Funeral Platter

by Greg Ames

  “Has anybody noticed anything … odd … about the puppy?” I began, after taking silent roll call with my eyes. “Anything? Go ahead and say the first thing that comes to your mind, even if it’s negative.”

  “Tex fetched today,” Charlie said. “He fetched in the backyard. I threw a stick in the air and he—”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Tex fetched a stick. Duly noted. What else? Alice?”

  “I love Tex.” Charlie laughed and smacked his sticky little hands down on the edge of the table. “Tex runs and jumps and can catch the stick.”

  “That’s enough, son,” I said, shaking my pencil at him. “You had your turn. Relinquish the floor, please.”

  Charlie was a hard-working six-year-old, a spunky right-brain thinker with leadership potential, a pacesetter with good instincts who sometimes, unfortunately, had a tendency to reach for the lowest hanging fruit. However, he was an opinionated little contributor who knew exactly what he wanted, though his heated emotions governed his behavior early in the morning and late at night. Helicopter view: you could count on Charlie in crunch time.

  “Tex!” he said again.

  Dammit, where was our loyalty to old Willy? Was this simply “how life goes,” as they say, in the leafy sheltered confines of our neighborhood? Out with the old dog and in with the new? The old dog forgotten like last week’s pop star—no bon voyage, no portrait above the mantel, nothing? And the new dog systematically deconstructing the previous dog’s best work while we stood by and passively watched?

  “Alice?” I said, touching my daughter’s hand. “Has Tex bitten you? Has he been a very bad dog? Would you like to file a formal complaint against him?”

  “Nuh uh,” she said, shaking her head. “Tex fetched the stick.”

  Slight-of-build but refreshingly enthusiastic, prone to follow the pack with no inclination to lead, Alice was a supportive team player, a five-year-old with a good head on her shoulders and an ear for the telling detail. She had not yet impressed me with her intelligence or her work ethic, but one couldn’t expect a great deal from such a new member of the team. She was still learning the ropes in terms of contributing. Root-and-branch view: Outstanding potential. Gradual improvement required.

  Tex was trouble, a red flag poster boy. He got himself into the latticework, into the macaroni salad, into mud puddles. Tex nipped ankles, scratched, howled, whimpered. He squirted our cut pile carpet with his pungent urine. He downloaded pornography on the Internet—unless it was Charlie. Or Alice. Or Mary Ellen. Or me. And Tex was building something in his room, something dangerous. One night, late, I thought I heard him working with a drill or a lathe. The next morning I tried to get a look in there when Tex was out doing his aerobic exercises in the backyard, but every time I tried to peek my head into his room, Tex would bolt through the door flap and tear around the corner so fast, his ridiculous tongue flapping, that I had to pretend I was straightening a picture on the wall outside his door. He growled until I went away.

  On a Monday morning in March, about two months after Tex moved into our home, I called in sick to work after yet another sleepless night. My nerves were simply too frazzled to be an effective workplace contributor. My supervisor Manny, a Latino go-getter, a successful left-brain thinker and a textbook ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs scale, suggested that I drink some Red Bull and get my “fat shitty ass in gear.”

  While I was on the phone, Tex urinated on the kitchen floor. Right in front of me! And then he stood there looking up at me, as if to say: “That happened. You gonna do anything about it?” What would I do about it? We both knew the answer. I’d get down on my hands and knees and clean it up. What choice did I have?

  I told Manny I wouldn’t be able to come in that day. “Things are heating up over here.”

  “Maybe you should heat your résumé up while you’re at it,” he said.

  At night, in bed, Mary Ellen glared at me as if I were a stranger. I blamed Tex for this. He was ruining everything we held dear. How could we go on pretending he wasn’t destroying our family? Mary Ellen told me to get a grip.

  The kids avoided me. They had chosen sides. Clearly they loved this puppy and had forgotten Willy and all that he had accomplished in his eight years with us. That’s when I understood that Willy had been my dog, my favorite, and Tex was theirs. I convened no more family meetings.

