from Harper's Magazine
ONCE THEY were out on the street, Grace, his dog, paid no attention to John Hillman, unless she wanted to range farther than her leash permitted. She would pause and look back at him, holding up one paw instead of lunging ahead and straining against her collar as John had observed other dogs do.
On her suddenly furrowed brow, in the faint tremor of her extended paw, he thought he read an entreaty. It both touched and irritated him. He would like to have owned a dog with more spirit. Even after he had put her dish of food on the kitchen floor, she would hesitate, stare fixedly at his face until he said, heartily, “Go ahead, Grace,” or, “There you are! Dinner!”
He entered Central Park in the early evening to take their usual path, and the farther he walked from the apartment house where he lived the more benign he felt. A few of the people he encountered, those without dogs of their own, paused to speculate about Grace's age or her breed.
“The classical antique dog,” pronounced an elderly man in a long raincoat, the hem of which Grace sniffed at delicately.
John had decided she was about three years old, as had been estimated by the people at the animal shelter where he had found her. But most of the people who spoke to him in the park thought she looked older.
“Look at her tits. She's certainly had one litter. And some of her whiskers are white,” observed a youngish woman wearing a black sweatshirt and baggy gray cotton trousers. As she looked at John her expression was solemn, her tone of voice impersonal. But he thought he detected in her words the character of a proclamation: “Tits” was a matter-of-fact word a woman could say to a man unless he was constrained by outmoded views.
What if, he speculated, inflamed by her use of the word, he had leaped upon her and grabbed her breasts, which, as she spoke, rose and fell behind her sweatshirt like actors moving behind a curtain?
“You’re probably right,” he said as he glanced up at a park lamp that lit as he spoke, casting its glow on discarded newspapers, fruit-juice cartons, crushed cigarette packs, and empty plastic bottles that had contained water. He had seen people, as they walked or ran for exercise, pausing to nurse at such bottles, holding them up at an angle so that the water would flow more quickly into their mouths. Perhaps they were merely overheated.
“I don’t know much about dogs,” he added.
She was pleasant-looking in a fresh, camp-counselor style, around his age, he surmised, and her stolid-footed stance was comradely. He would have liked to accompany her for a few minutes, a woman who spoke with such authority despite the ugliness of her running shoes. He knew people wore such cartoon footwear even to weddings and funerals these days. Meanwhile, he hoped she wouldn’t suddenly start running in place or stretch her arms or do neck exercises to ease whatever stress she might be experiencing, emitting intimate groans as she did so.
When he was speaking with people, he found himself in a state of apprehension, of nervous excitement, lest he be profoundly offended by what they said or did. For nearly a year, he had dated a girl who did such neck cycles at moments he deemed inappropriate. After completing one she had done in a bar they frequented, she had asked him, “Didn’t I look like a kitty-cat?” “No!” he replied, his voice acid with distaste. At once he regretted it. They spent the night lying in her bed like wooden planks. The next morning she dressed in silence, her face grim. He had tried to assuage her with boyish gaiety. She had broken her silence with one sentence: “I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“Have a good day,” said the woman in the baggy trousers, crimping her fingers at him as she sloped down the path. He bent quickly to Grace and stroked her head. “But it's night,” he muttered.
Was the interest expressed by people in the park only for his dog? Was he included in their kindly looks? When the walk was over, John felt that he was leaving a country of goodwill, that the broad avenue he would cross when he emerged from the park to reach his apartment house was the border of another country, New York City, a place he had ceased to love this last year.
Grace made for frequent difficulty at the curb. If the traffic light was green and northbound cars raced by, she sat peacefully on her haunches. But when the light changed to red and the traffic signal spelled WALK, Grace balked, suddenly scratching furiously at the hardened earth at the base of a spindly tree or else turning her back to the avenue. John would jerk on the leash. Grace would yelp. It was such a high, thin, frightened yelp. John would clench his jaw and yank her across the avenue, half wishing a car would clip her.
In the elevator, a few seconds later, he would regret his loss of control. If only Grace would look up at him. But she stared straight ahead at the elevator door.
The trouble with owning a dog is that it leaves you alone with a private judgment about yourself, John thought. If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog—you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was looking, and it was as though you had done it in front of a mirror.
