They turned onto Broadway.
"White Street's down in Tribeca," Joseph added. "I've got a friend who has a loft there."
"I know where White Street is."
"Of course. I didn't mean to sound insulting. I'm not myself today because my dog just died. I'm on my way back from the vet's."
"Sorry to hear it."
"Thanks. It's strange, coming back empty-handed. And when I think that just an hour ago, I was riding downtown, her in my arms. My Sophie. She was thirteen."
"Pretty old for a dog."
"And then I had to pay the bill. Isn't it strange that even when something dies, you still have to pay the bill?"
The driver did not respond. Leaning back, Joseph found himself remembering the afternoon he and Kennington had driven out to the house of the breeder lady in Morristown, watched as she extracted Sophie from the wriggling mass of the litter: "like a furry worm," Kennington said later. That same week, he had moved into the loft on White Street, and Sophie had peed on the antique Bokhara, leaving a dark stain.
On Central Park West, the traffic eased. Because the driver knew the exact speed at which to coast in order to make all the green lights, they arrived at Joseph's building in a matter of minutes. Climbing out, he tipped too lavishly—payola for his need to confide—then stumbled toward the revolving door, where Hector, the handsomest of the doormen, awaited him.
"Afternoon, Mr. Mansourian," Hector said. "Everything go okay?"
"I'm afraid not, Hector. I'm afraid Sophie's passed on."
Hector's brow tensed, but it was the fabric braids glinting on his wide shoulders that captured Joseph's attention.
"Gosh, Mr. Mansourian, I'm sorry to hear that. She was a nice dog."
"Thank you."
"I know what it's like. A couple of years ago my mother lost her dog. Tidbit, we called him, on account of he was so small. It was very upsetting."
"Yes, it always is. You love them like children, you know?"
"I know, sir." With which regretful observation Hector pushed the revolving door. When he'd first moved into the building, twenty-five years ago now, it had amazed Joseph that people could be paid just to push revolving doors. Of course he hadn't understood then about unions. (Now he understood all too well about unions.) A certain grasping cynicism underlay the mechanics of New York luxury, he reflected, as the smooth and oiled gyre took him in, its brushed undersides scraping softly against the polished marble, ushering him through a multiplicity of reflections—like Alice through the looking glass, he sometimes thought. Then he was in the lobby. Ghosts of perfumes collided amid the dark wood veneers, the hard little pink sateen sofas and chairs that no one ever used—indeed, that seemed designed to repel use. And how many times had he passed through this lobby with Sophie, or with Kennington and Sophie, on the way back from the park?...but he didn't want to conjure Kennington right now. Funny that because Sophie had died, Joseph should find himself grieving Kennington's absence, when he was merely in Europe, as he'd been dozens of times before; would be coming back soon, very soon, in time for their anniversary. Twenty years, they told people, not mentioning, for the sake of discretion, the first five, during which Kennington had been underage. Meanwhile a second doorman, this one elderly, was ringing for the elevator, which was an old-fashioned one, with a little velvet bench on which Joseph had never once seen anyone sit.
"Afternoon, Sam," Joseph said.
"Afternoon, Mr. Mansourian."
"I'm afraid my dog has passed on, Sam."
"Has he, now?"
"She. Sophie was a she."
"A real crying shame," Sam said—a little mockingly, Joseph thought—and he opened the doors for Joseph to step through.
Silently the doors closed on Joseph's face.
Almost as soon as the elevator started moving, he felt faint again, so much so that for the first time in twenty-five years, he actually sat down on the little velvet bench. This turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, as the ride took all of forty seconds. Up onto his feet he hoisted himself, before continuing into the cramped corridor, where he undid the double doors with their triple locks. In the front hall a black-and-white checkerboard of tiles stretched to the shadowed living room. He smelled cooking, heard Mozart—both from other apartments.
