White Dog Fell from the Sky

12



Lawrence left for a ten-day work-related trip, and Alice returned home. That same night, between ten and eleven o’clock, she walked up the driveway of a house she’d promised herself never to enter again. She couldn’t have explained to herself or anyone else what she was doing, or why. All she knew was that Hasse had sought her out at work and asked her. Yes, she’d said, thinking of Beethoven. Yes.

Erika was also out of town, maybe with Lawrence. She didn’t know and she didn’t want to know. Hasse and Erika’s wolf children were in bed. Hasse was in the bath when she arrived. He asked her to come in, as Lillian had. She wasn’t in the habit of watching people bathe. It felt like something better done in private, but Alice stood in the door watching his beautiful Swedish cock floating pink and innocent just below the surface of the water. His glasses were on, gently steaming.

She slipped off her shoes at the doorway. In her Cincinnati mind, she was only there to talk about the situation. In her un-Ohio mind, she knew what she was doing and what would happen. He got out of the bath and dried off. He wrapped the towel around his waist. The towel was pure white. They padded into the kitchen together, where he took two glasses and a whiskey bottle down from a shelf. He opened the refrigerator and took out a floppy plastic packet of milk, snipped off a corner, and poured the contents into a jug. “I have an ulcer,” he said. “I drink my whiskey with milk. Do you want to try it?”

She nodded. Deep laughter lines played at the edge of his eyes. He must have been at least ten years older than Erika.

“Egg in yours?”

She laughed. “No.”

He held her shoulders and looked into her face. “You are quite beautiful,” he said. He ran the back of his finger down her cheek and over her lips, moving her hair back with the palm of his hand. He looked at her fondly, paternally. The tips of his ears were rosy from the bath. He smelled of soap. He poured whiskey into both glasses, more in his than hers, then filled them up with milk.

“Skål!” he said, clicking her glass.

“Skål!” she said back. It occurred to her that what she was doing was wrong, but it was a passing thought, unimportant.

“Come,” he said, taking her hand and leading her to the bedroom. He put his hand on her shoulder at the threshold of the room. “You want this, don’t you?”

She nodded, a lump in her throat like loss.

They set the drinks down on the bedside table. He undressed her slowly, appreciatively. She took off his glasses and unwrapped the towel from his waist. His cock, so indolent and pink in the bath, had woken. They climbed into bed. Somewhere, a dog was barking. A small light shone in the room, on his side of the bed. His body was square and firm, his back broad. His touch on her skin was light, as though he cared for her. There was a blue vein in the middle of his forehead under the thatch of hair. The thought came to her, I don’t know this man.

He asked her which way she liked things. She didn’t know what he was asking. His English was perfect, but his thinking was Swedish. His hand grazed her thigh, indicating that he’d like her on top. She felt young, self-conscious, lacking prowess.

He felt it and said in her ear, “It’s all right, you can do whatever you like.”

She loved him then. And what she did came from her heart, all of it, for those moments.

But it was over. And after the strokings and murmurings, they sat up with their backs to the wall and drank the whiskey and milk. He searched for his glasses, and she put them back on him. He looked like the conductor of a boys’ choir. Churchy. She told him so, and he looked very slightly hurt. She’d meant no harm. She thought if they were ever together, their lives would begin to weave just like this, one small hurt, a backing down and recovery, another and another until a tapestry was woven, as complicated as any other. The euphoria of newness would last a month, two months, a year, and then they’d be caught in something of their making and beyond their making.

She felt him pulling back. Had he thought she could be something to him? They seemed to realize simultaneously that they were not destined to become each other’s saviors. They’d been shot out of cannons, two hurtling objects meeting in midair. “I’ll drive you home,” he said.

“No, please, I want to walk. It’s a beautiful night.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

“No, I feel quite safe. Thank you, you’re very sweet to offer.” Her eyes told him it had been good with him, and it was over. She kissed him again and shut the door behind her softly.

