Kate Christensen - The Great Man

Outside, the street was completely empty except for a couple of boys in their twenties or early thirties, swaying arm in arm along the sidewalk, looking dreamy, either on their way to brunch after a night of sex or coming home drunk or drugged from a club or party. Their footsteps echoed a little in the hazy morning air. As they passed Maxine, one of them said, “Good morning!”

Unused to being visible to anyone under fifty, surprised, Maxine said, “You, too!” She set off toward the little grassy enclosure near Houston Street where dogs were allowed to run unhindered by leashes. As they walked, she pulled bits of kibble from her trousers pocket and fed them to Frago, who took each piece with undiminished enthusiasm and eagerly resumed his wait for the next one. The kibble was the same crap she’d been feeding him for years, baked nuggets of pulverized meat by-products, cheap grain, preservatives, and God knew what else. Poor mutt, he lived for it. He didn’t know any better. Occasionally, he found a chicken bone or a bit of pizza on the sidewalk and managed to swallow it before Maxine could jerk his head away, but other than those windfalls, he never got anything good. Maxine didn’t believe in pampering animals. Anyway, he seemed perpetually grateful to receive these dubious tidbits from her hand every morning on their slow rounds.

The dog run near Houston Street was already full of dogs and their owners when Maxine and Frago got there. Maxine scanned the crowd before she let Frago loose. There was no sign of the psychotic German shepherd, so she let him go. Frago immediately shuffled off to the far corner to sniff the anus of his old friend Walter, a dignified beagle of about the same vintage. Walter acquiesced to this greeting with a doleful expression, returned the favor, and then the two old dogs began their usual lope around the fence together, sniffing pee and adding their own elderly dribbles to the mélange. Maxine watched with a smile she was unable to help. She was amused by the way dogs were so insatiably curious about one another, just like people. No wonder the two species got along so symbiotically.

She turned her attention to the human population of the run. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was looking for the black-haired girl who looked exactly like Oscar. Of course, she didn’t know for certain that this girl really was her niece, but she suspected that she was, and had covertly watched her, wondering whether she also suspected who her aunt was. Maxine sometimes caught the girl watching her curiously and was certain suddenly that she recognized her aunt, but later, at home again, Maxine always dismissed this idea as ridiculous. How would she recognize Maxine? Maxine looked nothing like Oscar; he had taken after their mother, and she took after their father, which was why Oscar had been tall and beautiful and she was squat and ugly. Their father had been a peasanty shtetl Jew, their mother an aristocratic urban Jew, and the siblings had each inherited one parent’s evident caste. If the girl noticed her aunt at all, Maxine had always concluded, it was because she was obviously intensely interested in other people. Sometimes Maxine made eye contact with her, and when that happened, the words that almost always rose to her tongue from some ancient genetic instinct were bubbeleh, shayneh maydeleh, kind, words she had never, to her memory, spoken aloud in her life.

But the girl who might have been either Ruby or Samantha wasn’t here today. Maxine dawdled by one of the benches, debating whether or not to sit down. If she sat down, she would have to get up again. Such were the decisions necessitated by old age. Frago came up and briefly nuzzled her, then ambled off with Walter again. Here at the dog run, he was in his element; she was a visitor.

Maxine lowered herself to the bench seat and allowed her bones to settle there, to rearrange themselves to fit the ninety-degree angle of wood. She leaned back, sighed, wishing she’d had another cup of coffee. As she was lighting a cigarette, the girl who might have been her niece (girl? she was forty or thereabouts, but she looked girlish to Maxine) arrived, looking even more beautiful than usual in a red dress and cowboy boots, bare-legged, her hair loose and wild around her wide, pale face. She was arm in arm with a man who looked much younger than she, a sapling of a boy, lithe and sinewy, with his jeans slung so low that his hipbones showed, a head of hair so lively and self-possessed, it seemed to move independently of his head, like a tiny dog. Samantha/Ruby’s dog was enormous, a Russian wolfhound named Svetlana. Svetlana bounded ahead of the two lovers into the run and disrupted a knot of smaller dogs who’d been tangling passionately together. “Svetlana!” yelled the girl in her husky voice.

She and Maxine locked eyes then and both of them looked startled.

Maxine was positive then that the girl was her niece and that she knew Maxine was her aunt. But she had thought this same thing at various times before, and had no proof either way about it.

The girl and her swain went laughing to a bench at the far end and sat there, entwined together, while Svetlana stumbled clumsily but with transparently good intentions into various canine social groups. When she came to Frago, he gave her a benign crotch sniff and nose touch and seemed to be done with her, but she stuck around him, as she sometimes did, loitering hopefully, sensing that he was less snooty than others, less inclined to give her the brush-off. Maxine had a strong feeling that she’d been a rescue dog, abused or abandoned, then brought into a shelter and adopted by this girl as a fully grown dog. She didn’t seem properly able to connect with her own kind, for all her pedigree. She was like an inbred duchess, a brain-damaged blue blood.

Frago and Walter exchanged a look: Would they let this weird young beauty into their elderly perambulations? They seemed to agree with a kind of “What the hell” mutual shrug, because Svetlana fell in peaceably enough with them, seemingly calmed by their gentlemanly indifference. The three dogs came toward Maxine’s bench, led by Frago, and surrounded her feet in a panting trio of fur and tongues and haunches. She could smell them in the hot morning sun, their doggy muskiness. She had never been this close to Svetlana; leaning down to pet her, she had a sudden urge to read her tag, something people almost never did in the dog run. It was considered a breach of etiquette for humans in here to express too much curiosity about one another’s identities. Everyone felt perfectly free to ask the most intimate and nosy questions about one another’s dogs’ names, habits, funny proclivities, type of food, texture of feces, neuroses, and history, but nobody here revealed their own particulars; it just wasn’t done.

Daringly, her heart beating a little faster, under cover of the girl’s distraction with her boyfriend, Maxine grabbed Svetlana’s tag and looked right at it. Her old eyes, behind thick bifocals, focused on the engraved name and address, and then Svetlana jerked away and began licking her own pink, hairless crotch. Maxine was left with a blurred impression of the name Ruby Feldman, but she wasn’t sure. Yet she was sure. The girl looked like a female Oscar, uncannily; even her gestures were Oscar’s, the careless way she flung her hands around when she talked, her expansive smile, that self-aware marshaling of her undeniable beauty and charm.

So this was Ruby, then, not Samantha. Maxine had never wanted anything to do with either of them, officially, since the day they’d been born. But having watched this girl — for what, two years now? — here at the dog run struggling with her poor sweet misfit of a dog, Maxine had become inadvertently, instinctively proprietary toward both girl and dog. She’d often itched to give advice to Ruby about Svetlana: “Be firmer with her. Don’t let her walk ahead of you. Make her sit before you put her leash on.” Auntlike advice, that was what it was; it came out of nowhere, involuntary, completely uncharacteristic, like the words bubbeleh, shayneh maydeleh, kind. Maxine’s own Tante Esther had dispensed such advice, her mother’s older sister, and Maxine had always chafed at it: “Such a pretty girl. You should smile more, maydeleh, wear something flattering, bubbeleh!” Maxine had wanted to smack her, had hated the way she smelled, sharp cologne undergirded with stale chicken fat; it had made her nauseous, and this sort of advice always brought that smell back, cloyingly intimate….