Wild Child and Other Stories

ADMIRAL

She knew in her heart it was a mistake, but she’d been laid off and needed the cash and her memories of the Strikers were mostly on the favorable side, so when Mrs. Striker called — Gretchen, this is Gretchen? Mrs. Striker? — she’d said yes, she’d love to come over and hear what they had to say. First, though, she had to listen to her car cough as she drove across town (fuel pump, that was her father’s opinion, offered in a flat voice that said it was none of his problem, not anymore, not now that she was grown and living back at home after a failed attempt at life), and she nearly stalled the thing turning into the Strikers’ block. And then did stall it as she tried, against any reasonable expectation of success, to parallel park in front of their great rearing fortress of a house. It felt strange punching in the code at the gate and seeing how things were different and the same, how the trees had grown while the flowerbeds remained in a state of suspended animation, everything in perpetual bloom and clipped to within a millimeter of perfection. The gardeners saw to that. A whole battalion of them that swarmed over the place twice a week with their blowers and edgers and trimmers, at war with the weeds, the insects, the gophers and ground squirrels and the very tendency of the display plants to want to grow outside the box. At least that was how she remembered it. The gardeners. And how Admiral would rage at the windows, showing his teeth and scrabbling with his claws — and if he could have chewed through glass he would have done it. “That’s right, boy,” she’d say, “that’s right — don’t let those bad men steal all your dead leaves and dirt. You go, boy. You go. That’s right.”

She rang the bell at the front door and it wasn’t Mrs. Striker who answered it but another version of herself in a white maid’s apron and a little white maid’s cap perched atop her head, and she was so surprised she had to double-clutch to keep from dropping her purse.

A woman of color does not clean house, that was what her mother always told her, and it had become a kind of mantra when she was growing up, a way of reinforcing core values, of promoting education and the life of the mind, but she couldn’t help wondering how much higher a dogsitter was on the socioeconomic scale than a maid. Or a sous-chef, waitress, aerobics instructor, ticket puncher and tortilla maker, all of which she’d been at one time or another.

About the only thing she hadn’t tried was leech gathering. There was a poem on the subject in her college text by William Wordsworth, the poet of daffodils and leeches, and she could summon it up whenever she needed a good laugh. She developed a quick picture of an old long-nosed white man rolling up his pantlegs and wading into the murk, then squeezed out a miniature smile and said, “Hi, I’m Nisha? I came to see Mrs. Striker? And Mr. Striker?”

The maid — she wasn’t much older than Nisha herself, with a placid expression that might have been described as self-satisfied or just plain vacant — held open the door. “I’ll tell them you’re here,” she said.

Nisha murmured a thank-you and stepped into the tiled foyer, thinking of the snake brain and the olfactory memories that lay coiled there. She smelled dog — smelled Admiral — with an overlay of old sock and furniture polish. The great room rose up before her like something transposed from a cathedral. It was a cold room, echoing and hollow, and she’d never liked it. “You mind if I wait in the family room?” she asked.

The maid — or rather the girl, the young woman, the young woman in the demeaning and stereotypical maid’s costume — had already started off in the direction of the kitchen, but she swung round now to give her a look of surprise and irritation. For a moment it seemed as if she might snap at her, but then, finally, she just shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

Nothing had changed in the paneled room that gave onto the garden, not as far as Nisha could see. There were the immense old high-backed leather armchairs and the antique Stickley sofa rescued from the law offices of Striker and Striker, the mahogany bar with the wine rack and the backlit shrine Mr. Striker had created in homage to the spirits of single-malt scotch whiskey, and overseeing it all, the oil portrait of Admiral with its dark heroic hues and golden patina of varnish. She remembered the day the painter had come to the house and posed the dog for the preliminary snapshots, Admiral uncooperative, Mrs. Striker strung tight as a wire and the inevitable squirrel bounding across the lawn at the crucial moment. The painter had labored mightily in his studio to make his subject look noble, snout elevated, eyes fixed on some distant, presumably worthy, object, but to Nisha’s mind an Afghan — any Afghan — looked inherently ridiculous, like some escapee from Sesame Street, and Admiral seemed a kind of concentrate of the absurd. He looked goofy, just that.

When she turned round, both the Strikers were there, as if they’d floated in out of the ether. As far as she could see, they hadn’t aged at all. Their skin was flawless, they held themselves as stiff and erect as the Ituri carvings they’d picked up on their trip to Africa and they tried hard to make small talk and avoid any appearance of briskness. In Mrs. Striker’s arms — Call me Gretchen, please — was an Afghan pup, and after the initial exchange of pleasantries, Nisha, her hand extended to rub the silk of the ears and feel the wet probe of the tiny snout on her wrist, began to get the idea. She restrained herself from asking after Admiral. “Is this his pup?” she asked instead. “Is this little Admiral?”

The Strikers exchanged a glance. The husband hadn’t said, Call me Cliff, hadn’t said much of anything, but now his lips compressed.

“Didn’t you read about it in the papers?”

There was an awkward pause. The pup began to squirm.

