So after a while, after a particularly good training session, after herbal tea and cookies, Leo wondered aloud if Wizard and owner weren’t sufficiently trained at this point to go it on their own.
“If that’s what you want,” she said, her stern cherubic face in unacknowledged collapse. “He still has a few things to learn, you know. You said he pulls on the leash when he sees another dog. We might do a few outdoor lessons. It’s much harder to get him to obey when there are distractions around.”
It struck Leo that Sara, though otherwise a bundle of positive qualities, had almost no sense of humor. Possibly her sense of humor was so subtle that his own crude radar failed to acknowledge it.
“You’ve done very well with him, “Leo said, trying not to sound condescending. “We’re both pleased, you know, with his considerable progress.”
His compliment seemed to distress her. “If there’s a financial burden,” she said, “I’d be willing to cut my fee. Would that make a difference? I think Whizzer is on the verge of his next big breakthrough.”
“Look, why don’t we take next week off,” Leo said, “as a kind of vacation for all of us. I’m doing a reading from my book on Nikola Tesla in Rochester and I’m thinking of taking Wizard with me to see how he handles the trip.”
“I have a sister who lives in Rochester,” Sara said.
“Do you?”
“Yes, and she’s been having a hard time since her divorce. I’ve been planning to go up and see her but then something always comes up that gets in the way. I’ll have to check my schedule but maybe I could go along for the ride and give you both a hand. Have you considered what you’re going to do with the pup when you’re reading whatever it is in front of an audience?”
Feeling trapped, Leo improvised a barely credible explanation as to why it wouldn’t work for Sara to accompany him. “I appreciate your offer,” he added.
“I’d better go,” Sara said.
Leo awakes the next morning aware that it was a mistake to have rejected Sara’s offer, a mean-spirited, self-protective tic. He would have to be some kind of wizard himself to manage the puppy alone.
Wrestling with his choices—the last of which would be leaving Wizard behind—he grudgingly decides to phone the trainer, apologize for his unintentional abruptness, admit that he needs her on the trip and ask her, virtually plead with her, to join them.
He has allowed himself to imagine Sara’s pleasure in getting this call from him.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’ve already made other plans.”
That is the not the answer he has anticipated, so he hangs on waiting hopelessly for better news.
“Is there something else?” she asks.
“That’s about it,” he says, noting out of the corner of his eye that Wizard has one of his shoes in his mouth, whipping his head ferociously from side to side as if it were a fearsome opponent.
“Stop that,” he calls to the dog.
“What are you saying?” Sara says. “What should I stop?”
“Not you. Wizard was chewing on one of my shoes.”
“Whatever. Leo, you never shout at your dog. A quiet command should be sufficient to deter him.”
“It’s only in the last few days that he’s started these life-and-death battles with my shoes. He gets so much pleasure out of it, it seems churlish of me to deny him.”
“I don’t know that you want to encourage bad behavior, do you?”
“Of course you’re right,” he says.
2
There are a few timid out-of-season snow flurries when they take off in the morning for Rochester, but several hours into the journey, Leo finds himself driving in blizzard conditions. Losing traction here and there despite his all-wheel drive Forester, he considers pulling over to the side of the road to wait out the worst of the storm. That the others seem oblivious to any danger makes it difficult for him to concede to the weather. Trussed into the passenger seat next to him, Wizard is staring out the window like a tourist. Sara, keeping company in the back with her cell phone, has been trying to reach her sister in Rochester, the phone failing or the sister not available, Sara unnervingly patient.
When Sara finally completes her call, Leo learns that the reading in Rochester has been postponed because of the unexpected storm. Exhausted from his unrewarded efforts, he suggests they stop at the Wanderer’s Motel in the near distance if only to wait for the storm to abate.
As they have no plans to stay the night, they agree for economy’s sake to take a single cabin. So as not to set off any false alarms, Leo registers Sara as his wife.
“You must be totally worn out,” Sara says as they move through the mix of sleet and rain to their accommodations. “Why don’t you sack out and I’ll get the pup from the car and give him his bathroom walk.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “I appreciate the offer. It’s just that walking Wizard is one of the unsung highlights of my day.”
“Oh. go ahead, you look dead on your feet. I know how stressful it can be driving in treacherous weather. Leo. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
So, feeling anything but grateful, carrying an overnight case in each hand, Leo lets himself into the motel room while Sara takes the puppy on the stretch lease, the two wandering into the distance like snow ghosts. The boxy cabin is furnished, along with a low-slung three drawer dresser, a writing table with a Bible wrapped in plastic on its otherwise virgin surface, with two three-quarter-size beds barely a foot apart. Not bothering to remove his shoes, Leo throws himself on the bed farthest from the door.
He dozes or imagines he has and wakes to find himself still alone in the room. Where are the others?
He should have insisted on walking the dog himself.
There is a heavy green curtain over what seems like a back window and, though it takes awhile, he finally locates a device that parts the brocaded cloth.
He is surprised to discover a back garden with tables under umbrellas—a place to picnic perhaps—overwhelmed by the blinding whiteness of the still falling sleet. He has no idea what he is looking for, but as his eyes adjust, he sees something that speaks to the worst of his expectations.
