The Best American Short Stories 2015 (42 page)

My ex-wife, Simone, comes for lunch sometimes, and we talk of our sons, who are long grown and have children of their own. One lives in New York and the other in Zurich—they are both in the banking. They know James, of course, but they do not like him. There is no reason they would. They are serious men, and James is not. Their children, my grandchildren, are charmed by him. They consider James an uncle. He is the correct age, and he is willing to play with them in a way adults are not. And Simone accepts him, which is in some ways a remarkable thing.

Simone looks as she always did, although she says this is only because I never saw her, not really. But I do: she is an elegant woman, all angles, gold bracelets on thin, tan wrists. And she understands what it is to be old, which is a comfort. After she leaves, Desi clears away the lunch dishes, and I take Cordelia out for a walk.

There came a point when I realized that James was in Paris only when there was an important party. Every person has one great gift, and James is unequaled at an important party. He is good-looking, of course, with the well-cut brown hair and the trim body and the bespoke suit. He has a brilliant smile, very warm and interested and sincere, and when he talks to people they feel special. He has many other abilities, but this one above all. They want to do business with him because of this attention. He is never looking over the shoulder to see who else is at the party. Who he is talking to, this person gets everything.

But then we go home, and the attention goes off like a light. He does not give me the warm and interested smile. He says a thing or two about the party, in the French he speaks like an Englishman but very well. He looks at his phone, swiping with his thumb. He takes his expensive clothes off carelessly, leaves them on the furniture like a child. He has had money always, and good looks, and was his mother's darling. He says Desi will pick up the clothes, although I tell him this is not her job. He says of course it is, what else is her job? He is careful only with his shoes. He puts them on wooden shoetrees in the closet, then goes into the bathroom and closes the door.

I think of the first boy I loved, two lifetimes ago. He came to my family's house, and I ran inside from playing and saw him standing with his mother. He had a light behind his eyes and a crown of silken curls. He was like someone standing in the sun, even in the dim, cool room. I was still very young, and it was a shock, because it was the first time I knew who I was. He was older than I, and he understood also—I could see that.

Then came the war, and the people fleeing Paris, and the Germans in the city. I was sent to England to live with some cousins, and I did not know what happened to this boy. He stayed behind. When I discovered him again, in a nightclub after the war, he did not like to talk about those years. The beauty that could help him in another time was not so useful during the Occupation. The Germans would be happy to kill him, or to send him to build their bunkers, which would be the same, and I do not know how he escaped. He said he tried to help the Maquis, but the people he knew did not want him. He did not seem strong, or robust. He was not a saboteur. Perhaps he could get information, but they did not trust how he would do it.

He was arrested at the end of the war, when the Germans were in a panic, and they simply left him in prison with no food. When I saw him in the nightclub he had the
tuberculose
from this prison, but he was still extraordinarily handsome. He seemed very pitiful to me, and very desirable.

My older brother had his own flat then, to be independent, but I still lived in the family house. This boy came to visit me when my parents were away. I knew my father would not approve, but it was exciting. I remembered the way the boy had lit up the old carpets, the paintings, the dust floating in the air.

One night, the boy and I were eating dinner at one end of the long table in my family house—he was always hungry—when he began to cough. The sound was wet and terrible, and the coughing did not stop. There was blood on the napkin, and his face was purple around the eyes, and then something went very wrong. There was so much blood, and he was coughing, dying, there on the dining-room floor. I didn't know what to do, how to stop this hemorrhage. I thought, He will open his eyes in a minute, he will smile, he will wipe his mouth and say, “No, no, do not worry. I am fine.” But it did not happen. I heard a roaring like the sea in my ears. My hands were shaking.

I telephoned the doctor and my brother, and they came. My brother was furious, concerned only with the scandal of this disreputable nightclub boy dying in our family house. “You should have put him in a bathtub,” he said. “For the blood.”

I stared at him. When was I to carry him upstairs? There would be blood everywhere if I did this.

