The Dogs of Littlefield

by Suzanne Berne

  12.

  It was Bill’s idea to host a Christmas dinner this year instead of going to the Number One Noodle House as they usually did. His idea to invite anyone they knew who did not have Christmas plans, which really meant anyone who was Jewish. For years Margaret had offered exactly this suggestion –probably to make up for neither of them having much family, Margaret’s parents both gone and now his mother in Arizona with his brother – but Bill had always demurred. Christmas day was tiring enough as it was, with Julia overexcited in the morning and then dejected all afternoon, sloping about the house with a long face, fingering her stocking to see if she’d missed something in the toe. The whole commercial thing was toxic. Then let’s volunteer at a soup kitchen, Margaret always said, and he always agreed that was a great idea, and every year they had dinner at the Number One Noodle House.

  This year looked to be no different, starting with Christmas cards shuffling through the mail slot, most of them picturing kids and a golden retriever all wearing red Santa hats, posed in a snowy front yard. Season’s Greetings from the Schmidlapps! Greetings from the Wu Family!

  Greetings from the Necropolis. That would have been their Christmas card. With a photo of Julia’s animal graveyard under skeletal hydrangeas in the snow.

  A week ago, Margaret had said, ‘Why don’t you just act like you love me? Sometimes if people act the way they want to feel, then they start to feel the way they want to feel.’

  Dr Vogel said, ‘Say more about that,’ but Margaret said it was Bill’s turn to say something. They both sat staring at the pink lotus blossoms of Dr Vogel’s Oriental rug. Finally, he said, ‘So you want me to pretend to feel something? Like some kind of robot?’ When she didn’t answer, he said, ‘Why don’t you tell Dr Vogel what you told me, about seeing dead dogs everywhere?’

  Margaret looked as stunned as if one of them had just jumped in her lap.

  Dr Vogel had of course wanted to hear more about that, but it was almost the end of the session and Margaret said she’d rather talk about it next time. On the way to the car she wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘Okay,’ he said that same evening at dinner. ‘Let’s invite people over on Christmas. Let’s really do it this time.’

  It was the stress of what they were going through – it was infecting her, doing something to her brain. He’d read about this kind of projection stuff in a copy of Psychology Today in Dr Vogel’s waiting room. Neurotic obsession. Common for people going through a bad time. The same thing was happening to him. For the last several weeks he’d woken every morning convinced the bed was full of bedbugs; his whole body itched. When he told Margaret they might have a bedbug infestation, she said he was just allergic to the new laundry detergent. Yet as soon as she used the word ‘allergic’ he understood what it was: he was allergic to her, to sharing a bed with her, and then the whole phantom dog thing made sense.

  But it was starting to infect Julia, too. She stayed shut up in her room, coming downstairs only for meals, sitting hunched over her plate, hair hanging in her face, the pale nape of her neck exposed. Whenever he asked her questions about school, she answered in monosyllables, like a prisoner refusing to confess. Maybe having a party would help. Maybe Margaret was right: if they acted like a regular family, and people saw them looking like a regular family, maybe they could trick themselves into feeling like a regular family. The more he thought about it, the more the idea took hold of him. He pictured polishing the dining-room table himself, the way his father used to do it, with a rag and linseed oil, making the old wood shine. He pictured people standing around Margaret at the piano, everyone holding plastic cups of eggnog and singing ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’. A kind of exorcism, maybe.

  ‘Invite anyone you want to invite,’ he told Margaret, mentioning the subject again the next evening. ‘Tell Julia to invite Hannah. Invite her folks. The more the merrier.’

  He’d figured Margaret would be glad he was finally in favor of a holiday dinner, would interpret it as a sign of commitment. But she only looked at him in a drained, hopeless way and said, ‘No thanks.’

  He should have been more sympathetic. It was practically obliterating her, what they were going through, and it was his fault, or mostly his fault. But he couldn’t stand the thought of spending Christmas dinner alone in a restaurant with Margaret and Julia, the three of them sitting wordlessly over spring rolls and shrimp lo mein. So he brought it up again later as they were getting ready for bed, finally asking, ‘Is this how you want Julia to remember her childhood, Christmas in a noodle house?’

