Creature Discomforts

by Susan Conant

  To return to my original point, which concerns Anita Fairley, there’s nothing psychic about my occasional flashes of insight about what my fellow creatures are thinking and what they’re going to do next. Anita, I hasten to add, was not on the verge of getting sick to her stomach. Not that it would have mattered. We were outdoors, on the rocky shore of the ocean, not in the middle of a rug. Anyway, in a flash, I suddenly knew as surely as if Anita Fairley had spoken aloud that she just ate up being seen with this man. She gobbled it up with the ardor my dogs would’ve shown if they’d been turned loose on the raspberry pies. And how could I blame her? If I’d been with him, I’d have felt the same way.

  Gabrielle made a great fuss about Anita’s arrival. “Anita Fairley, of course, and Steve Delaney,” she said, her tone hinting at what I already recognized as a characteristic desire to have everyone know and like everyone else. “And the rest of you can introduce yourselves.” Gabrielle went on to offer lobsters and steamers to the latecomers, but Anita said that she and Steve had stopped for dinner. It seemed to me that at a minimum, Anita should have invented a white lie about heavy traffic or a flat tire. We’re late for dinner because we stopped to eat didn’t exactly sparkle with social grace. To make matters worse, Anita wasn’t just an ordinary guest at an ordinary social event. Her father was the guest of honor. This was a celebration of the Pine Tree Foundation. And Anita was, as Tiffany had informed me, the foundation’s attorney.

  If my presentation of Anita seems ever so slightly biased in an almost imperceptibly negative direction, forgive me. My only excuse for the lack of objectivity is that I hated her on sight. Why? Not because of her good looks or her bad manners, but because of my violently overwhelming physical reaction to Steve Delaney, the man who was with her, meaning, of course, not with me. Let me cool down, step back, and relate the facts. The principal one is that as soon as I caught sight of him, blood rushed to surfaces of my skin I didn’t even know I had, and my heart pounded so fast and so powerfully that the tachycardia must almost have been audible. As to the rate and quality of my respiration, I’ll say only that recent head trauma hadn’t destroyed my memory of what that meant and, worse, would mean to any adult listening in, and even though I was sitting, my knees went weak, and sparing you further details, I’d have made a god-awful public spectacle of myself if I hadn’t been saved, as usual, by dogs.

  Kimi deserves most of the credit. Popping up like a jack-in-the-box, she delivered a prolonged string of the woos and roos that malamutes link together to form what are unmistakably human sentences. Kimi belted out her dialogue so loudly that all on her own, she’d have drowned me out, but Rowdy did me the face-saving favor of adding his voice at an octave or two lower than hers, and then everyone broke into embarrassed laughter.

  Tiffany, who was still making a pet of Kimi, controlled her canine charge better than I did mine. Unbalanced by the events of the day and now, suddenly, awash in this weird maelstrom of desire, I was no match for Rowdy, who made a headlong pull toward Steve Delaney. By accident, I think, I managed to hang on to Rowdy’s leash and to stay upright. Ears flattened to his head, tail madly wagging, Rowdy dragged me straight to Steve Delaney, who bent down, took the big dog’s head in his hands, and spoke to him in tones too soft for human ears.

  “Well, of course!” Gabrielle announced to everyone. “I should have realized!” Explaining herself, she said, “Steve is a veterinarian. His practice is in Cambridge. I think we can take a wild guess that Holly uses him.”

  Her words echoed in my ears. Holly uses him. It’s a common enough expression, isn’t it? And a perfectly innocuous one. What dentist do you use? What doctor? What vet? And if I reply that I use so-and-so, there’s no connotation whatever of exploitation. But suddenly, dear God, far from limiting themselves to nasty hints, the words now multiplied into a tirade of denunciation. Holly uses him: She uses him to her advantage, exploits him, profits from him, preys on him, cashes in on him, imposes on him. Do you use him, Holly? Oh, do you ever! The worst of the tirade was this: My muddled head had somehow left me with a clear heart. Every word of the tirade was true. This man I couldn’t remember? I had used him. I had used him badly indeed.

  “You’re the last person I expected to find here,” he said, speaking only a little more loudly than he’d spoken to Rowdy.

  “Me, too,” I said. “I mean, you’re…”

  “What are you doing here?”

  The truth spilled out. “I have no idea. I really have no idea at all.” Now I was on the verge of tears.

  “You’ve hurt yourself,” he said.

  “I fell.” Groping for dignity, I hastened to add, “I’ll be all right. Really, I’ll be all right.”

  “Steve!” Anita demanded. “Steve?”

  Earlier that evening, it had been easy to identify her father’s voice as the one I’d heard when I’d regained consciousness on the mountain. When Malcolm Fairley had spoken, I’d known instantly. Could Malcolm’s companion on the mountain have been Anita? But Anita hadn’t been on the island this afternoon, had she? She and Steve Delaney, my Steve Delaney, had been elsewhere. Headed here. Or had they started from here and taken a day trip? Had someone said? I couldn’t remember. My hands made fists of themselves. I wanted to pound them hard on almost anything. My eyes teared up. I had to disappear before I made an utter fool of myself.

