by Warren Adler
The hysterics arrived on cue, and the activity on the landing picked up steam just as Barbara returned to work.
“What’s going on?” Barbara asked as she entered the apartment. “There’re two policemen on the landing and Harry the doorman as well. I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Martinez. She is totally deranged.”
“What could it be?” Milton asked innocently.
Not long after her arrival, Barbara opened the door to the policemen, who demanded to see Milton. But before she could invite them in, Mrs. Martinez, hair askew, clothes in total disarray, her expression belching fire, pushed her way into the apartment.
At that moment, Milton, hearing the racket and steeling himself for what he knew was coming, came out of his now quiet writer’s room wearing a contrived expression of confusion and surprise.
“There he is, that bastard,” Mrs. Martinez screamed. “What have you done with her? I’m sure he did it. He is the one. I want him arrested and jailed. I’m sure he murdered her. He hated her. You filthy murdering swine. You rat…” She continued in this vein until she tried to push past the two burly policemen and physically attack Milton. One of the policemen grabbed her and dragged her out of the apartment, although her screams did not abate.
“Her dog is missing,” the remaining policeman shrugged. “She thinks you had something to do with it.”
“That is ridiculous,” Milton said, exchanging glances with his wife, who looked somewhat skeptical. She invited the policeman into the kitchen where, seated around the kitchen table, the policeman, a thin Hispanic looking man, took notes.
Milton calmly explained what had transpired over the last few months, how he had complained about the whining dog because it had interfered with his work. He was careful not to leave out a single detail of his campaign.
“I lost the battle,” he said finally. “I had to live with the annoyance and find ways to cope.”
To his credit, the policeman probed deeply, taking notes. He was thorough and properly suspicious, and Milton answered all his questions with, he thought, believable deniability. He doubted, however, that he would have the skill to beat a lie detector.
Finally the policeman slapped shut his notebook, shrugged and left the apartment.
“All this for a dog,” Milton sighed.
“To Mrs. Martinez she was family, her child,” Barbara said.
“She probably couldn’t stand being left alone and beat it.”
“How could she possibly do that?” Barbara said.
“Stranger things have happened.”
Milton knew that the investigation was far from over although he feigned disinterest, although Barbara, he suspected, looked at him with suspicion. From Harry she learned that the disappearance was indeed a mystery and that Mrs. Martinez had apparently lapsed into a deep depression, which apparently required hospitalization.
“Are you sure you had nothing to do with this Milton?”
“Such a question is demeaning,” was his response.
Nevertheless, as he had expected, the investigation continued. He was interviewed by a plainclothes detective the next day and had to confront questioning from the board at a hastily convened meeting two days later.
“I am the logical suspect,” he told them patiently fielding their questions. “I understand your concerns.”
Racking his brains to see if he had overlooked something, he did experience a trill of panic when he realized that the rolling suitcase might have revealed some clue, like the scent of a dog and some white doggy fur. He attended to that as soon as it occurred to him, discovering that it would indeed have nailed him as the culprit.
Nevertheless, despite all his planning, all the emotional fences he had erected, he was discovering that he could not quite avoid a pang of conscience, not for Mrs. Martinez, despite her unfortunate reaction, but for Vickie. Hell, he had only been exposed to her clever dog wiles for an hour or so, the time it took him to drive to the animal shelter. Her fate began to trouble him. He grew anxious and, once again, his work suffered. He could not concentrate.
He was certain that one glance at Vickie and a potential pet seeker would adopt her immediately. Mrs. Martinez did not engage his compassion. She deserved her fate. She had, he decided, cruelly abused Vickie, leaving her alone, cooped up in a room, forced to perform her ablutions on paper. No wonder she whined. It was heartless. He wished he could justify his action to Barbara, who normally would have provided him with emotional sustenance. Unfortunately, it was impossible to confide in her.
Worse, he was discovering that it was getting increasingly difficult to justify his actions to himself.
Vickie’s fate began to gnaw at him. He could not work, could not sleep. His appetite suffered.
“What is wrong, Milton?” Barbara asked. “You look like hell.”
“A cold coming on,” he replied, growing more and more morose.
Finally, summoning up his courage, and disguising his voice, he called the animal shelter in Westchester. Their response shocked him.
“We have not received such a dog.”
“A little fluffy white female, well cared for. Answers to the name of Vickie.”
“You knew this dog?”
“Not really.”
“Typical,” the voice harrumphed. “Abandoner’s remorse.”
He could not find the words to respond.
“Shame on you,” the voice said. “But the fact is that we have no record of such a dog. People like you . . .”
Milton hung up, stung by the rebuke. He could barely catch his breath. His heartbeat pounded. He broke into a cold sweat.
“Am I dreaming this?” he asked himself. He recalled the events of that day. He had come to the shelter, brought the dog inside, then quickly exited. Perhaps someone had stolen the dog. He was baffled. Worse, he felt sickened, nauseous, the initial elation at his cleverness dissipated.
