The Dogs of Detroit

by Brad Felver

  The doctors found the tumor in Annabelle’s brain when she was four years old. It was the size of a robin’s egg, malignant, and needed to come out.

  “But you can do surgery, can’t you?” Ruth asked.

  “We’re not sure yet,” the doctor said. That phrase—We’re not sure yet—became an oft-heard refrain through months of consultations, and they learned it had a very specific meaning: We are quite sure, and it’s bad news.

  They saw specialists in a dozen cities: Pittsburgh, Orlando, Denver, Los Angeles, Toronto. Ruth was ferocious in her research, in her preparation for each appointment, bringing with her pages of questions that she asked like accusations. The numbers gave her something to focus on, though quantifying bad luck in such a way also made her want to murder the universe.

  “Do you know the odds of this happening?” Ruth asked one time. “Sixty-eight million to one,” she said. “Sixty-eight million.”

  Gus looked down at her legal pad, the scratches and strange symbols, Greek or Latin, perhaps. He sometimes forgot about her imposing mathematical pedigree, which now became a prison, intellect stunting emotion. What was the point of calculating probabilities or the effects of random elements? Gus wanted to know. They were here already. These calculations served only to make him feel like a helpless victim. What he didn’t understand, of course, was that they allowed Ruth a respite, precious moments of cold, abstract thought. Through them, she could quarantine her despair so that it would not pollute everyone around her.

  They drove to Boston to see a specialist her father had known at Mass General. She was from Mumbai and had a long name that Gus could not pronounce. The doctor paged through Annabelle’s chart, frowning and shaking her head without speaking. When she finally looked up, she smiled at them, but it was the kind of smile offered to a dear friend at a funeral.

  “No more bad news,” Ruth said.

  This specialist was aiming to lead a trial of an experimental treatment that involved first inducing a coma and then utilizing a special cocktail of drugs that would, perhaps, target the ravenous tumor.

  “She’s a good candidate, isn’t she?” Ruth asked, not completely a question.

  The doctor leaned in with a bowl of candy and told Annabelle to take as much as she could hold. Ruth realized then that this doctor had done this many times, was as expert in delivering bad news as she was in the operating room.

  “I won’t presume to understand what you are going through,” she said. She spoke with that peculiar British Indian accent, which Ruth decided meant she had likely been educated at Cambridge or Oxford. “My father was a particle physicist and my mother died when I was a teenager. He could be a harsh man, largely devoid of human sentiment. He forbade me grieving over my mother’s death because he believed there was no reason, scientifically speaking, to do so. According to the law of conservation of mass, she was still with us. Mass cannot be created or destroyed, of course. In fact, he pointed out, the very atoms from my mother’s body were now repurposed in our own bodies. This is true of every human who has ever lived. Every human currently alive is composed of the very atoms of every person who has ever lived. Every person! Billions of atoms from each person. Can you imagine? A billion atoms that make me a person once made Shakespeare a person, and Cleopatra and Gandhi and Einstein.”

  “Also Hitler and Stalin,” Ruth said. “Genghis Khan, Oliver Cromwell, Caligula, Attila, Jeffrey Dahmer.”

  “Ruth.”

  The doctor ignored this and handed Annabelle another sucker.

  “So, scientifically speaking,” Ruth said, “we cannot be sad.”

  “Ruth,” Gus said, more pleading than scolding.

  “Well,” the doctor said but then said nothing else.

  Gus insisted on making the casket himself, long hours alone in the workshop, and he was unable to see the strange selfishness of this. It was a refuge he refused to share with her. He fixated most on the casket dimensions, hardly larger than a laundry basket.

  “Why are you punishing yourself like this?” Ruth asked.

  “She’ll be in there forever.”

  “Come home,” she said, but he had already gone back to work.

