The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [205]
“Howard, did you say that you fell in love with somebody? When?”
“A few weeks ago. The semester’s over. She’s graduating. She’s gone in January. A graduate student—like that? A twenty-two-year-old kid. One of my pal Lightfoot’s philosophy students.” Howard lets go of the wheel. When he turned the ignition off, he had continued to grip the wheel. Now his hands are on his thighs. We both seem to be examining his hands. At least, I am looking at his hands so I do not stare into his face, and he has dropped his eyes.
“It was all pretty crazy,” he says. “There was so much passion, so fast. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think I let on to her how much I cared. She saw that I cared, but she . . . she didn’t know my heart kept stopping, you know? We drove out here one day and had a picnic in the car—it would have been your nightmare picnic, it was so cold—and a dog came wandering up to the car. Big dog. Right over there.”
I look out my window, almost expecting that the dog may still be there.
“There were three freezing picnics. This dog turned up at the last one. She liked the dog—it looked like a mutt, with maybe a lot of golden retriever mixed in. I thought it was inviting trouble for us to open the car door, because it didn’t look like a particularly friendly dog. But she was right and I was wrong. Her name is Robin, by the way. The minute she opened the door, the dog wagged its tail. We took a walk with it.” He juts his chin forward. “Up that path there,” he says. “We threw rocks for it. A sure crowd-pleaser with your average lost-in-the-woods American dog, right? I started kidding around, calling the dog Spot. When we were back at the car, Robin patted its head and closed the car door, and it backed off, looking very sad. Like we were really ruining its day, to leave. As I was pulling out, she rolled down the window and said, ‘Goodbye, Rover,’ and I swear its face came alive. I think his name really was Rover.”
“What did you do?” I say.
“You mean about the dog, or about the two of us?”
I shake my head. I don’t know which I mean.
“I backed out, and the dog let us go. It just stood there. I got to look at it in the rearview mirror until the road dipped and it was out of sight. Robin didn’t look back.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get ice,” he says, starting the ignition. “But that isn’t what you meant, either, is it?”
He backs up, and as we swing around toward our own tire tracks I turn my head again, but there is no dog there, watching us in the moonlight.
Back at the house, as Howard goes in front of me up the flagstone pathway, I walk slower than I usually do in the cold, trying to give myself time to puzzle out what he makes me think of just then. It comes to me at the moment when my attention is diverted by a patch of ice I’m terrified of slipping on. He reminds me of that courthouse figure—I don’t know what it’s called—the statue of a blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice. Bag of ice in the left hand, bag of ice in the right—but there’s no blindfold. The door is suddenly opened, and what Howard and I see before us is Koenig, his customary bandanna tied around his head, smiling welcome, and behind him, in the glare of the already begun party, the woman with red hair holding Todd, who clutches his green dinosaur in one hand and rubs his sleepy, crying face with the other. Todd makes a lunge—not really toward his father but toward wider spaces—and I’m conscious, all at once, of the cigarette smoke swirling and of the heat of the house, there in the entranceway, that turn the bitter-cold outdoor air silver as it comes flooding in. Messiah—Kate’s choice of perfect music for the occasion—isn’t playing; someone has put on Judy Garland, and we walk in just as she is singing, “That’s where you’ll find me.” The words hang in the air like smoke.
“Hello, hello, hello, hello,” Becky calls, dangling one kneesocked leg over the balcony as Deirdre covers her face and hides behind