  With what I recognized as freakish formality, I said to Steve Delaney, “You’re going to have to excuse me. It’s time for me to leave.” Catching sight of Gabrielle, I led Rowdy to her and uttered some sort of formula for thanking hostesses for lovely evenings.

  Instead of replying with another formula, she said, “Holly, you’re woozy from that fall you took today. Do you want someone to walk you back to the guest cottage? Or help you with the dogs? Tiffany would be glad to go with you. Or you could stay here. I think maybe staying here’s the best thing.”

  “A crack on the head is nothing to fool around with,” Malcolm Fairley agreed. “I learned the hard way. No pun intended! Gabbi will—”

  “It’s just cuts and bruises,” I insisted. “Strictly superficial. I’ll be fine. Thank you for the offer, Gabrielle, that’s really kind, but I’ll be fine on my own.” Looking around, I saw no sign of Steve or Anita. Good! There’d be no need to wish them a pleasant evening or, worse, say that I hoped they slept well.

  I retrieved Kimi from Tiffany, thanked her for her help, and, with a sense of tremendous relief, followed my dogs up the rocks, onto the lawn, and around Gabrielle’s house to the parking area at the back. I would recover, I told myself, if I could just get away from all these people, get some sleep, and spend some time with my dogs. When it came to healing, one dog was worth a million doctors. Sleep was the second great healer. In the morning, I’d be myself again. When I was, everything would explain itself. The horrible sense of responsibility would shrink to a normal, perhaps even trivial, sense of minor obligation.

  Amid the sport-utility vehicles parked behind Gabrielle’s house was an old van that hadn’t been there when I’d arrived. A panel door on the side stood open. By the door, almost stage-lit by the floods on Gabrielle’s house and garage, was Anita Fairley. I could, of course, see her more clearly than had been possible on the dark beach. The illumination made everything worse, which is to say that she was even more striking than I’d realized. With her long, pale hair, rich green sweater, tan trekking pants, and fashionable boots, she belonged in an ad in an expensive sporting-goods catalog. What really made her look like a model was that she posed, catalog fashion, with a dog on lead, a liver-and-white-ticked pointer bitch whose attention was directed toward the inside of the van. The pointer was, in fact, spoiling the shot. Instead of lovingly eyeing Anita or gazing self-confidently around in apparent search of upland game birds, the poor thing was trembling and issuing a soft, pitiful whine.

  From inside the van came Steve Delaney’s voice. “I’m ready for Lady now, Anita. Could you…?”

  Anita reached into the dark in
terior of the van with the hand that held the pointer’s lead. Her hand emerged empty. The pointer started to climb into the van. Her tail was now whipping nervously back and forth. Anita was almost motionless. She could have given the animal a soothing pat. But she didn’t. She didn’t even bother to look around in case anyone was watching. In one swift, graceful, almost imperceptible movement, she swung a handsomely booted foot at the pointer’s hindquarters. The pointer did not cry out. Anita hadn’t exactly kicked her. She’d delivered a nudge, I suppose, a push, a poke, or a little prod. But she’d done it in a sneaky way. With her foot. And I don’t like to see people use their damned booted feet on dogs.

  “There you go, Lady!” Anita crooned. “There you go, sweetheart!”

  I felt frozen in place. You bitch, I thought. You insufferable bitch.

  Chapter Thirteen

  AFTER LURKING IN THE SHADOWS until the van drove off, the dogs and I followed its route down the road to the guest cottage. As we approached the door that led to the little kitchen, the dogs’ hackles and ears rose. A fat, dark blob scuttled away from the big plastic trash barrel by the steps. The yellow bug light by the door cast almost no actual light, and I was too slow to catch the animal in the beam of my flashlight. My guess was a raccoon. The shadow had sped away a bit quickly for a porcupine. Maine has bears, and they sure will raid trash, but I somehow had the feeling that there were no bears on Mount Desert Island. Besides, although Maine’s black bears are much smaller than grizzlies, the blob had been more raccoon size than bear size, and raccoons are notorious garbage thieves. If they’d neatly remove lids, sort through refuse, and deposit rejected items back in trash barrels in the fashion attributed to government investigators, no one would mind too much. As it is, they make a horrible mess. And Maine has lots of raccoons. Consequently, Maine trash barrels left in the open are always equipped with bungee cords, rocks, cinder blocks, or other marginally effective animal-proofing paraphernalia. If you locked your trash in a safe with a combination lock, a determined raccoon would eventually dial the numbers in their correct sequence. Still, when I noticed that the bun-gee cord on the barrel at the guest house was loose and that the cinder block on the lid was poised to fall off, I felt obliged to set things right.

  I put the dogs in the cottage, went back outside, secured the bungee cord, and settled the cinder block squarely in the middle of the barrel lid. Just as I finished, the pale, bobbing beam of a flashlight appeared on the road in the direction of Gabrielle’s house, and I heard people talking. Having spent the evening blundering my way through human social interaction, I felt desperately eager to avoid even the slightest contact with anyone of my own species, which should properly be known as Homo palaver. At the same time, I wanted to avoid making the blatantly unfriendly gesture of dashing into the cottage and shutting the noisy screen door. Consequently, I slipped around the corner of the cottage to wait until the passersby had become just that by passing by. Within seconds, I’d identified them as Quint and Effie. They must, of course, be walking home.