Mrs. Martinez returned from the hospital. Through the peephole in his door, he saw her, a mere shadow of her former self. She had lost weight. Her dark complexion looked like gray clay and she seemed zombie-like, lifeless.
“Poor woman,” Harry told him. “She really loved that dog.”
“People do get attached to their pets,” he said.
The people on the board whom he met on the elevator avoided his eyes. He was, he knew, persona non grata in the building. Milton was certain that everyone in the building suspected him of foul play concerning the missing dog. They had it right, of course.
As the days passed, he grew more and more remorseful. The absence of the dog did nothing to help his work. In fact, he had gone dry, confronted with a mammoth writer’s block. He lost his appetite, paid little attention to his grooming, stopping shaving, and could not bear to look at himself in the mirror.
“I’m finished,” he complained to Barbara.
“I’m really worried about you Milton. Maybe you should see a shrink.”
“Not a bad idea,” he groaned, although he couldn’t even consider such a possibility since he would have to reveal what he had done.
Soon he could not bear to walk into his writing room. There were too many reminders of what he had done. The worst of it was the uncertainty, the inexplicable disappearance of this innocent abused creature. He spent most of his days sitting on a park bench in Central Park like some homeless person waiting out his time.
One day, about a month after he had perpetrated his perfect crime, he heard something that made him feel certain he was hallucinating. For some reason he had felt compelled to pay a visit to his writing room as if drawn by some mysterious emotional magnet. What he heard froze all movement.
There it was, the familiar whine. He was certain it was an illusion, an imagined oasis. I am losing my mind, he told himself.
Nevertheless the whine continued. He put his ear to the wall. He was not imagining the sound. There was a dog on the other side of the wall, the sound unmistakable. The first thought that came to mind was that Mrs. Martinez had bought anothe
r dog, a not uncommon cure for a replacement of a loved pet. But the sound was so true to its original owner that he could not believe that this was another dog. No question about it. This was Vickie’s whine.
For a moment, he was tempted to employ the same subterfuge that he had used to gain access to the spare key from the lobby. But it was long past noon. Instead he went down to the lobby and confronted Harry, who was shaking his head the moment he saw him.
“Damnedest thing, Mr. Preston. Damnedest thing. Bout two in the morning Barney tells me, this little dog, a bit scraggly and dirty, starts scratching on the lobby door. Barney said he looked more like a rat than a dog. But there was no mistaking it.”
“Vickie?”
“Like a miracle. I swear. Barney calls upstairs and the Martinez woman rushes down. You’d think it was her long lost daughter. Hell, I guess it was. A goddamned miracle, that’s what it was. Wherever the hell he was for a month, he sure knew the way home.”
Milton felt something shift inside of himself, a sense of resurrection, perhaps. Born again. He could not contain his joy. He went upstairs to his writing room, lay on the couch and listened with pleasure to Vickie’s undulating whine.
“She’s back,” he told Barbara when she came home from work.
“Who?”
“Vickie.” When she didn’t react he told her again. “The dog. Mrs. Martinez’s dog.”
“Good for her. Now you have a better excuse for not writing.”
He didn’t answer her fearing that he would give away his elation. He tried writing again, and again the dog’s whine was inhibiting. He felt enormous pity for the creature, cooped up alone all day in its room. He discovered that when he tapped on his side of the wall, the whining stopped.
It was then that he had his eureka moment. He placed his iPod against the wall and programmed it for hours of classical music, putting it on its lowest volume. The whining stopped.
Apparently his muse understood. He began to write again. A story about a lonely dog.
Pregnant
by Warren Adler
“I think I’m pregnant,” Sheila said.
Her assertion was casual. He could see her in profile, looking up at the ceiling of the motel room, in the Holiday Inn tucked neatly in the shadow of the West Side Highway across from the Hudson River. The docks still berthed some of the cruise lines and the fleet. For them, both East Siders, it was well off the beaten track and a reasonably safe place to carry out a clandestine affair.
Suddenly Harold wished he had a cigarette. He had given up the habit ten years before but there was still a memory imprint when he became anxious.
“Are you sure?” was about all he could muster.
“I’ve been through it once before, Hal,” Sheila said. “Believe me, I know the signs.”
Her little girl was five now. Sandra, little Sandy, played with his Liz, and they attended the same nursery school, which was where Sheila and Harold had met and where this conflagration had begun. They had been drawn together like magnets, catching them both off guard. Fearing discovery, they had adapted to this weird, twice-a-week routine that had been going on for seven months. It was a first time for both of them.
Their relationship transcended guilt or conscience, and their only real fear was exposure, since neither of them intended to sink their marriages. For both of them, the sheer ecstasy of this erotic explosion was worth the candle and the risk. “Don’t overanalyze” was their mantra.
Because he was a manufacturer’s rep and could make his own hours and she was a stay-at-home mom who had gaps in her day when Sandy was in nursery school, they had figured out together that they could meet at this out-of-the-way Manhattan motel and conduct their business in delicious isolation and without fear of discovery by the prying eyes of their normal social circle.
For two hours, raging lust ensued and left them both gorgeously drained and tranquilized by the effort.
