Dogfight (3 page)

I have often thought about having the talk with my son, about
what I would tell him. The birds and the bees, the facts of life. For a man who spent his days talking, my own father, a professor of literature, was surprisingly inarticulate. He was maroon-faced and shifty and read me a poem about love. He tried to establish a connection.

“Do you know what I mean, Byron?” he said. “You know already, right?”

“Sure. I've got it covered,” I said. I was twelve and only four years from discovering that I had nothing at all covered.

X has never seemed the right age for that sort of talk. Nine and ten, still too much a boy. Eleven, the year his mother died. My wife, Sarah. I couldn't get my head around anything that year, except the fact that she was gone. Her absence was everywhere. Dust on the piano keys. Dirty dishes in the sink. A coolness beneath my covers, in place of her body heat. Twelve, our move to the city, to Alexandria, at the beginning of the school year. That seemed weight enough for both our shoulders. I sold the piano. X had a short-lived fling with smoking cigarettes. Now, thirteen, and suddenly he is too old for all that.

It could be that I am avoiding the issue. Nine months ago, I went to the library and xeroxed copies of the male and female anatomy, those full-body biology textbook shots, intending to make my presentation to him. I wanted to keep it clinical, the way I would have shown a customer at my veterinary that their dog was having pregnancy complications. My intention was to leave love out of it. On my way home, I saw a terrifying vision of what I would do when the conversation turned to actual procedure. I pictured myself placing the male copy on top of the female copy, between my hands, and rubbing my palms together. I broke out in a humiliated sweat. I jerked the car over to the curb and slipped the pages into a gutter. X probably knows the basics already. What he doesn't know, the smooth way morning light looks on a woman's skin, the way her hair can play between bare shoulder blades, Grace across the way, with her potted daisies on the windowsill, will surely teach him.

* * *

To the uninitiated, it would appear that Grace Poole has renounced clothing altogether. She has dark curly hair, all of it, and wild eyebrows and is so pale as to be distracting. It's true that she walks from room to room naked. Sleeps and feeds her dog, watches television, and eats breakfast without clothes. Grace spends almost all of her time at home, clothesless. These things I have learned in the four days since I discovered my son's little secret. And his homework fetish began almost two weeks ago, just about the time our new neighbor arrived.

When she does go out, Grace makes the act of getting dressed something almost unbearably alluring. The slow taking away of my guilty pleasure. She makes her body a secret again, dressing slowly, as if she regretted having to do it at all. A reverse striptease; I imagine balloons inflating around her as she pulls pins out of them. The sight of her rolling panty hose over lightly muscled calves and dimpled knees, tugging them over the crescent folds where her supple thighs meet her bottom, shifting her hips side to side, or standing in the middle of the room, slipping her arms into the sleeves of a clean shirt, buttoning it over her breasts, breaks my heart. I have not seen a naked woman since my wife was alive.

Now, Grace is talking on the telephone. She has six phones, each one a different color, lined up on a card table against her downstairs window. My first thought was phone sex, but that would be too perfect. She is standing behind the table, arms crossed beneath her breasts, lifting her brown nipples, pinning the phone against her shoulder with her cheek. I can just make out the blue earpiece in all that hair. The wall behind her is lined with cardboard boxes, stacked three high, each one imprinted with the same logo—a rust-colored rooster—and writing in Spanish. I hear my son trotting down the stairwell and just have time to drop the shade in my study and stash the binoculars between the chair and my lower back before he opens the door. I can't get my hands on any documents to look busy, so I stare at the ceiling and pretend that I was daydreaming. Watching Grace seems like daydreaming sometimes, languorous as jasmine.

“Shouldn't you be working, Dad?” X says. “Somebody's got to put food on the table around here.” He is standing just inside the room, still in his school uniform, gray slacks and blue shirt, now untucked. X is blond and tan and brown-eyed. He looks exactly like his mother. I try to find traces of myself in him when he doesn't know I'm watching. While he sleeps, his cheeks flushed with dreaming. At dinner, sitting in front of the television, holding his plate near his chin, his eyes half closing when he lifts a mouthful. Usually, I don't find anything, and when I do, those things are fleeting, an expression, a gesture, gone almost as soon as I've seen them. The sight of him, of his mother in him, makes me feel guilty about watching Grace. He is smiling strangely, and I can't tell if he is on to me.

