The Dogs of Littlefield Read online

  But the problems of Margaret Downing were all too obvious: the ennui of a loveless marriage, resulting in attempts to connect with external sources of emotional intensity: elaborate seasonal decorations; sentimental German music played endlessly on the piano; and, of course, the banal affair with a sexist male novelist, whose emphasis on sports culture epitomized the phallocentric world that simultaneously rejected and enslaved her, leading to the inevitable emphasis on youthful appearance amid the decline of middle age – blonde salon highlights, yoga classes, skin coddled daily with serums and moisturizers that cost as much as the yearly income of a bean farmer in Rajasthan – all adding up to the worst kind of social blight: the completely self-absorbed human being.

  Like the lungs of frogs, Margaret Downing exhibited unusual simplicity and transparency. One could almost see her blood circulate. In the wilderness of life, she was a view of mown lawn. She was the famous sketch from Leonardo’s notebooks, multiple arms and legs pointing in various directions, going nowhere.

  But Margaret could not be simultaneously a frog, a view, a sketch by Leonardo. Or perhaps she could, which made her something else altogether. Clarice recalled Margaret’s toast at Christmas: To all of our troubles! Margaret at the book club meeting, her pale strained face. All I do these days is worry … about everything. Margaret’s desolate voice from the other side of the dark hedge, floating in the evening air. What do you mean, it’s okay?

  And then an incident from several weeks ago: Margaret in her silver station wagon, big black dog in the back seat, stopped at a red light on Brooks Street. Margaret staring straight ahead, holding the steering wheel, tears sliding down her face. Then the light changed and Margaret drove on. What had she been weeping over this time? Husband? Lover? Her sad skinny child? Perhaps she was not completely self-absorbed. She was weeping about everything. But did it matter? To notice and weep, to worry about everything and yet do nothing in particular.

  Clarice discovered that she had spilled coffee on her steno pad. After blotting the spill with a napkin, she resumed typing. Behind her the bang and clatter of pots and dishes being washed in the kitchen grew louder, and the voices of men at the counter, grumbling about last night’s Red Sox game, grew more insistent, and the gabbling of a woman at her left, speaking into a cell phone about spending a hundred dollars on a pair of sandals she didn’t need but thought were cute but now wasn’t sure she liked, became deafening. All that noise steeped in the acrid smell of coffee, which had left an ashy taste in her mouth. She stopped typing.

  Why had she ever expected these people to be happy? Because they were comfortable?

  What a fool she had been. She had figured the people of Littlefield would be balanced. Rich enough that they didn’t worry about food and shelter and safety, but not so rich that they never worried about food and shelter and safety. Balanced. Especially because they were all in therapy, investigating their fears rationally, with the care and absorption of scientists. That, she had thought, was the secret of good quality of life. Rational balance. But instead she had stumbled onto the most unbalanced people of all: they were afraid of everything. They projected their fears onto everything. Everything they could do nothing about, but had the wit to recognize. The whole world surrounded them, a black forest crawling with beasts and creatures, phantoms, monsters.

  Such a rabble, such a throng. She stared at the unfinished paragraph of her grant proposal. She’d had too much bad coffee, she could not hear herself think.

  What had been neglected? What object overlooked?

  You are a sympathetic person.

  Her fingers trembled as she reached for her water glass just as a UPS truck lumbered by outside on Brooks Street, making the water in her glass tremble. Even the sunlight trembled, slanting through the windowpane beside her, falling warm as a hand on her bare arm.

  21.