John hoped that Grace would forget those moments at the curbside. But her long silky ears often flattened when he walked by her, and he took that as a sign. The idea that she was afraid of him was mortifying. When she cringed, or crept beneath a table, he murmured endearments to her, keeping his hands motionless. He would remind himself that he knew nothing about her past; undoubtedly, she’d been abused. But he always returned, in his thoughts, to his own culpability.
To show his good intentions, John brought her treats, stopping on his way home from work at a butcher shop to buy knucklebones. When Grace leaped up and whimpered and danced as John was opening the door, he would drop his briefcase and reach into a plastic bag to retrieve and show Grace what he had brought her. She would begin at once to gnaw the bone with the only ferocity she ever showed. John would sit down in a chair in the unlit living room, feeling at peace with himself.
After he gave her supper he would take her to the park. If all went well, the peaceful feeling lasted throughout the evening. But if Grace was pigheaded when the traffic light ordered them to walk—or worse, if the light changed when they were in the middle of the avenue and they were caught in the rush of traffic and Grace refused to move, her tail down, her rump turned under—then John, despite his resolution, would jerk on the leash, and Grace would yelp. When this happened, he had to admit to himself that he hated her.
This murderous rage led him to suspect himself the way he suspected the men who walked alone in the park, shabbily dressed and dirty, men he often glimpsed on a path or standing beneath the branch of a tree halfway up a rise. In his neighborhood there were as many muggings during the day as there were at night. Only a week earlier a man had been strangled less than one hundred yards from the park entrance. Now that it was early summer, the foliage was out, and it was harder to see the direction from which danger might come.
A day after the murder, he wondered if his cry would be loud enough to bring help. He had never had to cry out. He stood before his bathroom mirror, opened his mouth, and shut it at once, imagining he had seen a shriek about to burst forth, its imminence signaled by a faint quivering of his uvula.
Grace didn’t bark—at least he’d never heard her bark—and this fact increased his worry. Would she silently observe his murder, then slink away, dragging her leash behind her?
Sometimes he wished she would run away. But how could she? He didn’t let her off the leash as some owners did their dogs. Were he to do so, she was likely to feel abandoned once again.
He had got Grace because he had begun to feel lonely in the evenings and on weekends since the end of his affair with the kitty-cat girl, as he named her in memory. In his loneliness, he had begun to brood over his past. He had been slothful all his life, too impatient to think through the consequences of his actions. He had permitted his thoughts to collapse into an indeterminate tangle when he should have grappled with them.
When regret threatened to sink him, he made efforts to count his bless- ings. He had a passable job with an accounting firm, an affectionate older sister living in Boston with whom he spoke once a month, and a rent-controlled apartment. He still took pleasure in books. He had been a comparative-literature major in college before taking a business degree, judging that comp lit would get him nowhere. His health was good. He was only thirty-six.
Only! Would he tell himself on his next birthday that he was only thirty-seven, and try to comfort himself with a word that mediated between hope and dread?
He had little time to brood over the past during work, yet in the office he felt himself slipping into a numbness of spirit and body broken only by fits of the looniness he had also observed in colleagues and acquaintances. He called the phenomenon “little breakdowns in big cities.”
His own little breakdowns took the form of an irritability that seemed to increase by the hour. He became aware of a thick, smothering, oily smell of hair in the packed subway trains he rode to and from work. There was so much hair, lank or curly, frizzed or straight, bushy or carved in wedges, adorned with wide-toothed combs, metal objects, bits of leather, rubber bands. There were moments when John covered his mouth and nose with one hand.
Then there was the bearded man he shared an office with. Throughout the day, with his thumb and index finger, he would coil a hair in his beard as though it were a spring he was trying to force back into his skin. When John happened to look up and catch his office mate at it, he couldn’t look away or take in a single word the man was saying.
He was in a fire of rage. Why couldn’t the man keep his picking and coiling for private times?
That was the heart of it, of course: privacy. No one knew what it meant anymore. People scratched and groomed themselves, coiled their hair, shouted, played their radios at full volume, ate, even made love in public. Not that anyone called it lovemaking.
On a scrap of paper that he found on his desk, John wrote:
Name's Joe Sex
You can call me Tex
You kin have me, have me
At 34th and Lex.
