Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

“Try the dog park,” I said, and Owen turned left and then left again and there was the shuttered gate of the park, padlocked for the night.

We got out of the car and walked the perimeter, calling the dog’s name into the empty air. He would have come if he had heard us. I knew that. He wasn’t there.

“I’m so sorry,” Owen said.

I shook my head.

“This is my problem and I woke you up. I don’t know what I thought.…”

We were back at his car, our eyes still searching the blackness with the hope of somehow seeing a large black dog come loping out of the gloom toward us.

“I love this dog, too,” I told him, and it was true. This furry, ill-trained, exuberant dog had gathered in a piece of my heart. I put my hand on Owen’s arm and he took my hand in his without looking at me.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if he’s gone for good,” he said. “I didn’t want him, that’s the truth, and I certainly didn’t want to love him, but here we are.”

“Let’s drive the streets again.”

And we did, only this time Owen drove with one hand and held my hand with his other. I scanned the sidewalks and front yards for a hint of motion, any motion, and called Bandit’s name as Owen inched the car down street after street. And then, when we were very close to his house, I saw a man — he seemed quite young, maybe early twenties — standing under one of the streetlights, his long blond hair bright against the darkness. Bandit sat by his side, calmly, a leash attached to his collar. It looked like they were waiting to be found.

Owen was looking to his left, his eyes scanning the opposite side of the street, so he didn’t see the man smile and then spread his arms out as if to say, Here I am . His blond hair fell over his shoulders and shimmered in the light. He looked like an angel.

“Owen, look!”

I was watching the man and Bandit, so I didn’t see Owen’s face when he saw the pair, but I felt the car jolt to a stop and heard him swear, “Of all the fucking idiotic—”

The blond man ambled over to Owen’s window and looked in. His eyes did a swift sweep of me before smiling at Owen.

“I found your dog,” he said.

“None of this is the least bit amusing, you know.”

The man shrugged and then grinned. He was beautiful. He knew he was beautiful.

“Put the dog in the car,” Owen said without a trace of civility in his voice.

The man opened the back door and Bandit happily leapt in, but the man wasn’t done. He kept his hand on Owen’s door through the open window.

“Very nice, Owen,” he said, looking at me.

“Go home, Tony.” And the man stepped back, raised his hands in surrender.

For the two blocks it took to get Bandit home, Owen said nothing and his eyes never left the road. I watched his profile, waiting for him to speak, willing him to explain — who was this Tony? — but I said nothing. I remember feeling, as we drove home, that Owen’s anger put up an impenetrable shield. It’s what I told myself at the time.

BOTH OF US STOOD IN OWEN’S KITCHEN and watched Bandit drink from his water bowl as if he had just returned from a forced march through the Sahara — loud slurping noises and water spraying half the laundry room floor.

“I really thought he was gone,” Owen said.

We stood close together. I nodded. I was afraid of that, too. “Did that man, that Tony, find him, do you think?”

“No,” Owen said, “he took him.”

“And broke into your house,” I suddenly knew.

“Yes.”

“Not the best friend to have.”

Owen turned and looked at me then. He took my hand again. “I’m trying, Anna,” he said and then put his other hand on the side of my face.

When he leaned in to kiss me, the certainty leapt up within me that I had been waiting since the day I met him to move into his arms, to feel his body against mine. We stood in the brightly lit kitchen kissing softly until Owen turned off the light and led me into his bedroom, the one that contained a single bed. That night it was all that we needed.

Feeling Owen’s naked body against mine was a revelation. There was none of the awkwardness of the first time, that fumbling discovery of a new body that feels, at first, like a foreign country. Not with Owen. Our bodies knew each other — that’s the only way I can describe it. Touching Owen, moving with Owen, looking up into his face — it felt like coming home.

“Finally,” Owen whispered into the darkness as we lay beside each other afterward.

I turned to face him. I’d had sex with enough men to know that something else entirely had happened here. “Owen, what is this?”

“Shhh …” he said and he pulled the sheet over us and drew me so close to him that I no longer knew where my skin ended and his began.

I woke just as the sky was lightening through his uncurtained windows. Owen slept on his stomach, sprawled across the bed with the same unself-conscious abandon I associated with his laugh.

In the morning light I distrusted my own sense of what had happened the night before. I needed to be back in my apartment, at my desk, anchored to my small and tidy life, not swept away into this confusing territory. Who was this man? What was I doing? There was something tugging at a corner of my consciousness that told me to step back. I wasn’t sure if it was my natural caution or something more. I should leave , I told myself, while he’s sleeping . I got up and put my clothes on quietly.

But I couldn’t go without touching him. It was impossible. I leaned down and kissed him lightly on the side of his face. He smiled without opening his eyes. “You going?”

“Work,” I said.

“Mmmm, so glad I’m your work,” he said, “I get to see you later.”

And then I couldn’t leave at all. I sat down next to him and he gathered me into his arms. “Stay,” he said. And I did.

WHEN WE WERE ALONE IN HIS HOUSE or sometimes in my tiny apartment, we were both happy. Of that I am sure. And for a while, that was all we needed. The two of us, with time carved out of the rest of our lives, filled to the brim with the other’s presence. Owen would joke that we should find some small but fertile island somewhere in the Pacific or Caribbean and make a break for it. We could live out the rest of our days there, he said, supremely happy with each other.

“You are the love of my life,” he told me one day while we were preparing dinner together at his house. Owen had put some music on, the jazz he liked that I was struggling to understand, and had poured us each a glass of wine. For some reason I remember that on his refrigerator door along with the picture of his niece holding the starfish was a picture he had snapped of me running with a joyful Bandit across the grass of the dog park. I remember thinking that we were beginning to invade each other’s lives just a little.

While I chopped and he sautéed the vegetables for the soup we were making, he was telling me about a workshop he’d observed that afternoon. A young poet, female, black, was working with a group of fourth graders who’d never read a poem in their lives.

“Every time she got to the end of a line, this one kid would pipe up, ‘That don’t make no sense.’ Then she’d read the next line and he’d say the same thing. ‘That one don’t make no sense, either.’ ”

Owen was laughing as he told me the story and I began to laugh with him. We got the giggles in his kitchen as he mimicked the child’s voice and then the poet’s stern “Wait a minute …” whenever the child interrupted.

I was leaning against the kitchen counter, knife still in hand, wiping tears of laughter from the corners of my eyes when Owen just fell silent, mid-story, and the silence hung between us.