Daphne came around the chair and sat on his knee, draped her arm over his shoulder.
“How often do you do this? Rob houses, I mean.”
“I do it when I need the money,” he said.
“When was the last time?” Her face was close enough that he could smell the liquor on her breath.
“A while ago,” he said. “Could I have another sip of that?” She helped him with the glass. He felt the scotch behind his eyes. The truth was he’d done an apartment house just last week, waited at the door for somebody to buzz him up, then broke the locks on the places where no one was home. Just now, however, he didn’t see the percentage in the truth. He said, “I only ever do rich people and I give half my take to Jerry’s Kids.”
Daphne socked him in the chest.
“Ha, ha,” she said.
“Isn’t that what you want to hear?” he said. “Right? You’re looking for a reason to let me go?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
He shrugged. “Who’s to say it isn’t true?”
“Jerry’s Kids,” she said.
She was smiling and he smiled back. He couldn’t help liking this girl. He liked that she was smart and that she wasn’t too afraid of him. He liked that she had the guts to bullshit the police.
“Ha, ha,” he said.
Daphne knocked back the last of the scotch, then skated her socks over the hardwood floor, headed for the window.
“Do you have a car?” she said, parting the curtains. “I don’t see a car.”
“I’m around the block,” he said.
“What do you drive?”
“Honda Civic.”
Daphne raised her eyebrows.
“It’s inconspicuous,” he said.
She skated back over to his chair and slipped her hand into his pocket and rooted for his keys. Cashdollar flinched. There were only two keys on the ring, his car and his apartment. For some reason, this embarrassed him.
“It really is a Honda,” Daphne said.
There was a grandfather clock in the corner but it had died at half past eight who knew how long ago and his watch was out of sight beneath the duct tape and Cashdollar was beginning to worry about the time. He guessed Daphne had been gone for twenty minutes, figured he was safe till after midnight, figured her father and his lady friend would at least ring in the New Year before calling it a night. He put the hour around 11:00 but he couldn’t be sure and for all he knew, Daphne was out there joyriding in his car and you couldn’t tell what might happen at a party on New Year’s Eve. Somebody might get angry. Somebody might have too much to drink. Somebody might be so crushed with love they couldn’t wait another minute to get home. He went on thinking like this until he heard what sounded like a garage door rumbling open and his mind went blank and every ounce of his perception was funneled down into his ears. For a minute, he heard nothing—he wasn’t going to mistake silence for safety a second time—then a door opened in the kitchen and Daphne breezed into the room.
“Took me a while to find your car,” she said.
She had changed clothes for her foray into the world. Now, she was wearing an electric blue parka with fur inside the hood, white leggings, and knee-high alpine boots.
“What time is it?” he said.
But she passed through without stopping, disappeared into the next room.
“You need to let me go,” he said.
When she reappeared, she was carrying a stereo speaker, her back arched under its weight. He watched her go into the kitchen. She returned a minute later, empty-handed, breathing hard.
“I should’ve started small,” she said.
He looked at her. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a good thing you’ve got a hatchback.”
For the next half hour, she shuttled between the house and the garage, bearing valuables each trip, first the rest of the stereo, then the TV and the VCR, then his pillowcase of silverware, then an armload of expensive-looking suits, and on and on until Cashdollar was certain that his car would hold no more. Still she kept it up. Barbells, golf clubs, a calfskin luggage set. A pair of antique pistols. A dusty classical guitar. A baseball signed by someone dead and famous. With each passing minute, Cashdollar could feel his stomach tightening and it was all he could do to keep his mouth shut but he had the sense that he should leave her be, that this didn’t have anything to do with him. He pictured his little Honda bulging with the accumulated property of another man’s life, flashed to his apartment in his mind: unmade bed, lawn chairs in the living room, coffee mug in the sink. He made a point of never holding on to anything anybody else might want to steal. There was not a single thing in his apartment that it would hurt to lose, nothing he couldn’t live without. Daphne swung back into the room, looking frazzled and exhausted, her face glazed with perspiration.
“There.” She huffed at a wisp of hair that had fallen across her eyes.
