There was a bell to the side of the door. She found it — the bell, the buzzer. Whatever it was, it was mounted in tin, and was crooked as the step on which she stood. She rang or buzzed — either. She would say to Mr. Edward — what would she say? Composing, composing herself. That who should answer but dogs, or dog? She tended to exaggerate. The barking and the scratching, however, were real, the sound of dogs’ paws, of the nails of the paws of a carnivorous animal on wood.
The door swung in. A nose poked out. A long-legged man appeared in the doorframe. To see them both, the man, the dog, graying and angular, sniffing, you might as well think it true, what was said about the looking-alike, attraction or living the means to it.
“Good morning,” she said, though it was, in fact, later than this.
The man just stood, he with his shirt a fright, the tails of it tortured. The face bespoke illness, why else to be creased and flushed this way, or maybe of only a recent, likely fully-dressed inebriated nap.
“Come in,” the man said.
And so she did. It was almost as if she could see herself. With a hand to the hair, to the hat, to the battered pocketbook — still and all tasteful — here she was: She was a woman with a mission, a woman with a scarcely perceptible limp, as if merely a slightly lazy stride (persuaded thus, she soldiered on). She was a woman with a scrap to the dog.
The dog began to circle.
“Do you know who I am?” she said, and, stepping back, “Does that dog bite?”
It was scarcely lazy.
“No,” the man said. “Sit. I said sit.”
There was nowhere a chair. There was a lingering gloom, promoted, she thought, by smelclass="underline" disinfectant and dog and a masculine essence and something else familiar that she could not identify, nevertheless. What appeared to be a medical examining table, covered unhygienically, she’d had to have added, had anyone asked, the wrinkled paper seeming much the worse for what she’d had to have said had been multiple uses — this table, this was the point, for there was no time to waste, for she was here about business, personal in nature though it was, point being it was out in plain sight. There was nothing like a stethoscope, nothing like a needle or gauze. There was no framed medical diploma. There was, she saw, stacked, a supply of dispensable towels, coarse, such as might be dispensed near a sink in a not-so-gentle, public, even flea-ridden, place.
It was, anyway, the dog who sat. It was the dog who sat, and whined, and seemed eager, ready, poised to jump — a silver-nosed projectile. Make no mistake: What there was in the eyes was a roiling sense of injustice, at war with appeal to the master for release.
“Sit,” the man said.
Defeat, humiliation. In the eyes of the dog, in the dream of the eye, a life bereft of hope.
It was not without rage.
“The dog,” she said. And on seeing the man did not see the question, “What do you call the dog?” she said, this creature in an anguish of malevolent restraint. If there was something she had learned, it was this: Familiarity or friendship, or maybe it was knowledge, could vanquish all. She had had an education. “To what does he answer to?” she said.
“Penny,” the man said.
“Penny?” she said. “Penelope?”
The man did not repeat it. He patted himself on the front of the shirt as if seeking tobacco, change, or some flawed comfort pocketed in haste.
That the dog was a female, to think of it — Penny! Gray Penny — why, she had to admit, it altered the way the dog looked. She had clung to assumption, had she not, adhered to an idea of a rabid masculinity (a cat being female).
The obvious made obvious—“Penny,” she said.
So called, the dog, Penny, arose, an obvious and tawdry nuzzler of knees, of dress, of dangled pocketbook.
Eyeballed, the master shrugged.
“Mrs. — Ida,” she said, unclasping, clasping. Buried within, amid the billfold, pills, a brush, pressed powder in a compact, deep inside in her pocketbook, her scrap, damply rumpled, a secret re-concealed, was laid uneasily to rest. She had nothing to offer the dog at all. So as not to be sidetracked (how had it taken all this while, her whole life, it seemed, with its paid education, its civic tour of duty, and so forth, its beige corrective shoes, for her to get to where she was?), so as not to be distracted, she spoke of Mr. Edward, invoking his health. That such a man such as he should have to suffer—
“Rex,” the host said, hand held gauntly out to her, and yellow-nailed. Of jaundiced manners, nonetheless the looming and undeniable host: Did she maybe require a beverage? he said.
“Me?” she said. Thinking, could she take that hand?
“Yourself,” Rex said. “The one and the same.” For it was not for Mr. Edward, he said, he suspected, that she, Ida, honestly had come to here to him—“now, Ida, now have you?”—and wasn’t she here on behalf of herself? He could recognize the look, the hesitant gait. “You have suffered a loss,” Rex said.
No, she would not take that hand. Her face, she feared, was moist, a telltale sheen about the nose. Applied frugally, her powder had surely been absorbed. It was hot. The hat itched. She had drool on her stockings. “Penny,” she said to no discernible result.
“Penelope,” she said to hot breath on the shin.
The hand still waited.
“Water,” she said. She would relish a cold glass of water with cold crushed ice.
“Can’t do,” Rex said. “The water isn’t drinkable.”
“Goodness,” she said, and then, “You’re wrong.” She heard herself, took note of herself, feeling, then seeing the slatted day darken through a window, midday gone. The hour entered the bloodstream. Pure wrought iron. “I am here on a promise,” she said. “I am keeping my promise, true to my word. That’s all.”
With this, the hand withdrew itself.
Penny affected a nothing less than hangdog expression.
She, Ida, flinched. “Mr. Edward,” she said, her rather enfeebled, yet, of course, still deeply respected employer, of mutual acquaintance, she presumed, had sent her, insisted, in fact, that the matter was entirely utmost. She was loyal to a fault, she had to admit. She said, “He said you’d know.”
“I know. You have suffered a loss,” Rex said as he apparently followed and somehow invaded her gaze. It fell to the examining table. “Look at me,” he said. “Do you know your eyes are red?”
She touched her eyelids — one and the other, in an almost involuntary, foolish, she might have conceded, gesture, as if with the faith that a person could finger a redness there, could identify a color or shade through skin, as if the senses had been thoroughly denied their limitations. She fingered moisture. Dismayed, she tried again, confirmed it: Pink, at least, as if fear of the thing was the thing that had made it so. This and the man’s presumption. “The air,” she said. “The air,” and thought, dust — dust and worse. Motes, she thought, and here she was, a swollen-ankled woman with a compromised mien. She was hugging, even choking, her pocketbook; would that she were in it, inside it, she and her sundries, she and her necessities, she and her scrap. If only she were hidden in the bowels of the thing! But here she was, alone in a room with a need and the voice in her head; a man, of course, certainly, a man, of course, and rather less expectedly, rather more pointedly, a dog, a carrier, heaven knew of what, and she herself, Ida, with a delicate system, thirsty and worn, her forearms moist on poreless leather, pockmarked; the irritant spores — was it spores? — the word that inserted itself in her thoughts; it was a general invisible itch.
Rex smiled.
Just smiled yellowly, the gaps in abundance, while Penny continued to conspicuously breathe.
“What are you?” Ida said, attempting — she wouldn’t have argued, had anyone asked — in this way to regain herself. “Are you some kind of doctor? Some kind of medical doctor?”