He rolled it up into a ball and aimed at but missed the wastebasket. Later that day, a secretary retrieved it and read it aloud to the staff. People grew merry and flirtatious. He was thanked by everyone for cheering them up, for lightening the day.
On the weekend before he found Grace at the animal shelter, he wrote three letters to the New York Times. The first was to a noted psychiatrist who had reviewed a study of child development, calling it an “instant classic.” John wrote: “An instant classic is an oxymoron. A classic is established over time, not in an instant.”
The second was sent to a book reviewer who had described a detective story as lovingly written. “Lovingly,” John wrote, “is not an adverb that applies to literature, especially thrillers when they concern criminal activity.”
His third letter was about a term, “street smart,” used by a writer to describe a novel's heroine. “This is a superficially snappy but meaningless cliché that trivializes reality,” he wrote. “On the street, the truth is that people stumble about in confusion and dismay even when they are making fortunes selling illegal drugs. People are smart for only a few minutes at a time.”
While he was writing the letters he felt exalted. He was battling the degradation of language and ideas. But the intoxication soon wore off. He stared down at the letters on his desk. They looked less than trivial. He crumpled them and threw them into a wastebasket.
He came to a decision then. What he needed was a living creature to take care of; an animal would be a responsibility that would anchor him in daily life.
On weekends, Grace was a boon. John played with her, wearing an old pair of leather gloves so her teeth wouldn’t mark his hands. He bought rubber toys in a variety store, and she learned to chase and fetch them back to him. Once, while he lay half-asleep in his bathtub, she brought him a rubber duck. “Why Grace,” he said, patting her with a wet hand, “how appropriate!”
Perhaps dogs had thoughts. How else to explain the way Grace would suddenly rise from where she was lying and go to another room? Something must have occurred to her.
She followed him about as he shaved, made breakfast, washed his socks, dusted the furniture with an old shirt. When he sat down with his newspaper, she would curl up nearby on the floor. In the three months he had owned her, she had grown glossy and sleek. He liked looking at her. Where had she come from?
As if feeling his gaze, she stared up at him. At such moments of mutual scrutiny, John felt that time had ceased. He sank into the natural world reflected in her eyes, moving toward an awareness to which he was unable to give a name.
But if he bent to pet her, she would flatten her ears. Or if he touched her when she was up, her legs would tremble with the effort to remain upright yet humble. Or so he imagined.
One day he came home from work at noon. He had felt faint while drinking coffee at his desk in the office. Grace was not at the door to welcome him. He called her. There was no response.
After a thorough search, surprised by the violent thumping of his heart, he discovered her beneath the box springs of his bed. “Oh, Grace!” he exclaimed reproachfully. As soon as he had extricated her, he held her closely, her small hard skull pressed against his throat. After a moment he put her down. “You gave me a scare,” he said. Grace licked her flank. Had his emotion embarrassed her?
John's throat was feeling raw and sore, but he took Grace for a walk right away. She might have been confused by the change in her routine. At the park entrance, she sat down abruptly. He tugged at the leash. She sat on—glumly, he thought. He picked her up and walked to a patch of coarse grass and placed her on it. Dutifully, she squatted and urinated. A dozen yards or so away, John saw a black dog racing around a tree while its owner watched it, swinging a leash and smiling.
Grace seemed especially spiritless today. Later, propped up by pillows in bed and drinking tea from a mug printed with his initials—a gift from the kitty-cat girl—he wondered if Grace, too, was sick.
She was lying beneath the bedroom window, her paws twitching, her eyes rolled back leaving white crescents below her half-closed lids. He tried to forget how he had dragged her back home after their brief outing.
Of course, animals didn’t hold grudges. They forgave, or forgot, your displays of bad temper. Yet they must have some form of recollection, a residue of alarm that shaped their sense of the world around them. Grace would have been as exuberant as the black dog circling the tree if her pup- pyhood had been different. She pranced and cried when John came home from work, but wasn’t that simply relief? My God! What did she do in the apartment all day long, her bladder tightening as the hours accumulated, hearing, without understanding, the din of the city beyond the windows?
John felt better toward dusk, after waking from a nap. He determined to take Grace to a veterinarian. He ought to have done so long ago. In the telephone directory, he found a vet listed in the West Eighties, a few blocks from his apartment house.
