Women have had a history of misunderstanding him. Which may also mean that he has a history of sending out messages to women that are susceptible to misreading. Or, without being fully conscious of his motives, some part of him wants to send the wrong messages.
A somewhat familiar voice interrupts his self-concern. He sees the dog first, brushing up against his leg, before he recognizes Angela at the other end of the leash. “How are you this morning?” she asks.
That’s one of those questions he never has the answer to, so he pets the dog as a time-consuming diversion. “Where’s your mother?” he asks to fill the silence.
“I’m afraid there’s only me today,” she says. “Is that a disappointment to you?”
“Why would I be disappointed?”
“Actually, my mother’s not feeling so well.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he says. “Tell her I hope she feels better.”
“Ah-ah,” Angela says. “She will feel better if you agree to come to dinner tomorrow night.”
When someone invites him somewhere out of the blue, he usually says he has to check his calendar to see what else he has on, but this time he says, “What time do you want me to come?” He is not going to make the same mistake twice, or if he is, he is not going to let himself know it.
He arrives five minutes early carrying a bottle of red wine that is somewhat more expensive (perhaps even better) than the ones he usually delivers to dinner parties. Angela lets him in, offering him a hug he is not fully prepared for.
Twenty minutes go by—they sit in the cramped living room, drinking white wine and looking for a subject on which they might have something of interest to say—without an appearance by their hostess. Presumably, Winifred is in the kitchen preparing dinner. Still it seems to him odd that she hasn’t at the very least stuck her head in the room to say hi or whatever.
Between them, they finish the bowl of mixed nuts—mostly stale peanuts, as it turns out—which represents, as he sees it, the hors d’oeuvres course. He hopes he hasn’t killed his appetite, but the meal has been a long time in coming.
He resists inquiring on Winnie’s absence, though he gives muddled consideration to the question, self-consciously aware of the awkwardness of his situation.
He evokes, insofar as memory allows, the wording of Angela’s invitation. He thinks dinner was mentioned, though under oath he wouldn’t swear to it.
At last, Tris says in the voice of uncontrolled desperation, “Is your mother going to hang out in the kitchen all night?”
His question seems to surprise Angela. “My mother? Didn’t I tell you, Tris? Winnie’s not here. Winnie had a job-related appointment for tonight she couldn’t get out of. She sends her regrets.”
He doesn’t know what to say and so says nothing while wondering what the hell is going on. By this time, they are on their second or is it third bottle of white wine and he is not sure whether muted outrage is the appropriate response. Should he be flattered that Angela wanted to have him over despite her mother’s absence? “Is there anything to eat?” he asks.
“Oh,” she says. “The reason I didn’t serve anything is that I’m on this diet. Should I get you something? I didn’t realize you were hungry.”
“It’s all right,” he says, not wanting to be trouble or wanting to be more trouble than he knows what to do with. “What’s available?”
They go into the kitchen together—that is, he trails after her— and Angela swings the refrigerator door open for his inspection. “Tada!” she says.
Perhaps not. There are lots of bowls covered in plastic elbowing each other among the crowd of jars and plastic containers. His own refrigerator has virtually nothing in it. This is the antithesis.
“You can have anything you want,” Angela says, “but I have to say that a lot of it is probably past its prime. My mom can’t bear to throw anything away. It has an odd smell, doesn’t it?”
The decision seems to make itself. “You know, I think I’ll go,” he says. “Thank you for…” He has difficulty completing the sentence. “For putting up with me.”
“It was really nothing,” she says.
When he gets home after picking up a slice at Mamma Roma’s, a poor substitute for the homemade dinner he had allowed himself to anticipate, he imagines that Angela, not wanting to be left alone, says, “There’s no need to run off,” and takes his hand and leads him into the smaller bedroom—her mother’s guest room—where she has been staying during her visit. He thinks to say to her that this, whatever it is, is inappropriate and not what he wants, but, on the other hand, not having had sex with another person for a while now, it is what he wants—it is exactly what he wants, there is nothing he wants more—and so rather than lie to her, he shyly accepts her tacit offer.
After extended foreplay, they are just getting into it when he hears the outside door open, and someone, Winifred no doubt, enters the house. He freezes, regrets everything.
“Angela,” a voice calls.
“I’m here, Mom,” Angela says. “I’m in my room.” Footsteps approach.
He revises his scenario. After a peck on the cheek at the door— actually, an extended kiss initiated by Angela, the kind of kiss it would be poor manners not to respond to—he manages to get out of the house unscathed. Before leaving, he gives Angela his card—the last one of a pack he had made up twelve years earlier, the one he had been holding onto for just such an occasion—which includes his various contact information.
