The Dog Who Knew Too Much (7 page)

“God,” he said, his voice suddenly husky, “your hair does the same thing Lisa's did when it got wet.”

His was jet black and thick. It stood straight up when it was wet, in spiky little clumps.

“Another family thing?” he asked, his voice soaked with sadness.

I pulled my hands away and brushed the hair off my face.

“Nah, it's a Jew thing. We all have curly hair and big noses.” Big Nose was what the Chinese called Caucasians.

He smiled and ran his finger down my nose. “Your nose isn't so big. It's just about perfect,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. Next thing he'd be telling me I was a hard-boiled egg, white on the outside, yellow on the inside, a Caucasian with an Oriental soul. Like my cousin.

I'd forgotten how dark his eyes were.

He turned and headed for the men's locker room.

For a moment in the pool, he'd seemed so angry, I'd been afraid he was going to push me under. But that couldn't have been my real fear. Hell, my sister did that all the time when we were kids. The real threat was becoming sucked in. The real fear was that something about this man was making me lose my objectivity, even my judgment.

“Wait,” I shouted at his back.

“You bellowed?” He came back to where I was standing.

“About tonight,” I said. Avi had said he'd have a surprise for me. I thought he might be ready to talk. “I can't meet you tonight. How about—”

“How about now? I'm ready for lunch.”

“Lunch?” I said, as if I were a parrot.

He simply waited.

“Okay, lunch. That sounds fine.”

I had to talk to the man. He was an important source. Lunch was better than the deep end of the pool. For one thing, I'd be dressed. Suddenly, lunch sounded safe, it sounded perfect. What the hell could happen at lunch? I asked myself, feeling smug now, as if it had been my idea all along.

“It'll take me ten minutes to get dressed. Can you wait that long? You seem to be a pretty impulsive person.” He picked up a corkscrew strand of my wet hair, shook his head, then let it go and headed for the locker rooms.

“I'll meet you at the front door,” I said to his back, watching his adorable little
tochis
as he walked away. “In seven minutes. Don't keep me waiting.”

I'm not one for fussing. I was showered, dressed, and in front of the gym in six minutes.

“We can go right across the street,” Paul said a moment later, not breaking stride as he joined me on the steps and swept me along onto Varick Street.

The mystique of perfect timing pervades the literature of dog training. Correct a dog precisely at the moment of his indiscretion, and he'll learn to mend his ways. Make your correction a minute later, and he won't. Had we come out of the Club a minute sooner, or a minute later, I never would have seen him.

I was supposed to look across the street, see the ordinary-looking luncheonette that, according to the Zagat survey, had the best fried chicken north of the Mason-Dixon line, and agree to have lunch there. That's all. But trouble never asks permission. Like that proverbial bad penny, it just keeps turning up.

There, across the street, standing right in front of Edna Jean's, was a middle-aged man I knew, a man who shouldn't have been there. It was Saturday, wasn't it? He should have been home, having lunch with his wife of twenty-four years, admiring his panoramic view, listening to his children bicker. Instead he was on Varick Street, so absorbed in the blond at his side that he never turned and noticed his sister-in-law staring at him from across the street.

Was she one of his models? She was all in black, of course, except for her perfect, long blond hair, which she wore loose, even on such a mild day. Didn't it make her neck too warm?
I
was certainly hot under the collar.

Not the blond. She looked cool holding his arm and smiling up at his face. Totally cool. Maybe you could do that when you had zero percent body fat, flawless skin, teeth that were probably perfectly even and actually white—but that was just a guess, because surely I wouldn't get close enough for the bitch to bite me. She might have rabies.

I thought about my sister and her big dimpled ass, her size-eleven feet, her mouse-brown hair. Until that moment, until seeing her husband hanging on every word of a stunning slip of a blond—or was that actually a
dress
she was wearing?—I'd thought of my big sister as beautiful.

Suddenly I began to panic. My brother-in-law was turning in my direction. So I did the only thing I could.

I grabbed Paul's shoulders and pulled him toward me, as if he were a Chinese screen I could hide behind. I moved my arms from his shoulders to his neck, then into his wet black hair, and keeping him between me and what I was still watching across Varick Street, I whispered, “God, I feel so terrible about Lisa,” and buried my face in his neck.

