Tell Me One Thing (29 page)

For most of my life I felt as though I was in the middle of a military maneuver—doing what was asked of me, never straying outside the lines, and avoiding anything that would garner undue notice. The only time I ever felt free was when I was writing. Maybe because it felt like a secret and slightly subversive activity, I carried no rules over to that realm. And allowed no one else in. I was still at that tentative, terrifying stage where I wanted to be able to write but had no confidence I would be able to master the mystery of it. I carried the kernel of that desire within me at all times. Sometimes it was all that pushed me forward—that incipient desire.

AS I LOOK BACK ON IT NOW
, the first strong feeling I had about Owen was envy. When I would let myself into his house and gather Bandit’s leash from the front hall closet, I would often hear Owen laughing on the phone, a rolling, infectious sound that ended with hiccups of glee. It was the freedom in that laugh that drew me in. And I would hear it a lot. If only, I thought at times, if only I could be free enough to laugh like that.

I gradually picked up, from overheard snippets of conversation, that he worked in the nonprofit world grant writing or fund-raising, something like that, something that relied on social skills and networking and a passionate belief in the goodness of the cause. I heard the charm and the laughter in his voice and the long periods of listening he did on the phone often punctuated with “Yes, that’s exactly right!” making the listener feel he had managed to say something brilliant.

It was his voice, I would have to say, that first drew me toward
him, his voice which carried the lilt of his spirit. I would often stop with my hand on Bandit’s leash and listen to the rise and fall of Owen’s voice and wait for the laugh and the “Yes! Yes!” as he validated whoever was speaking, and then I could snap the leash to Bandit’s collar and let him lead me out the front door.

I didn’t give all this much thought at the time. I was supremely self-involved, as only beginning writers can be. My few friends from college who would have forced me outside my isolation had scattered after graduation—back to hometowns far from L.A. or to jobs in other big cities—making it only easier to ignore the rest of the world. Only Jennie, my college roommate, was still close by, but she had moved in with a new boyfriend and had very little time right then for our friendship.

I didn’t mind. It felt as though all that was essential for my survival happened in those quiet morning hours before the rest of the world was stirring and my obligations began. From the corner of my tiny second-floor bedroom where I had set up my desk, I would watch the sky lighten and the sun spill over the Hollywood Hills in the distance and I would write and despair and write some more and finally despair too much. Had I managed to write an acceptable paragraph in three hours? Should I pare down the opening of my story? What happens next to my characters? What happens?

My head was always full of a completely made-up universe that felt so much more compelling than the mundane world I inhabited. That may be why, one day when I went to return Bandit, I didn’t notice glass shards glistening along the driveway like a trail of diamonds.

Owen had been gone when I picked up Bandit. That wasn’t unusual. I knew immediately when I let myself in that the house was empty, Owen’s absence as great a presence as his actual being. Bandit more than made up for the quiet with barking leaps of
happiness. He jumped as if his legs were made of springs, encircling me with a pent-up energy that directed me straight to the dog park.

We were gone a little more than an hour. That’s usually the time it took for Bandit to flop down at my feet, long pink tongue hanging sideways out of his mouth, utterly spent from running circles around the perimeter of the park and tumbling across the grass with whichever dog would comply. His prostrate body was my cue to stand up, attach his leash, and begin the slow walk home.

I was filling Bandit’s water dish in the laundry room when I heard Owen’s car pull up. I lingered. I had to admit to myself that I lingered so that we would see each other as he came in. Our conversations were always inconsequential, but something about them sustained me through the rest of my solitary day. Often he’d tell me something he’d just done and I would laugh with him. Or I would give him a report on Bandit’s exercise and he would listen as attentively as if I were divulging national security secrets.

This day, though, he came into the house, worried, his face dark and his energy tight.

“There’s glass on the driveway.”

And in the next second his eyes found the broken kitchen window and his face melted with recognition. It was only then that I also saw the vandalism.