“You’re crazy,” Cashdollar said.
Daphne dismissed him with a wave.
“You’re out of touch,” she said. “I’m your average sophomore.”
“What’ll you tell the cops?”
“I like Stockholm Syndrome but I think they’re more likely to believe you made me lie under threat of death.” She took the parka off, draped it on a chair, lifted the hem of her sweatshirt to wipe her face—exposing her belly, the curve of her ribs—pressed it first against her right eye, then her left, as if dabbing tears.
“I’ll get the scissors,” Daphne said.
She went out again, came back again. The tape fell away like something dead. Cashdollar rubbed his wrists a second, pushed to his feet and they stood there looking at each other. Her eyes, he decided, were the color of a jade pendant he had stolen years ago. That pendant pawned for $700. It flicked through his mind that he should kiss her and that she would let him but he restrained himself. He had no business kissing teenage girls. Then, as if she could read his thoughts, Daphne slapped him across the face. Cashdollar palmed his cheek, blinked the sting away, watched her doing a girlish bob and weave, her thumbs tucked inside her fists.
“Let me have it,” she said.
“Quit,” he said.
“Wimp,” she said. “I dropped you twice.”
“I’m gone,” he said.
Right then, she poked him in the nose. It wouldn’t have hurt so much if she hadn’t already hit him with the toilet lid but as it was, his eyes watered up, his vision filled with tiny sparkles. Without thinking, he balled his hand and punched her in the mouth, not too hard, a reflex, just enough to sit her down, but right away he felt sick at what he’d done. He held his palms out, like he was trying to stop traffic.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “That was an accident. I’ve never hit a girl. I’ve never hurt anyone in my life.”
Daphne touched her bottom lip, smudging her fingertip with blood.
“This will break his heart,” she said.
She smiled at Cashdollar and he could see blood in the spaces between her teeth. The sight of her dizzied him with sadness. He thought how closely linked were love and pain. Daphne extended a hand, limp-wristed, ladylike. Her nails were perfect.
“Now tape me to the chair,” she said.
Now You See Her
Xavier tells me he is upstairs doing his homework, but I know that he is watching our new neighbor. Grace Poole lives in the town house just across a narrow alley from our own. I was taking trash to the alley on Monday when I noticed my son at our second-story window, his face close enough to the glass to breathe mist onto it. I followed his eyes across the way, and there was Grace Poole, standing naked in her kitchen, sipping from a coffee mug. She gave no indication that she saw me or that she saw my son, perfectly still, entranced, huffing brief ghosts of longing against the pane. Today is Friday, and I’ve been watching her myself ever since. I have the benefit of binoculars.
I believe that I should be angry at him, should sneak up the stairs, right now, kick his door
open, and demand to know what he thinks he’s doing. But I’m not angry. X—he has started calling himself X— is thirteen. I remember thirteen and being full of that strange water, drawn and released by the sight of a woman, tides and moon. X was in such a hurry to get to his window after school that he didn’t even stop to wonder why his old man is home this early in the day. How can I be mad at him? Grace is, at this moment, swimming closer to me through the binocular lenses.
I have often thought about having the talk with my son, about what I would tell him. The birds and the bees, the facts of life. For a man who spent his days talking, my own father, a professor of literature, was surprisingly inarticulate. He was maroon-faced and shifty and read me a poem about love. He tried to establish a connection.
“Do you know what I mean, Byron?” he said. “You know already, right?”
“Sure. I’ve got it covered,” I said. I was twelve and only four years from discovering that I had nothing at all covered.
X has never seemed the right age for that sort of talk. Nine and ten, still too much a boy. Eleven, the year his mother died. My wife, Sarah. I couldn’t get my head around anything that year, except the fact that she was gone. Her absence was everywhere. Dust on the piano keys. Dirty dishes in the sink. A coolness beneath my covers, in place of her body heat. Twelve, our move to the city, to Alexandria, at the beginning of the school year. That seemed weight enough for both our shoulders. I sold the piano. X had a short-lived fling with smoking cigarettes. Now, thirteen, and suddenly he is too old for all that.
