Housebroken (17 page)

Sometimes, when the man left the house, the woman would open the door and invite the dog in, as if he were an old lover. She would sit down on the sofa and pat the seat beside her, but the dog remained standing in the entrance hall, or sometimes, against his will, he'd be drawn by some longing into the living room and lie down hesitantly on the floor. At night he could hear the voices of the man and the woman rising from the apartment, quiet voices. There were no sounds of clattering pots, metallic music, or crying.

Nobody took him out for walks anymore. He went out alone, once or twice a day, for a short and purposeful walk around the neighborhood, sometimes going into the park and looking from a distance at the dogs playing together or at some lucky dog racing after a stick somebody threw him. When the stick flew through the air, his body would tense in participation, his head and front legs would spring forward, but his sagging, broken hindquarters would always remain rooted to the spot, as if to say: The stick isn't for you.

Sometimes he would accompany the woman to the grocery and sit outside, displaying the calm indifference of a dog waiting for its master. When she'd come out he would follow her home and climb the stairs behind her, stop on the last step before the second floor landing, wait until she went inside and, sending him an apologetic look, closed the door. Then he would lie down on the doormat. He had his food, his water, and his mat, and he was free. He was neither a street dog nor a house dog, He was a kind of in-between dog, a temporary pet.

And then there was the birthday party, the procession of people climbing the stairs carrying bottles and plastic bags. They rang the bell, bent down to pat the dog's head, and disappeared into the apartment. The stairwell was flooded with music, cheerful voices, bursts of laughter, and whistles. At midnight the man's friend came out, bent down, swayed on her heels for a moment because she was drunk again, and then kissed the dog on his nose and shoved a piece of birthday cake into his mouth.

She had organized the party and paid for almost everything. She called the woman one day and asked her in her cheerful voice: “So what are we doing on the thirtieth of October?”

“I don't know,” said the woman. “I haven't thought about it.”

“You didn't?” the friend asked in a tone of rebuke. “But you know what the thirtieth of October is, don't you?”

“Yes,” said the woman. “Of course I know. It's his birthday.”

“And today it's mine,” said the friend, an accusing sadness stealing into her voice.

“Really?” said the woman. “Happy birthday! I didn't know.”

“Never mind,” said the friend. “I thought that maybe we could do something together. We always celebrated our birthdays together. If you like, we can have it at my place. Or yours. Whichever is more convenient.”

“Our place,” said the woman. “I think we've got more room here. But I'm not sure he wants a party.”

“So what?” shrieked the friend. “He's not supposed to know anything about it. It's a surprise. I throw a surprise party for him every year. He expects it.”

“He does?” the woman asked hesitantly.

“Yes he does! And listen, you won't have to do a thing. I'll bring everything.”

“But I can do something too.”

“No, don't do anything. Really. I'm an expert. I'll buy the cake, I know a good place, I always buy there, and if you like you can make some dips and buy crackers or something.”

“Okay,” said the woman. “I'll make dips. I'll buy crackers.”

“And everybody'll bring wine and beer, so you don't have to buy any.”

“Who will we invite?”

“You invite whoever you like and I'll invite whoever I like.”

“So you'll invite friends of yours too, right?”

“Absolutely!” said the friend and laughed loudly.

But she arrived alone. She was carrying a huge cake in a cardboard box and there was a plastic bag holding a parcel wrapped in pale blue paper hanging from the fingers of her right hand. The woman opened the door and took the cake and made room for it in the fridge. “I brought decorations too,” said the friend, and stood a chair in the middle of the living room. “Let's do the balloons. When's he coming?”

“He should be here in an hour. When did you tell people to come?”

“Now,” said the friend and blew up a giant balloon. “I told them to come at nine. And you?”

“Nine,” said the woman. She took the balloon from her mouth and tied it.

The man's friends and the man and the woman's friends arrived, and the woman waited for the friend's guests to arrive, but when the man arrived, at half past ten, and pretended to be surprised, there were still none of her guests there. The man embraced the woman and kissed her on the mouth, and squeezed the friend's shoulder. “She does this to me every year,” he said to the woman.

Then he sat down to open his presents, and someone put a new cassette he had bought the man into the tape deck—another metallic horror to which the man listened with a kind of guilty childish smirk, looking around the room for the woman. She had bought him a shirt. It was a denim shirt that she knew he wanted, and everybody immediately urged him to try it on. At first he protested, but then he gave in, took off his T-shirt and threw it on the floor, and put on the denim shirt which suited him and was the perfect size. Whistles of admiration rose from the men and women who were standing around drinking beer.

He looked at the friend and said: “I'm sorry. I haven't had a chance to buy you a present yet.”

“Never mind,” she said. “I haven't had a chance to buy you one either,” and the woman glanced quickly at the entrance hall and the plastic bag leaning against the man's desk.

“The shirt's great,” the friend said to the woman.

“Yes,” said the man, “I've wanted one like it for ages.”

“I know,” she said.

The friend had paid a lot of money for the shirt she had bought, and for a moment she wondered if she and the woman had gotten their gifts at the same place. “Where did you buy it?” she asked the woman, who told her the name of the shop. It wasn't the same one, and suddenly this made the whole thing even worse, as if the two women, sometime during the week, had set out in different directions, for different parts of town—one known for its expensive boutiques and the other for its sidewalk bargains—and had each bought the same shirt for the same man. One of them would hang up one shirt later in the closet, smelling faintly of his sweat, while the other would take hers back the next day, wrapped in its pale blue paper, to the awful, pretentious shop uptown, and ask them to exchange it for something else.

