The Dogs of Babel

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  Don’t Close Your Eyes

  First Aid for Dogs and Cats

  Put Me in the Zoo

  Where to Stay in Northern California

  A Feast for the Eyes

  Thrill Rides of North America

  Clay Masks from Around the World

  I’m Taking My Hatchback to Hackensack and Other Travel Games

  I Had a Dream: The Civil Rights Movement and Real Life

  796 Ways to Say “I Love You”

  Things I Wish I’d Known

  Strange but True: Aliens in Our Midst

  Forget About Yesterday and Make the Most of Today

  You’d Better Believe It! The World’s Most Famous Hoaxes and Practical Jokes

  How to Be a Success While Doing What You Love

  And No Pets Step on DNA

  More 10-Minute Recipes

  My Ántonia

  A Room of One’s Own

  Places I’d Never Dreamed Of

  To Have and to Hold

  The Toad Not Taken: The Linguistic Value of Puns

  Out of the Rat Race and into the Chips

  Your Fortune in Mail-Order Selling

  Exercises for a Healthy Heart

  A Handbook of Dreams

  Flesh Wounds

  Papier-Mâché Arts and Crafts

  Put a Lid on It: Managing Your Anger

  Learn to Play Piano in Fourteen Days

  The City of One

  A History of the English Language

  Stone Shoes and Other Fables

  It’s from “Tam Lin.” It’s what the elf queen says to Tam Lin before she releases him to the world of mortals. When she knows he is lost to her. When Lexy told me the story, I thought that these were bitter words, full of malice and spite, and perhaps for the elf queen that’s all they were. But reading these words now, they seem to me very sad. I see that they can also be words of kindness, words of protection. An incantation, a wish to avoid causing pain. How often since Lexy’s death have I wished for eyes that could not cry, a heart that could not grieve?

  But I see now that her wish for me came true by half. I’ve been looking through eyes of clay all this time. And now my useless heart, my fallible heart, my heart of flesh, seems to break in two, and inside it I find the truth I suppose it has held all along. And I know at last that my Lexy killed herself.

  FORTY

  What was Lexy like in those last two months, the months in between the time we conceived a child and the time she climbed into that tree? She was fine, that’s how it seemed to me. She was fine. The depression and lethargy that had followed our trip to New Orleans seemed to have disappeared, and she was beginning to take interest in new projects. A local café with a Venetian Carnival theme had begun to display some of her masks on its walls, and she made a few sales as a result. We spent a weekend at the beach in early September, and we walked along the ocean hand in hand. My face turned bright red with sunburn, and we ate a pound of saltwater taffy in the car on the way home. A colleague of mine got married, and we went to the wedding. My birthday came and went and was celebrated in all the usual ways. I spent a weekend repainting our bathroom. Lexy became interested in Chinese cooking and made special trips to buy ingredients at an Asian supermarket. It was normal, do you see? I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have, because it all seemed so normal. I didn’t know the end was so near.

  But somewhere in there, something happened to change everything, and I didn’t even notice. Somewhere in there, Lexy discovered she was pregnant. I remember there was one evening, maybe in mid- or late September, when she complained of feeling nauseated. And one Sunday, maybe a week later, she took a nap, which was not something she did very often. Were these the symptoms that led her to take the pregnancy test? Her periods, I think, were not very regular under the best of circumstances, but perhaps she noticed it had been a particularly long time since the last one. The question is when. How long did she live with this knowledge? How long did I live with her in that changed state without sensing that anything was different?

  The only clue I have is that little corner of pink cardboard I found in the trash. Maybe I can work backward from there. Our trash is collected once a week, of course, but that little bathroom trash can has never filled up fast enough to warrant being emptied every week. I’m not sure how often we used to empty it; that task, I confess, usually fell to Lexy. I can tell you this: Since she’s been gone, I don’t think I’ve emptied that little container more than once a month. But before that, when it was the receptacle for all of Lexy’s female detritus of disposable makeup sponges and cleanser-soaked cotton balls, I think it’s safe to say it would have filled up at least twice as fast. And when I went through it after her death, it was only half full. So we’re looking at one week at the outside; it’s only in the last week of her life that she knew she was pregnant. Knowing what I now know, knowing that the week ends with Lexy climbing that tree with the intention of ending her life, I have to try to reconstruct that week.

