The Dogs of Babel

THIRTY-SEVEN

After our trip to New Orleans, Lexy and I returned home in a somber state. Lexy kept silent, refusing to talk about Blue Mary or the night she came to me wearing the mask. She had thrown away the rubbings from Blue Mary’s grave, and when I rescued them from the trash and smoothed them out, she told me she didn’t want them anymore. Even so, I packed them away carefully in my suitcase in case she changed her mind.

Lexy went back to her death masks, but her interest in them seemed to have waned. I don’t know if it had anything to do with Blue Mary or if she had merely exhausted her enthusiasm for the medium. She continued doing them when asked, but she stopped advertising, and eventually the requests dropped off. But she didn’t seem to want to return to the kind of masks she’d made before, either. She came up with new ideas she didn’t follow through on, drawing up elaborate plans for series of masks she never started. She had an idea for a line of children’s Halloween masks, good ones—grotesque hags and demons that would have been a million times better than the cheap plastic and rubber ones I remember from my childhood—but she decided that the prices she’d have to charge were more than most parents would be willing to pay. For a few days, she was excited about a series called Laundry-shaped Souls, based on a phrase half remembered from a dream she’d had. She wasn’t able to tell me what the phrase meant exactly, but the dream had been so evocative, the words so mysterious when she woke with them on her lips, that she felt she had to do something to bring them to life. But after a few days, as so often happens with dreams, the urgency of her memory faded, and she found that she’d lost the ability to put herself in the frame of mind she’d been in when she’d first awakened. Another idea, inspired by some of the dogs in disguise we’d seen at Mardi Gras, was to make human-faced masks for animals to wear, sort of a counterpart to the animal-faced masks for humans that had always been among her most popular items. She did make one of these, using Lorelei’s face as a model, and the effect was quite eerie—a Victorian-looking child’s face, with rosy cheeks and blond ringlets and Lorelei’s snout protruding underneath—but again, she soon lost interest. Lorelei, for her part, walked around the house for days with plaster stuck to her fur until we could get her an appointment at the groomer’s.

I was worried about Lexy. Some days I’d come home to find her lying on the couch with Lorelei curled up beside her. “I didn’t do a damn thing all day,” she’d say. She was having trouble sleeping, too. One night, I woke up to find her gone from the bed. I went to look for her and found her down in her workshop, pacing the floor.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Just thinking,” she said. “Just trying to think what to do next.”

I wanted to do something to help her out, so I talked to a friend of mine in the theater department, Patricia Wellman, who was going to be directing a summer-stock production of Macbeth. She had some rather ambitious ideas for the staging of the play—she’d cast women in all the men’s roles, for example, and men in all the women’s, and she’d set the whole thing in a karaoke bar in Hackensack—and when I suggested to her that she consider having masks made for all the characters, she was very excited.

Lexy wasn’t thrilled by the assignment at first. It wasn’t exactly groundbreaking work for her, and Patricia’s ideas were a bit vague and subject to change at a moment’s notice—one week, she wanted all the characters to wear blank white faces with no features at all, and the next week she changed it to yellow have-a-nice-day smiley faces—but it seemed to do Lexy some good to have steady work, deadlines, a task at hand. She enjoyed going to the rehearsals and watching the show take shape, and the two of us had fun laughing together about some of Patricia’s more outlandish ideas.

On opening night, Lexy and I went to see the play, which turned out to be a bit better than I’d expected. Lexy’s masks were a focal point of the production. She’d managed to talk Patricia out of the smiley faces, and they’d settled instead on masks that revealed the inner torment of each character, which lent a striking and harrowing effect to an otherwise rather silly production. Afterward, Patricia invited us to join the cast for the opening night party, which was held—where else?—at a karaoke bar. I remember we had a very good time that night. We drank shots of tequila, and after several drinks, Lexy was able to persuade me to get up with her and perform a duet of “I Got You, Babe.” I have a snapshot in my mind of Lexy standing there, flushed and laughing, with a microphone in her hand, singing the words of a love song to me. When I sang “Put your little hand in mine,” she reached out to me, and her grasp was warm and soft. Afterward, we kissed in the taxicab on the way home, making out like teenagers while the cabdriver studiously ignored us. It was a moment of pure happiness, not just for me, but for us both. She was happy that night, do you see? She was happy.

That was somewhere around the middle of August. That was, according to the best estimates of the medical examiner, the week our child was conceived.