Lorelei's Secret (26 page)

Sometimes I liked to play up my academic-gasbag persona so that Lexy could poke holes in it.

‘Right,’ Lexy said, interrupting. ‘But getting back to my story …’ We both laughed.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

‘So one of the myths I had come across was the story of Lorelei. It’s German. Do you know it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s about this beautiful woman who drowned herself because her lover was unfaithful, and then she became a mermaid and sat on a rock in the Rhine River and

lured sailors to their deaths with her beautiful siren song.’

‘So you read that and thought, what a perfect name for a puppy?’

‘No, of course not. But when I first saw Lorelei shivering in the rain, half drowned, I thought she looked like kind of a tragic figure. And she always has that worried expression on her face, even when she’s happy. It just seemed to fit her.’

I imagined a woman with Lorelei’s dog-face sitting on a rock and howling an unearthly song.

‘So did you ever make a Lorelei mask?’ I asked. ‘The mythological Lorelei, I mean.’

“I did, but it didn’t come out that well. I was imagining her with this really harrowing, haunting look on her face, but it was hard to make it work with the eyeholes cut out.

I was just never that happy with it.’

‘Do you still have it?’

‘No, I sold it to this German couple. They actually

wanted something more American, like a Bill Clinton mask or something, for a souvenir, but once I heard their accents, I started doing a real hard sell on the Lorelei mask. They were familiar with the myth, which no one else had been, and I gave them a good deal on it.’

There was a loud clap of thunder, and Lorelei shuddered convulsively beneath my hand.

‘Shh, girl,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’

But she would not be comforted. When Lexy and I

went to bed, we let her climb up and lie between us, and all through the night, my sleep was troubled by her trembling and her whining. It wasn’t until the rain stopped and the morning sun showed the world washed and new

that Lorelei’s body relaxed, and the danger past, she closed her eyes to sleep.

My last weekend with Lexy was a quiet one, full of easy lulls when she could have told me the secret she carried. It was fall, yard sale season, and we spent Saturday afternoon driving through neighborhoods we’d never been to and trying to decipher the handwriting on signs where the writer had run out of space and had had to cram all

the details into the bottom corner. It was something we liked to do together, a happy reminder of the way we’d met. I bought a sweater vest Lexy didn’t like and a clock for my study; Lexy bought an electric coffee grinder and an ice-cube tray that made ice cubes in the shape of a heart.

She said she liked the kitschiness of it. It’s the hopefulness of these items that gets me now. She was still imagining a future where we would drink fresh-ground coffee together in the mornings. Where we would slip tiny ice hearts into our drinks to see how they’d float.

At our last stop of the day, Lexy paused in front of a table of children’s toys. She picked up a plastic Halloween mask, the kind that’s held in place with a rubber band.

It was a Frankenstein mask, cheaply made and garishly colored.

“I think yours are nicer,’ I said to Lexy, talking quietly so that the woman sitting in the lawn chair a few feet away wouldn’t hear.

‘Yeah, but these are fun. They’re like everyone’s memory of their childhood Halloweens. I think I’m going to get it.’

She paid the woman a quarter, and we walked across

the lawn to the car.

“I think,’ Lexy said, and it makes my chest ache to think of it, ‘maybe I’ll start collecting these.’

Sunday, we slept late and Lexy made pancakes, working from a cookbook.

“I never knew these were so easy,’ she said. ‘My mom never made anything from scratch, and I used to be so jealous when I slept over at friends’ houses and they had the kind of moms who made pancakes in the morning. But it turns out it’s really easy.’

‘See?’ I said. ‘You could be a mom.’

She looked at me for a long moment, and I think she

might have told me then. But she didn’t. She turned away to ladle more batter into the pan, and what she said was, ‘Yeah, I guess I could.’

I filed that away in my brain as a small triumph. I thought I’d bring it out another time, if the topic of having children came up again. I ate my pancakes happily, pleased with this small concession. Maybe there’s hope, I thought.

We went for a walk in the afternoon, and then to a

movie. We had dinner at our favorite pizza place. Sunday was a lovely day. And Monday was fine.