“I think about you all the time,” Harold had admitted, after she told him about how she grew moist at the thought of him.
“It’s crazy,” she told him often.
It began always with a wild frenzy, clothes strewn everywhere, erotic imagination in high gear as they tried everything they knew to try or had ever heard about. Oddly, their intimacy had its borders. They rarely talked about life at home with their spouses, as if that occurred on some other planet. As far as anyone knew, they were well-matched in marriage, good parents, respected, well-off. They knew each other socially and were often together as couples. Her husband, Bob, was his regular squash opponent at the University Club.
Both were from good stable families with undivorced parents. Were they in love? Hard to say, they admitted to each other. Call it overwhelming need, he told her. Erotic overflow was a phrase they bandied about with giggles.
They were both thirty-five, both Sagittarians. They were certain that this place on the zodiac had something to do with the fury of their suddenly discovered libidos.
Neither of them had ever stepped out of line. In fact, Sheila admitted, she had been one of those rarities, a virgin when she married. Her wedding night was a painful ordeal and it took her a week for her husband to make his official entry. This was about the most intimate detail about her marriage that she had ever confided. He told her nothing about his marital experiences, nor did she ask.
Often, in the aftermath, cooling down in a temporary recess, they talked of their kids, never tiring of describing their antics.
Harold was surprised at his own ingenuity, the logistics and planning required to enjoy their few hours of sexual bliss. He had figured it all out time-wise, and it had worked exceedingly well, without a hitch. He was dead-certain that neither his wife nor her husband had the slightest suspicion.
He let the revelation of her pregnancy sink in, the shock of it taking some steam out of the routine. Up to then, the possibility of pregnancy posed the least risk of all.
“How could that happen?” he asked. “You said you were on the Pill.”
“I am.”
“It’s supposed to be foolproof.”
“I might have forgotten or something.”
His mind was racing with possibilities.
“Are you dead-certain?” he asked, turning to her, leaning on one elbow, his hand tracing her profile, then tickling her down to her nipple, which was instantly erect. Her hand moved to caress him. As always, he rose to the occasion and they did it again, more slowly this time, ending it more quietly than at the beginning. They had gotten each meeting down to a triple-header.
But while his body reacted in its usual fashion, his thoughts were busy with deciphering the impact of her news.
“What do you intend to do?” he asked when they had finished. He looked at his watch. There was still time. She didn’t answer him, but got up to use the shower. She was always first, leaving ahead of him. He sat on the edge of the bed, mulling the consequences of their complicated future. Finally, he got up and went into the bathroom while she toweled herself dry. He repeated the question.
“Do?” she replied. “I’m not sure.”
“Abortion?”
She shook her head and made a face.
“Why? Isn’t that procedure for unwanted children?”
Dismayed, he got into the shower and adjusted the taps to make it hotter than normal, as if it were a form of punishment. In his mind, he characterized the revelation as a disaster. She was putting on her makeup when he returned to the bedroom and began to dress. Finally, he asked the central question that had been bugging him.
“Whose is it?”
She shrugged.
“I haven’t got a clue,” she said turning to him, smiling. “I couldn’t begin to calculate.”
“There is a scientific way to find out. A paternity test.”
“There’s that. I thought of that.”
“It will prove who the father is.”
“Probably.”
“Isn’t that important? Wouldn’t you like to
know?”
She put a brush through her hair and didn’t answer.
“Did you hear me, Sheila? Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Their eyes met in the mirror.
“Would you, Harold?”
Coming up with an answer stumped him. If he was the designated father, then what? Neither of them was going to give up their spouses, and it was certain that neither of them was willing to go through the trauma of confession or anything that would endanger the stability of their normal lives, especially the lives of their children.
“Aren’t you upset?” he asked.
“More surprised than upset,” she confessed.
“Does Bob know?” Odd, how fucking Bob’s wife had changed nothing in Harold’s relationship with her husband. It was as if, in this manly arena, wives didn’t exist. What surprised Harold as well was that he had no pangs of conscience as far as his own wife, Alice, was concerned. He supposed it was the same way in the relationship Sheila had with his wife. He had not observed the slightest bit of tension between them in those social situations that brought them together as couples.
“I haven’t told him yet.”
“Why did you tell me?”
“Because we share a secret. And you could be the father? And . . .”
“And what?”
“You supply a lot more little sperms to my eggs.”
“It’s not a matter of quantity, Sheila. It has to do with timing.”
“I don’t keep track. With Bob, I do my wifely duty on a regular basis. I’m not the instigator.” She smiled. “We’re hardly as active in that department as you and I.”
“Are you saying that because of our greater frequency, I am the likely father?”
She sighed and shrugged.
“I wish I knew.”
He looked at his watch. It was getting late. Somehow the dilemma had taken on greater urgency.
“Then how will we ever know?” he asked.
“What will it matter? I’m married. Whoever is the father, the child will have a good home. If it’s a boy, Bob will be happy. He always wanted a boy and, eventually, we were planning to have one more child.”