The Dogs of Babel (11 page)

Thrill Rides of North America
(Lexy’s. She loved roller coasters; she always said she planned to ride every single one in this book before she… well, that’s what she said. Before she died.)

Clay Masks from Around the World
(Lexy’s.)

I’m Taking My Hatchback to Hackensack and Other Travel Games
(Ours. We bought it on that first trip to Florida before we set out for the long drive back.)

As I write down the last title, I hear Lorelei padding down the hallway on her way to the kitchen. I get up and follow her. I watch as she sniffs around the corner where I put her bowls. She licks her empty food dish, perhaps finding some microscopic particle left over from her breakfast. Then she sniffs the floor where her water bowl should be.

“
Wa,
Lorelei?” I say. “Do you want some
wa?
” She looks up at me and twitches her tail in a miniature wag.

“Say
‘wa,’
Lorelei.” I massage the folds of her throat. She lets out an impatient whine. The sound it makes is more
mmnnnn
than
wa,
but it’s progress.

“Good girl,” I say. “Now say
‘wa.
’”

She turns away from me and goes back to sniffing around the empty bowl corner, as if a dish of water might have appeared there in a moment when she wasn’t looking.

Maybe she’s not thirsty enough for this to work. I decide to up the ante. I take a bag of potato chips from the kitchen cabinet and give her one, then another. The sound of her crunching fills the kitchen. When she’s finished, I turn on the faucet. She looks expectantly toward the sound of running water.

“
Wa,
Lorelei,” I say.
“Wa, wa.”

I stand and wait. Lorelei watches me for a moment, then turns and walks out of the kitchen. I start to follow her, but by the time I’m halfway down the hall, I can hear the unmistakable sound of lapping coming from the bathroom. With a heavy heart, I turn into the room. There’s Lorelei, her head in the toilet, drinking long and deep from the bowl.

D
uring that first winter of our marriage, Lexy and I fought a battle between us. I wanted us to have a child. A baby with my features and hers. I imagined Lexy pregnant, holding our child within her, cradling it with her blood and her bones wherever she went. I imagined walking the leafy streets, pushing my son or my daughter—or both! Twins are not an unheard-of occurrence in my family—in a carriage, narrating the life of the neighborhood as we walked. “Look,” I would say. “The leaves are changing color. Look, there goes Mrs. Singh in her red car.” My child lying on her back, taking in the sky. I could almost see the soft curl of her hair. I wanted it very much. I wanted to spread a blanket on the grass when the weather got warm and to set my baby down upon it so she could reach for handfuls of grass and wriggling worms. I wanted to rescue a worm from her pudgy fingers before she put it in her mouth. I wanted to lift her up to the sky and hear her laugh. I wanted to dance her around the room when she was fussy and wouldn’t sleep.

We were at a restaurant the first time I brought it up. At the table next to us was a couple with a baby, a boy maybe eight months old. I was in love with the scene of it, the mother and father taking turns entertaining the baby with a parade of toys produced one by one from a voluminous diaper bag, feeding him a snack from a plastic bag full of dry Cheerios, offering him a bottle of juice. From time to time, the baby would let out a string of nonsense syllables, and the happy sound filled the restaurant.

At one point, the baby’s mother scooped up a spoonful of couscous from her plate and offered it to the baby. “Look at that,” she said to her husband as the baby swallowed it. “His first couscous.”

Lexy smiled at me. “His first couscous,” she said in a low voice. “If I ever had a kid, it’d probably be more like, ‘Aw, look at that, his first Big Mac.’”

I laughed. “His first taco chip. Wasn’t that a Norman Rockwell painting?”

“Or one of those Precious Moments figurines. His first Hostess snack cake.”

“His first onion ring.”

“His first Mountain Dew.”

“I had a friend in college who told me his mother used to put Coke in his baby bottle.”

“Wow. Nothing like an infant hopped up on caffeine.”

I paused to take a bite of my salad. “So,” I said. “Do you ever think about that?”

“What,” she said, “babies hopped up on caffeine?”

“No,” I said. “Babies, period.”

“Sure, I think about it,” she said. “But mostly I think no.” She looked at me to see my reaction.

“Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you like kids?”

“I love them. I’m just not sure I should have one.”

“That’s a strange choice of words,” I said. “You didn’t say, ‘I’m not sure I
want
to have one’ or ‘I’m not sure I’d
like
to have one,’ you said, ‘I’m not sure I
should
have one.’ What does that mean?”

“Oh, here we go,” Lexy said, rolling her eyes. “The perils of dining with a linguist.”

“No, really,” I said. “I’m curious. Why don’t you think you should have a baby?”

She searched my face for a long minute before she spoke. “I’m just not sure it’s fair to give a child me for a mother. And that’s the last I’ll say about it.”

I stared at her, astonished. “Are you serious? My God, Lexy, I think you’d make a wonderful mother. You’re caring and generous —”

She put up her hand to stop me. “No,” she said. “Don’t. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”

“But, Lexy, I can’t believe you’d think such a thing.”

She stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said, “and when I come back, we’re going to talk about something else.”

She started to get up, then stopped. “You know I’d never actually feed that kind of stuff to a baby, right?” she said.

“See?” I said, smiling. “There’s that maternal instinct kicking in.”

We didn’t discuss it again that night. But the conversation wasn’t over. I found myself thinking about the subject almost constantly in the weeks that followed. At the time, I had a graduate student in one of my seminars, a woman named Angelica Raza, who was pregnant with her first child. One day, she and I both arrived early to class, and after we exchanged a few pleasantries, I decided to ask her some questions that might help me figure things out.

“So,” I asked. “Did you always want kids?”

She thought about it. “Yeah, pretty much always,” she said. “My husband was a little harder to sell on the idea. But he came around eventually. Obviously,” she added, placing her hands on her rounded belly.

