“We deceive ourselves. All we do is dream. Good dreams, bad dreams…”
“The ways that others see us is our life,” the girl said.
“Yes!” the breeder exclaimed.
—
The girl sat moving slowly on the porch glider. She imagined herself standing laughing, younger and much nicer, the shepherd leaping into her arms. Her head buzzed and rustled. The bourbon bobbed around the flamingo’s lowered head on the gaudy glass. The shepherd’s drowned weight in her arms had been a terrible thing, terrible. She and Chester were both dressed rather elaborately because they had just returned from dinner with two friends, a stockbroker and his girlfriend, an art dealer. The girl was very thin and very blond. There were fine blond hairs on her face. The small restaurant where they ate appeared much larger than it was by its use of mirrored walls. The girl watched the four of them eating and drinking in the mirrors. The stockbroker spoke of money, of what he could do for his friends. “I love my work,” he said.
“The art I handle,” his girlfriend said, “is intended as a stimulus for discussion. In no way is it to be taken as an aesthetic product.”
The girl had asked her for the untouched steak tournedos that their waiter had wrapped up in aluminum foil, the foil twisted into the shape of a swan. The girl remembered carrying the meat into the house for the shepherd and seeing the torn window screen. She remembered feeling the stillness in her house as it flowed into her eyes.
—
The girl looked at the Gulf. It was a dazzling day with no surf. The beach was deserted. The serious tanners were in tanning parlors, bronzing evenly beneath sunlamps, saving time.
The girl wished the moment were still to come, that she were there, then, waiting, her empty arms outstretched, saying, “Do you love me?” Dogs hear sounds that we cannot, thought the girl. Dogs hear callings.
Chester had dug a deep square hole beneath the largest of the bougainvillea bushes and the girl had laid her dog down into it.
Their pale clothes became dirty from the drowned dog’s coat. The girl had thrown her dress away. Chester had sent his suit to the dry cleaner.
Chester liked the dog, but it was the girl’s dog. A dog can only belong to one person. When Chester and the girl made love in her house, or when the girl was out for the evening, she kept the shepherd inside, closed up on a small porch with high screened windows. He had taken to leaping out of his pen, a clearing enclosed with Cyclone fencing and equipped with old tires. It was supposed to be his playground, an exercise area that would keep away boredom and loneliness when the girl wasn’t with him. It was a tall fence, but the shepherd had found a way over it. He had escaped, again and again, so the girl had begun locking him up in the small porch room. The girl had never witnessed his escape, from either of these places, but she imagined him leaping, gathering himself and plunging upward. He could leap so high — there was such lightness in him, such faith in the leaping.
On the beach, at Chester’s, the waves glittered so with light that the girl could not bear to look at them. She finished the bourbon, took the empty glass to the kitchen and put it in the sink.
When the girl and the shepherd had first begun their life together, they had lived around Mile 47 in the Florida Keys. The girl worked in a small marine laboratory there. Her life was purely her own and the dog’s. Life seemed slow and joyous, and remembering those days the girl felt she had been on the brink of something extraordinary. She remembered the shepherd, his exuberance, energy, dignity. She remembered the shepherd and remembered being, herself, good. She lived aware of happiness.
The girl pushed her hands through her hair. The gulf seemed to stick in her throat.
There had been an abundance of holy things then. Once the world had been promising. But then there had been a disappearance of holy things.
A friend of Chester’s had suggested hypnotism. He was quite enthusiastic about it. The girl would have a few sessions with this hypnotist that he knew, and she would forget the dog. Not forget, exactly. Rather, certain connections would not be made. The girl would no longer recall the dog in the context of her grief. The hypnotist had had great success with smokers.
Tonight they were going to have dinner with this man and his wife. The girl couldn’t bear the thought of it. They would talk and talk. They would talk about real estate and hypnotism and coke. Tonight, they would go to a restaurant that had recently become notorious when an elderly woman had died from burns received when the cherries jubilee she was being served set fire to her dress. They would all order flaming desserts. They would go dancing afterward.
Animals are closer to God than we, the girl thought, but they are lost to him. Her arms felt heavy. The sun was huge, moving ponderously toward the horizon. People were gathering on the beach to watch it go down. They were playing their radios. When the sun touched the horizon, it took three minutes before it disappeared. An animal can live for three minutes without air. It had taken the shepherd three minutes to die after however long he had been swimming in the deep water off the smooth seawall. The girl remembered walking into the house with the meat wrapped in the foil in the shape of a swan, and seeing the broken screen. The house was full of mosquitoes. Chester put some soft ice in a glass and poured a nightcap. Chester always looked out of place in the girl’s house. The house wasn’t worth anything, it was the land that was valuable. The girl went outside, calling, past the empty pen, calling, down to the bay, seeing the lights of the better houses along the seawall. A neighbor had called the sheriff’s department and the lights from the deputy’s car shone on the ground on the dark dog.
A buzzer sounded in the beach house. Chester had had the whole house wired. In the week he had owned it, he had put in central air-conditioning, replaced all the windows with one-way glass and installed an elaborate infrared alarm system. The buzzer, however, was just a local signal. It stopped. It had been just the door opening, just Chester coming home. Chester activated the total system when they were out or when they were sleeping. The girl thought of invisible frequencies monitoring undisturbed air. The girl found offensive the notion that she could be spared pain, humiliation or loss by microwaves. She contemplated for a moment the desire Chester had for a complete home security system. There wasn’t anything in the house worth stealing. Chester was protecting space. For a moment, the girl found offensive the touch of Chester’s hand on her hair.
“Why aren’t you dressed,” he asked.
The girl looked at him, and then down at herself, at the thin T-shirt and hibiscus-flowered shorts. I am getting too old to wear this shit, the girl thought. The porch was cooling down fast in the twilight. She shivered and rubbed her arms.
“Why?” the girl said.
Chester sighed. “We’re going out to dinner with the Tynans.”
“I don’t want to go out to dinner with the Tynans,” the girl said.
Chester put his hands in his pockets. “You’ve got to snap out of this,” he said.
“I’m flying,” the girl said. “I have flown.” She thought of the shepherd leaping, the lightness. He had escaped from her. She hadn’t gotten anyplace.
Chester said, “I’ve consoled you the best I can.”
“There is no consolation,” the girl said. “There is no recovery. There is no happy ending.”
“We’re the happy ending,” Chester said. “Give us a break.”
The sky was red, the water a dull silver. “I can’t bear to see the Tynans again,” the girl said. “I can’t bear to go to another restaurant and see the sneeze guard over the salad bar.”