Dogfight (6 page)

Joan Bishop had once complained that Hi John was making overtures toward her springer spaniel and that while he was making overtures—those were her exact words—he was lifting his leg on her rosebushes. Maggie wanted to know what was wrong with Hi John, why he wasn't good enough for Mrs. Bishop's dog. She said the peeing was just a manifestation of canine courtship, though Reed
wasn't sure about that. Maggie called Mrs. Bishop's dog a whore. She made a case for free will. She said, just because you don't approve of our living arrangement doesn't mean you have to take it out on our dog. Reed had watched the two women arguing in the street, heard the unnatural anger rising in their voices, and he couldn't help feeling sad for Hi John. That moment was probably the end of his romance and he would never understand why. Reed knew about endings and the loss of love. Joan Bishop had avoided them since.

“He'll be incarcerated for ten days,” Reed said. “How is Bill? His hand okay?”

“His hand is disgusting,” April said. “He had to get a cast and his fingers are all swollen like sausages.”

Reed was thinking that in all the time they had lived near the Hoffmans, maybe two years, he had never been alone with this woman. He couldn't recall ever actually speaking to her but he was sure that he must have, being neighbors. And here she was now on his couch, in a white blouse open at the neck and skirt dotted with sailboats, and sandals with straps, thin as paper, speaking as if they had known each other all their lives. He was strangely excited by her presence. He sat on the couch next to her and she crossed her legs so that her foot was just touching his shin. She looked at him over the rim of her cup.

“I'm really sorry about all this,” he said. “It isn't your fault, really.”

“If not for you,” April said, “everything could have been a lot worse. Bill's hand will get better. Hi John could have been killed.”

“I don't know,” Reed said. “He was holding his own.”

The phone rang and Reed walked into the kitchen to answer it. It was Maggie. Reed was nervous and excited both. He felt like he was up to something and it felt good. He pressed his fingers against the windowpane, which was cool and clammy.

“Have they come for Hi John yet?” she said.

“This morning,” he said. “I can't talk right now. April Hoffman is here apologizing. She brought some bones for Hi John.”

“Make sure she doesn't sue,” Maggie said, before hanging up.

April was looking out the window, past beads of rainwater, toward the backyard and Maggie's house. Reed wondered if she knew what she was looking at. Her hair was swept back into a chignon and she had pulled her knees up beneath her, covering her legs with her skirt, which was cotton and loose. Her toes were peeking out from beneath it, her toenails painted creamy red. He thought he had once heard Maggie call that color coral. He wanted to ask about her marriage but thought that was a bad idea, since it would possibly raise questions about his own marriage or lack thereof and that was not something he felt comfortable talking about.

Instead he said, “This was very nice of you to come by. We don't really know each other very well, do we? That's too bad. Since we're neighbors and all.”

She smiled and narrowed her eyes at him and picked up her coffee cup with both hands. She wasn't exactly what he thought of as beautiful, her face a bit too long, her eyes set too far apart, but he found himself terribly excited by her. He couldn't stop picturing bedroom scenes with her. The two of them winding together, the covers knotted at the foot of the bed. April Hoffman on her back with his fingers in her mouth. He remembered, suddenly, the commandment about coveting thy neighbor's wife. He almost laughed and knew that his smile must have been crazy and obvious. The Bible didn't acknowledge that wives could also covet. In real life, he thought, women do all the seducing. They know what they want and no amount of drinks bought or lies told can change that fact. The best you can wish for is to be the person that they want you to be in that first hopeful moment.

“Come sit by me,” April said.

The primary problem in Reed's marriage to Maggie had been his own eventual impotence in her presence. The first few years had been marked by a slow tapering off of desire but this hadn't really bothered Reed. He believed it to be commonplace and attributed it, partly, to the fact of their physical resemblance. They were comfortable
and they were friends. It was when Maggie slept with her secretary, a young woman whom Reed never found attractive, that his ability to perform with her stopped altogether. Maggie called it her fifteen-minute flirtation with lesbianism. Reed didn't know what to call it. One of the worst things about her sleeping with a woman was that there had been no one to lash out at, no one to hit. The event had fueled his fantasy life for months but despite the fantasies, he could not actually bring himself up to the task of sleeping with Maggie.