  Soft lavender shadows stretched across the quieting lanes and byways of Littlefield; but the light, of course, was what everyone noticed. The dense honey-colored light of early June evenings, falling in broad bands across lawns, shining through the scissor-cut red leaves of a Japanese maple, illuminating cascades of purple rhododendron blooms, each leaf, each blossom with its own dusky corona of sunlight. A breeze settled into the trees, agitating the crowns. Lawns sank deeper into velvety shadow. The air tasted of wine. Such elegiac light, gilding every driveway cobble, every deck rail, gleaming along the curve of every outdoor grill. Flowing across the village and into the park, spot-lighting each milkweed tuft drifting across the soccer field, falling back just at the edge of the woods where ferns, tall and luxuriant, were joined by lady slippers and that most mysterious of plants: jack-in-the-pulpit, its knobby identity hidden under a striped curled jade-colored leaf. What force of nature could have dreamed of such a thing? The breeze picked up; the trees swooned with a deep watery rush and a bird sang out five notes like links in a silvery chain.

  Bill was fixing a supper of pasta and tomato sauce from a jar for himself and Julia. Margaret was already at Duncklee Middle School – he had just dropped her off, her car was in the shop – doing a final run-through before accompanying the chorus in tonight’s Spring Concert. Bill and Julia planned to attend the performance in half an hour.

  In the kitchen he hustled from sink to stove to counter, heating the tomato sauce in the microwave while the pasta boiled, setting out baby carrots in a bowl, finding half a loaf of French bread in the breadbox, only slightly stale. As he moved about the kitchen, he kept thinking he saw the dark shape of Binx asleep in his crate in the mudroom. Every so often he thought he heard a small groan.

  Poor crazy bastard.

  Because he did not want to get tomato sauce on his white shirt, Bill wore a blue apron he’d given to Margaret for her birthday a few weeks before. The white letters on the apron read: I’d Rather Be Playing Schumann. Ordered online, from a company that would print whatever you wanted on almost anything: T-shirts, balloons, wallpaper. He was proud of this gift idea, gratified when Margaret said, ‘Where on earth did you find it?’ When he’d put on the apron five minutes ago Julia had actually laughed.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re making dinner,’ she’d said just now, sitting at the kitchen island with her glass of milk, long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. ‘You’re a terrible cook.’

  ‘Says you. Sit back and watch the master gourmet.’

  ‘Master of mess,’ she said.

  He was feeling a little better tonight; in fact he’d been feeling a little better every day, slowly coming back to life. He’d just got off the phone with Passano, who’d been looking at office space in the Back Bay for the consulting company they might start. Downing & Passano. It looked like Roche Capital might not be kaput after all. Last week a district court judge ruled that the electronic surveillance of their computers had been illegal and recommended the federal charges against Roche be dropped. Roche was quoted in the papers saying he was going to sue the SEC. A photo of him standing outside the courthouse in his shamrock tie: ‘In the America of our forefathers, a man did not get punished for success and hard work.’ Some punishment. Six months of sunning himself on a rock in Sedona. No way would Bill ever work for that old snake again, but it would help to have Roche more or less in the clear. A few of the old clients might come back. Passano & Downing. Money would be tight, especially at first, but what could you do but give it a shot? A couple of rooms with plain white walls and some cheap furniture, two guys in shirtsleeves answering their own phones, eating subs from Quiznos at their computers. That’s the America of our forefathers.

  As for him and Margaret, oddly enough, ever since she told him about George Wechsler, they’d been getting along much better. What they’d both been dreading had happened: one of them had finally thrown in the towel and now at least they had something to talk about.

  They had a regular late-afternoon appointment with Dr Vogel now, four thirty on Thursdays. Often when they left her office they went across the street to the Tavern to continu
e talking. At that hour the Tavern was still almost empty; they sat at the back, always choosing the same dark booth, with a battered table and worn plush banquettes that smelled anciently of beer. The table top was made of rough pine planks stained a sodden-looking umber, the varnish pitted and gouged by forks and knives dropped clumsily or dug into the wood, the exposed mortise and tenon joints coming apart.

  Over the table hung a framed print of people in red jackets on horseback amid a swarm of leaping hounds. Between them a candle flickered in a greasy bubbled holder of pinkish glass. Mostly they talked about Julia – what to tell her, when to tell her. Julia had hardly spoken to Margaret since Binx had to be put down, would not allow herself to be touched, looked at Margaret as if she were a toad or a frog. She was nicer to Bill.