“It must have happened while we were gone. Bandit wouldn’t have let anyone in otherwise.”

“Unless it was someone he knew,” Owen said as he walked through the kitchen and into the other rooms of the house. He didn’t invite me but I followed, and when we ended up in his office I saw that one of the windows in that room had been left open, the screen pushed out, as if someone had exited the house that way.

Owen scanned his files, the paperwork on his desk, double-checking that it was all there.

“Is anything missing?”

“No.”

And then his eyes settled on the bookshelf where the bottles of wine from the kitchen had been arranged on the top in the shape of an arrow pointing to the open window. “This was meant as a message.”

“Telling you what?”

“Just announcing his presence.”

“You know some strange people.”

“I used to.”

And then, because there was a moment of awkward silence—I didn’t know what to say and he wasn’t about to elaborate—he asked me, “Would you like a cup of tea?”

I said yes although I never drank tea. I said yes because he still seemed upset. I said yes because I didn’t want to leave.

We sat at his round dining room table in the two mismatched chairs. Bandit slept at Owen’s feet, snoring slightly from time to time. The tea Owen made us was some kind of herbal concoction and I didn’t like it, but I sipped it anyway.

“What do you do with the rest of your time?” Owen asked me.

“I walk other people’s dogs.”

“And when you’re not doing that?”

I hesitated. My morning hours at my desk were so sequestered from the rest of my life I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him, and so I was slow to answer.

“Is it illegal?”

And that made me laugh. “No, just fragile,” I said.

And he nodded as if he understood. “Just being born?”

“Yes.”

“And each day, you’re not sure it won’t all collapse and there
you will be, back where you started without anything to show for all your effort.”

I just looked at him without answering—how did he get inside my head?

“Can you tell me what it is?”

He was looking directly at me as he spoke, his brown eyes never left my face. He was wearing a blue shirt, I remember, bright blue with the cuffs rolled up on strong forearms. His body leaned forward over the table and his naked hands cupped his mug of tea. He was waiting with infinite patience. The rest of the world receded to the periphery of my consciousness and in that moment there was only the two of us sitting in this high-ceilinged room looking at each other. It unnerved me—the intensity of his interest, the answering pull within me that I suddenly recognized. What was happening here?

I stood up quickly, took my mug of tea to the kitchen sink, and only then managed to say, without looking at him, trying to keep my voice light, “Oh, I’m messing about trying to write some short stories.”

He followed me into the kitchen. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes … when I get it right.” Then the truth: “Yes, it is.” And we smiled at each other.

THAT DAY SHIFTED OUR ROUTINE
, imperceptibly, but definitely. After that, oftentimes if he wasn’t on the phone, we would sit at Owen’s oak table and drink tea, and then coffee when I finally confessed that caffeine was my lifeline, and we would talk. He seemed to be home more often, and I made sure I had no dogs waiting for me in the early afternoon.

What did we talk about? At first it was our work lives. I learned about the nonprofit, Art into Life, that convinced him to
come back to California and fund-raise for them. Their mission was to pair working artists—writers, painters, poets, architects, photographers—with afterschool programs in the city schools. It was a way for kids who had never been to a museum or read a book that wasn’t assigned in school to see, learn, and try out their creative wings. The organization was in its third year of operation, long enough to convince the community that they were viable, but not yet at the stage to make the kind of impact they envisioned. That’s where Owen came in.

Living and working in New York, Owen had been employed by a small family foundation that gave out yearly grants to carefully chosen artists, three or four at a time. The last awards had gone to a weaver who created wall hangings from used denim, a glass artist who constructed Tiffany-style lamps, and a conceptual artist who used found sites—an abandoned gas station, a crumbling factory—to stage his work. All very well and good, Owen said, supporting an individual artist’s work, but when this job came to him he decided reaching kids at an early age was an even better idea, and he came back to L.A. where he had lived before, and reclaimed the house he had been renting out.