“Admiral passed,” Gretchen breathed. “It was an accident. We had him — well, we were in the park, the dog park … you know, the one where the dogs run free? You used to take him there, you remember, up off Sycamore? Well, you know how exuberant he was…”

“You really didn’t read about it?” There was incredulity in the husband’s voice.

“Well, I–I was away at college and then I took the first job I could find. Back here, I mean. Because of my mother. She’s been sick.”

Neither of them commented on this, not even to be polite.

“It was all over the press,” the husband said, and he sounded offended now. He adjusted his oversized glasses and cocked his head to look down at her in a way that brought the past rushing back.

“Newsweek did a story, USA Today — we were on Good Morning America, both of us.”

She was at a loss, the three of them standing there, the dog taking its spiked dentition to the underside of her wrist now, just the way Admiral used to when he was a pup. “For what?” she was about to say, when Gretchen came to the rescue.

“This is little Admiral. Admiral II, actually,” she said, ruffling the blond shag over the pup’s eyes.

The husband looked past her, out the window and into the yard, an ironic grin pressed to his lips. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” he said, “and it’s too bad he wasn’t a cat.”

Gretchen gave him a sharp look. “You make a joke of it,” she said, her eyes suddenly filling, “but it was worth every penny and you know it.” She mustered a long-suffering smile for Nisha. “Cats are simpler — their eggs are more mature at ovulation than dogs’ are.”

“I can get you a cat for thirty-two thou.”

“Oh, Cliff, stop. Stop it.”

He moved to his wife and put an arm round her shoulders. “But we didn’t want to clone a cat, did we, honey?” He bent his face to the dog’s, touched noses with him and let his voice rise to a falsetto,

“Did we now, Admiral? Did we?”

At seven-thirty the next morning, Nisha pulled up in front of the Strikers’ house and let her car wheeze and shudder a moment before killing the engine. She flicked the radio back on to catch the last fading chorus of a tune she liked, singing along with the sexy low rasp of the lead vocalist, feeling good about things — or better, anyway. The Strikers were giving her twenty-five dollars an hour, plus the same dental and health care package they offered the staff at their law firm, which was a whole solid towering brick wall of improvement over what she’d been making as a waitress at Johnny’s Rib Shack, sans health care, sans dental and sans any tip she could remember above ten percent over the pre-tax total because the people who came out to gnaw ribs were just plain cheap and no two ways about it. When she stepped out of the car, there was Gretchen coming down the front steps of the house with the pup in her arms, just as she had nine years ago when Nisha was a high school freshman taking on what she assumed was going to be a breeze of a summer job.

Nisha took the initiative of punching in the code herself and slipping through the gate to hustle up the walk and save Gretchen the trouble, because Gretchen was in a hurry, always in a hurry. She was dressed in a navy-blue suit with a double string of pearls and an antique silver pin in the shape of a bounding borzoi that seemed eerily familiar — it might have been the exact ensemble she’d been wearing when Nisha had told her she’d be quitting to go off to college. I’m sorry, Mrs. Striker, and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to work for you and Mr. Striker, she’d said, hardly able to contain the swell of her heart, but I’m going to college. On a scholarship. She’d had the acceptance letter in her hand to show her, thinking how proud of her Mrs. Striker would be, how she’d take her in her arms for a hug and congratulate her, but the first thing she’d said was, What about Admiral?

As Gretchen closed on her now, the pup wriggling in her arms, Nisha could see her smile flutter and die. No doubt she was already envisioning the cream-leather interior of her BMW (a 750i in Don’t-Even-Think-About-It Black) and the commute to the office and whatever was going down there, court sessions, the piles of documents, contention at every turn. Mr. Striker — Nisha would never be able to call him Cliff, even if she lived to be eighty, but then he’d have to be a hundred and ten and probably wouldn’t hear her, anyway — was already gone, in his matching Beemer, his and hers.

Gretchen didn’t say good morning or hi or how are you? or thanks for coming, but just enfolded her in the umbrella of her perfume and handed her the dog. Which went immediately heavy in Nisha’s arms, fighting for the ground with four flailing paws and the little white ghoul’s teeth that fastened on the top button of her jacket. Nisha held on. Gave Gretchen a big grateful-for-the-job-and-the-health-care smile, no worries, no worries at all.

“Those jeans,” Gretchen said, narrowing her eyes. “Are they new?”

The dog squirming, squirming. “I, well — I’m going to set him down a minute, okay?”

“Of course, of course. Do what you do, what you normally do.”

An impatient wave. “Or what you used to do, I mean.”

They both watched as the pup fell back on its haunches, rolled briefly in the grass and sprang up to clutch Nisha’s right leg in a clumsy embrace. “I just couldn’t find any of my old jeans — my mother probably threw them all out long ago. Plus”—a laugh—“I don’t think I could fit into them anymore.” She gave Gretchen a moment to ruminate on the deeper implications here — time passing, adolescents grown into womanhood, flesh expanding, that sort of thing — then gently pushed the dog down and murmured, “But I am wearing — right here, under the jacket? — this T-shirt I know I used to wear back then.”

Nothing. Gretchen just stood there, looking distracted.