There was something necessary about putting one step in front of the other in the shadows of moonlight, her flashlight searching for movement at her feet. Puff adders were the most dangerous snakes at night: sluggish in the cool of dark and unable to move out of the way. Along the road, she wondered, What just happened? Did I go there to even the score? She hoped that wasn’t true. She didn’t think it was. She was drawn to the music in him. He made love the way he made music: sensitively, expressively, holding more than a little in reserve. However much had been held back, though, she felt deeply grateful to him, as though she’d been seen again.

She found her mind tracing the pathways that had brought her to this road on this night—as though each step could be unraveled and retraveled—the men who’d touched her, taught her something, and left.

Michael was the first. In the spring of her junior year, they’d both quit their cross-country teams, and every day after school, he took her home to his room. He was shy, tender, perfect. For the junior talent show, he came on stage in his thick glasses and dirty white sneakers and a baggy Sherlock Holmes double-breasted raincoat. He carried his cymbals, one in each hand, his glasses glinting in the spotlights like fevers of the brain. When he clanged the cymbals together, the audience went wild. She felt in that moment that she loved him as much as it was possible to love anyone. But she was wrong. Then there was Drew with the bad reputation, and Zachary, the aesthete, and Brandon with the beautiful, sad eyes. And a while later, Lawrence.

She undressed and lay in bed, with the moon passing across the window. The lights of the Gordons’ house shone across the boundary fence. She thought of Hasse, his kindness, his sweet lovemaking. And then an image of Erika and Lawrence flashed into her mind. She imagined a hotel room, and her face grew hot with shame and fury. Her heart pounded, and finally it slowed. The moon passed out of sight, and she slept.

The following day, Alice came home from work at lunchtime. Isaac was still among the missing. The house was very still, except for the trilling of the crested barbet in the tree. Daphne was asleep, visibly pregnant. Alice patted her, asked her how she was while Daphne thumped her tail against the floor and panted, too hot to stand up.

Alice sat down at the wooden table in the kitchen with a glass of water, gulped it down, and refilled the glass. She was losing weight, not because she wanted to. Her head, her whole body, was dizzy with memories. In those early days of being together with Lawrence, her love for him had been a spring colt, a shiny, shy thing. He was a man for whom words came hard, like water at the bottom of a deep well, with only one bucket to the top. She’d been patient, thinking there would be words worth waiting for.

In graduate school, they’d moved into a scantily winterized outbuilding ten miles outside of Providence, part of a nolonger-working farm. The windows rattled in the wind. In May, the lilacs dwarfed the building they lived in, dwarfed everything in sight. They were almost frightening when they bloomed, throwing their scent into the air so insanely, there was nothing to breathe that wasn’t lilac.

Lawrence was in a doctoral program in economics. Alice was in anthropology. Lawrence’s extended family sprawled like the lilacs. She loved them, perhaps more than she loved him. His sister, Wren, his brothers, Howard and Jeremy, his empty-headed young niece, Dahlia, his bulky aunts and rumbling uncles, and especially a caustic great uncle who lived alone not far from them and dressed impeccably, a silk cravat hiding his stringy old neck.

After Lawrence had successfully defended his thesis, his adviser told him of a job in newly independent Botswana in the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. As soon as Lawrence told Alice it would be good for his career, she knew he’d be going. He left Providence in June and asked her to visit the following summer when she’d be working on her thesis.

After he left, his letters were full of his work, and when she thought back on them, not very interesting. But something in her wouldn’t let him go. It all felt promising. She went to Botswana that next summer to visit a man she thought she might marry. From Providence to London, from London to Johannesburg. From Johannesburg, she boarded a night train to Mafeking, and in the morning changed trains for Gaborone. When she woke somewhere between Mafeking and the border of Botswana, a bleached and pitiless landscape stretched forth, with no sign of human habitation. Only when the train stopped at small stations could she see that the land was peopled with children, dozens of them, selling beads and mopane worms and carved wooden statues stained with mahogany-colored shoe polish. Few people on the train bought anything, but the children’s voices were high and loud and their hands empty of food. From a young sculptor, she bought a soapstone carving of a boy’s face. The chin was long and eager, the lips full, with small vertical cracks carved into them.

When the train arrived in Gaborone, she caught sight of Lawrence before he saw her. He was wearing a safari suit and moved with an ease she hadn’t seen in him before. His face had filled out, and he looked large and healthy. His straight brown hair, which had once hung in his eyes, was combed back from his forehead.

