The Dogs of Babel (26 page)

At our last stop of the day, Lexy paused in front of a table of children’s toys. She picked up a plastic Halloween mask, the kind that’s held in place with a rubber band. It was a Frankenstein mask, cheaply made and garishly colored.

“I think yours are nicer,” I said to Lexy, talking quietly so that the woman sitting in the lawn chair a few feet away wouldn’t hear.

“Yeah, but these are fun. They’re like everyone’s memory of their childhood Halloweens. I think I’m going to get it.”

She paid the woman a quarter, and we walked across the lawn to the car.

“I think,” Lexy said, and it makes my chest ache to think of it, “maybe I’ll start collecting these.”

Sunday, we slept late and Lexy made pancakes, working from a cookbook.

“I never knew these were so easy,” she said. “My mom never made anything from scratch, and I used to be so jealous when I slept over at friends’ houses and they had the kind of moms who made pancakes in the morning. But it turns out it’s really easy.”

“See?” I said. “You could be a mom.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and I think she might have told me then. But she didn’t. She turned away to ladle more batter into the pan, and what she said was, “Yeah, I guess I could.”

I filed that away in my brain as a small triumph. I thought I’d bring it out another time, if the topic of having children came up again. I ate my pancakes happily, pleased with this small concession. Maybe there’s hope, I thought.

We went for a walk in the afternoon, and then to a movie. We had dinner at our favorite pizza place. Sunday was a lovely day. And Monday was fine.

But Tuesday. Tuesday is when we had our last fight.

W
e’re getting nearer. We’re nearing the end, of course you know that, you’ve known from the beginning, from the very first sentence I spoke. I’m tensing up as we get closer, I can feel myself wanting to slow down and to speed up at the same time.

I had a slow day at work on Tuesday—I was supposed to be finishing up a symposium paper, but I kept getting distracted. I found myself, at one point, thinking about the myth of Lorelei. The image that kept popping into my mind was the one I had envisioned the night of the storm—a combination of the two Loreleis, the dog and the siren, a woman with flowing hair and a deadly song, her human face replaced with a Rhodesian Ridgeback’s earnest, furrowed features. It was a captivating image, at least in my mind, and it started me thinking that maybe this could be Lexy’s next big project. She’d seemed a bit aimless since finishing the
Macbeth
masks over the summer, and I thought this might be the answer. It drew on some elements she’d worked with in the past, and it allowed for endless combinations; she had all of mythology to work with, and all the dogs of the world. Didn’t the Egyptians have a dog-faced god? Why not carry that over to other mythologies? I imagined Medusa with the snarling face of a Doberman, her snaky hair sprouting from the glossy black fur of her forehead. I imagined Botticelli’s Venus rising from a clamshell with the sweet face of a sheltie. I made some clumsy sketches. I drew a pug-faced Cupid, a dalmatian-faced Athena bursting forth from the Labrador forehead of her father, Zeus. I drew Hermes with his winged hat resting gently on the ears of a Jack Russell terrier. I was quite taken with the idea. My drawings were mediocre, but surely Lexy would be able to do a better job.

I looked at the clock. It was four o’clock, and it was clear I wasn’t going to get any more real work done that day. I left my office and headed for the library. I found an illustrated book on world mythology and one on dog breeds. Using the photocopy machine and some scissors and tape borrowed from the reference desk, I created a few prototypes. Here was Poseidon with the face of a Portuguese water dog. Here was Hades with a bulldog’s bloated grimace. I laughed out loud at what I had made, causing several nearby students—it was close to midterms, and the library was packed—to cast annoyed looks in my direction. The images I’d created were crude and out of proportion, but there was something about them that made sense to me. At least they would give Lexy some idea of what I had in mind. I made one final picture, with a Ridgeback’s face on top of a siren’s body—I wasn’t able to find a picture of the German Lorelei, so I used one of the Greek sirens—and I headed home to show my creations to Lexy.

When I got home, Lexy was chopping vegetables for dinner. I kissed her on the top of her head and sat down across from her at the kitchen table. She smiled at me.

“Hi,” she said. “How was your day?”

“Good,” I said. “Excellent. I had a great idea.”

