See You in Paradise (35 page)

“Hello, Bounder!” said the girl.

The chains rattled on his cell door. Jesus Christ, he thought. She has to name my goddamn dog. They drove off into the prairie night, the stars unnecessarily bright, Bounder curled up in the back, perfectly content, as if he’d come with the car.

Ah, those days! Now he can’t even remember her name. Wait a minute—it was Francis (not Frances, she was named after an uncle) Jean Sheppard. Her phone number was 455-6171. Her birthday was, and probably still is, September fourth. He ought to have married her.

Instead he married Ellen Meeks, now Ellen Meibusch, which is his name, though they are no longer married. Ellen took to Bounder in a big, big way. He licked her face and she licked his. She taught him how to dance and sing. She combed his speckled fur and he tipped and tossed with mad pleasure. After Ellen, Bounder treated him with a distant, perfunctory respect, as if he were any old human. They still played catch, or hide-the-tennis-ball, but he had to bribe the dog with meat-flavored snacks.

Ellen comforted him at regular intervals, like a prescription. “He loves you so much, Ray.” She hugged him and patted his back.

There was little question of who would get Bounder in the divorce. It never even came up when they lunched with their lawyers. Besides, Julia, his then-lover and new wife, is allergic.

It is Julia who now shouts to him from the tub. “Anything good?” she says.

She is talking about the mail, which he has come to the front door to get. It is a lovely spring day. His old house, the one Ellen still lives in, is visible from here just a few blocks away; there is no evidence of life inside. The mail consists of a single cream-colored envelope that contains a cream-colored card, on which are printed the following words:

Ryan is their son, Ray’s and Ellen’s. His name was a compromise. Ray had wanted to name the boy Ray. Ryan was Ellen’s suggestion: “It rhymes with my name, and yours is in it.” It made a kind of sense. Very little about Ellen does, any longer.

He didn’t know the dog was dead.

In answer to her question, he brings Julia the invitation. She’s lying there, naked and wet. Of course—she’s in the tub. But he loves the words, the practical filthiness of them:
naked
and
wet.
Her hair is spread all over the tub’s rim and floats on and in the water, over her shoulders and breasts. It’s very long, this hair. She hasn’t cut it since they married, two years ago. If he’d known she would do something so arbitrarily sentimental, he might not have married her, so he’s glad he didn’t know. She takes the card from his hand with wet fingers and the envelope flutters into the water, and Ellen’s nutty all-caps handwriting begins to blur and the ink streams off in tiny ribbons.

Ray works at NYTech, the renowned local university. He is director of something called Distance Learning. This used to consist of setting up VCRs in classrooms and taking them down again after the videotaped lectures were shown. Now it involves the internet and consequently a great deal of money. (Ray personally takes home a healthy chunk.) He travels to faraway places and tries to convince people that computers will make them smarter. This isn’t hard to do, it’s something people want to believe.

Julia hands back the invitation. “Have fun,” she says.

“You won’t come?”

“Ellen will hug me.”

“She hugs everybody.”

“She hugs me harder.”

It’s true. When Ellen found out he was getting married, she marched right over to their house and took poor Julia into her arms. Ellen was already a hugger, but now the hugs have come to define her for others. You never know which innocuous personality traits will grow cartoonish.

He looks down at Julia and wonders if she’ll have sex with him. Probably she will. When they first had it, he hadn’t had any for a long time, and she still feels bad for him, though that was a long time ago. He sits on the toilet seat and pushes his shoes off with his toes. “I didn’t know the dog was dead,” he said.

“She hasn’t been walking him.”

Apparently Ellen walks Bounder past this house daily. According to Julia, she cranes her neck as she passes, peering through every window. Julia works in the attic—she paints watercolors of flowers, birds, and cats for a greeting-card company, and watercolors of people screwing for a self-help publisher—and waves to Ellen when she passes, and Ellen waves enthusiastically back.

“Really?” Ray says, removing his socks. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you don’t care.”

He removes his shirt.

“What are you doing, there?” She is frowning.

“I was thinking we could—that maybe—since I need to get a shower or a bath anyway—” He stands and continues to undress.

Julia sighs. She reaches down and pulls the drain plug to let some of the water out, so that it won’t overflow when he gets in. He gets in.

That was Saturday. This is Wednesday. The boy, Ryan, is at school. He is in the second grade. At the moment he sits cross-legged on the asphalt at the edge of the kickball diamond, talking with his friends Darren and Philip. A kickball game, of which they are a peripheral, almost theoretical, part, goes on ten feet away. Ryan examines his no-longer-new sneakers, streaked and roughened with coarse dirt. Two weeks ago, when he first wore them to school, they were brilliant white, blinding white. During recess the bigger kids came roaring up and scuffed them with their giant brown boots. These were farm kids, bused in from the other side of the college. When he got home, his mother flew into a rage and called the school, staying on the phone for a good twenty minutes, by Ryan’s reckoning, and the following day the farm kids told him he was dead meat. So far he hasn’t become dead meat. But at least once a day one of the farm kids points at him and mouths the words. He isn’t worried, though: soon they will abandon their threats and simply remind him, as they always did before the sneaker-scuffing, that his mother is a loony.

Ryan’s mother is again the topic of conversation. It’s Philip who taps his shoulder and points to the parking lot beyond the game. “Here comes your mom,” he says without malice. Indeed, his mother’s Volvo is careening into an empty space, her rectangular head framed by the rectangular window framed by the rectangular car.

