Stepdog (11 page)

She was gone by the time I rose. There was a terse note on the counter:
Kennedy Building, Government Center, Room E-160, 11 am.
She thought me too irresponsible to remember when my own fucking green-card interview was.

I looked at the dog, curled up delicately in the bed to which I'd exiled her the very first night, her chin resting on her two crossed paws, the long silk of her ears draping over the side of the dog bed. She looked freakishly human in that pose. We made eye contact, and she raised her head a little as her tail thumped the wall, once.

“Do you have any idea the trouble you have caused me?” I sighed.

Her eyebrows lifted hopefully, and her tail thumped the wall again.

“Of course you don't,” I said.

B
ECAUSE MY HEAD
was fuzzy and my eyes refused to focus, buttoning the oxford shirt took ages. I'd planned to iron the suit coat but did not trust myself to manage without burning it. I had shaved before the dinner party last night, thank God; I could not have safely handled any sharp object now. No amount of cold water could make my eyes less bloodshot, my face less puffy, or my brain less clouded. Finally, bundled insufficiently against foul weather, I waddled to Centre Street, bought a large coffee at Fiore's, dragged my sorry arse to the Forest Hills T stop, and rode in to Downtown Crossing. My head was pounding without mercy; the roar of the T made it worse.

It was a grey late-winter morning, spitting down a chilled precipitation too wet to be snow. I had forgotten my hat and the rain felt both cooling and wretched on my ears and neck as I crossed the brick plaza toward the Kennedy Building. I arrived early, but Sara had arrived earlier. She was waiting outside for me: of course, under the circumstances, she would go out of her way to make me appear to be the laggard. Her short dark hair was waving wildly above her pink cheeks in the drizzle, making her look like some deranged pixie, out of place in a concrete jungle. Seeing the cold look she gave me as I approached, I craved a cigarette more than I ever had in my life. We stared at each other for a moment in silence.

“Truce?” I finally said, and held out my hand.

When you are gazed at scornfully by a beautiful woman you're in love with, especially when you deserve some of the scorn but most definitely not all of it . . . that's just rotten. Especially when you also have a headache and your mouth tastes like sour beer and you know you look like shite. And most especially when you are dependent on her immediate cooperation for something you have been striving to attain for fifteen years.

She glanced from my outstretched hand to my eyes and back to my hand. Then back to my eyes. “It's not okay,” she said.

“I know that,” I said miserably. “But please, can we get through the next hour, don't make me beg.”

“I'm not making you beg,” she said, affronted. “Who do you think I am?” A pause. With a grimace, she shook my hand. “All right,” she said, “let's get this over with.”

We reached together grimly for the door.

A
s soon as we were inside the lobby, my cell phone rang. Sara looked at me as if I'd just farted in public.

“I'll turn it off,” I said, and reached for it.

But out of habit I looked at the screen. “It's Dougie,” I said in a stage whisper. “I can't believe the timing.”

“We're going to be late,” she said. “Call him back.”

I stared at the buzzing screen knowing she was right, but still my stomach clenched with each new vibration. Finally it went to voice mail. Sara had already started off down the hall without me, looking washed out, even from the back, under the merciless fluorescent lights. The lights were buzzing at precisely the right pitch to make my swollen brain vibrate painfully within my skull.

Sara was standing inside the waiting room with her back to the door. It was a large room with glazed windows high on one wall and more fluorescent light panels flush in the asbestos-tile ceiling. Rows and rows of moderately comfortable, padded chairs were arranged as if this were a cheap airport lobby. At the far end was a bank of clerks, like hospital admitters or vendors at a train sta
tion. Everything was beige—the carpet, the paint on the wall, the clerks' dress, the clerks themselves.

“Let's go,” she said as I came near to her, and strode off briskly toward the clerks. I tagged along behind her, longing for water, longing to close my eyes against the fluorescent glare.

We crossed a sea of nationalities, mostly Brazilian. A few Indian families, others Haitian judging by the nearly-Frenchness of their speech. One Asian, some Caucasians. A few Middle Easterners—I silently wished them the most luck, they would need it. Despite the anticipation and multiculturalism one might imagine enlivening such a place, it was tense and depressing. Maybe they had all just estranged themselves from their spouses, too.