I heard his voice, so close the words reverberated on my skin, heard him say, “Poor Dog Paddle,” and when I felt him stepping back, what could I do, I had to keep him there, I lifted my face and found his lips. And then the most surprising thing occurred. Despite the fact that my only motive was to protect myself from being seen until I'd figured out what to do if I were, I found myself being kissed by a complete stranger, his long fingers in my hair, the tip of his tongue tracing my lips, a guttural sound like the one Dashiell makes when I scratch inside his ears coming from only God knew which one of us.

Then over his shoulder I could see Ted's arm up, waving for a cab.

“Hold me,” I whispered, pulling him closer, so close you couldn't slip a slip of paper between us.

“Rachel,” he said, “Rachel.”

A cab stopped. I watched Ted and the blond get into it. Were they lovers? I wondered as the cab moved into traffic and pulled away, heading downtown. Maybe there was another explanation.

Yeah, right, maybe.

That's when I realized that something else wasn't right. The cab was gone, but Paul was hanging on to me, breathing audibly. And something was pressing into my leg, something hard. What the hell was it, an egg roll in his pocket?

No, I thought, not an egg roll, it felt more like a knockwurst.

I stepped back.

“Oh God, Rachel,” he said, his dark eyes all gooey with lust. He sure did have a way with words.

“Look,” I said, “something just came up. I have to reschedule our lunch.”

He turned and looked the other way, his face now more the color of rose hip tea than jasmine.

“I'll call you,” I said. “I'm sorry.” And like a steak left out to defrost in the same room with an untrained dog, I was gone.

Walking home, thinking about my sister, I remembered another kiss. Well, it was sort of a kiss. That time I'd been a child, and the person I'd sort of kissed had been Lillian.

I was too young to know how ridiculous her original idea was. We were lying on the glider on Aunt Ceil's screened-in back porch, after a day at the beach. We were face-to-face, so close I could see the fingerprints on Lili's glasses.

Let's become blood sisters, she said.

How? I asked.

First you have to put a match under the needle, like when Mommy takes a splinter out, she said. Then you stick your finger, and I stick mine. Then we press them together, mixing the blood, Lillian said, pressing her two pointers together to illustrate. That makes us blood sisters, forever.

I began to cry.

Okay, okay, she said. There's another way. Stick out your tongue.

Wug iz dis thaw, I asked.

She didn't answer. She stuck out her tongue and made the smooth tip of it touch mine.

Forever, she said.

Thawevah, I repeated obediently, afraid to pull in my tongue. God only knew what germs were on it, I thought. Even then.

Could you even let your own sister's tongue touch yours nowadays? Probably not. Not if her husband was maybe running around doing God knows what with God knows whom.

The bitch wore black, a short, slinky thing that went in and out wherever she did. Her hair was long and straight, shimmering where the light hit it, moving as gracefully as seaweed in the ocean. I hated her on sight.

But what could
I
do about this? Tell my sister? Mightn't she simply kill the messenger?

Not tell her? Then what?

Confront my brother-in-law? And say what? Who was I supposed to be, the sex police?

Was this even what it appeared to be? And if it was, mightn't it blow over without Lili getting hurt?

Without Lili getting hurt, I thought. How could she not get hurt, even if the thing was a one-night-stand? Doesn't infidelity, even the briefest sort, always damage a relationship? Even if Lillian never found out, wouldn't the very fact of it change everything? Forever.

10

Something Was Different

When I got home, I made two urgent phone calls. Then I sat in the garden with Dashiell until it was time to see Avi.

As soon as I opened the downstairs door to Bank Street T'ai Chi, Dash knew something was different. His nose dipped down to the floor in front of him and soaked up information unavailable to mere humans. His head pulled up. It appeared he was looking up the stairs, but it wasn't his eyes that were working so hard. His nostrils flared as he tuned in on the scent cone hanging thickly in the air. Whoever had recently passed this way interested Dashiell greatly. He turned as if to ask if my hands had fallen off or my feet were nailed to the ground, and he whined. I unhooked his leash and watched him disappear.