  With the frankness of one member of a couple speaking to another in presumed privacy, Quint said, “Well, at least Gabbi won’t be able to inflict Norman Axelrod on us from now on. Him and his goddamned needling. For Christ’s sake! Any charitable donation, any charitable enterprise, has tax benefits. What did he think? That Gabbi could afford to just give all her land away? He knew damned well that this is not some shady tax dodge, but he would just not let up.”

  “What he was, was hostile,” Effie agreed as they were directly in front of the cottage. “But we’re still stuck with Wally and with that damned Opal the Snake. The next time that woman tells me that development is inevitable, I’m going to kick her. Don’t think I haven’t come close!”

  “Opal is an old friend of—”

  “I am sick of hearing that she’s an old friend of Gabbi’s! So what? The fact is that Opal and Wally are nothing but philistines. Business types,” she added damningly. “You know what Wally did before? Ran a chain of drugstores! And then he sold out so he could start ruining…” Effie’s irate voice trailed off as she and Quint continued home.

  Instead of feeling relief at my freedom from human company, I found myself listening intently for any overtones or undertones that might waft back toward me. Furthermore, once I was back inside the cottage, it seemed disquietingly clear that Rowdy and Kimi were in some peculiar mood that I couldn’t fathom. As I wandered around turning off lights, straightening cushions, brushing my teeth, and trying to discover what, if anything, this Holly Winter person customarily wore to bed, the dogs followed me, but not in a peaceful, cozy way. In fact, zipping back and forth around me, their tails carried finlike above their backs, they moved with a distinctly predatory air, like furry gray sharks circling a victim in preparation for the kill. Not that I expected an attack. On the contrary, never for a second was I afraid of the dogs themselves. What disturbed me was my complete inability to interpret their behavior: And I somehow knew that if I had lost my ability to understand dogs, I had lost my comprehension of my mother tongue.

  “What is it?” I asked them plaintively. “What’s the trouble here? You expect something. Is that it? I’m so terribly sorry. I’m so tired. My head aches. I hurt all over. We just have to go to sleep. That’s all I can do. Maybe in the morning, I’ll know what you want. I am so, so sorry.” I was again close to tears. Then, finding a king-size sheet folded neatly across the foot of the bed, I hoped for a moment that I’d deciphered the dogs’ expectations. “Aren’t you good dogs!” I exclaimed. “You sleep on the bed, don’t you! Of course you do. And you know to wait until I spread a sheet over the comforter, so we don’t get dog hair on it. Good dogs!”

  It’s now strange and rather wonderful to look back on what I took for granted. For example, I found nothing startling or ludicrous about the idea that preparing the bed for dogs was my way of turning down my own covers.

  After I’d finished spreading out the sheet, however, the dogs were still restless. They zoomed out of the bedroom. Something clattered. I was too weary to investigate. The dogs zoomed back. When I patted the bed, both dogs leaped onto it, but then immediately jumped off, circled around, and eyed me with trust and mystification. So what did I do? Instead of sensibly ignoring the dogs, crating them, or even offering another apology, I burst into a crying fit. I sank to the floor, threw my arms around Rowdy’s neck, and buried my scratched, stinging face in his thick, deep coat. Pushing her way into the mass of big, hairy dog and exhausted, sobbing person, Kimi nuzzled me, licked my face, and then gave Rowdy a monumentally rivalrous shove that bothered him not at all, but sent me sprawling.

  So there I lie, fragile, addlebrained, aching, scared, and suffering from a maniacal crush on a stranger who must be my vet, but is another woman’s lover. Also, I’m coated in dog spit and undercoat, and all of a sudden? I’m happy. For the first time since I awoke on the mountain, I have this sharp, clear sense that everything—in particular, who I am and the situation I’m in—has this magical quality that it seemed as if nothing would ever have again. And the magical quality is, of course, familiarity. And it’s not a creepy, déjà vu, malfunctioning-brain-cells kind of familiarity, either. Far from it! I really have been here before. Indeed, I have often been jolted by big dogs. I recognize the sensation. It is mine. I am happy.

  And my nose is running. I’m thirsty. Lobster and clams? That ever-so-obvious explanation of my thirst entirely eludes me. I wash my face at the bathroom sink, but cannot find a drinking glass. With a stupid smile on my face, I make for the kitchen. The dogs follow. I choose a blue plastic tumbler from a shelf, fill it with cold bottled water from the refrigerator, and drink the entire eight ounces. Meanwhile Kimi picks up a stainless-steel bowl sitting empty on the kitchen floor. She drops it. It rings. Ah-hah! The clatter!

  Rational thought emerges: Rowdy and Kimi are restless because they are thirsty. They are thirsty because their water bowl is empty. They have been asking for water.