The Hand That Feeds You

16

I took the C train to Seventy-Second Street so I could walk the last fifteen blocks through the park to clear my head before a session with Cilla. Single-stem roses were scattered across the Imagine mosaic, the tribute to John Lennon in Strawberry Fields. The night before, I had looked up Jimmy Gordon online. There was nothing on the Jimmy Gordon I was looking for, but then again, he had disappeared in 1992 at the age of seventeen. I had only been able to find a Maine coon cat named Jim Gordon with his own web page, as well as the infamous rock drummer Jimmy Gordon, who had toured with John Lennon and the Beach Boys until he was imprisoned for stabbing his mother to death.

I stood in line to buy a bottle of water from a park vendor and saw him fish out a hot dog from a vat of hot water that he would probably not change until spring. I was hungry, too, but not that hungry. When he gave me the bottle of water, I handed over two singles.

“Three dollars,” he said sharply.

I walked past the teeming playground filled with toddlers minded by nannies and entered the Ramble, the only part of the park that I got lost in. Even though the wooded, hilly paths sometimes ended at a rock face or a stream, I never feared nature here. In Central Park you won’t be attacked by a pack of coyotes or a wolf spider; people are the threat. Think Robert Chambers, the preppy murderer, who killed a teenaged girl not too far from here, or the “wilding” gang who were accused of attacking and nearly killing the Central Park jogger. Their convictions were vacated when Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer serving a life sentence for other crimes, confessed.

Before leaving for Cilla’s, I’d phoned the coroner’s office to identify the body of “Bennett.” I also phoned the Boston detective to give him the real name of “Bennett.” He took the information dispassionately, and I felt like saying, The case may be over for you, but it’s not for me. I reiterated my fears about Samantha. I sensed that I had not been in the woods alone last night, and the only person who knew I was visiting Pat was Samantha. But I had no proof of anything.

Cilla’s office was in a brownstone on West Eighty-Seventh Street, a ground-floor office. She buzzed me in and I sat in the waiting room until she finished with the client before me. I picked up a copy of Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, and read part of the article “The Art of Being Wrong.” I smiled at the copy of Rolling Stone, a holdover from her singing with Lou Reed.

Though I had seen her only a week before, so much had happened in the interim. I took a seat on the sofa and didn’t wait for Cilla to ask how I was.

I caught her up on Samantha and Pat. I asked, “Did Bennett target troubled, insecure women or did he create them?”

“Any woman can be fooled by a practiced sociopath. It’s what they do. Isn’t that what your thesis is trying to prove?”

“I’m not so sure about my thesis anymore.”

“Do you think that Bennett has changed who you fundamentally are?”

“How could I have had a blind spot that large? Where is the point where giving a person the benefit of the doubt invites dangerous behavior? Should I have known when he refused to show me where he lived? Or when he didn’t want to meet any of my friends?” I realized I was sitting on the edge of the couch. Pat’s vulnerability was wanting to succeed as an artist. What was mine? We must all be alike in some damaged way. What did we have in common? Does there have to be something in common?

“We were all duped.”

“You think trust has to be replaced by suspicion?”

“It would appear so. I don’t mean to sound flippant. I don’t want to be a cynic; I don’t want to become embittered. But I need to understand this. That’s why I’m going to see his mother.”

“You found out his identity?”

“Pat told me his real name was Jimmy Gordon. She told me how to find his mother.”

“What is it you feel you can get from meeting his mother?”

“She may want to claim the body.”

“No, no. What would you get from meeting her?”

“Whatever I find will be better than what I would imagine.” I was hit by the weight of the situation.

“Is this a job for you or for the police?”

“The case is closed as far as they are concerned. He killed Susan Rorke. My dogs killed him.”

“What about your classes? Are you keeping up with your research?”

“This is my research. You’d tell me if I was going off the deep end, right? I mean, if I was really off the mark here?”

“Your instincts are good. Trust them.”

• • •

Back in Williamsburg, I was starving when I got off the subway at Lorimer Street. I bought a Godfather wrap — soppressata, provolone, roasted red peppers — at Bagelsmith on the corner. I walked slowly — there was no wind — and had eaten about half the wrap when I saw a little white dog, unleashed, running in the street. I looked for the dog’s owner, but saw only a couple of young people calling after the dog. I crouched on the sidewalk and pulled a piece of salami from between the bread I was holding. I tried to get the little dog’s attention, making kissing noises. A truck was coming down the street, and I ran in front of it and waved my arms for it to stop. The young people continued to call after the dog, who had not stopped running. This was not going to end well, I feared.

