A Multitude of Sins

  Mack’s eyes moved gradually to me, and his impassive expression, which had seemed to signify one thing—resignation—began to signify something different. I knew this because a small cleft appeared in his chin.

  “Yes,” he said and let his eyes stay on me.

  People were shouldering past us. I could smell some woman’s heavy, warm-feeling perfume around my face. Music commenced in the rotunda, making the moment feel suffocating, clamorous: “We three kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we traverse afar …”

  “Yes,” Mack Bolger said again, emphatically, spitting the word from between his large straight, white, nearly flawless teeth. He had grown up on a farm in Nebraska, gone to a small college in Minnesota on a football scholarship, then taken an MBA at Wharton, had done well. All that life, all that experience was now being brought into play as self-control, dignity. It was strange that anyone would call him a dog when he wasn’t that at all. He was extremely admirable. “I bought an apartment on the Upper East Side,” he said, and he blinked his eyelashes very rapidly. “I moved out in September. I have a new job. I’m living alone. Beth’s not here. She’s in Paris where she’s miserable—or rather I hope she is. We’re getting divorced. I’m waiting for my daughter to come down from boarding school. Is that all right? Does that seem all right to you? Does it satisfy your curiosity?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.” Mack was not angry. He was, instead, a thing that anger had no part in, or at least had long been absent from, something akin to exhaustion, where the words you say are the only true words you can say. Myself, I did not think I’d ever felt that way. Always for me there had been a choice.

  “Do you understand me?” Mack Bolger’s thick athlete’s brow furrowed, as if he was studying a creature he didn’t entirely understand, an anomaly of some kind, which perhaps I was.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well then,” he said, and seemed embarrassed. He looked away, out over the crowd of moving heads and faces, as if he’d sensed someone coming.

  I looked toward where he seemed to be looking. But no one was approaching us. Not Beth, not a daughter. Not anyone. Perhaps, I thought, this was all a lie, or possibly even that I’d, for an instant, lost consciousness, and this was not Mack Bolger at all, and I was dreaming everything.

  “Do you think there could be someplace else you could go now?” Mack said. His big, tanned, handsome face looked imploring and exhausted. Once Beth had said Mack and I looked alike. But we didn’t. That had just been her fantasy. Without really looking at me again he said, “I’ll have a hard time introducing you to my daughter. I’m sure you can imagine that.”

  “Yes,” I said. I looked around again, and this time I saw a pretty blond girl standing in the crowd, watching us from several steps away. She was holding a red nylon backpack by its straps. Something was causing her to stay away. Possibly her father had signaled her not to come near us. “Of course,” I said. And by speaking I somehow made the girl’s face break into a wide smile, a smile I recognized.

  “Nothing’s happened here,” Mack said unexpectedly to me, though he was staring at his daughter. From the pocket of his overcoat he’d produced a tiny white box wrapped and tied with a red bow.

  “I’m sorry?” People were swirling noisily around us. The music seemed louder. I was leaving, but I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood him. “I didn’t hear you,” I said. I smiled in an involuntary way.

  “Nothing’s happened today,” Mack Bolger said. “Don’t go away thinking anything happened here. Between you and me, I mean. Nothing happened. I’m sorry I ever met you, that’s all. Sorry I ever had to touch you. You make me feel ashamed.” He still had the unfortunate dampness with his s’s.

  “Well,” I said. “All right. I can understand that.”

  “Can you?” he said. “Well, that’s very good.” Then Mack simply stepped away from me, and began saying something to the blond girl standing in the crowd smiling. What he said was, “Wow-wee, boy, oh boy, do you look like a million bucks.”

  And I walked on toward Billy’s then, toward the new arrangement I’d made that would take me into the evening. I had, of course, been wrong about the linkage of moments, and about what was preliminary and what was primary. It was a mistake, one I would not make again. None of it was a good thing to have done. Though it is such a large city here, so much larger than say, St. Louis, I knew I would not see him again.

