He eats meat, but never in the presence of his strict vegetarian girlfriend. She would become hysterical if he ever did that, and he hates her hysteria almost as intensely as he loves her sweet, pale face, and her breasts.       She eats no animal products whatsoever, avoiding not just meat and fish and eggs, but dairy products as well, which she feels are a cruel and nutritionally needless exploitation of animals. She will not consume yeast, which is composed of tiny living creatures, or honey, which is taken forcefully and without consent from the bees.       "We need not live by force", she says, sitting on his bedroom carpet. He smiles in helpless gratitude for her; she is a crippling symphony of natural beauty sitting doing nothing on his floor.       They have both stopped seeing others, though this exclusivity is new. She has made him promise never again to eat meat, nor purchase the products of companies that conduct their experiments on animals. He has agreed with heartfelt fervor and an aching erection. She decides to celebrate his new lifestyle by taking him to the same Thai restaurant she's been taking him to three times a week for the last two months, and he serves himself the same plateful of buffet enigmas which he knows will fill and twist his intestines into a painful balloon poodle by midnight. She doesn't understand why he won't take any of the lemon grass. She's so gorgeous that he spears a huge forkful of the hated grass from her plate and chomps it in imitation of a giant tortoise to make her laugh, which she does demurely.      Sometimes while she's at work he'll make himself lunch by heating up a can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup without adding the can of water to it. He thinks it's rich and good this way, but he knows how she would feel, so he always deposits the can in his next door neighbor's recycling box in case she should drop by on her lunch hour. He is aware that if he had a job, he could report to that job and eat a tuna fish sandwich there -- every day if he wished -- without anyone caring in the least. With her it would be high treason. He tries to imagine her eating a tuna fish sandwich, but can only do so if he pictures her as a child, eating at a plastic kiddie table, her blue and purple stuffed animals keeping her company in a backyard somewhere in history. He builds her imaginary sandwich on whole wheat bread, then changes it to white. He adds a slice of American cheese, and inexplicably, a soft marzipan piglet. Her little tongue licks the brimming edges and he changes the mayonnaise to Miracle Whip. He drinks his soup and works on a song he's writing for her.       On a Sunday she goes through his closet, removing everything leather and piling it into a paper grocery sack. She trusts the disposal of these items to him, and when she has gone he pokes through the bag. The belts and sandals he simply throws away, but the two leather jackets are harder to part with. They're in fine condition and he hates to see such fond friends wasted in the trash. He decides he'll wear each one to a bar he seldom frequents, then leave them behind for some lucky drunk to find.       After several days he still has a pair of suede boots and four pairs of leather shoes. Giving the problem some thought, he suggests with tender sincerity that they give the shoes a burial.       "That's completely ridiculous," she says, and he's humiliated for having tried to second guess her.       His remaining footwear inventory consists of a pair of nylon joggers and one rubber beach thong. She buys him a pair of cotton Chinese flats and takes him to a new Middle Eastern vegan cafe that's piqued her interest. She is wearing the calico dress that gives the world a blessed peek at her magnificent cleavage. He has seen her breasts full and bare and from every angle now, and he privately guards his treasured access to them. He feels elevated among men because of it; the keeper of some glowing talisman, the finder of some lost legend. She announces that as of today she will no longer wear or purchase wool.      "Sheep were not made to be shaved like concentration camp inmates," she says. The Lebanese waiter brings humus and tabouli.       He takes a job painting houses, but at the end of one week the company owner disappears without paying. She writes a check to cover his rent and he gives her a piece of petrified wood he bought in Oregon eight years ago. He strums her the song she's inspired. It doesn't sound quite finished.      She has an old boyfriend with whom she's still friendly. Though it didn't bother him at first, he now finds himself thinking about it more than he should, torturing himself with stinging paranoiac fantasies. He imagines her slinging all manner of cruel barbs and false accusations at him publicly, then pictures her shredded with guilt once it's too late and he's gone. He imagines eating corned beef in front of her. He loves corned beef and wonders how she like it's salty surprise in his kiss.      