Once safe in his bedroom, he changed out of his suit; checked his e-mail (there was none), checked his voice mail (there was none). And what next? He wasn't sure. A planless evening stretched ahead of him. Of course he knew better than to go into the kitchen, where on the other side of the swinging door Sophie's bright red dishes still sat, one half filled with kibble and the other with water in which little bits of kibble floated, bloated, disintegrated. Her toys lay idle in the dog bed. He'd noticed the blood when he'd picked her up to take her to Dr. Wincote. And then, in the taxi on the way downtown, she had died without drama. No, he decided, in the end it was better to steer clear of the kitchen tonight; better, in the morning, to let Maria remove "the effects" with that harrowing efficiency that was her hallmark, so that when Joseph returned from the office the next afternoon the apartment would be scraped clean of all signs of canine life; except from photographs, no one would be able to tell that for years a dachshund named Sophie had lived here.
Still shaking a little, he went into the living room, where he mixed himself a drink and put on a CD: the adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Then he sat down. He was wondering whether he should tell Kennington about Sophie. It was one-thirty in the morning in Rome, which meant Kennington would either be asleep, or out walking, or out at the bars; if he went to the bars, that is; if he did anything along those lines. And anyway, did the expected death of an old, sick dog really constitute enough of an emergency to justify a phone call in the middle of the night? Probably not. Probably better to call Tushi, who was in town. Or his mother in Queens. Except that Tushi was a cat person; his mother was dead. Ridiculous, that even after so much time passed, he should still want to call her. Another sign that he was becoming senile. Floating, bloating.
Or he could call someone else.
At the prospect, his fingers tingled.
From a side table, he picked up a magazine with a shirtless man on the cover; flipped through it; ran down the list of photographs and descriptions with his pencil, until he landed on one that he liked.
He reached for the phone and dialed.
To his surprise, a human voice answered.
"Good evening, this is Matt."
"Hello, Matt. I just saw your ad in Advocate Classifieds. I was wondering if you were free for an outcall."
"When?"
"Tonight, if possible."
"Give me your number and I'll call you back."
Joseph gave the number; hung up. Instantly the phone rang.
"Sorry about that. I've got to verify the calls. It's a matter of security."
"I understand."
"Anyway, my terms are two hundred for an hour, three hundred for two hours, five hundred for an overnight."
"An hour should be fine."
"I'm downtown. Where are you?"
"Upper West Side." Joseph gave the address.
"I should be able to get there in about twenty minutes. Oh, and you have to cover my cab fare."
"Of course."
"My name's not really Matt, by the way. It's Kenneth."
"Kenneth, I'm Joseph."
"Good, Joseph. Well, see you soon."
"Sounds good."
They hung up. Immediately Joseph switched off the adagietto. In his hall closet he kept a supply of cheap towels, which he now spread over the bed. Then he took a shower and dried himself before the mirror. And what did he see? A man who, at sixty-one, might have been an advertisement for the force of gravity, which pulls everything down, down. "Face or figure," he remembered his mother saying. "Every woman makes the choice." Only in his case it hadn't been a choice. Face had chosen him. In his clothes, he was a handsome man.
He put on his bathrobe, mixed himse
lf another drink, then made his final preparations for the rendezvous, which consisted of putting his credit cards and passport in the safe, along with whatever small, tempting valuables happened to catch his eye. As an afterthought he slipped off his watch and put that in the safe as well. Finally he settled down in the living room and turned on the television. To his horror a dog food commercial filled the screen; he flipped past it quickly. On a Japanese soap opera, two women knelt on tatami mats and spoke earnestly. He could not understand a word they were saying.
After a while the buzzer rang. "A Mr. Kenneth to see you," he heard Hector call through the intercom.
"Send him up," Joseph answered, and went to wait by the front door. Above the elevator a familiar sprite of light climbed through the numbers, until the doors opened, and a tall, slightly weather-beaten young man in sweatpants and a leather jacket stepped out. "Hi," he said, holding out a thick hand. "I'm Kenneth."
"Kenneth, Joseph."
Joseph shut the door behind them. "This is a nice apartment," Kenneth said, taking off his jacket.
"I'm glad you think so. Would you like a drink?"
"A beer, if you've got one." Sitting on the sofa, he started untying his tennis shoes.
"One beer coming up," Joseph said, and almost automatically went into the kitchen. He was there before he knew it, confronting the twin red bowls from which, as he opened the refrigerator, he tried (and failed) to avert his eyes. Just as quickly he had fetched the beer and carried it back to Kenneth, who was struggling with a knot in one of his shoelaces. Finally he got it undone; kicked off the shoe.