  ‘How do you want her to remember it?’ she’d said.

  Plenty of people had midlife crises and came out all right. Three-quarters of the couples in town were in counseling and the ones who weren’t probably should be. And yet Bill couldn’t bring himself to say to Margaret, ‘We’ll be all right.’ Not only because he didn’t believe they would be all right – which he didn’t, but at this point he was prepared to pretend if it would make her feel better – but because it wasn’t just their marriage that wasn’t all right.

  Three weeks ago he and the rest of the management at Roche Capital had been informed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company was being investigated. Allegations of insider trading. Everyone was going to be questioned.

  He hadn’t seen it coming. Who had made these allegations? What kind of insider trading? No one had told him anything and he himself had mentioned nothing to anyone. Not even Margaret. All he knew, and this from Passano, was that when the office computers crashed that afternoon in September, it wasn’t a problem with their network server: while he’d looked out of his window at the river below, a remote-monitoring device was being installed in their system.

  Now the green banks of the river were covered in snow, the feathery trees gone bare. As he sat at his desk, as he drove home, as he brushed his teeth before bed, he pictured SEC investigators rising up out of the gray water, as impassive as frogmen, flat-footing up those banks, across the bridges, filing into his office in black suits, carrying black briefcases, their dark gelled hair gleaming.

  Could we speak with you for a few minutes, sir? We’d like to ask you a few questions.

  But I don’t know anything, he’d have to tell them. You may not believe me, but I really don’t know how things got this way.

  ‘It’s got to be one of the gardeners,’ Margaret was saying.

  ‘There’s no evidence pointing to a gardener.’ Bill patted his red and green striped tie, a present from Margaret that morning. He’d given her pearls, forgetting that he’d given her pearls last year. He glanced around the living room at their guests. ‘Let’s not make wild accusations.’

  ‘I’m not making a wild accusation,’ said Margaret querulously. She was already on her second glass of wine. ‘Look at all that graffiti.’

  Since the death of Boris the sheepdog, graffiti had been appearing all over the village: Leash Your Beast.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ said Bill, ‘accusations can get out of hand.’

  Perched on the two sofas like a flock of owls were the four Melmans, Hedy Fischman and their new neighbor, Dr Clarice Watkins. He’d got a nice fire going in the fireplace. The Christmas tree was twinkling cheerfully. He checked again to make sure. Yes, there it was, a very nice Frasier fir, decorated with ornaments and glass icicles and frosted white orb-shaped lights that blinked on and off, reflected in the dark glass of the French doors. Below spread a skirt of fake snow, insisted upon every year by Julia. Very nice. But when he’d glanced at the Christmas tree a few minutes ago it looked as if it were covered with eyeballs and finger bones.

  ‘Well, the gardeners do have a motive,’ Naomi Melman was saying. ‘My theory is they feel possessive about the park and resentful because they can’t own it. Like neurotic tenant farmers.’

  ‘Enough motive to poison dogs?’ said Bill. ‘Who has that kind of motive?’

  ‘A sociopath,’ cr
oaked old Hedy Fischman. Dr Doom.

  ‘A sociopath?’ echoed Stan Melman.

  ‘Someone reliving a frightening childhood experience of being attacked by a dog and now, in the grip of a narcissistic ideation, he is trying to control all his fears by killing what he believes to be the source of them.’

  ‘Looks like the fire could use a little attention.’ Bill put his hands on his knees to stand up.

  He smiled apologetically at the Melmans: Naomi and Stan; Julia’s friend, Hannah; and the son, Matthew, a thin, dark boy with protuberant brown eyes and the beginnings of a mustache, sitting beside his mother. Naomi was a good friend of Margaret’s, but Bill knew the Melmans mostly from the girls’ soccer games. Stan and Naomi were both psychologists. Stan was as usual wearing a black yarmulke; he had a thick graying mustache and beard and a benign-looking pink wart beside his nose. Mother and daughter had both dressed up in skirts and velvet tops – Hannah’s skirt was very short; she was also in fishnet stockings – but Matthew was wearing a striped rugby shirt and torn blue jeans. For the past twenty minutes, while everyone else was chatting, Matthew had sat silent on the sofa contorting his face, apparently in the grip of private torments that Bill imagined must be hormonal. Several times this fall he’d seen the boy flash through town on his bicycle, squinting against the wind, pumping wrathfully. Hell on wheels, was the thought that had come to him. Along with an unexpected sting of envy.

