The Dogs of Littlefield

by Suzanne Berne

  ‘What a shame,’ said Margaret, watching George turn back to Naomi. Naomi was wearing a brick-colored raw-silk blouse and a necklace of what looked to Margaret like bent nails.

  ‘So this is a book group.’ Hedy sounded unimpressed. ‘So what have you been reading?’

  ‘Well, George’s book, of course.’ Margaret nodded at the copy Naomi had placed on the coffee table, next to the cheese plate. ‘Before that we read Bleak House.’

  ‘Eh?’ Hedy struggled to sit up again among the pillows, the beaded chain on her glasses swinging. ‘Do you know, I’m going to tell you something. I want you to listen. Children do not think like adults. What makes no sense to you made sense to her. That is how it is. But I am sure you are worried.’

  ‘All I do these days is worry.’ Margaret lowered her voice. ‘About everything.’

  Hedy gave a twitch to her hairy cardigan. ‘Yes? Well? As Marv says, worry is part of the language of love. You worry about what you love.’

  ‘You also worry,’ said Margaret, ‘about things you’re afraid of.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Hedy.

  She seemed about to say something else when Naomi called out, ‘Find a seat, everyone!’

  Naomi had pulled a straight-backed chair in from the kitchen and set it for herself in front of the fireplace. Installed next to her, in a throne-like bamboo Papa-san chair, was the author, smiling gamely above his blue denim shirt, unsnapped to reveal a few curls of graying chest hair, the stem of a wine glass in his fist.

  ‘More chairs in the dining room if anyone needs one.’ Naomi sat gripping the seat of her straight-backed chair, beaming impatiently. ‘Okay! As you all know, we have a special guest tonight, and we’re going to begin by saying hello to George Wechsler, who has agreed to talk to us about his novel.’

  ‘Hello, George!’ chorused everyone.

  Naomi began by asking George to give a brief history of how he got his start as a novelist. George revealed that his father, a high school math teacher in Brooklyn, had told him there were two ways to get ahead: the stock market or a trust fund.

  ‘But since I wasn’t interested in the first and wasn’t getting the other, I focused on girls.’

  Dutiful laughter.

  ‘And pretty soon I noticed the best way to get girls’ attention was by being a basketball star or playing football.’ In his Papa-san chair, George leaned forward, smiling adamantly. ‘Unfortunately, I dribbled like a guy playing football and played football like a guy dribbling.’

  More dutiful laughter.

  ‘So I started writing poetry. Figured it worked for Lord Byron. Had some success with the editor of the school literary magazine. Went on to major in English in college, dooming myself to a future of low-paying jobs, a requirement for all serious writers.’

  Several women were now looking at the floor. But George was launched into his story, familiar to anyone who, like Margaret, had read his website biography: years of rejections from publishers, mornings of waking at five a.m. to write at the cold kitchen table, the struggle over whether he should just ‘chuck it’ and go to law school; then the precious month alone in a friend’s cabin in Maine when he took the six hundred and fifty-page manuscript on which he had labored for ten years ‘and turned it like an ocean liner’, pointing it in a new direction and throwing three hundred pages overboard.

  Expressions of astonishment.

  ‘So that’s my story.’ George sat back and drank half of the wine in his glass, then set the glass on the floor.

  A regretful sigh seemed to run through the room. Hedy had dozed off among the pillows. Clarice was staring fixedly at a Kokopelli figure. Margaret was thinking about George’s harsh voice: tonight there was something almost tender in it – something greedy and youthful, and also unwary. She winced and then wondered where George’s wife had been while he was in that cabin in Maine.

  ‘Any questions?’ asked Naomi.

  After a few long moments of silence, Naomi said, ‘Well, I’ve got a question. George, I’ve been dying to ask. Is any of this book autobiographical?’

  With a grateful smile, he began explaining that everything a writer writes is autobiographical, since it all comes from his own interests and observations, his own fears and obsessions. ‘We all sing the same note,’ he concluded, scowling apologetically. ‘Me, me, me.’