When Winifred opens the door, he has this determinedly innocent look on his face and has one shoeless foot on the floor. Winifred makes an incomprehensible noise—something between a sigh and a scream—and covers her face with her hands.
Angela says, “Please, Mother, I’m a big girl now.”
He leaves Angela without another word spoken between them. Winnie is sitting on the couch, her eyes averted, as he makes his endless journey to the front door. “I thought you would be home,” he says.
Winifred says nothing until he has his coat on and is making his escape, has one foot out the door.
“Why don’t you take Winni with you,” she says, “and keep him for the night. I’ll make up a plastic bag of dog food for you and I can give you a sheet of instructions. I’d like you to have him for the night. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”
Though her offer puzzles him, he doesn’t ask for an explanation but takes the proffered leash and the bag of food. It is the least he can do after his unseemly transgression.
At first, he is touched by her kindness. He now has a dog to legitimize his thirty-minute morning walks. Still, when he gets home, despite the meticulous instruction sheet Winifred has typed out for him, he worries he has gotten himself into something he is not equipped to handle.
He decides to take Winni on a tour of the house to acclimate the dog to his new surroundings. The six-room excursion takes seven minutes and a handful of slow-moving seconds to complete, leaving a large chunk of time still unsubscribed. The dog seems mostly bored in his company while being a good sport about it, and Tris considers returning him, though he doesn’t want to admit defeat.
He usually reads before going to bed for the night, but with the dog on hand he decides to watch some TV instead, an activity that might possibly also include his guest. Include may not be exactly what he means. Distract, perhaps. He doesn’t really believe that a dog, no matter how intelligent, has enough attention span to sit through an entire movie. Nevertheless, feeling desperate, Tris runs through his commercial-free movie channels, hoping to hit on something that might catch Winni’s attention while beguiling Tris at the same time.
What he needs, he decides, is a film in which a likeable dog plays a prominent part. Something like Turner and Hooch, which he has seen random moments of over the years while browsing channels, looking for something else. At first go-around, there is nothing appropriate outside of one of the Thin Man sequels on TMC, which he stays with for a while, directing Winni’s attent
ion to Asta whenever the famous terrier scampers mischievously across the screen. Lying at his feet, the dog glances at the movie only long enough to dismiss whatever it is Tris is staring at, more taken with watching him watch than with the images on the screen.
When Tris, after nodding off at the very moment the murderer is revealed, goes upstairs to bed, the dog trots after him as if they had known each other forever. As he undresses to get into his pajamas, prelude to flossing and brushing, the dog watches him with a quizzical look on his face. Shortly after he falls asleep, maybe two hours later, the dog barks, startling him awake.
He has difficulty falling asleep with the dog, a stranger really, sitting stiffly just a few feet away, giving off vibes of displacement. “It’s all right, Winni,” he says, and the dog gets up from his squat and licks Tris’s hand, which has been hanging over the side of the bed. At once touched and revolted, Tris turns on his side facing away and gives up nagging consciousness for a few moments of oblivion. When he wakes at whatever time, he discovers with a pang of pleasure the dog lying, paw over his eyes, on the rug alongside his bed, moaning softly in his sleep. “It’s okay, Winni,” he says as he steps over the dog, careful not to wake him, to get to the bathroom down the hall. On his return, the dog is missing.
“I didn’t realize,” Winifred says, back-stepping out of the room and shutting the door behind her.
“What a mess!” Angela says as he sits with his back to her, slipping on his pants. “I don’t know why it is, but I’ve always had a thing for mother’s boyfriends.”
“We had too much wine,” Tris says.
Dressed, he holds out his hand for Angela to shake, but her focus is inward. “Anyway, nothing really happened,” she says.
Before leaving, in a rueful state, he repeats his wine excess explanation to Winifred, who seems almost willing to forgive him. “My daughter is in a vulnerable state,” she says sternly, her arm on his shoulder as she escorts him to the door. “I hope you’ll be kind to her.”
“I missed you,” he says. “It was you I came to see.”
“Go on,” she says, pushing him out the door.
He discovers Winnipeg sitting by his bowl in the kitchen, after a bout of concern that the dog had gotten out somehow and run away—or worse, that the dog had in fact never actually been there.
Though he is apparently waiting to be fed, Winnipeg walks away from his food after Tris fills his bowl. “Come back,” Tris calls after him, but then notes, on the instruction sheet, “that sometimes Winnipeg will not eat in a strange house and not to worry about it.” Nevertheless it takes a while for him to shake off his disappointment and even, to some extent, hurt at having his meal rejected.
