Bark: Stories (13 page)

She peeked into the bathroom to see him leaning sideways with the plastic pot, water running down his lips and chin. “Are you disclosing national security secrets?”

“No fucking way!” he exclaimed. “The netis will never learn a thing from me.”

“You can take a book or leave it. There is a simple latch, no lock.” The honey-hued planes of the hutch, angled like a bird feeder, might indeed attract birds if it didn’t soon fill up with books and the clasp was not shut.

“Let’s see what you have in there already.” She moved in close to him. His waxy smell did not bother her.

“Oh, not much really.” An old copy of
The Swiss Family Robinson
and one of
Infinite Jest
. “I’m aiming for the kids,” he said. He had put up a sign that said,
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT BOOK-NOOK
:
HAVE A LOOK
. As with a community bicycle, you could take one and never have to bring it back. Dench himself had a community bike from several communities ago. “Now that
the bookstore has gone under, and with the hospital so close, I thought people might need something to read.”

In addition to the elegance of the wood, there was something antique and sweet in all this—far be it from her to bring up the topic of electronic downloads.

“Probably there is a German word for the feeling of fondness one gets towards one’s house the more one fixes it up for resale.”

“Hausengeltenschmerz,” said KC.

But he did not laugh. He was thinking. “My wife would have known,” he said.

His wife had been a doctor. He told KC this now as she ate another muffin in his kitchen. It had been a second marriage for his wife and so there was a bit of sunset in it for them both: he had been stuck in his bachelor ways and hadn’t married until he was sixty.

(“Bachelor ways!” Dench would seize on later. “You see what he’s doing?”)

“She was a worldly and brilliant woman, an oncologist devoted to family medicine and public health policy,” said Milt.

There was a long silence as KC watched him reminisce, his face wincing slightly as his mind sifted through the files.

“I never got on with her daughters much. But she herself, well, she was the love of my life, even if she came late to it and left early. She died two years ago. When it came it was a blessing really. I suppose. I suppose that’s what one should say.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. But she was brilliant company. My brain’s a chunk of mud next to hers.” He stared at KC. “It’s lonely in this neck of the woods.”

She picked off a moist crumb from the front of her jacket. “But you must have friends here?” she said, and then she put the crumb quickly in her mouth.

“Well, by ‘neck of the woods,’ I mean old age.”

“I sort of knew that, I guess,” she said. “Do you have friends your age?”

“There are no humans alive my age!” He grinned his sepia teeth at her.

“Come on.” Her muffin was gone and she was eyeing the others.

“I may be older than I seem. I don’t know what I seem.”

She would fall for the bait. “Thirty-five,” she said, smiling only a little.

“Ha! Well, that’s the sad thing about growing too old: there’s no one at your funeral.”

She always said thirty-five, even to children. No one minded being thirty-five, especially kindergartners and the elderly. No one at all. She herself would give a toe or two to be thirty-five again. She would give three toes.

He looked at her warmly. “I once studied acting and I’ve kept my voice from getting that quavery thing of old people.”

“You’ll have to teach me.”

“You have a lovely voice. I take note of voices. Despite my deafness and my tinnitus. Which is a nice substitute for crickets, by the way, if you miss them in the winter. Sometimes I’ve got so much whistling going on in my ears I could probably fly around the room if it weren’t for these heavy orthopedic shoes. Were you the singer in your band?”

“How did you know?” She slapped her hand down on the table as if this were a miracle.

“There’s a way you have of wafting in and hitting the sounds of the words rather than the words themselves. I mean to clean off this piano and get you to sing.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I’m very much out of tune. Probably more than the piano. As I said, my career’s a little stalled right now: we need some luck, you know? Without luck the whole thing’s just a thought experiment!”

“We?”

“My musical partner.” She swallowed and chewed though her mouth was empty. He was a partner. He was musical. What was wrong with her? Would she keep Dench a secret from Milt?

