Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  “She. Medium, the vet thinks. Knee-high, the perfect size for a dog.” The puppy nosed its chew toy into his crotch. His eyes began to water. “She’s very smart. She knows ‘sit,’ and she comes when I call her. We’re working on ‘stay.’ Show Andrew how you can shake hands. Watch this—Sock, shake hands. She has to be sitting, put her feet on the floor. Sock, sit. Good girl! Now, shake hands. Put your hand out, Andrew. Sock, shake. Shake hands. Usually she can do this. Get closer. Sock. Shake hands, honey. Shake.”

  When Andrew had time to control them, his sneezes were discreet, choked-off affairs in his hand or his handkerchief. When they came without warning, like this one, they were startling, ear-piercing explosions that made people jump, then made them angry.

  “Achh!”

  The dog leaped high in the air, squealed, and flew out of the room.

  “Oh, honestly.” Dash got up and went after it. Andrew tried a laugh, but she called back, “It’s not funny!” and kept going.

  Usually it would be funny. Nothing was working today, though. Look where impulsiveness had got him. If he’d stayed home, he’d still have some dignity left. Nothing gained, but nothing risked.

  Then he remembered—he had something of a trump card. A dubious ace in the hole.

  “Guess what.”

  In the kitchen, Dash was holding the perfectly fine puppy in her arms. She kissed the top of its head and set it on the floor. “It’s getting late. You know how you hate to drive after dark.” She turned her back on him, opened the refrigerator, and took out a plastic container.

  “Guess what.”

  Her shoulders rose and fell. “What.”

  “Richard Weldon offered me his job.”

  She turned around in slow motion, huge-eyed. “As chairman? Of the department?” He nodded. “Oh, Andrew.” She put the container down and clapped her hands. “Oh, I’m not surprised at all!”

  He laughed—clearly that wasn’t true.

  She laughed with him. “Oh, this is outstanding. Good for you.”

  Too late, he began to see that his trump card was a two of diamonds. “Hang on,” he said lightly, “there’s a catch. Nobody’s comfortable with me taking the job as an associate professor—not that it couldn’t happen, but now, you see, the push is on to get me a full.”

  “But that’s good. And about damn time.”

  “Richard says the quickest way is if I’d agree to write a chapter in a book Peter Flynn’s editing.”

  “But you hate Peter Flynn, you—” She stopped. Her head came forward on the long stem of her neck; her voice rose higher on every word. “So you’re not going to do it?”

  “You don’t understand. It’s called The Great Cover-up—Flynn’s book—The Great Cover-up: A Reexamination of Race and Gender Issues in the Framing of the Constitution.” His lips curled. “I’m amazed he didn’t get ‘deconstruction’ in there somewhere.”

  “Oh no. Andrew, for God’s sake.” She wilted against the counter. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Don’t you see, it’s going to be a hatchet job. Flynn’s not a historian, he’s a number cruncher. Regression, quantitative analysis—that’s his field, it’s not history, it’s math, and all in the service of proving”—he made derisive quotation marks in the air—“that Thomas Jefferson had little black children, Washington was a slaveholding hypocrite—”

  “Oh, save it. Why didn’t you say so? No wonder—this is about Jefferson, your hero. Which means the end, case closed.”

  “There’s no point in trying to explain this to you,” he said coldly.

  “You don’t have to explain it.”

  “I don’t want the job anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’d rather teach. That’s what I do; I’m a teacher.”

  “You can do both!” She came after him when he went back into the living room. “Damn it, you deserve this job, and you’d be great at it. It’s more money, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the whole point for you, isn’t it?”

  She gasped. “How can you say that? About me?”

  “Why not about you?”

  “I care about getting Chloe through college, if that’s what you mean!”

  “Right. So I should take the job so you can give up yours and go to vet school.” He grabbed his coat.

  “You are so unreasonable! This is why we need counseling,” she threw at him, following him out on the porch. “I made the appointment, by the way—it’s this Thursday night at seven. Put it on your list.”

  “I will.”

