The Doctor's House

by Ann Beattie

  I found him sitting near the back, a folded newspaper on the tabletop, an empty cup of coffee in front of him. He stood and pulled out a chair for me. Whether because of his kindness or my being frazzled at being late, I found myself on the verge of tears. I picked up the menu to use as a sort of curtain between him and me. He suggested that we order lunch. I was flustered. I was supposed to be at the children’s school, to see the art show in which Andrew had won second place. The hour for viewing had almost passed. I would have to reallyhurry, or forget it entirely. So I joined Peter for lunch. We both had toasted cheese sandwiches with tomato. The pointless details the mind retains. . . . He expressed pleasure that I meant to take the course the following year. He kept returning to the subject of my leaving, though, rephrasing his question about why I had dropped out.

  Finally, he got to the point. He said that he had found my husband’s manner, on the phone, threatening. He had been puzzled that Frank referred to himself in the third person.The doctor does not admire failure, Frank had apparently said to Peter. Peter wanted to know whether Frank was mocking him, or mocking himself. I was taken aback—not so much by what Peter had said, but because I was Frank’s wife, and I didn’t know what to do: try to defend my husband—he did not mock people—or admit to this man who was almost a stranger that I did not always understand everything my husband did. I tried to evade his question. “He’s quite adamant about everyone doing their best,” I said. Peter looked at me. He did not ask again about Frank. Before we left, though, he said that he wanted me to know that I had a friend, if anything was—he hesitated—wrong, he finally said.

  I don’t remember how we got out of the restaurant. He must have paid. He might even have said that he would call me again. I don’t know. I do know that a week passed in which he did not call, so that when I heard from him again I was relieved, and delighted to hear his voice. It was his idea that we see a movie together. I knew that if Frank found out, there would be hell to pay. But still, I understood my own motivations. Frank had nothing to worry about. So I went. We sawThe Misfits. We were both impressed by how good itwas. Stunned, really. You expected Marilyn Monroe to be cast in a particular sort of role, but she was not.

  All that spring we went to movies. We went until Peter’s mother became ill in Pittsburgh. He told me that she had been suffering for years with emphysema. The day after we saw what I didn’t know would be the last movie we were ever to see together, as he intended to fly to Pennsylvania. He took the ticket out of his breast pocket and put it on the table like a child presenting you with something curious he had not yet encountered. He asked me if I would keep his dog while he was away. I thought: What kind of a friend would I be, if I refused to do him that favor, while his mother was so sick? I realized that I had not known much about his life: that his mother lived in Pittsburgh; that he had a pet. I said that I would be pleased to take the dog. That he could drop the dog by the house. I hoped that he and Frank might get along, if they actually met.

  But he had anticipated my answer. He already had the dog in the car. I hadn’t expected that. I had expected . . . what? Some time to get used to the idea? A few hours, during which I’d mull over a way to tell Frank that my former teacher was coming by, to drop off his dog for a few days? I took a deep breath and decided that taking care of a dog could not be very difficult. I walked to his car with him, and he opened the back door, taking a leash out of his pocket and leaning in to fasten it to the dog’s collar.

  The dog was a mutt. A nice, placid dog. There was a big bag of dry dog food that Peter transferred from his car to mine. I patted the dog, which seemed docile enough. Rather large, but I’d always been afraid of those high-strung littledogs. Of all things, the dog’s name was Molly. I warmed to her immediately, just because she had that name. I tried not to appear flustered, leading the animal on its leash. Fortunately, the dog walked as tentatively as I did. At my car, Molly seemed unwilling to get in, but Peter coaxed her gently, snapping his fingers, and finally Molly jumped onto the seat.

