by LEE OLDS
“The dogs?” Said Hammond. “Now you are telling a tale.”
“Since when do three hungry dogs make a tale?” I answered him. “And they weren’t so hungry at that for they’d already been fed. But then dogs are always hungry.”
Everything was apparently ready. The table leaves had been installed, and it had been set with a white linen cloth. Sandy’d bought out her best silver with implements (nothing like her mother’s), the salad and main dishes had been furnished. The only lacking ingredient was the large plate of steaks that Benji was to bring in and set down. This he did. Then, of course, there were the people, who due to their drinking, carousing, one thing and another were the last items to take their chairs, which had been stood alongside the table. All eight of them. Guests, you know, in a situation like that aren’t all that anxious to eat, even though after they do they feel better and the food in their stomachs leavens the effect of the alcohol.
The dogs, the Beagle, the retriever and the Dachshund, unnoticed observers under the coffee table had been all too aware of the sumptuous fare placed in the dining area. If it wasn’t their eyes it was their noses that set them off. Steaks on the top of an empty table. What else but a window of opportunity. The Beagle, went up like a horse clearing a hurdle only to land with his paws on a chair. One, two, a steak was between his jaws before he vaulted back down on the floor. Then came the old lab. In a split second at the very least, an eternity to a roomful of drunks, the plate crashed to the floor and three steaks were in the mouths of three dogs, one nearly as large as the Dachshund that held it.
Hartwig, who’d seen it all like the action in a dream, was the first to react. He’d grabbed Stanley and begun to spank its side. Thumping it hard but not really hurting it, like the pulled blows at a jujitsu practice.
“God damned dog,” he’d blurted, “that was our dinner.” He, with his lack of wherewithal was proud he’d been able to buy such meat for his rich mistress and bring it over the hill. He felt his own dog had betrayed him. And it had been their dinner. It wasn’t as though you could gather up the residue, wash it and serve em up. Cut off tainted parts, whatever. It was the idea of the thing. The dogs’d taken your food or most of it. The dinner, in other words, was ruined. Who was going to eat salad and potatoes without the main entry? Maybe in Africa or China, but we were here in the good old opulent USA.
The boys were upset, and amused. Jennifer, the artist and his wife were surprised more than anything else. June, who by that time could scarcely acknowledge what’d happened didn’t want to eat anyhow. She could care less. She held up her glass.
“Bon voyage,” she managed, and she gave a little cheer at the spectacle. Sandy, however, bolted. At the sound of the yelping dog she turned to Hartwig and shouted,
“You beat your dog over a God damned steak you son-of-a-bitch. Here’s your dinner…” And with that she grabbed hold of the table-cloth and yanked the entire setting onto the floor. Potatoes, gravy, salad, bread, the peas and pearl onions, you name it. She then ran out onto the deck and disappeared onto the darkened beach. Hartwig, now master of the house could only think of one thing to say. And like an announcer after an untoward occurrence,
“Party’s over folks.” And very shortly the guests began to leave. Benji wandered tipsily down to his room. The artists walked home and Jennifer drove her mother along with Marcus and his girlfriend back to the Tiburon mansion to spend the night. They’d had to leave the nurse’s car there for she’d had a few herself and was in no shape to drive. In other words the evening’d turned out to be a disaster just like the play they’d seen that afternoon. I wonder if that had anything to do with it?
“Oh, come on,” said Hammond. “The socialite, what happened to her? Did anyone find her or did she decide to join the dolphins?”
“Not until next day,” I told him. “Hartwig went out looking for her. He’d walked up and down the beach in the dark, calling, but couldn’t find her. He spent the night on the couch, listening to the thunderous waves crash and hoping for the best, naturally…”
But you know what’d happened? You know why she acted that way, don’t you?
“No, why?”
“What other reason than to express her love for her boyfriend.” Don’t you see that by censoring him for brutality towards the very thing he loved most, his dog, it was she who ruined the evening. In effect she was saying ‘she understood’ that love and was willing to sacrifice herself for him by out loving him if that makes sense. Unconscious, of course, but highly intuitive. An act only women can pull off. One only hopes at that stage they’re eventually happy together. Why would she have been so upset about the simple spanking of a dog over a just cause?
“Some people are just emotionally crazy,” said Hammond. “Even if at times they’re cruel themselves. She seems like one of them.”
“I,” I said, “would prefer to think the act had a deeper meaning,” and we left it at that. The next morning she walked in bright and cheerful, woke Hartwig up and made breakfast. She’d spent the night at old Sid’s, the retired baker whose old white wooden house that was shaped like a castle she sometimes visited and talked to. He was a lonely old man who lived by himself and obviously so was she, only she wasn’t a man but a woman. And she wasn’t that old, but a highly attractive and eligible female at that. One thing that came out of the evening, I imagine, was her self-confidence in Hartwig’d been restored. She didn’t consider June a real rival anymore especially after checking with her son to make certain Hartwig’d spent the night right where she’d found him. It was a strange day.
“So,” said Hammond. “Small rewards for small favors.” I nodded my head.