Handing Kenneth the beer, Joseph sat opposite him, on the sofa.
"So where are you from, Kenneth?"
"Kansas City."
"Been in New York long?"
"About fifteen years."
"Ah." Joseph's upper lip twitched as he watched Kenneth pop the beer. "I'm from New York myself. Queens, actually."
"I don't know about you," Kenneth said, gulping from his beer, "but I'm kind of hot. Mind if I take off my shirt?"
"Feel free."
He yanked the T-shirt over his head. His chest was shaved, stubbly, tanned to a synthetic coffee color. "Very nice," Joseph said, as standing, he moved to run his fingers over the warm skin.
Kenneth stepped slightly back. "Mind if we take care of the money first?"
"Oh, of course not. Excuse me." Removing his hands, Joseph backed away, to the bureau, from the drawer of which he extracted his wallet.
Kenneth was undoing the drawstring of his sweatpants.
"So you said two hundred for an hour, is that right?"
"Yup. Plus twelve for the taxi."
Joseph counted out bills. "The fact is, I've never been to Kansas City, though I've been just about everywhere else in this godforsaken land. Let's see, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty." Suddenly he stopped. "Oh, dear. Oh, I can't believe this. This never happens. Let me—" Again he counted.
Then he smiled across the room. "This is very embarrassing," he said, "and I don't know quite how it happened, but I don't seem to have enough cash on hand. I have—let me count it again—eighty-four dollars. But that's not possible! I got money this morning! Oh, the vet, of course. I had to pay the vet in cash. You see, my dog died today." He sat down.
Kenneth said nothing. Already he had his shirt back on, was tying up his shoes.
"I'm sorry," Joseph went on. "You wouldn't by any chance take a check, would you? Or a credit card?"
"I turned down another job for this."
"I really do apologize. I'm not in the habit of doing this sort of thing."
Kenneth was dressed again. Joseph saw him to the door.
"Let me at least give you forty dollars for your trouble," he said.
"I turned down another job for this," Kenneth repeated.
"Then eighty." He handed Kenneth the bills. "Sorry again."
Kenneth said nothing. Folding the money in his fist, he stepped through the door, which Joseph closed and latched without a word. Sitting down on the floor, Joseph listened for the elevator. For some reason he was remembering a summer afternoon not so many years ago when, driving toward Rome, he and Kennington had had to stop for cows crossing the road. The sound of the bells they wore around their necks was almost music, almost an echo of cows' voices.
Amazing, memory's trick of seeming random, when of course there is always a key: in this case, Italy. Rome. Where Kennington, for all Joseph knew, might be sleeping; might be fucking; might be dead, or drunk, or stumbling down streets the stones of which the torchlight had burned to a primeval intensity.
Only minutes ago, a boy ... he winced. He hated sounding, or feeling, like Kennington's mother. Yet it was true: they'd gone to choose Sophie from the litter, and Kennington, just like a little boy, had fallen to the floor and let the puppies crawl all over him. They'd licked his face, licked, when he laughed, the bright polished surfaces of his teeth, while Joseph watched, and the breeder lady smiled. "I can see your son's a real dog lover," she'd said.
"Yes," he'd echoed. "You're a real dog lover, aren't you, son?" Somehow calling him "son," as he sometimes did in bed, excited him. But Kennington, in a heap of dachshunds, was too convulsed with laughter to answer.
6
"ENOUGH BLUE in the sky to make a Dutch boy a pair of pants," Pamela said. "Remember that?"
Paul, stirring sugar into his coffee, shook his head.
"Just an old expression your grandmother used to use. When we were going on a picnic, and it started to rain, she'd peek out the window, and say, 'We'll go if you can find enough blue in the sky to make a Dutch boy a pair of pants.' Well, what do you think, Pauly? Is there?"
He looked at the sky, where threads of clouds still drifted. He looked at his mother. She had on dark glasses. Nonetheless her features—yesterday discomposed by shock and uprooting—were starting to reassemble themselves. Yes, she was ceasing to be the walking disaster to whom pride alone lent some semblance of dignity, and becoming again the laughing woman she had usually been, the laughing woman Paul had always thought of her as being.
