Expensive People (22 page)

Spark yelped and whimpered and ran at Father's legs. Father had to pick him up and give him to me. Spark did not seem to know me, but after a moment he began to lick my face. Nada hugged us both, and when I looked at her I saw that she was so strange and beautiful. “Spark says he don't like doctors, just like me,” I told her.

“He
doesn'tlike
doctors,” Nada said gently.

And Spark and I played in the back and nearby stood Father and Nada, watching. They were happy. Father had his arm around Nada's shoulders.

Then one day about a week later (I am guessing at the time) Nada and Spark and I went for a walk. Nada wore slacks and had a scarf around her head. It was a blowy, happy day. Spark and I ran along, yipping
and dashing, Spark's short little legs chopping as fast as they could and me falling down once in a while, and when I did I didn't bother to cry.

Nada said, “Wait for me,” when we ran ahead to the corner, but Spark didn't hear her and kept running on with his little legs pumping. Off over the curb he went, and in the air for a second, and still running, and I was right behind him, and Nada said more sharply, “Richard, wait!” and I made a lunge to grab Spark's little tail but it was too late. Out of nowhere came an aqua truck, not a laundry truck this time but a delivery truck, and its brakes squealed and its body shuddered and swerved, and there was a scream of surprise from Spark and a scream of anger from Nada, who cried, “Oh, no!”

The delivery man stood talking to Nada. Spark was somewhere on the other side of the truck, but he was quiet, and Nada wouldn't let me go see him. I cried. Nada was crying too, but she was angry. The delivery man was not crying and he was not angry, he was like men are: they get things done. “Well, all right, you take that dog to the doctor,” Nada said. “To the doctor. And when he is well you will bring him back again. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma'am,” the delivery man said.

They both glanced at me to see if I heard.

So Nada dragged me home. I cried for a while but then forgot why I was crying. She made fudge. We watched the Mickey Mouse Show together.

That day there was no Spark, and the next day no Spark either. I asked the maid where Spark was, was he at the hospital? She said he was getting fixed up and he'd be back. And the next day at noon Father's car turned up the driveway, and Father got out a little rushed and dropped Spark at my feet and said, “Good Christ, I should be at the airport right now,” and said good-by and backed out again. There was a bad moment when Spark seemed to be running under the back wheel, but somehow he didn't run under it, or Nada's scream scared him out, and I chased him into the evergreens and picked him up. He was a lot bigger than he was two days before. His coat was not so soft. He whimpered and lunged in my arms, trying to get away.

“Spark don't like me anymore,” I said, weeping.

“Doesn't
like you,” Nada corrected me, trying to pet Spark's bony,
nervous head. “Bring him inside and we'll feed him. He's been at the hospital for two days. After all…”

So we brought him into the house and he made a puddle right away on the kitchen floor, which the maid had just cleaned, and Nada said something she sometimes said to Father. We fed Spark and spent all day petting him and trying to make him stop whining. He wouldn't play, and I told Nada I didn't like him anymore, and Nada told me that I had better like him if I knew what was good for me.

We had Spark for several years, then when we moved to Charlotte Pointe he had a nervous breakdown and never recovered.

That is the tale of my dog Spark.

We arrived somewhere late at night. I remember lights, car doors slamming, the scuff and scrape of luggage. Then bed. An unfamiliar pillow, but I slept my familiar heavy sleep.

I woke to hear Father arguing with someone. He was in the motel bathroom talking in a fast, furious voice with someone unknown. “Genet is not sensational,” Father said angrily. “You argue as if you were unaware that the
cas Genethas
been studied by Sartre and other intellectuals. It's all sewed up.” I dozed off again, and someone outside the motel-room door was scraping his luggage along. Two children argued bitterly. I woke up, startled, and it was dawn. I was alone in the cold motel room, and it occurred to me that perhaps it was I who had been left behind, not Nada.

The bathroom was empty. Father had never been there, of course; Father had his own motel room. When he came in to wake me he had already shaved, showered, and combed down the thinning hair on the left side of his head. He was ready to go. “First we eat and exercise our stomach muscles,” he said happily.

