The Dogs of Littlefield (23 page)

Taking a macaroon between her thumb and forefinger, Margaret gazed at it intently; a moment later she dropped it on the floor and with a sharp exclamation bent over to look for it. Her dog was too quick and, rooting around on the carpet, snapped up the macaroon while she scolded him. Next she announced she had lost her house keys somewhere in the chair and began to hunt for them, crouching down to reach under the cushion.

“I'm sorry,” she said, in a high, artificial voice. “I don't know what's wrong with me. I feel like I've been losing everything lately.”

George stood up to help her look and a moment later realized she was kneeling, flushed and trembling, eye level with his belt buckle.

“Yes!” She held up a small silver ring of house keys.

Staring down at the parting in her hair, he noticed that she needed to touch up her roots. Faint lines were etched around her mouth; a dusty halo of fine, dry hairs outlined her face. It was not kind, or fair, he realized, to examine her so closely, and yet he could not make himself look away.

She lowered her gaze and began playing with the keys in her hand, shaking them and saying, “I don't know how—I don't know—”

“Here,” he said brusquely, and reached down to help her to her feet.

Her dog growled again.

“I just meant to stop by. I've wanted to talk about—”

They were both standing now; he still had hold of her arm. She gave a convulsive jerk, as if startling awake.

“Bill's whole firm has been shut down. We may have to sell our house.”

George took hold of both her elbows.

“I think he's seeing things.”

She described hallucinations Bill had been having: He imagined their bed was full of bedbugs. The Christmas tree ornaments had looked to him like eyeballs. Twice he thought he'd seen his dead father, holding a bottle of beer.

“What do
you
think?” she asked. “Could they be manifestations of—?”

“Sounds like regular nuts to me.”

Her eyes looked bright, as if she were on the point of tears. But in a determined voice she went on, “What you said a few weeks ago, at the book club meeting—”

“Don't remind me.”

“No, no. That's not what I meant. I haven't been able to stop thinking, what you told us about unappeasable longing, and fear and grief, and being hit with—”

“Crap,” he said, dropping her elbows, “all crap, the minute you start talking about it.”

“You don't understand.” She stared at him. “Oh, what am I doing here?” She pressed her hands to either side of her face. “What am I doing?”

She looked so distraught that his exasperation vanished.

Quickly he gathered her into his arms and kissed her, breathing in a floral perfume that emanated from the pink lace at her collar.

At that same instant, her dog launched itself from the rug, snarling, teeth bared.

“Jesus!”

“Oh, my God.” She'd grabbed the dog's red collar with both hands. “Did he bite you? I'm so sorry. Binx! Bad dog! I hope he didn't bite you. We haven't had him fixed yet and he's gotten so aggressive. I'm sorry. I'll get him out of here.”

“No,” he said. “Wait.”

While Margaret held the dog by its collar, George snatched up the end of its leash and tied it to a leg of the coffee table. Hanging half in the air, the dog scrabbled helplessly with its forepaws, making a strange, low grizzling noise that sounded almost abject.

“You can let him go,” he told her, stepping back.

Immediately, the dog sank down on the rug beside the coffee table. Margaret spoke to it sternly, put her hand on its big black head, and told it to stay, while it rolled its muddy eyes up to look at her. When she saw that the dog was secured and would not follow them, she let George lead her across the room, holding her once more by the elbow, but now as if she were a convalescent or someone elderly. Yet when they reached the bottom of the stairs, she went up first, rapidly, easily, her black clogs almost noiseless on the worn plum-colored carpeting, so that she was waiting for him when he reached the landing.

