Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

  Slowly Trudy turns to face the now-rapt audience. All eyes are on her. She sees Clementine and her kind husband, David, toward the back of the room, watching her with real sympathy in their eyes. There’s that nice woman with all the children, Susannah, who signed her petition, and the older couple with the white hair from across the street. She recognizes other faces, too, from the library. All these people watching her, waiting for her to say something brilliant or noteworthy or important. Trudy has no idea what that might be, but she opens her mouth anyway and out come words.

  “Why is change always good? Newer this and bigger that.

  Why is that better? Why do we need to wipe out what we have in service of something we don’t? I love that park.” And here Trudy is mortified to find that her eyes may be filling with tears. “And I’m not the only one. If we build those disgusting cement boxes, will anyone say, ‘Oh, I love my condo. It’s so beautiful. It gives me such pleasure.’ Will anyone say that?” And Trudy answers her own question. “Only if there’s something seriously wrong with their use of language! People love living things—children, nature …” Now her voice falls to a whisper. “Other people …,” and she realizes she has to go sit down or she’s going to be in trouble. But her legs are refusing to work. She looks out over the crowd and her eyes find Fred’s. He’s been watching her intently and somehow he knows she’s in trouble. She can see it in his face.

  Trudy whispers, “Other people” one more time and watches as Fred stands up, a short, graying, tidy man who finds within himself the ability to shout in this packed auditorium, “Yes!” as if he were affirming a preacher’s call to arms. “Yes, we need to save the park!”

  A couple seated behind Fred stands up quickly and claps. Then another, and a woman in the front row, and then Clemmie and David, and then a whole row of people, and more and more, and through it all Trudy keeps her eyes on Fred, who doesn’t turn his eyes away from hers and slowly he smiles at her and slowly she heaves an enormous sigh of relief as she realizes she can now walk back to her seat and stand next to him. The fact that she’s getting applause doesn’t even register until she’s by his side.

  Wishing

  I LOVED A MAN ONCE. LOVING HIM TOOK ME by surprise. He wasn’t the man I was supposed to love, but he was the man who swept me away.

  I showed up at his front door with no expectations. A friend had recommended me, that’s what Owen had said when he called. “Michael’s two beagles are in love with you.”

  I had been walking Huey and Dewey for the past year and Owen, newly returned to the house he owned in L.A., needed someone to walk his dog. That’s what I did to pay the rent back then. The rest of the time I tried to write.

  “I’m afraid it’s a big dog,” he said in that first phone call.

  “I walk big dogs as well.”

  “A very big dog.”

  “Maybe I’ll charge by the pound, then,” I said and he laughed. I liked that—that he laughed.

  I STOOD IN FRONT OF A SMALL Spanish house, most likely built in the 1920s, with a large arched living room window facing the street and two or three bedrooms hidden behind in a separate wing. If you had lived in Los Angeles for as long as I had, you knew these houses. They had thick walls and curved doorways, beautiful hardwood floors, and high, pitched ceilings in the public rooms.

  I rang the doorbell and immediately heard the manic scatter of a dog’s nails on wood and some serious deep-pitched barking. And then Owen opened the door and I was presented with both of them, jockeying for position in the open doorway—the dog, enormous as promised, and the man slender and apologetic.

  My immediate thought was that this was absolutely the wrong dog for this man. There was a dissonance about it—large, powerful, willful dog and besieged, boyish owner.

  “Bandit, sit!” Owen said firmly. The tone was right. The dog ignored him. “Sit!” was said in a louder voice with the same result. “Excuse me,” Owen said to me and closed the door. I heard scuffling and Owen’s voice repeating the command to sit and then silence. Slowly the door opened to reveal a now-seated, extremely hairy, huge-headed, eighty-five-pound black dog and a somewhat more composed man in his late thirties facing me. His dark hair was cut short and framed a sharp-featured face that carried a hint of the child he must have been—animated and curious.

  “He’s a Briard …” Owen said, an attempt at an explanation.

  “I can see that.”

  “Do you know the breed?”

  “Smart, spirited, devoted,” I said.

  “Pushy, dominant, stubborn,” he countered with.

  I nodded. Briards could be all those things. “You didn’t know that when you got him?”

  “I sort of inherited him. From a friend.”

  “And you couldn’t say, ‘No thanks’?”

  He shrugged, then grinned at me, somehow amused at the predicament he’d gotten himself into. “Obviously not.”

  And we both turned and examined the still-seated dog, whose eyes had never left Owen’s face.

  DURING THOSE FEW YEARS I WALKED DOGS for a living I discovered you could learn an awful lot about a person by walking into their empty house. Most people have no idea how revealing all the detritus of their life is: which magazines they subscribe to, whether they make their bed, what they choose to leave out on their bathroom sink, what they had for breakfast that’s still sitting on the kitchen counter. I never snooped. I had a firm rule against opening medicine cabinets and dresser drawers, but what was in plain view was usually enough to give me some substantial clues.

