Housebroken (14 page)

Afterward she went into the kitchen and filled the electric kettle with water and turned it on and read the long list of instructions about the dog in the woman's fine handwriting. At the bottom the woman had written, in her name and the man's name: “We hope you'll feel at home.”

She went back to the bedroom, sat on the bed, and took off her shoes. She lay on her back, unzipped her jeans and wriggled out of them, and then took off her shirt. She went on lying on her back, on the man's and the woman's bed, wearing her bra and panties. She turned over onto her stomach and laid her head on one of the pillows, and suddenly she found herself sniffing, breathing in the pleasant smell of detergent, but seeking a different smell.

The dog walked down the hallway, peeped into the room, and returned sadly to the living room. He was ten months old. The friend lay on her side and fingered the clean sheet drawn tightly over the mattress. She thought about the man. She thought: I haven't slept with him for ten months now.

She got up and looked for something to wear, pulled a tank top and a pair of shorts out of her pile, and put them on. She heard the kettle hissing and closed the closet door, but she immediately opened it again and pulled a big white T-shirt with long sleeves out of the jumble of the man's and the woman's clothes. She didn't know which of them it belonged to. She took off the shorts and the tank top, crammed them into her pile, and put on the big T-shirt.

Then she made herself a cup of coffee and looked for something to eat. In the fridge she found a pot with leftover rice and two meatballs. She put the pot on the stove and lit the flame, but suddenly she was too hungry to wait. She took the cold food off the stove, put it on the table, and sat down to eat.

The man told her about the meals. Whenever she asked him how things were going with the woman, if he didn't regret moving in with her, if he thought their relationship had a future, what he felt about her, he would tell her about some meal the woman had cooked, as if this was the answer to all her questions. He never told her about their sex life.

Afterward they had invited her to their dinner party, and she had tasted the woman's cooking herself, but she was so drunk that the next day, when she sat at home and tried to reconstruct the menu, she couldn't remember it. All she could remember was the taste of the single man's rejection. She remembered how she had fawned on him in the car, and she remembered herself writing down her phone number for him before the three of them dropped her off in front of her house.

She ate the cold rice and meatballs greedily, scraped the leftovers from the bottom of the pot with a fork, and gathered up bits of rice with her fingers. The dog, whose hope was still automatically aroused by the sound of food, got off the sofa and presented himself shyly in the kitchen. The friend looked at his bowl. It was empty. She studied the list again, to see when she was supposed to feed him. The woman had written eight o'clock, and it was already after nine. The dog sniffed the air. The friend stood up, held the pot close to his nose, and then put it in the sink. She glanced at the bagful of dog food standing on the fridge, a new bag which the man and the woman had bought before they left to save her the trouble. The note assured her that it would be enough to last all week. She took it down and stood it on the table, and the dog began to wag his tail. She picked up his bowl and put it on the table next to the bag. They could have cleared a shelf for her. They could have filled his bowl before they left, but no. They left it up to her.

She found a pair of scissors in a drawer, and was about to open the bag, but suddenly she changed her mind and returned the scissors to the drawer. She lifted the heavy bag and put it back on top of the fridge. She put the empty bowl down on the floor, and when the dog approached it and stopped next to it, stared at it, and then looked at her inquiringly, she stuck out her tongue at him.

She went into the living room and flopped onto the sofa. She picked up the newspaper which was lying on the table, and when she began to read it she noticed a stain of tomato sauce on the collar of the white T-shirt. She sprang up and ran into the bathroom, took off the shirt, put it in the sink, and rubbed the stain with soap. She stood there for a long time, rubbing the material between her fingers, afraid to lift the shirt out of the water and foam in order to see if the stain was gone.