The doctor was kinder, more practical. He asked if there would be semen on the body, or inside it. I was shocked by the question, but I said no. It was the truth. He said this would make it easier. He asked me to help carry the boy to his car, and I lifted the shoulders. The doctor took the legs. He weighed so little. The head dropped back—the pale face, the bruised eyes—and I could not look, I was filled with horror. The doctor took him away in his car to the morgue and said I was never to speak of it.
N'en parlons plus jamais
. And, you see, still I find I do not want to say his name.

The housekeeper would arrive in the morning, so my brother helped me clean. I moved very slowly, my arms and legs frozen, while my brother gave me orders. I ran cold water on the napkins and towels in the sink, for the blood. I knew I could never repay what the doctor had done. I also knew that my brother would now have the moral advantage over me for the rest of my life. That is what I thought with my hands in the cold pink water, feeling sorry for myself, when it was the boy I loved who was dead.

Within the year, I met Simone. She was very appropriate, with a good family, the most graceful lines in a dress. She was in every way correct, and I must have proposed, because there was an engagement, a great announcement. I had never seen my father so happy. My mother was not so sure, but we had no way of discussing this at that time. There was the momentum of the approaching wedding—it was like climbing into an enormous car without brakes. The party, all the people watching, the flowers and the caterers. In front of everyone I knew, I put my grandmother's ring on Simone's elegant hand and made promises that I could not keep.

Cordelia sleeps on our bed, in the wide gulf between James and me. But she is old now, like me, and she gets down and pees on the rug. I go for the bottle of Perrier, the towel. Then she pees in the hall. James is still asleep, so I clean the hall floor and leave the bottle there. I put on my clothes quietly, and I take the dog outside.

Cordelia starts to go in the impasse, which she knows is not allowed. The concierge will come out, the neighbors will complain, it will be a whole issue. I speak to Cordelia, I pull on her leash, but she does not want to move. I pull harder. Finally she follows, very slowly. I could pick her up, but she needs to walk, just a little. This is the important thing, not to stop moving.

On the pavement outside the gate, she stands and seems to think about something far away. Her eyes are cloudy. She does not do a shit. She makes a strange sound and falls over. Her feet go up in the air, like a dead dog in a cartoon.

Here I become not so dignified. I fall down on my knees on the pavement and put my hands on Cordelia's chest. I feel no heartbeat, and I try to remember the rules. Two fingers for babies, or you break the ribs. Cordelia is about this size. I put my two fingers on her chest and start to push. I think about the heartbeat—how fast? My own heart is pounding in my ears, too fast, but Cordelia is small. Perhaps the rhythm is right. I press down with each loud pulse in my head.

People walk around me on the street. I can feel them stare. A few speak: they ask can they help, should they call an ambulance. I only feel for the pulse. I think, absurdly, of the boy coughing and dying on my floor, in another time. I could not press on his chest because the blood was coming from his lungs, and everything had broken loose. I did not know what to do.

Now I press and press. My knees ache, and I think there is broken glass on the pavement, cutting into my skin, but it is only sand and grit. Minutes go by, and more minutes. My arms tremble. I count the times I push, and then stop counting. I wonder if I have broken Cordelia's ribs. Someone told me once that this pressing does not work without the
truc machin
—the paddles to the heart. I think if I could open the bony chest I could hold the heart in my hand and squeeze it until it began to beat again.

Maybe someone should call an ambulance. But what would the driver say, arriving to see me with an old dog? Do they have this service for animals? I have no feeling in my hand.

“Il est mort,”
a helpful person says, standing over me. A young man this time.

“Elle,”
I say. The dog has her feet in the air. The world can see she is not a male. Do the young know nothing? But when I look at her I think he is right—she is dead.

“Ouais, bien, elle est morte,”
the young man says. And then he is gone.

I continue to press. I look at my watch, but I do not know what time we came outside.