  Sleep eluded me. In vivid and recurring nightmares I heard the click-click-click of Tex’s claws on the linoleum floor, the sound growing progressively louder. Click-click-click. I sat bolt upright in bed, sweating and chilled. Mary Ellen pressed herself against the wall, moving away from me.

  Morning in America. The smell of eggs and toast in the air. Coffee percolating, the radio buzzing with news. Death in Iraq. Black sites. Anthrax. Wiretapping. Backpacks zipped, jackets lost and found. “Where’s your homework?” The congested kitchen throbbed with activity. “Put your shoes on.” Yellow cake uranium. I made sandwiches and folded napkins for packed lunches. Suicide bombers. “No, there’s no time to use the computer, Charlie. It’s time for school.” I kissed my children and wife goodbye before they rushed out the door, all three of them, click-click-click. And then it was just the two of us again, this puppy and me.

  Tex watched me scoop hard brown pellets of food into his bowl. Bending to his will, I served him as if he were my master, but he did not appear grateful for this service. He regarded my compliance as his birthright.

  For the first time in my life I questioned the practice of electing a pet dog. The whole system seemed flawed to me. You might as well invite a highway drifter into your home and handcuff yourself to him for eight years. You feed him a gross ton of food, which he summarily craps out on your floor or on your lawn. You always have to clean up after him. The quiet neighbors complain about his barking. More often than not he doesn’t even come when you call him. I could go on, but I think the case has been made.

  At ten o’clock that morning, Tex sauntered through the living room without a care in the world. Now, I want it noted for the permanent record that I’m no expert on canine genitalia, but I believe that anyone, including innocent children and the elderly, would have shared my shock at the sight of the private parts swinging between his stumpy legs. Had Tex been sired by a caribou? I was tempted to put a pair of Bermuda shorts on him just so that I could finish my Cheerios in peace.

  Our neighbors grew to hate him. Every time I released him to the outdoors he immediately shat on their lawns, bit off the heads of their flowers, and made so much noise that they threatened to call the police. “He’s your dog,” they said.

  “No, he’s not,” I said. “He just showed up on our doorstep.”

  I had once enjoyed a sterling reputation on our cul-de-sac. I was widely considered one of the most enthusiastic members of our Neighborhood Watch committee. I was known for my smile, the booming hello I offered everyone, my willingness to pitch in on community initiatives. Those days were forgotten. The people who used to pat Willy’s head and rub his belly while Willy rolled in the grass with his legs in the air were now forming coalitions against my family, against me.

  I missed another day of work. I called Manny and explained that we had a new puppy in the house. I was involved in a domestic dilemma, I said, and would need to take a few more days off. “You’re just digging yourself deeper and deeper,” he said, and handed the phone to Wren, a part-time employee with no previous references and shaky intrapersonal skills.

  In a moment of weakness, I told Wren about Tex. Amazingly, Wren’s voice became bright and lively. She said that she understood completely. She was a cat owner, a cat caregiver, and things could get hairy. Sometimes ignoring domesticated animals was the best policy, Wren advised.

  If simply ignoring Tex proved ineffective, Wren suggested a ten-minute Time Out in the locked bathroom. “See if that doesn’t change his tune,” she said with a laugh.

  I never knew Wren had such strong, interesting ideas on this topic. At her desk, she wore elbow-lengt
h satin gloves from the Goodwill. Her hair changed colors almost every week. She wore torn fishnets and platform boots. A kitten-on-a-rope poster hung in her cubicle—“Hang in there,” it said—but Wren had redacted “in there” with a black sharpie. Once, I watched her chop all the hair off the rubber troll on her pencil and put the shimmering purple strands in the suggestion box. She winked at me and said, “I hope they consider it.” I laughed like a broken bell; I both did and did not understand what she meant. Her laugh sounded like an ambulance siren. Earlier in the week I’d noticed her inner thigh tattoo of the Virgin Mary. I stared at it for too long.