“It’s been washed, of course, and sitting in the back of the top drawer of my dresser where my mother left it, so I don’t know if there’ll be any scent or anything, but I’m sure I used to wear it because Tupac really used to drive my engine back then, if you know what I mean.” She gave it a beat. “But hey, we were all fourteen once, huh?”

Gretchen made no sign that she’d heard her — either that or she denied the proposition outright. “You’re going to be all right with this, aren’t you?” she said, looking her in the eye. “Is there anything we didn’t cover?”

The afternoon before, during her interview — but it wasn’t really an interview because the Strikers had already made up their minds and if she’d refused them they would have kept raising the hourly till she capitulated — the two of them, Gretchen and Cliff, had positioned themselves on either side of her and leaned into the bar over caramel-colored scotches and a platter of ebi and maguro sushi to explain the situation. Just so that she was clear on it. “You know what cloning is, right?” Gretchen said. “Or what it involves? You remember Dolly?”

Nisha was holding fast to her drink, her left elbow pressed to the brass rail of the bar in the family room. She’d just reached out her twinned chopsticks for a second piece of the shrimp, but withdrew her hand. “You mean the country singer?”

“The sheep,” the husband said.

“The first cloned mammal,” Gretchen put in. “Or larger mammal.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Sure. I guess.”

What followed was a short course in genetics and the method of somatic cell nuclear transplant that had given the world Dolly, various replicated cattle, pigs and hamsters, and now Admiral II, the first cloned dog made available commercially through SalvaPet, Inc., the genetic engineering firm with offices in Seoul, San Juan and Cleveland. Gretchen’s voice constricted as she described how they’d taken a cell from the lining of Admiral’s ear just after the accident and inserted it into a donor egg, which had had its nucleus removed, stimulated the cell to divide through the application of an electric current, and then inserted the developing embryo into the uterus of a host mother—“The sweetest golden retriever you ever saw. What was her name, Cliff? Some flower, wasn’t it?”

“Peony.”

“Peony? Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“I thought it was — oh, I don’t know. You sure it wasn’t Iris?”

“The point is,” he said, setting his glass down and leveling his gaze on Nisha, “you can get a genetic copy of the animal, a kind of three-dimensional Xerox, but that doesn’t guarantee it’ll be like the one you, well, the one you lost.”

“It was so sad,” Gretchen said.

“It’s nurture that counts. You’ve got to reproduce the animal’s experiences, as nearly as possible.” He gave a shrug, reached for the bottle. “You want another?” he asked, and she held out her glass. “Of course we’re both older now — and so are you, we realize that — but we want to come as close as possible to replicating the exact conditions that made Admiral what he was, right down to the toys we gave him, the food, the schedule of walks and play and all the rest. Which is where you come in—”

“We need a commitment here, Nisha,” Gretchen breathed, leaning in so close Nisha could smell the scotch coming back at her.

“Four years. That’s how long you were with him last time. Or with Admiral, I mean. The original Admiral.”

The focus of all this deliberation had fallen asleep in Gretchen’s lap. A single probing finger of sunlight stabbed through the window to illuminate the pale fluff over the dog’s eyes. At that moment, in that light, little Admiral looked like some strange conjunction of ostrich and ape. Nisha couldn’t help thinking of The Island of Dr.

Moreau, the cheesy version with Marlon Brando looking as if he’d been genetically manipulated himself, and she would have grinned a private grin, fueled by the scotch and the thundering absurdity of the moment, but she had to hide everything she thought or felt behind a mask of impassivity. She wasn’t committing to anything for four years — four years? If she was still living here in this craphole of a town four years from now she promised herself she’d go out and buy a gun and eliminate all her problems with a single, very personal squeeze of the trigger.

That was what she was thinking when Gretchen said, “We’ll pay you twenty dollars an hour,” and the husband said, “With health care — and dental,” and they both stared at her so fiercely she had to look down into her glass before she found her voice. “Twenty-five,”

she said.

And oh, how they loved that dog, because they never hesitated.

“Twenty-five it is,” the husband said, and Gretchen, a closer’s smile blooming on her face, produced a contract from the folder at her elbow, “fust sign here,” she said.

After Gretchen had climbed into her car and the car had slid through the gate and vanished down the street, Nisha sprawled out on the grass and lifted her face to the sun. She was feeling the bliss of deja vu — or no, not deja vu, but a virtual return to the past, when life was just a construct and there was nothing she couldn’t have done or been and nothing beyond the thought of clothes and boys and the occasional term paper to hamper her. Here she was, gone back in time, lying on the grass at quarter of eight in the morning on a sunstruck June day, playing with a puppy while everybody else was going to work — it was hilarious, that’s what it was. Like something you’d read about in the paper — a behest from some crazed millionaire. Or in this case, two crazed millionaires. She felt so good she let out a laugh, even as the pup came charging across the lawn to slam headfirst into her, all feet and pink panting tongue, and he was Admiral all right, Admiral in the flesh, born and made and resurrected for the mere little pittance of a quarter million dollars.