We ate in a glass-enclosed coffee shop attached to the motel. A waitress in a uniform too yellow brought us food. I had an enormous appetite in spite of being so tired, as if someone else had charge of my stomach. Father ate well as always. There were a few travelers in the
coffee shop, crabby husbands and bright-eyed wives, businessmen reading newspapers. From a radio set atop a shelf by the cash register came morning music interspersed with advertisements for the cure of thinning blood and chronic backache. It was a cheerful, sunny place, and when we left, the waitress giggled at some witticism of Father's and spiked our green-and-white “breakfast check” onto a sterilized nail on which many another check had been impaled.

“Things starting to look familiar yet?” Father said as he drove us closer and closer to Cedar Grove. “Ah-hah, hah—look at that. New bank! Remember any of this?”

I stared out the window at the slow-passing sights, which were the sights of Fernwood. A bank with white shutters and white trim, pretty orange-red brick, evergreens framing everything; a shopping plaza empty of cars this early in the morning; across the way the Common, a big square area of green with library, courthouse, and post office, all of them constructed from the same mountain of buff bricks and according to the same plan. A feeling of lassitude overtook me, as if I were indeed coming home.

“Just like coming home, eh?” Father said.

We drove along. My eyelids were grainy, as if a few specks of sand had somehow worked in under them. The silence between Father and me was getting awkward, so I said, “Have you read Genet?”

He looked at me sharply. “Have you?”

“No.”

“Yes, I've been reading Genet,” he said, a little relieved. “I was just discussing his works with Mr. Body the other day. You were in the den. Did you hear us?”

“I guess so.”

“I don't recommend that writer for you, Buster, not right now,” he said comfortably.

We turned off onto a handsome boulevard shaded by elms. Some of the elms had yellow tags on them, but Father did not notice. Father's car sped along silently. It was strange how being awake did not make much difference. It was like being asleep. Dimensions were blurred and edges softened and even Father's cheerfulness was easy to take. He meant no harm, after all, no matter how much harm he caused, and in Flavius Maurus' heaven he would have been sainted.

“Look at that house! God,” he said admiringly.

I didn't know which house he meant. It seemed important to me that I know, but already we were turning and entering a new street, and up before me arose more houses that looked different but were really familiar. I wondered if I should play the thinking game, to save myself from paralysis. I had to get awake enough for when Father finally stopped the car and pointed out our new home to me. What if I sat there all day, paralyzed? I tried to think of my mother, but at the very center of my vision there was nothing—a burned-out spot as if the mere thought of her had annihilated part of my mind.

“Here we are, Buster. What do you think?”

We were driving up a hill. A driveway up a hill. Blacktop, but not overly black and vulgar: a worn-smooth, conservative black. Sloping lawn, evergreens—some spiked up proudly against the house, others flattened out and creeping against the ground like sculpture. And the house—the house was (so I learned later) French Normandy, with a hint of a courtyard on one side, material that looked like hard-baked clay held together with strips of dark wood; wrought-iron gates, a tree growing placidly up near the doorway, everything lovely, lovely. It was a lovely house, and Nada would have wept to see it. Father said to me, “Buster, what's wrong? You're not
crying,
are you?” I astonished and dismayed the poor man at times. No, not crying, not crying! I was all right, I told him.

We bounded out of the car. He was like a magician showing me a galaxy of tricks, optical illusions—look at this, it all belongs to us! We live here! All this lawn, Kid, and back here is a swimming pool, which we didn't use at the other house; see here, see the landscaping, see the bathhouse, see the bird bath, see the little grotto where all of us can have hotdog roasts and your little friends can join us, and here's a dog house in the exact shape of the big house, goddam cute!

Maybe Spark can come back, I said to Father, but this was too cruel, you don't talk to your father like that. He stared at me and told me that Spark had died, didn't I know that? (Evidently he had no idea how old an eleven-year-old child was.) I knew it, I told him, but sometimes I forgot.

Father led me around to the front walk, a lovely flagstone walk. Silvery delicate bushes, just greening up (it was late April), and look at those rhododendron bushes—five hundred dollars' worth, for sure! Over there shaggy, golden forsythia, and everything lovely, lovely. My
eyes throbbed with such sights. You would know, waking in such a world, that happiness is to be inhaled with the misty fragrance of the flowers, but at the back of my mind a voice began to chant at the same time that Father chattered about the house, so as to drown out his voice, You won't outlive this house, Buster! This is the last one. You've had it. So many houses, so many miles, so many maids, plumbers, lawn men, snowplow men, so many doggies, so many parties, so much eavesdropping behind doors, sofas, over telephones, through laundry chutes, furnace vents, air-conditioner vents, so many roasted cashews, so many silver trays, so much hatred, so much love! You have had it.

