Closing time, p.13
Closing Time, page 13
Instead of coffee I ordered a single-malt whiskey with my crème brûlée. It was an impulse. A tiny celebration.
I never saw the two of them again.
At home that evening when Dorothy seemed to want to go on with our fight from the night before I barely listened.
I met the antithesis of Aristophanes about a year later. In Greece of all places. On the island of Mykonos.
Once again I was really in no mood for strangers.
A lot about the travel-guide and travel-writing business had changed since I started working for the Let’s Go! and Dollar-a-Day Guides and the occasional Fodor’s freelance job back in the seventies. Computers had made everything easier. Whole sections of the guides—the getting there sections for instance, keeping up with site hours, admission fees, currency conversions, that kind of thing—could be updated yearly by simply consulting the net and recording the facts accordingly.
What you still needed legwork for was to look in on the continued quality—or utter vanishing—of hotels, restaurants, services. Or in places that had become a bit dodgy for tourists of late via natural or man-made disasters you wanted somebody to count the guns so to speak. And of course if you were doing an article for the New York Times or the Washington Post or one of the better magazines you normally had to be there.
I didn’t much like computers so at the age of forty-nine I was still racking up the frequent-flyer miles as much as kids half my age.
It was the source of most of the problems between my longtime lady Dorothy and me. I was still on the road half the time. My New York Times press pass didn’t impress her one bit.
Dorothy hated flying.
And she was not going to move in with somebody who walked in, dropped his bags, wrote for a week or two and then took off again. When we fought it always ended the same way. I was a selfish bastard who refused to grow up. She was a smothering bitch. I could get mean.
At the time my bread-and-butter client was the Passport Guides series, with offices out of London, Paris, Melbourne and New York. Our yearly updates were assigned to six field writers per guide, one more at the computer and a pair of stay-at-home editors. This year our country was Greece—in which we each had some expertise—and while my colleagues were busy on the mainland, the Peloponnese and other of the island chains my own territory was the Cyclades and the Ionian Sea.
I’d already finished the Ionian and Mykonos was my third stop in the Cyclades after Andros and Tinos. All routine thus far.
It was mid-March, headed for Greek Easter and there was still a chill in the air.
The food at the Avra had been fine though overpriced and the room too brightly lit to my taste and you couldn’t help but despair a little at the presence of schnitzel on the menu and beef burger Roquefort. I stopped in for a couple of definitely overpriced drinks at Pierro’s and then headed up through town to Little Venice and circled around to the windmills.
It was still the best part of Mykonos if you were an old hand like me. The windmills hadn’t changed even if much of the rest of the island seemed to want to be Paris-on-the-Aegean. They sat overlooking the dark gleam of sea as bravely as they had for decades. I sat down on the rocks near the one farthest from the square and the music and considered the life I’d made for myself thus far.
Scotch can do that to me.
I had work which I usually enjoyed—though god knows not always—and which provided me with more freedoms than most people had and a more-than-adequate income. I had an intelligent handsome woman who loved me but whose creature-comforts I had for many years been unresponsive to in all honesty. I had health and reasonable vigor. I had a well-loved mother in her late seventies going steadily blind with retinitis pigmentosa in suburban New Jersey who saw the world as though through a soda straw but who asked little of me other than the occasional visit with her and her dog Beau and a postcard to add to her collection.
I had people who welcomed me warmly scattered all around the globe but few who could do so genuinely, who didn’t also view me with some suspicion and in some cases downright fear.
I considered all this. And I wondered about my usefulness in general.
A few years down the road as computers more and more peeked into every corner on earth—and in real time at that—it might be possible to eliminate folks like me entirely. Or at least cut our number to the absolute bone. I felt that I’d gone almost abstract somehow—as though, like the windmills, my original function had possibly long since ceased and was now more in the nature of the decorative and even metaphoric. I was the friend, the acquaintance, the boyfriend, the son, the travel writer.
I was a brand-name, a label.
I got up and went looking for a quiet bar where they still had real bouzouki on the tape or CD player and by the time I found one up in the hills it was late and by the time I had two or three metaxas it was later still. I was pleasantly lost as you tend to get in Mykonos’ winding maze of streets even after many visits and pleasantly buzzed from the metaxa. I meandered along, taking my good time about it. If I kept heading basically downhill toward the port I’d find my room eventually.
Crime wasn’t a problem on Mykonos so neither was the fact that I was alone.
At least not until I saw the dog.
I turned a corner and he froze me in my tracks.
He was peering at me from where he lay on a low stone step maybe twenty-five feet away. If I’d had the feeling of instant good will from Aristophanes back in New York I had exactly the opposite feeling from this one.
This dog hated me on sight.
Or maybe it was the sound of my steps or the smell of me he hated.
Because he couldn’t have had much vision left. The cataracts on both his eyes focused a dull opalesque gleam on me in the light from the porch above. I thought inanely for a moment of the statues of blind Homer. Eyes molded flat and empty. Eyes that could stare forever.
In The Iliad dogs scavenged the bodies of fallen Troy.
And just as I knew Aristophanes’ owner was going to talk to me and touch me that day I knew that this dog and I were going to have our own kind of conversation.
