Roberto decided to relocate to another city. Rosario moved with him. At our last meeting, she clutched my hands. “You’ve taught me to take care with endings,” she said. “We’ll probably never see each other again. I am not an unfinished symphony. The double bar has come.”
The metronome tapped away, prestissimo. Six years? Seven?
One summer afternoon, the sun closed down like an iris, the sky let loose a barrage, and I, who had been trying to outrun the storm, found myself huddling beneath a leaky cornice. Each time the blast seemed to have reached its utmost vehemence it would swell anew. I was thinking of a three-legged mongrel I’d seen, hoping the poor cur hadn’t drowned, when suddenly a shape bodied forth out of the swirl. A bald shape, with an umbrella. It slowed, squinted through the murk, advanced, halted, pushed its nose almost up to mine.
“Roberto!”
He glowered, brought the drumming black canopy over my head. “Music!” His jaw quivered. “The best music is silence.” His incisors dug into his lower lip till it bled. He planted his umbrella in my hand with a solicitous squeeze, and tromped off into the deluge.
I tried to conjure up Rosario's two sapphires. In her presence I had always forbidden myself to blink, not wanting to lose sight of their dazzle even for an instant. Now, in order to recapture her eyes, I needed to press my own tight shut.
Paula Fox
Grace
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
