The Dog Who Knew Too Much (12 page)

“Rachel, you don't have to—”

“How about tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Just say
yes
, okay?”

“Let me check.”

I heard him put the phone down, but I couldn't hear him walking away. Maybe he was barefoot. Or his appointment calendar was right near the phone. Or he was pretending to check his calendar in order to save face.

“Yes,” he said. “Consider yourself lucky. Tomorrow's okay.”

“Great. I'll pick you up at the Club. Is five okay?”

“Rachel—”

“It was all my fault. Five. Okay?”

Once again, I hung up without giving the person on the other end of the line a chance to say another word.

It was eleven fifteen. Stewie was teaching a noon class, so Dash and I headed over to Bank Street T'ai Chi.

Avi had just finished practicing the form. “Do you have a moment?” I asked him. “I need to ask you something, about the note Lisa left.” Show him proper respect, I thought, and he'll be putty in my hands.

“Are you familiar with the story of the young man who wanted to study Zen?”

“Oh,
please
.”

“‘Have you had your breakfast?' the master asked him. The young man nodded, just the way
you
always do. He had. ‘Then wash your bowl,' the master told him.”

“So, what does that mean?”

But didn't I know what it meant? After all, Avi had announced that I was his new apprentice, a role I'd had experience with. I had learned dog training as an apprentice to another trainer. That meant I would get lots of private lessons, a chance to assist in class, that I'd answer the phone, do the bills and mailings, lick the stamps, sweep up, dust, pinch dead leaves off the plants, run out and buy him cigarettes, and wash the coffee cups after class because he thought ceramic cups were more friendly to the environment than Styrofoam, a man clearly ahead of his time.

“Did you want me to sweep up out here?” I asked. “Or vacuum your office?”

Avi sighed.

“That won't be necessary. We have someone to do that, Rachel,” he said, as if I were a few logs shy of a full cord.

“Then will you answer my question?”

He merely waved his arm impatiently and headed for his office.

“Or not?” I said after he'd already closed the door.

“Being a de-tec-tive sounds like
fun
,” my nephew Zachery had said the night I'd made my official announcement to the family.

Yeah, right.

Thank God our mother is dead, Lili had added, because if she weren't,
this
would have killed her.

I sat down on the studio floor, against a side wall, to wait. The students began to arrive at ten of twelve for the lunch-hour class, changing shoes in the hall and then sitting in the area between the office and the studio until they were called to begin. Stewie arrived late, changed his shoes, and after nodding to his students, turned to face the mirror and began to do the form. I joined the class, taking a place in the back.

Stewie's eyes, which should have been half closed and half open, darted nervously from side to side, watching his students in the mirror. He was watching me, too, but when his eyes met mine, his moved away quickly.

He spoke softly as we moved slowly through the form. The empty leg is yin, he said, but when you shift your weight into it, it becomes yang, yin and yang, dark and light, soft and strong, these are constantly changing.

I thought about the way a bitch plays with her puppies, moving gracefully from her role of natural authority to a submissive posture so that the puppies can play at being alpha, then taking charge again when the game is over, never leaving them with a false impression of the way things are.

I was hoping I'd end up at lunch with Stewie after class, the way I had with Janet. Clearly I wasn't the only one of us who was curious, but before I had the chance to change my shoes, he was gone. I never did get to ask him any questions or find out how he felt about my cousin Lisa. Not wanting to waste the rest of the day, I got another idea.

I waited until I was downstairs to use the phone, calling information first, for Howard Lish's number, then asking to see him, for an emergency. My calf, I told him, was throbbing and cramped.

Come right over, he said, not stuttering at all. I'll take care of it.

I smiled as I hung up and, Dashiell at my side, headed east, just past the HB Acting Studio, to the building where Howie Lish lived and worked.

“The crick is in my leg,” I said when Howie, wearing a white jacket as if he were a dentist rather than a masseur, opened the door. “Instead of my neck.”

“You're pushing yourself too hard,” he said, turning and walking toward an open door just down the hall and on the right. “You're trying to learn t'ai chi too fast, working too many hours.”