It could be that I am avoiding the issue. Nine months ago, I went to the library and xeroxed copies of the male and female anatomy, those full-body biology textbook shots, intending to make my presentation to him. I wanted to keep it clinical, the way I would have shown a customer at my veterinary that their dog was having pregnancy complications. My intention was to leave love out of it. On my way home, I saw a terrifying vision of what I would do when the conversation turned to actual procedure. I pictured myself placing the male copy on top of the female copy, between my hands, and rubbing my palms together. I broke out in a humiliated sweat. I jerked the car over to the curb and slipped the pages into a gutter. X probably knows the basics already. What he doesn’t know, the smooth way morning light looks on a woman’s skin, the way her hair can play between bare shoulder blades, Grace across the way, with her potted daisies on the windowsill, will surely teach him.
* * *
To the uninitiated, it would appear that Grace Poole has renounced clothing altogether. She has dark curly hair, all of it, and wild eyebrows and is so pale as to be distracting. It’s true that she walks from room to room naked. Sleeps and feeds her dog, watches television, and eats breakfast without clothes. Grace spends almost all of her time at home, clothesless. These things I have learned in the four days since I discovered my son’s little secret. And his homework fetish began almost two weeks ago, just about the time our new neighbor arrived.
When she does go out, Grace makes the act of getting dressed something almost unbearably alluring. The slow taking away of my guilty pleasure. She makes her body a secret again, dressing slowly, as if she regretted having to do it at all. A reverse striptease; I imagine balloons inflating around her as she pulls pins out of them. The sight of her rolling panty hose over lightly muscled calves and dimpled knees, tugging them over the crescent folds where her supple thighs meet her bottom, shifting her hips side to side, or standing in the middle of the room, slipping her arms into the sleeves of a clean shirt, buttoning it over her breasts, breaks my heart. I have not seen a naked woman since my wife was alive.
Now, Grace is talking on the telephone. She has six phones, each one a different color, lined up on a card table against her downstairs window. My first thought was phone sex, but that would be too perfect. She is standing behind the table, arms crossed beneath her breasts, lifting her brown nipples, pinning the phone against her shoulder with her cheek. I can just make out the blue earpiece in all that hair. The wall behind her is lined with cardboard boxes, stacked three high, each one imprinted with the same logo—a rust-colored rooster—and writing in Spanish. I hear my son trotting down the stairwell and just have time to drop the shade in my study and stash the binoculars between the chair and my lower back before he opens the door. I can’t get my hands on any documents to look busy, so I stare at the ceiling and pretend that I was daydreaming. Watching Grace seems like daydreaming sometimes, languorous as jasmine.
“Shouldn’t you be working, Dad?” X says. “Somebody’s got to put food on the table around here.” He is standing just inside the room, still in his school uniform, gray slacks and blue shirt, now untucked. X is blond and tan and brown-eyed. He looks exactly like his mother. I try to find traces of myself in him when he doesn’t know I’m watching. While he sleeps, his cheeks flushed with dreaming. At dinner, sitting in front of the television, holding his plate near his chin, his eyes half closing when he lifts a mouthful. Usually, I don’t find anything, and when I do, those things are fleeting, an expression, a gesture, gone almost as soon as I’ve seen them. The sight of him, of his mother in him, makes me feel guilty about watching Grace. He is smiling strangely, and I can’t tell if he is on to me.
“I thought maybe we could do something together after school,” I lie. “I didn’t know you’d have so much homework”.
I say homework in italics, hoping to catch him off guard, to put him on the defensive for a change. He leans into the door frame, shoves a hand into his pocket. I can hear the muffled thump of a tennis ball on the public courts across the street.
“Yeah, well.” He shrugs and looks in the direction of the tennis sounds.
“Besides, I’m on emergency call tonight. I thought an afternoon off would do me some good.” This is the truth. I have become part of an arrangement of the three local vets, where one of us stays on call twenty-four hours on alternating nights. The other offices transfer their emergency patients after business hours. “So, what do you say? Should we go down to the mall and look at that CD player you want?”
He brightens visibly.
“Cool,” he says. “Let me change clothes and we’re gone.”