Dench would want it. “What can I get for you?” she had asked Dench this morning, and he had stared at her balefully from the bed.

“You have a lot of different nightgowns,” Dench had replied.

“They’re all the dresses I once wore onstage.” And as she had gotten dressed for her walk, he’d said, “Don’t forget the coffee this time. Last time you forgot the coffee.”

“It’s good to have a business partner,” Milt said now. “But it isn’t everything.”

“He’s sort of a genius,” she lied. Did she feel the need to put Dench in competition with Milt’s dead wife?

“So you’ve met some geniuses.” He smiled. “You’re having fun then. A life with geniuses in it: very good.”

She lived with so much mockery this did not bother her at all. She looked deeply into his eyes and found the muck-speckled blue there, the lenses cut out from cataracts. She would see the cut edges in the light.

“Do you think our landlord, Ian, would miss a few of his books?”

“No one misses a few of their books. It’s just the naked truth. Look at the sign down the road,” Dench said.

The out-of-business Borders with its missing d: perhaps Dench had stolen it for himself, stashing it under the bed; she didn’t dare look.

“Old Milt has a little book nook—I thought I’d contribute.”

“I see.”

“I’d only take a few. I can’t donate my own since they all have the most embarrassing underlinings. In ink.” Plus exclamation points that ran down the page like a fence by Christo. Perhaps it was genetic. She had once found in her grandmother’s shelves her mother’s own frighteningly marked-up copy of
The House of Mirth
. The word
whoa
appeared on every other page.

“Come here. Lie on top of me.” Dench’s face was a cross between longing and ordering lunch.

“I’ll squash you. I’ve gained five pounds eating muffins with Milt.” He grabbed her hand, but she gently pulled it away. “Give me some time. I’m going to cut out the sweets and have a few toes removed.”

She had put on a necklace, of freshwater pearls so small they were like grains of arborio rice decorating the letters of
Decatur
. She combed a little rat’s nest into the crown of her hair to perk it up. She dabbed on some scent: fig was the new vanilla! As she went out the door, Dench said, “Win them with your beauty, but catch them off guard with your soul.” Then there was the pregnant pause, the instruments all cutting out at once—until he added, in a chilly tone, “Don’t even bother with my coffee. I mean really: don’t bother.” After that she heard only her own footsteps.

“I brought you a couple books,” she said to Milton. “For your nook.”

“Well, thank you. Haven’t had any takers yet but there’s still room.” He looked at the titles she had brought:
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
and
Lady Macbeth in the Gilded Age
. “Excellent.”

They once again went inside and ate muffins. Forget coffee: this time she had not even brought the dog.

She began to do this regularly, supplying Milt with more of her landlord’s books. He had taken to looking so happy to see her, his eyes brightening (blue, she had read once, was the true color of the sun) so much she could see what he must have looked like when he was young. He was probably the bachelor that all the old ladies were after. And when he had married there were probably some broken hearts. He had the look of a gentleman, but one who was used to the attention of women, even as the uriny smell of an old man had crept over him. “Here we are: two lonely fools,” he said to KC once. It had the sound of a line he’d said before. Nonetheless, she found herself opening up to him, telling him of her life, and he was sympathetic, nodding, his peeled-back eyes taking on a special shine, and only once or twice did he have to lean forward disconcertingly to murmur, “Say that again?” She didn’t mention Dench anymore. And the part of her that might consider this and know why was overshadowed by the unknowing part, which she knew in advance was the only source of any self-forgiveness. Ignorance ironically arranged for future self-knowledge. Life was never perfect.

When she twice stayed into the afternoon to fix Milt something
to eat and once stopped by later to cook a simple dinner, Dench confronted her. “Once more I must ask: What are you doing?”

“He’s a frail old man on the outs with his stepdaughters. He could use someone to help him with meals.”

“You’re fattening him for the kill?” They were looking into the abyss of the other, or so they both probably thought.

“What the hell are you talking about? He’s alone!”

“A lone what?”