And then Cordelia coughs. She opens her cloudy eyes. She seems to feel the indignity of her position, and she wriggles until her legs are under her. She coughs again, and shakes her head. She raises her eyebrows, as if to say how ridiculous we are, sitting in the street. What am I thinking, to make her so foolish? I struggle to my feet and pick her up, ignoring the people who stare. I carry her into the impasse. I can feel her heart beating against my arm. We take the tiny elevator—I have no strength for the stairs. In the faded bronze mirror, I have never looked so old.

In the apartment, James is awake, holding the Perrier bottle, in a white cotton dressing gown that Desi has ironed. He rubs his face, runs his fingers in his hair. “I didn't know where you were,” he says.

“Outside.” My voice is hoarse.

“Another accident?” The green bottle is bright against the white cotton.

“The dog is killing me,” I say, and I hand Cordelia into his arms. “She was dead. Now she's not.”

“Dead?” he says.

But I have no explaining left in me. My legs will not hold me up. “I'm going to bed.” I go into the bedroom, take off my clothes, step around the piss on the rug, and climb beneath the covers. Then I hear a scratching at the door, which opens, and small footsteps. Cordelia climbs the little carpeted steps at the end of the bed, which James bought when she couldn't jump up anymore—there is still tenderness in him—and I feel the small body curl beside me. We sleep.

James calls the vet, and we take the dog together. The vet says Cordelia is mostly blind, and deaf, and demented. But she wags her tail, she eats some food. She puts on a good show, for the vet.

James asks the doctor, in many different ways, if Cordelia's quality of life is not diminished. This is a code, a hint. He wants the vet to say maybe it is time to kill the dog. I find this more upsetting than I should. But the vet is cheerful and will not say the words. He pretends not to understand. He calls the dog Madame Lazarus and says it is a miracle, she has returned from the dead. Cordelia licks my hand as we drive home: a steady, appreciative lick. She knows.

The next morning, James leaves again, for Amsterdam, Dubai, I don't know. Somewhere is a schedule. Desi comes to clean and make lunch, and I tell her what happened. We study the dog together. Cordelia wags her tail at us, she eats. But she cannot turn her head to the right anymore, only to the left. She turns her whole body in a circle when she wants to look right. No one asks how Lazarus felt after he came out of the tomb. Maybe it was not so good. Maybe he fell over and died again as soon as the people were not watching.

Desi goes to work on the spot on the rug, and I think of the morning after the doctor took the boy away, when the housekeeper found that I had washed some napkins and towels. She was French, her gray hair in a tight knot. It was not normal for me to wash anything. She frowned down at the place where the carpet was wet and a little pink, and I told her I had spilled the soup. She looked at me in the steady way of a
maîtresse
in school. And then she went back to her work and said nothing.

Sometimes Cordelia takes her small steps into an empty room and stands there, staring. I follow to see what she sees: the furniture, the pictures on the walls. But can she see them? She is listening, maybe, for James's voice. She stands there a long time, waiting for something that does not come.

I begin to carry her up and down the stairs and out to the street. Sometimes, after pissing on the rug, she cannot do it outside. I know this feeling, so I squeeze her to help, while people pass by. A river comes out. I carry her a bit so she can smell the air, and I think, My God, what comes next?

What comes next is a morning, three months later, when Cordelia does not get out of bed. I carry her to the street, but she cannot stand up. She does not wag her tail. She does not eat. I call James on his mobile in some other country. He sounds busy at first, but then he is listening, paying attention. The tenderness is there. He says, “
Chéri
, maybe it's time.”

I wait for Desi to arrive. We speak English together, because she does not speak so much French, after so many years. Enough to shop and to eat. She lives with other Indonesians, it is not necessary. “Come with me to the vet,” I say.

Desi's eyes slide away from me, and I see she does not want to go, but then she collects her bag. I carry Cordelia, and we find a taxi. I cannot drive and hold the dog also, and Desi does not drive. The taxi driver talks on his mobile, the radio is low—all in Arabic. Desi sits with her hands folded on her bag. Cordelia is very still in my lap.