“There was a dog here last week,” he says.
I look at him.
“Lots of dogs in the country, right?” he says.
“What are we doing here?” I say, drawing up my knees.
“I fell in love with somebody,” he says.
I had been looking at the water, but when he spoke I turned and looked at him again.
“I didn’t think she’d be here,” he says quietly. “I didn’t even really think that the dog would be here. I just felt drawn to the place, I guess—that’s all. I wanted to see if I could get some of that feeling back if I came here. You’d get it back if you called that man, or wrote him. It was real. I could tell when you were talking to me that it was real.”
“Howard, did you say that you fell in love with somebody? When?”
“A few weeks ago. The semester’s over. She’s graduating. She’s gone in January. A graduate student—like that? A twenty-two-year-old kid. One of my pal Lightfoot’s philosophy students.” Howard lets go of the wheel. When he turned the ignition off, he had continued to grip the wheel. Now his hands are on his thighs. We both seem to be examining his hands. At least, I am looking at his hands so I do not stare into his face, and he has dropped his eyes.
“It was all pretty crazy,” he says. “There was so much passion, so fast. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think I let on to her how much I cared. She saw that I cared, but she . . . she didn’t know my heart kept stopping, you know? We drove out here one day and had a picnic in the car—it would have been your nightmare picnic, it was so cold—and a dog came wandering up to the car. Big dog. Right over there.”
I look out my window, almost expecting that the dog may still be there.
“There were three freezing picnics. This dog turned up at the last one. She liked the dog—it looked like a mutt, with maybe a lot of golden retriever mixed in. I thought it was inviting trouble for us to open the car door, because it didn’t look like a particularly friendly dog. But she was right and I was wrong. Her name is Robin, by the way. The minute she opened the door, the dog wagged its tail. We took a walk with it.” He juts his chin forward. “Up that path there,” he says. “We threw rocks for it. A sure crowd-pleaser with your average lost-in-the-woods American dog, right? I started kidding around, calling the dog Spot. When we were back at the car, Robin patted its head and closed the car door, and it backed off, looking very sad. Like we were really ruining its day, to leave. As I was pulling out, she rolled down the window and said, ‘Goodbye, Rover,’ and I swear its face came alive. I think his name really was Rover.”
“What did you do?” I say.
“You mean about the dog, or about the two of us?”
I shake my head. I don’t know which I mean.
“I backed out, and the dog let us go. It just stood there. I got to look at it in the rearview mirror until the road dipped and it was out of sight. Robin didn’t look back.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get ice,” he says, starting the ignition. “But that isn’t what you meant, either, is it?”
He backs up, and as we swing around toward our own tire tracks I turn my head again, but there is no dog there, watching us in the moonlight.
Back at the house, as Howard goes in front of me up the flagstone pathway, I walk slower than I usually do in the cold, trying to give myself time to puzzle out what he makes me think of just then. It comes to me at the moment when my attention is diverted by a patch of ice I’m terrified of slipping on. He reminds me of that courthouse figure—I don’t know what it’s called—the statue of a blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice. Bag of ice in the left hand, bag of ice in the right—but there’s no blindfold. The door is suddenly opened, and what Howard and I see before us is Koenig, his customary bandanna tied around his head, smiling welcome, and behind him, in the glare of the already begun party, the woman with red hair holding Todd, who clutches his green dinosaur in one hand and rubs his sleepy, crying face with the other. Todd makes a lunge—not really toward his father but toward wider spaces—and I’m conscious, all at once, of the cigarette smoke swirling and of the heat of the house, there in the entranceway, that turn the bitter-cold outdoor air silver as it comes flooding in.
“Hello, hello, hello, hello,” Becky calls, dangling one kneesocked leg over the balcony as Deirdre covers her face and hides behind her. “To both of you, just because you’re here, from me to you: a million—a trillion— hellos.”
Home to Marie
My wife, Marie, has decided to give a party—a catered party—and invite old friends and also some new people and the neighbors on the left, the ones we speak to. Just before the caterer arrives there’s a telephone call from Molly Vandergrift, to say that her daughter’s temperature is a hundred and two, and that she and her husband won’t be able to come, after all. I can see my wife’s disappointment as she consoles Molly. And then, a few seconds after the call, Molly’s husband’s car peels out of the drive. My thought, when I hear a car streaking off, is always that a person is leaving home. My wife’s explanation is more practical: he’s going to get medicine.
My wife herself has left home two times in the three years we’ve been reconciled. Once she left in a rage, and another time she extended her visit to a friend’s house in Wyoming from one week to six, and although she did not really say that she wasn’t coming back, I couldn’t get her to make a plane reservation, couldn’t get her to say she missed me, let alone that she loved me. I’ve done wrong things. I’ve bought myself expensive new cars and passed off my old ones on her; I’ve lost money gambling; I’ve come home late for dinner a hundred times. But I never left my wife. She was the one who moved out the time we were going to get divorced. And after we reconciled she was the one who tore off in the car as a finale to a disagreement.
These things bubble up from time to time; some little thing will remind me of all the times she’s left, or threatened to leave. Or she’ll want something we can’t afford and she’ll look at me with what I call her stunned- rabbit eyes. For the most part, we try hard to be cheerful, though. She’s been looking for work, I come straight home at the end of the day, and we’ve worked out the problem with the remote control for the TV: I give it to her for an hour, she gives it to me for an hour. We don’t tend to watch more than two hours of TV a night.
Tonight there won’t be any TV at all, because of the cocktail party. Right now, the caterer’s car is double-
