by Julia Glass
Last month, three of Alan’s patients had quit. All three gave financial excuses. Greenie made the mistake of telling him that he need not panic; her revenues had risen. A few days later, one night early in February, he stayed up late and drank far too much Scotch, a poison he resorted to only when he was feeling low (and which, after briefly raising his spirits, made him feel even lower). After Greenie told him that she thought she might land a new account, a good one, he launched into an angry speech about the disillusionment of the millennium. “It’s like, last year or the year before, they all took up therapy—took it up like tennis or bowling—or devoted themselves to yoga and Buddha, or went vegan, because they thought this arbitrary flip of the digits would initiate some kind of presto change-o!” He spoke bitterly, pacing the living room, glass in hand. “Like they were vestal virgins awaiting their sexual-spiritual epiphany, as if those three fat, indolent zeroes entitled them to be enlightened—hey, there’s the title of a best-seller waiting to be written. Entitlement to Enlightenment!…And now, now that nothing happened overnight, when they didn’t wake up in the new millennium anything other than just plain hungover as usual, now they dump all those disappointing, no-money-back yearnings, go whining back to their old shopaholic ways. Now they eat lemon meringue pie instead of sitting down to ponder their dreams. You get the clients I lose. At least somebody here’s in the black!”
Greenie had listened, speechless, appalled. She knew he was unlikely to remember much of what he was saying. The next morning he would apologize, but that night, lying beside him as he snored with abandon, she wondered if their collusion had changed—for Alan and without her noticing—into a competition.
By the time she reached the public library at Forty-second Street, her feet were cold. She paused to look up at the building (a palace, really) and noticed, on the steps, the dark hummocks of people huddled under blankets. She had a brief image of Alan as one of these drifting, frigid souls. You have a tendency to exaggerate, she could hear him say. His voice was one of the voices in her own head that, lately, she found herself having to discipline. And so what? she retorted in silence.
She walked to the curb and waved toward an empty cab, entered its dark, stale warmth with grateful surrender. Alan would be long asleep, she knew that, but she had hoped to find a note, just a few words hinting at reconciliation. When she found no words at all, she went into George’s alcove and stood beside his bed. He slept in his habitually trusting sprawl, pajamas rumpled, his belly exposed in the golden glow of his nightlight. She laid a hand lightly on one side of his rib cage as it rose and fell. His flesh was silky and warm. He did not stir. The mobile of the planets that hung above him, however, bobbed and turned eerily in the air displaced by her presence. She noticed that the planets were dusty. It occurred to her that George had long ago outgrown mobiles, at least as infantile entertainment; perhaps she should take this little cosmos down.
She went over to the shelves that held his books and toys; her eyes fell on his wooden United States of America puzzle. She pulled it out quietly and placed it on George’s small table.
New Mexico was a luscious maraschino red, with two details: a white star marking Santa Fe and a green lizard with a long curlicue of a tail (the cowboy on the map belonged to a purple Wyoming). Greenie held the piece of painted plywood to her lips as if it might have a magical taste, offer a fairy-tale moment of truth. But no, she was not one of Alan’s millennial brats, expecting epiphany; she was no vestal virgin, no virgin of any sort. When she put the piece back in the puzzle, next to those other western states—all so much more clear-cut, more decisively shaped than their eastern companions—it made a small, solid click.
FOUR
A DEFIANT OBSTACLE—HARD, SMOOTH, AND CHILLY —confronted Alan Glazier’s left middle toe when, for the first time in months, he stepped into his running shoes. When he turned the shoe over, a chrome marble fell out, rolled across the rug, and stopped when it struck the leg of a chair. Alan picked it up. When he smiled, he saw his smile reflected, tiny as an eyelash, in the silver surface of the marble. “Oh George,” he said, and if anyone had been there to hear him, they would have heard love and sorrow, futility and frustration all jumbled up together in his voice.
