The Hand That Feeds You (21 page)

I saw a homeless man bundled up and sitting on a bench, reading from a paperback copy of
War and Peace.
A vendor selling roasted chestnuts was warming his gloved hands under the heat lamp keeping the nuts warm. Dogs wearing coats from tony stores were walked on braided-leather leashes. A well-dressed man wearing different-colored gloves saluted me as he passed. Nice, or nuts, I couldn’t tell.

The salt on the paths left a white ring on my black boots; I would have to oil them when I got home. As I approached my apartment building, I thought of the study that had been done on the moment a dog knows its owner is coming home; film had been made of dogs moving to sit by the front door when their owners started home after work, even when their schedules were irregular. I hadn’t yet unlocked the downstairs door when I heard Olive begin to bark. Hysterically. I raced up the stairs to quiet her before the neighbors complained.

I took Olive for a perfunctory walk, having had such a long one myself. She didn’t seem to mind. She seemed glad for it. After, she curled up at my feet as I waited for water to boil for tea. I heard the murmur of the people in the next apartment, and I liked the vague sounds—it was company without having to have company. It was the hour when the lights inside turned the windows into mirrors, the time when you can no longer discern color in the sky. I turned off the kitchen light so that I would not see my reflection. It was the opposite of my performance in the Cajun’s apartment. Standing in darkness allowed me to look inside others’ apartments, though I saw nothing like what I had done, just strangers making dinner.

•  •  •

On my incomprehensibly bundled Internet, phone, and cable service a representative had tricked me into getting—the first two months were free—all my electronics were synced, whether or not I wanted them to be. This meant that I could be watching television and the phone number of whoever was calling me would blink in the corner of the screen, interrupting my true-crime shows, which were all I wanted to watch. I used to like them because I couldn’t believe how easily people were taken in, how mundane was the trigger for the crime that followed. Now I watched as one of the taken-in; in the show that most spoke to me, women discovered whom they had really married, after they had married these bigamists, murderers, and rapists.

A late-night call showed up on the screen.

“Have you heard from the man you call Bennett? I’ve heard nothing for ten days.” Samantha sounded urgent and scared.

“Since I just got home from his funeral, no.”

“What are you talking about?”

“His mother invited me. The funeral was in Maine.”

“What happened to him?” Samantha’s confusion was palpable.

I could have jerked her around and fed out information slowly. I could have been sarcastic and made fun of her refusal to acknowledge what I knew to be the truth. But I also knew that this woman was unhinged and desperate, or else someone was pretending to be Bennett and tormenting her. The mature psychologist part of me took over. I told Samantha that when I located his mother, his mother had arranged for her son’s remains to be flown to his hometown of Rangeley, Maine, for burial. His real name, I told her, had been Jimmy Gordon. I told her that he had been killed last September, and that I was sorry to have to deliver this news twice.

“I never heard of Jimmy Gordon, but my fiancé is in Canada and was e-mailing me up until ten days ago.”

“
Somebody
has been contacting you, but not him.”

“I want that woman’s phone number.”

“You shouldn’t bother his mother right now.” I tried to keep my voice steady and uninflected. It would be so easy to step wrong, I knew. What would it take to convince her that he was dead? And if I convinced her, then who would she think was pretending to be him? Didn’t this make her a victim twice over?

“Is the reason you’re being so cruel to me because he left you for me?” I heard Samantha reaching to make sense out of what she was hearing.

“I’m just telling you what I know. I don’t know what more I can do.”

“You can call me if you hear from him.”

In an exercise for a psychology class at John Jay, we students were paired, and one person was instructed to say, “No, you can’t,” to the partner. The partner was instructed to reply, “Yes, I can.” This was to go on indefinitely. I remember everyone getting ready, then the professor announced, “You may start . . .
now
.”

Amabile, my partner, faced me in a chair and said, “No, you can’t.” I said right back, “Yes, I can.” He smiled and said, “No, you can’t,” the inflection slightly firmer. “Yes,” I corrected him, “I can.” We did this back and forth a few more times, until the smiles left our faces. We were shocked at how quickly the simple phrases enraged us. I could feel my face turn red. He wasn’t listening to me. Amabile’s voice rose. I was aware that something similar was going on elsewhere in the classroom.