  In Owen’s house there was practically nothing. A dining room table, round and made of oak, with two mismatched chairs. A living room empty of furniture, the floor covered by a worn but still beautiful old rug in shades of deep blue. One bedroom held a bed, pristine white walls, and nothing else. A second bedroom was completely outfitted as a working office—desk, gray metal filing cabinets, several phone lines, bulging manila folders stacked on a bookcase. On his kitchen counter were several bottles of unopened wine and a box of Cheerios. On the refrigerator there was a snapshot of a little girl, maybe three, at the beach, her blond hair wispy and blown by the wind, squinting into the camera and holding out a starfish by one of its legs. His child? There was no way to know.

  THE ARRANGEMENTS WE MADE WERE THESE—I would walk Bandit five days a week, middle of the day, unless I heard from Owen. He gave me a key and said anytime between noon and two would be fine with him and Bandit. There was a dog park not too far from his house, and if I wanted to take Bandit there and let him run around, that would be fine, too.

  The first few days I showed up, Owen was at the door to greet me, always polite, always grateful, and somehow rueful that I was doing this task for him, as if he felt he should be walking his own dog. But gradually, as I became a fixture, I saw less and less of him. Most days as I walked up the front path, I would see Bandit through the large living room window dancing with excitement, running back and forward from the window to the front door. As I would let myself in, Owen would yell hello from his office but not emerge.

  My relationship began with Bandit and that was fine with me. It was no accident that I was struggling to master a profession that required a single-mindedness of purpose and a self-imposed isolation. I relished the solitary hours each day broken only by conversation with the canines I walked. People were harder. I exhausted myself trying to meet expectations I was sure they had of me—perpetual good humor, constant attentiveness, smart conversation, and never a moment of neediness. All the dogs asked of me is that I show up on time and get them out of the house quickly. That I could do without breaking a sweat.

  WALKING BANDIT MADE IT ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that Owen wasn’t much good with boundaries. The Briard was affectionate and rambunctious but obviously believed he had as much right to make decisions and lead discussions as I did. He would not turn left when we hit the sidewalk in front of the house, because the dog park loomed several blocks to the right. He would listen to my f
irm and calm voice telling him to sit at each intersection and then blithely pull me across the street. No one had broken the news to him that he was a dog and, as such, was supposed to take his lead from the humans in his life.

  I could tell without ever sharing a personal conversation that Owen valued spontaneity over protocol and exuberance over orderliness and that rules held no sway in his universe. I had found my polar opposite.

  For most of my life I felt as though I was in the middle of a military maneuver—doing what was asked of me, never straying outside the lines, and avoiding anything that would garner undue notice. The only time I ever felt free was when I was writing. Maybe because it felt like a secret and slightly subversive activity, I carried no rules over to that realm. And allowed no one else in. I was still at that tentative, terrifying stage where I wanted to be able to write but had no confidence I would be able to master the mystery of it. I carried the kernel of that desire within me at all times. Sometimes it was all that pushed me forward—that incipient desire.

  AS I LOOK BACK ON IT NOW, the first strong feeling I had about Owen was envy. When I would let myself into his house and gather Bandit’s leash from the front hall closet, I would often hear Owen laughing on the phone, a rolling, infectious sound that ended with hiccups of glee. It was the freedom in that laugh that drew me in. And I would hear it a lot. If only, I thought at times, if only I could be free enough to laugh like that.

  I gradually picked up, from overheard snippets of conversation, that he worked in the nonprofit world grant writing or fund-raising, something like that, something that relied on social skills and networking and a passionate belief in the goodness of the cause. I heard the charm and the laughter in his voice and the long periods of listening he did on the phone often punctuated with “Yes, that’s exactly right!” making the listener feel he had managed to say something brilliant.

  It was his voice, I would have to say, that first drew me toward him, his voice which carried the lilt of his spirit. I would often stop with my hand on Bandit’s leash and listen to the rise and fall of Owen’s voice and wait for the laugh and the “Yes! Yes!” as he validated whoever was speaking, and then I could snap the leash to Bandit’s collar and let him lead me out the front door.

  I didn’t give all this much thought at the time. I was supremely self-involved, as only beginning writers can be. My few friends from college who would have forced me outside my isolation had scattered after graduation—back to hometowns far from L.A. or to jobs in other big cities—making it only easier to ignore the rest of the world. Only Jennie, my college roommate, was still close by, but she had moved in with a new boyfriend and had very little time right then for our friendship.

  I didn’t mind. It felt as though all that was essential for my survival happened in those quiet morning hours before the rest of the world was stirring and my obligations began. From the corner of my tiny second-floor bedroom where I had set up my desk, I would watch the sky lighten and the sun spill over the Hollywood Hills in the distance and I would write and despair and write some more and finally despair too much. Had I managed to write an acceptable paragraph in three hours? Should I pare down the opening of my story? What happens next to my characters? What happens?

  My head was always full of a completely made-up universe that felt so much more compelling than the mundane world I inhabited. That may be why, one day when I went to return Bandit, I didn’t notice glass shards glistening along the driveway like a trail of diamonds.

  Owen had been gone when I picked up Bandit. That wasn’t unusual. I knew immediately when I let myself in that the house was empty, Owen’s absence as great a presence as his actual being. Bandit more than made up for the quiet with barking leaps of happiness. He jumped as if his legs were made of springs, encircling me with a pent-up energy that directed me straight to the dog park.