But Tuesday. Tuesday is when we had our last fight.

We’re getting nearer. We’re nearing the end, of course you know that, you’ve known from the beginning, from the very first sentence I spoke. I’m tensing up as we get closer, I can feel myself wanting to slow down and to speed up at the same time.

I had a slow day at work on Tuesday - I was supposed to be finishing up a symposium paper, but I kept getting distracted. I found myself, at one point, thinking about the myth of Lorelei. The image that kept popping into my mind was the one I had envisioned the night of the storm - a combination of the two Loreleis, the dog and the siren, a woman with flowing hair and a deadly song, her human face replaced with a Rhodesian Ridgeback’s earnest, furrowed features. It was a captivating image, at least in my mind, and it started me thinking that maybe this could be Lexy’s next big project. She’d seemed a bit aimless since finishing the Macbeth masks over the summer, and I thought this might be the answer. It drew on some elements she’d worked with in the past, and it allowed for endless combinations; she had all of mythology to work with, and all the dogs of the world. Didn’t the Egyptians have a dog-faced god? Why not carry that

over to other mythologies? I imagined Medusa with the snarling face of a Doberman, her snaky hair sprouting from the glossy black fur of her forehead. I imagined Botticelli’s Venus rising from a clamshell with the sweet face of a sheltie. I made some clumsy sketches. I drew a pug-faced Cupid, a dalmatian-faced Athena bursting forth from the Labrador forehead of her father, Zeus. I drew Hermes with his winged hat resting gently on the ears of a Jack Russell terrier. I was quite taken with the idea. My drawings were mediocre, but surely Lexy would be able to do a better job.

I looked at the clock. It was four o’clock, and it was clear I wasn’t going to get any more real work done that day. I left my office and headed for the library. I found an illustrated book on world mythology and one on dog breeds. Using the photocopy machine and some scissors and tape borrowed from the reference desk, I created a few prototypes. Here was Poseidon with the face of a Portuguese water dog. Here was Hades with a bulldog’s bloated grimace. I laughed out loud at what I had made, causing several nearby students - it was close to midterms, and the library was packed - to cast annoyed looks in my direction. The images I’d created were crude and out of proportion, but there was something about them that

made sense to me. At least they would give Lexy some idea of what I had in mind. I made one final picture, with a Ridgeback’s face on top of a siren’s body - I wasn’t able to find a picture of the German Lorelei, so I used one of the Greek sirens - and I headed home to show my creations to Lexy.

When I got home, Lexy was chopping vegetables for

dinner. I kissed her on the top of her head and sat down across from her at the kitchen table. She smiled at me.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How was your day?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Excellent. I had a great idea.’

‘Tell me about it,’ she said. She pushed aside the onion slices she’d been working on and started in on a red pepper.

‘Well, it’s an idea for you, actually. I’ve got your next project for you.’

She put down her knife and looked at me warily. ‘Okay,’

she said. ‘But you know I don’t really tend to take other people’s ideas for my work. It kind of has to come from me, you know? I have to be inspired by something on

my own. It’s like, remember when you published your

first linguistics textbook, and all of a sudden your uncle started telling you all his ideas for mystery novels? It’s not like you were about to give up all your own work to work on someone else’s ideas.’

‘Well, no, of course not. His ideas were terrible. But I think what I’ve got is pretty good. Just let me show it to you.’

She sighed. ‘Fine, but just be aware that I may not want to take your advice.’

I pulled my drawings and photocopy art out of my jacket pocket and smoothed the pages on the table. Lexy looked at them skeptically. She didn’t smile.

‘See,’ I said, ‘it’s figures from mythology done with dog faces. Isn’t that kind of interesting?’

She shrugged. “I guess so,’ she said.

‘Well, these aren’t done very well, of course, but I think that if you did them …’ She didn’t say anything. She was staring at the table. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

‘See,’ I went on, “I got the idea from your story about the myth of Lorelei and the way that when Lorelei, the dog, showed up, she kind of looked like the character from the myth. And I just started envisioning this mythical mermaid with Lorelei’s face.’ I shuffled through the pages until I found the one with the Ridgeback. ‘Look, it’s this one here.’