“I thought maybe we could do something together after school,” I lie. “I didn't know you'd have so much
homework”
.

I say homework in italics, hoping to catch him off guard, to put him on the defensive for a change. He leans into the door frame, shoves a hand into his pocket. I can hear the muffled thump of a tennis ball on the public courts across the street.

“Yeah, well.” He shrugs and looks in the direction of the tennis sounds.

“Besides, I'm on emergency call tonight. I thought an afternoon off would do me some good.” This is the truth. I have become part of an arrangement of the three local vets, where one of us stays on call twenty-four hours on alternating nights. The other offices transfer their emergency patients after business hours. “So, what do you say? Should we go down to the mall and look at that CD player you want?”

He brightens visibly.

“Cool,” he says. “Let me change clothes and we're gone.”

He pivots on a heel and goes stomping back upstairs.

After my wife died, I moved my son from our farm in Loudon County to this place, a brick town house in Alexandria, anonymous among the rows of similar buildings. Ours wasn't a working farm, just some land, the old farmhouse and the sagging barns behind it,
and a grain silo that Sarah called the Leaning Tower of Loudon. My practice has boomed since our move to the city. My clientele, though, has changed from horses and hearty dogs to mostly cats and those dogs that need constant grooming. Poodles and such, city dogs. I never would have thought that grooming would become a vital part of my practice, but I've recently hired an assistant, Sissy, for just that purpose. Sissy is young and attractive and people like her, and the owners of my new patients seem to find something charming, something quaint, in having a country doctor for their pets. I make my manner brusque and forceful and have lately found myself speaking in colloquialisms to fit the part that has been given me. They often ask why a veterinarian, a natural lover of animals, does not have a pet of his own. I mention lack of space and the inclemency of keeping animals confined to the city. A happy dog is a running dog, I say. I made that up. And they nod and look at the floor, guilty in their minds of animal cruelty. They like my subtle scolding.

What I don't tell them is that I once saw a Siberian husky called Bear run over by a lumber truck, flatbed strapped with skinned trees. This was before X was born, and Sarah and I loved that dog as if he were our child. She would put a plate for him under the dinner table so he could have his meals with us. On cold nights, he slept in the bed between us, his head on a polyester pillow that Sarah bought because it turned out he was allergic to down. All of us slept on polyester pillows. I still do. To console her on the evening of the accident, I had to promise that we would never have another pet. I'm not certain how serious she was about the promise, whether it was just one of those things people did at a time of tragedy, self-denial as punishment for some implicit fault in the affair, but our farm was without animals until her death.

X found a cat curled up in the grain silo the month after Sarah's funeral and I gave in to his pleading and let us keep it. The cat was never fond of me, ignored my attempts at affection, hissing at my touch and rushing to X for protection. The cat wouldn't eat until the kitchen lights were off and I had gone up to bed. Late one night, I
went down to the kitchen for a snack and flipped the light switch and surprised him at his bowl. He skittered across the linoleum, out of the little pet door and our lives. We never saw him again. I tried fish, after the cat, for X's sake, but could never remember to feed them or change their water and when I did remember, I thought of Sarah and the promise that I made.

Grace Poole and her shar-pei, Candle, are new patients of mine. I have never found any truth in the idea that people and their pets come to look alike over time. Candle is all wrinkles and short, wiry hair and full of high-strung motion. They have only been in once, for a flea dip and groom, but Sissy noticed something about Grace immediately. Sissy is nineteen and always teasing me about not dating. While Grace was filling out her paperwork, she pulled me aside and said, “Bingo. That's the one. Ask her out, Dr. Shaw. We'll double. You can set me up with that pretty son of yours.”

She also teases X, when he sometimes comes in to earn his allowance after school. Both of us, X and I, clearly enjoy it.

“Can't. She's my new neighbor,” I said. “If it didn't work out, I would always be running into her at the mailbox.”

“If you don't get a date soon, the customers are going to think you're gay. Think about what that would do to business,” she said.