I heard the sound of a television set from somewhere else in the apartment. Howie closed the door to his office.

“Hop up on the table,” he said. “Let me have a look at it.” I signaled Dash to lie down in a corner of the room. Then I panicked. Had I told him which leg it was? I hoped not, because I couldn't remember. Luckily, my normal rocklike tension saved me. Howie began prodding the muscles in my right leg, and before I knew it, I was screaming. Then he squeezed the calf on my left leg, pressing his fat fingers in so deep they could have touched each other. Again, I embarrassed myself.

“Hey,” I said. “Easy.”

“It's only a matter of time until the other one goes into spasm,” he said, as serious as an undertaker. “You're very tense.”

I guess he'd be eligible for Mensa now that he'd figured that out.

“I only have time to work on your legs today. I have a client coming in twenty minutes. But you'll need to do more than just this if you want to stay out of trouble.”

He handed me a cotton smock, telling me to strip from the waist down. Right, like guys weren't telling me that since I grew tits. Leaving my underpants on is sort of a rule I have when I'm around strange men. And if ever there was a strange man, it was Howie Lish. Wearing the smock, I got back up on the table. Now what? Was I supposed to call him? Or just lie around in my skivvies hoping he'd eventually return?

Howie came back into the room carrying a thick blue towel, which he laid over one leg, and a bottle of lavender-scented oil. Standing at my side, he put a strong, gentle hand on my back.

“Howie, I can't tell you how—”

“Shh,” he said. “This is going to hurt.”

I heard him rubbing his hands together. When they landed on my bare leg they were warm, wet, and slippery. He began to massage my leg in long strokes, first up the back of the leg, then on the sides, and after it had gotten warm, the blood circulating nicely, thank you, he began to dig into the calf, and I heard someone cry out in pain and realized afterward that since it hadn't been deep enough to have been him, it must have been me. Again.

Saying nothing, his hot, slimy hands never stopping, going back and forth between the painful kneading and poking and the delicious long strokes that ended right at the edge of my tiger-striped underwear, Howie worked on my legs for over half an hour. At the end he took my feet, one at a time, in his big, strong hands and did exquisite things to them. I was sure it couldn't be legal to feel this good.

“Better?” he asked.

“Wonderful,” I told him. “Thank you.”

“I'll go out so you can get dressed.”

I pulled on Lisa's leggings, then turned. Howie was standing in the doorway. Had he just come back? Or had the little weasel been there all along? I picked up Lisa's turtleneck and put that on too, breaking eye contact with Howie for the moment the shirt slipped over my head.

“When you get home, take a long, warm bath,” he said, as if nothing untoward had happened. “Not hot,” he added. “Hot baths make you more tense.” His face looked hot. At any rate, his nose and cheeks were as red as if he had been in a sauna. “You're pushing yourself very hard, physically and mentally. Your body gave you an important message today, to lighten up on yourself. You ought to pay attention to that. And I'd like to see you again on Friday.”

I bet you would, I thought.

“I can fit you in at three thirty.”

“Perfect,” I said. I could always call and cancel later.

I wondered what Lisa had said to make him cry. I didn't think it would take much.

“You're probably eating badly, too,” he said.

“What am I supposed to be, a vegetarian or something?”

Howie smiled. “No, but raw, organic vegetable juice can really help give you the stamina you need for t'ai chi. You don't need to be a vegetarian, but you certainly should watch your fat intake—”

Look who's talking.

“But I'm not—”

“It's not for your weight. Your weight is good. Fat's been linked to—”

“
Stop
. I'm feeling too good to hear the list of diseases you get from each food group. I read the papers. The trouble is, they change their minds every week or so. You know, one week it's oat bran, the savior of the human race, then it's selenium, or green tea or beta-carotene. You know what I'm saying, Howie?”

“I do,” he said, shifting his weight and looking uncomfortable. “Sometimes you sound just l-like her,” he said, looking down at his Fred Flintstone feet.

“You mean Lisa?”