The next morning he called his office to say that he wouldn’t be in until after lunch; he had to go to the doctor. Did the secretary sense an ambiguity in his voice when he mentioned a doctor? She didn’t know that he had a dog. No one in the office knew.
Yet was it possible that his evasions, his lies, were transparent to others? And they chose not to see through them because the truth might be so much more burdensome?
He recognized that people thought him an oddball at best. His friends warned him that, at worst, he would dry up, he was so wanting in emotion. But he considered most of them to be sentimentalists, worshiping sensations that they called feelings.
“You have a transient sensation. At once you convert it into a conviction,” he said to a woman sitting beside him at a dinner party. The hostess heard him, sprang to her feet, grabbed the salad bowl, with its remaining contents, and emptied it onto his head. He was dismayed, but he managed to laugh along with the other guests, who helped to pick leaves of lettuce and strips of carrot and radish from his collar and neck.
For the rest of the evening, desolation wrapped itself around him like a mantle. Everyone, including himself, was wrong. Somehow he knew he was alive. Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble. He couldn’t get the olive-oil stains out of his shirt and had to throw it out.
In the vet's waiting room, Grace sat close to John's feet, her ears rising and falling at the cries of a cat in a carrier. The cat's owner tapped the carrier with an index finger and smiled at John. “Sorry about the noise,” she said. “We all get scared in the doctor's office.”
She may have been right, but he shied away from her all-encompassing “we.” He smiled minimally and picked up a copy of Time magazine from a table.
When the receptionist told him to go to Room One, Grace balked. He picked her up and carried her, turning away from the cat owner's sympathetic gaze. He placed Grace on a metal examination table in the middle of a bare cubicle. A cat howled in another room.
As the doctor entered, his lab coat emanating the grim, arid smell of disinfectant, he nodded to John and looked at Grace. She had flattened herself against the table; her head was between her paws. The doctors pink hands moved Grace's envelope of fur and skin back and forth over her bones as he murmured, “Good girl, good dog.”
He took her temperature, examined her teeth, and poked at her belly. With each procedure, Grace grew more inert. “Distemper shots?” the doctor asked. John shook his head mutely. The doctor asked him more questions, but John couldn’t answer most of them. Finally John explained that he’d found her in an animal shelter. The doctor frowned. “Those places weren’t great even before the city cut funding for them,” he said. John nodded as though in agreement, but it was all news to him. What he’d known about dogs was that they could get rabies and had to be walked at least twice a day.
The doctor said that Grace had a bit of fever. It would be best to leave her overnight for observation. John could pick her up in the morning on Saturday.
John went to his office. People remarked on his paleness and asked him what the doctor had said. “I had a fever yesterday. Probably a touch of flu,” he replied. After his words they kept their distance. A secretary placed a bottle of vitamin C tablets on his desk, averting her face as she told him they were ammunition in the war against colds.
“I have leprosy,” John said.
She giggled and backed away from his desk. She doesn’t know what leprosy is, he guessed, or senses that it's vaguely un-American.
He kept to his section of the office the rest of the day. He was gratified that his colleagues had him pegged as a bit crazy. He had no desire to dislodge the peg. It made it easier. Thinking about that now, as he drank his third carton of tea, he didn’t know what the it was that was made easier.
After work, with no special reason to go home, he stopped at a bar on Columbus Avenue. He ordered a double whiskey. As he drank it, his brain seemed to rise in his skull, leaving a space that filled up with serene empti- ness. He ordered a repeat, wanting to sustain the feeling, which recalled to him the moments that followed lovemaking, almost a pause of being. But as he lifted his glass, he became cautious at the thought of four whiskeys on an empty stomach, and asked a passing waiter for a steak, medium. He took his drink to a booth.
The steak, when it came, was leathery, and it reminded him of the gloves he wore when he played with Grace. At this very moment she was in a cage in the dark, bewildered but stoical. Long-suffering was more like it, poor thing, carried along on the current of existence. No wonder she suddenly got up and went to another room to lie down. It wasn’t thought that roused her, only a need for a small movement of freedom inside of fate. Why, after all, had he stopped in this awful, shadowy bar?
He had a few friends, most of them cocooned in partial domesticity, living with someone or seeing someone steadily. His oldest friend was married, the father of a child. Occasionally someone would introduce him to a woman in an attempt at matchmaking, feebly disguised as a dinner party.