  The dog whimpered as I drove away. I felt like a criminal. The poor animal was so distraught. I talked to it, reassured it with explanations it didn’t understand. She, notit. Frank was the one who called the dogit, and acted as if I’d taken in a leper. It was almost funny, how much the presence of my friend’s dog rattled him. He wanted me to boardit, but the children adored the dog. Even Frank picked his battles. He was disdainful, really, because of the dog’s owner, not because of the dog. He didn’t want anyone in my life except himself, and Molly’s presence indicated that I had more of a relationship with my ex-teacher than he’d realized. I thought he would go on a rampage. That was my worst fear. But instead, he became amorous. He was in my bedroom night after night. The dog was an aphrodisiac to Frank.

  Peter had asked me to keep her for a week. At the end of that time, he called and asked if I could keep her for a few more days: his mother was dying. His voice was strained. The phone call was brief. As we spoke, the children were outside, playing games with the dog. Andrew had spent his own money to get a brush for Molly. Even coldhearted Nina wrapped her arms around Molly’s neck. I knew it was going to be a problem returning the dog. Days passed, a week passed, and then a call came from a friend of Peter’s. Peterwas delayed in Pittsburgh, he said, and had asked him to pick up the dog. I assured him that there was no need to do that. “Well, I’m the co-owner,” he said. “I’ve been in Michigan on business, but I’m back now.”

  A co-owner? I asked the man to call back, but he was adamant: he needed to pick up the dog that evening. He intended to take the dog when he drove to Pittsburgh, to join Peter. He sounded perturbed, the more I hesitated. Finally, I made myself a silent promise: if the dog did not indicate she knew him, I would find a way, whatever it took, not to release her.

  Only Nina was home when the man came. Frank was usually home by six, but that night he was not. Andrew had returned and gone out again, to the library. I didn’t have the heart to tell him Molly might not be there when he returned. I had a drink and tried to calm down. What was I going to do if the man seemed strange, and there was no one there to support me? Nina saw me sipping my drink, and went directly to her room. I followed her, wanting to ask her advice, but she would not open her door, and I thought: It would serve her right if something terrible happened. If this man coming for the dog was a dognapper.

  He was not. He was a short, slight man, with an acnescarred face and dyed blond hair. The dog was overjoyed to see him. The man fussed over the dog. Feeling sad, I got some twine and wrapped it around the bag of dog food. I patted the happy dog, which seemed already to have forgotten me. “We’ll go back to the apartment and get my stuff and set off tonight, Molly,” the man crooned. Nina must have heard the commotion. Why didn’t she come down?Why stay upstairs until they departed, then descend to glare at me with her cold eyes? It would have been better if she had said good-bye, but Nina always had the ability to pretend painful things weren’t happening. Whatever anguish she felt she saved for Andrew. She said nothing to me at all when she finally came downstairs, even though I sat in the living room, bereft.

  Though I heard from Peter again, he only called to say that his mother had died and that he would be leaving his job at the end of the semester and moving to Michigan. He said this in such a way that I knew he did not want to be questioned. He thanked me profusely for caring for the dog. At the end of the tense call, he said, “I want you to know that wherever I go, you still have a friend.”

  For months after that, I had nightmares in which the dog was found buried under mounds of trash. I would wake up amid tangled sheets I’d kicked aside, my feet digging for her. It would take a drink to get me back to sleep. The dreams persisted until finally the anxiety they caused me erased almost all fondness I’d had for Molly’s owner. What had it all been about? I kept asking myself. His singling me out in the first place. Our shared enthusiasms. Our guilty pleasure in going to movies, goofing off. Our toasted sandwiches, for all that.<
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  The more time passed, the more I began to feel embarrassed. I was so glad Frank never discovered what had gone on. I must have been crazy to risk his discovering the extent of my friendship with another man. I was also grateful that Frank hadn’t seen the man who came to reclaim the dog. In time, I decided that Peter and I had been fated to meet. Hehad come along at a time when I was feeling low, and flattered me by his attention. I had needed someone to acknowledge that I was special, and his attention had done that. In time the nightmares ended, and I allowed myself to think more fondly of him. I thought that perhaps he had been like the brother I never had. It gave me some insight into Nina’s closeness to Andrew. It made me more at ease about their private bond.