For a long while she wrestled with him, flipping him over on his back each time he charged, scratching his belly and baby-talking him, enjoying the novelty of it, but by quarter past eight she was bored and she pushed herself up to go on into the house and find something to eat. Do what you used to do, Gretchen had told her, but what she used to do, summers especially, was nap and read and watch TV and sneak her friends in to tip a bottle of the husband’s forty-year-old scotch to their adolescent lips and make faces at one another before descending into giggles. Twice a day she’d take the dog to the doggie park and watch him squat and crap and run wild with the other mutts till his muzzle was streaked with drool and he dodged at her feet to snatch up mouthfuls of the Evian the Strikers insisted he drink. Now, though, she just wanted to feel the weight of the past a bit, and she went in the back door, the dog at her heels, thinking to make herself a sandwich — the Strikers always had cold cuts in the fridge, mounds of pastrami, capicolla, smoked turkey and Swiss, individual slices of which went to Admiral each time he did his business outside where he was supposed to or barked in the right cadence or just stuck his goofy head in the door. She could already see the sandwich she was going to make — a whole deli’s worth of meat and cheese piled up on Jewish rye; they always had Jewish rye — and she was halfway to the refrigerator before she remembered the maid.

There she was, in her maid’s outfit, sitting at the kitchen table with her feet up and the newspaper spread out before her, spooning something out of a cup. “Don’t you bring that filthy animal in here,”

she said, glancing up sharply.

Nisha was startled. There didn’t used to be a maid. There was no one in the house, in fact, till Mrs. Yamashita, the cook, came in around four, and that was part of the beauty of it. “Oh, hi,” she said,

“hi, I didn’t know you were going to be — I just… I was going to make a sandwich, I guess.” There was a silence. The dog slunk around the kitchen, looking wary. “What was your name again?”

“Frankie,” the maid said, swallowing the syllables as if she weren’t ready to give them up, “and I’m the one has to clean up all these paw marks off the floor — and did you see what he did to that throw pillow in the guest room?”

“No,” Nisha said, “I didn’t,” and she was at the refrigerator now, sliding back the tray of the meat compartment. This would go easier if they were friends, no doubt about it, and she was willing, more than willing. “You want anything?” she said. “A sandwich — or, or something?”

Frankie just stared at her. “I don’t know what they’re paying you,” she said, “but to me? This is the craziest shit I ever heard of in my life. You think I couldn’t let the dog out the door a couple times a day? Or what, take him to the park — that’s what you do, right, take him to the doggie park over on Sycamore?”

The refrigerator door swung shut, the little light blinking out, the heft of the meat satisfying in her hand. “It’s insane, I admit it — hey, I’m with you. You think I wanted to grow up to be a dogsitter?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you. Except you got your degree — you need a degree for that, dogsitting, I mean?” She hadn’t moved, not a muscle, her feet propped up, the cup in one hand, spoon in the other.

“No,” Nisha said, feeling the blood rise to her face, “no, you don’t. But what about you — you need a degree to be a maid?”

That hit home. For a moment, Frankie said nothing, just looked from her to the dog — which was begging now, clawing at Nisha’s leg with his forepaws — and back again. “This is just temporary,” she said finally.

“Yeah, me too.” Nisha gave her a smile, no harm done, just establishing a little turf, that was all. “Totally.”

For the first time, Frankie’s expression changed: she almost looked as if she were going to laugh. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said,

“temporary help, that’s all we are. We’re the temps. And Mr. and Mrs.

Striker — dog crazy, plain crazy, two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar crazy — they’re permanent.”

And now Nisha laughed, and so did Frankie — a low rumble of amusement that made the dog turn its head. The meat was on the counter now, the cellophane wrapper pulled back. Nisha selected a slice of Black Forest ham and held it out to him. “Sit!” she said. “Go ahead, sit!” And the dog, just like his father or progenitor or donor or whatever he was, looked at her stupidly till she dropped the meat on the tile and the wet plop of its arrival made him understand that here was something to eat.

“You’re going to spoil that dog,” Frankie said.

Nisha went unerringly to the cabinet where the bread was kept, and there it was, Jewish rye, a fresh loaf, springy to the touch. She gave Frankie a glance over her shoulder. “Yeah,” she said. “I think that’s the idea.”

A month drifted by, as serene a month as Nisha could remember.

She was making good money, putting in ten-hour days during the week and half days on the weekends, reading through all the books she hadn’t had time for in college, exhausting the Strikers’ DVD

collection and opening her own account at the local video store, walking, lazing, napping the time away. She gained five pounds and vowed to start swimming regularly in the Strikers’ pool, but hadn’t got round to it yet. Some days she’d help Frankie with the cleaning and the laundry so the two of them could sit out on the back deck with their feet up, sharing a bottle of sweet wine or a joint. As for the dog, she tried to be conscientious about the whole business of imprinting it with the past — or a past — though she felt ridiculous.

Four years of college for this? Wars were being fought, people were starving, there were diseases to conquer, children to educate, good to do in the world, and here she was reliving her adolescence in the company of an inbred semi-retarded clown of a cloned Afghan hound because two childless rich people decreed it should be so. All right. She knew she’d have to move on. Knew it was temporary.

