16
Even on a sunny day it was a quiet neighborhood. Men went to their offices early in the morning and returned in the evening to eat dinner and read the newspaper and watch television behind closed blinds. Young children were kept off the street in nursery schools or walled patios, and dogs were fenced. It was a neighborhood built by and for retired people and members of the younger professional set who were on the way up.
Gordon didn’t belong there; he had never felt any sense of belonging. When he came home from his office after the day’s work he usually hesitated a moment outside the front door as if he was not sure whether it was his own door, or what lay behind it, his wife, Elaine, or some hostile stranger.
There was only one light on in the house, the night light in the upstairs bathroom. Elaine always left it on for the children so he knew they must be there, all four of them, sleeping quietly and not caring whether he came back or not. His absence seemed to have made only two differences: Elaine had been more careful about locking the doors, and she had bought a dog. He wondered whether the dog was intended as protection or as compensation for the children. A dog in exchange for a husband. Well, that’s fair enough, he thought wryly. Elaine doesn’t like either breed.
He leaned back against the slippery trunk of the loquat tree. Fog condensed on its leathery leaves and dripped on the ground with a monotonous little tune, plink, plunk, like a dozen leaking faucets. Plink, plunk, the tune was taken up by the bougainvillea over the garage and the hibiscus along the patio wall and the row of red-flowering eucalyptus that bordered the street. The sound reminded him of when he was a boy in Minnesota; in the spring the icicles that had hung stiff as quartz from the eaves throughout the winter started to melt until they fell loose and shattered, and the ice on the pond split open and water began to gurgle up through the cracks. Water sounds, dripping sounds everywhere. The first thaw in spring was almost as noisy as the first storm in autumn.
A cold trickle of moisture slid down the back of his neck. He pulled up his collar and walked silently through the fog to the front of the house. He had meant to arrive earlier, he had started out at dinner time from San Luis Obispo but as soon as the highway curved west to the coast the fog had struck like a crippling plague. Sleek young cars became gray and slow and anemic and moved like a procession of old men.
He went up the porch steps and sat down on the blue canvas glider, and from the inside of the house the dog began to bark again, in a higher pitch of hysteria and frustration. It wants to get out and bite me, chase me away, Gordon thought. I am an intruder. The house already belongs to him.
He was certain that the dog’s barking would wake Elaine, and now that the moment was at hand when he must face her he felt uneasy and afraid. He couldn’t remember all the compelling arguments he’d thought of during the day. He had planned each one carefully, using words and phrases that Elaine would understand and respond to emotionally. The arguments were still there inside his head but they had lost form, had thawed and dripped out of shape, like the icicles under the eaves, until they were blobs of slush.
He looked at the front door expecting it to open and not knowing what to say when it did. The door was solid mahogany because that’s what Elaine wanted. She said it gave people a good impression from the start if they were faced with a solid mahogany door. But, as it turned out, she was mistaken. Hardly anyone came to the house, and of those who did not one had recognized that the door was solid mahogany, and Elaine was forced to tell them: “How do you like our door?” or “I hardly heard, you know, the door is so thick. Solid mahogany, you know.”
Solid mahogany, closed and impenetrable. The key to it was on a key ring in his pocket. He could open the door if he wanted to, it was a simple matter, except for the dog. This was no ordinary dog. It sounded larger, stronger, fiercer. Its hoarse barking set up disturbing echoes in his mind, and each echo set up a new echo of its own until his eardrums reverberated with a cacophony of fears.
He sat motionless on the canvas glider with the fog dripping down his face.
A car came over the crest of the hill, languid and yellow-eyed. It crept past the house and paused with a sigh of brakes. The headlights went out, a door slammed, shoes scraped along the wet cement of the driveway.
A man walked out of the fog, like an actor making his entrance from behind a gray plush curtain. He crossed the lawn and came up the porch steps, a heavy-set man with a fedora pulled down low on his forehead. In the dark he could be anyone; but even in the light Gordon would not have recognized him. He knew George only as the half-hero, half-child of Hazel’s conversation.
Gordon leaned forward as if he was about to rise to welcome the stranger. The glider creaked.
The man turned with a little jump of surprise and said harshly, “What the hell.”
“I didn’t mean to startle—”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was about to ask you the same question.”
“Ruth called me, said there was a prowler hanging around the house.”
“Ruth? You must have the wrong address. This is my house.”
“So?”
“It’s not paid for, but I have the deed, so you might say it’s my house. Are you a policeman? It’s funny somebody should call a policeman because a man wants to get a little fresh air.”
“If it’s your house why don’t you go inside?”
“Well, I would, except for the dog. It isn’t any of your business but I don’t mind telling you. She bought a dog while I was away. It sounds like a fairly large dog. You heard it a moment ago?”
“I heard it.”
“Don’t you think it sounds like a fairly large dog?”
“It’s a little white mongrel,” George said, “about the size of a fox terrier.”
Inside the house there was silence, as if the dog was eavesdropping on the conversation.
Gordon rose, wiping the moisture from his forehead with the sleeve of his topcoat. “A little dog,” he said quietly. “How could you know that?”
“I know a lot of things about you, Foster.”
“You have the advantage of me. I don’t even know your name.”
“Anderson.”
“You’re Hazel’s—”
“That’s right.”
“Well.” Gordon looked down at the floor. Six inches from his left foot lay the doll he had given Judith the previous week. He had bought it, not for a special reason like a birthday, but in a moment of guilt and compunction, as if he could give to her in the form of this doll the happy babyhood she had missed. He had been able to buy off his conscience to some extent, but he hadn’t bought off Judith. Within two days the doll was naked and almost scalped, one arm was gone, its china eyes had been carefully pushed back into its empty head, and into its slightly open mouth between the rows of tiny perfect teeth, Judith had thrust Elaine’s ivory-handled nail file.
“Well,” he said again. “I suppose it’s time we met, even under circumstances like these. I’m not sure,” he added wryly, “what circumstances they are.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No. No, I confess I’m puz—”
“Where’s Ruby?”
“Ruby.” Gordon repeated the name in a flat voice as if it aroused no interest or memory in him. “She’s all right. Nothing happened to her.”
“Tell me where she is.”
“She’s — I left her in San Luis.”
“You left her.”
“She has a cousin there. I — she decided to stay with her until — while I came back and settled things with Elaine. So I came back.”