One showed no interest in him, but another had taken him aside and asked him why he had lent himself to what was, basically, a slave auction. His impulse was to remark that no one had bid for her. Instead he asked why she had agreed to meet him. She replied that she had a sociological interest in the lifestyles of male loners in New York. He observed that life, like death, was not a style. She called him a dinosaur.
The only woman over the years for whom he had felt even a shred of interest was the mother of his friend's child. When he recognized the interest, stirred once more to life after he stopped seeing the kitty-cat girl, a sequence of scenes ran through his mind like a movie: betrayal, discovery, family disruption, himself a stepfather, late child-support checks. She was steadfast and not especially drawn to him.
There had been a time when he took the kitty-cat girl out for social evenings with his friends. Their enthusiasm for her was tinged by hysteria, he noted, as though he’d been transformed from a lone wolf to a compliant sheep. Walking away from a friend's apartment where they had spent an evening, he felt like a figure in a heroic illustration: a woman-saved prodigal son.
Now he was down to a sick dog. An apartment filled with unattractive furniture awaited him. But Grace would not be there.
He was dizzy after downing such a quantity of whiskey. His fork slid from his hand to fall beneath the table. He didn’t bother to search for it but continued to sit motionless in the booth, most of the steak uneaten on the plate.
It might be only the strange weakness that had come over him like a swoon, but he imagined he could feel his bodily canals drying up, his eyes dimming, the roots of his hair drying with tiny explosions like milkweed pods pressed between two fingers.
His resounding No to the kitty-cat girl, from months ago, echoed in his ears. What had prevented him from saying yes? She might have laughed and embraced him. By that magic of affection that can convert embarrassment into merriment, they might have averted all that followed. Instead she had turned away and, he thought, gone to sleep, leaving him in an agitated wakefulness in which his resentment at her fatuity kept at bay, he knew now, a harsh judgment on his own nature.
She was, after all, a very nice woman: kind, generous, full hearted. What did it matter that in bending to someone's pet or a friend's small child she assumed a high, squeaky voice, that she held her hand over her heart when she was moved, that she struck actressy poses when she showed him a new outfit or hairstyle? What had it mattered? Body to body—what did it all really matter?
He sighed and bent to retrieve the fork. In the darkness beneath the table he found a whole cigarette lying among the damp pickle ends and crumpled napkins. Smoke it, he told himself as he felt the strength returning to his arms and hands. Smoking was the one thing that aroused the kitty-cat girl to anger. He’d been startled by it, so much so that he’d given up the pleasure of an infrequent cigarette after dinner in the evening. “Don’t make it a religion,” he’d chided her. “It's only one of a thousand things that kill people.”
He summoned a waiter and asked him for a match. While he was speaking, he heard a voice boom out, “… and this will impact the economy.” Someone at the bar had turned up the volume on a suspended television set. John glimpsed the speaker on the screen, an elderly man wearing steel-rimmed eyeglasses. “Impact is a noun, you stupid son of a bitch,” he muttered, puffing on the cigarette.
“Always correcting my English,” she had protested to him more than once. It suddenly came to him that he’d been lying to himself about how the affair had ended. He’d convinced himself that she had left his apartment, angrily, the morning after their quarrel about “kitty-cat.” In fact it had taken a week, during which they met at the end of the day in his or her apartment, ate together, went to a movie, slept in bed side by side. They had not made love. When they spoke, it was of mundane matters, and when they parted in the morning, he to his office and she to the private school where she taught first grade, she had briefly pressed her cheek against his. Life has its rhythms, he told himself.
But at the end of the week, after staring down at the light supper he’d prepared, she burst out at him in words that suggested a continuation of an angry interior monologue, “—and it's not only the way I talk. You’re trying to change the way I am!” She paused, then shouted, “Why don’t you say anything you really mean? My God! You wouldn’t acknowledge the Eiffel Tower if it fell right on you!”
He had laughed, startled at such an extravagant image. “I’d be speechless then, all right,” he’d said. But he admitted he’d been clumsy.
She asked then, as she wept, how he could have said No to her so savagely. Afterward, when she was dying inside, he’d walked around the apartment with a foolish smile—as though nothing had happened between them.