“A lone ranger for God’s sake, what is wrong with you?”

“I don’t understand what you’re pretending.”

“I’m not pretending. What I don’t get is you: I thought I was doing what you wanted!”

He tilted his head quizzically the way he sometimes did when he was pretending to be a different person. Who are you doing that head-tilt thing for, she did not say.

“I don’t know what I want,” he said. “And I don’t know what you’re doing.”

“You know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Is that what you think? Hmmmm. Are we always such a mystery to ourselves and to others?”

“Is a disappointment the same as a mystery?”

“A disappointment is rarely a mystery.”

“I’m starting to lose confidence in you, Dench.” Losing confidence was more violent than losing love. Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed.

Now he lifted his face beatifically, as if to catch some light no one else could see. His eyes closed, and he began rubbing his hands through his hair. It was her least favorite thing that he did in the head-tilting department.
“Sorry to interrupt your self-massage,” she said and turned to go and then turned back to say, “And don’t give me that line about someone has to do it.”

“Someone doesn’t have to. But someone should.” The muttered snark in their house was a kind of creature—perhaps the one in their walls.

“Yes, well, you’re an expert on
should
.”

It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nine-tenths of the human brain had been rendered useless: to make you stupidly intrepid. One was working with only the animal brain, the Pringle brain. The wizard-god brain, the one that could see the future and move objects without touching them, was asleep. Fucking bastard.

The books she brought this time were
Instinct for Death
and
The Fin de Millennial Lear
. She and Milt stood before the nook and placed the volumes inside.

“Now you must come in and play the piano for me. At long last I’ve had it tuned.” Milt smiled. “You are even allowed to sing, if you so desire.”

She was starting again to see how large the house was, since if they entered through a different door she had no idea where she was. There were two side doors and a back one in addition to the front two. Two front doors! Life was hard enough—having to make that kind of decision every day could wear a person out.

She sat down at the piano, with its bell-like sound and real ivory keys, chipped and grainy. As a joke she played “The Spinning Song,” but he didn’t laugh, only smiled, as if perhaps
it were Scarlatti. Then she played and sang her love song to the chef, and then she did “Body and Soul” and then her own deconstructed version of “Down by the River,” right there inside the house with no requests to leave and go down by an actual river. And then she thought that was probably enough and pulled her arms back, closed her mouth, and in imitation of Dench closed her eyes, lifted her face to the ceiling, and smoothed back her hair, prepping it for the wig maker. Then she shook her arms in the air and popped her eyes open.

Milt looked happier than she had ever seen him look. “Marvelous!” he said.

No one ever said
marvelous
anymore.

“Oh, you’re nice,” she said.

“I have an idea! Can you drive me downtown? I have an appointment in a half hour and I’d like you to come with me. Besides, I’m not allowed to drive.”

“All right,” she said. Of course she had guessed that soon she might be taking him to doctors’ appointments.

Instead, she drove him in his old, scarcely used Audi, which she found stored in the garage with a dust cloth over it, to his lawyer’s. “Meet my lovely new friend, Casey,” he said, introducing her as they were ushered into the lawyer’s gleaming office and the lawyer stared at her skeptically but shook her hand.

“Rick, I would like to change my will,” Milt said.

“Yes, I know. You wanted to—”

“No, now I want to change it even more than I said before. I know we were going to leave the house to the Children’s Hospital, which was Rachel’s wish, but they’re doing fine without us, their machinery’s over there tearing things up every day on that new wing. So instead I’d like to leave everything, absolutely everything, to Casey here. And to make her executor as well.”

Silence fell over the room as Milt’s beaming face went back and forth between pale-feeling KC and pale-looking Rick.

“Milt, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” KC said, clutching his arm. It was the first time she had actually touched him and it seemed to energize him further.

“Nonsense!” he said. “I want to free you from any burdens—it will keep you the angel you are.”

“It hardly seems that
I’m
the angel.”

“You are, you are. And I want you and your music to fly untethered.”