Ruffly Speaking

by Conant, Susan

  “Stephanie, I honestly don’t think—” I started to protest.

  “What harm will it do? We’ll give it a little try, and if the phone rings, there we are!”

  “It’s only this extension? The white phone?”

  In Morris Lamb’s day, as I’ve mentioned, the kitchen had been a cheerful jumble of great food and pretty dogs, but Stephanie kept the counters and the granite work island tidy. The only area that looked even slightly messy was what I suppose a decorator would have called the communication center. The mounting bracket for Morris’s phone now held a couple of little plastic jacks from which sprouted a tangle of wires that led to a gray answering machine and to Stephanie’s telephone on the counter, which also held a jar of tiny dog biscuits, a pad of bright pink While You Were Out message slips, and a tray of pens and pencils. The phone was one of those full-size, enhanced amplification, big-button AT&T white models with fire, police, and ambulance symbols on the top row of buttons, and immense numbers and slightly smaller letters on the buttons underneath, as if hearing loss put people in constant need of emergency aid and simultaneously impaired their vision and their manual dexterity.

  “This is the only one I ever answer,” Stephanie said. “It’s the only one I can hear on. I’m getting another one just like it, but, in the meantime, either I answer this one, or I let the machine pick up. So let’s try it!”

  Stephanie wore an Easter-egg lavender homespun cotton dress that flowed around her as she made her way quickly to the deck, where she asked Doug to take Ruffly around to the front of the house for a minute or two. After they’d passed by the kitchen windows, I waited briefly, then aimed the Yap Zapper at the big white phone. I pressed the button. The little red light flashed on and off. The phone didn’t ring. At Stephanie’s insistence, I held the gadget right next to the phone and pressed the button. But, once again, the experiment failed.

  “Oh, well,” Stephanie said cheerfully, “maybe I was being greedy. I was hoping there’d be some sort of sympathetic vibration or something. I don’t really understand these things. It’s all those years being married to a physicist, I suppose, and then Matthew, too. Live with people who understand everything about something, and one winds up understanding nothing oneself. In any case, this other business is more within my own discipline, and I’ll have to ponder the matter of precisely how to approach her about it. Loving one’s neighbor as oneself is always particularly challenging when neighbor must be taken literally, I always think.”

  Stephanie was right: She did not have a scientific mind. When I’d first tried to explain what ultrasound was, I’d mentioned the gadget designed for use on a neighbor’s dog. Unfortunately, Stephanie had latched on to the example, and I now had difficulty in convincing her that the sound reaching her house did not necessarily emanate from Alice Savery’s and might even come from some long-untouched device of Morris Lamb’s. Or maybe Stephanie simply didn’t like the idea of having her house searched. Who would? And when I finally persuaded Stephanie of the need to look, she promised that she and Matthew would go over the place, but scrupulously pointed out that the cellar was packed with cartons of Morris Lamb’s belongings, possessions and papers that no one but Doug had any right to examine. It seemed to me that my fondness for Morris Lamb was proof against whatever horrible secrets I might uncover while searching for some hidden version of the Yap Zapper, but I felt embarrassed to say so. Also, since Doug Winer was right outside, it made sense to question him first and, if necessary, to ask him to delve into Morris’s cartons.

  When Stephanie and I moved out to the deck, we found that Doug had returned from the front of the house. He was near the grill, bending over to fasten the latch on a small metal toolbox.

  “Doug, where’s Ruffly?” Stephanie asked. “Ruffly! Ruffly, come!”

  “He was here a second ago,” said Doug, rising to his feet. He wore an open-necked shirt, freshly pressed shorts, and athletic shoes so clean that they looked brand-new. The tennis whites highlighted the blackness of his hair, including the thick growth on his arms and legs, and the individual whiskers emerging on his face after what I suspected was a recent shave. “The naughty boy, did he run off? Ruffly!”

  Within seconds, however, Ruffly danced up the stairs to the deck, ran to Stephanie, stood on his hind legs, and balanced there. “Good boy,” she told him warmly, and added, to Doug and me, “Compromise. He knows not to jump on people, so he gets his front paws within a half inch, and he stops right there.”