— —

Once he might have found
her awkwardness exciting, even touching; but the truth was they were both at an age where it was upsetting to be clumsy and inept. She had stepped on his foot when they were maneuvering onto the bed. She'd failed to understand that he wanted her to take off her blouse herself—not wanting to hazard those cloth-covered buttons, which might be only decorative. And yet something like ardor swept through him as he pressed his mouth to hers and pulled, finally, at the pink buttons on her blouse; they proved to be real and gave way with surprising ease. Whenever he stopped kissing her she began apologizing and saying that she did not know why she was there. Several times her dog howled from downstairs and she apologized for that, too. He kissed her harder, realizing with some disappointment that she expected him to overmaster her. Eventually she stopped talking, and there she was—hair loose on the pillow, eyes deep blue, the skin of her throat pulsing.

“I want—I want—”

“Hush,” he said, and went back to kissing her.

A little while later he asked, “Do I need—?”

They both had most of their clothes off and she was making encouraging noises. He managed to locate a condom in the top drawer of his bedside table without too much fumbling.

Her breathing quickened.

Everything was—it was just as he liked to imagine—

And then his old enemy slipped into bed with them: the third person.

He mounted her,
he found himself reading, he hoped not aloud, from a continuous feed of pornographic bulletins that appeared to be running across the headboard.
His well-muscled buttocks heaving
.

“Oh,” she moaned. “Yes.”

No, he thought, gritting his teeth. No.

With a tremendous thrust he—

A long, stricken howl sounded in his ears.

Outside magnolia buds swelled and surged magnificently open in the sun.

— —

Afterward they lay for a
time, side by side, looking at the shifting leaf patterns thrown by sunlight on his bedroom wall, sharing a kind of collegial relief that their ordeal was over, as if they had delivered a joint lecture that was received with indifference and then had retired to a campus bar. He was surprised not to feel ashamed, but instead oddly proud of himself. It was not the end of the world. It was even pleasant, to be lying next to a woman who did not seem to mind that they had not achieved what they set out to do, but had instead been waylaid by other notions, other demands. She had not wept, either, which he'd expected given her earlier apologies.

The room was warm and mellow, fragrant with an apple core he'd left last night on his bedside table. The bedclothes were comfortably rumpled. They were talking about first memories. She had just said something about a blind knocking against a window sash in the summer breeze (had she been reading Virginia Woolf?), and was asking whether he thought people's lives rested, somehow, on a first memory (she had been reading Virginia Woolf), when he heard himself say, “I've never outgrown mine.”

Which wasn't what he meant to say. He didn't know what he meant and wasn't even sure his first memory
was
his first memory—something about touching a dog's rear end and having his hand swatted came back to him—but once more he felt her attention turn to him, and the heady sensation of having someone want to hear him talk about himself, mixed with the opulence of lying in bed in the middle of a sunny morning, made him keep talking.

His first memory was of carnival lights: the Ferris wheel's lit web of steel struts and stanchions, and below a treasure-box glow of lights against an indigo backdrop. Also the side of his father's head, the dark curl of an enormous ear. He was being carried away from the lights, home to bed probably, but what he really recalled was watching those magical lights recede, turning and turning, as he was borne off on his father's shoulder, his protests unheeded.

“Pretty Freudian, huh?”

She did not respond, but lay looking at the ceiling.

Finally she sighed. “No. Not Freudian, I don't think.”

“The ear part.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe just that part.”

This was kind of her. But now he wanted her to leave. His memory had depressed him. Now it seemed more about his father's ear than about the Ferris wheel, an image he had privately cherished. It was almost eleven. He could hear the postman clump up the front steps, arrive at the front door, and stuff envelopes through the mail slot. Her dog began barking downstairs.

Margaret was talking again about Bill. His job. Her worries about him. This, too, depressed George. Here he was with a woman in his bed, but all she could talk about was her poor deadbeat of a husband. He stopped listening and began thinking about his novel and the scene he had left off writing. Perhaps it was Margaret's earlier mention of Bill's father making ghostly appearances, but as he lay there thinking of Moses Finkle, it seemed to George that Moses Finkle was standing at the end of the bed. Wearing old gray Kansas City pinstripes, tight across the waist.

Margaret was still talking about Bill. “He says he feels no desire for anything. We haven't had sex for a year. Even before that it was—for a while we tried—”

George had so many questions for Moses.