  The laughter was genuine this time. Then Naomi asked George if he would mind reading aloud a passage from his book. They all waited as he leafed through the copy that had been lying on the coffee table, announcing finally that he’d like to read a scene toward the end.

  He cleared his throat. In a slow, resonant voice he began reading one of Margaret’s favorite passages, the moment when the young hero’s rabbi father, sitting on the temple dais at his son’s bar mitzvah, listens as the boy interrupts his Haftorah reading, in Braille, from Judges 13:10–14, to tell the congregation that in a world of confusion and false gods it’s important to listen to yourself and believe in your dreams – and that if his father, Rabbi Pinchas, would only have faith in him, and send him to baseball camp in Fort Lauderdale, then he, Danny Pinchas, might someday be drafted by the Yankees.

  After a stunned moment, Rabbi Pinchas rises slowly from his chair. In front of an aghast congregation, he falls to his knees. Shaking a fist at the empty ark, he cries out, Isn’t it enough? Haven’t I suffered enough?, repeating this question for nearly a quarter of a page until at last, from the very back of the temple, he is interrupted by the tired old voice of Krasnick the janitor.

  So, rabbi, tell us. What is enough?

  George stopped reading, allowing the final word to vibrate in the air.

  There was a lull, a sense of emotional percipience, followed by a smattered ovation that grew stronger.

  ‘Thank you, George.’ Naomi was grasping the armrest on George’s Papa-san chair. ‘What a powerful moment.’

  George thanked her and leaned down to pick up his wine glass.

  Now women began raising their hands with questions for George. Do you write on a computer? How did you find your agent? Someone inquired into his literary influences.

  Twain, Melville, Hemingway. ‘And Poe, of course.’

  Margaret had been playing again with her ostrich charm, but she looked up as George began talking about Poe’s haunted characters. He said the living dead were manifestations of ‘unappeasable longing’ as well as fear and grief, and that the unseen were always with us, something Poe understood better than anyone, which was why he was a psychological genius.

  She could feel everyone in the room listening to him differently now, attentive and thoughtful, until he introduced the psychology of Moses Finkle, the zombie hero of his new novel – ‘because who’s deader than a ball player who never hit above 180?’ – when Naomi interrupted.

  ‘Do you read any women writers?’

  After thinking for a few moments, he mentioned George Eliot and a young Senegalese poet-activist whose name he had trouble pronouncing. ‘There are others,’ he added uncertainly, an elbow propped on the armrest of the Papa-san chair, one hand loosely cradling his empty wine glass. But before he could list them, Emily Orlov, sitting across from Clarice in a bentwood rocker, announced that she thought his novel was about ‘the recognition of human isolation’ and said Krasnick the janitor reminded her of a character in a short story who tells all his troubles to his horse because no one else will listen to him.

  ‘It’s hard to find real companionship in this world,’ she said, rocking back and forth.

  Murmurs of assent rippled around the room.

  Someone asked about the novel George was working on now, while someone else refilled his wine glass. Margaret watched him lean back in the Papa-san chair, cowboy boots crossed at the ankles. Once more he began talking about Moses Finkle, when from the back of the room came a husky, imperious voice.

  ‘I have a question.’

  George’s mother-in-law, Mrs Beale, was standing in the doorway wearing a trench coat and a Li
berty scarf, with a small elderly woman hunched in an old fur beside her. Margaret hadn’t seen her come in; she must have arrived while George was reading.

  ‘Yes?’ George sat up.

  The room hushed instantly.

  ‘It seems to me,’ continued Mrs Beale, ‘that when Sybil here and I were girls, a lot of novels were about people giving up things for love. And doing things for love.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand the question,’ said George.

  ‘That is my question. Love does not seem to be in novels nowadays.’

  ‘Are you talking about romance novels?’

  ‘I am talking about the job of the novelist. Your job as a novelist.’