Reed was too thrilled to go straight to work so he drove around the block and let himself in Maggie's front door. He called to her and she said she was in the tub and he went back and sat on the toilet across from her. When she saw the look on his face, she said, “Get the cigarettes.”

Neither of them smoked but when they had been married, it had been their habit to keep a pack of cigarettes around for heart-to-heart talks. Reed found them in the refrigerator in the place set aside for storing butter. They smelled musty and antique, relics from their life together. It had taken almost a year to smoke the pack half empty and would probably take another year to finish it.

He lit a cigarette for Maggie and placed it between her lips while she dried her hands. Both of them took a few shallow drags, warming to the conversation, Reed now sitting on the cold tile, leaning his back against the tub. He turned and flicked his ash into the water. Maggie dropped hers on the soap dish and waited for Reed to begin what he had come to tell her.

“I had sex with April Hoffman,” he said, finally, trying to be matter-of-fact.

“You were able to sleep with her?” Maggie said.

Reed ignored this remark, let it hang in the air like the white wisps of smoke on their breath. He felt good. Maggie lifted one leg from the water and ran a washcloth over it, past her knee, along her calf.

“Where?” she said.

Reed took the washcloth from her and helped her wash her foot
and ankle. When he was finished Maggie brought the other leg up and he washed it, too, stopping to dip the cloth back in the water and ring it out. He flipped his tie over his shoulder to keep it dry.

“On the floor of the living room,” he said. He was holding the cigarette in his mouth to wash her leg and his voice was funny. “And in the bedroom.”

“Twice?” she said. “Wow.”

“No, just the one time. The floor was uncomfortable so I carried her back to the bed,” he said.

Her foot was slick with soap and slipped from his hands, splashing him, spotting his blue oxford with water. He was holding his wet hands away from his body and squinting from the smoke in his eyes.

“Damn,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said, smiling. “Run the blow-dryer over that. Clear it right up.”

He took a long drag from his cigarette and jetted the smoke in her direction. She flicked the water off her fingertips at him. Beneath the water her body looked wavy and nondescript. Reed stood and plugged in the blow-dryer near the sink and began making savage passes with it over his shirt. He was looking at her in the mirror.

“I guess, now, they won't sue us for medical bills,” Maggie said.

“What?” Reed couldn't hear her over the blow-dryer.

“I guess now they won't sue.”

“On the contrary,” Reed shouted. “I think a suit is more inevitable now than ever. I did, after all, sleep with the man's wife.”

He laughed and looked at his own reflection, then back at hers over his shoulder. He couldn't see her face, because of where the tub was situated, just her knees, rising like little islands from the water. He saw her hand appear briefly, drop an ash into the water between her knees and disappear again. His shirt was drying nicely.

“I wish you wouldn't sleep with her again,” Maggie said.

“What?” Reed said, not hearing clearly.

“Never mind,” she said.

“What?”

Maggie leaned over the edge of the tub to look at him. In the mirror, he could see her face, flushed from being in the water so long, the damp ends of her hair, her breasts pushed against the wall of the tub. Never mind, she said, again, but still he couldn't hear her. He could see her lips moving but couldn't understand what she was trying to say.

After some threatening glances and a surreptitious twenty palmed across the counter, the attendant at the pound agreed to let Reed take Hi John outside for a little while. There was a yard in the back where they took the dogs to do their business. Hi John was being kept in a small cage that they used for solitary confinement, hard cases only. He swaggered past the other dogs in the community cage, a different sort of criminal, and they watched him pass, enviously, a little afraid, the way Reed imagined petty thieves goggled at mob assassins.