He closes his eyes as if to return to a dream from which he then might shake himself awake. When after a moment of inconsequential reverie, he allows his eyes to open, nothing has changed or nothing has changed sufficiently to put his original perception in doubt.
As near as he can make out, Sara is sitting under one of the umbrellas in the garden with her back to him. At first he assumes that she has returned Wizard to the car, but then he sees that she is not alone. Something—a head, Wizard’s head most likely—is sticking out from the opening in her yellow down jacket and Sara’s hooded head is tilted forward so that the two heads seem at some point to converge. It is only when she returns to her original position that Leo can tell that Sara and Wizard have been—there is no other word to describe it—kissing. Sara’s head moves forward again and her mouth meets the dog’s—a suspicion of tongue flashing—which is more than Leo can bear to watch.
Not wanting to eavesdrop any longer than he has, he closes the curtain and goes into the bathroom to wash his hands. For a moment, he has difficulty recognizing the face in the mirror over the sink that answers his troubled glance.
Perhaps ten minutes later, Sara enters the room alone, reporting that she has left the dog in the car because of the No Pets Allowed sign they hadn’t noticed before.
“Did you get some sleep?” she asks, pulling off her boots. “I stayed out for awhile so as not to wake you.”
Lying on her back, eyes flickering shut, the whisper of a snore in counterpoint to the indeterminate hum of the room, the trainer is apparently asleep before the biographer can frame an answer to her question.
A few hours later, the weather has quieted sufficiently for them to return to the road. Unaccompanied in front this time around—Sara and Wizard shoulder to shoulder in the backseat—Leo feels deserted. A sadness he ha
sn’t acknowledged in months, perhaps since the dog entered his life, holds him in its sway.
Could they have missed a turn? They have been driving a while now—he has lost track of the time—and the passing scene, what he can make of it from the badly lit road he has been following slavishly, seems unfamiliar.
“Are we lost?” Sara asks him.
“I don’t see how,” he says. “We haven’t left the route we started on.”
“Whizzer is getting anxious,” she says. “He senses something’s wrong.”
They are approaching a restaurant called The Helden Inn on their right and Leo wonders out loud if it might be a good idea to stop for a bite. “What do you think?” he says.
to no one in particular.
“If that’s what you want to do,” Sara says. “I can’t speak for everyone but I suspect we’re all a bit peckish.”
There are an impressive number of vehicles, mostly high-end SUV’s in the restaurant lot, which suggests, given the deterrence of the weather, a devoted local following. “I think we may have lucked out,” he says to Sara.”
Sara calls his attention to a sign on the parking lot side of the Inn rising out of the white ground, which offers the modest recommendation, “Just Good Food,” the remark in quotes, the speaker unattributed. Underneath the quote in smaller letters it says, Pets and Children Welcome. “I think that’s funny,” she says.
Leo parks the Forester at the far end of the lot—he feels fortunate to find a space in the crowd of vehicles—and they have to wade, Wizard in Sara’s arms, through several inches of slush to reach the Inn.
As they find their way inside, an elderly couple, oddly costumed (the old man in lederhosen, the woman in frilly blouse and apron), seem to be waiting for them (or someone) in the cavernous foyer. “Do you have reservations?” the woman asks, her broad smile welcoming them.
“We don’t,” Leo says. “Is that a problem?”
“There are only problems if we make them problems,” the woman says, her accent vaguely foreign, the smile seemingly frozen on her face. “We’ll do our best to take care of you. Please to follow.”
She leads them into a spacious dining room—13 tables by Leo’s quick count—in which surprisingly there is only one other diner, a fat man in a three-piece suit, at the far side of the room, working at what appears to be an elaborate cream-filled desert.
Leo dries Wizard off with his rumpled cloth napkin while Sara inspects her menu. “There isn’t anything here I can eat,” she says. “I don’t eat meat.”
“What about a salad?” Leo says. “They must have salads.”
“The truth is,” Sara says, “—and I hope you won’t mention this to anyone, okay?—though I don’t eat meat, I don’t really like salads.”
Wizard, who seems to have grown during the difficult trip, barks from under the table at some unseen menace.
The proprietress, her perpetual smile a kind of rictus, returns with a basket of sliced rye bread and three glasses of water. She seems poised to take their order when someone or something whistles from the kitchen and she hurries off.
Coming out from under the table, Wizard has taken residence on one of the padded chairs, accomplishing the feat with an impressive jump.
The fat man on the other side of the room lifts his head languorously from his dessert long enough to clap.
When Leo has a chance to go through the menu, which is several pages long, he has a greater appreciation of Sara’s concern. The Helden Inn is celebrating something called Carnivore Days and all or virtually all of the dishes offered have some kind of animal meat as its base. Even under “Starters.” Leo can find nothing that seems like a green salad. Under the Carnivore Days Specials, there is a quote in italics as a kind of epigraph:
“The carnivore loves his animals so much he is willing to eat them.”