  They stood under the porch light without looking at each other. Dash wrapped her arms around herself, frowning, dissatisfied. “Well, go on, then. Be careful driving.”

  It was hard to see how he could’ve made a bigger hash of this visit, especially in light of his hopes at the outset. “Go inside,” he said, “you’re freezing.”

  “Okay. Be careful driving,” she repeated, not moving.

  He took a chance and put his arms around her. Strangeness and familiarity warred, but only for a second; then everything was fine. “Sweetheart,” he murmured. Holding her was like slipping into a favorite shirt still warm from the dryer. “You’re too skinny.” He didn’t even realize until afterward what a perfect line that was.

  “Oh, I am not. I have lost a couple of pounds, though.” She went looser in his arms.

  “From not eating right.” He hadn’t kissed her in five weeks. “I’m not, either. I’m living on ice cream and frozen potpies.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “God knows what my cholesterol is. It was one-ninety-seven at my last checkup, which is borderline, but that was four months ago.” He nuzzled her neck. “They sell kits, home monitors, I was thinking we should get one. My father’s LDL—”

  He was surprised when she bussed him on the cheek, pushed him in the chest, and backed out of his arms. “Good night, Andrew.” She went inside and closed the door. The porch light went out before he could get to his car.

  dash

  nine

  “You fell asleep during meditation,” Mo accuses me.

  “I did not.”

  “Did, too.”

  “I did not. I was deeply, deeply into the present moment. Look, those guys look like they’re leaving, let’s get their seats.”

  “She was asleep, right?” Mo turns to Greta for support. “You heard that little snort?”

  Greta, my loyal employee, merely casts down her eyes and smiles. Mo made us come to her yoga class this morning, and Greta didn’t fix her hair afterward. I see now why she always wears it in braids or dreadlocks or some other bound fashion: otherwise it explodes like Easter basket filling, like orange tinsel glued to her head in piles and left to wander. I like it this way, myself. Free.

  We’re waiting for a table at a restaurant I’ve either never been to before or they’ve remodeled out of recognition. That happens a lot in my neighborhood, which is nice, lots of variety and everything, except as soon as you get attached to some little Milanese bistro, you come back and they’ve turned it into a cigar bar. This place features high round tables with uncomfortable stools, a long, lively bar, and a shiny black counter along the front window, behind which you can sit, eat, and watch the world go by. My first choice every time—and lo, the three businessmen I’ve been watching all stand up at the same time. While they’re still putting their coats on, we swoop down and take their seats at the counter.

  “Isn’t this nice?”

  “I love people watching.”

  “I could do it all day.”

  The waiter comes. We’re examining our menus when Mo says, “What an incredibly good-looking man.”

  Greta, sitting between us, murmurs, “Mmm.”

  “He was,” I say, not looking up, thinking of our yoga instructor.

  Greta giggles. “Not him. Him.”

  “Oh. Him.” Out on the sidewalk, a tall man with his hands stuffed in the pockets of a soft brown leather coat, his shoulders hunched,
back to the wind, is talking to another man, older, not as attractive. They shake hands, say final words, and the older man walks off. And then, as if our collective, barely conscious wish has been granted by the god of oglers, the Leather-Coated Man makes a quarter turn and strolls into our restaurant.

  He takes a seat behind us at the bar, invisible unless we turn completely and gracelessly around, as if looking for the waiter or at the clock. How many times can you do that? Twice, I decide, and return to my menu, but Mo is much bolder. “Doesn’t he look familiar?” she muses, openly staring, resting a finger on her cheek. “Like someone we know?”

  “No.”

  “I wish,” Greta says.

  “I’m sure I’ve seen him before.”

  “Go ask him,” Greta says, giggling again. She really does not know who she’s dealing with. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mo asked the hunky yoga instructor for a date. But maybe that’s not fair, because she was really into it today, incredibly focused and precise. She says she goes three times a week now, and it shows. She looks fabulous. She’s cut her hair and stopped coloring it since I saw her last; now it’s a cap of streaky gray, and she’s an aging Joan of Arc. There’s a new sharpness in her face, too, as if living a Phil-less life has scraped away all the soft curves and made her pointy and avid. But attractively so. I think.