  Lexy died on a Wednesday. I’ll start with the Thursday before. She was up before me, I remember. Is that the morning when she got up early and took the test? It seems to me now that maybe she was a little more animated than usual that morning, that maybe when she said good morning to me, she smiled a little longer than she normally would have. But I’m not sure. We had breakfast together and read the paper, then I showered and dressed for work.

  “What are you going to do today?” I asked her before I left.

  “I’ve got a few Halloween orders to finish up,” she said. “And this afternoon I’m going grocery shopping.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, and kissed her. “Well, have a good day.”

  Do you see how ordinary it all was, how boring, the routine dailiness of that week? Try as I might, I can’t coax any more meaning out of it than I saw at the time. I went to work, I met with one of my dissertation students to discuss his progress. I worked on a grant application that, as it turned out, I would never send in. I went home, and Lexy made pasta for dinner. We watched a movie, sitting close together on the couch. It was all so normal. We read in bed, each of us lost in our own book, and I fell asleep before she did. Another day of our marriage, and I was content with it. I believe, even now I believe that Lexy was, too.

  Friday night, there was a thunderstorm. We’d been playing a word game together, a pen-and-paper game we both enjoyed, when the lights went out. We found candles pretty easily—for some reason, we’d received about a million decorative candleholders as wedding gifts, so we had candles everywhere—but matches proved a bit harder to find. We stumbled around clumsily, bumping into tables and calling out to each other in the dark. We’d been listening to music before the power went out, and our voices sounded strangely loud in the sudden silence. Lorelei was frantic—she was terrified of thunder and lightning—and I could hear her anxious panting as I wandered around the house. Finally, I found some matches on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, and we lit some candles. In the soft light, I could see Lorelei wedged into a small space between the couch and the wall. She was shaking violently and drooling with terror.

  “Oh, poor girl,” Lexy said. She went and sat down on the floor next to the dog and began petting her and speaking to her softly. I settled myself on the floor next to Lexy, and together we tried to soothe the shuddering dog.

  “I’ve always wondered,” Lexy said, “if her fear of thunderstorms has anything to do with the storm she got lost in the day I found her.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I think most dogs are afraid of the noise.”

  “Did I ever tell you,” she said, “why I named her Lorelei?”

  “No. I thought you just liked the name.”

  “Well, I did. But I’d also been reading a lot of mythology right around that time, trying to come up with new ideas for masks. I was sick to death of doing Medusas and Bacchuses—would that be Bacchi?”

  “Yes, I suppose it would be Bacchi with an i. Bacchae with an ae refers to
his female worshipers, as in the title of the Euripides play. . . .” I was being deliberately pompous. Sometimes I liked to play up my academic-gasbag persona so that Lexy could poke holes in it.

  “Right,” Lexy said, interrupting. “But getting back to my story . . .” We both laughed.

  “Right,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “So one of the myths I had come across was the story of Lorelei. It’s German. Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s about this beautiful woman who drowned herself because her lover was unfaithful, and then she became a mermaid and sat on a rock in the Rhine River and lured sailors to their deaths with her beautiful siren song.”

  “So you read that and thought, what a perfect name for a puppy?”

  “No, of course not. But when I first saw Lorelei shivering in the rain, half drowned, I thought she looked like kind of a tragic figure. And she always has that worried expression on her face, even when she’s happy. It just seemed to fit her.”

  I imagined a woman with Lorelei’s dog-face sitting on a rock and howling an unearthly song.

  “So did you ever make a Lorelei mask?” I asked. “The mythological Lorelei, I mean.”

