Carolyn Parkhurst - The Dogs of Babel

When I got home, Lexy was chopping vegetables for dinner. I kissed her on the top of her head and sat down across from her at the kitchen table. She smiled at me.

“Hi,” she said. “How was your day?”

“Good,” I said. “Excellent. I had a great idea.”

“Tell me about it,” she said. She pushed aside the onion slices she’d been working on and started in on a red pepper.

“Well, it’s an idea for you, actually. I’ve got your next project for you.”

She put down her knife and looked at me warily. “Okay,” she said. “But you know I don’t really tend to take other people’s ideas for my work. It kind of has to come from me, you know? I have to be inspired by something on my own. It’s like, remember when you published your first linguistics textbook, and all of a sudden your uncle started telling you all his ideas for mystery novels? It’s not like you were about to give up all your own work to work on someone else’s ideas.”

“Well, no, of course not. His ideas were terrible. But I think what I’ve got is pretty good. Just let me show it to you.”

She sighed. “Fine, but just be aware that I may not want to take your advice.”

I pulled my drawings and photocopy art out of my jacket pocket and smoothed the pages on the table. Lexy looked at them skeptically. She didn’t smile.

“See,” I said, “it’s figures from mythology done with dog faces. Isn’t that kind of interesting?”

She shrugged. “I guess so,” she said.

“Well, these aren’t done very well, of course, but I think that if you did them…” She didn’t say anything. She was staring at the table. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“See,” I went on, “I got the idea from your story about the myth of Lorelei and the way that when Lorelei, the dog, showed up, she kind of looked like the character from the myth. And I just started envisioning this mythical mermaid with Lorelei’s face.” I shuffled through the pages until I found the one with the Ridgeback. “Look, it’s this one here.”

She picked up the paper and looked at it, then let it fall to the table.

“It’s just not that simple, Paul,” she said. There was a sudden sharpness to her voice. “Look, some of these can’t even be done as masks. This Venus on the clamshell thing—if you just did her head, no one would understand what it was supposed to be.”

“Well, you just give it a title that explains it—that’s what artists do, isn’t it? You call it ‘Sheltie Venus’ or something. ‘Sheltie Venus Number 1.’”

“Oh, so now I’m supposed to do more than one of them? A whole series of sheltie Venuses? And this is going to be my claim to fame?”

“Lexy, I spent half the day working on this. You could at least…”

“Well, I didn’t ask you to.”

“I don’t know why you’re getting so upset,” I said, my own voice rising. “I was just trying to help. You’ve been sitting around for weeks, trying to come up with something new to work on. Why won’t you at least consider this?”

“Because it’s a bullshit idea.”

“I don’t see what makes it worse than some of the things you’ve come up with. ‘Laundry-shaped Souls’? What the hell is that?”

She stood up from the table and glared at me with such rage that I had to look away. “I can’t believe you just said that,” she said, her voice shaking. She was clenching and unclenching her fists. She made a noise of strangled anger and frustration, and in a single motion swept everything off the table, the papers, the vegetables, the cutting board. The knife hit the floor with such force that it bounced up at her, and she had to step back to avoid being hit by it.

I was not charitable. “Great,” I said coldly. “Here we go again.”

She raised her fist and banged it hard on the table once, twice, then stopped and rubbed her hand as if she’d hurt it.

“Go to hell,” she said, and left the room, her movements stiff and jerky. I heard the basement door slam.

I picked my papers off the floor and smoothed them out, but I left the mess of the vegetables. The wooden cutting board, I saw, had broken in half.

I paced the kitchen floor, growing more and more angry. Why did everything have to be so damn hard? There are people, I thought, whose lives are easier than this. There are people who don’t have to worry that their tiniest acts of kindness will be met with fury by the ones they love. It was in that moment that I thought, for the first time, about leaving Lexy. For a moment, only for a moment, I saw my life without her and I saw it to be better. Easier. Lighter. In that moment, that second heart of mine seemed to soar free. And it was in that same moment that I heard a cry from downstairs.

I went down to Lexy’s workshop to find her sitting on the couch, crying. She had a book on her lap, a big coffee-table book of African masks, with a piece of paper on top of it. She was holding her hands in front of her, looking at them. They were covered with a red liquid that I thought at first was blood. There was a pool of the same liquid seeping into the paper.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was just so mad,” she said. “I just didn’t know what to do with it.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, I thought maybe it would help if I tried to write it down, but as soon as I started writing, I lost control and started pounding the pen into the paper as hard as I could, and I was stabbing the paper with it, and the pen just broke.”

“That’s ink?” I said.

She nodded. She dropped her head and began to sob harder.

“What’s wrong with me?” she said. “I broke a pen. What kind of person does that?”

I just stood there and watched her cry. I tried to summon the strength to go to her, to comfort her, but then I saw the wreckage of the pen in her hands, and I realized what pen it was she had broken. It was a gold pen I had received from my parents when I graduated college. I used it to grade papers and exams; I kept it filled with red ink for that purpose. It was a pen that meant a great deal to me, and even though I’ve spent every day since then wishing I had acted differently, in that one moment I just couldn’t bring myself to be kind.

“I’m going upstairs,” I said. “Do you think you can avoid damaging any more of my things?”

I left her sitting there, crying, her hands covered with ink like blood.

I didn’t see her for the rest of the night. She stayed in the basement until after I’d gone to bed. And even though my anger had waned by the time I went to sleep, even though I cleaned the vegetables from the floor and left a note saying I was sorry, the harm was already done. That night, while I slept, Lexy picked up the phone and called Lady Arabelle and told her the secret she had not seen fit to tell me. “I’m lost,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” And Wednesday morning, when she woke up, when she got dressed, when she apologized to me over breakfast, when she kissed me once on the mouth before I left for work, she did so knowing it was the last day of her life.

Or perhaps not. I think I may be wrong on that last point. Knowing my Lexy, with her faith in impulse, her “suicide is just a moment,” I think she may not have known for sure until she reached the top of that tree and looked down at what lay below. And that, I can see now, is the great lie of her life and the great lie of her death. Because for most of us, suicide is a moment we’ll never choose. It’s only people like Lexy, who know they might choose it eventually, who believe they have a choice to make. And so Lexy, walking through her day, laying puzzles for me to solve, let herself believe there was a chance she might climb down from that tree unharmed. And so she granted herself absolution.