  But about the dog . . . I don’t think Andrew or Nina ever forgave me for giving back the dog. It must have signified to them that I would do other things behind their backs, that I couldn’t be depended on. Like so many things, Peter and the situation with the dog was a blessing in one way, and a curse in another.

  Why do I say that my relationship with Peter was anything like Andrew and Nina’s relationship? It was not.

  Why think of it at all?

  Why think that after all this time, somewhere a bottle will be tossed overboard with a note inside, and that note will miraculously find its way into my hands. What would I even want such a note to say? “Come away with me and my faithful dog and my blond-haired friend, and vanish into . . .” What? Into another version of Nina’s fairyland? Her watercolor world where smudges possessed a clarity more real than human figures?

  I knew my husband all too well, and my children only when they were truly children. I have frozen them in time before I stopped knowing them. I remember them when they needed me. They didn’t really cry as they got older, but they let me know they might have. Nina’s cold squint kepttears back; Andrew’s puzzled frown did the same. How their faces were transformed when Molly the dog arrived. When she left, it was as if I’d done the most traitorous thing a mother could ever do; it was as if I’d given their childhood away.

  The fairy sprinkled fairy dust on the dog’s head. She said, “We’ll keep it our secret that now you can fly. The ghost and I have magic powers. The important thing is to believe in them even if the other person stops believing. But don’t feel bad. I would never do that. I am giving you the last of my fairy dust so all three of us can have special powers. Put your paws forward and keep your back legs close together. Fly. Then pass through other galaxies where the stars are Hershey’s kisses. From far away you will appear so small that people will mistake you for a shooting star. The sky is not blue there. It is black but it is not scary. The air you fly through will be as soft as the ghost’s skin. You have no reason to be afraid.”

  WHENNINA ANDIWERE YOUNG,there had been elaborate signals between us. We mimed sentences with a gesture, passing each other in the hallway. We fought, but we always kept our secrets. We were capable of reading each other’s minds when it was necessary—as it was, so often—for one of us to answer for the other. If our mother wanted to know why Nina was coming home late from school, I would be able to turn my best guess into an assertion—usually correctly enough that on questioning, Nina wouldn’t contradict me. Our mother, unlike our father, had no reason to want to trip us up, though. She wanted everything to go smoothly; she really didn’t want to focus on either of us, with the exception of my being useful as her late-night companion. Our father, also, wanted us out of his thoughts, unless he decided it was better to lick the thorn in his side. You could never be sure, though, when something was festering. Sometimes it required no time to pass—he acted the minute the thorn pierced him. Other times, it was as if he decided to stop and take note of what sort of shape he was in. When he did that, a major problem was always found. There was simple punishment for sloppiness, such as towels left over the backs of chairs, or boots stepped out of in the middle of the hallway.But for things that he thought affected him—meaning, Nina’s and my actions—he found it necessary to complicate the punishment, and to make sure he punished himself in the process. Maybe punishment provided its own kind of relief. Maybe digging his feet in distracted him from his more immediate, ongoing problems—such as his terrible relationship with his wife. In any case, he became such a parody of the concerned parent that his meanness built in his pressure cooker of a brain until it led to an explosion. Orgasmic release, even.

  Quite the notion. One of Mac’s observations years after the fact, not my own.

  My sister is a person you have to take on her own terms. If you visit and she doesn’t feel like talking, she will simply declare talk off limits and insist that you sit silently and listen to music. I’m sympathetic, of course; she’s had to take care of herself since Mac died, and within the confines of her house, she sets her own rules. Sensitive people, like my former fiancée, Serena, realize that Nina isn’t standoffish, but shy. “Traumatized” would be a better word. Through the years, some of those people have tried to extend themselves, hoping to bring her out of herself. Serena had more luck than anyone else, so perhaps it is natural that Nina blames me for Serena’s departure, which meant the end of their friendship. For a long time Nina has refused to meet anyone new I’m going out with. I think it would be wrong to mislead her, though, and pretend that because she doesn’t have a social life, I don’t either.