After X left for school today, I called the office, told Sissy and my other assistant, Roy, to take the day off, and spent the morning watching Grace. From the window in my study, I can see into her kitchen and living room, but when she went to the second floor, I had to dash up to X's room and crouch on his bed, where I imagine he must watch her. Our separation on the stairwell was torturous. The dog followed her everywhere. I wondered what my son thinks when he does his spying. I crossed my arms on the sill, the way he does, and pressed my forehead to the cool glass. I pulled his blanket over my shoulders. She must seem to him unreal, a gift so lucky, so fantastic, he can hardly believe in her. I pictured him saying honest prayers that she wouldn't go away, the image so perfect and fragile that to touch her, to even imagine touching her, might make her
come apart in wisps of smoke. X's return from school confined me to the study, and now I have lied my way into having to leave the house altogether, but I don't mind really.

One thing has impressed me about X since my discovery. He hasn't brought anyone over to watch with him. When I was his age, the first thing I would have done was have a dozen friends lined up at the window eating popcorn or something. Having a secret to share made me feel important. But not X. He doesn't want to share her. He doesn't want to spoil whatever it is he's feeling up there. I hope he doesn't know that he's splitting time with his father.

It is almost five o'clock by the time we leave. X is very careful when dressing for the mall. He has selected a plain white T-shirt from the Gap, Levi's jeans, and brand-new Nike high-tops. Close to two hundred dollars for the whole outfit. I had no idea. His mother did all his shopping. I have suits that cost less, and, except for the shoes, he looks like a fifties hoodlum. I half expect him to roll a pack of cigarettes in his shirtsleeve.

We drive a while, all interstate and highway on the way to the mall, and X is quiet, maybe thinking about his CD player, maybe thinking about Grace. The breeze from the open window whips his hair. I let myself think about Grace, too. I'm not sure how I will react when I see her again in person. In the flesh, so to speak. Our meeting, as neighbors, as doctor/patient, is inevitable. I wonder sometimes if she knows that she is being watched, if the absence of curtains on her windows is deliberate, and not, as I tell myself, just because she's new to town. I don't think she knows that her vet lives next door—the last four days, I've been getting my mail under cover of darkness—but I wonder if she can feel our eyes on her, if the two of us are giving off some kind of lonely vibe. X is staring, blank-eyed, in front of us. Our thoughts of Grace fill the car as palpably as the quick air.

“How about you roll that window up and let's get some AC going,” I say.

He rolls his eyes at me but does as I ask. He turns on the radio, and I turn it down a little. X does a sigh, one that is full of implications.

“Dad, I need to ask a favor,” he says. “There's this girl I want to ask out, and I was wondering if you'd drive us to the movies. Her parents could drive, but they're real old, and they want to drive too much, you know. They're happy-assed about stuff like that. They get off on participating.”

At first, I'm panicked. He's going to ask Grace to the movies. But that's absurd and besides, Grace has her driver's license. At the same time, I'm unreasonably happy that he's asked me to be their chauffeur. I struggle to withhold a barrage of questions. I turn the radio back up.

“Sounds like fun,” I say.

He nods and grows remote again. A woman in an antique convertible, a DeSoto or something, passes us on X's side. It has fins and everything, makes her look like a movie star. Both of us turn to look.

I say, “How would you feel about your old man getting a date soon?”

“Cool,” he says.

“That wouldn't bother you?” I'm surprised.

“No way,” he says.

“Understand that I loved your mother. I will always love your mother,” I say.

“Mom's dead,” he says. “She'd understand.”

X is a man of few words, the strong, silent type. Add a scuffed leather motorcycle jacket to his outfit and he could double for Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
. X's mother died of an infection resulting from her tubal ligation. Almost an unheard-of cause of death, the doctors said, but this I already knew. Even vets know a thing or two about people medicine. Sarah was alive in the hospital less than a week. I had always wanted a big family, wanted the constant clamor of children in our house, but there were medical reasons for the operation, and Sarah softened things by saying how much the idea of raising an only child appealed to her. We could spoil him rotten, give
him whatever he wanted. She wouldn't have to divide her love, she said. Two ways was enough.