Swore that she’d work up a new resume and start sending it out — but then the face of her mother, sick from vomiting and with her scalp as smooth and slick as an eggplant, would rise up to shame her. She threw the ball to the dog. Took him to the park. Let the days fall round her like leaves from a dying tree.

And then one afternoon, on the way back from the dog park, Admiral jerking at the leash beside her and the sky opening up to a dazzle of sun and pure white tufts of cloud that made her feel as if she were floating untethered through the universe along with them, she noticed a figure stationed outside the gate of the Strikers’ house.

As she got closer, she saw that it was a young man dressed in baggy jeans and a T-shirt, his hair fanning out in rusty blond dreads and a goatee of the same color clinging to his chin. He was peering over the fence. Her first thought was that he’d come to rob the place, but she dismissed it — he was harmless; you could see that a hundred yards off. Then she saw the paint smears on his jeans and wondered if he was a painting contractor come to put in a bid on the house, but that wasn’t it either. He looked more like an amateur artist — and here she had to laugh to herself — the kind who specializes in dog portraits. But she was nearly on him now, thinking to brush by him and slip through the gate before he could accost her, whatever he wanted, when he turned suddenly and his face caught fire. “Wow!”

he said. “Wow, I can’t believe it! You’re her, aren’t you, the famous dog sitter? And this”—he went down on one knee and made a chirping sound deep in his throat—“this is Admiral. Right? Am I right?”

Admiral went straight to him, lurching against the leash, and in the next instant he was flopping himself down on the hot pavement, submitting to the man’s caresses. The rope of a tail whapped and thrashed, the paws gyrated, the puppy teeth came into play. “Good boy,” the man crooned, his dreads riding a wave across his brow. “He likes that, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he, boy?”

Nisha didn’t say anything. She just watched, the smallest hole dug out of the canyon of her boredom, till the man rose to his feet and held out his hand even as Admiral sprang up to hump his leg with fresh enthusiasm. “I’m Erhard,” he said, grinning wide. “And you’re Nisha, right?”

“Yes,” she said, taking his hand despite herself. She was on the verge of asking how he knew her name, but there was no point: she already understood. He was from the press. In the past month there must have been a dozen reporters on the property, the Strikers stroking their vanity and posing for pictures and answering the same idiotic questions over and over — A quarter million dollars: that’s a lot for a dog, isn’t it? — and she herself had been interviewed twice already. Her mother had even found a fuzzy color photo of her and Admiral (couchant, lap) on the Web under the semi-hilarious rubric CLONE-SITTER. So this guy was a reporter — a foreign reporter, judging from the faint trace of an accent and the blue-eyed rearing height of him, German, she supposed. Or Austrian. And he wanted some of her time.

“Yes,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I am from Die Weltwoche, and I wanted to ask of you — prevail upon you, beg you — for a few moments? Is that possible? For me? Just now?”

She gave him a long slow appraisal, flirting with him, yes, definitely flirting. “I’ve got nothing but time,” she said. And then, watching his grin widen: “You want a sandwich?”

They ate on the patio overlooking the pool. She was dressed casually in shorts and flip-flops and her old Tupac tee, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because the shirt — too small by half — lifted away from her hips when she leaned back in the chair, showing off her navel and the onyx ring she wore there. He was watching her, chattering on about the dog, lifting the sandwich to his lips and putting it down again, fooling with the lens on the battered old Hasselblad he extracted from the backpack at his feet. The sun made sequins on the surface of the pool. Admiral lounged beneath the table, worrying a rawhide bone. She was feeling good, better than good, sipping a beer and watching him back.

They had a little conversation about the beer. “Sorry to offer you Miller, but that’s all we have — or the Strikers have, I mean.”

“Miller High Life,” he said, lifting the bottle to his mouth. “Great name. What person would not want to live the high life? Even a dog.

Even Admiral. He lives the high life, no?”

“I thought you’d want a German beer, something like Beck’s or something.”

He set down the bottle, picked up the camera and let the lens wander down the length of her legs. “I’m Swiss, actually,” he said.

“But I live here now. And I like American beer. I like everything American.”

There was no mistaking the implication and she wanted to return the sentiment, but she didn’t know the first thing about Switzerland, so she just smiled and tipped her beer to him.

“So,” he said, cradling the camera in his lap and referring to the notepad he’d laid on the table when she’d served him the sandwich,

“this is the most interesting for me, this idea that Mr. and Mrs.

Striker would hire you for the dog? This is very strange, no?”

She agreed that it was.

He gave her a smile she could have fallen into. “Do you mind if I should ask what are they paying you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Another smile. “But it is good — worth your while, as they say?”

“I thought this was about Admiral,” she said, and then, because she wanted to try it out on her tongue, she added, “Erhard.”

“Oh, it is, it is — but I find you interesting too. More interesting, really, than the dog.” As if on cue, Admiral backed out from under the table and squatted on the concrete to deposit a glistening yellow turd, which he examined briefly and then promptly ate.

“Bad dog,” she said reflexively.