“Tell me about it,” she said. She pushed aside the onion slices she’d been working on and started in on a red pepper.

“Well, it’s an idea for you, actually. I’ve got your next project for you.”

She put down her knife and looked at me warily. “Okay,” she said. “But you know I don’t really tend to take other people’s ideas for my work. It kind of has to come from me, you know? I have to be inspired by something on my own. It’s like, remember when you published your first linguistics textbook, and all of a sudden your uncle started telling you all his ideas for mystery novels? It’s not like you were about to give up all your own work to work on someone else’s ideas.”

“Well, no, of course not. His ideas were terrible. But I think what I’ve got is pretty good. Just let me show it to you.”

She sighed. “Fine, but just be aware that I may not want to take your advice.”

I pulled my drawings and photocopy art out of my jacket pocket and smoothed the pages on the table. Lexy looked at them skeptically. She didn’t smile.

“See,” I said, “it’s figures from mythology done with dog faces. Isn’t that kind of interesting?”

She shrugged. “I guess so,” she said.

“Well, these aren’t done very well, of course, but I think that if
you
did them…” She didn’t say anything. She was staring at the table. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“See,” I went on, “I got the idea from your story about the myth of Lorelei and the way that when Lorelei, the dog, showed up, she kind of looked like the character from the myth. And I just started envisioning this mythical mermaid with Lorelei’s face.” I shuffled through the pages until I found the one with the Ridgeback. “Look, it’s this one here.”

She picked up the paper and looked at it, then let it fall to the table.

“It’s just not that simple, Paul,” she said. There was a sudden sharpness to her voice. “Look, some of these can’t even be done as masks. This Venus on the clamshell thing—if you just did her head, no one would understand what it was supposed to be.”

“Well, you just give it a title that explains it—that’s what artists do, isn’t it? You call it ‘Sheltie Venus’ or something. ‘Sheltie Venus Number 1.’”

“Oh, so now I’m supposed to do more than one of them? A whole series of sheltie Venuses? And this is going to be my claim to fame?”

“Lexy, I spent half the day working on this. You could at least…”

“Well, I didn’t ask you to.”

“I don’t know why you’re getting so upset,” I said, my own voice rising. “I was just trying to help. You’ve been sitting around for weeks, trying to come up with something new to work on. Why won’t you at least consider this?”

“Because it’s a bullshit idea.”

“I don’t see what makes it worse than some of the things you’ve come up with. ‘Laundry-shaped Souls’? What the hell is that?”

She stood up from the table and glared at me with such rage that I had to look away. “I can’t believe you just said that,” she said, her voice shaking. She was clenching and unclenching her fists. She made a noise of strangled anger and frustration, and in a single motion swept everything off the table, the papers, the vegetables, the cutting board. The knife hit the floor with such force that it bounced up at her, and she had to step back to avoid being hit by it.

I was not charitable. “Great,” I said coldly. “Here we go again.”

She raised her fist and banged it hard on the table once, twice, then stopped and rubbed her hand as if she’d hurt it.

“Go to hell,” she said, and left the room, her movements stiff and jerky. I heard the basement door slam.

I picked my papers off the floor and smoothed them out, but I left the mess of the vegetables. The wooden cutting board, I saw, had broken in half.

I paced the kitchen floor, growing more and more angry. Why did everything have to be so damn hard? There are people, I thought, whose lives are easier than this. There are people who don’t have to worry that their tiniest acts of kindness will be met with fury by the ones they love. It was in that moment that I thought, for the first time, about leaving Lexy. For a moment, only for a moment, I saw my life without her and I saw it to be better. Easier. Lighter. In that moment, that second heart of mine seemed to soar free. And it was in that same moment that I heard a cry from downstairs.

I went down to Lexy’s workshop to find her sitting on the couch, crying. She had a book on her lap, a big coffee-table book of African masks, with a piece of paper on top of it. She was holding her hands in front of her, looking at them. They were covered with a red liquid that I thought at first was blood. There was a pool of the same liquid seeping into the paper.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was just so mad,” she said. “I just didn’t know what to do with it.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, I thought maybe it would help if I tried to write it down, but as soon as I started writing, I lost control and started pounding the pen into the paper as hard as I could, and I was stabbing the paper with it, and the pen just broke.”

