“I’d better go,” she says.
“Must you run off? Finish your glass first.”
“It’s wonderful wine,” she says. “Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“Do I get any points for making that admission?”
Another laugh gets the better of her private decision not to be amused. “I don’t give out points,” she says. “If I did…”
He stands up. “Did you have a coat?” he asks. “I really have to get back to work. We’ll do this again soon, I hope.”
“My coat, it’s lying on one of your boxes,” she says, unsure of what’s going on.
He holds her coat for her. She gets up, feeling a bit unstable, to accept his gesture, wondering if he is protecting her from herself. Nevertheless she feels, as she works her arms into her coat, that she’s the one that’s being deprived. At the door, where she initiates a kiss, she notices that her wine glass, her second glass of wine, perhaps her third, is approximately half full.
She will go to bed with Berger on her next and last visit to his apartment. And ten years later, she will confess it to Josh, who is her husband now, during a stay in the south of France.
The confession is the beginning of the end of her marriage, which will last another two and a half years, coming apart as if it were a slow motion replay of its burgeoning failure. She knows Josh will never forgive her for sleeping with Berger and she will grow to hate him for being so unforgiving.
This is the forgotten story or at the very least its stand-in. For the moment, if you can imagine it, we are back in Josh’s five year old Volvo, his inamorata Genevieve in the passenger seat, Lisa Strata and Harry Berger in the back, en route to Copington Vermont to have dinner at the home of the celebrated writer, I.M. Tarkovsky. We are frozen forever in a moment of unbridled expectation.
TRAVELS WITH WIZARD
When Spring finally made its entrance on the scene, the hopelessness the biographer Leo Dimoff felt during the long excoriating winter persisted and so, sensing the need — at 59, at the cusp of 60—for radical change in his life, he decided to get himself a dog.
Why a dog?
For one thing, living alone after a lifelong failed apprenticeship in the relationship trade, Leo felt deprived, wanted companionship though without the attendant complications. The women in his life — former wives and lovers — had, so his story went, burdened him with unanswerable demands.
“You want a dog because they don’t talk back,” Sarah, his most recent former live-in companion, told him over dinner at Shiro, the very Japanese restaurant that had hosted their break-up. They had lived together for almost a year in the not so distant unremembered past and had remained contentious friends.
“Dog owners are never called chauvinists,” he said. “And certainly not by their dogs.”
“I love dogs,” she said. “though I’ve never had one. What kind of dog are you thinking of, Leo?”
“I’ve been doing the research,” he said. “I may have read everything about choosing a dog the Book Loft had in stock. I may in fact have acquired more information than I know what to do with. What I’m in the market for is a medium-sized, aesthetically pleasing, low maintenance puppy who is affectionate, intelligent and, most importantly, faithful. What do you think? I’d be grateful for suggestions.”
“Whew!” she said, turning her face away to issue a brief secretive smile. “Well, I know it’s not for everyone but I’ve always been partial to the Russell Terrier.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a kind of circus dog, isn’t it? One of my dog texts — it may be Puppies for Dummies — says that Russells tend to be high strung.”
“Too high strung, huh? You want a placid, doting, drooling dog, is that it? Mixed breeds are thought to be less high strung than full breeds. Leo, you could go to a shelter and pick out a puppy.”
“I could,” he said. “Would you accompany me?”
“I might,” she said. “And then again I might not.”
That the heart has its reasons and usually poor ones represented a good half of Leo’s shaky acquired wisdom. On the other hand, as a biographer, he was generally esteemed for an empathic understanding of the wisdom and frailty of others.
Nevertheless, in careless love, he had come home one day with an odd-looking, long legged, long-haired, big-nosed tan and white puppy that had, said the shelter report, some terrier, some poodle and a soupcon of shepherd in its otherwise indecipherable makeup. The woman running the shelter, who reminded him of a former grade school teacher whose name he sometimes remembered, said he could bring the puppy back in a week if it didn’t work out. “It’ll work out,” he told her.
Leo stayed awake much of their first night together, concerned that the silent puppy, tentatively named Wizard after the subject of his latest biography, might suffocate without him there to monitor its sleep. The woman who ran the shelter had warned him that the infant dog, feeling displaced in new surroundings, might cry his first night away from the only home he knew. That Wizard’s behavior defeated expectations gave the biographer, a worrier in the best of seasons, cause for concern. The puppy started the night in an overwhelmingly large crate at the foot of Leo’s bed. In the morning, when Leo opened his eyes, unaware of having slept, his charge was on the pillow next to him. In fact it was Wizard’s yelp, or perhaps it was only a high-pitched bark, that woke Leo from a dream in which the small dog he was caring for grew unacceptably large overnight.
At Sarah’s advice and against his own predilections, Leo took Wizard to a local trainer, a friend of Sarah’s also named Sara (without the h) for obedience lessons.
Rosy-cheeked, slightly pudgy, the trainer, the other Sara, seemed barely out of her teens. When Leo asked her age, she let him know with a shin-kicking glance that she considered his question impertinent. “I’m older than I look,” she said. “And I’m excellent at my job.”
Leo, only slightly cowed, resisted the impulse to apologize.
In the following moment, they had their second misunderstanding. It came when she asked him the puppy’s name. “Wizard,” he said, not yet comfortable with the choice.
“Whizzer?” she said.
“Wizard,” he muttered.
“I understand,” she said. “Whizzer.”
From what he could tell, Wizard seemed to be failing his first lesson, which embarrassed the biographer, who offered excuses for his charge’s slow-wittedness. “He tends to be shy with strangers,” Leo said.
“Oh he’s doing just fine,” Sara said. “And since we’re already friends, aren’t we, Whizzer? (chucking the puppy under the chin), we can no longer be considered strangers. I think we need to do this twice a week and you need to practice commands with him in the morning before breakfast and at night before he goes to sleep. If it will make it easier for you, I’ll come to your house next time.”
Leo reluctantly accepted her offer, having no reason — none he could find words for — not to.
For the next several weeks, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Sara appeared at his door promptly at 4:30 for Wizard’s lesson. At their first session, Leo offered the trainer a cup of coffee, which she declined. Thereafter he made her herbal tea, specifically the ginseng-chai combination she favored, and more often than not the trainer stayed beyond the forty minutes set aside for the actual lesson. Though he was at least twenty years her senior, Leo sometimes imagined that her extended stays had something to do with him.
“Whizzer’s very bright,” she told Leo, who, although pleased by the compliment, remained skeptical. Not only was the dog not toilet-trained after three weeks in his care, but he tended to leave his shit just off the edge of the paper — usually The New York Times sports page — laid out to take its measure.