The Dogs of Babel

FORTY

What was Lexy like in those last two months, the months in between the time we conceived a child and the time she climbed into that tree? She was fine, that’s how it seemed to me. She was fine. The depression and lethargy that had followed our trip to New Orleans seemed to have disappeared, and she was beginning to take interest in new projects. A local café with a Venetian Carnival theme had begun to display some of her masks on its walls, and she made a few sales as a result. We spent a weekend at the beach in early September, and we walked along the ocean hand in hand. My face turned bright red with sunburn, and we ate a pound of saltwater taffy in the car on the way home. A colleague of mine got married, and we went to the wedding. My birthday came and went and was celebrated in all the usual ways. I spent a weekend repainting our bathroom. Lexy became interested in Chinese cooking and made special trips to buy ingredients at an Asian supermarket. It was normal, do you see? I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have, because it all seemed so normal. I didn’t know the end was so near.

But somewhere in there, something happened to change everything, and I didn’t even notice. Somewhere in there, Lexy discovered she was pregnant. I remember there was one evening, maybe in mid- or late September, when she complained of feeling nauseated. And one Sunday, maybe a week later, she took a nap, which was not something she did very often. Were these the symptoms that led her to take the pregnancy test? Her periods, I think, were not very regular under the best of circumstances, but perhaps she noticed it had been a particularly long time since the last one. The question is when. How long did she live with this knowledge? How long did I live with her in that changed state without sensing that anything was different?

The only clue I have is that little corner of pink cardboard I found in the trash. Maybe I can work backward from there. Our trash is collected once a week, of course, but that little bathroom trash can has never filled up fast enough to warrant being emptied every week. I’m not sure how often we used to empty it; that task, I confess, usually fell to Lexy. I can tell you this: Since she’s been gone, I don’t think I’ve emptied that little container more than once a month. But before that, when it was the receptacle for all of Lexy’s female detritus of disposable makeup sponges and cleanser-soaked cotton balls, I think it’s safe to say it would have filled up at least twice as fast. And when I went through it after her death, it was only half full. So we’re looking at one week at the outside; it’s only in the last week of her life that she knew she was pregnant. Knowing what I now know, knowing that the week ends with Lexy climbing that tree with the intention of ending her life, I have to try to reconstruct that week.

Lexy died on a Wednesday. I’ll start with the Thursday before. She was up before me, I remember. Is that the morning when she got up early and took the test? It seems to me now that maybe she was a little more animated than usual that morning, that maybe when she said good morning to me, she smiled a little longer than she normally would have. But I’m not sure. We had breakfast together and read the paper, then I showered and dressed for work.

“What are you going to do today?” I asked her before I left.

“I’ve got a few Halloween orders to finish up,” she said. “And this afternoon I’m going grocery shopping.”

“Sounds good,” I said, and kissed her. “Well, have a good day.”

Do you see how ordinary it all was, how boring, the routine dailiness of that week? Try as I might, I can’t coax any more meaning out of it than I saw at the time. I went to work, I met with one of my dissertation students to discuss his progress. I worked on a grant application that, as it turned out, I would never send in. I went home, and Lexy made pasta for dinner. We watched a movie, sitting close together on the couch. It was all so normal. We read in bed, each of us lost in our own book, and I fell asleep before she did. Another day of our marriage, and I was content with it. I believe, even now I believe that Lexy was, too.

Friday night, there was a thunderstorm. We’d been playing a word game together, a pen-and-paper game we both enjoyed, when the lights went out. We found candles pretty easily—for some reason, we’d received about a million decorative candleholders as wedding gifts, so we had candles everywhere—but matches proved a bit harder to find. We stumbled around clumsily, bumping into tables and calling out to each other in the dark. We’d been listening to music before the power went out, and our voices sounded strangely loud in the sudden silence. Lorelei was frantic—she was terrified of thunder and lightning—and I could hear her anxious panting as I wandered around the house. Finally, I found some matches on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, and we lit some candles. In the soft light, I could see Lorelei wedged into a small space between the couch and the wall. She was shaking violently and drooling with terror.

“Oh, poor girl,” Lexy said. She went and sat down on the floor next to the dog and began petting her and speaking to her softly. I settled myself on the floor next to Lexy, and together we tried to soothe the shuddering dog.

“I’ve always wondered,” Lexy said, “if her fear of thunderstorms has anything to do with the storm she got lost in the day I found her.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I think most dogs are afraid of the noise.”