Chapter Thirteen
In her efforts to make Hartwig perk up and at least pay more attention to her, as well as latching onto someone who might just be able to render that attachment meaningless, Gloria in taking up with Barth, had encountered a different problem. Though they still went out and about around town and she sometimes stayed over at his aesthetic Victorian condo above Tiburon cove, always on the couch, and he never at her place, though he sometimes visited it, she ended up playing nursemaid to the older man. And though she hadn’t minded this and it drew her nearer to him, she certainly hadn’t bargained for it.
We, of course, hadn’t known the older gentleman as well as we thought we had. That he was an ex newspaper writer and a disgruntled war veteran (he’d retired from the war with grave doubts about its ethical principles) were facts. That the coughing spells we’d witnessed when in the middle of a conversation at a bar or table when he’d gag, choke and suddenly excuse himself for the men’s room were attributed to cancer of the esophagus we had no idea. Moreover, of the scenes he’d put Gloria through before his bay window, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over some of them. In the end result she never took him seriously enough to believe him and that, of course, is what made his last act so shocking.
“So,” said Hammond, “what’d he do, this old reprobate, jump off the Golden Gate Bridge?”
“No,” I said, “he apparently wasn’t so vain.” What more could I say about something you found disquieting to talk about. His drinking, of course, exacerbated this cancer. Cirrhosis of the liver affected the portal vein that supplied the esophageal varices, which tended to swell and bleed. His doctors’d warned him and this Dadaist had said,
“So, are you saying that I might drink myself to death. I can’t think of a better way to go. Cheers.” And he’d cup his hand like it held a glass and pretend to tipple.
“No,” of course, said the doctors, “we’re not saying that and you know it very well. Just don’t drink. The dilation causes your vessels to hemorrhage. You don’t want to suffocate on your own blood, do you?” For the windpipe was in that vicinity and that caused all the choking. Evidently he excused himself to the men’s to cough up that blood in the privacy of a toilet. It wouldn’t’ve been polite to sit there and cough it all over the table or in your date’s lap. An enemy might’ve b
een a different matter. Hartwig, he’d’ve coughed it all over. He’d told Gloria that too. In her delicate approach to life, and a little defense of her ex she’d responded,
“Oh, John, how can you say that?” A sensitive woman’s display of etiquette though I imagine if she’d really thought about it she could’ve considered the act something her boyfriend deserved although he was so healthy he’d never get cancer of the esophagus. She still hadn’t reached the point where she could consider him her ex, however. That for her turned out to be a race against life or death.
It was lucky Barth’d been a vet for that way he could receive medical coverage that otherwise wouldn’t’ve been available to him. While his pension and social security provided him with a bare minimum to keep up his lifestyle in the expensive community in which he lived, he’d spent any savings on the condominium he’d purchased when he’d first moved out there. Not only was that gone but he’d taken out a second on his equity and that’d taxed his income. He’d come for a wealthy family all right but all that’d done was to give him a taste for better doctors. And it was on them he’d also spent his money. This resorting to veterans’ care had been a recent move for him. One fomented out of desperation. And now when he sought care he drove to the hospital at Fort Miley in the Presidio. He still had a car but used it selectively for he’d acquired several drunk driving infractions and those too’d cost him money and left him without a license for a time.
“With doctors like them (army),” he’d been heard to say, “diseases have their holidays. I just don’t want to celebrate them.” The sicker he’d become the more his attitude’d changed until he’d finally come to look upon such practitioners as quite competent. What else could he do? He’d begun to badger Gloria about money and she who couldn’t be bothered with it had lent him several thousand dollars, which he vowed to pay back.
“I’ve a small annuity that’s coming due soon. You’ll get that.”
“Don’t worry about it, old friend,” and she’d tweaked him on his snub nose.
Barth’s condo occupied the loft in an old Victorian that had been converted into three units. From his windows under the pitched knotty pine ceiling one looked down into a small cove where waves plashed against the rocks and seals rested from their ocean forays. The window faced west. From it at certain times of the year the sun could be seen setting like a large golden eye lurking under the Golden Gate bridge.
“Well,” said Hammond, “at least the man had a pretty view to live with if he was going to live that way.”
“Yes,” I said. “And though views can also become tiring, I believe, Gloria’d come to enjoy spending evenings in Barth’s place before the fire more than she did in her own. She came to practically live there having forsaken her own quaint shack, which she’d personally furnished with antiques and over which she’d been so proud. Now, it seemed, just living there’d given her an impetus to move on to something better. Especially with the memory of Hartwig haunting her bed.”
Yes, though she’d leave Barth’s place early morning to bicycle around the small bay to her job and her apartment, many was the time she’d clean up there and then bike back to the condo to fix her companion dinner. In that way you see she’d come to care for someone else. You can only do this by making an emotional investment in them. And this she had in Barth. The two’d become quite close. Though, of course, I’d say far more like father and daughter than older man and mistress. Yes, and when she’d come back at night she’d chide him for the citadel of Styrofoam cups she’d discover on the mantelpiece that he’d filled with blood he’d coughed up during the day. For some reason he enjoyed having them there. He claimed these reminders looked better than ornaments on a Christmas tree or the altar at a church. Which meant what? Probably nothing to most people except children compared to what those cups meant to him.
