The Art of Regret

by Mary Fleming

  “Well, what am I going to do with it?” I asked, beginning to feel desperate.

  “Her,” Piotr said. The dog was pulling on a rag while he held the other end.

  “How about using it to guard the shop at night,” I said.

  “Not nice,” Piotr shook his head. “And look.” The dog now had complete possession of the rag and was looking playfully at him—looking, in fact, as cute and harmless as a stuffed toy. Watchdog did seem a bit of a stretch.

  So that evening I walked it back to the rue des Martyrs, coaxing it away from smells, nudging it back to its feet when it lay down, with a resolute look of “Don’t rush me” or “I don’t want to go this way; I want to go that way.” It whimpered all night, when it wasn’t scratching itself. Michel had obviously had no reason to house-train the dog, and it left an unspeakable mess in a corner of my room, during the short time I managed to get some sleep. At six a smelly, wet tongue ended that fleeting state of bliss.

  Later in the morning, after a tortuous walk back to Mélo-Vélo, I phoned the closest vet. It had continued to scratch itself with a vigorous, whooshing sound reminiscent of the foot-brush that Lisette used to polish the floors. And the messes it deposited were of a nauseating consistency. The vet, who seemed amused when I described the circumstances of my new charge, poked and prodded, looked it up and down, and confirmed the dog was home to a broad array of parasites—fleas, earwigs, intestinal worms—and had a staph infection all over its belly. After giving it three shots, she prescribed treatments that cost a fortune. She insisted that there be no canned food. “You’re asking for gum problems later on,” she said. I said: “There is not going be a ‘later.’ Not one involving me anyway,” but I bought the croquettes she suggested anyway.

  From that sunny afternoon in February, the dog nosed and butted its way into my life, demanding adjustment after adjustment to my calibrated days. In fact, I remember nothing about the month that followed except dog care. Pills that the dog wouldn’t swallow until Viviane, whom I consulted urgently and frequently, told me to try sticking them in Apéricubes—small, individually wrapped squares of highly processed cream cheese. With cotton swabs for babies (extra-large ends), I cleaned the ears of black, smelly wax left by the earwigs, before dripping liquid down the Eustachian tubes, while she wriggled and resisted. But that was nothing compared to the baths for the staph infection. After the first treatment she was on to me, and I had to chase her around the room like a contestant in a greased pig contest to get her in the shower. Water went everywhere as I administered vast quantities of prohibitively expensive medicated shampoo onto the thick coat of fur.

  But when I went back to the vet after a month, she nodded approvingly. The dog’s various ills were cured; her black coat gleamed.

  “She’s a beautiful dog,” she said, pulling up her ear. “I can’t figure out why she’s not tattooed.”

  “What?” I said to what I thought was a poor joke.

  “Dogs in France have numbers tattooed into their ears for identification. Usually pedigreed dogs—and this one is a beautiful Labrador—have it done before they leave the kennel.” She held the muzzle in her hand and looked her up and down. “Well, whatever happened, I guess she’s yours now.” She smiled.

  “I’m just keeping her until the owner gets out of prison.” I was holding her trembling body tightly so she wouldn’t try and jump off the metal examining table. Just one visit with injections had made the dog quake when we got within a hundred meters of the vet’s office.

  “Turn her back to life on the streets? After all the time, care, and money? How could you?”

  “Well . . . ,” I started to say as I thought of the glass she’d broken, or the row of bicycles she’d felled like dominoes, breaking a pedal here, a bell there. Or the time in a post-bath frenzy that she’d knocked the lamp off the table, leaving the lightbulb shattered and the shade forever lopsided. Or her mine-sweeping tail that cleared my crates of all objects. Or the fact that what she didn’t break, she chewed. And it wasn’t just the proverbial shoe, though she got one of those too. She liked to live more dangerously than footwear, and one day almost electrocuted herself on a wire. Another time I left her alone too long in my room, and to teach me a lesson, she knocked over my one chair and gnawed a leg, rendering it uneven and useless. As a result of the mishaps, I had dubbed her Cassie, because casser she did.