  Wren continued to advise me. We had never talked much before, and it excited me to hear her voice in my ear. She said if her last suggestion didn’t prove to be an effective anger-management technique and Tex continued to act out, then I should consider a strategic food withdrawal followed by sleep deprivation. “Keep all the lights on in his room and play glam rock at full blast,” she said. “We’re talking Winger, Bon Jovi, Poison. He’ll know who’s boss then.” She gave me her cell number and told me to text any new developments.

  I thanked her for her input, but I did not lock up Tex or deny him the comforts of food and sleep. That wasn’t my style. I believed in reaching accord through means of diplomacy, compromise, and empathy.

  The conflict only intensified. Tex mangled my favorite pair of running shoes. He chewed up a half dozen paperbacks in my bookcase and reduced my favorite bathrobe to soggy shreds of plaid flannel. At night I couldn’t sleep or get comfortable in bed. Mary Ellen couldn’t stand my fidgeting and sighing. She asked me to please take my pillow to the couch downstairs.

  “But I want to sleep with you,” I told her.

  “Just for tonight,” she said and handed me my pillow. “I need a little space.”

  Tex was tickled by this turn of events. He peeked out from the comfort of his bedroom and stared at me, a big stupid grin on his face. It was impossible to deny his popularity. Nothing short of a scandal would have diminished his luster. But he was too careful, too folksy about his mishaps, too cute to fail.

  Exiled on the couch, unable to sleep, I plotted a coup. I didn’t need anybody’s help, I decided. There would be no paper trail. No more calls to Wren. I could handle this one myself.

  In the living room, Tex and I stared at each other like gunslingers in a Western.

  “I see what you’re doing.” I propped myself on one elbow. “You hope to bring ruin upon this family, but you won’t get away with it. You may have fooled my wife and kids, but I know you’re a fake, and public opinion is turning. Our neighbors are on to you. You’re not nearly as clever as you think. The mask will soon crack.”

  Tex didn’t reply. He looked at me without pity or remorse. Then he returned to his room and nudged the door shut with his snout.

  Early the following morning I awakened from a dead sleep and knew what to do. The plan had come to me in a dream.

  Before my family stirred, I shredded a dishtowel, overturned a lamp, and perforated a student paper of Mary Ellen’s with my own slobbery teeth marks. I scattered the pages about. Then I bit a doggie biscuit in half, leaving one piece on the floor by the couch and swallowing the other half, thereby destroying the evidence. I ground one of Charlie’s favorite video games under my boot heel, destroying it completely. I ripped the blonde hair out of Alice’s favorite doll and flung the synthetic strands on the carpet.

  Finally, in a stroke of genius, I wrote a quick note on a pink Post-It. “Went out for delicious donuts for the family I love. Back in 20 mins. Love, Daddy.”

  Was that enough? I worried that it was not enough. So I urinated on my wife’s cardigan sweater, the one she wore around the house a few times a week. I’d given it to her three years earlier and was surprised and pleased by how much she adored it. I was saddened to see it defaced by Tex.

  Still, I wasn’t sure they would see it my way, so I made the executive decision to defecate on our couch.

  I’ll confess to a moment of uncertainty. Should I have taken a different approach to incentivize my team? We all had a lot on our plates that quarter. Mary Ellen was so deep in the weeds with those student papers you couldn’t see her face anymore. The kids were giving as good as they got. Somebody needed to push the envelope. We couldn’t let the grass grow on this one. In a family such as ours, the team leader had to do some heavy lifting to stay one step ahead of the paradigm shifts. I completed my davenport project in record time, hurried to the bathroom and performed the necessary ablutions.

  A minute later, I banged on the puppy’s bedroom door. “Wake up. Wake up, you adorable little sleepyhead.” Tex tore out of his room barking like a maniac. He dove for my ankles, snapping with his sharp teeth, but I danced out of the way. “Ha, ha, ha.” Taunting him with my laughter, I ran circles around the soiled couch. Tex leaped onto the cushions. His right front paw landed squarely in my feces. He jumped back down and ran around the room, smearing it all over the carpet.

