Cryogenics

All he wants is dinner, is that so much to ask? Healthy Choice or Hungry Man, Adrian Bull has no preference. He misses her cooking, the indecent aromas of paella, basil, elephant garlic intoxicating him after work. Misses the way her perfume swirls around on his tongue like a fine wine, wants to drink in the bouquet of her hair after she's been baking. It's the last straw when he plunges his hands into the abyss of Doreen's chest freezer and pulls out a stiff skunk.

He doesn't know how long it's been in there, hidden under the bags of peas and carrots. She could have buried it months ago, after that first fight they had when Mrs. Dody next door called 911, or she could have hired someone to plant it yesterday. Hard to tell. Doreen can say she hates your guts with a beatific smile, make you feel lucky to be dumped.

He hasn't been paying that much attention anyway, mostly nuking the first frozen entree he finds, washing it down with plenty of stout dark. Goddam Doreen, he thinks, finding a beer, twisting the cap, flicking it on the floor.

Before the skunk turned his appetite to shit, he'd been so hungry he could eat the cat, if he still had one. Doreen took Nick, his twenty-pound rat catcher when she moved out last week. He was Adrian's cat to begin with, but she had the cat carrier and now he had a chest freezer as big as his Land Cruiser. Nick loved to fetch those bottlecaps.

Earlier, as February's five pm darkness had clamped its jaws around the evening commute, Adrian deliberately looked away from the fast food drive-throughs, coming onto him like hookers. He had more virtue than this, he'd told Hal, his best friend and drinking partner. No way would he lower himself to the loneliness of Wendy's on a Friday night.

Now he has to dispose of the skunk, which in spite of the snow flurries out in the city night, has begun to thaw slightly. Adrian is getting more pissed every minute and he feels a little weak in the knees, from hunger (he skipped lunch for a power meeting) and because he knows this is how Doreen wants him. His head throbs in cadence with the low hum of the freezer, which by now sounds as if it is her mouthpiece. The green light on the front of it glows alien green, watches him like a voyeur. She is an apparition, speaking through a white Kenmore energy saver.

"It's so not fair," she pulses to him. "I look at food and it jumps right on my hips. You've got a tapeworm." Doreen actually said something like this to him once, when he thought she was a goddess, resplendent with dark eyes and hair and the biggest breasts he'd ever seen.

"Voluptuous and smart and a damn good cook," he'd replied, licking at her fingers after dipping them in pesto. Doreen let him, but later said all he thought about was food and fucking.

She's right. He's one of those A-types with a racing metabolism, and she knows it. His Italian/American nostrils flare to get more oxygen in, and he has the habit of raking at his wavy hair when he's on deadline. His thin narrow shoulders always hurry toward the next challenge, the next stoplight, next chance to pull her onto the floor for a quickie. He talks too much, gets too much done at work, all the other guys in sales hate his guts. People person who never sleeps, that's what she said before she moved out. For ten years Adrian used her like a rechargeable battery. He fed on her, invented himself to her, gave himself a leg up by standing on her stable sturdy back. He marvels that he remembers all of her tirade.

But she could pout her lower lip in that way that always aroused him, present him with a plateful of her osso bucco and send him to heaven. Too bad she turned on me, he thinks. Too bad she's a beautiful bitch, he tells the skunk, which he has laid down on yesterday's newspaper.

The black and white tail of the dead varmint has pointed itself into a plume. Adrian wonders if she put it in there alive, whether she would have the mercy to kill it first. He can't see any wounds. The skunk's face reminds him of an old woman's mink stole, the kind with the head still attached.

Perhaps she knew it would be kinder to anesthetize the animal into a slow deep sleep brought on by hypothermia. They say it's almost pleasurable to die this way, you slip away painlessly, thinking about how you forgot to unplug the iron before you left home. Adrian almost wishes he could crawl inside the freezer himself.

He looks at the skunk again. All four legs are still straight up in rigor, even though the body is thawing. Its unique and unmistakable stink begins to fill the room and Adrian gets a black plastic trash bag from the cupboard above the freezer. He wraps poor Pepe (he's already named it after Bugs Bunny's pal) in three days' worth of newspapers and cinches the trash bag tight with duct tape. When he goes out to the dumpster he's glad it's much closer to Mrs. Dody's place than his.

Slushy snow slicks the walk and stairs and Adrian steps carefully. The streetlights converge up the hill, growing smaller in the distance, stars in a far away galaxy. It reminds him of the time he and his father, Big Tony, and his brother, Little Tony, had gone hunting in the woods, miles up some old logging road. He hasn't thought of it in years. He was only thirteen. Now he remembers that in between scraping dung from his boot soles and having to eat beef stew out of a can, there'd been a skunk.

It had somehow found its way into the tent, walked across their sleeping bags in the middle of the night. His father and brother knew to keep still, just let Mr. Le Pew keep on going, but not Adrian. He'd screamed, leapt up like he was on fire. The skunk did "what comes natural," Big Tony had said between snorts and choking sounds, and they all had to go home early, reeking because of the spray.