“Did I ever tell you,” she said, “why I named her Lorelei?”

“No. I thought you just liked the name.”

“Well, I did. But I’d also been reading a lot of mythology right around that time, trying to come up with new ideas for masks. I was sick to death of doing Medusas and Bacchuses—would that be Bacchi?”

“Yes, I suppose it would be Bacchi with an i. Bacchae with an ae refers to his female worshipers, as in the title of the Euripides play… .” I was being deliberately pompous. Sometimes I liked to play up my academic-gasbag persona so that Lexy could poke holes in it.

“Right,” Lexy said, interrupting. “But getting back to my story…” We both laughed.

“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”

“So one of the myths I had come across was the story of Lorelei. It’s German. Do you know it?”

“No.”

“It’s about this beautiful woman who drowned herself because her lover was unfaithful, and then she became a mermaid and sat on a rock in the Rhine River and lured sailors to their deaths with her beautiful siren song.”

“So you read that and thought, what a perfect name for a puppy?”

“No, of course not. But when I first saw Lorelei shivering in the rain, half drowned, I thought she looked like kind of a tragic figure. And she always has that worried expression on her face, even when she’s happy. It just seemed to fit her.”

I imagined a woman with Lorelei’s dog-face sitting on a rock and howling an unearthly song.

“So did you ever make a Lorelei mask?” I asked. “The mythological Lorelei, I mean.”

“I did, but it didn’t come out that well. I was imagining her with this really harrowing, haunting look on her face, but it was hard to make it work with the eyeholes cut out. I was just never that happy with it.”

“Do you still have it?”

“No, I sold it to this German couple. They actually wanted something more American, like a Bill Clinton mask or something, for a souvenir, but once I heard their accents, I started doing a real hard sell on the Lorelei mask. They were familiar with the myth, which no one else had been, and I gave them a good deal on it.”

There was a loud clap of thunder, and Lorelei shuddered convulsively beneath my hand.

“Shh, girl,” I said. “It’s all right.”

But she would not be comforted. When Lexy and I went to bed, we let her climb up and lie between us, and all through the night, my sleep was troubled by her trembling and her whining. It wasn’t until the rain stopped and the morning sun showed the world washed and new that Lorelei’s body relaxed, and the danger past, she closed her eyes to sleep.

My last weekend with Lexy was a quiet one, full of easy lulls when she could have told me the secret she carried. It was fall, yard sale season, and we spent Saturday afternoon driving through neighborhoods we’d never been to and trying to decipher the handwriting on signs where the writer had run out of space and had had to cram all the details into the bottom corner. It was something we liked to do together, a happy reminder of the way we’d met. I bought a sweater vest Lexy didn’t like and a clock for my study; Lexy bought an electric coffee grinder and an ice-cube tray that made ice cubes in the shape of a heart. She said she liked the kitschiness of it. It’s the hopefulness of these items that gets me now. She was still imagining a future where we would drink fresh-ground coffee together in the mornings. Where we would slip tiny ice hearts into our drinks to see how they’d float.

At our last stop of the day, Lexy paused in front of a table of children’s toys. She picked up a plastic Halloween mask, the kind that’s held in place with a rubber band. It was a Frankenstein mask, cheaply made and garishly colored.

“I think yours are nicer,” I said to Lexy, talking quietly so that the woman sitting in the lawn chair a few feet away wouldn’t hear.

“Yeah, but these are fun. They’re like everyone’s memory of their childhood Halloweens. I think I’m going to get it.”

She paid the woman a quarter, and we walked across the lawn to the car.

“I think,” Lexy said, and it makes my chest ache to think of it, “maybe I’ll start collecting these.”

Sunday, we slept late and Lexy made pancakes, working from a cookbook.

“I never knew these were so easy,” she said. “My mom never made anything from scratch, and I used to be so jealous when I slept over at friends’ houses and they had the kind of moms who made pancakes in the morning. But it turns out it’s really easy.”

“See?” I said. “You could be a mom.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and I think she might have told me then. But she didn’t. She turned away to ladle more batter into the pan, and what she said was, “Yeah, I guess I could.”

I filed that away in my brain as a small triumph. I thought I’d bring it out another time, if the topic of having children came up again. I ate my pancakes happily, pleased with this small concession. Maybe there’s hope, I thought.

We went for a walk in the afternoon, and then to a movie. We had dinner at our favorite pizza place. Sunday was a lovely day. And Monday was fine.

But Tuesday. Tuesday is when we had our last fight.