important to say, and I, lone wolf Black woman, bearing a picture of Malcolm and the words "revolution by any means" on my chest, well, by that third Friday out on the hunt, we were a little worn at the edges, I say to them, I say:.

"Let's go home, hang out, watch some TV, eat some popcorn, shoot the breeze."

"Don't be such a party pooper, Cassandra Ann."

I had known Mila twenty years since Introduction to Creative Writing that first day while the professor was ranting on about the risks and responsibilities of fiction, old Mila, sitting in the back row, outlined her first story, wrote her seven haiku, and organized her purse. In our current enterprise, Mila said all she wanted was to meet somebody, get laid, get married, have a kid, file for divorce, get it over with.

Janet I met in two classes during our sophomore year-Ethics and German. She never raised her hand, did elaborate dreamy doodles in her notebook, and hummed Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," under her breath. Autres temps, autres moeurs.

Admittedly my taste for fox hunting that summer was blunted by the fact that I was still carrying on with Gunter. We started up when I became the new temporary secretary moved over from English to German, still at the college of my only possible choice, our city college, Indiana University at South Bend. As my German professor, twenty years before, Gunter ran the class like the conductor I had riding the train from Paris to Munich. The conductor in full-dress train conductor uniform insisted that I sit in my assigned seat although the car was empty. After the German class was over and I had traveled more, lived longer, I saw another side of Gunter. Beneath the bluff and bluster, I discovered a Gunter more like the French conductor I had going back to Paris. In shiny slacks and fraying sweater, this conductor told me there was an extra bunk in one of the compartments, no extra charge. Merci, mon ami. The compartment was in the throes of a party, it turned out, everybody in their underwear not to wrinkle their good traveling clothes-a grandmother in her slip, her husband in shorts who contributed bread and wine, two German students, one who looked like Janet, with a tin of sardines, and I, the American, with a chocolate bar.

My mother once told me that when she and my father were courting she would miss him so much late at night she would run from her house to his house barefoot in her pajamas. It could have been like that for me, too. Except, of course, Gunter lived in his house with his wife and little kid. Furthermore, he told me that people in his department were just waiting for him to stumble, and if anybody had anything on him he was kaput in academia. We kept our little romance quiet.

Mila, a hard headed woman, voiced concerns about Gunter not related to his standing in his department: "Rein in your passion, Cassandra, rein it, train it, teach it to mind its manners. Remember that Blond Beast is married."

Janet was sweet, let use her apartment. I liked being in her little nest, seeing all her stuff-her apron thrown over a chair, her apple green dish towels. She had a tea pot which she kept her Tarot cards in. Janet herself was like a Tarot lady, the one of the lithe young lady in a white diaphanous dress, curly yellow hair holding up the World. Everything about Janet was pretty. Her sheets had a pattern of green ivy and behind her bed was a picture of a unicorn enclosed by a fence in the middle of the forest. She had The Little Prince, The Secret Garden and other neat books wedged between two Buddha bookends. For Gunter, Janet's place inspired sloppiness. During our little trysts, he slapped around barefoot, ate in his shorts and T-shirt at her white kitchen table, favoring sausages and cheap beer, sesame crackers and black bean dip straight from the tin. Crumbs in the bed were fine for him.

Gunter aside, and I knew Mila was right, that nothing would ever come of it, we three friends on the prowl found ourselves at the Ratz Blues Club on that August Friday Reggae Night, not getting a minute younger. By our second pitcher, the band was still not there, and just as we were about to leave in walks the drummer braided to the nines, and a that yellow sleepy-dog look of ganja, ganja ganja gin on his silly face. One look and Janet's Nordic hormones started popping like peppers in the fry pan.

"He's the hottest man I've ever seen."

"Are you out of your mind, Janet, that man is ugly."

"You know, Cassandra Anne, " Mila said. "Janet has Meal Ticket written all across her forehead."

My mother, who knew nothing about Gunter, Chair of the German Department, but did know Janet, Mila and I were going to clubs, said I had no business at my age looking for men in a bar with a bunch of white girls.

"Who are you going to find in a bar except losers?"

"So who are the winners, Mom, tell me."

"You ladies be nice." My father was reading a book called The Adventures of Zoltana. Zoltana wore a tight little space suit with epaulets on her shoulders which could turn into wings. In the year 2050, she saves her people from devastation, we, earthlings, by leading us in diagonal ascent straight to the fourth planet. Kind of a homecoming, my father said, since we really are Martians to begin with.

"I was nice last night," my mother answered. "Why doesn't she use the internet. There are lots of eligible men on the web."

"Flyboys?"