  We were gone a little more than an hour. That’s usually the time it took for Bandit to flop down at my feet, long pink tongue hanging sideways out of his mouth, utterly spent from running circles around the perimeter of the park and tumbling across the grass with whichever dog would comply. His prostrate body was my cue to stand up, attach his leash, and begin the slow walk home.

  I was filling Bandit’s water dish in the laundry room when I heard Owen’s car pull up. I lingered. I had to admit to myself that I lingered so that we would see each other as he came in. Our conversations were always inconsequential, but something about them sustained me through the rest of my solitary day. Often he’d tell me something he’d just done and I would laugh with him. Or I would give him a report on Bandit’s exercise and he would listen as attentively as if I were divulging national security secrets.

  This day, though, he came into the house, worried, his face dark and his energy tight.

  “There’s glass on the driveway.”

  And in the next second his eyes found the broken kitchen window and his face melted with recognition. It was only then that I also saw the vandalism.

  “It must have happened while we were gone. Bandit wouldn’t have let anyone in otherwise.”

  “Unless it was someone he knew,” Owen said as he walked through the kitchen and into the other rooms of the house. He didn’t invite me but I followed, and when we ended up in his office I saw that one of the windows in that room had been left open, the screen pushed out, as if someone had exited the house that way.

  Owen scanned his files, the paperwork on his desk, double-checking that it was all there.

  “Is anything missing?”

  “No.”

  And then his eyes settled on the bookshelf where the bottles of wine from the kitchen had been arranged on the top in the shape of an arrow pointing to the open window. “This was meant as a message.”

  “Telling you what?”

  “Just announcing his presence.”

  “You know some strange people.”

  “I used to.”

  And then, because there was a moment of awkward silence—I didn’t know what to say and he wasn’t about to elaborate—he asked me, “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  I said yes although I never drank tea. I said yes because he still seemed upset. I said yes because I didn’t want to leave.

  We sat at his round dining room table in the two mismatched chairs. Bandit slept at Owen’s feet, snoring slightly from time to time. The tea Owen made us was some kind of herbal concoction and I didn’t like it, but I sipped it anyway.

  “What do you do with the rest of your time?” Owen asked me.

  “I walk other people’s dogs.”

  “And when you’re not doing that?”

  I hesitated. My morning hours at my desk were so sequestered from the rest of my life I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him, and so I was slow to answer.

  “Is it illegal?”

  And that made me laugh. “No, just fragile,” I said.

  And he nodded as if he understood. “Just being born?”

  “Yes.”

  “And each day, you’re not sure it won’t all collapse and there you will be, back where you started without anything to show for all your effort.”

  I just looked at him without answering—how did he get inside my head?

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  He was looking directly at me as he spoke, his brown eyes never left my face. He was wearing a blue shirt, I remember, bright blue with the cuffs rolled up on strong forearms. His body leaned forward over the table and his naked hands cupped his mug of tea. He was waiting with infinite patience. The rest of the world receded to the periphery of my consciousness and in that moment there was only the two of us sitting in this high-ceilinged room looking at each other. It unnerved me—the intensity of his interest, the answering pull within me that I suddenly recognized. What was happening here?

  I stood up quickly, took my mug of tea to the kitchen sink, and only then managed to say, without looking at him, trying to keep my voice light, “Oh, I’m messing about trying to write
some short stories.”

  He followed me into the kitchen. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes … when I get it right.” Then the truth: “Yes, it is.” And we smiled at each other.

  THAT DAY SHIFTED OUR ROUTINE, imperceptibly, but definitely. After that, oftentimes if he wasn’t on the phone, we would sit at Owen’s oak table and drink tea, and then coffee when I finally confessed that caffeine was my lifeline, and we would talk. He seemed to be home more often, and I made sure I had no dogs waiting for me in the early afternoon.

  What did we talk about? At first it was our work lives. I learned about the nonprofit, Art into Life, that convinced him to come back to California and fund-raise for them. Their mission was to pair working artists—writers, painters, poets, architects, photographers—with afterschool programs in the city schools. It was a way for kids who had never been to a museum or read a book that wasn’t assigned in school to see, learn, and try out their creative wings. The organization was in its third year of operation, long enough to convince the community that they were viable, but not yet at the stage to make the kind of impact they envisioned. That’s where Owen came in.

  Living and working in New York, Owen had been employed by a small family foundation that gave out yearly grants to carefully chosen artists, three or four at a time. The last awards had gone to a weaver who created wall hangings from used denim, a glass artist who constructed Tiffany-style lamps, and a conceptual artist who used found sites—an abandoned gas station, a crumbling factory—to stage his work. All very well and good, Owen said, supporting an individual artist’s work, but when this job came to him he decided reaching kids at an early age was an even better idea, and he came back to L.A. where he had lived before, and reclaimed the house he had been renting out.

  I wondered if the person who had broken into the house had been his renter, communicating something like You made me leave with those wine bottles arranged in an arrow and pointing out the window. Whoever did it was angry, that much was clear.