White Dog Fell From the Sky (10 page)

A pickup truck drove into the driveway. At
first she thought it was the water people, but then she saw that the driver was Peter
Ashton, and beside him, Lawrence. In the back of the truck was Peter’s Alsatian
dog, chained to the bar behind the rear window, straining toward Daphne.

“Isaac hit the water main,”
Alice said to Lawrence. “What’s that dog doing here?”

“It’s the one the Moretons
recommended.”

“You’re going to set him loose
on her?”

“I wouldn’t put it like
that.”

“The two of you were just going to
stand here and watch him screw her?”

“They’re dogs, Alice. This is
what dogs do.”

“Get him out of here!” she
yelled. “Get your goddamn dog out of here, Peter Ashton, or I’ll take him
out with a rake!”

“For god’s sake, Alice, get
control of yourself!” said Lawrence.

“I’m in control of myself. Get
that dog out of here.”

Lawrence turned and climbed into
Peter’s truck, and the two of them drove away.

“I’m very sorry,
mma,
” Isaac said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s all right. It could have
happened to anyone. The water people will be coming soon.”

He looked toward the geyser. “I must
go, madam. I’m very sorry to cause you trouble. I hope you understand why I cannot
stay.”

She didn’t understand, not then, but
she said yes, of course, go if you need to.

She fed Daphne and shut her in the kitchen.
A government truck pulled into the yard, and three men got out, two whites and a
Motswana. The Motswana clicked his tongue. “Oh shame,” he said. One of the
Europeans said it would take them some time to get the water shut off and the pipe
mended and suggested she might like to sleep elsewhere that night. There’d be no
water at least until the following day, maybe several days. She left a note for
Lawrence, telling him that there was no telling when the water would be back on, that
she’d be staying with the Gordons for a few days. She ended with, “I
can’t see you right now. Please drop a note in the mailbox if
you won’t be here, and I’ll feed Daphne.”

She walked next door with her pillow and a
few clothes in a paper bag. She was covered with mud. “What a mess you are,”
Lillian said, peering out the door at her.

“Isaac punctured the water main with a
pickax. The men are over there fixing it. There won’t be any water, probably for a
few days. Can I come in?”

“Stay as long as you like.
Gerald’s away. You better take off your shoes, and I’d say a bath is in
order.” She dug out a blue towel and pointed her toward the bathroom. Alice turned
on the faucet. The walls were a shouting shade of blue. The sink, bathtub, and toilet,
all blue.

The bathroom reminded her of Lillian’s
last dinner party, when she’d served Jell-O eggs on a bed of lettuce for one of
the courses. To make them, she’d blown out real eggs, sealed one end of each
shell, and filled them with different colors of Jell-O. When they’d set,
she’d peeled them painstakingly. Like the bathroom, they were absurd, a kind of
parody of a dinner party. The guests had been impressed, at least they said they were,
and Alice had watched Lillian watching them, one eyebrow cocked.

The tub filled, and she sank into the water,
which instantly turned brown. Had she just left Lawrence for good? She didn’t
know.

At the moment, she had to admit she
didn’t care where he spent the night, and she wouldn’t care if he
didn’t come back. Something had snapped, seeing him there with Peter
Ashton’s dog straining after Daphne, the two men ready to set him loose. She
couldn’t put a finger on why it had bothered her so. It had to do with Daphne not
having a choice. At least with the neighborhood ruffians, there was a kind of natural
selection. But to will it, to set it up … Alice plunged under the water,
rinsed her hair, let out the muddy water, and filled the tub again. Lillian had dozens
of lotions arrayed on shelves. The shampoo was creamy and smelled of peaches. She lay
back and breathed. Her body had not felt her own since the night at the
Lunquists’. She’d felt
defensive, under siege, sad,
unlovely. A gray hair stuck to her belly and she went underwater and floated it
away.

Lillian was in the kitchen when she came
out. “I never cook when Gerald’s away,” she said.

“What do you eat?”

“Whatever I feel like. Mayonnaise out
of a jar. Canned sardines.”

Alice laughed. “Yuck.”

“But tonight, I thought we’d
have this.” She set a plate of toast on the table, and two boiled eggs upright in
egg cups. “Speaking of food, how was your dinner the other night?”

