Bark: Stories

  Laughter in the midafternoon night. The daylilies in the Plexiglas table vase had already called it a day.

  “Veterinarians really have it down,” she said. “It’s so much more humane than human medicine—especially the endgame. They’ve got the right injections. No bad morphine dreams.”

  “That’s why I’m getting my little puppy suit ready,” he said.

  “Ho ho.”

  “If you’re suicidal,” he said slowly, “and you don’t actually kill yourself, you become known as ‘wry.’ ”

  He had headaches that could be debilitating, but he had always hid in his apartment when they came on so she had never seen how crippling they were. Two years later, when he had a chip implanted in his head—a headache cure, experimental, cutting-edge, but who could not think of The Manchurian Candidate?—she would go visit him, bring him lunch, listen to him joke about his shaved-off hair and the battery pack implanted in his chest. Someone, it seemed, was experimenting with him, but he did not say who, precisely. He was susceptible to charming leaders and group activities despite his remarks about sheep. He was also simultaneously stoical about all. Still later, when the chip was removed, sloppily, and the trembling that had begun in that café overtook the entirety of him, leaving him frail, unsteady, leaning on a cane, filling out retirement forms—“apparently I was in the control group and the control group does not experience the experiment”—she would drive up to see him in one of the cottages in the veterans’ lakeside compound in the northern part of the state. But the woman at the reception desk always said, “He’s just not seeing people today.” Uniformed guards would check her car at the security gate, and once when she got home she found one of the guards’ cell phones in her trunk. Mostly, if allowed, she would walk the grounds and seek out his cottage—he had his own, like a high-ranking officer, so his GS number was probably substantial. Still there was no response, even though he had replied by e-mail that yes it would be good to see her. He never answered the door the four times she had gone to see him and the nine times each that she had knocked.

  “By the way,” he added now, “make sure I don’t have one of those ostensibly green funerals where they put the unpreserved body on view on a giant heap of ice in someone’s blazingly sunny backyard. I want a church. Also? I have my music picked out.”

  “OK.”

  “Just plug my iPod into some speakers in the front of the chapel.”

  “Positioned to Genius?” A compliment, forehanded, she thought. They were so rare in life and even less often believed.

  He acknowledged it with a nod, respecting her effort. “Oh,” he said, “Shuffle will do.”

  Her own iPod would be an embarrassment: Forbidden Broadway, Sting, French for Dummies.

  She looked around at the café’s brass-rimmed tables and the waxy caned chairs. Then she looked back at Tom. He was in a state of pain and worry she had never seen him in before. Back in their once-shared hometown, through the years, first when he was married, then when she was married, they had looked for each other across rooms, hovered near each other at parties, for years they had done it, taut and electrified, each stealthily seeking the other out and then standing close, wineglasses in hand, spellbound by their own eagerly mustered small talk. She would study the superficially sleepy look his face would assume, atop his still-strapping figure, the lowered lids and wavy mouth, and emanating from behind it all his laserlike concentration on her. The more a lovely secret was real the less you spoke of it. But as the secret came to evanesce, as soon as it threatened to go away on its own accord, the secret itself grew frantic and indiscreet—as a way to hang on to its own fading life.

  Now they had gotten lucky at long last and neither of them was married anymore—though anything that was at long last, and that had involved such miserable commotion, was unlikely to be truly lucky. They had arranged this rendezvous in faraway France, and neither of them knew its meaning, for its meaning had not been determined out loud. “Is this a date, or independent contractors in semi-prearranged collision?” he had asked just last night, and then spring rain had poured down upon them, shining the concrete, dripping off both their eyeglasses, which they removed, and she had kissed him.

  A private car now pulled up at the curb.

  “Good God,” he said, “the car came so fast.”

  “Keep eating. That comes first. Eat whatever you can. The car can wait.”

  She could see he had no appetite but was force-feeding, pushing the food in as if it were a job. Small bites of the lamb. “People are indeed sheep,” he said now, chewing. “Stupid as sheep. Actually with sheep at least one of them is always smart and the others just turn their brains off and follow. ‘What’s Maurie doing now?’ they ask each other. ‘Where is Maurie going, let’s follow!’ The flock is the organism.”

