BARBARA LOUISE BROOKS
With her bare breasts nestled into the folds of fur that ripple behind Charlotte’s neck, Lillie often goes all night without touching Pete.
Lillie sleeps on her side, in a fetal curl like a cradle, that is just open enough for Charlotte to wiggle into. Within minutes of folding her naked limbs around the dog’s chocolate body, Lillie melts into the soft center of a molten sleep, and all night long, she grips the almost-human retriever with the haunting yellow eyes, who, by day, she nurtures and confides in, shares her meals with, and bathes with baby shampoo. From this angle, Lillie can’t see Pete on the other side of the bed. His back is to the dog, and his face is to the wall.
There’s ample room for all three of them in the queen-sized bed, yet Pete can’t understand why he should have to sleep with a dog who sheds and snores and weighs almost as much as his wife does. Ever since Lillie announced that Charlotte would be allowed to sleep on the bed all night, their lovemaking has stopped pretty much altogether.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Lillie has said. “I don’t think one thing has anything to do with the other.”
Pete doesn’t sleep so well anymore. Alone in the dark with a light bulb gadget illuminating a half a page at a time, he reads awhile when he first gets into bed: he on his side, Lillie on hers, and the dog in the middle. He reads instead of shoving the dog onto the floor. He reads instead of shaking Lillie awake and pleading with her to tell him what’s happened to them. Thrillers and crime stories that choke him with their predictable suspense.
Between chapters, Pete lightly touches the ends of Lillie’s tangled hair, which seems to be scribbled onto the pillowcase canvas with a burnt sienna crayon. He remembers how short and straight she wore it when they were first married, five years ago. How one day on a whim, she’d walked in to a shop in the Village and had it cut so short that in the sun, Pete could see clear through to the curvature of her scalp. She tried to get him to go in too, but instead he watched a ballgame on television in a bar next door. Back then, they could spend a few hours apart and still want to hook up at the end of an afternoon.
These days, Pete works late while Lillie goes to the movies or to the gym, and once in awhile they eat dinner together at the tiny table that folds down off the kitchen wall. After a year of plotting Lillie’s basal temperature on a flimsy paper chart, they make love matter-of-factly, maybe once a month. On those nights, Pete finds Charlotte asleep in Lillie’s arms, with her head on his pillow. When he prods the dog to move over, she looks up at him lazily, and maneuvers her body in even deeper. When Pete tries to kiss Lillie, Charlotte pokes her wet nose right in between their lips. Or she nibbles on Lillie’s earlobe and Lillie doesn’t push her away. After awhile, Pete can’t tell who is making who moan, or where the sound is coming from.
It’s been three years since Lillie tiptoed into the apartment at dawn, smeared with dry blood and funky-smelling. While Pete had watched a World Series rerun on the VCR, Lillie and two other novice midwives in nightgowns from Bergdorf’s had sat vigil in an apartment down the hall, taking turns awkwardly catching one bloody sac after the next, like water balloons, as they were squeezed from Sophie’s womb into a New York co-op instead of a barn in Montana or wherever else a bitch might like to give birth. Moonlight had mixed with the twinkling lights from insomniacs’ apartments, while the sire, reduced to a bit player in the core drama of his simple life, scratched a paternal path into the herringbone floor outside the master bedroom.
“Hey, I live her too,” he seemed to say.
It was morning when Lillie tiptoed back down the hall.
“I have to have one,” she had said as she passed Pete, who was making coffee and catching the overnight scores on ESPN.
“Yes!” he cheered when he heard that the Mets beat the Padres in extra innings.
For the next week, Lillie had stayed home from work, just so she could stand over the makeshift crib and watch the eight chocolate puppies, lined up like tootsie rolls, nursing at their mother’s sore teats. When they’d stumble away like drunken sailors and fall asleep in a pile, Lillie would nap too. She’d dream of lying among them in the whelping box, cushioned in her own soft cover of down. When the smell of mother’s milk, and saliva, and urine, and feces filled the room, the puppies opened their eyes.
