The Way of the Dog (15 page)

A nurse showed me into a windowless office and left me there. I sat in a molded plastic chair where a patient would sit normally. After a while I got up and walked over to a poster-sized illustration of a human heart on the wall opposite, the parts brightly colored, labeled, and explained—atrium, ventricle, artery, vein. Arteries in red, veins in blue, with arrows marking the direction of flow. A soft knock, and the doctor entered. He shook my hand. His handshake was loose, relaxed. I recovered the plastic chair. He sat down facing me in a swivel chair he pulled away from the desk. He had tired, grave eyes. A thin shock of gray hair fell across his forehead. A man well into middle age, but his face was as smooth as a boy’s. A bland, kind face, I thought. I resisted a temptation to reach out and grasp his hand. “Help her, Doctor. Please help her.”

*

It is all arranged. The shipping company has come for the Meininger. It will be sent on to Los Angeles for sale. A young woman and an older man lifted it down from the wall. They swaddled it in bubble wrap and carried it out to a truck parked in the street, flashers blinking. From the window I watched them walk it up the ramp and secure it inside with wide cloth straps. The woman climbed into the cab, rolled down the window, lit a cigarette. The man came back up the steps with papers on a clipboard, which I signed. He tore off my (pink) copy. “Put it there,” I said, pointing to the Nivenson mantel.

There is now a blank space where the painting was. The wallpaper there is a darker color, a large beige rectangle above the mantel. There are strands of dull-gray cobweb clinging to it. With the walls on each side crowded with paintings, the rectangle stands out as a place from which a painting is missing, a perfect representation of absence.

I suppose I could write something there, or draw something.

One day in the not-very-distant future someone else is going to live in this house, as generations have lived in it before me. I imagine they will hang something else in the space above the Nivenson mantel, though perhaps not a painting. In the meantime, I am not going to write anything on the wall and I am not going to hang anything else there. I am going to leave the space open, leave it there as a representation of pure possibility, a picture of the future, though it won’t be my future. I am not troubled by that thought.

I will arrange the cards. That will be enough.

Sun shining on the saffron fabric that Moll has tacked over the windows lends a yellow glow to the air in the room, which smells of incense still,
like a Buddhist temple
, I think as I close the door behind me. She has taken down all the paintings I had hung there, but left the hooks. Except for the hooks, a little art-deco mirror, and a small print of Hakuin’s wild-eyed Bodhidharma taped above the television, the walls are now bare. On the floor below the mirror she has placed a cardboard box and draped it with the same yellow fabric. On the box, flanked by stubs of candles and white paper chrysanthemums, sits a little Buddha made of blue china. A pale sprinkle of incense ash dusts the cloth in front of the statue. Her reading glasses lie folded on a stack of magazines on the nightstand, in a clutter of balled-up Kleenex. Several white-capped pill jars of various sizes are on the nightstand as well, and one is on the floor nearby. I pick it up and put it on the table with the rest. Her bed was unmade.

Janine has taken a broom and swept the cobwebs from the wall where the Meininger used to be. The leaves have fallen from the trees. The streetlight casts a tangle of naked branches on my bed. If the wind is strong the branches move with small stiff jerks.

The children coming home from school, horsing around on the sidewalk, pushing, shoving, and chasing one another, never glance at my house. They don’t see the process of decay. To them it has always been this way, a fixture on their landscape: that old man’s falling-down house, as eternal as the moon.

Moll is back. She has grown thinner. She seems frail, her skin has a grayish pallor, and she moves gingerly, as if worried about falling. She cleans less and spends more time in her room. She watches a lot of television.

Sitting in my chair, looking out at the street, I receive little bulletins that testify to her presence: the complaint of floorboards overhead, the rasp of water traveling up the pipes to the bathroom, a burst of canned laughter from the television, footfalls on the stairs, slower than before, the radio in the kitchen and Moll singing along. Now and then she stops in this room. She sits in the rocker but doesn’t rock or jiggle. We look out the window and argue about the neighbors.