  They couldn’t even hold hands at the funeral or feign unity at the wake. They each faced the same choice at this moment—anger or sadness—and each opted for anger. Perhaps this was not a conscious decision. The world had drained them of compassion until no residue remained. Anger seemed easier, cleaner, almost tangible. But in the coming years, each of them would look back at this time, searching for the precise moment they pivoted away from each other, because if they could isolate the fulcrum, the singularity, perhaps some wormhole would sprout and revive a conduit to the past.

  Ruth said awful things and then felt horrible about them, but then she would say more awful things. It was an addiction she could not kick, as if discarding her grief and forcing him to bear it instead. You can’t play ukulele and fix this, you know. You always wanted a boy anyway. She’ll never need one of your desks now.

  If Ruth said awful things, Gus said nothing at all. He retreated to the farm, to the workshop, where he could easily make her feel like an interloper. He spent whole days there, while Ruth sat at home, waiting for him to return to her, though he never truly did. She began to spend weekends in Boston. For months they lingered on this way, trapped in a stalemate.

  Ruth appeared at the workshop one afternoon. Gus had been mindlessly sanding the tapered legs of a desk for several hours, his arm ached from it, and as he stood to look at his work, he realized he had sanded so much that the third leg was now noticeably thinner than its counterparts.

  Ruth sighed. “I need a break.”

  “Me too,” he said.

  “From you. From all of this. I don’t expect you to understand.”

  Gus dropped the sanding block, and it rattled on the concrete floor.

  “Do you have to act like this?”

  “How am I acting?”

  “Like the spoiled little rich girl.”

  He’d never once spoken to her that way. Halfway through saying it he already felt horrible. He didn’t love her any less now, but everything around them had changed, as if they were standing still while a storm swept through around them.

  Ruth sat down on the cold concrete and suddenly looked very young and very fragile. For a moment Gus had some hope, the smallest breach. But her face was drawn, had grown tighter, menacing.

  “We can use a lawyer we know,” she said. “Charlie’s brother, I guess. Keep it all simple.”

  “Simple,” he said.

  It was stunning how quickly their country could crumble. Civil war. A dozen years to construct but only a few months to collapse.

  Gus started moving his things out of the house the next week. At first Ruth was still there, but by the time he was nearly finished, she managed to be absent. The last hours he moved slowly, one small box at a time, adding in extra, unnecessary trips. What did he hope for? A change of heart at the last minute? A dramatic reconciliation where they fell to the wet ground and kissed?

  He found a note on the kitchen counter, just a small Post-it, as if Ruth did not even care if Gus found it: It’s different for mothers.

  He stared at the letter. It demanded that he develop a fresh emotional response, one that hadn’t yet been charted and classified by scientists: profoundly sad and confused and resentful and sad again around the edges. Such hardness in her. Jesus, he thought, halfway wishing he were capable of such hardness also. How easily grief could mutate into something else entirely. She was right, of course: there were things that only mothers were capable of, like lifting cars off their children during tornadoes. Like this.

  He left the note where it was. He needed her to wonder for the rest of her life if he even saw it. Initially, he had planned on leaving her the Pomeranian, but the note stopped him. He made room in the front seat, where it curled into a ball and fell asleep as they drove away.

  Gus moved back to the farm. He lea
sed the land: soy, wheat, corn, hay. Days he worked jobs in Cleveland—elaborate built-ins, mantels, newel posts hickory spindles on wide staircases—and evenings he built desks, the glow of the old workshop spilling into the barnyard late into the night. He ate microwave dinners in his underwear and left the telephone off the hook. He became a ghost, the sort of man that people in a small town recognize, though no one can recall ever speaking to.

  Ruth sold the house to the first offer. She couldn’t be in Ohio any longer. She moved back to Boston, where her mother still lived, and soon she was attending fundraisers and charity auctions in the ballrooms of the most elegant old hotels. She found herself surrounded by people so wealthy they had no need to locate Ohio on a map. The city offered as many distractions as she needed, faces new to her and those whom she had known many years earlier when they were thinner and more eager.