The dog walked down the hall and stopped to look at her. Then he went up to his rug, lay down on it, curled up into a little ball, and closed his eyes. The friend took the wet T-shirt out of the sink and held it up to the light, but there was no need for light to see that the stain was still there. It had spread and changed its shape, from a little spot surrounded by splatters into a huge amoeba dividing and multiplying itself in the fabric. She rushed around the apartment looking for bleach. She looked under the kitchen sink, in the cupboards, on the kitchen porch, in the bathroom, and even in the bedroom closet, but she couldn't find any. She threw the wet shirt into the bathtub and hurried to the living room to look for a pen and paper. She found a notebook on the woman's desk, tore a page out of it, and wrote a memo to herself, in big letters: “Buy bleach!” She put her frantic note on the kitchen table, next to the woman's calm note.

In the morning, after sleeping in the man's and the woman's bed, she went into the kitchen and found the dog dozing next to his empty bowl, his head on his paws. Then she saw her note, made herself coffee, drank it quickly, and washed the cup and the pot and fork standing in the sink. She got dressed, went down to the grocery, bought two bottles of bleach, milk, beer, and rice, and went back upstairs. She crammed the shirt, which had begun to smell bad, into the pail she found on the kitchen porch, and poured in the two bottles of bleach. She heard the phone ring and the answering machine saying: “We're not at home. Leave a message and we'll get back to you,” and then the beep, and someone leaving a message: “Where are you? What's happening? How are you? Call us.”

She gave the dog water, but his bowl remained empty. She didn't want to kill him. She wanted to see him suffer. After she hadn't taken him out for three days the dog peed and shat on the bathroom floor, next to the pail which gave off a terrible stink.

Most of the time he lay on his rug in the hallway and slept. From time to time he got up and walked slowly to the kitchen, his tail between his legs, his pelvis lowered, as if he couldn't make up his mind whether to sit or stand. He stood for a long time at the kitchen door, in this new posture, looking like a big, old rabbit. He looked at his bowl from a distance, too hungry to beg, too well trained to try to snatch something from the hands of the friend, who greedily devoured everything in the fridge.

It was a week of heat wave and the apartment blazed. Every day the dog drank his water, and at night, when the friend went out and left him alone in the house, he went to the bathroom, squatted next to the pail, and peed. During the day she closed the shutters and lay on the sofa in her bra and panties, and in the evenings she went out. She came back very late, long after midnight, and took off her clothes on the way to the bathroom where, ignoring the sharp smell of the bleach and the urine, the puddle on the floor, and the rotting T-shirt in the pail, she took a cold shower. Then she wrapped herself in a towel, opened the shutters and the windows in the bedroom, and lay down on the bed. She wondered what the weather was like in Paris.

And she wondered how she would celebrate her thirty-fourth birthday in three months' time. For five years she had celebrated her birthdays with the man, who always brought her some silly present—kitschy earrings, heart-shaped soaps, dolls. On his birthdays she gave surprise parties for him in her apartment. In three months' time he too would be thirty-four, she thought. All these years she had seen the fact that she and the man had been born in the same year, one week apart, as another sign that they were meant for each other. There were a lot of other signs she invented, but the birthdays were the main thing.

Two weeks before he had met the woman he had celebrated his birthday. He was depressed, he said, he was already thirty-three and still alone. She had made a party for him on her porch. It was a pleasant summer evening, not hot and stifling like this one, and you could breathe. She had invited all his friends, everyone she had invited in previous years, and made sure to tell the couple with the baby a few of weeks in advance so they could find a baby-sitter. Nevertheless they turned up with the baby, who was six months old and turned into the attraction of the evening. The man played with her, held her in his arms, and hugged and kissed her, and after he had blown out the candles on his cake with her help, he took her to the bedroom and changed her diaper, on the bed, as if she were his baby.

The friend had bought him a pair of black jeans, which she knew he liked, and after the guests left and the man remained sitting in his armchair on the porch she said to him: “Try them on.” He went into the bedroom, took off his pants, and came out to the porch wearing the new jeans, which were tight. “Never mind,” he said. “I'll wear them a bit and they'll stretch.” But he never wore them. Afterward he returned to the bedroom and got undressed, taking off his shirt and underwear as well as the new jeans, lay on his back on the mattress, and called her to come to bed.