She picked up the paper and looked at it, then let it fall to the table.

‘It’s just not that simple, Paul,’ she said. There was a sudden sharpness to her voice. ‘Look, some of these can’t even be done as masks. This Venus on the clamshell thing - if you just did her head, no one would understand what it was supposed to be.’

‘Well, you just give it a title that explains it - that’s what artists do, isn’t it? You call it “Sheltie Venus” or something.

“Sheltie Venus Number i.”’

‘Oh, so now I’m supposed to do more than one of them?

A whole series of sheltie Venuses? And this is going to be my claim to fame?’

‘Lexy, I spent half the day working on this. You could at least …’

‘Well, I didn’t ask you to.’

“I don’t know why you’re getting so upset,’ I said, my own voice rising. “I was just trying to help. You’ve been sitting around for weeks, trying to come up with something new to work on. Why won’t you at least consider this?’

‘Because it’s a bullshit idea.’

“I don’t see what makes it worse than some of the things you’ve come up with. “Laundry-shaped Souls”? What the hell is that?’

She stood up from the table and glared at me with such rage that I had to look away. “I can’t believe you just said that,’ she said, her voice shaking. She was clenching and unclenching her fists. She made a noise of strangled anger and frustration, and in a single motion swept everything off the table, the papers, the vegetables, the cutting board. The knife hit the floor with such force that it bounced up at her, and she had to step back to avoid being hit by it.

I was not charitable. ‘Great,’ I said coldly. ‘Here we go again.’

She raised her fist and banged it hard on the table once, twice, then stopped and rubbed her hand as if she’d hurt it.

‘Go to hell,’ she said, and left the room, her movements stiff and jerky. I heard the basement door slam.

I picked my papers off the floor and smoothed them out, but I left the mess of the vegetables. The wooden cutting board, I saw, had broken in half.

I paced the kitchen floor, growing more and more angry.

Why did everything have to be so damn hard? There are people, I thought, whose lives are easier than this. There are people who don’t have to worry that their tiniest acts of kindness will be met with fury by the ones they love. It was in that moment that I thought, for the first time, about leaving Lexy. For a moment, only for a moment, I saw my life without her and I saw it to be better. Easier. Lighter.

In that moment, that second heart of mine seemed to soar free. And it was in that same moment that I heard a cry from downstairs.

I went down to Lexy’s workshop to find her sitting on the couch, crying. She had a book on her lap, a big coffee-table book of African masks, with a piece of paper on top of it.

She was holding her hands in front of her, looking at them.

They were covered with a red liquid that I thought at first was blood. There was a pool of the same liquid seeping into the paper.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

“I was just so mad,’ she said. “I just didn’t know what to do with it.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘Well, I thought maybe it would help if I tried to write it down, but as soon as I started writing, I lost control and started pounding the pen into the paper as hard as I could, and I was stabbing the paper with it, and the pen just broke.’

‘That’s ink?’ I said.

She nodded. She dropped her head and began to sob

harder.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ she said. “I broke a pen. What kind of person does that?’

I just stood there and watched her cry. I tried to summon the strength to go to her, to comfort her, but then I saw the wreckage of the pen in her hands, and I realized what pen it was she had broken. It was a gold pen I had received from my parents when I graduated college. I used it to grade papers and exams; I kept it filled with red ink for that purpose. It was a pen that meant a great deal to me, and even though I’ve spent every day since then wishing I had acted differently, in that one moment I just couldn’t bring myself to be kind.

“I’m going upstairs,’ I said. ‘Do you think you can avoid damaging any more of my things?’

I left her sitting there, crying, her hands covered with ink like blood.

I didn’t see her for the rest of the night. She stayed in the basement until after I’d gone to bed. And even though my anger had waned by the time I went to sleep, even though I cleaned the vegetables from the floor and left a note saying I was sorry, the harm was already done. That night, while I slept, Lexy picked up the phone and called Lady Arabelle and told her the secret she had not seen fit to tell me. “I’m lost,’ she said. “I don’t know what to do.’