He stood slowly and never took his eyes off me and if an animal can rise in total threat that was what he did. He seemed to unfold from the stone itself like some ugly black gargoyle brought to life with teeth already bared.
He wasn’t huge but he wasn’t some cocker spaniel either. Maybe three feet long from nose to tail. So skinny you could count his ribs. His coat was thin, short. Patchy-looking, dull and dirty. The fur along his backbone bristled.
When he started to move I put my hands slowly into the pockets of my jeans and waited. He didn’t so much walk to me as glide in my direction. As though the air between us were thick as mud. His claws on the fieldstone footpath didn’t make a sound. There was just that low, quiet growl.
I guess I expected him to stop at some point, prepare to take a leap at me or maybe take a run at me, and in either case that was when the hands came out of the pockets and I’d step back for what I could only pray would be a good solid kick.
But he did neither.
He just kept coming. Until I could have reached down and patted his scarred, matted head. Which would have been a very good way to lose a hand at the wrist. And he stared. Not so much as a blink. The growl got louder and so did the pulse throbbing in my ears.
Then he opened his mouth.
And very carefully and purposefully bit.
He bit my thigh just above the knee. Not hard enough to reach the flesh beneath but hard enough to pinch and increase the pressure of the pinch so as to succeed in intimidating the hell out of me. Hard enough to let me know he was there goddammit and not some figment of my imagination. He bit malevolently, his pale eyes never even twitching, growling all the time—and the thought went through my mind that this was good for him, he was somehow enjoying this, to him this was wonderful. That he was getting even for god knows what offenses against his person or how many times or when or where, taking it all out on a total stranger in the silence of a dimly lit pathway late into the lonely night.
I let him bite. I had no choice. I never made a move. In his awful way he was as huge to me as Aristophanes.
A moment later he released me. Turned and walked away as though I were of no consequence whatever nor had ever been. As though I weren’t there.
I couldn’t trust a dog after that.
I avoided them on the street unless they were so small as to barely qualify as dogs at all. The others I gave a wide berth.
I knew it was irrational. I just couldn’t help it.
That black seemed to sidle up to me every time.
The only one I did trust was my mother’s dog. An unshaven miniature poodle I’d known for years. Beau and I were old buddies. I fed him scraps of steak and fries from the dinner table. When I slept over I’d awake with him sleeping at my feet. No way in the world he was ever going to bite anybody and certainly not me.
He could barely see to bite anyway.
It was the only thing he had in common with that creature in Mykonos.
His blindness wasn’t due to cataracts though. It had the same inherited root as my mother’s—retinitis pigmentosa—what begins as a kind of night-blindness slowly narrows your field of vision on each side and up and down until all you can see is what’s directly in front of you. Tunnel vision. Quarter-size down to nickel-size down to dime-size and finally down to nothing at all.
My mother’s hadn’t progressed that far.
Beau’s had. He was sensitive to changes in light but that was all.
It was uncanny—my mother and I both thought so, like that old saw about owners and their dogs starting to look alike—but he also had dangerously high blood pressure and so did she. Like her, he was on medication for it. Which worked most of the time. But since his meds went into his food it all depended on his appetite. Sometimes between the retinitis and the meds not quite taking and a poodle’s somewhat hyper temperament in the first place he’d be bouncing off walls.
Literally.
Over the past few years he’d chipped or knocked out several teeth.
But she and the dog were alone and they were crazy about one another. My mother’s feeling was—meds, vets, dental work—whatever it took. She worried about the pain of course. Broken teeth. Bloody nose. I did too. He was a sweet-minded animal who still leapt yipping at me when I walked through the door like the pup he was when she first brought him home.
But the vast majority of the time he still seemed like a happy animal, however grotesque these occasional accidents had become.
I’d been in Nice for a while, doing a piece for the Times on the restorations there, when I got a call from her. I had only returned the day before and I was jet-lagged as hell and exhausted. The trip had come hard on the heels of a Post article on the remote Yaeyama Islands in the Okinawa chain. One day it seemed I’d be looking at water buffalo and mangrove swamps and the next, string bikinis along the private beach at the Hotel Beau Rivage.
I wondered how much longer I could go on like this.
“I want you to come see Beau,” she said. Her voice sounded shaky.
“What’s going on?”
“Can you come tomorrow? He’s…he’s just not right. I want you to see him for yourself.”
She was scaring me a little.
“Hell mom, I’ll drive in tonight if you want.”
“No! Tomorrow! Come in tomorrow. There’s something…”
“What?”
“There’s something I want you to do for me.”
“All right. Sure. I’ll be there by noon, okay? Are you all right, mom? You don’t sound good.”
“I will be. I will be now I think. Thank you, Rob. See you tomorrow.”
“What was that about?” said Dorothy. She was cleaning up takeout from Chirping Chicken.
“I dunno. Something’s going on with the dog. She wouldn’t say. She sounded upset though.”
“You want me to come along?”
“Don’t you have a bunch of fourth-graders to deal with?”
She shrugged. “I can take a mental-health day. If you want.”
I thought about it. “No, that’s all right. I’ll handle it myself.”
