I see you everywhere (14 page)

He just looks at me, oblivious and fearful at the same time. I say, ‘I guess I’m asking, what do you want from life?’ We’ve been married one whole year and we’ve never had this kind of conversation and I’m horrified. It’s my fault, too, I realize. But do you know what he says?”

“What?”

“ ‘To be comfortable.’ That’s it! What he wants out of life!”

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“That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable goal,” I say. “A more honest answer than most.”

“But it’s so aimless!”

“What are you, full of a million aims?”

“And when we went home,” Louisa says, “I lost it. I cried and cried. Hugh went into the bedroom and read.
Read.
He got up in the morning, shaved, read the paper, and went to
work.
” She looks down at her empty plate. “And to think I was thinking about getting pregnant.”

“You wouldn’t be so stupid,” I say. I’m feeling irritated because some idiot’s Neil Diamond appears to have bumped my Bob Marley. Actually, Louisa probably should have a baby. For Louisa, that makes sense.

“It would be, wouldn’t it, things the way they are,” she says sadly.

“Well, if you want to talk
rationally
about having babies, no time would be a good time.” I can’t seem to shut up.

Louisa rolls her eyes. “Oh, right, the world’s too awful a place to inflict on a child. Spare me.”

“No, not exactly. It’s more like, sometimes I think, people are too awful to inflict more of them on the world.” This leaves Louisa speechless, which is rare. “And say you did have a kid. If it’s a girl, she’ll grow up to despise her mother no matter what, because that’s what daughters do. A boy? He could end up gay, get AIDS, and die. Break your heart, either way.”

Louisa gasps. “What a horrid thing to say, what’s the matter with you? They’re going to cure AIDS, they’re getting nearer all the time.”

“No, they won’t—and it’s so incredibly tragic. I’m not a bigot. Listen. No one’s ever cured a virus. The media’s full of treacherous wishful hogwash. A vaccine, maybe, but who’d take it?” I explain carefully and coldly how a virus works, how this one mutates like nothing they’ve ever seen. Bob Marley kicks in at last with “Lively Up Yourself.” Louisa looks both appalled and demoralized, and it’s all my fault. How can I laugh at Zip? At least he knows how to console. I say, “Hey. Do like the man says.”

Now she’s almost in tears. “You are an utter nihilist.”

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“I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.” And then I do shut up. As always, too late.

For the next three days, we hardly see each other. I’m buried in the library—disciplined by Louisa’s mere presence—and two nights I’m on at the clinic. I haven’t asked how long she plans to stay, and she hasn’t said.

She sits on my couch, drinks mug after mug of Zip’s mint tea, and reads a bunch of books she’s supposed to review. I realize now why her suitcase weighed so much.

Tuesday night when I get back, she’s on the phone. Zip’s out, running his soup kitchen. Louisa smiles quickly when I walk in, turns her back, and lowers her voice. She murmurs, “Yes, I will, I know, I promise. I have to go but yes, of course, I will, don’t worry, me too, I will, soon,” things like that, so I know it’s Hugh and I’m glad, but when she gets off, she looks sheepish, as if jilting him would please me. She asks how things went at the clinic.

“This Rottweiler swallowed a tennis ball. That caused a little excitement. One of those neon pink ones.” I describe the owner’s hysteria, the surgery, tell her all about Rottweilers’ oral compulsions, about the things I’ve seen emerge almost unscathed from their stomachs: balls of tinfoil, rubber spatulas, spiky toy dinosaurs, a pair of fuzzy dice. Last month we x-rayed a dog who’d been vomiting for days and wouldn’t eat. We saw a long straight line all the way from the esophagus down to the upper intestinal tract, a total mystery. What we removed was the rubber-coated telephone antenna from the owner’s Jaguar, nearly as good as new (as was the dog after surgery). I took the antenna into the waiting room and waved it in the guy’s face. “Missing something?” He wasn’t amused. Louisa nods at the phone, which blinks double time. “Guess who,”

she says. “First, to say she’s certain he’s here. Second, she’s decided to forget the police. She had an argument with a desk sergeant in Carmel who she describes as an ‘animal-rights fundamentalist.’ ”

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“You didn’t pick up?”

“I don’t want her knowing I’m here. How do I explain?”

“Say you’re reviewing a show for your magazine! You’re the creative one. I hate dealing with this all alone.”

“You took it on. I’d have refused.”