Before Rasta Man Bouncy of the Ratz moved in with Janet, Gunter and I had reached a point that he wanted me to buy a decent bed meaning one with bars. In the Sears catalogue, they looked hospitalish, not the least bit sexy. Once, a long time ago, I was in D.C. General hospital during my unsuccessful foray into government work and I had to use the phone on the floor below, where the sick prisoners had their rooms, not only shackled to their beds, but enclosed in rooms with bars on the doors. That didn't stop them from calling out: Hi honey, want to dance? Who is that, Cass? Just a prisoner, Mom. When are you coming home to South Bend? I did come home. I missed my family, my friends especially.

Left to my fantasies the two weeks Bouncy lived with Janet (Mr.Musicman emerging in the afternoons when it cooled off to ride Janet's old red Schwinn on the sidewalk, lazy eights, swooping dips), I created my own Eternal Return. In it, Janet's apartment becomes one of those timeless lovers' rooms you see in foreign films, the sun spilling between the wooden slats like spun taffy, fat pigeons in the piazza below, Gunter lisping hotly in my ear, liebschen, liebschen. Had to be a dream because night was falling and I was still across the street in the lilac bushes watching Janet in her summer dress moving between the sink and the stove, her radio bringing you twilight jazz, WVPE. Still later the candlelight in her bedroom threw shadows against the wall-black cups and elliptical plates-and the whole street except for the funnel of dancing insects around the streetlight was enveloped by sleep.

Two weeks and then just like that one day Janet comes home to a note on the table.

Left for a Big Gig in Canada, nice meeting you, take care, Horatio (Bouncy) Marshall Manley III.

Nice meeting you? What utter nerve. By then it was late August, fall looming on the horizon like failure on a black horse come to town. Thereafter, Friday nights after a week of work at the Selmer Instrument factory in Elkhart where she made E keys on the flute assembly line, Janet retired to her bed. She said her roadie days were over. She had had it. And no wise cracks from the peanut gallery. But I did try to cheer her up.

"He is not worth your little finger, Janet," I said one night when Mila and I called around with a bottle of wine. "You can do better than Bouncy.

"All the princes you entertain," Mila observed.

"You know, Mila, I don't appreciate the aspersions you are casting. Gunter is okay."

"He's fat."

"A little husky is all, big boned, heavy set."

"Husky, Cassandra?"

"All muscle, Mila."

"All muscle married, Cassandra."

"And where can I do better?" Janet perked up. "New York?"

"Alaska."

Mila looked at me as if for once I had a point, like she was going to fetch her parka, bundle up her pets, book for cooler climes.

"I can't think of Alaska. My life is a mess." Janet sniffed.

"Bouncy was in a band, for God's sakes, open your eyes, Janet."

"I do have my eyes opened, Cassandra, "Janet said, "and you know what I see, I see three chicks running around saying the sky has fallen in, and guess what, it has. You don't get it, do you?"

"You can finish your Ph.D.," I said.

"You can go to hell."

Mila recommended a kitten. Mila had so many animals, her vet gave her a discount like Catholic School, and for everybody's checkup, we would have to go with her in the car, Rover-Bover got the whole front seat, sentry on duty, Janet struggled with Mr. Mick, who got car sick in back next to me with Count Constantine who farted freely wherever he be.

"I think I am going to make some bread." That's what Mila did when there was nothing else to do about something.

I sat down on the vintage couch trying to be rational. I wanted to think the whole thing through. At one time I was a student of German, wanted to read Goethe and Schiller and Rilke in the original, Mila was Art and Janet, Music. I was going to write a novel before I was thirty, have adventures. Now I was a secretary, Janet worked in a flute factory, and Mila was an art therapist at Portage Manor, a facility for the indigent old, schizophrenic young and the mentally challenged of all ages. Portage Manor had their own corn field, as if Indiana needed more corn, their own recreation room, and once a week they were taken to the swimming pool and got a barbeque. When I went to their Valentine party, I never met so many happy people in my life. What did they know that I didn't know? Plenty, it seemed.

"At least we don't have AIDS," Mila said cheerily from the kitchen up to her elbows in flour. We had gone to Public Health for our tests, holding each other's hands, then telephoned each other with the result, A-O-K code for negative. Speaking of which I could not telephone Gunter at home, which I was dying to do right that moment. Rather I had to call his office voice mail at all hours of the day and night, and got in the habit of leaving special messages. I want to go to Vienna on the train, Gunter. All day I am traveling while reading Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Wunschlosses Ungluck. It is a small leather-bound book with a red ribbon bookmark. I am wearing a straw hat. Actually I couldn't imagine myself that way. Janet is the "poetic" one with her delicate flower-stem wrists and little girl features. She would be perfect in the part. Mila's place was not only packed with her menagerie and layered in shed fur, but draped with drying underpants. The place had a warm, gynecological smell. I lived with my parents with all their stuff. My mom was near seventy, my dad in his eighties. I loved them, what was the big deal? Except that I could not have gentlemen guests.

