The Dogs of Babel

FIVE

Here’s another talking-dog joke. My colleagues have been sending them to me by e-mail. A man walks into a bar with a dog. He says to the bartender, “I’ll sell you this dog for five bucks. He can talk.” “Yeah, right,” says the bartender. The man nudges the dog. “Go on, show him,” he says. The dog looks up at the bartender and says, “Oh, please, kind sir, please buy me. This man mistreats me. He keeps me locked in a cage, he never takes me for walks, and he only feeds me once a week. He’s a terrible, terrible man.” The bartender is amazed. “This dog could make you rich,” he says. “Why do you want to sell him for five bucks?” The man replies, “Because I’m sick of all his damn lies.”

It’s just a joke, but it brings up an interesting point: Who’s to say that your average talking dog would be any more honest than your average talking person? Who’s to say that Lorelei, if I could loose her tongue, would speak the truth?

I had never owned a dog before I married Lexy; to be honest, I was rather afraid of them. When I was a child, I knew a great mammoth of a dog named Rufus who was angry all of his days. His owner was a bitter and reclusive man named Bucky Jones who used to terrify neighborhood children by gutting deer carcasses in his yard and throwing bits of bloody viscera in our paths as we walked by on our way to school. I’m quite sure he abused the dog on a regular basis, but even so, Rufus was devoted to him. The same dog who spent his days tied to a tree, leaping and snarling bloody murder, would whimper with sweet puppy joy whenever his owner came into the yard. On summer evenings, when Bucky used to climb up onto the roof to sit and drink beer and say wild things to no one, he’d hoist Rufus up there with him, and the strange silhouette they made against the night sky is something I see in my dreams to this day.

The first time I met Lorelei, apart from the wary once-over we gave each other the day of the yard sale, was when I arrived to pick up Lexy for our first date, a date that, as it turned out, would last a full week. As soon as I rang the bell, I could hear the enormous noise of Lorelei’s bark beginning at some distant corner of the house and moving with alarming speed toward the other side of the door. I took an involuntary step backward and cowered against one of the porch posts as Lexy opened the door. Lorelei bounded out and leaped toward me, landing with her paws just below my shoulders. I stood rigid as she peered up into my face for a long moment, no longer barking, and I felt an unexpected calm run through me as I met her eyes. For one strange moment, my anxieties about the evening ahead of me faded, and without even thinking about it, I reached out and rested my hand gently on her head. This is the beginning of our story, mine and Lorelei’s, a story separate in many ways from the one Lexy and I would begin to create that night. For the first time, I looked into those earnest eyes and touched that rough-soft fur. For the first time, I felt a hint of tenderness for this dog who has, through time and the earthly miracle of canine trust, come to be my own. All that we are together now, the sum of our grief and our play, the daily movement of man and dog through an empty house, following the passage of sun from room to room until it’s gone, all of it began that moment on the porch, with Lexy standing in the background.

When she stepped forward then, my Lexy, and I turned finally to look at her for the first time that day—she was pulling the dog off me and apologizing, chiding Lorelei in low tones as she maneuvered her into the house and shut her inside—I felt nothing of the rapt nervousness, the deep-bone stage fright, I had felt on all the other first dates of my life. Lexy had kept our plans for the evening deliberately vague, which had left me with some uneasiness, an unfamiliar tilting feeling of not knowing where I might end up, but now as I watched her negotiate all of the everyday hubbub of calming the dog, putting on a jacket, locking the door, I knew that somehow, without even realizing it, I had made the decision to follow her wherever she wanted to take me.

“Hi,” she said, turning to face me and relaxing into a smile. “I’m sorry about Lorelei. She’s really a sweetie, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

“Oh, I could tell,” I said.

She looked lovely. She was wearing a kind of silky black T-shirt and a long slim skirt, and she had pulled her hair back from her face. In the week since we had met, it seemed as if I had spent my time doing nothing else but conjuring her image in my mind, but I saw now that I had remembered everything wrong. I saw now that the brown of her eyes was lightened with flecks of amber and that the heart-shape of her face was more round than angular. I saw the complex layering of pale gold and dark honey in her hair and the rose-flush of her skin. I saw now that she was beautiful.

“So,” I said as we walked toward my car, “where are we going?”

“Well,” she said, sounding rather apologetic, “I’m afraid the first thing we have to do is go to a wedding.”

