even when he wasn't trying to be. She thought he probably had a rabbit for a pet when he was small but she wasn't sure why this made sense.
'You're tall, aren't you?'
He asked this suspiciously, as if she'd been concealing it.
'No taller than you.'
'My wife is small. Have you met her?'
'I'm not sure.'
'She wants me to take her to New York next month. I have to consult with engineers at the Fresh Kills landfill, which is sort of the King Kong of American garbage mounds.'
'Does Nick like this kind of work?'
'You're asking me?' he said.
'Yes, I'm asking you.'
'I think he likes it more than I do. I think he sees it in purer terms. Concepts and principles. Because this is Nick-the technology, the logic, the esthetics. Whereas I, in my little gringo mind-set.'
'You're moving into new quarters. That may help your self-image.'
'Yes, a great bronze tower. Just like an investment firm or media giant. Of course the structure resembles a geometric turd but that's only fitting, no?'
The man brought their drinks and they looked at the menus in the nearly empty room, they talked and looked, not really looking-looking and forgetting. Marian felt the nice bite of the gin and wondered what it was about Brian that made him so easy to talk to. She thought he went around scared most of the time but did not try to hide it from women, some women anyway, maybe the rare woman he runs into a hundred miles from home, and he falls all over himself with honesty and self-scathing insight, the things he does not normally show the boys.
To reciprocate perhaps. She didn't know why else she'd tell the dog story if not to strut her own confessional skills. They had another drink and ordered lunch.
'The dog barked and whined incessantly, Dukey, but the kids were small and they loved their dog and he barked, he cried, he went bye-bye in the house, he yapped at other kids and the neighbors complained and I secretly tried to give him away but no one would take him and so I finally, on an impulse-this is awful, why am I telling you this?'
'Because the story haunts you. Because you see mercy in my eyes.'
'Yes, a frantic impulse. I convinced myself the dog was miserable and sick and suffering some irreversible thing and I drove out on 85,1 think it is, down past some dam into stark stony desert, much farther than I absolutely had to go, and I just kept going and going and finally stopped the car and opened the door and set Dukey out on the ground and then drove home and told Lainie, Sweetheart the dog ran away and I'm so sorry. But I did not let it go at that. I went reeling out of control. I started driving them through the streets, both kids, day after day, calling out the windows for Dukey, Dukey, and it haunts me, yes, like something I only dreamed and what a relief it is to realize it didn't actually happen.'
'And then you realize it did happen.'
Brian was enjoying this immensely and so she began to enjoy it too, which was probably the point, she thought.
'Driving through the dead summer streets in the long afternoons. I can hear their voices. Dukey, Dukey. They were five and three, I think. Calling out the windows for their dog.'
She was nearly laughing-crying, looking at Brian's mug alight with pleasure and feeling the misery and shame of her act and smoking in the middle of a meal in an empty dining room where the air conditioner is not responding.
He said, 'Dukey, Dukey.'
'Duchino actually. Little Duke. Nick came up with the name. Do you know he's half Italian?'
'Our Nick? When did this happen?'
'You don't see it in his face?'
'I hear it in that voice he does.'
'What voice?'
'The gangster making threats.'
'What gangster?'
'It's a voice he does. Expert, stereotyped, pretty funny.'
'Speaking of backgrounds,' she said. 'And if this is too personal, you don't have to answer. But did you ever have a rabbit for a pet?'
They were having a fine time. When he talked she found herself sorting through the responses, getting them ready, one after another, and sometimes she broke in irresistibly and watched his face go bright. She told him she played field hockey in school and missed it. She missed drinking from a garden hose. She missed her mother and father more than ever and they'd been dead nine years and six years and were stronger forces now, so deeply present in her life that she understood completely how people see ghosts and have conversations with the dead. She had a garden hose but did not drink from it and did not allow her kids to drink from it and this was the difference, less in lost things than in knowledge become suspicious and alert. She told him she missed smoking even though she hadn't been able to stop.
When they were finished they walked up a stairway to the lobby and in her mind she kept ascending to a shadowed room at the end of a long empty hall and saw herself folding down the bedspread and standing above the cool sheets waiting for a knock at the door. Then they heard plaintive falsettos from the loudspeakers on the courthouse lawn and they walked down to the cars in the easy heat.
Brian went into a state of body rapture over a lime sherbet Chevrolet, a '57 Bel Air convertible with white upholstery. He draped himself over the hood and pretended to lick the hot metal. Marian thought this is what men get instead of fatty deposits around the thighs. But she had to admire the car, which was carefree and racy and even great in a way, the chromium sweep of it and the funny and touching music that bared its innocence.
Brian detached himself from the hood.
'Did you own one?'
'Too young,' he said. 'My oldest brother had one for a while. Brendan's Bel Air. We still talk about it in awed tones. It was the high point of his life. It meant everything to him. Girls, love, personality, power. It meant the moment. All those cars had the so-called forward look. Sleek as jet fighters. But it turned out that forward didn't mean the future. It meant do it now, have your fun, because the sixties are coming, bow wow bang bang. The engine had a throaty roar. We couldn't know it at the time but it's been downhill for Brendan ever since.'
They walked under the elms at the edge of the square. His car was parked by the old city jail, which was the chamber of commerce now. They spoke oddly polite goodbyes. She thought maybe they felt guilty about something and needed to prepare their faces for the journey home, get the noise out of the system. She walked up the street to her car and felt the liquid pulse of the sun in every step.
3
Brian drove due north, looking for a sign that would lead him to the bridge. A sludge tanker moved downriver, funky and low-slung. He felt the old foreboding. It wasn't widely known, it was narrowly known that he experienced terrible things every time he crossed a bridge. The longer and higher the span, the greater his sense of breathless abyss. And this was a major bridge over a broad and historic body of water. The truth of bridges is that they made him feel he was doing some mobius gyration, becoming one-sided, losing all purchase on name and place and food-taste and weekends with the in-laws-hanging sort of unborn in generic space.
Then he saw it in the distance, steel-beamed and cabled, sweeping to the palisaded bank. He followed the signs, made the loops and started out across the bridge, choosing the upper level because the long gray Lincoln in front of him went that way. Lincoln and Washington, keep me safe. The radio was ablast with call-in voices, they're griping, they're spraying spit, it's the sidewalk salvo and rap, and he imagined a long queue of underground souls waiting to enter the broadcast band and speak the incognito news. He listened in solemn gratitude. It was a clamor so strong it amounted to a life force, carrying this Ohio boy through his white anxiety and across to the
