I opened the door on Steve, his hair matted now and wet with snow. He was holding a bottle of tequila by the neck and raised it in offering as he stamped in through the door. “Hey,” he said, handing me the bottle, “cool place.” He shrugged out of his jacket, dropping it right there on the floor. “Anybody down for a little action? Nora, how about you? A shot? Want to do a shot?”
She looked at him, bewildered — or maybe it was just that she wasn’t wearing her glasses and had to squint to take him in. I just stood there, the bottle like a brick in my hand — or no, a cement block, a weight, avoirdupois, dragging me down.
Steve never hesitated. He crossed the room to her, digging in his pocket for something, grinning and glassy-eyed. “Here,” he said, producing an envelope. “After I saw you tonight? You’re so beautiful. I don’t even know if you know how beautiful — and sexy. You’re really sexy.” He handed her the envelope, but she wasn’t looking at the envelope, she was looking at me. “I wrote you a poem,” he said. “Go ahead. Read it.”
“Steve,” I was saying, “look, Steve, I think—” but I couldn’t go on because of the way Nora was staring at me, her lips parted and her eyes come violently to life.
“Read it,” he repeated. “I wrote it for you, just for you—”
“Look,” I said, “it’s late,” and I moved toward him and actually took hold of his arm in an attempt to steer him away and out the door, back into the snow and out of our lives. “Nora’s tired,” I said.
He never turned, never even acknowledged me. “Let her say it. You’re not tired, are you?”
For the first time, she shifted her eyes to him. “No,” she said finally. “No, I’m not tired at all.”
Before I knew what I was doing, I’d set the bottle down on the desk and I was pulling on my coat, furious suddenly, and then I was out the door and into the night, the snow swirling overhead and Steve’s voice—“So you want a hit of tequila?”—trailing off behind me with a soft hopeful rising inflection.
—
Outside, the snow made a noise, a kind of hiss, as if the night had come alive. I walked twice round the house, cursing myself — and I wouldn’t go back in, I wouldn’t, not till whatever was going to happen happened and he was gone — and then I found myself huddling under the gazebo. I turned my collar up, pulled on my gloves. There was a wind now and a taste of cold northern forests on the air. I walked out on the dock and stood there for I don’t know how long, the lake locked up like a vault below me. That was when I noticed the light in the house directly across from ours, the one with all the chimneys and the two red rowboats that were turned over now, twin humps like moguls in the snow. It was the only light visible anywhere, a single lamp burning in a window on the ground floor of the wing nearest the lake. What came over me, I can’t say — what the impulse was, I mean — but I lowered myself down off the edge of the dock and started across the lake. The wind was in my face. There were no stars. And the footing was bad, drifting powder over ice as clear as if it had come out of a machine. I went down twice, hard, but picked myself up and kept on.
When I got close, when I came up the crescent of beach past the rowboats and on up the slope of the whitening lawn, I saw that the curtains were open, which explained the resiliency of the light. The people there — and I didn’t know them, not at all, not even by sight — must have left them open purposely, I realized, because of the snow, the romance of it, first snow of the season. It came to me that I was trespassing. Peeping. That anybody could have seen my tracks. But as soon as the thought entered my head I dismissed it, because I didn’t care about any of that — I’d gone out of myself, fixated on that light. Still, I kept to the shadows. I might even have crouched down in the bushes there, I don’t know.
What I saw was an ordinary room, a bedroom, lit like a stage. I saw a bed, an armoire, pictures on the wall. A shadow flickered across the room, then another, but for the longest time I didn’t see anything. And then the man came into view, padding back and forth, undressing, getting ready for bed. How old was he? I couldn’t tell, not really. Older than me, but not old. He settled into the bed — a double bed, queen-sized maybe — flicked on the lamp there and picked up a magazine and began reading. At some point, he set it down and seemed to be saying something to the other person in the room — the wife, I guessed — but of course it was just a murmur to me. And then, as if she’d heard her cue and stepped out of the wings, there she was, in a nightgown, fussing around her side of the bed before finally settling in and turning on her own light.
I felt guilty. I felt sick. And I didn’t see anything revealing — or sexual, that is — no snuggling or stroking or even a kiss. They were night owls, those people. That light burned a long time. I know. Because I stayed there till it went out.
(2012)
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared:
After the Plague: Esquire, “Peep Hall”; GQ, “Death of the Cool”; Granta, “Rust”; The New Yorker, “She Wasn’t Soft,” “Killing Babies,” “Captured by the Indians,” “Achates McNeil,” “The Love of My Life,” “Friendly Skies,” “My Widow” and “The Underground Gardens”; The Paris Review, “Going Down”; Playboy, “Termination Dust,” “The Black and White Sisters” and “After the Plague.”
“Killing Babies” also appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1997, edited by E. Annie Proulx (Houghton Mifflin); “The Underground Gardens” in Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards, edited by Larry Dark (Anchor Books); and “The Love of My Life” in Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards, edited by Larry Dark (Anchor Books).
Tooth and Claw: GQ, “The Kind Assassin”; Harper’s, “Rastrow’s Island” and “Here Comes”; The New Yorker, “When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone,” “Swept Away,” “Dogology,” “Chicxulub” and “Tooth and Claw”; Playboy, “Jubilation,” “Up Against the Wall” and “The Swift Passage of the Animals”; StoryQuarterly, “All the Wrecks I’ve Crawled Out Of”; Zoetrope, “Almost Shooting an Elephant.”
“Swept Away” also appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, 2003, edited by Laura Furman (Anchor Books); and “Tooth and Claw” in The Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore (Houghton Mifflin).
The author would also like to cite the following works as sources of certain factual details in “Dogology”: The Wolf Children: Fact or Fantasy, by Charles Maclean; Wolf-Children and Feral Man, by the Reverend J. A. L. Singh and Robert M. Zingg; and The Hidden Lives of Dogs, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
Wild Child: Best Life, “Bulletproof”; Harper’s, “Question 62” and “Admiral”; The Kenyon Review, “Hands On”; McSweeney’s, “Wild Child”; The New Yorker, “La Conchita,” “Sin Dolor,” “The Lie,” “Thirteen Hundred Rats” and “Ash Monday”; The Paris Review, “Balto”; Playboy, “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado” and “Three Quarters of the Way to Hell”; A Public Space, “Anacapa.”