  ‘Are you asking,’ said Naomi, wearing a strained, hostessy expression, ‘if writers should love their characters?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Beale scornfully. ‘I am saying that novelists are doing a bad job, in my opinion. It is lonely being a person, very lonely, as that young woman pointed out.’

  She gazed at Emily, who had taken off her spectacles and was polishing them on her blouse. Emily made a throaty noise and put her spectacles back on.

  ‘I don’t see how this relates to my book,’ said George, with surprising gentleness.

  ‘What we need in this world –’ Mrs Beale gave him a severe look in return – ‘are bravery and honor. Models of decency. Not more zombies and monsters and strange behavior.’

  She stood very straight in the doorway, her expression militant above the epaulets on her trench coat; beside her, Sybil hunched into her fur collar, smiling with chipmunk panic.

  ‘Just so I understand,’ Naomi tried again, ‘are you talking about –?’

  ‘Husbands and wives who promised to love each other, for instance.’ Mrs Beale pointed a bony finger at George. ‘In sickness and in health. That is a good subject for a novel. Why don’t you write a novel about a bad husband who apologizes to his wife and they get back together?’

  A pause sheathed the room, like ice encasing a twig. Margaret closed her eyes. When she opened her eyes again, George was looking steadily at Mrs Beale.

  ‘How about you write that book,’ he said, ‘and I write one about an old lady who puts up anonymous signs in the park, upsetting a lot of people?’

  Two dull red patches appeared on Mrs Beale’s flat cheeks.

  ‘Mine were polite.’

  ‘That’s your story.’

  ‘Naturally that’s my story.’ Her voice was sepulchral. ‘Because it is the true story.’

  Everyone had started to murmur. Beside Margaret on the sofa, Clarice Watkins was noting something on a steno pad.

  ‘You want a true story?’

  Once more the room hushed.

  George had pushed himself out of the Papa-san chair and was on his feet by the fireplace. ‘I’ll tell you a true story.’ His voice was dangerously subdued. ‘Listen to this one. A man spends his goddamn life sitting in a goddamn chair trying to figure out the exact words for how a blade of grass looks in the morning, while everyone else is out there, doing things, because he loves the goddamn world so much he’d claw his eyes out to understand five minutes of it.’

  His face was terrible, Margaret thought, the face of Rabbi Pinchas howling at the ark. On the mantelpiece behind him, two Kokopelli figures appeared to be blowing pan pipes into his ears.

  ‘But guess what? It’s not the world’s business to explain itself. Your job is just to sit there until it finally hits you in the face.’ His voice had dropped lower, so that everyone leaned forward to hear him. ‘And maybe what hits you smells like roses or maybe it smells like dead fish, or maybe –’ his voice sank to a snarl – ‘it smells like a werewolf’s asshole.’

  Margaret pressed three fingers to her lips.

  A few feet away, two women were whispering.

  ‘Did he say –?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘That’s not very nice. Also, I don’t get it.’

  ‘Me neither. Too much sitting if you ask me.’

  But George was not finished.

  ‘And for your information –’ he glared at Mrs Beale – ‘telling people what to do isn’t a very effective way of getting things to happen.’

  Naomi was standing now, too. ‘George, this has been such a fascinating evening –’

  But George was already shouldering his way past Sybil and Mrs Beale, stiff as sentries in the doorway. A moment later the front door slammed.

  How excruciating it had been, thought Margaret, watching him get angry – so crude, embarrassing, almost suffocating, like watching someone get sick on a plane, and yet for the first time in weeks she felt a flicker of hopefulness. She wanted to remember exactly what he’d said; it seemed crucial to remember, but already the words were drifting away and all she could recall was something about what hit you and that the world’s business was not to explain itself.

  Other women were beginning to stand up, tugging at their blouses, looking for where to set their wine glasses. Naomi was twisting her necklace.

  ‘I suppose that’s enough discussion for tonight. Anyone like more wine?’

  ‘No need for him to get so huffy.’ In the doorway, Mrs Beale’s long face looked drawn and very old above her Liberty scarf. ‘Sybil,’ she said hoarsely, ‘where are you? Could we go home, please. I am feeling rather tired.’