  Ruth eventually settled in with a man named Harold Gutman. He had worked as an intern under her father and kept a trimmed beard, mostly gray now, and had a single bumper sticker on his BMW, which read, very simply, “DOCTOR.” Ruth found this a strange and gaudy touch for a man who otherwise largely passed through the world undetected. When he started speaking of marriage, she would turn away and tell him that she wasn’t so sure, not yet. She still had so many things to sort out, tangled linkages in her brain. It was in the evenings when Harold Gutman would invariably make such hints, always after a few drinks. He never proposed outright, only took her temperature, which was icy for many years, though he was convinced a thaw would eventually come.

  “I’m just not sure,” Ruth would always say if he pressed her. Of course, she was perfectly sure, perfectly sure she did not want to marry Harold Gutman, did not want to marry again, ever.

  It was this incessant talk of marriage which pushed her back into her dissertation. She needed something to occupy her evenings in order avoid Harold Gutman’s affections, and so she holed herself up in the wood-paneled study, finally finishing eight years after Annabelle’s death. She declined to walk at the commencement ceremony because she did not want to travel back to Cleveland. Instead, she strolled the Back Bay streets alone, and when she returned to their apartment, she found on her desk a sticker of the letter S, which Harold Gutman had left for her. Together they would be “DOCTORS” for all the world to see.

  When the Pomeranian died, Gus buried it behind the barn. He stood in front of the old rotary wall phone, ready to dial Ruth and deliver the news. It was all he could think to do. Should he or not? They hadn’t spoken in years. He wouldn’t even know how to say hello. Old lovers were far worse than strangers. Should he use her name or not?

  Hello, Ruth.

  Ruth, hello, it’s Gus.

  Hi, there, it’s me.

  Ruthie, dear, I’m sorry to deliver such bad news.

  When he finally dialed, a man’s voice answered, and he hung up immediately.

  Ruth took an adjunct position at a local community college, teaching a course or two each semester. It felt like a concession, but she ended up liking her students, most of whom were bright and engaged. Some days she would stay on campus for eight or ten hours, teaching and meeting with students. She loved most how they would stomp into her office, breathless and full of absurd excuses. She would come home and tell Harold Gutman about them. “Even when they say ridiculous things, they’re so enthusiastic about it,” she said.

  “What about children then?” Harold Gutman asked her one evening after a benefit at the Park Plaza. He’d allowed himself an extra glass of wine and was feeling warm and confident.

  She squinted, though it was dark in their bedroom. “We’re too old for that, Harold.” She was only forty-six but felt much older.

  “We could adopt.”

  “It’s nice of you to say that, but no, we couldn’t.”

  Harold Gutman didn’t pursue it after that. No marriage, no family of their own. Instead, her students would become her children, in a way that was common but not terribly healthy.

  When a full-time teaching post opened up, Ruth took it. “If your father were still alive” was all her mother would say to the news, which was the harshest sort of admonishment she could muster at the thought of a community college. Harold Gutman too seemed perplexed. “Isn’t it terribly repetitive?” he asked, and she told him that of course it was. “I don’t like surprises or changes the way I used to.”

  At a conference in Phoenix, she slept with a young assistant professor of statistics. He was barely thirty and played video games on his cell phone. He was aggressive in bed like an upperclassman in a fraternity. In the morning, when she woke and saw him there splayed atop the covers, naked and hairy, she immediately thought of what a horrible thing she had just done to Gus. How would she admit this to him? Would he ever forgive her? It was only at breakfast, when they sat in relative silence, that she realized she meant Harold Gutman. It was Harold Gutman whom she had betrayed.

  Several years later Ruth took a stroll down Newbury Street, not so much interested in buying anything as in walking the promenade the way people do after a harsh winter. She was just about to turn back for home when she saw in the front window of a store a three-legged desk. That unmistakable aesthetic: austere, unassuming, clean.

