“Just getting my newspaper,” he said. “Nice dog.”
“Hey, Catsy, get back here.” She tried to pull the leash in, but its automated spring was broken and the leash kept unspooling.
The man’s face brightened. He had started to take his paper out of its plastic sleeve but stopped. “What’s the dog’s name? Cathy?” He did not scrunch up his face disapprovingly when he failed to hear what you said, the way deaf people often did. But he did have the recognizable waxen pee smell of an old man. It was from sweat that no longer could be liquid but accumulated like scaly air on the skin.
“Uh, Cat. It’s part family name, part, um, joke.” She wasn’t going to get into all the Katherines in her family or her personal refrigerator magnet altar to Cat Power or the general sick sense of humor that had led this dog, like all pets, to be a canvas upon which one wrote one’s warped love and dubious wit.
“I get it.” He grinned eagerly. “And what’s your name?”
“KC,” she said. Let that suffice.
“Casey?”
“Yes,” she said. A life could rhyme with a life—it could be a jostling close call that one mistook for the thing itself.
“We live the next block over. We’re renting.”
“Renting! Well, that explains it.”
She didn’t dare ask what it explained. Still, his eyes had a wet dazzle—or an amused glint—and were not disapproving. Cat started to bark loudly at a rabbit but then also turned and started barking at the man, who took a theatrical step back, raised the paper over his head, and pretended to be afraid, as if he were performing for a small child. “Don’t take my crossword puzzle!”
“His bark is worse than his bite,” KC said. “Get over here, Cat.”
“I don’t know why people always say that. No bark is worse than a bite. A bite is always worse.”
“Well, they shouldn’t make rabbits so cute or we wouldn’t care if dogs ate them. Why are rabbits made so cute? What is nature’s purpose in that one?”
He beamed. “So you’re a philosopher!”
“No, not really,” she murmured as if in fact she thought she might be.
“I think the rabbits are probably only accidentally cute to us. Mostly they’re cute to each other. The purpose? The new urban pest made palatable: more rabbit stew for everybody.”
“I see. So you’re a sort of Mr. McGregor kind of guy. I was always scared of Mr. McGregor!” She smiled.
“Nothing to be scared of. But it does seem of late that there is some kind of apocalyptic plague of rabbits. Biblical bunnies! Would you like to come and finish your coffee inside?”
She didn’t know what to make of this invitation. Was it creepy or friendly? Who could tell anymore? Very few people had been friendly to them since they’d moved here two months ago. The man’s tea-stained teeth made a sepia smile—a dental X-ray from the nineteenth century.
“Oh, thanks, I really should be going.” This time the leash caught and Cat came trotting toward her, bored and ready to move on.
“Well, good to meet you,” the old man said and turned and walked back toward his house, with its portico and porch and two stone chimneys, its wings that stretched east and west and one out back smaller and south-facing, with a long double sleeping porch, she could barely see. Over here on Princeton Place things seemed bigger than they were on Wellesley Way. She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn’t stand the sight of it. This whole privileged neighborhood could use a neat little guillotine or some feed-capped crowds with pitchforks.
“Good to meet you,” she said, though he hadn’t given her his name.
“Here’s your coffee,” she said to Dench, who was still in bed.
“Yum. Tepid backwash.”
“Hey, don’t complain. You can go next time and bring me back half.”
“I’m not complaining,” he said in a sleepy stretch. “But it’s like it took you longer this time.”
She took a brush sharply to her scalp and began brushing. If she waited longer with her hair she might get twelve hundred. She threw it back and arched from her waist. Only in the mirror could she see her Decatur tattoo, put there one night in Linotype Gotharda in the crook of her neck, when they were playing in Decatur and she wanted to be reminded never to play there again. “That’s a strange way to be reminded,” Dench had said, and KC had said, “What better?”
“Was there a big line at the coffee shop?” Dench asked, smacking his lips.