  Game, set, match: Daddy.

  “Bye, bye,” I said and hurried out the door.

  I rang the front doorbell to wake up the family, pulled out of the attached garage, and drove away laughing.

  When Mary Ellen saw that disgusting mess, she would be outraged, horrified. She’d finally realize what a terrible mistake she’d made. Even the kids would be revolted. They’d cover their mouths and run around in circles, going, “Ewww! Tex made weewee on Mommy’s sweater and doodoo on the couch.” And twenty minutes later, Daddy would reappear, all smiles and innocence, the returning hero, carrying a bright pink and orange box filled with fresh delicious donuts. Greeted by pandemonium, Daddy would march in and restore order.

  I would prevent Mary Ellen from cleaning it up herself. “Let me do it,” I’d volunteer, a no-brainer considering the origin of the mess. “You shouldn’t have to put up with this.” Donning yellow dishwashing gloves with surgeon-like confidence, I would both instigate the cleanup efforts and delegate responsibilities. “Kids, go in the kitchen and have some donuts. I bought all your favorites.” And to Mary Ellen: “Make no mistake. After I clean up here, we’ll go out and buy a new couch. Any style you want. Your choice.”

  Later that afternoon Tex would be tried and convicted as a war criminal. Soon he would be out of our lives forever.

  First, though, we’d sit down as a loving family and enjoy the donuts that wonderful Daddy had brought home. We would laugh and celebrate. Then we’d have our last family meeting. There would be some new business to discuss. I expected the vote to be unanimous. That puppy wouldn’t know what hit him, and peace would be restored at last.

  For the first time in my life, I drove the long way to the shopping plaza, leaving behind all the cottage houses with their narrow lawns and short driveways. I hit all the red lights but couldn’t stop smiling. Confident that I’d taken care of everything at home, I turned up the radio as loud as it would go. Hard rock blared from the speakers. I lowered the driver’s side window and pounded my palms on the steering wheel. I shouted at a jaywalker: “Let’s keep it moving!”

  Carried away by all the excitement, I gripped the wheel in one hand and called my coworker, Wren, on her cell phone. “You’ll never guess what I just did.”

  Wren asked me if I wanted to come over to her apartment. She said she was frying eggs and drinking vodka.

  That sounded like a dangerous and inadvisable situation.

  “See you soon,” I said.

