Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

Fifteen minutes later Phil came in, his nose red, his eyes wild, and said, “What in the hell happened?” and when Jean-Michel started to explain, Phil looked at him as if he couldn't understand a word he was saying, as if he were speaking a language that was eerily similar to English yet not English, and Jean-Michel trailed off into silence.

“Phil,” I said, “go find out about Blister.”

He barged past the reception desk into the hospital room and was gone for a long ten minutes. During this time Jean-Michel wrote down his name, address, and phone number, tucked the piece of paper into the pocket of my coat, and left me alone with the glossy photographs of healthy cats and dogs. When Phil came back he was crying, so I thought the worst, but he took my head in his hands and told me that Blister was torn up, that Blister was bloody and weak, but that Blister was going to be fine.

At home Blister recovered quickly. He had to wear that lampshade on his head for a few days, kept knocking into things without understanding why, and Phil and I had some good laughs about that, but he didn't seem to mind. I recovered, too. They couldn't give me stitches because dogs' mouths are septic, so I had a hole in my calf that reminded me of a tin can ripped open using an improper tool; it hurt like hell before it got better. Phil contacted the animal-control officer, who went to Jean-Michel's house next to the apartment complex and examined Sweetpea. When a dog breaks out of a fenced area and attacks a person, the officer told us, it's designated a dangerous dog. The owner must put up collateral against the possibility of the dog ever attacking anybody else, and if it does, the dog will die. This information was relayed with a certain amount of relish. The owner, he added, must also take out quite a lot of expensive insurance. And at his behest Jean-Michel's brother, the doctor, sent us a check to cover my medical expenses and Blister's.

March turned to April, though the weather didn't get any better. One day I was home alone with Blister — the walking wounded, as Phil called us — when the doorbell rang and Jean-Michel stood there on the front porch in that stupid red Gore-Tex jacket. I let him in, he took off his boots, and then we sat down in the living room.

“So,” he said, his voice still low and melodic. “You are all right. I was concerned.”

“I'm okay.”

“Ellen,” he said. “Is it all right if I call you Ellen?”

“Call me whatever you want,” I said. “I don't care.”

“I've come here today, Ellen, to tell you that we are going to contest the dangerous-dog designation. My family, we cannot afford it. The collateral, the insurance. It is too much.”

Blister came into the room and lay down at his feet. Jean-Michel reached down, stroking the dog's head while looking at his healing wounds, his buffed nails long and elegant. The palms of his hands were a much lighter color than the backs, and I found myself staring at the two colors as he gestured.

“What am I supposed to say?” I asked him.

“You will be called to trial,” he said. “To testify about what happened. I wanted to ask you something, because I have a feeling about you. I can tell that in your heart you are a kind woman, Ellen. I wanted to ask you to be kind. At the trial, be kind.”

“Be kind?” I said. Nobody had ever asked me such a thing before. I had never thought of myself as being kind, or unkind, either. The issue had never crossed my mind.

Jean-Michel's eyes were dark, dark brown. As I looked at him a strange thing happened. I fell a bit in love with him then, in that one look; it was simple and immediate, like walking through a doorway. I was so attracted to him, in fact, that I could hardly breathe; but I also wanted to know everything about him, what every day of his life was like from his childhood in Haiti to his nights at the hotel. I'd been married to Phil for six years and nothing like this had happened before — crushes, yes, an occasional passing attraction to someone else's husband at a summer barbecue after too much beer. But not this: a moment when you felt like your whole life could change.

I stood up. “I'll think about it,” I said.

After he left, I lay down on the living room carpet and looked into Blister's eyes. Since the attack we'd had a special bond, and he tended to stick close to me almost all the time, as if he were still looking for the protection I had not, at the crucial instant, been able to offer.

“What am I going to do, Blister?” I asked him. “I'm in trouble with the Dutchman again.”

Blister wagged his tail, once, and gave me no answer, which was understandable. Being in trouble with the Dutchman was my own personal code, one I shared with no one, not even Genevieve, my closest friend at work. I'd met the Dutchman just before Phil and I got engaged. I was in school for the summer session, and he was in one of my classes. I called him the Dutchman as a joke — he'd been born in this country, the same as I was— because his hair was so blond, his cheeks so round and red, that he looked like a grown-up version of that kid with his finger in the dike. His name was Albert, and when he sat down next to me in class, my whole skin registered his presence. I could feel when he was looking at me and when he wasn't, and at breaks, in the hallway, we talked and made jokes about the professor and the whole time were really talking about something else, we were talking about each other. Class met Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and for me it was as if the rest of the week didn't exist. I wasn't even alive on those days. But when I saw Albert I was. He knew I had a boyfriend, but he could also tell how I felt, and so he was confused, and bided his time. And I was this close to cheating on Phil. I mean my body was already cheating. It had already made the decision to be attracted to someone else, and the rest of me was only postponing the inevitable.

At the end of July, before the inevitable happened, Phil proposed. I loved him then, as I do now, and I said yes. When Albert asked me out a few days later, I said, “I'm engaged,” and we stopped talking in the hallways.

Ever since then, whenever I've fallen victim to these few passing crushes and summertime barbecue attractions, I've said jokingly to myself, I'm in trouble with the Dutchman, and remembering the romance of Phil's proposal, I've been able to shut it off with no problem, as easily as turning a faucet.

This was not like that at all.

We received a notice in the mail that a date had been set for the dangerous-dog trial. It was at city hall, with a judge and everything, and Phil offered to take a day off work to go with me, but I told him I was fine. Ever since the attack he'd been treating me like a delicate vase he was carrying from one room to another, something too decorative and valuable for everyday use, and it was driving me insane. I dressed with care, wearing loose pants that could be rolled up, if necessary, to show my ugly scar. I'd expected the trial to be in a regular courtroom, like on TV, but it was just a conference room full of tables, with the judge sitting behind one at the back of the room. She was a well-manicured woman in her late thirties, wearing a yellow wool suit. The animal-control officer was there, and Jean-Michel and his brother's wife and their daughter, and their lawyer. Jean-Michel's brown eyes flashed when he saw me, and I knew that whatever I was feeling, he was feeling it too.

The animal-control officer acted as the prosecutor. Jean-Michel's family, the Chevaliers, had hired a cheap lawyer from the look of his suit; he slouched there with his fedora on the table in front of him, next to his briefcase. The little girl, Mireille, glowered at me. The judge explained to all of us that the hearing would be held in confidence, and that we would have to leave the room when other people were testifying. They began with Mrs. Chevalier, Jean-Michel's sister-in-law, and the rest of us filed outside. Mireille put her small hand in Jean-Michel's.