Erhard studied the dog a moment, then shifted his eyes back to her. “But how do you feel about the situation, this concept of cloning a pet? Do you know anything about this process, the cruelty involved?”

“You know, frankly, Erhard, I haven’t thought much about it. I don’t know really what it involves. I don’t really care. The Strikers love their dog, that’s all, and if they want to, I don’t know, bring him back—”

“Cheat death, you mean.”

She shrugged. “It’s their money.”

He leaned across the table now, his eyes locked on hers. “Yes, but they must artificially stimulate so many bitches to come into heat and then they must take the eggs from the tubes of these bitches, what they call ‘surgically harvesting,’ if you can make a guess as to what that implies for the poor animals”—she began to object but he held up a peremptory finger—“and that is nothing when you think of the numbers involved. Do you know about Snuppy?”

She thought she hadn’t heard him right. “Snuppy? What’s that?”

“The dog, the first one ever cloned — it was two years ago, in Korea? Well, this dog, this one dog — an Afghan like your dog here — was the result of over a thousand embryos created in the laboratory from donor skin cells. And they put these embryos into one hundred and twenty-three bitches and only three clones resulted — and two died. So: all that torture of the animals, all that money — and for what?” He glanced down at Admiral, the flowing fur, the blunted eyes. “For this?”

A sudden thought came to her: “You’re not really a journalist, are you:

He slowly shook his head, as if he couldn’t bear the weight of it.

“You’re what — one of these animal people, these animal liberators or whatever they are. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you are?” She felt frightened suddenly, for herself, for Admiral, for the Strikers and Frankie and the whole carefully constructed edifice of getting and wanting, of supply and demand and all that it implied.

“And do you know why they clone the Afghan hound,” he went on, ignoring her,”—the very stupidest of all the dogs on this earth?

You don’t? Breeding, that is why. This is what they call an uncomplicated genetic line, a pure line all the way back to the wolf ancestor. Breeding,” he said, and he’d raised his voice so that Admiral looked up at the vehemence of it, “so that we can have this purity, this stupid hound, this replica of nature.”

Nisha tugged down her T-shirt, drew up her legs. The sun glared up off the water so that she had to squint to see him. “You haven’t answered my question,” she said, “Erhard. If that’s even your name.”

Again, the slow rolling of the head on his shoulders, back and forth in rhythmic contrition. “Yes,” he said finally, drawing in a breath, “I am one of ’these animal people.’” His eyes went distant a moment and then came back to her. “But I am also a journalist, a journalist first. And I want you to help me.”

That night, when the Strikers came home — in convoy, her car following his through the gate, Admiral lurching across the lawn to bark furiously at the shimmering irresistible disks of the wheels of first one car, then the other — Nisha was feeling conflicted. Her loyalties were with the Strikers, of course. And with Admiral too, because no matter how brainless and ungainly the dog was, no matter how many times he wet the rug or ravaged the flowerbed or scrambled up onto the kitchen table to choke down anything anyone had been foolish enough to leave untended even for thirty seconds, she’d bonded with him — she would have been pretty cold if she hadn’t. And she wasn’t cold. She was as susceptible as anyone else.

She loved animals, loved dogs, loved the way Admiral sprang to life when he saw her walk through the door, loved the dance of his fur, his joyous full-throated bark, the feel of his wet whiskered snout in the cupped palm of her hand. But Erhard had made her feel something else altogether.

What was it? A sexual stirring, yes, absolutely — after the third beer, she’d found herself leaning into him for the first of a series of deep, languid, adhesive kisses — but it was more than that. There was something transgressive in what he wanted her to do, something that appealed to her sense of rebellion, of anarchy, of applying the pin to the swollen balloon … but here were the Strikers, emerging separately from their cars as Admiral bounced between them, yapping out his ecstasy. And now Gretchen was addressing her, trying to shout over the dog’s sharp vocalizations, but without success. In the next moment, she was coming across the lawn, her face set.

“Don’t let him chase the car like that,” she called, even as Admiral tore round her like a dust devil, nipping at her ankles and dodging away again. “It’s a bad habit.”

“But Admiral — I mean, the first Admiral — used to chase cars all the time, remember?”

Gretchen had pinned her hair up so that all the contours of her face stood out in sharp relief. There were lines everywhere suddenly, creases and gouges, frown marks, little embellishments round her eyes, and how could Nisha have missed them? Gretchen was old — fifty, at least — and the realization came home to Nisha now, under the harsh sun, with the taste of the beer and of Erhard still tingling on her lips. “I don’t care,” Gretchen was saying, and she was standing beside Nisha now, like a figurine the gardeners had set down amid that perfect landscape.

“But I thought we were going to go for everything, the complete behavior, good or bad, right? Because otherwise—”

“That was how the accident happened. At the dog park. He got through the gate before Cliff or I could stop him and just ran out into the street after some idiot on a motorcycle …” She looked past Nisha a moment, to where Admiral was bent over the pool, slurping up water as if his pinched triangular head worked on a piston. “So no,” she said, “no, we’re going to have to modify some behavior. I don’t want him drinking that pool water, for one thing. Too many chemicals.”