  HALLIE BANG

  That summer I had been reading Steppenwolf, and at night I walked around town in cutoffs and a Hawaiian shirt, thinking about despair, not sure if I was actually in it myself, and one Friday night, on a whim, I ended up at J.P. Bullfeathers on Elmwood Avenue, where I drank draft beer at the bar and watched a dull boxing match on the muted TV above the cash register. Waitresses hurried by with steak tacos and chicken wings for the bikers on the front patio. Around 11:30, just as I was leaving, my old friends Cheryl and Carlos rolled in, drunk and la
ughing, with funny stories to tell. So I hung out with them, chain-drinking beers and throwing plastic darts. Around midnight a troupe of modern dancers flapped into the bar like tropical birds that had migrated to the rust belt by mistake. They were still in their stage costumes—flowing dresses and head wraps—and I recognized a guy I knew, John Cogan, grinning in the midst of them. The women disappeared into the back room of the bar where there were tables, and John and I shook hands, stood by the front windows and talked shit about The Cracked Bowl, a tiny local journal we both had poems published in, and after a while one of the dancers came up to him and said, “John, we’re all waiting for you in the back, we’re gonna order food soon,” and he said OK, then he introduced us. Buffalo is not a big city and I had seen her around on Elmwood Avenue—long straight copper hair and a pale lovely face and a nose ring and skinny arms and legs and a walk that at times seemed more like hopping—and I had read a poem of hers in The Cracked Bowl, back when I used to study each issue in secret devotion, hoping that someday a poem of mine would appear in it. So when John said, “Do you know Hallie Bang? She had a poem in the Bowl a while ago,” I said, “Yes, I know,” and recited a few lines for her on the spot. I had remembered it, I don’t know why. She stared at me, frowned, and said nothing, then returned to her friends. An hour later I was pounding tequila shots with Cheryl and Carlos and Hallie came out of the back room, plopped down on a stool near me, and ordered a beer. We started shouting at each other over the music. Hallie flailed her hands and laughed as she talked, gray-green eyes, nose ring glinting, and I wanted her phone number, but she took off while I was in the men’s room. That week there was a reading for the latest Cracked Bowl and I was scooping some fruit chunks onto my paper plate—pineapples, melons—and John Cogan said, “You’re popular all of a sudden. Two women have been asking about you,” and I said, “Is one of them Hallie Bang?” and he said, “Yeah,” and I said, “Well then I don’t care who the other one is.” I read my crappy poem that night, one that took me two years to write, and then John, Hallie Bang, her roommate Annie and I went to the Old Pink to get drunk. We shot a few games of pool, and I told a story that made Hallie spit her vodka tonic onto Annie, laughing, but when John offered me a ride home, I declined. They all piled into his Monte Carlo and I started heading back to my apartment on Lafayette and Grant, a half hour walk. John slowed his rumbling Chevy beside me. “You don’t want a ride, man? Hop in.” Hallie and Annie looked out at me from the passenger side windows. I shook my head. “Thanks, anyway!” Now I understand that I had painted a confusing picture of myself in Hallie’s eyes—a man walking home alone with a depressing novel hidden in the baggy pocket of his bermudas—but the truth is I was insecure and could conceal my awkwardness for only a few hours at a time. I had to get away from them, I thought, before I blew it and turned into a monster of unease. I went home that night and talked about this odd, brilliant, beautiful Hallie Bang to my roommate. There wasn’t much to say—I didn’t know her—but I managed to talk a lot. He yawned and wondered why the hell I didn’t get her phone number. I was twenty years old and still couldn’t recognize when a woman was attracted to me. Any signs of encouragement were imaginary, I believed, wishful thinking on my part and not to be acted upon. About a week later, I think, Hallie called me up and asked me out for coffee. That night I had plans with Jodi, the stoner who lived on the first floor of my building, but I said yes to Hallie anyway—hence our future joke that we both dumped our Jodis for each other. Her Jodi was actually named Steve. We agreed to meet at Pano’s, a Greek diner on Elmwood: four greasy booths and a cracked counter with maybe nine squeaky stools. Intimate, grubby, perfect. I arrived first and tried to read my book, but I was too keyed-up to concentrate. Then Hallie meandered in, twenty minutes late, glowing in bright colors—orange and green and purple. Her clothes looked like they’d been knitted by a blind person. She wasn’t a jeans and T-shirt type of woman. She wore a scarf on her head and yellow combat boots, and I would give anything to experience that same fear and elation again, the feeling that we were starting something new together. Hallie drank her coffee black, one sugar, but she peeled back