I wondered if the person who had broken into the house had been his renter, communicating something like
You made me leave
with those wine bottles arranged in an arrow and pointing out the window. Whoever did it was angry, that much was clear.

But I didn’t ask. There seemed to be an implicit etiquette to those early conversations. Each of us spoke about what we wanted the other to know. And each of us listened and accepted and didn’t probe. It worked. A sense of shelter grew, a sense of being heard but not challenged.

When we sat in that quiet dining room in the early afternoon, the sun coming in through the westward-facing windows, I felt safe enough to talk about the work I had done that morning at my desk or even the struggle I’d put up with nothing to show for
it. Owen was the only person in my life then who knew about my writing.

My parents, who lived in Pleasanton, in Northern California, would call dutifully every Sunday night and, from time to time, carefully raise the question of what I was planning on doing with my life. It was my mother who would always preface her inquiry with “I know the first few years after graduation are for figuring out what you want to do,” and then my father, on the extension, would jump in and remind me of how expensive my UCLA education had been. There was no way I could ameliorate the fact that their college-educated daughter was spending her days taking dogs for a walk and picking up poop without telling them about the writing. And I wasn’t ready to do that. My father, who was a scientist and worked at the neighboring Lawrence Liver-more National Laboratory doing something with national defense contracts that he couldn’t ever completely explain to us, would have dismissed a literary career as a pipe dream. My mother, who had spent her career as a middle-school counselor in the Alameda County School System, would have worried about the amount of rejection I would have to suffer.

But with Owen, the words rushed out of my mouth. “I had a good morning!” I would say as we sat down. And he would put the two mugs of coffee on the table, sit down across from me, and say, “Tell me,” as if he hadn’t anywhere else to be or anything else to do. “Tell me everything”—as if my progress made him personally happy, as if he had a stake in it. And so I would. I have never had a traditional mentor in my life, but those early afternoons with Owen were as close as I ever got.

That’s where things rested for months. I walked Bandit five days a week. Owen and I had our midday coffee in his dining room when he was home. He listened eagerly and because I was so hungry to share my early morning secret, I was the one who talked and talked. Over those months I learned very little about
his life until late one Thursday night, after midnight, when my phone rang, startling me awake. Owen sounded frantic.

“Bandit’s gone” were his first words. I wasn’t fully awake. I didn’t quite understand.

“Gone where?”

“I just got home and he’s not here and the backyard gate is open.”

“I’m sure I didn’t—” I started to say.

“No, of course not,” he cut me off, “I didn’t mean to imply. I just picked up the phone without thinking.” I heard him take a deep breath and then another. “I woke you,” he said, sounding only minimally calmer. “I’m sorry, Anna. What can you do? Please, go back to sleep.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

WHEN I PULLED UP TO OWEN’S HOUSE
, the kitchen and dining room lights were blazing. I could see him pacing as I let myself in through the back door.

“I walked the streets calling him but it’s dark and he’s black and …” He sat down at the table. “Nothing.”

“Has he done this before? Gotten out?”

“Never.”

“Let’s try again. We’ll take the car. You drive and I’ll look—we can cover more area that way.”

Slowly Owen drove the dark streets of his neighborhood. The streetlights were dim and far apart, yielding only modest pools of amber light here and there. Most of the small houses were dark by now as well. It was close to one in the morning.

“Try the dog park,” I said, and Owen turned left and then left again and there was the shuttered gate of the park, padlocked for the night.

We got out of the car and walked the perimeter, calling the dog’s name into the empty air. He would have come if he had heard us. I knew that. He wasn’t there.

“I’m so sorry,” Owen said.

I shook my head.

“This is my problem and I woke you up. I don’t know what I thought.…”

We were back at his car, our eyes still searching the blackness with the hope of somehow seeing a large black dog come loping out of the gloom toward us.

“I love this dog, too,” I told him, and it was true. This furry, ill-trained, exuberant dog had gathered in a piece of my heart. I put my hand on Owen’s arm and he took my hand in his without looking at me.