As she’d be emptying those down the toilet one by one and discarding them in the stove burner she’d chide him.
“Can’t you at least make the toilet to do this? You don’t do it at restaurants. What if you were to fill their empty glasses with your gore? How’d you think they’d like that?” She’d stand up and face him hands on her hips.
“But then, my dear, who’d I have to bear witness to my malady.” The two’d hug. She’d rub her soft face against his stiff whiskers. The man was most formal I must say, a real gentleman in his Scottish tweeds. Hartwig could’ve learned something from him but the two were made differently. I’m sure that was all it was with any of us.
Take Johansson, for instance. He had a new girlfriend and though a little older than himself she provided everything he needed at least physically and while perhaps not as choice as Gloria in the looks department, experience can make up for a lot of things. She provided that, and understanding. One of her relatives had part ownership of the lumber company on the lagoon and she’d set up a job interview for him there but he’d have none of it.
“Everyone has to have a job,” Emily’d told him. “What’d I do if I didn’t wait tables? I don’t know where I’d live.”
“I’ll think about it,” he’d told her and since it was still summer and warm out and he was sleeping in the park when he wasn’t at Emily’s he didn’t really need a place to stay. He ate free at the little church of the open door on the hill and picked up odd jobs on the waterfront where he’d caulk, sand and paint boats. At that sort of thing he did have talent but the kid just wasn’t himself. He had wanderlust; just felt things in general weren’t going well for him. He wanted to get away and see the world.
That, of course, is one way to look at things. Another is you can’t get away from yourself no matter where you run off to, though you can at least try. And for some persons that seems to provide a solution for they’re forced to see and accept different situations they wouldn’t ordinarily be exposed to. The kid had a real problem. We all felt for him anyhow.
“I thought you said,” Hammond commented, “his new girl put him on a sane tack after Gloria, whether he acquired another job immediately or not.”
“No, that was the problem. His problem that is. And it wasn’t any particular woman, it was just women in general. He couldn’t handle em. He’d been bitten by the jealous bug over Gloria. After a while the same affliction hit him with Emily but this time for no ostensible reason.”
You knew the two were good in bed together, at least that’s what Emily’d told her co-worker who passed things on to us. Moreover, she wouldn’t look at another male though I did say she was approached often enough on her job. She … she just hadn’t accepted any of them until Johansson’d come along. She’d fallen for him. She pretty much devoted herself to him. And Gloria didn’t appear to be the problem either. Johansson’d told Emily all about her and she’d pretty much been forgotten.
“So,” said Hammond once more, “what was?” I threw up both hands as if to grasp the darkness from the sky where we were sitting.
Where those behaviors arise we really don’t know or are incapable of knowing is my guess. They obviously stem from the genes or some combination thereof but just how they manage to surface in social behavior is one circuitry that’s eluded us. Maybe someday we’ll solve the puzzle. Maybe it’ll remain forever out of our grasp of comprehension; our very act of knowing in general walled off some truths from us forever. I can only tell you what Johansson did. The effects always seem to surface understandably even if the causes don’t. Why do we have criminals at all if it were a simple matter of finding the causes? They’d then be something you could deal with. We can’t, of course. We await the effects and by that time it’s often too late. We have a criminal on our hands, a dead wife and a jealous husband in jail. That’s why we have prisons and murders. I’m not saying Johansson was anything of the sort though he nearly drove Emee crazy.
It came about that he couldn’t stand her, not only what to his mind was her flirting with the customers she waited on as he lingered about, but he’d begun to prevent her from doing her job, which, in fac
t, was waiting tables. That’s what she was, a waitress and a damned good one too.
Johansson, in effect, became convinced she was seeing someone else even though it was impossible for she had no time to. He’d taken to following her around and yet was with her constantly. Just the suggestion of her wanting to spend one night alone was enough to drive him into a furor. And remember now, she was renting a room in a house and albeit in the basement with its own private entrance and out of the way. Her landlord hadn’t rented to two people. He’d given her a good deal and she didn’t want to lose it. She had a son up north who she was sending through boarding school on her salary. So far he hadn’t met Johansson, didn’t know a thing about him, but the holidays were coming up and he’d be sure to visit. With a madman there, no way. He’d be jealous of the boy.
And to tell the truth Emee had become sexier and blossomed out since she’d taken up with the young Swede. Her smile’d become warmer, self-confidence oozed from her pores. Steady and self-satisfying sex can do that for a woman. It had to her. Johansson’d enhanced the very quality he dreaded yet what’d attracted him to her in the first place, her sex appeal.
He began to stalk and follow her everywhere so as to quell the veracity of his suspicions. If she went to the Seven Eleven market next door on her break for a slurpee, which she loved, he’d be waiting for her. He’d stand there pretending to be looking for a magazine.
“Oh,” he’d say, “off again. I was just looking at this.” He’d hold up a Times.