“No. I stopped and talked to some guy. Cat is going up every driveway that ever had a squirrel or rabbit dash over it.”
“Some guy?”
“Geezer.”
“Hey, this backwash is good. There’s something new in it. Were you wearing cherry ChapStick or something?”
“Have you noticed that there are a lot of people with money around here?”
“We should meet them. We need producers.”
“You go meet them.” She would look up guillotine on the Internet on her next trip to the library.
“You’re cuter. Of course, time is of the essence in these matters.”
She loved Dench. She was helpless before the whole emotional project of him. But it didn’t preclude hating him and everything around him, which included herself, the sound of her own voice—and the sound of his, which was worse. The portraits of hell never ceased and sometimes were done up in raucous, gilded frames to console. Romantic hope: From where did women get it? Certainly not from men, who were walking caveat emptors. No, women got it from other women, because in the end women would rather be rid of one another than have to endure themselves on a daily basis. So they urged each other into relationships. “He loves you! You can see it in his eyes!” they lied.
“Casey!” the old man shouted the next morning. He was out in his front yard pounding together something that looked like a bird feeder on a post.
“Hi!” she said.
“You know my name?”
“Pardon me?”
“Old family joke.” He still seemed to be shouting. “Actually my name is Milton Theale.”
“Milton.” She repeated the name, a habit people with good memories supposedly relied on. “They don’t name kids Milton anymore.”
“Too bad and thank God! My father’s name was Hi, short for Hiram, and now that I’m old I find my head filled up with his jokes and stories rather than very many of my own, which apparently I’ve forgotten.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, as long as you don’t actually come to believe you are your dad, I suppose all is well.”
“Well, that may be next.”
“Probably that’s always next. For all of us.”
He squinted to study her, seemed to be admiring something about her again, but she was not sure what. No doubt something that was a complete mirage.
“Nice to see you again,” he said. “And you, too,” he said to the dog. “Though you are a strange-looking thing. It’s like he’s been assembled by Nazi veterinarians—a shepherd’s head, a dachshund’s body, a—”
“Yeah, I know. Sometimes he reminds me of the dog in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
“Hmmm?”
“The remake.”
“The remake of what?”
“Frankenstein!” she yelled. His deafness would give her a heart attack. Perhaps this was nature’s plan for old people to kill each other in an efficient if irritating fashion.
She could feel the heat leaving the coffee and entering her hand. “He’s like a dog made in Frankenstein’s lab!” Sometimes she hated the dog. His obliviousness to the needs of others, his determined, verbally challenged conversation about his own desires—in a human this would indicate a severe personality disorder.
“Oh, he’s not that bad,” said Milt. “And wouldn’t we like his energy. In tablet form.”
“That would be fantastic.”
“But you’re young; you wouldn’t need something like that.”
“I need something.” Was she whining? She had never made such an announcement to a stranger before.
“In lieu of that, come on in and have a blueberry muffin with me.” Again, the line between neighborliness and flirtation was not clear to her here. She knew in this community you had to do an extroverted kind of meet and greet, but she had heard of soccer parents wandering off from their children’s games and having sex in far parking lots. So the guidelines were murky and breachable. “And while you’re at it you can help me with the crossword puzzle.”
“Oh, I can’t. I have to get home. Lot of things to tend to.”
“Well, it’s not ten to. It’s ten past.”
“To tend to,” KC repeated. Perhaps his deafness had exhausted all the other neighbors and this accounted for his friendliness to her. On the other hand, no one seemed to walk around here. Either they jogged, their ears stuffed with music, or they drove their cars at murderous speeds. One old man could not have single-handedly caused that. Or could he have?
“Hmmm?”
“Gotta get home.”
“Oh, OK,” he said and waved her on.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said out of kindness.
He nodded and went back to work.
She stopped and turned. “Are you making a bird feeder?”
“No, it’s a book nook! I’ll put books inside and people can help themselves. Like a little library. Now that the bookstore is closed. I’m just adjusting the clasp.”
