The Dogs of Babel

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  We were at a restaurant the first time I brought it up. At the table next to us was a couple with a baby, a boy maybe eight months old. I was in love with the scene of it, the mother and father taking turns entertaining the baby with a parade of toys produced one by one from a voluminous diaper bag, feeding him a snack from a plastic bag full of dry Cheerios, offering him a bottle of juice. From time to time, the baby would let out a string of nonsense syllables, and the happy sound filled the restaurant.

  At one point, the baby’s mother scooped up a spoonful of couscous from her plate and offered it to the baby. “Look at that,” she said to her husband as the baby swallowed it. “His first couscous.”

  Lexy smiled at me. “His first couscous,” she said in a low voice. “If I ever had a kid, it’d probably be more like, ‘Aw, look at that, his first Big Mac.’”

  I laughed. “His first taco chip. Wasn’t that a Norman Rockwell painting?”

  “Or one of those Precious Moments figurines. His first Hostess snack cake.”

  “His first onion ring.”

  “His first Mountain Dew.”

  “I had a friend in college who told me his mother used to put Coke in his baby bottle.”

  “Wow. Nothing like an infant hopped up on caffeine.”

  I paused to take a bite of my salad. “So,” I said. “Do you ever think about that?”

  “What,” she said, “babies hopped up on caffeine?”

  “No,” I said. “Babies, period.”

  “Sure, I think about it,” she said. “But mostly I think no.” She looked at me to see my reaction.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you like kids?”

  “I love them. I’m just not sure I should have one.”

  “That’s a strange choice of words,” I said. “You didn’t say, ‘I’m not sure I want to have one’ or ‘I’m not sure I’d like to have one,’ you said, ‘I’m not sure I should have one.’ What does that mean?”

  “Oh, here we go,” Lexy said, rolling her eyes. “The perils of dining with a linguist.”

  “No, really,” I said. “I’m curious. Why don’t you think you should have a baby?”

  She searched my face for a long minute before she spoke. “I’m just not sure it’s fair to give a child me for a mother. And that’s the last I’ll say about it.”

  I stared at her, astonished. “Are you serious? My God, Lexy, I think you’d make a wonderful mother. You’re caring and generous —”

  She put up her hand to stop me. “No,” she said. “Don’t. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”

  “But, Lexy, I can’t believe you’d think such a thing.”

  She stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said, “and when I come back, we’re going to talk about something else.”

  She started to get up, then stopped. “You know I’d never actually feed that kind of stuff to a baby, right?” she said.

  “See?” I said, smiling. “There’s that maternal instinct kicking in.”

  We didn’t discuss it again that night. But the conversation wasn’t over. I found myself thinking about the subject almost constantly in the weeks that followed. At the time, I had a graduate student in one of my seminars, a woman named Angelica Raza, who was pregnant with her first child. One day, she and I both arrived early to class, and after we exchanged a few pleasantries, I decided to ask her some questions that might help me figure things out.

  “So,” I asked. “Did you always want kids?”

  She thought about it. “Yeah, pretty much always,” she said. “My husband was a little harder to sell on the idea. But he came around eventually. Obviously,” she added, placing her hands on her rounded belly.

  “How’d you bring him around?”

  “Well, basically, I tried not to pressure him. He’s just a cautious guy, and he likes to make decisions in his own time. It took him seven years to decide to marry me. And we’d been living together for five.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” she laughed. “I knew he’d eventually decide he was ready for kids, but I was afraid I’d be eighty by that time.”

  “But you didn’t pressure him?”

  “No. One thing I’ve learned about John is that he doesn’t respond well to pressure. So I kept it light. I’d drop little comments about people we knew who were having babies, and I’d make jokes. For a while, we had this game where we’d try to come up with the most inappropriate baby names we could think of. I think the winner was Tabula, for a girl. Get it? Tabula Raza?”

  I laughed.