  Puppy

  Early this past spring someone left a puppy inside the back gate of our house, and then never came back to get it. This happened at a time when I was traveling up and back to St. Louis each week, and my wife was intensely involved in the AIDS marathon, which occurs, ironically enough, around tax time in New Orleans and is usually the occasion for a lot of uncomfortable, conflicted spirits, which inevitably get resolved, of course, by good will and dedication.

  To begin in this way is only to say that our house is often empty much of the day, which allowed whoever left the puppy to do so. We live on a corner in the fashionable historical district. Our house is large and old and conspicuous— typical of the French Quarter—and the garden gate is a distance from the back door, blocked from it by thick ligustrums. So to set a puppy down over the iron grating and slip away unnoticed wouldn’t be hard, and I imagine was not.

  “It was those kids,” my wife said, folding her arms. She was standing with me inside the French doors, staring out at the puppy, who was seated on the brick pavements looking at us with what seemed like insolent curiosity. It was small and had slick, short coarse hair and was mostly white, with a few triangular black side patches. Its tail stuck alertly up when it was standing, making it look as though it might’ve had pointer blood back in its past. For no particular reason, I gauged it to be three months old, though its legs were long and its white feet larger than you would expect. “It’s those ones in the neighborhood wearing all the black,” Sallie said. “Whatever you call them. All penetrated everywhere and ridiculous, living in doorways. They always have a dog on a rope.” She tapped one of the square panes with her fingernail to attract the puppy’s attention. It had begun diligently scratching its ear, but stopped and fixed its dark little eyes on the door. It had dragged a red plastic dust broom from under the outside back stairs, and this was lying in the middle of the garden. “We have to get rid of it,” Sallie said. “The poor thing. Those shitty kids just got tired of it. So they abandon it with us.”

  “I’ll try to place it,” I said. I had been home from St. Louis all of five minutes and had barely set my suitcase inside the front hall.

  “Place it?” Sallie’s arms were folded. “Place it where? How?”

  “I’ll put up some signs around,” I said, and touched her shoulder. “Somebody in the neighborhood might’ve lost it. Or else someone found it and left it here so it wouldn’t get run over. Somebody’ll come looking.”

  The puppy barked then. Something (who knows what) had frightened it. Suddenly it was on its feet barking loudly and menacingly at the door we were standing behind, as though it had sensed we were intending something and resented that. Then just as abruptly it stopped, and without taking its dark little eyes off of us, squatted puppy-style and pissed on the bricks.

  “That’s its other trick,” Sallie said. The puppy finished and delicately sniffed at its urine, then gave it a sampling lick. “What it doesn’t pee on it jumps on and scratches and barks at. When I found it this morning, it barked at me, then it jumped on me and peed on my ankle and scratched my leg. I was only trying to pet it and be nice.” She shook her head.

  “It was probably afraid,” I said, admiring the puppy’s staunch little bearing, its sharply pointed ears and simple, uncomplicated pointer’s coloration. Solid white, solid black. It was a boy dog.

  “Don’t get attached to it, Bobby,” Sallie said. “We have to take it to the pound.”

  My wife is from Wetumpka, Alabama. Her family were ambitious, melancholy Lutheran Swedes who somehow made it to
the South because her great-grandfather had accidentally invented a lint shield for the ginning process which ended up saving people millions. In one generation the Holmbergs from Lund went from being dejected, stigmatized immigrants to being moneyed gentry with snooty Republican attitudes and a strong sense of entitlement. In Wetumpka there was a dog pound, and stray dogs were always feared for carrying mange and exotic fevers. I’ve been there; I know this. A dogcatcher prowled around with a ventilated, louver-sided truck and big catch-net. When an unaffiliated dog came sniffing around anybody’s hydrangeas, a call was made and off it went forever.

  “There aren’t dog pounds anymore,” I said.

  “I meant the shelter,” Sallie said privately. “The SPCA— where they’re nice to them.”

  “I’d like to try the other way first. I’ll make a sign.”

  “But aren’t you leaving again tomorrow?”

  “Just for two days,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

  Sallie tapped her toe, a sign that something had made her unsettled. “Let’s not let this drag out.” The puppy began trotting off toward the back of the garden and disappeared behind one of the big brick planters of pittosporums. “The longer we keep it, the harder it’ll be to give it up. And that is what’ll happen. We’ll have to get rid of it eventually.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “When the time comes, I’ll let you take it to the pound,” she said.

