by Marci Vogel
I lifted the receiver, dialed his number. “You don’t owe me any explanations,” I said through the line.
He picked me up in his truck, and we went to this ancient burger place Wilson used to take me to, Friday evenings on his way home from work, whenever my mother was out with the aunts.
The Apple Pan has been on Pico forever, a single room of linoleum and plaid, wood wainscoting, double-hung windows, and ceiling fans. There aren’t any tables, just a big U-shaped counter with red stools all around. You wait on either the left or the right, until someone finishes and a seat opens up.
One waiter works each side of the counter. Wilson and I always ordered from the guy with a thick gold band on his left ring finger. It presses into his skin like he’s been wearing it since he was a very young man. I went in once after Wilson died, and he served me this huge slice of banana cream pie. I’d never been in there alone.
I always order the Steakburger, which is really just a hamburger, I guess. I don’t get cheese, only lettuce, and they don’t have tomato, just ketchup, which I don’t eat on the burger, only a little on my fries. I never drink coffee, but Wilson thought theirs was the best in town. Sometimes he wouldn’t get anything except coffee with cream and a slice of apple pie.
Victor and I take seats on my usual side, and the waiter leans over the counter, nods at us, his ring glinting.
“Coffee, please,” Victor says.
“You?”
“Sure,” I say, “make it two.” The man raises one eyebrow slightly, brings two coffees, two thimbles of thick cream. I pour mine into my cup and watch it rise to the top, spiraling like cool, white echoes.
Veteran
THERE ARE THESE LEGAL holidays you get only if you’re a teacher or a postal worker or banker or some kind of county employee. The rest of the city goes about its business, and it feels a little strange, not working when everyone else is. I usually spend the day cleaning or doing laundry or something off the to-do list. These holidays are usually commemorative in nature, and I don’t know, but I feel a certain obligation.
Wilson was a veteran, and he used to tell me this story about being on leave in Boston before shipping overseas. “Coldest place I’ve ever been. My buddy and I, we couldn’t find dates to save our lives. And we were good-looking guys, too, in our uniforms.”
This year turned out to be more of a sick day than a holiday. I forgot to turn off the alarm on the clock, and when it rang, my throat felt scratchy. I rinsed my face, brushed my teeth, dressed in a heavy sweater and jeans, and drove over to Trader Joe’s for the usual orange juice, tissues, and chicken soup.
The parking lot was packed, everyone else must have also had the day off. They must have also been sick, because there was an empty space where the chicken soup should have been. A worker in a Hawaiian shirt walked by. “Sorry,” he said, “we’ve been out all week. The tomato basil is good if you want to give it a try. Lots of vitamin C.”
I reach for the tomato soup and wait my turn in a long line. The checkout guy asks how I am. “I’ve got a cold,” I say.
“It sure is,” he says. “It looks like rain.”
I ask about the bandage on his left two fingers. “Playing basketball,” he says, “jammed ’em.”
“Sounds painful.”
“Yeah, well. They’re almost healed.”
“Take it easy,” I say, wheeling away my cart.
When I get home, I pour the soup into a saucepan and heat it up on the stove. Little black flecks float to the top. They look like flies at first, but then I remember about the basil.
I’m eating the soup at the coffee table when I see the light blinking on the answering machine. It’s a message from Victor. “Hey, maybe you have the day off? Give me a call, maybe we can go hiking or something.”
Swerve
WE ARE IN THE TRUCK on our way to Solstice Canyon, and I am staring at the middle of Victor’s steering wheel, wondering why it’s smashed in when he tells me he’s the one who did it.
We reach the park entrance, and he parks the truck and we get out, and I say, “Okay, tell me more.”
We start walking. Victor takes a breath. “I deal with depression,” he says. “The serious kind. It’s gotten pretty rough sometimes, Hugo can tell you how much. He’s always been there to help. I take meds, see someone every week.”
“What about Portland?” I ask.
“I signed up to build houses for people who had no place to live, so I went. It’s done me good. I’ve been stable over a year.”