She picked up her purse from the chair where she’d been sitting, not eating while he ate and kept on talking cheerfully.
“You’re one big NO!” she burst out. “And you’re smiling this instant….”
He recalled touching his face. What she’d said was true. “I don’t mean to smile,” he’d said. She got up and dropped her key on a kitchen counter and left the apartment.
He'd eaten her untouched supper, his mind like an empty pail. Then he’d waited for her to telephone him. He’d waited for himself to telephone her. But something had gone out of him. He had slumped into a mulelike opposition to her: she skirted life's real troubles, chirping platitudes.
He dropped the cigarette the waiter had lit for him, got to his feet, and hurried from the bar. Behind him came the waiter. John paid his bill on the sidewalk, all too aware of the stares of the public.
I will not think about her, he ordered himself as he walked home. I have cleared the decks. I’m better off.
As he unlocked the door, he called, “Grace!” Then he remembered. “Oh, Christ…” he said aloud.
He took a long hot shower, emerging slack-limbed and unpleasantly warm. Naked, he walked through the rooms, letting the air dry him, waving his arms, a heavy object trying to fly.
He paused before the bedroom window that looked out on Central Park. Perhaps the comradely woman out for a run, who had remarked on Graces tits, would look up and observe to a friend, “See the cock hanging up there in the window?” But he was on the seventh floor, invisible to everything but passing birds.
He put on a ragged T-shirt and turned on the television set. As a rule he watched opera, a Friday-evening news program, and now and then an old movie. Tonight he would settle for diversion. He was finding it hard to keep his mind off the way he’d left the bar without paying his check.
A news anchor was saying, “The crisis centers around…” He switched channels and turned up a psychologist with devilish red hair and a sharp jaw who was discussing role models and sharing. “We must share,” she asserted in a tone John found menacing. “Share what?” he asked the screen. “Give me a noun or give me death. And isn’t ‘role model’ a tautology?”
On another channel a middle-aged actress declared that after years of substance abuse—“yeah, cocaine, the whole megillah”—and loveless promiscuity, she had become a sexually mature woman, in charge of her body and her life. The male interviewer smiled and nodded without pause.
On a call-in interview, a very large Arab emir was addressed as Abdul by a caller who then asked him, “How ya doin’?” The emir's expression of stolid indifference didn’t change, but he appeared to send out a glow like a hot coal.
John switched channels more quickly. In every mouth that spoke from the screen, that word, “hopefully,” ownerless, modifying nothing, inserted itself amid sentences like the white synthetic packing material that protected china or glasses.
The telephone rang. Startled—no one called at this time of evening— he picked it up, and a buoyant male voice asked, “John?”
The voice was not familiar. Perhaps he’d forgotten its owner; he wasn’t good with voices. “Yes,” he answered. He discovered at once that it was a selling call. “Do you know me?” John asked. The voice chuckled. “Well, no, John. I don’t,” it replied. John hung up.
It was nearly midnight when he turned off the set and went to bed. On a nearby table lay a volume of short stories by a British writer. In one of them, the writer had stated: “You can’t help having the diseases of your time.”
He thought of the letters to the newspaper he’d thrown away. Why had he bothered? The apocalypse would not be brought about by debased language, would it? “I’ve been cracked in the head, Grace,” he said to the absent dog.
His body, his brain, began a slow descent into the formless stuff of sleep. His hands fluttered at the light switch until, with what felt like his last particle of energy, he pressed it off.
At once his heart began to pound. His eyelids flew open, and he was fully awake, recalling the kitty-cat's account of her only brother's death. It had happened several months before he met her. Her brother was visiting her from the Midwest. While shaving one morning in her bathroom, he toppled over, dead from a heart attack. He had been twenty-eight.
She’d telephoned the news to their mother in Norman, Oklahoma. Their father had died of the same ailment several years earlier.
“Oh, Lord—where will we get the money to fly him home and bury him?” were her mother's first words, she’d told John.
He had expressed indignation at such petty concerns in a woman whose son had died.
“You don’t understand,” she had cried. “She was putting something in front of her grief—like you bar a door against a burglar. And money isn’t petty when there's so little of it!”
She had been right and wrong, as he had been. But he could hardly have pursued the subject while her cheeks were covered with tears.