So, although I knew Janet was suffering from loneliness, I went ahead and ordered the barred bed frame from the Sears catalogue, the one featured in the retro section that Gunter liked. Janet said it was okay with her, she didn't care, what the hell. When it arrived, it took Mila and me a good two hours to set up it up. We tried to be quiet about it, not rub it in that I was having a love affair, and Janet wasn't any more. Mila made jokes about me being Gunter's sex slave. Truthfully, this would be a first, and I was a little scared. The plan was that Gunter was going to be dressed up as Superman and I, naked and tied up, would need his assistance. Why Gunter could not have paid for a hotel room the two weeks Bouncy had been there, or why we couldn't have driven somewhere bothered me. Furthermore, our first session back together in Janet's apartment before the bed arrived, he took the phone into the closet, closed the door, called his wife.

When he came back to bed, I said. "You are in the doghouse." Then I poured my beer over his head.

"Bow, wow," he replied, dribbling his beer over me.

Later when I was at my desk in the department, he leaned over, smelled my hair, put his big hands on the sides of my head. He smelled of Fruit Loops. Then he went into his office, telephoned me to tell me all the great things he was going to do to my body next Wednesday. That made me feel like going under my desk, having a good cry it was so beautiful. I wanted to call Janet at work, tell her, but that would have been cruel.

The bed all set up, Wednesday afternoon arrived. Janet was at work, and Gunter had gotten into his skintight Superman suit. He was balancing on Janet's rolltop desk, prepared to take a leap to the bed as if he could really fly. I was naked, all tied up, just like he wanted.

"Superman, save me, save me," I whimpered my lines.

Gunter took a big jump, and plop, he fell on the floor, hitting his head on the iron bars of the bed. I tried to get a look, but couldn't stretch my neck that far.

"Gunter, mein Herr, sitzen Sie auf."

No answer in any language.

"Gunter, stop play-acting."

Not a peep.

"Gunter, Gunter, speak to me, Gunter."

Not a whisper.

"Gunter, don't die, please don't die."

I kicked and thrashed, thought of biting through the ties holding my wrists, but it was no use. I was immobilized, only my mouth free. There was nothing to do but scream my head off. Nobody heard or else they thought I was in ecstasy or they didn't care if a fellow human being was dying right there in their neighborhood. As I was giving up hope, I hear the front door open, steps.

"Janet," I cried out. "In here."

She opened her bedroom door.

"My God."

"Janet."

"You're naked." She looked at my body. "You're beautiful."

"Gunter is on the other side of the bed. He fell."

Janet rushed around, knelt down by him.

"Don't touch him," I said. "You could paralyze him."

When the rescue squad from Memorial Hospital only two blocks away pulled up at the sidewalk, the siren wailing, everybody in the whole neighborhood seemed to have gotten their wits together and was out watching. At the hospital, they confirmed that he was alive and the prognosis was more of the same, but I was worried. Already, I felt like a widow. Still in his Superman suit in the emergency room when he briefly came to, I had time enough to tell him I loved him more than anything in the world before they rolled him away for X-rays.

While Janet and I waited in the waiting room holding holds, I had nothing to say. A kid with an asthma attack was rushed in to get oxygen. A man with a dog bite kept saying he would have to ten rabies shot in the belly and he was seriously fucked. When Gunter's doc came down the hall both Janet and I jumped up.

"Is he. . .?"

The doctor called Janet Mrs. Weiss. Who was I supposed to be, I wondered, the maid who loves her white family like that stupid woman in "Gone with the Wind?" But no matter. Gunter was upstairs in a regular hospital room having a bowl of orange jello and watching a talk show about sexual harassment in the workplace in an outfit that looks like a big bib. They had cut off his Superman gear, which apparently was described to the nurse as a dress rehearsal outfit for his son's Halloween.

"Gunter?"

"Cassandra," he whispered. "My wife will be here any second. Between us, it is fertig, finito, fini, finished, but you are not fired."

"Fuck you, Gunter, Superman wasn't my idea."

"A bad idea," he agrees, but still I was the one who was fertig. Genug, already. I hated him, hated his eyes, hated everything about him.

"I never loved you," I said.

Back at the apartment, while I was contemplating sexual harassment charges in the workplace, we mourned my loss with a bottle of Michigan wine. It reminded me of summer, the summer of our innocence, when we were driving around hoping to meet somebody. Mila suggested it might be just desserts to Gunter if we take the bed down, reassemble it in Gunter's yard, put crepe paper streamers on it, balloons.