He walked into George’s room. On the bureau, in his spherical bowl, Sunny appeared to glance directly at Alan and put a little extra verve into his circular swimming. “You already got your breakfast,” Alan said to the fish, his sole roommate now for two weeks. He tapped the glass with a knuckle, and the fish flipped about, startled.
His son’s small bed was more perfectly made than it had ever been when he slept there, and the shelves against the wall were nearly empty. The books that remained were the dog-eared cardboard books, the ones George had chewed on before he could comprehend their function and purpose. The stuffed animals and the games, too, were those that George had outgrown—except for Mousetrap, which he had left behind, reluctantly, because it was missing one of its two essential marbles (and you had to have precisely these marbles, weighted just right, or the bucket wouldn’t spill down the rickety stairs, nor the backward diver land in his tub). “We have to buy a new one, we have to!” George had wailed the week before he left.
Alan, already bereft and in shock at his family’s impending departure, would gladly have run to the nearest toy store and bought a dozen games for his son, but Greenie said calmly, “George, we are taking plenty of things, and I promise you, there are lots of toys in New Mexico. We’re not going to the ends of the earth.”
Oh no? thought Alan as George asked, “Ends? The earth has ends? Where are the ends?”
Greenie had laughed—laughed!—and said, “Georgie, it’s just an expression. It means somewhere completely different from the places we know, without all the things we know and love.”
Well then I, thought Alan, I am the one consigned to the ends of the earth! But all that talk, all the talk that Greenie would accept, had already taken place. This, the packing and leaving, was a strange kind of aftermath that Alan had to suffer meekly through. Too little too late, she had told him—for the time being. It was not, she’d said, as if he didn’t have options: he could pack up and join them! “You can take your time, that’s perfectly fine,” she had said, as if he were George’s age, just another child. She wasn’t leaving him or running away, she pointed out. She was gaining distance. She was opening a window. She was breaking them up to keep them together. One cliché after another, as shiny yet leaden as this marble he held, tumbled blithely from the mouth of the smart, charming, still youthful woman he had married. At one moment, he was appalled to find that he actually wanted to hit her, if just to bring her to her senses. But that was a cliché, too, was it not? And by then he felt too tired to fight any further.
Forget the run, thought Alan. He pulled off his shorts and threw them onto George’s bed, went back to his own room and found a pair of jeans in the tangle of clothes on the chair beside the dresser. This locus of turmoil disturbed him because it reminded him that Greenie’s anger and even her decision to leave him alone with himself were not unjustified. How could he have told her what goblin, aside from his petty financial woes—his wounded breadwinner ego (our most primeval, panther-killing pride, he liked to tell his male patients)—was truly holding him hostage? Worst of all, she was right: he ought to be talking to Jerry. If ever there was a time to talk to Jerry, it was now—though Greenie did not know why. If she had known, she would most certainly have left him for good, behind in the dust, without a leg to stand on. Here, clichés would have been all too apt.
It was the first tantalizingly warm day of the year, the first day that promised summer before its true arrival, when you could not help feeling, Ah, the worst is over. In some years this day came in February; now that was heartbreak. This year, however, summer had postponed such flirtation, for it was now the beginning of May. Throughout the neighborhood, slender pear trees had put forth a cloud bank of blossoms; daffodils and tulips were already fading.
Waiting in line at the postal truck on Tenth Street, he stood in the sun and felt as free of despair as he had in days, at least viscerally, content just to feel the wash of heat as he waited to send his son a surprise that would bring him joy. Along with the now-complete game of Mousetrap, Alan had enclosed a few brand-new superhero comics. George had discovered this old-fashioned pleasure in just the past few months; for reasons that Alan found illogical, Greenie did not like to buy them. Did spite play a role in his sending along these treasured objects? Perhaps a little. Perhaps more than a little.
As he stood at the end of the line, he heard a faint mewling, the sound of new kittens or puppies. Looking around, he located the source of the sound in the arms of a young woman standing nearby, holding a cardboard box. Face bent toward the box, she was speaking in soothing high-pitched tones, motherly nonsense. She swayed from side to side, the habit of a parent accustomed to holding an infant. Every so often she’d look up, toward the oncoming traffic on the avenue. Alan watched her for a moment; when he turned back, he found himself at the head of the line.