  “I’ve met somebody,” she says, closing her menu with a snap. “Christ, there’s not one healthy thing to eat here.”

  “Who?”

  “His name is Anwar, but he’s British. He’s something in the consulate—I found him a condo. Get this: He only has one ball.”

  “Like Hitler,” Greta and I say in unison.

  “Yes. How do you know about Hitler?”

  “Everybody knows about Hitler.”

  “It doesn’t affect anything; I mean, he’s still potent and all.”

  Oh good, this is going to be easy. I wasn’t sure how Mo and Greta would like each other, and now I see it was silly of me to worry. We are getting right down to it, heavy-duty woman talk before the water comes.

  “So?” I say. “Do you like him?”

  “Yes, except he smokes. Tonight I’m going out with a guy from the office, and he smokes, too. I don’t get it. Don’t these people—”

  “Whoa, wait—what about Anwar?”

  “Oh, Dash. If God wanted us to be monogamous, he wouldn’t have made us multiorgasmic.”

  Ha-ha, we laugh. That’s funny in a sort of Sex and the City way, and here we are, girlfriends at lunch dishing on men, nothing missing but the Cosmos. It doesn’t feel quite real to me, though. I feel like the oldest one here, and I’m not. I feel as if I’m impersonating a frank, breezy girlfriend. I’m in a funny mood.

  “Seriously,” Mo says, moving her head oddly, peering at what I take for bare tree branches outside until I realize she’s found a way to see Leather-Coated Man in the window’s reflection. “Monogamy doesn’t work, obviously, because it shuts out so much of life.”

  Here we go. “Maureen is recently divorced,” I inform Greta—not very kindly, I suppose, but she deserves a warning.

  “Two people can’t be everything to each other forever, it’s just not possible. We’re not built that way. Or if you must institutionalize monogamy, then everyone gets three husbands. For ten years each, and in between you can have as many lovers as you want. I’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  Greta and I mull that over, searching for flaws. It does have an appealing sort of symmetry.

  “Maybe you have to keep falling in love with the same person? Over and over again?” Greta ventures. “And sometimes you just have to wait?”

  “Yeah, but too bad you keep falling out of love over and over, too.” Maureen signals the waiter, asks for the fruit salad with yogurt dressing and a side of asparagus, no butter, no salt. “So then your only hope is that your remarriages ultimately outnumber your divorces.”

  Greta and I order the zucchini omelet with pommes frites. “Why are you eating like a bird?” I ask Maureen. “You’re getting way too thin. It’s not healthy.” We’ve even discussed this: It’s what people who wish they weighed less say to their slim friends. A snarky defense mechanism. Deliberately tarnishing your idol.

  “Those fries are what will kill you,” Mo says in a superior tone. “Before yoga, I only eat fresh fruit. The rest of the time, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, mostly. Very little alcohol.”

  “You’re a vegetarian?” News to me. Although not that surprising, on second thought.

  “Practically. Virtually. Anyway,” she resumes, “monogamy is unnatural, that’s the point. Because all it comes down to, after all the pain and heartbreak, all your hopes and dreams, the struggling—all it comes down to is money.”

  I sigh. Greta’s shoulders sag.

  “Well,” I rouse myself to say, “nobody’s saying there should be monogamy—or marriage, that’s what we’re really talking about—without love. That would be slavery. That would be lack of imagination to the point of lobotomy. Apathy to the point of coma.”

  “Love,” Mo says, thinning her lips. “Good luck. All you can trust, bottom line, is lust. Outside of eating, sex is the most natural thing we do, but we suppress, suppress—women, not men—and then we wonder why married women have the worst mental health and married men have the best.”

  “Is that true?”

  “It’s absolutely true.” She’s turning around again, craning her neck to see Leather Coat. He’s taken it off; underneath, he’s wearing that sort of thick beige cable-knit sweater men never buy for themselves—it’s always a gift from the wife or the girlfriend. He looks very taken to me.

  “Lust is great,” I say, “but it’s not what holds two people together for a lifetime.”

