Just Bill

by Barry Knister

  All Bill understands is that the missus has stopped making a fuss when he’s wet. The first time he came out of the lake in Michigan, with the great pleasure of water still delighting the Labrador part of his nature, Bill shook himself on the dock. Mrs. Vinyl yelled about her dress, the chair cushion. She demanded the mister do something—lock the dog in the garage or tool shed—anything, so he wouldn’t do what was in his nature, to plunge into the delicious Michigan lake and lunge at fish.

  Vinyl stops scratching and sits back. The dog quivers from a strong wish to jump up and sprawl on the man, to mold himself into the presence that loves him, that is warm and generous and walked along the road at the most important time. But he doesn’t. Not on the flimsy chaise. On the couch inside, sometimes, but only when the mister is taken with a need of his own. Usually it happens when the missus isn’t with him. At such moments the small need flows from Vinyl’s head and heart to his hand—and he pats the cushion next to him. When this happens, Bill jumps up and settles close. It’s like what the missus calls all the things that make her voice happy. Certain people, and things to eat, and weather. She calls them all heaven.

  But not on the chaise. Bill spreads himself on the cool, smooth concrete at Vinyl’s feet. He smells chlorine. Sometimes when it’s hot, if the mister is in the pool and makes a certain move—Bill always watches for it, sprawled and panting in the midday heat—if he calls and claps his hands, oh what goodness! It’s almost equal to the big lake in Michigan, spreading from sandy shore and dock, out beyond the diving platform.

  No. Eyes closed, hearing the phone ringing inside, Bill knows the lake is better than the swimming pool. Better even, he decides, hearing the missus talking now in her high voice, than the times the mister takes him to Naples Pier. Together they walk out over water, filing between rows of men talking, smoking, the air loaded with scents of ocean and fish. Bill feels proud to be taken, sensing eyes on him, hearing questions asked, hands stroking. Then they go down steps to the beach. Yes, that is wonderful, too. The Gulf, the mister calls it, tasting of salt. Fish are everywhere, more than at the lake, almost too many. Half asleep now, he remembers barking and lunging, seeing flat, wavy things that flap and scoot, leaving plumes of sand.

  Many things make no sense to him. Lying under the dining table is one, looking at the feet of strangers, everyone talking, nicking the plates with knives. Bill stays still and listens, smelling food, smelling strange bodies and shoes, and what’s on the shoes. Sometimes the voices rise. When this happens, it makes him nervous. Like all dogs, Bill is a pack animal, with strong loyalty to his leader. When Vinyl seems for some unknowable reason to not be himself—shouting, banging the arms of his chair—Bill leaves.

  The missus comes out again. This time, she doesn’t have the doll. “That was Rita Fisk. Cliff Gilmore died two hours ago.”

  “Oh God.”

  “He had a coronary playing Frisbee with Hotspur. At the tennis courts. He died in the EMS van.”

  “Was Glenda with him?”

  “Shopping. It was on her answering machine when she came in. Talk about insensitive. You’re shopping, you come in and find out about it that way. Rita’s there now. Such a nice man.”

  “Cliff was a wonderful guy. The best. How’s Glenda?”

  “Rita says not well. Because she wasn’t there. Of course they weren’t married all that long, who can really know?”

  Vinyl doesn’t answer right away. “None of you like her because she’s young.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “‘Trophy wife, floozy, bimbo—’”

  “Rita thought you might be willing to walk Hotspur.”

  The mister stands and Bill does the same. It’s time to walk, and the missus said Hotspur.

  “I don’t want you hanging out over there.”

  Vinyl makes the clicking sound he uses to call Bill. “God, the man’s dead two hours. Already you think she’s husband-hunting.” He looks down. “Come on, let’s pay Hotsie a visit.”

  IT’S NIGHT, THE streetlamps on. They are high up, making their sound. Like small clouds, insects form a shifting mass atop each post. The lights themselves are TV blue.

  Bill and Vinyl walk along Donegal Boulevard. The road circles the property and is just over a mile long. Most nights the mister goes toward the clubhouse. Either they walk there and come right back, or Bill waits on the grass, hearing the mister’s voice among others in the lounge.