the lids of two half-and-half containers and tossed them down her throat as if they were shots of whiskey and she were a sailor on shore leave. I laughed. “What?” she said. “You’ve never done this before? It tastes like melted vanilla ice cream.” She made me take a shot and watched my reaction. “Like melted vanilla ice cream,” I said. “Right!” she said. “That’s what I think, too.” I ordered a chicken souvlaki and Hallie got a buttered pita bulging with scrambled eggs and feta cheese. Halfway through the meal I ran out to buy a bottle of red wine at the liquor store down the street. Throughout our meal, people kept coming up to the table and talking to Hallie. Every time it happened I had a mouth full of souvlaki. She introduced me to Yousouff, Suki, Elise, Dagoberto, Amy. I couldn’t keep the names straight. Even the short order cook acknowledged her with a nod and sent over a flaky brick of baklava. “Where do you know all these people from?” I asked her. Not one person had come up to the table to talk to me. Hallie shrugged and said she hadn’t thought about it before. She lived in a small world full of people who loved her, people who made squealing noises when they saw her. Nobody received more hugs in a day than Hallie Bang. Our waitress, who also knew Hallie from somewhere, gave us empty coffee mugs for our wine, and she didn’t seem to care that we sat there for two hours drinking. So we brought in a second bottle of wine and poured a third mug for our waitress, who stored hers under the counter. When I paid for our meals I left a hundred percent tip, pretending money wasn’t an issue. Money was definitely an issue for me. Outside Pano’s a palm reader sat behind a card table, and I paid for two readings. I can’t remember a single thing the fortuneteller said, though I do remember tipping her five extra bucks, and Hallie and I wandered in the general direction of her apartment. Whether the creases in our palms predicted our futures or marked the history of everything we’d held and let go, I couldn’t imagine a better purpose for my right paw, and its elaborate framework of little bones, muscles and nerves, than when it closed the space between us and grasped Hallie’s small hand, linking us for four blocks while we practically skipped down the sidewalk. Outside her apartment I said good night and offered her a handshake. “Really?” Hallie said. “That’s what we’re doing? Try again.” So I pressed her up against the wall and kissed her. When our tongues met, her hands rummaged beneath my shirt, her hot fingers on my lower back. I kissed her neck just under her ear, both of my hands in her hair, and then I followed her up the rotting wooden stairs to her third-floor apartment. Her mattress was under a dormer window in the living room. Her roommate Annie slept in the apartment’s one bedroom, which you had to pass through to use the slant-ceilinged bathroom, and everywhere on the hardwood floor and on cluttered counters were the props of their interesting lives—paintings on canvas and wood, stretcher bars and sketches, tackle boxes filled with charcoals and pencils and books everywhere, a cheap acoustic guitar missing its bottom E string, and broken pottery and dirty plates. “Who plays guitar?” I asked. Hallie grabbed the back of my head and kissed me. She sucked on my lower lip and pushed me back against the couch and straddled my hips. I had only been with one girl before, my high school girlfriend, but this felt different to me. I scooped Hallie up—her body vined around mine, her arms around my neck, her ankles crossed behind my thighs—and I carried her across the room and flung her down on the lumpy mattress. We undressed each other. She bit my shoulder, hard. When I kissed her belly and continued to descend, she took hold of my head and almost tore off my ears, bucked her hips hard into my face, and I thought, Tear them off. I don’t need ears, don’t need eyes, and you can break my nose because I want to feel it all, and I’m staying right here until you push me away, until you’ve had enough. Her breathing turned crazy. Finally she rolled away from me, twitching, before turning back again. She climbed on top of me and guided me into her. Then she jabbed the heels of her hands so hard into
my shoulders, and she rocked, her eyes closed, thinking whatever. I held on to her. Eventually, her eyes popped open, and she looked down, as if she was surprised to see me there. When she lowered her face to mine, I thought she might ask me who I was. Instead, she kissed my cheek, my neck, where I felt her breath, her tongue and lips, and for the first time I trusted that there might be something real between us, but I couldn’t quite say yet what it was. Afterward, I wound a strand of copper hair around my wrist while she talked about her half-sister, and I could hear the way she felt about the people she loved. The only downside to any of this was her jealous cat, General Sow. He patrolled the perimeter of the apartment like a sadistic prison guard hoping that one of his inmates would step out of line. More than once I turned to find this fat cat stalking me, creeping