The Dogs of Littlefield Page 17

  Looking down from his study window, he saw Margaret Downing in a beige raincoat standing on the front steps with her black dog, clutching the leash with both hands. Her face was turned toward the budding magnolia tree in his front yard.

  She’d been walking the dog –

  That was the first thing she said when he opened the door. She’d been walking the dog and realized – it must be – that she was by his house, and thought – his magnolia! – had just thought to stop by – not stay long – had just wanted to say – hoped she wasn’t bothering him – his magnolia was so beautiful that she –

  All while he was repeating please, please, come in. Hoping that none of his neighbors had seen her standing on his front steps.

  They were still talking over each other as he conducted her and her dog past the dank stew of boots, sneakers and cleats piled in the front hall. He ushered Margaret into the living room, into the red velveteen armchair by the window, then gathered up limp New Yorkers and old Playboys from the coffee table – whisking away also a roll of duct tape and a plastic tube which looked to be the beginnings of a bong – before hurrying into the kitchen to give himself a moment to think.

  Why was she here? What did she want?

  Should he offer her something? He found a canister of stale macaroons, left over from Passover. He put three or four macaroons on a clean plate and carried the plate out to the living room.

  Her black Lab was lying across her feet. An uglier beast than George remembered, and no longer a puppy but a big fat brute with a wet-looking coat like a seal’s and a hoggish snout. Just then a sulfurous smell floated up. Flatulent, too.

  The dog growled as George laid the plate on the coffee table.

  ‘Hush, Binx. Down,’ she said. ‘He’s gotten impossible,’ she said apologetically.

  George hovered on the other side of the coffee table, offering Margaret coffee, then iced tea and finally a beer, though it was not yet ten o’clock. She said no to everything and sat up straight in the red armchair with the expression of someone who has seen a mouse but is determined not to mention it. Finally he sat down on the sofa opposite, keeping his distance from the dog.

  He’d heard about her daughter falling through the ice. It had been in the papers and even the boys had talked about it, an edge of awe in their voices he hadn’t heard in years. She could have died, they kept saying. He’d wanted to send Margaret a note at the time, an email, but he couldn’t think of what to say, and in the end had done nothing; even when he saw her at that book club meeting, he’d said nothing, shocked at the sight of her, huddled on a sofa, looking like she’d nearly died herself. Even now her skin looked sallow against the musty red upholstery of the chair, especially compared to the creamy flesh of the magnolia blossoms just opening outside the windows. She had removed her raincoat to reveal a pale pink blouse with pink cloth-covered buttons, darker pink lace at the collar. A thin gold necklace glinted at her neck and from her ears dangled jade beads set in gold filigree caps. Judging by the earrings and the lace on her blouse, her fair hair pulled back in a clip, George saw that she had arrayed herself scrupulously this morning. He did not know from whence the words ‘arrayed’ and ‘scrupulously’ had come – they seemed to have blown in through the door when he opened it for Margaret, along with whence and a few yellow catkins that now lay like caterpillars on the braided rug in the hall. But there they were, like Margaret herself, mysteriously presenting themselves to him.

  Taking a macaroon between her thumb and forefinger, Margaret gazed at it intently; a moment later she dropped it on the floor and with a sharp exclamation bent over to look for it. Her dog was too quick and, rooting around on the carpet, snapped up the macaroon while she scolded him. Next she announced she had lost her house keys somewhere in the chair and began to hunt for them, crouching down to reach under the cushion.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, in a high artificial voice. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel like I’ve been losing everything lately.’

  George stood up to help her look and a moment later realized she was kneeling, flushed and trembling, eye level with his belt buckle.

  ‘Yes!’ She held up a small silver ring of house keys.

  Staring down at the parting in her hair, he noticed that she needed to touch up her roots. Faint lines etched around her mouth; a dusty halo of fine dry hairs outlined her face; below her eyes, bluish shadows. It was not kind, or fair, he realized, to examine people so closely, and yet he could not make himself look away.

