“What is it?” Ned asked.
Ben looked closely into her cupped hands. “A baby mouse,” he said, “at least that’s what I think it is.”
“Awful! Get rid of it,” Phoebe said.
“I can’t do that.”
Ned looked again and saw that the pink knob was, yes, probably a mouse, a hairless runt, jostled from the rodents’ wagon-train retreat. Why leave the nest at all, he wondered, but that the afterbirth that slicked the nest might have drawn predators — who knows? “You could put it there,” Ned suggested to Isabel.
“What?”
“Under the tree over there, next to the roots, cover it up with leaves. Its mother might come back.”
“Are you crazy?”
He watched as Isabel took the infant mouse into the house. Phoebe stood to follow. “I’ll go,” Ned said, and he started after Isabel, calling her name. “Isabel?”
Inside, Ned watched as she turned her side of the room, the guest room, into a close, incubated space.
“What are you doing?” Ned watched as she moved the decorative bedside lamp and put in its place the desk lamp with the arm bent low so the halogen might gently warm him — him?
“It’s a rodent, for God’s sake.”
“I need an eyedropper,” she said, “and some warmed-up milk. No sugar,” she said.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “Use your first-aid kit. I’m going back outside.”
But Phoebe and Ben were carrying the picnic, or what was left of the picnic, inside. Ben was going into town to get charcoal; Ned intended to stay near the mouse emergency, but in the end he stayed near Phoebe. On the screened porch, drinking rum, he sat with Phoebe while his wife ministered to a mouse. Upstairs in the guest room Isabel was squeezing milk onto the pink knob’s face or its anus — drowning what was already dead? He confessed it saddened him that he and Isabel were past caring about appearances.
“Stop fretting,” Phoebe said. “Come with me. You haven’t had the tour.”
Phoebe walked him through the oldest parts of the manse she had married; a bricked-up fireplace accounted for one of the chimneys in what could have been a breakfast room off the summer kitchen—Imagine, two kitchens! — so many rooms and so many of them unused. No, Phoebe had never thought of marriage in terms of sets of china; she was a bit overwhelmed. “But I love it,” she said. “More of everything — look!” He pressed against the old glass and saw the barn from the workroom window. “Yes,” she said, “the barn.” But first the summer kitchen and its narrowing to the fix-it room made greasy as a pipe for all its use.
“Not here,” she whispered. Her lipsticked lips against his ear. “Here,” she said, and the newly married Mrs. Benjamin Chester-Harris threw up her arm as she might toss away a hat, and she was his old flame again, Phoebe, a sly shepherdess — hardly dumb — in Ned’s arms in yet another room of indeterminate use but for chairs and windows and there, as abruptly situated as a closet, a bathroom only big enough for elves.
“My God!” The sink — for a child? — came to Ned’s knees.
“Quick,” Phoebe said.
*
Sometime in the middle of a dreamless night, Ned woke to Isabel crying into a towel she held over her face. He thought he had been gentle enough, wishing her good night, and quiet enough when he finally came to bed, so that to see her awake now—“What’s the problem?”—awake and at the jagged end of crying, trying to catch her breath, to speak, to say, “Nothing, nothing’s the matter.” She yawned and yawned until, visibly composed, no longer out of breath, she said, “I’m not crying over you if that’s what you think. You can do as you please.”
If the rodent wasn’t dead then, it was dead by morning. It was gone from the room, the bedside table cleared, and the lamps returned to their rightful places; Isabel, fully dressed, sat composed in a chair, reading a book on terror. Breakfast with the host and hostess was equally sedate. The New York Times was on the table, a bowl of grapes, cheeses, salami, hard-boiled eggs, and bread.
“I’m still in Italy,” Phoebe said.
In the car, Isabel remarked on Phoebe’s ass. Salami and cheese are not the breakfast foods she should be having. So the cheerless drive home began.
*
Why not compound defeat was Ned’s response two weeks later, when he came home to a blind dog of uncertain age, a shih tzu mixed with something, so sick upon rescue, Isabel had thought to return him, but it was too late now with the dog in her lap and the loft’s lights dimmed. She was smiling in the corner near her desk where she had made up a crate. She had sprayed her own perfume onto the fleecy mat, so the dog might know her.
“If it makes you happy,” he said. Met with a dog less alive than a stuffed one and just as pliable, Ned could only say, “If this is what it takes, if it makes you this happy.”
She said it did make her happy although she did not sound convinced. Isabel held the dog close — spoke softly to him about going to bed. The scene was dismal, and Ned sighed to see the dog let himself be fitted into the crate. Then for a while it seemed the dog was awake. Hard to tell. Ned had yet to get too near the crate.
“I almost forgot. Doggie bag!” he said and held up the dessert he had ordered over lunch. “I didn’t eat it and Carol never finishes hers.” Carrot cake, wrapped separately, and crème brûlée, skidding in its container: two of Isabel’s favorite sweets.
“I thought you just had lunch with Carol,” she said. “Why were you having lunch with Carol?”
“Why do I always have lunch with Carol?” was the answer he gave even as he saw Phoebe ask the waiter, please, could he make a doggie bag?
Now Ned put the desserts out on separate plates. “We could do this for dinner.”
“I don’t have anything else in mind,” Isabel said.
So they drank red wine and shared the carrot cake—“So good,” Isabel said — and she came around the table and kneaded Ned’s shoulders.
Her being nice made Ned feel guilty about seeing Phoebe — God knows, not Carol — but when he remembered the blind shih tzu and the fact of Isabel’s touching him after cold dinners, no dinners, silence and silence, it annoyed him.
“Thank you for letting me foster this dog,” she said, and she kissed his cheek.
“Do I have a choice?”
“You sound tired.”
“I am.”
Her joyless “All righty.”
“What is it now, Isabel? Huh?”
The grunting of the disgruntled; they’re both too tired to fight.
Later, they lay in bed listening to the dog’s wheezy breathing. “Will you help me?” she asked. “If we could just do this one thing together, I think. . ”
He could hear in her voice that she was as lonely as he was, but for answer he could only say her name, “Isabel”—an equivocal answer at best.
*
Ned saw the dead eye, a pink glistening marble, and the other an otherworldly blue, cataracted, scratched. The dog was in pain and made the most tormented cries. The head doctor whose name came first on the board though he wore blue jeans and a checked shirt and eschewed a white coat, the head vet came in to see if the younger vet attending the dog, a pale girl with a tiny face and enormous eyebrows, had applied a topical anesthetic. Ned didn’t understand her answer, but he liked the skinny boy in the green outfit, even though the green outfit suggested he was only a helper, an assistant — not a real vet. The head vet looked as if he should be fishing whereas the helper was doing the difficult work. He was holding the dog, and over its screams he was joshing, calling the dog “BK,” an upbeat endearment, a twist on Brooklyn, the name the pound had given this desolate being because the blind shih tzu had been found in Brooklyn on Neptune Avenue, a stray.