He held her carefully by the shoulders, and they kissed each other on the lips. The veldt had slipped into his eyes. For some reason she thought she might have gotten the wrong person, that perhaps she was kissing Lawrence’s brother. She touched his cheek and mouth with two fingers, like a blind woman.

She was dazed by the strangeness around her: women carrying their babies on their backs, tightly bound to them like bandages, the sound of Setswana, the train station with its tea shop, the dust that hung in the air and caught in the throat, the smell of rotting vegetables. Sights and sounds and smells poured through her. A boy gnawed on a long piece of sugar cane. A donkey stood tethered to a cart loaded with wood, its eyes clotted with flies.

Lawrence took her elbow and led her to his pickup truck. His flat was undistinguished, part of a Type I government building that adjoined another flat and another after that, with an enclosed piece of ground in back where a clothesline hung. Underneath the clothesline was baked dirt, swept clean of vegetation and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, the government-issue furniture was tinted the same shoe polish color as the wooden carvings the children had been hawking on the train platform.

While Lawrence went to the bathroom, she sat at the table and took the covers off the food that Dikeledi, his servant, had cooked. Strips of beef sat sullenly in a metal bowl beside another bowl that held white rice, scooped into a sticky ball; in another were little round squashes cut into halves. On the far end of the table was some kind of tinned fruit with a pitcher of custard sauce beside it. Lawrence sat down, and they served themselves. Dikeledi was in the kitchen, and then the door shut behind her, and Alice heard her shouting to friends in the backyard.

She felt suddenly forlorn.

The beef was tough and dowsed with black pepper. She told Lawrence it was good. In those days, she didn’t set out to tell lies, but the truth was often buried under politeness. In fact, the rice was without salt, the squashes watery like something that had been strangled and drowned. Lawrence held her hand after lunch and led her to the bedroom. An hour later, he was on his way back to work.

He’d taken a job as an underling in the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning and had already been promoted twice. His friends were mostly economists, and their principal topic of conversation, apart from where to get good marijuana, was development. She didn’t know what they were all talking about. The word was one she’d heard before only in relation to breasts. Except for Lawrence, she was offended by these economists who talked as though Botswana had been a great emptiness before they’d arrived.

During the days he was at work, she toiled away at her thesis. It was winter in the southern hemisphere, with rainless warm days and cool nights. In the evenings, she and Lawrence read around a small electric fire. She looked up from her book at the two glowing rods and there he was. After the sun went down, the stillness in him was different from his daytime self. Occasionally they stepped outside to the little closed-in area by the clothesline and looked at the Southern Cross and he put his arm around her waist and drew her close. She didn’t ask what she was doing there, or what she was doing with him. His body was sturdy, like an answer. She looked into eyes that mirrored that wild, parched veldt and saw infinite space stretching before them that she mistook for their life together.

Lawrence and she shared a single bed, which encouraged feats of athleticism; they each slept half on and half off the mattress, like cheetahs. They woke in the cool of the night and made love, sometimes three or four times. They were young, and it cost them nothing. She remembered the dark, rushing desire in her ears, the furious fumbling out of sheets into each other’s arms.

Some days, Alice tried to speak with Dikeledi, but they knew only a few words of the other’s language. She felt awkward being waited upon and found herself smiling too much, dropping things, over-thanking. Dikeledi was short of stature and tireless; her movements were like humming—unconscious, tuneful, at peace. Her skin was dark, coffee-colored, and her eyes forceful. Her bottom lip was full and her mouth good-humored. She lived behind the flat, in the small tin-roofed servants’ quarters, and on Sundays, she put on a red polka dot dress and a white hat shaped like a pancake and walked to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the old part of Gaborone.

A few times, Alice went across the road to escape the flat, but what was out there frightened her—the blind blue sky and unrelenting sun. Thorns, tinier than the smallest hooked claws of a cat, waited under dusty leaves. They caught in her hair and plucked at her sleeves like beggars.

By the end of the summer, Lawrence and she were engaged. What did she know? Nothing. Yogi Berra once said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”