  I smiled apologetically. “That’s fine. If the time comes, then I will.”

  We ended it there.

  I am a long-time practitioner before the federal appeals courts, arguing mostly large, complicated negligence cases in which the appellant is a hotel or a restaurant chain engaged in interstate commerce, and who has been successfully sued by an employee or a victim of what is often some often terrible mishap. Mostly I win my cases. Sallie is also a lawyer, but did not like the practice. She works as a resource specialist, which means fund-raising for by and large progressive causes: the homeless, women at risk in the home, children at risk in the home, nutrition issues, etc. It is a far cry from the rich, arriviste-establishment views of her family in Alabama. I am from Vicksburg, Mississippi, from a very ordinary although solid suburban upbringing. My father was an insurance-company attorney. Sallie and I met in law school at Yale, in the seventies. We have always thought of ourselves as lucky in life, and yet in no way extraordinary in our goals or accomplishments. We are simply the southerners from sturdy, supportive families who had the good fortune to get educated well and who came back more or less to home, ready to fit in. Somebody has to act on that basic human impulse, we thought, or else there’s no solid foundation of livable life.

  One day after the old millennium’s end and the new one’s beginning, Sallie said to me—this was at lunch at Le Perigord on Esplanade, our favorite place: “Do you happen to remember”—she’d been thinking about it—“that first little watercolor we bought, in Old Saybrook? The tilted sailboat sail you could barely recognize in all the white sky. At that little shop near the bridge?” Of course I remembered it. It’s in my law office in Place St. Charles, a cherished relic of youth.

  “What about it?” We were at a table in the shaded garden of the restaurant where it smelled sweet from some kind of heliotrope. Tiny wild parrots were fluttering up in the live-oak foliage and chittering away. We were eating a cold crab soup.

  “Well,” she said. Sallie has pale, almost animal blue eyes and translucently caramel northern European skin. She has kept away from the sun for years. Her hair is cut roughly and parted in the middle like some Bergman character from the sixties. She is forty-seven and extremely beautiful. “It’s completely trivial,” she went on, “but how did we ever know back then that we had any taste. I don’t really even care about it, you know that. You have much better taste than I do in most things. But why were we sure we wouldn’t choose that little painting and then have it be horrible? Explain that to me. And what if our friends had seen it and laughed about us behind our backs? Do you ever think that way?”

  “No,” I said, my spoon above my soup, “I don’t.”

  “You mean it isn’t interesting? Or, eventually we’d have figured out better taste all by ourselves?”

  “Something like both,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Our taste is fine and would’ve been fine. I still have that little boat in my office. People pass through and admire it all the time.”

  She smiled in an inwardly pleased way. “Our friends aren’t the point, of course. If we’d liked sad-clown paintings or put antimacassars on our furniture, I wonder if we’d have a different, worse life now,” she said. She stared down at her lined-up knife and spoons. “It just intrigues me. Life’s so fragile in the way we experience it.”

  “What’s the point?” I had to return to work soon. We have few friends now in any case. It’s natural.

  She furrowed her brow and scratched the back of her head using her index finger. “It’s about how altering one small part changes everything.”

  “One star strays out of line and suddenly there’s no Big Dipper?” I said. “I don’t really think you mean that. I don’t really think you’re getting anxious just because things might have gone differently in your life.” I will admit this amused me.

  “That’s a very frivolous way to see it.” She looked down at her own untried soup and touched its surface with the rim of her spoon. “But yes, that’s what I mean.”

  “But it isn’t true,” I said and wiped my mouth. “It’d still be the thing it is. The Big Dipper or whatever you cared about. You’d just ignore the star that falls and concentrate on the ones that fit. Our life would’ve been exactly the same, despite bad art.”

  “You’re the lawyer, aren’t you?” This was condescending, but I don’t think she meant it to be. “You just ignore what doesn’t fit. But it wouldn’t be the same, I’m sure of that.”

  “No,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been exactly the same. But almost.”