Father rang the doorbell, silly, happy Father, and, shifting his weight from one big foot to the other, he chuckled just to be out here in the warm Cedar Grove sun. We heard someone coming, another maid I supposed, and then the door opened. The door was a most complex arrangement, very heavy; you must imagine a regular door and overlaid upon that a big greenish pane of glass and overlaid upon that a marvelously intricate pattern of wrought iron, half green (as if with age) and half gray, the pattern in the shape of a limp delicate vine, and blinding in the sun a nice vulgar brass doorknob—and when this vision was pulled aside there stood Nada herself!

She hugged me, and Father towered over us, clearing his throat, terribly moved and embarrassed and overjoyed. Nada kept saying, “Richard, I'm so sorry … Richard, how are you? How are you?”

“He's just fine, he eats like a little pig these days. Let's get inside where we can have some privacy,” Father cried, red-faced.

Nada tried to gather me in her arms but I was too big. The three of us scuffled inside together.

“Everything's fine, just fine, absolutely first rate,” Father cried.

Nada bent down to stare into my face. “But how are you, Richard?”

My heart was pounding heavily. I wanted to get rid of it, get free of its terrible rhythm, so that I could breathe the lovely perfume of her skin and hide in her arms, hide from everything. I had difficulty breathing and could not speak.

“Richard?” Nada said. “What's wrong?”

Father thumped my back. “He's just a little surprised, Sweetheart.”

“You mean you didn't tell him?”

“Well, you know—”

“You didn't tell him about me?”

“Just a little surprise for the kid,” Father said, rubbing his hands and looking busily around. “Ah-hah, I see the painters finished in here. Very nice. Very good taste.”

Nada touched my forehead. With her cool, soft hands she framed my face and looked at me. “Do you hate me?” she said.

“Don't talk morbid, please,” Father said, turning back suddenly. “Richard is just a little surprised, as I said. I didn't mean to upset him.”

I was embarrassed that they could see my heart thudding so violently in my chest. Nada said, “Richard? Are you all right?” and I managed to nod. She embraced me happily as if I'd given the right answer. “Do you love me? Do you forgive me?” she said.

I told her yes.

“Do you love me?” she said fiercely.

I said, “Yes, Nada.”

“Oh, Nada,” she said, laughing, “we should get rid of that foolish name. It was the first thing you said and I wanted to hang onto it, but it's foolish, your father is right. Richard, I will never leave you again. Never. You know that, don't you?”

I nodded again and let my eyes close.

In a day or two we had a ceremony and baptized the new house. This lovely, lovely house that Nada loved so much! “And your father picked it out himself. Your wonderful father!” Nada said. Oh, he was wonderful! There were big white flowers for Nada every day. Then the movers arrived and the furniture procession began again, inward this time, and rooms filled up slowly and the garage filled up with boxes and the basement with furniture that wouldn't be used (Nada wanted many new pieces of furniture), and when everything was settled we had our ceremony. Nada lay on the French love seat that now found its resting place in the hallway, and Father sat at one end so that her long lovely legs could lie across his lap, and I sat, like a little prince, on a stool at their feet, and she wore a green velvet dressing gown, and her hair was
long and silky down to her shoulders, and she held the plastic Princess telephone in her graceful fingers and prepared to make calls. I had on my lap the two telephone books.

In the background was a strain of violin music—Father had requested Mozart. The records were in a jumble and I put on Bartok, knowing Father wouldn't notice the difference. Close about us was the perfumy but civil odor of white roses, Nada's favorites.

First of all Nada asked me the number of the Cedar Grove Employment Services and she called to request a maid, and before she hung the plastic Princess phone up again a mysterious person was being contacted and would be on her way to us. The first call had been a success! What now? I said the groceries, but Father overruled me by saying, “Better send over a plumber for that bathroom.” And I looked up another number for Nada and she called Cedar Grove Plumbing, and sure enough, in a few minutes someone else was on his way over.