I see you everywhere (15 page)

Julia Glass

women wore badges: Summer Camp Administrator, Smith; Gal Friday at Morgan Guaranty, Barnard; Vacation Planner, Florida at Tallahassee. People couldn’t help giggling, however kindly, whenever they spotted May’s. It read, Breeder and Handler of Brown Swiss Cows, Montana at Bozeman.

The wine was risky, but she drank to keep her hands busy. Not long and she found herself teetering carefully down a rugged brick sidewalk, lost but relieved. She went into a coffee shop, sat at the counter, and ordered an ice-cream soda. Beside her, a young man was reading a seed catalog as if it were an Agatha Christie whodunit. His white shirt was pressed, his black hair combed and glossed, but his fingernails were haloed with dirt. When she stood up to pay, the young man turned and found himself staring straight at May’s badge, perched on her wellrounded chest. He said, “Oh, are they the ones that turn out the luxury chocolate?” She says he was perfectly serious, didn’t even crack a smile. She was about to slap him when she realized that she was still wearing her name tag.

He told her he was studying horticulture. He took her to see the glass flowers at the Peabody Museum. Next day, at Arnold Arboretum, he actually dared to kiss her. I can’t imagine daring to kiss my mother. She married our father, she likes to say, for his excellent teeth, good posture, and pedigree: descent on his mother’s side from the
Mayflower,
on his father’s side from Huguenots who settled New Orleans. Lots of generals, lots of muscular prolific wives. “You may buy education,” our mother says, “but class flows in your veins.” Those French twists no longer faze her.

Louisa agrees with me that we should leave our mother in the dark until we figure out what we’ve got on our hands. So I call Mom next morning and tell her to sit tight; no concrete leads but I’m on the job.

“So help me, I will sell every stick of his furniture, every heirloom antique,” she says, “to pay for shipping those poor creatures back. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 97
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They’ll travel like stars. I’m going to give his car to the first college dropout who wanders by. Blacklist him with the Humane Society of the United States.”

“Hey, you can do that?” I ask, thinking of all my daydreams about certain corrupt harbormasters, fishing inspectors, seal-bashing senators who pose for the papers chucking their golden retrievers under the chin. She sighs. “There’s a first time for everything, honey.”

I’ll be at the aquarium in the afternoon, so we plan to head over once I’m through diving. The plan is to take Zip’s van, with Zip as our driver and strongman (though I doubt we’ll be exerting any muscle). Late last night, I took another stab, feeble as ever, at breaking it off. He’d picked me up at the Ark, where we had a slow day. Reading papers from a wildlife conference, I’d let my attention stray to a talk on black rhinos.
Endangered
becomes quite the soft sell. So when I climbed up into Zip’s van, doom hooded me, damp and meddlesome as fog. We sat high above the traffic—which as a rule makes me irrationally happy, like a small hit of endorphins—and Zip told me about visiting a farm where autistic children ride horses. “Miracles,” he said. “Miracles begin to look possible.”

But his reasonable virtue just pushed the gloom deeper, right into my pores. I made trite sounds of encouragement, but all I could think was, What is the
point
?

Louisa made us dinner. Smoked-pepper soup, curried lentils, and garlic bread; she appointed Zip her sous-chef, and the two of them danced up my kitchen like a couple of courting woodcocks. “You’re not to lift a finger,” she told me. I should have felt like a princess, but I felt like an unwanted guest in my own home. After kiwi sorbet, green as new grass, she insisted on washing up by herself, so Zip and I went for a walk. After a long strolling silence, I said, “I can’t figure out what you want—from this, from me. Besides the sex, okay, and maybe my fridge, which is bigger than yours, and my oven, which does better bread.”

“Entrance to your heart,” he said. “That’s what I want. The hinges are rusty, I know.”

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“Zip, what do we have in
common
?” I was fending off his let-yourselfbe-loved speech, which I’d heard before. But I wondered, too, what the hell I was doing. Was I really ousting this beautiful, smart guy from my life? This guy with a responsible job, two vehicles, no shortage of patience; and hey, no family baggage?

“Common,” Zip said, perusing the word like a bite of fruit. “No. It’s the
un
common that concerns me, that draws me in.”

“Well, I’m an uncommon pain in the ass, sure.”