  “What does?” Greta asks. She and Joel are still an item, but she doesn’t talk about him as much as she used to. Good: I don’t like the sound of him, and I was afraid his hold on her was lethal.

  “What does,” I say ruminatively, cronelike. “The details. A million little details, like threads in a tapestry. Weaving our lives together.”

  Maureen coughs behind her napkin.

  “No, but lust is great,” I backtrack, “you gotta have that. Absolutely, it’s a prerequisite.”

  “So do you and Andrew…” Shy, Greta lets that trail off.

  “Have lust? Well…yes. You know. Peaks and valleys. Good times and bad, mostly good.”

  Both women look skeptical.

  “No, we do. Really.” I’ve put it too mildly—they think I’m equivocating. “We definitely do. We had sex in Andrew’s office not that long ago, last fall sometime. On the desk.” Now I’ve got their attention. “And it wasn’t because we wanted to get caught, nothing kinky like that, I mean, we locked the door and everything.”

  “Then…”

  “Well, we just wanted to. So we did.”

  I don’t know who’s looking at me with more subtle amazement, Greta or Mo: Greta, because she finds it incredible that two old fossils like Andrew and me can still get it on at all; Mo, because she’s wondering why I’ve left him if my husband is still so virile and desirable. (Phil was a dud in their bedroom for a year or two before the divorce. But not, it turned out, in other women’s bedrooms.)

  “Wow,” says Greta. “That’s…”

  “A fucking miracle,” Mo finishes.

  “Is it?” I watch a couple of teenagers out on the sidewalk, moving fast arm in arm, their breath visible as they laugh at something one has said. They look so healthy and vigorous with their jutting knees and swinging arms. Like nothing can stop them. “I guess I take it for granted.”

  Andrew used to tell me it was my doing, the fact that we’re good at lovemaking. I was happy to take credit, but the truth is, there’s never been a time with him when I haven’t felt safe. In every conceivable sense of the word, and you have to have that, you absolutely have to have that firm, friendly ground under you, like your native land, before you can…take off and go flying around
in the wild blue yonder, so to speak. And by the same token, maybe he needs me to yell at him from high up in the thin air, “Come on, let’s go for a ride!” So we’re a team. Of acrobats, the flashy woman on top, laughing, going “No hands!” the strong, silent man on the bottom, steady as a rock.

  It’s true—I’ve had that for so long, I take it for granted.

  Mo shakes her head, as if clearing it, and stops staring at me. “Lust is a fever,” she pronounces, “and marriage is the powerful antibiotic that cures it.”

  “Oh God.” I make imploring gestures toward heaven. “Would you stop? Poor Greta, she’s going to think you’re a misogynist.”

  “A misogamist, you mean. Which I am. Okay, okay—I’m tired of myself,” she says, laughing, sprinkling a dash of forbidden salt on her asparagus—and this is why I love her. Just when she starts to get really tiresome, she always pulls up short and boomerangs back into my funny, normal friend. “Greta,” she says, stabbing at a piece of dry lettuce, “tell me about yourself. All I know from Dash is that you’re perfect.”

  “She is! She’s smart, she’s creative—look, she’s beautiful.” She’s blushing. I put my arm around her. “And she’s going places, the sky’s the limit. Oh yes, I can see it,” I say, squeezing poor Greta’s shoulders while she wobbles and grins, looking down. She likes it, though. And she needs it. I was lucky, my mother spoiled me with it almost, if you can spoil someone with encouragement.

  Mo asks Greta if she has a boyfriend, and she glances at me, says yes, and sums up Joel in about two sentences. I trust she’s not skipping over him so quickly on my account. True, I have very little use for Joel, but I’ve kept that to myself. I’m sure I have.

  “And you like your job, Dash isn’t too tough on you? Not too bossy and demanding?”

  That’s a joke, but Greta’s a bit of a literalist. “Oh no. She’s terrific, I’m learning so much. Today—well,” she defers, “you tell her.”

  “No, you.”

  “Well…this afternoon we’re doing a studio shoot, and I’m going to sort of, um…”

  “Be in charge!” I crow.