  Meeting at such times or on evenings when allowed out, the dogs communicate through gestures and infrasonic noises. They understand some often-repeated sounds—words—but the human world is mostly understood through sense impressions. They pick up changes in inflection and skin tone, in eye size and electrical discharge. Fear or desire makes itself known through scent and movement. Changes in barometric pressure signal the coming of storms.

  When Bill meets other dogs on walks, they are always on leads. He never is, and it makes him proud. From the beginning, Vinyl knew what to do. He had owned dogs before and knew to spend time and be clear. Firm but patient, he trained Bill in a school gym with other dogs and misters. He trained his dog to walk at his side without a leash, to heel, stay, come. Slow or fast, always the dog trots next to his mister’s left thigh. When Vinyl stops to speak to someone, Bill sits.

  The dogs he sees live in single-family homes. There are other dogs, in townhouses and condos—he hears them across the fairways. But this part of the property is Bill’s domain. Sometimes he and Vinyl see Luger, or Chiffon. Sometimes even the Yorkies are walked, a troika on tiny leads, small and busy. There were four, but last winter one fell in his mister’s unheated pool. Of the dogs at Donegal, Bill most often sees Hotspur, with Cliff Gilmore. The man has a big voice and always makes Vinyl laugh.

  They move up a driveway. Bill’s flank just touches Vinyl’s hip as they step now into the carriage-light glow of the entry. Bill sits. A bell rings, just like the one where he lives. Hotspur barks inside, there are footsteps.

  The door opens. “Hello Rita.”

  “Oh, Fred. Good.” Nails are clicking on tile.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Valium seems to help. Come in.”

  “Maybe I should just—”

  “No no, come in for a minute, it’s better if she talks. Hotsie—” She grabs for Hotspur’s collar, but the collie slips past. The two dogs begin the greeting ritual at nose and anus.

  “It’s all right, they’ll stay here.” The mister goes inside and closes the door. Bill and Hotspur shift from the entry to the front lawn.

  —What happened? Bill spreads himself.

  —How do I know? Hotspur settles next to him on the grass. —I’m a dog. It’s Thursday. That’s the day we go to the club. He drinks beer, then we go to the tennis courts for Frisbee. It’s like always, nothing different. He throws, I catch, he throws a different direction, I’m there. You know.

  Bill knows.

  —One minute he’s clapping like always, the next he’s on his back. Glenda thinks he’s dead. Bill looks at the collie. —This happened before, she wasn’t there. It’s before her. On the Cape. He’s surf-casting. Does your mister take you to the beach?

  —Yes.

  —They do it there. Surf-casting. Down he goes. The first missus is reading a book. She starts screaming “What’s wrong! What’s wrong!” It makes you wonder. “What’s wrong!” She doesn’t go for help.

  —What happened?

  —He’s bad, I can tell. I’m up close, looking down at his face. Then I start barking, trying to get the woman to help. She’s still yelling ‘Cliff, talk to me, what’s wrong?’ You have to wonder.

  —What happened?

  —I see she’s not doing anything. I run to the neighbors’. A smarter woman, I have to say. What is it, Hotsie, what’s wrong? They drive him somewhere. Whatever happens, he comes back. Then the missus dies. This is—I don’t know—a long time after Cliff got me. Something was wrong with her. She listened to polkas, she called them.

>   —Why is this one crying if the mister is coming back?

  —You see how it is. I knew you were all out there tonight. What can I do? The woman’s talking to me. They both do. With Cliff I know everything he means. Everything. This woman is actually better than the first. Don’t they do it with you?

  Of course they do. All dogs at Donegal have to deal with it. Lectures, jokes, listening mornings to the day’s plan while someone sits on the toilet or shaves. —My mister talks when he watches TV, Bill says. —‘They’re taking him out, what did I tell you? There it is, Bill, the two-minute warning.’ I don’t understand.

  —But you act like you do.

  —When he gets going, I don’t know what he wants.

  —But you stay there.

  —What can I do?

  —Same with Glenda. They’re all different. The first one, always talking to me. Who she’s knitting for, where they’re going on the next trip. The second didn’t talk at all. I think that’s why she left. Glenda talks a lot. When she and Cliff dance, when she does yoga.