—THE MANAGEMENT
“If you don’t want to stay,” he whispers to Sara, who has been negotiating a slice of stale bread, “I’m willing to leave.”
His offer seems in equal measure to puzzle and please her. “Leo, wouldn’t it be rude to just walk out after they’ve gone to all this trouble on our behalf? I was actually thinking of ordering my first burger in about six years. Did you notice that they have a puma burger on the menu?” She smiles self-deprecatingly, almost seductively. “I’ve been known to compromise in emergencies.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he notices that the suited fat man has fallen asleep face down in his desert. Sara, intent on the menu’s extended narrative, seems not to notice.
An odd muffled cry sounds from behind one of the walls.
Wondering, and not for the first time, where the people from the parked cars have gone, Leo takes a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and leaves it under the white enamel matching salt-and-pepper shakers. “That should pay for the service,” he says. “Did you notice that they actually have a ‘Bow Wow Burger’ on the menu?”
“They don’t?” she says, rising from her chair.
Sara is in the process of putting the puppy under her jacket when the proprietress, her smile unaltered, returns with a tray of unidentifiable appetizers. “I apologize for the delay,” she says. “The help isn’t always what you want.”
Leo is about to offer an explanation for their abrupt departure, but instead takes Sara’s hand and heads to the door that leads to the cavernous foyer.
The old man in the lederhosen is standing by the register as they hurry past him. “Come visit us again,” he says in an uninflected voice. “And don’t forget to drive safely.”
Since almost all the vehicles in the lot are covered with some residue of the weather, it is hard to determine in the dark which car is theirs.
In his hurry to get going, Leo, using the sleeve of his coat, clears off the front window of the wrong Forester.
A Lexus SUV, pulling out from the row behind them, startles them with its horn. The driver, who could be the younger sister of the proprietress, rolls down a window and offers them a ride.
In the chaos of the moment, Leo is tempted to accept, but Sara who is clearing off another car, says, “Wait a second. I think I found ours.”
They pile into the Forester Sara has cleared, though Leo is not at all sure it is the one that had brought them there.
This time, Sara drives while Leo and Wizard sit next to each other in the back, a larger space between them than the one Leo observed between Sara and the puppy when he was at the wheel.
Still he is pleased to be alone with his charge without other responsibilities and he reaches out awkwardly to rub the puppy’s head. Closing his eyes, Wizard accepts Leo’s homage. When, after awhile, Leo reclaims his hand, Wizard turns to look at him, the dog’s wise face making unspoken judgments, seeing though to the very bottom of the biographer.
For an unguarded moment, Leo’s considers apologizing for his failings, promising to do his best to transcend his limitations in the future. While these thoughts pinball about in his head,
Wizard leans over and licks his hand.
At some point, at Leo’s request—the gauge registering empty-Sara pulls into a Mobil station to gas up and to find out where they might be in relation to where they are going. The news is bad. Apparently, they have been heading for the most part in the wrong direction and are farther away from home than ever. The source of their information, an overeager teen-aged attendant, says he knows of a shortcut and he draws them a not quite decipherable map on a coffee-stained napkin.
“What do you want to do?” Sara asks Leo, showing him the makeshift map. “We could stop at the motel we just passed and start out fresh in the morning or we could turn around and drive through the night. Either way, honey, is okay with me.”
Instinctively, he turns to Wizard, but the shaggy dog, head pressed against Leo’s leg, eyes mostly shut, merely smiles.
As Leo considers his options, he imagines them—the three of them—moving on in whatever direction, stopping to get advice again and again, letti
ng the trip take them where it will, the hand-drawn map, the various maps, just an excuse to pursue space and distance, and the more lost they seem to get the closer they are to some place unknown to him he has never been to before and has never hoped to reach.
SEATTLE
For days they argued as if the terrifying unimaginable were at stake over something that had happened (or had not happened) 15 years back. Or perhaps 17 years back, as Genevieve continued to insist. The dispute concerned a trip they had taken to Seattle—that much was sometimes agreed on—in which they had both behaved badly, a trip that had very nearly ended in the dissolution of a long term marriage. It had come back to Josh in barely discernible disguise, provoked into memory by a startlingly vivid dream.
When he woke in a tattered rage, he replayed the dream in his head, not wanting to lose it as he had lost so much else in recent years, juggling its shapeless fragments in the imaginary air while waiting for Genevieve to open her eyes.
Finally, outmaneuvered by his own impatience, he woke her.
“I just had this disturbing dream…” he started.
She anticipated what came next. “And you want me to listen to it? Is that what this is about?”
“You were in the dream,” he said.
“Was I?”
He couldn’t remember when it started or even precisely how it started or if it had always been this way. He would have something in his hand or there was something in his sight he was thinking of picking up, something—whatever, car keys, reading glasses—he had plans for, and then in the next moment it was nowhere. Once it had vanished, he could look everywhere for it, he could tear the house apart, and not find it. It was as if the object were playing tricks on him. How furious it made him, furious at the object and furious at himself for being its gull. Genevieve hated his rages, but what else could he do, rage was the only revenge powerlessness offered.
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