“How’d you bring him around?”

“Well, basically, I tried not to pressure him. He’s just a cautious guy, and he likes to make decisions in his own time. It took him seven years to decide to marry me. And we’d been living together for five.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” she laughed. “I knew he’d eventually decide he was ready for kids, but I was afraid I’d be eighty by that time.”

“But you didn’t pressure him?”

“No. One thing I’ve learned about John is that he doesn’t respond well to pressure. So I kept it light. I’d drop little comments about people we knew who were having babies, and I’d make jokes. For a while, we had this game where we’d try to come up with the most inappropriate baby names we could think of. I think the winner was Tabula, for a girl. Get it? Tabula Raza?”

I laughed.

“And then one day,” she went on, “he just turned to me out of the blue, I think we were watching a cop show or something, and said, ‘Let’s have a baby.’”

“That’s great,” I said.

“Yeah, and now he can’t wait. He’s read more baby books than I have.”

Just then, a couple of other students arrived, and the conversation shifted to something else. But later that night, when I got home, I decided to give Angelica’s method a try.

I started by telling Lexy Angelica’s story about naming a girl Tabula. She smiled and said, “Oh, you linguistics scholars. Never a dull moment.”

“So then,” I said, “I was wondering if there were any names that wouldn’t go with our last names, but I couldn’t think of any for Iverson. I guess Ivan Iverson would be pretty bad.”

“Well, not as bad as Stinky Iverson,” Lexy said. “It doesn’t matter what your last name is, I think if you name a child Stinky, you’re setting him up for a life of hardship.”

This seemed to be going pretty well, I thought. “What about Ransome?” I said. “Is there anything that doesn’t go with Ransome? Kings, I guess. You wouldn’t want to name a kid Kings Ransome. But that’s not a real name, anyway.”

“My dad used to have some complicated joke that took forever to tell, and I was too young to really get it anyway, about how he should have two sons and name them both William. God, I wish I could remember the whole thing, it’d tell you a lot about what my father was like. Anyway, the punch line was something about paying a Ransome in small Bills.”

I laughed, maybe a little too hard.

Lexy looked at me. She had a serious expression on her face, suddenly. “Sweetie, I know what you’re doing,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s going to work.”

“No?” I took her hand. “Look, Lexy, I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but don’t you think it’s possible you might change your mind?”

“Well, anything’s possible, but I don’t think so.” She looked away. “I guess this is something we should have talked about before we got married,” she said, and it was like a question. “I guess it might have changed things.” Her voice sounded fragile suddenly, like a little girl’s.

“No, of course not,” I said. “Nothing could have stopped me from marrying you.” She smiled at me tentatively. “I can’t say I’m not disappointed, and I can’t say I don’t hope you’ll reconsider, but I’m in this with you for good. No matter what.”

And so I agreed to it. I agreed to a life without children. I agreed it would be just the two of us, here in the tilting world. What would our days be like, I wondered, with that space in them, the space where a child might be, the space where a child might walk between us, holding each of our hands? But no, I resolved. Our days could be filled with the two of us. We would walk through our days together, and the shadow we would cast on the ground would be tall, the shadow of two adults walking together, not the familiar H of adult-child-adult walking hand in hand. We would live a good, quiet life, uninterrupted by the shouts of children at play, the daily chaos of cuts and scrapes and quarrels over the sharing of toys. There would still be the two of us, and the bright sky of our love. I could do this for her. This was not so bad. There would be hard times, but what did I care if we had hard times? The branches of my love were wide, and they caught the rain and the snow. We would be okay, the two of us together. We would be okay.

W
hen I was a little boy, my mother, who was given to hyperbole, used to tell me that if the world were to come to an end, her last thought would be of me, and she would fling my name out to the heavens as the mortar of the earth burst apart and the ground fell from beneath her feet. It is only now, when I am surprised to find that I am growing older every day, it’s only now that I am beginning to believe that my mother was not just speaking extravagantly. I think every one of us carries with us a name like this, a name whose importance may not be clear to us until we find it on our lips in those final moments. I don’t think it is ever, perhaps not even for my mother, who we expect it to be.

All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. “When I get to Heaven,” my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, “your grandfather won’t even recognize me.”

Lately, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. It’s the getting to sleep that causes me problems. During the day, I go from one task to the next, not thinking much about the shadow areas of my life, Lexy’s death, my grief and the strange way I have chosen to respond to it, the laughingstock I have become in my field. I can go the whole day without thinking of any of it. And then I get into bed. All those hours spread before me, and nothing to do but think. I would get up and work on my research, but Lorelei has made it clear she will not work between the hours of eight P.M. and six A.M. Dogs sleep a lot—one lesson I’ve learned in my two months of research is that dogs sleep a hell of a lot more than they do anything else.

And so it is that on this night, my wife four months dead, I find myself sitting in the dark watching an infomercial for a telephone psychic.

I’ve never been much of a believer in the mystical arts, although as a child I indulged all the natural curiosities for ghost stories, Ouija boards, and the like. In fact, the powers of the Ouija board have become legendary in my family: once when my sister and I were children, a Ouija board told her that she would marry a man with the initials PJM, and as it turned out, she did. My sister’s first husband, to whom she was married for a scant eight months right after college, was named Peter James Marsh. Now, happily married for almost fifteen years to a man with the initials LRS, the only thing she will say about her first marriage is that she should have known better than to marry a man based on his initials.

But in my adult years I’ve always been something of a skeptic. I don’t believe in ESP or UFOs, past lives or parallel worlds or spirits of the dead that haunt the living. I don’t believe in anything I can’t put my hands on. Still, something about this woman on the screen intrigues me, and I find myself not wanting to change the channel. I suppose everyone is a skeptic until they have a reason to believe.