  “There’s only one Big Dipper,” she said and began to laugh.

  “That we know of, and so far. True.”

  This exchange I give only to illustrate what we’re like together—what seems important and what doesn’t. And how we can let potentially difficult matters go singing off into oblivion.

  The afternoon the puppy appeared, I sat down at the leather-top desk in our dining room where I normally pay the bills and diligently wrote out one of the hand-lettered signs you see posted up on laundromat announcement boards and stapled to telephone poles alongside advertisements for new massage therapies, gay health issues and local rock concerts. puppy, my sign said in black magic marker, and after that the usual data with my office phone number and the date (March 23rd). This sheet I xeroxed twenty-five times on Sallie’s copier. Then I found the stapler she used for putting up the AIDS marathon posters, went upstairs and got out an old braided leather belt from my closet, and went down to the garden to take the puppy with me. It seemed good to bring him along while I stapled up the posters about him. Someone could recognize him, or just take a look at him and see he was available and attractive and claim him on the spot. Such things happen, at least in theory.

  When I found him he was asleep behind the ligustrums in the far corner. He had worked and scratched and torn down into the bricky brown dirt and made himself a loll deep enough that half of his little body was out of sight below ground level. He had also broken down several ligustrum branches and stripped the leaves and chewed the ends until the bush was wrecked.

  When he sensed me coming forward he flattened out in his hole and growled his little puppy growl. Then he abruptly sat up in the dirt and aggressively barked at me in a way that—had it been a big dog—would’ve alarmed me and made me stand back.

  “Puppy?” I said, meaning to sound sympathetic. “Come out.” I was still wearing my suit pants and white shirt and tie—the clothes I wear in court. The puppy kept growling and then barking at me, inching back behind the wrecked ligustrum until it was
in the shadows against the brick wall that separates us from the street. “Puppy?” I said again in a patient, cajoling way, leaning in amongst the thick green leaves. I’d made a loop out of my belt, and I reached forward and slipped it over his head. But he backed up farther when he felt the weight of the buckle, and unexpectedly began to yelp—a yelp that was like a human shout. And then he turned and began to claw up the bricks, scratching and springing, his paws scraping and his ugly little tail jerking, and at the same time letting go his bladder until the bricks were stained with hot, terrified urine.

  Which, of course, made me lose heart since it seemed cruel to force this on him even for his own good. Whoever had owned him had evidently not been kind. He had no trust of humans, even though he needed us. To take him out in the street would only terrify him worse, and discourage anyone from taking him home and giving him a better life. Better to stay, I decided. In our garden he was safe and could have a few hours’ peace to himself.

  I reached and tried to take the belt loop off, but when I did he bared his teeth and snapped and nearly caught the end of my thumb with his little white incisor. I decided just to forget the whole effort and to go about putting up my signs alone.

  I stapled up all the signs in no time—at the laundromat on Barracks Street, in the gay deli, outside the French patisserie, inside the coffee shop and the adult news on Decatur. I caught all the telephone poles in a four-block area. On several of the poles and all the message boards I saw that others had lost pets, too, mostly cats. Hiroki’s Lost. We’re utterly disconsolate. Can you help? Call Jamie or Hiram at … Or, We miss our Mittens. Please call us or give her a good home. Please! In every instance as I made the rounds I stood a moment and read the other notices to see if anyone had reported a lost puppy. But (and I was surprised) no one had.

  On a short, disreputable block across from the French Market, a section that includes a seedy commercial strip (sex shops, T-shirt emporiums and a slice-of-pizza outlet), I saw a group of the young people Sallie had accused of abandoning our puppy. They were, as she’d remembered, sitting in an empty store’s doorway, dressed in heavy, ragged black clothes and thick-soled boots with various chains attached and studded wristlets, all of them—two boys and two girls—pierced, and tattooed with Maltese crosses and dripping knife blades and swastikas, all dirty and utterly pointless but abundantly surly and apparently willing to be violent. These young people had a small black dog tied with a white cotton cord to one of the boys’ heavy boots. They were drinking beer and smoking but otherwise just sitting, not even talking, simply looking malignantly at the street or at nothing in particular.