What's it like to strike out with the bases loaded at the bottom of the ninth and hear twenty thousand fans groan in unison? What's it like to watch the next guy hit a triple, a rocket out to left field, and in that moment know, not just suspect but
know,
that you'll never be major, that you'll always be minor league in the thing you've given up everything to do?

Would that be enough to pull a guy out of his grave, the chance to do it all over, be better, be
great
?

Moses shook his head. His blue batting helmet, scarred and blackened with pine tar, hid most of his face, but from the tilt of his chin George could read disapproval.

Margaret's voice had dimmed. “It was all—too—complicated somehow.”

He made an effort to sound interested. “Yeah?”

“Sort of—heavy. I kept feeling it was my fault—”

Sex in middle age is like making a matzo ball,
he heard Moses Finkle say from the end of the bed.
It requires a sensitive touch. Too much handling and it turns to lead.

George sat up halfway against his pillow. My God! What a line. Sex advice from a zombie! He had to write it down before he forgot it. His heart was racing. He'd been worrying that a zombie baseball player was too derivative—Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Malamud book—but a zombie sex therapist!

That was new. That was all his. No more baseball player. The whole story would have to be revised, but it was falling into place. The boy wouldn't find a baseball card; he'd find a
business
card, an old, faded business card, stuck to the sidewalk outside an adult movie theater in Albany. Or maybe Moses would be summoned from the dead by the boy's grandfather, a rabbi, with a congregation full of dysfunctional marriages, to deliver a series of miraculously effective sex education lectures (“Mazel Tov for Masturbation!”, “Why Make ‘Putz' a Four-Letter Word?”). The story would take place in the Catskills. Moses could come back to life in the Borscht Belt.

Beside him, Margaret was gazing at the ceiling and slowly twining a lock of hair around one finger. She looked like she could lie there all day. He had to get to work; his fingers were trembling with the need to start typing. But could he tell her to go home without ruining the fraternal feeling that had sprung up between them?

Already he saw her opening the door for herself and walking quickly down the front steps. In another moment she had gained the walkway, passing under the magnolia branches, and was onto the sidewalk, striding away toward the corner, the sun on her hair and the wind in her coat, that ugly black dog loping beside her.

At least he should offer her coffee or a cup of tea. But then she might stay even longer. Also, he'd just noticed she had a mole on her neck she should really get looked at.

How impossible everything always turned out to be.

“Anyway, I think it
is
my fault”—her voice had sunk to a whisper—“at least—”

For an instant Moses Finkle lifted his batting helmet and George glimpsed a dark, admonitory face that bore a strong resemblance to old Hedy Fischman's.

Margaret had stopped speaking. She seemed scarcely to be breathing, and George realized she was waiting for him to say that
he
found her desirable, in spite of his earlier performance, which must be confirming her worst fears about herself. He should reassure her. He should say something gallant, something complimentary.

“About what happened earlier,” he muttered.

For a long moment they looked hopelessly at each other.

“It's not Bill, it's me,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I'm the one seeing things.”

George sighed. “You and me both, sister.”

“I see ghosts.”

“Who doesn't?”

“No,
really
.” Her eyes were huge and frightened. “I'm trying to tell you something.”

“Listen, two minutes ago I had a ghost telling me how to make matzo balls.” He pointed. “Right there by the footboard. I kid you not. Matzo balls. How's that for Freudian?”

For a moment she looked shocked, and then bewildered, followed by angry, then sad, and as he watched each expression flit across her face, changing her features from lovely to plain to something in between, he thought how extraordinary it was that so many selves could inhabit a single person. Why was anybody ever lonely?

As if she'd had the same thought, suddenly she began to laugh. It was an infectious sound, made up equally of despair and relief, and a moment later he began to laugh, too. Soon they couldn't seem to stop. They rocked on the bed, laughing until their eyes leaked tears.
Whoo
whoo,
they both cried as they tried to catch their breath. He was blotting his eyes with a corner of the bedsheet.