He mailed the box and asked to see the most picturesque stamps, choosing a series that showed endangered mammals. He bought a sheet for himself and another sheet to send George in his next letter. He tried to write at least a few lines every other day.
When he had folded the stamps and slipped them in a pocket, he turned around to see that the woman with the box stood a bit farther away, in the middle of the block, but she was clearly waiting. Feeling magnanimous, Alan approached her. “Can I help you get a cab?”
“No, no. Thanks anyway,” she said cheerfully.
Simultaneously, he saw that the box held six squirming spotted puppies and that the woman’s face was asymmetrical, one of her eyes sharply narrowed, the two corners of her mouth in discord. One of her cheeks was smudged, and her long brown hair, though combed back into a ponytail, was oily and dull. The lapels of the wool jacket she wore—all wrong for the weather—were frayed. At a glance, she looked like someone leading a vagrant or hapless existence, yet she did not have the slouch or the glassy-eyed expression of the chronically homeless. Alan guessed her to be about thirty. It was something of a curse, his clinical eye, because it refused to take time off.
“Cute,” he said, nodding at the puppies, before he turned to walk home. He felt relieved yet also unsettled and embarrassed. But then the woman called out, “Wait! Could I ask a different favor?”
He turned around.
“Do you have…one of those personal phones?” she asked. “I always carry quarters, but the pay phones around here are busted. None of them work nowadays, since rich people don’t need public phones anymore, do they?”
Alan had just bought a cell phone, which he carried everywhere, placing it beside his wallet on his dresser at night so that he would never forget it. With George so far away, he felt more alert to the possible emergency, the possible change of heart from Greenie, the possible moment when George might miss his father so much that he needed to hear Alan’s voice right then, exactly then. Only Greenie had the number, and she had yet to use it. When she was the one to call, she called their home number, sometimes at an hour when she ought to know he wouldn’t be there.
So it took him a moment to remember that he did have a phone, and when he took it out, he fumbled at getting it open. He supposed this could be an elaborate scam (of course it was!), but he decided to let himself think the best of this woman. To hell with his clinical eye. Here was another change since George and Greenie had left: though he wasn’t the slightest bit religious or superstitiously inclined, Alan acted as if he were trying to accumulate what he could only think of as positive karma, just in case it might tip the Fates in his favor (why not keep all your mythological bases covered?).
“I don’t use it much,” he said.
The woman set the puppies on the sidewalk between them and took his phone. “Here now,” she said. “You guard the little guys, would you? But no petting! They haven’t had their shots.”
He listened as she spoke to someone’s answering machine. “Stan, I’m on Sixth and Tenth, like we arranged. Where are you? I’ve been here half an hour. Pick up, Stan.” She waited, squinting at the sun. She sighed. “Okay. Okay, Stan. I’ll try you later, but I guess I’ll just take them over myself, since you gave me the address. I guess what I can do is—Oh I hate that. He’s got one of those guillotine message machines.” She pronounced the word “gillateen.” She closed the phone and handed it back to Alan.
She put her hands on her hips. She scanned the avenue. She made a motherly noise of disapproval. As she leaned down to pick up her box, Alan said, “Is there anything I can do?” Like most New Yorkers, his instinct was to remain sealed inside the safety of his individual shell, but by profession he was supposed to be a helper, and there was nothing worse in his book than a hypocrite, especially a hypocritical helper.
“Well now that is an offer I cannot afford to ignore,” said the woman. “I’ll tell you my situation. This friend of mine, or not really a friend but a guy I work with, he was supposed to pick these guys up to get their shots and help find them homes. He’s a busy guy, so maybe he got hung up. So.” She craned her neck to look down the avenue again, as far as she could; as she did, a cloud passed over the sun and the air became abruptly chilly. She glanced at the sky and frowned briefly. “Okay, here’s the plan.”