  The little paragon’s contrast with my own dogs was beginning to grate on me. I almost wished that Ruffly had appeared with a dead squirrel in his mouth just to prove that he was a normal dog after all. When my envious surge abated, I took a good look at Ruffly and realized that I didn’t entirely trust his consistent display of faultless behavior. In other words, I felt the way I usually do when I’m watching a poodle in the obedience ring. As a big fan of poodle antics, I’d become pretty good at predieting when an apricot mini was going to ruin a 200 score by leaping up into the handler’s arms, or when a black standard heading for high in Open B was going to turn the Retrieve on Flat into tug-of-war by refusing to part with the dumbbell, but Ruffly didn’t show the devilish glint in the eye or the little telltale wiggle in the gait. The tilt of his head? Although it was Ruffly who was Stephanie’s Victrola, her canine ear trumpet, he might have copied the bewitching angle from the old RCA ad. Only when I’d worked my way down the full length of the dog did I finally spot the cue: Almost imperceptibly, the very tip of Ruffly’s tail drummed a minibeat of deviltry.

  Before I could decide what to make of that observation, however, Stephanie asked me to explain our discovery to Doug and announced that she was going to make a preliminary search of the kitchen, where the majority of Ruffly’s episodes had occurred. Then she would examine her bedroom. In case the shots of ultrasound were fired from outside the house, she also wanted to close the windows and the big sliding glass doors. Ruffly, of course, followed her inside.

  “A crise of some sort?” Doug asked.

  “With luck, a resolved one.” I went on to explain. Then I casually asked whether Morris had ever happened to buy anything like the Yap Zapper.

  Although I’d tried to be tactful, Doug was insulted. Had I ever even heard Morris so much as raise his voice to his dogs? Had I already forgotten what Morris was like?

  “Doug, I had to ask, just on the off chance, and ultrasound is really not an instrument of torture, but I’m sorry. And, no, I have not forgotten what Morris was like. Whenever I’m here, I keep half expecting to have Morris show up and tell me all about his wins, and then make me taste whatever he’s been cooking, and the more different everything looks and sounds and smells here, the more I miss him, and—”

  “God, it’s awful,” Doug said. “How I loathe being here. I can hardly endure walking up the stairs to the second floor. It’s like going through it all over again, walking in that morning, and going up there, and finding him like that.” The lilt in Doug’s voice, the exaggerated emphases, the whole gay speech pattern sounded entirely unaffected; everything gay about Doug felt like a genuine expression of solidarity with Morris. “I have this terrible fear about being here.” Doug pulled a terry cloth sweat-band from one of the pockets of his white shorts and vigorously wiped the palms of his hands.

  “Fear of—?”

  The July sun was beating down on the deck, and Doug’s face was damp from the heat, but instead of mop-ping his forehead, he kept scrubbing his hands. It had been warm under the big striped tent at the Essex County show, and with Nelson about to enter the Bedlington ring, Doug had been keyed up. It’s possible that the thick dog-show odors of grooming spray, canine perfume, and exhibitors’ nerves had blunted my sense of smell or masked whatever odor came from Doug, but I hadn’t caught so much as a whiff of after-shave. Now, though, the heat of the sun and the sweat of Doug’s body activated Ivory soap and diffused it so effectively that I wondered whether Morris’s backyard would ever again
smell like fresh -cut grass.

  Doug went through the motions of wringing out the sweatband, but no drops of moisture hit the wooden deck. He glanced around, and when he spoke, his voice was oddly flat. “Have you ever been afraid of seeing someone who wasn’t there?”

  I knew exactly what he meant. “My mother,” I answered. “After she died.” I’d been terrified of seeing her ghost. A somewhat similar phenomenon plagued me after Vinnie died. The difference was that I’d have welcomed even the most hazy, protoplasmic shade of Vinnie. I could have made this confession to Morris. To Doug? I didn’t entirely trust him. Not everyone understands about being scared of seeing your mother, but feeling eager to greet the great obedience dog of your life in whatever form she chooses to materialize.