up on me to slash my balls with his dagger claws while I lay naked in bed. But I made it through the night without injury and the following morning Hallie and Annie sang and played guitar, and I knew then that they could cut an album if they’d only write more songs, but they had five songs, that was it, and they were beautiful, and we spent another day in bed while Annie worked her shift at the co-op, and that evening when Hallie made dinner she asked me to help and I didn’t know what to do with an eggplant, but I faked it and maybe it was endearing, who knows, and we started spending whole days together, loitering on Allen Street or in the park, and when it got too hot outdoors we crashed at her place, listening to her Phoebe Snow and Roberta Flack albums, and napping in that bed under the whooshing trees, and the road crew outside her apartment showed up every morning at 8:00 a.m., causing Hallie to whisper in my ear, “Oh, the chirping of the jackhammers fills my heart with joy.” Sometimes Hallie knew what I was thinking before I did, recognized when I was wandering off into the wildwood of my mind, second-guessing myself—“turning into a pretzel,” she called it, and she poked her finger into my forehead and said, “Dzzzzt,” as if to change the frequency of my brain waves, a perfect shorthand gesture that never failed to bring me back to the present. “My parents were lunatics, Hallie. Totally incompetent. Why did they even have kids?” “Dzzzzt.” Finger to the forehead. “Look at this, babe. I’m definitely going bald.” “Dzzzzt.” Right between the eyes. It’s no small thing to say why you love someone. I have always thought it a worthy goal, however impossible. Sometimes Hallie counted my ribs—one, two, three—or she compared the circumferences of our thighs with her cupped hands. Constant physical contact, breath-sniffing closeness, seemed crucial to her. Four days a week I rode my bike to work thinking of Hallie Bang and the things she said, and I couldn’t wait to get back to her apartment, where there was no TV so we played Hallie-invented games like “Wear It!” which meant you had to heap as many items on your body as you could, including T-shirts, sweaters, winter coats, scarves, clip-on key chains, clothes hangers, and whatever else was within reach. I won this game of hers only once, when I picked up the shocked General Sow and wore him like a stole. Other nights we sat cross-legged on her bed in our underwear and played cards, Crazy Eights, or I read my favorite authors to her, and then we looked at her weird penis sculpture for a while, an activity always followed by intense, ardent sex—sweat shining on sunburned skin, her sheets a twisted braid on the floor—and Hallie knocked on Annie’s door once, saying, “We’re going for a walk now,” and Annie joked back, “Can you guys walk after that?” and we headed toward Delaware Park and got stuck in the rain and it didn’t matter and the smell of grass is in my mind now and I’m sniffing the air because I smell that summer and I have never wanted anyone to like me more than I wanted her to. In July, she went to North Carolina to dance at the American Dance Festival but we talked on the phone almost every day, and one weekend I flew into Raleigh-Durham Airport as a surprise, riding around Duke University campus in a green-and-white cab for thirty minutes until I found the address she had given me, and I hurled peppermints at the window of the white brick building she inhabited with five other dancers, and for two nights we shared a mummy bag on the cement floor, until I was politely told to leave by a stern, gray-haired woman named Mrs. Turco. That August Hallie’s roommate Annie went to Chicago for graduate school, so Hallie moved into my apartment and we cooked meals together and drank coffee at midnight and walked around town, and she sniffed and tasted and touched everything she could get her hands on and pointed at things and made up stories about them, and once when I came home from work on my bike she had choreographed the neighborhood kids to ambush me with water pistols and they piled out of bushes and nearby garages drenching me to the skin while Hallie sat watching from our porch and laughed, and I began to think about marriage and children of our own, thoughts that didn’t scare me at all, and I gave her two drawers in my dresser and half my closet, and we had sex everywhere in that apartment—on the floor, in the shower, in my bed, on my roommate’s bed—and we lived in three more places together, two in Brooklyn and a hovel in Paris, where she had a difficult abortion, not wanting to jeopardize her dancing career, a decision I supported, and I started bartending at La Violon Dingue, where I drank for free every night and got paid under the table, and she met a new bunch of friends who loved her, a troupe of Czech dancers who performed on the streets of Pigalle and passed the hat to tourists, the two of us staying out nights, lying to each other, bored with each other, fighting about nothing, until one morning we passed in the kitchen like any two strangers on Elmwood Avenue might, and that was that.