“The Lunquists? It was a
disaster.”

“I’ve always hated dinner
parties.”

“I thought you liked
entertaining.”

Lillian huffed out of the side of her mouth.
“So what happened?”

“It turns out Lawrence has been
sleeping with the hostess. Her husband told me that night.”

“Ah, not a fun evening.”

While Alice talked, Lillian whacked off the
top of her egg with a knife, sprinkled salt, and dug in with a small spoon. Between
bites, she broke off bits of toast and ate them. Alice loved watching her eat; she got
such immense pleasure from the simplest food. Her profile was a fallen glory, her
breasts sagging. Her face was a ruin, wrinkled to lizard skin by years of African sun.
She took a sip of tea and looked at Alice. “So, what will you do?”

“Leave him?” asked Alice in a
small voice.

“Is this the first time?”

“Yes.”

“Does he love her?”

“He’s infatuated.”

“People get over it. No one’s
perfect,” Lillian said. “He seems decent enough.”

No one’s perfect, Alice said in her
head, rolling it around like a marble. She felt as though she were seeing the world
through Lillian’s glaze of disappointment and compromise and something harder to
define. Not resignation, not joy. If the feeling were a color, it would be gray
green, the color of moss on the north side of large trees, the thing
that endures, that softens edges.

Next door, the house was dark. She went home
to check on Daphne, and shut the door firmly against marauding dogs.

She and Lawrence met a couple of days later
over the back fence. The water had drained halfway out of the hole. Five orioles called,
weela-weeoo, weela-weeoo,
as though they’d flown into paradise.
Lawrence was wearing the shorts of his safari suit and a T-shirt with a smear of
toothpaste down the front. “I’m finished with her,” he said. “I
told her last night it was over. I never loved her. You know that, don’t you,
Alice? I was obsessed, I can’t explain it.”

How did she know he wasn’t still
obsessed?

“It was like a drug,” he said
hanging onto the fence like a criminal. “I didn’t want it, well I did. Yes,
I did very much, the way you’d want a cup of coffee after not having one for three
days. No, stronger than that, much stronger. Do you hate me?”

She considered his question. His hair was
rumpled and needed to be washed. “No. But I don’t trust you, and I
don’t trust that it’s over.”

“It’s over. I swear it. I miss
you. Will you come home?”

She studied him a moment and smiled at him
for the first time in weeks. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Well if you don’t hate me, do
you like me?” He touched her finger through the fence.

“That’s not really the
question.”

“What
is
?”

“We didn’t make a nest for
ourselves. It’s dry sticks. We couldn’t make a baby.” Her eyes
filled.

“Do you want to go home, I mean
home
home?”

“No.”

Their fingertips touched once more, and she
returned to Lillian’s house. It was quiet inside, and the white-walled rooms were
cool and peace filled. A faint smell of veldt rose from the grass rugs. Martha, the
Gordons’ servant, was in the kitchen humming a song, pulling it from low down.
Alice saw the back of her, the motion of her arm whipping
something in
a bowl. She walked into the guest room and sat on the bed. The orioles still called.
They didn’t know that the water was sinking into the earth, more each day. She
looked down at her hands resting in her lap, one on top of the other.

Lillian was having a bath.
“Well?” she called through the door.

“He wants us to try again. Do you
think I should?”

“It has nothing to do with me,”
Lillian said. It was quiet behind the door as though she was thinking. “Why
don’t you come in?”

“In there?”

“What do I have to hide?”

Lillian was wearing a white bath turban and
her face was rosy from the rising heat. Under the water, shimmering just under the
surface, were stretch marks crisscrossing her belly. Hope, and hope again. “Sit
down,” she said. Her breasts were flattened out, draped softly to each side. Alice
perched on the edge of the tub, near her feet.

“What does your heart say?”
Lillian asked.

“My heart?” As though
she’d never asked it anything.

Lillian slid underwater and sliced up
through, her face shining with droplets. “That’s all that matters. Do you
want to go back or not?”

She wasn’t sure.

Lillian sat up in the bath and said,
“It’s none of my business, but when I was your age, I thought my life was
over. I’ll dry off and we’ll have a cup of tea, and then you can sleep on
it.”

