The Dog Who Knew Too Much (4 page)

One guilt attack and one hundred and thirty-two dollars later, we were home and I was making room on the small kitchen counter for the Q-Tips, the ear cleaner, and the otic antibiotic. After listening to my messages, I headed back to Lisa's apartment to watch her t'ai chi tapes, look through her books and papers, listen to her music, and gaze out her windows.

Late that evening, still wearing Lisa's scarf, I walked over to Bank Street T'ai Chi to keep my appointment with Avram Ashkenasi. I took the elevator to five and tied Dashiell's leash to the railing at the top of the stairs, just across from a long, low shelf filled with pairs of black cotton shoes of all sizes, the kind you see for sale in Chinatown, only used. Since this was the top floor, and it was so late the building seemed deserted, I thought it would be safe to leave Dashiell in the hall while I spoke to Lisa's mentor and former employer.

He opened the door, looked us both up and down, then motioned with a sweep of his arm for me to follow him.

“Yes,” he said as if I had asked a question. “Bring him, too.”

He was a troll—barrel-chested, short waisted, long armed, his meaty hands, red and hairy, hanging at his sides, fat, clumsy, and useless looking, his yellowish white hair long and held in an elastic band, the scraggly ponytail reaching halfway down his back, his stern-looking face half hidden behind an untrimmed white beard.

Santa Claus. In a horror movie.

“Take off your shoes,” he commanded before we walked onto the polished wooden floor of the studio.

He was cranky, too.

Most of all, he looked dangerous, like one of those professors the other girls would tell you not to get caught alone with.

Keeping my eyes suspiciously on him, I obeyed, taking off my shoes and leaving them, toes touching the wall, next to another pair, black cotton shoes, small, like mine, not big, as his would be.

He pointed one of his big hands to a spot against the mirrored wall of the studio. “Sit,” he said, as if I were his dog. I did.

“You, too,” he told Dashiell, who usually obeys no one but me unless I hand over his leash. Dashiell sat, too.

Turning toward the adjacent wall, also mirrored, he began the form, first breathing deeply, then finding shoulder width with his feet.

He raised his too-long arms as if they had been lifted by a string attached to his wrists. Next the fingers rose, and soon his body began to move, ever so slowly, as if propelled not by his own power but by another force. A weather vane, pushed by the wind.

Legs folded in front of me, Dashiell at my side, I watched as he moved silently through space, strong, smooth, and graceful, his body shifting direction, his arms and hands slicing through the air, decisive, deliberate, and painfully slow, like foreplay. Before my eyes the troll became beautiful, transformed by movement into something almost holy.

When he stopped, I stood, full of questions. I had come, after all, about Lisa.

“Mr. Ashkenasi—”

He stopped me with one finger to his lips. “Now you,” he said.

“Look,” I said, straightening my back, “I came about Lisa, not to learn t'ai chi. As I told you on the phone—”

“Yes, yes,” he said, “you're a friend of the family. You want to know about Lisa. You have many questions to ask.”

“A cousin.”

“A cousin?”

“Yes. And I've promised my aunt and uncle—”

“Of course you did,” he said. “I am going to help you, Rachel.
If
you'll trust me.”

It was a question. Though it wasn't spoken as one.

“I—”

He smiled to himself.

“I know. It's asking a great deal of you, an enormous leap of faith on the word of a stranger. But you are asking a great deal, too, Rachel, to try to understand a person who—” He waved his hand in the air. “Has vanished from our midst. But, of course, you knew her, your cousin. So—”

“We weren't close,” I said. “It's sad, when you think about it, living in the same city but being so wrapped up in our own lives—”

“That happens, of course.”

“The truth is,” I said, “I hardly knew her at all. I hadn't seen her since we were kids.”

Had I been a wooden puppet, he would have been impaled on my nose by now.

I looked into his pale eyes. He seemed moved to tears.

Damn, I was good.

“You won't learn anything worthwhile about Lisa by asking questions,” he said softly, so softly I had to lean closer to hear him. “The police have already done that, Rachel, and what have they learned? If you want to learn about Lisa's life, you must walk in her shoes.”

