Taking Care

Shepherd

IT had been three weeks since the girl’s German shepherd had died. He had drowned. The girl couldn’t get over it. She sat on the porch of her boyfriend’s beach house and looked at the water.

It was not the same water. The house was on the Gulf of Mexico. The shepherd had drowned in the bay.

The girl’s boyfriend had bought his house just the week before. It had been purchased furnished with mismatched plates and glasses, several large oak beds, an assortment of green wicker furniture and an art deco ice bucket with its handles in the shape of penguins.

The girl had a house of her own on the broad seawalled bay. The house had big windows overlooking shaggy bougainvillea bushes. There were hardly any studs in the frame and the whole house had shaken when the dog ran through it.

The girl’s boyfriend’s last name was Chester and everyone called him that. He was in his mid-thirties. The girl realized she was no kid herself. She was five years younger than he was. Chester favored trousers with legs of different colors and wore sunglasses the color of champagne bottles. He wore them day and night like a blind man. Chester had a catamaran. He loved to cook. “It’s just another way to cook eggs,” he’d say as he produced staggeringly delicious blintzes on Sunday morning. Chester had a writing dentist who had serviced the Weathermen in college. Chester had wide shoulders, great hands and one broken marriage on which he didn’t owe a dime.

“You have fallen into the pie,” the girl’s friends told her.

Three days before the shepherd had drowned, Chester had asked the girl to marry him. They had known each other almost a year. “I love you,” he said, “let’s get married.” They had taken a Quaalude and gone to bed. That had been three weeks and three days ago. They were going to be married in four days. Time is breath, the girl thought.

The girl sat on a rusted glider with faded cushions and drank bourbon from a glass printed with orange suns and pink flamingos. She wore skimpy flowered shorts and a black T-shirt. Tears ran down her face.

The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, “Do you love me?” he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight.

The shepherd had been five years old when he drowned. The girl had had him since he was two months old. She had bought him from a breeder in Miami, a man who had once been a priest. The girl’s shepherd came from a litter of five with excellent bloodlines. The mother was graceful and friendly, the father more solemn and alert. The breeder who had once been a priest made the girl spend several minutes alone with each puppy and asked her a great many questions about herself. The girl didn’t know what she was doing actually. She had never thought about herself much. When she had finally selected her puppy, she sat in the kitchen with the breeder and drank a Pepsi. The puppy stumbled around her feet, nibbling at the laces of her sneakers. The breeder smoked and talked to the girl with a great deal of assurance. The girl had been quite in awe of him.

He said, “We are all asleep and dreaming, you know. If we could ever actually comprehend our true position, we would not be able to bear it, we would have to find a way out.”

The girl nodded and sipped her warm Pepsi. She was embarrassed. People would sometimes speak to her in this way, in this intimate, alarming way as though she were passionate or thoughtful or well-read. The puppy smelled wonderful. She picked him up and held him.

“We deceive ourselves. All we do is dream. Good dreams, bad dreams …”

“The ways that others see us is our life,” the girl said.

“Yes!” the breeder exclaimed.

The girl sat slowly moving on the glider. She imagined herself standing laughing, younger and much nicer, the shepherd leaping into her arms. Her head buzzed and rustled. The bourbon bobbed around the flamingo’s lowered head on the gaudy glass. She stood up and walked from one end of the porch to the other. The shepherd’s drowned weight in her arms had been a terrible thing, a terrible thing. She and Chester were both dressed rather elaborately because they had just returned from dinner with two friends, a stockbroker and his girl friend, an art dealer. The art dealer was very thin and very blond. There were fine blond hairs on her face. The small restaurant where they ate appeared much larger than it was by its use of mirrored walls. The girl watched the four of them eating and drinking in the mirrors. The stockbroker spoke of money, of what he could do for his friends. “I love my work,” he said.

“The art I handle,” his girl friend said, “is intended as a stimulus for discussion. In no way is it to be taken as an aesthetic product.”