"I can envision it," she said. "A lone, iron bed as if on a prairie somewhere or in a dump, an artifact, a skeleton, an iron lung, a trap, a sign, an echo. The End of Romance in the Heartland."

Janet and I were not in the mood for metaphors. My loss of Gunter reminded her of her loss of Bouncey. It has all come back to her in a rush, how he simply left town, and she had nobody.

"His wife will wake up," Mila continued, "Look out the window. 'Gunter, what is that?' "

"There's no hope for us," Janet says. "We've been undone."

"I think Janet needs to do some shots to cheer her up," Mila suggessted.

"I don't want any shots. I want my MTV."

Mila took that as a command to run over to her room to get the Cuervo and lemons. Then we put on a Rickie Lee Jones' song, "Ghetto of my Mind."

"At least we are not pregnant," I said.

"I want to be pregnant." Janet moaned.

"Don't sweat it, Janet, sixty year old women do it now."

"Cassandra Ann Smith, what do you have for a heart, a rock?"

"At least it's not a clock, Mila Avarado."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

Janet started to bawl, made for her bed.

"Oh, baby, I'm sorry."

"See," Mila said. "See what you did?"

"I didn't do anything."

"Put her in bed," Mila said. "Tuck her in. I'll get some tiramisu."

Mila ran out to the bakery. I got Janet into the sex slave bed, took off her shoes and socks. I pulled off her jeans, her blue shirt. She was wearing a chain with a little dove on it. No bra, her breasts like a girl's. How small she was, like a little bird; her collar bone could be snapped at a press. I could choke her easy.

"The nightgowns are in the top drawer."

I knew. One day, when I was there with Gunter, I accidentally opened the drawer. I opened all her drawers while Gunter was in the shower taking up the whole stall like the pig he was. I saw Janet's flimsy night garments, lacy, little things like folded angel wings, and I found a bottle of perfume-CoCo Chanel's Chance, sprayed on my wrist and bottom. I checked out her jeans and her two blue chambray work shirts, her child-size flip flops, and I examined the charms on her charm bracelet. I couldn't fit into her clothes, but I lay on the bed, placed them all around me, her underpants over my face, and held onto the bottle of perfume with one hand, and her Victorian Fairy Book in another. Gunter still in the shower shouted out like Goethe dying. "Beer, Beer, mehr beer."

"Will anybody ever love me?" Janet asked me.

"I love you, Janet."

"You know what I mean."

I lay down bedside her, started to sing, "get along little doggies," then that song by Sting about "everywhere you'll go, I'll be there." Holding her fingers, I did itsy, bitsy, spider.

"Don't worry about a thing," I said, taking one of her curls in my finger, twisting it around.

She lifted up her nightgown. Her stomach was flat, but soft, and the color of brie cheese. Her nipples were the pink of puckered cheery blossoms. I brushed one of them with my thumb. It got hard. Her eyes got bigger, and her breathing picked up.

"What is going on here?" Mila was standing over us with the box from Macri's bakery. "What the hell? What are you two doing?"

"Cassandra is a lesbian," Janet said very quickly as she jerked down her night gown.

"I am not a lesbian." I stood up. "No way. I have spent my life chasing men."

"Maybe you should go home, Cass." Mila said like a creepy school teacher.

"Maybe I should."

I looked down at Janet. "I didn't mean anything."

"I think it best that you leave, Cass."

"I'm going home," I said.

Mila went down the stairs with me.

"You shouldn't have kissed her," she said. "She's fragile."

"I didn't kiss her."

At home, I didn't have to say anything to my parents. They knew I wasn't in a good mood. They each gave me a hug, and my father settled down in his chair with his Zoltana book, and my mother said she would run me a hot bath.

"There is a little nip in the air. Halloween is just around the corner," she said, sitting on the rim of the tub.

I went into the bedroom, took off my clothes, looked out the window. The grass was as brittle as straw. Some damn crickets were singing their hearts out. Long time ago in girl scout camp, we played Wedding Night, and everybody giggled and squirmed, but then camp was over and you went home, and then we grew up. I walked about our living room in my bathrobe and slippers, handled my mother's hand-painted Russian Easter Eggs, her Mexican donkey from Ensenada, straightened a picture of Martin Luther King and another one of JFK. On the side table were photos of cousins, aunts and uncles. My Dad's books were piled by his chair, my mother's wedding china was in the cabinet, our TV in the entertainment unit. I tried to gather everything to my mind, take comfort from familiar objects. Hell, I wasn't a lesbian. I was a Martian. Where was Zoltana when I needed her, Zoltana, who will save her people from this cruel planet?

© Frances Sherwood