Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [92]
“Hey, I’m happy to go.”
“I wouldn’t want to put you out.”
“No, really, I’d like to.”
“May I bring my dog?”
“Sure,” said Lewis.
David went into the house to fetch his things. Alone in the car, Lewis reconsidered his impulsive offer, which obviated once and for all the possibility of intercepting Lydia at the airport, hurling himself at her feet, and begging one more time.
David emerged from the house with a blue blanket, a leather knapsack, and an ancient spotted hound. He spread the blanket over the backseat and helped the dog into the car. A female. White-muzzled, with huge droopy ears and filmy eyes, she gave Lewis a doleful look and slumped against the seat, exposing a belly of festering sores. The car filled with a moist, sour smell like rotting bacon.
Lewis opened his window, breathing in cool, fresh air as David sat down in the front beside him. “What’s wrong with her, anyway?” Lewis asked.
“Her oil glands have stopped working.”
“How old is she?”
“Seventeen.”
“She already smells dead.” When David didn’t reply, Lewis said, rather more nicely, “Isn’t that old for a dog?”
“Especially such a large dog.” David leaned into the backseat, stroked the dog’s head, then pulled his door closed.
The door shut with a muffled click, a subtle and final sound that triggered images of Lydia with acute, almost hallucinatory clarity: the curve of her long neck; her small, exquisite head. Barbara said Lydia, at twenty-five, was simply too young for him. Lewis felt Lydia’s disinterest, whatever the cause, was inevitable. The miracle was that she had ever enfolded him, all his meagerness and angst, in those slim, tennis-sculpted arms.
“Hey,” he said to David. “I don’t mean to mooch free medical advice or anything, but I was wondering: do you know a treatment for someone whose idiot heart has been kicked to a bloody pulp?”
“What’s that again?”
“You know, a cure—or maybe not a cure exactly, maybe just a salve—for a guy who’s just lost the most brilliant and beautiful girlfriend?”
They were on the freeway now. Trucks trundled alongside them. The car was incubator warm. “Oh,” said David. “What you need is a guayanchero. These men and women in Peru are world experts in love magic. Actually, they’re wonderfully pragmatic. I met a man who went to one because his wife had stopped loving him. The guayanchera went into a trance, burned herbs, consulted dead birds, and then she said, ‘Well, if your wife doesn’t love you, maybe you’d better start looking for someone who does.’ ”
“I’m glad I didn’t fly all the way to Peru to hear that.”
“It’s not what anybody wants to hear.” David thought some more. “There’s always the literature cure. Take a big box of books out to the desert and read until things shift. Bleak House can cure anything.”
Lewis smacked the steering wheel. “Bleak House is about my favorite fucking book in the world.” He couldn’t wait to teli Barbara and the chair of his thesis committee he’d spent the day with a curandero who prescribed Bleak House for a broken heart. You can’t make up something like that.
They settled into a relaxed, motoring hum. Lewis explained his dissertation on Flaubert, Turgenev, and Paris in the 1860s. David Ibañez described his childhood on the Sally Morrot ranch.
GROWING UP in the workers’ village, said David, was like living on a feudal estate: a prescribed, simple, unquestioned hierarchical arrangement in which Sally Morrot spoke the word of God.
His earliest memories were smells. Wood smoke and dirt, a gamy mixture of chickens and compost, the orange groves’ pungent dust and perfume. As a small child, he could smell water, before it rained or when the river was full. On certain February days, he’d get a whiff of spring, the moist balminess peculiar to afternoons in April, May, and June. People smelled then, too, and he could identify them by their particular tangled blend of food, sweat, and soap. He gauged moods by the onion scent of fear, the baked-goods aroma of contentment, the rankness of alcohol rising off skin.
He might’ve joined the twentieth century earlier, he said,