  Both Fischmans had been invited, but Marv wasn’t feeling well, so only Dr Doom had come, in a black pants suit, a long black scarf wrapped around her neck, accompanied by Clarice Watkins in a golden turban and a leopard-print outfit that reminded Bill of bedspreads from the seventies. They’d all arrived in a rush of cold fresh air, awkwardly bunched together. He’d taken their coats and poured each of the adults a glass of wine, urged them to sit by the fire, grateful when the living room began to seem convivial.

  As he was stirring up the fire with the poker, the doorbell rang again and Binx started barking. ‘I’ll get it,’ he said.

  Margaret threw him an unfocused look. ‘Who could that be?’

  A week before he’d gone to Walgreens to buy light bulbs for the front hall chandelier, though really just to get out of the house; as he was walking up and down the aisles, he’d passed a man in jeans and a windbreaker reading a magazine next to the family planning section – a man who looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. Until he realized it was the guy from the dust-jacket photo of a book on Margaret’s nightstand. That novelist she kept mentioning.

  The next thing he knew, Bill was introducing himself and saying, ‘My wife’s a big fan of yours. Margaret? You’ve met her, I think.’ He held out his hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, the other guy took it.

  ‘George Wechsler.’

  George was holding Iron Man Magazine, Bill noticed, so he asked if he lifted weights. George said he belonged to a gym and worked out twice a week.

  ‘You know, I should be doing that.’

  ‘Too busy?’

  ‘Bad back,’ Bill said mildly, noting the edge in George’s voice. Probably figured out that Bill hadn’t read his novel, or hadn’t liked it. Shouldn’t have said, My wife’s a fan. Implying that he himself was not. Recalling that the novel had something to do with baseball, Bill said it was too bad the Red Sox hadn’t traded for an ace and together they bemoaned the farcical performance of the Red Sox last season, agreeing that the bull pen should be beefed up and that the outfield still needed a slugger and predicting they’d be in the basement all spring. George kept looking up at him oddly, with a kind of truculent apology, the unconscious posture a short man takes with a tall man, Bill recognized, though George was built like a bag full of soccer balls. It struck Bill that this was cosmically unfair, that he should have been born to be tall, to enjoy the benefits of stature whether or not he earned them, while George had to work out to make up for being so short, and was forced to assert himself in a way that must feel exhausting and sometimes humiliating.

  He asked George what he was doing for the holidays. When George admitted that he had recently separated from his wife and hadn’t planned much besides watching football, Bill felt a flush of comradeship and heard himself say, ‘Well, we’re having kind of a catch-as-catch-can thing at our house on Christmas night. You’re welcome to join us.’

  As he said it, he wanted it to be true; he wanted to be the kind of spontaneous guy who hosted catch-as-catch-can dinners. A pot of chili on Sundays. Neighbors over for cook-outs. Tag football in the yard. It had been years since he’d played football. He really should work out. Exercise improves your mood, everybody said, makes you feel more alive, and it would be another excuse to get out of the house.

  ‘A bunch of people will be there.’ He smiled down at George. ‘We’d love to have you.’

  Predictably George had protested: no, no. Thanks, but couldn’t possibly. Not the Christmas type.

  ‘Well, we’re only inviting people who don’t celebrate Christmas.’

  ‘Members of the tribe?’

  ‘Sikhs. Buddhists. We’re still looking for a couple of Druids. Maybe a Wiccan.’

  George smiled and thanked him again, then repeated that he couldn’t possibly; yet the more he protested the more Bill felt determined to get him to say yes. Dr Vogel had suggested that he try seeking out the company of other men. Not colleagues, not the guys he worked with, but friends. Margaret had friends. She went out to dinner with them, celebrated their birthdays, asked after their ailing parents. Became friends with the mothers of Julia’s friends, with people she’d met walking the dog. But not him. Not for years. He’d had friends in college, frat brothers. What had become of his friends?