  “And then one day,” she went on, “he just turned to me out of the blue, I think we were watching a cop show or something, and said, ‘Let’s have a baby.’”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “Yeah, and now he can’t wait. He’s read more baby books than I have.”

  Just then, a couple of other students arrived, and the conversation shifted to something else. But later that night, when I got home, I decided to give Angelica’s method a try.

  I started by telling Lexy Angelica’s story about naming a girl Tabula. She smiled and said, “Oh, you linguistics scholars. Never a dull moment.”

  “So then,” I said, “I was wondering if there were any names that wouldn’t go with our last names, but I couldn’t think of any for Iverson. I guess Ivan Iverson would be pretty bad.”

  “Well, not as bad as Stinky Iverson,” Lexy said. “It doesn’t matter what your last name is, I think if you name a child Stinky, you’re setting him up for a life of hardship.”

  This seemed to be going pretty well, I thought. “What about Ransome?” I said. “Is there anything that doesn’t go with Ransome? Kings, I guess. You wouldn’t want to name a kid Kings Ransome. But that’s not a real name, anyway.”

  “My dad used to have some complicated joke that took forever to tell, and I was too young to really get it anyway, about how he should have two sons and name them both William. God, I wish I could remember the whole thing, it’d tell you a lot about what my father was like. Anyway, the punch line was something about paying a Ransome in small Bills.”

  I laughed, maybe a little too hard.

  Lexy looked at me. She had a serious expression on her face, suddenly. “Sweetie, I know what you’re doing,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  “No?” I took her hand. “Look, Lexy, I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but don’t you think it’s possible you might change your mind?”

  “Well, anything’s possible, but I don’t think so.” She looked away. “I guess this is something we should have talked about before we got married,” she said, and it was like a question. “I guess it might have changed things.” Her voice sounded fragile suddenly, like a little girl’s.

  “No, of course not,” I said. “Nothing could have stopped me from marrying you.” She smiled at me tentatively. “I can’t say I’m not disappointed, and I can’t say I don’t hope you’ll reconsider, but I’m in this with you for good. No matter what.”

  And so I agreed to it. I agreed to a life without children. I agreed it would be just the two of us, here in the tilting world. What would our days be like, I wondered, with that space in them, the space where a child might be, the space where a child might walk between us, holding each of our hands? But no, I resolved. Our days could be filled with the two of us. We would walk through our days together, and the shadow we would cast on the ground would be tall, the shadow of two adults walking together, not the familiar H of adult-child-adult walking hand in hand. We would live a good, quiet life, uninterrupted by the shouts of children at play, the daily chaos of cuts and scrapes and quarrels over the sharing of toys. There would still be the two of us, and the bright sky of our love. I could do this for her. This was not so bad. There would be hard times, but what did I care if we had hard times? The branches of my love were wide, and they caught the rain and the snow. We would be okay, the two of us together. We would be okay.
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  TWENTY

  When I was a little boy, my mother, who was given to hyperbole, used to tell me that if the world were to come to an end, her last thought would be of me, and she would fling my name out to the heavens as the mortar of the earth burst apart and the ground fell from beneath her feet. It is only now, when I am surprised to find that I am growing older every day, it’s only now that I am beginning to believe that my mother was not just speaking extravagantly. I think every one of us carries with us a name like this, a name whose importance may not be clear to us until we find it on our lips in those final moments. I don’t think it is ever, perhaps not even for my mother, who we expect it to be.

  All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. “When I get to Heaven,” my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, “your grandfather won’t even recognize me.”

  Lately, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. It’s the getting to sleep that causes me problems. During the day, I go from one task to the next, not thinking much about the shadow areas of my life, Lexy’s death, my grief and the strange way I have chosen to respond to it, the laughingstock I have become in my field. I can go the whole day without thinking of any of it. And then I get into bed. All those hours spread before me, and nothing to do but think. I would get up and work on my research, but Lorelei has made it clear she will not work between the hours of eight P.M. and six A.M. Dogs sleep a lot—one lesson I’ve learned in my two months of research is that dogs sleep a hell of a lot more than they do anything else.

