CHAPTER 7
Susan and I were walking Pearl along the Charles River on one of those retractable leashes which gave her the same illusion of freedom we all have, until she surged after a duck and came abruptly to the end of her tether. The evening had begun to gather, the commuter traffic on both sides of the river had reached the peak of its fever, and the low slant of setting sun made the river rosy.
I had the dog on my right arm, and Susan held my left hand.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“One should do that now and then,” I said.
“I think it’s time we moved in together.” I nodded at Pearl.
“For the sake of the child?” I said.
“Well, I know you’re joking, but she’s part of what has made me think about it. She’s with me, she spends time with you. She’s really our dog but she doesn’t live with us.”
“Sure she does,” I said. “She lives with us serially.”
“And we live with each other serially. Sometimes at my house, sometimes at yours, sometimes apart.”
“The `apart‘ is important too,” I said.
“Because it makes the `together‘ more intense?”
“Maybe,” I said. This had the makings of a minefield. I was being very careful.
“Sort of a `death is the mother of beauty‘ concept?”
“Might be,” I said. We turned onto the Larz Anderson Bridge.
“That’s an intellectual conceit and you know it,” Susan said. “No one ever espoused that when death was at hand.”
“Probably not,” I said.
We were near the middle of the bridge. Pearl paused and stood on her hind legs and rested her forepaws on the low wall of the bridge and contemplated the river. I stopped to wait while she did this.
“Do we love each other?” Susan said.
“Yes.”
“Are we monogamous?”
“Yes.”
“Then why,” Susan said, “aren’t we domestic?”
“As in live together, share a bedroom, that kind of domestic?”
“Yes,” Susan said. “Exactly that kind.”
“I recall proposing such a possibility on Cape Cod fifteen years ago,” I said.
“You proposed marriage,” Susan said.
“Which involved living together,” I said. “You declined.”
“That was then,” Susan said. “This is now.”
Pearl dropped down from her contemplation of the river and moved on, snuffing after the possibility of a gum wrapper in the crevice between the sidewalk and the wall.
“Inarguable,” I said.
“Besides, I’m not proposing marriage.”
“This matters to you,” I said.
“I have been alone since my divorce, almost twenty years. I would like to try what so many other people do routinely.”
“We aren’t the same people we were when I proposed marriage and you turned me down,” I said.
“No. Things changed five years ago.”
I nodded. We walked off the bridge and turned west along the south side of the river. We were closer to the outbound commuter traffic now, an unbroken stream of cars, pushing hard toward home, full of people who shared living space they shared.
“Trial period?” Susan said.
“And if it doesn’t work, for whatever reason, either of us can call it off.”
“And we return to living the way we do now,” Susan said.
“Which ain’t bad,” I said.
“No, it’s very good, but maybe this way will be better.”
We swung down closer to the river so Pearl could scare a duck. Some joggers went by in the other direction. Pearl ignored them, concentrating on the duck.
“Will you move in with me?” Susan said.
We stopped while Pearl crept forward toward the duck. Susan kept hold of my left hand and moved herself in front of me and leaned against me and looked up at me, her eyes very large.
“Sure,” I said.
“When?”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
Pearl lunged suddenly against the leash, and the duck flew up and away. Pearl shook herself once, as if in celebration of a job well done. Susan leaned her head against my chest and put her arms around me. And we stood quietly for a moment until Pearl noticed and began to work her head in between us.
“Jealousy, thy name is canine,” I said.
“Tomorrow?” Susan said.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
Tomorrow… and tomorrow… and, after that, tomorrow… Yikes!