I was shutting her out again. I knew that. But I didn’t want her there. I didn’t know why but I didn’t.
I arranged for a ten-thirty pickup at Avis the next day and by quarter after eleven pulled into our driveway. I’d grown up in this house and lived here all through college and knew every inch of it like I knew my own apartment. Yet there was a stillness about it today as I climbed the steps that seemed somehow unfamiliar. I almost wouldn’t have been surprised to see it stripped of furniture. But I opened the front door and there was my mother rising to a sitting position on the worn old couch she still refused to part with, fumbling for her glasses and I realized simultaneously that she’d been asleep this late in the day which was not at all her habit and that Beau hadn’t come to greet me which definitely was his.
“Mom? What’s happening? What’s going on?”
She focused on me and her face seemed to break apart from the center outward like a broken mirror.
Her arm swept low across the room.
“Look!” she said. “Just look.”
The walls and baseboards in the living room were white. She’d had them painted white over my objections—I’d argued for natural wood. Now, by the fireplace, on each side of the television set, at the foot of the couch, in the corner behind the end table, they were smeared and flecked with brown.
“Is that…?
“Yes. It’s blood!” she wailed. “It’s his blood. I don’t understand it. My god! He’s trying to kill himself!”
My mother was not a hysterical woman. She sounded like one now.
I went to her and wrapped my arms around her and let her cry it out awhile. She smelled like sleep and old tears. I felt miserable for her. Poor little boy, she kept saying, my poor little boy, I don’t understand, my baby.
Finally she seemed to calm a little.
“Where is he?”
“In your bedroom.” It was still my bedroom. “I locked him up in your bedroom—I don’t know—last night, early this morning. It’s smaller. And he just won’t stop. I couldn’t look at him anymore! I couldn’t watch it! I tried to pad it for him. I just couldn’t stop him.”
“How long has this been going on, mom?”
“Since yesterday. You know he’d been bumping into things now and then because he couldn’t see. But this was different. It was like he was all of a sudden searching for something. Something he couldn’t find. And he kept walking faster and faster like he was, I don’t know, desperate, banging into everything, and crying, making these terrible whimpering sounds—banging into the fireplace, my god! the fireplace! The chairs. But I couldn’t stop him, I’d hold him for a while and I’d think I had him calmed down but then as soon as I let him go he’d start right up again. He won’t eat. He hasn’t eaten.”
“We’ll get him to the vet.”
I got up and got his leash off the kitchen doorknob and walked down the hall to the bedroom. She didn’t follow.
And there was Beau all right, walking directly into my closet door. Turning and lurching into one of the bedposts as though he were drunk. She’d wadded up bath towels, sheets and blankets and even some of my old shirts for padding along the walls and furniture but he was still hitting things hard and I couldn’t tell how much good they were doing. His muzzle was glistening.
The sounds were awful.
I picked him up and at first he tried to wriggle free but then I guess he got the scent of me and turned and licked my face. The gesture made me want to cry. Instead I sat down and patted and petted him and talked to him. Good old boy. You gotta cut this out, you know that? We’re gonna get you to the vet. Get you back to your old self again. You’ll see.
I was lying through my teeth. His heart was racing. He was ten years old, almost eleven. He’d been sustaining this kind of exertion for a day and a half.
I was amazed he’d made it this long.
I clipped the leash to his collar and carried him down the hall.
My mother still sat on the couch.
“You ready, mom?”
She stared down into her lap.
“I can’t, Rob. I can’t go with you. I know what the vet’s going to say. And I can’t do that to him. I just can’t.” Then she was crying again, her shoulders quaking. “You understand?
I could lie to the dog but not to her.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure. You go. He’s your dog too. Just give him to me for a minute, will you?”
I placed him on her lap and he stayed there quietly while she stroked him.
I thought she’d want some privacy so I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of juice and took my time drinking it until she called me.
She’d been crying again naturally but she kissed him goodbye on top of the head and moved her hand off his back so I lifted him up and took him outside into the bright spring sunshine and put him down on the lawn and walked with him and watched him sniff around like any dog would until he found a spot near the sidewalk that suited him and watched him lift his leg and piss a trace of himself into the fresh-cut grass for some passing dog to find.
Then I lifted him into the car and drove away with one hand on the wheel and the other holding onto his collar because he kept wanting to walk again, lurching up toward the unforgiving dashboard so that I had to gently pull him down again and drove the three or four miles to the vet’s office.
Everyone knew us there. Beau was a frequent visitor. The pretty dark-haired nurse took one look at him and with sweetness and concern rushed us to an examining table in a private room and went to fetch the doctor. I petted and talked to him and held him still until a few moments later Dr. Laury appeared. I filled her in on what was happening.
She touched him with care, more even than I was used to from her, wiped the blood old and new from his muzzle with a wet towel, listened to his heart and lungs and examined his eyes.
“I think he’s had a stroke of the optic nerve,” she said. “It’s called Giant Cell Arteritis—GCA. It’s caused by poor circulation to the blood vessels in the nerve. We’d have to run some bloods. And I’m afraid we’d have to do a biopsy of the temple region to be sure. I’ve got to be honest with you, this isn’t good.”