“A wedding.” I did my best to quell rising panic. Socializing with strangers is not something I do well, as anyone I know will tell you.

She went on in a rush. “I know that’s a really weird first-date activity, but they’re clients of mine and I promised I’d put in an appearance. We don’t have to stay long—don’t worry, I’m not going to know anyone there either, and I promise we can do something fun afterward.”

“Great,” I said resolutely. “That sounds like fun.”

She laughed. “No, it doesn’t,” she said. “And if you want to back out, I won’t mind. But I guarantee you, it won’t be like any other wedding you’ve ever been to.”

I opened the car door for her. “Well, then,” I said. “What are we waiting for?”

We drove, following a small hand-drawn map that I imagine had been included in the wedding invitation.

“So,” I said. “You said these people are clients of yours. I don’t even know what you do.”

She smiled. “Oh, that will become apparent,” she said. “I think I’ll keep it a secret for a while longer.”

“Am I going to be dressed all right for this thing?” I asked. “It’s not formal, is it?”

“No, not at all. I think it’s going to be kind of New-Agey, actually. They made a big deal on the invitation about this being the day of the vernal equinox—you know, when day and night are equal. They called it ‘the day the sun marries the moon.’” She laughed. “I guess they were looking for something more dramatic than just ‘the day Brittany marries Todd.’”

We were in the country now. It was late afternoon, nearing sunset. Eventually, we turned down a long dirt road that dead-ended at a patch of tall grass and wildflowers. A path had been cut into the growth and marked with garlands of roses on either side.

A woman was standing at the entrance to the path, holding a large basket twined with ribbons. She smiled as we approached her, and she held the basket out toward us.

“Please choose your masks,” she said.

I glanced at Lexy, who was watching me and smiling. “You go first,” she said.

I leaned forward warily and looked into the basket. I think I was expecting something like the Halloween masks I wore as a child, flimsy plastic monster faces and shiny superheroes with no backs to their heads, elastic bands stapled to the sides of the masks to keep them from slipping off your face. Instead, the basket was filled with wonders the likes of which I had never seen. A dozen papier-mâché faces looked up at me with cutout eyes. I saw a frog first, then a zebra. A sunflower with vibrant yellow petals framing its face. A tall golden feather with ghostly features pressed into its wavy barbs. There were three-quarter-length masks with wrinkled brows and outrageously curved noses, and wild-looking jesters decked out in playing cards. A snaky-haired Medusa and a Bacchus crowned with grapes. I felt giddy with the choice.

“Go on,” Lexy said. “What do you want to be today?”

I reached in and pulled out the first one I touched. It was a book, a thick, old-fashioned kind of book with its pages spread open. Eyes, nose, and mouth protruded from the gilded text.

“That’s perfect,” Lexy said. As she bent to rummage in the basket, I examined my mask. Across the two pages, a single phrase was written in a long, sloping hand: You have taken the finest knight in all my company. I fixed the mask to my face.

“Oh, good,” I heard Lexy say. “I was hoping this one would still be here.”

I turned toward her. She had covered her own lovely face with the smiling face of a dog. An earnest, familiar face.

“That’s Lorelei,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “It is. So have you figured out what I do for a living?”

“You made all these?” I asked.

“Mm-hmm,” she said. She took my hand. “Let’s go to the wedding.”

We walked down the path until we reached a clearing. There were chairs set up around a center aisle, and each of them was filled with a person wearing a mask. I saw a sea nymph with starfish caught in her hair talking to a man with the head of a bull. I saw an angel with a halo talking on a cell phone. We took our seats, in between a splendid butterfly-woman and a man with an enormous iceberg perched on his head, the Titanic broken in two across the top.

Up at the front, a string quartet dressed in formal wear, with silver stars spread across their faces, began to play. We rose and turned to see the sun and the moon walking toward us through the crowd. The bride wore a dress of palest yellow silk with layer upon layer of iridescent gauze catching the light. Her face was a dazzling circle of gold, framed with fiery rays. The groom wore a tuxedo, his face masked with a tall crescent of silver. They were beautiful.

Lexy leaned toward me. “I’m curious to see how they’re going to do the kiss,” she whispered. I reached out for her hand and held it as we watched the sacred joining of sun and moon, silhouetted by the falling dusk.