He turned the light back on and picked up the book of short stories, opening it at random. He read several sentences. Unable to make sense of them, he dropped the book on the table. The phone rang. He grabbed it, aware that he was breathless with hope it would be the girl. “Hello, hello?” he pleaded. A muffled voice at the other end asked, “Manuel?”
The next morning he returned to the vet's office. The waiting room was crowded with animals and their owners. Dogs panted or moved restlessly or whimpered. A brilliant-eyed cat sat on a man's lap, one of its ears nearly severed from its bloodied head.
To John's relief, the receptionist sent him at once to an examining room. The doctor was waiting for him with a grave expression on his face.
“I’m sorry to inform you that”—he turned to glance at a card lying on the table—“Grace has passed away.”
John was astonished to hear himself groan aloud. The doctor gripped his arm. “Steady! Relationships with pets are deeply meaningful,” he said softly. “You shouldn’t blame yourself. Grace was a casebook of diseases. But it was the heartworm that finished her off.”
“Heartworm!” cried John.
“It's carried by mosquitoes,” the doctor replied. He relinquished John's arm.
“She didn’t seem that sick,” John said dully, leaning against the examining table.
“She was,” the doctor stated brusquely. “And please don’t lean against the table or it’ll give way. Let me advise a grieving period, after which, hopefully, you’ll move on. Get a new pet. Plenty of them need homes.” He nodded at the door.
John held up a hand. “Wait! Had she littered?”
The doctor frowned momentarily. “Yes, I believe she had.”
“What do you do with the bodies?” John asked at the door.
“We have a disposal method in place. You’ll be notified,” the doctor answered, taking a bottle of pink liquid from a shelf and shaking it.
On the sidewalk, John stood still, trying to compose himself. He felt a jab of pain over his navel. He loosened his belt, and the pain ceased. He had been eating stupidly of late and had certainly gained weight. He set off for his apartment.
The ceiling paint in the living room was flaking. Really he ought to do something about it. He took a dust mop from a closet and passed it over the floor. The dust collected in feathery little piles, which he gathered up on a piece of cardboard.
Had any of Grace's puppies survived? For a few minutes, he rearranged furniture. He discovered a knucklebone beneath an upholstered chair, where Grace must have stored it. A question formed in his mind as he stooped to pick it up. Was it only her past that had made her afraid? Her puppies lost, cars bearing down on her, endless searching for food, the worm in her heart doing its deadly work. He stared at the bone, scored with her teeth marks.
As if suddenly impelled by a violent push, he went to the telephone. In a notebook written down amid book titles, opera notices, and train schedules to Boston was a list of phone numbers. He had crossed out kitty-cat's name but not her phone number. Still clutching Grace's bone, he dialed it.
On the fifth ring, she answered.
“Hello, Jean,” he said.
He heard her gasp. “So. It's you,” she said.
“It's me,” he agreed.
“And what do you want?” She was breathing rapidly.
“I’d like to see you.”
“What for?”
“Jean. I know how bad it was, the way I spoke to you.”
“You were so—contemptuous!”
“I know. I had no right—”
She broke in. “No one has.”
They fell silent at the same moment. Her breathing had slowed down.
“I haven’t just been hanging around, you know,” she said defiantly.
“I only want to speak to you.”
“You want! You have to think about what other people want once a year!”
“Jean, please…” He dropped the bone on the table.
In a suddenly impetuous rush, she said, “It was so silly what I asked you! I’ll never forget it. I can’t even bear describing it to myself—what happened. All I feel is my own humiliation.”
“We are born into the world and anything can happen,” he said.
“What?”
“Listen. I had a dog. Grace. She got sick. Last night she died at the animal hospital. I guess I wanted to tell someone.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that news,” she said. “But I’m really sorry.” She paused, then went on. “Poor thing,” she said gently, as if speaking to someone standing beside her.
Something painful and thrilling tore at his throat. He held his breath, but still a sob burst from him. Despite its volume, he heard her say, “John? Are you all right?”
“Oh, John, I can come over this minute. I’ve been running, but I can change clothes in a jiffy. I don’t feel you’re all right.”
The few tears had already dried on his cheeks. They stood in their apartments, hanging on to their telephones, trying to make up their minds if they really wanted to see each other again.