Wild Child and Other Stories Page 19

  “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 note-pad 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 exposé 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.”