Dogfight (11 page)

Alex drove Holly from the airport. I was supposed to pick her up, but they took an earlier flight. That they left early might be a good sign. His headlights draw hieroglyphs in shadow against the wall.

Holly explodes into the room, leaving the door open, and Pancho tightens, growling, and presses against my shins.

“Hello, baby,” Holly says to the dog. “I brought you something.” She pulls a studded leather collar from her purse and twirls it on her finger.

“I'm not sure that's his style,” I say. She leans over the back of the couch and kisses me, then vaults it to sit beside me.

“It's definitely his style,” she says. We kiss again, harder, lingering, Holly pressing herself against me, pushing me back against the cushions. Pancho wedges his head between our knees.

“Well,” I say, “aren't
you
excited.”

“Juiced,” she says. “Reborn. This is the ten-thousand-volt Holly. New York is another world.”

She pulls away and walks a circle around the couch, stretching, shaking out the airplane kinks. She looks so alive, untouchable, like at the Laundromat with that impossible smile. She stands tiptoe to straighten a bouquet of dried roses she has hung above the door. I swear that where she walks the room gets brighter.

“You hungry?” I say. “I could fix us some dinner.”

“Ravenous,” she says.

“Stay put,” I say. “I'll put something together.”

“I want to watch you cook,” she says and follows me into the kitchen, hands on my hips, taking wide steps so that her feet fall outside my own. She hops up on the counter.

“Take your clothes off,” she says.

“What?” I say. I take a package of spaghetti from the cabinet.

“I want you to cook naked for me,” she says. “Maybe just an apron. Parade around the kitchen like a woman in a porno movie.”

She is smiling, drumming her nails. Pancho is watching us from the doorway.

“You're awfully frisky,” I say. “Should I wear my heels?” I turn on the tap and begin rooting under the sink for a pot.

“I mean it,” she says.

I straighten up and look at her. She slips off the counter and leans into me again. The water spatters hotly out of the sink onto my back and my hands, where I'm bracing myself. Pancho rumbles and takes a step into the room.

“It's okay,” I tell him. “We're not hurting each other. She's not hurting me.”

Holly takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom. She closes the door when the dog tries to follow and says, “Sorry, sweet boy.”

I imagine that there is something different about her lovemaking, the way her hips and hands move. Her tongue seems hard and violent in my mouth. Not the same. Asleep later, she kicks the covers and twists on the mattress. For a long time, I try to make my breathing match hers, but I can't for more than a few seconds. Her breathing is impatient and irregular.

I have to stop sleeping with my dog. When Holly leaves the second time, for Los Angeles, I try to resist Pancho's scratching, but eventually I give in and let him sleep with me. I clean dog hair from the blankets every morning. I don't know what Holly would say if she knew, probably nothing good. I tell Mason and he says, “Dogs are dogs and should be treated accordingly.” I tell him that I read in some book that the most well-behaved dogs are house dogs, dogs that are comfortable with people. Dogs that sleep with their owners. I don't admit that I made this last part up.

Twice before she left I drove to see Holly at work, leaving Pancho in the back of the truck watching the door expectantly for my return. I would find her in the showroom and lead her away from Alex
and the other salespeople, and she told me each time, “No, I will not make love to you in the dressing room.” I pretended that I was only teasing, and she smiled and kept her arms firmly between us. The pressure of her arms was at least something.

Pancho and I walk what seems like five hundred miles while she is gone, following the old logging trails through the ginhouse field and Butcher's Field, named when this was still hunting ground. I can't work. Mosaicing makes me restless, is overwhelmingly tedious. Some nights Pancho wakes me with his dreaming. He is on his side on top of the covers, his whole body shaking, paws churning. I wonder if he's having the same dream that I've been having. The one where Holly is coming down the steps of an airplane. It is a propeller plane and the tarmac is wet, like some sentimental forties movie. Humphrey Bogart should be there. And I'm standing on the runway, holding this big ball of light with both hands, waiting to give it to her. I don't know exactly what it is, but I know it's something important.

I call her hotel all the third day, but there is no one around until evening. Alexander answers.