She mentions on the phone one day that she loaned her car to the ex-boyfriend, and they quarrel bitterly over it. Later he goes to see her, bringing a little hand-painted silk coin purse. She gets angry again and has to remind him that silk comes from silk worms. At bedtime he stays, and she is utterly soundless as he makes his best love to her. He lies awake, blaming the silk purse for everything in the world.      Very late on a Saturday night he is seated at a diner booth with a girl named Becky, who he knows casually from the days when they dropped out of the same college. This girl would very much like to have sex with him, and he with her, but what he wants most from Becky is a strip of bacon from her plate, or an oily mouthful of her mountainous yellow omelet. The diner aroma floods his entire skull; he regards the house salad in front of him and wants to spit in it. He is finding Becky very appealing, something succulent added to her since her sophomore sweatshirt dowdiness. She is pretty in a thicker, pinker way as she chews bacon and talks about movies. But he's being relentlessly vexed by a popular vegan dogma -- that this woman is a carnivore and therefore her pussy stinks. He's had sex with dozens of women in his life and knows this isn't necessarily true, but he drives home by himself anyway and eats a raw Pop-Tart in his dark kitchen.      On top of the refrigerator are two warm beers. He opens one and stands listening to the sink growl. Upstairs in his dresser drawer he keeps a piece of jewelry he found; a small, single pearl on a delicate gold chain. He doesn't know where it came from, but speculates that something so frail must have been a child's item. Taking the beer with him, he goes to his dresser and studies the necklace, thinking how much he would love to give it to marvelous, perfect her, how graceful it would look on her ivory neck. Pearls are another forbidden animal product. He would be dismissed forever for such a gift. Still, he can't help feeling the pearl belongs to her already; more than that, it is his right to bedeck her. He has the urge to slip it beneath her mattress like a storybook pea; see if she can detect it's animalian presence through the bedding. He knows this won't work. She turns her futon over each week. Yet the desire to give her the pearl swells as the beer empties. With tweezers, he carefully pries the pearl from it's tiny gold setting and tucks it in the silk purse. An elegant little packet of meat byproducts. Taking the other warm beer from the refrigerator top, he drives to her house through the dark night streets.      Parking where the headlights won't wake her, he wonders now what to do about getting the pearl into her possession. The mailbox and doormat are eliminated; she'd find it and kick it away. He prods the soft grass of her lawn, pulls off his Chinese flats, lets the grass lead him around back where dried herbs hang from the porch door. The near morning is bringing dampness to the ground, and on his knees he locates the basement window with a fan-shaped chip in the lower left corner.      Focused and rodential, he quietly picks a small hole through the rusty screen covering it, ignoring the growing pink light that shows through the trees. When it's big enough for thumb and forefinger he pushes the pearl through, letting it drop with the very tiniest tick to the basement floor. Something tightens in his deep insides; he has committed an act he can't undo. He doesn't hear it roll away, and hopes it has, but now he knows that it's there -- she is it's new, if unwitting, owner.      He drives home to bed, leaves the unopened beer in the car, hangs a towel across the window to block this new and treacherous Sunday morning.      By noon he has returned to her house and sits watching while she makes them a stirfry of mandarin slices and plantain for breakfast. She is mildly allergic to cats but has two of them anyway, and the elderly gray one lounges across the kitchen table in stately repose. The scents of cinnamon and cardamom fill the room and then disperse as if by a flick of the cat's matty tail.      On the floor is the cats' food, an unpleasant tempe mash which they will ignore until desperate, preferring bugs and other huntables that scramble unexterminated in secret places. The lanky marmalade cat scratches at the basement door, and when at last she lets it go down he is seized by prickling worry. Will she hear a pearl being rolled by a paw? He imagines the cat growing giant in the basement, anticipates it's thundering leaps up the stairs where it will drop the pearl from it's loyal tongue for it's mistress to dash against the wall.      In the wicker kitchen chair she sips herb tea and a patch of sunlight from the window moves to her face. She is exquisite; so breathtakingly beautiful that it makes him want to sob, free of all dignity or control, and he senses in a moment he will. ~ © 1997 by Mare Freed This story was first published in Wings Magazine.