“How lovely.” It was a varnished pine angled to look like the ski chalet of a doll.
“Giving the old guy a thrill? Good idea.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m just saying,” said Dench in a hushed tone. “He’s probably loaded. And gonna keel soon. And …”
“Stop.” This was the grifter in Dench, something violent in the name of freedom, like his father, who had fled through the men’s room window. “Don’t say another word.”
“Hey—I’m not talking about murdering him! I’m just saying you could spend a little time, make him happy, and then the end result might be, well … we’d all be a little happier. Where’s the harm?”
“You’ve really gone over to the dark side.” He could be shameless. Perhaps shamelessness kept bitterness at bay. Not a chance Dench could ever be bitter. Never even post-bitter. Bitterness came when one had done the long good thing and then gone unrewarded. Dench would never operate that way. She, on the other hand, had been born with a sort of pre-bitterness, casting about for the good and unacknowledged deed that would explain her feelings—and not coming up with it. So instead a sourness could beset her, which she had to appease and shrink with ice cream and biographies of Billie Holiday.
“Hey, wasn’t it you who wrote, ‘Get your hands on some real meat’?” Now he began to sing. “ ‘An old shoe can be made chewy like game / but it takes a raftload of herbs and it’s just not the same.’ You wrote that.”
“That was a love song to a chef. Before I knew you.”
“It’s good. It’s got existentialism and advice.” His eyes avoided hers.
“You’re pimping me. Is this what you call your ‘talent for life’?” He had once boasted he possessed such a thing.
“It’s a working view.”
“You’d better be careful, Dench. I take your suggestions seriously.”
He paused and looked at her, sternness in one eye and gentleness in the other. “Well, my first piece of advice is don’t take my advice. And there’s more where that came from.”
“There’s a smell in the house. Yeasty and sulfuric. Can you smell it?” She looked at Dench with concern, but he seemed to have none.
“The zeitgeist!”
“Something rotting in the walls.”
“Meat or shoe?”
“Something that died in the winter and now that it’s spring is decaying in the floorboards or some crawl space or one of the walls of this room.”
“Maybe my allergies are acting up. But I think I have smelled it along this side of the house, on warmer days, out there trying to get better cell phone reception. A cabbagey cheese smell: goaty with a kind of ammonia rot.”
She reached for a sip of Dench’s coffee.
“He probably has adult children who will inherit everything.”
“Probably,” said Dench, turning away and then looking back at her to study her face.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
Dench’s sexiness, his frugal, spirited cooking (though he was no Jim Barber), his brooding gaze, his self-deprecating humor, all had lured her in. But it was like walking into a beautiful house to find the rooms all empty. In those beginning years she often saw him locking eyes with others, as if in some pact. He still had no money. She paid. At times he glanced at her with bewildering scorn. There was, in short, little romantic love. No conversation of tender feelings. Just attachment. Just the power of his voice when it spoke of things that had nothing to do with them, when it churned round and round on its loop about his childhood dogs, misdeeds, and rages at his lot. He was attractive. He was amusing. But he was not emotionally well. Intimacy was not his strong suit. “Clubs and spades,” he joked. “Not diamonds, not hearts. Red cards—I just see red. They throw me out of the game every time.”
“Shut up and drink your beer.”
Where were the drugs?
She could see he felt sometimes that he could prey upon her insecurities and still be taken in and cared for by her. Was not the news always full of one beautiful young movie star after another thrown over for some younger and more beautiful movie star? What hope was there for ordinary women? He required a patroness but had mistakenly auditioned for her. If she possessed fewer psychic wounds than he had hoped for in a woman her age, or at least different ones, he would attempt to create some. But she was less woundable than he might think. She had not had a father who had to see a man about a horse. She in fact had a father who’d been killed by a car named after a horse. Along with her mother. A Mustang! How weird was that? Well, she had been a baby and hadn’t had to deal with it.
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