  “It’s a gorgeous piece, isn’t it?” the salesman said. He wore a tailored vest, no tie, buttons undone through the hollow of his chest.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “A relatively new artist, just breaking onto the scene in the last few years. He lives in Iowa, I believe—Iowa or Ohio—and crafts everything individually, which is unheard of anymore.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said again.

  “This desk is made from bur oak and features through-mortises and a tripod—all of his desks do.” He eased out the lap drawer. “He does all the dovetails by hand, no jig. You can see the Shaker and Pennsylvania Dutch influences, of course, but he has carved out new territory. Remarkable work, lines as distinct as I’ve seen since Tom Moser.”

  Ruth traced her fingers across the edges of the desktop. She could smell the workshop, the arousal taking shape in her. Sparks that had hidden themselves away, dormant for many years.

  “We’re thrilled to have some of his pieces here,” the salesman said. He was young and very fashionable and seemed afraid of Ruth’s silence. “Ordinarily our New York and London stores get first crack, but they’ve done remarkably well here. All the young students, perhaps. People want smaller, cleaner desks now. Computers are smaller than ever. No more of those shelved, multilevel monstrosities of the eighties and nineties. That’s the trend, anyway.” He slid the lap drawer back in. “Quite the visionary.”

  The pain from this encounter was real, and yet so was the excitement. Ruth was alternately sad and angry, though she couldn’t deny she felt more alive than she had in many years. She became convinced Gus’s aim was to torture her. He could have sold desks anywhere. Why Boston? Why so close to her parents’ old brownstone? Clearly, he wanted to force a confrontation between them where he would reveal to her . . . what? His children, his beautiful new wife? How he had survived and moved on? He would not say a word, but he would parade them in front of her. That was very like him, the quietest possible revenge.

  But then other days she thought that perhaps Gus simply wanted to see her and didn’t know how. He would kiss her on the cheek, tell her how he had missed her, how differently his life had ended up without her. And then he would look down and say, “Could we just talk about her now?” And she would cry, and he would cry, and they would talk about her all night.

  She found herself distracted during her lectures, and more than once she had to excuse herself into the hallway. For months this happened at regular—and then increasing—intervals. Harold Gutman noticed the change in her, but she told him it was just the stress of teaching.

  Gus had burrowed his way back into that small nook of her brain where the trauma still lingered, quiet for many years but never truly dormant. His appearance had disturbed a
system at rest, jolting it back into a slow but accelerating orbit that would slowly consume her. But Ruth surrendered to this freely, as if leaning into a strong wind, considering for the first time in many years that perhaps memory can exist without despair.

  Harold Gutman didn’t understand why he needed a new desk. His old one worked perfectly well, and besides, he was used to it.

  “This one is just better,” Ruth said.

  “I liked all the drawers and nooks in my old one. Where will I put everything now?”

  “You’ll get rid of things. That’s the point.”

  He frowned, unconvinced. She sauntered over to the desk, leaned against its edge, and slid off her heels. She unbuttoned her blouse and leaned back, trying to appear seductive but feeling ridiculous.

  “What are you doing?” Harold Gutman asked.

  “I’m showing you how much better this desk is.”

  “But we have a bed, a big comfortable bed. And I don’t think it can support us both. It seems to be missing one leg.”

  She bought more desks, at first just to furnish guest bedrooms, then two more for the house Harold Gutman kept on the Cape, then more that she put directly into a storage bay. Eventually, the young furniture salesman asked what she’d been hoping he’d ask. “I’d be happy to arrange an introduction,” he said, “for such a generous fan of his work. He’s in town occasionally.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ruth said, suddenly feeling diffident as a teenager.

  “I haven’t met him myself, but he’s supposed to be a modest, quiet sort of man. With all his success, he supposedly still lives in an old farmhouse in the middle of Iowa.”

  She told him it wasn’t at all necessary, there was no need to go to such trouble. She just adored his desks was all. The salesman shrugged, unconcerned. Later that night, though, she dialed the number on his business card and told him that she had changed her mind. She would like to meet the artist the next time he came to Boston.