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.