I don’t go the park anymore.

Janine does the shopping. Sometimes she and Alfie bring prepared dishes, and sometimes they fix a meal here and eat with us. Mostly we eat precooked frozen dinners that Janine brings us in stacks from the supermarket, or we order out.

We play checkers.

From my window I watch the giraffes in their Sunday spandex stretching on their little patch of lawn. Ever since I noticed the telltale paunch I have been keeping an eye on the young woman. Today there is no doubt about it.

Professor Diamond’s house is for sale. A realtor’s sign appeared in her yard last week. They are constructing a concert shell in the park. Moll says they plan to remove the railroad tracks, so the park can run all the way to the river.

The neighborhood is changing.

I was still awake when she came down. I didn’t say anything. She smelled of peppermint soap. I lifted my hand, held it so the shadow of a gingko branch lay in my palm. She lifted her hand; the skeletal branch fell across her wrist like a bracelet. She put her mouth to my ear, so close I could barely make out the word. “Love,” she whispered, “love.” The flesh of her arm lay against mine. I rolled onto her, sank into her, into the big softness of her. She wrapped my bones.

I am going to stop now.

It is not even true that man is born, suffers, and dies. Even that is too much of a story. What is true is that every day the sun rises and sets.

There is not enough time to reckon the sum of our folly.

I am still alive.

MISSION

T
he mission of Coffee House Press is to publish exciting, vital, and enduring authors of our time; to delight and inspire readers; to contribute to the cultural life of our community; and to enrich our literary heritage. By building on the best traditions of publishing and the book arts, we produce books that celebrate imagination, innovation in the craft of writing, and the many authentic voices of the American experience.

VISION

VALUES

Innovation and excellence in all activities

Diversity of people, ideas, and products

Advancing literary knowledge

Community through embracing many cultures

Ethical and highly professional management
and governance practices

Join us in our mission at
coffeehousepress.org

FUNDERS

C
offee House Press is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher. Our books are made possible through the generous support of grants and gifts from many foundations, corporate giving programs, state and federal support, and through donations from individuals who believe in the transformational power of literature. Coffee House Press receives major operating support from Amazon, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts—a federal agency, from Target, and in part, from the Minnesota State Arts Board through the arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the Legacy Amendment vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008. Coffee House also receives support from: several anonymous donors; Suzanne Allen; Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation; Around Town Agency; Patricia Beithon; Bill Berkson; the E. Thomas Binger and Rebecca Rand Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; Ruth Dayton; Dorsey & Whitney,
LLP
; Mary Ebert and Paul Stembler; Chris Fischbach and Katie Dublinski; Fredrikson & Byron,
P.A.
; Sally French; Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Jeffrey Hom; Carl and Heidi Horsch; Alex and Ada Katz; Stephen and Isabel Keating; the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; Kathy and Dean Koutsky; the Lenfestey Family Foundation; Carol and Aaron Mack; Mary McDermid; Sjur Midness and Briar Andresen; the Rehael Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner,
P.A.
; Kiki Smith; Jeffrey Sugerman; Patricia Tilton; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation; Stu Wilson and Mel Barker; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation; Margaret and Angus Wurtele; and many other generous individual donors.

To you and our many readers across the country,
we send our thanks for your continuing support.

OTHER BOOKS BY SAM SAVAGE

Glass

$15 • Paperback • 978-1-56689-273-5

$9.99 • E-book • 978-1-56689-273-2

Tasked with writing the preface to a reissue of her late husband’s long-out-of-print novel, Edna’s mind drifts in a Proustian marathon of introspection. What unfolds is the story of a marriage: is Edna’s preface an homage or an act of belated revenge? Is she the cultured and hypersensitive victim of a crass and brutally ambitious husband? Or was Clarence the long-suffering caretaker of a neurotic and delusional wife?