  “Like the military,” she said.

  He swallowed with some difficulty and at first did not say anything. “Yeah. Occasionally. Civ-Mil has never worked properly as a unit.” He pulled a bay leaf out of his couscous. “Bay leaves are bullshit,” he said, flinging it down on his plate.

  “What will you do with the rest of your time here?” he asked, rounding up the remaining food with his fork, pushing it into small piles, with rivulets and valleys.

  “I’ll find things,” she said. “But it will not be the same without you.”

  He put his fork down and grabbed her hand, which put a knot in her chest.

  “Remember: never drink alone,” he said.

  “I don’t,” she said. “I usually drink with MacNeil-Lehrer.” She assumed he would call her when he got to D.C.

  He withdrew his hand, fumbled with his wallet, threw cash down on the table, and grabbed his suitcase.

  They got up together and walked to his car. The blue-bereted driver got out and opened the door for him. Tom tossed the bag in the back and turned to her, about to say something, then changed his mind and just got in. When the door shut, he lowered his window.

  “I don’t know how to say this,” he said, “but, well—keep me in mind.”

  “How could I not?” she said.

  “That’s something I don’t ask, ma chère.” She lowered her head, and he pressed his lips to her cheek for a very long moment.

  “May our paths cross again soon,” she said, stepping back. And then like a deaf person she made a little gesture of a cross with the index fingers of each of her hands, but it came out like a werewolf ward-off sign. Inept even at sign language. A Freudian slip of the dumb. As the car began to roll away, she called out, “Have a good flight!” His head turned and bent toward her one last time.

  “Hey, I’ve got all my liquids packed in my unchecked bag,” he shouted, not without innuendo. She flung one palm quickly to her mouth to blow a kiss, but the car took a quick right down the Rue du Bac. A kiss blown—in all ways. But she could see him lift his left hand quickly at the window, like a karate chop that was also a salute, as the car merged and disappeared into the fanning traffic.

  Years earlier, at a Christmas party of a mutual friend, their spouses both out on the wintry summer porch smoking, she had found herself next to him, in the kitchen, jiggling the open bottles of wine to see which one might not yet be empty. The day before, along with a photo of prizewinning gingerbread houses on display at the mall, he had sent her an e-mail: “I just took three Adderall and made these for you.” In the next room Bob Dylan was singing “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

  “What is the thing you regret most in life?” he asked her, standing close. There were perhaps a dozen empty bottles, and she and Tom methodically tipped every one of them upside down, held them up to the light, sometimes peering into them from underneath. “Nothing but dead soldiers here,” he murmured. “I’d like to say optimistically that they were half full, not half empty, but these are just totally empty.”

  “Unless you have a life of great importance,” she said, “regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town.”


  His face went bright with amusement and drink. “Then what happens to the town?” he asked.

  She thought about this. “Oh, there’s a lot of weather,” she said, slowly. “It snows. It thunders. The sun comes out. People go to church and sit in the sanctuary and sometimes they see escaped clowns sitting in the back pews with their white gloves still on.”

  “Escaped clowns?” he asked.

  “Escaped,” she said. “Sort of escaped.”

  “Come in from the cold?” he inquired.

  “Come in to sit next to each other.”

  He nodded with satisfaction. “The past is for losers, baby?”

  “Kind of like that.” She wasn’t sure that she agreed, but she understood the power of such a thought.

  His stance grew jaunty. He leaned in close to her, up against the kitchen counter’s edge.

  “Do you ever feel that no one knows what you’re talking about, that everyone is just pretending—except for me?”

  She studied him carefully. “Yes, I do,” she said. “I do.”

  “Ah,” he replied, straightening his posture. He clasped her hand: electricity burst into it then vanished as he let go. “We’re all suckers for a happy ending.”

  THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME

  The day following Michael Jackson’s death, I was constructing my own memorial for him. I played his videos on YouTube and sat in the kitchen at night, with the iPod light at the table’s center the only source of illumination. I listened to “Man in the Mirror” and “Ben,” my favorite, even if it was about a killer rat. I tried not to think about its being about a rat, as it was also the name of an old beau, who had e-mailed me from Istanbul upon hearing of Jackson’s death. Apparently there was no one in Turkey to talk about it with. “When I heard the news of MJackson’s death I thought of you,” the ex-beau had written, “and that sweet, loose-limbed dance you used to do to one of his up-tempo numbers.”

  I tried to think positively. “Well, at least Whitney Houston didn’t die,” I said to someone on the phone. Every minute that ticked by in life contained very little information, until suddenly it contained too much.

  “Mom, what are you doing?” asked my fifteen-year-old daughter, Nickie. “You look like a crazy lady sitting in the kitchen like this.”

  “I’m just listening to some music.”

  “But like this?”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “You are so totally disturbing me,” she said.

  Nickie had lately announced a desire to have her own reality show so that the world could see what she had to put up with.

  I pulled out the earbuds. “What are you wearing tomorrow?”

  “Whatever. I mean, does it matter?”

  “Uh, no. Not really.” Nickie sauntered out of the room. Of course it did not matter what young people wore: they were already amazing looking, without really knowing it, which was also part of their beauty. I was going to be Nickie’s date at the wedding of Maria, her former babysitter, and Nickie was going to be mine. The person who needed to be careful what she wore was me.

  It was a wedding in the country, a half-hour drive, and we arrived on time, but somehow we seemed the last ones there. Guests milled about semipurposefully. Maria, an attractive, restless Brazilian, was marrying a local farm boy, for the second time—a second farm boy on a second farm. The previous farm boy she had married, Ian, was present as well. He had been hired to play music, and as the guests floated by with their plastic cups of wine, Ian sat there playing a slow melancholic version of “I Want You Back.” Except he didn’t seem to want her back. He was smiling and nodding at everyone and seemed happy to be part of this send-off. He was the entertainment. He wore a T-shirt that read, THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME. This seemed remarkably sanguine and useful as well as a little beautiful. I wondered how it was done. I myself had never done anything remotely similar. “Marriage is one long conversation,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Of course, he died when he was forty-four, so he had no idea how long the conversation could really get to be.

  “I can’t believe you wore that,” Nickie whispered to me in her mauve eyelet sundress.

  “I know. It probably was a mistake.” I was wearing a synthetic leopard-print sheath: I admired camouflage. A leopard’s markings I’d imagined existed because a leopard’s habitat had once been alive with snakes, and blending in was required. Leopards were frightened of snakes and also of chimpanzees, who were in turn frightened of leopards—a standoff between predator and prey, since there was a confusion as to which was which: this was also a theme in the wilds of my closet. Perhaps I had watched too many nature documentaries.

  “Maybe you could get Ian some lemonade,” I said to Nickie. I had already grabbed some wine from a passing black plastic tray.

  “Yes, maybe I could,” she said and loped across the yard. I watched her broad tan back and her confident gait. She was a gorgeous giantess. I was in awe to have such a daughter. Also in fear—as in fearful for my life.

  “It’s good you and Maria have stayed friends,” I said to Ian. Ian’s father, who had one of those embarrassing father-in-law crushes on his son’s departing wife, was not taking it so well. One could see him misty-eyed, treading the edge of the property with some iced gin, keeping his eye out for Maria, waiting for her to come out of the house, waiting for an opening, when she might be free of others, so he could rush up and embrace her.

  “Yes.” Ian smiled. Ian sighed. And for a fleeting moment everything felt completely fucked up.

  And then everything righted itself again. It felt important spiritually to go to weddings: to give balance to the wakes and memorial services. People shouldn’t have been set in motion on this planet only to grieve losses. And without weddings there were only funerals. I had seen a soccer mom become a rhododendron with a plaque, next to the soccer field parking lot, as if it had been watching all those matches that had killed her. I had seen a brilliant young student become a creative writing contest, as if it were all that writing that had been the thing to do him in. And I had seen a public defender become a justice fund, as if one paid for fairness with one’s very life. I had seen a dozen people become hunks of rock with their names engraved so shockingly perfectly upon the surface it looked as if they had indeed turned to stone, been given a new life the way the moon is given it, through some lighting tricks and a face-like font. I had turned a hundred Rolodex cards around to their blank sides. So let a babysitter become a bride again. Let her marry over and over. So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time.

