The Dogs of Babel (23 page)

“The next card,” Lady Arabelle says, “the sixth, is the opposite; it represents forthcoming influences. Here it was the Seven of Wands. This is a card that tells the seeker it’s time for her to take action. She may be unsure about what to do next, but she has to do something. Any action is better than nothing.”

“Any action is better than nothing,” I say.

“Right. The seventh card is called Where One Finds Oneself. It’s kind of like the Significator, but it takes it a little further. It represents the inner state of the seeker and gives an idea of what she’s likely to do next. For your wife, the card here was the Fool.”

“Are you calling Lexy a fool?” I say, sort of trying for a joke. I’m feeling punchy.

“No, not at all. But the Fool represents someone who… well, if you could see the card, it’s a picture of a man walking off a cliff. And in the picture, it varies from deck to deck, but there’s usually an animal trying to stop him, sometimes a dog or something like that.”

“A dog?” I say, sitting up.

“Or sometimes a bird. The point is, those around the fool can see he’s making a mistake, and most likely the fool knows it himself. But he’s refusing to see it, and if he keeps going the way he’s going, he’s going to walk right off that cliff.”

“So it’s a card of death?”

“No, it’s not usually that literal. It just means the person has a choice to make, and if he makes the wrong choice, the consequences could be great.”

“Okay,” I say.

The eighth card, she tells me, is the card that represents the way other people saw Lexy. It was the Ace of Cups, which Lady Arabelle says is a very good card. It represents happiness, love, fertility. A happy marriage and family life.

“But that’s how other people saw Lexy?” I ask. “Not how she saw herself?”

“Well, that’s the position of the card. But that doesn’t mean anything, sweetie. I didn’t see anything to suggest she wasn’t happy with your marriage. I didn’t see anything like that at all.”

I nod, unable to speak. I have a sudden lump in my throat.

“The ninth card—hang in there, baby, we’re almost at the end—is the Hopes and Fears card. The idea is that hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. The Five of Swords came up here. That’s a very negative card, implying great loss and tragedy. Complete ruin. I guess that’s what your wife was afraid of.”

“Well, isn’t everyone?” I say.

“Sure, sweetie,” Lady Arabelle says. “That’s what we’re all afraid of. Now, the last card, the tenth card, that represents the Final Outcome. But that’s a little misleading, because, like I said, and I would have told this to her, too, there’s nothing written in stone. ‘Final Outcome’ just means the likely outgrowth of the current circumstances.”

“Okay. And what card was that?”

“Well, I don’t want you to make too much of this, baby, but it was the Hanged Man.”

“Good Lord,” I say.

“The Hanged Man doesn’t mean death, though, sweetie. It just means self-sacrifice. It’s a card of renunciation. It means you may have to give something up for the sake of something more important.”

“I see,” I say. “And that’s it?”

“That’s it,” she says. She pauses. “I want to emphasize,” she says, “that this was not a bad reading. There was nothing in here that made me worry about this woman’s future.”

“Okay,” I say. “And that’s all you have in your notes?”

“Well, let me see. I have that she was thirty-five years old, married and pregnant, and that she hadn’t told her husband about her pregnancy. That much she told me up front. I have her birthday, and I have a list of the cards I read for her. I also wrote that she had stopped crying by the time she hung up. She thanked me, and she said I’d helped her. I’ve got a plus sign next to the call, which means I thought it went well. And that’s all I’ve got.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome, baby,” she says. “Keep yourself well. Try to let go of this. I’m sure that’s what she would have wanted.”

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

I hang up feeling lost. For so long I’ve been pinning my hopes on this call, and now it’s over, and I know no more than I did before. I have my pages of careful notes to file away with all the other pages of notes I’ve taken—notes on Lorelei’s behavior, notes on canine physiology, lists of books shelved side by side in an order that seems to mean nothing at all. I suddenly miss Lorelei very much. What I want most, more than all of death’s secrets revealed, more even perhaps than my wife back in my arms, is to crawl into bed and to feel the comfort of Lorelei’s great, furry heft beside me. To rest my hand on her warm, breathing flank as I drift off to sleep. I get up and go into the bedroom, stopping to close the curtains against the bright day. I lie down on my bed and slip into a troubled, bereft sleep full of falling women and the barking of dogs always out of sight.