  “I did, but it didn’t come out that well. I was imagining her with this really harrowing, haunting look on her face, but it was hard to make it work with the eyeholes cut out. I was just never that happy with it.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “No, I sold it to this German couple. They actually wanted something more American, like a Bill Clinton mask or something, for a souvenir, but once I heard their accents, I started doing a real hard sell on the Lorelei mask. They were familiar with the myth, which no one else had been, and I gave them a good deal on it.”

  There was a loud clap of thunder, and Lorelei shuddered convulsively beneath my hand.

  “Shh, girl,” I said. “It’s all right.”

  But she would not be comforted. When Lexy and I went to bed, we let her climb up and lie between us, and all through the night, my sleep was troubled by her trembling and her whining. It wasn’t until the rain stopped and the morning sun showed the world washed and new that Lorelei’s body relaxed, and the danger past, she closed her eyes to sleep.

  My last weekend with Lexy was a quiet one, full of easy lulls when she could have told me the secret she carried. It was fall, yard sale season, and we spent Saturday afternoon driving through neighborhoods we’d never been to and trying to decipher the handwriting on signs where the writer had run out of space and had had to cram all the details into the bottom corner. It was something we liked to do together, a happy reminder of the way we’d met. I bought a sweater vest Lexy didn’t like and a clock for my study; Lexy bought an electric coffee grinder and an ice-cube tray that made ice cubes in the shape of a heart. She said she liked the kitschiness of it. It’s the hopefulness of these items that gets me now. She was still imagining a future where we would drink fresh-ground coffee together in the mornings. Where we would slip tiny ice hearts into our drinks to see how they’d float.

  At our last stop of the day, Lexy paused in front of a table of children’s toys. She picked up a plastic Halloween mask, the kind that’s held in place with a rubber band. It was a Frankenstein mask, cheaply made and garishly colored.

  “I think yours are nicer,” I said to Lexy, talking quietly so that the woman sitting in the lawn chair a few feet away wouldn’t hear.

  “Yeah, but these are fun. They’re like everyone’s memory of their childhood Halloweens. I think I’m going to get it.”

  She paid the woman a quarter, and we walked across the lawn to the car.

  “I think,” Lexy said, and it makes my chest ache to think of it, “maybe I’ll start collecting these.”

  Sunday, we slept late and Lexy made pancakes, working from a cookbook.

  “I never knew these were so easy,” she said. “My mom never made anything from scratch, and I used to be so jealous when I slept over at friends’ houses and they had the kind of moms who made pancakes in the morning. But it turns out it’s really easy.”

  “See?” I said. “You could be a mom.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, and I think she might have told me then. But she didn’t. She turned away to ladle more batter into the pan, and what she said was, “Yeah, I guess I could.”

  I filed that away in my brain as a small triumph. I thought I’d bring it out another time, if the topic of having children came up again. I ate my pancakes happily, pleased with this small concession. Maybe there’s hope, I thought.

  We went for a walk in the afternoon, and then to a movie. We had dinner at our favorite pizza place. Sunday was a lovely day. And Monday was fine.

  But Tuesday. Tuesday is when we had our last fight.

  FORTY-ONE

  We’re getting nearer. We’re nearing the end, of course you know that, you’ve known from the beginning, from the very first sentence I spoke. I’m tensing up as we get closer, I can feel myself wanting to slow down and to speed up at the same time.