Howie's face got all splotchy, and his neck flushed red. He nodded.

“It's hard to get a handle on her,” I said. “We were cousins, but I hardly knew her. And now I hear so much about her, being at the school and everything. But it's inconsistent. Sometimes she sounds so special, so smart, so graceful, the way her parents saw her. Other times—” Something in Howie's eyes made me pause. “You'd want to toss her out the window.”

Howie blinked once.

The doorbell rang.

Dashiell stood, ready if needed.

“Do you miss her, Howie?” I asked as he headed out of his office to answer the door. “Were you and Lisa close?”

He turned to face me. “Of c-course I m-miss her,” he said, his voice as flat as Kansas. “She was my teacher—and a client.”

“That's all?” I asked him.

“I-isn't th-th-that enough?”

He ought to do something about
his
tension, I thought. The man looked as if he were ready to implode.

“How much do I owe you for fixing Mr. Leg?”

The bell rang a second time.

“I'll catch you next time,” he said, a kind of pain showing on his face that couldn't be fixed as easily as a bogus spasm could.

16

You Think Too Much

When I left Howie's, I headed for Lisa's. I'd decided I'd sort through her mail and check her answering machine messages and then reward myself with a bacon burger and some fries. I was feeling really tired, probably a fat deficiency.

The concierge handed me even more junk mail than was waiting for me upstairs, the stuff too big to fit in her mailbox, catalogs and magazines folded and held together by a fat rubber band. Just the volume of stuff started depressing me. If I liked paperwork, I would have become a CPA. By the time I'd gotten upstairs, I'd convinced myself, just as I did at home, that I could pitch out Victoria's Secret and L. L. Bean one day later.

The answering machine was flashing, but instead of rolling it back and listening to the messages, I picked up the cordless phone that sat next to it, walked over to the black couch under the windows, and dialed my aunt Ceil.

“Hello?” she said, her voice strong and gravelly.

“Ceil? It's Rachel. I was wondering if I could come and see you tomorrow afternoon. I have a favor to ask.”

“Of course, tootsie. Come early. Stay late. I'll make us a little lunch. When can I expect you?”

“Is two okay?”

“Two is perfect, darling. See you then.”

Was Ceil the only one in my family I had an easy time with because she had been married to my father's brother, so she wasn't a blood relative? Maybe, like dogs, people just got along better with others that were not from their own gene pool.

I meant to get up and listen to Lisa's messages, I really did, because the tenth law of investigation work is, You never know. I thought again about dumping the junk mail and doing whatever was appropriate with the rest of it. But I felt almost drugged. Perhaps it was the massage. With some of my tension gone, there was nothing left to hold me up.

I'd heard Dashiell going up the wooden steps. I'd heard the bed creak as he'd gotten onto it. I thought of joining him, but the black couch was so soft and inviting, and I was already there. So I leaned sideways, pulled up my legs, and fell immediately asleep, Lisa's cordless phone still in my hand.

When I woke up, it was dark in the apartment, and for a moment I had trouble remembering where I was. Dashiell was lying next to the couch now, and when I sat up, he looked up at me, reminding me that a dog has needs, too. I looked at my watch. It was after seven. I pulled myself together, and we headed for the waterfront so that Dashiell could stretch his legs and use his muscles before dinner.

We crossed over at Christopher Street and headed north, Dashiell running far ahead, ecstatic to be free to move, running back to check on me every few minutes.

There was a Great Dane wearing an American flag bandanna waiting up ahead, and in no time they were jumping in circles, eyes dancing, feeling each other's strengths and weaknesses as they practiced a dog version of Push Hands.

When I felt someone right behind me, I turned.

“Stewie. Hey.”

It was my lucky day. I was now looking into the small, dark eyes of Stewie Fleck. He was wearing a heavy black turtleneck and black jeans, a beatnik in the age of grunge. When I turned, he smiled, and I could see the strain in it.

“I was going to practice the form out on the pier,” he said, looking at his feet now, “but it's too crowded tonight. Avi says to be careful practicing outdoors, because someone might see you and challenge you.”