  “It didn’t start until I read about it,” Doug said softly. He glanced anxiously toward the kitchen, as if there were a remote chance that Stephanie might hear him. “In a book Stephanie gave me,” he added. “The book was supposed to, oh, allay one’s fears, I suppose, but it was ghastly, the way it went out of its way to suggest new possibilities, and ever since then, I’ve been plagued by this terror that I’m doomed to start hallucinating visions of Morris. Every time I’m here and I hear sirens, well, I’m on the verge of a flashback, and I’m in the grip of a sort of compulsion to go dashing out to shoo all the police cars and the ambulances away.”

  I had to suppress a sudden, crazy urge to tell Doug about hallucinatory fly catching in King Charles spaniels. To my horror, anxious laughter welled in my throat. What suppressed it was a memory: Doug had gone to work at Winer & Lamb on the day of Morris’s death as well as on the day of his funeral.

  “They came in droves,” Doug continued, his face ashen, “because I kept calling and calling 911. They sent dozens of policemen and two ambulances. It was horrible. First, there was no one, and then suddenly the house was filled with all these enormous men, and then they put me in the ambulance with him, and I wanted to clean him up —Morris would have despised being seen like that; he was a fright—and once we got to the emergency room, I had to wait and wait. And the absolute worst was when they started talking about a postmortem, and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying until it hit me, and I was sick at the thought of these strangers cutting into Morris.”

  I was so confused and overwhelmed that I hadn’t noticed Stephanie’s reappearance on the deck. Without actually touching Doug, she reached toward his arm. She said gently, “Doug, please try to remember. That was not Morris. It was only his body.”

  A Christian priest seemed a peculiar source of those words, which Doug seemed to find oddly consoling. Or perhaps what helped was Stephanie’s presence. Within a minute or two, he’d recovered. To my surprise, he told Stephanie how relieved he was that she was going to take the house off his hands. Neither of them lingered on the topic—the sale wasn’t news to the buyer and the seller— and Stephanie graciously asked Doug whether he’d prefer to skip the party that evening. I expected Doug to take advantage of the opportunity, but he assured Stephanie that he was dying to come, and he apologized to both of us for having made a scene—Doug’s word and his emphasis. His insistence on attending the barbecue puzzled me until I remembered his father’s courtliness. Doug was now making amends for the unpardonable rudeness of having even suggested to his hostess that he felt like reneging on an invitation he’d previously accepted. Looking greatly restored, he picked up the metal toolbox, told Stephanie that there was nothing wrong with the valve on the grill, and launched into one of his normal fits of fussing about all the things he had to do at Winer & Lamb and at home before he’d have the pleasure of seeing us again.

  When Doug finally left, I spoke bluntly to Stephanie. “Tell me something. It’s none of my business, but a lot of people have been assuming that Morris died of AIDS.”

  Her surprise was unmistakable. “Whatever gave anyone that idea?”

  “A lot of people still think of AIDS as a gay disease,” I said, “and this story Doug keeps telling people about Morris being accidentally poisoned sounds so unlikely. In a way, it sounds just like Morris to go wandering around feeling creative and randomly gathering up things and then making a salad, but...” I faltered. “Maybe it sounds so much like Morris and at the same time so improbable that it feels trumped up, so people assume there’s something to whitewash, something stigmatized, and then since Morris was gay, they think of AIDS.”

  “That’s because Doug’s not telling the whole story,” Stephanie said. “What Doug is omitting is that he built the garden, the raised bed.”

  “I know he did.”

  “But Doug ordered the seeds, too. He had a catalog. It had a whole section on edible flowers, and Doug ordered some special collection, and he and Morris started the seeds. They planted them together, some of them indoors, some of them out here.”

  “That’s harmless.”

  “In itself,” Stephanie said. “In itself, it’s harmless, but it’s the source of Doug’s terrible sense of guilt, as if he’d staged Morris’s death. I’ve tried to help with that, but, unfortunately, it has some basis in reality. The garden is undoubtedly what gave Morris the idea. In effect, it is what killed him.”