“What about the woman in Eugene?”
“I haven’t always made the best decisions, April. I’m working on it.” He looks up. We’re at the trailhead.
“Me, too,” I say.
And because I don’t want to love another man who kills himself, I ask Victor if he’s ever tried.
“No,” he says, taking my hand. “I promised Hugo I wouldn’t.”
We keep walking, and Victor continues. “I had a younger brother named James. Hugo used to stay with us summers. The neighbors called us the Three Musketeers. The summer Hugo and I were eleven, James drowned. It was an accident. Argos started barking and dove in, it’s how we found him. My parents split up afterward, but Hugo and I promised we’d stay in the world together, just the way we came in.”
We reach the burned-down house with the stone foundation, the one by the creek. We wander up the trail and sit on a flat rock by the waterfall. Victor slips off his pack and hands me a Nalgene bottle. I take a deep swallow and pass it back to him.
Saturation
ABOUT A MONTH AFTER Wilson died, I was washing the Civic with an old V-neck T-shirt of his. It smelled of witch hazel and Vitalis. It soaked into my clothes, my hair, my teeth, into my bones.
“April, my love,” he used to say, “the problems of the world are impossible to solve.” I forgot to turn off the hose and got drenched.
Leap
DON’T YOU BELIEVE he’ll keep his word?” my therapist asks when I tell her the story about Victor’s brother, the depression, his promise to Hugo.
I couldn’t stop sobbing. She waited.
“Yes,” I said finally. “It’s myself I worry about.”
“How do you mean?”
“How do I know it will last, that it’s real?”
“That’s love, April. You never know. You feel.”
Harvest
I DON’T KNOW WHY I thought I could grow anything, but it seemed worth a go.
Victor told me I could sign up for a plot in the community garden down the street from my new apartment. It has a great view, you can see all the way to the ocean. I went to the nursery and bought all kinds of stuff. Gloves, seeds, fertilizer, an assortment of shovels and rakes. I put it all in the trunk of my car.
Victor and I took to walking over in the evenings, after dinner. The first time we went, Victor tore out all the weeds with his bare hands while I watched the sun go down. After that, it became our regular Friday night date. We kept a couple of aluminum and nylon-webbed folding chairs there. We’d sit them in the dirt, watch the pink sky, the glassy ocean.
The Friday after Thanksgiving, we actually drove over. We took all the gear out of the car, turned over the dirt, and emptied a bag of Soil Grow into the ground. The woman in the next plot told us it wasn’t really the season to start a garden, not tomatoes, anyway. I looked up early-winter planting in a book I got from the library: Sunset Easy Guide to Vegetable Gardens. It said lettuce and certain kinds of beans.
“This is California,” Victor said, “plant whatever you want.”
I bought seeds for lettuce, zucchini, and green beans, and drove over to the garden. I followed the directions on the back of the seed packets, planted the zucchini in two lopsided circles, the beans in a small grid. They would need watering more than every Friday.
“It’s best to come in the early morn
ing or evening,” the woman in the next plot told me. “If you’re going to be here in the afternoons, you’ll need a hat.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
About every two days, I drove over to the garden after work, put on my blue denim hat, and watered the dirt. By the next Friday, the beans had sprouted. I showed Victor.
“Beans put in the ground will do that,” he said.
In another week or so, the zucchini plants poked up, and the beans were ready to pick. I cooked them that evening for dinner. We each got twelve beans.
Later, we walked over to the garden to see the bright orange flowers on the zucchini plants. It was getting dark early now, and the petals glowed like huge orange bugs in the twilight.
The next week, I had a big project at work, and by the following Friday, everything had wilted from no water. I was miserable with failure. Victor kissed me, held my hand all the way back to the apartment.
The next day, I got the yearly Jewish New Year’s letter from Esther and Saul, elderly cousins of my father’s. Three months late, the letter had been forwarded to my new place. It was written all in capital letters.