This was how I felt talking with Samantha. She didn’t listen. I made no impression on her whatsoever.

I
took Leland’s advice and spent the next day in the library at John Jay on the MEDLINE database. I read articles by Laurence Tancredi, MD, on the ways in which brain structure and functioning are profoundly affected by hormones, drugs, genetic abnormalities, injuries, and traumatic experiences. Bad judgment, he argued, could be the result of physiological abnormalities. This was a theory I wanted to include in my thesis, his idea that we are “hardwired” to act as we do.

I was mostly looking at a phenomenon called mirror cells. The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran had said, “Mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology.” Mirror cells were discovered in monkeys in 1992. A team of Italian scientists noticed that the same neurons fired when a monkey reached for an object as when the monkey saw another monkey reaching for an object. Ramachandran, among other scientists, believe that mirror cells are the building blocks for a number of essential human skills—imitation, the ability to intuit what another person is thinking, and most important, empathy. Ramachandran’s theory is that autism is the result of broken mirror cells. I was trying to find enough data to confirm my own theory. Sociopaths also suffer from broken mirror-neuron systems.

The sole message on my machine when I got home was from Billie, calling to say she had found an animal sanctuary with a short waiting list just outside New Milford, Connecticut. She asked if I’d like to drive up together to check it out for Cloud.

She picked me up in her old Volvo, the interior as immaculate as the day she showed up on Staten Island for the temperament test. I offered money for gas, but she said she had filled the tank, and it wasn’t necessary. It was a clear day for the ninety-minute drive to Connecticut.

Billie said she’d found the place through a friend who worked with Bad Rap out in Oakland, California. The friend had gone West after years in the rescue network in the Northeast. She had started For Pitties’ Sake, the place we were headed for, though they did not turn away other breeds if they needed help.

“They’ve never had a Great Pyrenees there,” Billie said.

That was all the dog talk for a while. As though we had agreed to it, we stayed quiet until the exit for Rye, no traffic to battle.

“My mother used to take us to Playland,” Billie said. “Couple minutes from here. There was a ride called the Steeple Chase, a carousel with horses that looked like they were stampeding in terror. There were four horses abreast, maybe fifty horses altogether. And the thing went, like, sixty miles an hour. Amazingly, no one was ever killed on it, but a seven-year-old boy died of blunt force trauma to the head on Ye Old Mill ride, tame and slow.”

Billie tuned her Sirius radio to
Coffee House.
Easy listening with an indie vibe.

“My grandmother has a place here,” Billie said, when we passed through Greenwich. “That’s where I rode the real horses.”

“Nice,” I managed.

When we took the exit toward New Milford, the landscape, for a few miles, was more scenic—nicer trees. Where I expected to see cattle grazing, we drove past small businesses and shopping centers. Billie asked if I wanted to stop for coffee or just keep going. I was glad she had asked, and we stopped for coffee-to-go from a diner.

Back in the car, we had two cups of hot coffee, but only one drink holder. I amused myself picturing the power play of who would claim the sole cup holder, though the driver usually gets it if there is only one. As though reading my mind, Billie pulled it a little farther out, and I saw that it did, in fact, hold two.

We turned off the main drag onto a barely marked dirt road and followed it for about a quarter of a mile until Billie stopped the car in front of a red-painted, raised ranch house. No sign announced the place, but I saw that the grounds went on for acres and acres, with an agility course set up to one side of the house, and a frozen-over creek on the other. Before we could ring the doorbell, the door opened, and a young man with dark hair and a mustache greeted us.

“The director made a dog-food run, but I can show you around.” He took us downstairs first, where each room held two or three wire crates the size of studio apartments. A dog was in each, with piles of fleece blankets, a bowl of water, and rawhide bones and toys.

“The dogs live inside the house?” I asked, used to the foul conditions of the shelter.

“They each have their own crate in the house, and there are large areas for socialization, where they can run free upstairs and play together. Outdoors we have the agility course, and tie-outs when the weather is better.