  I had a slow day at work on Tuesday—I was supposed to be finishing up a symposium paper, but I kept getting distracted. I found myself, at one point, thinking about the myth of Lorelei. The image that kept popping into my mind was the one I had envisioned the night of the storm—a combination of the two Loreleis, the dog and the siren, a woman with flowing hair and a deadly song, her human face replaced with a Rhodesian Ridgeback’s earnest, furrowed features. It was a captivating image, at least in my mind, and it started me thinking that maybe this could be Lexy’s next big project. She’d seemed a bit aimless since finishing the Macbeth masks over the summer, and I thought this might be the answer. It drew on some elements she’d worked with in the past, and it allowed for endless combinations; she had all of mythology to work with, and all the dogs of the world. Didn’t the Egyptians have a dog-faced god? Why not carry that over to other mythologies? I imagined Medusa with the snarling face of a Doberman, her snaky hair sprouting from the glossy black fur of her forehead. I imagined Botticelli’s Venus rising from a clamshell with the sweet face of a sheltie. I made some clumsy sketches. I drew a pug-faced Cupid, a dalmatian-faced Athena bursting forth from the Labrador forehead of her father, Zeus. I drew Hermes with his winged hat resting gently on the ears of a Jack Russell terrier. I was quite taken with the idea. My drawings were mediocre, but surely Lexy would be able to do a better job.

  I looked at the clock. It was four o’clock, and it was clear I wasn’t going to get any more real work done that day. I left my office and headed for the library. I found an illustrated book on world mythology and one on dog breeds. Using the photocopy machine and some scissors and tape borrowed from the reference desk, I created a few prototypes. Here was Poseidon with the face of a Portuguese water dog. Here was Hades with a bulldog’s bloated grimace. I laughed out loud at what I had made, causing several nearby students—it was close to midterms, and the library was packed—to cast annoyed looks in my direction. The images I’d created were crude and out of proportion, but there was something about them that made sense to me. At least they would give Lexy some idea of what I had in mind. I made one final picture, with a Ridgeback’s face on top of a siren’s body—I wasn’t able to find a picture of the German Lorelei, so I used one of the Greek sirens—and I headed home to show my creations to Lexy.

  When I got home, Lexy was chopping vegetables for dinner. I kissed her on the top of her head and sat down across from her at the kitchen table. She smiled at me.

  “Hi,” she said. “How was your day?”

  “Good,” I said. “Excellent. I had a great idea.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. She pushed aside the onion slices she’d been working on and started in on a red pepper.

  “Well, it’s an idea for you, actually. I’ve got your next project for you.”

  She put down her knife and looked at me warily. “Okay,” she said. “But you know I don’t really tend to take other people’s
ideas for my work. It kind of has to come from me, you know? I have to be inspired by something on my own. It’s like, remember when you published your first linguistics textbook, and all of a sudden your uncle started telling you all his ideas for mystery novels? It’s not like you were about to give up all your own work to work on someone else’s ideas.”

  “Well, no, of course not. His ideas were terrible. But I think what I’ve got is pretty good. Just let me show it to you.”

  She sighed. “Fine, but just be aware that I may not want to take your advice.”

  I pulled my drawings and photocopy art out of my jacket pocket and smoothed the pages on the table. Lexy looked at them skeptically. She didn’t smile.

  “See,” I said, “it’s figures from mythology done with dog faces. Isn’t that kind of interesting?”

  She shrugged. “I guess so,” she said.

  “Well, these aren’t done very well, of course, but I think that if you did them . . .” She didn’t say anything. She was staring at the table. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “See,” I went on, “I got the idea from your story about the myth of Lorelei and the way that when Lorelei, the dog, showed up, she kind of looked like the character from the myth. And I just started envisioning this mythical mermaid with Lorelei’s face.” I shuffled through the pages until I found the one with the Ridgeback. “Look, it’s this one here.”

  She picked up the paper and looked at it, then let it fall to the table.

  “It’s just not that simple, Paul,” she said. There was a sudden sharpness to her voice. “Look, some of these can’t even be done as masks. This Venus on the clamshell thing—if you just did her head, no one would understand what it was supposed to be.”

  “Well, you just give it a title that explains it—that’s what artists do, isn’t it? You call it ‘Sheltie Venus’ or something. ‘Sheltie Venus Number 1.’”

  “Oh, so now I’m supposed to do more than one of them? A whole series of sheltie Venuses? And this is going to be my claim to fame?”