“Easy for you to say.” I sigh. It’s ten o’clock here, too late to call back. I see, too, that any hope I had for my sister’s willing help was a delusion. Though Louisa, I’ll admit, sees the harshest side of our mother. Because she’s too smart? Because she interrupted something? I don’t know. But I know this: when Louisa got into Harvard, how proud was our mother? The first words out of her mouth were “Cambridge? Hotbed of political heretics and whining overgrown hippies. If you ask my opinion, it ought to be designated a nuclear-waste dump. Drown the bastards in PCBs.”

When Louisa became engaged, she said, “Now don’t you let that boy down. The ring alone must have cost him a fortune!” Louisa never challenges these insults. She’s been hearing them forever, I guess.

“I have an idea,” I say. “Let’s go for a drive.”

“At this hour? Where?”

“We’ll look for the hound truck,” I say, pleased at my ingenuity. Part of me wonders what the hell Tighty could possibly be
thinking
—and part of me is shaking its head like a parent, muttering, Great. Just great. He’s fucking up all over again.

Tighty is fifty, almost a decade younger than Mom. He doesn’t rate as a lost soul—he’s not quite derailed—but his bitterness, his sense of never having found a way to make an upper-class living, comes across loud and clear. He dropped out of Yale in the late fifties and liquidated his fledgling trust fund to travel around the world. Batiked and bearded, he returned to Rhode Island to find that his father was divorcing his mother, selling the family homestead, and heading south in pursuit of an equestrian debutante fresh out of Vassar. He spent half of Tighty’s would-be inheritance roping her into a three-year marriage. Poor, bewildered Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 92 92

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Tighty took a job at the local stable in our hometown and stayed there till it closed ten years later. Enter my mother, May Jardine. She had just revived Figtree Domain and needed a chaperon for the hunt’s forty foxhounds. Tighty happily seized the job, which didn’t pay much though it gave him a small but classy place to live: the carriage house next to the kennels.

When Tighty isn’t mucking out the runs, leash-breaking puppies, or currycombing his mare, he likes to paint nudes. Even Louisa says he has talent, of an old-fashioned sort. In the second bedroom of the carriage house, store-bought canvases are stacked against the walls. Tighty covers them with generously built women, young and not so young: models he hires from bars in Fall River or sometimes, after a rowdy hunt breakfast, horsey forlorn divorcées. I don’t think he’s ever shown his paintings in public; maybe he doesn’t even want to. He wishes he’d been born Degas—no, Louisa corrects me, Rubens.

Tighty has frazzled graying red hair and is built like a Percheron, pure heft, but he has soulful green eyes and a purple velvet voice that, when he wants, do the seducing for him. As far as I could tell, growing up, he had a different girlfriend every week. We’re the boss’s daughters, so we were always safe, and when I hung around the kennels after school, he was kind and businesslike, showed me a hundred ways to watch over animals. He taught me how to pill a mean tomcat, drain a bad boil, peroxide the gums of a hound with bad breath. One winter morning he taught me how to save a colicky horse’s life with an enema, a task involving ginger ale, a garden hose, a funnel, and expendable clothing.

Whenever he and my mother set forth with their gay obedient brood, forty white tails alert as quills, the world is a luminous place. Maybe this is the closest he’ll ever come to a marriage, to having kids. Did reality suddenly hit him? Is that what’s going on?

One thing is clear: Tighty’s crime reeks of passion and folly, not stealth. According to Mom, his mother lives in Carmel, yet she managed never to tell me why she’s so sure he’d bring the hounds out here. Apparently the woman’s remarried so many times that the phone book is totally Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 93
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useless. Yet, as I suspected, it takes us only twenty minutes of cruising Carmel to find the truck, parked in front of a stockade fence on a street hooded with luxurious trees. It’s a four-door pickup with fencing and a wooden roof over the back. The hunt insignia, a circular design in which a fox head crowns a lighthouse, decorates the driver’s door; in the leafy dark, it stands out bright as a moon. “A genius or what?” I say as I pull up behind the truck. Between the slats of the fence, light shines from the cloistered house, so I close my door gently.

Louisa gets out, too, when she sees me trying the doors on the cab.

“What are you doing?” she hisses.

“Investigating!” I hiss back. The doors are locked. Strewn across the front seat are half a dozen disposable coffee cups, a pair of leather gloves, and a pile of maps spilling onto the floor. The backseat is a snarled mayhem of tarps, dog couplings, sweaters, and socks, but I can make out a saddle, a fifty-pound bag of dog food, a sleeping bag, the glint of Tighty’s hunting horn.

From the back bumper, I hoist myself onto the roof. Louisa is standing in the middle of the street having a pantomimed fit. “Get up here,” I whisper.