  She lowered her gaze and began playing with the keys in her hand, shaking them and saying, ‘I don’t know how – I don’t know –’

  ‘Here,’ he said brusquely, and reached down to help her to her feet.

  Her dog growled again.

  ‘I just meant to stop by. I’ve wanted to talk about –’

  They were both standing now; he still had hold of her arm. She gave a convulsive jerk, as if startling awake.

  ‘Bill’s whole firm has been shut down. We may have to sell our house.’

  George took hold of both her elbows.

  ‘I think he’s seeing things.’

  She described hallucinations Bill had been having: imagining their bed was full of bedbugs. The Christmas tree ornaments had looked to him like eyeballs. Twice he thought he’d seen his dead father, holding a bottle of beer.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Could they be manifestations of –?’

  ‘Sounds like regular nuts to me.’

  Her eyes looked bright, as if she were on the point of tears. But in a determined voice she went on, ‘What you said a few weeks ago, at the book club meeting –’

  ‘Don’t remind me.’

  ‘No, no. That’s not what I meant. I haven’t been able to stop thinking, what you told us about Poe and the unseen being with us, and fear and grief, and being hit with –’

  ‘Crap,’ he said, dropping her elbows, ‘all crap, the minute you start talking about it.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ She stared at him. ‘Oh, what am I doing here?’ She pressed her hands to either side of her face. ‘What am I doing?’ Looking so distraught that his exasperation vanished.

  Quickly he gathered her into his arms and kissed her, breathing in a floral perfume that emanated from the pink lace at her collar. At that instant, her dog launched itself from the rug, snarling, teeth bared.

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ She’d grabbed the dog’s red collar with both hands, jerking it backwards. ‘Did he bite you? I’m so sorry. Binx! Bad dog! I hope he didn’t bite you. We haven’t had him fixed yet and he’s gotten so aggressive. I’m so sorry. I’ll get him out of here.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Wait.’

  While Margaret held the dog by its collar, George snatched up the end of its leash and tied it to a leg of the coffee table. Hanging half in the air, the dog scrabbled helplessly with its forepaws, making a strange low grizzling noise deep in its throat that sounded almost sorrowful.

  ‘You can let him go,’ he told her, stepping back.

  Immediately, the dog sank down on the rug beside the coffee table. Margaret spoke to it sternly, put her hand on its big black head and told it to stay, while it rolled its muddy eyes up to look at her. When she saw that the dog was secured and would not follow them, she let George lead her across the room, holding her once more by the elbow, but now as if she were a convalescent or someone elderly. Yet when they reached the bottom of the stairs, she went up first, rapidly, easily, her black clogs almost noiseless on the worn plum-colored carpeting of the stairs, so that she was waiting for him when he reached the landing.

  Once he might have found her awkwardness exciting, even touching; but the truth was they were both at an age where it was upsetting to be clumsy and inept. She had stepped on his foot when they were maneuvering onto the bed; she’d failed to understand that he wanted her to take off her blouse herself – not wanting to hazard those cloth-covered buttons, which might be onl
y decorative. And yet something like ardor swept through him, something that felt like urgency as he pressed his mouth to hers and pulled, finally, at the pink buttons on her blouse; they proved to be real and gave way with surprising ease. Whenever he stopped kissing her she began apologizing and saying that she did not know why she was there. Several times her dog howled from downstairs and she apologized for that, too. He kissed her harder, realizing with some disappointment that she expected him to overmaster her. Eventually she stopped talking and there she was – hair loose on the pillow, eyes deep blue, the skin of her throat pulsing.

  ‘I want – I want –’

  ‘Hush,’ he said, and went back to kissing her.

  A little while later he asked, ‘Do I need –?’

  By then they both had most of their clothes off and she was making encouraging noises. He managed to locate a condom in the top drawer of his bedside table without too much fumbling.

  Her breathing quickened.

  Everything was – it was just as he liked to imagine –

  But it was then that his old enemy slipped into bed with them: the third person.