  He thought of his father’s occasional phone calls, just to shoot the breeze, talk about the box scores and how he’d fixed the lawnmower motor with a fly wheel he found at the dump. Bill always had to cut the calls short and his father would say, ‘Okay, pal. Catch you next time.’

  Several times he’d thought about talking to Stan Melman. They often stood together at soccer games, arms crossed high on their chests, chatting about the weather, the stock market, the craziness in Europe and when it was all going to blow. On a really bad night a few weeks ago he’d walked over to Stan’s house when he was out with Binx; but it was late, and he didn’t know what to say if Stan came to the door. Instead he’d stood in the street for a long time, looking at the windows of the Melmans’ house.

  ‘Really, no.’ George was replacing his magazine in the rack, edging toward the feminine hygiene section. ‘But thank you.’

  George had almost reached the end of the aisle when Bill had an inspiration. ‘About my wife,’ he said, following George.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, man,’ said George, holding up both palms.

  Bill held up a hand, too. ‘I just wanted to say, she really did love your book.’

  George seemed as taken aback as if Bill had just said Margaret was an astrophysicist and had won a Nobel Prize. Why should it be surprising that Margaret had liked George’s book? Did he think she wasn’t intelligent enough to appreciate it?

  ‘She’s reading it again, in fact. I keep finding it all over the house.’

  ‘I think I’m visiting her book club,’ muttered George.

  ‘Well, she said yours is the best book they’ve read all year and she was just saying the other day how much she wants to talk to you about it.’

  Untrue, but suddenly Bill felt he would do almost anything to try to persuade George to come to dinner. It would show Margaret that he cared about what she cared about. Or at least that he could act like it.

  He took a step forward, not meaning to block the aisle but noticing that he had done so, also noticing that George’s fists were bunched in his windbreaker pockets, the ridge of his knuckles outlined through the fabric.

  Bill moved back a pace. ‘Listen, it really would be great if you could join us. Margaret would be too shy to ask you herself, but she’d be so glad. It would be som
ething for her, having you come to dinner. I know it’s a big favor to ask, but really it would be great.’

  George said he’d think about it. Bill gave him the address and said they’d be starting with drinks around six. He asked George again for the name of his gym, having already forgotten. He might want to join himself. Might be good for his back.

  ‘Catch you later,’ he said as George lifted two fingers in salute.

  He figured there was a fifty-fifty chance George would show up. Margaret kept telling him to read George’s novel, saying it might give them something to talk about – well, he’d gone one better: here was George himself, coming to Christmas dinner.

  That would give them something to talk about.

  ‘Goodness,’ Margaret was saying coldly, hands clasped against her chest. ‘Look who’s here.’

  George Wechsler was still standing in the foyer in his parka, holding a bottle of cabernet, snow capping the toes of his cowboy boots. He’d just introduced the two identical angular curly-haired teenage boys looming behind him. His sons, Aaron and Bradley.

  She hadn’t offered to take his coat, just stood in the hall looking at him under the too-bright chandelier. Bill couldn’t understand it. Margaret was always so gracious to visitors, especially when she felt put out by them.

  ‘Bill will take your coat.’ And then she disappeared.

  ‘Hope this is really okay.’ George handed him the wine with a contrite grimace. ‘Bringing the boys last minute.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Bill clapped him on the shoulder. ‘The more the merrier.’

  He took their coats and led George and the two boys into the living room, where everyone blinked up at them from the sofas near the fireplace, as if until that moment they’d been sitting in the dark. George seemed to know some of the adults and Matthew Melman, and he introduced his sons. There were cries of Please don’t get up and No, no, you sit here. Hedy Fischman moved to an armchair, as did Clarice Watkins; George and his boys commandeered one of the sofas, while Hannah and Julia fluttered onto the carpet to sit at their feet. Outside it was snowing again, snow tapping lightly against the windowpanes.