A
fter our trip to New Orleans, Lexy and I returned home in a somber state. Lexy kept silent, refusing to talk about Blue Mary or the night she came to me wearing the mask. She had thrown away the rubbings from Blue Mary’s grave, and when I rescued them from the trash and smoothed them out, she told me she didn’t want them anymore. Even so, I packed them away carefully in my suitcase in case she changed her mind.

Lexy went back to her death masks, but her interest in them seemed to have waned. I don’t know if it had anything to do with Blue Mary or if she had merely exhausted her enthusiasm for the medium. She continued doing them when asked, but she stopped advertising, and eventually the requests dropped off. But she didn’t seem to want to return to the kind of masks she’d made before, either. She came up with new ideas she didn’t follow through on, drawing up elaborate plans for series of masks she never started. She had an idea for a line of children’s Halloween masks, good ones—grotesque hags and demons that would have been a million times better than the cheap plastic and rubber ones I remember from my childhood—but she decided that the prices she’d have to charge were more than most parents would be willing to pay. For a few days, she was excited about a series called Laundry-shaped Souls, based on a phrase half remembered from a dream she’d had. She wasn’t able to tell me what the phrase meant exactly, but the dream had been so evocative, the words so mysterious when she woke with them on her lips, that she felt she had to do something to bring them to life. But after a few days, as so often happens with dreams, the urgency of her memory faded, and she found that she’d lost the ability to put herself in the frame of mind she’d been in when she’d first awakened. Another idea, inspired by some of the dogs in disguise we’d seen at Mardi Gras, was to make human-faced masks for animals to wear, sort of a counterpart to the animal-faced masks for humans that had always been among her most popular items. She did make one of these, using Lorelei’s face as a model, and the effect was quite eerie—a Victorian-looking child’s face, with rosy cheeks and blond ringlets and Lorelei’s snout protruding underneath—but again, she soon lost interest. Lorelei, for her part, walked around the house for days with plaster stuck to her fur until we could get her an appointment at the groomer’s.

I was worried about Lexy. Some days I’d come home to find her lying on the couch with Lorelei curled up beside her. “I didn’t do a damn thing all day,” she’d say. She was having trouble sleeping, too. One night, I woke up to find her gone from the bed. I went to look for her and found her down in her workshop, pacing the floor.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Just thinking,” she said. “Just trying to think what to do next.”

I wanted to do something to help her out, so I talked to a friend of mine in the theater department, Patricia Wellman, who was going to be directing a summer-stock production of
Macbeth.
She had some rather ambitious ideas for the staging of the play—she’d cast women in all the men’s roles, for example, and men in all the women’s, and she’d set the whole thing in a karaoke bar in Hackensack—and when I suggested to her that she consider having masks made for all the characters, she was very excited.

Lexy wasn’t thrilled by the assignment at first. It wasn’t exactly groundbreaking work for her, and Patricia’s ideas were a bit vague and subject to change at a moment’s notice—one week, she wanted all the characters to wear blank white faces with no features at all, and the next week she changed it to yellow have-a-nice-day smiley faces—but it seemed to do Lexy some good to have steady work, deadlines, a task at hand. She enjoyed going to the rehearsals and watching the show take shape, and the two of us had fun laughing together about some of Patricia’s more outlandish ideas.

On opening night, Lexy and I went to see the play, which turned out to be a bit better than I’d expected. Lexy’s masks were a focal point of the production. She’d managed to talk Patricia out of the smiley faces, and they’d settled instead on masks that revealed the inner torment of each character, which lent a striking and harrowing effect to an otherwise rather silly production. Afterward, Patricia invited us to join the cast for the opening night party, which was held—where else?—at a karaoke bar. I remember we had a very good time that night. We drank shots of tequila, and after several drinks, Lexy was able to persuade me to get up with her and perform a duet of “I Got You, Babe.” I have a snapshot in my mind of Lexy standing there, flushed and laughing, with a microphone in her hand, singing the words of a love song to me. When I sang “Put your little hand in mine,” she reached out to me, and her grasp was warm and soft. Afterward, we kissed in the taxicab on the way home, making out like teenagers while the cabdriver studiously ignored us. It was a moment of pure happiness, not just for me, but for us both. She was happy that night, do you see?
She was happy.

That was somewhere around the middle of August. That was, according to the best estimates of the medical examiner, the week our child was conceived.