  Separation anxiety. That’s what Dr Vogel said.

  ‘She is separating me from my wits,’ said Margaret.

  It was all her worries about Julia, that’s what she’d been seeing, she told him, when she thought she saw those dogs. She was very cogent about it now, almost businesslike. She did not believe in ghosts. It was all neurosis. Not sleeping, not eating, the difficulties they’d been having, trying to suppress her fears – all of that had made her unbalanced, so that her mind had shown her what she was afraid to see. Just as Dr Vogel said: anxiety. It wasn’t madness – she wasn’t going mad, thank God, though for a while she’d thought she was – but only anxiety, its next-door neighbor. She was going to get a prescription. There was a certain medication. Naomi knew someone, a psychopharmacologist.

  ‘I can’t spend my life worrying about Julia,’ she said.

  But some evenings they left off talking about Julia and leaned across the battered wooden table, faces aglow from the candle, and talked about what had happened to them; they went back to when they’d first met, and the ways in which their lives had been predictable and ways in which they were still surprised by how everything had turned out. How could it be that once they’d had no idea that life could be so hard?

  He found himself listening to Margaret’s voice as he hadn’t since their early days together, when she used to talk to him about poetry and her English class.

  Oh the after-tram-ride quiet, when we heard a mile beyond, Silver music from the bandstand, barking dogs by Highgate Pond …

  ‘Is he in love with you?’ he asked one evening at the Tavern.

  ‘I think he’s still in love with his ex-wife,’ she said. ‘She might move back in.’

  ‘I thought you said she hated him.’

  ‘Apparently living with her mother has given her a new appreciation for marriage.’

  He shifted the metal-capped salt and pepper shakers on the table, sliding them next to each other and then drawing them apart. He did this several times.

  ‘So is it over, between you?’

  She sighed. ‘It wasn’t ever a real affair. More like an outside interest.’

  He’d glanced up from the salt and pepper shakers then, prepared to laugh at this small gift, this mordant joke, recognizing the way Margaret used to offer up news stories about disasters, to let him know that things could be worse. But from the stiff way she held herself, one hand at her brow half shielding her eyes, he saw the joke was too bitter to be meant for him. Her husband did not want her, her child did not like her. Even her lover preferred his ex-wife.

  So he said nothing, just watched her across the table as she tried to hide her face; she seemed impossibly lovely to him again. The graceful turn of her slender wrist, the way her hair brushed her cheekbone, skin warmed by the ruddy light of the candle.

  ‘Anyway.’ She dropped her hand and sank back, away from the halo of light from the bubbled-glass candle holder. ‘I don’t know what it was. Anyway, basically, if you want to know,’ she said, ‘I was dumped.’

  They were quiet and drank their wine.

  ‘What should we do?’ he asked at last.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘I might be starting to feel something again. So maybe we could see what happens. I think that’s what I want.’

  ‘You think that’s what you want,’ she said, putting a hand to her brow again. ‘Well, that’s something.’

  She wouldn’t say anything else after that, so he paid for their drinks and they drove home to make dinner for Julia.

  A mayfly had somehow got into the kitchen and died by the blender. After looking at it closely, Bill picked it up by a hair-like leg and was about to drop it in the trash can when its delicate semi-transparent wings caught the pale light from the window above the sink. For a moment, the whole kitchen seemed semi-transparent.

  ‘They only live for one day,’ said Julia. ‘We learned that in science.’

  He was aware of her watching him.

  ‘Isn’t that sad?’

  ‘Better than nothing,’ he said, depositing the mayfly in the trash.

  ‘They hatch and they mate. I don’t think they even get to eat anything.’

  ‘At least they get to mate.’

  ‘Dad.’ Julia made a revolted face and drank some of her milk.