Behind the fence is a modern house, all glass, and a yard. A sliding door leads into a turquoise kitchen. Outside, on a patio table, a wine bottle and a glass. No one in sight. Standing together on top of the truck, our heads in the swaying branches, we can hear the ocean clearly, a dozen blocks away. It growls and sizzles, sucking pebbles away, herding them back.

“This is where his mother lives?” Louisa whispers.

“Beats me,” I whisper back. “But it stands to reason.”

“Beautiful town.”

“Clint Eastwood’s mayor,” I tell her.

“I know that!” she hisses.

Then we hear it, from the garage, and instantly I know the voice, deep to begin with, then mournful and tremulous as it spins out, bell curve in a minor key. It’s Juno: a bitch from one of the last litters I helped raise Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 94 94

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before going to college. A canine dowager now. Then Tighty’s voice, soothing her.

Along with the usual virtues—intelligence, nose, conformation—my mother breeds for tongue, for the melodious strength of a hound’s voice. In hunt circles, she’s famous for that. At field trials, the Figtree pack is the one that sounds like a small intense concerto. It isn’t a quality judged; the scores are on speed and faithfulness to the line. But it’s a masterpiece, that sound. My mother knows the voice of every hound, can pick out each one from the distant jumbled thrill of thirty dogs in hot pursuit of a phantom. “There’s Cicero, he’s up front, having a heck of a day,” she might say, “and Jazzman’s right behind Garbo, good boy. Apollo’s pluggin’ away; hear that
nork nork nork
? But Barrister, where’s he? Barrister, you layabout!” And then she’d raise her own powerful voice: “Try on, try on,
hoowee
!” Following, listening, I couldn’t help learning the best ones myself.

Tighty emerges from the garage. Curiously proper, he wears a long white kennel coat over his clothes. The hounds spill into the yard behind him, joyously sniffing the night air, relishing their adventure. Tighty talks in a low playful voice, reassuring them, keeping them quiet. From a deep pocket, he hands each one a biscuit. When he sits at the patio table, they settle in an untidy crowd at his feet, scratching and grooming themselves, bickering lightly over who’ll get the spots next to Tighty. He bends to stroke the heads of the nearest hounds, then pours a glass of wine and downs it like medicine.

“Don’t care if she does!” he says with belligerent abandon. A few of his companions thrash their tails, as if to second his righteousness.

“But watch her try to fix it. Ha!” He sighs loudly and hugs himself, rocking to and fro. Behind him, the kitchen glows cleanly, bright as a swimming pool. He covers his face with his hands. Louisa whispers, “Now what? This is completely bizarre.”

“Now nothing. He’s too drunk. Too sad. We’ll come back tomorrow,”

I decide. “The hounds are safe, that’s what counts.”

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“You think he looks sad?”

“Sad disguised as really pissed off.” I’m surprised Louisa doesn’t see this.

“What if he up and leaves?” she says.

“Just look at him.” I look again myself, and it sort of breaks my heart. Whatever made him lose his grip, this fifty-year-old guy had nowhere to go but his rich mother’s house, three thousand miles away. Carefully, we climb down from the truck; I get down first and help Louisa. Tighty’s beyond noticing even a major earthquake, but we don’t want to alert the hounds. As we follow the fence to my car, Tighty groans.

“May, you bitch,” he says and then, in case the neighborhood didn’t quite catch it, enunciates loudly, “You royal everlasting bitch! Untie
this
knot!” A hound whines in sympathy.

As we drive away, Louisa gives me that censorious big-sister look and says, “If I were me, I’d stay a million miles away from this one.”

“Well, go ahead and take the next plane out,” I say, and when she’s silent, I know things must be pretty bad with Hugh.
Oh Louisa, don’t go
proving me right about marriage.
That’s what I think but don’t say. In 1950, our mother left her parents’ Minnesota farm when she won a scholarship to the school of agriculture in Montana. She won it for her celebrity record at state fairs, exhibiting cows from Topeka to Lansing. There were so many trophies and blue rosettes, my grandparents’ house looked like a bovine hall of fame. After school, she figured, maybe she’d work in cattle feed. She could be a nutrition consultant. She knew all about how this grass or that, this grain or that, affected production and flavor of milk, sleekness of coat. In the spring of her senior year, she flew east to represent her school at a Budding Businesswomen of America symposium, held in Cambridge. She’d never been on the right bank of the Mississippi, and when she stood in Radcliffe Yard, a trembling hand splashed with chablis, surrounded by stiletto sandals and gleaming French twists, she might as well have crossed an ocean. All the young Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 96 96