He pivots on a heel and goes stomping back upstairs.
After my wife died, I moved my son from our farm in Loudon County to this place, a brick town house in Alexandria, anonymous among the rows of similar buildings. Ours wasn’t a working farm, just some land, the old farmhouse and the sagging barns behind it, and a grain silo that Sarah called the Leaning Tower of Loudon. My practice has boomed since our move to the city. My clientele, though, has changed from horses and hearty dogs to mostly cats and those dogs that need constant grooming. Poodles and such, city dogs. I never would have thought that grooming would become a vital part of my practice, but I’ve recently hired an assistant, Sissy, for just that purpose. Sissy is young and attractive and people like her, and the owners of my new patients seem to find something charming, something quaint, in having a country doctor for their pets. I make my manner brusque and forceful and have lately found myself speaking in colloquialisms to fit the part that has been given me. They often ask why a veterinarian, a natural lover of animals, does not have a pet of his own. I mention lack of space and the inclemency of keeping animals confined to the city. A happy dog is a running dog, I say. I made that up. And they nod and look at the floor, guilty in their minds of animal cruelty. They like my subtle scolding.
What I don’t tell them is that I once saw a Siberian husky called Bear run over by a lumber truck, flatbed strapped with skinned trees. This was before X was born, and Sarah and I loved that dog as if he were our child. She would put a plate for him under the dinner table so he could have his meals with us. On cold nights, he slept in the bed between us, his head on a polyester pillow that Sarah bought because it turned out he was allergic to down. All of us slept on polyester pillows. I still do. To console her on the evening of the accident, I had to promise that we would never have another pet.
I’m not certain how serious she was about the promise, whether it was just one of those things people did at a time of tragedy, self-denial as punishment for some implicit fault in the affair, but our farm was without animals until her death.
X found a cat curled up in the grain silo the month after Sarah’s funeral and I gave in to his pleading and let us keep it. The cat was never fond of me, ignored my attempts at affection, hissing at my touch and rushing to X for protection. The cat wouldn’t eat until the kitchen lights were off and I had gone up to bed. Late one night, I went down to the kitchen for a snack and flipped the light switch and surprised him at his bowl. He skittered across the linoleum, out of the little pet door and our lives. We never saw him again. I tried fish, after the cat, for X’s sake, but could never remember to feed them or change their water and when I did remember, I thought of Sarah and the promise that I made.
Grace Poole and her shar-pei, Candle, are new patients of mine. I have never found any truth in the idea that people and their pets come to look alike over time. Candle is all wrinkles and short, wiry hair and full of high-strung motion. They have only been in once, for a flea dip and groom, but Sissy noticed something about Grace immediately. Sissy is nineteen and always teasing me about not dating. While Grace was filling out her paperwork, she pulled me aside and said, “Bingo. That’s the one. Ask her out, Dr. Shaw. We’ll double. You can set me up with that pretty son of yours.”
She also teases X, when he sometimes comes in to earn his allowance after school. Both of us, X and I, clearly enjoy it.
“Can’t. She’s my new neighbor,” I said. “If it didn’t work out, I would always be running into her at the mailbox.”
“If you don’t get a date soon, the customers are going to think you’re gay. Think about what that would do to business,” she said.
After X left for school today, I called the office, told Sissy and my other assistant, Roy, to take the day off, and spent the morning watching Grace. From the window in my study, I can see into her kitchen and living room, but when she went to the second floor, I had to dash up to X’s room and crouch on his bed, where I imagine he must watch her. Our separation on the stairwell was torturous. The dog followed her everywhere. I wondered what my son thinks when he does his spying. I crossed my arms on the sill, the way he does, and pressed my forehead to the cool glass. I pulled his blanket over my shoulders. She must seem to him unreal, a gift so lucky, so fantastic, he can hardly believe in her. I pictured him saying honest prayers that she wouldn’t go away, the image so perfect and fragile that to touch her, to even imagine touching her, might make her come apart in wisps of smoke. X’s return from school confined me to the study, and now I have lied my way into having to leave the house altogether, but I don’t mind really.
Dogfight Page 2