  He began to saw through the loaf of bread, staler than he’d thought, relieved to see Julia making faces. She seemed unnaturally responsible these days, doing her homework, once again practicing the oboe, all without being asked. Her attempt to impose order on the troubled atmosphere at home – that was Dr Vogel’s theory. He was almost relieved when she went back to her old little-kid questions, a steady battery of best and worst. Who’s your favorite Red Sox player? What’s the meanest thing anyone ever said to you? If you had to spend the rest of your life eating only liver or broccoli, which would you choose? He always tried to answer honestly, feeling he owed her that. It was clear she was monitoring them, like a nurse watching patients’ heart rates on screens at the nurses’ station. Every hour or so in the evenings she hunted them down, wherever they were in the house, in the den off the living room, or in the kitchen talking about replacing the stove fan or why the celery kept freezing in the refrigerator’s vegetable bin. Sensing some fibrillation, signs of a skipped heartbeat, a palpitation. Prepared to resuscitate any silence.

  What was the best day in your life? What’s your worst memory?

  At last week’s session with Dr Vogel the word ‘cohabitation’ had been introduced, tentatively, by Bill, along with a financial argument for such an arrangement, one that was logical and fair. Afterward they went across the street to the Tavern, ordering beer because the evening was so warm. They were about to continue their discussion when George Wechsler walked in. With George was a short woman wearing a red sundress, dark blonde hair pulled back, oversized sunglasses pushed on top of her head; from the brisk way she pointed to a table by the front windows and the docile way George followed her, Bill figured she must be the ex-wife. Square, compact, large-busted body. Athletic calves she clearly liked to show off; on one small shapely hand an array of stacked gold rings.

  ‘We’d like a menu,’ Bill heard her say to the bartender, in a not-unpleasant bray.

  Margaret had seen them, too.

  To give her a moment to collect herself, Bill gazed up at the old print of fox hunters and their leaping dogs that was hanging above their table. He thought of the fox, not pictured, perhaps huddled in a culvert just below the frame. Long nose quivering, eyes unblinking, listening to the baying overhead, the shouts and horses shifting their hooves. The timbered low ceilings of the Tavern began to shake. It was the trolley passing outside, rumbling along the tracks.

  ‘We can go,’ he said quietly.

  Her face had gone sharp and white. Once more her hand shielded her eyes, a gesture that now seemed theatrical, demanding.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ he said coldly. ‘But I don’t want to sit here like this all night.’

  ‘Then don’t.’ Her lips barely moved.

  More reasonably, he said, ‘But I also don’
t want to leave you.’

  She said nothing. He stared for a while at the table. In the unsteady candlelight flickering through the tall beer glasses, he had the brief impression of a raft afloat.

  At last Margaret said, ‘I can’t bear it.’

  She stood up and walked past the bar to the front of the Tavern where George and his wife sat by a leaded glass window, each square full of evening brilliance, looking at laminated menus. Bill stared into his beer. What was expected when confronting your wife’s lover? His father once told him a story about a guy who’d found out his wife was sleeping with his boss. The guy drove to the boss’s house, crawled in through a basement window, went up to the bedroom and worked his way through the boss’s closet, cutting off the right sleeve of every shirt and jacket.

  ‘How Freudian,’ Margaret had said, when Bill told the story to her.

  He pushed back his chair and got to his feet.

  ‘Hello,’ she was saying to the wife, whom George had just introduced.

  ‘What a nice evening,’ said the wife politely, squinting slightly in the bright haze of the window beside her. Bill couldn’t tell by her expression if she knew who Margaret was; he could not bring himself to look at George.

  ‘Isn’t it? Just beautiful.’ Margaret’s cheeks were red. ‘By the way, this is my husband, Bill.’

  ‘Hello,’ Bill heard himself say.

  More weather-related comments were exchanged. Then Margaret was saying something about the Tavern, making a menu suggestion: the onion rings were good but the Caesar salad was limp. It was hard to find a good Caesar salad that wasn’t limp, still the Tavern could try harder, buy fresher lettuce, because who wants a limp salad. Her back was very straight and she had rested her fingertips on the back of a third chair at their table, as if she were prepared to pull it out and sit down.