  They hear crying inside the house, coming to them over the buzz of the streetlamp. Hotspur looks to the door, then faces forward. —I can tell this one loves Cliff and me. Sometimes we’re alone. He goes in the car or plays golf. She’s doing email or yoga. She looks down, she says, ‘Hotsie, we’re lucky to have him.’ You can see from her face and hear it.

  Studying the bugs, the shifting, nervous quiver around the streetlamp, Bill understands. Hotspur knows they are lucky to have good misters. Emma understands, too, but in a different way. She is what humans call standoffish.

  —Luger thinks crying is wrong, Bill says.

  —Because of his mister. Hotspur now stands. —Glenda thinks Cliff is dead. She wasn’t there the first time. She thinks the truck thing won’t bring him back.

  The other women at Donegal talk about Glenda Gilmore. In retirement, they are hungry for gossip and think Cliff Gilmore’s third wife is a gold digger. They resent the woman, you can hear it in the rise and fall of their voices. Tomorrow, Bill’s missus will talk on the phone about her. Others at lunch or over coffee will tell each other to watch their husbands like a hawk, whenever Glenda Gilmore is around.

  —Are we going to walk? Hotspur is up and pacing now. He sees something on the far side of the street and tears after it. Bill wants to follow, but stays where he is. When the mister comes out, he needs to be here, to show he has learned and remembered.

  The collie is trotting back as the front door opens. —Armadillo, he says. —Nothing you can herd.

  “OK, boys, let’s go.”

  At last. Reluctantly, Hotspur stops jumping as Vinyl fastens the lead to his collar. However smart they are, however good their training, in the end border collies are all action. Not me, Bill thinks. At the mister’s side he walks slowly, proudly. As they move toward the street, Hotspur is already pulling on the lead.

  The following morning, plantation shutters have been opened in the study. Slats of static brilliance lie on an oriental carpet, and on all sides bookshelves cover the walls. A Waterford bowl rests on the butler’s table, holding a gardenia. The ceiling fan is making its soft luffing sound.

  “‘—at last, she was through with lying, cheating and with the numberless desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor heart, sweet and remote like the echo of a symphony dying away.’”

  The poodle rests next to her mistress on the loveseat. “So foolish,” Madame says. She closes the book. “But of course beautifully written. And nicely rendered. This is a new translation by someone named Paul DeMan.”

  She folds her hands on the jacket and stares straight ahead. “I’m always divided about Emma Bovary. Such a ridiculous romantic. So devoid of self-knowledge. But here, where she makes such a mess of her own death—” Madame shakes her head. “It’s impossible not to feel something, don’t you think? Because she is in pain, isn’t she? Not the social discomfort Jane Austen’s Emma goes through. She’s your namesake, by the way. No, this Emma experiences the real thing. Intense suffering, spiritual torment. But how much of it is her own fault, how much is fate?”

  Madame is still staring at the wall opposite. She is doing this more now, stopping to think before going on. “By fate, I’m not talking about Zeus and so forth. I’m talking about biology. Genetics.”

  She places the book on the table. Standing slowly, she moves to the open double doors. Emma steps down from the loveseat and follows, across the foyer to the door leading to the garage. Madame is eighty-four, but neither foolish nor delusional. I’m just old, she tells people. What’s all this nonsense about aging gracefully? She opens the door and leans in to push the button. The acrid odor of raw concrete joins the sound of the big garage door rolling up. As this is in progress, she turns and begins moving toward the back of the house. There, bright morning sunlight streams through the expanse of glass that looks out on the lanai. These impressions tell Emma they will be gardening. She settles on the smooth wood floor to wait.

  When Madame talks—about books, stories in the paper, other people—none of it holds meaning for her dog. But more than any other pet at Donegal, Emma, a chocolate-brown, AKC-registered miniature poodle, knows words. Not like a human, and not just because she’s smart—although poodles are clever and high-strung, given to moods. The development of her gift derives from an aspect of her mistress’s marriage. Before his death, Archie and “Madame Lydia” Stafford loved reading to each other. Side by side on the sofa or in separate chairs, at the dining table or in bed, one swimming, one stretched out on the lanai, they read novels to each other, the Times, articles in The New Yorker—sometimes, just for fun, tabloids from the supermarket.