The water came back on. Isaac had
disappeared without a trace. Each afternoon after work, Alice drove to Naledi, parked
the truck, and walked around looking for him. She went down one path then another. The
place stretched out in all directions, shacks and cardboard houses as far as you could
see. She was ashamed she didn’t even know his last name. One day, she thought she
saw him on the road. She stopped the truck, rolled down the window and shouted,
“
Dumela, rra!
” A stranger turned his face to hers, and
that’s when she stopped her search. He’d come back, or he
wouldn’t.

Gradually, the mud subsided. The orioles and
their sweet song disappeared.

Lawrence left for a ten-day work-related
trip, and Alice returned home. That same night, between ten and eleven o’clock,
she walked up the driveway of a house she’d promised herself never to enter again.
She couldn’t have explained to herself or anyone else what she was doing, or why.
All she knew was that Hasse had sought her out at work and asked her. Yes, she’d
said, thinking of Beethoven. Yes.

Erika was also out of town, maybe with
Lawrence. She didn’t know and she didn’t want to know. Hasse and
Erika’s wolf children were in bed. Hasse was in the bath when she arrived. He
asked her to come in, as Lillian had. She wasn’t in the habit of watching people
bathe. It felt like something better done in private, but Alice stood in the door
watching his beautiful Swedish cock floating pink and innocent just below the surface of
the water. His glasses were on, gently steaming.

She slipped off her shoes at the doorway. In
her Cincinnati mind, she was only there to talk about the situation. In her un-Ohio
mind, she knew what she was doing and what would happen. He got out of the bath and
dried off. He wrapped the towel around his waist. The towel was pure white. They padded
into the kitchen together, where he took two glasses and a whiskey bottle down from a
shelf. He opened the refrigerator and took out a floppy plastic packet of milk, snipped
off a corner, and poured the contents into a jug. “I have an ulcer,” he
said. “I drink my whiskey with milk. Do you want to try it?”

She nodded. Deep laughter lines played at
the edge of his eyes. He must have been at least ten years older than Erika.

“Egg in yours?”

She laughed. “No.”

He held her shoulders and looked into her
face. “You are quite beautiful,” he said. He ran the back of his finger down
her cheek and over her lips, moving her hair back with the palm of his hand. He looked
at her fondly, paternally. The tips of his ears were rosy from the bath. He smelled of
soap. He poured whiskey into both glasses, more in his than hers, then filled them up
with milk.

“
Skål!
” he said,
clicking her glass.

“
Skål!
” she said
back. It occurred to her that what she was doing was wrong, but it was a passing
thought, unimportant.

“Come,” he said, taking her hand
and leading her to the bedroom. He put his hand on her shoulder at the threshold of the
room. “You want this, don’t you?”

She nodded, a lump in her throat like
loss.

They set the drinks down on the bedside
table. He undressed her slowly, appreciatively. She took off his glasses and unwrapped
the towel from his waist. His cock, so indolent and pink in the bath, had woken. They
climbed into bed. Somewhere, a dog was barking. A small light shone in the room, on his
side of the bed. His body was square and firm, his back broad. His touch on her skin was
light, as though he cared for her. There was a blue vein in the middle of his forehead
under the thatch of hair. The thought came to her, I don’t know this man.

He asked her which way she liked things. She
didn’t know what he was asking. His English was perfect, but his thinking was
Swedish. His hand grazed her thigh, indicating that he’d like her on top. She felt
young, self-conscious, lacking prowess.

He felt it and said in her ear,
“It’s all right, you can do whatever you like.”

She loved him then. And what she did came
from her heart, all of it, for those moments.

But it was over. And after the strokings and
murmurings, they sat up with their backs to the wall and drank the whiskey and milk. He
searched for his glasses, and she put them back on him. He looked like the conductor of
a boys’ choir. Churchy. She told him so, and he looked very slightly hurt.
She’d meant no harm. She thought if they were ever
together,
their lives would begin to weave just like this, one small hurt, a backing down and
recovery, another and another until a tapestry was woven, as complicated as any other.
The euphoria of newness would last a month, two months, a year, and then they’d be
caught in something of their making and beyond their making.