She quickly cleared away the empty bottles and the ashtrays and the paper plates with the remains of the expensive cake she had bought, the beautiful, multilayered cake, which didn't taste as good as it looked, and she collected the thirty-four little pink candles, which the baby had pulled out of the cake and scattered all over the house, and then she hurried to the bedroom. The man made love to her, kissed her on the cheek, and thanked her for the party and the present and going to all that trouble, and then turned his back to her and fell asleep. Now, as she lay in the middle of the man's bed, she couldn't remember what had made her think those days had been happy.

She fell asleep crying into the pillow. In the house the air stood still, hot, and heavy, full of the dreams she dreamed in her sleep—in which she saw herself as a big gray pigeon gathering crumbs in a rainy European square—and the waking nightmares of the hungry dog.

On the morning of the fourth day the friend hurried to the butcher's and bought a pound of fresh meat. She ran home, sweating in the heat, and filled the red plastic bowl. She sat at the kitchen table—the woman's note was still there, stained with coffee and tomato sauce—and looked at the dog. He stood next to his bowl and stared. His legs trembled and she thought that perhaps it was too late, perhaps he was already too weak, perhaps he was dying, perhaps he had forgotten how to eat.

She encouraged him with kind words, urged him to eat, she pleaded, but the dog went on standing next to the bowlful of meat, the trembling spreading from his legs to his back, his tail hanging between his legs, making weak whimpering sounds.

Suddenly he began to howl. It was a long jackal howl which split the air and caused the shutters in the opposite building to open. He stood with his back to her, his head raised to the ceiling, his eyes closed, and his howls tore the silence of the hot, dry morning.

She pressed both hands against her ears and began to cry. I've killed him, she thought, and tried to think of what she would say to the man and the woman when they returned, in three days' time, refreshed and in love, looking for their dog. What would she do with his corpse? But suddenly the dog fell silent. He turned his head to her and she smiled at him and whispered: “Eat.” He circled the bowl, sniffed it, looked at her again, then picked up a piece of meat daintily between his teeth, and ran to his rug. He ran like this, back and forth between the rug and the kitchen, until the bowl was empty, and a pile of red meat rose on the mat. The dog lay next to it, his head resting on his paws. He pulled one piece after the other into his mouth and chewed the meat slowly, as if the act of eating hurt, and his face was twisted in a strange, crooked smile.

28

In Paris the woman was the man's translator. He didn't understand a word of French, and the woman, who spoke French fluently, was happy to be his teacher, his interpreter, ordering for him in restaurants, consulting the waiters on his behalf, chatting with strangers in the street, asking them for directions. In the mornings she would slip out of their hotel and return with big breakfasts. They ate sitting on the bed, and the woman told him enthusiastically about the adventures she had had on the way. Everything was an adventure for her that week. The whole week it didn't stop raining.

She made friends immediately, with the unfriendly shop assistants and the old neighborhood barber, to whom she entrusted her hair one morning on the way back from the delicatessen. When she returned to the room she jumped onto the bed and tossed her cropped head in the man's face, splashing him with cold raindrops.

For a week she dragged him through the streets, his hand clutched in hers, and he tried to keep up with her, holding over their heads the big umbrella they had bought at the airport. She was full of joy and he had never seen her like this. At home, even when she was in a good mood, there was always a cloud of unhappiness floating above her head, liable to burst at any moment and shower them both with tears. He liked that cloud. He liked the tears. He didn't like seeing the woman unhappy, but he liked the permanent presence of her tears, the fact that it was easy for him to make her cry. Here in rain-swept Paris the cloud had vanished. Now and then he tried to see whether it still existed, sticking imaginary pins into it, provoking, sulking, but nothing happened. The cloud and the woman he knew had stayed at home, and he ran after this strange woman in the street.

In the plane on the way back she told him that she loved him. All the way they had been silent, he sullen, she pensive. A little while before landing she took his hand in hers, turned her face to the window and looked at the white floor of clouds and the wing of the plane gliding above them, looked back at him, and said: “I love you.”