Reed left his job at the Historical Preservation Society an hour early every day for his visits. Maggie took the afternoons, Reed the evenings. And the two of them, Reed and Hi John, sat at the fence, looking out, watching the streams of passing cars, Hi John's head turning slowly to follow each one. Reed brought the bones that April Hoffman had left and told his dog about their affair. About April coming over the last three mornings after her husband was gone. Telling him every detail, the way April breathed, deep and slow even at their most excited, the way her hair kept getting stuck to his lips. He liked that he could smell her on his clothes long after she was gone. The telling pleased him as much as the act itself. He asked about Maggie's visits, too, but Hi John didn't have anything to say, just listened without comment, cracking the bones with his teeth, the sound like branches snapping off in winter air.

“What do you two talk about out there?” the attendant said, mockingly, as Reed was on his way out.

“Women,” Reed said.

They looked at each other, not speaking. The man opened his mouth, as if to say something, then snapped it shut and went back to
the paperwork on his desk. Reed was surprised to find himself disappointed. Outside, the sun was shocking. It was as bright, Reed thought, as he had ever seen it.

A strange thing happened between Reed and Maggie when they got married. They had been living together for a year already and neither of them believed that a ceremony in a church for the sake of their parents would affect their relationship one way or another. Life would be business as usual, Maggie working for the county prosecutor's office, Reed overseeing the affairs of local Civil War battlefields for the Preservation Society. After dark, they would come home at roughly the same time, alternate nights cooking dinner, watch Let-terman on the couch, make the kind of genial love they had grown used to, filled still with desire but regular and pretty and easy. Something did happen, though neither of them ever mentioned it, and it had nothing to do with the arm of the law or the eyes of God. It was as if a web, a delicate filigree, had been drawn between them and over the things that were theirs. This thing extended, lightly, over their past together and into the future, giving them shape, the way a sheet is thrown over the invisible man in movies to make him visible. Both of them felt it, though they might have described it differently, comforting and terrifying at the same time.

Maggie didn't want to talk about Reed's affair anymore, though he desperately wanted to tell her about it. He had to content himself with Hi John's quiet listening. She still came over at night or he went to her house and they talked of other things. The presentation that Reed was to make tomorrow to potential benefactors for Shiloh battlefield. The case Maggie was trying. But mostly they talked about Hi John.

“I don't think they're treating him well enough, do you?” Maggie said. “He looks like he's lost weight.”

“Maybe he's gone on a hunger strike,” Reed said.

“Don't joke,” she said. “I'm serious.”

“I love it when you're serious,” he said.

“Look out,” she said. “Somebody's being clever. Hit the dirt.”

Maggie punched his arm playfully and he pretended that it hurt. He tickled her ribs and they rolled off the couch in her attempts to escape his fingers. Maggie pulled his hair and bit his shoulders and ears but not too hard and he kept on tickling her until she was in tears. The two of them rolled around this way, bunching the rug beneath them, until Maggie's leg, in a spasm of laughter, shot out and kicked a glass off the coffee table. It shattered, sprinkling the floor with shards, and brought them to their senses.

“Look what you made me do,” she said. “Idiot.”

Reed said, “You started it. Moron.”

“Imbecile,” she said.

“Ignoramus.”

“Half-wit.”

Later, Maggie fell asleep, leaning back against Reed on the couch with her head on his shoulder, her face turned slightly inward toward his. The television was on but he watched only her for a long time. In the dark, he could see the colors thrown off by the TV, mostly blues and reds, reflected on her skin. He could feel her breath on his neck and beneath his chin. He wanted to kiss her but he didn't, just leaned forward gently, awkwardly, so that their cheeks were together, the corners of their lips just slightly touching.

April Hoffman called in the morning to tell him that she wouldn't be stopping by today. She said it just like that. I won't be stopping by today. Reed played the moment over in his head, then went further back, like rewinding a tape, searching his memory for something he might have done wrong, something he might have said. He couldn't remember anything. Reed wasn't certain how he was supposed to feel. He knew he was supposed to feel something. At the time, he was sitting on a high stool in the kitchen, his feet hooked into its rungs, the phone on the wall near him. He felt along his arms, first one then the other, squeezing gently with his fingers, pressing against the bones, as if checking for fractures. At the elbow
of the second arm, he stopped, satisfied, and let his mind wander to the coming evening. He smiled, thinking of telling Maggie that his affair was over and wondering how she would react to the news.