We checked in with one of the clerks, then Sara crossed to an empty bank of chairs and sat. I moved as if to sit beside her. She gave me a cold stare, pale skin almost green in the fluorescence, and I moved two chairs away before sitting. Not because I was frightened by her iciness but because my own volcanic irritability was rising in response to it.

I was a white, native English speaker; the system was predisposed to go easy on me as long as I could demonstrate I was in “a bona fide marriage.” Suddenly, for the first time ever, I worried about that. Twelve hours earlier I had declared I was moving out because I disapproved of my wife's affection for her dog. Bona fide husbands were probably not quite that reactionary.

“So glad I didn't marry my cousin,” I said impulsively. “I mean, I think we'd have done it fine, but this feels so much better.”

“Does it,” she said, in a damp, uninflected voice.

Oh, fuck.

“Maybe I should just check Dougie's voice mail,” I said, des
perate for chitchat, and reached into my raincoat pocket for my phone.

She did not bother to argue with me, but released a sigh of fake boredom and looked around the room, making it clear that every stranger in there was worthier of her time than myself. I'd not known she was capable of being so insulting. My hands clenched.

“O'Connor,” a male voice called. We looked at each other. I stood up. She didn't move. With nauseating dread, I was sure she wasn't going in to the interview.

“Put away your cell phone,” she muttered, finally standing. “For the next half hour this green card is not about your brilliant career, it's about your
marriage
.”

Surly but abashed, I put away the phone and grabbed her limp hand as we walked toward the middle-aged official who had called my name. He was tall and gaunt, and grim, like that servant in
The Addams Family
. He introduced himself as Mr. Smith. I bet all the immigration officials called themselves Smith.

He led us along a narrow hall—more industrial carpet, more fluorescent lights—and into his very little office, one of many off the same corridor. It was just large enough for him to slide between his desk and the wall and then sit behind his desk. There were two chairs on the near side and we took these. Sara's hand had remained limp in mine; she pulled it away as soon as we were seated. I tried to give her a reassuring squeeze before she had entirely removed it, but she ignored this and did not look at me. I felt my gut clench. Which made my headache worse. I felt like one of those rubber stress-release dolls, whose eyes bulge out when you squeeze their belly.

Sara, the furrow between her eyebrows misshaping her face,
unclasped a blue plastic accordion file: the most recent tax return, which she'd filed jointly; the records of our joint bank account, including printed statements showing that we both used it regularly. Affidavits from our friends, who all said they saw it coming and that Sara had never seemed so happy. Printed copies of all the photos from the parties and gatherings. She had spent hours preparing this dossier, although I'd like to think I helped some by serenading her and feeding her ice cream while she did so. She looked as if she wanted to simply hand the folder over to the bloke and then close her eyes and hold her breath until he made his decision. She did not want to ruin this for me, but her heart was not in it today.

I sat back in my chair and pretended I did not have a pounding headache or a mouth full of cotton. I wished I was still a smoker, and then I was glad I wasn't because then I'd be craving a smoke even worse than I was now.

The bloke had his own file on us, all the stuff we'd sent in weeks ago. He looked through it, as if for the first time, glancing up at us occasionally. He especially glanced a lot at me, which I'm sure had to do with how miserable I looked. To be fair, his own skin was a sallow pasty color and the bags under his eyes larger than the eyes themselves. I knew I had bags that morning, too, and hoped I did not look as saggy as he did, because that would definitely undermine the charm I needed to ooze, to make up for Sara's lack of spirit. Mr. Smith's expression suggested he was holding a grudge against one of us and hoped to find satisfaction before we left the room. Or maybe that was the hangover talking.

“So,” he said at last in a droll voice, looking up. “You're married.” He said it as if he already did not buy it. “How did you meet?” His
eyes turned to Sara. She fumbled a moment, looking like a deer in headlights.
What a nightmare,
I thought.

Something clicked in Sara and she managed to summarize, succinctly but without enthusiasm, the story of my busking in front of the museum and how I kissed her when she laid me off. This was the story that, if told with her usual twinkly-eyed pleasure, would surely have netted me the green card right away. I could see that she was genuinely trying to look engaged, but what showed most was that she was making an effort. It looked and sounded forced.