“That’s ink?” I said.

She nodded. She dropped her head and began to sob harder.

“What’s wrong with me?” she said. “I broke a pen. What kind of person does that?”

I just stood there and watched her cry. I tried to summon the strength to go to her, to comfort her, but then I saw the wreckage of the pen in her hands, and I realized what pen it was she had broken. It was a gold pen I had received from my parents when I graduated college. I used it to grade papers and exams; I kept it filled with red ink for that purpose. It was a pen that meant a great deal to me, and even though I’ve spent every day since then wishing I had acted differently, in that one moment I just couldn’t bring myself to be kind.

“I’m going upstairs,” I said. “Do you think you can avoid damaging any more of my things?”

I left her sitting there, crying, her hands covered with ink like blood.

I didn’t see her for the rest of the night. She stayed in the basement until after I’d gone to bed. And even though my anger had waned by the time I went to sleep, even though I cleaned the vegetables from the floor and left a note saying I was sorry, the harm was already done. That night, while I slept, Lexy picked up the phone and called Lady Arabelle and told her the secret she had not seen fit to tell me. “I’m lost,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” And Wednesday morning, when she woke up, when she got dressed, when she apologized to me over breakfast, when she kissed me once on the mouth before I left for work, she did so knowing it was the last day of her life.

Or perhaps not. I think I may be wrong on that last point. Knowing my Lexy, with her faith in impulse, her “suicide is just a moment,” I think she may not have known for sure until she reached the top of that tree and looked down at what lay below. And that, I can see now, is the great lie of her life and the great lie of her death. Because for most of us, suicide is a moment we’ll never choose. It’s only people like Lexy, who know they might choose it eventually, who believe they have a choice to make. And so Lexy, walking through her day, laying puzzles for me to solve, let herself believe there was a chance she might climb down from that tree unharmed. And so she granted herself absolution.

What’s it like, Lexy? You wake up and you feel—what? Heaviness, an ache inside, a weight, yes. A soft crumpling of flesh. A feeling like all the surfaces inside you have been rubbed raw. A voice in your head—no, not voices, not like hearing voices, nothing that crazy, just your own inner voice, the one that says “Turn left at the corner” or “Don’t forget to stop at the post office,” only now it’s saying “I hate myself.” It’s saying “I want to die.” It starts in the morning, as soon as you wake up. You see the sun through the curtains, it’s a beautiful day maybe, it doesn’t matter. You turn over to see if you can sleep some more, but it’s already too late for that. The day is upon you. You want to hide, to curl up in a ball, but that’s not really what you want either. After all. It doesn’t stop your mind, does it, it doesn’t stop the ache. It’s not an escape. The whole day in front of you. How will you bear it? You want to escape, but there’s no place you can go where it won’t be with you. Inside you like a nausea. Even sleep, really—you wake up with a jaw sore from clenching your teeth in the night and a feeling inside you like you’ve spent the whole night dreading this moment of waking up. The shining sun is of no use to you. Crying helps sometimes, the way that the wrenching act of vomiting can lead to a few moments’ respite from nausea. And the way it racks your gut is exactly the same.

You don’t want to get out of bed, but you don’t want to turn into that cliché, you know danger lies that way. So you get up, and you try to find pleasure in the little things, the first cup of coffee in a mug you like, the mint-burst in your mouth when you brush your teeth, but you can tell you’re trying too hard. You have breakfast with your husband, your sweet unknowing husband, who can’t see anything but the promise of a bright new day. And you say your apologies—you’re sorry, you’re always sorry, it’s a feeling as familiar as the taste of water on your tongue—and you kiss him on the lips as he walks out the door, and he’s gone.

You go through your morning, but your interactions feel false, all the little things you take for granted at other times, the need to smile at the neighbors on the street, the need to speak pleasantly to the awkward boy with the terrible face ringing up your groceries. The smile feels wrong on your face. You look at other people, and you know they have their problems, too, but it seems to come easier to them, all of it. They don’t have that hollow sound in their voices when they talk.