  28

  Imagine the cosmos as an Antarctica of infinite magnitude, cold, bleak, cheerless. The monotony is relieved once every three trillion --light years by some tedious astronomical event. A boring mess of gas explodes. A few celestial epochs later, a black hole looms. Pity the poor aliens. Among other things, their kids must drive them crazy. Consider the possibilities of intergalactic whining: When are we going to get there? and Ma, he hit me! and I have to go to the bathroom, and I have to go now! And then the father, Ralph, yells, Doris, can’t you get those brats to shut up! And Doris tries placating them: Now, darlings, only another thirty zillion millennia to the next clean rest room, and in the meantime, let’s see who can spot the first white asteroid. Aaron, you take the left, and Hazel, you take the right, and whoever finds it gets a lovely piece of green cheese. Won’t that be fun!

  Now ponder the typical abduction story, which goes something like this: At nine o’clock on the evening of September 3, 1993, a woman we shall call Violet J. is driving her two-year-old tan Ford Escort from Hoboken to Hackensack when she experiences the first interesting event of her thirty-six years, the previous ten of which she’s spent explaining the difference between universal and term insurance policies and selling both. After work, she watches television game shows while eating Rice-A-Roni. Her social life consists of occasional visits to discount shopping malls. Once in a while she treats herself to a wild fling by risking the price of a postage stamp to enter the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. She always promises herself that if she’s ever the lucky winner of the Grand Prize, she won’t change her life-style one iota.

  Ah, but something will. Enter Ralph, Doris, and the kids. In the driver’s seat of the Escort on the road to Hackensack, Violet has just reached forward and switched from a talk-radio discussion of household stain removal to a golden oldies station when a blinding burst of light appears, weird bells tinkle, and distant whistles sound. Some six hours later, a frightened and disoriented Violet finds herself in the passenger seat of the Ford Escort, which is inexplicably parked next to a foul-smelling Dumpster at the rear of the same pet shop where she once bought a gerbil that died three days later. At first Violet recalls nothing of the minutes immediately preceding those lost hours, but over the next few days, fragments return. She recalls that rubbing alcohol will remove ink from carpets and that Jerry Lee Lewis was singing “Great Balls of Fire.” After that? Floating through space. Paralysis. Looming gray figures.

  Hold it. Zillions of light years crammed in a flying saucer with whining kids for the sole purpose of spacenapping Violet? Come on! Sorry, Violet, but these beings don’t want insurance, Rice-A-Roni, game shows, Ford Escorts, or anything else you have to offer. What’s the one thing on earth worth that miserable trip through the great celestial three-dog everlas
ting night? Certainly not Violet. And not just any dog, either. After all, the cosmos is an infinite Antarctica. Of course. An Alaskan malamute.

  But they won’t get mine. Even co-ownership is out of the question. It’s nothing but trouble. The last person I co-owned a dog with was my own mother, and I’ll never do it again. My will weakens only when I watch Leah train Kimi. Leah is a great natural dog trainer, very charming, endlessly persistent, and so outrageously and implicitly bossy that she’d never undermine her authority by raising that sweet, rich, domineering voice.

  At four-thirty on the afternoon of July 4, about twenty minutes after I’d arrived home from Stephanie’s, I was sprawled on the landing of the steps that lead down to my fenced yard. I was practicing the popular obedience training technique that consists of drinking coffee while your dog sleeps. The temperature had reached the high eighties. Rowdy was indoors snoozing under his air conditioner in my bedroom. I was reviving myself with iced Bustelo and supervising the spiritual development of that rank-novice postulant, my cousin Leah, who had yet to attain the elevated state of enlightenment that consists of knowing nothing whatsoever about your field of greatest expertise. Leah continued to harbor the illusion that in dog training, as in all other meditative endeavors, an objective truth exists out there somewhere and that revelation is reached by way of hard work. Novice that she Was, she’d drenched herself and Kimi with the garden hose and was praying in the shade cast by the high brick Wall of the luxury grooming spa and Malamute Rescue haven temporarily known as someone else’s spite building.