When Tris goes into the living room to collect the dog’s leash as prelude to their conjoined morning walk—the main event, as he sees it, of their limited time together—he hears crunching sounds coming from the kitchen. Winni is apparently eating his food. So: not a strange house after all, he tells himself with perhaps inordinate satisfaction, restraining the impulse to wave his fist before an unseen audience.
As he is fastening the leash, as instructed, to the ring protruding from the dog’s collar, the phone rings. He considers not answering, can say afterward that he has already gone out, but the insistence of the ringing gets the better of his resolve.
As expected, it is Winifred on the line, setting up a place and time for them to meet and exchange the dog. “Was it a good visit?” she asks.
When he finally leaves the house with his borrowed dog for his morning walk, he feels a sense of well-being unknown to him for as long as unreliable memory extends. He is by nature too cautious, too aware that every high has a low waiting in the shadows to take it down, to name the feeling happiness.
Nevertheless, it is undeniably pleasure to him to share a connection with this other creature while traversing on a warm pre-spring day the handsome streets of his Brooklyn neighborhood. His only regret is having agreed to the exchange with Winifred, which awaits him—checking his watch—twenty-three minutes down the road.
Only for a few minutes does he wonder what the others think when they see the non-dog man with a dog, with a dog they recognize as belonging to someone else. He can imagine the scenarios a passing owner-and-dog, who have seen him many times in his usual dogless state, might take away from the encounter. The obvious conclusion is that he is in some way connected to the dog’s owner, a friend no doubt, probably a romantic involvement, possibly a live-in boyfriend, which is, the passerby would surmise, a late-in-the-day development.
The first dog to cross his (their) path is the Shih Tzu, Lulu, with her oversized owner, and they seem unimpressed with the change in his status, the owner muttering his usual “good morning” while keeping his dog from contact with Winni. The next dog, a spaniel mix, merely crosses the street when they see him coming.
Not sure of the protocol, Tris keeps Winnie close when larger, meaner-looking dogs approach. On occasion, barks are exchanged.
He oversees Winni’s urination with an encouraging compliment, pleased at their mutual accomplishment.
And then, as he dreamed he might, he manages to pick up Winnie’s poop in a blue plastic bag, imitating the deftness of others he has observed.
The business part of the walk out of the way, Tris goes off in a new direction, matching his increased pace to Winni’s. After a while, he enters what he thinks of as unknown territory.
At some point he realizes, glancing at his watch, that he is nearing the time for the exchange while being a considerable, unspecifiable distance away from the appointed spot.
He wants to keep going, doesn’t want to give up the dog, but it is hard to reverse a history of doing, more often than not grudgingly, the expected thing. So he turns around and to the best of his ability—sense of direction not one of his natural skills—attempts to retrace his route. Several blocks pass as they hurry along, guided by urgency. He doesn’t so much look at his watch as his watch, on its own recognizance, glances at him, making him aware that the appointed time for his meeting with Winifred has passed. On two different occasions, he thinks he sees her in the distance, shortening the space between them.
He is surprised that Winifred accompanies him out the door, her hand still at his back. “Let’s take a little walk,” she says. “Okay?”
He nods, without words, locked in regret not so much at what he had done as being caught almost in the act of doing it.
She takes his hand as they walk the same streets he has walked by himself every morning. “I know you didn’t mean what you did,” she says. “At least I hope I know that.”
“Thank you,” he says. “I also hope I didn’t mean it.”
She lets go of his hand. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m trying to be honest with you,” he says. “I don’t know why I went into the room with Angela.” He reaches for her hand, but she hides it behind her back.
“I’m not sure that honesty is what I want from you at the moment,” she says. “And I don’t want to hear any more apologies.”
Her saying that silences him. The only words that offer themselves are in the nature of regret. If they keep walking together, he suspects, inspiration will extend his vocabulary.
“I’m not forgiving you,” she says.
“No?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why are we taking this walk?”
She pushes him away from her and he staggers with comic exaggeration as if her fairly gentle shove had considerably more force.
“You had that coming,” she says, “and I think you know it.”
“I had worse coming,” he says, finding her hand and pulling it to his side. He waits in suspended time for a teenage couple to move past them.
“I’m warning you,” she says, “if you try to kiss me, you’re looking for trouble.”
He lets her threat hang about on the periphery of consciousness before digesting it. Time passes. She makes a point of t
aking back her hand and returning it to the sanctuary behind her back. They turn the corner. This street is darker than the one they abandoned. After a few more idle steps, sensing his moment, he risks everything.
The Pavilion of Former Wives Page 15