T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

Nisha murmured a thank-you and stepped into the tiled foyer, thinking of the snake brain and the olfactory memories that lay coiled there. She smelled dog — smelled Admiral — with an overlay of old sock and furniture polish. The great room rose up before her like something transposed from a cathedral. It was a cold room, echoing and hollow, and she’d never liked it. “You mind if I wait in the family room?” she asked.

The maid — or rather the girl, the young woman, the young woman in the demeaning and stereotypical maid’s costume — had already started off in the direction of the kitchen, but she swung round now to give her a look of surprise and irritation. For a moment it seemed as if she might snap at her, but then, finally, she just shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

Nothing had changed in the paneled room that gave onto the garden, not as far as Nisha could see. There were the immense old high-backed leather armchairs and the antique Stickley sofa rescued from the law offices of Striker and Striker, the mahogany bar with the wine rack and the backlit shrine Mr. Striker had created in homage to the spirits of single-malt scotch whiskey, and overseeing it all, the oil portrait of Admiral with its dark heroic hues and golden patina of varnish. She remembered the day the painter had come to the house and posed the dog for the preliminary snapshots, Admiral uncooperative, Mrs. Striker strung tight as a wire and the inevitable squirrel bounding across the lawn at the crucial moment. The painter had labored mightily in his studio to make his subject look noble, snout elevated, eyes fixed on some distant, presumably worthy, object, but to Nisha’s mind an Afghan — any Afghan — looked inherently ridiculous, like some escapee from Sesame Street, and Admiral seemed a kind of concentrate of the absurd. He looked goofy, just that.

When she turned round, both the Strikers were there, as if they’d floated in out of the ether. As far as she could see, they hadn’t aged at all. Their skin was flawless, they held themselves as stiff and erect as the Ituri carvings they’d picked up on their trip to Africa and they tried hard to make small talk and avoid any appearance of briskness. In Mrs. Striker’s arms — Call me Gretchen, please — was an Afghan pup, and after the initial exchange of pleasantries, Nisha, her hand extended to rub the silk of the ears and feel the wet probe of the tiny snout on her wrist, began to get the idea. She restrained herself from asking after Admiral. “Is this his pup?” she asked instead. “Is this little Admiral?”

The Strikers exchanged a glance. The husband hadn’t said, Call me Cliff, hadn’t said much of anything, but now his lips compressed.

“Didn’t you read about it in the papers?”

There was an awkward pause. The pup began to squirm.

“Admiral passed,” Gretchen breathed. “It was an accident. We had him — well, we were in the park, the dog park … you know, the one where the dogs run free? You used to take him there, you remember, up off Sycamore? Well, you know how exuberant he was…”

“You really didn’t read about it?” There was incredulity in the husband’s voice.

“Well, I–I was away at college and then I took the first job I could find. Back here, I mean. Because of my mother. She’s been sick.”

Neither of them commented on this, not even to be polite.

“It was all over the press,” the husband said, and he sounded offended now. He adjusted his oversized glasses and cocked his head to look down at her in a way that brought the past rushing back.

“Newsweek did a story, USA Today — we were on Good Morning America, both of us.”

She was at a loss, the three of them standing there, the dog taking its spiked dentition to the underside of her wrist now, just the way Admiral used to when he was a pup. “For what?” she was about to say, when Gretchen came to the rescue.

“This is little Admiral. Admiral II, actually,” she said, ruffling the blond shag over the pup’s eyes.

The husband looked past her, out the window and into the yard, an ironic grin pressed to his lips. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” he said, “and it’s too bad he wasn’t a cat.”

Gretchen gave him a sharp look. “You make a joke of it,” she said, her eyes suddenly filling, “but it was worth every penny and you know it.” She mustered a long-suffering smile for Nisha. “Cats are simpler — their eggs are more mature at ovulation than dogs’ are.”

“I can get you a cat for thirty-two thou.”

“Oh, Cliff, stop. Stop it.”

He moved to his wife and put an arm round her shoulders. “But we didn’t want to clone a cat, did we, honey?” He bent his face to the dog’s, touched noses with him and let his voice rise to a falsetto,

“Did we now, Admiral? Did we?”

At seven-thirty the next morning, Nisha pulled up in front of the Strikers’ house and let her car wheeze and shudder a moment before killing the engine. She flicked the radio back on to catch the last fading chorus of a tune she liked, singing along with the sexy low rasp of the lead vocalist, feeling good about things — or better, anyway. The Strikers were giving her twenty-five dollars an hour, plus the same dental and health care package they offered the staff at their law firm, which was a whole solid towering brick wall of improvement over what she’d been making as a waitress at Johnny’s Rib Shack, sans health care, sans dental and sans any tip she could remember above ten percent over the pre-tax total because the people who came out to gnaw ribs were just plain cheap and no two ways about it. When she stepped out of the car, there was Gretchen coming down the front steps of the house with the pup in her arms, just as she had nine years ago when Nisha was a high school freshman taking on what she assumed was going to be a breeze of a summer job.

Nisha took the initiative of punching in the code herself and slipping through the gate to hustle up the walk and save Gretchen the trouble, because Gretchen was in a hurry, always in a hurry. She was dressed in a navy-blue suit with a double string of pearls and an antique silver pin in the shape of a bounding borzoi that seemed eerily familiar — it might have been the exact ensemble she’d been wearing when Nisha had told her she’d be quitting to go off to college. I’m sorry, Mrs. Striker, and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to work for you and Mr. Striker, she’d said, hardly able to contain the swell of her heart, but I’m going to college. On a scholarship. She’d had the acceptance letter in her hand to show her, thinking how proud of her Mrs. Striker would be, how she’d take her in her arms for a hug and congratulate her, but the first thing she’d said was, What about Admiral?

As Gretchen closed on her now, the pup wriggling in her arms, Nisha could see her smile flutter and die. No doubt she was already envisioning the cream-leather interior of her BMW (a 750i in Don’t-Even-Think-About-It Black) and the commute to the office and whatever was going down there, court sessions, the piles of documents, contention at every turn. Mr. Striker — Nisha would never be able to call him Cliff, even if she lived to be eighty, but then he’d have to be a hundred and ten and probably wouldn’t hear her, anyway — was already gone, in his matching Beemer, his and hers.

Gretchen didn’t say good morning or hi or how are you? or thanks for coming, but just enfolded her in the umbrella of her perfume and handed her the dog. Which went immediately heavy in Nisha’s arms, fighting for the ground with four flailing paws and the little white ghoul’s teeth that fastened on the top button of her jacket. Nisha held on. Gave Gretchen a big grateful-for-the-job-and-the-health-care smile, no worries, no worries at all.