“Uncommon souls, that’s what I’m talking about. Uncommon communion. Uncommon sense of justice.”

“Stop acting like a guru. I mean, raise your voice now and then!

Snort when you laugh! Swear in your sleep! Have a single
vice
! Do you remember the first time you came over, how we talked about the World Series? About antiwhaling sanctions? About the Kitty Dukakis factor and the bow-tie factor and whether Gephardt was dyeing his lashes? About
life
?”

“The debates.” Zip smiled. “You made me laugh. That was fun.”

“Fun, yes. That prehistoric conceit, shallow though it may be.”

“You don’t think we have enough fun,” he said gravely. I thought of how we’d cycled the rim of Big Sur. I thought of our Otis Redding connection. I thought of his black-bean chili with tiny cubes of roasted tofu glazed with cayenne. “Oh what do I know, what do
I
know? Except, I’d like to see you unprepared just once. Is this nuts? Am I a bitch? You’re like this Boy Scout, you know—always so damn
prepared.
”

We had circled the block and were back in front of my driveway, under a cypress that whispered and creaked. I tilted my forehead toward his.

“You’re so tall,” he said. His smile was too close to see, but I heard it.

“I’ve always liked how tall you are.” He weaseled a hand deep in my heattangled hair. “Clem.”

“Let’s go to bed,” I said, because I love the way he makes my name sound holy, because his fingers had crept to that tingling furrow under my skull, and because when you get there with Zip, in bed, you would never call him a guru.

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∞

“Tighty,” I say when he opens the gate. “Tighty, Tighty, Tighty.” I’m shaking my head and carping like a headmistress.
Higher ground,
Zip advised me in the car.
Claim the higher ground.

“Jesus Christ,” says Tighty, and then, when he spots Louisa behind me, “Jesus Double H. Fucking Christ.” But he lets us in. The hounds, basking in the yard, are thrilled to have guests. Well mannered as ever, they sniff us demurely but never jump up. No one barks. I recognize nearly all of them, acknowledge the ones I know by name. Louisa hangs back by the gate.

“Both of you? Oh Jesus. What did she do, hire Jeane Dixon?”

“Face it, Tighty, you did nothing to hide your tracks.” I can’t help smiling. “Should I ask why? Or can we just turn this whole thing around somehow, U-turn, no questions asked? Because I haven’t called the police—like I’ve been ordered to do, by the way.”

Relieved but cautious, he smiles back. “You are anything but your mother’s daughters,” he says. “Take it from the loyal retainer.”

“Loyal you’ve always been, but
Tighty.
” I cock my head toward the trusting, far more loyal creatures around us, oblivious to why they’re in this strange place, yet loving every minute. Like a quiz-show audience, they gaze at us in gleeful suspense.

I introduce the two men; they shake hands without a word. For a few seconds we hover in a sheepish trapezoid, hounds milling everywhere, rubbing against our legs, panting and shimmying.
Oh wonderful, a party!
they seem to be saying. One thing they need is a good long hike.

“This calls for a toast,” Tighty says drily. “Everything does these days.” He goes into the kitchen and brings out an expensive-looking chardonnay, doubles back and retrieves a clutch of stemmed glasses.

“This house belongs to my mother,” he says, addressing our nosy appraisal of the surroundings.

“Where
is
your mother?” I ask.

“Europe. Stepdad Rolf prefers London.” Tighty shrugs. “But he likes Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 100 100

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his California wines. Cellar’s stocked to the gunnels. Thank you, Rolf.”

He salutes vaguely toward the sky with his left hand while pouring with his right.

Zip declines, but Louisa and I accept, to humor Tighty. He raises his glass. “To love. To foolish love. To foolish, doglike, dirt-blind love.”

Louisa throws me a missile of a glance: You got us into this, you get us out.

I clear my throat and say, “To passion. To impulse. To letting the chips fall where they may.” In turn, I throw my own piercing glance at Zip, but he is enthralled by the sea of dogs gently engulfing our ankles. It feels like a parody of so many evenings when we were small: our parents and their friends outtoasting one another beneath our bedrooms. Catching on, Louisa jumps in. “To cutting a deal. To getting the hell out of hot water.” Hers the practical toast.

“To the wages of blood sport,” rejoins Tighty, and oh, if looks could gut a fallen elk.