He picked them up, the single pair of shoes that I had placed mine next to, little black cotton shoes with rope soles, like the ones I'd seen in the hall, only these had “Lisa” written in black Magic Marker inside each shoe.

He held them out to me.

I didn't move.

“What can it hurt?” he asked. “You're already wearing her perfume.”

When I took the shoes from his hands and lifted one foot, I felt his large hand cup my elbow. I let him support me while I slipped each one on. His hand was as warm as the hearth of my fireplace after a fire had been burning all evening.

“They fit,” I said.

He smiled.

“Does he need water?” he asked. “Come,” he said to Dashiell, “there's a bowl in the office.” A moment later I heard the slapping sound of Dash drinking. Good, I thought, he still has the Akita.

The huge windows on the north side of the studio opened out, which must have made it easy to see from the street below from where Lisa had taken her plunge. I wondered which one Lisa had gone out of and exactly what she was thinking at the time. I wondered how I'd possibly find out what made her so desperately unhappy that she had decided to take her own life. Was it in fact a decision? Or might it have been instead a thoughtless, spur-of-the-moment rush to make an end, once and for all, to her pain?

I tried to picture Lisa in pain, but I couldn't. All I could come up with was the lovely, smiling face I had seen on her parents' piano and in their photo album.

Not average, her mother had said.

Avram returned with Dashiell padding along at his side as if they were old friends. He took my hands in both of his.

“I am so glad you came,” he said, his eyes filling, as if he would cry. But then he let go of me and stepped onto the polished wooden floor of the studio and faced the mirror again.

“I do not want you to worry about what you look like. Just copy. Come, come, come, stand behind me. One day soon, you will feel what t'ai chi is. I cannot explain it to you any more than I could explain Lisa to you. You will feel it for yourself. And then one day you will feel Lisa.”

I stood behind him, heels together, toes to the diagonal, and shifting my body and then my legs and feet, ever so slowly, I found shoulder width. My arms lifted as if a string were tied to my wrists, gently pulling them toward the heavens, and I moved as Avram did, slowly through space, my dog lying at the edge of the tan carpet with only his front paws touching the light oak flooring of the studio.

Each time Avram stopped, I stopped, and we would begin again; sometimes repeating the same few movements over and over again; sometimes Avram would go ahead as I struggled to mimic him, clumsy where he was graceful, shaking where he was steady, struggling where he was authoritative, worried where he was calm.

After a while my legs were burning, especially the few times he spoke, asking me to hold a position while he looked at me. Several times he gently moved me, adjusting the position of an arm, a foot, straightening my spine or wrist, and afterward I felt something like a breeze, but inside, not on my skin, something cool and calming, something moving slowly, something wonderful, and when that happened, I wanted never to stop.

We worked from eleven to three in the morning, and finally Avram stopped and sighed audibly.

“I've forgotten everything already,” I said in a panic.

“Go home, Rachel. You're tired. We're both tired. You couldn't possibly hold all the movements in your mind. Your body is learning t'ai chi. Your body will remember for you.”

“But when will you—”

“Shh, shh, shh,” he said, holding his head as if I had given him a headache. “Are you familiar with the parable of the tiger?”

No, I told him. I shook my head no.

“A man was walking alone in the country, and he came across a tiger. He began to run, but the tiger also ran. It pursued him. Finally he came to the edge of a cliff, and grasping a vine, he attempted to escape from the tiger by climbing down. As he climbed, he looked beneath him. There below him was another tiger, looking up, waiting to devour him.”

What was he talking about? He might as well have been speaking Chinese.

“One tiger above, one below. Only the vine saved him. But when he looked back up, he saw two mice, one black, the other white, gnawing away at the vine. That's when he noticed, right in front of him, growing on the side of the cliff, a perfect strawberry. He plucked it and ate it. It was delicious.”

He smiled, then shut off the light in the studio.

If the man had something to say, why couldn't he just say it?

“You'll be safe walking home,” he said. Again, a question that wasn't one.