  Wasn’t I looking forward to giving her back to Michel, so that I could return to the ordered existence that she had completely disrupted? Because even once she got housetrained, she had to be walked three times a day; she needed a lot of exercise, meaning that my way to work now included a stop in the Tuileries gardens, where she could run free or with other dogs. Even once purged of parasites, I had to brush her because she shed. I had to feed her twice a day, change her water constantly, clean the floor where she drooled, which she did profusely, or sweep where she dragged her dirty paws.

  But she was trouble I wasn’t able to resist. The damn dog had worked her way into my heart with the skill of an Olympic fencer. The way she looked at me with her upturned brown eyes, exposing a heartbreaking crescent of white, so full of trust and devotion— they spoke to me in complete sentences. “You can’t leave me here”; “Come on, let’s play”; “You wouldn’t forget to feed me, would you?” The way she followed me everywhere, nipping lightly at my leg to remind me she was still there. The way she rested her head on my foot while I ate supper. I fell for her every trick.

  Except they weren’t ruses. She sat there with her perfect head and gleaming coat, the picture of good breeding and beauty—you didn’t need to be a dog expert to see that—but she didn’t know or care about her looks, didn’t use them or her abundant charm as tools of manipulation. She had no complex layers; all she required was food, exercise, and affection. This was a first for any female I’d opened my heart to, and that stupid dog (for brains she was not long on) barged right through all those doors I’d carefully closed and locked.

  So when the vet continued: “You have to consider whether you want her sterilized. I could tattoo her ear at the same time, and then you would be the legal owner,” I just nodded my head. I wrote a huge check. And afterward I carried her up the stairs, changed her bandages with the greatest of care, and watched her every move for three weeks, until the muscle tissue had grown back together again.

  All during this time, Michel’s friend—Claude was his name—would stop by from time to time in his tight, short striped trousers and laceless boots, never with much news. Only that Michel’s past offenses meant he was in for longer.

  “Don’t you get at least ten years for knifing someone?” I asked.

  “Not when it’s hardly more than a scratch on the hand of an illegal immigrant.”

  Each time Claude came by, always lingering for wine money in exchange for his non-information, my heart give a little jump at the reminder that one day Michel would get out of prison. Now that the medicine and the operation were over, I’d settled into life with a dog. She kept me company walking to and from the shop and in the evenings, more and more of which I spent alone in my room because it was over with Claire, and Joséphine was away on a teacher-training course. At the shop, Cassie and Piotr got along like a pair of shoes. Every morning she awaited his arrival impatiently, then danced around him as if she hadn’t seen him for weeks. Once she was calm and on the new bed I had bought, he’d get down on the floor and whisper to her in Polish, and Cassie would wag her strong, straight tail as if she understood every word he was saying.

  Piotr may have loved the dog, but something else was wrong. Soon after Cassie entered our life, he’d started coming back from lunch with red, glassy eyes, smelling like fermented fruit. First he’d be half an hour late; then it sometimes stretched to a full hour. Many mornings he’d arrive looking ragged, his usually pert hair flat and unwashed, his pale face ashen as he leaned over Cassie’s bed. I asked him several times in a significant tone if everything was all right, and he always repl
ied, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But one morning he was a full three hours late.

  “Okay, what’s up? If you’re going to start showing up at noon, you have to tell me why.”

  “I sleep over.”

  “I guessed that. The question is why did you oversleep? Farm boys don’t do that. The cows won’t stand for it.”

  “Wanda wants to move. Back for Poland,” he answered, hanging his head, stuffing his big hands in his pockets.

  “And you?”

  “She says one day she wants to make a baby. She says our baby needs Polish air, Polish ground, Polish grandparents. But what I do back there?” He threw his hands in the air. “In Poland, you make millions of zlotys and they are worth nothing. Nothing. Who wants Polish zlotys?” He looked around. “I don’t go back there!”