“Okay, sure,” Nisha said, shrugging. “I’ll try.” She raised her voice and sang out “Bad dog, bad dog,” but it was halfhearted and Admiral ignored her.

The cool green eyes shifted to meet hers again. “And I don’t want him eating his own”—she paused to search for the proper word for the context, running through various euphemisms before giving it up—“shit.”

Another shrug.

“I’m serious on this. Are you with me?”

Nisha couldn’t help herself, and so what if she was pushing it?

So what? “Admiral did,” she said. “Maybe you didn’t know that.”

Gretchen just waved her hand in dismissal. “But this Admiral,”

she said. “He’s not going to do it. Is he?”

Over the course of the next two weeks, as summer settled in with a succession of cloudless, high-arching days and Admiral steadily grew into the promise of his limbs, Erhard became a fixture at the house. Every morning, when Nisha came through the gate with the dog on his leash, he was there waiting for her, shining and tall and beautiful, with a joke on his lips and always some little treat for Admiral secreted in one pocket or another. The dog worshipped him. Went crazy for him. Pranced on the leash, spun in circles, nosed at his sleeves and pockets till he got his treat, then rolled over on his back in blissful submission. And then it was the dog park, and instead of sitting there wrapped up in the cocoon of herself, she had Erhard to sustain her, to lean into her so that she could feel the heat of him through the thin cotton of his shirt, to kiss her, and later, after lunch and the rising tide of the beer, to make love to her on the divan in the cool shadows of the pool house. They swam in the afternoons — he didn’t mind the five pounds she’d put on; he praised her for them — and sometimes Frankie would join them, shedding the maid’s habit for a white two-piece and careering through a slashing backstroke with a bottle of beer her reward, because she was part of the family too, Mama and Papa and Aunt Frankie, all there to nurture little Admiral under the beneficent gaze of the sun.

Of course, Nisha was no fool. She knew there was a quid pro quo involved here, knew that Erhard had his agenda, but she was in no hurry, she’d committed to nothing, and as she lay there on the divan smoothing her hands over his back, tasting him, enjoying him, taking him inside her, she felt hope, real hope, for the first time since she’d come back home. It got so that she looked forward to each day, even the mornings that had been so hard on her, having to take a tray up to the ghost of her mother while her father trudged off to work, the whole house like a turned grave, because now she had Admiral, now she had Erhard, and she could shrug off anything. Yes.

Sure. That was the way it was. Until the day he called her on it.

Cloudless sky, steady sun, every flower at its peak. She came down the walk with Admiral on his leash at the appointed hour, pulled back the gate, and there he was — but this time he wasn’t alone. Beside him, already straining at the leash, was a gangling overgrown Afghan pup that could have been the twin of Admiral, and though she’d known it was coming, known the plan since the very first day, she was awestruck. “Jesus,” she said, even as Admiral jerked her forward and the two dogs began to romp round her legs in a tangle of limbs and leashes, “how did you—? I mean, he’s the exact, he’s totally—”

“That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

“But where did you find him?”

Erhard gave her a look of appraisal, then his eyes jumped past her to sweep the street. “Let’s go inside, no? I don’t want that they should see us here, anyone — not right in the front of the house.”

He hadn’t talked her into it, not yet, not exactly, but now that the moment had come she numbly punched in the code and held the gate open for him. What he wanted to do, what he was in the process of doing with her unspoken complicity, was to switch the dogs — just for a day, two at the most — by way of experiment. His contention was that the Strikers would never know the difference, that they were arrogant exemplars of bourgeois excess, even to the point of violating the laws of nature — and God, God too — simply to satisfy their own solipsistic desires. Admiral wouldn’t be harmed — he’d enjoy himself, the change of scenery, all that. And certainly she knew how much the dog had come to mean to him. “But these people will not recognize their own animal,” he’d insisted, his voice gone hard with conviction, “and so I will have my story and the world will know it.”

Once inside the gate, they let the dogs off their leashes and went round back of the house where they’d be out of sight. They walked hand-in-hand, his fingers entwined with hers, and for a long while, as the sun rode high overhead and a breeze slipped in off the ocean to stir the trees, they watched as the two dogs streaked back and forth, leaping and nipping and tumbling in doggy rhapsody.

Admiral’s great combed-out spill of fur whipped round him in a frenzy of motion, and the new dog, Erhard’s dog — the imposter — matched him step for step, hair for glorious hair. “You took him to the groomer, didn’t you?” she said.

Erhard gave a stiff nod. “Yes, sure: what do you think? He must be exact.”

She watched, bemused, for another minute, her misgivings buried deep under the pressure of his fingers, bone, sinew, the wedded flesh, and why shouldn’t she go along with him? What was the harm? His article, or expose or whatever it was, would appear in Switzerland, in German, and the Strikers would never know the difference. Or even if they did, even if it was translated into English and grabbed headlines all over the country, they had it coming to them. Erhard was right. She knew it. She’d known it all along. “So what’s his name?” she asked, the dogs shooting past her in a moil of fur and flashing feet. “Does he have a name?”

“Fred.”

“Fred? What kind of name is that for a pedigree dog?”