Lillie knew immediately which one was meant for her. There was just one with a hairless Buddha belly and wise yellow eyes that saw straight through to her longing. One who spoke to her directly, and listened to her with compassion and soul. Lillie’s hands trembled as she tied a piece of gold yarn around the tiny creature’s neck, as proof to the endless stream of puppy hunters with houses in the Hamptons that this one splendid being had already been chosen.
“She’s perfect,” Lillie said when she brought the puppy home to meet Pete.
“No,” Pete said. “She’s not.” He showed Lillie the smallest fleck of white hairs under the dog’s chin: a flaw that, to Pete, interrupted her otherwise seamless flow of silky brown fur. The spot was distracting. It was disturbing, really, the more he thought about it. But she smelled so good.
“Why do you want a dog so much?” Pete asked. The last dog he had was a miniature collie that was hit by a car when Pete was 10. The dog had kept running: back into the house, up the stairs, and under Pete’s single bed, where she finally flopped down and let out a sigh so heavy it had to be her last.
“She’ll be like a little friend,” Lillie said. The puppy, wrapped like an infant in a yellow fleece blanket, was asleep in her arms.
“But you have friends.”
“Oh come on. Look at her,” she said, tucking the dog’s cool snout into the loose sleeve of Pete’s t-shirt.
“You’re out of your mind,” he said shrugging them off. “Cabs come whizzing around every corner. You’ll step off the curb one day and come home with an empty leash.”
“Oh God,” Lillie said. “Can’t you ever just say ‘Wow, what a great idea.’?”
“But we just bought rugs.”
“Right,” Lillie said to Pete, “And if I ever get pregnant are you gonna say ‘But you just bought a new pair of jeans.’?”
Lillie buried her nose in the puppy’s neck and closed her eyes. Pete saw that her lashes were the same silky brown of the puppy’s ears, and that they both had an extra pinch of skin between their eyebrows. He thought it was only old women who looked like their schnauzers, but he could see it already: Charlotte and Lillie would start to look alike. When Lillie looked back up at him, Pete saw the flecks of yellow in her eyes.
Pete reached over to touch the puppy’s nose, and he was surprised how leathery and spongy it was. Like a fig, or like the skin around Lillie’s nipples. Maybe they could walk the dog together in the evenings, he thought. Spend Sundays in the park.
“OK, OK,” Pete said finally. “We can keep the dog.”
Lillie kissed and squeezed the dog until she squealed. “I told you he’d come around,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper without looking at Pete
“But under one condition,” he said. “If we ever get divorced, whoever splits has to leave the dog behind.”
“That’s nuts,” Lillie said. “She’s gonna be my dog and you know it.”
“No,” said Pete. “Assuming we’re together, she’ll be both of ours. But if not, whoever gets left will be more lonely, and that’s who’ll need the dog the most.”
“OK,” Lillie had said. “Whatever.” But Pete thought she said it too lightly.
“No, I’m serious,” he pressed. “If I were to leave you, you could keep the dog. But if you leave me, the dog is mine.” He had said it so gravely that Lillie touched the side of his face with the palm of her free hand.
“Alright, alright,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
From the day Charlotte arrived, Pete felt like he was back in high school, watching his first girlfriend drive past him in a red Camaro with another guy. During the first weeks, he would wake up alone in the middle of the night and find Lillie sitting on the floor of the kitchen, with her back against the cold cabinets and her knees up. The sweet-smelling lump would be fast asleep in her lap.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?” Pete would say to Lillie, wanting her back.
“In a minute,” would be her answer, but she wouldn’t tear herself away. Some nights she would curl up around the dog and fall asleep on the linoleum floor behind the wooden safety gate that penned them in. When weeks went by and Lillie was still completely consumed with Charlotte, Pete changed his strategy.
“If you don’t come to bed, I swear, you’ll come home one day and that dog’ll be gone.”