"I'd say yes," Paul said. It was eight in the morning, and they were breakfasting on the loggia of their hotel.
"Still, we ought to take umbrellas as a precaution. Oh, I'm so excited. I want to see the Colosseum, the Parthenon—"
"The Pantheon."
"The Pantheon, the Forum. Unless of course you'd rather be by yourself. If that's the case, Paul, just tell me. I understand."
"No, no, we can sightsee together."
They got up. An inward sense of victory had turned the corners of Pamela's lips upward in the slightest smile. Something had happened. She didn't know why, but this morning, as she was finishing her make-up, Paul had barreled into her room and flung himself against her. "Sweetheart," she'd said, her arms going round him. "Honey, what's the matter?" But he hadn't answered.
People rarely admit it, Pamela observed to herself, but the sorrow of a beloved can be gladdening. Usually when he was upset, Paul pulled away from his mother, as he had last night. She'd had to train herself not to plead for his company. And then, when she least expected it, these hiccups of childhood would seize him, and something would freshen in her, especially as she knew they would come less and less frequently as the years passed, then not at all.
In the Pantheon, he read aloud to her from Georgina Masson. Beneath the enormous aperture at the center of the dome the marble, inset with little drains, was still wet from last night's storm. "Listen to this," he said. "In the niches there used to be statues of all the gods and goddesses, and according to Pliny, the statue of Venus wore as earrings two halves of a pearl Mark Anthony took from Cleopatra. And the pearl had a twin that she dissolved in vinegar and drank to win a bet."
"Cleopatra drank a pearl?"
Paul nodded.
"Ugh," Pamela said. "No thank you. Not for all the tea in China." Then they were pushed away by a bargelike woman who was leading a German tour group to Raphael's tomb w
ith a flyswatter. "Until the twentieth century this was the largest dome in the world. Some of the bricks date from 125 A.D. And the interior—it says here, 'The concrete was mixed with travertine, tufa, brick and pumice stone in successive layers, with the heaviest materials at the lower levels, the lighter tufa and pumice mixture being used at the top of the dome.'" Paul shut his book. "It must have really been something before all this Christianizing."
"Must have been," his mother echoed.
They went out the immense bronze doors. Tiny cars, the smallest she had ever seen, buzzed around the piazza. Their wheels were half the size of those on her station wagon, and a few had only three of them.
"Look at that. That car doesn't even have a steering wheel, it has handlebars, like a motorcycle. And it's called an Ape."
"No, it's pronounced ah-pay. That means 'bee.'"
"So ape is bee and cold is hot. What a funny language." She pulled her scarf tighter around her neck. In fact she was more at ease talking about cars than the Colosseum, the dust of which smudged her shoes, and which in any event stank of urine. For the architecture of Rome was not only monumental, it was monumentally indifferent. It bore down. Thousands have come and gone here, it seemed to say. Goethe, Liszt. You do not matter.
They went into more churches than she could keep track of. In one of them Paul started reading to her about the apse. She was too embarrassed to admit that at forty-seven years old she didn't know what an apse was. And then all the ruins started to seem to her to be just so much stone and earth. Unlike Paul, she couldn't extrapolate a temple from two columns of marble. Rome to her was dirt, deadness.
When they finished their touring they took a walk down the Via Condotti. In the shops saleswomen in ruthlessly tailored little suits followed them everywhere, as if they were thieves. These women's shoes were not scuffed. There wasn't a wrinkle on them. Whereas Pamela, in her black slacks and wrinkled blouse, might as well have had a sign taped to her back that read "TOURIST." Every shopkeeper addressed her automatically in English. No wonder the little gypsy girls in their filthy patterned skirts and shawls flocked to her in front of the Spanish Steps! When it happened, Paul was across the piazza, buying a newspaper. Suddenly a bevy, several pregnant, had surrounded Pamela. They thrust torn maps and dirty pieces of cardboard into her abdomen. At first she thought they were asking directions. "I don't speak Italian!" she told them, as quick hands slipped inside her purse. It was all rather dreamy. "Stop that!" she said, slapping them away. "Stop it! Paul!"
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