“Alexander, hi. It's me, Banks,” I say. “Is Holly there? Have I called your room by mistake?”

We have a bad connection. The static sounds like rushing water.

“Hey there,” he says. “Hello from the City of Angels.”

I suddenly see him crumpling paper next to the mouthpiece to simulate line interference. But that's ridiculous. I rap the side of my head with my knuckles to stop myself thinking that way.

“No and no,” he continues, loudly, “I'm just over here doing some work. Sorry, but I sent Holly on an errand. Boundless energy that girl.”

“Oh,” I say. “I understand.”

He says, “Everything's great here. A little business and a lot of pleasure, if you know what I mean. She's a terrific girl.”

Pancho gets to his feet and watches me. Behind him is a bookcase filled with my work. A decorative bowl with a mosaiced daisy in the
center. A pitcher done in black and red with a slender handle. It took patient hours to cut glass small enough for that handle. Clay candlesticks in Christmas colors. All the things that I have made.

“Hello?” Alexander says.

“I'm here,” I say.

“Holly said the strangest thing to me today,” he says. “We were coming back from a lunch meeting and there was one of those daytime moons. You know the kind I'm talking about?”

“Un-hunh.” I can see it. The moon white and false-looking in the light. Its surface scarred with dry blue lakes, its edges blurring into the pale sky.

“And she looks me right in the eye and says she wishes she could walk on the moon,” he says. “That someday they're going to colonize it up there. Isn't that strange?”

That sounds like something Holly would say. I picture her—I can't help seeing her with him—scanning the sky for an uncommon moon, one hand raised to shade her eyes, drawing a perfect line of shadow across the bridge of her nose.

“Yes,” I say, “very.”

“Well,” he says.

The static evaporates. His voice, saying good-bye, is clear but distant from the mouthpiece. There is a long moment before he hangs up, when I imagine I can just barely hear someone moving in the background.

I call Mason and tell him that I want to get drunk. He takes me to a Western bar that he likes, where they make me take off my baseball cap, even though fully half of the men inside are wearing Stetsons. I wore the hat because I haven't showered since Holly left, and my hair is slick and dirty and stays close to my head.

Mason guides me to a seat at the bar and we watch the dancers, lined up, moving stiffly in unison. They all know the steps. It is an unfortunate combination, the seventies disco lighting, blinking pink
and turquoise, and the awkward line dance, a cotillion version of someone's idea of country western dancing.

“You look like shit,” Mason says.

“Thank you very much,” I say.

“If it's driving you this crazy put an end to it,” he says. “I always tell people, if you're worried, you've probably got good reason to be worried. Simple as that.”

He knows that I know what he means.

I had the idea that I would have an affair tonight, sleep with someone completely different than Holly. I would find a tall and skinny country girl, all angles to Holly's athletic curves. But what would I do if I found her? I wouldn't know how to begin, wouldn't have anything to say to her or know how to kiss her. Holly has taken all of that from me.

“You've spoiled that dog absolutely rotten,” Holly says to me. She is sitting on the couch twisted around to watch me feed Pancho leftover cake and ice cream. The two of us, the dog and I, had a party last night, when I came in drunk, and ate ourselves silly. Holly folds her arms on the back of the couch and rests her chin on them. To the dog she says, “You're ruined, Pancho. I mean it.”

He raises his eyes but keeps eating. I made certain to pick up Holly at the airport this time but couldn't think of anything to say in the car. It was the longest hour of my life, but Holly didn't seem to notice and filled my silence easily, it seemed, with stories of Los Angeles. Alex is going to carry Donna Karan this season. They saw Michael Bolton on the sidewalk in West Hollywood. She met a group of ten phenomenally—her word—handsome gay men, handsome as statues, she said. She couldn't understand why they were gay, looking like that. I said maybe they had never seen anything as beautiful as each other. She laughed.

Now she says, “Where have you been the last two nights? I tried to call. I let it ring and ring.”

“I don't know,” I say. “Maybe I was in the shower. Or outside with the dog.”

“It was like midnight when I called,” she says. “You two are unnaturally attached.”