She put the box of puppies in Alan’s arms and took a large card out of her pocket. She looked at it, mouthed something, looked up at the nearest street sign and back at the card. She started uptown. For one ghastly moment, Alan thought she might simply abandon him with the puppies, but a few steps away from him, she turned back and said, “Follow me, okay? I hope you don’t mind, but my arms are tired.”
“No,” said Alan, suddenly charmed by her sense of purpose. He had planned to catch up on reading professional journals, but he did not have patients for another four hours, and in truth, he would probably have gone home to brood, since this was the time when he ought to have been picking up George at his preschool and taking him out for a snack or to the library or, if it was warm enough—as it was now—to the playground. His life felt so thin without George.
Catching up to the woman, he said, “I’m Alan. Alan Glazier.”
“I’m Saga,” she said. Despite a minor limp, she walked along quickly, slowing only to look at the street signs and back at the card she still carried. “It’s just a block or two from here. You okay with that?”
“Yes, fine—did you say Saga?”
“Like the blue cheese,” she said.
Or like a story, a grand story, he thought. Finding out stories, decoding them, that was his job—what was her story?
She did not seem interested in making conversation, so he followed without asking questions. They turned one corner, then another, until she stopped in front of a tenement building with dirty windows. She stood by an iron staircase leading down to a basement door that announced itself as the entrance to a veterinary office. Alan probably passed this building five times a week, but he had never noticed the sign.
“You with me?” she said.
“Lead on,” he said, and down the stairs they went.
The waiting room was small, windowless, empty of people, and lit with a long fluorescent fixture that hovered too close from the low ceiling and buzzed intermittently. The smell of disinfectant was strong, but not strong enough to hide the stench of kennel. No receptionist sat at the white Formica counter where a small sign read RECEPTION. Saga leaned across this counter and called out, “Yooooohoooo!”
From somewhere close but out of sight, two dogs began to bark.
“Coming!” A few footsteps, and then a man in a white smock emerged from the door behind the desk. “Hello again—you’re Stan’s friend, am I right?” he said pleasantly. He glanced at Alan. “Are you with Stan’s group, too?”
“No, he’s with me,” Saga said before Alan could answer. “Stan couldn’t make
it. Some kind of appointment. I thought I could just bring them by on my own. Is that okay?”
“Today’s my day without an assistant, but if you help out, I can take care of them now.” He was young, this doctor, the kind of young that made Alan realize how old he was becoming—for though the vet was probably nearing thirty, to Alan he looked like he was barely out of high school. Skinny and pale, he might never have left the unpleasant cave of his subterranean office.
“You’re a gem,” said Saga. “A true gem.” She took her precious cargo from Alan. Without speaking, she and the vet went into the room behind the desk; the vet closed the door.
Alan stood in the empty, buzzing room for a moment. Should he leave? He could knock on the door and say good-bye. But then he heard the first puppy yelp. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, you’re a brave little guy!” he heard Saga saying, her voice raised but gentle. “All done, there you go. Skedaddle.” Right away, the next puppy yelped.
Alan sat down on an orange plastic chair. He looked around and laughed. He could have described this episode to Jerry and passed it off as a dream; he felt that off-balance, that disembodied. This was just the sort of room you encountered in dreams—in dreams about to morph into Alice in Wonderland nightmares. An urban rabbit hole, this place. “All right, so I’m dreaming,” he said aloud, to hear his own voice, something familiar. From behind the closed door, he continued to hear the pups getting their shots, each one comforted loudly by Saga. Was that her real name? Perhaps she’d been the child of early hippie parents, the people who so thoughtlessly gave their offspring naïve or grandiose names like Storm, Sequoia, Moonbeam, Cosmos. Right before Greenie, Alan had dated a younger woman named Truce, whose parents loved to brag about how many times they had been arrested for demonstrating against the Vietnam War. They claimed to have conceived her while in jail. They told her this.