As the evening wore on, the girl friend became quite drunk. She had a large repertoire of light-bulb jokes.

The girl had asked the woman for her untouched steak tournedos. The waiter had wrapped it for her in aluminum foil, the foil twisted into the shape of a swan. The girl remembered carrying the meat into the house for the shepherd and seeing the torn window screen. She remembered feeling the stillness in her house as it flowed into her eyes.

The girl looked at the Gulf. It was a dazzling day with no surf. The beach was deserted. The serious tanners were in tanning parlors, bronzing evenly beneath sun lamps, saving time.

The girl wished the moment were still to come, that she were there, then, waiting, her empty arms outstretched, saying, “Do you love me?” Dogs hear sounds that we cannot, thought the girl. Dogs hear callings.

Chester had dug a deep square hole beneath the largest of the bougainvillea bushes and the girl had laid her dog down into it.

Their pale clothes became dirty from the drowned dog’s coat. The girl had thrown her dress away. Chester had sent his suit to the dry cleaners.

Chester liked the dog, but it was the girl’s dog. A dog can only belong to one person. When Chester and the girl made love in her house, or when the girl was out for the evening, she kept the shepherd inside, closed up on a small porch with high screened windows. He had taken to leaping out of his pen, a clearing enclosed with cyclone fencing and equipped with old tires. It was supposed to be his playground, his exercise area and keep away boredom and loneliness when the girl was not with him. It was a tall fence, but the shepherd had found a way over it. He had escaped, again and again, so the girl had begun locking him up in the small porch room. The girl had never witnessed his escape, from either of these places, but she imagined him leaping, gathering himself and plunging upward. He could leap so high — there was such lightness in him, such faith in the leaping.

On the beach, at Chester’s, the waves glittered so with light, the girl could not bear to look at them. She finished the bourbon, took the empty glass to the kitchen and put it in the sink.

When the girl and the shepherd had first begun their life together, they had lived around Mile 47 in the Florida Keys. The girl worked in a small marine laboratory there. Her life was purely her own and the dog’s. Life seemed slow and joyous and remembering those days, the girl felt that she had been on the brink of something extraordinary. She remembered the shepherd, his exuberance, energy, dignity. She remembered the shepherd and remembered being, herself, good. She had been capable of living another life then. She lived aware of happiness.

The girl pushed her hands through her hair. The Gulf seemed to stick in her throat.

There had been an abundance of holy things then. Once the world had been promising. But there had been a disappearance of holy things.

A friend of Chester’s had suggested hypnotism. He had been quite enthusiastic about it. The girl would have a few sessions with this hypnotist that he knew, and she would forget the dog. Not forget exactly, rather, certain connections would not be made. The girl would no longer recall the dog in the context of her grief. The hypnotist had had great success with smokers.

Tonight they were going to have dinner with this man and his wife. The girl couldn’t bear the thought of it. They would talk and talk. They would talk about real estate and hypnotism and coke and Cancún. All of Chester’s friends loved Cancun. Tonight, they would go to a restaurant which had recently become notorious when an elderly woman had died from burns received when the cherries jubilee she was being served set fire to her dress. They would all order flaming desserts. They would go dancing afterwards.

Animals are closer to God than we, the girl thought, but they are lost to him. Her arms felt heavy. The sun was huge, moving ponderously toward the horizon. People were gathering on the beach to watch it go down. They were playing their radios. When the sun touched the horizon, it took three minutes before it disappeared. An animal can live for three minutes without air. It had taken the shepherd three minutes to die after however long he had been swimming in the deep water off the smooth seawall. The girl remembered walking into the house with the meat wrapped in the foil in the shape of a swan, and seeing the broken screen. The house was full of mosquitoes. Chester put some soft ice in a glass and poured a nightcap. Chester always looked out of place in the girl’s house. The house wasn’t worth anything, it was the land that was valuable. The girl went outside, calling, past the empty pen, calling, down to the bay, seeing the lights of the better houses along the seawall. A neighbor had called the sheriff’s department and the lights from the deputy’s car shone on the ground on the dark dog.