I
think about the baby all the time. It’s been a week since Lorelei disappeared, and I don’t have much else to do. I’ve papered the neighborhood with her picture, I’ve placed ads in the local papers, and I call the police every day, but there’s still nothing. So I sit at home, waiting for news of my dog, and I think about what I’ve lost. It’s July now; the baby would be two months old, almost old enough to hold up its head by itself, old enough perhaps to smile. I try to imagine that other life, that other winter, the one where I get to watch Lexy’s body grow heavy with new life. The one where her water breaks in the middle of the night, and we time her contractions on a stopwatch. The one where we drive home on a bright spring day and I hold Lexy’s elbow as she carries our child into the house for the first time. I imagine a girl baby first, a tiny girl with dimpled fingers and a scalp covered in soft fuzz. Then a boy, a sweet little boy with a mouth like a rose. And I find, at last, that I am angry.

I’m angry at a dead woman. It’s not a welcome feeling. And when I try to catch hold of the thread of my anger, to follow it through to its other end, I hit knot after tangled knot. I’m angry, I suppose, that she climbed to the top of a tree, knowing that she held our child within her. I’m angry that she never told me she was pregnant, that she never gave me the gift of that knowledge and all the potential it held. And I’m angry, of course—but you don’t know anything, I tell myself, you don’t know anything at all—I’m angry that if she took her own life, she did it knowing that she was taking a second life with it.

I feel like yelling, I feel like pounding the walls with my fists, I feel like ripping apart everything in the house. My blood feels hot in my veins, and I want to jump out of my body. I pace back and forth through my empty rooms, sampling the flavor of this untested emotion. It feeds on itself and gains weight in my body until I think I must do something to let it out. It’s only after I’ve walked past the basement door fifty times or more that I decide to open it and walk down the stairs to Lexy’s workshop. It’s not the first time I’ve been down here since her death, of course, but it’s the first time I’ve looked around this room with my eyes unclouded by the exquisite tenderness of fresh grief. I want to wreak havoc down here, I want to tear the masks from the goddamned walls, but I hold myself back. What I
really
want is to understand. I want to see Lexy as she really was. There has to be something down here that can help me understand.

In the corner, there’s a small desk where she kept her files, her receipts of masks sold, her sketches for future designs. I throw myself on the desk and start pulling papers out of the drawers. I tear through drawer after drawer, looking for something, anything, that will tell me something new. And it’s in this reckless frenzy, this disrespectful pawing through the things that mattered to Lexy, that I come upon her book of dreams.

I recognize it immediately, of course—how many times have I seen it in her hands?—and I can’t believe it’s never occurred to me to look for it before. It’s a beautiful book, made by Lexy herself, with a blue velvet cover and soft pages of grainy, handmade paper. It’s not the original book, of course, the one she started in childhood. That first book, a tattered red notebook with the cover torn nearly off and the spiral binding poking out at dangerous angles, was the one she was still using when I met her. But for our first Christmas together, I bought her a paper-making kit, and she spent weeks carefully transcribing each dream from the old book into the new one she’d created.

I hold the book in my hands, stunned at the discovery. For a frightened moment, I think that I shouldn’t open it at all, that I should hide it away again, burn it, bury it the way the parents of Lexy’s dead girl, Jennifer, had buried their daughter’s diary without ever seeing what secrets it held. But in an instant, I know I will read it. How can I possibly not?

I take the book over to the sofa and sit down. The dreams are listed in chronological order. Lexy was eleven when she first started writing them down, and she began by listing every dream she could ever remember having. The very first one, dated tentatively with a question mark as being from the year she was four, is one of the ones I remember her telling me during our drive to Disney World: “I was in a castle, but there was only one room. A king came in and I hid behind his throne, but he saw me and yelled at me, and I was scared.” The next one, dated two years later, is also a nightmare: “There were spiders everywhere. I wasn’t even in the dream, just the spiders.” And when she was nine: “My dog Sunshine died and I was sad.” At age ten, she writes, “I got married to Jonathan Weiss, this boy I liked at school. When I woke up, I thought he would really be there, and I went walking all over the house looking for him.” As she gets older, as she and her dreams age and mature a bit, the descriptions become more detailed, as in this one, written when she was twelve: “I was in my friend Lisa’s house, but it was also the same as the McDonald’s at the Wal-Lex shopping center. I tried to find Lisa to tell her that this wasn’t really her house, but her mother kept taking me behind the counter and making me cook hot dogs. I was yelling at her that they don’t even
have
hot dogs at McDonald’s, but she wouldn’t listen.” So many of them are like this: ordinary, meandering, shaped by the kind of internal logic found only in dreams. And that’s it—they’re only dreams. What can I hope to learn?