  And so it is that on this night, my wife four months dead, I find myself sitting in the dark watching an infomercial for a telephone psychic.

  I’ve never been much of a believer in the mystical arts, although as a child I indulged all the natural curiosities for ghost stories, Ouija boards, and the like. In fact, the powers of the Ouija board have become legendary in my family: once when my sister and I were children, a Ouija board told her that she would marry a man with the initials PJM, and as it turned out, she did. My sister’s first husband, to whom she was married for a scant eight months right after college, was named Peter James Marsh. Now, happily married for almost fifteen years to a man with the initials LRS, the only thing she will say about her first marriage is that she should have known better than to marry a man based on his initials.

  But in my adult years I’ve always been something of a skeptic. I don’t believe in ESP or UFOs, past lives or parallel worlds or spirits of the dead that haunt the living. I don’t believe in anything I can’t put my hands on. Still, something about this woman on the screen intrigues me, and I find myself not wanting to change the channel. I suppose everyone is a skeptic until they have a reason to believe.

  Lady Arabelle is her name. She could not be more of a cliché—colorful scarves knotted about her head, a jangle of gold necklaces at her throat—but there’s something so sincere about her you forget all that. Something about her manner, the warmth she displays, draws you in right away. I can see why you’d want to believe what she has to say. The people who phone in with their problems, she calls them honey and baby, and she makes it sound like she means it. There’s something distinctly motherly about her. If she called me baby, I think I’d want to cry.

  “Check him out, honey,” she’s telling the woman on the phone. “Make sure his divorce is final, because I don’t think he’s being honest with you. He’s hiding something. Did he ask you not to call him at home?”

  “Well, he told me he has this roommate he doesn’t like, so he’s not home much. He told me I should call his pager.”

  “That’s no roommate, honey. That’s his wife.”

  They flash a phone number. “Lady Arabelle knows all your secrets,” the voice-over tells me. “She answers your questions about the future, your questions about the past.” Well, that’s something. Your questions about the past. Idly, I imagine the conversation that would follow if I called the number on the screen. “I see a large dog. The dog has something to tell you.”

  Another caller, a man this time. “I’m sorry, hon,” Lady Arabelle tells him. “But that’s not your baby.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No, honey, it’s not. Tell me this, did she go out of town a few months ago, maybe for her job? Did she go to an Eastern city?”

  “Yeah,” he says, his voice gone flat. “She went to Boston in June.”

  “Well, that’s when it happened. Ask her about it. Ask her if she ran into an old boyfriend in Boston, and see what she has to say for herself.”

  I give some thought to this man whose marriage may now be over as the result of a phone call to a stranger. I wonder if it’s true, this scenario she’s put in his mind. I picture the confrontations that will follow this phone call.

  Another voice-over, some fine print about rates per minute. I find myself tempted to write the phone number down. Then Lady Arabelle is back, talking to another woman.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me about,” she says. “You’re all excited about something. Something you found in his coat?”

  “Yes,” the woman says. “I found a ring. I think he’s going to propose!”

  “Well, I’m gonna tell you something, baby. That ring’s for someone else. That ring is not for you.”

  It’s the specificity that seals the deal. The Eastern city, the hidden ring. She’s very convincing. But something about the desperation of these callers, the faith they put in this woman who, sincere though she seems, knows nothing about their lives, bothers me. I stand up, ready to turn off the TV—I have the remote in my hand—but what I hear next makes my heart stop.

  Because the next voice I hear is Lexy’s.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It’s her. It’s her. I know it the way I know the pound of my blood in my chest. Lexy’s voice, like a homecoming for me. Lexy’s voice, filling the room once more.

  “I’m lost,” she says, and I lose my legs beneath me. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, and I make a sound like an animal struck.

  My hands are shaking, and I feel dizzy. My heart is beating so hard I think it will break. I pick up the remote from where I’ve dropped it, and I turn the volume up as high as it will go. Lady Arabelle, her voice like a lullaby, gives her reply.