  He mounted her, he found himself reading, he hoped not aloud, from a continuous feed of pornographic bulletins that appeared to be running across the headboard. His well-muscled buttocks heaving.

  ‘Oh,’ she moaned. ‘Yes.’

  No, he thought, gritting his teeth. No.

  With a tremendous thrust he –

  A long stricken howl sounded in his ears.

  Outside magnolia buds swelled and surged magnificently open in the sun.

  Afterward they lay for a time, side by side, looking at the shifting gray and white leaf patterns thrown by sunlight on his bedroom wall, sharing a kind of collegial relief that their ordeal was over, as if they had delivered a joint lecture that was received with indifference and then had retired to a campus bar. He was surprised not to feel ashamed, but instead oddly proud of himself. It was not the end of the world. It was even pleasant, to be lying next to a woman who did not seem to mind that they had not achieved what they set out to do, but had instead been waylaid by other notions, other demands. She had not wept, either, which he’d expected given her earlier apologies.

  The room was warm and mellow, fragrant with an apple core he’d left last night on his bedside table. The bedclothes were comfortably rumpled. They were talking about first memories. She had just said something about a blind knocking against a window sash in the summer breeze (had she been reading Virginia Woolf?), and was asking whether he thought people’s lives rested, somehow, on a first memory (were all literate women possessed by Virginia Woolf?), when he heard himself say, ‘I’ve never outgrown mine.’

  Which wasn’t what he meant to say; he didn’t know what he meant and wasn’t even sure his first memory was his first memory – something about touching a dog’s rear end and having his hand swatted came back to him – but once more he felt her attention turn to him, and the heady sensation of having someone want to hear him talk about himself, mixed with the opulence of lying in bed in the middle of a sunny morning, made him keep talking.

  His first memory was of carnival lights: the Ferris wheel’s lit web of steel struts and stanchions, and below the treasure-box glow of lights against an indigo backdrop. Also the side of his father’s head, the dark curl of an enormous ear. He was being carried away from the lights, home to bed, probably, but what he really recalled – and even now the memory smote him in the chest – was watching those magical lights recede, turning and turning, as he was borne off on his father’s shoulder, his protests small and unheeded.

  ‘Pretty Freudian, huh?’

  She did not respond, but lay looking at the ceiling.

  Finally she sighed. ‘No. Not Freudian, I don’t think.’

  ‘The ear part.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘maybe just that part.’

  This was kind of her. But now he wanted her to leave. His memory had depressed him. Now it seemed more about his father’s ear than about the Ferris wheel, an image he had privately cherished. It was almost eleven. He could hear the postman clump up the front steps, arrive at the front door and stuff envelopes through the mail slot. Her dog began barking downstairs. Margaret was talking again about Bill. His job. Her worries about him. This, too, depressed George. Here he was with a woman in his bed, but all she could talk about was her poor deadbeat of a husband. He stopped listening and began thinking about his novel and the scene he had left off writing. Perhaps it was Margaret’s earlier mention of Bill’s father making ghostly appearances, but as he lay there thinking of Moses Finkle, it seemed to George that Moses Finkle was standing at the end of the bed. Wearing old gray Kansas City Royals pinstripes, tight across the waist.

  Margaret was still talking about Bill. ‘He says he feels no desire for anything. We haven’t had sex for a year. Even before that it was – for a while we tried –’

  He had so many questions for Moses. What’s it like to strike out with the bases loaded at the bottom of the ninth and hear twenty thousand fans groan in unison? What’s it like to watch the next guy hit a triple, a rocket out to left field, and in that moment know, not just suspect but know, that you’ll never be major, that you’ll always be minor league in the thing you’ve given up everything to do? Would that be enough to pull a guy out of his grave, the chance to do it all over, be better, be great?

  Moses shook his head. His blue batting helmet, scarred and blackened with pine tar, hid most of his face, but from the tilt of his chin George could read disapproval.

  Margaret’s voice had dimmed. ‘It was all – too – complicated somehow.’