“I have Dashiell,” I told him.

I slipped into my own shoes and put Lisa's carefully back where they had been, toes pointing to the wall. Everyone else's shoes were relegated to the hall. Only Lisa's shoes had a place of their own inside.

“Tomorrow night classes end at ten. Come at ten thirty. Bring your boy.”

“Look,” I said, standing in the doorway, “this was interesting, tonight's work. But I didn't come here to learn t'ai chi. I came—”

“First the t'ai chi. Then the questions. And Rachel, next time, don't take the elevator. Walk. It's good for your legs.”

Meditation in motion. That's what one of Lisa's books had said t'ai chi was, a kind of Zen for people with ants in their pants. Okay. I had done it. Now what? Where was the brand-new world Zen was supposed to give me? Except for the pain in my knees, nothing had changed.

All the way home everything looked the same, homeless people sleeping in doorways, trash swirling about like tumbleweed when the wind blew, transvestites heading home after a long night, their false laughter echoing in the empty streets.

Where with each step was my connection to the earth? Where with each breath was my connection to the sky?

I unlocked the gate and followed Dashiell down the narrow passageway that led to the garden in which my cottage sat.

Where, I wondered, were the answers to all my questions? Where, in fact, were the questions?

I unlocked the cottage door, but I didn't go inside. Instead I sat on the cold steps in the skeletonlike shadow of the big oak tree, waiting unsuccessfully for enlightenment.

6

I Wondered If It Might Have Been Lisa

The ninth law of private investigation says, Keep moving. This advice is meant to aid the operative during those unfortunate times when he or she is being shot at by one or more disreputable persons, but as a law to live by, it can't be beat. I had learned the wisdom behind it back when I was training disreputable dogs.

Keep an aggressive dog still while you berate him for his rotten nature and unacceptable behavior, and he'll have nothing better to do than figure out precisely which of your many body parts might be the most succulent. But keep a bully moving by walking fast, changing directions, appearing to all but ignore him, and your unpredictability will consume his mind. It's as effective as if he were a balloon and you had a pin.

Keep moving. It gives you a much better chance of keeping yourself intact, whether it's bullets or teeth coming in your direction.

Unfortunately, when I got up late on Thursday morning, moving seemed all but out of the question. I could barely lift my arms or swing my legs off the bed. With a gait so stiff that if I were a dog the word
euthanasia
would come to my owner's mind, I finally made it to the bathroom and into a hot bath. And much as I would have liked to stay there all day, I decided to obey law number nine. It was time to check out the boyfriend. His phone number was in Lisa's address book. But before I called, I looked through her appointment calendar and found two most curious things.

I reached Paul Wilcox at work. He listened politely to my request and said that if I could come by at one thirty, he could talk to me about my cousin Lisa.

Okay, I do sometimes stretch the truth a bit, but only in order to get the job done. I learned the hard way that revealing my occupation has a silencing effect on people, even those whose worst crime has been finding a quarter in a pay phone and failing to return it to the phone company.

I had time before my appointment, and time was what Dashiell needed. I cleaned and medicated his ear, then headed for the dog run at Washington Square Park. Dashiell needed to spend part of every day just being a dog, and I needed to spend part of every day watching him do exactly that.

It would be nice to imagine the dog run as a fenced outdoor area where dogs can safely run around and play in the fresh air. But this was New York City. There is no fresh air.

As for safety, just as in playgrounds reserved for human children, there's a microcosm of life, and life, my mother would be quick to point out were she here, is lots of things—but safe isn't one of them.

So while Dashiell played, I paid attention. Once I saw that things looked benign, I let my eyes wander, noticing a young man practicing t'ai chi on the grassy area just to the west of the run. I had once seen a young woman practicing there. I wondered if it might have been Lisa.

In China, Avi had told me when we took a break from practicing the form, people always practiced out of doors. Groups of hundreds of people gathered in the early morning, before going to work, and in the evening, on their way home, to do the form in a sea of shared energy. Most Americans practiced alone, as Lisa must have, Lisa who had wanted to go to China but had gone only in her imagination.