\u201cThat man looks like a real scum bucket,\u201d said Andrea. The man entered O\u2019Malley\u2019s Pub with a white plastic bucket and placed it on one of the shaky tables. Sofia, the owner\u2019s wife, flipped her wet rag over her shoulder and peered into the bucket. \u201cHoly fuck, a baby alligator!\u201d she yelled, and we all crowded around, as many of us that could, trying to see inside. O\u2019Malley himself huddled around the bucket with us too. He turned his shoulders out to create just enough space so that another slim body might enter, and it was difficult to say if his wife Sofia noticed the invitation wasn\u2019t meant for her but for Andrea, who hadn\u2019t followed us yet to the bucket. Andrea took one glance into the bucket, shrieked, threw her hands up, and cowered under the countertop between the bathrooms, eyes shining black between her little fingers. There were seven of us crammed around the bucket, including a little blonde boy, the son of one of the other patrons, who\u2019d slid in beside O\u2019Malley and took the spot intended for Andrea, though he was too short to even see inside.<\/p>\n
That baby alligator did what we wanted it to, at least at first, in that it was itself, an alligator in miniature form, as prehistoric as we\u2019d hoped. It was green as a lizard should be, the color of a swamp, and its bulbous jelly eyes lifted above the water. It could bite, of course, and it would hurt, and we\u2019ve all heard about those jaws snapping shut and never opening, until death, death, death, and not even then, but still, it was just a baby, barely eight inches long. It was not a baby as we were all babies, where \u201cOh its eyes are like,\u201d and \u201cOh she has your mother\u2019s feet,\u201d and \u201cOh it has the hands of a drummer\u201d are fine and dandy games, when really we\u2019re just lumps of flesh sloughed from some unfinished mold. Not this baby alligator; it was already exactly what it was. It had only to double, triple, quadruple, to grow to ten times its size. It was only a question of scale. How much enormity would it take until that same baby alligator was a full-grown giant of the swamp?<\/p>\n
\u201cFeed it!\u201d said the blonde boy. It was the thing we\u2019d all wanted to say.<\/p>\n
\u201cManners, boy!\u201d said O\u2019Malley, but then his eye twitched, which was as good as a nod from him. Our breathing became heavy. Feed it, we begged, because this baby alligator wasn\u2019t moving. It was just sitting there. We didn\u2019t have all day. It wasn\u2019t that our collective sense of wonder was already spent, it was just that we had nothing more to talk about because the wonder of watching something that doesn\u2019t move is introspective, branched and convoluted as evolution itself, filled with all the metaphoric self-revelations we have whenever contemplating the immobile\u2014the patterns on floor tiles, the petals of a flower, or the ocean, for the ocean though it moves also does not move\u2014each containing patterns that reassemble as we stare at them.<\/p>\n
\u201cFeed the damn thing!\u201d shouted O\u2019Malley, and we all jumped. \u201cIt\u2019s gotta be hungry!\u201d<\/p>\n
On the other side of the bar, Andrea blushed. O\u2019Malley\u2019s wife nodded at the alligator, but did not otherwise acknowledge her husband. The man who\u2019d brought the baby alligator in his white plastic bucket (no one had yet asked him his name) pulled out an inflated plastic bag with a pair of weightless goldfish. Each had a strip of black running vertically at the edge of its tail, up to the tip, where one of them was torn. Noticing the bite mark, I felt pity for the wounded fish, and anger toward the other one. We all knew it was up to O\u2019Malley to decide. Which fish would he choose to die? If he suggested the predatory goldfish, he was showing Andrea he was sworn to justice, an eye for an eye, a fin for a life, and was sentimental toward those pitiable ones who bore the brunt of their own weaker natures. If he chose the goldfish already accustomed to being prey, Andrea might see his sadism only, and not the adherence to the natural order O\u2019Malley was trying to observe, though it was also possible that his sadism would excite her, even as she cowered, even as she watched between her fingers. Before O\u2019Malley could make his choice, the boy yelled, \u201cPut \u2018em both in so we can see which it goes for,\u201d and the man emptied the bag into the bucket.<\/p>\n
Down in the hole, the alligator\u2019s body curved against the inside of the scratched bucket. The fish swam about, past each other, past the alligator\u2019s open eyes, past the tips of its protruding teeth, but the alligator never opened its mouth. I imagined it slowly ratcheting its jaws open, micrometers at a time, barely noticeable, until its victim was surrounded by teeth, inside that mouth, waiting for that snap. How fast, how strong would that snap really be? But the two fish were just swimming in circles on the opposite side of the bucket, and the alligator hadn\u2019t moved a goddamn muscle.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, for Pete\u2019s sake,\u201d huffed Sofia, throwing her hands up.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Malley sighed, half a growl. \u201cYeah, always poor Pete,\u201d he grumbled.<\/p>\n