A buzzer sounded in the beach house. Chester had had the whole house wired. In the week he had owned it, he had put in central air conditioning, replaced all the windows with one-way glass and installed an elaborate infrared alarm system. The buzzer, however, was just a local signal. It stopped. It had been just the door opening, just Chester coming home. Chester activated the total system when they were out or when they were sleeping. The girl thought of invisible frequencies monitoring undisturbed air. The girl found offensive the notion that she could be spared pain, humiliation, or loss by microwaves. She contemplated for a moment the desire Chester had for a complete home security system. There wasn’t anything in the house worth stealing. Chester was protecting space. For a moment, the girl found offensive the touch of Chester’s hand on her hair.

“Why aren’t you dressed?” he asked.

The girl looked at him, and then down at herself, at the thin T-shirt and hibiscus-flowered shorts. I am getting too old to wear this shit, the girl thought. The porch was cooling down fast in the twilight. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

“Why?” the girl said.

Chester sighed. “We’re going out to dinner with the Tynans.”

“I don’t want to go out to dinner with the Tynans,” the girl said.

Chester put his hands in his pockets. “You’ve got to snap out of this,” he said.

“I’m flying,” the girl said. “I have flown.” She thought of the shepherd leaping, the lightness. He had escaped from her. She hadn’t gotten anyplace.

“I’ve been very sympathetic,” Chester said. “I’ve consoled you the best I can.”

“There is no consolation,” the girl said. “There is no recovery. There is no happy ending.”

“We’re the happy ending,” Chester said. “Give us a break.”

The sky was red, the water a dull silver. “I can’t bear to see the Tynans again,” the girl said. “I can’t bear to go to another restaurant and see the sneeze guard over the salad bar.”

“Don’t scream at me, darling. Doesn’t any of that stuff you take ever calm you down? I’m not the dog that you can scream at.”

“What?” the girl said.

Chester sat down on the glider. He put his hand on her knee. “I love you,” he said. “I think you’re wonderful, but I think a little self-knowledge, a little realism is in order here. You would stand and scream at that dog, darling.”

The girl looked at his hand, patting her knee. It seemed an impossibly large, ruddy hand.

“I wasn’t screaming,” she said. The dog had a famous trick. The girl would ask, “Do you love me?” and he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. Everyone had been amazed.

“The night it happened, you looked at the screen and you said you’d kill him when he got back.”

The girl stared at the hand stroking and rubbing her knee. She felt numb. “I never said that.”

“It was a justifiable annoyance, darling. You must have repaired that screen half a dozen times. He was becoming a discipline problem. He was adopting ways that made people feel uncomfortable.”

“Uncomfortable?” the girl said. She stood up. The hand dropped away.

“We cannot change any of this,” Chester said. “God knows if it were in my power, I would. I would do anything for you.”

“You didn’t stay with me that night, you didn’t lie down beside me!” The girl walked in small troubled circles around the room.

“I stayed for hours, darling. But nobody could sleep on that bed. The sheets were always sandy and covered with dog hairs. That’s why I bought a house, for the beds.” Chester smiled and reached out to her. She turned and walked through the house, opening the door, tripping the buzzer. “Oh you’ve got to stop this!” Chester shouted.

When she reached her own house, she went into the bedroom and lay down there. There was a yawning silence all around her, like an enormous hole. Silence was a thing entrusted to the animals, the girl thought. Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.

The girl lay on her side, turned, onto her back. She thought of the bougainvillea, of the leaves turning into flowers over the shepherd’s grave. She thought of the shepherd by her bed, against the wall, sleeping quietly, his faith in her at peace.

There was a pop, a small explosion in her head that woke her. She lurched up, gasping, from a dream that the shepherd had died. And for an instant, she hovered between two dreams, twice deceived. She saw herself leaping, only to fall back. The moonlight spilled into the clearing.

“I did love you, didn’t I?” the girl said. She saw herself forever leaping, forever falling back. “And didn’t you love me?”