Whatever tatters of sanity lurk in our midst, someone, I decide, had better start patching. “Right. Okay,” I say. “No harm done—except maybe mileage on the truck—but Tighty, we’ve got to get these guys home. And look, unless you’ve made other plans, we’ve got to get you back in May’s graces.”

“You think this was a joyride? A lark?” Tighty snorts loudly. “No way I’m driving them back, I’ll tell you that much. No way I’m giving anything back to that mother of yours. No way she’d take
me
back. No lousy way. I’m through with being a serf in her kingdom. Her Majesty Queen May.” He makes a mocking flourish with his wineglass, then sets it down and crosses his arms. I look at Zip, wishing for once that he would unleash a few of his effortless wisdoms, but he is petting Cicero and Rhapsody, intent on doling out equal affection.

“Besides, it’s too late,” says Tighty. He smiles triumphantly, stands up, slides back the glass door, and waves me into the house. Zip stays with his newfound friends. Louisa sulks in her lawn chair. The house is a lair of aquatic chintzes. Tighty leads me down a dusky blue hall, a lavender carpet muting our steps, to a bedroom like a honey-Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 101
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moon suite on Barbados: king-size bed canopied in pistachio gauze, basket of pink-bellied conches, teak ceiling fan, Winslow Homer palms. But even out of context, there’s no missing her: in a corner, lying on a thick pad of newspapers fenced off with ladder-back chairs, here’s Tallulah. It’s clear, from her fervent panting in this shady retreat, that she’s in labor.

“This,” I say, “now this was foolish, bringing her. You know that.”

Tighty looks at me darkly. “I raised her, I made her the perfect creature, the good dog she is. She’s mine.” He kneels beside her then and, as he feels her nose for fever, says quietly, “She rode in front with me all the way. I never let her out of my sight.” He strokes her head and, for several minutes, coaches her with the words of a lover. He spreads one hand like a starfish across her abdomen. “Damn,” he says. “Sideways.”

From the kitchen, I hear the sound of the sliding door and Louisa’s voice, impatiently calling my name. But the first face in the doorway is Zip’s. “Oh!” he gasps. “What—oh.”

Louisa pushes past him. “This is a farce,” she says. “This is pathetic. This is just ridiculous.”

“Quit complaining,” I say. “Quit acting so Ivy League above it all.”

Tighty couldn’t care less about what Louisa thinks. He says to me tersely, “Gloves. There are latex gloves in my shaving kit.” He points toward the bathroom.

As I look around the bathroom, I notice—in the shower, of all places—a short stack of canvases facing the tile wall. But there’s no time to snoop. I see Tighty’s kit on the counter by the sink. When I return, he’s wrapped himself around Tallulah, his arms and legs a cradle. He performs a complicated massage on her belly. Tallulah whines, but she tolerates his meddling, trusts him like a father. “Down you go,” he whispers, “easy and over. . . . Just turning the little guy over, babe, just a hair more—this way, sweetheart, here we go . . . I’m right here.” He mutters amorously on, sometimes grunting, sometimes pausing to kiss Tallulah’s left ear. With long patient fingers, he steers the unborn puppy.

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behind Tighty, is transfixed, mute as a mannequin. For once, he has no prescriptions.

“How about you mind your own business and let Tighty do what he’s done for years?” I say to Louisa.

“Three, two—good girl!” says Tighty, and the first puppy slides out, slippery and smooth, pink as rhubarb in its opalescent casing. Talullah nudges Tighty’s arm aside, stretches down and roughly, gently, roughly, licks this still object into a struggling four-legged creature: blind, okay, but ready to tackle the planet.

“Now
that
calls for a toast,” I say. “I mean, wow. Canine Lamaze.”

Tighty lies back on the lavender carpet, eyes closed, face flushed and gleaming with sweat. He sighs. “Business as usual.” That’s when Zip, still kneeling, utters a small sob.

“Hey.” I reach toward him, alarmed.

“Birth,” he says. “The first one I’ve ever seen. Actually
seen.
” I put an arm around him. It’s clear that for once the world has caught him completely by surprise. Back on the patio, Zip opens a bottle of pinot gris. The ocean murmurs complacently. The stars are so bright they flicker. Louisa sits across from me but talks only to the men. She leans her shoulder against Zip’s. “What do you want out of life, do you know?”