  And when Archie died suddenly of a brain aneurism eight years before, his widow had asked her friends about dogs. You know me, she told them. What would be best? But please, no baby substitutes. No lint balls with wet noses. Very well, the friends said. A real dog. Enter a puppy from a new litter of poodles with highly regarded bloodlines.

  Even during paper training (Madame called it the Gutenberg phase), Emma’s mistress kept her new puppy next to her. As she had done with her son decades before, she traced the words with her finger as she read. Emma listened to the sounds. Not that she learned to read or grasp syntax. But something happened at the end of the second year: Madame read, then reread a book she especially liked. The sounds, the finger tracing lines on the page—I know what this is, Emma thought. This is reading.

  Now she is coming back, a slow-moving form against brilliant light. “Weeding day, Emma. No rest for the wicked.” She has changed into one of the loose cotton dresses worn when doing yard chores. Never shorts. Everyone at Donegal wears shorts all the time. Not Madame. Are we children? she asks. Extras in lederhosen from The Sound of Music?

  She is very thin, and the old sneakers now on her feet make her look more so. Or perhaps it’s the hat, a broad-brimmed straw with a green scarf tied to the crown. Emma rises and follows her down the step into the garage. Madame gets her work gloves, bucket and trowel from a shelf in front of the car. “See, Emma? Everything’s here, where it belongs.”

  She shuffles along her ten-year-old gray Mercedes, out the opening to the drive. Already warm, the drive is made of brick pavers. A walkway leads to the front entrance, then around to the back. Emma keeps to Madame’s side. Perhaps she will work here, in front. There are two Christmas palms and two pigmy date palms. All are surrounded by impatiens. At the street, bright orange ixora plants form a hedge. Madame stops to inspect one of her date palms. “It’s doing well, isn’t it? I thought it was dying. All it needed was trimming.”

  She looks out to the street. The mailbox stands at the end of the drive, but it’s too early for mail. Or, she might be thinking to grocery shop, before it turns hot and makes the car an oven.

  “Was I on the phone?” She looks down at
the bucket in her hand, and resumes walking. At the corner, dog and mistress turn. A compressor is rattling behind a trimmed box hedge. As always, Madame says, “That’s what keeps the house cool. And that thing there controls the irrigation system.”

  They move slowly. Madame likes to identify things, instructing her dog as she cooks, holding up the garlic press or spatula, cautioning her sensitive poodle before turning on the noisy microwave or blender. This cocktail pitcher was one of Archie’s favorite things. She says that every night. The pitcher makes a bell-like sound when Madame stirs her martini.

  “And this loud gismo heats the pool. Ken must have called the service. I’m sure I didn’t remember. We want them seeing everything is comme il faut, don’t we? We certainly do, very important. When they get here, we want them to see us hunky dory.”

  Ken is the son.

  Madame moves slowly now. Emma no longer minds. Some dogs complain they don’t get enough exercise. Luger for one. I’m a schnauzer, he says. Mission-oriented, a working breed. Early on she felt the same, even though Madame paid the cleaning lady to exercise her new dog. But in the years since her surgery (“freed from the burden of reproduction,” Madame said of it), the poodle feels less edgy and confined.

  We’re slow together, she thinks as her mistress reaches the unpainted wooden stool. She leaves it out when working in the beds. Sitting carefully, she tucks her dress between her legs and gets the trowel from her bucket. She begins loosening a weed in the mulch under a gardenia bush. They’re past their prime, she said yesterday of the flowers. Like me. But heavy-scented blooms still hang among the waxy leaves. And there are hibiscus bushes, and liquala palms at the corners. Not trees, Madame insists. Palms are related to grass. People are always getting that wrong.

  Emma settles on the grass, content to feel morning sun on her curly back. “I’m always divided about her—” Madame digs out another weed. “Such a ridiculous romantic. But it’s impossible not to feel something, don’t you think? She is in pain. That’s really the question. How much is her, how much is fate—”