Little Tony wouldn't let it go, gave him grief about how Adrian ruined the whole trip. Little Tony got mad, called Adrian Skunkie because his favorite shirt had to be burned, griped about the stupid tee for weeks. Adrian stayed out of Little Tony's way and vowed never to touch tomato juice again.

Now he needs to juice his hands at least, but of course he has none, never touches the stuff. He settles for Bloody Mary mix instead. He holds his dripping hands up like a surgeon after scrubbing them for ten minutes, but the odor is still there. Sonuvabitch, he says. I'll kill you, Doreen. He misses dinner altogether, puts on Pavarotti and sleeps in his clothes.

She comes to him, strokes at his shoulders, lulls his heart into beating too fast. "Doreen," he murmurs, and she nestles against his chest. They are curved around one another like nested Russian boxes. Adrian feels so secure.

And hungry. His insides make noises and gnaw at him. Just touching her makes his mouth water for some of her homemade paesano, the ciabatta she learned to make from his own mother's recipe. Doreen's own family was second generation Turk, but there had been plenty of Turkish occupation in Roman history. Besides, she was a fast learner, so eager to please.

They had met in a Laundromat, in college. She was finishing up a master's in linguistics and he was struggling through business school. He had deliberately thrown his wet clothes into her dryer, to attract her attention.

"I positively love your silk boxers," she'd said.

"You like Chinese?" It was all he could think of to say, but he would add the laundry come-on to his list of stuff that worked.

It had been smooth and seamless, somehow Doreen and Adrian magically glued themselves together. They were inseparable, and Adrian dropped out.

"Business degrees are a dime a dozen," he told her. "Make more money selling cars than kissing some corporate ass."

"I love your ass," she said, and Adrian knew she was the one.

So he taught her to cook. Adrian had watched his mom and his grandmama and Aunt Francesca stand over the stove for hours every day of his childhood. He begged them to share their secrets with Doreen. His mother did so only after she met the girl, fell in love with her captivating smile, musical voice. She was not Catholic and they were not married, so the family parted with their recipes a little grudgingly. Somehow, Doreen had made them all look the other way about such impropriety.

After she had won the hearts of his family and his stomach was happy with what she prepared, the two of them would feast upon each other, sometimes for days at a time. He had never before, nor since, been so satisfied.

He reaches out to fondle her. Her skin has turned cottony, dry and impersonal. Adrian wakes and is holding his pillow, but he can still see her, standing at the foot of the bed.

"Fool," she says, and fades into darkness.

Adrian throws the pillow after her, but instead it hits the top of his dresser, knocks over a bottle of cologne.

Adrian gets up and trashes the leaking bottle. "Whole damn room stinks of her fucking CK," he says. He wishes Nick were here, for comfort, to hold onto instead of a pillow. At least he would have fetched the top of the perfume vial, which seems to have rolled under the bed. Adrian goes out for a smoke. Doreen never allowed him to smoke in the house.

He lights a Kamel Red and wonders what he can do to get her back. "I need you," he says to the night, smoke leaking from his nostrils in thin trails. "I'm starving here." He can hear that freezer out on the service porch, humming away.

He wants her so much that he calls in sick. In his boxers he goes out to get the paper, and he can see Mrs. Dody peeking out from her curtains, her eyes angry slits. The skunk smell hangs in the still morning air, frozen there like the fingers of the tree branches. "Ice storm last night," he thinks. Across the street, a huge limb crashes down under the weight of the ice, blocks the sidewalk. That's what he feels like too: heavy, blocked.

Maybe he should do something dramatic, he thinks. "I should poison Nick and put him under the hood of your goddam car," he says to the freezer on his way inside. "I can't have him, nobody gets him. How about that?"

"Fool," she purrs.

"I can't believe Doreen would do it," Hal says. Adrian meets him every Thursday after work for happy hour. It's the only day Hal's wife lets him out. He sips his domestic beer and cracks peanut shells, gets hulls all over the front of his shirt.

"You don't know," Adrian says. He'll be damned if he'll eat nuts in a bar.

"What? That she's crazy about you? I know that much or hell must have froze over."

"You could say that."

Hal laughs, and then chokes on a peanut until Adrian slaps his back. The woman across from them makes a face and mouths the word "loser." Hal ignores her or maybe he doesn't see. "Goddam you're a comedian," he says.

"Whole thing reeks," Adrian says and they both start in again, laughing so hard they're practically in tears.

"So what's your plan?"

"I called but she hung up on me. When I asked her she acted like a virgin. Didn't know anything about it. My ass. I'm getting Nick back. That's my plan."

Hal looks disappointed, brushes peanut shells from his crotch. "You wuss. Least you could do is send her a microwaved gerbil. Gwen ever tries shit like that, she better watch out."

"Doreen's not Gwen. Not even." He imagines Doreen naked on the bed, her breasts fragrant loaves of foccacia bread. She smiles, beckons. She's only got one gleaming green eye.