  Like so many people in distress, Nina denies that she is.She has no perspective on what she’s doing when she insists that our mother has rejected her, when she’s the one who has rejected our mother. Nina insisted on selling our parents’ house immediately when our father died, having long ago convinced herself that our mother was senile, which is also her excuse for not visiting her.

  “How is your sister?” my mother always asks when I call. “How is the old maid?”

  I tell her Nina is involved in a great romance. One I’m not allowed to disclose any details of. It’s become my standard response, and since I’ve said it so often, my mother has come to suspect that there may be some truth in it. When Hound figures it out, I might finally be telling my mother the truth. But as it stands now, I no longer report to Nina on my visits to my mother. If Nina defines our mother as a senile alcoholic who watches daytime TV, I don’t point out that she, herself, turns on the TV the moment she rises.

  My mother has decided that Mac’s death was, in effect, the death of her daughter—a notion close to the truth. Mac was always so hopeful when he talked to Nina about her childhood: he thought that through the power of positive thinking, he could convince her that she was nowhere near as damaged as she thought. When he talked to me privately, he was appalled. He loved my sister, but he knew she was an enormous undertaking. It wasn’t just at the track that he gambled.

  After the breakup of my relationship with Serena, I saw a porn movie on late-night TV about a woman who decidesto look up boys from high school, and I decided that however ludicrous the movie was, the idea, itself, was interesting. As coincidence would have it, not long afterward Josie Bower contacted me. Through the years I had seen some of the people from high school—running into them on the street; calling one or two when I was going to be in their part of the world—but Josie was the only significant person from those days who’d ever gotten in touch with me, even though it had only been by way of mailing an invitation to a high school reunion. I didn’t want to go, but it got me thinking about her again, and about the past, which I thought I looked at pretty squarely, as I always try to do. My father looked at things so squarely, everything he saw was framed in negativity; my mother never looked at anything she could avoid confronting. Nina hedged her bets: she had one standard for me—perfection—and another, much lower standard for people she intuited might harm her. Nothing could be done about our father, but she had good radar for avoiding those people otherwise.

  The day the announcement arrived, I was a little suprised there was no personal note, but because I’d never been contacted previously, I figured the invitation was pointed, and that Josi
e would like to see me again. She might even have heard that I’d looked up a few people from high school over the years—girls, I’ll admit, though I never had any intention of living my own version of the porn movie. When I got her letter, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions, but I thought—considering what she and I had been through together—that at the very least, it would be interesting to meet again as adults. I can usually be counted on to be my own worstenemy, as Serena would tell anyone who’d listen. If so, it was predictable that I’d follow through with Josie. I subscribe to the Chinese curse of wishing myself an interesting life; considering my mother’s and my sister’s empty lives, I feel the need to at least try to be involved in something interesting.

  I took a day off from work and went to meet Josie when she was traveling. It was her suggestion, but I thought it was a good one. People are different when they’re on the road: cut free from the usual routines, they tend to be more receptive—more open to chance, it seems. If it was true of Josie, of course the same held true for me. I didn’t have an exact scenario, and I hadn’t really tried to imagine one. I was just going to see what it felt like to be with her again. You can’t help but experience some degree of discomfort about being with a person you knew when both of you were young; someone who was part of your life when you didn’t have the sophistication—to be honest, the defenses—to be the cool person you prayed you’d eventually evolve into. When children set off on their bikes they forget the days of training wheels, but no adult ever forgets the struggles of adolescence: every dumb remark, every embarrassing pimple, every moment of paralysis. That adolescent is always there, hovering, needing to be integrated into the person you’ve become.