Pug Hill - Alison Pace [61]
I settle back into the bench and look out in front of me to see who else is out there. Over there, by the tree, there’s another fawn pug. He’s very tall for a pug, rather spindly actually, and he’s dressed in what looks like less of a sweater and more of a green Mexican blanket with a belt. The spindly pug is hovering over a much smaller and rounder pug, who isn’t wearing any pug accoutrement at all. I lean forward a little bit because the spindly Mexican-blanketed pug really does seem to be breathing down the little unadorned one’s neck. But then it seems that the Mexican-blanketed spindly pug bores easily; he trots off. A woman comes over to put a red harness on the little pug. He snorts up at her and reaches out his tongue to kiss her. I wonder if she has any idea how lucky she is, how much I envy her.
I stare out at the frolicking pugs, there must be ten of them here. Each one to me is love, each one is unconditional friendship, each one is happiness and each one is freedom.
“Is this seat taken?” says a British accent from above me. Startled, I look up and I see that attached to the British accent is a very cute guy, who, I kid you not, looks exactly like David Duchovny. Maybe, I think, just for a second, it is David Duchovny. That is if David Duchovny had a British accent.
“No, please,” I say, gesturing to the rest of the bench, and I’m pretty sure as he sits down, that he’s not actually David Duchovny, but, still. He leans back against the bench and looks out with me at the pugs spread out all around the hill in front of us.
“Which one is yours?”
“I don’t have one,” I answer. I feel him turn toward me. I look over at him and he’s looking at me quizzically.
“I just like to see them,” I say by way of explanation.
“Oh, a pug voyeur then? A bit like myself today ...” he says, trailing off, his eyes following as a pug in a hot pink jacket with a bright green hood charges past us.
“You don’t have a pug, either?” I ask, stunned.
“No, can’t say I do.” He says can’t like cahnt, and it occurs to me that I just might have read one too many chick-lit novels in my day. I have, somewhere along the way, lost the ability to hear an English accent and not think that it so surely implies that somewhere within earshot is the man with whom I am to live happily ever after.
I look over at him and he’s smiling; a really cute, really boyish smile by the way, and his teeth aren’t banged up at all, the way I tend to sometimes think British teeth might be. I try not to think how in so many of the books I’ve read, how the love interest is always British, how the happy ending always involves a cute British guy. But I do.
I smile back at him and then I cahnt really think of what to say, which isn’t so unusual because I can’t think of what to say a lot of the time. And so I just smile again, and he smiles back, and I can’t help wondering if maybe this is how it happens, if maybe this is how my search ends. I think how cinematic it would be, what a great ending this would make to the movie I would so prefer my life to be. Imagine: if after all my years of coming to Pug Hill, I meet someone, who by virtue of being British is, of course, happy-ending preapproved, and who also likes to just come to Pug Hill to sit here and see the pugs.
“Do you quite like pugs then?” he asks.
“I do,” I say and smile again, still. I feel a little funny and I wonder if this is how a person feels when she knows that her search for love is over, when she knows that everything is going to turn out okay. I’m not sure how, but I think I always imagined that it would have felt somewhat different from this.
“Pugs were quite a big thing for the duke and duchess of Windsor, you know,” he says.
“Indeed,” I say. And I know that indeed is sort of