The woman disappeared into the kitchen and returned carrying the cake with its seventy candles. Thirty-four for the man and thirty-four for the friend, and one each for the next year. She set it on the table, and the man and the friend, who were sitting side by side on the sofa, filled their lungs with air and blew out all the candles with one long breath. She started to pull out the candles and to lay them, smeared with white icing, on the table, but the guests stood over her impatiently and demanded their slice of cake. The friend hurried to the kitchen and got a big knife and smiled at the woman. “May I?” she said, and the woman stepped back and watched her sticking the knife into the middle of the cake.

32

The man took her home. It was strange to turn into her street and park next to the familiar building. She asked if he wanted to come up for coffee, and he found himself apologizing. The woman didn't like being left alone at night, he said.

“But she's got the dog,” the friend said. “What's she afraid of?”

“The dog”—the man smiled—“isn't a watchdog. He's a terrible coward.”

“When are you going to give him a name?” she asked, and took her keys out of her bag.

“Yes,” said the man, “it really is about time. Imagine if we have children someday. What will we tell them when they ask what the dog's name is?”

“Your children probably won't have names either,” she said.

His heart contracted. Not because of what she'd said, but because the possibility that the woman would be the mother of his children now seemed very remote to him. He lived with her, he went to bed with her, he had practical conversations with her, and recently he had even found himself spontaneously and somewhat savagely making dinner for her. The cooking took his mind off the silence that pervaded the apartment, and the woman who spent all day slumped in front of the television, the remote control lying limply in her hand, too apathetic to change channels.

He cooked like a madman, and she didn't protest. She sat down at the kitchen table when he called her, and the food he had cooked with imagination and rage was inedible. Either he added too much seasoning or he forgot the seasoning altogether, either he burned the meat or he served it almost raw and sat and watched her struggling, bolting it down and ignoring the blood dripping onto her plate. She hoped he would leave. He hoped she would ask him to leave.

His love for her had gone through so many metamorphoses that when he looked at her eating or emerging from the bathroom after a shower, fully dressed, suddenly shy, he felt all that was left of his love was fear, that this was the love of his life and it was over, and therefore there was no point in leaving and moving on, because he had already received the ration of love he had coming to him.

He found himself following his friend upstairs. “Just for coffee,” she said. He looked around at the familiar apartment, he even went into the bedroom for a minute to see if everything there was the same, the bed, its thick, scratchy cover, the two pillows, and then he went out onto the porch.

“It's a little chilly,” said the friend. “Should we go inside?”

She brought the two armchairs in from the porch and stood them in the living room. Then she went into the bedroom, taking with her the plastic bag she had been holding in her hand all this time, and came out in a T-shirt and panties. The man sat in his armchair and glanced at his watch. Exactly two o'clock. He wondered if the woman had started to worry yet, or if she had already lost her capacity to worry about him, just as she had lost the capacity to yell at him and scold him and fight with him and cry because of him.

“So we're thirty-four years old,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “And we're both still single.”

The last time the woman had cried was the night they had spoken about breaking up and afterward they had gone out to meet friends at a bar. Even though he was very drunk, before he fell asleep he had heard her crying in the bathroom. Since then they had gone on with their lives as if they were still a little drunk. There was a kind of dull heaviness between them accompanied by a faint queasiness. And every morning it seemed that one of them would wake up sober, look around and take fright, drag himself into the kitchen, and drink a couple of cups of strong coffee. When the other one shuffled in, they would look each other in the eye and say: “Enough.”

The friend gave him a cup of coffee and sat down on the floor at his feet. “You still take sugar?” she said. “Yes,” he said and closed his eyes.

“You too, right?” he said.

“No,” she said. “I don't take any.”

“Right,” he said. “I forgot. You don't.”

And suddenly she burst into tears. The man opened his eyes and listened for a moment to her sobs, to her sniffling, and he touched the hand covering her eyes. He bent down and whispered: “What's the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said, “nothing.”

“Tell me. What's the matter?”

“It's nothing,” she said, “I just feel a little down.”

“I've never seen you cry before, you know? Is it because I forgot how much sugar you take in your coffee?”

“I don't take any sugar,” she burst out and began to sob again. She laid her head in his lap. He put his hands on her shoulders. “Stop,” he said, “Please don't cry.” And he glanced at his watch again.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Her head nodded in his lap.

“Are you sure?”

She sniffed and raised her head and looked at him. She stared at him with her wet eyes and began to undo his fly buttons. The man held her wrist and said: “Stop it! What are you doing? Don't do that.”

“But why not?” she wailed. “Tell me why?”

“You know why,” he said.

“You were never so faithful before,” said his friend. “Never!”

“I never had a girlfriend before,” he explained in a fatherly voice.

She listened to him, her face turned to the side, her eyes still full of tears, her fingers holding one of the metal buttons on his fly.

“Why do you stay with her?” she asked. “You're not happy.”

“I don't know,” he said and stroked her hair. “Because I love her, I guess.”

“You don't love her,” she said. “You don't even know what love is.”

“Look who's talking,” he said.

He touched her chin, his fingers groping for a little scar, and he raised her face and smiled and said to her: “You know that I'll always love you.”

“Yes,” she said, “like brother and sister.”

“Yes”—the man smiled—“like brother and sister.”

She laid her cheek on his knee. He felt the wet warmth of her tears soaking through his jeans. He ran his fingers absentmindedly through her hair, looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes, and sighed. “Life sucks,” he said.

He thought about the children he wanted to have with the woman. A girl, and then a boy. He tried to think of names for them and he couldn't come up with any he liked. He stroked the friend's hair. He tried to think of all kinds of names. He brushed his fingers over her tense neck and felt the little hairs bristling under his fingers. He felt comfortable in his old armchair.