“What’s she doing here, man?” This is Darren. There is a hint of threat in his voice, but this is habitual. He is bused in from downtown, where the tough people live.

“I think she’s doing story time today.”

“What is she, man, is she a teacher or what is she?”

“She’s just a helper.”

“Man.” Darren shakes his head. Ryan likes the way everything is astonishing to Darren.

His mother climbs out of the car and begins to make her brisk and direct way to the cafeteria door. On Wednesdays she reads to the kindergarten. Monday she plays guitar and sings songs, Tuesday she helps with bulletin boards. (On occasion she has left Ryan secret messages on the bulletin boards—a rocketship with his face sketched in the window, his name spelled out in a jumble of alphabet blocks—so he always gives them special attention.) Thursday and Friday she types in the main office. She goes on every field trip, not just the ones Ryan’s class takes. Of course she isn’t at the school all day; she also goes to meetings downtown and writes letters to the newspaper. The paper also runs photos of his mother, usually of her speaking into a microphone or holding up a painted sign. Once a new teacher clipped such a photo from the paper and posted it on the wall. The teacher announced that Ryan’s mom was famous. The following week another, nearly identical, photo appeared in the paper, but instead of posting it the teacher just took the first one down.

The boys turn to the kickball game. There are too many outfielders because there were too many boys, but the rule is that all the boys must be picked. A fly ball drops with a percussive wheeze onto the pavement near a cluster of such boys. The big kids get angry as the runner rounds the bases.

Bounder loved kickballs. He used to somehow get his narrow jaws around them, to carry them in that proud dog way without puncturing them with his teeth. There are half a dozen in the yard at home, mostly airless, to give the ailing Bounder a good grip. He liked to make a little pile of them, to half-bury them in the sod. He liked to bring them into the house and nibble and paw at them as if they were babies.

The dog’s decline has not been easy for Ryan. Of course he will miss Bounder, the games of fetch, the couch-sprawling, the scrap-tossing, the squirrel-chasing. And death itself—the specter of it, its inevitability, whether or not it has taken or will take notice of him, Ryan, personally—this is grounds for some concern. But it isn’t himself he’s worried about. It is his mother, what his mother is going to do without the dog. Who will she talk to after he, Ryan, has gone to bed? Already she asks him questions he doesn’t understand, questions that don’t seem to have answers but to which she nevertheless expects some response.
How could they do this to us? What kind of nation do they think we live in? Are they serious, Ryan, I mean are they fucking serious?
She gets upset about simple, faraway events that don’t have anything to do with her: the construction of a certain highway, something somebody said in a foreign country, some numbers read over the radio. She screams and cries and grips her hair in her fists. Ryan’s tack so far has been to gently embrace her rigid body and then go outside to play.

Now he sees that she has noticed the kickball game. She stands on tippy-toes, shading her eyes with her hand, looking for him. Philip scoots forward to hide him from her; he’s done this before, which is why he is Ryan’s best friend. But it doesn’t work.

“She’s got you.”

In the bright sunshine Ryan’s mother marches across the playground, waving as she comes. The asphalt-baked air distorts her image, so that she looks like a spelling test, a C-minus, uncrumpled from a booksack, flung by wind.

Last night they played a game she made up, a game in which Ryan pretends to be her, and she pretends to be Bounder. She went into the kitchen like a normal woman but emerged on her hands and knees, pushing the empty dog dish along the floor with her nose. With the same nose she poked Ryan in the shin. That’s how the game starts. Ryan fed her. She ate some of the food. He scratched her back. It wasn’t totally crazy—she was laughing the whole time, she always does, so does he, it’s like a kind of joke—but it was a little crazy. Last night it stopped when she brought him the leash in her mouth. He said No, Mom, we’re not going outside. She whined. He said he didn’t want to play anymore. After a while she stood up and went to bed.

When he was sure she was asleep, he went down the street to his dad’s. The bedroom light was on and he thought he could see him and Julia moving around. But no one answered when he rang the bell.

Now she is here. She says, “Hello, boys,” and the boys say hello.

“Will you two be attending our party on Friday?” This in a fake English accent.

Darren looks at Ryan in astonishment, but Philip only hangs his head. Darren says, “What party?”

“A farewell to Bounder,” says Ryan’s mother. “To see him into the next world.”

“I’m there, Mrs. Meibusch,” says Darren. “I am all over that.”

“You too, Philip,” she says sternly.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She gives Ryan a look: Why didn’t he invite his friends? He gives her a look: Because it’s a freaky-ass dead dog party, that’s why.

When she’s gone, Darren says, “Dude, I didn’t know your dog died.”

“He didn’t,” Ryan says.

Julia had a dream one night, the autumn after the summer she started sleeping with Ray. She dreamed that she woke up and went to the window and saw something moving in the yard below: Ellen, dressed in a black catsuit, digging holes in the grass with a trowel. There was no apparent purpose to this exercise; it was methodical and uninspired and rather boring to watch, and Julia wondered why she was dreaming about Ellen and what the dream could mean. Then she dreamed she went back to bed and had a dream: a nice sensible one, something about flying and screwing; they (it was an old boyfriend she was screwing, but she would tell Ray it was him) were on a carpet or raft or something, and birds flew above and below them while they did it. She woke up and called Ray at work and described the dream, leaving out the part about Ellen. Then she forgot about it for a long time.