  George made an effort to sound interested. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Sort of – heavy. I kept feeling it was my fault –’

  Sex in middle age is like making a matzo ball, he heard Moses Finkle say from the end of the bed. It requires a sensitive touch. Too much handling and it turns to lead. You have to put everything together, lightly.

  George sat up halfway against his pillow. My God! What a line. Sex advice from a zombie! He had to write it down before he forgot it. His heart was racing. He’d been worrying that a zombie baseball player was too derivative – Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Malamud book – but a zombie Jewish sex therapist! That was new. That was all his. No more baseball player. The whole story would have to be revised, but it was falling into place. The boy wouldn’t find a baseball card; he’d find a business card, an old faded business card, stuck to the sidewalk outside an adult movie theater in Albany. Or maybe Moses would be summoned from the dead by the boy’s grandfather, a rabbi, with a congregation full of dysfunctional marriages, to deliver a series of miraculously effective sex education lectures (‘Mazel Tov for Masturbation!’, ‘Why Make Putz a Four-Letter Word?’). The story would take place in the Catskills; Moses could come back to life in the Borscht Belt.

  Beside him, Margaret was gazing at the ceiling and slowly twining a lock of hair around one finger. She looked like she could lie there all day. He had to get to work; his fingers were trembling with the need to start typing. But could he tell her to go home without ruining the fraternal feeling that had sprung up between them?

  Already he saw her opening the door for herself and walking quickly down the front steps. In another moment she had gained the walkway, passing under the magnolia branches, and was onto the sidewalk, striding away toward the corner, the sun on her hair and the wind in her coat, that ugly black dog loping beside her. At least he should offer her coffee or a cup of tea. But then she might stay even longer. Also, he’d just noticed she had a mole on her neck she should really get looked at.

  How impossible everything always turned out to be.

  ‘Anyway, I think it is my fault –’ her voice had sunk to a whisper – ‘at least –’

  For an instant Moses Finkle lifted his batting helmet; George glimpsed a dark, admonitory face that bore a strong resemblance to old Hedy Fischman’s.

  Margaret had stopped spe
aking. She seemed scarcely to be breathing, and George realized she was waiting for him to say that he found her desirable, in spite of his earlier performance, which must be confirming her worst fears about herself. He should reassure her. He should say something gallant, something complimentary.

  ‘About what happened earlier,’ he muttered.

  For a long moment they looked hopelessly at each other.

  ‘It’s not Bill, it’s me,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m the one seeing things.’

  George sighed, ‘You and me both, sister.’

  ‘I see ghosts.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’

  ‘No, really.’ Her eyes were huge and frightened. ‘I’m trying to tell you something.’

  ‘Listen, two minutes ago I had a ghost telling me how to make matzo balls.’ He pointed. ‘Right there by the footboard. I kid you not. Matzo balls. How’s that for Freudian?’

  For a moment she looked shocked, and then bewildered, followed by angry, then sad, and as he watched each expression flit across her face, changing her features from lovely to plain to something in between, he thought how extraordinary it was that so many selves could inhabit a single person. Why was anybody ever lonely?

  As if she’d had the same thought, suddenly she began to laugh. It was an infectious sound, made up equally of despair and relief, and a moment later he began to laugh, too; it wasn’t long before they couldn’t seem to stop. They rocked on the bed, laughing and laughing, until their eyes leaked tears. Whoo whoo, they both cried as they tried to catch their breath. He was blotting his eyes with a corner of the bedsheet.

  ‘Oh, I’m going to die,’ she gasped.

  ‘Me too,’ he wheezed.

  This set them off laughing once more, Margaret snorting in a way that was not becoming and George goatishly kicking his bare legs in the air. How absurd they looked, he thought. How absurd they were. But when they had quieted a little, enough to notice the leaf shadows moving on the wall and hear the birds calling back and forth in the trees outside, he turned to her again and what happened next was not absurd; in fact, it was unlike anything he could have imagined.