“What kind of name is Admiral?”

She was about to tell him the story of the original Admiral, how he’d earned his sobriquet because of his enthusiasm for the Strikers’

yacht and how they were planning on taking Admiral II out on the water as soon as they could, when the familiar rumble of the driveway gate drawing back on its runners startled her. In the next moment, she was in motion, making for the near corner of the house where she could see down the long macadam strip of the drive. Her heart skipped a beat: it was Gretchen. Gretchen home early, some crisis compelling her, mislaid papers, her blouse stained, the flu, Gretchen in her black Beemer, waiting for the gate to slide back so she could roll up the drive and exert dominion over her house and property, her piss-stained carpets and her insuperable dog. “Quick!” Nisha shouted, whirling round, “grab them. Grab the dogs!”

She saw Erhard plunge forward and snatch at them, the grass rising up to meet him and both dogs tearing free. “Admiral!” he called, scrambling to his knees. “Here, boy. Come!” The moment thundered in her ears. The dogs hesitated, the ridiculous sea of fur smoothing and settling momentarily, and then one of them — it was Admiral, it had to be — came to him and he got hold of it even as the other pricked up its ears at the sound of the car and bolted round the corner of the house.

“I’ll stall her,” she called.

Erhard, all six feet and five inches of him, was already humping across the grass in the direction of the pool house, the dog writhing in his arms.

But the other dog — it was Fred, it had to be — was chasing the car up the drive now, nipping at the wheels, and as Nisha came round the corner she could read the look on her employer’s face. A moment and she was there, grabbing for the dog as the car rolled to a stop and the engine died. Gretchen stepped out of the car, heels coming down squarely on the pavement, her shoulders thrust back tightly against the grip of her jacket. “I thought I told you…,” she began, her voice high and querulous, but then she faltered and her expression changed. “But where’s Admiral?” she said. “And whose dog is that?”

In the course of her life, short though it had been, she’d known her share of embittered people — her father, for one; her mother, for another — and she’d promised herself she’d never go there, never descend to that hopeless state of despair and regret that ground you down till you were nothing but raw animus, but increasingly now everything she thought or felt or tasted was bitter to the root. Erhard was gone. The Strikers were inflexible. Her mother lingered.

Admiral reigned supreme. When the car had come up the drive and Gretchen had stood there confronting her, she’d never felt lower in her life. Until Admiral began howling in the distance and then broke free of Erhard to come careening round the corner of the house and launch himself in one wholly coordinated and mighty leap right into the arms of his protector. And then Erhard appeared, head bowed and shoulders slumped, looking abashed.

“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” Gretchen said, setting down the dog (which sprang right up again, this time at Erhard) and at the same time shooting Nisha a look before stepping forward and extending her hand.

“Oh, this is, uh, Erhard,” she heard herself say. “He’s from Switzerland, and I, well, I just met him in the dog park and since he had an Afghan too—”

Erhard was miserable, as miserable as she’d ever seen him, but he mustered a counterfeit of his smile and said, “Nice to meet you,”

even as Gretchen dropped his hand and turned to Nisha.

“Well, it’s a nice idea,” she said, looking down at the dogs, comparing them, “—good for you for taking the initiative, Nisha …

but really, you have to know that Admiral didn’t have any — playmates — here on the property, Afghans or no, and I’m sure he wasn’t exposed to anybody from Switzerland, if you catch my drift?”

There was nothing Nisha could do but nod her acquiescence.

“So,” Gretchen said, squaring her shoulders and turning back to Erhard. “Nice to meet you,” she said, “but I’m going to have to ask that you take your dog — what’s his name?”

Erhard ducked his head. “Fred.”

“Fred? What an odd name. For a dog, I mean. His does have papers, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, yes, he’s of the highest order, very well-bred.”

Gretchen glanced dubiously down at the dog, then back at Erhard. “Yes, well, he looks it,” she said, “and they do make great dogs, Afghans — we ought to know. I don’t know if Nisha told you, but Admiral is very special, very, very special, and we can’t have any other dogs on the property. And I don’t mean to be abrupt”—a sharp look for Nisha—“but strangers of any sort, or species, just cannot be part of this, this …” she trailed off, fighting, at the end, to recover the cold impress of her smile. “Nice meeting you,” she repeated, and there was nowhere to go from there.

It had taken Nisha a while to put it all behind her. She kept thinking Erhard was lying low, that he’d be back, that there had been something between them after all, but by the end of the second week she no longer looked for him at the gate or at the dog park or anywhere else. And very slowly, as the days beat on, she began to understand what her role was, her true role. Admiral chased his tail and she encouraged him. When he did his business along the street, she nudged the hard little bolus with the tip of her shoe till he stooped to take it up in his mouth. Yes, she was living in the past and her mother was dying and she’d gone to college for nothing, but she was determined to create a new future — for herself and Admiral — and when she took him to the dog park she lingered outside the gate, to let him run free where he really wanted to be, out there on the street where the cars shunted by and the wheels spun and stalled and caught the light till there was nothing else in the world. “Good boy,”

she’d say. “Good boy.”