Then a man on a bike stopped pedaling and approached the dog slowly, while not looking at it. I remembered that this was the way to win a stray’s trust — don’t look at it directly. The man slapped his leg — like a tail wagging — and he knew to swing his arm against his leg from right to left, mimicking the tail wag of a friendly dog. Left to right shows aggression. It was coming back to me — the right things to do. I had been moving toward the man as he made these gestures, and then I saw that it was McKenzie.

“Hey,” I called out to him, “do you know whose dog this is?”

“Give me a minute.” He asked me to bring him my sandwich.

He put half of it a couple of feet in front of him on the pavement. He sat down and told me not to move. By this time, the young couple had recognized someone who knew how best to proceed and were, themselves, now spectators at what might turn out to be a rescue, after all.

The dog was hunched under a parked car. I sat down beside McKenzie, and we waited. We didn’t speak. When five minutes had passed like this, the little white dog crawled out from under the car and dispatched the sandwich in two bites.

An amateur might then have grabbed the dog, but McKenzie unzipped his backpack and retrieved a worn bungee cord, made a quick slipknot at one end, and collared the dog gently, all the time speaking to it in a low, friendly voice. The dog looked relieved, not trapped.

Finally, McKenzie turned to me. “I’ve got to be somewhere half an hour ago. Can you take this pup home till we can arrange a foster?” I had two dogs on a DOH hold, but no way would I not take this stray home with me.

I took the makeshift leash from McKenzie’s hand.

“I’ll phone you later,” he said.

The little white dog pulled in his direction, wanting to go with him.

“You’re stuck with me, little one.” I had plenty of dog food at home, and this would be the first time a dog had been in my apartment since the day Bennett died.

I carried her to my apartment and filled one of my dog bowls with cold water and another with kibble. The little dog tucked right in. I’ve always loved the sound of a dog eating. Satisfied, she leaped into my lap, so lightly that I was surprised to find her there. I stroked her gently between her shoulder blades, trying to feel for a rice-grain-size microchip. I could feel vertebrae, but nothing else. She could not have weighed more than twelve pounds. I ran a bath in the kitchen sink and eased the filthy pup into the warm bath. She didn’t fight me but gave herself over to the pleasant sensation of a gentle shampoo. I towel-dried her, and a name came to me. Her big, black eyes looked like olives, so that is what I called her. Later that night, I persuaded Olive to accompany me into the bedroom. When I woke sometime after midnight, I found her sleeping on my chest. I needed to turn over, and moved slowly so as not to jar her, but it wasn’t necessary; Olive moved along with me, remaining on top, logrolling.

In the morning, while I was still in bed, McKenzie called to tell me that he’d found a rescue organization willing to take the stray.

“I’m fine fostering Olive for a while.”

McKenzie laughed. “Olive? You want to take this on right now? The hearing is on Monday.”

“The hearing is on Monday whether I keep her or not. How worried should I be?”

“Were you able to persuade your downstairs neighbor to testify?”

“She said she didn’t want that killer dog back.”

“Well, that was a long shot. I guess you won’t be watering her plants when she goes on vacation.”

“How many cases like this do you win?”

“Not enough.”

“But you keep at it.”

“The individual outcome is only part of what I’m trying to do. The law is the way I can try to change the way people treat animals.”

His simple eloquence reassured me, and I thanked him again for his help.

When we hung up, I went online to check FidoFinder for lost dogs. I clicked on lost, white, small, and my zip code. I braced myself against the wrenching descriptions of the missing, but none of the dogs seemed to be the stray I had taken in. I printed out a Lost flyer. The site recommended posting the flyers within a half-mile radius of where a small dog was found. Taking Olive with me, I papered the neighborhood. On the walk home, I posted the last flyer at the McCarren dog park. One woman held her puppy on its leash over the pen and dunked it into the play group, then withdrew it, like a tea bag.

I phoned Billie when I got home to remind her about the hearing on Monday and to tell her about my visit with Pat. I liked what happened when I brought Billie up-to-date: whatever horror I was reporting on became a narrative; it was transformed in the telling into a story, and as such felt further away from me than it actually was. It was like the times Kathy and I had regaled each other with a game called He Actually Thinks. He actually thinks he can call me on Christmas Eve to meet him for a drink. That kind of thing. Turn an upset into a game or a story, and you move ahead of it, maybe even to a place of not caring.

When I told Billie that Pat had displayed the series of naked self-portraits with a pig’s heart over her left breast, Billie said, “You wouldn’t want to be a muse for that girl.”

“And her dog. A missile when there was the slightest sound outside. Throwing herself against the glass.”

I told Billie I had taken in a stray and was caught off guard when she said, “Shouldn’t your focus be on your own dogs?”

“I am entirely focused on them.” I was hurt by her scolding tone.