  Pushing past me, he grabbed a bicycle to repair. He hoisted it brusquely onto the stand, snatching a wrench in rough anger. I’d never seen Piotr anything but smooth-motioned and even-tempered, no matter how impossible the customer, how heavy the repair load. And I’d stopped noticing what a quiet worker he was until that day, when tools clattered, rubber squeaked against metal, and every few minutes he’d sigh and begin muttering under his breath in Polish. I had trouble concentrating on the books I was painfully trying to balance. Cassie rose from her bed and stood near him, looking at his impatient movements with her head cocked, her tail waving in perplexed sympathy.

  “Maybe she just needs a visit,” I finally said. “It’s been five years.” Members of their family had come to Paris, but they had never gone back themselves. “Sometimes a visit will cure you.”

  “Money. Time,” he said, not even looking up.

  “You need a break. Or you’re going to end up like Michel or Claude.” The screwdriver stopped. He stood up, then bent down over the dog. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed,” I went on. “Why don’t you take two months, in July and August. I’ll even pay you what’s not vacation time.”

  “Hmm,” he said, turning back to work, but quietly. “We see.”

  Although he didn’t mention Poland or Wanda again, over the next week, Piotr showed up sober after lunch every day but one. He came to work on time; his hair returned to its clean-brush pertness. The following week, he said: “We go to Poland, July and August. Thank you.”

  That same week, Claude came, dancing from foot to foot, now that he had real news: Michel was getting out of prison. “Soon. I don’t know exactly when. They always say it’s one day. Then it’s not. They like to make us suffer.” He looked at me expectantly. “He’s already mentioned the dog.”

  “Oh,” I said and handed him some money.

  I decided to hide Cassie and tell Michel that I’d given the dog away because I couldn’t deal with her anymore. Or I could say she’d run away. Then maybe he would knife someone else. Maybe he’d move to another begging station. At least I’d gain some time.

  The obvious place to hide the dog was with Cédric and Viviane, and besides, a visit was long overdue. The weekend I’d planned to go in February I’d spent shampooing the dog and popping her pills, which meant I hadn’t seen them since Christmas. In the meantime, they’d finally become parents. Adoptive parents, to a Russian orphan. Though she had held out for three more years—had kept hoping and believing—Viviane finally conceded to Cédric’s adoption plan. The process itself had been endless and grueling. Besides voluminous paperwork, they’d been made to jump through hoops—interviews and signed statements from professionals—that no natural parent would ever have been subjected to. Finally the previous December, they’d been approved and told that a five-month-old baby was available. In January they’d traveled halfway across Russia to pick him up.

  So Saturday afternoon, on another wet day in April, I left Mélo-Vélo in the hands of Piotr and took the train to Vernon with the dog and all her worldly possessions: bed, leash, food bowl, water bowl, and the rubber toy Piotr had given her. Cassie thought the Saint-Lazare station, where muzzled and unmuzzled pit bulls roamed beside their body-pierced, leather-clad owners, and the train, which was littered with scraps of food from previous passengers, was high adventure. She lunged right and left and generally infuriated me, until we sat down, and I realized her presence meant that nobody would want to sit next to me. As the train made its way to Vernon, doing its coy dance with the Seine while the city unfurled to the increasingly suburbanized countryside, I slumped in my seat and watched through the rain-speckled window. Cassie, who had exhausted the possibilities of finding food, was asleep with her head on my foot.

  In my car was a group of older American tourists on their way to Giverny. They looked like East Coast people, from New York or Boston or Philadelphia. People who might go to Long Island in the summer. One woman wore combs in her hair and looked reserved, like my mother. Suddenly a great wave of longing for my family washed over me. Particularly for Mother, my only connection to the father and even to the sister I only remembered snatches of. But I even missed Edward and his unflinching ease in the world, his quick dismissal of the past—or had I destroyed all that too, just as my malevolent semiconscious had desired? Even Edmond I could have stomached. He was, after all, the owner of the rue de Verneuil, and over the last couple of years, I’d found myself getting funny longings for that apartment with its creaking oak floors, its high ceilings, and large, ripple-paned windows. Even for Mother’s oversized collection of boxes. And certainly for Lisette, whom I must have hurt very much with my unconscionable behavior.

