Bob Burdett looked at Tooly. “You don’t prefer staying there, with Momma?”
She glanced at Paul, then at the guest, then back at Paul.
“All righty, then,” Bob Burdett said. “Thank you both for the hospitality. And your momma gets here, you all come over and meet Pluto.”
“What kind is he?” Tooly asked.
“Good old mutt, like his daddy.” He smiled thinly at Paul, broadly at Tooly, and left.
As soon as Paul and Tooly were alone, she asked, “Am I in trouble?”
He shushed her, hastening to the window to watch until the guest had departed Gupta Mansions and could be seen walking up the soi. Paul closed his eyes, shook his head. “Damn,” he said. “Damn.”
“If your father’s feeling sick,” she ventured, “should we go there?”
“Yes,” he shot back. “I should be there helping. Right now.” He pinched his thigh. “But we can’t go. And you know that.”
1999
TOOLY LOITERED OUTSIDE the building, seeking a pretext to return. She figured it out.
“I have a question,” Tooly said, when Duncan opened his front door. “Can you introduce me to the pig?”
“Hey. You again.”
“The one that lives here.”
“Despite appearances, no pig lives in my actual apartment.” Though studying, Duncan welcomed any distraction from case law. Plus, he rarely had female company, and tended to do whatever it commanded.
He also happened to know the animal’s owner, Gilbert Lerallu, having provided advice in his dispute with city authorities over whether the Vietnamese potbellied pig, Ham, should be defined as “livestock” and thus banned from residential premises. Gilbert was a composer of harpsichord music, his latest self-released album, Moonharps, having sold eight copies worldwide, including those purchased by his aunts. They tried his door.
Taking a walk was entirely Ham’s decision, according to Gilbert. Since the pig failed to communicate opposition, they borrowed a leash and led the porker outside. It was near freezing. Duncan wore only a hooded Eddie Bauer sweatshirt, but insisted he was fine. Ham’s bristly back steamed. When Tooly touched the pig’s nose, he snorted — and prompted her to hop back in fright and pleasure.
They crossed the Columbia campus, the snuffly pig waddling between them, his snout beaded with condensation. The neighborhood had never acclimatized to this swine in its midst, so students stared as Ham promenaded past Low Library. Duncan seemed at a loss for what to say, their only common reference being her previous visit. They’d talked for a while then, and with seeming freedom, yet she had revealed nearly nothing. “Is walking a pig different from walking a dog?” he said finally. “Do you think?”
“I have the impression Ham wouldn’t fetch like a dog.”
“Would he sit?”
“Sit!” she commanded.
Duncan looked at her — indeed, he appeared the more likely to obey. They tried other commands and, upon reaching Riverside Park, toyed with taking Ham off his leash to let him run free, as were several dogs, a couple of which sniffed the air near the swine, then bolted.
“Maybe let’s keep him on the leash for now.”
They resumed their walk. He asked what had brought her to these parts again. “I thought you were passing through town.”
“I’m passing through again.”
Before he could pursue this, Tooly had questions of her own. As a method of self-concealment, hers was powerfuclass="underline" few people, when presented with the possibility of discussing themselves, preferred to hear of another. From sincere curiosity, she asked him about law school. “I imagine everyone doing mock court cases where you stand up and cross-examine hostile witnesses, and they deny being there on the night of the murder.”
“That has not been part of the curriculum,” he said, shivering, hood up, the cords yanked tight, leaving a pale oval of face peeping out. Law school, as he told it, was largely a matter of poring over judicial opinions. “Basically, you read these things without any understanding of what the topic is, or why it’s relevant. Then it all boils down to one exam. And those grades determine a hundred percent of what you do for the rest of your life.”
“Sounds highly stressy.”
“It is highly stressy.”
“Are the teachers horrible?”
“Depends. A lot never practiced law — law schools don’t like to sully themselves with professors who’ve done stuff. It’s like most of these professional schools — a matter of paying your fees and surviving. We’re not learning how to practice law,” he concluded. “We’re learning how to be lawyers.”
As for which legal discipline to pursue, he was leaning toward something noble, because the NYU do-gooder ethic pushed students that way. Public defender was a possibility. Still, he wasn’t sure. If you had brains, they said, you did international corporate law.
He shuddered so intensely that she undid her duffle coat and draped it over his shoulders, forcing her residual warmth onto him. Duncan objected weakly while trying not to look directly at her figure, now more evident without the coat. He fastened his attention elsewhere — tree bark, the pig, a fence — then found her, head cocked, looking directly at him, smiling. “Nice and bracing,” she said. They remained there for a minute, breath clouds alternating, his gradually synchronizing with hers.
He tried further questions, asking where she was from, noting her odd way of talking, inquiring about her age. Tooly gave her birth date, which surprised him — he’d taken her for older. His other queries she dodged, which punctured the exchange and left them in silence till they reached his building. This time, Tooly wasn’t talking her way in; to do so twice would look suspicious.
“Well, I should go,” she said, touching his hand, which was cold and fettered with the leash. She took back her coat, stooped to pat Ham, and strolled off. At the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, she glanced back, catching sight of him struggling to push the pig toward the building. Ham remained doggedly, or perhaps piggedly, in place. Amused, she turned away.
But Tooly did not complete her pivot on that icy sidewalk.
Her legs kicked up, her arms flailed, her behind slammed into the concrete. Rather than springing gracefully to her feet, she waited, her breaths dissolving upward, backgrounded by the nimbus of a streetlamp.
A pig snout entered this tableau.
“You okay?” Duncan asked breathlessly, having run over.
“I’m broken for life.”
“Seriously?”
“Not seriously. I’ll just have a purple bruise that, when I try to admire it in the mirror later, will be too far around to see.”
The pig sat on her.
“Argh!” she said, laughing. “Crushing me!”
Minutes later, Tooly was inside his room, just as she’d planned.
Duncan dropped a compact disc onto the tray of his stereo, which swallowed the album and sighed to life. “I’m obsessed with this song right now,” he said.
She closed her eyes to appear appreciative, but had a long-standing aversion to music, dating back to school days. When she looked up, Tooly found herself being observed and turned away — shyness still caught her out sometimes. “Can’t figure what he’s saying,” she said, sipping a beer Duncan had pilfered from the shared fridge. “Is it ‘Comma — please arrest that girl’? Seems a bit extreme to imprison her for using a comma.”
“It’s ‘Karma police/Arrest this man.’ ”
“No way. And even if, in the most crazy of situations, you were right—”
“We can check the liner notes.”
“Don’t. I hate ruining my opinions with facts. Even if your version is right, what’s it mean? It’s madness!”