I heard the beeps that indicated I had an incoming call, but I ignored it, knowing that Billie would hear me pass up a call to stay on the line with her — a peace offering. It worked, and we were back on track. She told me she had gotten Enrique, the head kennel worker, to write a character reference for my dogs. My phone beeped again, and this time Billie suggested I take it. “I’ll see you Monday at the hearing,” she said.

I took the incoming call and immediately wished I had not.

“I heard you met Pat,” Samantha said.

It took me a moment to formulate the obvious question. “How did you know?”

“Did she show you the naked photographs of herself? She shows them to everyone. That fucking pig’s heart?”

My own heart was beating faster.

“Did she also tell you her ex stole her grandfather’s paintings? She gave them to him to sell, and it’s not his fault that the auction house never paid her.”

Samantha was clearly trying to bait me, but her words left me exhausted. I did not want to engage with a crazy person, a possible killer. I wanted help. I wanted this crazy woman to leave me alone. But what really scared me was what we had in common. Though I was not still defending him. How to navigate a conversation like this? Better still, how to end it? I took a submissive stance, not wanting to ignite the person who must have followed me out to Sag Harbor. How else would she have known about my visit? The Pat I met would not have called Samantha.

“I saw the pig hearts,” I said, as neutrally and calmly as one can say I saw the pig hearts.

“She blames him for ruining her career. Ha! Who would hang a pig’s heart over a sofa?”

“I know I wouldn’t.”

“You didn’t tell her I gave you her name, did you?” Before I could answer, Samantha said, “He only married her because she pretended to be pregnant.”

“Women still do that?” I said, knowing they had not married. “What did Bennett do when he found out she had lied about being pregnant?”

“Same thing he did when he found out she faked a miscarriage later — he felt sorry for her.”

I knew that pity was a condescending emotion. Bennett was not capable of empathy.

“He still thinks she has it in for him,” Samantha said.

It unnerved me to hear her use the present tense. I refused to side with unreality. I felt only relief when Samantha banged down the phone. She was crazy or dangerous or both. And I wanted none of it.

• • •

It was Friday afternoon, and I had no plans for the weekend. Whereas this would have troubled me a year ago, I was now glad for the unclaimed days ahead of me. I needed to be a normal person, someone not facing a court hearing or worrying about my murdered fiancé’s other fiancées. I lifted little Olive and, instead of asking if she wanted to go for a walk, said, “Wanna go out to lunch?” I put her in my tote bag, forgetting it held so many dog treats. No wonder she settled in right away. Thanksgiving was a few days away, so Christmas ornaments were already crowding the streets. I’d promised Steven I would bring a pie, so I set off for the Blue Stove on Graham to order one.

It was cold and clear with the white sky familiar to New Yorkers in winter. I decided to spruce up the apartment and went to Abode on Grand. I browsed the shelves: a bottle opener that was just a nail in a board ($18.99), and the cardboard end tables made to look like tiny stacked cargo crates ($59.99). I passed up the black, geometric hanging light fixture that looked as though it contained a galaxy ($12,500). A black throw pillow had what looked like a swirl of smoke on it ($270), and I knew I’d find nothing I could afford. I stopped by the vintage store Mystery Train, but they had no pillows, just clothes. Two Jakes, on Wythe, carried furniture, mostly, and I found “accent pillows” in a color called chalk. At $39 apiece, they seemed like a bargain, and I bought one. I next walked to Grand Ferry Park — a nod to Olive. I sat down on one of the benches right by the East River and lifted Olive out of the bag. She wanted to sit on the bench next to me. The Manhattan skyline lived up to its reputation. I had never heard a metaphor that made it more than what it was on its own.

I put Olive back in the tote, and we were on to the hardware store, with its five-thousand-square-foot plant section in back. The bonus here was an eighty-five-pound hog named Franklin; he lived in a good-size pen (think studio apartment in Williamsburg) among the thousands of plants for sale. I picked up several small flats of herbs for the kitchen, and a container of lavender to scent the bedroom.

I dropped off the pillow and plants, poured Olive’s kibble, and left by myself. It had been a long time since I’d seen a movie. I took the L to Union Square, where half a dozen theaters are within a few blocks. The multiplexes showed the blockbuster commercial hits, none of which appealed to me. I checked out the Village East, where I found the documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom, about black female backup singers. One of the women who affected me most had had no interest in a solo career. She valued the harmony several voices created. Of course I thought of Cilla. She had told me during a recent session that a time had come when she no longer knew how to harmonize. Deeply rattled, she stopped singing. Eventually, she told me, she realized that this inability just meant it was time for her to make a different kind of harmony; she brought harmony to people in trouble and turned their lives around.