  My resentment had dissolved into a large vat of regret that I didn’t know how to transform into something more solid. There was that looming temptation to call or to write, to try and make amends, but I could never get myself closer than a hand on the telephone, a letter unsent. An insomniac night of resolve always evaporated in the light of day. I’d been difficult enough to endure before my disgrace; who’d want to ruin their Sunday roast with me now?

  Or should I say that I’d succeeded in creating yet another form of regret. Because as I’ve already mentioned, even before being ousted from my family, I was wallowing in the stuff. Regret for my early life, regret for my failed career, regret for my unsatisfactory love life. Regrets that I had carefully camouflaged with resentment and disdain, until I blew my own cover to smithereens. In the fallout, I’d left myself with almost no people, just memories of them. Yes, some of those memories had been preserved in photographs. But I’d discovered that memory on paper, in the absence of flesh and blood human beings, remains a visual exercise, a mental picture, a cold and lonely function of the brain.

  The train pulled into Vernon, with Cassie once again all nervous attention. Cédric was there, an unusually broad grin on his mild face.

  “What’s the stupid grin?” I asked. “You haven’t gone baby crazy, have you?”

  “Fatigue, probably,” he said, stroking Cassie’s head. “Sweet dog.”

  “Thanks. In fact . . .” I started but stopped because Cédric was grappling with Cassie, trying to get her into the back of the old Volvo. “She’s not used to cars,” I said instead.

  “I can see that,” he said, holding her with one hand as he closed the back hatch with the other.

  I threw all her paraphernalia in the back, next to the baby seat. The car was cleaner than I’d ever seen it.

  “So now you’ve got a dog in your life,” Cédric said, shifting gears to get us up the hill out of town.

  “For the moment she’s just a mission of mercy. I told you about the homeless guy Michel, who went to prison. His friend Claude came by the other day to say he’ll be out soon, and he’s already asked about the dog. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  When Cédric didn’t answer, I looked at him. He appeared not to have heard a word I’d said.

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m distracted.”

  “Distracted by what?”

  “I’m not supposed to say anything.”

  “Not even to me? Come on.”<
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  “Viviane’s pregnant.”

  “She’s what?”

  “Pregnant.” Cédric turned left from the main road, onto the narrow road that stretched across the fields. “The doctor says it’s fairly common. Just when you give up hope and sign the adoption papers, bang, a baby of your own. If we’d only known years ago that all Viviane had to do was abandon hope.”

  “What are you going to do with two babies?”

  “Just what anybody would do. Take care of them, watch them grow up. What do you think? We’re going to pack André back to the orphanage in Russia?”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Please tell me it’s not André as in Prince André.”

  “It’s a nice name.”

  “I can’t believe it. A dog called Fyodor is one thing but naming a baby after a character in War and Peace?”

  “Why not? Besides, I like to think of him as a prince. It helps me forget that awful place.”

  “The orphanage?”

  He nodded. “I mean, it was clean, and the people were perfectly pleasant. It was all the kids, especially the older ones. Their eyes. They were either angry or vacant or hopeless.” He shuddered. “It would have broken even your hardened heart.”

  “But two kids. It’s hard enough for me to get used to you with one child, much less another.”

  “Your saturation level on the number of children we have is somewhat beside the point, wouldn’t you say?”

  We turned into the courtyard of Hautebranche and parked next to another car. “There are other people here?” I asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you? I’m really in another world these days. A couple of painter friends and their model are visiting. As a matter of fact, the woman—English—says she’s met you. Béa Fairbank?” I shook my head.

  When we got out of the car, a cold rain was still coming down in that calmly persistent Normandy way. Everything dripped, from the branches of the still leafless trees, to the eaves under the undulating tiled roof. But through the wetness, birds were chirping. It was an odd note of spring in a still almost wintry scene. Cassie, once released from her car prison, went wild. She darted left and right, sent into a frenzy by the onslaught of new odors. When Cédric opened the front door, their three dogs charged out. She went low to the ground and began darting around in figure-eights, spinning herself in circles, until she finally landed under a bush, with the other dogs sniffing her from top to bottom.