Robert Calder - The Dogs

Bauer was frozen. The wild ululation pulled at his guts like a tide, summoning him from his body. The sound peaked, then spiraled down through long moments into a haunted stillness. The dog stared up through the window, contemplating the moon. Bauer hardly breathed. The animal turned its head. It looked into Bauer's eyes and regarded him calmly. Bauer grew disjointed and apprehensive. He was dislodged from the habitat of his own being and drawn into a foreign realm, where he could find neither landmark nor handhold. He felt himself rolling in some murky river, attacked by vertigo, fear burgeoning, while the dog, concrete and certain in this universe, remarked him with indifferent sufferance. It became unbearable, but Bauer couldn't pull away. Orph released him finally, turning back to the moon. The animal was alone once more, though Bauer still stood by the door, and it lifted its head and issued forth its call, its testament of vassalage and barony, its acknowledgment, assertion, and integration, its clear cry of dominion across the emptiness.

Bauer returned to his room. He lay with his arms at his sides and his eyes open, listening to Orph. The dog's communion ended soon, and Bauer heard nothing more from the animal that night, not a creak of board beneath its weight, a scratch of nail against the floor.

The Country Inn was a beef and seafood place with barn-siding walls, captain's chairs and gingham tablecloths. Bauer took a table and ordered a double Scotch. Ursula still hadn't arrived when he finished, so he ordered another, and midway through it she appeared in the broad arch that demarcated the bar from the dining room. She wore heels, and a skirt and jacket of pale green. She was a tall woman, but had always been comfortable with her height and she liked the way heels turned the line of her calves.

She was handsome, with green eyes, clear skin and fine bones; and high-breasted and willowy, had a tight round bottom and superb legs.

She was supple, strong, like a swimmer, sure in her movements, and quick to judge. Men either disliked her or desired her passionately, sometimes both.

Bauer had always desired her, still did; the inaccessibility of her self, which he had discovered-or rather eventually had to accept as intrinsic rather than a deliberate, protective mode, which could have been relaxed or even discarded in time-only after they'd been married some years, had disappointed him but not diminished his love of her.

They greeted. He held a chair for her, an unpopular convention he couldn't break.

He saw that she'd dyed the gray out of her hair; it was the first personal uncertainty he'd ever seen in her. He felt compassion; he was also angered a little-she had taxed him sorely for his own confusions, though his had not been physical.

Her new hair stripped a few years from her, which mattered nothing to him, but he supposed it was why she'd done it.

"I like your hair," he said.

"Thank you." She was careful, examining the compliment for obligation.

Watching her, he knew it wasn't just another man, which had been responsible for her last period of coolness toward him, but that she wanted to finish it. Ordinarily when they dined together he cooked at his house and she stayed over the night.

She didn't seem in a hurry. Over appetizers, they talked about Michael and Jeff, and about each other's work briefly since he was no more interested in what new lines she was buying for the department store, to whose executive stratum she belonged, than she was in his late adolescents-and then social topics. They were both intelligent and they liked each other's minds. Together, they'd been given more to intellection than emotion.

People of intimacy, of personal revelation and inquiry, had unsettled them, especially Ursula. She detested public ness and thought candor a weakness.

They were easy enough through dinner, in the molds of habit, and Bauer actually enjoyed it.

Over coffee she said, "I want to talk to you seriously, Alex."

"Okay. About us?"

"Yes. Bluntly, I think it's time we get divorced."

"You don't see any possibility of making it work?"

"No."

"I don't think it's likely either, but I'd be willing to try, just on the chance. It'd make a better ending if we were both sure it was dead."

Not unkindly, she said, "Alex, please, give it up. It's possible we could get along-we like each other, at least I like you, underneath all this melancholy and existential malaise you've been indulging in-but what for, what would be the point? Being friends hardly justifies the daily work of living together."

He smiled. "Well, you fuck good."

"So do you when you're not questing the meaning of life, but then so do a sufficient number of other people, and one hardly needs to be married to fuck, so that's quite irrelevant, isn't it?"

"The formality of a divorce would seem irrelevant too, unless one of us wanted to marry again."

"I find marriage a useful concept in hunting societies and on frontiers, but a senseless gauntlet otherwise. You, of course, are entitled to your own views, but since you agree that the formality or lack of it is of no special importance, then you shouldn't have any objection. I'm bothered by the ambiguity and I'd like to resolve it."

"That's the problem with ambiguities, they can bother your soul to pieces.

Unfortunately we live in a sea of them, and part of the quality of an ambiguity is its impossibility of resolution."

"Well, here's one you can resolve, and presto, your burden becomes lighter by one. Come on Alex, don't go clever. Will you be pleasant, or do we have to send lawyers into the arena?"

Bauer signaled the waitress and ordered two brandies. "Sure enough," he said to Ursula. "Let's get divorced."

She was suspicious.

"I mean it," he said. "It's okay."

She nodded. "Thank you, Alex."

"Jesus, you're polite-you're welcome:"

The brandies came. Bauer lifted his. "To a long happy divorce."

"On the surface you appear to be dealing with this well. But I wonder whether you're really dealing with it at all."

"I am," he said soberly. "What reaction did you have in mind for me?"

She shrugged.

He lit another cigarette from the stub of the one in the ashtray. He inhaled and coughed.

"You should stop that," she said. "It'll kill you."

"Maybe. I'll quit someday. We don't have to hassle over the kids or money or anything, do we?"

"Not unless you want to change the way things are now."

"I'd like them to live with me."

She shook her head. "It's better for them to be with me."

"Probably, for them anyway."

"But as they grow, if they ever want to go and live with you, I won't fight it."

"Fair enough." He was quiet several moments. "Ursula, don't cut yourself off. Love or whatever, some kind of union, it's a context in which people can transcend themselves and become larger, more multiple than they could be alone."

"Your experiences would hardly seem to lead to a theory of such rapture."

"We didn't find the way, that's all."

"Oh for God's sake. That's romantic claptrap, Alex. Do you know what's real? Stone is real. That's all. You're burying yourself in intellectual quicksand, Alex, you're destroying yourself inside your skull. Don't do it." She put a hand over his. "The kind of love we were taught to believe in doesn't exist," she said softly. "And that hurt us both. It wasn't either of our faults. I am fond of you, Alex, even if you can't understand the simplicity of that."

Bauer placed his other hand atop Ursula's. "Then, in the spirit of camaraderie, why don't you come and spend a friendly night with me."

Ursula pulled away. "You can be detestable."

"It was a joke. My brave smile into the face of horror. Inside, is a man who weeps." He said it with self mockery the only way Ursula would tolerate it, but it was fairly true.