WHAT IS GOING ON IN OUR GARDEN: THINGS ARE NOT GOING TOO WELL. WE HAD SOME CABBAGE BUT IT TASTED BITTER; THE TOMATO PLANTS STARTED OUT VERY GOOD BUT BY THE TIME THE FRUIT CAME THE PLANTS WILTED SO IT COULD HAVE BEEN THE HEAT OR A FUN-GUS IN THE SOIL. THE FIG TREE IS DOING VERY WELL EXCEPT THE GREEN FIGS THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO TASTE SWEET ARE NOT. WE ALWAYS HAVE A ROSE ON OUR DINING ROOM TABLE.
Diagram of Dogs
VICTOR’S DOG Argos was named after the dog in the Odyssey, which is what Victor was reading when he found him as a puppy, abandoned on the street. They’d been together a long time, Argos and Victor, eighteen years. Long before me. Long before any woman. Any girl, even. It was boys only for a long time, and they didn’t mind, those boys.
Victor’s Argos was a graceful chocolate Lab mix, with a deeply curved chest and majestic head. He stood as high as my hip and had a sly way of nudging underneath my hand so as to start me petting his ears, symmetrical, heart-shaped.
They lived in a little studio off Libby and Hugo’s garage, where Victor made furniture for hours, shaping and sanding his imagination into tables and desks, cabinets and chairs. Argos spent most of his time sleeping on layers of cotton quilted moving blankets. Whenever I’d visit, he’d hobble over to wherever Victor and I were kissing and squeeze himself in between us, the oil from his fur turning whatever I was wearing brown. Victor’s clothes would be brown already, stained with Argos and a fine layer of sawdust.
The workshop was jammed with stuff. There were piles of wood stacked on either side of the door, lumber thick as telephone poles, along with saws and machinery, all kinds of things I didn’t know how to use, tools with sharp edges and unfamiliar names, jigs, jointers, clamps, and planes. Everything was dirty, dangerous, or noisy, and it all smelled of slightly damp brown fur.
If I was around when Victor was working one of the saws, he took care to wear protective goggles and big plastic ear covers that made him look as if he were ready to take off flying. Argos’s hearing was nearly gone by then, the machines never bothered him.
Some nights, Victor drove to my place and left Argos asleep on the blankets. One evening, after we’d washed the dishes and curled up on the couch, he told me Argos was dying. “He’s not eating, April. He falls down and can’t get up without my helping him. I don’t know what to do,” he said, choking up. I said I’d find out, and Victor drove back so Argos wouldn’t be alone.
The next day, I went to a vet’s office we’d passed on the way to the garden. It had a dog’s entrance and a cat’s entrance, but I didn’t have an animal with me and I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just stood there. In the end, I chose the dog’s entrance because I figured it was about a dog.
A receptionist greeted me. “How can I help you?” she asked, but when I tried to answer, no words came out.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She motioned to a box of Kleenex on the counter, told me what to expect. We could stay in the room. It wouldn’t take long. We’d need an appointment. She handed me a card. “Call when you’re ready,” she said.
Victor came over that night. “It’s time,” he said. I circled my arms around his shoulders and showed him the card with the vet’s number. He called to make the appointment, and we left to be with Argos. We had until noon the next day.
We woke up early, but time passed quickly anyway. Argos always loved water, so Victor took him round back for a bath. I watched the brown coming off in his hands as he soaped Argos’s coat. “Almost done, old man, almost done,” Victor whispered, until the water from the hose ran clean. “Where’s all the brown going to come from, Argos? Leather and wood and chocolate? Will there be any left when you’re gone, source of all brown in the world?” Victor dried Argos’s ears then, his hands gentle and sure, the way he handled wood, the way he touched me.
We lifted Argos into the truck bed lined with blankets and drove to Rancho Park. He ambled through the grass, then gnawed clean the bone we’d picked up at the butcher’s. Finally, we drove to the vet, walked in the dog’s entrance, and waited.