A moment later, they were both standing on the landing, looking down at me. He, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the dog world, a can-do machine, was all muscle. Except for the black patch over his right eye and the black freckles on his skin that show through his short, smooth coat, Dashiell is white. He has a broad head with great fill in his cheeks, a jaw so strong he can hoist his own weight, a chest as hot and powerful as a blast furnace, and a heart so elastic you'd think his dam was Mother Teresa.

She reminded me of Lisa's mother, refined where Dashiell was crude, decked out where he was no-frills, feminine where he was clearly one of the guys, champagne to Dashiell's beer.

The bitch wore black, a double coat of medium length, thick, lush fur, the splash of white at her front like a bib of pearls. Her feet were white, too, as if she had delicately dipped them in gesso. Her tail was tossed majestically over her back, the white tip resting lightly on her flank. A symbol of good health in the breed's native country, she radiated her own vigor. She stood above me, her head cocked to the side, her brow wrinkled, her intelligent brown eyes alive with light. I loved her on sight.

I looked at Dashiell. He had fallen hard and fast for the Akita, too. His eyes were absent of all intelligence. He had moved, lock, stock, and rawhide, into pheromone city.

As if on a signal from each other, the dogs turned, taking the stairs at a speed I couldn't even aspire to, and disappeared. I climbed to the fifth floor at my usual pitiful, human pace. Because Lisa never took the elevator.

“She's called Ch'an,” Avi said. At the sound of her name, the Akita turned and looked at him. She was large for a bitch, probably about eighty-five pounds. “Outside,” he said, waving his arm toward the windows, “they call her Charlie. But of course Lisa did not name her Charlie Chan.”

“You mean she gave a Japanese dog a Chinese name?”
Ch'an
, I had read recently, was the Chinese term for Zen, or meditation.

Avi's eyebrows went up. “You've been studying. You are so like Lisa.”

“It's just that I'm walking in her shoes, trying to understand her life so that I might, one day, understand her death.” Avi winced. “I love the t'ai chi, Avi, but I don't know much more about Lisa now than I did the day I met you, certainly nothing that would explain in the slightest what happened.”

“In China,” he said, “if one wants to study t'ai chi, seriously study it, the way Lisa did, it is necessary to be accepted by a master. You cannot go to a school, pay your money, and be taught t'ai chi, the way you can here. Every family guards its secrets,” he said. “They will not teach just anyone.”

“I—”

He raised his hand to stop me. Both dogs, thinking his gesture was meant for them, lay down.

“In China,” he said, “tradition dictates that the student follow the teacher, and that is how he learns. Here we place great emphasis on education. It is different. But even the way we teach here, giving our students helpful images and patiently correcting postures, we still count the time of study in decades instead of years. Even that may be optimistic. So we try to find peace and beauty along the way. Now, about Lisa”—he pointed to the black shoes, their toes touching the wall—“a few days, Rachel, would be on the optimistic side in this study, too, wouldn't it?

“Twenty years or forty years, there isn't enough time in the world to know someone after they are gone. It's just not possible to get a true portrait of a human being from the detritus of his or her life and the opinions of others.

“Zen teaches you who
you
are, Rachel. Once you know that, you will know everything you need to know.”

Then why, I wondered, had Alan Watts said, “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth”? Or was that my grandmother Sonya, the night her false teeth fell into the split pea soup?

“And t'ai chi—” I interrupted him.

“Yeah, yeah, Zen in motion.”

So what else could I do? I took off the pink high-tops, put on Lisa's t'ai chi shoes, and silently, standing behind my mentor, I practiced the form. Afterward Avi asked me to do a silent round, and this time, instead of working with me, he watched.

Something was different. Perhaps the study now had forged a link with the past, with the t'ai chi I had studied so long ago and thought I had forgotten. Or perhaps concentrating on what I was doing rather than on watching Avi was what made the difference. Now when I placed my foot in an empty step, it felt as flat as a sheet of paper. I felt at ease, my body remembering everything, energy moving up my spine, over my head, spilling down my chest, connecting me to the earth beneath my feet and the universe above and beyond.