  “Listen to me, honey,” she says, so loud I can feel it in my teeth. “You have more strength than you know.”

  I wait for more, I wait for Lexy to come back and say something else, but that’s all there is. They’re back to the voice-over about rates and phone numbers.

  Lexy’s voice gone once more. I cover my face with my hands and give myself over to the wave of sound racking my body. A tightness in my chest gives voice to a bottomless noise like a howl. I kneel on the floor in the half-light of the television and wail loud enough to wake the dead.

  I feel a wet pressure on the back of my hand, and I look up to see Lorelei staring me in the face. “Lorelei,” I say, my voice wrecked and uneven. “Did you hear it, girl?” She licks my face. I gather her in my arms and lift her, all of her dense, heavy weight, onto my lap. I press my face into the rough warmth of her neck, the thick leather band of her collar. I’m sobbing now, and her fur grows damp beneath my face. “Did you hear it, Lorelei?” I say. “It was her, it was her, it was her.”

  Later, later, when I’ve calmed down enough that my body has stopped shaking and I’ve quieted my breath, I get a piece of paper and I write down the number on the screen. I stare at the number. My head is pounding. What does it mean? For a wild minute, I imagine Lexy alive, sitting in a room someplace, with a phone pressed to her ear. But no. Just as quickly, I see it all again, Lexy lying in her coffin, her body strange and still. Who knows how long ago she made this call?
It could have been months before her death, it could have been years. For the first time, I think about Lexy’s words. “I’m lost,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” What kind of trouble was she in? And where was I? It occurs to me that there must have been more to this phone call. I have to talk to this woman. I have to hear the rest of the story. But will she even remember Lexy? She talks to a hundred people a day. And all their problems are the same. All the world’s troubles and secrets, none of them new. She gives them all the same advice, Follow your heart and You know what you have to do. There’s no mystery there. The people who call know the answers already. They just need someone to say them out loud.

  I get up and walk to my study. For once I’m glad I never throw anything away. In my desk drawer, I find a thick folder filled with old bills, and I begin to go through it. Nothing’s in any order; I always just cram papers in here at random after paying the bills. Here’s a water bill from three years ago; here’s the credit card bill I paid last week. I go through, separating out the phone bills and throwing the rest on the floor.

  It takes me an hour to find it. That phone number, the one I’ve just written down, 11:23 P.M. Forty-six minutes in length. What desperate night was this? While I slept, she sat in this very room and made a phone call to a television psychic. “I’m lost,” she said, and I was asleep. And then she came in and lay beside me. She was lost, and I had no idea. She lay beside me, lost and scared.

  The charge is $229.54. How could I have missed this? I tend to be a bit absentminded when it comes to such things—it once took me six months to notice I was being charged a monthly membership fee for a health club I didn’t belong to—but a two-hundred-dollar phone call? And then I see the date. October 23 of last year. The day before Lexy’s death. Of course I paid my bills that month in a fog.

  Lorelei comes into the room and whines to be let out. It’s late; she had her nightly walk hours ago, and there are hours still until morning. This is a strange night for us both. I follow her to the back door and let her out into the yard. She sniffs around the base of the apple tree. I wonder if Lexy’s scent is still there, embedded in the damp earth. Strange that Lorelei didn’t respond to Lexy’s voice on the TV. She slept through the whole thing, awakening only when she heard me cry out. How could she have missed it, with all her strong canine powers of hearing? Has she forgotten Lexy’s voice in this short time? Or is there something about the filtering effect of the tape recording, the tinny TV speakers, that reduces even the most beloved voice to mere background noise? I’ve noticed before that Lorelei doesn’t respond to familiar voices on the telephone answering machine either. The doorbell, though. Whenever she hears a doorbell on TV, she jumps up and runs to the door, barking. And our doorbell hasn’t worked as long as I’ve lived here.