One Sunday in February, pale lemon light streams through Central Park, across 89th Street, and into the wide picture window of Pete and Lillie’s 10th floor bedroom. It has snowed all night and the rooftops and cartops are coated with a divine powder that, despite falling through the city air, is somehow still white. Charlotte stirs first, stretching and slowly rolling over onto her back. Her hind legs float open, like the wings of a big brown butterfly, and she balances with her front paws bent at the wrists, her jowls relaxed and her mouth half-open, looking upside down at Lillie. The brown hairs under her chin are just beginning to fade, and a few strands of premature gray spray the edges of her belly. The motion in the bed wakes Lillie, who props herself up on one elbow and buries her nose in Charlotte’s silky coat.
“Go to the park?” Lillie whispers. “Go for a run?”
Pete hears them and gets out of bed too. He slips his hat off the foot board and onto his head, tugging the brim down as though he’s sitting behind third base at a Mets game on a sunny afternoon. While the coffee brews, he shuffles around their cramped apartment in his flannel boxer shorts and socks, picking up stuffed toys, bones and tennis balls and tossing them onto the empty monogrammed dog bed that was a gift from his parents to their grand-dog. Pete considers inviting himself along, but by the time he skims the box scores in the Times, he talks himself out of it.
In the meantime, Charlotte watches Lillie dress in top-of-the-line running gear that reflects and repels. With her hat and gloves, a Power Bar, liver treats and her headphones, they could be gone all day. Lillie snaps a leash around the dog’s neck.
“We’re outta here,” she calls to Pete, and closes the door behind her. Charlotte’s tail, like a rudder, leads them down the quiet hall to the elevator. Lillie presses the button, and Charlotte waits, electric in her eagerness to please.
“Let’s go, baby,” Lillie whispers when the doors open.
Outside, Lillie stops at the first corner, and Charlotte sits at her side. Two people are walking toward them, winding a loose, sort of sideways path, with their arms wound around each other’s hips, so that, from their shoulders to their knees, no light can pass between them. Their eyes are half closed, and they gently kick up feathery tufts of snow, and watch it fall. For sure the girl, and probably also the guy, is wearing the very same blue jeans and soft black t-shirt that spent the night in a crumpled heap at the foot of the bed. They are walking slowly, rhythmically, the way people do when they can still smell their first lovemaking – while they try to walk and kiss and carry the first Sunday Times and the first bag of bagels they’ve ever bought together. No doubt the two of them chipped in on this purchase with crumpled dollar bills and a handful of loose change, half of which had jangled in his pocket, and half in hers.
Lillie watches the couple as they stop in front of the brick doorway of a brownstone walkup. The streetlight changes from red, to green and back to red again, while the girl fumbles with her keys and the guy presses his lips against the back of her neck. Several sections of the heavy newspaper slip out from under his arm, and they turn to each other, laughing, before they bend down to pick it all up. Standing there, Lillie feels a hot flush of air and a buzzing in her bones, as though she is walking over a subway grate while a train is barreling through.
The light changes again and Lillie steps off the curb. But instead of crossing toward the park, she wanders uptown in the fresh snow, 15 maybe 20 blocks, stopping often to allow Charlotte to dig up scraps of food or garbage that litter Columbus Avenue. She finally stops at a coffee bar that allows dogs inside, and orders their usual – a cappuccino for her, and a banana muffin to share – and settles into a corner table for two. Charlotte rests her chin on Lillie’s knee and waits to be fed. A woman sitting alone watches them from across the room, as Lillie breaks off chunks of the muffin, and puts them into Charlotte’s gentle mouth, which has been bred to carry felled birds without crushing their fragile bones.
Lillie savors her coffee, never taking her eyes off the dog. She smooths the bumpy cowlick that runs the length of Charlotte’s nose. Smells the translucent insides of the dog’s triangular ears. Then, with her fingers, she scoops the sticky foam out from around the inside edges of her cup, and lets Charlotte lap it up.
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