  Someone very swanky and tall and in muddy high heels in the grass was now standing in front of Ian, holding a microphone, and singing “Waters of March” while Ian accompanied. My mind imitated the song by wandering: A stick. A stone. A wad of cow pie. A teary mom’s eye.

  “There are a bazillion Brazilians here,” said Nickie, arriving with two lemonades.

  “What did you expect?” I took one of the lemonades for Ian and put my arm around her.

  “I don’t know. I only ever met her sister. Just once. The upside is at least I’m not the only one wearing a color.”

  We gazed across the long yard of the farmhouse. Maria’s sister and her mother were by the rosebushes, having their pictures taken without the bride.

  “Maria and her sister both look like their mother.” Her mother and I had met once before, and I now nodded in her direction across the yard. I couldn’t tell if she could see me.

  Nickie nodded with a slight smirk. “Their father died in a car crash. So yeah, they don’t look like him.”

  I swatted her arm. “Nickie. Sheesh.”

  She was silent for a while. “Do you ever think of Dad?”

  “Dad who?”

  “Come on.”

  “You mean, Dad-eeeeee?”

  The weekend her father left—left the house, the town, the c
ountry, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back—he had said, “You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.”

  And I had said, “Are you on crack?” And he had replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, “Yes, a little.”

  “Dadder. As in badder,” Nickie said now. She sometimes claimed to friends that her father had died, and when she was asked how, she would gaze bereavedly off into the distance and say, “A really, really serious game of Hangman.” Mothers and their only children of divorce were a skewed family dynamic, if they were families at all. Perhaps they were more like cruddy buddy movies, and the dialogue between them was unrecognizable as filial or parental. It was extraterrestrial. With a streak of dog-walkers-meeting-at-the-park. It contained more sibling banter than it should have. Still, I preferred the whole thing to being a lonely old spinster, the fate I once thought I was most genetically destined for, though I’d worked hard, too hard, to defy and avoid it, when perhaps there it lay ahead of me regardless. If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why “learn to be alone” in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.

  Maria came out of the house in her beautiful shoulderless wedding dress, which was white as could be.

  “What a fantastic costume,” said Nickie archly.

  Nickie was both keen observer and enthusiastic participant in the sartorial disguise department, and when she was little there had been much playing of Wedding, fake bridal bouquets made of ragged plastic-handled sponges tossed up into the air and often into the garage basketball hoop, catching there. She was also into Halloween. She would trick-or-treat for UNICEF dressed in a sniper outfit or a suicide bomber outfit replete with vest. Once when she was eight, she went as a dryad, a tree nymph, and when asked at doors what she was, she kept saying, “A tree-nip.” She had been a haughty trick-or-treater, alert to the failed adult guessing game of it—you’re a what? a vampire?—so when the neighbors looked confused, she scowled and said reproachfully, “Have you never studied Greek mythology?” Nickie knew how to terrify. She had sometimes been more interested in answering our own door than in knocking on others, peering around the edge of it with a witch hat and a loud cackle. “I think it’s time to get back to the customers,” she announced to me one Halloween when she was five, grabbing my hand and racing back to our house. She was fearless: she had always chosen the peanut allergy table at school since a boy she liked sat there—the cafeteria version of The Magic Mountain. Nickie’s childhood, like all dreams, sharpened artificially into stray vignettes when I tried to conjure it, then faded away entirely. Now tall and long-limbed and inscrutable, she seemed more than ever like a sniper. I felt paralyzed beside her, and the love I had for her was less for this new spiky Nickie than for the old spiky one, which was still inside her somewhere, though it was a matter of faith to think so. Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether. When, in the last few months, Nickie had “stood her ground” in various rooms of the house, screaming at me abusively, I would begin mutely to disrobe, slowly lifting my shirt over my head so as not to see her, and only that would send her flying out of the room in disgust. Only nakedness was silencing, but at least something was.