Mr. Smith seemed pensive. Then he turned to me. I thought for a moment he was going to ask me what color Sara's toothbrush was. “You moved in together very quickly. Why?” he asked me.

“Because she has a dog,” I said in flat, low tones. The pain was shifting from dehydration headache to tension headache.

He blinked. My response didn't exactly answer his question, but he found something useful in it. “What kind of dog?”

“A sort of golden-red silky mutt,” I said—too promptly, so that it sounded like something I had memorized. I think that made him suspicious.

“Boy or girl?” he asked.

“Girl,” I said more slowly, which again made me sound ragged. “Her name is Sara. I mean Cody.” I had to suppress a welling up of the nervous giggles. Sara glared at me like I was mad.

“What kind of food does she eat?” he asked.

“Oh God, I don't know,” I said, trying not to groan, the edges of my vision blurring from the pain. I sensed Sara squirm, and Mr. Smith's eyebrows rose a little. A slightly predatory look settled onto his gaunt features; now he looked
interested
. I was about to
fuck this up—because of the dog. “The big blue bag with a giant salmon leaping out of a stream,” I said.

He continued to gaze at me levelly. He seemed suddenly like a sheriff in a seventies TV show who was nice enough, but about to inform me that he was going to have to take me in. And secretly, he would enjoy it. After all, calling someone out was the only thrill to be had in his job.

“What's her name again?”

“Cody.”

“How old is she?”

“She's two,” I said.

“Three,” Sara corrected. She paled slightly, and gave him a pleading look. “Rory can hardly keep track of his
own
age,” she said, a nervous joke. “And he's right about the dog food, it's called Taste of the Wild and you can go online right now and see it. He does most of the shopping because I'm at work. He's bought it plenty of times.”

Stop it,
I tried to say to her psychically. She was terribly tense, and he was noticing.

He looked at me. “How big is the dog?”

“I'm not sure,” I said, fighting off a rising sense of worry, which at least had the benefit of cutting right through the headache and giving me some clarity. This was not going at all the way I'd imagined it. “Maybe sixty-five pounds.”

“Where'd she come from?”

“I don't know. She's not my dog. She's my wife's dog.” I silently thanked all the young mothers of the arboretum for giving me the chance to learn to say that so offhandedly.

But Mr. Smith frowned. “Doesn't that make her
your
dog?”

“No, and here's why,” I said, feeling my Irish temperament well up through the hangover fog and get the better of me. “Sara's mother had just died when Sara and her ex got the puppy, so she was pretty fragile. Her ex was such a wanker that her best friend Lena literally spits when she mentions him. He was very controlling and he decided they were going to have the best dog in the world, so he pressured Sara to take a
leave of absence
from her job at the museum, if you please, so she could be home with the puppy all day and train it. If I were her, I'd hate the dog for all that, but Sara's so affectionate and loving, and she
needs
affection and love, and she used to get it all day long at work, but now she only got it from the dog, plus of course the dog came of age believing that life consisted of spending all day every day with Sara, so they developed a seriously codependent relationship which frankly neither of them has grown out of, and explains why no matter what I do for the dog—and let me tell you, I do a lot, I take her out to the arboretum every weekday and we go to her favorite spots, every single day, rain, hail, sleet, or snow, and I give her treats—I have a whole bag of treats I keep in my anorak that Sara doesn't even know about—”

“You
do
?” said Sara, making nonhostile eye contact with me for the first time since Lena's kitchen.

“And all she wants when Sara comes home is Sara's attention, not mine, so yes, she is my wife's dog, and my stepdog, so I don't know where she came from. That's Sara's business.”

I suddenly noticed I was standing up. Somehow in all of that, despite the hangover, I'd risen and started pacing in the tiny office, and didn't even realize it until I stopped.

I sat down. Quickly. “Sorry,” I said.

Sara was staring at me. “I didn't know you gave her treats,” she said, sotto voce.

“Not nearly as much as you do,” I retorted impatiently.

A cough from Mr. Smith silenced us and commanded our complete attention. He grimaced, and looked back and forth between us.

“I think I've seen enough,” he said, forebodingly.

I felt my stomach sink into my balls.

“I've been doing this a long time,” he went on. “And that was about the most convincing display of matrimony I have ever witnessed in this room. Mr. O'Connor, sir, welcome to the United States of America.”