She smiles and pats the couch next to her for me to sit down. Last night, when she called, I was sitting right where she is sitting. I knew it was her but let the phone keep ringing, twenty, thirty earsplitting rings. It was all I could do not to answer. I wanted to vomit. I wanted her to wonder.

The phone rings now, and I nearly jump out of my skin.

“Is Willy home?” The voice says. A woman's voice.

I tell her she has the wrong number but she doesn't believe me. She reels off my number and I say, “Yes, that's right but there's no Willy here.”

“Just put him on, Arthur,” she says. “This is Arthur, isn't it?”

“No,” I say.

Holly smiles and shakes her head. She says, “Hang up on 'em.” She makes a phone with her hand, thumb as earpiece, pinky mouthpiece, and slams it on an imaginary receiver.

I don't hang up. I can hear music playing softly in the background. Jazz. The woman sounds a little drunk.

“Look, Arthur,” she says, “I haven't talked to him in a week.”

“I'm sorry about that,” I say.

“Just tell him that I called. Please, Arthur. Make sure he knows that I called,” she says.

“I'll tell him,” I say. “I promise.”

I hang up and cross the room to Holly. She drapes her arm over my shoulders and sags against me. We watch the fire play.

“You've been sleeping with Alexander,” I say.

“Don't be silly,” she says. I expected a reaction, but there is nothing. She is still soft and warm against me, relaxed, innocent, fingertips brushing the back of my neck. The dog circles, then curls up in front of us, between the coffee table and our feet. This could be so right. It could be.

“Let's go to bed,” Holly says.

“I'm not tired,” I say. “You go on.”

“I'll put up with this forever,” she says. “If you want me to.”

Pancho scrambles to his feet, suddenly, and rushes to the window barking. He has the deep, booming bark of a dog twice his size. Its sound fills the room, like a gunshot, and its force causes him to bounce and hop with each report.

Holly puts a hand on my cheek and turns my face toward her. She kisses me, but I don't open my mouth. The dog stops barking but doesn't leave the window. Holly takes her shoes off, pushing each one loose with the toes of the other foot. She stands and pads gently to the bedroom. For a while, I pretend that Holly will come back and stand in the doorway and smile the way she did at the Laundromat, as if everything, all of this, were perfectly natural. But I don't believe that it is.

I go over and crouch next to the dog, shading my eyes so I can see past our reflections, trying to see what spooked him. There isn't anything out there that I can see, just night. In the faint moonlight, I can make out the drowned cypress trees looming up from the water. I try to remember if I have made Holly any promises. Or she me. I can't remember.

When she was in the fourth grade, Hettie saw her father kissing Amelia Earhart. Hettie wasn't supposed to be at home, was supposed to be down the beach swimming with her mother and the Fitzgeralds, but she wasn't. She was cutting through the dining room on her way to the wide balcony that faced the ocean. She was angry at her mother for embarrassing her and had a sketchy plan to rest her elbows on the stone railing, her chin in her hand, and stare wistfully out at the ocean, like a prisoner in a story musing of home. But this was better. Both sets of French doors were open and the sail-white curtains were billowing back into the room, and beyond the doors, in dreamy flashes because of the waving curtains, she saw Amelia Earhart in her father's arms.

Not fifteen minutes before, Hettie had been wading in the shore-break with Baker Fitzgerald. She couldn't actually swim, because she had a cast on her arm. Baker was a year older, and they went to the same school in the city. He had jabbed a finger over Hettie's shoulder. “Ahoy,” he said, “a white whale.” Hettie had turned to look and seen her mother in a bathing cap, floating on her back in the water. Her arms were spread like flabby wings and her skin was pale and doughy-looking, bunched beneath her swimsuit. Her lips were blue with cold. She was as bloated as a drowned man. Hettie threw a fistful of sand at
him and stalked off down the beach. Her mother hadn't seen her leave.

Hettie took an apple, now, from the crystal bowl on the dining table and sat in her father's place. Her father was the most handsome man she knew. A Panama hat was perched on his head, cocked back to show his dark widow's peak, and he had snappy little creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He was so tall that he had to stoop to kiss Amelia Earhart and she had to lift herself on tiptoe, her round, bare heels coming out of her shoes, to reach his lips.