T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

The refrigerator door swung shut, the little light blinking out, the heft of the meat satisfying in her hand. “It’s insane, I admit it — hey, I’m with you. You think I wanted to grow up to be a dogsitter?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you. Except you got your degree — you need a degree for that, dogsitting, I mean?” She hadn’t moved, not a muscle, her feet propped up, the cup in one hand, spoon in the other.

“No,” Nisha said, feeling the blood rise to her face, “no, you don’t. But what about you — you need a degree to be a maid?”

That hit home. For a moment, Frankie said nothing, just looked from her to the dog — which was begging now, clawing at Nisha’s leg with his forepaws — and back again. “This is just temporary,” she said finally.

“Yeah, me too.” Nisha gave her a smile, no harm done, just establishing a little turf, that was all. “Totally.”

For the first time, Frankie’s expression changed: she almost looked as if she were going to laugh. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said, “temporary help, that’s all we are. We’re the temps. And Mr. and Mrs. Striker — dog crazy, plain crazy, two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar crazy — they’re permanent.”

And now Nisha laughed, and so did Frankie — a low rumble of amusement that made the dog turn its head. The meat was on the counter now, the cellophane wrapper pulled back. Nisha selected a slice of Black Forest ham and held it out to him. “Sit!” she said. “Go ahead, sit!” And the dog, just like his father or progenitor or donor or whatever he was, looked at her stupidly till she dropped the meat on the tile and the wet plop of its arrival made him understand that here was something to eat.

“You’re going to spoil that dog,” Frankie said.

Nisha went unerringly to the cabinet where the bread was kept, and there it was, Jewish rye, a fresh loaf, springy to the touch. She gave Frankie a glance over her shoulder. “Yeah,” she said. “I think that’s the idea.”

—

A month drifted by, as serene a month as Nisha could remember. She was making good money, putting in ten-hour days during the week and half days on the weekends, reading through all the books she hadn’t had time for in college, exhausting the Strikers’ DVD collection and opening her own account at the local video store, walking, lazing, napping the time away. She gained five pounds and vowed to start swimming regularly in the Strikers’ pool, but hadn’t got round to it yet. Some days she’d help Frankie with the cleaning and the laundry so the two of them could sit out on the back deck with their feet up, sharing a bottle of sweet wine or a joint. As for the dog, she tried to be conscientious about the whole business of imprinting it with the past — or a past — though she felt ridiculous. Four years of college for this? Wars were being fought, people were starving, there were diseases to conquer, children to educate, good to do in the world, and here she was reliving her adolescence in the company of an inbred semi-retarded clown of a cloned Afghan hound because two childless rich people decreed it should be so. All right. She knew she’d have to move on. Knew it was temporary. Swore that she’d work up a new résumé and start sending it out — but then the face of her mother, sick from vomiting and with her scalp as smooth and slick as an eggplant, would rise up to shame her. She threw the ball to the dog. Took him to the park. Let the days fall round her like leaves from a dying tree.

And then one afternoon, on the way back from the dog park, Admiral jerking at the leash beside her and the sky opening up to a dazzle of sun and pure white tufts of cloud that made her feel as if she were floating untethered through the universe along with them, she noticed a figure stationed outside the gate of the Strikers’ house. As she got closer, she saw that it was a young man dressed in baggy jeans and a T-shirt, his hair fanning out in rusty blond dreads and a goatee of the same color clinging to his chin. He was peering over the fence. Her first thought was that he’d come to rob the place, but she dismissed it — he was harmless; you could see that a hundred yards off. Then she saw the paint smears on his jeans and wondered if he was a painting contractor come to put in a bid on the house, but that wasn’t it either. He looked more like an amateur artist — and here she had to laugh to herself — the kind who specializes in dog portraits. But she was nearly on him now, thinking to brush by him and slip through the gate before he could accost her, whatever he wanted, when he turned suddenly and his face caught fire. “Wow!” he said. “Wow, I can’t believe it! You’re her, aren’t you, the famous dogsitter? And this”—he went down on one knee and made a chirping sound deep in his throat—“this is Admiral. Right? Am I right?”

Admiral went straight to him, lurching against the leash, and in the next instant he was flopping himself down on the hot pavement, submitting to the man’s caresses. The rope of a tail whapped and thrashed, the paws gyrated, the puppy teeth came into play. “Good boy,” the man crooned, his dreads riding a wave across his brow. “He likes that, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he, boy?”

Nisha didn’t say anything. She just watched, the smallest hole dug out of the canyon of her boredom, till the man rose to his feet and held out his hand even as Admiral sprang up to hump his leg with fresh enthusiasm. “I’m Erhard,” he said, grinning wide. “And you’re Nisha, right?”

“Yes,” she said, taking his hand despite herself. She was on the verge of asking how he knew her name, but there was no point: she already understood. He was from the press. In the past month there must have been a dozen reporters on the property, the Strikers stroking their vanity and posing for pictures and answering the same idiotic questions over and over— A quarter million dollars: that’s a lot for a dog, isn’t it? — and she herself had been interviewed twice already. Her mother had even found a fuzzy color photo of her and Admiral (couchant, lap) on the Web under the semi-hilarious rubric CLONE-SITTER. So this guy was a reporter — a foreign reporter, judging from the faint trace of an accent and the blue-eyed rearing height of him, German, she supposed. Or Austrian. And he wanted some of her time.

“Yes,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I am from Die Weltwoche, and I wanted to ask of you — prevail upon you, beg you — for a few moments? Is that possible? For me? Just now?”

She gave him a long slow appraisal, flirting with him, yes, definitely flirting. “I’ve got nothing but time,” she said. And then, watching his grin widen: “You want a sandwich?”

They ate on the patio overlooking the pool. She was dressed casually in shorts and flip-flops and her old Tupac tee, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because the shirt — too small by half — lifted away from her hips when she leaned back in the chair, showing off her navel and the onyx ring she wore there. He was watching her, chattering on about the dog, lifting the sandwich to his lips and putting it down again, fooling with the lens on the battered old Hasselblad he extracted from the backpack at his feet. The sun made sequins on the surface of the pool. Admiral lounged beneath the table, worrying a rawhide bone. She was feeling good, better than good, sipping a beer and watching him back.

They had a little conversation about the beer. “Sorry to offer you Miller, but that’s all we have — or the Strikers have, I mean.”

“Miller High Life,” he said, lifting the bottle to his mouth. “Great name. What person would not want to live the high life? Even a dog. Even Admiral. He lives the high life, no?”