An assistant showed us to a small room with an examining table and a large wall chart of dog breeds. I counted seven main categories: working dogs, hounds, sporting dogs, terriers, toy dogs, non-sporting dogs, and herding. Each category was linked to another with connecting lines, it was like a whole blueprint of relationships.
I looked to see what it meant to be part German short-haired, part chocolate Lab. Sporting. Half pointer, half retriever.
When Victor was a boy, his brother drowned in the backyard pool they swam in every summer. It was Argos who dove in after him, barked so the others would follow.
In the bottom right-hand corner of the chart there was an illustration of a dog tag: Diagram of Dogs, it said. Please return if lost.
The vet came in then, told Victor they don’t often come across dogs of Argos’s size at eighteen years, told him he was sorry. “It’s a lethal dose of barbiturates, it’s painless, it’ll be about fifteen seconds. You may see some movement in the ears or paws, it’s only muscles reacting. I assure you, there won’t be any pain.”
Victor placed his hands on Argos. I placed my hands on Victor. When it was over, Victor removed Argos’s collar, soft leather the exact color of his fur.
Back in the truck, Victor hooked the collar over the rearview mirror, so that the tag hung suspended in the center of the windshield. The tag is a flat gold circle, like the tag in the diagram, only all the etching is worn away. Sometimes driving next to Victor, I look over, and it catches the light, like a low full moon, or maybe a midnight sun.
Revolve
NOBODY EXPECTS to be cold in Los Angeles, but winter indoors can be freezing. Victor says it’s because these old stucco buildings are constructed like Lego sets, no insulation or weather stripping.
Most people just crank up the heat for a few chilly weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. It drives Libby nuts. “It’s as if the energy crisis never happened,” she complains, but back when we shared a place, I’d sneak a turn on the thermostat dial whenever the temperature fell below sixty.
Now when Victor and I are asleep, and it’s cold, I nestle close to him, until he gets too hot and inches away. In the middle of the night, he’s always having to get out of bed and come around the other side because I keep moving to wherever he is until he’s on the edge, about to fall off. I told him he should just push me over, but he says it’s easier to just go around.
He says I’m like one of those heliotropic plants, a sunflower or black-eyed Susan. We saw a stand of them last time we went hiking in Solstice Canyon. Their centers weren’t actually black, but dark dark brown, the same brown Argos was.
Shelter
VICTOR CAME WITH ME to Aunt Arlene’s house. It’s the largest
house of all the aunts’, she’s got a whole room devoted to ships. There are dark, wood-paneled walls with fishing nets affixed, lamps poking out of the heads of plaster sea captains, and a table made out of a ship’s wheel.
It was Christmas. We’re Jewish, but everyone gets the day off, and Aunt Arlene always goes all out. This year everything was either gold-colored or gold-plated. The tablecloth, candles, silk flower centerpiece, even the flatware was gold. Aunt Arlene wore a gold lamé pantsuit with matching sandals. There wasn’t room for everyone at the gold table, so Victor and I ate dinner in the game room, where they keep the billiard table and a full-sized mannequin of an English bobby. We used paper plates and plastic utensils.
During dessert, Aunt Estelle told us about a chip in her sink from the earthquake. They were having to remodel the entire kitchen. “It’s impossible to take the sink out without breaking the surrounding tile,” she explained. “I’ve been scrubbing that grout for ten years, so we’re going with the granite. It’s much more updated.”
Victor and I left soon after the presents were opened, drove back to my neighborhood, and took a walk. We passed the house with the arched windows and low roof that makes it look as if it’s about ready to sink into the ground. We went by the one with the lighting fixtures everywhere, even on the garage. The people on the corner, they’ve been landscaping their yard since last summer, and there are big piles of black dirt surrounding their stout cinder block house like an earthbound moat.
We walk by the Neilsons’, they have a dark wood sign over the porch that says so. The Neilsons’ entire roof and front yard are decorated with huge cardboard figures of Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. A metallic Christmas tree blinks on their lawn.
“Thanks for going with me,” I say to Victor.