His wife left the circular porthole of the bucket for the smaller ones at the bottom of the glasses she dunked into the hot sink. She shook, dried, and held the glasses out before her, closing one eye and looking through each shape of glass, each a unique porthole from which to see the rest of the bar, the crooked looks of her husband, the movements of Andrea and the rest of the help they\u2019d hired to give them more time for themselves. As I watched Sophia watch Andrea watching O\u2019Malley watching the alligator, I saw him and his wife for the first time with absolute clarity. Sofia thought that by expressing her exasperation, O\u2019Malley would agree, and they\u2019d be able to storm off together, leaving Andrea in the corner by herself. But O\u2019Malley only became frustrated with his wife\u2019s frustration, so typical, so impatient, and scolded her by looking across the bar to the young waitress whom he knew really wanted to be a dancer. I wondered if O\u2019Malley would have the same realization that I\u2019d once had, sitting on a similar cracked stool in a similar dim bar: the realization that love for another can reach a dangerous paradox. Sofia\u2019s \u201cOh, for Pete\u2019s sake,\u201d and O\u2019Malley\u2019s sigh were just like my wife\u2019s \u201cJesus Christ,\u201d and my \u201cJesus Christ what?<\/em>,\u201d her expression of frustration, followed by my frustration at her frustration. Sometimes it was even the other way around. I\u2019d express an innocent frustration, and she\u2019d get flustered trying to solve it, and eventually we\u2019d be yelling at each other, in a fight that would last until sleep, as I was sure would happen to O\u2019Malley and Sofia if I kept watching. It comes from our desire to tell our lover all the things that bother us, often in sequences triggered by an immediate cause, but reaching back through time: \u201cDamn this lazy alligator, and speaking of, damn these slippery glasses, and damn these dim light bulbs, and damn the coldness of ice, etc, etc.\u201d They\u2019re only expressions of frustration translating to, \u201cHoney, darling, love, this is me<\/em>, I am being honest now; these are my unedited and uncensored frustrations, and I desire you to be frustrated with me as if we were the only two in agreement against the entire world,\u201d but this poorly articulated desire, this \u201cOh, for Pete\u2019s sake,\u201d when heard by someone like O\u2019Malley, becomes confused with the need to solve his lover\u2019s problems, to take upon himself that threat which degrades the happiness of the person he\u2019d sworn to keep happy. O\u2019Malley heard only blame, the complaint taking on the precedent of \u201cBecause of you,\u201d or \u201cMaybe if you\u2019d have,\u201d such as, \u201cMaybe if you\u2019d have been a better husband this alligator would eat the damn fish, or else you\u2019d have had the forethought to keep it out of our bar, or else you\u2019d have better prepared me, philosophically, through the course of our relationship, for dealing with so much disappointment.\u201d<\/p>\n I knew, of course, that it was not my fault that the power in my entire apartment block went out, ruining the eggs my wife had been cooking, and O\u2019Malley knew it was not his fault that the alligator wasn\u2019t lunging for the fish, as of course Sofia knew it too, but O\u2019Malley\u2019s instinct that she had no right<\/em> to blame him for something he couldn\u2019t control further aggravated him, and Sofia\u2019s knowledge that he\u2019d just take her exclamation as a personal insult further aggravated her. And so it would go, in a terrible cycle until bedtime, the bed suddenly too large and the sheets between them cold, and it would take until well into the night for her to finally articulate to him that she was simply expressing her dissatisfaction in the hopes that O\u2019Malley would acknowledge and agree and they\u2019d be again close to each other, instead of apart, as they were then, with Andrea still watching from under the wooden countertop near the bathrooms.<\/p>\n Later, after relieving the man of his plastic bucket and placing it beneath my table, I wondered if my wife and I would ever get past the argument that had sent me into that bar, into that situation where I had become the proud owner of a baby alligator I had no idea what to do with, and it struck me how two lovers\u2019 desire for both sharing and service are, and will always be\u2014at least in the moment they\u2019re expressed\u2014completely adversarial. It is with love that we enter into this paradox, and with love that we fail to overcome it. I wondered what my wife would think about living with a baby alligator in the bathtub, and how long it would take before I was the unknown man in another bar across town offering a baby alligator in a white plastic bucket to the first taker. I looked down into the bucket. The baby alligator swished its tail among the flakes of golden scales that had once been fish. It had mauled them while I wasn\u2019t looking.<\/p>\n \u201cThat man looks like a real scum bucket,\u201d said Andrea. The man entered O\u2019Malley\u2019s Pub with a white plastic bucket and placed it on one of the shaky tables. Sofia, the owner\u2019s wife, flipped her wet rag over her shoulder and peered into the bucket. \u201cHoly fuck, a baby alligator!\u201d she yelled, and we all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2247,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[71],"tags":[24],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-4zr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17573"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17573"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17631,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17573\/revisions\/17631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/h6>\n
Scott Lambridis<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"