“The idea here is to de-stress the dogs, give them exercise, get them veterinary care if they need it, and provide obedience training if that is what they need, whatever will help them get their ‘forever homes,’ ” Alfredo said. “Upstairs it’s the same—we can have thirty dogs here at a time.”

“How do you pay for this?” I asked.

“We get donations; the woman who started it is a good fund-raiser. There are angels, people who don’t ask for recognition for the money they give us—a
lot
of money. I came here from Guatemala to work as a landscape gardener. I was hired to maintain the yard, and one day the director asked me for help walking her six unruly dogs. When I took them all out on their leashes, they instantly stopped squabbling and walked perfectly as a group. Not one of them barked. They didn’t pull to chase other dogs in the park. I didn’t have to raise my voice to them.”

“But what about a dog you can’t find a home for? My dog would be here for life.”

“Her dog, the Pyrenees, was ruled a ‘dangerous dog,’ ” Billie said.

Alfredo led us to what was once the garage. But no cars were there, and it was heated the same as the rest of the house. An industrial washer and dryer were at one end, and shelves were filled with grooming equipment and hooks for dozens of leashes. An even larger wire crate was set up on a platform a foot or so above the garage floor, so that a crated dog could see out the window. Inside the extra-large crate—filled, as the others were, with blankets and toys—was a German shepherd, reclining comfortably.

Is this where Cloud would stay? In a garage?

“We’re in and out all day,” Alfredo said. “The dogs who stay here get stimulation, they get ‘enrichment’—we take them outside to play, but not with the other dogs.”

Another crate was against the opposite wall from the German shepherd. I didn’t see the dog in it at first—she had burrowed under the blankets. But when Alfredo passed by, the dog poked her muzzle out and licked at the wire. She was some kind of hound mix, with a frosty muzzle—an old dog with cloudy eyes. Was this the dog whose death would make room for Cloud? I hated myself for the opportunistic thought.

“How’s the dog I brought in doing?” Billie asked.

“She’s being walked now. Bridget has her out.” Alfredo told us that Bridget was a new volunteer, who took time from her nursing job at the nearby hospital to help them out. Alfredo said that the rottie had calmed down a good deal since arriving at For Pitties’ Sake.

“That’s great,” Billie said. “I worried about that one.”

“When could you take Cloud?” I asked Alfredo.

“The vet said that Boss—the hound mix you saw—probably has a few weeks at best.”

I wanted to stay to meet the director, but Billie said she needed to get back—she had tickets to see a play at St. Ann’s Warehouse. She said
tickets
, plural, so of course I felt I knew whom she was going with.

Not until we entered Greenwich did Billie ask if I would mind if we stopped at her grandmother’s house for a minute so she could pick up her snorkel and fins.

“I’ve got time,” I said.

Billie left the parkway, and within minutes she turned onto Round Hill Road, then onto Clapboard Ridge Road. The driveway was so long that Billie had to slow down a couple of times. “Speed bumps in your driveway are a status symbol here,” she said drily.

Her grandmother’s was a farmhouse on steroids. We pulled into the immense turnaround, passed the portico, and parked behind the house.

“Looks like she has company,” I said.

“Those are just the house cars,” Billie said. “For guests,” she added, when I didn’t understand.

The “house cars” were newer models than the car Billie drove.

“We’ll go in the back way. I want to say hello to Cook first.”

Ah, I thought—the sign of wealth: Billie dropped the article. Not
the
cook, but Cook.

The kitchen was spacious, spectacular, but also warm. It didn’t look like a place where servants worked. Copper pots—dozens of them—hung from racks above the ten-burner stove. Cook, aka Jennifer, was a middle-aged woman with an Irish accent who greeted Billie with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. She was not in uniform, but wore an apron over a simple dress.

“Your grandmother is in a mood,” she confided. “Last night was the gala for Children’s Hospital, and she expected to raise more.”

“She’s never satisfied with the money raised,” Billie said. “The money she raises at a single gala would run a rescue organization for a year. Not that she’d ever offer.”