  ‘Enough,’ sighed Hedy, from the depths of the sofa, ‘was tonight maybe too much.’

  17.

  It began in the grocery store with buckets of unopened daffodils, stems bound together with rubber bands like bunches of asparagus. Carried home and placed in a vase of water, the daffodils opened within two days, filling one’s house with a delicate, waxy scent.

  Next snowdrops, here, there, so early, so tenuous, a clutch of sunny delirium.

  Then came weeks of cold rain that washed away even the peak of snow in the library parking lot, followed by gray days that made students at Warren College yawn through afternoon classes and sleep through morning ones – sleeping, too, through Dr Clarice Watkins’s series of noontime seminars on theories of modern social structure and the influence of global destabilization – while at night they kept vampire hours, histrionic lyrics pulsing through ear buds connected to their iPods, eating cold pizza that tasted of cardboard and stalking each other on Facebook. Something in them was stirring. They wandered further into the Web, news passing before them on search-engine pages: war criminals acquitted, movie stars arrested, rivers swelling, dams breaking, the polar ice cap melting faster and faster. Vaguely frightened, they began tracking down kindergarten classmates, former camp counselors, teachers from middle school. Photographs appeared, to be liked or not liked – people smiling, people wearing silly hats, people naked – also posted slogans, obscene song lyrics, snatches of quoted poetry:

  When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,

  The mother of months in meadow or plain

  Fills the shadows and windy places

  With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain …

  As night faded toward morning and the pizza boxes lay empty, the students were filled with a restless desire for even greater knowledge. Would they ever experience sex as something other than sordid and incidental? Ever be able to buy a house, lift their own children into their arms? Did life hold fierce secret joys they could not yet imagine?

  They rubbed their eyes and readjusted their ear buds, then returned to Facebook. Only to find themselves glancing up every so often at their pale reflections in the dark rain-streaked windows, wondering what else was out there.

  Rain, rain, rain.

  Then at three o’clock one Tuesday afternoon the sun appeared.

  Suddenly all the splendors of late April were on display: yellow forsythia, pink azaleas, tight purple clusters of grape hyacinths. Green mist hung about tree branches as the first buds appeared and everywhere the air was mild and smelled freshly of earth. ‘Such weather,’ people all over Littlefield kept exclaiming. Even people who prided them
selves on being realists were moved at the arrival of spring, believing against their better judgment that whatever sadness and worry they carried were at last beginning to lift.

  Redbud, dogwood, quince. Tulips, narcissus, violets in the grass. Torrents of lilacs. In the collective gardens of Baldwin Park, gardeners in fleece jackets pulled up pallid soggy stalks from last year’s planting, crumbled moist soil through gloved fingers. Deep in the woods, ferns were unfurling from tiny cocked fists under oak leaves so new they were salmon-colored. Everything sticky and furred and succulent, burgeoning, bursting, unrepentantly blooming.

  On a bright cool gusty morning, as wind blew down the sidewalks and threatened tulip heads, knocking them first one way then another, George Wechsler faced his computer, working on a scene between Moses Finkle and his former agent, Sam Gruber. Moses had just spent three pages convincing Gruber that he had been brought back to life by a kid praying over his baseball card. Now they were discussing Moses’ brief season with the Kansas City Royals, particularly the high point of his career, in 1962 when he’d saved a game against Cleveland by chasing down a line drive and diving, mid-air, to make a stunning bare-handed catch. The crowd had been on their feet! The next day Moses dropped an easy pop fly; two days later he was sent back down to the minor leagues. Gruber had just said to Moses: You had your chance at the brass ring, buddy, and you didn’t grab it. And Moses had replied: The brass ring was brass, Sam. I’m ready for something in gold. George was trying to decide whether he meant this conversation to be read ironically and wondering, in general, how to make his novel less about baseball and zombies and more about the dark laboratory of the soul, when the doorbell rang.